The haircut

Shortly after we arrived in California my parents secured a flat in a housing project that had originally been built as Navy housing during WWII and was now being used for veterans housing. The buildings were one-story triplexes with a two bedroom flat at each end and a three-bedroom flat in the middle between them.

Government housing for veterans circa 1950

 We lived there until the middle of my first-grade year when we moved about four blocks away into an Eichler-style bungalow with no proper sewage disposal, situated on a dirt road. This was my mother’s idea of “moving up” as she and Dad were buying the house with the cesspool that backed up into the bathtub during high tides rather than paying rent to the US government for a flimsy apartment that at least had proper sewage and paved roads.

I still have numerous clear memories of living in that apartment, of the short walk to school, the neighbour girl I used to play with, the peeling pea-green lead paint on the buildings… I remember we got our first TV while living there, and that there were only three channels, one of which was broadcast from the other side of the Mexican border. I remember the black and white test pattern that my little brother, Petey, would watch, mesmerized, while waiting for the morning offering of cartoons and child-oriented serials.

I remember many of my favourite serials and Saturday morning TV shows, none of which were cartoons, but at this point in time—between 1950 and 1952—the pickings were slim and my favourite of that period was Hopalong Cassidy and his fabulous white horse, Topper. My mother liked to sleep in on Saturday mornings, so my father would get up early and go to his Saturday job at a local garage where he was a part-time mechanic and my brother and I would be left on our own: even if my mother was up when Dad left for work, the minute he drove away, she was back in bed, asleep, while Petey and I were to entertain ourselves until she was ready to get up.

I do not remember exactly what prompted it, but one Saturday morning it came to me that Petey needed a haircut. Even at age five (Petey was three) I knew better than to do anything without my mother’s permission so, during a commercial break I tiptoed into her bedroom to ask. I recall that Petey and I had matching Hopalong Cassidy shirts, mine with a dark green background, his with dark blue, the pattern being a repeat of Hoppy’s smiling face beneath his trademark ten-gallon hat, a piece of rope in the shape of a lariat encircling. I always wore that shirt on Saturday mornings when his show came on as my personal tribute.

My mother was a heavy sleeper so once she went back to bed after Dad had gone to work, you could have set off fireworks in the living room and she would have slept right through them. If you did manage to wake her, she would be in a sleep-walking kind of state, and could talk to you and answer questions and then go back to sleep without ever remembering it. As a young child, however, I was unaware of that fact but I was acutely aware that to do anything except watch TV or read a book until she go up would be a punishable offense and that was something to be avoided at all costs.

I also was acutely aware that my mother was very focussed on money. The absolute worst sin you could commit in our house was one that cost her money. Breaking something, tearing or staining your clothes, ruining your shoes by walking in puddles—worst sins ever because it would cost her money to replace them. I was too young at that time to make value judgments about her spending money on herself but not on us—it was one of those things I simply accepted as a child: parents had the money, the decided how to spend it, and their decisions were right. Always. So having to spend money on kids was a bad thing.

I don’t recall what I was watching on TV that gave me the notion but I got the bright idea that I could save my mother some money (always a good thing)) if I cut Petey’s hair rather than her taking him to the barber. I ran to the kitchen junk drawer and found the scissors, then crept into my parents’ bedroom to get my mother’s permission. She struggled up to a half sitting position at stared at me with bleary eyes as I asked if I could give Petey a haircut. She blinked a couple of times, said “Sure,” they flopped back onto the bed and mumbled something about being careful before falling back to sleep.

Delighted, I came out to the living room to tell Petey that Mommy said I could give him a haircut. Eyes glued to the moving images on the screen, he didn’t respond. One of the things people always remarked about my brother was that he seemed incapable of sitting still. Despite his unassailable position as the Golden Child, our mother would snap and snarl at him when the family was watching TV: “Stop fidgeting!” she would bark at him. “Petey, for Chrissake if you don’t sit still I am going to pop you one!” “Sit still and stop fidgeting, goddammit!” Watching TV on Saturday mornings was an exercise in avoiding his restless flinging of arms, legs, and wriggling torso, and trying to cut his hair this particular morning was an exercise in futility.

I was convinced that if he just sat still I could run the scissors parallel to his skull and give him an even haircut, a “butch” haircut that was all the rage with young and old alike. Essentially a buzz cut with the hair the same length all over the head, it looked very simply to achieve. It was, with electric clippers, but not so easy with a pair of questionably sharp scissors wielded by an inept five-year-old on the head of a perpetual motion three-year-old.

Petey frustrated me because he wouldn’t sit still. Every time I tried to make a cut some part of him undulated or jerked, moving his head and causing my cut to go awry. I hissed at him to be still and he just reached up and tried to bat my hands away. I was getting upset because Mommy was going to wake up soon and I needed him to sit still to finish—and fix—the haircut and he was having no part of it. Eventually I gave up—his hair had chunks cut out here, shingled layers there, original lengths elsewhere, and my beloved Hopalong Cassidy shirt was covered with hair. I went into the bathroom to brush it off into the toilet and, focussed on my task, I didn’t hear the bedroom door open. Concentrating on getting the little hairs off my shirt, I jumped a foot when I heard my mother bellow from the living room: “VIOLET!”

She was mad because of the hair all over the floor, I was certain. I came running out of the bathroom babbling “I’ll clean it up. Lemme get the dustpan…”

She stopped me in my tracks with a glare. “What the hell is this?” she demanded, gesturing to Petey, the scissors and the clumps of hair on the floor.

“I’ll clean it up,” I repeated, heading again for the kitchen.”

“No you don’t!” she said. “Get your ass back in here. What the hell is this all about?”

I didn’t understand. She had given me permission to cut his hair, why was she pretending she didn’t know what this was all about.

“I gave Petey a haircut?” I ventured, not sure what she wanted me to say.

“Why in god’s name would you do that?” she demanded. “Look at the mess you made!”

“I’ll clean it up,” I said again, trying to get to the kitchen and the dustpan.

“Are you going to clean up his hair?” she bellowed. “Jesus Christ on a goddamned crutch, what is the matter with you? I can’t even take a little nap without you screwing something up and costing me money I don’t have!”

And I started to cry because instead of saving her money I was costing her money and now she was mad and yelling at me. And that just made matters worse.

“Do not start with the water works, missy!” she levelled at me. “If you want to cry I have more than enough reason to give you plenty to cry about!”

Stifling tears makes you sniffle. I was not allowed to leave the living room to go get a tissue, if she saw snot running out of my nose she would be furious, if I sniffled it would make her furious because she hated that sound. I was caught—to cry would get me a spanking, to force myself to stop crying would make my nose run and I didn’t have permission to leave the room to get a tissue which means I would sniffle and she would likely backhand me for it. I sniffed, she glared, I pointed towards the bathroom with one hand, my nose with the other and she gave me a grudging nod.

I clearly remember Petey being annoyed at us because he couldn’t hear his cartoons. He turned the TV up so loud that my mother turned it off, which made him mad at me. She send us both outside to play and he stayed mad at me the whole day because he had been deprived of his morning fix of Popeye and Oswald the Rabbit. When my father got home I heard my mother haranguing him in the kitchen and a few minutes later he came out, scooped up Petey and the two of them drove off in his car. When they came back Petey had a proper butch haircut. Nobody said anything more to me about it—I remember my father’s face as he and Petey got into the car, a look of suppressed mirth—so I suspect he told my mother to let it go and she did.

What I learned from this was that I couldn’t trust my mother. Nobody told me not to trust what she said when she was asleep, in fact, nobody said anything at all about it. All I knew was that I asked permission, got permission, and got in trouble for it anyway. I remember feeling kind of hopeless at the realization that I could do everything exactly by the rules and still come out in a heap of trouble. It was many years later, after my parents were divorced, that I discovered that unless my mother was sitting up in the bed with both of her feet on the floor, you could not trust a thing she said because she was still asleep and she refused to be responsible for anything she said in that condition…I was in trouble for asking because I “should know” her brain was still asleep.

It would have been nice if somebody had bothered to tell me about that much earlier on.

"Why can't I make or keep friends?"

How many times have you kicked yourself for getting involved in a friendship or even romantic relationship with a person who turns out to be mean-spirited or even a narcissist? Do you blame yourself because you “should have known better” or think of yourself as a “narc magnet”? Do you think there is something wrong with you that your friendships with these people burn brightly for a few weeks or months and then, suddenly, you are cold shouldered and don’t even know why. What is wrong with you that you attract these people and don’t seem to see the signs or even the coming of that painful, confusing cut?

 Nothing.

 That’s right. Nothing.

What is wrong is that you are holding yourself to a higher standard than “normal” people, people who didn’t grow up in a toxic, dysfunctional environment, people who were not taught to think badly of themselves and their abilities. Those so-called “normal” people also run into an array of dysfunctional and personality disordered people, they may briefly find themselves friends with them, but when the disordered behaviour surfaces and the cruelties begin, these people react differently from the way we do...they don't keep trying, they walk away.

I have noticed this in myself, comparing behaviour from my childhood through early 30s to how I think and react today. Those behaviours that would have left me hurt and full of self-doubt—“what is wrong with me?” “Why am I always the butt of their jokes?” “Why do I always attract these people?” no longer fill me with such self-abnegating introspection. Today I react with acceptance and dismissiveness, today I think “Welp, another asshole revealed” or “No surprise there—shallowness is invariably an indicator of deeper issues…”

Where we go wrong is in having the assumption that if we were “normal,” or at least healed, we would not be attracting or having to deal with these disordered and toxic people. And that is just not true. These people play a numbers game, rather like throwing shit against a wall to see what sticks. Those to whom it sticks are the people they will go for. It can stick to you if you are emotionally vulnerable—but it can stick to you if you are not emotionally vulnerable but are empathetic and compassionate (which the disordered interpret as weakness and vulnerability). Truth is, it has little to do with you because no matter who or what you are, you can be a target for their predations.

The difference is in how we handle it: the emotionally whole and strong will soon figure out what is going on and, if not dropped by a disordered person who has realized the jig is up, will walk away from the drama. And they don’t beat themselves up over it because they realize the world is full of assholes and they just shed one. If they have any sense of themselves in this, it is one of pride for having found a pebble in the peas and gotten rid of it. They don’t beat themselves up for not being perfect and clairvoyant and able to suss this disordered person out earlier—they are simply satisfied that they did.

We ACoNs seem to carry a myth in our heads that “normal” people do not encounter—and even get entangled with—these losers, but nothing could be further from the truth. These people are everywhere and they come into the lives of everyone from the emotionally fragile to the emotional supermen and women because they are simply part of life. There is no magical filter that comes with emotional wholeness that filters them out of our lives. In fact, some malignant Ns are more attracted to emotionally grounded and stable people than the obviously vulnerable because those people are challenges to the Ns. They consider it a real triumph to destroy the emotional stability and self-confidence of such a person because it proves, to them, just how powerful they really are.

Years ago, before such things as Tinder and Harmony, I placed an on-line ad to meet a man I could socialize with. I was not looking for a lover or a boyfriend but someone I could go to movies and museums and concerts and just “do things” with. I deliberately did not post a picture and I just as deliberately discarded all replies that included an unsolicited picture on the premise that if looks were of primary importance to this respondent (his looks or mine), he was already too shallow for the purpose I had in mind. One of the most surprising responses I got was from a guy who fancied himself a dominator (as in B&D) and he came on strong, telling me I need him to tell me what to do and that I hadn’t known pleasure until I submitted to him. It made me laugh—primarily because I knew the guy was dead serious and that he really believed that of himself. I also got a lot (more than half) of responses from married guys and a substantial number of responses from guys who wanted to experience an “older woman” (I had made mention of my hair starting to grey in my ad)—some of them even claimed to be virgins looking to be initiated by an older woman. Remember—there was absolutely nothing sexual in the ad and I deliberately avoided posting a picture. Out of nearly 60 responses to my ad, only two guys looked worth contacting!

I could have taken those responses any number of ways: I could have scoured my ad for some hidden innuendo that invited these sexual responses. I could have decided that all men were scum and out for one thing. I could have decided there was something wrong with me that so many complete strangers thought I was a slut. There was also the option to see these responses as indicative of something being wrong with me because surely, “normal” people didn’t have to deal with this kind of thing.

When I ran the ad the second time I added a line ruling out men who were married or in any kind of relationship. I still got nearly 60 responses, most of them with unsolicited pictures in them—although there was a smaller percentage of married men but a larger percentage of invitations to threesomes—and of that batch, only one was worth my time to contact. So what did I take away from that experience? More pejorative sentiments about myself? Or an eye roll and a rueful laugh about the nature of human—particularly male—kind?

I spent two weeks in email correspondence with the three men—I also contacted the B&D guy to invite him to my (non-existent) dungeon where I promised to shackle him to a pipe in my (non-existent) basement and “tickle his fancy” with a cattle prod until he was ready to be my bitch. Sadly, he didn’t respond. I decided one of my email correspondents had mother-issues (he was 40, lived with his parents and had to ask permission to go out to dinner with me!), the second guy I went out with once and quickly ascertained that while he ticked a lot of the boxes, we just had no chemistry. The third guy was a foreigner, younger than me, who was working in the area and he was interesting and funny and smart and articulate and when I finally met him, I found him delightful. He fulfilled the goals I had in writing that ad so I looked no further.

But look at my numbers…first of all, I set out some things about myself and some criteria for respondents, so this wasn’t blind chance, which is the way we meet most people in our lives. So I had a much higher chance of meeting the kind of guy I was looking for than if I sat in a bar or a coffee shop or a library or other public place and waited for an opportunity to meet.

I said things about myself like I was mature, intelligent, had a sense of humour, liked cars and good food, museums and heavy metal rock as well as country music, enjoyed dancing, races, was self-supporting and single. I asked for respondents who had the same kind of traits and interests. Again, this gave me a much higher chance of meeting people who were more like me than different from me, the kinds of people I would like as friends. And what did I get? Three possibilities out of roughly 120 respondents, less than a 3% hit rate and of them, only one—less than 1%—turned out to be compatible with me. And that was compatible for a friendship, not a romance.

Was there something wrong with me or my ad that I got so few compatible responses? Of course not. I am not responsible for what people read into my writing any more than you are responsible for what other people have as an agenda in meeting or befriending you. If they are not responding appropriately to the signals you are sending out—like the B&D guy who thought I wanted to be dominated in a relationship—that is not on you. What’s more, a significant percentage of the people you meet will not be right for you as friends, let alone anything closer. Even with the screening criteria I set down, two of the three guys I thought were “possibilities” turned out to be wrong for me, but I had to give them a chance to show me what they were like. Two weeks of corresponding with Guy #1 revealed him to be indecisive and afraid of his parents. Two weeks of corresponding with Guy #2 got a meeting, but he was emotionally “flat,” muttered, and couldn’t (or wouldn’t) hold a conversation, intelligent or otherwise. Two weeks of corresponding with Guy #3 got a meeting—in a Peruvian restaurant—and a dinner table conversation that went on for three hours after dinner was finished, as we walked around the restaurant district and stopped occasionally for a drink or to sit on a bench. 120 respondents, a month of my time, and I found one—just one—guy who was likely to pan out as a friend. And, to be honest, I considered myself fortunate that I didn’t have to fine-tune and run the ad another two or three times.

Making friends is a numbers game. Of the zillions of people you meet in your lifetime, only a few of them will have the right stuff to make them keepers. Sometimes you have to “try them on” for a while, to see if they really are who they seem to be, sometimes you won’t be able to tell until a crisis arises and they reveal if they are fair-or-foul weather friends. And the truth is, “normal” people go through the same numbers that we do because they might be normal but a lot of the people they meet aren’t: people truly compatible with them and who possess the kind of character that makes a true friend are just difficult to find.

Sometimes we make mistakes—sometimes we think someone is a friend until they prove they really are not. But it’s not just us—other people make the same kinds of mistakes. They think the woman next door is their best friend until she runs off with their husband, they think the co-worker at the next desk has their back until they are stabbed in it and are passed over for a promotion, they think they know someone until that someone proves they were running a game on them, sometimes for years. Sometimes we are lucky and we find real friends without much effort but that doesn’t mean we are immune from being taken in by the charlatans and pretenders who fake friendships for their own reasons.

So, when someone you thought was a friend betrays you, when you have difficulty finding or making friends, when people around you seem to be making friends and you are not, stop defaulting to “what is wrong with me?” and start defaulting to “Meh, wrong chemistry,” or “Whew, dodged a bullet there!” And if you are stuck in the mindset of “a bad friend is better than no friend at all,” think about what you are saying to and about yourself: you are saying that you don’t deserve a true friend, someone who will extend herself for you, someone who would willingly inconvenience herself for you. And if you truly believe you don’t deserve that kind of a friend, you will set your standards low enough that a friend of that calibre won’t even cross your path.

Think about it like buying shoes: can you just say “I need a pair of shoes” and then the first shoe you see is perfect? Or do you have to set down some criteria for the shoes (colour, heel height, sandal/closed shoe, formal/casual, etc) first? Then you have to go to the places that carry the kind of shoe you want and try some on. How many pair will you look at and reject even before you try something on? How many pair will you try on before you find the shoe that fits your criteria, fits comfortably, is in your budget, and you like the look of? And then, there are those days that you aren’t even thinking about shoes and you walk by a store window and there you see a pair of shoes that are just crying out your name, fit perfectly and you can afford, aren’t there? Finding friends is a lot like that: sometimes you go through a whole host of people who just don’t fit right, but other times you walk into a room and bam! you just click with somebody. It happens to all of us this way, even ACoNs: the only difference between us and “normies” is that we are trained to think we are at fault while they just understand that there is no fault and it will happen when it happens.

Protecting yourself from digital thinkers

Last time we talked a bit about digital thinking: that is a situation in which a person sees the world in only two states—right/wrong, good/bad, etc.—with no room for nuance. These are rigid-minded people who see the world only in terms of their own personal sense of morality and who view terms like “situational ethics” pejoratively because they cannot conceptualize the idea that ethics, like so many other things in life, actually are situational: they depend on context.

It shouldn’t surprise you that many (most?) narcissists are digital thinkers. They live in the black-and-white world of “if you aren’t with me, you are against me,” or “my way or the highway.” They are notoriously difficult to prove wrong, at least in their own eyes, clinging to even the most absurd beliefs despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.

One could write this off to such things as “filters,” saying we all have them, but for the digital thinker, those filters don’t change. They may evolve to be even more rigid than in the past, but no amount of reason can get them to change. My own parents exemplify both sides of this.

My mother was a racist. She wasn’t pro-active about it—she didn’t go around proselytizing and trying to win others to her racist ways—but she never passed up an opportunity when it was dropped in her lap, either. Nor was her racism rational. I understood from childhood that I wasn’t supposed to play with black or Mexican or Asian children—and it was easy for me to tell these children apart from “white” kids like myself—but I had never heard her speak out against Jews. When, in my last year of high school, she discovered that my best friend of six years was Jewish, she hit the roof, informing me that I couldn’t have the girl in her house ever again. The proof that her racism was entire irrational was right there under her nose: the girl had been my friend since 7^th grade and it was not until she was told the girl was Jewish that she knew. She couldn’t tell on her own, she had never been able to tell, and until that moment, the girl had been wholly acceptable as a friend for me.

On the other hand, my father’s racism was tempered, considering the times. In the mid-Fifties to mid-Sixties, before the Civil Rights Movement got under way, my father’s racism was rather mild by the standards of the day. He believed it was fine to have black neighbours, co-workers and friends. He drew the line at dating and marrying out of your race because, in his estimation, the children of such a union would not be accepted by either the black or the white community. But the early 1980s saw my sister marrying a black man and by the time my father met his newest grandson, he had put his racist inclinations behind him.

My mother, the narcissist, was a digital thinker: even if you couldn’t tell a person was of another race, even if the person had been a good friend for more than five years, once their race was revealed it was the relationship with the person that changed, not the belief that was just proven to be insupportable. My father, on the other hand, was not a digital thinker and when it was shown to him that his original premise was faulty, he abandoned it in favour of one that more accurately reflected reality.

People who think digitally often have an answer for everything, even things that haven’t come up yet. When something new comes along they are unlikely to give much thought to the position they take and once they have taken a position, they are unyielding in defending it and standing behind it. The position they take will often be in alignment with other positions they have taken in the past that have some peripheral relationship. An in-the-news example is the current controversy about kneeling during the national anthem at sporting events. This originated as a protest against injustice as exemplified by a common meme that says “Rosa Parks, wasn’t protesting the busses, Bostonians weren’t protesting the tea, Gandhi wasn’t protesting the food, the players are not protesting the anthem: protesting injustice is an American tradition.” Digital thinkers who are racists, for example, will see dark-skinned people kneeling in front of the flag while the national anthem is being played and come to the erroneous conclusion that these people are disrespecting the flag for no reason at all. Explaining that standing to salute the flag is not legally required, pointing out that they don’t stand and salute the flag in their family rooms while watching football on their big screen, clarifying that the protest is legal and appropriate because the flag symbolizes the country that is heaping injustice upon people of colour, even enlightening them that kneeling has, for centuries, been a gesture of respect: when you pray and ask something of God, you kneel, when you ask a woman to be your wife, you take a knee, when you receive an honour from a monarch, you go down on one knee, and in many situations a symbolic kneel, in the form of genuflecting or a curtsey, is a sign of respec—none of these things penetrate the mind of the digital thinker because she has already made up her mind.

Even if the person is a supporter of Tim Tebow, the quarterback who famously made a habit of taking a knee at the beginning of football games, the foregoing information will not phase the digital thinker who has decided these kneeling athletes are disrespecting the flag. “That’s different,” he will say, and stubbornly defend his belief that the kneeling athletes are just being disrespectful even after the athletes themselves explain the reasons for their actions. No, once the digital thinker’s mind is made up, no amount of information to the contrary is going to budge him from his position, not even testimony from the very person the digital thinker has made incorrect assumptions about.

Why is this important? Because you are going to come across these people and their bull-headed insistence that they are right and you need to understand where they are coming from. It is they who are coming from a place of disrespect because they have substituted their perceptions for reality even after the reality has been revealed to them.

You are going to come across this in personal relations, in family relations, at work, church, social gatherings—everywhere. You are going to try to tell people things about your life—people you believe to be sympathetic, understanding individuals or you would not open up to them. You might think they need to know because you are in an increasingly intimate relationship, or because they are providing a service that somehow provokes your anxieties. There comes a time for most of us that we cannot keep our dysfunctional upbringings under wraps any longer—perhaps you need some help or to explain an N drive-by to someone important to you—but despite the necessity of our revelations, we are still at the mercy of those to whom we reveal.

The problem is, too many of those people don’t just lack empathy, they have filters in place that create knee-jerk reactions. You tell someone that you don’t like being hugged from behind because your NF used to do that to you and frighten and hurt you—the “hug” was an excuse to inappropriately grope your chest—you have left yourself open to being read through the hugger's filters. Most of us find it very difficult to just say “Don’t do that, I don’t like it,” we feel like we need to give a reason, so we say “Someone in my childhood used to sneak up on me like that and then hurt me. It makes me jumpy.”

What do you expect after a revelation like that? Well, I would expect “Oh, I’m sorry! I really didn’t mean to alarm you. I won’t do it again. Are you okay?” All too often we get, instead, “That was a long time ago, get over it already!” or “You can’t seriously think I was going to hurt you?” or—my favourite clueless response—“Aren’t you a little old to still be feeling sorry for yourself for something that happened when you were a kid?”

I have been told by some, after factually relating some event or another in my past, that I was angry or bitter or feeling sorry for myself when, in fact, I was feeling none of those things. I have been accused of holding a “pity party” when sharing an event from my past. Any emotion I put into—or withhold from—the telling is given more weight by this kind of thinker than the actual event being related. “My mother used to beat me with a thin leather whip…” “That was a long time ago, why are you still so angry about it?” “I was a helpless little kid—she used to beat me with a thin leather whip and leave long red welts on my body…” “You should get over it and stop feeling sorry for yourself…”

What prompts those kinds of responses? Well, obliviousness is one thing but it goes deeper than that. These people have a filter that, whenever they are challenged for doing whatever it is they want to do, whether it is to hit on you or give you a wedgie, or say something hurtful, makes them right and you wrong. The digital thinkers have only two states of thinking: I am right and I am wrong. But narcissists cannot conceive of the second state even existing so for them, the mantra is “I am right, you are wrong,” and every experience in their lives is passed through this filter. It is because this filter colours and adjusts every experience that we find ourselves staring at the most bizarre and unbelievable contortions of logic and memory when we listen to a narcissist’s version of something. That filter—the “I am always in the right” filter—is where reality get twisted and distorted, where the rationalizations, justifications, specious logic and lies all happen. And for many (most?) narcissists, it all happens subconsciously and all that comes to their conscious brain—and out their mouths—is the finished product: blaming you.

The process works something like this: you have said something that would prompt a normal, empathetic person to feel something for you. That feeling would prompt a person of normal empathy to say something comforting—“I’m sorry that happened to you”—or validating, like “That was abusive! She was out of line to do that!” and maybe even offer an empathetic gesture like a pat on the arm or a hug. The more giving people may offer some kind of assistance, like the name of a therapist or a good website or a book, a ride to a women’s shelter or a cup of coffee or even their phone number so you can come to them for comfort and support.

But for digital thinkers, some of whom may respond emotionally to your words, there are only two states of being, right/good and wrong/bad. If they have an emotional response to your words, they can perceive it as demand for action—from you. So you get responses from them like “What do you expect me to do about it?” or “I can’t help you with that.” Or, they may go on the attack because if they can see you as being in the wrong, then they can see you as underserving of their intercession: “Aren’t you a little old to be whining about stuff that happened when you were a little kid?” or “All kids get spankings,” or, my personal favourite, “What did you do to make your mother that mad?” As soon as they can make your pain out to be unreasonable, irrational, or your own fault, they no longer feel an obligation to do anything: remember, in any circumstance they see only two, opposing options—in this scenario, if you are truly a victim, then they have “comfort you” and “ignore you” as their choices. Which of those choice is good or bad depends on whether you deserved the punishment or not: if you didn’t deserve it, then ignoring you is bad—which would make them bad for ignoring you. But if you are wrong in any way: you are holding on to things you should have let go by now, you are complaining about what he perceives to be a normal part of childhood (so you are whining) or you actually provoked a loving mother into beating you until you had stripes, then you are not a victim and he can safely ignore you without feeling he did something bad. In fact, he can twist it further into seeing it as him doing something good, teaching you that you can’t play victim and expect sympathy, at least not from them.

If, at a later date, they discover that you weren’t playing them, they still won’t take responsibility for their lack of compassion for you: either they will exonerate themselves with something like “How was I supposed to know that was true? You have to admit it sounded pretty far-fetched…” or outright blame you for not convincing them. They will never feel wrong for not taking an appropriate action because they will never acknowledge responsibility.

And so you find yourself talking to someone—maybe a family member you haven’t seen in a long, long time—and she asks “How are things with you?” and for whatever reason you decide that you aren’t going to play the lying game anymore, you aren’t going to gloss over the abuse and let your N off the hook anymore, you aren’t going to be the scapegoat, always in the wrong, and you tell her the truth: “Not so good right now. I am in therapy a couple of times a week to deal with anxiety and depression,” and she narrows her eyes and says “What do you have to be anxious or depressed about? You have a nice house, a good job and a family who loves you…” And if you don’t take that as a sign that you don’t have a sympathetic ear and you press on with “It’s more about my upbringing and the abuse I suffered…” you get one of two basic responses: defence of your parent(s) or attacked for feeling sorry for yourself—or both.

That is because this person is a digital thinker: if she acknowledges that your parent was abusive and did nothing to intercede, then she might have to acknowledge that she was wrong to not step in—or, more importantly, other people might think she was in the wrong not to step in. Acknowledging your abuse could mean she feels like she is betraying your abuser which could make her feel either wrong or put her at risk of becoming a victim herself. If she can believe either that you were not abused in childhood or take the position that you should be “over it” by now, then she can believe that the fact that you aren’t over it means you are feeling sorry for yourself and then she can feel exonerated—and safe.

I come across this on my blog on occasion, when I write something about the abusive behaviours of my mother and someone emails me privately telling me that I was using the internet to get a lot of people to feel sorry for me. If I engage such a person in an exchange of emails, they often go further, accusing me of deserving the abuse, based on the fact that I will not accept their point of view: I am being stubborn and contrary and “difficult” and if I was like that as a child, no wonder my mother lost it and beat me black and blue. This kind of person not only lacks empathy for that terrified child laying rigid on a bed waiting for the next lash to fall on her bare flesh, this person has made himself my self-appointed superior because if I don’t agree with him, he feels perfectly justified in decreeing my assault a just punishment for being defiant. I find this very interesting because this is, without exception, a person who didn’t witness the assault, has no idea what led up to it, and—worse of all—a person who thinks that a legitimate reason exists to whip a small child and leave long red whip marks that turn into big painful bruises and last for days.

I have learned to be careful who I talk to and to gauge their reactions carefully because, for most people, the kinds of abuse we suffer is outside their experience. Most people can identify with losing their patience with a child and smacking the kid but few can identify with deliberately and methodically laying lashes on a quivering, terrified child not once but repeated times over a period of years. They take the narrative into themselves and, knowing they would never do such a thing, find it not believable. Or, if they are the kind of person who could do such a thing, they take it into themselves and know the degree of provocation it would take them to beat a child in that way and assume that is what you did to your mother. Either way, the abuser is exonerated in their minds, making the victim responsible.

With ACoNs, we are so accustomed to having others define our behaviour and feelings for us that coming up against such a person can actually make us doubt ourselves. We see it as a perspective we hadn’t considered and, unlike the digital thinker who goes to extraordinary lengths to protect and reinforce his perception, we too readily assume that we are wrong and worry that the motives we thought we had were, in fact, just a cover for a deeper, more nefarious purpose: attention and/or sympathy seeking. That our listener may be projecting—because that would be her motive for such a revelation—never enters our minds because we naïvely assume they are no less sincere as we are.

So the next time you reveal some facts about your history and someone accuses you of feeling sorry for yourself or being bitter and angry, or they tell you that you need to “let it go” or “forgive” those who hurt you, don’t leap immediately to feeling guilty or shamed—recognize that this is projection from a person who really isn’t hearing you. This person has his own agenda, and that agenda has no room for you or your feelings in it, only his perceptions, regardless of their validity. Trying to explain yourself to this person will be like explaining string theory to a chimpanzee: the capacity to understand just isn’t there.

And it’s not your fault.