I consider him too reactive to interact with. I don't know what will set him off around me. He used to become passive aggressive against what I consider little provocation (see previous posts for more on what that means), and now he has discovered how to be aggressive aggressive as well. I think when he feels threatened, for whatever reason, he doesn't have a rational response. He becomes reactive. I discussed it with him a while back, telling him I think he doesn't realize how passive aggressive he is because he is often so passive he can misconstrue it (or these days, misrepresent it). Interestingly, that conversation went well, and I find it ironic that it's as he has moved onto this course of "life mastery" that he has become more and more reactive (though a friend has pointed out he has always been so reactive, it's just that The Game has given him an outlet).
As a side note, I find it interesting that his life has taken on many aspects of The Game's main character, Style, including physical appearance. I don't want to oversimplify, because it's not as though he is living in Hollywood with a bunch of other pick-up artists, but it seems as far as his addictions and relationships go, it is as though he took Style's journey as shown in the book and is now using that as a script for his life.
I've encountered this kind of behavior before and for a long time wondered if me moving away from emotionally volatile people was an indication of my own insecurity. As those close to me know, I went through a period of self-imposed extreme emotional distance. Because of my journey to learn how to connect with people, I wondered if distancing myself from those that showed strong emotional reactions was another consequence of my habit to distance myself from any emotion at all.
But I realize that is not so. It's reactive people that bother me. Reactive people that become so fueled by their emotion they lose self-control.
I am not talking about passion. Passion fuels our lives. Passion wakes us up and keeps us going in the face of adversity. Passion causes us to take control of ours lives. I am talking about that powerful mix of rationale and emotion, the mind to form a plan and the heart to get us moving.
As my good friend Gamemaster has taught me, emotions are a part of our lives. They are neither right or wrong, often can't be explained, and except in an indirect sense, we rarely have any immediate control over how we feel.
What we do have control over is what we choose to do with those emotions.
For example, in an early conversation about getting married, I heard our relationship might not work out if we didn't agree to get married, so I reacted to my feeling of loneliness and agreed to get married rather than face the threat of being alone. It's so weird how being reactive can seem so rational! Talk to me at that time and would have told you I was confident I could find someone else. I would choose to marry this person because I loved her, all the while denying I was reacting on such a deeply emotional level I could not separate my thoughts from my emotions.
Or, my brother forcing me to live in an apartment with no utilities because he felt uncomfortable. I talked to him the next day, asked him to reconsider since that left me roughly a week to find a new place to live, and he told me I created the situation, so it was my problem. (He later relented to forcing me out halfway through the month instead of the beginning, but LOL, 15 days or 30 days, I did not see a difference, considered him too volatile to remain around, so left of my own volition ahead of schedule).
Or, when I left, I told him I needed distance from him. But upon reading blog posts that I conclude he felt threatened by, he took it upon himself to break that distance and post again and again to bring me around to me what he called the Truth. For a blog post! It is my opinion a blog is pretty much diatribe and shouldn't be reacted to with any extreme response.
That's all.
2 comments:
Nicely written. I kind of disagree about your last comment, though; if a blog entry is written in such a way as to be vindictive or intentionally misrepresentative, I think it's only fair for the person who's the subject of it to respond with their own opinion, if that's what they feel they need to do.
I think what is inappropriate about your brother's reaction is that a) he disrespected your request not to interact with you, and b) there was no intentional malice for him to react to. Both these elements show a callousness towards the feelings of others that makes me uncomfortable.
I do agree that a person's blog is their opinion. If one is so insecure that one needs to try and force someone else's musings into accordance with their opinions, there are deeper issues than just blogging that need to be dealt with anyway.
But anyway, I just wanted to tell you I'm glad you're being so open and self-reflective about your feelings and thoughts. :D *mwah*
I think you've got a point about the reactiveness as well, and I think it ties into a larger issue of framing. If you're not willing to accept that your life may not have particular elements in it, I think you can't really be ready for those things to begin with.
If you can't accept that sometimes you will be absolutely, unqualifiedly wrong, then you are not in a position to ever be right. If you're not willing to accept that you may not get married, you won't be ready to do that either (as we know from personal experience!).
I always get a little something out of your entries. :D
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