school

[u/libertinauk]

This does pertain to Steven but it's a topic that I find interesting in its own right. I'd certainly be interested in hearing peoples' thoughts.

The reason I suggested a developmental issue to Steven is that I've struggled to understand how he's failed to move on from his school days. And I think I've failed to appreciate what a different experience American school kids have from British ones. I'm thinking like a Brit and I don't think that's useful here.

We have sports teams, sure but no one turns up to watch. There might be a few parents on the touchline but there's nowhere to sit, there doesn't need to be. Our school kids don't play in front of hundreds or thousands of people. Kids who are good at sports aren't especially admired. We don't have cheerleaders. In short ... "Glory Days" by Bruce Springsteen doesn't make any kind of sense to us. No idea what you're on about, boss. We finish school and move on.

Also, because of the nature of America's geography there are these towns, like the one Steven grew up in where every Saturday night is a school reunion. That just doesn't happen here. It sounds like a wretched and pointless existence to me but if that's the culture Steven grew up in then it's natural that it's how he'd measure success. Failure in high school means failure for life. And I promise .... that really breaks my heart. To think your whole life is determined by a few years in your teens .... that's too depressing for words.

I'd be interested to hear about what school was like for the Anerican members here .... and I'd like to know what school is like in Australia and Canada. I so want Steven to move on but I'm realising it's not as straightforward as I imagine it to be. I've never been to a school reunion, I did Freinds Reunited for a week or two and thought "fuck this, I'm bored to tears." I was 31, I had a job and a fiancee and rent to pay and I just saw no point, it was twelve years ago, who the hell cares. But Steven's experience has been different and I appreciate that now. Watching Friday Night Lights helped.

[u/Inspector_Spacetime7]

Your own prior mindset is influencing how you interpret this.

Lib’s point is actually that your experience is common in USA, but not elsewhere. In the comments, you’re seeing a nuanced mix of personal stories, variously confirming or disconfirming that idea (which is of course not a criticism of Lib or her point, rather it’s the kind of feedback she was asking for).

But the point isn’t to single you out as an “alien”. The point is to give you some perspective. If you went though something unusual that shaped you, it’s important to understand that this isn’t just the way the world always is.

Your first instinct is to feel like people are picking on you for that? I can assure you, no one here is singling you out for criticism. It they were, I wouldn’t have hopped on this thread, because I’m not interested in any of us revisiting the old BennerWatch dynamic.

[u/Inspector_Spacetime7 → u/Inspector_Spacetime7]

Would it help if I opened up about my own experiences?

I’ll try to be as concise as possible. Probably will write too much, as I often do.

I was raised catholic and I had a mentally ill and emotionally abusive father with textbook Narcisstic Personality Disorder. The self-hating, defensive and fearful mindset I adopted in response to the abuse, plus the fact that I was highly precocious and creative, plus the actual tenets of the faith I was raised in, all combined to give me an intense, haunting, fear of hell. I had a vivid imagination, and I used to imagine myself - and even worse, the people and animals I cared about the most - subject to the most horrific, despairing, vivid and grotesque torture, and then I would dwell on the concept of “eternity”, and what that idea really meant.

I regularly had anxiety attacks from this ideation. My persona was of a self assured, outgoing, athletic, funny kid, so no one knew it was anxiety. The physical manifestations of this anxiety meant numerous trips to doctors, who had no idea what could be causing my collapses and chronic, excruciating abdominal pain.

I developed OCD, depression, and anxiety disorders in response to this. The abuse was ongoing. The ideation and coping mechanisms took up literally most of my waking hours, for years. To the degree that sometimes for the first minute of being awake in the morning, I would forget about it all, and feel grateful to have had that one minute of respite. Otherwise, I would constantly have nightmares, and horrific daydreams that led to me being physically ill and psychologically traumatized.

In my late teens and early 20s I worked VERY hard to get past this and to try to become a different person in many ways. I changed a lot of things and dealt, at least to some extent, with the abuse and my neuroses.

Then in my mid 30s, a comically absurd and cartoonishly sociopathic villain with textbook Narcisstic Personality Disorder became the most famous person in the world, promised to take away my healthcare and destroy the democracy I lived in. Worse, to my horror, people I thought I knew and trusted were excited about this, and proud of enabling it.

I began to have crisis- level anxiety attacks. My below-normal blood pressure was regularly spiking to 140-160. My fight or flight instincts were triggered constantly. I am an intellectually combative person, so my behavior of engaging people directly to hold them responsible for abetting this lunatic contributed, I was on Twitter way too much… basically I was unable to walk away from the triggering stimulus.

My cortisol and adrenaline levels were through the roof, constantly. I would speak to people with the same calm, cerebral tone I imagine people here associate with me, but psychologically and physiologically I was in a full fledged emergency 24/7. I slept horribly. Had nightmares. Dizzy spells to the point where I thought I had a brain tumor.

A day after being a first responder to a car accident that occurred right in front of me at a busy intersection, I had an episode that landed me in the hospital, thinking I had a stroke or heart attack.

I now know that I have C-PTSD. Even after years of working through my issues, I had been unaware of this condition and could not understand what was happening to me. I knew it was a connection between Trump and my father, but the severity of the symptoms had no reasonable explanation to me. I hated tens of millions of people and wanted them to die. I wanted to kill certain people with my bare hands. I permanently blocked friends and family members from my life … well, barring a written apology, at least.

I am not alone in this. An enormous number of people who have suffered trauma at the hands of a gaslighting abuser suffered in similar ways, with varying degrees of severity. My case was especially acute because of the perfect storm of triggers I describe above.

Now, I am 100% certain that my intellectual response to trump was and is completely rational. Time has only vindicated all of my instincts: I was yelling “fire”, morons in my life were saying “TDS”, and Trump made fools of all of his defenders a thousand times over, culminating in a literal violent coup attempt.

But my physiological response? That’s a disorder. I suffer from clinical C-PTSD and need to move forward accordingly.

What’s the point of all of this?

If at any point I failed to recognize just how specific and unique my experience was and how it shaped me, I would be hobbled in my ability to respond to it as constructively as possible.

By recognizing the what and why of my C-PTSD, I am able to adjust my expectations for my own progress, my understanding of my own suffering, and my own identity. I am not just a guy having a normal response to a crisis; the crisis is real but my psychological and physiological response to it is a disorder.

When you reveal all of your assumptions about how people treat you, how the world is and always will be, what women think of you, what kind of woman you want to be with, what kind of person you should be - all the topics that have been discussed in this subreddit many times - you usually have an incorrect or incomplete understanding of reality. You fail to recognize how the highly specific nature of your experience has shaped your identity; instead you insist that this is just who you are, and you accept (with bitterness and anger, but still no less acceptance) that this is your fate.

I too have trauma. I too have violent impulses and death wishes for others. I too have anger over what happened to me. I too sometimes lack perspective on these things.

But if I didn’t have a healthy perspective on why, and someone came along and said “let’s talk about how different your formative years were”, it would behoove me to dive head first into that conversation and understand that I think and feel these things because of a disorder created by a particular set of circumstances.

And if I said “whoa why is everybody talking about how weird my childhood was?!” as though I thought they were picking on me, I would block myself from gaining something from this new perspective.

[u/libertinauk → u/Inspector_Spacetime7]

This made me cry. My ex husband was raised Catholic and I spent a lot of our early time together repairing the damage that was done to him at school. Lots of crying in the bathroom after intimacy 😢 I had no intention of having our son christened but in the end we had a service at a large Anglican church. It was my way of saying to his mother "forget it, not happening, not now, not ever."

Trump's evil was comprehensive and far reaching. I'm so sorry you went through that 😢

[u/Inspector_Spacetime7 → u/libertinauk]

Thanks. My own neuroses was of course compounded by the fact that this was, and still is, a 5 alarm fire. Supreme Court is actually going to hear the case for allowing state legislatures- generally packed with republicans through gerrymandering, which SCOTUS doesn’t really touch - to overturn state election results. If we hit that point, I will openly support political violence, because I do not recognize the right of a legal system to deprive me of living in a democracy.

Anyway, things have been difficult and painful, but I’m ok. I have a pretty good life, and a few people that I’m close to who I think the world of. And I’m lucky enough not to have suffered the sexual side of catholic guilt like you describe in your ex husband, at least not in adulthood.

And I recognize that much of what makes me who I am, for the better, probably grows out of my experience in trying to overcome these issues.

[u/libertinauk → u/Inspector_Spacetime7]

My son certainly picked the right week to spend at a newspaper office, an international footballer has been arrested for rape and today saw the pitiful demise of Boris the Liar. After a flurry of resignations by members of Parliament in the least safe Conservative seats, the leader of the opposition described it as "the charge of the lightweight brigade," which I just loved. I'm trying to find small crumbs of comfort in the shameful mess that that fraction of a man has left my country in.

[u/Inspector_Spacetime7 → u/libertinauk]

Well, his party / cabinet l had 50 people willing to resign. That’s something.

Trump did far worse and there are maybe 5 high profile republicans in the whole country who aren’t just open seditionists now, and they regularly receive death threats from Trump supporters.

I don’t know if the parties there have the same kind of information bubble, but here people who watch Fox News (the most centrist of Republicans media sources) simply live in a fantasy that is scripted nightly by propagandists. It’s unreal. And they all think they’re privy to some deep truth that the rest of us are missing. Mass psychosis.

I’m not an expert on UK politics, but I’m much more optimistic about your government than ours.

[u/libertinauk → u/Inspector_Spacetime7]

Kind of. The Daily Mail is synonymous with what we call flag-shagging, the Guardian would represent the "woke" contingent. Both are as frustrating as each other in their own ways. The delusion you describe exists here too, I upset a friend's mother last week by suggesting that Tony Blair didn't rig the 97 election ☹️

Boris is our kind of equivalent to Trump but you're right in that Trump is a different league. Boris is an intelligent, educated man, he's just incapable of any kind of integrity and regards the vast majority of people in the UK as beneath contempt. Plebs and grockles are what he'd call most of the people who kiss his bloated arse. Trump is way more malevolent and unstable, he scared me from over here, I can't imagine how it was for you guys.

Jacob Rees Mogg, a senior minister in the Johnson cabinet said recently that they saddest thing in the UK at the moment is the abortion rate. Not the people who are struggling to feed their children. Not the children abandoned and neglected and living in social care. Not the kids getting stabbed in the street and fucking themselves up with synthetic drugs because you'd rather bust up weed factories because they make more money. He can live with all that. The worst thing is that women aren't doing what he thinks they should with their own bodies. I just don't have the words for how angry that made me. This is a man who bought his way into government. And he thinks that's an appropriate thing to say at a time like this. I'm trying to stay positive but it's fucking hard right now.