Literally I still find myself in rap sessions of my own unintentional design.
heh. I refer to that as my "rap hat". "Wait, am I putting on my rap hat?"
When I start to feel irritated as I am about to tell someone something, I have to ask myself.
1. What is my motivation for saying this?
2. If this person is someone I care about, do I have their best interest in mind? (and if they aren't, then why am I wasting my time talking to them?)
3. If I am confronting this person because they are annoying the fuck out of me, am I being direct about it, or am I doing it in the guise of "advice for their own good"?
There is nothing wrong with telling someone to fuck off, if that's what you really mean. But if you want to tell someone to fuck off, and instead disguise your message as some form of "feedback" to point out how fucked up they are, then yes, that's a problem.
I have a friend who posts regularly in livejournal, who is bipolar and borderline. I have responded to posts in her journal where she is at her lowest. Yet year after year, I noticed that (up until a few days ago) she had no gratitude for the outpouring of support she had received from people, in addition to the fact that she had really come far, done amazing things in her life, and would slip back into old crap again and again. (You can't jump beyond your own development, but sometimes you can refuse to keep up with it, too.)
In short, I was starting to get annoyed. Very annoyed. I really had to check myself when I commented on something she said, asking myself "Why am I saying this? Will this help her? Do I even fucking care anymore?" In addition, I was insanely jealous that she had so many people there to support her and stroke her. To sum up, I was losing my empathy for her situation, no matter how responsible or irresponsible she was being.
Finally, I realized that I would be the most help to her by saying nothing at all, at least for a while. Because I knew that anything that came from me from this point on would be tainted with irritation and impatience. So I stopped commenting. I still read her journal, because I want to know how she is doing, and it still, for the most part, annoys the hell out of me, because I feel that she knows better, based on years of reading about what is going on in her life. But I know that to say something would be all too golden an opportunity to don my rap hat and say hurtful, judgmental things that are most likely inaccurate. Seriously, I was at the point where I just wanted to post "Oh for fuck's sake, grow the hell up." Maybe she needs to hear that, but I doubt it. Especially because she is borderline.
I had a similar situation in my twenties, when my then-boyfriend moved up to Syracuse with me. For quite a while, he *would not* find a job, and my student meal ticket couldn't afford the both of us for long, *and* he was living rent-free. He said he was finding a job, but every time when I came home, there he would be, either just getting out of a bubble bath, or saying that he slept in too late. Finally I sat down with him in the bathroom as he was in the tub, after I had just gotten home from class, and instead of saying "Look, I need you to find a job." I went on about what precisely I thought was wrong with him. You this, you that, you n*e*e*d to do this... all with the intent that I was somehow enlightening him or giving him insight. (and this was well after I stopped drinking the cedu kool-aid.) Whether it did or not, I assure you, was purely incidental, because the truth of the matter was
I wanted him to find a fuckin job, and it had nothing to do with what hidden potential he had as a person or not. I needed him to get off of his ass and get to work. It was that simple, and there was nothing wrong with that. It was a perfectly legitimate need on my part, but I wasn't taking responsibility for that, and was instead thinking I was telling him this for
his needs.
To an extent, people who haven't been in a program do this, too.
The program just amplifies the general attitude of dysfunctional dynamics that are present in our society, and pushes it to the point of pathology. Mainly because when you wear a rap hat, 1. The person you are speaking to becomes an object or mirror, and is no longer a person, and 2. You are superior to them, to the point of thinking that you know exactly what is wrong with them.
I've written this in here before:
"Honesty" without empathy is nothing but vindictiveness.CEDU robbed us of our empathy. We have had to fight to reclaim it.
