What's the right way to deal with your FOO? How about someone else's FOO?
Knowing Mrs. Eddie's FOO never gave me much leverage to help her become happier or behave more to my liking. For a while she was frequently angry, frequently timid, frequently judgemental, and when she was playful, it was "annoying little kid" playful. While she was growing up, her dad would drink himself stupid, stay out ridiculously late, and beat her and her mom; the last bit stopped when she was nine and kicked back in self-defense - she knocked him on his ass and he never touched her again. He eventually cut way back on the drinking and is now a decent guy, although he still doesn't talk much. I don't think her mom has ever been officially diagnosed, but she gives a convincing impression of being at least borderline retarded.
It doesn't take a psych degree to suspect that these facts are related. But that insight never did get me anywhere. She had to get sick of her own behavior and her own issues and then learn how to do better. I couldn't do any of that for her or to her. All I could do was become the kind of guy that she would want to lower her defenses for... the kind of guy that would have her scrambling to undo all her locks, worried that I'd get away before she got the door open. And even then, unless she does the work on her own, she'll lock the door right back the way it was as soon as she's done with you for the moment, and keep it locked as long as she can get away with without losing you. But entice her enough the right way and it might help her move past her tipping point so she'll get to work. No guarantees though.
On my side, I spent a lot of time trying to "move past" my FOO, to put it out of my mind and stop it from affecting me, and the one thing I strove to avoid was using it as a crutch or an excuse. It wasn't that bad, and I'd feel like a fool admitting that it bothered me at all. I see a lot of that same thing in guys like Mr. LFL. But that's really not the right way to look at it.
What you need to do is find all the lessons that healthy people get growing up that you missed out on and then learn those lessons. That works a lot better than the reverse, which is finding all the lessons you got growing up that healthy people don't and then unlearning them. While those bad lessons are easier to find, since you lived through them and all, it's very difficult to unlearn anything, especially when you put your mind to it. And when you try to unlearn or forget or close your eyes to anything, it starts infecting your whole mental landscape... if you can't stand to think about X, then you learn to start shying away from thoughts Y and Z which lead to X. And then you find that A and B lead to Y which leads to... blank-out.
And so it goes. Soon you're living your life in a comfortable fog, thinking that everything will be all right as long as you don't think too much about anything remotely related to blank-out, including all those dumb behaviors that serve as distractions from blank-out, the dumbest of which get added to the list of things that must be blanked out and hidden from yourself as well as the rest of the world. And you tell people you're OK, but you never have much to talk about for some reason, and you never want to talk about anything and get angry and afraid when others do.
Learning the lessons you missed works much better. And some of the lessons you got that others didn't can be used to your advantage, especially after you make up the ones you missed. I'll bet that some of the same strength a nine year old found within her when she fought back against a man three times her size wielding a belt buckle as a weapon eventually helped the adult Mrs. Eddie face what was wrong and admit it and fix her part of it without hiding from it any longer.
Speaking of my own FOO, I finally told my mom about my efforts to contact the woman that gave birth to me. I dropped a letter in the mail with pictures enclosed, and it was never answered (it eventually came back "Attempted Not Known"), and my mom said she felt bad for me. She had worried that this was going to happen, but she knew there wasn't much she could do about it. And she said "I'll always be your mom". Now I spent decades avoiding the whole subject with her because I dreaded hearing those very words - spoken as an accusation. But they weren't... she was reassuring me (How's that for loving (and not cold) differentiation?), although I spent a few moments launching into a reaction of trying to reassure her before I really heard what she said and how she said it and calmed down and thanked her.
a fine and enviable madness, this delusion that all questions have answers, and nothing is beyond the reach of a strong left arm.
