“I feel bad when you say I hurt you”
This piece is making the rounds on Facebook–deservedly. It’s about how people mistake feeling bad about hurting somebody for feeling bad because they were hurt, how guilt disables empathy, and how people become so used to being catered to by people lower on the ladder that other people’s emotional work is invisible to them. The article’s main focus is on white people and males, but it applies to any power structure.
Own, Apologize, Repair: Coming Back to Integrity
A favorite section of mine:
If you are the kind of person who likes to know when you have caused harm, then there are some valuable questions about how to make that real: how do you invite this information, how do you welcome it, how do you thank those who help you grow this way, if they have to tell you because you have not figured it out for yourself? Do you realize just how scary it can be to tell you, before they know how you will react? Do you mix up their fear of you for anger? Is their fear in any way justified? How can you make sure it is not?
If your focus is more on the fact that harm got named than it is on the harm itself, does this strike you as at all peculiar?
…. [D]o you make it the responsibility of those you have harmed to tell you ‘in a nice way’?
Is it possible they have tried to tell you in a nice way, and you have clapped your hands over your ears or made it hard for them, and eventually they lose the capacity to be ‘nice’ while they are getting harmed? If you think back – really think back – how long were they trusting you and quietly asking you for help and empathy and support and compassion and honesty before they lost their buffer of capacity to speak kindly while drowning?
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Issendai – thanks for sharing this. It is really powerful. I will come back to comment after I re-read & think some more. Good stuff!
I, uh, just shared it.
After re-reading, this really resonates. This is exactly what my brother and I are going through with my mother. We have spoken up about words and behaviors of hers that are hurtful and frankly traumatic for us, the result was anger at us. Right now she is feeling the victim in the scenario. There has been no ownership of her behavior – responses have ranged from excuses for the behavior, to denials of the behavior, or claiming to not even understand what we’re talking about.
Until recently, I felt quite a lot of pity for her. That has pretty much been stomped out of me now. I don’t believe I can reach her.
The author of this article seems to hold some hope that people can move from one end of the spectrum to another. I believe some can & in fact, I believe I have moved a great deal since recognizing some of these behaviors in myself & actively trying to conquer them. But can everyone improve? Can everyone be reached? Are some people just too fragile to face this sort of self-reflection?
Yep. When you’re dealing with a narc, your response to any hurtful behaviour of theirs is just another of those things that you have to seamlessly edit out of their reality if you want to survive. I thought her description of what it feels like to be the person doing that was really eloquent – the most non victim blaming explanation I’ve ever heard of what it is to be codependent.
I desperately need to learn how to own, apologize, and repair. I am basically Kyle thinking that being told “you kicked your father!” is as much of a violation as actually kicking your father.
i want to publish a post on this site wt the way pls
I worry a lot because my mother was narcissistic and abusive and her husband was sociopathic and abusive. I have a son who is 22 and still lives at home – he is mildly autistic and pretty quiet. I have tried really hard not to inflict any of my own issues on him but I always worry – would I know? How would I know? How would I react if in a year or 5 he says I was abusive? I worry about this a lot (like I worry about everything, I have severe anxiety) and when I imagine it, I think I would just cry and cry and apologize for my failings as a parent. I can’t imagine attacking him. I mean who does that? Well I know who does, just a rhetorical statement.
I’ve been rereading your posts, and when I got to this one I thought of my mother. The post goes a different way than she does, though. Which doesn’t invalidate the post of course, but something I rarely see mentioned is this dynamic:
Kid: “Parent, could you please *do thing* or *stop doing thing*?”
Parent: “OMG! I’m such a terrible parent! I’m so so so so so sorry! I’m so awful! I’m atrocious! I’m the worst ever!”
Kid: “Parent, I didn’t mean –”
Parent: “*sobbing* I’m terrible and rotten and horrible and I did the best I could but I’m terrible so it wasn’t good enough I’m so rotten but I love you!”
Kid: “You’re good Parent, I love you too.”
Parent: “So, what’s on TV?”
Thing either doesn’t get done or keeps being done. Kid will never bring it up again.
I know this is about your mother, but this is exactly my husband. It’s so reassuring to see someone else that knows how this game goes.
Me: “Can you please wipe up spills when you make them.”
H: “I’m such a terrible person. I try so hard but I just can’t make you happy.” *cries*
Me: *Just quietly cleans up all his messes*
His mother is diagnosed as mentally ill, though no one knows for sure what the specific diagnosis is. She had EST though. In ten years of being together with her son, I’ve only spent any significant time with her twice, and she’s so obviously and wildly BPD that I am willing to label her that, and I don’t believe in diagnosing anyone without hearing it from psych.
I used to think it was just how he was raised, but the behavior surrounding our split (divorcing now) and a backward view have me pretty convinced that there’s a personality disorder there or possible psychopathy (no empathy + manipulation + impulsive conduct). He refused therapy for a long time and now goes but does not meaningfully engage, so he’ll never willingly get a diagnosis.
I’m exhausted but also relieved because I no longer carry that burden of having to cater to his moods to try to maintain peace in the household.
When it comes to my mother, I think it’s severe untreated C-PTSD. She had a strange childhood and especially adolescence, in which she wasn’t exactly abused but her homelife was chaos. Her older brother has paranoid schizophrenia, and in his adolescence he went from a quiet, nice nerdy guy to a randomly violent (very tall and strong) guy who punched walls and his own mother on the regular. This was when psychologists were still blaming mothers for schizophrenia, and they told my grandmother it was her fault for being “smothering” (bullcrap), so she distanced herself from my mother and her next two kids. My mother’s father had depression as well as PTSD from WWII, along with his generation’s ideas about quashing feelings, so he also retreated most of the time.
They were a nice ludicrously highly-educated middle class family, so there was that constant need to preserve appearances too. The “This only happens to people in trailer parks or mansions so we can’t admit it’s us too” thing.
The middle three kids all had their own survival strategies, and my mother’s was primarily avoidance. If somehow cornered, she will either dissolve into tears or snap. I don’t think any of her therapists have gotten everything about her childhood out of her, and if they did recognize it as severely traumatizing, I think she’d change therapists rather than confront it. She’s actually extremely easy (probably too easy) to live with for *one* person, but as soon as she lives with more than one and they come into conflict, she can’t deal. I also don’t think she could ever handle either being alone or being with a man who wasn’t psychologically abusive, and more than one of her therapists has agreed with me.
Tl;dr: C-PTSD can screw people up bigtime, especially when it’s not acknowledged.
That is interesting. My Husband was raised by addicts and there was a lot of chaos in his childhood. I can see C-PTSD being a factor, with the alcoholic PD mom and the drug addict dad.
He does not clean and one of the reasons he cites is being “traumatized” by being mad to clean as a child (yes, I know how that sounds, but asking him to clean results in an hour + of dramatics after which I somehow end up consoling him).
I can believe that cleaning is a trigger for him, especially because the messes addicts make are incredibly disgusting. (For me, being told “I love you” is often severely uncomfortable up to triggering if I’m stressed — we end up with weird stuff.) But what he needs to do with that is take it to counseling and find a way to handle it so he can take on his share of chores.
So the thing your mother and (soon to be ex! Yay! Good for you!) husband are doing is the same psychological pattern of what’s described in this article, but a different manifestation. They are centering themselves and their feelings so YOU feel obligated to comfort THEM. This is because they don’t want to do the “own apologize make amends” steps in this article, just like the people going WAAAHHH YOU HURT ME, generally for the same reason—they don’t want to genuinely address their guilt/shame around their behavior. They will act like they are apologizing, but notice how it’s still centering them, and not an actual apology? It also (conveniently for them) makes it so emotionally burdensome for you to bring up these issues that you don’t…you either let their behavior slide or you do the cleaning yourself, exactly as they intend.
Yes, I definitely see that. I saw his father recently (who is clean now) and his comment was that H is acting like his mother. Of course, no one can ever say that to him. His father is supportive of his son but he privately encouraged me to leave, “like [he] did” because there’s no fixing it. I’ve known he’s essentially been manipulating me for a long time but I was hopeful that he would actually work on it this time because he actually went to counseling (I’m an eternal optimist when it comes to people). Instead he became enamored with someone else (with whom the relationship would be extremely inappropriate) and told me he wanted the divorce. I was beyond done so I wasn’t going to argue him out of it. I’m feeling joy again and I realized I haven’t for years, with all that weight. I’m a little overwhelmed with all the stuff I need to do over the next couple of months but it is definitely worth it.
FWIW, I am no contact with my mother because of her similar mental issues. I clearly have some work to do as both of my marriages have been to people that do this, as well as my most significant relationships that didn’t end in marriage. I know that this place is too comfortable for me. I’ve never not been in a situation where I was somehow responsible for another person’s emotions. The good news is that I have little desire to get into another relationship any time soon. I just want to be on my own for now.