Backstabbing: Search and Destroy

An ethical question is - when is it OK to gossip about friends/speculate on their relationships with other friends? Because I do this quite a lot, in the knowledge that both myself and the people I'm talking to are genuinely concerned as well as pruriently interested. But am I wrong to do this? (I entirely expect the same thing to happen with me, incidentally).

Honestly, I can say that as it takes alot for me to consider someone a friend, none of this sort of thing has happened. I would say, as they are being bitchy, they are no longer friends, cut the cord.

However, I think you're mixing up amusement with concern. There are some people who find us an odd couple, and a bit weird, but there are lots and lots of people, more than I thought existed, who are genuine friends of ours and are genuinely worried and concerned. I can think of vast numbers of people who are really worried about the two of us. RickyT, Martin, Tom, Matt, Suzy, DG, Irene, Ros, and so on and so on. We shouldn't be shutting people out when they're concerned, we should be taking the time to talk to them.

I've genuinely been backstabbed a lot of times. Friends have turned against me, done some horrible, horrible things. It wasn't pretty, and it certainly isn't happening now. People are worried about us and so am I.

I don't usually feel strongly about ILE, but I do now. Most of the people here care about you, Kate. And they want to make sure you're okay.

I really hate the proverbial cheap holiday in other people's misery. I'm sure Kate and Paul will be fine on tour...

Almost everybody gossips. Unless they are a saint, everybody is interested in everybody else's business, and I'd be a hypocrite to decry that. If you live with a bunch of people in public, you are going to talk about them in private. I accept that.

What really bothers me and upsets me about this whole situation is not even the whole "taking bets" sideshow aspect of it, though that is fucking assholish, and I don't even want to know which one of this whole social scene it was, because I would probably punch them.

My problem is this: if someone is genuinely concerned about me, or my relationship, or anything else: ASK ME ABOUT IT. I am never going to yell at anyone for asking me if I'm OK. If I consider you a good enough friend, I will tell you what is upsetting me, if I don't, then I'll thank you for your concern but evade the question. End of story, no hard feelings.

What fucks me off about this whole situation is that NO ONE involved has come to me and asked me if I'm OK, or if we're OK. They've gossiped about it, they've discussed it, they've even gone to friends of mine, or asked my boyfriend if things are OK... all this fucking high school underhanded, behind my back thing, so nothing ever gets reported to my face, and it has this whole air of secrecy, and no one really likes Kate enough to talk to *her* about it, everyone is scared of her and whispering in the hope that vague whispers of their "concern" will get back to me when...

NO - that's the last thing that gets back to me. I hear people gossiping about me, I hear people talking about me behind my back, I hear people talking shit about me to my boyfriend.

Asking me if I'm OK will never make me upset. If I hear THIRD HAND HEARSAY that you've been talking about me behind my back - whatever your intentions, good bad or hell - then I WILL get upset and blow up.

If you want to gossip about me, fine. Gossip away, I can't stop you. If you are concerned about me, write me or call me up and ask me how I'm doing. But this inbetween she said he said "telephone" shit is UNACCEPTABLE.

I took a week-long break from this forum because of all this sort of crap going on. Within 3 days of my getting back on, it's happened all over again. This is the real problem here- not this high falluting intellectual codrottle that Momus vents.

This was because of an incident i still have trouble talkign about and had me want to scar lennons qoute into my flesh.

I lost a job once via colleague-backstabbing which I had sorta originally got via colleague-backstabbing (tho neither actually led to unfriendship, except in the inev.parting of ways and hardly see each other since sense). In private life terms, nothing: but that probably kinda follows on from my sere and minimalist private life. Is this becoz I am nice? Or too trusting to notice? End of friendship with [xXx] involved a kind of betrayal of trust, but [xXx] already claims ditto had happened the other way, hence what followed.

Thank krishna for karma, eh? Saves money on poison, as Lucretia Borgia used to say.

I certainly never said or even implied the male half of this particular two-backed beast was any of those awful things, but I thought he was a touch insensitive to my feelings at the time, which I attributed (rightly or wrongly, who knows?) to a few issues he had with me and the wife. That's all history, luckily, and I'm not in the habit of polluting my own friendships with those kind of deceits and lies, as you well know ;-).

.

I search the archives looking for "betrayal" and "trust" and "friends" and look what I came up with. A different time, a different situation, but oh, how this issues behind circumstances never change.

"Certain events have certain circumstances" is the first line in an Ackroyd novel I'm now reading.

To engage in mean, hurtful, High School behaviour?

Or to rise to the bait and be upset by it?

I can't help the way that I feel, and I do feel very hurt. It's almost worse to know that this hurt was caused not by forgetfulness or genuine omission, or even by maliciousness - but by sheer cowardice.

For want of thirty seconds' conversation, a five minute phone call, I am left not just with the hurt, but with the humiliation of finding out second hand.

How cowardly a person, to spare themselves a moment of awkwardness, to cause me this much pain. Well. This person has lost my trust,and lost my respect. And this will cost them my friendship.

I wish I were not so upset. I may not be rational right now, as I did not get much sleep last night. All I can do is shake my head and say "I will not get burned again."

The perpetual outsider mistrusts groups, cliques, circles of already established friends. You can only ever observe, maybe participate, but never ever belong.

You *expect* to be betrayed, let down, excluded, snubbed. So you hold yourself in a guarded or suspicious manner, to protect yourself. This guarded manner is read as arrogance, difficultness, otherness. A self-perpetuating cycle.

Oooh, Kate, by the way, I've been thinking on a mixCD, and I've been re-arranging tracks in WinAmp all weekend. Will you think badly of me if I put some Gilbert & Sullivan on there?

Gilbert & Sullivan? Why, Johnney, I would think you the very model of the modern major gentlemen if you could include some Gilbert and Sullivan. I look forward to this mix immensely!

I spent the morning at the doctor, getting my blood checked, my mental state "evaluated" after a month on SSRI's. I had forgotten about that sort of stuff. I never have enough blood to be tested. The doctor increased the dosage of my anti-depressant. He offered me counselling, again, I demurred. I just don't think it would do much good any more.

I've had a rough few days. It's gone beyond being "oversensitive" or "upset" and spiralled down into a full depressive episode, thoughtworms, crying jags and insomnia. That's the nature of this disease - something which may start as an overreaction to a stimulus turns into something psychological.

It's hard for me to talk about this, but I *need* to. I can't help feeling like it's a weakness, like it's admitting defeat to say that something is out of control, that you can no longer control your reactions to problems in a normal way. So much of my life has been a triumph over mental illness. Overcoming manic depression (or whatever the trendy word for it today is) has been the struggle of my life since my early teens. Some people are supportive, they reassure me that it's a good thing to ask for help. Others are not so supportive, they change the subject awkwardly, look panicstruck, say "I really can't deal with this right now."

The worst thing is the way that people treat you, like you're a bomb that could go off at any moment. ("I was a bouncing baby, now I'm a bouncing bomb. Please come and defuse me, before I kill someone." - Julian Cope)

The nature of my very personality is to see patterns. The problem with depression is that one picks up, repeatedly, even obsessively, on negative patterns. Everything becomes sympomatic of the fundamental *badness* of your own life.

Sorry, had to do a moment's work. I've been a mess these past two days (mainly due to the insomnia) and the last thing I want is them finding out about this while I'm still in my trial period.

I am very good at spotting patterns. In my line of work, it's a blessing. It's a positive talent when it comes to things like Marketing Analysis.

But in your personal life, when the patterns you spot are you own negative behaviour, and the negative reactions of others to that behaviour, it's a curse.

I've been thinking about the events that provoked me to start this thread. One of Hasbeen's great tricks (used not just with me, but with the other partners he abused) was to repeat two different sets of lies to two different people, in order to promote divisions between other people, and aggrandise himself.

The details are no longer important. But the deep sense of suspicion and mistrust that it created within me has never really gone away. Especially with regard to ILX and a certain group of people within it.

On the face of it, the events of the weekend are petty and superficial. So I was snubbed and deliberately excluded from a group of mututal friends from someone I thought I could trust.

Mean, and humiliating (especially to find out about it so publicly) but not really that big a deal. I've been snubbed before. It's one of the things you get used to as a perpetual outsider.

Sometimes it's genuine omission - someone forgets to include you in an email, or else you are not included in an invitation list because they don't think you have an interest. Fair enough. A brief word, and it's resolved.

Sometimes it's malicious or spiteful. A break-up with a BoyInABand and next thing I knew, my band had been dropped from the lineup of a gig where *all* of our mutual friends' bands had been invited to play. Those are the snubs where you rage to your friends, then put your nose in the air like a Jane Austen heroine.

if you don't feel that your situation can be handled by trained professionals, how can you expect your friends to handle it?

You misunderstand. It's not that I think a professional *can't* handle it. It's just that I have been in therapy on and off since the age of 13. I *know* what's wrong with me, I *know* what I have to do to control it, and there's really no more magic words or coping strategies that any more counsellers can tell me that I haven't already heard.

I know what the coping strategies are. I just need to do them.

i'm still sort of sensitive to when i get cranky/tired, especially when i'm convinced i should be having fun. it's sort of "oh my god, is this the start of another phase".

I feel like an alcoholic who has relapsed, trying to get a handle on why they relapsed so it doesn't happen again. What triggered this bout of extreme depression when I'd been doing so well?

The snubbing made me angry and hurt, it plunged me back down into those old familiar fears that I *don't* belong. That I'm alien, that no matter how hard I try to be friends with people, it will just never quite work because I am a Bad People and people can smell Otherness on me like the stench of decay. A close friend throws a party and invites all our mutual friends with the noticable exclusion of me. What am I supposed to think? I don't actually think they're gossiping or backstabbing or whatever. What I think, deep down, is that I DON'T EXIST. It's *natural* that I am not there, because I am not One Of Them, and I never will be.

40 minutes on the phone, trying to work through my feelings and my hurt, trying to make sense of it, why someone I cared about - and thought cared about me - would treat me like that. A throwaway excuse, retracted almost immediately: "I don't really think of you as part of our scene."

I fell silent after that. There was nothing I really could say in reply.

Muttering about the overlapping social cliques of ILX and IRL friends aside, that's it. That's exactly it.

Which is ridiculous, really. I know it is. I've been here since Day One - I AM THE OLD SKOOL - no matter how bad things get here, I can remind myself that my Neurotic Self-Over-Analysis Schtick is as much a part of the fabric of ILX as Dan's Dirty Jokes Schtick or Ally's Glamourous Schtick or Tom's Obsessive Lists Schtick or Mark S's Otherworldly Genius Schtick.

It started, way back then, with Hasbeen's deliberate attempts to isolate me from my community, from my friends. But the fear has never really gone away. It's part of me. I try to joke about it, but it's still there.

The genius of ILX is that everyone here is an alien. That's what's brought us together.

I just typed something out, and then deleted it, because I promised Matt as moderator that I wouldn't bring other people into it. This is about me, not him. But I've figured it out. Hurt, bruised, but a lesson learned.

Alan, it's a funny thing, I think it's a personality thing, rather than a depressive thing. Do you remember ages ago when we all took the Meyers-Briggs personality thing. Programmers and Data Analysts are often Masterminds or Architect types. The love of patterns, the love of systems. That's what attracts us to our work. But I remember that the very personality description also included a bit about the way that we were "haunted by a sense of impending failure" because they can see so clearly the patterns of their own lives.

I think depression is a symptom of pattern analysis, rather than pattern analysis being a symptom of depression.

xpost

i am not a depressive person, and have only one in my life found myself circling its bad seas i think (abt ten years ago): but i too certainly associate good things (i mean what i consider to be the good things in my life) with patternlessness - and i guess somewhat "nurture" that, here and IRL

this can come apart a bit when it comes to developing good housekeeping habits to keep friendships simmering nicely (esp.eg w.friends who live far away) (so i forget to reply to letters and whatever, bcz i don't have a ritual to do so)

This is about me, not him.

Him there meaning the Snubber, not Matt the Moderator, who is an excellent individual natch!

x-post...

Thanks, Kate. :-) A compliment means a lot coming from a cool chick like you.

And I'm sorry. This is really not meant as self pity or a demand for attention. I'm really trying to work through exactly why I've been so upset and thrown off balance by this all.

Now I know, time to move on.

Mark, ritual and pattern has always been a calming and good thing to me, e.g.:

Routine and Ritual: Boring or Comforting?

Perhaps this is because the disruption of my childhood, perhaps this is because of some inherent autistic tendencies, perhaps it's just a personality thing.

Patters are what makes me know that the world is turning, that gravity is functioning, and we will not go flying off into space at any moment. Maybe pattern means that there is some kind of divine plan, and I'm in it?

A lot of what you say w/r/t otherness, and especially some little snub or setback knocking you flat is quite strongly resonant, I don't really feel like i fit in w/much at all and to be honest at the moment I don't really want to :/

i can't fit everyone i know in my flat after all :(

but i guess i like to bring ppl together who don't know each other, so that is my hostessy rationale when challenged (which luckily i never have been)

(this is not to get into this incident specifically where i am too close to all involved to be comfy taking sides)

kate, i have depression with anxiety and always hated therapy, but cognitive-behavioral therapy helped me. it's more 'useful' and works on distracting you from thought patterns with action instead of wallowing in them like other therapy - which seems like the exact opposite of what some people need.

also, i'm going through something similar where i'm really bitter over the way a guy in one of my social groups treated me. the thing is, social groups work funny. i've talked about him to others and they all agree he probably treated me like shit 'hate to say it, but that sounds like something he would do'. but he's funny in a crowd and knows where the party's at so people would always call him instead of me if they want to go out. which of course makes me more bitter. and they inevitably let their guard down and he pisses them off again. i think he feeds on other people's insecurities. a lot of times people with the most problems have the most people around them. because they NEED them. and they go through them quickly. who do you think is probably the nicer guy, the one who's been with 100's of women or only 10? looks who's famous and powerful. it fucks with your self-esteem, but you have to realize group dynamics are largely jr. high bullshit and working on being a good person and cultivating real friends won't help your ego or your insecurities - but helps with most everything else. it's much more powerful when you stop giving a shit, but you can't really force it. i feel maybe i'm on the verge with this asshole i know, but it's easier said than done. especially since he's much more socially comfortable than i.

What is ironic is that the actual "backstabbing" of the title never. actually. happened.

It was a lie made up by an abusive partner, to get me to distrust my friends, and think of him as the only "supportive" person in my life.

I didn't find this out until ages later, and by then it was too late.

There is a lesson to be learned from that, perhaps, about time and distance, and how perspective changes things.