Let me pose a multiple-part question for you to mull over –
Do you like conflict? Do you get off on it? Does it give you a thrill? Does conflict light up your switchboard?
Let’s have a little chat, shall we?
In, fact, let’s make it a kindly chat from a nice uncle, one you trust, not weird uncles that creep you out or aunts who buy you age-inappropriate clothing because they see you as perpetually 3 years old.
Whoever in your family is the dude you put your trust in, because he has always been that straight arrow, straight shooter, person who “gets” you and doesn’t try to keep “changing” you.. Let’s make that our conversationalist.
I want you to conjure up that perfect person who offers you argument in a non-threatening way, makes you feel whole, not minimized, not stepped on. Let’s get that guy or gal in the room, telling you what I have to say.
But – we gotta have this talk. We must get into it. We must get you involved, whoever you are, and that means, I need to motivate you and influence you.
Now you know my intentions. My intentions are neither good, nor are they evil. My intention is to get you reading, thinking, practicing examination of both self and others. You must learn, as I have been required to do time and again, to open your “Mr. Magoo” eyes (a reference to a Hanna-Barbera cartoon character) and actually see what your senses are showing you, and not keep throwing your defenses up and telling yourself it isn’t happening.
I need to yank you mercilessly out of cyberspace, off your cell phone, away from your computer or iPad, get you to turn off the iTunes, and remove those ear buds. This has to be an “empty chair” exercise, because I cannot be in that room with you.
Yes. I require you to keep reading. I hope that’s okay. I hope it is something you’ll have time for.
The idea for this article came about because we are tearing up a millennium of successful human migration and change. We are destroying the foundations we created that allowed us to move forward and survive all the changes our planet endures, whether we caused them, or the very nature of space, geology, and everything humans just do not understand are creating the changes.
We – collectively and individually – need to change our minds.
We – a species, a world of living, breathing human animals – need to accept what our senses have shown us as real and own that it is not a made-for-TV fictional representation that we’re all going to somehow survive.
We – a collection of small families, multiplied by a million-fold, assembled from everywhere on the planet, and moving with much greater freedom than ever before – are now the “proud owners” of a planet that doesn’t need ownership; we have to adjust our thinking.
We- the human adventure – must decide: Are we a dead-end experiment, or are we capable of calming our asses down, drinking a healthy cup of shut-the-fuck-up, paying attention for more than a nanosecond, breaking free from all that we keep hurting ourselves with?
Can we accept the status of temporary tenancy, getting to “Survive Mode,” and becoming stewards of this orb we’re tied to,
Or, are we done here?
Are we dead, and we just don’t know it?
Are we all zombies?
Did the apocalypse hit, and we’re the roughly 8 billion androids that survived the cataclysm, and we’re through? Is it over? Should we all just fuckin’ die already and get out of nature’s way, let things be “it is what it is” or ….
Are we ready to stop cutting and hurting ourselves because a lunatic or two or three or four dozen of ‘em want us clawing our own flesh off, much to their delight?
Are we ready to begin getting better? How much more hurt do we have to cause ourselves?
In the movies, and on TV, there are stunt doubles, fake blood, choreographed punches and kicks, CG animations, and afterward, lots of editing to create a story. The story is an illusion. It is not real.
We need to stop being delusional about it. The villains and heroes do not keep getting up again and again like what happens when we have violent, traumatic shows and movies.
In real life, the trauma happens, the wounds occur, and people do not get up again.
This story is about how we keep wounding ourselves, time and again, over many generations of people, and we simply do not learn. We live out George Santayana’s prophecy/curse,
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
I was looking for a way to make this story about remedies and what we can do to make our lives better. Then I read a meme about the “Collapse of Society.” The author made some valid points, but those points were fraught with a need to get us emotionally reactive. This author really needed the reader to be emotionally tagged and bagged, as hunters refer to what they do with their quarry.
Is reactivity and hair-trigger emo going to solve the problem we’re living with?
Will it simply make things that much worse?
Our friends at Southern Poverty Law Center (www.splcenter.org) have documented hate groups, anti-government groups and armed militias. At present, they track 1,221 of these groups, with the largest concentrations around major metropolitan areas. These groups rely on singular ideologies, rising anger, a stoked thirst for violence, an addictive-like pattern of seeking out opportunity to cause others harm. To reference what SPLC says, “All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.” In short, hating, belligerence, making those one thousand cuts is based on what we see, every day, all around us, and it does not change. It is what we’re conditioned to do by the example and encouragement of those around us.
The taste for conflict and doing harm to self and others should not be “baked-in” to the makeup of the human, but I suggest that it probably is, and the very best we can ever do is learn to control it within ourselves. We all see plenty every day to piss us off; life contains lots of hardship, and it always has.
But life also has an ample supply of things to behold in awe, to wonder about, to be grateful for, to want to see more of and know more about and spend more time with.
So, my unknown friend and relative, in that we share common DNA and the same number of chromosomes, what value does “Death By A Thousand Cuts” serve for you? Does it give you that “buzzsaw” excitement, cause you to get all tickly down there, make you feel other-than-numb, make you want to go out and cause some damage just to shake it all up, or does it cause you to re-think your precarious position, calm your voice, get inside your own head, shrink away into a quiet isolation?
What is your reactivity, training, example and self-sovereign reason for the really terrible choice of engaging in the Death By A Thousand Cuts dance?
Or, as personality and TV shrink-show icon Dr. Phil McGraw used to offer, “How’s That Working For You?”
A basic truth I have observed about how we acquire knowledge is that people learn what they see and pursue what appeals to them. Both parts are present, or there is no learning. If you are trying to learn to play the ukulele and you simply do not like making finger chords, then you will not learn it. If you hate math, no matter how many times I show you the solution to a problem, it will exit your brain. If you see how a needlepoint is made and you like the movements and the way the process works, you will learn it. If you have not seen how to do something, but it appeals to you, and you want to give it a try, you will find ways to learn it. We learn by reading. We learn by watching. We learn by hearing. We learn by getting our feelings in touch with the subject.
If the thing that you wish to learn gives you wounds, hurts you, cuts you physically or emotionally, you will 1) struggle through the pain of it, because you want to learn it that badly, or 2) run like hell from it. If Option 1 is the direction for your experience, you will begin trial and error until you find ways to stop getting hurt when you do the thing. Trauma will inform you, and you can either die that death of a thousand cuts, or you can find ways to stop cutting every time you do it.
If the hurt comes as an option 2, you may remember it vividly enough to build up a wall, or construct a bubble, to prevent ever getting hurt by it again. More on this in another piece, another time.
Some things build up scar tissue. Some things build up emotional scarring. But if you like what you are doing, you endure, until you no longer can, no longer respond to the appeal, or others help you discover where your wounds are.
So it is with human behavior. So it is with trauma. Trauma is recurring. Trauma happens to hurt people. Those hurt people go on and “find their groove” and hurt other people. They are, in essence, the golfer who practices with the biggest basket of range balls he can buy and pulls the driver out first, hits the ball with everything they have, misses, slices, veers wildly in the shot, gets no range and cannot stay on course. They keep doing it over and over again, until someone else comes out and stops them, advises them, or worse, someone gets hurt.
Hurt people hurt – people.
The patterns repeat over time, generation to generation.
We learn and teach the dysfunction so incredibly well.
We need to stop it.
I’m going to touch on some very painful items here.
I know they make me wince … if you are human, you’ll pull back in pain too. As well you should.
Friday the 24th of June our Supreme Court of the United States, familiarly known as SCOTUS, struck down a legal precedent and previously ruled upon case known as “Roe v. Wade.” (https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/410/113)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade
For women who were recipients of pregnancy termination, and for women who had come to rely on the courts to protect them from future harm, future trauma, future change in their circumstances, this ruling was a reanimation and re-exposure to perhaps the most difficult thing a woman might ever have to decide about her life and the lives of people around her.
Here’s the second item that caused me to feel really sick – how about you, did this make you want to throw up as well?
On the 4th of July, a lone assassin strode a rooftop, planned his attack with military precision, and opened fire on the holiday celebration in Highland Park, Illinois. Seven people lay dead. The attacker was able to flee the environment and was apprehended several hours later.
For everyone in this nation of guns, we were yet again reminded that guns are a concern, and guns are a source of fear and anger. We were yet again reminded that SCOTUS has made efforts to deny rights that were considered “settled law” but permit the tools of violence to be in the hands of untrained, dangerous persons. Persons with a long-standing medical and social history of violence toward self and others.
This is not freedom. This is deliberate intimidation, and it is intentionally opening up previously healed wounds. And there is no solid, cogent, decent or reasonable argument for either situation to stand. Both were incidents of malice aforethought. Both were cuts in the same place, of the same nature, repeated over time.
My question to you is, what value does either situation have? How is either situation going to make your day better, and help you heal? No matter where you stand on the reproductive rights issue, no matter where you stand on gun laws and the seemingly absolute authority of an amendment that tells us we can all have a weapon, and we should all be able to defend ourselves (the 2nd amendment doesn’t really say that, and its origins are well documented, please read Kim Wehle’s,”How To Read The Constitution and Why”), what is your position on self-harm, harm to others, intent to harm, ability to protect, ability to deter harm, ability to resolve conflict?
Do you value conflict resolution?
Or, is it the conflict that turns you on?
Do you get off on it? Do you seek out the people, places and things that keep taking you into the Danger Zone, like the TopGun movie theme, to turn everything upside down, inside out, yell, “YEE-HAW!!” in an uncontrollable reality that knocks the wind out of you, and you come back for more of an ass-kickin’?
What happens when you get dropped off in Boredom Central, where nothing exciting ever happens, people, places and things move through predictably, reliably, and free of drama and spectacle? Are you in the game as a non-player character (NPC) and can you be okay with that, or must you have player status? What happens to you when ordinary becomes your source code and pixel set?
This article is not about the topic of abortion, reproductive rights, who decides what means of contraception a woman or man employs, whether or not the traditional roles are being attacked or sullied by the behaviors of a series of “liberal” generations. This article is about wounds, both seen and unseen, and the conflict that caused them.
This is not an article about gun control, although I personally think it is a really bad idea to have military-grade armament available in the civilian sector. It is also a really bad idea to keep pushing violence in entertainment. Having said that, we have an appetite for it, and if you got rid of all the guns in Hollywood, Bollywood and every other production set, you would have nobody interested in movies. We want to see it, just not in our back yard or neighborhoods. The Crimo family will have to stand before the citizenry and be judged for their action, or lack of it, and I will have to leave that story to be told by others who research it more thoroughly.
This article is about being harmed, not only harm inflicted by others, but also about harm we memorialize and re-create, and wounds we continue to tear at and re-open.
This article is about the loss we experience each time we re-inflict old hurts. We use law to cut at one another, rip one another, injure one another. Law should not do that. Law should be the suture and bandage; it should not be a crude, battlefield amputation with naught more than whiskey for an anesthetic.
Another word for old wounds and for fresh ones is trauma.
Trauma is defined as, “… an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape, or natural disaster. Immediately after the event, shock and denial are typical. Longer term reactions include unpredictable emotions, flashbacks, strained relationships, and even physical symptoms like headaches or nausea. While these feelings are normal, some people have difficulty moving on with their lives. Psychologists can help these individuals find constructive ways of managing their emotions.”
(https://www.apa.org/topics/trauma)
Here’s a much simpler way to think of trauma:
- Pain. Unpredictable, unimagined, unforeseen pain. It comes to you without warning. It may temporarily be blocked by your body and brain as you fight to stay alive, keep your sanity, hold your composure.
- Loss. Unpredicted, unimagined, unforeseen. Even with your best efforts, you could not ward off the loss.
- Anger and fear, all at once, bouncing back and forth like a ping-pong ball, tearing at your insides, some people lean toward the one side, others drive toward the other. A clinical word used is “labile.”
- Urgency. DO SOMETHING, DAMMIT! DON’T JUST SIT THERE! As we teach in active shooter training, run away if you can, hide if you cannot get away, fight as a last resort. Use the energy of the fear and anger chemistry to mobilize.
- Suffering. Suffering comes in waves and stages. The Kubler-Ross model memorializes stages of a cycle, but they do not happen in a rigid sequence, more like storm waves battering the shore: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Suffering is not easy, but it is inevitable. Being wounded, being traumatized, always leads to suffering; it may last a short while, or it may endure. It is variable in the individual and in groups of people. People may bond through a common suffering.
- Struggling. After trauma, there is a lost sense of self. There is a lost identity. There is a “never-to-be-so-again” person that begins to take up residence in our husk. It is an unpleasantness and discrepancy that keeps doing a comparison between what once was, and what now is. I am not talking about the normally occurring struggle of leaving one stage of development and transitioning to another. Those life experiences are easily adjusted for because as creatures we move along a timeline with our peers, and we have the common experiences that create a collective narrative. Those struggles are cleared up by moving in groups. The struggle in trauma is to reconcile the resulting wounded spirit (soul, if you prefer), give it value, give the experience meaning, and keep its radiation from poisoning us. Viktor Frankl called this “logotherapy.”
Another way to speak to the struggle in the self is to call it “internal conflict.” (Allen and Mary Ivey, “Intentional Interviewing and Counseling”) It is the “little voices in my head, talking about me and haunting me.”
Old wounds that have scarred over still have a memory tag in your mind. I remember the first time a doctor needed to put stitches in my arm, after I fell playing a child’s game. That was sixty years ago! I remember my skiing accident. I never lost consciousness throughout the event, and I was so fortunate to not be all alone when it happened. I remember with clarity each motor vehicle accident I ever was in. I remember being accosted twice in my life, where I had to actually fight another human to survive. It does not go away. It leaves its lessons present, puts a record in place, then, leaves our brains to sort out the meaning of the event.
Some trauma is blocked by the brain, because re-living it is simply too painful – being abused as a child, being molested, being raped, being battered, being assaulted, not feeling safe because of repeated threats from hate-filled and hurtful people. For some folks, the trauma must be buried under as much dirt as can be thrown on top of it.
Our memories are, however, living patterns, assembled by living cells, and held on to beneath that dirt. This creates a discrepancy between what once was, and what now is. This is the essence of conflict.
Conflict often creates indelible memories, persistent trauma, disordered states.
Here are just a couple of what we might call internal conflicts, aligned with one item in this piece:
- A girl who discovers she is pregnant, feels entirely alone and no one will help her.
- A young single woman whose birth control program has just failed her, leaving her with dark and solitary thoughts to wrestle with, instead of the joy of a future new possibility.
- An older woman who is well past the prime of her life, thinking that her cycles are coming to their end, and her family is as good as it will get. A set of old, familiar symptoms prompt her to buy an over-the-counter test kit. The answer is unsettling – she picks up the phone and calls her doctor. She is referred to a genetic counselor. A prenatal deformity is detected, and it is one that will leave the future unborn child helpless and vegetative.
The Iveys also talk about external conflicts. There are two types of external conflict they discuss – you against the world, and you against specific individuals in that world:
Wars on foreign soil, putting families in peril, creating hardships for people fleeing war zones. Smaller wars and skirmishes right here in America, pitting neighbor against neighbor, attempting to use force to gain advantage, using threat, assault, battery and killing as a way to send a message of exceptional cruelty.
Conflict. A very broad expression, a euphemism, a bon mot describing the feelings and thoughts that spin off a person and into a giant maelstrom. Conflict causes trauma. Conflict hurts.
Conflict isn’t only thoughts and feelings -
Conflict is alteration of our material world, in ways that damage, hurt, wound, break, shatter, disrupt, slaughter, defeat, crush, antagonize.
Conflict is real, determinate, able to be sensed by us. We humans can also measure it. We create formulas to look at the cost of it. We attempt to price out the repairs for the conflict.
We do not want to die by a thousand cuts. We want to live. The ultimate conflict in human and other life is between the tug of nature to render unto death, and the determination to be alive, in whatever form that might mean. But we keep cutting our world and our species in the same, time-honored, anger-and-hate filled rut, and we go back into it with alarming precision.
Conflict is as old as time, and our thoughts and feelings are as old as each one of us is. Our first breath was that very thing, an absolute need to get respiration going, a separation from supportive life to independent existence. Our very first thing that we did all on our own, and often, it starts just as soon as the midwife, dula or physician clear the last bit of amniotic fluid out of our lungs. The reflex to fight back against failure is almost immediate.
We want to live. It is not a mistake. We are here. The rest of our life we will spend making mistakes, repeating cuts in the same old wounds, going after errors and repeating until a worthwhile person comes along and tells us, “Here’s a way you should try, you’ll be more successful…”
When a moment like that happens, when a steady hand touches us on the shoulder, when we are not struck in anger or treated with disdain, disgust or contempt, when we are allowed to process the conflict between what we “have always done this way” and the “try this way…it will work differently” message,
The result is conflict resolution.
Here are a few of the activating axes of conflict we face as we live our lives:
- Old versus young
- Rich versus poor
- Educated versus uneducated
- Fearful versus brave
- Free versus encumbered
- Stupid versus smart
- Women versus men
- Innovative versus traditional
- People of color versus non-colored people
- Powerful versus not powerful
- Have’s versus Have-Nots
- Progressive versus conservative
- Armed versus unarmed... there is a spectrum of asymmetry where one side has more firepower and is therefore, perceived to be “tougher.”
You will experience some or all of these conflicts in your life. How you move through them depends largely on your choices. Sometimes, they happen in combination. Are you good at looking at things and separating the different axes? Can you say to the person or group, “Here’s part of the problem, and I was thinking we could talk about this one way that we keep getting off track…”
- Do you see a giant “gemisch” and get confused or angered by it, do you lose clarity, do you get upset by the conflict? Do you try to hide in the background and just pretend it will go away?
- Or, are you one of those people who sees conflict, equates it with opportunity, or worse, gets all hot and bothered by it, likes to stoke it and feed it, gets a thrill from the hurting, or self-inflicts the pain because at least you are feeling something instead of numb? Are you able to own the practice of self-harm? Or, are you prone to blaming others for the pain you need so that you know you are living?
- Last, are you the person in the room who takes the whole woundedness thing and carefully looks at how to turn it to your advantage, how to profit from others being in pain, are you someone who really has no business being there, but has conned your way in, and you are licking your predatory chops because in your head is a script that goes, “I’m gonna make a killing off of this…”
We could adopt a safety culture and a moral will to be safe. It is not a progressive pipe dream. It is a survival imperative in a world that really does not need us. But something keeps us going back and hurting ourselves in the same way, in the same places, for the same unreasonable reasons. What is that blockade we two-footed wonders of the firmament seem to have that sets us off, chasing a dragon, certain that this insane time, we’ll get it right, and not cut ourselves in the same old place?
I think that it actually turns us on to hurt ourselves and others.
I think we get a thrill out of it.
I have observed that the hurting gets people off, and that momentary adrenaline high is the dragon people chase.
Yeah, it is pretty sick.
It is sick because we don’t learn. It is sick because we don’t get to a place where we all say, “We’re done hurting ourselves. We’re done.”
We don’t stop. Conflict comes, conflict turns us on, conflict gets our motors revved up, and it becomes an infectious plague, making every sane person you see fall victim to their own worst self.
We hate the fight, but we love to get it on. We don’t want to engage in a controlled fashion. We want unfairness, we want the deck stacked, we want to feel that thrill. We want to hurt self and others.
I wish there was a cure, but there is none. Conflict is part of our makeup, and it will be so until our species is no more. We can manage it and we really should do a better job with that management. We have the tools to resolve many conflicts, but often, what slows us down is the recognition that conflict exists.
I’ve written other notes on DailyKos, you might have read them, thank you for that. I’ll remind you of a couple acronyms I’ve used:
- HALT – hungry, angry, lonely, tired. These triggers are often cited for addictive behavior.
- STOP – sincerity, thoughtfulness, ownership, patience/persistence. I coined this to help make it easy to put in your own circuit breakers for your triggers when trauma occurs
- WAIT – Why am I talking? As a point of reflection, this one’s my failure point, because I never seem to know when to just shut up. Maybe you struggle with that one, too…
- CAMP – careful, attentive, mindful, patient. Again, I came up with this to help those folks who have coping skills, need to organize a little bit so that they can practice their coping skills more often, get on with the daily work of quieting the brain, soothing the soul, especially after trauma.
If I can leave you with a single lesson on trauma and its effects, it is this:
This world is dangerous. No question. You will get hurt, and many times, you and I will carry scars of the hurt. As long as you can breathe, as long as you can muster any level of movement, as long as you can locate your will to survive, you can fight back against the hurting, begin a journey to become “you” again, and get yourself ready for the next thing that comes along to leave its indelible mark on you.
Don’t give up. Don’t allow the dance of a thousand cuts to bring its final step, your death. You are definitely worth the effort, and we need you to remain living and among us. Be well; learn; grow and share your wisdom with all of us. Thanks for reading.