Meatloaf Analogy
13/8/10 14:40![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eredienThe meatloaf analogy
In![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rm's journal, trinker wrote a comment about how surviving abuse makes people abjectly grateful for whatever they get.
I wanted to expand on that a little, and wanted to put it in a place where I could talk about how that was rekevant to my own situation right now.
Totrinker's comment, I would add to this that it makes people abjectly grateful for whatever they get--even if they don't want it, even if they detest it, even if getting it is actively bad for them. And when people are told and believe that they should be grateful for getting things that are bad for them over and over again, they generally end up not being able to articulate what it is that would actually be good for them, because they have never had the opportunity to have something that was good for them, whether they got it for themselves or had other people give it to them.
When you are starving for food, and someone hands you meatloaf, you are going to eat it even if you don't like meatloaf. You are going to eat it even if you are allergic to meatloaf, if you are hungry enough. And if all that the people who cook for you know how to make is meatloaf, you are eventually going to learn to eat and probably cook meatloaf, even if you don't want it. Then, once you've learned to eat it all the time without throwing up, you will start to wonder if you really do like meatloaf--after all, you're eating it all the time.
Then, you learn that other people eat other things--beans, squash, fish, ice cream, sometimes even meatloaf. At first you are surprised--people eat a variety of things? You spend a while adjusting to that idea, and then you go to the kitchen and tell the chef about pumpkins and they say, "but my meatloaf is the very best!" or "sorry, I don't know how to make salad; you'll have to make do with meatloaf!" or "you don't like my meatloaf? Fine! Don't eat tonight, then!" or "but you've been eating my meatloaf your whole life, so you must like it--and look at how healthy you are! " These last two arguments are quite convincing, because you a.) don't want to stave, and b.) you yourself were already wondering if maybe your hatred for meatloaf was irrational--it reinforces that self-doubt that was already there. You never stopped to wonder if you could have become more healthy if you ate soup instead: for one thing, you'd never had the opportunity to try soup because you'd never had it in your kitchen. And for another, you had no reason to think that eating something else would fix the problem, since when other people said they ate other things and were "normally healthy" you assumed that meant that they were constantly sick, since that was "normally healthy" for you and everyone who you knew, since you all ate from the same kitchen.
But then you finally figure out that maybe you should to learn how to cook.
You go to the cook and ask to use the kitchen, but they won't let you make anything other than meatloaf; so you have to go elsewhere to learn to cook.
There are three options from that point.
- You can decide that you know how to cook and eat meatloaf, and that continuing to eat meatloaf will make the cook happy. And you can stay right there in the kitchen where you were. So, you keep making and eating and maybe kinda enjoying meatloaf, but it always feels like something is wrong and you keep throwing up every once in a while.
- You start making pie and casserole and spaghetti and popsicles. You eat so much you get sick in a new and different way from before--which scares you, because it's not familiar, so you go back to eating meatloaf.
- You start making gazpacho and muffins and cake and peanut-butter sandwiches, and eat in moderation, and start feeling healthier--but you're not used to that, and think something is wrong because you don't throw up after every meal. That's pretty scary, and may make you go back to meatloaf unless you can manage to realize that it's ok to heal.
If you take the third option and realize it's ok to heal, when you come back to the kitchen, and start setting your cheese and your olives and your fruit flan out on the table, the cook is going to start complaining:
"What's wrong with meatloaf? It was good enough for you before!"
"You don't look well. Are you sure you don't want me to send a meatloaf care package?"
"I see you've learned to cook. How about learning my recipe for meatloaf? It would mean a lot to me."
"Thanks for bringing these...potato chips, but I'm not going to eat them. Man, you have such weird food; I'm intimidated by your fancy tastes you picked up elsewhere. You certainly didn't learn how to eat potato chips from me."
"Here, add a little bit of meatloaf to your plate full of salad."
If you say, "I don't want any more stupid meatloaf! It made me sick!"
They will say, "but meatloaf is all I know how to make."
And if, thinking to fix this, you offer to teach them how to make cookies or omelets or sushi, they will say, "oh no, thanks, I'll just stick with my good 'ol meatloaf. When I eat things other than meatloaf I get sick."
When you point out that you would like them to learn how to make things other than meatloaf for you, even if they do not want to make them to eat for themselves, they say, "this is my kitchen, you're rarely here anyway, you refused my offer of teaching you how to cook when you started cooking and went to somebody else's kitchen instead, and I like making meatloaf for myself. And even though you've offered, I can't really eat all this other weird shit that you bring with you when you cook here. That doesn't even seem like food to me; it's just too different from the meatloaf I'm used to. Given that, and given that you've already learned to feed yourself by bringing your own food with you when you come, why should I take the time and trouble to learn how to make food that you like and serve it to you if I can't eat it myself?"
In the end, the cooks recognize that they have the capability to make things other than meatloaf, but they are fundamentally selfish--unable and unwilling to make and serve you food that is good for you if they themselves cannot eat the same types of food. The only way you might change their mind is by encouraging them to eat a little variety from your stash of food, but of course you brought that along so you wouldn't have to eat meatloaf or starve, so you're a little wary of sharing all of it, and they don't really do more than nibble anyway.
I have been--am--guilty of this fundamental selfishness, in terms of relationships. I think that is because I believed that the only permissible way to live with and love others in a relationship--and in turn be lived with and be loved by those others--was the already socially sanctioned way of showing those things. Which is just not true.
Which is probably why I spent a lot of time in the past six months deconstructing arguments against gay marriage and following the news about worldwide queer rights and Prop 8--I was using my thoughts about what was actually happening as a tool to try and work through my feelings about the social sanction of marriage. After the first few months, I was even able to articulate to myself that I was using all that reading and writing as a tool to get to something else, a means to an end, but I wasn't quite sure what end I was looking for. (I was so crushed when the prop 8 victory was handed down a day before R. and I broke up, but the reason I was crushed didn't make sense to me--we had never planned on getting married in CA anyway, so why would the timing have such an affect on me and my relationship, personally? Turns out I was crushed because the social sanction aspect so central to the case was something that I had really believed I needed to have a happy, loving relationship, and at the very point that that social sanction was making global news headlines, I no longer had a happy, loving relationship for those sanctions to apply to). It was that reading and writing and thinking that led me to realize that I didn't actually want or need those social sanctions to have a loving relationship, and further led me to realize that my insistence on those sanctions was what led me to ignore my own idea of what I actually wanted, which led me to destroy the loving relationship I actually had going on already. [After some reflection, I don't think that I destroyed the relationship, and I don't think it was the pressure for social sanction that led it to be destroyed. I do however, think that my insistence on the sanction let me to ignore what I wanted.]
This is not to say that other people shouldn't want or need social sanctions, because I think the vast majority of people do, and deserve them. I will continue to fight for gay marriage. I just won't continue to fight for it for me anymore, because it's not what I want.
(The meatloaf analogy, BTW, is both a metaphorical and a literal analogy--I'm vegan and I literally get the "wow, this is so good but it's so weird, I don't think I could eat it every day; are you sure you don't want steak--and you aren't losing any weight, are you?" with every family dinner for which I make and bring my own food. (When I was a preteen and decided to become pescatarian, my parents forbid me from buying and/or cooking my own food at home. I would eat what they cooked and pick out the bits of meat. I survived a year on frozen/canned side-dish vegetables, pasta, and McDonald's caesar salads, before I realized that I could not get enough protein without the tofu that I could not buy or cook, and went back to eating meat for my own long-term health.) The whole point of bringing the food in the first place is to enable me to make the food choices that are right for me, and stay emotionally and physically healthy by doing so), but my mom just complains that eating fish would make me healthier and feels bad that I won't eat her turkey gravy, and my dad won't try anything made of tofu at all, though I think he had three slices of vegan cake).
I am pretty sure this is why I have problems with food--I didn't like the food I was being given, but didn't have an opportunity to eat kind of food I wanted much, wasn't allowed to have my own diet when I found out my ideal foods were radically different from those of the people around me, and was told my choices were invalid so began to doubt my own ideas about what I liked and whether my food opinions were just totally invalid.
I am pretty sure this is why I have problems with relationships--I didn't have an opportunity to get much attention as a kid, and didn't like what attention I was given. But when I expressed this, I was told that it was not acceptable to ask for or want different kinds of affection, because the kinds of attention I was given were the kinds they could give, and the prevailing socially sanctioned idea my parents and I had of love was "the parents will love to the best of their ability, and since that is all they can do, the child will know and feel loved" -- even though that doesn't really follow. Even when I found out that my ideal forms of getting attention and expressing love and affection were acceptable to ask for from people who weren't my parents, I still didn't have a good understanding of what kinds of attention I did want, or if I wanted attention at all, or if I wanted it how to get it or give my own.
I think this problem, though, has gone a long way toward being solved in the past decade. Some highlights: I learned a lot about what kind of types of affection I actually wanted and about what kinds were no good for me. I learned that it was ok to desire them, and to ask for them. I learned how to say "no" and "yes" when someone gave them to me, and mean it. I learned it was ok to say "I don't know," and wait. I learned it was ok to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for myself beyond "what I desire in my relationships." I learned it was ok to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for myself within my relationships. I learned it was ok for others to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires in their relationships. I learned it was ok for others to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for themselves beyond "what they desire in their relationships."
All those things are really important.
In
rm's journal, trinker wrote a comment about how surviving abuse makes people abjectly grateful for whatever they get.I wanted to expand on that a little, and wanted to put it in a place where I could talk about how that was rekevant to my own situation right now.
To
trinker's comment, I would add to this that it makes people abjectly grateful for whatever they get--even if they don't want it, even if they detest it, even if getting it is actively bad for them. And when people are told and believe that they should be grateful for getting things that are bad for them over and over again, they generally end up not being able to articulate what it is that would actually be good for them, because they have never had the opportunity to have something that was good for them, whether they got it for themselves or had other people give it to them.When you are starving for food, and someone hands you meatloaf, you are going to eat it even if you don't like meatloaf. You are going to eat it even if you are allergic to meatloaf, if you are hungry enough. And if all that the people who cook for you know how to make is meatloaf, you are eventually going to learn to eat and probably cook meatloaf, even if you don't want it. Then, once you've learned to eat it all the time without throwing up, you will start to wonder if you really do like meatloaf--after all, you're eating it all the time.
Then, you learn that other people eat other things--beans, squash, fish, ice cream, sometimes even meatloaf. At first you are surprised--people eat a variety of things? You spend a while adjusting to that idea, and then you go to the kitchen and tell the chef about pumpkins and they say, "but my meatloaf is the very best!" or "sorry, I don't know how to make salad; you'll have to make do with meatloaf!" or "you don't like my meatloaf? Fine! Don't eat tonight, then!" or "but you've been eating my meatloaf your whole life, so you must like it--and look at how healthy you are! " These last two arguments are quite convincing, because you a.) don't want to stave, and b.) you yourself were already wondering if maybe your hatred for meatloaf was irrational--it reinforces that self-doubt that was already there. You never stopped to wonder if you could have become more healthy if you ate soup instead: for one thing, you'd never had the opportunity to try soup because you'd never had it in your kitchen. And for another, you had no reason to think that eating something else would fix the problem, since when other people said they ate other things and were "normally healthy" you assumed that meant that they were constantly sick, since that was "normally healthy" for you and everyone who you knew, since you all ate from the same kitchen.
But then you finally figure out that maybe you should to learn how to cook.
You go to the cook and ask to use the kitchen, but they won't let you make anything other than meatloaf; so you have to go elsewhere to learn to cook.
There are three options from that point.
- You can decide that you know how to cook and eat meatloaf, and that continuing to eat meatloaf will make the cook happy. And you can stay right there in the kitchen where you were. So, you keep making and eating and maybe kinda enjoying meatloaf, but it always feels like something is wrong and you keep throwing up every once in a while.
- You start making pie and casserole and spaghetti and popsicles. You eat so much you get sick in a new and different way from before--which scares you, because it's not familiar, so you go back to eating meatloaf.
- You start making gazpacho and muffins and cake and peanut-butter sandwiches, and eat in moderation, and start feeling healthier--but you're not used to that, and think something is wrong because you don't throw up after every meal. That's pretty scary, and may make you go back to meatloaf unless you can manage to realize that it's ok to heal.
If you take the third option and realize it's ok to heal, when you come back to the kitchen, and start setting your cheese and your olives and your fruit flan out on the table, the cook is going to start complaining:
"What's wrong with meatloaf? It was good enough for you before!"
"You don't look well. Are you sure you don't want me to send a meatloaf care package?"
"I see you've learned to cook. How about learning my recipe for meatloaf? It would mean a lot to me."
"Thanks for bringing these...potato chips, but I'm not going to eat them. Man, you have such weird food; I'm intimidated by your fancy tastes you picked up elsewhere. You certainly didn't learn how to eat potato chips from me."
"Here, add a little bit of meatloaf to your plate full of salad."
If you say, "I don't want any more stupid meatloaf! It made me sick!"
They will say, "but meatloaf is all I know how to make."
And if, thinking to fix this, you offer to teach them how to make cookies or omelets or sushi, they will say, "oh no, thanks, I'll just stick with my good 'ol meatloaf. When I eat things other than meatloaf I get sick."
When you point out that you would like them to learn how to make things other than meatloaf for you, even if they do not want to make them to eat for themselves, they say, "this is my kitchen, you're rarely here anyway, you refused my offer of teaching you how to cook when you started cooking and went to somebody else's kitchen instead, and I like making meatloaf for myself. And even though you've offered, I can't really eat all this other weird shit that you bring with you when you cook here. That doesn't even seem like food to me; it's just too different from the meatloaf I'm used to. Given that, and given that you've already learned to feed yourself by bringing your own food with you when you come, why should I take the time and trouble to learn how to make food that you like and serve it to you if I can't eat it myself?"
In the end, the cooks recognize that they have the capability to make things other than meatloaf, but they are fundamentally selfish--unable and unwilling to make and serve you food that is good for you if they themselves cannot eat the same types of food. The only way you might change their mind is by encouraging them to eat a little variety from your stash of food, but of course you brought that along so you wouldn't have to eat meatloaf or starve, so you're a little wary of sharing all of it, and they don't really do more than nibble anyway.
I have been--am--guilty of this fundamental selfishness, in terms of relationships. I think that is because I believed that the only permissible way to live with and love others in a relationship--and in turn be lived with and be loved by those others--was the already socially sanctioned way of showing those things. Which is just not true.
Which is probably why I spent a lot of time in the past six months deconstructing arguments against gay marriage and following the news about worldwide queer rights and Prop 8--I was using my thoughts about what was actually happening as a tool to try and work through my feelings about the social sanction of marriage. After the first few months, I was even able to articulate to myself that I was using all that reading and writing as a tool to get to something else, a means to an end, but I wasn't quite sure what end I was looking for. (I was so crushed when the prop 8 victory was handed down a day before R. and I broke up, but the reason I was crushed didn't make sense to me--we had never planned on getting married in CA anyway, so why would the timing have such an affect on me and my relationship, personally? Turns out I was crushed because the social sanction aspect so central to the case was something that I had really believed I needed to have a happy, loving relationship, and at the very point that that social sanction was making global news headlines, I no longer had a happy, loving relationship for those sanctions to apply to). It was that reading and writing and thinking that led me to realize that I didn't actually want or need those social sanctions to have a loving relationship, and further led me to realize that my insistence on those sanctions was what led me to ignore my own idea of what I actually wanted,
This is not to say that other people shouldn't want or need social sanctions, because I think the vast majority of people do, and deserve them. I will continue to fight for gay marriage. I just won't continue to fight for it for me anymore, because it's not what I want.
(The meatloaf analogy, BTW, is both a metaphorical and a literal analogy--I'm vegan and I literally get the "wow, this is so good but it's so weird, I don't think I could eat it every day; are you sure you don't want steak--and you aren't losing any weight, are you?" with every family dinner for which I make and bring my own food. (When I was a preteen and decided to become pescatarian, my parents forbid me from buying and/or cooking my own food at home. I would eat what they cooked and pick out the bits of meat. I survived a year on frozen/canned side-dish vegetables, pasta, and McDonald's caesar salads, before I realized that I could not get enough protein without the tofu that I could not buy or cook, and went back to eating meat for my own long-term health.) The whole point of bringing the food in the first place is to enable me to make the food choices that are right for me, and stay emotionally and physically healthy by doing so), but my mom just complains that eating fish would make me healthier and feels bad that I won't eat her turkey gravy, and my dad won't try anything made of tofu at all, though I think he had three slices of vegan cake).
I am pretty sure this is why I have problems with food--I didn't like the food I was being given, but didn't have an opportunity to eat kind of food I wanted much, wasn't allowed to have my own diet when I found out my ideal foods were radically different from those of the people around me, and was told my choices were invalid so began to doubt my own ideas about what I liked and whether my food opinions were just totally invalid.
I am pretty sure this is why I have problems with relationships--I didn't have an opportunity to get much attention as a kid, and didn't like what attention I was given. But when I expressed this, I was told that it was not acceptable to ask for or want different kinds of affection, because the kinds of attention I was given were the kinds they could give, and the prevailing socially sanctioned idea my parents and I had of love was "the parents will love to the best of their ability, and since that is all they can do, the child will know and feel loved" -- even though that doesn't really follow. Even when I found out that my ideal forms of getting attention and expressing love and affection were acceptable to ask for from people who weren't my parents, I still didn't have a good understanding of what kinds of attention I did want, or if I wanted attention at all, or if I wanted it how to get it or give my own.
I think this problem, though, has gone a long way toward being solved in the past decade. Some highlights: I learned a lot about what kind of types of affection I actually wanted and about what kinds were no good for me. I learned that it was ok to desire them, and to ask for them. I learned how to say "no" and "yes" when someone gave them to me, and mean it. I learned it was ok to say "I don't know," and wait. I learned it was ok to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for myself beyond "what I desire in my relationships." I learned it was ok to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for myself within my relationships. I learned it was ok for others to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires in their relationships. I learned it was ok for others to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for themselves beyond "what they desire in their relationships."
All those things are really important.
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(no subject)
13/8/10 19:26 (UTC)I would like to try again to make you a vegan cake some time, if you will let me.
(no subject)
14/8/10 03:37 (UTC)the food analogy made a lot of sense to me, albeit in a different relationship scenario.
*hugs*
gotta catch up with you more
(sorry i'm only reading bits and pieces because I am rarely on lj)
(no subject)
14/8/10 14:49 (UTC)*hugs*