Yup. We’re back to angst and the constant re-examination of my childhood.
Therapy can get kind of repetitive like that.
I have been pondering what it must have been like to deal with me as a child (again), and it has occurred to me that I was quite the bag of troubles.
Highly sensitive, highly intelligent, and yet neither confident nor strong, I was almost custom designed to not be liked. Because this is what I figured out today.
People cannot stand people who come across like they could be alpha, but aren’t because they are weak.
It brings out depths of contempt rarely applied to our personal lives. If someone gives off leader signals but fails to actually live up to said signals, we hate them for failing us, in essence.
People hate mixed signals. They hate them, in a sense, more than they hate people with unmixed but very negative signals. They might not like the person who radiates hostility and danger, and they might not trust them, but they respect them more than they do the mixed signal strong-but-weak person.
And that is what this all boils down to : respect. Respect is extremely important to us humans. Weakness may well elicit compassion but if they do not respect you in the first place, they will still not want to deal with you.
We can’t stand being around people for whom we have no respect. That’s why marriages break down when the couple no longer respects one another. You might hate each other’s guts for decades, but if you have no respect for your partner, the relationship is doomed unless you regain it.
People we hate infuriate us, but people we have contempt for disgust us, and disgust is the opposite of compassion. That’s why the evil aliens are bug eyed monsters who ooze slime. Or zombies.
Doesn’t matter, as long as they are gross. That way, we will have no compassion for them and feel really good about slaughtering them by the hundreds.
Makes me want to write a science fiction story where the alien invaders behave exactly like standard big eyed monster but are adorable. Morally identical, but I bet we’d feel worse slaughtering hundreds of aliens if they all looked like baby koalas.
Anyhow, back to me and my life. On the one hand, I was extremely intelligent. That is a classic leadership signal. It is the second most powerful one, in fact, after strength of presence.
And I am just now realizing that I have always had a strong presence as well. I learned to mask it at an early age, but there was a lot to mask.
Especially as an adult, because as an adult, I am not only highly intelligent but I am also large, and size coems with its own set of social assumptions. We tend to associate size with power and power with authority, and so if you are big but weak you arouse a contempt that a smaller weak person would never face.
Small people have trouble getting respect too, but for different reasons.
If you’re a weak man, you will get more contempt from women than from men. Another man might have no respect for you if you are weak, and they might dismiss you or mock you, but they won’t hate you for it.
But in my experience, women hate weak men with a passion and act as though we have personally failed them. That is the price of all gender nonconformity, of course. Women who are strong get the same kind of hostility from men with ideas that women should be all weak and nonthreatening.
Respect is the difference between a wounded warrior and a wimp. It’s the difference between an elder statesman and a historical nobody. It’s the difference between the sad friend you help and the depressed friend whom you just start avoiding altogether because they are socially unpleasant to be around.
So my advice to alpha negative males like myself is, if you want more long term compassion from people, to work on convincing people that you are someone they should respect who is temporarily down in the dumps and who could be back in respectable condition with enough help.
If you can do that, people might actually be willing to get close enough for long enough to really help. They might even respect you when you have no respect for yourself, and that is a precious thing indeed.
Depression makes that hard, though, and makes it far easier to simply broadcast your weakness to others in the vain hope of attracting some help.
That’s how it should work. You need help, you get help, end of story. But the hard cold truth is that without respect, there is contempt and disgust, and where those exist, compassion dies.
If people do not respect you, they will avoid you. That is why people have so little compassion for the homeless and people on welfare. They have no respect for these people in need and so their response is one of anger and contempt where there should be compassion and caring.
I have not even been respectable, in the true sense of the word. I have always been shabby and slobby and sensitive and smarter than was good for me. Somehow along the line, I never learned how to compose myself and make myself easier to respect and therefore easier to love.
I have realized that I have the potential to be a very powerful individual, in the social sense of the world. Someone who radiates power and confidence and respectability. I have the intelligence and the presence to do it. I would just need to learn to focus my personality through a strong ego, be unafraid to be exactly who I really am,
and let the chips fall where they may.
And it would be perfectly okay for me to do that. None of that means I have to become a raging asshole. I could still be a warm and wonderful guy.
Just a more respectable one.
I think I could manage that.