What are we? What is our purpose? We don’t have answers for that! But what we are trying to do is to progress in life. And what is progression if you don’t move forward? Is time linear or circle? We don’t know for sure. But what is circular is your thought of mind. What you face, you return to that, and you become that again. Your sadness, it makes you come back to it, rot in it. Because I guess that is what it is! You get victimised, and you become the perpetrator either for someone else or for yourself. First, there is a catalyst, someone or something saddens you, making you rot in your dark hole. But for the next time, when you think that you are out. You somehow will start finding your way back to that stink, by hurting yourself for finding ways to get hurt once again. I want to call it emotional masochism, and you can consider the following article as my case study, maybe.
Foreword: Sometimes, I can’t help myself becoming too objective by treating everyone around me as subjects for my little experimentations and observations. Wish, I could stop that, but that helps me be objective when I’m faced with unexpected twists of life. So you can see that I’m using the word “I” a lot, to make it personal. Because this write-up is ‘me’ and telling ‘you’ directly about the things I’ve observed.
Case of Stockholm Syndrome:
We see ourselves submitting to a lot of things; cigarettes, coffee, tea, pleasure, control and sadness. Those last two might look odd one out, but no! Looking at multiple cases and subjects, I have come to the conclusion that there are people who submit themselves and love to be in someone else’s control. They can’t be judged for not sounding logical, because they have grown fond of that oppression; they need that. They need a dictator to control, abuse and treat them as property.
I have seen many women get attracted to the ‘macho’, oppressive guys. Is it dad complex? Are they looking for someone to replace their overprotective dads? It sure is a probability! But regardless of what complex it is, few really return back to the very person who has hit them pretty bad. They also seem to get defensive when anyone tries to protect the girl from beatings. It’s almost like they are craving for that abuse. Is it not masochism? I never really thought we had so many masochists around us, but here we go, almost every 3 out of 5 women I have run into since my observation had begun were such masochists who crave to be submissive.
I was judgemental, and those words they speak always shock me. It’s not like they tell me directly, but their behaviour, it can be deduced to masochism. It is nothing but Stockholm syndrome because they seem to get a liking towards the abuser, and sometimes surprisingly miss the chokehold on their neck and spanking on the butt.
Of course, the majority of the subjects whom I have seen suffering from this syndrome, are women, there are men too. Some men want to be controlled by very leading and manipulative women. They get attracted to the woman who validates their every move. These men cannot and will never dare to do anything without their pseudo-MAMA’s approval. No matter if you try to help them drag out, they find their way back to the claws of such dictators.
Case of emotional masochism:
Now, this is a peculiar case, and I’m one of the subjects too. I can say the number of emotional masochists is a lot higher, and every 2 out of 5 humans are such. They don’t have anything, they are suffering from ‘normal-life’ syndrome. I was affected too, it is boring, and the boredom kills. We, the subjects, search for the meaning of life in different places, we find nothing, as there is nothing. But, we crave for depth, a character arc in our stories. We want our lives to not be flat and something that has a meaning, we are almost obsessed with this search. So much that we find the most comfortable way out.
Depression! No, we don’t have clinical depression, not at the beginning of course. But that is the climax of the path we head to. Somewhere in our life, we, the subjects understood that sadness can be easily achieved. In fact, it is the sadness that made us awake and coming out of it, we began this hunt for meaning. We had a purpose, some definition for ourselves when we were sad and loathing. We had reasons for being like this. We had everything to blame, and when we are not worried, there is nothing but ourselves to blame for things we do.
A friend of mine hinted to me about this ‘addiction to get depressed’. I instantly got connected to it, I know that I’m heading that way. I already had clues about myself liking the sadness. When I’m sad, I feel I had some depth. It was when I’m messy and scratching the un-groomed beard that I felt like an enlightened being. It made me feel superior to others; like no one knows what I’m going through. It was false, everyone is going through their own shit and feels the same way. I only knew that I liked to get sad until I came out of the thought.
When I was sunk in it deeply, I had the tendency to surround myself with all the tragic news, sad memories, betrayals and overthinking. It took me months to recover from this sort of emotional masochism that I had become. I still find the remnant residual waste of sad-craving ideas in my mind. It cries “the moment is here for you to get sad, go cry” once in a while. I just try to divert myself or make jokes about it because it will run away. You can be a self-loathing sadness craving person almost at every corner, few have periods of such phases once in a while, and few are always craving for sadness.
I cannot be a judge and say that this is ‘wrong’. If it gives them a purpose to live, maybe we should just let them be. But it is really annoying to be a consoling person for the guy who is emotionally masochistic. And also the guy who always tries to save people from abusive relationships. I have been both, and some people were annoyed consoling me when I was an emotional-masochist. You don’t need to stress yourself, give thoughts about them. Neither should you empathise and try to change them because they won’t. You can hunt them, but it is up to them to change. I changed because I want some other things in life. If you are one of those masochists and you feel like doing some other stuff, do change for the sake of yourselves.
The minds of those have been burdened and tired, those who have tried to protect these masochists. They must have spent sleepless nights thinking they have to save these people. This is yet another problem, the saviour complex. This is not masochism but an equally irritating super-hero syndrome. But at least, these super-saviours don’t halt progression, they boost it but at the cost of their peace of minds. One thing I want to say to both saviours and masochists is that the progress of life is what we want. Being sad, being in an abusive relationship it makes you stay in the same place for too long. Too long that you almost waste your entire life before you even realise that you can do a lot more things with your life than getting choked or walking in a dark abyss. It takes you nowhere, that path is circular, a void where the end and the beginning are just a hole. All you need to know is that there is a hole, and you can just jump back to the world. Do not take the easy way out, you can do a lot of things with your life.
Let’s talk about more submissive ideologies and phases in our next article. If you are familiar with more such humiliation-craving masochistic ideas to live, you can comment or mail us at penfluky@gmail.com.
Penfluky 