as small as a world and as large as alone

6:28am May 6, 2014

nectaresque:

youneedacat:

“Just because your pain is understandable, doesn’t mean your behavior is acceptable.”

—

Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience (via paintdeath)

Seriously I wish more people understood this.

I have a problem with this. Maybe it is a context problem, as in ‘this is true in some contexts but not others’, or maybe it is a semantic problem, as in ‘when do you say you understand something, how do we express in action what acceptableness looks like’ and so on.

I had a bunch of meltdowns yesterday. A bunch? Shut up I know I’m not managing them very well yet. I was very lucky with the first one though, it happened in an environment with people who, after the first shock, understood what was happening. And they accepted this behaviour, a very rare thing (I actually was physically violent towards them).

Soooo okay I can see where my misunderstanding comes in. The quote above expresses a step (one maybe not all that crucial intermediate step) in the logical argument that justifies the rejection/condemnation of abuse. It vaguely sounds applicable to my situation because understanding/accepting pain/behaviour are relevant in both cases, but it’s not. There’s some inversion going on (hard to visualize), and I could take the quote as saying something about my internalized ableism and how I’ve been conditioned to understand the unease of my allistic environment and therefore accept being abuse by them and by my superego.

Why do I feel so concerned about this? Well I’m just starting to get used to treating meltdowns as meltdowns. For decades I didn’t have the conceptual frame for them, and they felt like demonic irruptions of terror and violence. And I have no clue about after-care yet. I’m exhausted, my gross motor skills (mostly unable to stay upright) are shot, and my mind is an endless churn of justifying, condemning, meaninglessness and a wish to cease. So this kind of quote is perfect bait for that kind of obsessiveness. I strongly suspect a link between (mental) obsessiveness and stimming, I reckon that a lack of proper useful stimming means the impulse will show up as enhanced drive to mentally obsess and worry (I don’t believe it can be the primary reason for it, but it can contribute a lot). I remember that yesterday just after the first meltdown I told myself to look for a stim so that I could try and see if that would soothe my system, and it worked, so that’s nice. Felt unfamiliar, didn’t matter. I had this hope that stimming would immediately become my new thing, my return to lost sanity, my salvation - some people write about it like that, fortunate ones.

The thing that sucks the most about saying things like the above quote, is that the people who least need to internalize the wrong message from it, are the ones most likely to internalize the wrong message from it.  Because the people most likely to internalize the wrong message from it (in this instance) are people whose behavior is something not under their current control, who are not necessarily doing anything wrong, but who are constantly condemned as doing something wrong and can interpret the quote as condemnation.  (And who knows, some people using the quote may be condemning things like meltdowns.)

I reblogged the quote because of a group of people who pretty much never internalize its message, or who internalize it only in a very unproductive sort of way.  (Like “I am going to take this quote personally and then immediately dismiss it even though it actually does apply to me, but still feel really lousy about the whole thing.”  Which you are not doing, if you’re wondering.  It’s hard to describe.)

Basically, there’s people out there who are habitually nasty to other people, and who justify their habitual nastiness as a response to emotional pain, oppression, or injustice.  That’s the people the quote needs to apply to.

I really needed to hear the meaning of this quote when I was younger.  I had a serious anger problem, but believed that my history of abuse and oppression justified any and all expression of my hair-trigger temper.  Including, for instance, attacking a good friend and dislocating her finger, which was not a one-time event, I’m ashamed to say.  I believed that anything an abuse victim or oppressed person did in response to current or past abuse or oppression was justifiable.  And I hurt a lot of people I didn’t have to be hurting.

I also have meltdowns in response to overload, and have friends who have meltdowns.  I have fewer meltdowns than I used to (for some reason, probably related to adrenal insufficiency, I’ve switched to shutdowns in the last six years or so).  But I have them.  And I have friends who have them.  And I have one friend in particular who is an amazing, compassionate person who is basically judged really harshly by a lot of people because she has meltdowns where she screams and cusses and sometimes says things that sound really nasty – the whole while wishing it wasn’t happening and not actually meaning a word that she’s saying.  And we all work as hard as we can to control them, but sometimes you can’t, and people need to understand that.  

I do think that it’s important, if you have meltdowns, to learn to control them as much as possible.  But that doesn’t mean I judge people for having them.  I think physical violence is the most important thing to control, followed by self-injury, followed by screaming, followed by anything that sounds like verbal nastiness (like cussing people out).  Because all of those things can do harm.  But I don’t think such things are always controllable, and I think allowances have to be made.  And I don’t think that “control” has to mean being able to “stuff it down”, which often makes it worse.  It often means learning to figure out different circumstances that can cause things, and avoiding those circumstances.  It often means learning to relax, rather than tense up.  But these things don’t happen overnight, and they can’t always be controlled at all, and allowances have to be made in the meantime.  And this is not, in any case, what I meant when I reblogged the quote.

That said, there are people who use the idea of meltdowns as an excuse to be nastier than they have to be.  And that’s a whole other story.  Again, not talking about you.  But I’ve seen it.  Basically, anything that can be outside of a person’s control, and results in doing things that can be a problem to people… some people are going to use that grey fuzzy area as an excuse not to work on things that are under their control.  Because those situations are just tailor-made for denial.

I started realizing that my self-assessment about abuse and oppression was wrong, when I encountered an extremely abusive woman.  She engaged in meticulously planned, premeditated nastiness towards other people, on a level that really is impossible to understand unless you’ve seen it.  But it was not like she just had her temper triggered off, she planned stuff to a degree that would be stunning and impressive if it weren’t so diabolical.

Anyway, part of her method of gaining support from people was to talk about how she was abused in ways too severe for anyone to possibly imagine, how she was more oppressed than anyone in the communities that she frequents, and things like that.  And that anyone objecting to her behavior, was objecting to her “PTSD symptoms” and “understandable responses to oppression” and things like that.  And people allowed her to get away with things that nobody else could have gotten away with, because she was very smart and played into the social games of “more abused than thou” and “more oppressed than thou”, masterfully.  People believed that abuse and oppression could justify just about anything, so they let her get away with anything up to and including stalking and threatening to kill people.

That’s when I began reevaluating whether “all responses to abuse and oppression are understandable and need to be excused” was a viable way to operate in the world.  And I began to realize that some of my behavior, even though it was related to pain that was related to abuse and oppression, was absolutely not justifiable.  None of my behavior was anywhere near as bad as this woman’s, but it took seeing something as extreme and calculated as what she was doing, to realize that my less-extreme and not-calculated-at-all behavior wasn’t just automatically acceptable.

And then I started realizing that the idea that “my pain justifies any and all responses I have to that pain” is a very seductive idea that is rampant in both abuse survivor communities, and oppression-fighting communities.  Because some responses to pain are understandable and justifiable.  And some anger is understandable and justifiable.  And people doassume that if someone’s angry, or if they’re doing something that might otherwise be considered unacceptable, then they aren’t worth listening to, and this plays into bad things for abuse survivors and oppressed people alike.  And those things are quite real and quite important to talk about.  But they’ve resulted in community norms where anything and everything becomes excusable.

And those community norms result in three really serious problems.  One, there’s people like the woman above, who will consciously manipulate and exploit such community norms to their own advantage, and they will continue to do so as long as such community norms exist.  Two, there are people who aren’t as consciously manipulative, but who are really nasty pieces of work who will use such community norms to avoid looking too hard at themselves.  Three, there are people who possibly wouldn’t otherwise even have a problem, who get sucked into justifying really dysfunctional behavior as a result of these community norms.  And there’s combinations of the three, and other things, too.

And it’s because of seeing those three things operating for a really long time that I wholeheartedly endorse the idea that just because your pain is real doesn’t mean your behavior is justifiable based on that pain.  But endorsing that idea doesn’t mean that I believe that people should be ostracized for meltdowns or something, or that all stuff people blame you for is stuff you should be blamed for.  Nothing is all or nothing and there’s no such thing as a short quote like that that can possibly cover every circumstance.

Unfortunately the people who most need to get this message, probably never will, and the people who most need to stop internalizing ideas like this will internalize them.  And some people who do need to take in such ideas, will take them in in a self-blaming way that ultimately results in violently rejecting them (while hanging onto the self-blame but not actually changing in any way), neither of which is useful.

445,945 notes