Some Lessons I’ve Learned I

I had more lessons to include than I thought — things that have made it difficult for me personally to let go of my old life. They are just going up in the order they occurred to me.

Life is not a gladiatorial combat.

By this I mean, it turns out that life is not after all a giant ring where everyone gets tossed in and only a few ever emerge, with those few being the best, the strongest, the winners. This was the extent of my social experience for the first 35 years of this body’s existence. There was no bowing out of the battle, and those who tried were simply the first to go down. Survival meant doing whatever it took to stay standing.

But life outside of the predator’s world is not that way. It is not a perpetual battle of wits and one-upmanship, and not everyone in the world is my enemy. The world is not conspiring to take me out. In fact, most people couldn’t care less about me. They have their own lives to worry about, and I am free to focus on my life without having to constantly worry about what everyone else is doing to mess with it.

This lesson was easy in some cases – most people are so obviously focused on their own worlds that, once I began to look, it was easy to see they had no real interest in mine. This lesson was most difficult in relation to other people who I knew had similar experiences and similar training to mine. With them, I still felt myself to be back in the gladiatorial arena, still wanting to strike at their weak spots before they struck at mine.

Resisting that impulse was very very difficult – but valuable, because it gave me an opportunity to watch what they did, and to evaluate the results in a new context, which led to another realization…

Predatory tactics do not dominate the whole world.

I realized this only after I saw it in practice. Those accustomed to predatory tactics have an extensive repertoire of manipulation, backstabbing, intriguing, and lying, and those are the means by which success is achieved in the predators’ world. Such tactics are the life blood that flows through the whole network. In those worlds, everyone is engaged in the same dirty games and whispered plots, and everyone is vulnerable to them as well.

In this world, however, such games are not the foundation of social interaction, and an individual’s level of skill at predatory tactics just doesn’t translate. In this world, a clumsy strike is as likely to work as a clever one, and skill is no guarantee of success. A strike that would be mortal in the predators’ world can actually be rather pathetic and completely harmless in this world.

Predatory tactics still work effectively against those conditioned to respond to them – that is to say, against other survivors who are not in therapy or who haven’t done much work with their system – but the more healing we do, the less vulnerable we are.

This was a particularly illuminating realization – because what it proved to me was that, whether someone attempted to strike at me or whether they didn’t,  it didn’t matter. I didn’t have to be alert for any pending attacks, or to strike first before someone else had the chance. I didn’t have to insure my survival in that way any more – the stakes were no longer that dramatic, and the route to safety was different. Someone else’s attempt to damage me was no longer an actual threat to my survival, and all I really had to do to protect myself was focus on my own learning and my own progress.

This general realization is also applicable to less dramatic situations. For example, in this world, it is usually more effective to ask directly for what I want rather than to employ manipulative tactics to get it. This was another new concept for me. Asking for something directly went against my ingrained experience that manipulation was the only way to get what I wanted – but in this world, manipulation is much more likely to backfire on me than to work for me, so directness was something I needed to learn.

I will never forget my experiences in the predator’s world, nor will I ever forget the skills I depended on there, but they no longer represent the totality of my social skill set or the first options I use. I can relate to people in other ways now, and each time that the new approach brings me the result I hope for (where I see so many people stuck in the old patterns of relating  and still not getting the results they want), it confirms for me the importance of this effort.

I can survive feeling like I’ve “lost.”

I gather that most people learn this much earlier than I did. Apparently that’s the point of tiny tot sports programs around the world. But in my world, everything was a competition, and losing had consequences that were more (or felt more) dire than just not getting the free pizza after the game.

In the world from which I came, fighting for survival was simply a fact of life, and this was true on many levels – the snake pits of social interaction, the games of wits, and the fight within my own self to stay on this side of the line between coherently broken and shattered beyond use.

The competitive atmosphere in which I lived fed into the naturally competitive personality of this self. Competitiveness is one of those qualities that can be seen across many members of the system in varying degrees because it is a quality that the single self would have possessed.

For me, though, because of my personal experiences, my competitive edge was honed more to the point of unhealthy jealousy and vengeful hatred than reasonable competition.

So when I first shifted from that world to this one, I was completely unable to handle feeling like I had lost in any way – not just at games, but in any way at all where it felt like someone else had bested me, or gotten to something before me, or gotten more than me, or anything at all along those lines.

And I was accustomed to dealing with such “losses” by attempting to smash the successful competitor and take what had been theirs — I was a real social star when I first emerged from my darker world.

As it turns out, crushing people into the dust (literally or figuratively) really isn’t an acceptable way of dealing with things out here in this world. Of course, there are still people who do it, or attempt to do it, but it’s not quite the same as what I was familiar with. In this world, you can’t steal someone else’s status or favored position or other intangible concepts like that simply by destroying the person who holds them. The things of which one is jealous are destroyed along with the person who held them. They can’t be passed on.

For some people, the destruction is still enough – a living embodiment of the “if I can’t have it, then neither can you” mindset.

Sometimes I find that mindset tempting. Very tempting.

And occasionally I give in to it – but more often, I make every effort to stay away from that perspective. I do stay with the situation for as long as I can, trying to temper my feelings, trying to learn to moderate them to something appropriate – but if (or when) they get the better of me, I walk away.

Walking away, in my world, was an ignoble move tantamount to admitting defeat, and as such, making that choice is still a learning experience for me.

So far, I haven’t died. Walking away from something, purposely absorbing myself in something else, gives me enough distance to shift my perspective. And I feel better. The rumpled, angry, chaotic feelings that I once thought were just a way of life have dissolved into a somewhat calmer state of being, and I find I like it better – a lot better.

The old jealousies and rage and desire to vent my vengeful fury on whoever has crossed me still come, but they don’t feel as familiar as they used to, and they don’t feel comfortable at all. I don’t want to be in that place any more, and these days, when I find myself there, I work actively to get myself back out.

Who I was yesterday does not have to define who I am today.

The world is always looking to the past to set a precedent. If something has happened before, it stands to reason that we can expect it to happen again. If something has never happened, we would be foolish to expect that it ever will. Past precedent defines our legal system, our social hierarchies, and our personal expectations of the world and of ourselves.

Sometimes past precedent can be a form of security. But sometimes it can be a shackle that ties us to a place and a self we don’t want. In those cases, it is important to remember that past precedent – although it is given a lot of weight – is not the final word on anything. It is never too late to learn to be the person we wish we were.

I don’t have any experience being anyone other than who I am. But I am perfectly capable of envisioning who I wish I were, who I want to be – and then asking myself, would that person do what I’m thinking of doing? Does that choice contribute to me becoming that person? And that is how I try to guide my actions.

It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that – that is complicated enough! But at the same time, it’s very simple – and it is, in fact, the way we become who we want to be.

And if the response to such a choice is “well, maybe that person wouldn’t do this thing, but I’m not that person”… I answered my own questions this way many times – because I believed that I couldn’t change, that I didn’t deserve to have a better life than what I knew, that I wasn’t worth that much effort – but however much these things felt like facts, they were and are not facts. They were my beliefs. It was my beliefs holding me where I was, and changing my beliefs is allowing me to move on.

In his essay Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson says that “the force of character is cumulative.”

We have that quote written in a lot of different places in our home, places where we see it frequently, although nobody else is likely to see it at all. It is one of our guiding principles. Changing our selves will never happen overnight, or as the result of one big effort to make it happen – it will happen slowly, as the result of day after day after day of doing different things, acting in different ways, teaching our mind to think different thoughts. We have to work on it every single day. Every interaction and every personal or emotional crisis and everything we do when there is nobody else watching is another opportunity to let a drop of water fall on the stone of our old self… and as the old Chinese proverb says, enough drops of water can wear down a mountain.