The Sudden Scream of a Sadomasochistic Life

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.

Excerpt from "The Truth About Men"

[Taken from an entry on my other blog, Anger Management]

I been distracting myself in every conceivable way in order not to see the big picture...how every single human being's neuroses just exactly, precisely, perfectly keep their just exactly, precisely, perfectly [unconsciously] chosen relationships from working out; and how, God bless me, I see men [all men] as being hobbled by their missing leg on that Y chromosome, enslaved by their piteously selfish, narcissistic myopia [the little Sun Gods] thinking their tiny penises are almighty when, in fact, they themselves are biologically inferior beings because: 1) their reproductive organs aren't even protected; 2) they have no hormonal protections against cancers, heart disease, osteoporosis, etc; 3) their role in reproduction of the species is minuscule; 4) their general stamina is sorely lacking over the course of a lifetime; and 5) genetically they're missing an entire leg...born amputees, as it were. NO WONDER they've had to take dominion. They're scared shitless of us!

What is the GREAT SADNESS is that we, the Strong Ones of the species, bought into it. The joke is on us. Obviously we can use them any way we like. As a group they are pitifully mindless--and are proud of it! They are ripe for manipulating. We really should take charge, be mindful as a group, and stop them from destroying the planet...family by family, tribe by tribe, race by race, country by country, armed conflict by armed conflict. They have just about done us all in with their incessant need to prove their power. If they had ever truly felt their power, they would have no longer been crazed by the need to display it.

Unfortunately, biologically, they have no power--and they know it. The truth is so simple. It is the dead elephant lying in the middle of every living room, conference room, war room in every country in the world: men run the show because they can't; they are driven to prove they have the control, the power they know they don't. They work as a group to keep out the other half of the tribe who does have the control, the power, the natural prowess, the longevity, the clear-headedness that prevails when rage does not dominate, the ability to reason over time. Men call that natural cycle something abominable while they simply dump their memory of their testosterone-fueled rage episodes into the void of collective male unconsciousness, or rather female consciousness, while they go about their plotting and pondering and exercising their powers of paranoia and grandiosity.

Meanwhile the women nurture the little people and the older people and the sick people and even the the men and make sure the planet holds itself together even as the men plot to destroy it.

No wonder the men come home at night, pour a tall one, and go off somewhere by themselves. As a group, they believe they are in charge. Individually, they have trouble looking us in the eye.

the dance

At a thousand paces I smell a metallic stench
of drool at the wait to macerate my privacy
innocent request by screaming silent demand
until integrity lies beside me like shredded raiment.
Let you near to lick my sacred juices with your
hot rotting deceits?
I know you, velvet hammer,
You were born of Adam.

I am millennia older than Your cronies.
In the dawn before time you worshiped
my million mothers, who died
in your untold ontogenetic accidental arrivals,
until only the Virgin escaped your rapacious claim.
Now, you and I remain. I transform you
and wrap you around me like mail:
Bite me and spit out your own teeth.
I am of the Goddess.

...reaction formation to last entry

Did you ever let your lover

See the stranger in your eyes?