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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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Feral cats and hurting people both require trust, patience, time to heal

By David McElroy · June 26, 2016

Bessie1

Although Bessie has lived inside with me for more than seven years, she’s still a wild, untamed and terrified little cat — just as she was when I brought her in from the cold on a freezing December night years ago.

Bessie and her sister, Molly, had lived on the streets around my house with their mother. They were a few months old when their mother suddenly disappeared. I took them in with the assumption that I could teach them to trust humans if they were loved and cared for. After all, I had done that repeatedly with other cats who had turned into loving companions.

But Bessie and Molly never learned to trust. They enjoy food and a safe place to sleep and live, but they have never accepted that it’s safe for me to touch them. Something in their feral genes or their early life on the street has taught them that humans aren’t to be trusted. So I just accepted long ago that I could give them a safe place to live but that they would never want human love.

In the last month, I’ve had reason to think I might have been mistaken. Maybe with even more time and work and love, Bessie might change.

Nearly a month ago, I had to catch Bessie to shave some mats out of her fur. She had gotten something into the fur of her back and she hadn’t been able to clean it out, so it had matted. She has only three legs, so it’s harder for her to clean some parts of herself than it is for other cats.

It was an ordeal to catch her — as it always has been — but I caught her and used the trimmer to shave the mats out. And while I had her, I thought I might as well take the chance to love on her again, in the hopes that she might accept it this time, even though she never has before.

Oddly, Bessie did something unusual that night. Out of the blue, I felt her muscles relax a little bit. She let me stroke her fur and she stretched out as though she might be enjoying it, grudgingly of course. She even purred quietly.

Over the next couple of weeks, I saw a remarkable transformation. Bessie started allowing me to love on her — at times, not always — and she didn’t always run from me. One day when I rubbed her as she lay on the fireplace mantle, she even lifted her one back leg — to expose her underside and show me where she wanted to be stroked. It was shocking and it made me very happy.

Bessie2As I started seeing this change in her, I found myself thinking — not for the first time — that earning the trust of a feral cat is very much like loving a hurting person who is falling apart.

I was once in love with a woman who was emotionally falling apart. I didn’t understand what was wrong at the time, but her behavior scared me. We had planned to marry. Most of the time, she was a brilliant, loving and amazing woman. Every now and then, she was unexpectedly a crying, angry, scared person — an emotional wreck.

When she was in the grips of whatever that was, she was like a feral cat. There was nothing I could do to help her at those times.

I backed out of marrying her because I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t have the patience to figure things out or consult an expert. I later understood that she was almost certainly suffering from some degree of a condition called borderline personality disorder. By the time I understood how I could have helped her — and provided an emotionally safe environment in which she could to heal — it was too late.

That relationship is ancient history, but I keep thinking about other people I know who are hurting — emotionally damaged in some serious way — and I can’t help but realize that dealing with them is a lot like dealing with a feral cat.

I know a very kind and loving man who has been living with a wife who’s been severely depressed ever since an emotional breakdown about a decade ago. He’s long-term tired and he’s frustrated and he’s lonely. He feels as though he’s lost his companion to a terrible illness called depression. He’s given up on her. If he didn’t feel so obligated to take care of her, he would walk away from her.

I can’t blame him, because I walked away from a woman I loved, too, and I didn’t deal with 10 years of dysfunction.

Sometimes we give up on people too quickly. Other times, we put up with far too much for far too long. I don’t know where the happy medium is. I doubt there are any rules.

There are times when you have to cut people out of your life. When people are causing physical or emotional damage, you have no choice. But when you have the time — and the risks are low — time and love can heal a lot of hurts, as long as you don’t give up.

I’ve come to believe that the woman I gave up on could have been emotionally healthy with enough love and support — given enough time and an emotionally safe environment. I’ll never know for sure, but I think so. And my experience with Bessie serves as a reminder that you never know when someone is about to finally respond to your love and patience.

Bessie will almost certainly never be a normal house cat. She’s always going to be skittish. There will be many days when she’s still going to run away and not let me touch her. (Today was one of those days.)

But there are days when she can relax and accept love. There are times — not often — when she can let go of her fear enough to lie on my chest and purr while I rub her.

I think a lot of people are the same way. They’re so damaged that they can never be completely over whatever has damaged them. They’ll always be scared. They’ll always have emotional triggers that make them run away.

But if you love someone and you want to make that person part of your life for good, things can change with time, love and patience. Providing a consistent loving environment can earn trust. And in the trust of that safe space, there can be room for healing.

Some of us will never completely get over damage that we’ve experienced. And others have experienced really difficult damage and nothing is going to help them at all. But for many, time, love and patience will earn some trust for you — if the effort is worth it to you.

I’m willing to invest that sort of effort into a love relationship if it’s necessary. I was once too afraid of what I saw and I didn’t think I could do it, but I know now that I can hold onto an emotional tornado and wait until the storm is over. It’s a conscious choice.

I might not always be quick to learn, but if I give her enough time, Bessie is going to teach me how to love her — and in doing that, she’s going to continue teaching me how to love hurting people, too.

Bessie3

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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