who is responsible for what

quotes from the dance of anger by harriet lerner

"anger is inevitable when we submit to unfair circumstances and when we protect another person at our own expense."

"feeling fuzzy-headed, inarticulate, and not so smart are common reactions experienced by women as we struggle to take a stand on our own behalf. it is not just anger and fighting that we learn to fear; we avoid asking precise questions and making clear statements when we unconsciously suspect that doing so would expose our differences, make the other person feel uncomfortable, and leave us standing alone."

"karen's emotional reaction to her boss's criticism obscured her thinking about what she wanted to ask and what she wanted to say. . . her tears and her willingness to let her boss play the role of advisor and confidant were, in part, her unconscious way of reinstating the status quo and apologizing for the 'separateness' inherent in her initial position of disagreement. . . karen had deep-seated fears of her own omnipotent destructiveness and the vulnerability of men. our very definitions of 'masculinity' and 'femininity' are based on the notion that women must function as nonthreatening helpmates and ego builders to men lest men feel castrated and weakened. . . karen was afraid of transforming her anger into concise statements of her thoughts and feelings lest she evoke that disturbing sense of separateness and aloneness that we experience when we make our differences known and encourage others to do the same. . . karen had a long-standing pattern of attempting to restore the togetherness of her relationships by crying, criticizing herself, becoming confused, or prematurely making peace. at the heart of the problem was the fact that karen needed to work harder at the task of clarifying her separateness and independence within her first family."

"more often, and more crucially, separation anxiety is based on an underlying discomfort with separateness and individuality that has its roots in our early family experience, where the unspoken expectation may have been that we keep a lid on our expressions of self. daughters are especially sensitive to such demands and may become far more skilled at protecting the relational 'we' than asserting the autonomous 'i.'"

 "learning to use our anger effectively requires some letting go -- letting go of blaming that other person whom we see as causing our problems and failing to provide for our happiness; letting go of the notion that it is our job to change other people or tell them how they should think, feel, behave. yet, this does not mean that we passively accept or go along with any behavior. in fact, a 'live-and-let-live' attitude can signal a de-selfed position, if we fail to clarify what is and is not acceptable or desirable to us in a relationship. the main issue is how we clarify our position."

"we are responsible for our own behavior. but we are not responsible for other people's reactions; nor are they responsible for ours. women often learn to reverse this order of things: we put our energy into taking responsibility for other people's feelings, thoughts, and behavior and hand over to others responsibility for our own."

"why is the question 'who is responsible for what?' such a puzzle for women? women in particular have been discouraged from taking responsibility for solving our own problems, determining our own choices, and taking control of the quality and direction of our own lives. as we learn to relinquish responsibility for the self, we are prone to blame others for failing to fill up our emptiness or provide for our happiness -- which is not their job. at the same time, however, we may feel responsible for just about everything that goes on around us. we are quick to be blamed for other people's problems and pain and quick to accept the verdict of guilty. we also, in the process, develop the belief that we can avert problems if only we try hard enough."

"the emotional rescuers of the world can have a terribly difficult time allowing others just to sit with their feelings and learn to handle them. . . when we do not put our primary emotional energy into solving our own problems, we take on other people's problems as our own. . . the problem arises when we are excessively reactive to other people's problems, when we assume responsibility for things that we are not responsible for, and when we attempt to control things that are not in our control. when we overfunction for another individual, we end up very angry, and in the process, we facilitate the growth of no one."

this hand that writes

excerpt from faces in the crowd by valeria luiselli

in winter there were windstorms. but i used to wear miniskirts because i was young. i wrote letters to my acquaintances telling them about my rambles, describing my legs swathed in gray tights, my body wrapped in a red coat with deep pockets. i wrote letters about the cold wind that caressed those legs, compared the freezing air to the bristle of a badly shaved chin, as if the air and a pair of gray legs walking along streets were literary material. when a person has lived alone for a long time, the only way to confirm that they still exist is to express activities and things in an easily shared syntax: this face, these bones that walk, this mouth, this hand that writes.

now i write at night, when the two children are asleep and it's acceptable to smoke, drink, and let drafts in. before, i used to write all the time, at any hour, because my body belonged to me. my legs were long, strong, and slim. it was right to offer them: to whomever, to writing.

weakness

excerpts from the story of a new name by elena ferrante

but he promptly shifted onto the only terrain that seemed to justify our meeting. he said that he was glad to see me, all he could talk about with his friend was soccer and exam subjects. he praised me. professor galiani perceived it, he said, you're the only girl in the school who has any curiosity about things that aren't useful for exams and grades. he started to speak about serious subjects, we resorted immediately to a fine, impassioned italian in which we knew we excelled. he started off with the problem of violence. he mentioned a peace demonstration in cortona and related it skillfully to the beating that had taken place in a piazza in turin. he said he wanted to understand more about the link between immigration and industry. i agreed, but what did i know about those things? nothing. nino realized it, and he told me in great detail about an uprising of young southerners and the harshness with which the police had repressed them. "they call them napoli, they call them moroccans, they call them fascists, provocateurs, anarcho-syndicalists. but really they are boys whom no institution cares about, so neglected that when they get angry they destroy everything." searching for something to say that would please him, i ventured, "if you don't have a solid knowledge of the problems and if you don't find lasting solutions, then naturally violence breaks out. but the people who rebel aren't to blame. it's the ones who don't know how to govern." he gave me an admiring look, and said, "that's exactly what i think."

i was really pleased. i felt encouraged and cautiously went on to some reflections on how to reconcile individuality and universality, drawing on rousseau and other memories of the readings imposed by professor galiani. then i asked, "have you read federico chabod?"

i mentioned that name because he was the author of the book on the idea of nationhood that i had read a few pages of. i didn't know anything else, but at school i had learned to give the impression that i knew a lot. have you read federico chabod? it was the only moment when nino seemed to be annoyed. i realized that he didn't know who chabod was and from that i got an electrifying sensation of fullness. i began to summarize the little i had learned, but i quickly realized that to know, to compulsively display what he knew, was his point of strength and at the same time his weakness. he felt strong if he took the lead and weak if he lacked words. he darkened, in fact he stopped me almost immediately. he sidetracked the conversation, he started talking about the regions, about how urgent it was to get them approved, about autonomy and decentralization, about economic planning on a regional basis, all things i had never heard a word about. no chabod, then: i left him the field. and i liked to hear him talk, read the passion in his face. his eyes brightened when he was excited.

            *                         *                               *

who knows if michele solara had kept to himself what he had seen. who knows if everything was going smoothly. who knows if nunzia was already asleep in the house on the road in cuotto or was trying to calm her son-in-law who had arrived unexpectedly on the last boat, hadn't found his wife and was furious. who knows if lila had telephoned her husband and, reassured that he was in naples, far away, in the apartment in the new neighborhood, was now in bed with nino, without fear, a secret couple, a couple intent on enjoying the night. everything in the world was in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who didn't agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life. i understood suddenly why i hadn't had nino, why lila had had him. i wasn't capable of entrusting myself to true feelings. i didn't know how to be drawn beyond the limits. i didn't possess that emotional power that had driven lila to do all she could to enjoy that day and that night. i stayed behind, waiting. she, on the other hand, seized things, truly wanted them, was passionate about them, played for all or nothing, and wasn't afraid of contempt, mockery, spitting, beatings. she deserved nino, in other words, because she thought that to love him meant to try to have him, not to hope that he would want her.

          *                        *                    *

unlike pietro, his father, mother, and sister conversed on a wide variety of subjects. at lunch, in the restaurant of the hotel where they were staying, professor airota and his daughter had, for example, affectionate skirmishes on political subjects that i had heard about from pasquale, from nino, and from franco but of whose substance i knew almost nothing. arguments like: you've been trapped by inter-class collaboration; you call it a trap, i call it mediation; mediation in which the christian democrats always and only win; the politics of the center left is difficult; if it's difficult, go back to being socialists; you're not reforming a thing; in our place what would you do; revolution, revolution, and revolution; revolution is taking italy out of the middle ages, without us socialists in the government, the students who talk about sex at school would be in jail and so would those who distribute pacifist leaflets; i want to see how you'd manage with the atlantic pact; we were always against the war and against all imperialism; you govern with the christian democrats, but will you stay anti-american?

like that, a swift back and forth: a polemical exercise that they both obviously enjoyed, maybe a friendly habit of long standing. i recognized in them, father and daughter, what i had never had and, i now knew, would always lack. what was it? i wasn't able to say precisely: the training, perhaps, to feel that the questions of the world were deeply connected to me; the capacity to feel them as crucial and not purely as information to display at an exam, in view of a good grade; a mental conformation that didn't reduce everything to my own individual battle, to the effort to be successful. mariarosa was kind, and so was her father; their tones were controlled, without a trace of the verbal excesses of armando, professor galiani's son, or of nino; and yet they injected warmth into political formulas that on other occasions had seemed to me cold, remote, to be used only in an attempt not to make a bad impression. following each other in rapid succession, they moved on, without interruption, to the bombing of north vietnam, to the student revolts on various campuses, to the many breeding grounds of anti-imperialist struggle in latin america and africa. and the daughter now seemed to be more up to date than the father. how many things mariarosa knew, she talked as if she had first-hand information, so that airota at a certain point looked at his wife ironically, and adele said to her, "you're the only one who hasn't chosen a dessert yet."

"i'll have chocolate cake," she said, breaking off with a graceful frown.

i looked at her in admiration. she drove a car, lived in milan, taught at the university, stood up to her father without resentment. i, instead: i was frightened by the idea of opening my mouth, and, at the same time, humiliated by staying silent. i couldn't contain myself, i said hyperbolically, "the americans, after hiroshima and nagasaki, should be brought to trial for crimes against humanity."

silence. the whole family looked at me. mariarosa exclaimed bravo!, she took my hand, shook it. i felt encouraged and immediately bubbled over with words, scraps of old phrases memorized at various times. i talked about planning and rationalization, the socialist-christian democratic precipice, about neocapitalism, about organizational structures, about africa, asia, primary school, piaget, collusion of the police and the courts, fascist rot in every manifestation of the state. i was muddled, breathless. my heart was pounding, i forgot who i was with and where i was. yet i felt around me an atmosphere of increasing approval, and i was happy to have expressed myself, i seemed to have made a good impression. i was also glad that no one in that nice little family had asked me, as happened frequently, where i came from, what my father did, and my mother. i was i, i , i.

          *                       *                        *

i was working night and day on my thesis, i harassed pietro, reading aloud to him what i had written. he was kind, he shook his head, he fished in his memory of virgil and other authors for passages that might be useful to me. i noted down every word he uttered, i worked hard, but in a bad mood. i went back and forth between two feelings. i sought help and it humiliated me to ask for it, i was grateful and at the same time hostile, in particular i hated that he did his best not to let his generosity weigh on me. what caused me the greatest anxiety was to find myself -- together with him, before him, after him -- submitting my research to the assistant professor who was following the progress of both of us, a man of around forty, earnest, attentive, sometimes even sociable. i saw that pietro was treated as if he already had a professorship, i as a normal brilliant student. often i decided not to talk to the teacher, out of rage, out of pride, out of fear of having to be aware of my constitutional inferiority. i have to do better than pietro, i thought, he knows so many more things than i do, but he's gray, he has no imagination. his way of proceeding, the way that he gently tried to suggest to me, was too cautious. so i undid my work, i started again, i pursued an idea that seemed to me original. when i returned to the professor i was listened to, yes, i was praised, but without seriousness, as if my struggle were only a game well played. i soon grasped that pietro airota had a future and i didn't.

in aporia

by akilah oliver, from a toast in the house of friends

"i realized everything i was doing must have been death. it was christmas or labor day -- a holiday -- and every time you turned on the radio they said something like 'four million' or 'going to die.'"
-andy warhol

i'm trying on egos, [a justification for the planet's continuance]. oh
hello transgressor, you've come to collect utilitarian debts, humbling
narrative space. give me a condition and wheatgrass,

i his body is disintegrating, i his body is ossification. death my habit
radius, yeah yeah.
i his body can't refuse the summons. i can't get out
this fucking room. tell me something different about torture
dear trickster.

tell me about the lightness my mother told me to pick the one i love the best
how it signals everything i ever wish to believe true just holy on my ship.
i jump all over this house. this is it [what i thought is thought only,
nothing more deceptive than]:
i his body keeps thinking someone will come along, touch me.
as like human. or lima bean.

i'm cradling you to my breast, you are looking out. a little wooden lion
you & peter carve on bluff street is quieting across your cheekbone. not
at all like the kind of terror found in sleep, on trembling grounds.

it is yesterday now. i have not had a chance to dance in this century.
tonight i shall kill someone,
a condition to remember sunday mornings.

to think of lives as repetitions [rather than singular serial incarnations].
to understand your death is as exacerbating as trying to figure out why
as schoolchildren in mid-nineteen-sixties southern california we
performed reflexive motions:
cutting out lace snowflakes, reading dick and jane search for their
missing mittens,
imagining snow.

and this too, fiction. the book i would want to right.
the restored fallen, heroic.

did you expect a different grace from the world? or upon exit?

i'm working on "tough." they think i am already. all ready.

who is the dead person? is "i'm sorry" real to a dead person?
browning grass. my hands on this table. a contentious century.
a place to pay rent. redemptive moments.

am i now the dead person?
dead person, dead person, will you partake in my persimmon feast?

the body inside the body astounds, confesses sins of the funhouse.

i too have admired the people of this planet.
their frilly, ordered intellects.
the use they've made of cardamom,
radiation as well. how they've pasteurized milk, loaned surnames to stars,
captured tribes, diseases, streets, and ideas too.

if you're hooked

quotes from how to meditate by pema chodron

“the more we see this kind of pattern and don’t go on the downward cycle, the more our confidence grows in our capacity to awaken. as we expand our confidence in the workability of our situation, we begin to see that we are not victims of our habitual patterns. it can definitely feel like we are victims of our habitual patterns; they have a very sneaky way of getting the better of us. but the path of meditation addresses these patterns very directly, and it begins to unwind this whole sense of being imprisoned by our own mind.

the mind is the source of all suffering, and it is also the source of all happiness. think about that. in fact, you can contemplate this for the rest of your life. when something comes up in your life that causes you dissatisfaction, or triggers habitual patterns and reactivity, or makes you angry, lonely, and jealous, ask yourself: are these emotions happening because of outer circumstances? are they completely dependent on outer circumstances?

the path of meditation says that we have to work with our mind, and that if we do work with our mind, the outer circumstances become workable. things that used to irritate and bother us or that trigger our reactivity and habitual patterns begin to dissolve. so whenever you find yourself caught in an emotional attack, you have to ask yourself: ‘how much of this is really happening on the outside, and how much of this is my mind?’. . .

the guideline is this: if you’re hooked, then you need to work on your side of the situation, no matter how outrageous and unjust the outer circumstance might seem. if you’re hooked, this is a clue that you have some work to do -- and you, only you, can call yourself back. this is the basic attitude of meditation.”

“criticalness is an obstacle to meditation, and harshness is an obstacle to awakening. this tendency to be hard on ourselves does not come from the buddha nature, the basic goodness within all of us; it comes from the ego and our conditioning. we all have the seeds of this basic goodness within us -- we only have to nourish them. nourishing the basic goodness within includes not judging ourselves for all the wild thinking that takes place in our mind. we can’t control how many thoughts we’re going to have. and we can’t control what the next thought is going to be. as you practice, try to be faithful to the instruction with a gentle attitude. we train in attention, but it’s friendly attention. we train in labeling, but it’s friendly labeling.”

“as you spend more days and weeks with your commitment to practice, it might seem that your mind wanders even more. many people, even seasoned meditators, say, ‘i’m thinking more than i ever did before!’ they feel like their distractedness and thinking are getting worse, rather than better. the fact is that before you started meditating and trying to develop mindfulness, you weren’t aware of how many thoughts you have. now you are, and that’s why there appears to be more of them.”

“trungpa rinpoche used to say that this kind of experience is very good because it humbles us. he said, ‘our minds are great teachers because we have just enough growing awareness and alertness, or increasing kindness, to encourage ourselves.’ and as he pointed out, we can even get very arrogant about that. in other words, our humanity, this discursiveness and this inability to completely overcome the wild and drowsy mind, keeps us in balance.

the third word i’d like you to hold when it comes to your thoughts is ‘humor.’ gentleness, patience, and a sense of humor. have a sense of humor about the fact that your mind is like a wild monkey. in his book wake up to your life, ken mcleod has a great quote from the theravada meditation master henepola gunaratana. he says, ‘somewhere in this process, you will come face to face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy. your mind is a shrieking, gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell down the hill, utterly out of control and hopeless. no problem. you are not crazier than you were yesterday. it has always been this way and you never noticed.’ our thoughts are like the weather -- they’re just passing through. in our practice, there’s no need to cling to them, no need to see them as totally solid. they are thoughts, after all; they’re not the present moment. let them pass through the big sky of your mind.”  

mere unbeing

excerpts from housekeeping by marilynne robinson

"well, that's fine," sylvie said. "i'm glad to have a chance to talk to you. you're so quiet, it's hard to know what you think." sylvie had stood up, and we began to walk toward home.

"i suppose i don't know what i think." this confession embarrassed me. it was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that i often seemed invisible -- incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. it seemed to me that i made no impact on the world, and that in exchange i was privileged to watch it unawares. but my allusion to this feeling of ghostliness sounded peculiar, and sweat started all over my body, convicting me on the spot of gross corporeality.

"well, maybe that will change," sylvie said. we walked a while without speaking. "maybe it won't." i dropped a step behind and watched her face. she always spoke to me in the voice of an adult dispensing wisdom. i wanted to ask her if she knew what she thought, and if so, what the experience of that sort of knowledge was like, and if not, whether she, too, felt ghostly, as i imagined she must. i waited for sylvie to say, "you're like me." i thought she might say, "you're like your mother." i feared and suspected that sylvie and i were of a kind, and waited for her to claim me, but she would not.

*          *           *

the quilt was warm and soft around me arms and shoulders and my ears. i fell asleep where i sat, with the cup of brimstone tea in my lap, held carefully in both hands so as not to spill. sleep made one sensation of the heat in my palms and the sugar on my tongue. i slept precariously upright, aware of my bare feet, hearing the wood in the stove crackle. more words passed between sylvie and lucille, but i could not make them out. it seemed to me that whatever lucille said, sylvie sang back to her, but that was dreaming.

so this is all death is, i thought. sylvie and lucille do not notice, or perhaps they do not object. sylvie, in fact, brought the coffeepot and warmed the cup in my hands, and arranged the quilt, which had slid from my shoulder a little. i was surprised and touched by her solicitude. she knows, i thought, and i felt like laughing. sylvie is sitting beside the stove, flipping through old magazines, waiting for my mother. i began listening for the sound of the door opening, but after a very long time my head fell sharply to one side and i could not lift it up again. then i realized that my mouth was open. all this time the room was filling with strangers, and there was no way for me to tell sylvie that the tea had tipped out of my hands and wet my lap. i knew that my decay, now obvious and accelerating, should somehow be concealed for decency's sake, but sylvie would not look up from her magazine. i began to hope for oblivion, and then i rolled out of my chair.

sylvie looked up from her magazine. "did you have a good sleep?" she asked.

"all right," i said. i picked up the cup and brushed at the dampness of my pant legs.

"sleep is best when you're really tired," she said. "you don't just sleep. you die."

*         *            *

of my conception i know only what you know of yours. it occurred in darkness and i was unconsenting. i (and that slenderest word is too gross for the rare thing i was then) walked forever through reachless oblivion, in the mood of one smelling night-blooming flowers, and suddenly -- my ravishers left their traces in me, male and female, and over the months i rounded, grew heavy, until the scandal could no longer be concealed and oblivion expelled me. but this i have in common with all my kind. by some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it. so they seal the door against our returning.

then there is the matter of my mother's abandonment of me. again, this is the common experience. they walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. the only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.

types

from the dance of anger by harriet lerner

PURSUERS

• react to anxiety by seeking greater togetherness in a relationship
• place a high value on talking things out and expressing feelings, and believe others should do the same
• feels rejected and take it personally when someone close to them wants more time and space alone or away from the relationship
• tend to pursue harder and then coldly withdraw when an important person seeks distance
• may negatively label themselves as 'too dependent' or 'too demanding' in a relationship
• tend to criticize their partner as someone who can't handle feelings or tolerate closeness

 DISTANCERS

• seeks emotional distance or physical space when stress is high
• consider themselves to be self-reliant and private persons -- more 'do-it-yourselfers' than help-seekers
• have difficulty showing their needy, vulnerable, and dependent sides
• receive such labels as 'emotionally unavailable,' 'withholding,' 'unable to deal with feelings' from significant others
• manage anxiety in personal relationships by intensifying work-related projects
• may cut off a relationship entirely when things get intense, rather than hanging in and working it out
• opens up most freely when they are not pushed or pursued

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UNDERFUNCTIONERS

• tend to have several areas where they just can't get organized
• become less competent under stress, thus inviting others to take over
• tend to develop physical or emotional symptoms when stress is high in either the family or the work situation
• may become the focus of family gossip, worry, or concern
• earn such labels as the 'patient,' the 'fragile one,' the 'sick one,' the 'problem,' the 'irresponsible one'
• have difficulty showing their strong, competent side to intimate others

OVERFUNCTIONERS

• know what's best not only for themselves but for others as well
• move in quickly to advise, rescue, and take over when stress hits
• have difficulty staying out and allowing others to struggle with their own problems
• avoid worrying about their own personal goals and problems by focusing on others
• have difficulty sharing their own vulnerable, underfunctioning side, especially with those people who are viewed as having problems
• may be labeled the person who is 'always reliable' or 'always together'