Hi Sean,
Jasmine tells me you have written to her. She has gleaned that you indicate a wish to remain included within the group of Mission Saxicolous, for which I thank you.
This isn’t, however, a Mission Saxicolous email, but a personal one.
Having not heard from you for quite some while again it has now become clear that the necklace must be returned to you so that you can obtain a refund for it.
I would like to thank you very much for the thoughtfulness of your gift and to assure you that this is fully appreciated by me. The remembrance of that will not be lost by the return of the necklace to the shop from where you bought it. It will be lost by its not being returned. I am happy to accept the scented candle and the dream catcher. I am also keenly aware that I have a bag in my room with a card and gift for your own birthday which I would like you to have.
I am not very curious about the latest reasons for which you found yourself burning up with resentment instead of ‘turning the other cheek’ since (certainly up until your bizarre choice to avoid me as far as possible during the week of my birthday without this choice creating clear and critical social comment and then, on my birthday drinking several cans of beer without pause and then leaving the party before food or cake and without appropriate goodbyes to the other guests) your reasons for becoming hurt and angry with me since January and hitherto the present time have been consistently ungrounded in relation to me and your convictions of them nonetheless drew from you a range of what it might be fair to describe as unkind and even ugly behaviours. The most extreme of these was also actively frightening to me. I am not OK with physical violence of any kind. I do not accept that ANY perception of aggrievance justifies physical aggression of any kind. As it happens your excuse, in the eyes of any witness had there been one, would have sounded terrifyingly lame. This may or may not be the first time you have struck out in a rage against an innocent person because of issues that go back into your childhood and adolescence. As a man in your thirties you cannot conceivably continue to be excused or consider yourself excusable by reference to childhood slights, hurts or bullyings. What you do about the issues that seem to lie behind your anger issues is up to you. I fervently hope that you choose to find a way to address them that neither finds you hiding away from others for fear of them erupting nor deceiving yourself that you don’t have a serious problem, thus rendering you at risk at some point of striking out at the wrong person or with unforeseen and unintendedly serious consequences such that you find yourself as a defendant in court.
You have a great deal going for you by way of positives. What I have seen surface- and what you must, some part of you, have seen surface- in you since January is stuff that has utterly thrown me and frankly shocked me at times. It hasn’t been the ‘Sean’ I know. I believe that you may have ‘fallen’ for me more as a mother substitute than as a partner and in that context what we have been seeing is your regressive separation anxieties, attachment anxieties etc as well as any of the matters of paternal error or shortcomings, or adolescent peer group pressures and aggressions that you have spoken so much about.
Mission Saxicolous could be a group in which you could heal through some of these hurts and wounds of the past. On the other hand it is not a group that includes people who claim not to suffer or not to have suffered from mental distress on the grounds that they wouldn’t want to be seen in the same box as those with ‘labels’ of such a sort. Mission Saxicolous would regard such a position as a position of internalised stigma and discrimination. Those who regard themselves as ‘carers’ of other people who experience challenges of mental distress but do not identify and acknowledge their own challenges of mental distress would not be appropriately placed within our group. May I offer you an example? Swearing at someone and then knocking them clean over, backwards, and then later comparing them to ‘the anti-christ’, with not one shred of evidence to support such an accusation and much evidence to falsify it available to see- and no doubt maintaining such a paranoid idea over a significant stretch of time- this is a piece of conduct that were I to exhibit it would have me sectioned under the Mental Health Act for months. I have never in my life acted with such aggression toward a fellow human being as you acted to me on that day you pushed me. Moreover, whilst it seems I did develop some paranoid fears in relation to Darren’s relationship with Rachel and Louise at some points during my marriage, these were based on some worrying evidence of abnormal behaviours towards them on his part and I didn’t, even as I was being sectioned, ever advance my fears with as much conviction as you seemed to advance your fears of my ‘moral deficiency’ and ‘anti-christ’ stuff. I am not saying that you are ‘mentally ill’, any more than I am mentally ill- and you are well aware of my well-placed disdain for psychiatry’s misconceptualisations. It would appear to me that you do not, either, suffer from, e.g. wide repertoires of emotional liability such as I experience in a similar way to other individuals who attract descriptions of ‘manic depression’ for example. What I am saying is that you suffer inside yourself from a difficulty in appropriately identifying other peoples’ motives and expressions at times and that this difficulty stems from obsessive anxieties in relation to your ‘pride’, ‘self-esteem’ and ‘self-respect’.
I can’t offer to be your therapist. We have been friends for too long, and having crossed, for a season, the threshold between platonic and intimate friendship, it would be both entirely inappropriate and fully pointless even to try to play that part for you.
I beg you to go and talk honestly with your brother. What is honest to you may well be different from what would be honest to me. Because you may not see yourself as others see you at points where your conduct doesn’t flatter you, and/or at points where your judgement is affected by arrested development issues.
I might suggest that you share this email with your brother. Make sure he knows what happened when you knocked me to the floor of my kitchen. Don’t be ashamed of anything, don’t hide anything. Open up about the very things you most fear he might judge you for or feel disapproving of you for. Because guilt and shame are the most poisonous emotions when they lead to fear and secrecy. When you admit your problems you’re halfway to solving them.
Sean, no-one can deny that you had a challenging childhood and youth. Your challenge now is to rise above that and not to use it as an excuse for the rest of your life for temper losses, self-limitations, poor judgements and self-deceptions.
I very much hope that you will soon be getting to the point where you feel quite shocked and horrified to think about how appallingly, on occasion, you treated a very dear friend since January this year as it finally dawns on you that the dear friend concerned actually did nothing whatsoever to justify any of that treatment.
If and when you can get to that point, and if and when you can find someone in whom to confide about your self-discoveries- I suggest your brother because I can see all too clearly that your brother loves you not only as a brother but as a guardian of your best interests- then you will be well on the way to turning what must have been a very difficult and painful year for you into a genuine, life changing opportunity in personal development :-)
And thus it will have been ‘all for the best in the best of all possible worlds’.
Life is a learning curve, Sean. Sometimes it’s a steeper climb than at other times, but then you find a plateau from which you can look down at how far you’ve travelled, take a little rest and celebrate how far you’ve come....before checking the map or noticing a flower, or whatever contingency occurs to cause you to move yourself again. As long as you keep your eyes to the light, up not down, forward not back, then you’re going in the right direction.
I shall always be a friend to your best interests and your best self. I don’t reject you as a person or as a friend because of your behaviour this year: I do, however, need to point that behaviour out to you and share with you that I take it most seriously. For you personally I take it seriously because it is as a partial symptomatology of inner difficulties that you have with the ‘outside world’ and your place within it. As a fellow human being I take it seriously because I have observed your disinclination to take responsibility for your own unacceptable behaviour by reference to your childhood and youth, and by reference to imagined slights or ‘faults’ on my part and so forth.
You have a wonderful capacity to laugh and see humour in the world and I like that. There is also a time for seriousness. This is a time for you to take yourself seriously. To accept that you are not any longer a little boy being fed through a window or belittled by a thoughtless father or fellow school pupil. You are a grown man fully responsible for your actions in thought, word and deed. As such you must live, as such you are accountable.
It is not for me to forgive you your profound injustices of betrayal of my friendship to and with you. It is for you to forgive yourself. I can’t see how on earth you can do that while you aspire to adhere to Christian ideals yet find it impossible to do so, and despite experiencing a great desire to do so.
This is in fact the first time I have chosen to properly assert myself toward you with regard to any of your behaviours and attitudes that I have had misgivings about. This is because in my life I follow the principle ‘swift to bless, slow to chide’ both with my children and all I encounter. The only person I swap this principle with is myself- with myself I am swift to chide and slow to praise. That’s because my continual purpose is to be the best possible version of myself that I am capable of being. As you know I am far from blind to my many faults; hopefully you still have the list of my many faults which I wrote down for you not so long ago as a ready reference for you. Add to that long-winded if it isn’t on there already.....
I do pride myself on one thing. I pride myself on being a good friend. A good friend as far as I’m concerned is someone who looks for the best in the other whilst not being blind to the worst. A good friend is an encourager more often than a critic and only a critic when necessary and even then only in order to be helpful. A good friend is someone who never gives up on the other’s best and greatest potential even when they are giving up on themselves. A good friend neither deserts their friends nor clings to them. That’s my definition of a good friend. Maybe it’s a description of the kind of friend I most like to have. Maybe it’s not a good friend in relation to some peoples’ friendship needs.
Thus as far as I’m concerned I have been and remain a good friend in relation to you, Howard, Larry and many others, men and women who I haven’t had intimate relations with, who have left my life for reasons of their own. I don’t judge them or, after a while, miss them. Their absence, your absence from my life doesn’t mean I cease to regard myself as a friend of theirs, it simply means it opens up spaces in my life to support and entertain new people along the way.
I do miss Larry. I do regret letting Larry down. I do wish that I had had the maturity and insight to avert your ‘announcement’ in January- and beyond- so that I wouldn’t have found myself, all too soon after Larry was informed that his poor mother was dying, disclosing to him our partnership and hurting his feelings so deeply and leaving him feeling so very abandoned emotionally at such a very very important time in his life. I do regret that your insecurity meant so much to you that while continually talking about how you cared about Larry’s feelings you placed me under such pressure to inform him about us by threatening to visit him yourself. This I regret. Because in this, because Larry loved his mother so dearly and was already suffering so acutely the grief of her loss, my part at that point, indeed by allowing myself to do anything other than commit to his needs for a true friend this year I did in fact fail him as a friend most profoundly. The girls miss him too. That part of it is all most regrettable and I only have myself to blame for this part. I cannot take back time thus can never make it up to him. This will remain a life-long regret of mine. Because quite apart from priding myself on my qualities as a good friend and the stab in that pride that all this delivers, more, much more important is that I have deeply hurt a friend I loved and this I’m finding impossible to forgive myself for.
That’s all. Thanks for your time Sean. If you read it.
All the best,
Penelope
Jasmine tells me you have written to her. She has gleaned that you indicate a wish to remain included within the group of Mission Saxicolous, for which I thank you.
This isn’t, however, a Mission Saxicolous email, but a personal one.
Having not heard from you for quite some while again it has now become clear that the necklace must be returned to you so that you can obtain a refund for it.
I would like to thank you very much for the thoughtfulness of your gift and to assure you that this is fully appreciated by me. The remembrance of that will not be lost by the return of the necklace to the shop from where you bought it. It will be lost by its not being returned. I am happy to accept the scented candle and the dream catcher. I am also keenly aware that I have a bag in my room with a card and gift for your own birthday which I would like you to have.
I am not very curious about the latest reasons for which you found yourself burning up with resentment instead of ‘turning the other cheek’ since (certainly up until your bizarre choice to avoid me as far as possible during the week of my birthday without this choice creating clear and critical social comment and then, on my birthday drinking several cans of beer without pause and then leaving the party before food or cake and without appropriate goodbyes to the other guests) your reasons for becoming hurt and angry with me since January and hitherto the present time have been consistently ungrounded in relation to me and your convictions of them nonetheless drew from you a range of what it might be fair to describe as unkind and even ugly behaviours. The most extreme of these was also actively frightening to me. I am not OK with physical violence of any kind. I do not accept that ANY perception of aggrievance justifies physical aggression of any kind. As it happens your excuse, in the eyes of any witness had there been one, would have sounded terrifyingly lame. This may or may not be the first time you have struck out in a rage against an innocent person because of issues that go back into your childhood and adolescence. As a man in your thirties you cannot conceivably continue to be excused or consider yourself excusable by reference to childhood slights, hurts or bullyings. What you do about the issues that seem to lie behind your anger issues is up to you. I fervently hope that you choose to find a way to address them that neither finds you hiding away from others for fear of them erupting nor deceiving yourself that you don’t have a serious problem, thus rendering you at risk at some point of striking out at the wrong person or with unforeseen and unintendedly serious consequences such that you find yourself as a defendant in court.
You have a great deal going for you by way of positives. What I have seen surface- and what you must, some part of you, have seen surface- in you since January is stuff that has utterly thrown me and frankly shocked me at times. It hasn’t been the ‘Sean’ I know. I believe that you may have ‘fallen’ for me more as a mother substitute than as a partner and in that context what we have been seeing is your regressive separation anxieties, attachment anxieties etc as well as any of the matters of paternal error or shortcomings, or adolescent peer group pressures and aggressions that you have spoken so much about.
Mission Saxicolous could be a group in which you could heal through some of these hurts and wounds of the past. On the other hand it is not a group that includes people who claim not to suffer or not to have suffered from mental distress on the grounds that they wouldn’t want to be seen in the same box as those with ‘labels’ of such a sort. Mission Saxicolous would regard such a position as a position of internalised stigma and discrimination. Those who regard themselves as ‘carers’ of other people who experience challenges of mental distress but do not identify and acknowledge their own challenges of mental distress would not be appropriately placed within our group. May I offer you an example? Swearing at someone and then knocking them clean over, backwards, and then later comparing them to ‘the anti-christ’, with not one shred of evidence to support such an accusation and much evidence to falsify it available to see- and no doubt maintaining such a paranoid idea over a significant stretch of time- this is a piece of conduct that were I to exhibit it would have me sectioned under the Mental Health Act for months. I have never in my life acted with such aggression toward a fellow human being as you acted to me on that day you pushed me. Moreover, whilst it seems I did develop some paranoid fears in relation to Darren’s relationship with Rachel and Louise at some points during my marriage, these were based on some worrying evidence of abnormal behaviours towards them on his part and I didn’t, even as I was being sectioned, ever advance my fears with as much conviction as you seemed to advance your fears of my ‘moral deficiency’ and ‘anti-christ’ stuff. I am not saying that you are ‘mentally ill’, any more than I am mentally ill- and you are well aware of my well-placed disdain for psychiatry’s misconceptualisations. It would appear to me that you do not, either, suffer from, e.g. wide repertoires of emotional liability such as I experience in a similar way to other individuals who attract descriptions of ‘manic depression’ for example. What I am saying is that you suffer inside yourself from a difficulty in appropriately identifying other peoples’ motives and expressions at times and that this difficulty stems from obsessive anxieties in relation to your ‘pride’, ‘self-esteem’ and ‘self-respect’.
I can’t offer to be your therapist. We have been friends for too long, and having crossed, for a season, the threshold between platonic and intimate friendship, it would be both entirely inappropriate and fully pointless even to try to play that part for you.
I beg you to go and talk honestly with your brother. What is honest to you may well be different from what would be honest to me. Because you may not see yourself as others see you at points where your conduct doesn’t flatter you, and/or at points where your judgement is affected by arrested development issues.
I might suggest that you share this email with your brother. Make sure he knows what happened when you knocked me to the floor of my kitchen. Don’t be ashamed of anything, don’t hide anything. Open up about the very things you most fear he might judge you for or feel disapproving of you for. Because guilt and shame are the most poisonous emotions when they lead to fear and secrecy. When you admit your problems you’re halfway to solving them.
Sean, no-one can deny that you had a challenging childhood and youth. Your challenge now is to rise above that and not to use it as an excuse for the rest of your life for temper losses, self-limitations, poor judgements and self-deceptions.
I very much hope that you will soon be getting to the point where you feel quite shocked and horrified to think about how appallingly, on occasion, you treated a very dear friend since January this year as it finally dawns on you that the dear friend concerned actually did nothing whatsoever to justify any of that treatment.
If and when you can get to that point, and if and when you can find someone in whom to confide about your self-discoveries- I suggest your brother because I can see all too clearly that your brother loves you not only as a brother but as a guardian of your best interests- then you will be well on the way to turning what must have been a very difficult and painful year for you into a genuine, life changing opportunity in personal development :-)
And thus it will have been ‘all for the best in the best of all possible worlds’.
Life is a learning curve, Sean. Sometimes it’s a steeper climb than at other times, but then you find a plateau from which you can look down at how far you’ve travelled, take a little rest and celebrate how far you’ve come....before checking the map or noticing a flower, or whatever contingency occurs to cause you to move yourself again. As long as you keep your eyes to the light, up not down, forward not back, then you’re going in the right direction.
I shall always be a friend to your best interests and your best self. I don’t reject you as a person or as a friend because of your behaviour this year: I do, however, need to point that behaviour out to you and share with you that I take it most seriously. For you personally I take it seriously because it is as a partial symptomatology of inner difficulties that you have with the ‘outside world’ and your place within it. As a fellow human being I take it seriously because I have observed your disinclination to take responsibility for your own unacceptable behaviour by reference to your childhood and youth, and by reference to imagined slights or ‘faults’ on my part and so forth.
You have a wonderful capacity to laugh and see humour in the world and I like that. There is also a time for seriousness. This is a time for you to take yourself seriously. To accept that you are not any longer a little boy being fed through a window or belittled by a thoughtless father or fellow school pupil. You are a grown man fully responsible for your actions in thought, word and deed. As such you must live, as such you are accountable.
It is not for me to forgive you your profound injustices of betrayal of my friendship to and with you. It is for you to forgive yourself. I can’t see how on earth you can do that while you aspire to adhere to Christian ideals yet find it impossible to do so, and despite experiencing a great desire to do so.
This is in fact the first time I have chosen to properly assert myself toward you with regard to any of your behaviours and attitudes that I have had misgivings about. This is because in my life I follow the principle ‘swift to bless, slow to chide’ both with my children and all I encounter. The only person I swap this principle with is myself- with myself I am swift to chide and slow to praise. That’s because my continual purpose is to be the best possible version of myself that I am capable of being. As you know I am far from blind to my many faults; hopefully you still have the list of my many faults which I wrote down for you not so long ago as a ready reference for you. Add to that long-winded if it isn’t on there already.....
I do pride myself on one thing. I pride myself on being a good friend. A good friend as far as I’m concerned is someone who looks for the best in the other whilst not being blind to the worst. A good friend is an encourager more often than a critic and only a critic when necessary and even then only in order to be helpful. A good friend is someone who never gives up on the other’s best and greatest potential even when they are giving up on themselves. A good friend neither deserts their friends nor clings to them. That’s my definition of a good friend. Maybe it’s a description of the kind of friend I most like to have. Maybe it’s not a good friend in relation to some peoples’ friendship needs.
Thus as far as I’m concerned I have been and remain a good friend in relation to you, Howard, Larry and many others, men and women who I haven’t had intimate relations with, who have left my life for reasons of their own. I don’t judge them or, after a while, miss them. Their absence, your absence from my life doesn’t mean I cease to regard myself as a friend of theirs, it simply means it opens up spaces in my life to support and entertain new people along the way.
I do miss Larry. I do regret letting Larry down. I do wish that I had had the maturity and insight to avert your ‘announcement’ in January- and beyond- so that I wouldn’t have found myself, all too soon after Larry was informed that his poor mother was dying, disclosing to him our partnership and hurting his feelings so deeply and leaving him feeling so very abandoned emotionally at such a very very important time in his life. I do regret that your insecurity meant so much to you that while continually talking about how you cared about Larry’s feelings you placed me under such pressure to inform him about us by threatening to visit him yourself. This I regret. Because in this, because Larry loved his mother so dearly and was already suffering so acutely the grief of her loss, my part at that point, indeed by allowing myself to do anything other than commit to his needs for a true friend this year I did in fact fail him as a friend most profoundly. The girls miss him too. That part of it is all most regrettable and I only have myself to blame for this part. I cannot take back time thus can never make it up to him. This will remain a life-long regret of mine. Because quite apart from priding myself on my qualities as a good friend and the stab in that pride that all this delivers, more, much more important is that I have deeply hurt a friend I loved and this I’m finding impossible to forgive myself for.
That’s all. Thanks for your time Sean. If you read it.
All the best,
Penelope