More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 2 - August 24, 2021
But we all know now that many parents are the source of the problem.
We each come closer to a more mature understanding of who we really are, some kind of acceptance, while at the same time working to change the things we can in order to get closer to our desired self. In this way, that gap narrows from both sides: acceptance, and change.
African-Americans are assumed to have slavery pasts and so become (correctly or incorrectly) its reminder to the world. But white people are assumed not to have slavery pasts, and so those of us who do, pass incognito. As a result, slavery becomes something that was done to Black people by no one.
He denies complexity, and the people around him do not challenge him directly.
I have observed that people living in unrecovered trauma often behave in very similar ways to the people who traumatized them.
The unrecovered traumatized person cannot or does not negotiate because creating peace means altering one’s position and acknowledging the other person’s experience.
Who do we call when it matters, when it’s the moment to inhibit escalation, before the explosion becomes inevitable? Ideally, the people to call before are the healthy, fair, and self-critical group—family, friends, community
One problem here is how to intervene with a person who is overstating harm, hiding behind technology, shunning or otherwise escalating.
Escalation is almost always exacerbated when parties are members of shallow communities like dysfunctional families and bad friends. Religious/racial/national Supremacy concepts are at the basis of destructive groups, bound together by negative values.
Perhaps the offending person objects to a negative situation, they respond to an unjust structure, or by just being themselves they illustrate difference. In other words, they say or do or are something that requires an individual or a community to examine itself, something they don’t want to do, or are not supported to do.
people traumatized in childhood may consequently live with a fragile self as well as insecure boundaries
“gentrified happiness” in which people exploit others to avoid feeling uncomfortable.
as friends, owe each other the same when our issues destabilize us if we don’t tell the truth and help each other get our sense of scale back, we are actually refusing to help when it is most needed.
the woman who ruins everyone’s fun by telling the truth. She must be silenced, shunned, punished, and destroyed so that business can continue as usual, unopposed.
hurting themselves and/or others
triggered reaction stands out because it is out of sync with what is actually taking place.
Certain character types send criticizing, hurtful emails, with misconceptions and false information concluding with, “I consider this matter closed” or “Do not respond.”
Sending condemning emails, or taking hurtful actions and then hiding behind technology, is either a Supremacy action or Traumatized action. It insists on unilateral reality, the removal of difference.
When anxiety is at the wheel, we tragically project, blame, and then separate.
interpersonal hypersensitivity (i.e., prone to feel slighted or insulted).
intense fear of difference and overreactions to difference as a projected threat to one’s safety.
They are triggered by the nuances of other people that feel like criticism, such as normative disagreements.
making someone else the bad other,” the making of monsters.
It’s an interesting situation because loving someone who can’t be counted on to be present, fair, empathetic, reciprocal, honest, or dependable is a very particular experience. It means loving someone for reasons other than for what they can do for you. It means loving them because they move you, not because they provide for you.
someone who can tell and hear and act on the truth about their own situation.
much of the family’s work is about maintaining a strange kind of anti-social version of “loyalty” in which we prove our love to family members by upholding any wrongdoing they commit on others.
The mother role remains firmly fixed in both society and media representation as a place of guilt and martyrdom,
family members learn how to be exploitative, expectant, and entitled.
I believe that a truly “good” family is one that is deeply and in fact primarily concerned with the behavior of its members towards other people.
psychological insight, individuation, and a means of discussion that emphasizes context, objective, and the order of events.
we externalize problems that exist within a family and pin them on people outside of the family organization.
There is still that classic “bad” family which builds its internal legitimacy around maintaining one of its own members as the constant scapegoat. But the “good” family blames the outsider. It fears them because of what they can reveal about the family and its members, that the family may be human and have flaws.
Isn’t any ideology that pushes young women into marriage and motherhood reactionary? What about gay male parents and surrogacy? Hiring women to provide childcare? There are all kinds of anxieties, projections, and distorted thinking involved in our concepts of parenting.
As the queer community becomes more and more saturated with “family values” and familial imperatives, we see an increased privileging of “family,” even if it is corrupt and detrimental, over the community of friends.
In the construction of motherhood and the idea of a “good mother,” the model of self-sacrifice predominates. Sacrifice to the “child” is symbolic of good citizenship:
In 2011, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that almost a fifth of men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four still lived with their parents. And this number does not include men who live outside the home but are financially supported by their parents or female partners. For women, it’s only 10 percent who live at home at the same age.
normative and reasonable expectations of responsibility and accountability.
They spend a lot of time in the company of adults, so they can talk and think like them, but they never build up the confidence to be truly independent and self-reliant.
journey of learning how to individuate, how to develop their own world, their own habits, responsibilities, and relationships; how to live on their own, support themselves, and help others.
Being attracted to or even loving a woman has no relationship to treating her, and by extension one’s self, as a person who matters.
that is where real values are established, in the conflict between what our families tell us and the reality of the world.
Media reflect the values of apartheid and colonialism:
This of course is the classic paradigm: that the telling of the truth is the crime, not the truth itself.
overstating harm in order to justify acting out with cruelty.
enforce obedience, an exercise in overreaction, overstatement, projection, dehumanization.
illogic, a distorted system of thought that is delusional about both the self and the other.
The Israelis need to maintain the false notion of the Palestinian monster because it is only in opposition to that monster that the Israelis can construct themselves.
Being treated as a non-person may be the most crushing kind of oppression that there is. —JOHN BOSWELL (1986 lecture at the University of Wisconsin)
There is only the recognition of a reality. That’s it. It’s factually correct.
used. I ask what the other person would say happened. I ask for the order of events.
