In a marriage or a band or any socially defined game, there frequently comes a moment of truth when you either keep playing by the rules or you say to hell with it and kick over the card table.
That's where America is now: to kick over the card table or not to kick over the card table.
The biggie word for kicking over the card table is Revolution, but radical social reform often works just as well if not better.
This often plays out paradoxically because the textbook example is that things have to get worse before they get better. How many times have you witnessed (or participated in) a marriage that kept limping along because of cowardly enablers, i.e., people who pretend away the chaos and anguish because they don’t have the grit and intelligence to DEAL WITH the torturing dysfunctionality?
Now so long as the enablers have their way, the dysfunctionality never ends, but this needs to be said more precisely. What this means is that the family (there's usually children) keeps playing a moronically destructive game by rules that imprison them like cattle. The bars of their prison are an abstract set of game rules that no one dares to break. Conversely, DEALING WITH the interpersonal hell more than anything else means "kicking over the card table". Let's call it a "Rule Revolution" because the matrix of imprisoning abstractions are simply walked away from, e.g., a long overdue divorce, or imprisonment of a physically abusive spouse, or a legal "intervention" of grandparents to save the children.
Unfortunately, this salvation frequently takes place only when the enabled evil reaches some kind of critical mass and this, of course, is the paradox. Things have to get worse before they get better, where getting better means the dysfunctional game rules are simply ignored.
And odd analogy here is the evolution of mathematics. When a new area of math opens up it’s rarely because it was "deduced" from former mathematical systems (which would simply be a new variation of that system). No, the new area is really NEW, albeit logically related to former mathematical systems. It's a kind of quantum jump, if you will, into a new mathematical dimension. Hence the deductive connections in the history of mathematics can be retrospective, but never predictive.
That's what happens when critical mass is reached in a dysfunctional family. Some kind of line is crossed and the game rule prison of the dysfunctional system is left by either going into a different dysfunctional system, or, far less commonly, by "transcending" the dimension of social game rule slavery, which is indeed an existential liberation, since henceforth such people live from their birthright center of feelings and intuitions and not some concoction of family, religious, and governmental rules -- all, of course, invented by SOMEONE ELSE.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
