A Model of Personhood in Flux
I started writing up this post in an effort to play with a nascent model of what I’ll call territorialized personhood. The idea that much like the negotiations of anything else, existing as a person is about negotiating with yourself and other parties. Negotiating about who you are via demarcating where your personhood is. I also wanted to figure out how to explain to people that anger is good, necessary, and not a bad thing when – like any other emotion! – expressed properly. In doing so, I start to explore some tangents, and come upon shame which is a Fascinating thing to pick apart.
Defining Terms
Boundaries, as they are commonly talked about, are ways that we set mutual context and rules of engagement. They are always in negotiable states. In some part, this is due to our own sense of identity being in flux. In another part, it’s about evolving trust. About how that trust affects navigating the feeling of vulnerability. Vulnerability that motivates us to hold certain things as sacred to ourselves. Some of these things are needful from a egoic stability perspective. Some of them are better let go of, when possible.
Anger - the emotion that tells you someone is stepping on your idea of your own existence.
Guilt - the felt sense you did something wrong. In a territory model, realizing you left no-mans-land, and stepped into someone else’s place.
Shame - anger at yourself, because you perceive yourself as having done wrong. Hence, tied up with feeling of guilt, and also you perceive yourself as object to do this(?). Self-alienation. In stronger degrees, alienation from self becomes dissociation, because you begin to defensively perceive yourself entirely as object.
Establishing an Example
Commonly in a negotiation of boundaries, there will be pushes, movements in territories with unestablished rules. Let’s look at a push from party A to party B.
This negotiation is about territory. Perceived territory, on both sides, and who is in control of it. If person A encroaches on person B’s perceived territory, two things mainly happen.
- Person B can feel a sense of boundary crossed (anger of some degree), and in healthy expression, that will give them drive to tactfully put their foot down in reaction to the encroachment. Person A’s interpretation of this says a lot about how they respect and consider person B in the context of the boundary (the nature of the encroachment). If person A responds in anger, then they see person B’s section of territory as their own, object in some sense, and therefore do not respect B’s personhood in whatever area is being encroached on. They feel territory that is theirs is being encroached by person B’s refusal. Person A can also feel guilt (the retreating feeling), the sense that a step was misplaced, and should be given up. An apology would be good to follow, as it communicates that person A understands B’s boundary, explicitly. It also opens the floor for a more nuanced communication of the boundary B feels crossed. This will help A in future interactions with B.
- Person B cedes territory. Maybe they were overassuming their reach, maybe they are merely trying to feel things out. This is not always a bad thing to do. It becomes an issue when B regularly collapses like a deck of cards. This might happen anytime someone tries to encroach on their sense of personhood; they may lack a good relationship with anger. Maybe they only had poor examples in their youth, when impressionable minds make stark decisions about how they will be in the world. They made a decision or got the impression from another person that expressing anger is always bad. Or that they see themselves as unable to control their anger expression, and therefore avoid it entire. Maybe there was a particularly scarring social event that led to abandonment or ostracization due to enforcing a boundary, however mild. Unfortunately, whatever it is, humans often get stuck early, in calibrating their models of the world, and stay at setpoints that are sub-optimal. The truth is almost always that some degree of expressing anger is appropriate, and in proper company, will not be an issue.
Where are we?
I make an emphasis to point out it may relate to a specific territory or area, because each section of mentally associated territory may be negotiated independently. Your mother may respect that you exist, that you have certain people you date, but may encroach on your use of your ability to reproduce, and try to nudge you at giving her grandchildren. This can be grating, if mild. Still, a siege is a siege. Over time, the mild annoyance can start feeling like living inside a city with enemy forces outside the gate. Ya get triggery around mom and talks of children. Expressions of anger here can be needfully large if the encroaching party fails to recognize lesser expressions.
Explicating the Anger Spectrum
Anger is an indicator both internal to you, and external to others when expressed. Like other emotions, it is not bad in itself. It is a signal. It is the signal of a boundary’s existence, or where you feel you are. It’s also variable in expression and in an internal felt sense. Mild annoyance, frustration, capital A Anger.
Think of times you’ve felt angry. Sometimes, it is tied to expectation. Expectation that the world acts one way or another. This includes expectations about how other people treat you. When expectations are violated, we feel frustrated. Enough frustration from the same point, and we feel anger towards that point. Enough seemingly random events, and it starts to feel as if the very world is out for us. We feel encroached, and feel angry.
Great Expectations - or - The World and Other People
There’s a division I’d like to point out, in dealing with expectations. See the below quote:
“The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.” – The Third Chinese Patriarch (purportedly), Hsin Hsin Ming
I do not hold this as a pure implication that one should have no preferences. At best, that sort of take works for mendicants and cave dwelling monks. I instead read it as: preferences make interacting with reality harder. Expect it! I will however maintain that the ideal number of preferences is not zero. Otherwise, your sense of self is tatters, and your volition is violated by any passersby.
Expectations about reality can cause frustration. The thing is though, being angry at reality in a stewing way doesn’t really get you anywhere. You are the one party that can change their actions in relationship with reality. The reasonable thing to do here, is either you change reality, or let go of the expectation. The world will continue to be the way it is.
“If you’re dissatisfied with the world, change yourself. If you hate that idea, then close your ears and eyes, shut your mouth, and live in solitude. If you can’t stand even that…” – Motoko Kusanagi, Ghost in the Shell
With people, with systems, with anything that can be abstractly said to have a conscious sense of it’s own actions, you can (and often do) have to actively negotiate a boundaries. You should! I think a lot of people give way more than they need to, and ask for way less than they can get.
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference” – The Serenity Prayer, A. A.
In both cases, you flesh out your understanding of your own boundaries better with practice. It is the execution of this that differs between the two. Reality can present you with situations that cannot be negotiated, you must accept them. It can also put you in situations where you have the ability to change a part of the world, but you might not because you lack preference about it. Paying attention, testing previous ideas about what is/isn’t changeable, is key.
On Jerks, or being one
There is something to be said about the degree of expression of anger in response to a boundary violation. Expressing anger at a reasonable amount is key to not coming off as an jerk.
Certainly, there are many who just want to abuse you (in the classic lit sense), and therefore will consider you an jerk if you fail to capitulate in any circumstance. These people are not uncommon, and not worth wasting time feeling bad for “insulting”. As Dostoevsky wrote in an interesting little dialogue between a Priest and a Liar:
“You know it is sometimes pleasant to take offence, isn’t it? A man may know that nobody insulted him….yet he will be the first to take offence, and will revel in his resentment…” – Father Zossima, The Brothers Karamazov
“…it is not so much pleasant as distinguished sometimes to be insulted…” – Fyodor Pavlovitch, The Brothers Karamazov
Some people, you will always be in a losing social position with, and the game they play is not one in which you ever had a chance. “Heads I win, tails you lose” kinda games. If you grew up with such people, your sense of appropriateness of boundaries might be all sorts of screwed up.
A Crying Shame
So where does shame fit into this? It’s a common thing in human beings, and like many common things, it must have a common function. Right? Shame, by my measure, seems to be a strange expression of what I’ve stated above, anger expressed inwardly (towards the self), because of guilt that we’re also generating ourselves. It is sometimes pre-compensatory (especially in heavily disordered expression), or overly-compensatory (in post-hoc expressions). It is also something we can be prone to spiraling about, like the troll logic of two forklifts flying up into the air by lifting each other. It’s only by a moment of stopping it somehow, that this doesn’t spiral up into the sky, asphyxiating your thoughts in space. Shame itself marks me as a part of a pre-empting mechanism. Very often my friends who are “controlled by shame”, find themselves feeling guilty even when another party expressed no indication of anger/boundary. Sometimes, it comes off as an all-or-nothing, if the person feels any guilt, they must also feel shame. Not so, but the mind has its habits.
I would say that like most anxious behaviors – this a fun way to turn it on its head and question it directly – it seems narcissistic or overly controlling at a point. It’s certainly projective. You absolutely cannot know another person’s internals. A person may be decent at modeling people’s internal states. A lot of people aren’t half as good as they think they are. You should not operate (or have no right to) as if your models of other people override what they tell you to your face, or in extreme cases, how they are actually acting. But I do see this behavior, and have felt it myself.
Behavior and expressions of felt shame give me the vibe of a behavior derived from bad social signals earlier in life. Existing around duplicitous folk, or otherwise some form of bad communicator. Maybe it could be the result of being socially stagnated, of having caught onto socializing far later than peers, and committing social faux pas that lend themselves to one becoming over-cautious in action and in trying to predict how others feel. I’m not sure! Maybe some, or all of the above, depending on the person. For me, definitely late socialization, and I definitely had bad communicators in my life.
But I have gotten to a point in my life where feeling shame also elicits an anti-shame response. Like I said before, I know I don’t know what another person is thinking. I have to fallback to hoping they communicate themselves well. If they don’t, we’ll part as naturally as the splitting of a cloud. I’m resigned to that, because the alternative is this pathetic clinging to companionship with bad communicators, who are very often not-conscientious themselves, causing me problems. I’ve had enough of that kind of shit in my life. When my attempts at bridging gaps fail, because the other party doesn’t even want to acknowledge there’s a canyon there, I’m good, I did my part. I’m out. The boundary is established, between me, and them. This is a healthy expression of anger, as indignancy.
The Point
It is only by practicing anger expression at various levels that you can come to do so skillfully. There is never a guarantee that the opposite party will perceive, or have the same understanding of, what degree of anger you feel based on that expression. Knowing this, and holding that the effort to become skillful with anger is worthwhile, it is best to learn a spectrum of expressions of anger. In practice you ideally start in more subtle forms, and raise your response until the other party Gets It. A knack for guessing where to start on the scale should develop over time, with general experience, and experience with particular individuals.
Like everything else, it comes to a gut check. Have some guts!
P.S.
Interestingly, this applies to person to person scales, and to national scales. Discussion of these parallels of the personal and the national are beyond the scope of this writing, however. Consider it a point of future exploration.