The Happy Medium

I've talked about extremes, but not about the happy medium. Truth be told, I'm still figuring out what it is. All I can do is identify what it isn't. And one of the things it isn't is eliminating all pain/discomfort, which seems to have been one of my main goals. I mention it mainly because I don't think I'm the only person who operates this way although I suspect that most people don't realize it.

C.S. Lewis described pain as being 'the megaphone of God'. I may have misinterpreted a lot of what he meant by that, but I do understand that pain is a necessary component of life; it compels us to recognize and hopefully address things that causing harm/damage. The best way I currently have to help illustrate is to point out what really happens with people who contact Hansen's disease, otherwise known as leprosy. While it is a disease caused by infectious bacteria, much of the damage that a victim suffers is in fact self-inflicted because one of the symptoms is loss of sensation. The reality is that pain often prompts us to remove ourselves from unhealthy situations that would otherwise damage us.

So pain is supposed to be a regular and healthy part of life.  Part of what's unhealthy is struggling through it alone, although American culture tends to glorify individualism; being healthy means having at least one other person on whom you can rely for support. But that also means being a supportive person for those peers and not just an emotional leech.

And of course, figuring out who are the right people are means putting yourself out there and risking rejection and/or other bad experiences while figuring out which folks are the right type to try and concentrate being around. And that's something I'm not doing enough of now.

The Process

Today on Facebook someone commented: "Amazing you forgive her Barry. Very admirable. Don't think many people could do that."

I started what I thought could be a short reply explaining the process, and decided it would be better to post the response here and link the blog post.
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Simply put, there but for the grace of God go I.

It wasn't recently I was able to articulate it more fully, It was started in the blog post titled 'the same coin', with it being about mental health and how we cope with emotionally painful events. The way I see it, we have two extremes of coping that are equally unhealthy. One extreme, complete denial, allows us to appear to be functional, while the other extreme, remaining traumatized, results in that event influencing thoughts and behavior pretty much on a 24/7 basis. I lean towards the former. I take hits and keep plowing forward, this typically results in depression until I come to grips with the impact of whatever it was that happened. the point is that trauma affects me just as much as it does anyone else, it just manifests itself in a different way.

As I began to formulate my response, I recognize that there's more which I've already figured out but haven't touched on before in this blog, in that there is also a difference from person to person in their expectations and that can vary wildly. The higher the expectations, the greater the disappointment. But sometimes expectations can be unrealistic. Along the way, I found that when I recognize that I've been disappointed, it's often been helpful to examine what expectations got violated leading to the disappointment. Sometimes I've concluded that the expectations I had were not realistic and I've modified them. But this can be taken to extremes in two directions as well - refusing to acknowledge when expectations are unrealistic, or lowering those expectations so that one results it letting others violate boundaries that should not be violated.

The point is that I see that the person who attacked me is merely in a different quadrant of extremes and as such, I have no right to judge her, though I have judged others in the past. If anything, it's allowed to develop a sense of compassion when I can see that they are responding to some sort of pain in their lives.

The Verdict

After 3-4 days of deliberating, the jury rendered their verdict: guilty on all counts, but insane. Sentencing hearing next month on the 14th.

Also, going back to testifying last week, I was supposed to testify in the morning, but a juror failed to show, prompting the judge to go into recess until 1:30 in the afternoon. A few other members of the group were also forced to have to wait until after lunch to testify, so I suggested we have a long lunch and get caught up. One of the first things one person said was to acknowledge how scared he'd been to be at the park after what happened. I give him credit for being able to acknowledge this. But now I wonder if it would have been the right thing to share what I knew my attacker - for me, it gave me the impetus to depersonalize what happened and to see it as something that was completely random and also unlikely to occur again.

More on this later.

The Difference Between "Competency" and "Sanity"

At this the time the jury has found my attacker competent, but is now determining whether she is legally insane.

The short version as I understand it: you can be declared legally competent and then be determined to be legally insane. However, if you are declared legally incompetent you can not be judged to be insane. 

In other words, competency means that the person can understand the nature and consequences of the criminal proceedings against them. More specifically, a defendant must have:
- the sufficient ability to consult with their attorney with a reasonable degree of rational understanding;
- a rational and factual understanding of the proceeding against them;

Competency is determined by the judge, while insanity is determined by a jury and in these cases, the legal definition may overlap with a psychiatric term but they are not interchangeable. Moreover, the definition varies from state to state. with some states not recognizing an insanity defense at all.

Crosetti

One of my favorite TV series of all time is Homicide, the network predecessor of HBO's 'The Wire". There are a lot of great moments and scenes I find myself re-watching. One such moment is the final scene of episode 6 season 3, entitled "Crosetti".  Crosetti was a character written out of the series and they decided to explain it by having the character commit suicide. Among the issues that result from classifying his death as a suicide is the fact that the police department refuses to provide any of the traditional ceremonial trappings for the funeral, in particular, refusing to provide an honor guard. This refusal infuriates a particular detective Pembleton (whose character pretty much acts as the moral center for the series), and he consequently announces that he won't be attending the funeral.

The service is held, and the procession from the church to the cemetery is on foot, and goes past the police station, where Pembleton is seen standing in full uniform acting as the honor guard the department has refused to provide. There are brief shots of the responses reflected on various detectives' faces as what they see registers. Pembleton is then shown from multiple perspectives saluting the hearse as it passes ending with a close up on Pembleton's face.

I'm still not sure exactly why this resonates with me so much. A large part of it is about doing the right thing - and in this case, the right thing is about showing respect for someone for their life and how they lived it, and not letting the last thing they did be the overriding factor in how someone is remembered after they're gone. But I know there's more, and if I figure it out, I'll say more about it.

I guess it seems relevant to think about being reminded this week about almost being killed.

Returning To The Scene Of The Crime

In this case, literally; I have an appointment with the DA handling my case tomorrow morning and from their office we're going to head out to the park so the DA can review the specifics of the incident. More on this tomorrow/

The Same Coin

A call from someone from the victim assistance office, in conjunction with a random book review set off a long train of thought this week. First, the call - part follow up, but mainly to let me know that my attacker is going to trial this week with jury selection, and to expect to be subpoenaed to testify. The person was reviewing my claims for expenses and noted that I hadn't filed any claims in regards to counseling, etc. and I shared how I felt I'd achieved closure and had moved forward. It actually wasn't a book review as much as part of a top 100 best novels and #94 was a book by Kazuo Ishiguro.  Ishiguro is probably best known for 'Remains of the Day' and 'Never Let Me Go', but the thrust of the article was that Ishiguro's ethnic ancestry and his British upbringing came together in 'An Artist of the Floating World' as a tour de force in unreliable narration. In my own words, we all sanitize our personal history (and memory)  to avoid facing unpleasant truths. At the other extreme, the unpleasant memories become the only truth some people's minds can retain, forcing them to come up with the same flawed conclusions. This is how I categorize the behavior of my attacker. But am I the flip side of the same coin? More on this.

One person whose counsel I trust has suggested that my coping mechanism includes compartmentalizing (it does). And one of the things I've compartmentalized is the inherent evil in what happened and I have yet to come to grips with that evil. I'm not sure about the truth of that, I'm not even sure what that means. My first thought is to find the abyss, wherever it may be, and stare into it. Upon reflection, I reject that idea, not for fear of having the abyss stare back into me,  but because mainly because darkness is merely an absence of light.

But back to the other thought. There are two extremes in the way we can respond to trauma. We can compartmentalize it/ deny it. Or we can let the pain from that experience dominate our thoughts. It's that thought that's given me closure; we all have different coping mechanisms - but they all stem from the same source - dealing with some sort of trauma. And I've learned to respect the amount of strength and courage it takes to deal with bad memories in a healthy way.