The Drama of Conflict
I am often confused, having been abused as a child, as to why I have chosen to spend my life writing about conflict. You would think that as an adult I would want to run as far away from conflict as possible, and in many ways I have done just that. I work alone. When my five-year-old has a tantrum—thankfully a rare event, and almost always for good reason—I want nothing more than to resolve things quickly, or better still, to prevent her upset with more supple parenting. I am soft-spoken. When I teach I try not to persuade. I have been accused of appeasement in several arenas. At dinner parties I do my best to help everybody get along.
A psychotherapist would say—as, full disclosure, many have said—that I choose to spend my life writing about conflict precisely because of the conflict of my childhood; I am compulsively striving to control, even to master an abstracted conflict in the hope of transcending not only the humiliation of past abuse but the echoing, damning directives of self-abuse in my psyche. All this is true; but as usual the explanation cannot solve the problem.
Those of us who write scripts talk of an inciting incident, the precise point in our first five or ten pages where and when the conflict that is our story begins. Perhaps it’s fair to think of this section of my essay as an elucidation of a few inciting incidents, at least elements, in the ongoing conflict of my own personal dramaturgy.
Like most of us, I believe my parents could have used some therapy themselves. In my opinion, and I’ve had to think long and hard about this, my mother suffered from borderline personality disorder. She never got herself diagnosed but she checks enough boxes: splitting (also described as black-and-white thinking, and devil-god characterization of her loved ones), a ferocious if not delusional—and therefore self-fulfilling—fear of abandonment, uncontrollably intense emotions disproportionate to events and situations … Borderline people, to be flip about it, are dramatic.
Theirs is a disorder of perceiving conflict, and they overreact with such resentment and rage that they typically end up creating the very conflict that so terrorizes them. If you were raised by a borderline parent then you have come back from the war—that is, survived into adulthood—hyperattentive to even the merest hint of an incipient quarrel. You are anxious. You are maybe a writer. You understand in your heart, in your very cells, that the nature of conflict is fascinatingly, perhaps impossibly relative—if conflict makes any sense at all.
If I were his therapist (and he’s never had one) I would diagnose my father as a paranoid personality type, comorbid with schizoid personality disorder and autism spectrum disorder. Yet he was the less frightening parent because most of the time he simply ignored us, reading his science fiction and fantasy novels and watching TV. Living with him consisted of long bouts of boredom punctuated by explosions of shouting and swearing and walls punched and dogs kicked (he hit his children only a few times); but at least we knew where we stood with the man—as far away as we could, or sitting in other rooms with doors closed and books in our faces. By avoiding him we hoped we could avoid his conflict. Both my parents also exhibited florid symptoms of depression and anxiety—just to round out the
