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Aug. 10th, 2025 06:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormThere's a kind of scarring that happens to some people where their first thought is "will people think I'm bad" or "what will people think about this" even before they figure out what they think about a thing, whether they themselves want it or can tolerate it, and I'm not sure many of those folks have room after all that for "how will this actually impact other people" unless that impact is someone thinking they're bad.
I listened to a little bit of Terry Real's relationship stuff once and he referred to the lens of "one up" and "one down" where folks interpreted everything that happened through whether it made them "better" or "worse" than other people and I suspect they're related.
With some people this is so intense that I think they lose the idea that folks can have any other motive for anything they do: if someone asks a question it's to catch them out and get one over them, not because they questioner is curious or interested. If someone does something it's to raise or lower them in the heirarchy, not because they just want to. And they don't do real intimacy well because the first question is "will this make someone upset" and not "do I understand this", but of course they want to fake intimacy in order to "be good"
These folks have trouble accessing their own wants because they're so busy playing their game, the one they imagine everyone else is playing.
I don't know what causes this damage. I had an overlay of it for awhile, because of dad and needing to protect myself from him, and I think dad himself had it quite badly, but it's a horrible way to live and it takes a ton of energy so I jettisoned it. I've heard that BPD has it as a symptom, that sense that everything is being done "at" you. It makes sense that if someone grew up around it, it could be passed down if the chain wasn't interrupted.
It's sneaky because, if the person is smart, they can fake that intimacy very well in service of being good and earning the reward of positive regard. In the last while I'd been using "do they say no comfortably instead of stalling, ghosting, or just always always going along" as a way to screen these folks but it doesn't always work.
Being around this kind of damage is poisonous. There's no real positive regard, just some kind of pedestal or get knocked off the pedestal. There's no actual conversation if it's triggered, just a power contest. There's no real knowledge of someone because they spend all their energy on smoke and mirrors. It's lonely, and if there's no social counterbalance of undamaged people it's perilous because of the pervasive emotional and intellectual undertow designed to keep you, the opponent, off balance.
It sucks.
I listened to a little bit of Terry Real's relationship stuff once and he referred to the lens of "one up" and "one down" where folks interpreted everything that happened through whether it made them "better" or "worse" than other people and I suspect they're related.
With some people this is so intense that I think they lose the idea that folks can have any other motive for anything they do: if someone asks a question it's to catch them out and get one over them, not because they questioner is curious or interested. If someone does something it's to raise or lower them in the heirarchy, not because they just want to. And they don't do real intimacy well because the first question is "will this make someone upset" and not "do I understand this", but of course they want to fake intimacy in order to "be good"
These folks have trouble accessing their own wants because they're so busy playing their game, the one they imagine everyone else is playing.
I don't know what causes this damage. I had an overlay of it for awhile, because of dad and needing to protect myself from him, and I think dad himself had it quite badly, but it's a horrible way to live and it takes a ton of energy so I jettisoned it. I've heard that BPD has it as a symptom, that sense that everything is being done "at" you. It makes sense that if someone grew up around it, it could be passed down if the chain wasn't interrupted.
It's sneaky because, if the person is smart, they can fake that intimacy very well in service of being good and earning the reward of positive regard. In the last while I'd been using "do they say no comfortably instead of stalling, ghosting, or just always always going along" as a way to screen these folks but it doesn't always work.
Being around this kind of damage is poisonous. There's no real positive regard, just some kind of pedestal or get knocked off the pedestal. There's no actual conversation if it's triggered, just a power contest. There's no real knowledge of someone because they spend all their energy on smoke and mirrors. It's lonely, and if there's no social counterbalance of undamaged people it's perilous because of the pervasive emotional and intellectual undertow designed to keep you, the opponent, off balance.
It sucks.
