Those rare instances of lucidity, the rare knee-buckling moments of absolute clarity into one's true nature come not by invitation, but as if hurled into consciousness by a cosmic force beyond all comprehension. These are the realizations that cause sea changes in the way one thinks about oneself, about one's life, death, worth, necessity, raison d'être.
These emotional/mental/spiritual experiences, for of such magnitude are they, may concern realizations of lifelong habitual neurotic patterns inflicted upon the self and others, truly chronic delusional throught patterns, or other insights of astounding depth and breadth.
But among the most disorienting and devastating is the coming into focus of a lifelong tradition of a sadomasochistic nature of interaction with the world at large, stemming from beginnings in which the sadistic and masochistic patterns were at work in the family of origin in such a precisely well oiled, smoothly functioning process as to not be consciously noted by anyone within or without the family at all.
The sudden awareness is that one has carried on the majority of transactions in life with a major unconscious emotional stake in the tallying of suffering, counting every point from the most egregious to the most minute, and placing an appropriate percentage of that point in the column for each participant.
For the suffering stemming from sadomasochism is complicated: vastly more so than the Marquis would have led us to believe. For instance, the masochist is capable of inflicting great pain upon the torturer who cannot cause enough punishment and humiliation in his target to give the sadist pleasure. Likewise, the masochist is only too happy to receive that amount of pain which pleases him/her, even if it is more than the sadist had in mind to deliver and who is now feeling, God forbid!, the pain of guilt. Thus, point percentages can fly in all directions.
Later, in the rapprochement stages (for these must occur in order for any given sadomasochistic relationship to continue) the relieving of pain must occur and must, per force, overstretch and under reach, as is human wont: thus another redistribution of point percentages and another tallying...which is maybe the fun of the dysfunction.
When the masochist comes out on the short end, the cry may be, "Hurt me!" The sadist's response may be, "NO!" It is in this shrouding of the true dynamic that the whole venture can be carried on in blissful denial in so many well-ordered, normal looking households while strictly regimented, controlled patterns of behavior are in fact carried on by parents and children all.
For example, everyone in the home knows that Daddy blows his top when, after his second drink in the evening, he hears impulsive childish laughter. Everyone knows that Mommy will have the children dressed, with teeth brushed and beds made before Daddy comes home for 11:00 lunch hour on Saturdays. But sometimes Mommy feels lazy on Saturday morning and not at all in the mood for Daddy's rules, and so one of the children ends up screaming behind the bathroom door while being spanked naked. Or one of the children forgets to mind his/her tongue and tells a joke to another child after Daddy has had his second drink in the evening, and Mommy slaps both children in the face to quiet them so Daddy won't hear.
What makes these the strictly regimented, controlled patterns of behavior in this home is the fact that such slip-ups happen inevitably, week in and week out, always with the same cruel outcomes, and with the resulting enforced patterns of fear, shame, and guilt in all parties (excluding, perhaps, Daddy; he is inscrutable).
What can be taken to the bank, and invested for a lifetime's worth of behavior, is the children's responses. Practicing what they have learned in childhood, they will repeat behaviors that encourage their lovers, their bosses, their mentors to treat them in ways that humiliate, degrade, and dehumanize them just as they were so naturally and normally humiliated, degraded, and dehumanized from the time they could call out their parents' names.
Indeed, they will be recipients of visions from the gods if ever in their lives they are struck down by the heart rending realization that they are not leading lives of random suffering, but rather, have the means within themselves to control how the world deals with them by taking full responsibility for learning new ways to allow themselves to be dealt with: as the dignified, loveable, loving human beings they always have been.
