Lovedwrong: Been and Done
By: Dc Gary
Tags: Reflection, Domestic Violence, Future, Learning, Journal

My name is David Charles Gareth Brien, or DC Gary for short, and I was raised in a seemingly wonderful way by doting parents from opposite sides of a contemporary religious divide. Behind the scenes there was something more insidious happening, something difficult to pin down exactly. Flash forward about thirty years or so and upon reflection some patterns emerge.

Life can be a real challenge as we all know and we are all both victims and perpetrators of both real and imaginary forces at different times.

Lovedwrong is a form of self therapy for me and I hope reading my thoughts helps others. I am someone who believes they have been battling false narratives for twenty years. False narratives designed to cover up textbook abuse — the insidious and limiting Yellow Domestic Violence — over the course of the first fifteeen years. My experience is not unique. This is not an attempt to force blame upon any specific individual or group. Instead, lovedwrong is simply a call to acknowledge that Domestic Violence occurs across a broad spectrum of activities, some of which deserve more attention than they get. Verbal and Emotional abuse, hallmarks of YDV, often go undetected or unadmonished and can lead to the more serious Physical and Sexual abuse.

Lovedwrong says both victims and perpetrators are ultimately victims together, so let’s forget about blame, turn over the rugs, and start having difficult conversations about facts.

Rather than feel powerless every morning over past events with contemporary patterns which cause alarm, this effort was started. Maybe by making some thoughts public, and having my side told, this chapter can finally come to a close for me and for others. Yes, I can turn and walk away and build a life without resolution in this regard. But first I need to go back and try to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

A fun way to maintain a sense of continuity amid what are bound to be gaps in time between posts, might be to use a journal format. Will try that for now.

Journal Entry 1

What is lovedwrong about? Its about justice. Its about the wasted energy on confusion and anger and thoughts of retribution. Its about the people who are failing themselves without realizing it while their attempts to fail you have failed themselves. They tried to drag me into their mire. They tried to convince me that they knew a way to go worth knowing. The fact is that before they ever started to take me seriously, I had already stopped affording them that natural human grace. To trust first until proven otherwise is how nature intended us humans to be. To take what we need from the landscape and not more than that is how we lived for thousands of years. Envy. Boredom. Power. All factors in our collective psychology which, combined with others, have made simple tenets complicated, and obscured the foundation of our very desires. This leads to people never really becoming fully realized adult humans. What does “adult” mean? Is it a simple fact of timing? Is it instead a sensibility which requires the capacity to reason and to act rationally toward one’s own benefit?

Journal Entry 2

I grew up with one foot in the real world, the other in bubble wrap, and both in the shadow cast by the most diverse and dynamic built environment in human history. Talking about one foot in a community center and one at a country club. Living the common struggle one day, and living the privileged endgame the next. Endgame? At least seemingly so that is. We humans always seem to want more. The person making $15K annually wants to make $25K. Person making $25K wants $50K who wants $100K who wants $1m who wants $10m who wants $100m who wants $1b who wants $10b who wants $100b who wants $1T. Or do they? Well, yes, they decidedly do. But an income limit somewhere in the above range is a hard fact of life for 100% of the population. Take the striving for survival out of a person’s impetus, and then make it clear to them that they have reached an income ceiling, and you will still have a person striving for something. From pond to stream to lake to river to harbor to ocean, water flows downhill. That natural fact is repeated in our individual and collective psychologies, most critically during the formation of desire. The flow of human development is imprinted with man made obstacles often rooted in generations previous to the contemporary moment. When considering key concepts and dichotomies it is clear that on a fundamental level, in 10,000 years of societal development, not much has really changed. Unfulfilled desires still lead to dissatisfaction. Perceiving to be on the threshold of a new era, and feeling something strong about oneself because of it, whether hopeful anticipation or existential trepidation or something in between, is an experience for 100% of the human beings who have ever lived on this planet. Which is actually pretty great. A true and timeless equal opportunity. That feeling you have when you stand on your personal precipice, or imagine the day that you will, is one of the greatest things about being alive. But what happens when this perception of impeding change is rendered amorphous and threatening by internal and external failures of reason? Believing that reversion is on the doorstep, that what is had today will be less tomorrow, decreases a person’s rationality. Imagine the satisfaction of feeling like what you have is enough for now and clearing a path toward your more as you perceive it.

What if to those around you neither is good enough? What if their own lack of satisfaction is decreasing their rationality? What if humanity could learn to understand the biological chemistry driving ploughs through their lived experience, and vice versa?

Confusing? Most topics are.

Not the least of which is Yellow Domestic Violence.

lovedwrong was formed in 2020 to research, understand, and mitigate the causes and effects of violence within a household. Violence can take the form of emotional, verbal, sexual, or physical abuse. It can be graphic and alarming or subtle and insidious. Causes of violence can be personal or structural and immediate or communal. Effects of violence can be devastating, debilitating, merely detrimental, displaced, and deferred.

lovedwrong is here to work toward ending Yellow Domestic Violence.

Journal Entry 3

I grew up the scapegoat in a massively dysfunctional family, watching my father get bullied by my mother who was in a constant state of appeasement to an imagined and also very dysfunctional social norm. I knew it was only a matter of time before his powerlessness became my abuse. It took me years to realize how smoothly this dysfunction would pass into my own personal and loving relationships. Lucky for me, and for people in loving relationships with me, this was only verbal and emotional abuse growing up, no physical or sexual. My parents created a shy boy tiny tim narrative to explain away the impacts of the abuse. When I got old enough to be truly villainized, I was, and to great and lasting effect to this day. LovedWrong is my attempt to not only reclaim the narrative of my true identity, but also to draw attention to the more insidious forms of Domestic Violence that take place in households around the world every day.

The mission of lovedwrong is to raise awareness about the less violent or silent or unspoken forms of Domestic Violence that may seem less severe in the moment. This style of abuse tends to accumulate and fester and foster bad victim behaviors to cope with the gnawing sense of injustice. This style of abuse tends to perpetuate itself and is the gateway mechanism to physical, sexual, and even deadly violence.

Waking up with a sense of injustice and reliving memories and imagining what would be said if it could be, or done if it could be, informs the structure and anchors the impetus for this effort. Wanting to come clean about being a harbinger of dysfunction and to make amends for mistakes in how people were treated motivates this effort. One post per week will try to capture some aspect of the experience.

Lovedwrong is designed to be read both ways, as victim and as perpetrator.

Join us in being brutally honest with ourselves and others about what motivates our treatment of each other. How are we building our sense of self? Is it innate or propped up? Are we acting in good faith? Are we being too aggressive or too pliant to transgressors? What coping mechanisms have we deployed? Do we see any patterns emerging? What about the next generation and the generation after that?

Journal Entry 4

The anger, the outrage, the need for justice. The fear, the embarrassment, the need for fences. Both sides are wrong, and both sides are right, at least according to themselves anyway. So how does the situation get resolved? Battle? Mediation? The allegation is very clear: child abuse. Period. Verbal and emotional abuse straight out of a textbook, and guess what? I don’t give two shits about “the times” or “how it was back then” as an excuse. The facts of the abuse are one thing but as in all crimes against humanity, the real depravity sets in during the coverup. See, I was shy kid, kind of, sometimes, ask the ones I bullied how shy I really was. Those are facts to be disclosed at a later time. Evidence in fact of a massively dysfunctional household which had me realizing at age TEN that my parents were fucked up and that the shit that went on at home was fucked up and that part of my responsibility to the family at large was to make sure no one knew about it. An implicit secret upon which the vitality of the family was reliant. Daaaaannnnnnnnnng man, that was some heavy shit. Will never forget about the day at elementary school where it had been so bad and I was so distraught that finally someone would have to notice, then I can tell everything, then who knows. Never happened. No one said anything. Maybe I hid it so well. Maybe people didn’t think it was their place. Hot damn what could life had been if there was ever a de-escalation of the abuse. To this day the coverup haunts me and haunts all of them as well. It’s a cloud which they pretend is only over my head. And that if they could just get rid of me then I will take that cloud away from them. Oh well. Too bad the cloud is in their own hearts and minds and perspective on how to treat people, and in the financial and rhetorical and performative displays of a curated life existence and supposedly elevated value and on and on and on and on and on.

So clearly the real point is: Lets Talk About It. Because all kinds of rules can be broken or mended but if a person gets a physiological reaction to another on sight on mention or on touch then shoot there is something to that. For the person with the outsized physiological, really technically speaking, chemical, reaction happening inside their body and brain. We carve canyons in our brains if we are not careful. Sure from inside a canyon life can seem pretty beautiful when the river is flowing. Sure the predictability and the knowledge of what and whom are in the canyon together feels very very nice. And sure being somewhere first does have some inherent privilege. But, how can all this add up if the canyon needs contributing valleys to be a sustainable habitat? How can the canyon justify its superiority while also being wholly reliant on the outside? False displays of arms lengthedness and an unwillingness to be open to being wrong among other things lead the canyon to see the rest as beneath. The same happens inside the canyons of our electrical passways, if we so let it. Or is it inevitable? Only as much as doing the same damn thing day in and day out is inevitable. Because the latter of the two seems like personal choice to me, and or structural problems within society. Oh really? Society? Exactly. Though useful and poignant for discussion, the point of any of this is not to call out a single person or group of people or even entire towns, but instead, the point is to talk about it.

Why can one person not stand to be in a room with another? Many permutations boil down to: lack of justice. They have to have known each other well enough for something to have happened. One or both would have probably done or said something untoward or worse. Or they heard about it. Or it was with someone else they know that the incident occurred. We are the stories we tell ourselves and each other. But we are not those stories alone. Nope. Sorry. We are also bound by facts which can in many circumstances be proven and corroborated by a third party. Moreover, in our specialized society, there is opportunity to bring in many and multiple types of outside party. The problem is, that despite our seemingly advanced society, the majority of people on this planet do not think it is worth pursuing a holistic view of negative circumstances. Most people decide on their self-serving version of the events, so that they can move forward with whatever self belief or group belief they need.

That is what all of this and all of anything really comes down to. Who is the self that is reading these words? Who are you? How do you know that? Depending on your answers to those questions, you might have more work to do than others. Regardless of religion or long term after life assumptions, that we have an inner being and a dialogue with ourselves is well established. For thousands upon thousands of years, and it is likely that every single animal also has an inner being. And a sense of wonder, and of trepidation, and of hope and fear and love and comfort. Why is this likely? Because it is all chemical, and we are incentivized by chemicals to seek chemicals by ingestion, inhalation, or through an internal inducement natural to our being. This can be some powerful stuff. This power is why we have large structural institutions, and customs, and traditions, and laws, and sports franchises, and whatever else you want to think of along these lines. What happens next, fun to think about, matters less than what happens now. What happens now depends on how an individual or a group see themselves, want to be seen, and what they do to take action according to this vision. Better than, express it. Worse than, express it. Same as, express it. The danger of expression is the blurring of the individual and the group. If the group is one thing, and the individual is part of the group, then the individual is also that same one thing. Right? Something like that.

Easier to say and understand though is this: do you build the sense of your self from the inside out or from the outside in? You have a choice in the matter. Did it always seem like you had a choice? That’s up to you. You do, that is a fact of life.

Even me, I could drop all this lovedwrong stuff, forget about it and move on. Or could I? Maybe with deep therapy and some medication their artificial cloud could become more tolerable over time I suppose. But the problem isn’t just me and just them. The problem is the entire mentality. The entire social milieu is dysfunctional. We all need to talk about this because resources are being wasted. Even more importantly than that: human beings are putting each other through the ringer, and treating Nature like an also ran at the dog track of the universe. It’s backwards. The main stream of the biggest canyon reversed flow a long time ago. We need to talk about it.

Thanks for reading. Check out the LWJournal for further entries.

Cheers to the future!