By Joyce Alexander, RNP (retired)
Sometimes my parrot will come up with a sound or a word and we will wonder “where in the heck did he come up with that!?”
We noticed a few years ago that he would make a “Whooooosh” sound when anyone opened the door either to go in or out. He did it consistently, so we knew he had associated the door opening with the sound, but we couldn’t figure out who would make that sound often enough that he had picked it up. Then one day my husband came in the house and it was very hot outside and when he came in he made that “Whoooosh” sound as he hit the air conditioned inside!
My son and I went, “Whoopee! We know where he got it now!”
It takes endless repetitions of a word or sound for a parrot to pick it up, and my husband must have done this hundreds of times before the bird picked it up. The bird is way more sensitive to the sounds in his environment than we are. We tend to “tune out” the “background” sounds that are not important to us so we can concentrate more on those sounds that actually “mean something.” Not that our ears can’t “hear” that sound, it is just that our brains tune it out and assign no importance to it.
I think sometimes people (myself included) do the same thing with situations and associations. We tune out as unimportant things that happen every day—things that we decide are not important to our world and we don’t want to concentrate on them. I have osteoarthritis just from being over 65 and having used and abused my bones and joints in the past, so I have a sort of “background” pain in most or all of my joints. I try to “tune this out” and usually succeed, because if I concentrated on this background pain, I would not be able to think about anything else.
Emotional pain
It seems to me that I have done the same thing with emotional background pain as well in my associations with dysfunctional or disordered people. The other person would make some “snarky” or disrespectful comment to me, and it would hurt just a bit, but I would push it to the background noise of my life and not concentrate on it. Just as my son and I didn’t “hear” my husband’s noises when he came into the house from outside because it wasn’t important, didn’t mean they weren’t “there.”
Pushing our emotions, our pains, into the background helps us to keep ourselves from being overwhelmed by the vast number of little pains and injuries. It numbs us to those in our everyday life so we can keep on functioning and without succumbing to the overwhelming pain. Sometimes we get a huge emotional injury and we “feel it” intensely, but even then we can put the residual pain into the background of our everyday existence.
Noticing and responding to every little slight in life isn’t the point of this, because if we did, we wouldn’t be able to function. Taking to heart and internalizing every snide remark made by every salesclerk isn’t necessary, but to “notice” and “hear” the slings and arrows of a particular relationship is another matter entirely. If we are continuing to have to “tune out” painful things from a person or a relationship, the pain will build up until there is a cacophonous level of emotional pain in the background of that relationship.
It takes a tremendous amount of energy to keep that level of background pain under control—energy that could better be put to use in establishing boundaries.
It took my parrot’s continual “Whooshing” to draw attention to one of the sounds in the background of my environment. It took tremendous pain to draw attention to the pain that had accumulated as a background noise in my relationship with my son and other family members. I had “eyes and did not see, and I had ears and did not hear,” as Jesus said about the Pharisees. It was unpleasant for me to realize that our relationships were not healthy, because in realizing that they were not healthy, I would be required to do one of two things, neither of which I wanted to do. I could continue to endure this continuing assault on myself, or I would be required to act.
Confrontation
Confronting someone you love with the fact that they have been causing you tremendous emotional pain is a scary prospect. How will they respond? Will they stop doing what they have been doing and try to salve your wounds? Will they stop treating you badly? What if you confront them and they become angry? What if they leave you? What if they punish you? All those are questions that produce great anxiety. Confrontation is risky behavior.
Confronting dysfunctional people is especially risky. It is especially painful because they do not receive your confrontation well, but instead project the problem back on your shoulders. They will tell you that you are the problem. The pain becomes greater.
Becoming aware of the background noise in our lives of abuse and dysfunctional relationships is only the first step in a painful process. Taking action is the next step. If the person in the relationship is not dysfunctional or disordered, they will work with you. If they are unwilling to do so, you can’t make them do so, and so the next decision is to continue the relationship as is, or to terminate it.
Awareness if the first and most painful step, but it leads to a life free of the pain of a dysfunctional relationship continually assaulting our psyches.
Hi ox-
With respect to the guy I can honestly say it’s 100 percent my fault for being so darn stupid. Yes, for right now I do need to be polite however getting 8 calls a day will stop. It’s a definate lesson learned the hard way. What happened was yesterday I cashed an out of state check which was to reimburse me for my travel costs (which all on its own is a sick and twisted story) I cashed it instead of depositing it so it wouldn’t take the 3-5 days to clear so I could deposit the cash into my other bank to cover my bills. Bottom line is somewhere in my daze between errands I lost the damn envelope. I spent 4 hours running around trying to find it.
Long story short I was in freak mode and pissed at myself and I took a call from someone I didn’t know very well but who I had once worked with. I was upset because I had a check from daycare that was about to clear and I would have been $100 short. Well of coarse he said give me your bank info I’ll deposit $100 for you and you can pay me back next week when you get your check. So I was reluctant but did it… Duh!! So of coarse he wanted to catch up and came over. It was the last thing I was up for but felt obligated. He stayed forever and I basically had to kick him out. The entire time was spent talking about how we need to go out.. He would pay for sitter and everything. I kept saying no. Then he said my place was great and he can’t wait to hang out again to wait out the traffic..(like everyday). Told me my hair was better blond.. He would pay for it to get highlighted again.. Ext, ect.. He turned out to be a real jerk. Told me he was 28 with a full set of gray hair. Before he became an architect had been a bartender for 12 years… Timelines not adding up.. Red flags everwhere.. How much money he has but still lives with his parents. Crazy shit!! Has called me 8 times today… I have never done anything to lead this guy on.. Ever!! Bottom line I can’t wait to get my check next week to give this guy back his 100 bucks.. Apparently his goodwill had other motives.
3 lessons learned.
1.If someone you hardly knows offers to do something for you that seems to nice and kind of strange don’t accept.
2. Never answer the phone when you’re in stress mode.
3. Never ever carry cash when your running errands and in a daze to begin with.
Uggh!!
All within 24 hours.
Anyway.. No stress as soon as I pay him back this guy goes and the no answer list. Until then I can be polite but we are not hanging out again..it’s only a week. I’m not gonna stress about that..
There’s enough real crazy going on.. Lol.
I swear I do attract them.
Yep.. Am seriouse about the smoking…
Thanks… Sometimes in life you just need to step back, crawl into bed and say wtf!!
Hi sky-
Lol.. Yesterday I couldn’t have been more gray if I tried!! Naturally!! No makeup, sick, in jeans and frankly a polite but quietly stressed out woman. I didn’t need to speak… He did it all.
Btw- thx for the response… When things calm down and I can process things a little better.. I’ll try to make more sence…the email didn’t really make sence or address the point well.
🙂
Coping that is the old “get you obligated” ploy….then you can’t say “no” to their agenda…..lesson learned.
I, too, think gray rock works on these drama queens. The turd-eating, subhuman, low-life, parasite ex spath broke up with women he found boring. Of course this was when we were together. I let him screw anything that moved (what?!). Gray rock was the only, and I mean ONLY thing that made him turn away from his victim. Lucky ass boring people.
Woundlicker,
you cracked me up! “Lucky ass boring people.” is what I thought when I first figured it out.
Spath had told me he didn’t like talking to my good sister because she was boring. He also said that her son “lacked ambition.” He’s the kid who put himself through a private university with scholarships and got a 50grand a year job immediately after. He has no student loan payments and bought his own condo within a year of graduating. Poor kid, he has no ambition. LOL!
Envy is one of the many ugly traits spaths have. Yours didn’t really find your nephew unambitious. They lie constantly. He was jealous, pure and simlle. The only truth to what he said was your nephew lacked the ambition of getting thrown in jail.
The puke I put up with quickly turned into a boring, predictable, ten time loser. I was just sticking around because I feared change. Who knew change would eventually mean being able to breath?
yes, he was definitely envious. He also knew that my nephew couldn’t be “hooked”. He had one opportunity with him alone. With all the other minions, that’s all it took for him to OWN them.
He gave my nephew, C, a ride home. I’m sure he tried every lure and temptation. He got nothing because C is very non-committal, naturally. C conquered his own ADD as a teen because he didn’t want to take drugs. He doesn’t drink coffee and is very health conscious. He never follows a crowd, he’s very discriminating.
There are a few people out there who don’t do drama of any type. They have boundaries. I’m so glad for C.
I want C’s DNA.
woundlicker,
I guarantee you, it isn’t his DNA. He has my family’s spath DNA and his father is an N, and his grandfather is an alcoholic. But he was raised by my good sister, who is a devout Catholic and very determined to “do what’s right”. She stayed married to the N and refuses to see that he IS an N.
C is very quiet and not extremely social. So he makes the effort to socialize with church groups and attends mass weekly. He is fanatical about exercise and he loves food. He also has lists of books he decides are important to read. 2 years ago, it was the bible.
His success has been the result of very hard work. He observes himself and other people and makes decisions about what he wants. He does tend to be judgmental about how things “should” be. And how people “should” be.
I love him dearly, he has a good heart.
Oxy,
Wonderful post. You’ve described the essential element of every dysfunctional relationship I’ve ever had: I’d tune it out, numb myself to it, but then eventually would “feel” it intensely and the result was anxiety attacks. Before I learned about disordered people, I wondered why I had so many anxiety attacks and I felt shamed that I suffered from them. But, then I learned that the constant stress of dealing with toxic people was the major cause of my anxiety attacks. Remove the background (& the ‘front ground’) noise of abuse & Whooosh, the anxiety attacks have pretty much disappeared.
Your post also reminds me of Alice Miller’s book “The Body Never Lies”: Even though we may tune out the pain & numb ourselves, eventually, that pain (both emotional & physical) will manifest.
donna dixon, it’s the trickle, trickle, trickle that eventually becomes a flood.
“I can’t figure out for the life of me why I couldn’t recognize it?”
I like this saying: ’We cannot see the water that we swim in.’
Since we viewed dysfunction and abuse as “normal”, we never saw it as abnormal or unacceptable. We were so accustomed to the water that we swam in, we never notice the water itself.
“I don’t think I would have been able to handle the reality/pain any sooner.”
Me too. Deep down, subconsciously, I probably knew the truth, but I also felt that I’d be bulldozed into oblivion if I confronted the Ns & SPs. So, the denial is a survival mechanism.
Agree woundlicker:
“Envy is one of the many ugly traits spaths have. Yours didn’t really find your nephew unambitious. They lie constantly. He was jealous, pure and simlle.”
For me, the Ns’/SPs’ envy & jealousy is almost palpable and often, I actually feel that very strong negative vibration.