Beating up on the victim? part 2

The feedback on my last post was uniformly comforting, and I thank you all. Of course it is completely true that D was being high-maintenance in fretting over not hearing from me, and it's also true that I lost my temper when I shouldn't have. What interested me specifically, though -- from an analytical or diagnostic perspective -- was the concrete event when I lash out at someone who is already in pain, because her pain is flooding my circuits and making it impossible for me to function rationally. Quite apart from the question who was right or justified in doing what, I wanted to look more closely at how I feel -- how I experience it -- when that happens, because it helps explain one of my more bizarre (not to say disagreeable) behaviors.

Not long after all this blew up, I wrote back to D, apologizing for losing my temper but also trying to explain what had happened on the inside ... how I felt that impelled me to act as I did. I didn't write in exactly the same words that I used in my post, but the overall meaning was the same.


She wrote back to me as follows:

Your letter was very insightful; I have read it three times and I understand you a good deal better now. I also appreciate why I was so baffled, no, stunned at your response.... I think I can keep some of what you wrote in mind when we run into emotional issues again. I hope so. I have already learned to watch you very closely and to calibrate your emotional response, for you suffer all the maladies of the hyper sensitive person. Your sensitivity is what makes you so marvelous to be around, because there is so much life and feeling, but it can also go awry. Such monitoring is very difficult over long distances, and I will provoke similar reactions in the future despite my best efforts. Sigh* ....

I may be on the right track when I recognize that my own insecurities are my worst enemy; not just because they are self-absorbed and distort my view of myself, but because they prevent me from observing others carefully and responding with sensitivity and awareness. Every time we get to one of these places, I have been freshly reminded that the one attribute needed is a certain emotional stability. There are times with you when I literally tell myself to think about the situation without taking offense or devising justifications for my own position in order to observe without judgment and attempt to understand. That's very difficult for me, but it is vital to do. Again, it's much easier in person than by mail....

You do not have to worry about my devotion and love for you; they endure and grow.... Call it a gift if you like; I think it was fated to be. Whatever you make of it, it is yours.

So at least the relationship itself was unshaken. That's good to know. There are times my temper can overtake me so far that I worry about that. And in fact, much of the permanent wedge of distrust between Wife and me grew out of the many of the times I cried out (or lashed out) in agony in exactly this way ... for exactly these reasons. The knowledge, a split-second after I lashed out, that I had just made things permanently worse made me feel all the more trapped and anguished, of course. It contributed to the dark despair I felt about my marriage for many years. It is enormously encouraging to know that D is not so passive, so clay-like as Wife -- or in other words, that she is able to forgive.

It is also helpful to realize that D understands her own insecurities, and how much of a problem they can become.

But I didn't want to write back about her insecurities; I thought that would come across as a little too pointed. Instead I replied by looking again at this question of my own sensitivity:

I'm glad you found my earlier letter useful.... The critical part, the stuff I had to find some way to communicate, was the part about how I feel the pain and anxiety in these situations [i.e., when someone else is feeling a kind of pain that cannot be calmed or healed] in a visceral, tactile kind of way -- such that when the anguish gets intense enough I lose all ability to reason and begin thrashing about like a trapped animal.... If "hyper sensitive person" is the right terminology to describe that syndrome, then so be it; I am glad at least that it has a name. Because I think that this syndrome, this phenomenon, this event is at the heart of a lot of the things that have been said about my personality over the years.

• Hosea has a quick temper.


• Hosea turns on a dime.


• Hosea is always yelling.


• Hosea blows up over the most trivial little things.


• Hosea cannot stand being tickled.


• Hosea is likely to get violent -- unintentionally and purely out of reflex -- if you sneak up behind him unannounced to give him a hug.


• Hosea is cruel because he waits till I am down and broken and then kicks me and berates me for it. (This last is in Wife's voice, of course.)


• Hosea is a loner.


• Hosea needs a lot of solitude.


• Hosea's way of dealing with difficult emotional problems is to go for long, quiet walks by himself in order to sort things out.


• Hosea was expelled from kindergarten because he wouldn't join in the activities with the others and just wanted to sit quietly in the corner petting the cat.


• Hosea has to have his way over every little thing -- like what music is playing in the background, or whether somebody is humming or drumming his fingers, or whether things are on the floor that he thinks ought to be picked up, or whether somebody has turned a book face down while open so that the spine is being bent out of shape, or whether we are going to be on time for whatever event we are going to, or ..., or ... or ....

And while any one of these accusations can be delivered in such a way that it becomes a grotesque exaggeration and has nothing to do with reality, nonetheless it is also true that every single one of these statements has something true about it, or some toehold in reality, in the sense that every single one of them grew out of some event which really happened. But I think that hyper-sensitivity can explain all of them; because hyper-sensitivity explains why trivial things can become a rock in my shoe that won't go away, and why sometimes I have just been pushed so far that it is beyond the point of physical or mental endurance for me ... even though others don't notice that anything is wrong.

I'm not fussy about terminology. If it turns out that "hyper-sensitive" is the wrong word to describe this constellation of characteristics, I don't mind using another term instead. But the phenomenon -- that it happens to me, that it has happened as long as I have conscious memories, and that it is therefore possibly part of how I am built -- that part it is important to understand.

And so in the end, the whole event passed into history as one of those times that we have learned more about each other ... a far better resolution than the way my fights with Wife ever ended. D wrote back to me:

Your letter makes me very thoughtful; I have heard several of the claims, but some of the incidents cause me to feel great compassion for you. To be expelled from kindergarten seems pretty extreme....

I know much of what Wife calls your 'controlling' behavior has to do with your hyper sensitivity. I've also discovered that I need to be very aware of the environment around us in order to prevent you from being overwhelmed. On the other hand, you also put up with far more disorder than I could ever deal with, and there is no way I would tolerate some of the comments Wife and the boys make about the meals you fix or your appearance; they make me see red. I have long known that I too have acute emotional sensitivities. My early knowledge of [various calamities in her own childhood] made me aware that such sensitivity could be profoundly disorienting. I think you'll agree that such sensitivity is very much a mixed blessing, for despite all the intensity it brings, this hyper sensitivity will also shorten our lives. The real challenge is how to live with it graciously.

Interesting; I guess realizing how much you are affected by both physical and emotional sensitivity, I would recommend that you always keep one cat around. [D is allergic to cats and often teases me about the fact that we have two of them.] They are genuinely useful in reducing the symptoms of emotional overload; psychologists have long understood that cats have soothing properties. I suspect that allergy shots for me would be far cheaper in the long run than getting rid of the cats.

Good to know.

__________

P. S.: Good heavens, I just thought of something as I was writing this post. I have already written something about this strange sensitivity of mine, and how it disorients and confuses me. At the time I wasn't talking about lashing out at anyone, but I'm sure it is the same syndrome just viewed in a different light or under different circumstances. I'm thinking of the story I posted a year and a half ago, here.