Mark and I have had some great conversations since I've been here. The first one was about men. In it, we discussed an almost universal pull guys feel as part of their rite of passage into full manhood. It is the desire to experience and see the world. It is a powerful yearning, not unlike being pulled somewhere by a rope. It can happen in many phases, each phase setting the man up to embark on the adventure of the next.
At lunch with a friend, I was asked if Bill had done something similar in his earlier years, even before I knew him. I said, yes, Bill had gone into live as a 'square' in a well-known drug recovery community in the sixties and seventies. "Did he play their games?" my friend asked. "What games?" "You know the circle games, the therapy games, the attack therapy"....
I had forgotten about that. That was Bill's training ground for becoming the manipulator he was so good at being. That was the place he learned how to fight to win at any cost. Fighting dirty was okay if in the end, you got your way. This was a huge 'aha moment' for me. That's where he learned his way of fighting. I wonder if it was also where he decided that lying was okay, lack of trust was okay, if you got your way. A strange ethic, but one that apparently was worth it for him. I was no match for that.
No comments:
Post a Comment