On Jan 19, 5:34 pm, Chris Jenkins <[email protected]> wrote:
> Do you find (given your statement regarding bringing shadow with you) that
> you encounter what you perceive to be personal attacks ("verbal onslaughts")
> no matter where you go online?
Almost always, and not only online, but in Real Life too, starting
right from infancy. It's actually easier to enumerate the situations
where I /don't/ get attacked1 Oddly, I was scarcely bullied at school
(and I am weedy and nerdy, therefore it wasn't that I was myself a
bully!), whereas it seems that a large proportion of people, perhaps a
majority, do get bullied, often severely. And I don't suffer badly
from attacks over at the BBC Radio 4 and Radio 7 forums, but perhaps
that is only because they are very strictly (indeed, overly strictly,
and very irrationally) moderated. And I tend to be pretty much OK in
one-to-one situations. And most of whatever tribulations I suffered in
group situations between the years 1971 and 1979 are easily
attributable to some sort of unspecified and undiagnosed personality
disorder (on my part, I mean); but after that, it gets really
complicated and weird, and no such purely psychological explanation -
however vague and elastic, and no matter how much unconscious
individual or group psychology is taken into account - fits the
'facts'. (Of course, there is absolutely no reason why you or any
other stranger on the Net should be expected to take my word for
this. However, I am not lying, and I am also clear that I am not
deceiving myself.)
Being, as I've said, for all intents an atheist between the ages of
about 8 and 54, and having no system of belief in anything either
supernatural or paranormal, and being very much inclined to believe in
psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in general, I naturally inclined, for
decades, to seek for the personal fault in myself that was leading me
into so much persecution (for want of a better word), but "with the
best will in the world" (as I put it in the thread about the Niebuhr
prayer), I cannot find it. I find plenty of faults, of course, but
none that either explains or justifies the repeated pattern of verbal
assaults. Also, although I have just used the word "pattern", there
is no fixed pattern whatsoever to what happens, except for one broad
aspect, which is that those in positions of power or authority (in the
present case, that would be you and the other moderators) never
intervene in a way which resolves the conflict, and in most cases any
such intervention only exacerbates it. (I fear you will think that
with this comment, in particular, I am deliberately stirring the poop,
but I am only trying to be as honest about others as I already try to
be about myself, which I realise is uncomfortable, to say the least.)
This is going on rather long, and it's embarrassing and nerve-
wracking, but there are at least two more things I must say. One is
that several experienced consultant psychiatrists, with between them
many decades of clinical experience, who evidently all knew the
diagnostic manuals inside-out and back-to-front, and who had plenty of
real world face-to-face clinical experience with actual patients, and
who were not (at least, most of them weren't) dogmatic about the
medical model of 'mental illness', and who had empathy and respect for
me, have frankly confessed bafflement at my case, and have either said
that there is no clear diagnosis, or have tentatively offered several
wildly different, speculative, and conflicting diagnoses. All agreed
that I was highly intelligent, polite, had good rapport, and was not
psychotic. At least one mentioned aspects of Asperger's syndrome or
high functioning autism, but any such neurological diagnosis seems far
from clear, either to them or to me, although I do score 37/50 on what
I believe is a well-respected but informal screening questionnaire for
autism, on which the mean or median for AS/HFA is 35/50. I have in
fact just posted an enquiry to a Usenet newsgroup for autistic people,
in an effort to find out if some of my difficulties here at Minds Eye
might be explicable in such terms. Would I run into similar conflicts
if I were dealing with people who were autistic, or is this something
between me and 'nornal' people only?
I could (of course!) go on at much greater length, because in 57 years
things can get VERY complicated and VERY weird, but I think (and hope)
that this will do as a reply to your question. I had perhaps better
add that what has been happening here recently is relatively mild (and
has been offset by the interesting and friendly responses that I have
also received here), but I have been unusually persistent, so it has
gone on for longer than it might usually have done, and the
cumulative effect has been extremely distressing, with the result
that I could scarcely sleep last night. But I have been through FAR
worse (both online and in Real Life), and I have not yet despaired of
this place, although I am still inclining towards the view that it
might all be a bit too much for me here.
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