Don’t Feed the Trolls: Understanding Your Inner Aggression

Don’t feed the trolls.

Many people have heard this common warning, which is frequently offered to those who engage in Internet discussions, and it may be wise to keep this advice in mind when spending time online.  The admonition suggests that we leave wild things in their place and disentangle ourselves from any puppy-like banter with them. While a puppy bites in play, a troll bites to eat you up. Authors Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse offer this fitting description of trolls:

“The trolls we are concerned with are those that dominate discussions with overblown objections and personal attacks, who seem immune to criticism, and who thereby derail Internet argument. A further feature of trolls of this kind is that they seem to thrive on the negative reactions they elicit. Responding to them and defending your view causes them to become even more unhinged. It seems that the best thing you can do is simply ignore them.”

As our sense of community continues to merge more deeply with our online communities, these nameless trolls factor more into our daily lives. Ignoring them may reduce their reactivity, but we are still forced to live in anticipation of the next attack. They limit our trust to engage honestly with one another. Constructive argument becomes threatened as we hunt for cover from potential savagery. Is there no refuge from the influence of trolls?

I suggest the answer lies in the mirror.

The Mirror

To understand the troll within ourselves, we need to bring it out where we can clearly see it and recognize its desperate modes of operation. It is patient, humbling work.

Online blog forums—much like this one where people are invited to respond to articles and to one another—are ideal environments to conduct such self-examination. Here, we see a wide variety of anonymous responses to topical issues that often touch raw nerves. Inevitably, we come across threads of comments competing to tell different sides of a similar story. “On the other hand,” meets “I beg to differ, but,” followed by an, “I’m sorry but in my humble opinion.” Suddenly, it seems, we are off to the races.

It’s a moderator’s job to keep these interactions somewhat civil and as constructive as possible. But as readers, I would suggest that we have an opportunity to learn from even the most heated and unhinged arguments. I recommend staying curious about the emotional energy driving those that make withering and hurtful comments. Does some part of their outrage cast light on our own tendency to polarize and distort those messages we don’t want to hear?

Unearthing One’s Own Troll

If you have been criticized unjustly or humiliated in some way, your body has two natural reactions:

1. Recoil
2. Attack back

One part of us focuses on the victimized part that needs increased protection; the other part identifies more with crafting the perfect comeback. Both parts might prompt different impulses, but they stem from a similarly intense and primitive instinct. Unless we are honest about our natural tendencies toward self-protection and revenge, they tend to work their trollish magic on us below the surface.

The uncomfortable fact is that we remain a predatory species. Our ancestors survived due to their ability to engage in personal and tribal warfare. Likewise, when we feel we have been emotionally harmed—online or otherwise—we have a primordial desire to see harm done to another.

Flirting with Core Instincts

Our next challenge is to gain some mastery over how we respond to our primitive instincts. As an experiment, try recalling in detail a humiliating experience with the intent to view it impartially. Try to summon the most incendiary story from your past and think about it as if it were some TV show you stumbled upon while channel surfing. Try telling your story without embellishment and without making yourself the center of the story.

As your story unfolds, you will naturally find your narration skewed toward self-serving bias. You may find yourself uttering phrases similar to these:

• “I was clearly the innocent victim. He was out to get me.”
• “I was obviously trying to be careful. She was clueless.”
• “I may have been mistaken, but at least I had good reasons.”

These biases are so permanently embedded in how we tell stories about ourselves that it’s almost impossible to see them as biases. Only when challenged do we see how rigid we become in defending them.

Even if you are successful in not making yourself the hero of your story, can you keep from making yourself the anti-hero? Self-loving or self-hating, we are stuck as clever storytellers, forever featuring ourselves as the key player. This is part of being human. The more we try to remain neutral, the more we may bump up against the same impulses: unabashed self-righteousness or unabashed self-contempt. These are the favorite foods of your inner troll.

Accountability Breeds Compassion

As long as we remain ignorant of our own inner troll and the sources our own inner aggressiveness, we will likely remain vulnerable to the external trolls running rampart in our digital and physical worlds. Try seeing the next online or real-world outburst you encounter as a reminder to look within. Recognize the troll’s contempt, hatred, and self-pity. Remember that similar impulse to draw blood and remind yourself to tread carefully in your own life. Don’t feed the trolls!

Reference:

Aikin, S. F. and Talisse, R. B. (2013, April 29). Don’t feed the trolls. 3 quarks daily. Retrieved from http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2013/04/dont-feed-the-trolls.html#more

© Copyright 2015 by Jonathan Bartlett, MA, MFT, therapist in Los Gatos, CA. All Rights Reserved.

Originally posted on GoodTherapy.org

What to Do When You’re the Jerk

I’ve been a jerk many times in my life. But one time that stands out for me happened when I was 13. I had been invited to the bat mitzvah of a girl I barely knew. A bat mitzvah is a big event; at least 100 people were there. After singing “Happy Birthday,” some kid usually started chanting, “Skip around the room, skip around the room, we won’t shut up until you skip around the room.” Obviously, the intent was to make the birthday child … skip around the room.

On this occasion, I started the chant, but it fell flat on its face. Not a single person joined the chant with me.

It wasn’t until I was in college, recalling this embarrassing incident, that I finally realized my shameful behavior. The birthday girl, who appeared in class sporadically, sometimes showed up on crutches and sometimes arrived in a wheelchair. I had completely forgotten about her disability because she had put them aside for her bat mitzvah. Ignorantly, obliviously, I had thrown her illness in everyone’s face. What a horrible child!

It’s easier to forgive a child’s behavior than an adult’s. It’s also easier to forgive unintentional cruelty than intentional harm. But regardless, I will always feel a little ashamed that I hurt that girl and her family that day.

Shame, that gut-wrenching, nauseating feeling, keeps people from acknowledging when they’ve been hurtful. So often, admitting that you’re guilty means being overcome with shame. We all want to be the good guy. It’s awful to discover that we’ve been the villain.

The other thing that stops people from admitting when they’ve been wrong is punishment. Often, the punishment is shame: “Shame on you!” If a person admits to a spouse that he or she has been overreactive or harsh toward the spouse, will the person be understood and forgiven or will he/she be punished and repeatedly shamed?

Being able to take responsibility for one’s bad behavior is in everyone’s best interest. Being condescending, being harshly critical, being explosive, being prejudiced—these behaviors and more may occur for all of us, but unacknowledged and unchecked, they can become a person’s identity, overshadowing higher qualities and damaging or destroying relationships.

What to do:

• Focus on learning about yourself, not punishing yourself
• Separate the behavior from your identity; you can overcome the behavior, and it doesn’t have to define who you are
• Be honest with yourself
• Breathe, calm yourself, and tolerate the unpleasant feelings
• Take responsibility for your behavior
• Apologize, if possible
• Commit to being the person you want to be

What not to do:

• Lie to yourself
• Blame the victim
• Beat yourself up

These suggestions are sometimes easier said than done. It can take time, patience, and emotional support to work through these steps. A person may not get the understanding and forgiveness he or she desires. It’s important to do it anyway, regardless of the reaction. Just because someone becomes aware of his or her behavior doesn’t mean it won’t happen again. Hopefully, with repeated awareness and commitment, the person can learn to stop it faster.

In families that carry histories of substance abuse and/or physical abuse, the level of damage can be extreme, resulting in a greater need to justify, ignore, or suppress awareness of these behaviors. Twelve-step groups, support groups, and psychotherapy can assist individuals in regaining clarity and self-compassion in order to end abusive behaviors, including the abusive behavior of self-loathing and self-abuse.

No one is perfect. There is no shame in learning, growing, and striving to be your best self.

© Copyright 2015 by Rena Pollak, LMFT, CGP, therapist in Encino, CA. All Rights Reserved.

Originally posted in GoodTherapy.org.

Trauma as a Seed of Depression

In my practice, people trace depression back to trauma most of the time. Emotional trauma is an overwhelming shock to a person’s equilibrium. Trauma might be linked to an emotional, physical, or sexual attack or witnessing such an attack. War, rape, murder, accidents, and even well-intentioned medical procedures might all lead to trauma. So can single or repeated incidents of shaming and other emotional and verbal attacks. Trauma can also happen when heartbreaking losses of any kind occur.

When people are traumatized, it often shapes their beliefs about themselves or life. These trauma-induced beliefs— such as “I’m never safe,” “I’m unlovable,” “I’m a monster,” “love is dangerous,” “I’m a failure,” “I’m helpless”—affect how people feel and often contribute to depression. Sometimes an individual’s belief is based on something that was true at the moment of the trauma: “I’m helpless” is true when a person is in surgery under anesthesia (where unconsciously-remembered thoughts can still affect us).

But beliefs that formed during a traumatic event are stored without information about what that means over time. So “I’m helpless at this moment” can become “I’m always helpless.” This underlying belief may contribute to depression and helpless behavior indefinitely. If this person doesn’t get a chance to talk about their helpless feelings and express their emotions, they could carry that belief into the rest of their life. It is trauma that turns time-limited events into a part of people’s belief system and identity. It makes sense that people would be depressed when they believe they have no personal power to create the life they want.

“I’m a Coward”

Trauma-related beliefs can be a formative part of a person’s personality, particularly if trauma occurs in childhood. The trauma-related beliefs can be so painful that the traumatized person has to develop ways to coping with the belief—and then the methods for coping become a new part of who the person is.

For example, say a child watches his mother get mugged and freezes in fear until it’s over. Perhaps in his child mind, he concludes, “I’m a coward.” Living with the belief that he is a coward is so painful that he deals with it by trying to prove he’s brave: picking fights and engaging in high-risk behavior. These behaviors give him a euphoric feeling of self-confidence and he gets some relief from the pain of the “I’m a coward” belief. The combination of euphoria and the desire to avoid the shame of believing he’s a coward keeps him trying risky things.

He is new to taking risks, so he and others begin to think of him with a new identity. Risky behaviors get him in trouble in school, which means other kids in trouble gravitate toward him while cautious kids avoid him. This makes it hard for him to do well in school and he develops an identity as a tough street kid with crime rather than college in his future. This trauma-belief comes to shape every decision he makes and pretty much everything about him: who he dates, what he does for money, where he lives, who his friends are.

In situations where he might feel vulnerable or scared, he doesn’t dare show it for fear of revealing himself as a “coward.” So when he experiences other trauma, he can’t express his vulnerable feelings, which keeps him from processing the trauma, causing each new trauma to incapacitate him further. When he does start to feel vulnerable, afraid, or sad, he uses drugs or alcohol to suppress the feelings and give him the high of confidence again.

At some point, this man may realize he is depressed, perhaps when a friend dies of an overdose, a woman he loves leaves him, or he ends up in jail or a hospital. At this point, unraveling his story to find what is causing the depression will be complicated. The depression he feels is caused by this most recent loss, but it’s also caused by drugs and alcohol, living a life that keeps him from reaching his potential, and the self-hate that has developed over the years through taking risks despite serious consequences. But ultimately, the depression began when he watched his mother get mugged. When that is resolved, and he realizes he never was a coward, that freezing was normal and even wise at that moment, he will feel much better. He will probably begin to feel free to redefine himself and make different choices for his life. But because his whole life has been based on the way he reacted to trauma and the way he continued to react to his reaction, he will also have to unravel and replace all the aspects of his life and self-image that were created by that initial belief and shame that he was a coward.

“I’m Worthless”

Another example: imagine a child who is sexually assaulted by an adult. That child may respond to the trauma by believing “I’m only worth something if I’m being used for someone’s sexual satisfaction.” It’s not hard to imagine that this child might become an adult who deals with this belief by being sexually available to many people, who she may not even find attractive, as a way of getting some temporary relief from feeling worthless.

Being sexual with many people becomes part of her personality and identity, both of which would have been very different if she hadn’t been assaulted as a child. When this method of coping with trauma stops working—maybe because she can’t find lovers anymore, or she gets caught compulsively having sex outside her marriage and loses her husband—she may become depressed. She will be depressed about the recent changes in her life, but again, ultimately, the depression comes from the original trauma, and from the problems caused by trying to cope with the original trauma.

As complicated as these scenarios may seem, the origins of a given person’s depression can be even more complicated. Sometimes trauma isn’t involved in the origins of depression, but most of the time, with enough exploration, I find the roots of depression in trauma.

© Copyright 2010 by Cynthia W. Lubow, MS, MFT, therapist in El Cerrito, CA. All Rights Reserved.

Originally posted on GoodTherapy.org.