12:28am June 20, 2014

When you obsessively hate someone (and I explore my own dark side…)

Over ten years ago, I developed an obsessive dislike for another autistic person. She had initially been someone I had looked up to. But like many people we look up to too much she’d fallen off a pedestal that was not of her own creation. I also came to dislike her because I saw everyone around me keeping her on that same pedestal. I blamed her for the existence of the pedestal, even though I now know that she had no hand in creating it. It was something other people had done to her. But at the time, I blamed her for everything. And I blamed her for other people’s reactions to her, whether that was the near-worship some people held her in, or the tendency to emulate her and take her word as gospel. I was really upset by all of this, but for some reason I blamed her for it.

I became extremely irrational about this, and people started giving me a wide berth when I talked about her. I would go through things she had written and pick them apart almost viciously. Some of those things she had written really were wrong, in my eyes, even today. Some of them I’ve now come to agree with. But at the time I wanted to find everything possible that could be wrong with what she said, because I didn’t want her to be right about anything. I tried to enlist other people’s help, I even bought someone an entire set of her writings once, but nobody took me up on it.

This lasted for a period of years. I don’t know how many years, sometime between two and four years. But it got really ugly. I was obsessed with disliking her. People tried to tell me that if I just talked to her, I’d like her. I was afraid of doing so.

I was also afraid of her because I thought she had powers she didn’t have. She tended to put autistic people into categories. I was afraid she would put me into a category that I did not actually fit in, and then I would be stuck there, regardless of what category I actually fit in. There were things she wrote that seemed to describe the way I experienced the world, in a way nobody else had ever described them before. And yet I rejected it. I rejected all of it. Because every time I read anything by her, I felt a slashing feeling across my chest, like something was trying to knock me off-center and make me feel lousy whenever I read stuff by her. I interpreted this, somehow, as her doing, even though this was a completely irrational assessment of the situation. I interpreted this as, she was harming me, she was hurting me, all these statements that had nothing to do with me at all, actually were directed either at me or people like me, and that these statements meant something horrible about me or people like me.

So if she wrote about those things, I would pick through them. And I would feel things poking at me. Poking me in the chest, poking me in the stomach, saying “you’re not good enough, you’re not real enough”. And I’d interpret those messages as if they came from her, as if her words somehow meant that there was something horribly wrong with me. As if she was judging me in terrible ways, even if she didn’t know me, that she was judging people like me in terrible ways, and that was enough. That was enough to convince me that she didn’t like people like me, had it in for people like me, needed her writing counteracted somehow before she could spread the word that people like me were worthless and useless and terrible and all these other things.

The thing is, none of that ever existed.

She did say some things that I still agree are wrong. But 99% of the battle I was having with her, was a battle with imaginary things in my own head.

The worst part was how obsessive I became about her. I felt like I had to read everything she wrote. I felt like I had to read the fine print. I felt like if I did this enough, if I picked it apart enough for the rest of the world to see, then I would be doing the world a favor, and saving other people from the horrible judgements she was making about people like me.

Except she wasn’t judging people like me at all.

And part of my problem was actually jealousy. I was jealous that she was able to so readily define what her world looked like, in words. I knew it was hard for her, but I didn’t have that, back then. I just had echolalia. There were things she said that rang so true about my own world, that I couldn’t believe it. It was like she was describing the inside of my head, describing things nobody had ever described.

And I was jealous of her because I thought she was allowed to have those descriptions applied to her, and that I was not allowed to have those descriptions apply to me. I don’t remember how it worked that I thought I wasn’t allowed to claim those descriptions as my own. But I remember spending years finding ways to rip apart her descriptions of this inner world, so that if I couldn’t have them, then nobody else could either.

This came with the constant sensation of glass being ground against my guts. It came with a constant sensation of being slashed over and over again. These are warning signs. These are warning signs that it’s not you, and it’s not even necessarily the person you’re upset with. There’s something else going on. And you’d best avoid just falling into the obsessive hatred that something wants you to fall into at that point. Because at that point, you’re falling into a bad pattern, and the bad pattern wants you to do bad things. I can’t explain it further than this, other than it’s bad, and it’s not you, and it’s not the other person.

I did finally get over this.

I started talking to her.

I found out she’s just a person.

I still disagree with a lot of what she does, and will speak up when I do disagree.

I also agree with a surprising amount of things she says, and feel that we are in many ways made of the same cloth, for better or for worse. We have fairly similar autism subtypes, but very different ideas about autism, is what it comes down to.

But if you find yourself obsessively hating someone. If you find yourself reading what they read really closely, just looking for the places where they hate you, where you know they hate you, where you know all the hidden hate would be revealed if only you could make it obvious to other people?

Back off.

Back off now.

Block them, ignore them, find some way of getting their writing or their art or whatever it is you see, completely out of their life.

Take a step back.

Every time you think about them, try to stop yourself.

Remind yourself that they are only a person. Remind yourself that while you may see them as more than just a person, where you may have that expectation of them, it’s highly unlikely that they are the ones who created that expectation.

Remind yourself that whether they are right or wrong, good or bad, you are giving them a level of importance in the scheme of things that does not exist for any human being.

Remind yourself that what you are doing to them is not fair and borders on stalking — even if it’s technically legal, it’s still obsessive and intrusive and can hurt them.

Remind yourself that you might hurt them. That with the way you talk about them, you might lose them friends who otherwise would have never imagined they’d believe the things they… don’t actually believe, except in your head.

That when you talk about them that way, you are messing up their own social relationships, and this is not fair to them or to the people who might actually come to like them.

That you are also messing with your own social relationships — people will soon see that you are doing something very strange and obsessive and wrong here, and they will at minimum worry about you, and at most be concerned that you could turn on them next.

I know that I got a reputation as a very harsh, hateful person partly as a result of how I treated this woman. It took a long time to change that reputation.

Take responsibility for your own side in this. I had no idea, until I read a book where a woman realized it herself, what jealousy felt like, or that I was jealous. I was not jealous of the fact that she was well-known or well-liked. I was jealous of her ability to define herself, for herself. I was jealous of her ability to come up with an entire description of how her mind worked. I was jealous of her ability to say “This is who I am” and mean it. I was jealous.

And my jealousy turned to near-hatred.

And my near-hatred turned to obsessive behavior. Picking apart everything she did and said, finding fault in things that there was no possible reason or way to find fault in.

And I had to. Had to. In order to stop this. Understand that I was the problem, not her.

I had to understand that even when she did things wrong, I was magnifying them to a degree that made no logical sense at all.

I had to understand that half the time she wasn’t even doing anything wrong, my brain was dreaming up most of what she supposedly did wrong and inserting it among the things she’d actually done and said.

I also had to understand that there was a part of this that was not me, and not her, that was the problem. In the world, there are… I’d almost call them patterns of evil. I don’t pretend to know what they are. I know that they like to make people fight, to cause discord and discontent and to make people dislike each other for no good reason. And I know those patterns were at work here. They helped skew my perspectives, enhance my negative responses, and draw my attention to the parts of her writing that would upset me the most. Subtle things, but taken as a whole, something very real.

When you’re reading something and you feel strange sensations that seem to be accompanied by thoughts, those patterns may be at work. When you read something and suddenly there’s a stab in your belly accompanied by a sudden total difference in how you perceive what you’re reading? Be really careful.

What I had to do, to stop all this? I had to avoid her for a long time. I had to stop reading her work. I had to stop talking about her to other people.

And any time — any time — that I felt a certain sideways feeling, I had to back off and keep my distance. By a sideways feeling, it was like… I would go to read something she’d written. And instead of looking at it straight on, it felt like I could only look at it from a diagonal. And when that happened, I was much more likely to become obsessively infuriated by whatever she had to say, whether its as infuriating or not. Beware of that diagonal feeling at all times, whether you’re obsessively disliking someone or not. It’s never a good sign for the situation you’re in.

I started out believing that she was the majority of the problem.

I ended up finding out that the problem was shared almost entirely between me, and the negative patterns from the world around me that were manipulating me. (She and I are people who are both, by virtue of a lot of things, highly susceptible to being manipulated by negative patterns in the world, even patterns that just happen to be passing through and are not particularly aimed in our direction. There are all kinds of patterns, good and bad, floating through the world all the time, and they have an effect on everyone. But they affect some more than others, and she and I are the lucky winners of the susceptibility lottery. Both by virtue of autism and complex PTSD.) She was barely any of the problem at all.

Not that she was none of the problem. But compared to me and the negative patterns that were guiding me, she was virtually nothing. Only getting away from the negative patterns, getting some time away from reading her, and coming back, gave me any perspective on how little damage she had done to me or anyone else at all, compared to what I had imagined all those years ago.

Mind you, these days, i think she does do some damage with her opinions. But I no longer think that I need to obsessively read everything she’s ever written and save the world from her by writing blow-by-blow descriptions of how she is wrong about certain things. I do, sometimes, point out where I think something she is doing is damaging. But this is no different from my response to anyone else. And we remain on friendly, if casual, terms, because she helped me a lot during a period when many other people would have thrown me to the wolves.

The funny thing is… there’s a guy out there who thinks I have it in for him. He thinks I’m obsessive about him the way that I’m obsessive about her. The reality is that I rarely think of him, but when he throws his viewpoints so far in my face that I can’t ignore them, then I say “Hey, you’re damaging people here,” and he insists it’s an old vendetta to save face. The reality is that I’ve only once gotten obsessively hateful about someone, and it was never, ever him. It was one person, and it was a terrible thing I did to this person, although luckily I think she was unaware of most of it.

i think this is the only time I’ve ever done this to someone.

If you ever find yourself doing this to someone, there is a way out.

Back away.

Stop reading them.

Find ways to block them out of your Internet life, your offline life, and your mind, if at all possible. (Unless you want to take the step of actually, non-defensively, getting to know them. But only do that if you know you’re not going to slingshot yourself back into their face in a really vicious way, because that would just be cruel.)

When you feel those sensations like things zipping around your stomach an chest, fight back. Treat them as if they come from outside, because they might be an emotional manifestation of something that is both external and sinister in nature. Don’t trust anything that you “think” at the same time as those body sensations are happening. Especially if whatever you “think” or “feel” is full of anger, distrust, resentment, jealousy, etc.

Try to remember that even if the person is doing something wrong, a lot of what you’re seeing wrong is you. Try to remember that your thoughts and feelings are being highly, heavily distorted and that you should not trust them to give you accurate information about the other person.

Keep your distance. Keep your distance at all costs. That means emotionally, too.

Remember that what you’re doing borders on hate, if not crosses the line. Remember that hate will not help you, or them.

Remember that even if the other person is doing something bad, what you are doing will not help anyone see it, and will not fix the problem. It will merely make you look obsessive and cruel.

Remember that if you have conditions that can cause obsessiveness and rumination — autism, OCD, manic depression — you need to watch yourself even more.

Remember that if you ever put this person on a pedestal, then them falling off the pedestal by being human and having flaws is not your fault. They were not trying to be superhuman, you wanted them to be superhuman, and they weren’t. All of this takes place in your mind, not out in the real world.

Try to keep your distance until you can actually see this person as a person again. And maybe, maybe then you’ll be able to approach them and learn about them as a human being.

Until then, keep your distance. Try not to think about this person. Try not to talk about this person. Try not to gossip about this person. Try not to do so either in direct or indirect ways. Your life will not be made better by finding ways to avoid avoiding them.

And I don’t know how to describe this part, but try to cut the ties between you and the negative patterns that may be playing you against this person for their own reasons. If you feel something poking at you, act like it’s real, poke back, keep it away from you. If you feel strings pulling you diagonally every time you want to look straight at something, cut them. These things may be real, or they may be in your head, but treating them as real gets better results.

And this can be gotten rid of.

There was a time when I could not think of this person without a rush of jealousy and rage and being pulled this way and that by strings and a desire to obsess and talk nonstop about everything I saw wrong with her. Today, while we are not close, we sometimes email each other, and that feeling has totally gone away. There are things she does that I massively don’t approve of, but they are different things than the things I thought I didn’t approve of before. My urge to nitpick her writings to death is completely gone. Things are better. These things can go away, if you learn how. And they’ll help you be a lot happier, as much as they help the other person, if not more. (Because it’s quite possible the other person isn’t anywhere near as severely affected by your negative attention to them, as you are by obsessing about how much you hate them.)

Also if you ever find yourself in a community of people who seem to get together and engage in this behavior together? Run away. Do not walk. Do not think. Just get out. It doesn’t matter who the person is or what they have done, real or imaginary. It is toxic to yourself and those around you, to engage in this kind of behavior.