May 2019
There is a meme doing the rounds at the
moment that I think is exactly right particularly where relationships are
concerned, that is. It reads, “Be careful what you tolerate, you are teaching
people how to treat you.”
Unless you speak up and say what is
bothering you, others will think you agree with them, or at least don’t really
care, because otherwise, how would they know.
A lot of gaslighting begins here. The gaslighted tolerates quite a bit
of abuse for a variety of reasons including the idea that the abuser is aware,
without us telling them, that their actions are having a bad effect on us. The
thing is, most of the time they are not aware.
By repeatedly not speaking up, a person
can get really confused by the seeming lack of empathy coming at them from
others and in this confusion they can feel a deluge of contradictory responses
to them, such that they don’t know themselves anymore. This give a clue to
where a person is at emotionally. I see a number of people in this disempowered
mindspace who are experiencing interior collapse, without knowing where to
start to regain their sense of self. The other person blithely continues this
line of unexamined abuse for they don’t have a gauge of the us.
The belief that others sort of know us
without being told is a hang over from early childhood when the child thinks
the world revolves around them and that everyone shares the same mindspace as
themselves. This is classical magical thinking.
Magical thinking assumes that there is a causal
link between one's inner, personal experience and the external physical world,
and that other people automatically know what
the child is thinking, hoping for, wishing for. I suspect that a lot of
adults harbor some beliefs of this kind. It is, interestingly, in intimate
relationships where the magical thinking of childhood tends to reemerge. For it
is in such relationships we often expect the other person to know us more than
perhaps they do, and when they don’t, we get a shock.
Magical thinking is implicit in the idea of romantic
love, something writ large in popular culture.
There we have ideas of how it is to be in love, where heart and soul are
shared, where there are not two, but one, where there is a sacred unity in love
making and where we are destined to be together. I am not saying that this kind
of experience doesn’t happen; what I am saying is that such an experience isn’t
present all the time, and shouldn’t be.
Too much
gets assumed, consumed, presumed, when we expect a closeness that is
unexamined. It is in the unexamined that abuse is free to occur, and often
does. It is in the unexamined and unspoken that one or the other of us can
assert a control over what they deem suitable or unsuitable for us: clothes
they want us to wear, music they don’t want us listening to, members of the
family that they expect us to not associate with, whole philosophies of life
that they assume we are not interested in.
A sense of
being together is important, but also important is a sense of remaining an
individual capable of speaking up when required. When we, as individuals, speak up we give
permission for ourselves to be different people and also allow the other person
their uniqueness. They are not us, and we are not them. How nice it is to be
recognized and loved for ourselves, and not merely as a projection of our first
caregiver (usually our mother). Our adult relationships need to be different from
our parental ones. This differentiation,
this separation, is the beginning of the positive state of being caste out of
an Edenesque unconsciousness to an individuated self.
Consciousness requires us to examine and speak of our individual truths
and lives. When we speak from our unique
place we define ourselves and we literally shape how others treat us. And we, in knowing ourselves differently, can
speak increasingly with confidence and authenticity.
