Last time we talked about staying grounded as a self (and sneaked in a little self-love).
If you can manage to get to a point where you can hear yourself complain until you get bored or find it genuinely funny—if you can show up for yourself that well—your relationship to the people around you, particularly assholes, will change.
However, it will probably take time, serious time, for the real effects to start showing up.*
When they do, it will be surreal.
I’ll use myself as the example, but I’ve seen it in other people, too: different situations, different drama, different types of surreal events, different timelines…
But all with that same feeling of what the actual fuck just happened here?
Congrats. That what the actual fuck reaction means you’re accurately observing, and may be experiencing recovery from a toxic relationship.
…
I started seriously journaling (one of my favorite forms of self-complaint) and meditating (one of my least favorite forms of self-complaint) in 2015. If I’m remembering my dates correctly, it took me until 2018 to walk away from my asshole parent, 2019 to walk away from a group of friends that centered around some assholes, and 2020 to walk away from my asshole then-spouse.
It was hard.
Each time I had to make a big choice on whether to give up stuff that was helping me survive, the people I thought knew and loved me best—the people I thought I owed my happiness and stability to.
Each time, the situation felt insane.
Each instance started with something small, mostly just me noticing something that made me feel uncomfortable.
I only started noticing these things because I had started actually listening to myself complain. When you sit down and journal three pages daily (I was doing the daily pages from The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron at the time), a lot of stuff comes out. The stuff that came out before those blowups wasn’t huge or dramatic, just:
Huh. I don’t like that.
And then, almost as though the assholes in question could read my mind, there was a blowup.
I got screamed at, threatened to be put in my place (“Don’t make me drive over there and teach you a lesson!”), and blamed for everything that was going wrong in their lives, particularly with family.
I got sneered at in person (they thought I wouldn’t notice?) then ghosted from a wedding, never even told about it.
I got the silent treatment and, during the worst of COVID-19, the person stopped washing their hands.
Who does shit like that?
Assholes.
I’m pretty sure they couldn’t read my mind.
I think what happened was that they noticed I’d stopped helping them push the narrative about why things had to be the way they were, and realized that I wasn’t on their “side” anymore. I don’t honestly know for sure. I do know that almost immediately in each case, the other people shifted their narratives so that cutting off contact with me was justifiable on their part.
Lying, distorting, misrepresenting—and accusing me of doing those things.
In at least one case, I don’t think the person realized that they were actively lying about what I’d done. They’d just changed their memories so thoroughly that they couldn’t remember what either of us had done or said. (Despite the fact that I kept the fucking emails.)
Because I’d lived a life “protected” from rude social interactions for so long, I didn’t realize something important:
People who don’t have a grasp on reality are not unusual.
If they feel something is true, it is true. Retroactively. Despite all evidence.
Both assholes and people who have been strongly affected by assholes do this. A lot.
Normal people put a spin on how they see the world. If the scales are at fifty-fifty, most people will tilt things a little in their favor. Call it sixty-forty in favor of their point of view. Maybe more.
Assholes and those controlled by them are different. They’ll go:
I don’t get what you’re trying to say. You don’t even have a point of view.
Not that the other person’s concerns are not important, not that there’s more than one way to see the situation, not that they are right and you are wrong, but that there’s no other way to see the situation, because you aren’t capable of that kind of mental processing. Only they are.
Because assholes are terrified and unable to cope with reality, they use narrative to protect themselves, right? So not only do they defend themselves against outside perspectives, they mentally erase the fact that they exist. So do the people who are controlled by assholes: it’s the only way to stay safe in that situation.
In almost every single one of these surreal meltdowns, no matter what the circumstance, the assholes or their pawns tended, and still tend, to say something remarkably similar:
You always have to be right, don’t you?
Maybe you haven’t heard it (yet). But whenever I hear that phrase (or some flavor of it), I get ready for things to get weird.
When an asshole or their pawn decides to start defending themselves from you, things warp in truly surreal and yet predictable ways.
- Anything you say, do, or are gets invalidated using lies, removing things from context, subversion, etc.
- A coherent counter-narrative is formed, regardless of verifiable facts.
- Any attempt to refute the new narrative is met with screaming fits, ghosting, distractions (including “accidents,” genuine emergencies, and new fights over something else), blameshifting, meltdowns, devil’s-advocating, gossip, blacklisting, firing/dumping you, and backstabbing.
- Early on in the relationship, the asshole will have pumped you to figure out what your vulnerabilities are, under the guise of “getting to know you.” Every button they can possibly push to make you doubt yourself or self-destruct will be pushed.
The main thing that assholes do for other people is to protect them…from other assholes.
When you’re living quietly under an asshole narrative, you don’t have to deal with this shit. You belong, and any time some other asshole tries to undermine you, your asshole tells you that those other people are just plain crazy. Worthless. Stupid.
People like me stay with assholes because they help defend us…from everyone but themselves.
Among other things, recovery means learning how to live without that protection.
This applies on every level, from the inner level where you suss out that you’re not as neat and tidy of a person as you thought you were (whether you think you’re a “good” or “bad”person or even not a person at all), to the interpersonal level (when you discover some of your friends are inherently mean), to the career level (and discover your toxic coworkers), to the political and worldwide level.
For much of the world, the US used to be the asshole that sort of kept the rest of the assholes at bay. Now, under Shitler, the truth that the US was always a bully is becoming undeniable, and people are starting to realize that setting the world on fire isn’t profitable in the long run.
ACCOMMODATING ASSHOLES IS NOT A VIABLE LONG-TERM STRATEGY.
The second you can look at a situation and truly hear—and not silence—your own complaints about it, you are no longer protected by assholes and the people controlled by them. They will start seeing you as some sort of threat, which you are. Then, one way or another, they will try to erase, silence, and/or invalidate you.. Minorities of any kind aren’t invalidated just because they’re easy targets. They’re invalidated because they don’t buy into the narrative bullshit, and are therefor the nearest, closest, most subversive threat.
“Woke” isn’t just political. It’s intimate and personal and an ugly fucking mess as various assholes try to loop some narrative over you—even amongst the people who are supposedly being wronged. There are a lot of scammers out there, scooping up people who just got out of one system of abuse and who haven’t yet figured out how to stay out of others.
Normal people have had to deal with this bullshit all along, but it will probably come as a shock if you were abused: you lived inside a narrative and were protected by an asshole, and it kept you from having to deal with what other people had to deal with all along.
This applies whether you’re getting divorced, going to therapy to deal with addiction issues, or just waking up to what your racial privilege does for you. You can know how to navigate one set of asshole systems without getting sucked in, and still be vulnerable to others. (I know this so well.)
When people know you’re not inside their narrative, they will take steps to invalidate you.
If you want to stop falling victim to abuse, you gotta figure out how to extricate your self from the story of yourself, so you can remain valid (at least in your own eyes).
That is recovery.
More on that next time.
…
You can find the Asshole Mitigation Plan series outline here.
*No shame if this is a start-and-stop process, or if you come to different conclusions about what to do than I did. I’m using myself as an example because I have the most data on me, and my own permission to use it.
