Nimue Brown's Blog, page 111

When there is no right answer

Sometimes there is no winning move. Anything you might do would be a compromise, or a bad choice. It’s impossible to make good choices when you don’t have good options. I go round this a lot with health issues because often the thing that fixes one problem is a high risk for causing another and some days all I can do is choose the terms on which I’m going to be in pain.

Some things are unfixable. There is no magic wand. Not everything can be put right. No matter how deeply you may feel that you *should* be able to make it all ok again, sometimes that’s not even possible.

Sometimes these things are true because you’ve been set up. Whatever you do is going to be wrong. Bullies do this. People interested in coercion and control do this. It can be really hard to see when you’re in there, constantly feeling like you should have realised and done the other thing and unable to see that you’re in a trap and there was no right answer.

In my experience, the quest for the right answer can be both exhausting and impossible. If a right answer doesn’t even exist, you can waste a lot of time and energy looking for it. All the second guessing and self doubt doesn’t help, either.

It is ok to do the best you can with what you’ve got. It is entirely good enough to make the best decision you have with the information you’ve got – even if in hindsight you can see why that wasn’t optimal. If all else fails, doing whatever seems kindest or most honourable is a good response to an impossible situation. Sometimes all you get to hang on to is the knowledge that you acted with integrity, even if that didn’t work out well.

Sometimes all we get to do is choose the way in which we are going to fail. There is comfort in picking a path that feels honourable.

A Semblance of Hope

Please do saunter over and read the whole thing!

The Passing Place

This may be a familiar experience, it may not, but I often find myself intrigued by the idea of ‘another perspective’. Everything I write, everything I read, everything I watch, the world it self and every aspect of life in fact can always be viewed from another perspective.

This included my own past. Something I suspect we all feel at times. there are things I did in the past that had I done something even slightly differently would have changed everything about my life. Events I view now from a different perspective, because I am no longer the person to whom those things happened. I am not my teenage self… So my perspective on the events of my teenage years are not something I look back on now with the same thoughts and views as I had at the time.

As for those I interacted with, how they view those…

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Contemplating forgiveness

Where forgiveness is truly sought, my heartfelt response is to want to offer it. However, I’ve spent time dealing with people who apologise when they don’t mean it in order to have further opportunities to cause harm. Forgiveness isn’t owed, it has to be earned.

There are a lot of people who say that you have to forgive to heal. I don’t believe this at all. You have to work through your feelings, process your pain and anger, and figure out how to make peace with it for yourself. Whether that includes forgiving a person who harmed you, is really your call to make. 

It is possible to forgive someone without also giving them a second chance. Forgiveness can be part of a letting go process. No one is owed a second chance by someone they’ve hurt.

Forgiving someone is not a kindness or a virtuous act if you’re just enabling them to do harm, to you, to themselves or to others. Standards and boundaries also matter.

We all mess up. We’re all flawed, complicated life forms, and even when we’re doing our best, we don’t know everything. We can make mistakes in all innocence, trying our best and falling short or just not knowing enough to make a good call. Sometimes there are no good options anyway. It’s important to be able to forgive yourself for these, and to forgive anyone else you encounter who meant well but messed up. Expecting perfection is a form of cruelty.

It’s ok to be finished with someone. Not because they were unforgivable and did terrible things, but just because not everything works. Some things run their course. That I can forgive people for being flawed, foolish or wearying is one thing, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to go another round with them. I am at my least compassionate when I’m bored with someone else’s behaviour, tired of seeing the same mistakes over and over, tired of the dramas that seem small to me. I’m not good when I’m bored. It does not bring out the best in me.

I’m not going to forgive where that requires me to be smaller. I’ve had enough of cutting myself down to make other people comfortable. I’m not going to seek forgiveness from people who just find me too difficult – better for all of us if we move on. I don’t need to be forgiven for being myself. I don’t want to deal with people who have been so offended by me being myself that forgiving me seems relevant to them. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point.

War and whataboutery

Whataboutery is the art of derailing something by trying to foreground some other thing – but what about…?. The classic of the form goes ‘why are you helping those foreign people when we have our own homeless people to take care of?’ The people who practise whataboutery can be counted on to not care in the slightest about the cause they put forward. The aim of whataboutery is to upset, overwhelm and undermine anyone trying to get anything done. 

It’s worth noting that genuine activists support each other. People who rescue cats do not come on to posts from people who rescue dogs going ‘but what about cats? Why do you hate cats?’ When it comes to human issues, you often find that the people who are out today protesting about war in Ukraine are the ones who were out previously protesting about war in Palestine. Those of us who speak out against violence tend to speak out, for whatever cause most seems to need us at the time. My focus is domestic violence, but I care about ending all violence. And of course activists aren’t perfect, and have biases and issues of their own. If we wait for the perfect activist to come along, no one will ever resist anything that needs standing up to.

It’s amazing how many people on social media now seem to care about Palestine when normally they don’t. It’s amazing how many people want to talk about Yemen, and Syria who never showed the slightest interest in those countries before. This is whataboutery, and it’s not about supporting causes or protecting life.

As far as I can tell, the best thing to do if you get hit by whataboutery in any context, is to take them seriously and ask what they would like you to amplify. Ask how you can actively support the cause they mention and ask what they are doing that you can draw attention to. The whataboutery brigade tend to go quiet in face of this, which makes them less tiring to deal with than getting into any kind of conflict with them. It also quickly establishes if you’re dealing with someone truly devoted to a cause, or someone who just wants to derail you. Ignoring and blocking are also valid choices.

There are always other issues to talk about. As refugees move across Europe, we do need to talk about how differently white refugees are treated from brown and black refugees. We do need to be alert to this kind of injustice. No war is acceptable, no aggression is justified and everywhere this happens, matters. We urgently need to end all violence. But the whataboutery brigade don’t actually care about any of the real issues and should not be indulged.

The art of mental hygiene

Humans are malleable. We’re influenced by our environments and by the things we’re exposed to. If we keep seeing something, we become persuaded by it. This is how adverts work. It’s also how misinformation works. We do get a say in what we expose ourselves to, and taking thoughtful control of that is important if we don’t want to be persuaded by problematic input.

Exposure to lies, misinformation, denial of truth, fake news, people calling real news fake news, and so forth acts on our brains in just the same way that gaslighting does. After enough exposure, this stuff will start to impact on your mental health. Either you’ll be persuaded of their reality, or you’ll feel increasingly stressed, anxious, disorientated and confused as you try to hang on to what you know is true.

People who wish to cause harm invariably demand that you hear them out. They tell you that their opinions are valid and deserve your time. They want you to debate them. They tell you to do your own research, by which they mean expose yourself to more of their ideas. At the same time they are entirely closed to everyone else’s ideas, having already decided on the conspiracy theory or propaganda they are invested in. Debating them won’t persuade them of anything, but it does expose you to their toxic thinking, and that is harmful.

A coherent relationship with reality is better for your mental health than being exposed to things that have you second guessing yourself. This has to be balanced against the need to stay flexible and open to new information, because genuine insight advances all the time. Pick your sources, and consider the reason that you’re picking those sources. It can be hard to know who to trust, but a conscious decision about that will do you more good than being buffeted about.

Watch out for people who deal in radical reversals. The people who tell you that other people with an obscene amount of money are able to represent you and that people who are a lot like you are out of touch elites. People who describe kindness and inclusion as though it was a vicious assault on your rights. Famous people using massive platforms to tell you they’ve been cancelled. People who think that cutting their workers’ paychecks and giving themselves a rise at the same time is justice. If the internal logic of someone’s arguments doesn’t hold up, it is as well to keep away from it because that kind of thinking will damage your mental health.

We aren’t always going to get everything right. If in doubt, choose whatever looks kindest. Even if it turns out to be naive, misinformed, overly optimistic or otherwise doomed to fail, you are better off in a kinder environment. It’s better to fail while meaning well than to be pragamatically horrible. It’s better for your mental health to focus on spaces where kindness dominates and people mean well. Anger can be attractive and it can feel powerful but no one can live there. Angry spaces rapidly become exhausting. Anger can be a great short term motivation, but kindness will keep you moving for the long haul.

Your mental health is vital. Speaking as someone who has suffered with mental illness and experienced gaslighting, I know what it costs. Protecting your mental health is essential, and picking the spaces to be in can really make a difference to that.

Positive thinking and gaslighting

I recently ran into the suggestion that people who have experienced gaslighting are unlikely to cope well with positive thinking strategies. It was a real ‘lightbulb’ moment for me. I find positive affirmations incredibly stressful and panic-inducing. I do ok with very small ones – statements like ‘it is ok not to be perfect’ and ‘shit happens’ and ‘you can get through this’ don’t stress me out.

But, the kinds of things I’ve had recommended to me – like standing in front of a mirror and saying ‘you are beautiful and I love you’ to my reflection makes me feel physically sick. Even thinking about it twists my gut up.

Being gaslit involves taking onboard things that conflict with how you understand reality. For the person who has escaped that, being able to protect your own version of reality is incredibly important. Even when that might not be helping in other ways. I can say ‘that is a face, and it will do’ to my reflection, but that’s all. 

A while ago I tried experimenting with ‘positive’ affirmations and I ended up in a state of crisis and distress. Part of this is that a gaslit person will often have had to deal with being told that things were fine, normal, safe, reasonable and appropriate when that simply wasn’t true. I am better off with lower self esteem that feels real to me than telling myself I am great and facing the breakdown of my reality, again.

Realising this also raised for me some things about how CBT doesn’t work. I expect CBT with a therapist is an entirely different ballgame, but my experience was of being given a workbook. The workbook was based on the assumption that everything was ok really, and that I was panicking about nothing. That wasn’t the case, so what was supposed to be therapy felt like gaslighting. 

There can be no meaningful interventions if we don’t allow for the possibility that things aren’t ok. Saying ‘my life is good’ when your life is clearly hell, isn’t going to make you well. Imagining that there’s nothing to be afraid of when you have genuine reason to fear for your safety, isn’t going to fix anything. If the only problem is what goes on in your head, then maybe positive affirmations will help you. But, if what you have exists for reasons, you aren’t going to magic it away by doing something that feels like lying to yourself.

When stories are the battleground

How do you know what’s true? Who do you trust for information? It’s become ever more problematic since the start of the covid crisis, but the war of stories and information is far older than that. Most conspiracy theories are bunk, and a very few turn out to be super-important. How do you decide which stories to share and believe in?

For anyone on the bard path, the power of stories is likely already a consideration. For anyone interested in politics, and world politics, the question of how stories have become weapons is an ongoing issue. It’s not easy, when faced with a story, to decide what to do with it.

I want the stories that help me understand other perspectives. I want the stories that open out possibilities and make more room to include more people. I reject the stories that encourage us to hate each other and mistrust each other. I reject any story that is about how a group of people deserve to suffer for being who they are when they are doing no harm at all.

Any story has the potential to become true. If we adopt a story and live by it, and invest in it we may well make it real. Sometimes asking if something is factually accurate isn’t the key thing. It may be much more useful to ask what a story will do, what it will enable, who it supports and who it crushes. I’m here for the stories that uplift people and crush injustice. 

For some years now, stories have been part of an ideas war being fought across the world. Don’t share the stories you don’t want to see come true – not even to argue with them. If you need to talk about stories you consider problematic, work around them, don’t give them direct attention and don’t send people to the places airing the problem stories. If we don’t invest energy in them, stories wither and die, to be replaced by stories that were better able to engage people. We get a say in how that plays out.

The Imperfect Victim

The idea that only the perfect victim deserves help or justice comes up a lot around the treatment of women in cases of sexual violence and domestic abuse. The perfect victim is modestly dressed, sexually chaste, perhaps even a virgin. The perfect victim does not drink, or flirt… and on it goes. In terms of how the media and wider public responds to the victim, ideally they should also be young, white and pretty if they want to be taken seriously. The effect of this is to deny help or justice to the vast majority of victims.

It turns out that people will try much the same things when it comes to countries. Ukraine isn’t perfect and it is full of people who are not perfect. I’m seeing that used as a justification for Putin’s aggression, and to undermine people wanting to offer support and expressing concern.

Perfectly innocent victims are hard to find – whether we’re talking about individual humans or groups of people. Self defence is always a consideration, and it is always reasonable to defend yourself in whatever way is necessary. However, if what you’re defending yourself from is the flawed humanity of the other person, that’s not ok. 

There are right-wing elements in the Ukrainian army, apparently. By that measure, I’m not sure if we could find a country innocent enough not to deserve military invasion.

If we insist that only perfectly innocent victims deserve help or compassion, we undermine everyone’s humanity. We justify violence. We excuse the inexcusable. Domestic abusers and rapists alike always blame their victims, whether it’s the claim that their clothing was too provocative, or that they were ‘asking for it’ by making the aggressor angry, this is all too normal. If we accept the aggressor’s justifications, we enable them, and that’s just as true with countries as it is with individuals.

If it turns out that the victim is problematic, we can better sort that out when someone isn’t trying to kill them.

When traumas collide

This winter, Tom and I have done a lot of very deliberate work on changing our relationship. We both came to this marriage with a lot of history and with triggers – some of which we knew about, and some we didn’t. 

Usually when people talk about triggering, it goes like this: There is a person with a trauma history who encounters something that evokes that trauma. They are then thrown back into that history, like a soldier thrown back into the trenches by the sound of an explosion. Once you’re back in the trenches, everything you experience seems to be part of that scenario, and the original terror takes over.

When the trauma involves relationships, and when both of you have triggers, it’s entirely possible for both parties to set each other off. One person’s trauma response can become the other person’s trigger. Historical coping mechanisms can also be a big issue in all of this. If you have one person with a freeze response to panic, and one person whose emotional abuse history includes being totally ignored as punishment, that can be a messy combination.

It’s taken us a long time to get to the point of being able to talk about what happens when historical experiences collide like this. When it happens, we’re effectively functioning in two totally separate realities, not making sense to each other, unable to help each other and often adding to each other’s distress. It’s been messy at times. It’s taken work to get to the point of being able to pick it open and make changes.

One thing we’ve found that helps is to flag up problems as fast as possible. Tom tends to freeze around panic, and that intersects with what his ADHD brain does when he’s not coping. However, if he can tell me that he’s having processing issues, I don’t then take it personally, and we’re better able to work things through. 

I tend to make things worse because, thanks to my history, I act from the expectation that basic needs won’t be met and that in asking for small things I will be asking for too much. This creates the impression that the help I need would be impossibly difficult to achieve – an easy thing to persuade someone of if they’re used to being put under pressure to deliver impossible things. This means I don’t get the help, reinforcing my feeling that I don’t deserve to have my basic needs met and thus making me less able to ask for help. It’s really easy to get stuck in vicious circles like this.

I’ve learned to push back against my panic to ask clearly for what I need. Often it’s things like needing to be talked to so that I’m not simply trapped inside my own head with my escalating panic. You can see how well that works with Tom’s tendency to freeze when panicking…

Mental health problems aren’t solitary, personal issues. We didn’t get into this on our own. Much of where we are both struggling has everything to do with what happens around other people and in the context of relationships. Healing as a single-person project has never really worked. However, working together to support each other, deal with difficulties and find strategies for coping, is proving really effective.

Notes from inside a haunted meatsack

The most peculiar breakup I’ve ever had happened over the phone. He called, and told me he could not continue with the relationship. I admitted I was surprised because as far as I knew, we weren’t in a relationship.

It’s often really hard to get people to talk about how they want things to work. I hate having to infer. I really like it when people can be clear about what they want to do, and how they want to do it and what sort of relationship they think we have. 

People can ascribe such radically different interpretations to the same experiences. There are some people who will assume that if you have sex with them, that means you are in a romantic and exclusive relationship. There are also people who won’t assume that at all. It’s not just about romance, this. It’s about how we do any kind of relationships between people.

I have been surprised on a few occasions by how other people thought about friendship. People I thought I was closer to than I turned out to be. I was once dumped via email by a person who said she couldn’t invest any more energy in our friendship. That was odd because I barely knew her but had done a few things to help her out when she’d asked for help.

People have all sorts of interesting expectations – about what’s normal, or what should be forgiven. I’ve got into states of confusion with a few people along the way because we had differing ideas about what might be fair, or appropriate. The people I am most caught out by are the ones who expect a great deal from me but don’t hold themselves to the same standards. The kind of people who can ignore me for weeks and then get cross with me if I don’t respond to them within a couple of hours.

People are mystifying, sometimes. I know I must make as little sense to the people I’ve described as they did to me. Befuddlement seems to be a frequent feature of human interactions. I think the most important thing is to be able to talk about it. Wanting to understand helps a lot. Caring enough to find out what’s going on for the other person can be a game changer. Or letting them go if you find you don’t care enough to figure out what’s happening.

Did I miss a memo? Are there rules that are obvious to everyone else but invisible to me? Or are we just mostly crazy things, bouncing about in our meat sacks with really no idea how anything, or anyone else functions?