that Charlie Brown feeling

you know the one - Lucy puts the football on the ground in front of Charlie Brown, waits for him to kick the ball. Charlie Brown comes running up, draws his foot back to give it a good kick, and - Bam! Suddenly he's flat on his back on the ground.

Why? Because that b*tch* Lucy yanked it out from under him at the last minute. And she does this every time; and he keeps falling for it. Why??? Is he stupid? That's how it seems. But there's part of you that knows he's just a trusting soul (some would say 'gullible'), and you like that about him. You just wish he wouldn't get suckered over and over and over.

Some people are just like that.

This came up because I was thinking about my mom and her perpetual emotional unavailability, and how that felt, and how hard it was to figure out that that was what was going on; it took me most of my life to even notice, let alone understand. And I still puzzle over it; I mean, she's there, and she's looking at you, and she appears to be interested.

And yet - and yet. It's like there's this big, empty, aching void where the feeling of connection should be.

It finally dawned on me that it's because she's never actually there - she's sort of needy, and clingy, but not really listening. Or - she's sort of listening for something that she needs to hear, rather than listening to what you're saying, and trying to go where you are - empathize, or something. It's like trying to play ball with somebody who stands there and watches while you throw it to them, and every single time the ball ends up on the ground at their feet because they've made no effort whatsoever to catch it.

So the way this feels like the Charlie Brown thing is that she appears to be there, right up until the last minute. Until you actually need her, until that split second where the rubber actually meets the road. At that moment of truth, when you need her most, she isn't there. She vanishes, like the Road Runner, in a cloud of dust. (Need better analogy - RR knows perfectly well what she's doing. Mom, on the other hand, has no clue.)

In other words, she appears to be there, but really, she's not. Whenever you go to lean on her, there's nothing there to lean on.


*Yes, I'm a feminist. Yes, 'bitch' is a woman-derogating term. Unfortunately, in a patriarchy it's hard to come up with cuss words that have the appropriate oomph. So fuckin' sue me.


***
Ok, so now a quote, since my own words don't quite seem to be taking me where I'm trying to go. From a book called The transforming power of affect (bolds mine):

Unresolved disorganized attachment: Failed affective competence
Not feeling and not dealing. The unresolved-disorganized caregivers lose both contact and coherence; momentarily paralyzed on one side or the other of a dissociative state, they become unable to parent, and in that moment the child undergoes the trauma of loss.

Fear, a major disruptive affect if not relationally contained, is transmitted to the child, who is left completely unprotected in the face of helpless parental abdication.

Fancy language aside, what this says, as I understand it, is that fear is too big an emotion for little kids to handle alone. The only way they learn to handle it 'competently' - that is, handle it in such a way that they don't remain stuck in a fear state - is by having a grownup show them how.

Generally what this means is that the grownup gets down on the kid's level (either literally or metaphorically or both), and tries to see what the child is afraid of. Sometimes it's something obvious, like a spider or a scary person. But sometimes it's something that we as adults have 'learned' not to find frightening - for example, the way lots of small children are frightened by clowns.

Aside - I have to say, once again, that I'm feeling like the inability of autistics like ballastexistenz to be fooled by the surface 'act' that most 'grownups' (at least, Western ones) put on may actually be a feature, not a bug. In fact, said sensitivity, receptivity and perceptiveness may actually be a direct line back to our more connected-to-reality forbears, who didn't see themselves as 'separate' from the natural world. What I'm trying to say is, the level of dissociation required to function in our 'modern' world is actually quite unnatural. It may be functional, in that it serves a purpose, but the real question should then be: Whose purpose? To what end do we routinely, practically from birth, cut ourselves off from all the aspects of ourselves that make us most human???

The driver, I think, is capitalism. Greed, yearning for that which we don't have, causes people to cut off damn near every aspect of themselves that might prevent them from 'keeping up with the Joneses'. Along these lines, yet another comment mined from a comments thread over at ballastexistenz':

The fact is, that determining the moral worth of individuals is very much a capitalist view of things. After all, to the capitalist class, individuals are a resource to be exploited in making and selling goods and services to make profit. So if a person can’t do that, or at least not without lots of expensive ’support’, then from a capitalist point of view they are useless and therefore worthless. Of course, as the capitalist class control society, their world view is that of society.

And why are we so driven to 'keep up', to compete, to elevate our status at any and all costs? As somebody said somewhere, You can win the rat race, but you're still a rat...

Is it worth it, really? And if not, how do we extricate ourselves from this squirrel cage we find ourselves in?


***
Another thought stirred by some comments at BE's about how some of those labeled 'disabled' may try to denigrate or 'other' each other in order to get higher on the pecking order: It made me think of 'culling the herd', how the weak and elderly in a group of animals (or humans) would be allowed to fall by the wayside or would sometimes be actively killed so that they wouldn't slow down the rest of the group, or 'weaken the bloodlines'. Maybe this kind of thinking is still operant, at a subliminal, lizard-brain level? People who are 'normal' would never question this kind of 'thinking', because they'd never be the ones to get culled. Anybody who fell outside of 'normal', though, might live in unending fear of being the one to be left behind to die.