Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: coping mechanisms

Me and my temper, part seven

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I’m back to talk more about anger and my difficulty in controlling it since my medical crisis. I do have to consider that some of it is purely biological. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve found out that it’s a common side effect of having as stroke. And the war I had in my brain and body the last time I was arguing with my mother felt almost physically impossible to stop. I wrote about it at length in my last post, but I want to talk more about it in this one.

When you’re a weirdo as I am (neurodivergent), it’s difficult to know what is a flaw and what is just partof my personality and does not need to be changed.

For example. When I was younger, I had a really hard time going anywhere because I felt like all my senses were being assaulted all the time. Smells, sounds, and sights that I couldn’t just mute. If someone had told me that I wasn’t being oversensitive or too fussy, but that my brain was just wired differently, that would have helped a great deal. I got scolded often by my mother when I would protest about my environment.

She told me a story about how when I was two or three and my brother was five or six and upwards, she would take us to the State Fair every year. She told me I would be crying and screaming, and I asked why she continued to do it. She said because my brother loved it, and she could not afford a babysitter.

That was my standing in the family in a nutshell.  My brother was always more important than I was for several reasons. The first and biggest reason is beacuse he’s the son. Boys were much better than girls. girls were less than useless, and their only worth was to be married off to procreate. Oh, and in my case, to be my mother’s therapist. That’s it. I had no use as a person in and of myself, and I was treated accordingly.

Two. My brother was/is on the spectrum. He was never diagnosed with it (hell, it was barely acknowledged back in the eighties), but he has the classic symptoms. I was the one who clued him into the fact that he was on the spectrum, and this was a few months before I had my medical crisis. He said it changed his life, and it made so many things make sense. My only regret was that I didn’t tell him earlier because I knew decades earlier. It’s just that he displayed such stereotypical behavior for an autistic person, and he knew his son was autistic that I assumed he knew it about himself.

One of the most strenuous arguments K and I have ever (and it was really mild, but we don’t argue0 was about how talking about mental health was so much more open now than when we were younger. Neither of us was saying we should go back to the old days of not talking about it at all, but she was concerned that there was too heavy a reliance on medication. But, also, was there a need to label everything? Both she and her husband deal/have dealt with mental health issues. She pointed out that they got through it with some therapy, yes (on her part), but that was it.


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More about the anger inside, part five

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Let’s talk one more time about anger. I had my private lesson today, and I mentioned the argument with my mother that I recently had to my teacher. I was still upset with myself for letting it get as far as it did, but I totally did not see the trap in time. That’s what made me mad at myself, though. I’m usually really good at seeing the traps in time and neatly side-stepping them or jumping over them completely. Here’s my post on the subject from yesterday.

It’s been a lifelong study in patience when talking with my parents. I really hate when I lose my temper because what’s the point? In addition, I just don’t want to unleash it willy-nilly. I do believe in the power of anger, but I don’t want to let it run unleashed.

When I used to spend an inordinate amount of energy keeping it tamped down, it was so tiring. I was really afraid that if I let it out, it would just  explode everywhere. It was self-defeating behavior, but understandable. My therapist at the time asked me what I thought would actually happen if I let it out. I didn’t know for sure, but I did know that it would destroy the whole world.

I knew I wasn’t important at all, but I also was made to feel by my parents that every little mistake I made was the end of the world. They had no sense of proportion, which is one reason I don’t either. Another reason is because of my broken neuroatypical brain.

When I was a teenager, I was a hot mess–and deeply miserable. My parents were very much into saving face and maknig sure that we never appeared ‘wrong’ from the outside . We weren’t supposed to hint at anything other than a perfect family. One example that was seared in my brain happened when I was a teenager. My parents were out playing tennis with a few of their church friends. Another of their church friends (a woman) called, wanting to speak to my father. I told her that he was out playing tennis.

When my parents returned, I told them their friend called and that I told her they were out playing tennis. My father got mad at me for that. He said I shouldn’t have said it because it was family business. I didn’t understand that. Why was it such a big deal that he was out playing tennis with his friends? He did elaborate that she might feel bad because she wasn’t invited, but that didn’t feel like the whole reason.

It wasn’t until many years later that I figured it out. My father had a series of affairs since I was very little. I don’t know when I realized it, but he always had at least one sidechick–from the very conservative and sexist Taiwanese church we belong to. Everyone knew about it, and I was amazed that he didn’t get his teeth punched in. I guess that wasn’t the Taiwanese/Christian way. Anyway, the woman they were playing tennis with was a longtime side chick of my father’s. The woman who called from him was probably an ex or a future sidechick. That made much more sense to me than any of my father’s explanations. Yes, he was a highly secretive man, but that wasn’t an explanation in and of itself.

I try to be as compassionate as I can, but there’s a coldness at the very core of my heart/soul that I can’t quite explain. I’ve always known it’s there, and I’ve always tried to make sure that it stays where it belongs. I’ve been ashamed of it and thought it was my failing for so long.


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Taming the anger inside, part three

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Let’s talk more about rage. I could soften it and talk about it in the socially polite way. “I was having difficulty reining in my anger, and I needed to focus on my breathing to do so.” Here is  my post from yesterday in which I discuss all my struggles with my temper. I had it under control for the first twenty years of my life because I had to. It was psychological damaging, but I did what I had to do to get through it.

I had less of a grip on it through my thirties, and Taiji hepled me tap into my anger. Not in a bad way, but in a healthy way. It’s not healthy to hold back your temper to the point where you’re dead inside. Believe me, it isn’t.

For the majority of my life, I was numb. I could feel emotions way down deep, but they were very subdued–as if I was feeling them through a thick layer or twenty of gauze. This was positive emotions as well as negative ones–though I will admit that there were ten times the latter than the former.

I will point out that it’s also probably because I’m neuroatypical, which means I don’t feel things in the same way that other people do. However, I know it was more because of the emotional abuse I got whenever I showed any negative emotion in my family (I’ve mentioned more than once that only my parents were allowed to show their displeasure in any way).

Still. I felt I had a decent handle on it. With my parents, it was avoiding any topic that had the chance to go really wrong, and I could usually spot those within seconds. In general, I’m pretty good at spotting the pitfalls that will out me as a weirdo, alien, and/or freak. Or in the case of my family, just someone who’s completely wrong. Wrong at what? Everything. My mother wanted a daughter-shaped person who embodied the feminine ideals (even though she hated them herself) in order to repair her fractured relationship with her mother (don’t ask).

Somewhere in myy forties, I gave up on my relationship with my mother. (I knew there was no hope with my father and didn’t care at a much earlier age.) I knew that she was not going to change, and I knew that I wasn’t going to ever be the person she wanted me to be.

Side note: My father has dementia. It’s gotten progressively worse (as dementia does). When it first started, I was in a very difficult place with my parents. I have struggled with my relationship with them all my life. I did not know what to do. I mean, Taiji helped me a lot when I first started studying it, but there were limits to it.


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Try to see it from my point of view

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I have more to say about family dysfunction, dating, points of view, and other things related. In the last post, I was saying what was my deal-breaker in dating someone. It’s not race, religion, or gender (to a certain extent). It’s political affiliation, specifically being a Republican. That can expand more widely into cishet white dudes because there are so many layers of privilege going on that it tires me just to think of it.

I want to say up front. This is not saying that all cishet white dudes, some of my best friends are cishet white dudes, blah blah blah. But. I just don’t have the heart for it any longer. Trying to relate to them, I mean. I think everyone should be treated with decency and respect, yes. That doesn’t mean I need to give everyone a chance in the dating world.

Side note: This is something I firmly believe–you don’t have to date anyone you don’t want to date. I don’t think it’s cool if someone is prejudiced against, say, black people, I think it’s perfectly legit not to date them. More to the point, it’s a service to black people to not date them if you aren’t attracted to them because who wants someone dating them out of pity/guilt? I had white women who felt they should date me to show how progressive they were, and believe it or not, I was not turned on by that. At all.

Here’s my point. Everyone looks at things from their own point of view. The trick is to realize that other people don’t necessarily think the way you do. And, if you want to be advanced, you could try to imagine where the other person was coming from.

This is the problem in describing abuse. There is just no way to give the complete context other people need in order to understand what has happened. Each individual instance may not be a big deal in and of itself, but oftentimes, it’s the death of a thousand paper cuts.


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Dyfunction dysfunction, what’s your function?

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One thing rarely talked about when discussing abuse is how coping mechanisms that have been developed to deal with the abuse are faulty in healthy situations. It’s something that comes up on Ask A Manager on a regular basis because she talks about how being in a toxic work environment can warp you to what is ok and what isn’t. The wildest example I can think of is the letter writer who bit a coworker and in the update, said it was considered ok by her colleagues because the guy is a jerk. The LW’s conclusion was that people with normal jobs found them boring and hated it, so, yeah, her work environment was toxic, but, hey, at least it was interesting. Many commenters pointed out that the LW was getting warped by the toxic environment.

I bring this up because abuse does the same. In the last post, I mentioned that I was resigned to managing my parents because they weren’t going to change. The way I deal with them, though, is not something that would work well with healthy people. Basically, I just placate them and get through a conversation as painlessly as possible. I keep it as surface-y as possible as well. The goal is to not say anything of importance unless I absolutely have to.

You can imagine how this would not work well with people I actually want to be close to. You can’t shine off a friend and expect them to be happy about it. A true friend, I mean. Not just an acquaintance. When the tragedy happened in February, I told my close friends about it. I was devastated and needed the comfort/support. I would not think about holding back with them, which is the normal and healthy way to deal with it.

The longer you’ve been in an abusive situation, the harder it is to recalibrate your thinking. I am low-contact with my parents, but it’s still enough contact to keep me off balance. I have a shield up around them that I can’t afford to let done. Explaining that to other people is futile.

I’ve said it before, but it’s a matter of context. For people who have loving parents, it’s nearly impossible to imagine parents who don’t love their children. Or rather, it might be imaginable, but it’s not something that can be understood if you haven’t been in the situation. Like anything else that is the outlier, really.


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Compassion is hard

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In yesterday’s post, I touched on how we humans make things harder on ourselves. This is true in general, and even more so with family dysfunction. What we grew up with was the norm, and if it was unrelenting, then it can be hard to break free. In my family, women were subjugated to men (rather, my mother prostrated herself in front of my father. But, weirdly, she also argued with him incessantly about him staying out until all hours of the night. She told me not to tell him certain things, but she also stood up to him when he wanted to spank my brother. She also pushed to get my brother an Apple computer at a time when it was prohibitively expensive because my brother was techno-minded).

My mother has always been an odd mixture of rampantly sexist in general and believing herself to be above those rules. I guess that’s not odd, actually. Many people have a ‘not for me’ exception to their rules. “Oh, this is how things should be–except for me.”

It’s partly because people have plenty of context for their own behavior/ideas/views, but they don’t for other people’s. So something that they could justify for themselves, they would not do so for other people. In other words, it’s ok for me but not for thee.

My mother has dedicated her life to propping up my father’s ego. It’s really sad when you think about it from afar. I also think it has emotionally crippled him rather than helping him. Never allowing him to tolerate a moment of discomfort did not help him grow. Was he able to grow? I don’t know. Doubtful. But we’ll never know because my mother wrapped him in gossamer silk and never let him out.

It’s not entirely her fault. He was (and is) a difficult man. A full-fledged narcissist who did not think about anything other than himself. He had affairs from the time I was very young, and he and my mother fought about it endlessly.

Here’s the bottom line with that. My mother knew. She knew he was stepping out on her, and she accepted it. Yes, she fought with him about it, but she did not leave him. She did not enact any consequences for his bad behavior, so he learned that if he just waited it out, he would win in the end.

I can’t help thinking that her life would have been so much better if she had left him before my brother and I were even born, but that was never going to happen. My mother’s chidhood made it so she would never leave my father. Not just the sexist Taiwanese culture, but the fact that her mother was so domineering and withoholding of love.


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Personalized anxiety quirks

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I was talking to my mother the other day–by the way, I curse my brother for teaching her how to Zoom. Not because she’s using it, but because she hasn’t quite got the hang of Zoom etiquette. She called me and asked if Zoom was working. She had sent me an email with an invite, you see, and I hadn’t clicked on it. I had to explain to her that if I wasn’t expecting an email, I didn’t check it–especially not that one. She kept rambling about Zoom and making sure it worked and she had sent me an email, and I had to tell her to chill the fuck out (not in those words, obviously) as I was clicking on the link.

Side Note: My mom has always been an anxious talker, but it’s gotten worse in the past few years. My brother and I were talking about it how you literally have to talk over her because she just won’t stop.

Side Note to the Side Note: This is actually true of both my brother and me as well. Not the anxious talker part (though that’s me), but just the talking part in general. My mom has complained to me about my brother talking so much as well, and I know that once I get on a tear, it can be hard for me to shut my trap as well. The difference is that I’m aware of this. I am working on it. I am pretty sure that’s not the case with either my brother or my mother. Oh, and my father also likes to pontificate from time to time, and he definitely has no idea when he does it. I just don’t talk to him as often as I do to my mother and my brother.

Back to the first side note. My belief is that it’s because my father has retired. I have no proof of that except that the chattering started about the same time he retired. My hypothesis is based on the fact that her whole life revolves around him. Now that he’s home the whole time, she’s probably talking to him more than not. He needs attention all the time, and she’s the one who gives it to him. He’s a very cruel and exacting person in that he’s both overweeningly arrogant and excruciatingly thin-skinned. He’s suspicious to the point of paranoid about people talking about him, and he can find something to take offense at in anything anyone says. So, my mom has to walk softly and constantly couch what she says in a way that he won’t take offense. It doesn’t work, obviously, which means more talking and frantic explanations.


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