"My experience of you" vs. "real you"

It's funny once you become aware of something and it's on your radar, you start both (1) seeing other instances of it and (2) you understand what's going on in those instances. For instance, I remember at one time in my life not understanding the meaning of the Fleetwood Mac song Landslide, and I also remember there being a very specific (although I've forgotten it now, ha) moment in which I suddenly understood it and it applied perfectly to my situation at that time.

I've always liked this Bjork song, but a few months ago I finally understood it:


I watched the first episode of the Netflix comedy Grace and Frankie, sort of an odd couple dynamic between two women whose husbands leave them for each other. Frankie is hippy dippy, Grace is rich white lady. But it also had an example of the sort of defining someone's identity that I mentioned in the last post:

Frankie: I lost my best friend. You don't even like Robert. 

Grace: You have no right to judge me. You don't know us. 

Frankie [clears throat] I'm sorry, I was judging by my experience of you, not the real you. That was wrong of me. 

I thought, that's a good distinction to make -- judging by our experience of a person versus whatever the real them is. We would never assume that we know all there is to France and French people after watching a French film or visiting Paris. Why do we feel so sure of ourselves in terms of our ability to judge someone's character after seeing a similar small sliver of the real them.

Defining others = emotional abuse

One thing that I liked about the way the neurofeedback guy approached the whole dream interpretation thing, though, is that he didn't try to tell me who I am or what my dream meant. He asked me. My therapist is also huge on that -- will let me drift and drift and drift for months and years even until I learn a particular principle for myself. He says it's because that's essentially the best (only?) way for lasting change.

Sometimes I see people in life and here trying to tell people their truth, and I certainly have been 100% guilty of that in the past. I'm not sure if the impulse to dictate someone's truth is more likely to come from a largely ignorant or mislead desire to help or from a more ego driven desire to tear someone down or to build ourselves up as the keeper of Truths (capital T) about the world and other people. One thing that I have learned from therapy is how sacrosanct people's concept of identity is, and how so many behaviors can be traced to their identity, often negative behaviors occur when people believe that their identity is being threatened or has been mangled somehow. And one major type of psychological/emotional abuse is for the perpetrator to pretend to have the power to define the people in his or her life -- either as explicitly negative things like being stupid, no good, incompetent, ugly, or even as things that appear to be neutral but still are oppressive because some outside force as deigned to tell you what your thoughts, feelings, motives, etc. are and to try to impose their view of the world on you. These efforts are as emotionally violent to a person's sense of self or identity as punching them in the face, in fact most people would probably prefer to be punched in the face and have that unwanted invasion of one's personal space than they would an assault on the very thing that makes life seem worth living for most and what Victor Frankl credits in part to his survival in the concentration camps -- the no matter their circumstances, they still have absolute control over how they choose to view their circumstances and the power to define for themselves what they know to be basic and unassailable identity truths.

One reader posted in the "resources" post a book from this psychologist, that has coined the term "verbal abuse" and has written several books on the phenomenon:



It's interesting, she suggests that men who do this are much more likely to be trained out of it -- she believes because they have been accidentally trained into it as part of their socialization to be a "man" in this society. My brother said something like that to me once -- that he realized that he was a horrible boyfriend and was always undermining his girlfriend's sense of self in subtle ways to get her to be more what he needed and wanted her to be. After he realized what he was doing, he was able to stop. But there are others who have slipped into this behavior who apparently are not self aware enough to stop. She believes that most women emotional abusers fall into this category only because they're less likely to have stumbled into the behavior accidentally from a place of otherwise psychological normalcy. Consequently, if it shows up in women (despite all odds), there's likely something fundamentally psychologically wrong with them that is causing both the impulse to define others in this way and also is likely preventing some self-reflective insight that would help them see the truth of their behavior and get them to stop it.