When I was a kid, I had no friends. There were a couple of other kids whom I was told were my friends. In retrospect, none of them liked me or wanted me around, they were just forced to include me because my mother wanted to gossip with their mother without interruptions. The one whom I was told was my "best friend" didn't like me to the point where she ignored me at school, but she was the kind of kid whose mother picked out her clothes and hairstyle every morning, and she got clocked with a hairbrush if she protested, so clearly she couldn't do much to stop it.
The message this sent was that friends were people who would tolerate you when you were there, then roll their eyes and start running you down to others whenever you weren't. So far as I can tell, this is how my mother actually believes friendship works. She consistently behaved this way with all of her friends, back when she had them, and sailed merrily onward with her siblings once my sister and I aged out of public school and she was no longer forced into contact with unrelated adults. My sister and I were subject to a lot of inappropriately-adult level rants about people our mother supposedly liked, and a lot of general complaining about carpooling and babysitting and other things she had freely agreed to do for other parents. Nice as pie while the other person's kid was in the car, then the nanosecond she dropped them off at home, she would start bitching about how other people couldn't be bothered to be responsible for their own kids, a sentiment notably absent all those times she got other people to give us a lift home from school.
I didn't do this -- probably less from a moral imperative and more because I didn't have anyone else to bitch to -- but I came to expect it from others. People were obliged to be nice to my face even if they didn't like me; I didn't like the idea that my presence bothered them, so it was my responsibility to be hyperalert to subtle cues that said they were running out of patience, and fuck off before they hit zero. Everything had a running timer: How long could I stay tolerable? Probably longer if I kept my mouth shut. I never had a problem saying no to things I didn't want to do, but man I got good at remembering that nobody wanted to hear what I thought.
I had to escape to college, where my mother couldn't continually reinforce these ideas, before I realized why I wasn't being very successful, which was that normal people don't work that way. People who like you will act like they like you, and they probably won't change their minds on that as soon as you leave the room. I drove a lot of people away by needing to check in incessantly -- do you really like me? really really? explain, I don't understand why you think I should trust this. I still occasionally get advised to share these feelings with people, and I would rather chew my own leg off. No amount of reassurance has ever fixed those feelings when they crop up, and discussing them has destroyed a lot of relationships. No, thank you -- this is what blogs are for.
Unfortunately, there are still people out there who, for screwball reasons of their own, will act like they like you even if they can't stand you. Compounding this, they will lie frantically if you ever so much as breathe a suspicion that you've figured it out. There are as many reasons for this dysfunction as there are dysfunctional people, but most of them are in the general vicinity of being more afraid that someone else will be displeased with them than they are annoyed by my presence.
These people are not common, but they do exist, and I have run into a few of them, most catastrophically at work. Nothing brings back old nightmares quite like worrying that circumstances have trapped me in a room with someone who spends the entire time wishing that I were literally anywhere else. While I do try to be friendly and approachable at work, I also don't specifically try to befriend anyone who really can't avoid me, and I'm wary of anyone who tries it on me.
Very, very rarely, someone else actually succeeds at it, and I drive myself insane not spotting any signs that their patience is wearing thin. Sooner or later, other life stuff happens to stress me out, and at that point I have an epistemological breakdown over the fact that humans are not telepathic, and I will never know for sure what other people are thinking.
I'm getting really sick of this, so I did what I always do, which is cram a bunch of books into my head and then sit down with a lot of drugs to think it over.
Usually what you're diagnosed with, if you're a woman with a lengthy history of emotional neglect and relational trauma that has repeated meltdowns over functioning friendships, is borderline personality disorder. I don't fit the criteria for that, but I would be a near-textbook case of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, if C-PTSD were in textbooks, which it is not, because the DSM people are traditionalist pricks. (It is in the ICD-11, the diagnostic tome used outside the US, which goes into effect in 2022.) There's a pretty standard list of books recommended to people who think they have C-PTSD, and I've discovered that I hate about 90% of them.
The first on every list is C-PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker. Which I forced myself to finish despite wanting to give the author the coldest possible, crossed-arms Spock eyebrow by the end of the first chapter. I had to continually remind myself of how recently this book was published, because there is something about Walker's writing that reminds me inescapably of the academic gurus of the 1960s, all those middle-aged men with PhDs who stuck their noses into what the kids were doing and immediately thought they were going to save the world with Buddhism or drugs or whatever. Not that Sasha Shulgin isn't an interesting read, but it's all very self-absorbed comfortable-white-guy paternalistic insistence that their way is the right way to fix everything.
Walker writes very much like a man who believes he has become enlightened and cracked the code to a system that correctly files everyone on Earth, and tells them "how to heal". I will credit him with introducing "fawn" to the traditional fight-flight-freeze descriptions of reactions people have to perceived threat; fawning is a useful strategy in any social animal, including humans, where being ingratiating to an aggressor can stave off harm. Unfortunately, he wants to use these to classify people instead of situational reactions. Nobody really just picks one of those to use on everything, so he started subdividing his patients into subtypes like "freeze-fight" or "fawn-freeze", and otherwise mapping out increasingly-complicated epicycles, rather than admitting that just maybe the Earth is not the center of the universe. All of his case studies start with, "[NAME], a [CATEGORY] patient..." with all of their troubles framed by the position he thinks they occupy in his taxonomy.
There is an annoying amount of "comfort your inner child" verbiage. This is probably my own personal bugaboo. Unless you have a time machine you want to share, there is nothing you can do to improve what happened decades ago, and I am not really interested in writing fixit-fic for my childhood. Child-me has not existed for a very long time; I want to be a functional adult, right now. Likewise, while I see how schemata that name and personify various emotions and lines of thinking are helpful for other counseling patients, and the writers of Pixar's Inside Out, I find myself profoundly irritated by it. I am not a collection of bickering characters. I am one very integrated person, who sometimes has conflicting feelings on things. Forcing me to script them as conversations between fictional characters does not help.
Walker gives brief lip service in the introduction to "take what is useful and leave the rest", a la 12-step programs. Also like 12-steppers, this is then ignored, because all of his examples are of people who followed all of his advice, sometimes ignoring their own skepticism, and were cured. If he ever ran into a dead-end and had to try another tactic, he skips over it. There are also a lot of people who magically got better after having a sobbing breakdown in his office and screaming about how much they hate their parents. I have doubts.
In conclusion: This book is incredibly annoying, and mildly creepy. I do not like it and suspect I would also not like the author, should I ever run into him in person. I am glad I borrowed it from the library rather than giving this dude any additional money. It does explain a lot of the cult-ish thought-terminating cliches I see in C-PTSD message boards, though.
Next week: Something way more useful, from a Dutch guy.
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