Trap Lines Redux

[calumet]

Baldy's still baiting me, still not tempting me in the slightest. But I think I'm just about done with my own trap lines.

I won't say what they were/are, but I will say that they required active and energetic tending on my part. They gave me a chance to be a vindictive b*tch, and--prepare to be shocked--I thoroughly enjoyed it. They also allowed me to hold a mirror up to Baldy. The reflection was not pretty, but he needed to see it. I was only too happy to show it to him, and I know that seeing it has affected him. I am virtually certain he hasn't a clue who has been behind the shenanigans, and I don't intend to let him know.

Whether he will be able to make good use of what he saw, I can't say. I'm not optimistic about his chances for any sort of healthy development. I continue to be haunted by a dream he told me about, in which he was struggling to kick a skeleton into a well. He'd managed to kick all the bones in except for the skull, and he said that in the dream he kept kicking and kicking, and he woke up annoyed that he couldn't get rid of that last bit. Once upon a time, he would ask me again and again to hold and caress his head. He is not self-observant, and his emotional guardedness is enough to drive a woman mad. I'm absolutely certain that he had no conscious idea what he was telling me, nor would it have occurred to him that there was a connection between the dream and his need to have his head held and stroked.

Well, as I say, I am about done with the trap lines. I asked the Yi what I have accomplished with them, and the answer was 54.4-->19. I conclude that running them really wasn't such a bad way to eat him after all.

 

[dobro p]

54.4 talks about 'overrunning the date', which suggests doing something later than expected. On the one hand, that might mean that your trap lines were a way to continue the relationship past ifs official sell-by date, or that you've finally let go of the relationship.

Trap lines. Who do they trap, if they don't catch you something useful?

 

[calumet]

There was definitely an aspect of exceeding the allotted time. But the Yi says she marries late, at the proper time. So ... probably both interpretations apply.

The jury's out on whether I caught something useful. Karen Horney wouldn't approve of the ways in which I enjoyed this, but wotthehell. Meanwhile I will continue to enjoy letting the proffered bait rot. Purity of heart is an ideal, and I often miss it by a mile.

 

[calumet]

The story told in 54.4 has a happy ending. The more I think about the idea of exceeding the "proper" time, and then acting to one's profit when the "right" time arrives, the more it resonsates. In some ways, much of the relationship worked in just the way described in 54.4. As you can imagine, it was no walk in the park to spend four years with a man who is fighting to destroy the last remnants of his need for other human beings. I had tried to leave him three times before, but for reasons better elaborated in another conversation, I found I could not break it off.

I often do things behind my own back, and in retropect I realize I've been preparing for this final break for at least a year, and possibly longer. Wilhelm's translation says, "The marrying maiden draws out the allotted time. A late marriage comes in due course." I hung onto this relationship much longer than I should have done. Bad habit of mine. The trap lines have given me a little more conrol over exactly when to let go of Baldy; have given me some useful information; have allowed me to vent a mountain of hostility; and possibly may have done Baldy a bit of a favor, although that's highly doubtful. Chapter 8 in Horney's NEUROSIS AND HUMAN GROWTH explains him perfectly, and in 4 years the only desire for change he showed was in the direction of perfecting his "mastery" (Horney's term).

Although I'm retiring from the trapping business, it will be interesting to see how long he continues offering his own bait to me. Of course the reason he does it is that experience has taught him I'll come back eventually. Experience has taught me a thing or two as well, and I think he's wrong this time.

By the way, I ran across a line in Horney--can't find the exact spot right now, but I think it was in NEUROSIS AND HUMAN GROWTH--a line in which she makes a favorable comparison betwen the self-understanding sought in Hinduism with the self-understanding sought in psychoanalysis. I know nothing about Hinduism, but I do know a little about psychoanalysis. Somehow I like the comparison.

 

[dobro p]

After reading Chapter 8 twice, I got into reading the whole book. She does that 10-point typology of neurosis in Chapter 1 - it's a useful typology to see how much of each of the types is in you or in the people around you. And you know what? *Everybody's* neurotic. Everybody I know, anyway. But what does that mean? I mean, the word 'neurotic' is pretty derogatory, right? If you're neurotic, it's like you have some sort of disease or something, right? ('Nice girl. Pity about the neurosis...') So I started thinking about what neurosis is, and it seems to me to be a learned pattern that operates automatically and powerfully in how we see situations and how we act in situations. Because it's automatic and powerful, it keeps us from seeing things as they really are, and it keeps us from acting intelligently and flexibly and adapting to situations as required. In other words, we don't connect with reality. It keeps us stupid. And even when you start to see this or that neurotic pattern operating in yourself, you still don't have the power to overcome it usually - you just have the useful insight that you're not connecting with reality and don't have a free hand in this or that particular area of life.

But in terms of getting together with somebody, the question I'd really want answered before I committed is 'how neurotic is this person on a scale of 1-10?'. Again, because of that automatic chemistry thing we talked about in another thread, this is a tough question to answer in the heat of the moment. But if you can avoid the obvious nutballs, you're doing yourself a favor.

 

[calumet]

I have a collection of Horney's works, and I've read it through at least three times in the past couple of weeks. Some sections way more than three times. I have to agree that everyone's neurotic to some degree. Life is imperfect, even (especially?) for children; and we all end up damaged and consequently neurotic to a greater or lesser degree. Think of people as being somewhere on a scale from absolutely sane to crazier than a sh*thouse rat, as we say in my neck of the woods. Or think of them as falling somewhere on a bell curve of neurosis, or whatever you like. But be sure that everyone's got quirks.

I have heard experienced and successful sales people say that their professional survival depends to a large degree on developing a "nose" for who's a real prospect and who's not. They claim that all they have to do is ask a few casual-sounding questions to predict who's going to buy, and who is therefore worth their professional time. But these are sales people who talk to 50, 80, sometimes more, prospects each day. Unless I stumble across instructions for coolly and surgically qualifying potential romantic partners, all I can do is hope to god I don't have to go through that many men to develop a "nose" for who's worth my romantic time and who's not. It'd kill me.

 

[dobro p]

You were wondering in an earlier post about Peter in the Peter and Clare story Horney writes about. This sheds some light on it:

http://plaza.ufl.edu/bjparis/horney/fadiman/02_pers.html

(I tried your email here, but it doesn't work.)

 

[calumet]

So, another archetype: the wounded healer. Figures.

Thanks for the link.

 

[calumet]

Oh, yeah, and she got his fanny kicked out of the American Institute for Psychoanalysis. So she probably would have understood my trap lines quite well. (We can't have the ghosts of dead psychoanalysts disapproving of our behavior, now, can we?)

 

[dobro p]

I'm right back into her writings these days, and grateful to you for triggering it.

Aside from how useful her material is, and aside from all the thoughts it's prompting in me, two things knock me out about her personal story. One is how much she achieved with analysis and self-analysis. The other is how she got only so far with it by the end of her life. The conclusion I'm tentatively drawing from this is that self-reflection and psychological awareness is necessary, but not sufficient.