The Astrology of Deception

Last night I read a fun astrological article – How to Spot a Romantic Deceiver – on Sasstrology by the talented astrologer Nadia Gilchrist (Ruby Slipper Astrology).

It was fun, yet within the fun was wisdom to be gleaned. Although its main focus was on romantic relationships, I think it also applies to all relationships. It outlined certain astrological aspects which were ones most likely to cause the person with those aspects to behave in a deceptive manner in relationships. It also pointed out that the person being deceptive was not necessarily aware and conscious of the fact that they were being deceptive.

The thing about deception is that a large portion of it is unconscious. The deceiver is unaware that they are acting in a deceptive way, perhaps because they themselves are also deceived, they believe what they are saying and doing, or they truly want to believe what they are saying and doing.

Our society encourages us to be whomever we want to be, to think and believe something and that way it will become true. Be positive and you will attract positive things. To create ourselves, bend and twist ourselves until we become our desired self rather than accept that we may have limitations on who we can actually be. In fact considering that we have limitations is deemed to be highly negative and has to be avoided at all costs.

So it seems logical that most deception starts with us, and it ends with us. To be deceived you have to participate in the deception. Wishful thinking is always most eager to believe, and reluctant to disbelieve. We hope that what we are being told and shown is true, because we need it to be so to fulfill a desire or fantasy of our own. We want to be loved, so a person who tells us they love us has our attention and taps into our imagination.

I have a friend who has one of the aspects mentioned in the article. They go through relationships like the cookie monster goes through cookies. They keep hoping to meet the one, their prince charming soulmate, and keep thinking they have, but all the ones they meet are princes who turn into frogs. There is nothing wrong with the princes, other than the fact that as they get to know my friend they want to deepen the relationship, take it out of the airy fairytale bubble of magical beings in love, to real humans getting to know each other, the good and the bad and all the inbetween. This is when my friend freaks out, and decides that the prince has turned into a warty slimy frog.

They see themselves as a magical being, that’s final, they do not want to be a real human with all the ugly reality they attach to being human. So they reset themselves and start over. Ditch the frog and set out to find a prince. They do something very similar with their friendships. They cease communicating with a friend when the friends turns ‘negative’ or ‘ugly’, and wait until the friend has become ‘positive’ and magically beautiful again. I don’t know why my friend does this, I can guess, but that guess could be wrong, the reason I don’t know is because any kind of intimacy scares the shit out of them. They fear not being able to control the image and impression others have of them. They want others to see them only as they want to be seen and as they desire to see themselves.

Intimacy means revealing your real self, and the real self may not be as beautiful and magical as the ideal self. I disagree, but I’m not allowed to disagree with my friend, this might shatter their fairytale world. I think that the most beautiful part of a human is when they reveal all of themselves, the light and the dark, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad, because for one side to exist, it needs the other… and sometimes their version of ugly is my version of stunningly beautiful, and so on. Revealing all of yourself to another is an act of incredible courage.

I don’t want to change my friend, they are lovely as they are, I just wish the relationship could move beyond the point of reset, because going around in a perpetual circle which isn’t a spiral is… not really getting us anywhere. But if you love someone, you accept them with all their human bits and pieces because we all have them even if we believe ourselves to be made of magic alone. I have observed this friend for many years, or what feels like many years, and I can predict the moment that they reset themselves, it seems to coincide with when transiting Mercury crosses over certain points in their chart, especially the ascendant.

I have half of one of the romantically deceptive aspects, Pluto in the 1st house, but my Pluto is in Virgo, not Libra. I do draw very intense relationships into my life, and I am invariably transformed by each and every one. However I do not dump people once they have helped to transform me, they usually dump me because I am no longer the person they first met, I’ve changed, they haven’t. They feel that they have been deceived, even if one of the first things I tell new people who enter my life is that I am changeable and consistently inconsistent. They don’t believe me, thus they deceive themselves. This has always affected me deeply, but I accept that relationships are fluid, and come and go. Those who stay have a very special place in my heart and life.

Everything I do and experience changes me, who I am, thus everything I do changes. If you look at my blogs, my Twitter, the tweets and posts I write, they change as I change. Which is why I never expect those who follow any of my social media creations to stick around for very long, because what they followed may not be what they are still following. Those that stay are those who understand and appreciate that people can actually change, although fundamentally they are still who they are, at a core level. Or they followed and never check what I’m actually doing. Some of the changes are very subtle, and the only reason I notice them is because I watch myself closely. Others may not see what I see, I do not expect them to, in fact I expect people to be as fascinated with themselves as I am with myself, after all the most important relationship in our lives is the one we have with ourselves, for many reasons, one of them being that all our other relationships are intrinsically tied in with how we relate to ourselves.

And we do deceive ourselves a lot. Sometimes we are aware of it, sometimes it is at a subconscious level. Sometimes it is a matter of survival. Sometimes it is our imagination inspiring us. Sometimes it is just a little white lie designed to ease the tumult of life. To not hurt feelings. To just get along, when not getting along seems to be our default position. To smile and say we’re fine, even if we’re not, because… Humans are complex, to expect otherwise is… a wishful thinking deception.

Attitude Problem For Sale By Owner

Make me an offer. What? You want to know what is the attitude problem for sale? Some people are so fussy! What ever happened to taking a risk and living to regret it.

The attitude problem for sale is… come to think of it I have several which I could sell. In fact, according to several people I know (one of whom is me), I am made up entirely of attitude problems. So if I sell them all, there will be nothing left of me. That’s quite an intriguing idea. I have always wondered who I’d be if I didn’t have an opinion about who I am. If everything I know about myself vanished, who would be left to be me.

I used to wish I’d get amnesia, and not remember anything about myself or my life. Who would I be without my memories, without my knowledge of myself and all the things which have shaped me into who I am. What would fill the void?

I wonder what my thinking would be like? I wonder if I would still have dyslexia? I wonder who I’d see when I looked in the mirror?

So much of what we see in the mirror is defined by who we think we’ll see and that is influenced by who we think we are, who we think we should be, and who we deeply wished we were.

What clothes would I wear? Would I still be attracted to the same sort of people, things… have the same passions and obsessions? Maybe… maybe nature is stronger than nurture. Hmmm. But nurture has much to do with how nature grows and evolves. I kind of think I’m a Bonsai tree, nature twisted by nurture to be a certain shape… what sort of tree or plant would I have become if the Bonsai nurturers had not twisted me… if nature had just grown as it chose to do so without nurture? Or does nature have some say in what kind of nurture it receives, therefore my nature will always attract the sort of nurture I get, and ultimately I will always be and become exactly who I am now.

Truth is, if I ever had a bout of amnesia, I would probably spend all of my time trying to recall my forgotten memories, trying to remember who I was, and so the whole experiment would be a waste of time because I wouldn’t remember that I wanted to forget… unless I left myself a note, but then I would wonder what it was that I wanted to forget and… ugh!

Anyway, the attitude problem for sale at the moment is… the belief that somehow I am less important than others. The reason I am selling it is because life at the moment needs for me to stand centre stage, claim the spotlight, unveil my drama, and demand attention. Not from the whole world, just the part of it in which I live. In other words I need to stop pretending that I am not the centre of my universe.

If I don’t get rid of this attitude problem, everything which is happening in my life now is going to go horribly wrong. I can predict it, in fact being able to predict the consequences of actions is one of my more useful attitude problems. Some might think it’s a talent not a problem, but being able to predict how people are going to behave, what they are going to do, a chain reaction based on an action, is something which other people find incredibly annoying, especially when I am spot on with it. My predictions can be off, but that is usually down to missing information. Anyone can predict consequences of actions, it requires being observant of human nature, and absorbing the constant stream of information which people emit with every word, action, reaction and look. Since I have spent the majority of my life sitting on the sidelines, being observant and absorbent is a side effect of that.

I know where this attitude problem was born. In fact it was born before I physically arrived on Earth, and it welcomed me with open arms. Throughout my childhood, and beyond, I have always been pushed aside, into the shadow. So many experiences have confirmed that my stage belongs to others, that they are the centre of my universe, that their dramas are more interesting, better acted, better written, and frightfully important. I accepted this, they seemed right, they shouted and screamed the loudest, while I just sat in a dark corner silently. Watching. Applauding when ordered and expected to do so, gasping in the correct moments, murmuring approval or dissent when the pause in proceedings demanded it, never rudely nodding off if possible, and generally being a polite and dutiful spectator.

I must admit that, after a while, being an observant audience member gets very dull. You’ve seen all possible dramas, you know the beginning, middle, and end by heart of just about every variation on every theme. And human behaviour becomes so predictable that all you want to do is close the curtains and shut down the theatre. What keeps the theatre open is the hope that something new, a thrilling twist never before seen, a performance of an unusual kind, will appear before the rather glazed over eyes, titillate the mind, and awaken the once interested now bored audience member.

There comes a time in life, when life asks you to do the opposite of what you normally do. That time has arrived for me. Life has challenged me. It said, so you’ve seen it all and you are bored, then create your own drama, write, direct, and perform it, centre stage, lights blazing. Your time to step up has come. Sure you’ve had some walk on parts, but you were often replaced by a stand-in because you refused to do the part exactly as instructed. Now you’re in charge, do something about it. Stop mumbling, start emoting.

The drama I am writing, directing, and performing at this time is not original… but it is mine. And I’ll be damned if anyone is going to push me off stage as they have in the past because their drama is more important than mine and they need to perform it now, on my stage… Get your own stage!

This is all new to me, and I am having to confront stage fright, many of my fears, the self doubt which always comes when you face fears, and… battle with the big bad boss of attitude problems which keeps trying to undermine my newly found self belief and smidgeon of self importance. I don’t think that I am more important than anyone else, I don’t want to think that way, I’m happy with equality in the matter of importance, I just need to stop seeing myself as less important than anyone else.

So, anyone want to make an offer… or should I just bury this attitude problem in the garden and see what kind of plant grows out of it?

A Story of Uranus Transiting the Eighth House

Sometimes I think astrology is bullshit. Sometimes it is. And sometimes it is so incredibly spot on that I stare at it open-mouthed wondering how on earth it knows what it knows. That’s what I’m doing right now.

If you have been following astrology recently, you may have spotted that astrologers everywhere are astro-buzzing about the square between transiting Uranus in Aries and transiting Pluto in Capricorn. Radical change on the warpath meets destructive transformation of structure and established order. Chaos rules and it has no intention of being ordered and tidy, things are messy, will get messier, but eventually, once the old has been demolished, that which lies underneath will become fertile ground for the new to grow and be built upon. Or something like that.

Usually I only get to see the work of a transit in retrospect, mainly because while it is doing its thing I am so caught up in what is happening that I don’t have time or focus to see the universal picture. This time though, things are different, perhaps because Uranus and Pluto are involved.

I was born at the tail end of the generation who had Uranus and Pluto conjunct. Natally these two are located in my 1st house of the self, and so their energies, combined and separate are very familiar to me. I embody them. I am very Plutonian and Uranian. I have always struggled with such powerful energies, and have spent much of my life feeling like a freak who crash landed on Earth and then didn’t know how to get back to my planet of origin. However since transiting Pluto and Uranus have formed this square, I have felt more at ease on Earth. The energies affecting the planet right now are my energies. I am finally at home. More than that, I feel as though my time has come… to do what exactly I don’t know… perhaps just to fully embrace what it means to actually be myself, all of me, no holds barred, and to unleash that on the world rather than hide it as I have done for so long. Anyone else of my generation, the Pluto/Uranus conjunction, feel this way?

I am going through a sort of hell at the moment. Pluto and Uranus are not subtle in their effects, although some aspects of how they work are very quiet, silent but deadly… deadly as in they seek to transform, rip off the old skin, to reveal what lies beneath.

Uranus is transiting my 8th house. The House of Scorpio. When I first looked this up, I shuddered a bit, hoped for the best, prepared for the worst, and then forgot about it because nothing happened. Then my father died. The 8th house rules death. I’ve been estranged from my father for many years by my own choice, I found out about his death in a typically Uranian and unusual manner.

Pluto has been plumbing the depths of my 4th house, changing how I view myself from the perspective of family, unearthing childhood hang-ups and beliefs, and challenging me to confront them. It had just crossed over the cusp into my 5th house, stirring up my long abandoned creativity, pushing me to express myself artistically. I resisted for a bit, but you can’t resist Pluto’s energy when he has decided it’s time for you to change, not unless you want to be torn apart painfully, you will be torn apart, but it doesn’t have to be a bad pain, it doesn’t have to be excruciating, it can be experienced as a full body exfoliation rather than a skinning.

I had an idea about incorporating the artistic influences with which I had grown up into some of the photography I was doing. My father was an artist. So I did a Google search looking for inspiration, and found a news article announcing his demise. I was shocked. He had been ill for a long time, but being a Narcissist, he had decided that he was immortal. I saw a great quote on the cover of NME which summed up the Narcissist ethos to me - We don’t have egos, we have superpowers. I had wondered if perhaps, for once, he was right about being immortal. You never know, sometimes one must keep an open mind about such things, life is mysterious. But, anyway… he was dead, it was a surprise, and that was that.

I did not think beyond that, other than to worry a little because I knew his death might cause my mother to resurface in my life, and I had estranged myself from her too out of self preservation. A while passed. Then my mother contacted me through a friend. She had urgent information for me regarding my father’s death and an inheritance. I rolled my eyes, and did nothing. As far as I was concerned I had no intention of being a vulture, swooping in to pick the corpse’s body clean. He had many other people in his life happy to do that sort of thing. Besides, I thought I had an agreement with him to leave me out of his will, because I knew he would leave a mess behind, and enjoy the idea of the chaos which would ensue once he was gone. I ignored my mother’s drama. A while later my father’s live-in lover contacted me, also through a friend, to let me know that although my father had left no will the inheritance was all mine. I groaned, but I was also astounded. I was surprised that my father’s lover would go out of her way to contact me with this information. Then I realised why. She was afraid that if I didn’t claim the inheritance, that my mother would get it. I groaned again. This was exactly what I had feared would happen when my father died. I also imagined him grinning in the after death lounge, smug, very pleased that yet again he had created hell for others with him as the ring leader and master of madness.

The 8th house also represents the resources of others, such as an inheritance, and legal matters. Being that this is all under the auspices of Uranus, none of it is straightforward. There is no wedge of cash, there is a very small amount of money which will cover the legal costs of getting the inheritance that at the moment are eating up my savings. I have Jupiter in the 2nd house of personal finance, and it is not as lucky there as many astrologers seem to think it is, how it works is that sometimes I’m the windshield and sometimes I’m the bug, sometimes I have money and sometimes I don’t, regardless of how hard I work or if I just lie around finding shapes in clouds. There are also a couple of properties which would make excellent settings for a horror movie, dilapidated and neglected. Now I did consider renouncing this inheritance, but Uranus in the 8th also works in another way.

“Uranus Transiting the Eighth House - Our egos’ pointy little ears may stand jauntily above the waves, but the rest of the Self’s iceberg lies low, down in the deep waters of the unconscious mind. When Uranus transits through the Eighth House, those psychic depths are ready to emerge. In fact, there is no stopping them. Suddenly, our greatest fears, our frustrated desires, our unowned hungers—all the unintegrated dimensions of our psyches—begin to press upward. The wild woman and the wild man inside us all gather force. They come crashing out of the primordial wilderness and bash against the garden walls of Ego City. We’re “officially” very happy—but our secret grief leaps out. Maybe there’s a joy we crave—but which our civilized ego has forbidden. That joy starts making choices for us, grabbing the steering wheel. Right on schedule, people who represent or facilitate these drives appear.

We are invited to do some deep Shadow work, to integrate parts of ourselves which have been shamed by our societies or families, making our own moral judgements—and living, for the honest good or the destructive ill of it, with the consequences. For most of us, this transit represents a “coming of age”—even if we are ninety! “ ©Steven Forrest via Forrest Astrology

Something in me would not let me run away from this mess, as I have done in the past when dealing with the world according to my nutcase Narcissistic parents. This time I have to stand my ground - Aries - and fight for my right to exist and be counted - something which my parents tried very hard to take away from me. My deepest fears are asking me to face them and understand that within them lies a treasure that will be worth ten thousand inheritances. The true inheritance is not a material one, but one which lies within, but I can only access that by accepting the material one, fighting for it, and claiming it.

Easier said than done thanks to Uranus. The first problem is Italian inheritance law (my father’s Italian). It is so bloody complex even Italian lawyers don’t know how to deal with it. I speak and understand Italian, but I am not fluent, and even if I was… I still need lawyers to deal with legal mumbo jumbo. The first lawyers I hired, well, I had a hard time distinguishing between whether they were incompetent and inefficient or just being Italian. I eventually realised, after the hundredth time they got my name wrong, said they were doing things and didn’t, put me in a position where I had to quadruple check everything they did when they actually got their asses in gear and did something very sloppily, and pissed off people who have relevant documents and need to be kept sweet, that it was the former. On a day my astrology told me not to make any important decisions, I fired my lawyers. Best decision ever made. But it did leave me in legal limbo. My father’s lover wants me to do everything myself without lawyers, and she keeps pressuring me to do things her way… but transiting Saturn is sitting right on top of my natal Mars in the 3rd house, making my natural impatience suddenly very cautious. I am playing chess, looking ahead, and realising that if I act impatiently now to make this situation move forward and go away, further down the line it will be so much worse and harder to sort out than it is now.

There is an added astrological element. Saturn in Scorpio forming a mutual reception with Pluto. Apparently issues which surfaced the last time Saturn was in Scorpio, during the 80’s, will be revisited. In the 80’s, when I was in my early teens, my father cut me off without a penny. He didn’t tell me or warn me about it, he just did it. I found out when my mother tried to pay my school fees and had no funds to do so. My father, when confronted, pretended he didn’t know anything about it for a while, then admitted he’d decided it was time for me to make my own way in life. My parents were addicted to lying, so the truth is anyone’s guess. Mind you, that situation had more to do with the endless battles between my parents than with me personally, I was just hit by shrapnel as per usual. I did make my own way, as I had no option but to do so… albeit dragging my mother around like a lead weight. It’s interesting to note that, according to my father’s lover, my father wanted me to have everything when he died, to make up for things between us… but mostly because he didn’t want my mother to get her hands on anything, which is why he refused to write a will. So it goes.

Transiting Uranus is opposing my natal Uranus in the 1st and my natal Jupiter in the 2nd (which also represents personal values). So… what I have realised thus far is that I am being challenged to stand my ground. To do things my way. Trust myself and stand by myself through thick and thin. Which is not easy. I doubt myself a lot. When you grow up and spend most of your life thinking you’re a freak and don’t belong on Earth, you doubt your ability to deal with life on Earth, the inhabitants here, and all the customs and cultural quirks of society. You adapt your style to suit the environment even if it goes against every instinct and intuition. You learn to have an ego which can when need be pretend that it does not exist. An egoless ego.

I have spent many years giving in to the will of others, pushing my ego, my needs, my feelings and thoughts to one side. Mainly because most of the others whom I met were not willing to give an inch, they were entrenched in their egos, desirous of having their needs met their way, their feelings and thoughts being all important. They wanted control, especially of other people because sharing control frightened them. I hate being trapped in a stand-off. So I give way, but that does not mean I cede control. Yet that is what people think when you give way, they don’t see you as being reasonable, as moving towards them to meet them on neutral ground, they see you as a pushover. This time I am doing things very differently. No compromise. No pushing my ego aside, time to let my ego enjoy being an ego, with all the perks and stuff that includes. Not sure if this is right, but I’m going to go with it, doubting my doubts rather than doubting myself because of them. So far, this journey through hell feels awesome.
 

Thank you Uranus in Aries for accepting my crazy freak self and encouraging me to let it out and watch it flourish. I’m going out in a blaze of gory glory!

We Interrupt the Regular Postings of this Blog…

To announce that I am going through hell at this moment… See you on the other side!

When life gives you a challenge, it also gives you the strength to meet the challenge, but to get that strength bonus and level up, you have to face the challenge head on, move through it, and come out the other side.

Best wishes and blessings from me to you to meet your challenges. We can do this! Or not… Definitely! Fuck off doubt!

I Never Talk About Sex…

I also often do what I say I never do. In fact, when I hear myself say the word ‘never’, I know that soon enough I’m going to do whatever it is the never was referring to. It acts like a curse, or a signal.

I usually don’t talk about sex because like religion and politics, it is connected to personal beliefs, and it is a minefield of arguments. Debate flies out the window and is replaced by dogma. Since beliefs get strengthened when more people agree with it, what may be an illusion becomes more tangible and real as more people pour their energy into making a dream a reality, people tend to batter you with their beliefs until you agree with them rather than accept that there are alternate realities coexisting in one place. That I can believe one thing and you can believe another, these beliefs may even be polar opposites, and both of them are valid. You do not need to be wrong for me to be right, nor do I have to be an idiot for you to be a genius.

I’m not really going to talk about sex, not in the way it is usually discussed, but I am going to use it as a way to demonstrate an idea which intrigues me.

Many years ago, when the New Age movement first began, I was at my most voracious when it came to reading and experimenting with philosophy, psychology, self help (which was also new at the time), mysticism, theology, parapsychology, and anything which proffered to know the true nature of people, life, and the universe. I was going through an existential phase, trying to answer THE question - What’s the meaning of life? In truth, I really wasn’t that interested in answering the question for anyone else, I just wanted to know why I was alive, and what was the purpose of my life. This question was burning a hole in me. I needed to know because I really didn’t see any point in being alive, or continuing to be alive. Things were very grim. For me personally. And in the world around me. Everyone was obsessed with money, power, and climbing some invisible ladder, trampling on hands and heads to get to the top, and global nuclear meltdown was just a button click away. Sound familiar? Plus ca change…

Anyway, one of the authors whose work I read at the time was Barbara Ann Brennan. Her work centred mainly around spiritual healing using the natural energy fields surrounding our bodies, and encompassing all of us, mind, emotions, soul, and whatever else is there. To some she was a complete crackpot, to others she was an enlightened teacher. I shouldn’t talk about her in the past tense since she is still alive, but I haven’t revisited her work for a long time, so it’s in the past for me.

As with a lot of the books I read and the subjects which I study, when I move on, I tend to only keep what is relevant to me, what stood out and imprinted itself on my mind, the rest washes out of me and away. The only thing which stuck with me from Barbara Brennan’s work was the energy defense chart. My mind took a snapshot of it, and kept it in a file, a file in which I place all things pertaining to human interactions, and different ways of viewing them.

The concept that all of us have an energy force field is fascinating. We often describe others and ourselves in terms of energy. We talk about being zapped, shocked, drained, overpowered, electrified. We notice the change in atmosphere when certain people walk into a room and others walk out. Now some of that has to do with how we feel about a person, if we’re in love with someone, their presence and absence will always affect us, and the same applies to someone we hate.

To view interactions and relationships from an energy level is very intriguing and it adds a dimension of understanding. Such as when you feel as though you are being attacked, yet the person you think is doing the attacking has a lovely smile on their face and looks utterly innocent. Psychologically you could either conclude that you are being paranoid or that the other person is being passive-aggressive. There are nuances, the situation could be a bit of both, especially if there is a long history between the two of you. However if you do not know the other person at all, though they may remind you of someone you know who behaves in the way they are behaving, you would probably negate your impression, doubt yourself, and let them get away with what they are doing to you.

The sex bit comes in now. Sex is an exchange of energy. And in many ways, every interaction between humans is an act of sex. Our energy fields penetrate others and are penetrated by others. We take in seeds of thought, ideas, emotions, and if they find fertile ground, those seeds grow. What they grow into depends upon us, mostly. On how we nurture the thought, idea, emotion, what we feed it, what we feel about it, and what we want to do with it, our ambitions for the brain child growing within us.

When I say that it mostly depends upon us, I mean that sometimes we have holes in our energy fields which allow easy access to our inner self to others. They can manipulate us from within. That feeling that we are not being ourselves comes from this sort of a scenario. Our energy field has a hole in it, and someone’s energy hand has pushed its way through the hole and is inside of us, manipulating us. We’re still us, and even though we know we do not want to clap, our hands are being made to do so. Certain parents, often accidentally, usually because it was done to them, do this to their children. They create the hole and leave it there. The child does not realise their energy field isn’t supposed to have a hole, so it is never repaired. If the parent ever lets go of the hold they have of their child, removing their hand, they leave them open to having someone else take the place of the parent. One energy hand is replaced by another. The child and subsequent adult only knows this way of life, and feels incomplete without the energy hand within them.

I know, it sounds creepy, but there is a lot of creepiness in human interaction. Neediness is very creepy. You can feel the feelers of energy emanating from a needy human being touching your energy field, looking for ways in, seeking a means to latch onto to you like a leech and feed. Their energy field is emaciated and needs sustenance. Bullying is very creepy. You can feel the spikes on the energy field of a bully pushing against you trying to burst your energy field, so that they can get to you and crush you with the juggernaut they have created to protect a terrified and tiny inner self. They cover their energy field with the flattened energy fields of others, like skins sewn over skins to strengthen as a scar covers a wound, because most bullies have a giant gaping wound within them which is festering and frightening the bully.

There are many glorious exchanges of energy too. We all know and adore those. Feeling the warm sunshine penetrating our darkness, as a kind soul embraces us and encourages us, gives us hope and inspiration. The sweet and tender energy caresses of someone who loves us, and with just one look can reassure us, smoothing the rough surface of our frayed energy field. The boost of sudden enthusiasm when our bouncing energy field collides and merges with another bouncing energy field, and fun ensues, creativity is born, and the world seems as though it is the most beautiful place in the universe.

I never talk about sex, but, in some ways, all conversations are sexual. Words penetrate. Words are received. Sometimes words make babies. Please note, I am a thoroughly irresponsible parent to the babies created from the seeds of my words. If they create a monster, or if they create a magnificent masterpiece, the credit is all yours. Since what we say is often not what people hear… that’s my opt out clause. Besides. Karma is listening too and will deal with me accordingly.

Right, I’m exhausted, sated, and need a post-coital nap. Your turn to word me up, leave your seeds in the comment slot… ?

Reflections In A Mirror

ManuelLa by MoonVooDoo

I read a post on tumblr the other night about the tale of Echo and Narcissus, there was a source credit with a link, so I followed it to see what other myths they had for me to delve into, and found that it was a website – Echo.Me.Uk – which had extensive information about Narcissism.

Narcissism was named after the story of Echo and Narcissus. The beautiful man who fell in love with his own reflection. Reflections play a huge part in Narcissism, and in the interaction between a Narcissist and others. However Narcissists are not in love with their true image, they are in love with an illusion which they have created, and constantly adjust seeking the ideal image to possess. The parts of themselves which they do not want, the ugly, imperfect bits, are generously projected onto and into others.

I sometimes jokingly claim that I am a Narcissist magnet. Truth is, there are a lot of Narcissists in the world. There are also a lot of people who are not Narcissists, I just tend to recognise when someone is, because I know the symptoms… the symptoms of being a victim of a Narcissist.

Both my parents were Narcissists. I was trained to be an NSS, a Narcissistic Supply Source, from infancy. Being an NSS basically involves letting a Narcissist sink their teeth into your veins to drink your blood until they’ve had their fill. They drain you, then toss you aside when they’re done, leave you alone for a bit, give you time to replenish your blood supply, then they come back for more. That is how they replenish their blood supply because they can’t generate it from within. They can’t feed themselves, except by feeding off of others.

There is still a bit of a debate about how Narcissists are created. Do Narcissists breed more of their own kind. Vampire making vampire. Or can two humans breed a vampire. And who created the very first vampire. Can a Narcissist be an immaculate conception. Narcissists do believe that they are immaculate.

I’ve often wondered why I didn’t become a Narcissist. Then again, since most Narcissists don’t know they are Narcissists… I may well be one and not know it.

When I was a child my best friend lived in a mirror. I was not looking in the mirror to see what I looked like, but rather so that my eyes could look into the eyes of another and see affection. I was an only child living in the land of giants, and most of those giants were not friendly. Their eyes, when they deigned to look at me, were often filled with dismissive contempt, rage, blame, or fear.

I used to find it strange that adults feared me, I could understand that they were contemptuous, and angry, that they blamed me for everything, I was a flea which kept irritating them, but the fear seemed out of proportion to the scenario. Like an elephant being afraid of a mouse. They had all the power as they were adults, I was utterly powerless as I was a child. For me to fear them was logical, for them to fear me was illogical. Now that I am older I understand what that fear was and is, but a child tends to take everything very personally. If someone is angry, they think it is because of them, likewise if someone is happy. Magical thinking. It is just the way children perceive. Everything is up close and connected to them. So I took that fear personally and came to the conclusion that there was something very wrong with me. I was obviously not a normal human being. Why else would they look at me with fear. I must be a monster.

However my reflection did not see me that way. I used to talk to myself in the mirror. Friend to friend. I knew that it was me, my reflection, and that I was just talking to myself, but in some ways it was not me. I projected onto my reflection the parts of me which I would perhaps have projected onto others, onto a peer, a friend. Relationships are a vital part of life, and when you spend a lot of time alone, you end up having a relationship with yourself similar to one which you would have with another. I became very self reliant. If I needed emotional support, I sought it from myself. If I needed to discuss a problem, I discussed it with myself. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t seek out the views of others to expand my own, if and when others were available, but I usually reviewed what I gathered from others with myself before making a decision about anything. Especially if those views came from my parents.

One of the things I like most about being friends with myself is the ability to be myself without any hindrance, inhibition, self consciousness. To speak directly, bluntly, call bullshit if bullshit is being spoken, question my motives and intentions, attack and defend, then deconstruct and reconstruct… all without having to worry about hurting my feelings or any other nuances which come with friendship. I tend to be quite brutal with myself, but I know what I’m doing, most of the time, and so I can relax completely in my own company, most of the time.

This friendship with myself often causes problems with my friendships with others. In fact relationships are my Achilles’ heel. I am very socially awkward. When I am with other people, I am always conversing with myself inside my mind, it’s very handy having a portable friend, asking for advice on how to proceed with another. Can I say this, is it appropriate. Am I supposed to tell them what I actually think or give reassurance. And so on. The most difficult part of relationships for me is confiding in another, especially with regards to deeply personal issues. My inner attitude is, I’ve got this covered.

I have many viable reasons why I don’t confide in others. Some are designed specifically to reassure friends who accuse me of not confiding in them, not trusting them, not thinking they can handle my problems. I love having friends, I love knowing that they are there for me if I need a shoulder to cry on, but I prefer to cry on my own shoulder. It is just about physically possible. Laughing, on the other hand, I much prefer to do in the company of a good friend. And I do seek my friends out for support in the form of chilling, taking a break from the vicissitudes of life, discussing ideas, having brainwaves, solving all the problems in the world, and then having a big laugh about it all. That to me is invaluable. It is a great treasure of friendship. As is understanding. Others understanding that my best friend, my main confidant, is myself, and that there are certain things which I only ever share with myself. However, everything else is up for grabs, and I am flexible enough to change, yet not to the point where I become who I am not, to please someone else and who they are. I don’t want them to change who they are for me, because who they are is why I enjoy their company.

Sometimes I feel like a selfish ass for this attitude, but I embrace my selfish assishness because it is a part of me. I often call myself out on my attitude and behaviour. I can change it if need be, and every now and then the need definitely be.

A friend recently complained to me about me being myself with them. Then they accused me of not being myself with them. Then they wanted me to explain myself to them, to justify my reasons for being me, for being myself with them, and for not being myself with them. Then they accused me of not accepting them for who they are. And of attacking them when I asked them to respect my personal boundaries. I figured they were having an identity crisis and wanted me to have one too. I didn’t feel like having one. I’ve had way too many of those thanks to my parents who used to do a similar routine. I admit that I did not handle this interaction as well as I could have. I know what they really wanted was for me to fix their identity crisis for them. I just didn’t feel like it. I’ve given enough blood. I’m not saying my friend is a Narcissist, but I felt the familiar symptoms of being a victim of a Narcissist in this particular instance.

What we see in others is in ourselves too or we would not be able to recognise it so easily. So I wondered if the reason I see Narcissists, is because I am one. I was definitely an Inverted Narcissist for a while, feeling like I was the worst of the worst, the most hideous creature ever to exist on this planet. But I got over that when I realised that it was an illusion brought on by constantly being told that I was by others, so I believed it, but then I questioned it. The answer was that, yes, I had a chunk of badness in me, but I also had a chunk of good too. Sometimes I’m bad, sometimes I’m good, most of the time I’m a blend of both… and of course, what is good and what is bad is a matter of opinion. Some of my favourite bits of myself, like the ability to be brutally honest with myself, are the bits other people think are horrible. I’m aware of that, which is why I mostly keep those parts all to myself. Yum!

Since psychologists seem to believe that our society is creating more Narcissists than ever before, and that Narcissism is fairly incurable. Once a vampire, there’s no going back to being human. I wonder… rather than see it as a bad thing, or all bad, is there not, as there is in everything, a good side to this too. Perhaps it is a part of the natural evolution of humankind, just as going through a Narcissistic phase is a natural part of growing up, moving from child to adult. Just a thought.

So, What do you think?

Do Unto Others…

Do unto others as you would have others do unto you… and all the other variations of that thought.

Now, there are those who read that to mean - Do to others the shit they will probably do to you before they do it to you. Get in first. Slap them before they slap you. There is a certain logic to it. However the problem with that way of interpreting the thought is that if people were not going to do to you what you thought they might do, you may well have inspired them to treat you the way you have just treated them. Tit for tat. People are petty. Pettiness is a form of redressing balance, it may not be pretty but it has a reason for existing. Some people just don’t understand others, and sometimes the only way to get through to them is to speak their tongue. I know, don’t stoop to the level of others, but stooping has its uses. Stoop to conquer. And it keeps us flexible.

If you’re busy being very fair, moral, good, and zen while someone is repeatedly hitting you. If you’ve asked them politely to stop, then a little less politely, then very sternly, perhaps even raised your volume to a shout, yet they keep hitting you. Because they are not listening, they can’t hear you over the din inside their mind ordering them to hit you, because perhaps they believe you attacked them first, thus everything they do to you is fully justified. Then the only way to stop them from hitting you is to thump them hard on their head. Even that may not get through their hard head to get your point across to them, but it might knock a bit of sense into them, or a bit of stubbornness out, and it might hurt enough for them to reconsider the wisdom of hitting you. You’ve spoken to them in their language, because they don’t understand yours at all and have no intention of learning it. They think your language is stupid. They think you are stupid, for speaking a stupid language, and for allowing them to hit you for so long without reacting.

Give out what you would like to get back, you may not get back what you give out, you may get something much better or something decidedly worse or nothing at all. It’s a gamble in some ways.

If your reason for giving is based on what you are hoping to get back. If that is why you give, then you put yourself at the mercy of others. Your gift, be it kindness, love, or an actual material object, is a question waiting for a reply, a hand waiting to be taken. In some cases it is a blackmail letter awaiting payment. To give hoping to get the same in return is a seed of frustration. I listened to you, why won’t you listen to me! I care for you, now you have to care for me too!

Since others often don’t get what we give, the gift gets lost in the mail, in the air between you and me. Since what they get is often not what we were giving, we gave our version of love, they got their version of neediness, since they don’t like neediness, they return our love with their rejection. If they do happen to get exactly what we gave them, if our version of a high five is also their version of a high five, they may still leave our hand hanging in the air, they just may not feel the need to return it, they may not be in a high five mood. Our life may be great at the time, theirs may be weighed down by seriousness. Perhaps we want to give them some of our happiness because we want them to be happy too, but maybe being happy is not what they need or want, maybe being serious is exactly the mood they need to be in to deal with their life at the moment. Our version of happy may be the same as their happy, but since they are not happy, they can’t accept it or return it even if they would like to, it just isn’t possible at this time please try later. If you keep insisting that they have to be happy, because you are and are generously giving some of your happy to them, then your happy may be making their seriousness turn into serious annoyance.

If your reason for giving is just to give, unconditionally, with no expectation of a return, because giving is the return for giving. If you are doing it to please yourself, then doing what you are doing to others is the reward, the thing you get back. In other words you behave the way you do to others to satisfy your own needs. If you get something back, good or bad, or a bit of both, then you can decide whether that is a gift you would like to accept or not. You gave freely, and therefore you are also free. Giving in this manner means the hand that gave isn’t open waiting for a hand out, it is closed, holding within it the pleasure of having given and shared. It’s not a closed fist, it’s just not expecting anything. Then if someone chooses of their own free will to give to you a similar gift, it is a bonus. Unexpected and much appreciated… as long as their gift is also unconditional.

If their return gift has strings attached then you get placed in a position which asks you to choose between two options:

You can accept the gift, aware of the strings attached, but accepting it may mean that you are signing a contract to return to them what they gave to you. This contract may be very binding, have lots of small invisible print, and last for a long time with endless rituals of give and take, and you may begin to wish that you had never given them anything, that they had refused to take what you were giving, or that they had not given back.

Or you can refuse to accept the gift, not sign the contract, but they may refuse to accept your refusal. Some people get mad if you refuse their gifts, and they may give you another gift which may be unpleasant.

Some people use gifts as a way to get you to owe them, and to own you. Those gifts, whether you want them, asked for them, needed them, or not, are debts you will never repay, because the person giving them is using them to get as many gifts out of you as they can. They want all your treasures, and they intend to have them whether you want to give them or not. They will come down hard on you if you refuse to give them all that they are generously willing to take. How selfish of you!

Give and take is very complex, even though it seems very simple. What we sometimes forget is that there are layers of give and take to give and take. Accepting a gift, is also a form of giving, even though it appears to just be the taking part of the give and take equation. And accepting is a very powerful element in human interactions. Accepting relies a lot on understanding. Understanding exactly what the gift is which is being given, whether you are doing the giving or being given to. Understanding the intentions behind the gift. Understanding the person behind the intentions behind the gift, who they are, why they are giving, what the gift means to them, what they think it should mean to you, and so on. Without understanding, appreciation levels vary. Appreciating a gift is a gift too, an intricate part of the process. Something which means a lot to you, may mean absolutely nothing to another, and so the value of the gift you give may be lost to them. And so on.

So, I am going to give you a question… what you do with it is up to you. What do you think?

Quirks

My mother had a particular quirk which used to drive me nuts. She never listened to a word I spoke, that was normal, she never listened to anything anyone said unless what they were saying was what she wanted to hear, and even then, listening would not be the right term for what she did. She didn’t listen to anything she said either, or she would have had some realisation that she spoke an awful lot of drivel, and that every other sentence contradicted the previous one.

She did love talking, on and on and on, because she loved the sound of her own voice. She had trained to be an opera singer because she believed that her voice was angelic, magnificent, and must be shared with the world. Something like that. It was a very strident voice, eardrum shattering and hard to zone out. She never forgave me for that one time I fell asleep on the phone with her… I wonder how long it took her to realise that I had fallen asleep. The fact that there was a huge time difference, made no difference to her. The fact that I was recovering from an operation, was a trifling detail. She wanted to talk and I was the ear into which she had chosen to pour her endless stream of words, that was an honour I had to bow down to. But none of this is relevant really to the quirk… well it is, but it isn’t.

The quirk was that every now and then, quite regularly in fact, out of her mouth would come words which were incredibly familiar to me. They seemed this way because I had spoken them only minutes before. The first few times she did this, I foolishly thought that she was acknowledging my words. I was a bit shocked that she had actually heard something I had said. This should have been a warning to me that I was wrong.

When I pointed out to her that she had just repeated what I had just said, she looked at me utterly perplexed. Then her face took on that familiar expression of condescension, a favourite of Narcissists, and she informed me that not only was I very mistaken, but I had obviously not been listening to her. Big sigh of exasperation, what a saint she was to put up with such insolence. She would never take my words and claim them as her own, what nonsense, no such thing had ever happened or would ever happen, her words were all freshly brewed by her mind. Sometimes the levels of my idiocy were unbearably annoying to her. Poor, poor, put upon mamma!

Truth is, she really did not have a clue that she had just absorbed my words and made them her own. She could have easily passed a polygraph test.

I used to write poetry when I was a teenager. Existential angst ridden stuff mostly, but occasionally something lighter. Of course my mother found out about my poems, - which I hadn’t been hiding from her, but I hadn’t shown them to her either - because a teacher of mine wanted to enter one of them into a local competition. This was one of those teachers who liked to invest themselves in their pupils, find a spark and fan the flames. She did it with all of us and we all loved her for it. Problem is, she didn’t know my parents, even though she had briefly met my mother. When my mother discovered that her child had poetic delusion, she did her usual feigning interest in the idiot spawn. Small things please little minds. And besides, you never knew, maybe one day the idiot would turn into a genius as was always hoped, and then my mother could finally claim credit for her creation. As it stood, the child was rather an embarrassment. I reluctantly showed her a few of my poems. She critiqued them, told me they could be so much better if I made an effort, she could generously help me improve them. She took some of my poems to do exactly that, and to show them to her friends - Look how cute, the idiot is trying to be a poet! Haha! Adorable isn’t it! What a darling!

Some time passed, and lo and behold my mother suddenly found she had a passion for poetry. Just a few scribbles from her oh so humble self, written from the heart so no one must judge such things. She had collected her grand creations together and had them bound into a book. I was given the book as a special gift, and expected to receive it with grateful admiration. I was also expected to read and provide suitable, exaggerated applause. I did my duty. I read the book of poetry. And found that every poem was one I had written. My words, tweaked a little to suit her, but not tweaked enough to hide the fact that they were mine… well… exactly that… they WERE mine, and now they were hers.

I didn’t bother to point that out to her. There was no point in pointing out. She was mistress of her illusion and no one would ever pop that bubble because it was ultra-reinforced, completely unpoppable. Besides… she did that all the time with everything. There was nothing I had which she didn’t take and make hers. If she could. If she couldn’t actually take it from me, then she would own it by proxy. My hair, my teeth, my skin, my body. They belonged to her, I was borrowing them because she was wonderful and generous like that. But she didn’t approve of how I treated what she had so kindly given me on loan.

So, has something like this happened to you?

You Can Infect Others With Your Doubts

This is a very simple formula, which we all, some of us more than others, ignore.

If someone tells you they love you, especially if they back up their words with actions, they why question it. If you constantly ask someone why they love you, if you constantly demand reassurance of their love, want to know exactly what it is about you they love and why, then you question their love. If they know they love you, all of you as you are, they will, at a given point, wonder why you don’t accept their love as is. They gave you a gift freely, but it just doesn’t seem to be good enough for you.

Their gift, their love, is being rejected, maybe subtly, but it is being rejected. Rejection creates a defensive response. Thus they will begin to question their love for you, because you do and have convinced them to do so too.

Your doubts have planted a virus and that virus will grow into an infection. They may not realise they are questioning there love for you, but it will happen. Worse still, a side effect of this infection is that they will look at you and wonder if you truly love them.

People who don’t love others often accuse others of not loving them.

They will start to observe you, and if your actions don’t back up your claim that you love them, they will notice. Your endless questioning of their love, and demands of proof of love, will turn into proof against you of your lack of love for them. When you question someone’s love for you continuously, you tell them that you don’t love them enough to accept their love as they have offered it, ergo you don’t love them.

This formula applies to friendship too. To trust. And to many other things.

Such as, if someone tells you that you are beautiful, if you question their judgement often enough, they will question it too, and eventually they may change their mind. Especially since constantly questioning someone’s judgement is not a particularly beautiful trait.

If you continuously question people’s perception of you, wondering if they see you as you see yourself… rather than accepting that they see you as they see you, which may or may not be how you see yourself… you will end up having no one around you to give you feedback. You are not pushing people away, they are seeing you for who you are, someone who is obsessed with how others see them and who doesn’t actually see others, or acknowledge that others have similar needs to be acknowledged, seen, and reassured, understood, and so they will flee to a more hospitable territory.

Life is chaos. We are all crazy. We are also all hoping to find a port in an endless storm. If the port we find becomes the storm, we set sail in search of another safe harbour. One where we will be welcomed and accepted as we are, not as someone else needs us to be.

This is a quick jotting down of thoughts, please share your views so I can flesh this beast out. What do you think and feel?

The Anger Games

I’ve written about my anger before. In fact my anger fuels a lot of my posts. I have a lifetime supply of suppressed anger within me. Since I was first able to feel the emotion, it has been denied expression. This denial of expression caused more anger. More anger equals more inner resources channeled towards suppressing that anger. Which explains why I have always suffered from intense exhaustion. Suppressing anger takes a lot out of a person, so much so that they have very little energy left for anything else. Anhedonia ensues. Depression. No energy to charge up joie de vivre.

My parents were very angry people. But they were allowed to express that anger all the time. They did it whenever they felt like it, without concern for anyone else. However they were always very concerned about themselves, and they did not like it when other people expressed their anger, especially when it was in response to something my parents had done. They did not appreciate the consequences of their actions, and were always trying to deflect those consequences, and the blame for their actions, elsewhere. It was always Poor Them versus Meanie Others. They found that playing the victim worked a treat when it came to manipulating others. It’s very hard for others to lay blame upon or be angry with a victim. I was one of those others. I was not allowed to be angry. They ridiculed it - you’re so cute when you’re angry - seemingly affectionate, yet oozing with dismissive contempt. I was not even allowed to have an angry expression on my face. Apparently the wind was going to fix it so that I would be permanently disfigured, and others would flee from me in terror. They did not care whether my anger was justified or not. It bothered them and they didn’t want it in their lives. So I had to be forever happy. I was constantly told that I had a beautiful smile, but only as an order that it should be used. Interestingly enough, I ruined that smile by chipping a huge chunk out of my front tooth in an accident. I was angrily castigated for doing that, what had been perfect was now marred and needed to be hidden. Yet for me, doing that brought a sense of relief. I didn’t have to smile anymore.

The other day I was searching the internet trying to find some basic information about the purpose of anger. Most of what I found were articles and websites giving people advice on how to control their anger. Anger is bad, it must be denied expression. This pissed me off. More repression and suppression. And we wonder why people snap and explode. There is nothing sudden about it, it took a long time to build, and it eventually could no longer be contained. Like a volcano. We’re very harsh on people who snap and explode because we are all suppressing anger, and we feel that since we’ve managed to contain ours, others should do so too. To maintain our civilised society we must all make sacrifices, and natural urges are the first things to go. Unacceptable emotions must be eradicated, acceptable emotions must be exaggerated until we are all happy smiley people.

Finally I found a chart which gave the uses of our emotions, the reasons they exist, their purpose in our lives, why we have them, and what happens when those emotions are denied their natural expression. Anger’s purpose is to give us a shot of power when we are under attack, to fuel our strength, and allow us to stand our ground and stand up for ourselves. To protect our territory when a trespasser ignores the Private Property - No Trespassing sign. Expressing that anger allows us to ward off the attack and warn the attacker not to continue with what they are doing to us because we can defend ourselves. If we stop our anger from serving its purpose, and deny it expression, then our attacker thinks they can continue to attack us, they might even conclude that we like what they are doing, and so the cause of our anger doesn’t go away. We get even angrier, because we are putting up with something we do not want to put up with, we are angry at ourselves for allowing ourselves to be a victim, and every time the attacker attacks the pressure inside of us builds because the anger has nowhere to go.

If we deny anger its natural place in our lives, then we don’t express it when it is roused, which blocks its flow, dams it, and the anger begins to collect within us, creating inner pressure. We have to maintain the dam, be vigilant for cracks, for weaknesses in the structure. But this is a full time job, one which we are doing on our own, no shifts, no rest, and at some point we are going to fail, a moment of exhaustion, of distraction, and the dam will burst. Since we have been collecting years and years of anger, the destructive force of the dam breaking and thousands of gallons worth of anger gushing out all at once will be devastating. Had we just expressed the first drop, then the drop after that… expressed the anger when it was aroused, allowed it to fulfil its purpose, it would have dissipated, and we would be able to move on.

Last night I realised a truth about my anger, and it has opened my eyes to a lie which I have been living for a very long time. I have been telling myself that I am a noble hero for suppressing my anger and directing it only towards myself. Because I have so much anger due to never being allowed to express it, because I grew to fear what would happen if I ever expressed even the smallest amount of it towards another person, however justified, because I saw how harmful anger expressed can be having been at the receiving end of my parents’ outbursts many times over, because I only learned about the negative side of anger expressed, I created a story for myself, a legend to live by. I became a wounded hero who must at all costs protect others from the raging inferno inside, better to destroy myself than to even mildly hurt another. Even if they deserved it because they were hurting me. I knew they were hurting me because they were hurting. So, I couldn’t hurt someone who was already hurt. Other people were fragile, too delicate to handle anything unpleasant, especially not the power of my anger.

Wow! I know I’m a bullshit artist, but I didn’t realise quite how talented I was, this is some of my finest work!

Whenever I get angry my modus operandi has been to distance myself from other humans. Like a bomb disposal expert, I alone must defuse the dangerous explosive device, and everyone else must stay away for their own safety until my work is done. If I die in the line of duty, then my work still gets done. If I survive, then I can return to the inhabited world and give everyone the good news that they are all safe, and smiley face is back.

This legend has spawned spin-offs. Such as, that I am willing and able to absorb the emotional explosions of others fearlessly, and that I can often defuse others before they explode. And this pisses me off even more because I attract those who need a person into which they can dump their emotional baggage, get a reassurance ticket, then leave to go and enjoy their baggage free holiday, until the next time. I can’t get pissed off at them, because I created this hell for myself, so it’s all my fault, and they get a free pass to behave as they please. If I ever lash out because they want to dump, and I have no space for their dumpage, then I end up being labeled a baddie meanie and they cry and cry until they are sick and that’s my fault. I have to make amends. This causes me to get angrier. And the whole cycle just keeps going and going longer than the energiser bunny. If I could turn this anger into actual power, real fuel, I think I may just be able to solve the sustainable eco-friendly energy crisis.

Whew! Long post. The upshot of my realisation about my anger is that… I’m mad as hell and I need to express this constructively. Creatively. Positively. Naturally. Time to reprogram myself. Time to use all this fuel to power a dream, and win… even if it is just not to use all my energy resources up trying to contain one of my energy resources. Hope this makes sense to you, it does to me… finally!

You Can’t MAKE Someone Love you

You can’t make someone love you. You can’t make them happy, sad, angry, glad, etc. Other people are not your creations, they are their own creations, just as you create yourself. Trying to MAKE someone feel something, usually what you want them to feel, is a power play, an act of control, a manipulation. It doesn’t matter that you are doing it from a place of love, according to you. It’s not love, not unconditional love, it’s conditional love based on your conditions which may not be the conditions of the other person. Basically, you’re trying to force your version of love, of life, of feelings, onto them, ultimately for your own benefit. Perhaps all you want is to be reassured that your version of things is the right one. Life isn’t that simple. You may well think and believe that this is for the good of others, that you are being selfless rather than selfish, but your version of good may not be their version of good, in fact, in some cases, your version of good is their version of bad.

Villains see themselves as heroes, and they see the heroes as villains.

My mother thought she was an angel of mercy and deserved infinite gratitude from me when she trained me not to cry as an infant. It was a thoroughly selfish act. But she didn’t see it that way. She saw herself as wonderful, good, and very generous. Everything she did was from a place of love.

As a baby, when I cried it distressed her, especially when other people were around, she felt that she would be perceived as a bad mother, and she saw herself as a perfect mother. To maintain her image, she needed those around her to support it. So, for her to be perceived as the perfect and infinitely wonderful mother she was, in her eyes, she needed her child to behave in a certain way, and not to behave in a certain way. Crying was bad. She explained this to me when I was old enough to understand words, over and over again, in many different manipulative brainwashing ways, because I was not grateful enough for my super power of being completely unable to cry. It never occurred to her that I might want to cry, that I might enjoy it, or benefit from it. If I had tried to explain this to her I would have been accused of being an idiot, and not appreciating her love for me.

Truth is, she could not handle the emotions of others, because their emotions triggered hers, and hers overwhelmed her, caused her to get hysterical and histrionic, so she reasoned that if she controlled the emotions of others, then she could control her own. That was her logic. All of this was subconscious, of course. Consciously she was a saint, and everyone else was the devil.

You can’t make people feel what you want them to feel, but you can sure as hell try, and if they stubbornly keep refusing, if they think they have free will and are independent of you, you can use guilt, shame, blame, and the other tools of the emotional blackmail trade. The most heinous tool is dragging other people into the mix. Gossip and slander. If you can’t force someone into feeling what you want them to feel on your own, hire an army to help you. Spread your sob story far and wide. Create a superstorm of drama. Never give in. That’s what all those positive affirmations are about. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. If you keep at it long enough, you will eventually wear their resistance down and they will accept to pretend to feel what you want them to feel, just to get you off their backs so they can get away from you and spend some time with those who truly accept them as they are, rather than those who pretend they do. Those who pretend they accept others as they are, because that makes them seem as wonderful as they want to appear. Those that claim loudly that they love unconditionally (smallprint: conditions always apply). The heroes of love.

I realise life is terrifying, especially the emotional arena. Having control is a desirable thing. Most of us have been taught from a very early age to control our emotions to please others. So we continue to do this as we grow. Relationships are complicated by the dynamics of this. We need others to feel things so we can feel things, and we need others to not feel things so we don’t have to feel things. And that’s the simplified version. Hypocrisy - do as I say not as I do. Double-standards - I need you to reply to me, but I don’t have to reply to you because I am free, wild, and independent of you. Condescension - I am sorry you are hurting, but your hurt is your own problem, I had nothing to do with this as I am all good, you however are bad and have issues, and your hurt is obviously connected to your past issues which have nothing to do with me, my hurt however is important because you caused it. I will tolerate your momentary blip, but I have duly noted your flaws in my book of all others are flawed, I am perfect. And so on.

We all play power games, it is a part of life, relationships, and it is how we learn about our own power, and that of others. In and of themselves, they are neither good nor bad. Circumstances and context make a difference, as does the fact that since everyone plays power games, it is hard not to do so too. Sometimes it is very necessary. But not all the time. Not with everyone.

Thing is… You can’t make people love you the way you want them to love you, but they might love you the way they want to love you, and rigidly sticking to your version of love, means you miss out on the multitudinous versions of love which exist in this world filled with so many diverse and beautiful crazy souls full of love and a whole array of vast and varied emotions.

An Epiphany - Part 2 - Winning versus Failing

Last night a very dear friend who has been a rock during this period of very stormy seas, gave me a look which filled me with sweet emotion, and I reached out to stroke their cheek as a way of expressing how I felt without ruining the moment with unnecessary words. I miscalculated and accidentally poked them in the eye. I was mortified. The moment was ruined… or was it?

The overwhelming thought and feeling I had was one of failure. Yet again I had failed. I had hurt someone I loved, when my intention had been to express my love.

My friend was hurt, but they got over it quickly. They were fine. They reassured me all was well, and that should have been it. Now… usually… normally… that would not have been it at all. I would have castigated myself for this tiny incident. Wallowed in my failure. Painfully enjoying the horror of it, and reminding myself of every other failing I have, all the other failures in my life, and so on into infinite excruciating self torture. BUT. Not last night.

I had gone to bed early, exhausted from what has been a couple of days of shear stressful hell, hoping to get some sleep in spite of all the noise going on inside of me. I have not been sleeping well since all of this Gordian Knot mess started at the beginning of 2013. What a year! I passed out for about an hour, then woke up unable to breathe. My nose was blocked. I was too hot. My body was in pain from being contorted at a weird angle during the brief nap. I stared into the dark, certain I was having a heart attack, yet also certain I wasn’t having one. My mind was filled with a darkness darker than the room around me. Conversations of the previous day came back to haunt me. My father’s Lover screaming abuse via email, first at my lawyer, then at me for hiring assholes (her words), why was I turning this inheritance into a legal matter (because it is), when all I had to do was do things her way (which would plunge me headlong into illegal shit). This was just one in a long series of abusive, tantrum throwing emails from her, most of which I have dealt with using placatory tactics. No point arguing. My father liked a certain type of woman. Then the words of a friend, an Italian friend, echoed in my mind. Why don’t I renounce the inheritance. I had looked into doing exactly that, considered it very seriously when all of this first crashed into my life. It still costs money, and I still need a lawyer to fill out the paperwork. Then I thought about my lawyer. Doubts about him, and his associates, filled the last remaining space in my mind. Young, very ambitious, but… perhaps too green to handle this even though, legally, it should be fairly straightforward even though Italian Inheritance Law is very complicated. And all this for what?

Then an image flashed across the screen of my eyes of my last blog post. Perhaps I had revealed too much. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. Get it all out in the open. Change the energy. I’ve always had to keep schtum. It doesn’t work. It’s horrible, claustrophobic, and it is crushing me from the inside out. Get it out. But maybe the timing was wrong. No. It was exact. But… I should delete it. In fact I should delete my blogs, delete myself off the internet. Why am I doing this. What for. I’m giving people too much information about myself. They could use it against me. But revealing myself is a power play. It is so that I am no longer hidden, so I no longer have secrets which can be used to blackmail me, emotionally or otherwise. But… What if a con artist gets hold of… stop it! What if my lawyer is a con artist… stop it! What if the reason my father’s Lover doesn’t want lawyers involved is because she has done something illegal and doesn’t want it to be discovered…

Those last words, that last thought, was given to me by a friend. When they had said that earlier in the day I had shrugged and sighed. My father was always doing sneaky things to circumvent the law, so yes, the chances are… there is a hornet nest of illegal shit connected to this inheritance, which is why I am dealing with it in a lawful way. That is why I have hired a lawyer, why I am going by the book of Italian law, and following the rules of a country which is in political upheaval and never does anything in a truly legal way. Mani Pulitti… hahaha!

Oh GOD!!! What a fucking nightmare! Self pity creeping in. A memory of a moment not so long ago when I thought that finally my life was sweet. Finally after all those years of struggling, surviving, fighting… I could see what… why… that it was all worth it.

To escape the pit of gloom and doom, I picked up my favourite book, and opened it at a random page:

“Self-destructiveness sets in with a vengeance when life presents us with a challenge which for one reason or another we feel unable to meet. The self-destructive act, whether deliberate or not, buys time in which we secretly hope to find the ego strength to master the challenge and avoid humiliation of defeat.” - Going Mad To Stay Sane: The Psychology of Self-destructive Behaviour by Andrew White

The words - avoid humiliation of defeat - leaped off the page and slapped me in the face. Oh fuck! That’s it, I thought! My mind rewound everything connected to the inheritance, the Gordian Knot (the reason I call it that is because of this book and the knot is why I am rereading this book). I watched as the chronology of events showed me… showed ME. Who I am versus who I was. There was/is a battle going on inside of me, one of which I was vaguely aware but…

I am not trying to avoid the humiliation of defeat… I am trying to avoid victory. I’m afraid of winning. Why. Easy. Because… I embrace failure. I made it my home. Why. Because… I used to be terrified of failing. So much so that I turned to stone. My cure was embracing and immersing myself in the very thing I feared. But then I became too comfortable there. There was a lot of room, it was breathtakingly spacious, because no one else wanted to live there. I became king of a desert. Ruler of a kingdom no one else wanted. And it was good for a while… change has arrived. It is time for me to face another fear, embrace and immerse myself in winning.

And suddenly I had a deeper understanding of everything, and saw the Gordian Knot, and all the surrounding issues and events with intense clarity. An epiphany. I know why I did not reject the inheritance even though it is not worth very much in material terms… because it is time for me to learn to win.

Now, I need time to absorb this…


An Epiphany - Part 1 - Thanking those who helped it happen

I’ve had an epiphany and it is so mind blowing that… my mind is blown! I wanted to write one post to explain and share it, but… there are so many levels to it that it is going take several posts.

Firstly, I really want to thank all those who have helped me to have the epiphany… but the task is huge:

Some are easy to thank because they are friends who offered loving support during a testing time. It is very important to let those who are there for you know that you appreciate their thereness, especially when they think nothing of it, when they believe it is a natural part of being a good friend. They need to know their gift of love is truly appreciated, because they gave it freely expecting nothing in return.

Some are friends who were not behaving in a supportive manner, whose timing could not have been worse when they decided to dump their emotional baggage on top of me. As I tried to point out to one of them, context is important, if you wait until a person is weakened by circumstances in their life before you speak to them, because you are afraid of speaking to them when they are strong, then your words will most likely be rejected because they are not open to receiving them. They are caught up in their own drama and don’t want to know about yours, however important your drama is to you, theirs is important to them. Just because a venomous snake looks like it is dead, does not mean that it is, deciding that it is dead, that this is the perfect time to poke it with a sharp stick because it can’t bite you… may be a very foolish thing to do. But then again, I think this particular friend did that with the intent of getting bitten. I know I’m a venomous snake, I even have the markings to warn others, which is why I can sleep out in the open and hope no one is stupid enough to think I’m dead and poke me. I also don’t tend to use my venomous bite, although I do sometimes spit it in the general direction of the offender, that way they’ll get a skin irritation, but they won’t die. This person’s behaviour inspired such fury within me that I wanted to bite them and fill their veins with poison until they died a horrible death, and I had to use an enormous amount of self control to remind myself that I don’t do that sort of thing. Since I am already using tremendous amounts of self control to deal with my recent problem, I did not appreciate having to sap every last drop of it on a friend. A friend who should know better because they are an empath. Thing is, when I get this worked up, I usually know that there is a message in the rage, and if I can calm down enough (but not completely) to walk through the flames, I’ll see it and it will all be worthwhile. It was. I hope it was worth it for them too, that they got the food from me which they were seeking, and now they are satisfied. I think they are. They demanded that I reply to their needs, I did, and I have not heard from them since.

Some are enemies who can’t be thanked because they would not see the gesture for what it is, they would see it as an invitation to take advantage. It is good to be grateful to one’s enemies for the challenges they offer, and the insights those challenges reveal, it helps to put the relationship into perspective, but it is not always a good move to expose one’s soft underbelly, even though certain creatures use that as a means of gaining the upper hand of a foe. Gratitude can be done quietly from a distance, and it can be expressed through one’s actions. These people will most likely always be enemies, not all enemies can be befriended, but I do not have to treat them in the manner in which they treat me. They may not respect me, because these are the sort of people who respect no one, but I can respect them. Human to human.

Some are strangers who would not understand why I am thanking them because they are not aware of my existence. Some of these strangers are bloggers whose work I have come across while researching a problem on the internet, whose words have helped me, inspired me, and offered me information which I needed to know, or who have annoyed me so much that it has pushed me out of my comfort zone and into a new territory. Some are authors whose books I have read, and from which I have gleaned much wisdom and understanding. Some are artists whose work has somehow managed to express a feeling or thought which I could not, and which has freed me from the inexpressible. Some are the random strangers who cross our paths every day, and a glance, or gesture, or just watching them live their life… has triggered a thought, idea, emotion, or moment of collective consciousness.

Some are all those who I have internet met. Bloggers, Twitter users, forum members, followers, followed, and so on. People who I know yet don’t know. People who say things, comment, post things, express things, that strike a chord which may resonate for days within me. Occasionally that vibration lies dormant and only makes itself heard a long while later when the time is right. And sometimes, out of the blue, they surprise you by reaching out and touching you, heart to heart, human to human, soul to soul. Beautiful!

So, to all those who have touched my life, especially now, but also since my very first breath… Thank you… I am truly grateful… more than I could possibly ever express, but here is my attempt to do so as best as I can.

And that is why we say thank you.

I forgot to thank myself… Thank you me, for being me. It’s been emotional.

La Dolce Vita? Think Twice!

Ah! Italia! La Dolce Vita! Federico Fellini! Anita Ekberg in the fountain! I have met Anita, she was a friend of the family. La Famiglia! I have also met Federico… he was a bit of a persona non grata because a certain aspiring actress, also know as that histrionic narcissist who is my mother, refused to sleep with him when he made a pass at her, according to her, and he didn’t like being rejected so he fucked her over by making her unemployable… or whatever her version of the story was. I don’t know, listening to her was a painful thing to do because she suffered from verbal diarrhoea in extremis.

The root of all my problems, past and present, hopefully not future, is Italy. So I don’t really like the country, although I can appreciate the charm it has for those who… aren’t me.

It all began when a beautiful, charming, talented, ingenue decided that she would take a nanny job with a well to do family in Rome, so that she could study opera. She had the voice of an angel, it was amazing, and was going to inflict it on others via a grand operatic career. While in Rome… well, there was a bit in Milan first, where she had a relationship with an impotent married famous investigative reporter. Whatever. The Rome bit is the part which lead to my existence.

Rome in the Fifties was happening man! The McCarthy trials made Cinecitta and all things not… American… can I say that… without offending… no… fuck it, I’m in a careless mood… history… not now… then… context people! Context makes a BIG difference… attractive to artists and actors and directors. So wannabe opera singers were also wannabe actresses. That and when your relatives are acting nobility, albeit in the UK… blah blah. Narcissists do go on about their credentials to greatness.

Have I lost you yet, are you confused, welcome to what it is like to live with Narcissists. And their Flying Monkey minions. I won’t explain, things will only get worse if I try to do so.

Anyway, the Ingenue met a CIA man whose cover was as a goofy party organiser. Don’t ask. I learned the hard way. Seriously, just pretend whatever Narcissists tell you makes sense, then walk slowly away. He picked pretty people up in the cafes of Rome, invited them to Diplomatic Dos and Jet Set Affairs to make up the numbers, and… I have no fucking clue what else was served up or involved. Best not to know. At one of these parties the Ingenue met an On the Verge of Being Famous Artist. Sparks flew. They hated each other, so they got married. They lived an incredibly glamourous life, became rich and famous, or famous and rich. Details… what are they. They bought a dream house. Which the Ingenue hated. They had a child eventually, which both of them hated even though the Ingenue had the child deliberately, something to do with selfishness. The Child ruined everything by being born – psychologically known as Unwanted Child Syndrome. They passed the buck of blame like it was delicious candy. They fucked around. Well, the artist fucked every woman who wanted to be immortalised on canvas by him. The Ingenue, now Wife of Famous Artist, a role she took and takes extremely seriously, played the martyr, enjoyed playing the saintly martyr, thus played it some more.

Things grew increasingly complicated, confused, a narcissistic orgy. The Artist took a Lover. The Lover held on for dear life. The Lover had already had an affair with another famous married artist, a good friend of my father’s, but he had selfishly died from a heart attack. So she had to move on. She was a Dippy Cool Hippie from San Fran. Also an Artist. She understood the poor put upon misunderstood husband and very famous rich artist… blah blah blah.

Hell continued indefinitely. Endless battles, wars, choosing sides, always picking the wrong one… yadda yadda. That Unwanted Child eventually grew a pair of balls even though she was a female. It’s uncomfortable, but sometimes you just have to do what you have to do to survive. One day someone insane fell in love with her. The Ingenue hated this person, tried to scare them away. You can’t love something unloveable. It belongs to me even though I don’t want the fucking demon hell spawn child. But I am a Saintly Martyr par excellence! Perfect in everything I do! Love conquered that. Unwanted Child made its… her… escape. Left all that behind. Built a new life as a very relieved orphan. Happily ever after ensued. Then….

One day the Hippie Lover contacted the Unwanted Brat Child and said your father is dead, there is an inheritance, I don’t want your fucking mother to get her hands on it and by Italian law you are the Forced Heir so this shit is your problem whether you want it or not. You don’t count. Everyone else, as in MEMEME, does. Child was also contacted by Ingenue mother, who had found that she could not get her hands on the inheritance as Famous Artist father had managed to get a divorce just before he died.

Ah! Inheritance! It conjures up such lovely ideas of sudden wealth! Money problems solved! La la la! Have you ever explored Italian Inheritance Law? Have you ever dealt with Narcissists coming at you from every direction? Not just regular Narcissists, but fucking Malignant Ones? No? Yes?

So Unwanted Child with support from insane person who loves her… hired her very first lawyer. Oh, she’s dealt with lawyers before, but they were always hired by her fucking Narcissistic Parents to deal with some crazy case, crime…. whatever. Roy Cohn once agreed to represent Famous Artist father in quite an important case… Roy Cohn regretted that decision. Narcissists always know how to hit the regret button, over and over and over… again…. even in the most impervious souls. Fucking awesome talent, that is.

This thing is going to get way worse before it gets better… if it does get better. One thing I have learned… do things your way. If they go wrong, at least they went wrong because you did things your way. So be it. Problem is, when dealing with Narcissists, they don’t see you as an entity separate from them, with any rights or will or anything… When you don’t do things their way, which is usually toxic for you, they get very nasty… I’m being railroaded from so many angles… yet I resist and stick with my own crazy shit. I must be destroyed!

I’ve tried to explain it. The visible part of the iceberg. The Gordian Knot which can’t be cut with Alexander the Great’s sword. Wish it could. Wish I could tell everything and everyone to fuck off… But I am trying to deal with things in a logical and responsible way. The buck stops here. I’m an idiot!

Truth is you probably think I’m a whinging rich bitch. I’m not rich. Not sure about the bitch bit. It may be a very good thing. There isn’t a lot of money involved in this inheritance. Rich and Famous Artist self destructed his career yonks ago. You would have no idea who he is if I told you his name. He trashed his fame. He squandered his money. Fair enough, he earned it, he had every right to do whatever he pleased with it. I never claimed any part of it. Never wanted it. I washed my hands and walked away. But… YOU… ME… are not allowed to walk away. That’s not how narcissists see things. They make the rules, the decisions… blah blah blah. The inheritance is basically the shit he left behind which he didn’t have time to squander, and which he knew would fuck up and out his heir. That’s how he thought.

Think I’m exaggerating? Want to swap lives? But… if we swap you have to go through everything I have been through, those are the conditions. Still think I have it easy? Hmmm. I guess I’m just a spoiled brat. Not a problem. I’m past the point of caring about the sticks and stones. I’ve been told the awful truth about myself since I was an infant… it’s getting a bit tedious, to say the least. I cling to those who see some morsel of good in me. They are my friends, my solace, they make life worth living. I am deeply grateful to them. They know who they are.

As for why I don’t share my shit with my friends… this is just the bare bones of why.

I did smoke today. Next time you judge a smoker for smoking. A drinker for drinking. Etc. Pause. Think Twice.

Thank you for listening.

 It’s always sunny in Philadelphia - Oh my god I don’t care

This is me right now. Seriously. People’s brains seem to be melting… all logic seeping away leaving nothing but emotional drama. And I can’t blame this impression on trying to quit smoking, because it started while I was still in full chimney mode.

I made a silly remark, which I thought was amusing, and it caused the friend who heard it to have a meltdown. I tried to ignore the meltdown, hoping they would at some point come to their senses on their own, realise they were making an apocalypse out of a misunderstanding on their part, and then have a sheepish chuckle. But when people create emotional dramas they don’t do it just for their own benefit, they share it with all and sundry in the hopes of attracting an attentive audience and garnering ego food in the form of applause. Fair enough. If they’ve gone to all the trouble to have a crisis, one which could have easily been avoided, then the rest of us need to appreciate all the work and creativity being offered to us, and reassure them that they are a wonderful  genius and have done a brilliant job.

I love this friend, although that was put into question amongst other things. I know they are very emotional and hyper sensitive. I also know that they have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to other people, and the fact that other people have problems, emotions of their own, and lives that are not always easy. Our problems are always more important to us than the problems of others, and we sometimes think our problems should be as important to others as they are to us. We think our hurt, pain and suffering is special, more special than anyone else’s, because it is so precious to us, and we expect others to feel the same way, not that their hurt is more special than ours, but that ours is more special than theirs. We also think others should be thinking about us and our problems all the time, just like we do… thing is, others are busy thinking about their our troubles. Go figure.

This friend is aware that I am having a very difficult time at the moment in my life, that I turn to my friends for support, in the form of simply having a haven where I can relax, have a chuckle, be myself. I don’t share the details of my problem with my friends, mainly because when I do it fucks with people’s minds. (No, I am not going to share it with you to prove my point. Feel free to not believe me. It’s better that way. Mind you, I have considered writing a post all about it… we’ll see). So I haven’t told this friend the ins and outs of what is going on. They have a lot of their plate, they do not need me to add my stuff to it. That’s my take on it. I use my blog for venting when it all gets too much, that way people can choose whether they want to hear my drama or not, rather than being a captive audience because they are being a friend.

Seriously though. What this friend did pales in comparison to what the people connected with my Gordian Knot of a problem have been doing. I am surrounded by drama queens, all shouting and emoting loudly, all convinced their issues are the only ones which matter, that their hurt is the deepest, their pain is the cruelest, their life the only one which is counts… all wanting my attention… and… OH MY GOD I DON’T CARE!

Is This Brain Melting Season?

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