Coping

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever get back to who I was: sociable, could and would talk to anyone. Now I can't talk to people in yoga or singing class. I go in, avoid eye contact, though I can feel them looking at me. I do the thing I'm there for, leave straightaway and avoid tea if there is any afterwards. 

It's not only that I can't talk to them anymore, or not without profound suspicion of who they are and what motivates them and who they really are, their values; I just don't want to now. Even if therapy could reduce the generalised sense of threat I now live with, that interest in other people is like a light that has gone out. I just don't really care about them much, any more. Not always, but often, I don't care enough to ask them things. I wait for other people to ask, usually poor questions of others, or none at all. What I hear is frighteningly banal anyway and I realise I was always trying to get past that banality. Or maybe it's safety. Maybe no-one says anything or asks anything because it's safe and they enjoy living in limited worlds with clipped wings.

So, I can't see that therapy is going to make much, if any difference to me, except make me suspicious of therapists. Five sessions in there's still been no "therapy" to speak of and there is a net increase in stress overall. Most of what I hear or observe in daily life, I can only see in terms of power moves. People do them constantly, without even thinking. This person is using strategy X to dominate, this person is using strategy Y to do the same; this person is not dominating; this person is annoyed the don't have more sway. This person is using distortion, to reframe. This person enjoys control or needs it. Watching Pigface's moves was a great education in Machiavellian strategies for power, control and manipulation in the modern world, though such naked greed, cruelty or sadism I rarely see in everyday encounters.

It's plain mine is a subconsciously developed safety scanning technique. If you're always on alert, you'll be safe - until your body gives out from all the cortisol.

The guy in the series, I mentioned in the last post, the philosopher, doesn't seem ill. He just seems ill in his house, but when he's with people, he presents perfectly normally. I wonder how many people there are like that.

In episode 2, he says that Primo Levi was haunted by his survival. Levi did not claim to be a witness to Auschwitz, even though he survived. He said only the dead were those witnesses. Apparently he had survivor's guilt. While the philosopher is telling the inmates this, he struggles to say it because you can see he thinks that perhaps he himself got off lightly. He didn't end up taking drugs and going to prison because he was the younger sibling. His brother took most of the rap from the father.

So maybe he tries to cope by his OCD behaviour. Or maybe that's something else, yet to be revealed.

I don't know how Primo Levi coped. Well, he coped for a long time and then it's thought he committed suicide. I think a lot about people that have witnessed and undergone unthinkable things. I wonder how they coped, how they adapted to the world, or didn't, long before people talked about mental health, or therapy was common or people had blogs.

How many people walk around the world carefully, on eggshells, avoiding triggers, kow-towing, avoiding eye contact, keeping quiet, keeping their heads down, avoiding provoking people so they don't get hurt?

So the rich or greedy or abusive can just keep getting richer or more powerful, or more abusive, unobstructed?

It's not even that. I think a lot of us don't even want to go through the process of figuring out which of the masks have putrid faces behind them. We don't even want to risk getting close enough to smell.