Enactment of the Self

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Over the past two months I have sought to cement my understanding of my life and my lived enactment of the self. There has been a great deal of detail, more than I wish to include here. What I have developed is a set of key characteristics, qualities that have shaped me.

  • Mate selection influenced by subconscious emotional affinity.
  • Incapable of participating in male bonding rituals.
  • Acceptance of being alone as “normal” state.
  • Extreme independence. Outsider perspective.
  • Strong intellectual bias. Love of learning and discovery.
  • Technical bias reflected in photography, engineering, and computer interests.
  • Driven to understand circumstance and situation.
  • Empathetic. Biased in favour of the underdog.
  • Creative bias. Search for innovative solutions.
  • Concern for social equity and inclusion.

In situations where I experienced emotional hurt, that hurt was magnified by my past experience. I was less able to manage the emotional pain, less able to make a positive response. Instead, my response was to retreat within a protective shell.

Part of the problem lies in what I call a “low trust threshold.” Once my trust was violated then it became extremely difficult for me to rebuild it. Any betrayal in the present harked back to the betrayals of my youth. This made it impossible for me to reconnect with those who had betrayed my trust and this outcome left me even more isolated.

I also developed a strong sense of ethical norms. I suspect this arrived in response to childhood events. I knew that what happened to me was “wrong” and “unfair” and “inappropriate.” This grounded me in a practical ethical debate and has had a significant impact on my subsequent life trajectory. I have exited many situations I felt were unethical, or which would result in my having to compromise my ethical principles. This has shaped my economic future in manifold negative ways.

My inability to engage in male bonding has also had significant economic impact. I now perceive multiple instances in which I was offered mentoring by a senior male. I failed to take advantage of these opportunities; I did not understand them as opportunities.

Some of my responses to childhood trauma constitute my greatest strengths. Independence of thought and strong intellectual / analytic skills are among these strengths. Both are evidenced in this blog which commenced as a means to gain insight into the circumstance of my injury, was provoked by my desire to learn and understand, and built on my interests in photography and the written word.

At the same time, I also recognize that some of these strengths derive from compensatory mechanisms. My intellectual bias comes from an attempt to understand the behaviour of those who would bully and torment another human being. My technical interests spring from the fact that these are pursuits one can undertake on one’s own. My love of reading derives in part from the fact that this is a solitary activity. I can see a great deal of my behaviour as being due to an attempt to fit in and gain the acceptance of the group while at the same time experiencing distrust of the group.

It has taken some period of time to gather these thoughts and allow them to coalesce into these words of understanding. I remain dumbstruck and full of wonder at the capacity of the human mind, of the ways we come to think ourselves into the world. If there is one final thought it is the wish that these revelations might have come to me at age twenty, not forty years later.

 

 

 

 

Under Attack

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When I think back to my own experience of being under attack due to a disabilty, I develop several hypotheses.

The first is that human beings are social beings. Which is a polite way of saying that we are pack animals. Belonging is important to us. Once we belong, then the social hierarchy, and our rank within that hierarchy, becomes extremely important. I suspect this is one reason for the adulation of celebrities. Each celebrity sits at the centre of an abstracted social group. We are permitted to “belong” to that group; we invite ourselves in, to “join,” and then consummate our attachment; this fulfills some deep seated need.

One of the key ways of maintaining group identity is through exclusion. We define who we are by identifying who we are not. Identification of an out group helps cement the relations of the in group. Exclusion provides us with power. It is a means of obtaining submission through creating obstacles and barriers. “Want to join our group? Here is what you must do.”

Another key aspect is boredom. In my youth, I became highly sensitized to the mood of the group. Once the group became bored, it commenced looking for entertainment, for things to do. It began a hunt for targets, for the thrill of the chase, for the ravenous excitement of the pack attack. Since I was different, a clear member of the out group, I became the target.

This outcome was very confusing to me. I may have enjoyed positive relations with each individual member of the group. But this one-to-one relationship underwent a dramatic structural shift when those same individuals encountered me in a group context. Our prior individual relationship no longer mattered; I was abruptly “unfriended” in a way that was frightening and not at all abstract.

This created in me a profound sense of mistrust. One minute I was friends with X and Y and Z. But the next minute, once they came together as a group, and found themselves with nothing more interesting to do, they meta-morphed into something ugly and dangerous.

I learned to avoid groups.

I learned to distrust males.