Feeling Pulled In Two after Exiting a Manipulative Group or Relationship (More from Hamlet?)

Ever feel “caught between a rock and a hard place?”  Living life makes some frustrating situations unavoidable at some point, so such cliché’s develop because these “truisms” describe a universal and uncomfortable experience very well.  Prince Hamlet certainly understood this saying!  But if you’ve been a member or participant with an ideological group or in a relationship with a very demanding person, you definitely identify with the ongoing experience of a “no win” situation in a unique way, even though it is hard to describe sometimes.  Because of human nature, we tend to cope with this kind of situational stress, interpersonal stress, and social pressure within a group in predicable ways.  Just like certain physical illnesses produce specific physical symptoms, high stress relationships that place consistent pressure and demands upon people push them into predictable ways of coping with the inconsistencies that become an inevitable element of manipulation.

 

Even if you’ve left a manipulative group or a relationship some time ago, you may still experience the feelings and sensations that ex-members commonly experience immediately after leaving a group.  They can be brief or can emerge unexpectedly as more of a lingering annoyance or problem, even after you feel as though you’ve made a lot of progress and grown beyond them in the past.  Know that this is a very normal and healthy experience.  The experience results from your own good brain doing what it is supposed to do – it is protecting you.

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Patriarchy, Controlling Outcomes, and the State of Denmark: Desire that Gets the Best of Us

I’m always amazed at how different aspects of life converge to speak to seemingly unrelated matters.  As a friend of mine struggled this week with the very negative, long term consequences of following patriarchy, I also found time to enjoy a new rendition of Hamlet.  This found me as I finished the last of my preparations on an article that I wrote about patriarchy that I anticipate will be published in early summer.  I thus find myself pondering another aspect of the complicated and subtle topic that I did not have the opportunity to address in the article, resulting from all of these matters.  How can patriarchy’s desirous end of fostering wholesome family life by employing many wholesome and laudable means warrant criticism?  And…  What could patriarchy possibly have in common with Shakespeare’s Hamlet?

One of the great appeals of patriarchy for parents involves the idea that a prescribed plan can produce a specific if not a guaranteed outcome, a system promoted as God’s formula that can give parents the ideal family that they so desire.  Many swallow patriarchy like a medicine meant to anesthetize their fears.  The problem with this approach rests not with the virtuous end that seeks goodness but with the focus of the means one pursues to achieve the goal.  Desire gets the best of us as we seek the wisest and most expedient means to achieve our goal.  Much can be said about the trappings of formulaic religion, and it gives the illusion to the follower that they somehow bear less responsibility for their actions, displacing their responsibility on the plan that makes so many good promises to them in their great need. 

This kind of plan to control outcomes, craft as Shakespeare calls it, can also be seen throughout Hamlet in nearly every character, some for good in the pursuit of meeting God-given human need and some for evil in the pursuit of ambition.  Most spectators easily identify the murderous deceit of Claudius, but are Gertrude, Ophelia, and Hamlet any less culpable for their own choices?  Are they less culpable when they become the object of the craft of another or when they design their own craft as a means of coping with their own lot?  Can these examples provide some insight that might help us better understand patriarchy’s ambitions for virtue and the nature of its supposed error?

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