A rescued thread from Twitter, originally posted in March, 2022
An interesting observation from a session today: Cruelty evolves from fear, because if one cannot name a fear, all unknowns become a threat. And selfishness evolves from anxiety, because anxiety’s universalized unnamed fears limit the ability to use theory of mind skills.
Cruelty does not have to be an action, and it doesn’t start as an action. “I hope anti-vaxxers get sick (or die)”, glee at superspreader events, satisfaction with red state death rates? Those are all cruelty without any action, because they start with dehumanization. And the frequency of those expressions is rising.
Yes, everyone gets frustrated and engages in schadenfreude from time to time. The more tired, the less recharging we have? The more likely these feelings escape containment, either from our mouths or just into our heads.
The ability to talk oneself down from this type of angry cliff is what divides a somewhat dysfunctional coping mechanism like schadenfreude from interpersonal rupture that breaks relationships.
It’s the differences between being hangry at 5:15 pm after a long day, and letting that moment of being hangry become a grudge.
It’s also the difference between being able to say, “I overreacted and I’m sorry,” versus “You deserved it.”
Theory of mind skills are the skillset founded in the ability to understand what others are feeling and why they’re behaving as they are. It’s a skillset, not innate, and it gets harder with trauma, because theory of mind skills require a level of filtering, which always gets harder as we tire.
Our filters can give out in different ways — if they erode, everything hits us and we hit overwhelm very fast, or they clog up and become walls and nothing gets through, or we shut down and go to flattened affect and apathy. Or all, depending on situation.
All of this is extremely hard to self-monitor accurately, because emotions are a parallel processing system that is extremely efficient and very good at overriding all of the cognitive tools we build.
The best tool for self-monitoring appears to be a daily bullet journal habit, or a self-care app, and these matter even more when we’re very, very tired.
Nobody’s daily assessment questions are ever exactly the same, but having 5-10 items you answer daily with a couple of words becomes useful in days to weeks, not months to years.
Questions like
- Did I eat?
- Did I drink enough water?
- Did I take my meds?
- What was good?
- What was irritating?
- What did I do well?
- What didn’t work?
Because there really is a One Weird Trick here: the more you check in with yourself honestly, the easier it gets. And if you do it when you’re in the range of okay (surviving, not necessarily thriving) to not-great (struggling), you build warning systems and habits for when the feces hits the air mover.
And that keeps you from a shame-anger-fear cycle. It often limits lashing out before the lashing out happens, and with practice, it can stall out an anxiety or depression cycle before it becomes loathing and despair.
Because that’s the goal — not Shiny Happy People all the time, but to maintain a good homeostasis where we do not burn through all the empathy trying to get through the day.
While I only have eloquent, super-geniuses for clients, there is a chance that the original phrasing was closer to something like, “When I’m scared and exhausted, I can get really fuckin’ mean, and when I’m anxious, everything becomes about me and I stop being able to see other people, and I have got to STOP DOING THIS SHIT. So how do I do that?”
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