I still worry about my troubled, unwell Norwegian friend, the one I wrote about previously. I mean my troubled friend who was obsessed with child molesters: the one who kept bringing up, out of nowhere, her fascination with child molesters, only for it to turn out later that her paternal grandfather and two of his brothers were all credibly accused of sexually abusing girls over whom they were tasked with watching over.
I dearly wish for reconciliation, but that is not to happen absent of her returning to regular psychiatric care and ending contact with those who were, and likely still are, reinforcing her morbid gestures. I know that that is a prerequisite, and I know it because of what already happened years ago.
Soon before returning to Norway for the summer, she promised me unsolicitedly that when she returned to Norway, she would resume seeing a mental health professional. I did not initiate asking her about it. She took the initiative to make that promise, unprompted by anyone else. While I did not ask this of her, I was greatly relieved by this promise. When she was back in Norway, I asked her about it, and she claimed not to remember. Then she said she doesn’t need a mental health professional anyway. Soon after, she became mostly uncommunicative. But in one of the few times in that duration when she did communicate again, she said she was having panic attacks daily. Then when she returned to O‘ahu, she was uploading onto social media the photoshops that an internet-famous Norwegian artist did of her where she was photoshopped to have a chalky-white face like a corpse’s.
After two years of that, and after returning to Norway for the long term, she stopped uploading the dead-body photos. But then Corpse Artist started uploading pretentiously photoshopped images of himself up in the mountains with his mountain bike. Then my friend followed with photos of herself — no longer with the dead-body face — always hiking on mountain tops. Corpse Artist doesn’t do the corpse art anymore, but his influence is still very much in the picture (sometimes literally).
And my friend made a big show of legally changing her last name to match her father’s, a last name that was also the maiden name of her paternal grandmother who feigned ignorance about the child sexual abuse inflicted by her husband (my friend’s paternal grandfather). (Previously, my friend’s legal last name was her mother’s.) With my now knowing the history of what happened on her father’s side of the family, I think that though it is much more subtle than the chalky-white-face dead-body photos, the legal name change looks like another morbid gesture. It seems a very try-hard attempt to convey that her relationship with her father is fine; even great.
If I resume contact with my friend, and she’s not angry but instead welcomes reconciliation but doesn’t return to mental-health treatment and stay with it, I know what is going to happen. It will be a repeat of what happened before. She might return to treatment for a little while. But eventually she will stop with it and, when I ask about it, she will feign memory loss about it as she did before. And then all of our interactions will become a repeat of what happened that summer. At first it will again seem be a happy situation. But then my friend will resume making morbid gestures with the expectation that I play along and act as if they are safe and fine. And playing along and acting as if that is safe and fine is tacit reinforcement of the morbid gestures.
My friend first establishing regular psychiatric treatment is necessarily a prerequisite to any attempt at reconciliation.
If my friend sees this: legally remove the name of those who facilitated abuse: the last name of a father who facilitated abuse and the maiden name of a paternal grandmother who “looked the other way” to maintain plausible deniability about abuse that she knew had happened. Cut out of your life and social media those, such as Corpse Artist and his sister-in-law and brother, who reinforce your morbid tendencies. Rather than thanking them for their morbid images, they always should have been blocked, just as they should be now. Return to regular psychiatric care and have the borderline/ emosjonelt ustabil personlighetsforstyrrelse diagnosed properly. Make this known publicly. With the danger you have consistently imposed on self and others, even people outside of the inner circle have a right to know about your psychiatric condition and the risks of it. Such important steps would not be for me, but for your own happiness, well-being, and peace. But just as it was in our last phone conversation, you already know that.
Unironic trigger warning:discusses child sexual abuse and someone’s suicidal ideation.
After many years, this still haunts me. Years ago I would, on a daily basis, talk in person with someone who, out of nowhere, would bring up the topic of adults sexually abusing prepubescent children. She didn’t directly tell me the reason for this fascination. But now I have a strong suspicion for the reason. At first it started as a joke. She said that her favorite signature on internet message boards was “The internet is where men are men, women are men, and small children turn out to be undercover FBI agents.” The last part refers to the police’s sting operations to catch child molesters.
Later she said that I reminded her of an ex-boyfriend back in her native northern Europe. She said, “He was very sweet.” Then she stared into space, giggled, and said, “Fritz would always joke that he was a pedophile trying to trick little kids into having sex with him.” Suffice it to say, I don’t appreciate being compared to that sleaze. 😑
Then one night she said to me, “When a convicted sex offender moves into a neighborhood, why do Americans get so irrational about it?” My eyebrows raised. I stammered, “Wh– What do you mean?” She replied, “When a man who had sex with a little girl moves into their neighborhood, Americans want to run him out. They should learn to accept that she consented to it.” I was so flummoxed that I could not respond other than by staring with my mouth gaping open. She changed the subject.
She also mentioned that she had a long history of wanting to be dead literally. She blamed much of this on an incident when she was thirteen. She was mistreated by a boy who was also thirteen at the time. I don’t doubt that this happened. Even then, I thought that this didn’t explain completely why she was so fixated on full-grown adult men in particular preying upon prepubescent children in particular. Then my friend said to me, “Promise me that you will always protect me.” I replied that I would.
When she was not in Hawai‘i with me but was in her native northern Europe for the summer, she got mostly uncommunicative. But during a short interruption from that uncommunicativeness, she told me that she was having a panic attack every day. Greatly concerned, I made contact with her paternal aunt in the USA. Her paternal aunt soon started telling me about other topics, such as that, as a small girl, the paternal aunt was sexually abused both by my friend’s paternal grandfather and one of his brothers, the latter of whom killed himself later. She also said that when she told her mother (my friend’s paternal grandmother) about this, her mother denounced her and feigned ignorance about it. She also mentioned that she finds it doubtful that my friend’s father knew nothing of this.
My friend then had an “internet-famous” artist go through the effort of photoshopping her pictures to make her look like a recently-deceased corpse with a chalky-white face. That was his specialty: he would take photos of himself and photoshop himself to look like a dead body with chalky-white skin. To this very day, many people across the world enthusiastically re-upload his corpse photoshops on their social-media accounts. Everyone around my friend found her corpse photoshops concerning. But it was of especial worry to me because she had previously told me of her long history of wanting to be dead literally.
Corpse Artist said he wished she would dye her hair a particular different color. When she returned to Hawai‘i, her hair was dyed that color.
It turned out later that my friend has another relative who is a celebrity among Ralph Nader/Noam Chomsky-type Socialist activists. Her son and daughter-in-law were supporting actors in very famous movies; her daughter-in-law was even the main supporting actress in an Oscar-winning drama. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist even wrote an entire mainstream book about this socialist activist. In the book, she is quoted saying that, as a small child, she was sexually abused by her stepfather. On my own, having read some important obituaries online, I learned that the stepfather is my friend’s grandfather’s other brother.
That means: My friend’s paternal grandfather and two of his brothers were all accused of sexually abusing small girls whom they were supposed to be watching over. It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to face that this consideration might be connected to my friend’s insistence on repeatedly bringing up the topic of grown men molesting prepubescent girls. The aunt gave me the impression that my friend probably didn’t know of these accusations from her aunts and other relative. If my friend’s fascination with child molesters came from her family, it was something she learned about, not from her aunts and other relative, but horrifyingly more directly.
One day my friend stopped uploading the Corpse Artist’s pictures of her photoshopped as a dead body with a chalky-white face. She looked alive again and wasn’t dyeing her hair the color that Corpse Artist said. She was instead touting herself as a businesswoman and uploading photos of herself on the peaks of mountains. But then she did something else. Up until that point, my friend’s legal last name was not her father’s. There is an odd story about that, which relates to further trauma on her father’s side I haven’t mentioned. And now, with great fanfare, she legally changed her last name to that of her father. That’s much more subtle than uploading photos of oneself photoshopped as a dead body. But it looks to me to be a try-too-hard attempt to convey to everyone that her relationship with her father is just fine; great even.
When in Hawai‘i, she was especially manipulative in that she expected me to play along with her morbid gestures. I was to act as if everything with her was just fine and safe. I remembered what an immigrant from Russia had advised: “Do not help them to fake reality.” On my birthday, of all days, I summoned enough courage to confront my friend about these matters. I told her that I cannot, in good conscience, see her face-to-face and help her feign normality when she’s refusing to return to seeing a mental health professional on a regular basis. She told me that my saying this to her was more intimidating, threatening, and evil than all the times that men had assaulted her — sexually and otherwise — and threatened to murder her.
Minutes later, she feigned memory loss. She acted as if she didn’t remember anything said previously in that conversation, and casually asked me about my day. That’s when I learned the hard way: it might be fun to watch an Alfred Hitchcock movie, but it’s the opposite of fun to live through one.
I have often considered trying to reestablish contact with her and reconcile. But if she greets me warmly — not with hostility — and still refuses to return to regular psychiatric care, then this entire cycle is going to repeat. Absent of returning to regular psychiatric care and a proper diagnosis — likely emosjonelt ustabil/borderline personlighetsforstyrrelse — the following will happen. At first it will seem that everything is happy again. But then my friend will go back to making the morbid gestures and expecting that I tacitly reinforce them by pretending that they are safe and acceptable.
Recently I let my curiosity get the better of me, and I looked at Corpse Artist’s social media again. Corpse Artist actually stopped making the dead-body photoshops, but he uploaded other really pretentious photoshops where his self-image is literally distorted. His sister-in-law and especially brother also make art portraying people — apparently modeled on themselves — in a grotesque, morbid fashion. I feel sorry for those who see themselves, and even humanity, that way. (Their father is a genuinely competent portrait painter.) That my friend still makes a big show of using her father’s last name, and continues to enmesh with Corpse Artist, his sister-in-law, and his brother, all remain very bad signs. When I consider an attempted reconciliation with my friend, I remember those bad signs and the danger of what would happen if she welcomes communication only for her to maintain her refusal for the regular professional treatment that is needed.
If my friend sees this: stop embracing the name of someone who facilitated abuse. Cut out of your life and social media those, such as Corpse Artist and his sister-in-law and brother, who reinforce your morbid tendencies. Return to regular psychiatric care and have the emosjonelt ustabil personlighetsforstyrrelse diagnosed properly. This would not be for me, but for your own happiness, well-being, and peace. But just as it was in our last phone conversation, you already know that.
I think that so many problems that people have with one another has to do with control issues; people wanting control and failing to respect one another’s boundaries with that control.
Everybody Wants to Rule the World? Well, Everyone Needs Some Control
To some degree, every person needs control. You need control over objects outside of yourself in order to eat. To have shelter, you need control over objects outside of yourself. When you pay someone to do something for you, you provide instructions, and those instructions are a form of control. Absent of any control, you couldn’t live. For that reason, a desire for control can be healthy. It is even important — rather, I should say especially important — that a growing child increasingly gains a sense of bodily autonomy.
The problem is that many people are very insecure about how much control they possess, and so, to regain a feeling of being in control, people harm themselves or others. I think that self-cutting has a lot to do with this. The rationalization is, “I’m hurting myself, but at least the cuts I make on my wrist, unlike so much of what else goes on in my life, are in my control.”
And, of course, many people who feel insecure about how much control they have, seek to rectify this by controlling other people. The mildest form of this is someone making nonviolent demands of others which can be rejected. The severest form of exercising control over others is the initiation of the use of physical force upon them.
I am far from being alone in thinking this. University of London psychology instructor Rob Brotherton writes in Suspicious Minds,
...it is precisely when our sense of control is threatened that we are most likely to get a little paranoid. . . . The existential anxiety spurs us to find other ways to satisfy our need for order and control; when we can’t be in control ourselves, we’ll settle for thinking someone (or something) else is in the driver’s seat. Psychologists call this compensatory control.
We have a few options when it comes to finding compensatory control. A popular one is to believe we have a powerful ally. Religions based around the idea of a benevolent, controlling God assures believers that everything happens for a reason. Or, keeping things more down-to-earth, we can put our faith in institutions, like the government. Psychological studies show that when people’s sense of personal control is eroded, they are more inclined to believe in an interventionist God (but not in a more hands-off deity) and to support increased government controls [(New York: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2015), 110; emphasis Brotherton’s].
For this information, Brotherton cites Aaron C. Kay, et al., “Compensatory Control: Achieving Order Through Our Mind, Our Institutions, and the Heavens,” Current Directions in Psychological Sciencevol. 18 (no. 5, October 2009): 264–268. Say the paper’s authors, “...when personal control is threatened, people can preserve order by (a) perceiving patterns in noise adhering to superstitions and conspiracies, (b) defending the legitimacy of sociopolitical institutions that offer control, or (c) believing in an interventionist God.” On page 267 they say, “We have gone to great lengths to demonstrate that our effects cannot be accounted for via other processes or theoretical accounts.”
I think that even if we had a purely peaceful society, some people would still have control issues and boundary issues. There would still be really bossy, nagging people. There could be a romantic couple in which one partner wants to get a tattoo, and the other finds that so unsexy that it jeopardizes the physical attraction. How can that be resolved? At this point, I cannot give an answer.
You Should Control Your Body and Your Other Property; I Should Control My Body and My Other Property
I’m definitely no expert on resolving all these issues, but I think most people — including most Westerners — fail to understand that there is one very important line of demarcation. Someone should have control over her own body and her own private property; her desire for control becomes a major problem when this is not good enough for her, and she demands that the government control other people’s nonviolent behavior just so that she may feel safer (and therefore more in control).
You notice how so many of these anti-immigrationists are men experiencing midlife crises; they feel inadequate in the romance department and worry about some low-paid immigrant getting a job that he otherwise may have gotten. He feels as if he doesn’t have adequate control. He especially feels he doesn’t have enough control if he worries that immigrants are going to create a gang and go on some rampage. To restore his feeling of control, he demands the government “do more” against the menace supposedly posed by immigration.
I don’t begrudge the man that he feels as if he is not in control; I am not going to mock him or try to reinforce his worry that he is too weak. But where I do object is in the terribly misguided path he has chosen in an attempt to regain a feeling of having control.
This also happens with shooting rampages. They catch us by surprise. They deprive us of our sense of being in control — that’s understandable. And in an attempt to feel in-control again, many people clamor for action on guns. To feel “in control,” they demand action — and, too often, overlook how such governmental action will create a net reduction in safety.
Some people who grew up with relatively rustic lifestyles feel as if control over their food supply is being sapped away from them. They feel as if control over their food has been usurped by impersonal, faceless, multinational corporations like Monsanto and Conagra. They hear about genes from one species being inserted into another, and this sounds not only alien, but something outside of their control. To try to regain a feeling of being in control, many people promote special back-to-nature diets that they hail as superior to what they call factory farming. I would applaud such efforts much more if not for many of these people agitating for very harmful legislation and frequently spreading inaccuracies about biology, economics, court cases, and Monsanto.
Wanting Some Control Is Healthy — Overstepping Boundaries, By Use of Government Force, Is Not
Hence, I’m struggling to help people recognize this phenomenon. (That I worry about having failed in this matter, is perhaps the area where I feel as if I myself do not have enough control.) When people feel as if they don't have enough control, and demand government action, I want them to know that feeling not-in-control doesn’t make them weak and they shouldn’t fear being looked down upon. Likewise, I want them to come to understand that their demand for government control over nonviolent actions is not the proper method to rectify the inadequate control; they need to find more constructive and peaceful methods for restoring a feeling of being in control.
When there is a major problem facing society that makes us feel as if we are not in control — such as unexpected disasters or human-caused rampages — this is soon followed by a public campaign to give more power to the State to rectify this. When this happens, an important question we must ask ourselves and our neighbors is, “When we insist that the State must ‘do something,’ have we truly used our better judgment to ascertain that such governmental action will create a net increase in safety? Or is our insistence that the State must ‘do something’ and ‘take action’ mostly about just helping ourselves feel as if we are in control again?” If it is the latter, we should rethink our actions, as so many governmental responses to public clamor that the State “do something” ultimately resulted in net decreases in public safety.
Exhibit A for a situation in which parents felt as if they were not in control, and the government “doing something” about it actually resulted in a net decrease in public safety, was the “Satanic Panic” of the early 1980s.
To Say A Man Wants Control Is Just to Say He Wants What He Wants?
Right now, my biggest issue with my own line of thought on this is that I often ask myself, “Is saying ‘a person wants control’ too tautological? If ‘control’ means being able to perform some action in order to obtain what one wants, then isn’t saying ‘a person wants control’ the same as saying ‘a person wants what he wants’?” For now, my answer to that is no, because there are some cases where someone can desire to relinquish control.
For instance, one might say I am relinquishing control if I hire a chauffeur; I am forfeiting direct control over the automobile in which I ride. Yet if I am not the one driving, then it gives me more opportunity to do something else as a passenger that I otherwise would not be able to do if I had to be the motorist always keeping his eyes on the road. I would be giving up one form of control for the sake of gaining control in some other endeavor.
Most people want some form of control, but I think that “want” and “control” are still distinct concepts, as control is more specific: to have control means to be able to choose to perform some action that elicits the desired effect.
On Sunday, May 12, 2019, I added the block quotation from Rob Brotherton about compensatory control and I added his academic citation and my own quotation from that paper.
Lately the State of Humanity has been on my mind...
You know that saying that laughter is the best medicine? Psychology experiments confirm that life-affirming humor has a beneficent effect on your long-term happiness. By contrast, psychology experiments evince that morbid humor, cynical humor, self-effacing humor, and put-down humor do have a deleterious effect on the person dispensing such humor; those types of humor do not mitigate long-term unhappiness but instead reinforce it ultimately.
Whereas positive humor styles increase feelings of self-worth and conscientiousness, and possibly even improve longevity, negative humor styles have the opposite effect. People who use self-defeating humor tend to experience depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem, and those who use aggressive humor [putting others down] often adopt poor coping mechanisms....
In short, humor can either improve or harm our health, depending on how it’s used. Dealing with conflict in positive ways, such as laughing to put ourselves in a good mood, is probably as important as getting on that Stairmaster three times a week. Laughing negatively at ourselves or taking a dark, sardonic attitude — well, you might as well starting drinking and smoking, too.
—Scott Weems, Ha!: The Science of When We Laugh and Why, (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2014), p. 147, citing Paul Frewen, et al., “Humor Styles and Personality — Vulnerability to Depression,” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 21, no. 2, year 2008: pages 179–195; Vassilis Saroglou and Lydwine Anciaux, “Liking Sick Humor: Coping Styles and Religion As Predictors,” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 17, no. 3, year 2004: pages 257–277; Nicolas Kuiper and Rod Martin, “Humor and Self-Concept,” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 6, no. 3, year 1993: pages 251–270; and Nicholas Kuiper, et al., “Humor Is Not Always the Best Medicine: Specific Components of Sense of Humor and Psychological Well-Being,” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 17, no. 1/2, year 2004: pages 135–168.
