What do I get out of it? I'm being a net positive by helping others. Not a waste of oxygen. I'm assuaging any residual guilts. I'm taking joy in others' relief or happiness.
By pleasing others, even at the cost of subverting myself or my other wants, I make things safer for myself -- others are less likely to plan to humiliate or attack me in some fashion if I've been nice to them. (see recent journal entry for a recent insight :). Safety, and maintaining control of the process...
What's wrong with "self-denial while helping others-in-need" as an ethic? For me it feels like almost a matter of [...] Safety, and maintaining control...
Tyeing back several threads at once here... above is the best summation of your situation as I see it.
Pretty much all of these actions come across to me as control issues, likely motivated by a want of safety. Your descriptions of fear of rejection and internalization of requests-declined as personal rejection fit my model of this very well; the sense of obligation and urgency asserted in the few requests that you do make while clearly not looking after your own wants and needs among friendly company.
It also helps me describe the difficulty (that at least) I am faced with by the weight of your requests - I want to be your friend. I think you are a smart and interesting individual who has neat things to contribute to a social setting. But I am reluctant to manage (and refuse to suffer) unasked-for controlling behaviour from my friends. This is an attitude that I note in many of our common community.
as a start - and very obviously influenced by the particulars of this conversation... I would suggest working to: * decouple others' failure to accept your requests as personal rejection. (Or, as a starting point, do not discount in your interactions with others that this may be the position they are working from.) * ask for what you want from others * broaden your requests to fit your expectations * limit your expectations to fit your requests * express at face value in your requests of others the importance of your request * accept at face value the importance others are expressing when making requests * actively choose to do the things you do - especially the requests that you accept, or decline * consider /your/ alternatives when making your choices
but on whole, I think this distills to:
deal plainly with other people - by being up front and honest both informationally and emotionally
In some sense, it sounds like I'd need to *not care* at some level whether a request was accepted or refused... simply to go on either way without an emotional charge. This happens at work for me, but hasn't in my personal life.
* broaden your requests to fit your expectations
Wouldn't it be instead "narrow your requests to fit reasonable expectations"? If I expect a rejected request as a default, or a highly-constrained acceptance at best, then I'd think that I'd need to work on asking more often, but for less.
* accept at face value the importance others are expressing when making requests
Stop reading-between-the-lines so much, perhaps? Inferring?
In some sense, it sounds like I'd need to *not care* at some level whether a request was accepted or refused... simply to go on either way without an emotional charge. This happens at work for me, but hasn't in my personal life.
YesYESYESYESYES!
Wouldn't it be instead "narrow your requests to fit reasonable expectations"? If I expect a rejected request as a default, or a highly-constrained acceptance at best, then I'd think that I'd need to work on asking more often, but for less.
Nope. NONONONONO.
That way lies the trappings of the approach that I'm recommending against. Reducing requests to meet expectations contributes to the overall lowering of expectations. If you tell yourself "I couldn't possibly ask for foo, who would ever go along with that?" how soon do you get to expecting that nobody would. And from there, how quickly do you start further limiting your requests. "Well, obviously, if nobody would go for Foo, Bar isn't far off, either."
And if you have expectations that you do not express then how do you expect them to be met?
In asking to sit next to someone - are you asking for a place to park your butt, or for some amount of companionship? Do you expect that you will be significantly more pleased with a "yes" than a "how about..." answer? Than a "no" answer? Then perhaps you should express those expectations in your request. Maybe it requires an iterative approach to get the more subtle bit communicated.
But really - the core point here is to make the requests big enough to fill up and meet your expectations and not the other way around. And if you don't expect a reasonable person to accept a request, you should include that too. If you expect to be disappointed if your request goes unanswered, perhaps there's more there to be requested? See where I'm going with that?
Stop reading-between-the-lines so much, perhaps? Inferring?
Pretty much all of these actions come across to me as control issues, likely motivated by a want of safety. Your descriptions of fear of rejection and internalization of requests-declined as personal rejection fit my model of this very well; the sense of obligation and urgency asserted in the few requests that you do make while clearly not looking after your own wants and needs among friendly company.
Ding! Ding! Ding!
People who don't take care of themselves first require me to take care of them in order to be their friends. They're fragile and likely to break over the perceived slight of, say, a missed party invite or a forgotten hello.
I'm going to be a computer geek for just a moment, and suggest that the comparison of interrupt-driven versus polling device drivers is relevant. Polling device drivers are easy to implement; they ask the device (say, a mouse) over and over again, "got any data for me?". Interrupt ones are a bit more difficult to write; they require that the device be able to tell the system (via an interrupt) when it has data for the driver, and the driver needs to be able to asynchronously deal with the data. Interrupt-driven device drivers are much more efficient, though, because they don't have to spend all of their time asking.
I like my friends to be self-managing and our friendship to be scheduled or interrupt-driven. People who don't take care of themselves (and rarely ask for help) end up being polled devices -- in order to be their friends, I have to ask really frequently whether or not they're OK, and deal with occasional explosions. And yet, they often have a bizarre fallacy that it's somehow a less onerous set of assumptions on which to run a friendship than the simple idea that they'll ask me when they need attention/help/whatever -- either that, or they have a similar bizarre fallacy that that's how I run all of my friendships, and so not putting out that amount of effort for them indicates that I don't like them.
Both of these bizarre fallacies are functionally identical to having major control issues and wanting to control my behavior rather than being my friend. I assume the fallacies, both because I like to assume the best of people and because if a person I like is subject to the fallacies, there's some hope that a conversation like this will make them aware of the fallacies and so change the behavior.
But ultimately, in order to be friends with someone who acts like this, I have to accept behavior that is functionally identical to them having control issues. Most of the time, I like myself too much to agree to that.
Hmmm... that's interesting. Suppose one posited that the primary metric were to minimize the number of functional overhead cycles spent maintaining a given friendship. The end device is not aware of polling cycles, so that looks like zero cost... but the entity doing the polling is periodically expending m cycle-equivalents. In comparison, an interrupt cycle requires, say, 3m. (with handshake and confirmation and response)
If the overall objective is to minimize overheads, from the end device's viewpoint 3m>0, so interrupt processing looks onerous. But viewed more globally, 3m << m+m+m... = n.m over the typical time period between interrupts, so the occasional higher-cost interrupt is well worth not having to do repeated polling.
Am I understanding your premise? If so, then on a personal level, by trying to be as little bother as possible, I'd actually be *more*... (scratches head) Um.
Am I understanding your premise? If so, then on a personal level, by trying to be as little bother as possible, I'd actually be *more*... (scratches head) Um.
Exactly.
Remember the scene downstairs in the Observatory library last Wednesday as an example. You were on the fringes, unhappily watching other people have fun. In order to do anything about that, your friends would have had to a) notice that you weren't having fun and b) come up with a hypothesis as to why you weren't having fun (is he lonely? would he rather be alone but feels obligated to be here with people? is he cranky because it's too cold, or too dark? was it something we said?) and c) figured out what to do about it based on the hypothesis and d) executed that plan. And because most or all of us flubbed on item a, we all got to read about it on LJ the next day and feel crappy about it.
Was that really less bother than just saying, "hey. can I sit with you guys and have some strawberries?"
If I'd kept things quiet and not written about it (I was blaming myself, I didn't expect others to feel bad about my failures...) then arguably it would have been less bother. No interruption of the group activity, and any internal discomfort on my part would have been hidden.
we all got to read about it on LJ the next day and feel crappy about it
But by my talking about it, thereby tripping a discussion, I've caused a total of more bother and effort than if I'd just asked for a backrub or a strawberry.
Moral: I should either learn to ask for things directly, or else be better at sucking it up and keeping any unmet-needs or frustration hidden if I don't ask (or ask indirectly).
As your friends, and thus as people who want you to be happy, I think that most of us would be unhappy to learn that you're hiding frustrations and unmet-needs rather then asking. To me, it seems dishonest. It adds to the fragility of the relationship. That's not happy..
People who don't take care of themselves first require me to take care of them in order to be their friends.
Oooh oooh! Hang on a sec.... *rummage* Aha!
Someone on my friends list wrote a locked post about a situation in which she had neglected her physical needs so as not to displease her (non-24/7) Dom. Specifically, she knew that her blood sugar levels were low, but didn't eat so as not to keep him waiting, figuring it was her own fault for not snacking beforehand. (He had said "Make food for yourself, I'll be waiting when you're done", so she made it and put it away rather than eat, keeping to the letter of the law while--IMO--ignoring the spirit.) After the scene, she passed out.
I wrote an impassioned response that I want to excerpt here, because it says exactly the same sort of thing that I want to say to you, since you seem to regard the world as being 100% people who are dominant over you, or--at best--with whom you are locked in a struggle for dominance. So just replace "your Dom(me)" with "your friend" (or possibly "everyone" or "anyone") as appropriate.
Does it never occur to you that taking care of yourself could be pleasing your Dom(me)? It sounds to me like that needs to be said with a stunning degree of explicitness that bespeaks some internalized discrepancy. Why create this false dichotomy?
Were you and I to play in such a fashion, I would make this clear: I do not expect to have to concern myself with taking care of your needs. That is the whole point of the safeword, is it not? Your needs are yours to speak up about, yours to care for. When I enter into a D/s scene, I and the other person(s) share a mutual concern for the pleasure of whomever is on the D side of the equation. Why on earth should a sub disrupt the pursuit of that pleasure through self-harm? [...]
You seem to assume that in the absence of other instruction, your goal is the Dom(me)'s short-term pleasure; that fainting after a prompt scene is better than taking ten minutes to ensure your consciousness through a much longer one. Where does that assumption come from? [...]
To put it another way, you don't seem to take into account the Dom(me)'s caring for you. This is a pretty serious error, I think. For example, I would be very angry at someone doing with me what you did with him. In essence, you seem to have punished him for not being sufficiently explicit! You failed to consider his long-term desire for your well-being, or the distress that would be caused by your lapse into unconsciousness. Waiting ten minutes for someone to eat is well worth not having to spend ten minutes being frightened and angry when she passes out for lack of food. I would hazard a guess that you were less alert and responsive during the scene, too; definitely a net loss, there.
I've had to learn this lesson myself, mind, from the other side of things; but as others have hammered it into my head, thus do I attempt to hammer it into yours. Damaging or neglecting yourself is no service at all. Literal interpretation is more likely than not to lead to results intended and desired by no one involved. You are valued and cared for, or you would not be chosen for service; you are intelligent and skilled, or you would not be trusted to take on difficult burdens. Treat yourself as valued and cared for, and for heaven's sake, use those brains and skills! Everyone will be the happier and more satisfied for it.
Take care of yourself, Brian. It's your job. You have delicate, one-of-a-kind human machinery housing your intellect. As soon as you turn that intellect to the service of others and they come to depend on you, it's your responsibility to keep the machinery going, both body and brain, so that you can continue to be dependable. Unless explicitly negotiated, Brian-care is not your friends' responsibility, not your hosts', not your partners'. It's yours.
If I don't inconvenience anyone, I won't owe them any favors or recompense. Therefore no one will have an edge or hold on me, therefore I won't have to do anything anyone says. What appears as submission in small things is actually to protect myself from anyone's attempt to dominate me in more important things. In the latter case, I bridle and resort to scorched-earth. In the workplace, politeness and seeming accommodation in small things has led a few people to assume that I'd be a pushover... to their regret, when I then trashed their projects and damaged their careers when they tried to walk over me. One guy in the FAA is still exiled to their Kansas City regional office, 8 years later... ;)
Someone asks for help? Glad to pitch in. Someone tells me to serve? Upraised middle finger. That's a distinction.
You failed to consider his long-term desire for your well-being
Maybe I just don't understand the D/s dynamic in play scenes... but after a scene is over, wouldn't the players just go their separate ways? Why would the D-player care about the s-player's well-being, ten minutes after their session (transaction?) is completed? It sounds like that was the assumption that the s-player made in the example cited, too... afterall, I do not expect to have to concern myself with taking care of your needs ?
Brian-care is not your friends' responsibility, not your hosts', not your partners'
Maybe I just don't understand the D/s dynamic in play scenes... but after a scene is over, wouldn't the players just go their separate ways? Why would the D-player care about the s-player's well-being, ten minutes after their session (transaction?) is completed?
Because the Dom in this case was her boyfriend. Scenes can and often do exist in a much larger context of affection. I think that's the best parallel to your situation, too: with friends, with people who care about you in the larger long-term context, you still do things to damage yourself for their short-term pleasure, and then wonder why they're long-term annoyed or upset.
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no subject
Date: 2004-04-19 03:49 pm (UTC)By pleasing others, even at the cost of subverting myself or my other wants, I make things safer for myself -- others are less likely to plan to humiliate or attack me in some fashion if I've been nice to them. (see recent journal entry for a recent insight :). Safety, and maintaining control of the process...
no subject
Date: 2004-04-19 06:04 pm (UTC)Tyeing back several threads at once here... above is the best summation of your situation as I see it.
Pretty much all of these actions come across to me as control issues, likely motivated by a want of safety. Your descriptions of fear of rejection and internalization of requests-declined as personal rejection fit my model of this very well; the sense of obligation and urgency asserted in the few requests that you do make while clearly not looking after your own wants and needs among friendly company.
It also helps me describe the difficulty (that at least) I am faced with by the weight of your requests - I want to be your friend. I think you are a smart and interesting individual who has neat things to contribute to a social setting. But I am reluctant to manage (and refuse to suffer) unasked-for controlling behaviour from my friends. This is an attitude that I note in many of our common community.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-19 06:29 pm (UTC)So, what aspects of personal interaction, on my part, would lessen your reluctance if they were changed or altered? Any suggestions?
no subject
Date: 2004-04-19 07:14 pm (UTC)I would suggest working to:
* decouple others' failure to accept your requests as personal rejection. (Or, as a starting point, do not discount in your interactions with others that this may be the position they are working from.)
* ask for what you want from others
* broaden your requests to fit your expectations
* limit your expectations to fit your requests
* express at face value in your requests of others the importance of your request
* accept at face value the importance others are expressing when making requests
* actively choose to do the things you do - especially the requests that you accept, or decline
* consider /your/ alternatives when making your choices
but on whole, I think this distills to:
deal plainly with other people - by being up front and honest both informationally and emotionally
no subject
Date: 2004-04-24 10:49 pm (UTC)* broaden your requests to fit your expectations
Wouldn't it be instead "narrow your requests to fit reasonable expectations"? If I expect a rejected request as a default, or a highly-constrained acceptance at best, then I'd think that I'd need to work on asking more often, but for less.
* accept at face value the importance others are expressing when making requests
Stop reading-between-the-lines so much, perhaps? Inferring?
no subject
Date: 2004-04-25 09:54 am (UTC)YesYESYESYESYES!
Wouldn't it be instead "narrow your requests to fit reasonable expectations"? If I expect a rejected request as a default, or a highly-constrained acceptance at best, then I'd think that I'd need to work on asking more often, but for less.
Nope. NONONONONO.
That way lies the trappings of the approach that I'm recommending against. Reducing requests to meet expectations contributes to the overall lowering of expectations. If you tell yourself "I couldn't possibly ask for foo, who would ever go along with that?" how soon do you get to expecting that nobody would. And from there, how quickly do you start further limiting your requests. "Well, obviously, if nobody would go for Foo, Bar isn't far off, either."
And if you have expectations that you do not express then how do you expect them to be met?
In asking to sit next to someone - are you asking for a place to park your butt, or for some amount of companionship? Do you expect that you will be significantly more pleased with a "yes" than a "how about..." answer? Than a "no" answer? Then perhaps you should express those expectations in your request. Maybe it requires an iterative approach to get the more subtle bit communicated.
But really - the core point here is to make the requests big enough to fill up and meet your expectations and not the other way around. And if you don't expect a reasonable person to accept a request, you should include that too. If you expect to be disappointed if your request goes unanswered, perhaps there's more there to be requested? See where I'm going with that?
Stop reading-between-the-lines so much, perhaps? Inferring?
Something like that.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-19 08:06 pm (UTC)Ding! Ding! Ding!
People who don't take care of themselves first require me to take care of them in order to be their friends. They're fragile and likely to break over the perceived slight of, say, a missed party invite or a forgotten hello.
I'm going to be a computer geek for just a moment, and suggest that the comparison of interrupt-driven versus polling device drivers is relevant. Polling device drivers are easy to implement; they ask the device (say, a mouse) over and over again, "got any data for me?". Interrupt ones are a bit more difficult to write; they require that the device be able to tell the system (via an interrupt) when it has data for the driver, and the driver needs to be able to asynchronously deal with the data. Interrupt-driven device drivers are much more efficient, though, because they don't have to spend all of their time asking.
I like my friends to be self-managing and our friendship to be scheduled or interrupt-driven. People who don't take care of themselves (and rarely ask for help) end up being polled devices -- in order to be their friends, I have to ask really frequently whether or not they're OK, and deal with occasional explosions. And yet, they often have a bizarre fallacy that it's somehow a less onerous set of assumptions on which to run a friendship than the simple idea that they'll ask me when they need attention/help/whatever -- either that, or they have a similar bizarre fallacy that that's how I run all of my friendships, and so not putting out that amount of effort for them indicates that I don't like them.
Both of these bizarre fallacies are functionally identical to having major control issues and wanting to control my behavior rather than being my friend. I assume the fallacies, both because I like to assume the best of people and because if a person I like is subject to the fallacies, there's some hope that a conversation like this will make them aware of the fallacies and so change the behavior.
But ultimately, in order to be friends with someone who acts like this, I have to accept behavior that is functionally identical to them having control issues. Most of the time, I like myself too much to agree to that.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-19 08:42 pm (UTC)If the overall objective is to minimize overheads, from the end device's viewpoint 3m>0, so interrupt processing looks onerous. But viewed more globally, 3m << m+m+m... = n.m over the typical time period between interrupts, so the occasional higher-cost interrupt is well worth not having to do repeated polling.
Am I understanding your premise? If so, then on a personal level, by trying to be as little bother as possible, I'd actually be *more*... (scratches head) Um.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-20 12:23 am (UTC)Exactly.
Remember the scene downstairs in the Observatory library last Wednesday as an example. You were on the fringes, unhappily watching other people have fun. In order to do anything about that, your friends would have had to a) notice that you weren't having fun and b) come up with a hypothesis as to why you weren't having fun (is he lonely? would he rather be alone but feels obligated to be here with people? is he cranky because it's too cold, or too dark? was it something we said?) and c) figured out what to do about it based on the hypothesis and d) executed that plan. And because most or all of us flubbed on item a, we all got to read about it on LJ the next day and feel crappy about it.
Was that really less bother than just saying, "hey. can I sit with you guys and have some strawberries?"
no subject
Date: 2004-04-24 10:30 pm (UTC)we all got to read about it on LJ the next day and feel crappy about it
But by my talking about it, thereby tripping a discussion, I've caused a total of more bother and effort than if I'd just asked for a backrub or a strawberry.
Moral: I should either learn to ask for things directly, or else be better at sucking it up and keeping any unmet-needs or frustration hidden if I don't ask (or ask indirectly).
no subject
Date: 2004-05-01 12:40 am (UTC)It might be the immediatly easier answer, but..
no subject
Date: 2004-04-21 06:39 am (UTC)Oooh oooh! Hang on a sec.... *rummage* Aha!
Someone on my friends list wrote a locked post about a situation in which she had neglected her physical needs so as not to displease her (non-24/7) Dom. Specifically, she knew that her blood sugar levels were low, but didn't eat so as not to keep him waiting, figuring it was her own fault for not snacking beforehand. (He had said "Make food for yourself, I'll be waiting when you're done", so she made it and put it away rather than eat, keeping to the letter of the law while--IMO--ignoring the spirit.) After the scene, she passed out.
I wrote an impassioned response that I want to excerpt here, because it says exactly the same sort of thing that I want to say to you, since you seem to regard the world as being 100% people who are dominant over you, or--at best--with whom you are locked in a struggle for dominance. So just replace "your Dom(me)" with "your friend" (or possibly "everyone" or "anyone") as appropriate.
Take care of yourself, Brian. It's your job. You have delicate, one-of-a-kind human machinery housing your intellect. As soon as you turn that intellect to the service of others and they come to depend on you, it's your responsibility to keep the machinery going, both body and brain, so that you can continue to be dependable. Unless explicitly negotiated, Brian-care is not your friends' responsibility, not your hosts', not your partners'. It's yours.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-24 11:20 pm (UTC)Someone asks for help? Glad to pitch in. Someone tells me to serve? Upraised middle finger. That's a distinction.
You failed to consider his long-term desire for your well-being
Maybe I just don't understand the D/s dynamic in play scenes... but after a scene is over, wouldn't the players just go their separate ways? Why would the D-player care about the s-player's well-being, ten minutes after their session (transaction?) is completed? It sounds like that was the assumption that the s-player made in the example cited, too... afterall, I do not expect to have to concern myself with taking care of your needs ?
Brian-care is not your friends' responsibility, not your hosts', not your partners'
True. Thanks for the reminder.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-24 11:24 pm (UTC)Because the Dom in this case was her boyfriend. Scenes can and often do exist in a much larger context of affection. I think that's the best parallel to your situation, too: with friends, with people who care about you in the larger long-term context, you still do things to damage yourself for their short-term pleasure, and then wonder why they're long-term annoyed or upset.