MARTYR:  3: victim; especially: a great or constant sufferer

I am a martyr.

I try to control the impulse to be dramatic and miserable, but I come from a long line of professional martyrs who have suffered through the ages with every conceivable sort of oppression, illness, or vice. I’ve had decades of conditioning, and sometimes I’m not terribly successful at overcoming it. I am self-aware enough, however, to recognize and acknowledge that one of the reasons for my lack of success is that I am prone to enjoy the attention I receive when I am being dramatic and miserable. I like to think that it’s obvious that I would, of course, prefer the kind of attention I receive when I am happy and upbeat, but there is a certain dismal pleasure in moaning about one’s trials and sacrifices, and wallowing in self-pity.

In my line of life, though, I find that being a martyr is really only pleasurable if I don’t have any serious problems. When I do, as now, have a few Very Serious Issues that I’m trying to work through, I find I am constantly checking in with myself to verify that I am not falling into the trap of being a complete and utter misery to everyone around me. It is an obsession in its own right, this checking in, and all part of being a self-aware psycho.

Being a martyr, though, is really a full-time occupation if you’re going to do it right. Being properly miserable takes effort, and a lot of concentration, because if you even once let happiness, joy, or smug satisfaction creep into your demeanor of pain, you are revealed for the pseudo-martyr you actually are.

Unfortunately, that has not been a problem of late. Misery has consumed my life. It’s like a hole that I’ve dug for myself, one that has been aided by a Steam Shovel of Health Issues (+20 to all emotional damage rolls) and a Jackhammer of Job Dissatisfaction (-10 to Charisma). The health issues, especially, have been demoralizing and worrisome. Given my love of hyperbole, and my tendency toward histrionics, it is easy to propel myself further down the Tunnel of Despair.

Getting out is another thing entirely.

I get so frustrated with the “Positive Thinking” people. There are many different flavors of that sort of person, but invariably I run into the chirpy, vague ones. “Let go and let God.” “When a door closes, a window opens.” “Altitude is determined by attitude.” I do understand their point:  If you want to effect a change in your life, change your attitude first. The problem is the “how,” and those kinds of platitudes are not terribly helpful in that regard.

As it happens, though, I have hit on a simple solution. I’m surprised I didn’t think of it before. This time around, though, I was apparently paying a little more attention than I’ve been able to muster of late, and there it was, staring me in the face.

I needed to fake it.

It even turns out that there is a silly saying for that:  “Fake it ‘til you make it.” Who knew, right? That would have actually been a helpful thing to have heard, because that makes sense to me.

I discussed this, like any good, self-aware psycho would, with my therapist. He explained why it worked, how happy, happy body chemistry just starts bubbling away in that mad laboratory in your skull when you smile, and how pretending to be energetic can sometimes, occasionally, help you to actually feel more energized. When combined with magic pills that work with the Science that is happening in my brain, faking a good mood actually started to work. Soon, I was really smiling. I was also feeling happy, and even, dare I say it, chipper. Good followed good, and after a while, I was in danger of having my martyr card revoked.

This doesn’t work every day. It doesn’t even work most days. But occasionally it works, and occasionally is good enough for now. I arrive at work with a fake smile on my face, and even though my internal monologue may be sad and defeated and snarky, I modulate my tones to be pleasant and light, and pretend with everything I’ve got that I am not only happy to be there, but that I’m feeling great, too. And soon I will be actually feeling great, and actually be happy, and nobody but us will know that I was faking.

http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/m_en_us1275957#m_en_us1275957

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive%E2%80%93aggressive_behavior**

The buzz-word (phrase) du jour in communicating seems to be passive-aggressive. It seems to me to have been on the menu for quite a while now; since beginning my journey towards becoming a self-aware psycho, I have become much more aware of the phenomenon.

My grandmother, and subsequently my mother, are Olympic champions of aggressive passivity. They are manipulators of the first water, and they know all the tricks. As a result, I have been aware that such behavior exists for much longer than it’s been mainstream. We just didn’t have a fancy name for it. My therapist and I discuss this sort of thing quite often. I will go out on a limb here and estimate that the term or the concept comes up about two sessions out of three, in some degree or another. Sometimes it’s just me saying “yeah, you should have heard this comment.” Sometimes it’s me complaining about the behavior in others. Most of the time, however, it’s me obsessing about whether or not I do it, too.

See, having been manipulated in this way since my infancy, and having suffered because of it, I am terrified of being passive-aggressive. I write an email, then spend hours afterwards parsing every sentence trying to figure out if I had been trying to manipulate the recipient into doing something, or responding in a certain way, or feeling this or that. Not every email, not every day, but lots of emails…. lots of days…. When someone asks me to do something, and I can’t get to it right away, I examine every aspect of my time, how it was spent, was I being passive-aggressive without realizing? Was I? WAS I?

Recently my life has taken some bizarre and frightening twists and turns. Things have been, well, “odd,” and one of the oddest things is having suddenly acquired a lover who wants to communicate. <gasp> Yes, such creatures do exist, my friends, and I’ve seen them with my very own eyes…. Easier to find dragons and elves and pink fluffy unicorns (dancing… on.. um… yeah), but they do exist. People who want to communicate effectively and lovingly with other people.

By “communicate” I don’t just mean chat about his day; he actually wants to verbally puzzle out things that are wrong between us, and solve them. We had a long talk early on in our burgeoning relationship wherein I explained my family history of manipulation through the precise application of guilt and pain; I asked him to confront me when he thought I was being passive-aggressive.

OK, in retrospect, that was kind of ridiculous of me. Seriously, asking someone to call me on that sort of thing? What am I doing? What kind of psycho does that?

But that’s how obsessive I am about not being that way.

I slip; I slip a lot more than I would like. I’ve discovered, however, something very, very interesting:

People assume I am being passive-aggressive far more often than I am actually being passive-aggressive.

Yup. I was shocked, too. I was really shocked. How many times have I walked away from a conversation, especially one that began or ended as an argument, feeling like I got hit by a train when I wasn’t looking, all because someone assumed they knew what I meant, and that I was manipulating them?? Arguments with friends, lovers, relatives… I suddenly have been looking back on them with this revelatory perspective, and I am appalled.

What I’m now wondering is this:  Are people so jaded that they just automatically assume that the person they’re talking to is being manipulative? Do they automatically assume a defensive position or take the offensive because everyone in our culture is passive-aggressive? Has the emergence of this behavior into popular culture just made people in general afraid that everyone is doing it?

When did people stop saying what they mean? When did they start implying things instead of actually saying them? When did every phrase, every utterance, come to mean something different from the actual definitions of the words and construction of the sentence?

For most of my life I’ve been fascinated with language. I am enchanted by the idea that symbols form words, and words represent thoughts, and the act of writing or speaking them performs some alchemy that conveys what’s in my head to someone else’s. I love that whole concept.

Because I do, and because I think about communicating in general, and becoming a better, more effective communicator in particular, I have a theory. (Don’t I always? <grin>)

It seems to me that at some point the filters we use to soften things, to save the feelings of others and to survive and thrive in the world outside our own heads, end up hurting us. We know how much we change what we think betwixt brain and tongue, so we use “logic” and conclude that everyone else must be doing it, too. We then spend a lot of time and effort analyzing what the other person said, trying to figure out what they “really” meant, because we know how much we edited our own thoughts.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t use filters, or that we should throw caution and social nicety to the wind and just blurt out every single thing we think, because not everything we think is appropriate, or worth saying. But I do think we should try harder to say what we mean. Communication needs to be slowed down a bit.

In a world where texting, chatting, and emailing is instantaneous, it’s easy to just fire off words without really considering how they’ll be interpreted by the receiver. Because we’ve become used to lightning fast communicating, we have begun talking that way as well. Instead of trying to be a good listener, we’re Tweeting or texting or reading the next blog entry and we aren’t paying attention to what the speaker is saying; then we go right on with the monologue we’ve prepared in our own heads and pay no attention to whether or not it has anything to do with what the other person had just been talking about.

I’m trying to slow it down. I’m trying to think about the actual meaning that I want to convey rather than just getting out my quota of words so that I can keep up with the next guy. And I’m going to use all my words to do it. <grin>

-Cat

**yes, yes, I used Wikipedia. I finally drank the kool-aid.

And I decided a new journal with a new look was a good start. Planning on there being some new writing, some dream analysis, psycho ramblings and plenty of the incessant whinging we all know and… well… tolerate. 😉

-PJR