From http://people.tribe.net/rorybowman/blog/7c937de6-6148-468d-9636-243a6bcee4ba

Melodrama thrives on triangles of villain, victim and rescuer.

A woman whom I have never hit, threatened with physical violence or even spoken with in more than ten years is getting a lot of attention lately for claiming I want to hurt her. Based on a promised return of her property and two banal birthday letters over the course of five years, she has twice drug me into court where she claims to be in fear for her life. I believe she is in fear (and a lot of other things) but mostly I think she enjoys the attention. She has a long history of getting attention by feeling threatened, and there is no reason for her to change anything now. So long as clueless men want to feel protective and clueless women cluck and gather around her, she shall get the attention she needs.

This is all very well for her and her friends, but not so good for those falsely accused. The law she has used came out of the feminist movement and was part of a general goal to protect women against domestic violence and terror. The general assumption that the feminist movement promoted for years (myself included) was that one should always defer to a self-proclaimed victim, and always suspect men of villainy. Under these rules she brought me into court, had a lawyer tell demonstrable lies about me and got a young judge to grant her a restraining order, to continue not doing things I have not done. I am now tarred with the same brush as rapists of children and beaters of women, which displeases me. What can I do?

My first reaction was to stay silent and look hard within my soul. This person whom I had once loved deeply and valued more than my entire family must have special insight. I spent many years trying to figure out what I had done to make her so fearful. I was ashamed to have even been accused of such a thing, and thought that the flaw must certainly be in me. I got very angry and fantasized revenge, some of it quite theatrical, but mostly I brooded. She left me in 1998. I returned her stuff in 1999. I sent a last letter in 2003 and was called back to court in 2006. It wasn’t until 2007 that I allowed myself to get angry, and not until 2008 that I broke my silence.

In ten years of soul-searching and hard emotional work I had learned a few things and come to understandings. Whether she was malicious or crazy did not matter, because it became clear to me that both of us had been playing a script. I had committed to being the lifelong friend, and she the injured innocent. Both of these were bullshit, and far less interesting than telling truth, my truth, about what had happened. By telling my truth as I best understood it and publicly lancing the boil of my shame, I hoped to disinfect a festering wound, and perhaps provide some insight that might help others.

In a very old book called “Games People Play” an early self-help author by the name of Eric Berne describes a wide range of activities which are logical, but mostly subconscious. Out of this work grew various other theories, which have value, but one of the central things to emerge from this line of thought was something Stephen Karpman called a “drama triangle.” Huge parts of what I was experiencing and had experienced made sense within this triangle.

Karpman’s drama triangle is a melodramatic soap opera with an ensemble cast and three basic roles. For variety and to meet everyone’s needs, the roles change hands as the drama develops. This makes things more dramatic but (more importantly) interesting for the players. The three roles are straight out of The Perils of Pauline: there is a victim (classically a pretty white girl), a hero (Dudley Do-Right or equivalent) and a villain (Snidely Whiplash). I had allowed this woman, Catherine Lynne Carter, to draw me into a game I did not want to play, and my salvation was in breaking the script: a fundamental technique I had taught in self-defense. An attacker initiates their attack because they have certain psychological needs that they hope to play out through enacting a scene. One key way to disrupt any attack is to do something unexpected that “ruins” this scene. By “breaking the script” the attacker has in his head, one can quite effectively stop the attack without violence.

What Catherine Lynne Carter (Kate Cate Moonhare Invisigoth) had done was avoid her own psychological issues by substituting a simpler narrative. In her narrative she was a remarkable young woman, so beautiful and talented that men would die for her. When her choices helped create a situation where someone died, she freaked out. Overwhelmed, she did the logical thing and ran away, but ashamed of this she had to create a cover story. Her cover story was that I was a monster, some obsessed super-villain who had to hunt her down. What exactly I was to get by hunting her was uncertain but character development is tertiary to melodrama. If I was a villain, she was right to leave me, and if I was dangerous, she need never look back. Her game was to paint a plausible story of her victimhood, hoping I would play villain so that she could repeatedly draw in a series of well-meaning rescuers. And were I to accept, I could play too.

By accusing me of villainy, Carter invites me to play, only in MY game I get to be the victim. Falsely smeared in court, I could become a victim, except that the first judge would did not buy her story. Looking at my actions, my lack of threats and violence, he decided that I may have been a jerk, but that I was no danger, and so denied her motion. Playing my own game of loyal friend, I sent her a letter in 2003, and created an opening where she thought she could re-engage. When she saw me online three years after this, Carter initiated another round, only this time the story was better. Not only was I an obsessed psychopath, but I was an evil genius as well: I had a master’s degree in women’s studies, I had been an elite commando, I was cleverly using her boyfriend to try and get to her. When I decided it was not my job to dismiss irrelevancies, a younger judge bit, casting himself in the role of “rescuer” for the pretty white girl, and inviting me to play victim if I so chose. I did not.

Objectively speaking, I have certain skills. I can shoot. I hunt. I’ve been involved in martial arts off and on since I was fifteen years old. I could have killed Catherine Lynne Carter with my bare hands the day I met her, and my skills since then are exponentially improved. There are hundreds of people I could have thumped, yet I haven’t hit another person in anger since I was six. If a judge or her friends or the man on the moon wants to think that they have somehow prevented a basically non-violent person from killing a pretty white girl, go for it! Knock yourselves out. Imagine that your prayers have prevented sea monsters from overtaking Manhattan and meteors from striking the earth while you’re at it. No harm done. I know who I am, and I know what I’ve done. I also know what I can do, and what I haven’t done. What is the script, then, that Cate Carter is playing?

If you are a woman in mid-life who has not lived up to your hopes and dreams, it must be nice to have a stalker. If you have not made money, gotten a good degree, started a business that didn’t really fly but earned the admiration of a few close friends, a stalker gives you a certain panache and cachet. Yes, you can say, I have not lived up to the myth I’d set myself to be my mother, but at least I have a stalker, you can say. I would have done better, had it not been for my stalker. Are YOU so fabulous as to have earned the obsession of an evil genius? Well I’m sorry, dear. How ordinary. But you can bask in my reflected glory, and do small virtue by playing at protecting me. I like it when I get attention, you might say, and since there is no danger this is a win-win. Bullshit.

I call bullshit.

So long as people let themselves believe nonsense stories and indulge in self-serving melodrama, our culture will do crap like kill innocent people in Iraq. So long as we tell ourselves lies about our own virtue and deny the humanity of others, we increase the pain of the world. It feels great to think you are right all the time: ask any Republican. But it is a lie. “Those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities.”

I am no hero, neither rescuer nor victim. I will not remain silent for the convenience of a coward, and so I break a few convenient scripts.

Let those who would fawn over Cate Carter do so, but I am done. The script is broken, and I shall not play.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melodrama
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perils_of_Pauline_%281914_serial%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karpman_drama_triangle

Comment from F on Thu, June 26, 2008 – 1:04 PM

Disengage, cut the cord, leave this chapter of your life in the past as much as you can. It seems like you are still very connected to her psychologically. Why do you need her? You can work towards the closure you need without any involvement from her. Write letters to her and burn them, have imaginary conversations with an empty chair, but recognize that the two of you are a toxic combination that can’t be fixed. And I’m sure you have better things to do with your time.

Just some advice from someone who’s been there.

Reply to Comment on Thu, June 26, 2008 – 2:06 PM

I have cut the cord, more than once, but Carter engages the court system to legally bind herself to me in ways I find distasteful. Her legal shenanigans present certain long-term problems for me personally and professionally, and this writing allows me to inoculate myself against blackmail and other things until I decide to bring her back to court.

I assure you that I am bored with her almost spitless, but I estimate it will take a dozen or so (total) of these before I am ready for the third act. She lost the first round in court, then won a second by demonstrable falsehoods. Much of this is preparatory for a third act, where much of what I believe shall be on trial. By posting this I am methodically dismantling her nonsense, and hopefully providing some insight to myself and others.

The issue is not the relationship at all, but her insistence on insulting me and aggrandizing herself at my expense. So long as she and her lawyer have legally bound themselves to me, I’m going to use the cord for something educational.

I assure you that I play a much larger role inside her head than she does in mine. It would be quite flattering, if she was a better person. Since she is not, I do this: public privacy, for my own amusement, and in the interest of learning and sharing.

Comment from N on Thu, July 3, 2008 – 7:50 PM

The way I relate to your post here is how I once broke a script of my own and it was the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life. Of course I am speaking of the script where as the mother of a child that I surrendered to adoption, I was supposed to never see or speak of my baby again. It was the biggest sadness and heartache of my life and I missed my son every single day of my life for 21 years. I don’t know why one day I suddenly decided to break it, but break it I did, and I searched for him, found him, and for the last 8 years have had the pleasure of being a part of his life at last. Best thing, hands down, I ever did. Period. Of course, if he had said “I don’t want this, leave me alone” I would’ve been devastated but it still would’ve been better than never having taken that step at all. I hope you found the empowerment you deserve from the step you took and that it lends you strength to move on now. One of the hardest things to accept in life is that sometimes when you love someone very deeply and it is not returned, or even worse, mistaken for something bad, is that it is not your fault. It sounds like you are really getting that. Good on ya! Here’s to breaking bullshit scripts!

From http://people.tribe.net/rorybowman/blog/8cf65f99-d9d6-4898-845a-e5d6e27328d2

Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters mourned Sylvia Plath.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time–
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

Any semi-literate American woman between the ages of 30 and 60 will immediately recognize the name “Sylvia Plath.” An explicitly personal author and literary Janis Joplin, Plath was famous for three things: a 1963 novel (The Bell Jar), her suicide one month later, and a posthumously published collection of poetry, Ariel. The most-quoted poem from that collection is “Daddy,” which famously asserts that “every woman adores a Fascist.” A poet of modest talents on the global stage himself, her husband (Ted Hughes) was widely considered a murderer by some feminists, a complicit co-conspirator in Plath’s angelic death. Silent for decades on the matter, Hughes famously published a collection of poems just months before his own death in 1998. Titled Birthday Letters, this collection happened to highlight a personal custom of mine that began when I was fifteen.

It has been my goal, off and on, to write dear friends a birthday letter every year or three. Faced with the daunting task and commercialism of Christmas cards, I felt a short birthday letter each year was a more personal and humane way to keep in touch. Beginning in a time when telephone calls were expensive and stamps did not seem too cheap either, the custom has become something of an antiquarian oddity, often marked more by its breach than its observance, but one I have pretty much followed in my own journal and twice by mail with Catherine Lynne Carter. Big mistake.

After the ludicrous and confusing embarrassment of Carter’s subpoena and lawyer-fest of 1998, I spent a few years laying low and thinking. Brought up a feminist and coming of age in the late 1980’s, I had naive notions of masculine perfidy and feminist perfection in all things gendered. Elementary-school teacher, self-defense instructor and rape-prevention educator, I had spent years believing that most men were pigs, and that many of the manliest were pigs: child-raping, wife-beating drunks and lying bullies, whose word was always suspect and especially when at variance with the testimony of an inherently innocent and credible woman or child. That Kate Carter might be afraid of me was unthinkable, and that she would accuse me of wanting to kill her and misuse a statute written to address domestic abuse seemed to me bizarre, especially given what I saw as my clear tactical and strategic skills and (even in the worst of my depression) explicit courtesy. The only conclusion I could reach was in accordance with the judge’s of 1998: if not explicitly malicious, her alleged fears were clearly irrational. Time would heal certainly heal this, or so I hoped.

While appreciating the difference between commitment and obsession I do not, as a rule, abandon those I’ve loved. I reflected on Carter over many years, and for my own health used her birthday as a marker, writing unsent letters in my journals as a way to process my thoughts and try to create meaning. Some of what I felt was anger at being falsely accused, but mostly I was sad and confused. There was some fear that she might have seen something I could not, but mostly I assumed that each of us meant well and that she had been ill-advised. I was not my best at the time of her leaving and Martitia Dell had clearly continued to influence Carter for her own purposes, and possibly for Glen Slate. Although I wrote them, I sent no birthday letter to Carter in 1999, nor in 2000. In 2001 one, a letter sent through her lawyer was returned, so I skipped a year and wrote one in 2003. Finding myself out of town for the first time since 1996, I wrote three birthday letters in one day from Las Vegas: one to a friend of mine from fourth grade, another to a botanist friend from 1988 and a third to Kate Carter. Hand-written letters seem to me one of the least-intrusive, most personable and non-threatening forms of communication possible, but below is the exact content as a matter of public record.

It may help to know that I had seen Carter around Portland repeatedly, including a period during which I dated a dancer for whom she did costumes. Twice I had been in the same house with her for fittings, unbeknownst to Carter, just a room away. I kept my distance, though, out of courtesy and for her comfort. The 2003 letter was addressed care of her parents in California, with a return address to this client, whom I knew would see her often. Having been taught by the letter-bomb incident not to use my own return address, I did not wish to risk an inadvertent insult in this, my second contact in almost five years. After the bold rashness of returning her sofa with her truck five years previous, the text struck me as rather pleasant and banal gesture of reconciliation. She saw it, somehow, as an invasive threat. When she read it and freaked out at her wealthy client, it became obvious to me that Carter was beyond silly or mistaken, well into the irrational.

—

19 February 2003
Las Vegas, Nevada

Dear Kate,

Forgive me for not writing you as promised last year, but the point of your birthday as a time to write was to choose something clear and neutral: something well-defined but arbitrary that would lessen your fear and lessen my chances to do something rash or speak impulsively. “It is a characteristic of wisdom,” as Thoreau once wrote, “not to do desperate things.”

I was surprised when [E] mentioned you were in town, but pleased to hear that you seemed well. I don’t make much of [E's] insights into your character, but I have quite literally slept better since hearing that, making me realize how much free-floating anxiety I was carrying around you for all these years. As I was telling a friend earlier this month, you are in ways the last unresolved strand around Marcus’ death, the one variable I have not been able to balance. At an intellectual level I don’t understand what happened, at a limbic level I have not been able to process your scent, and the meds have partially arrested the mid-level stuff. Although clearly I needed them just to stay alive I believe that drug use (even anti-depressants) in some sense “freezes” emotional and other development, so some aspects of my coping and processing have been delayed until I am completely weaned of their effects. You must do what you need to, of course, and I have honored that, but just an FYI: I am glad of news and that you are well. Perhaps you could find it some year on my birthday to send promised news of your own, perhaps with a picture and news of your family.

I miss you, as I’ve said, and not always as one would think. Aristotle was right in the Nichomachean Ethics when he asserted that friends are dearer when one is happy. It is the good things I would share which pang me most sharply: a book or song, some craft or fabric. I understand so much more now some the things you said of color, as this week in Las Vegus I am bathed by shining light. I think you would cream over the Franklin-Covey organizing system and wish I could share small business tips and insights with you.

Was it worth gaining our brief sexual time time together, worth losing your friendship? At the time I thought it was, and I still might if we were friends, but life is funny that way, so today I am not so sure.

I think today of Gary Snyder’s poem “Seaman’s Ditty” and a song from Laurie Anderson’s Big Science, “Born, Never Asked.”

Happy birthday, Catherine Lynne, wherever you may be. – Rory

—

http://www.geocities.com/yesterdayswine/GarySnyder.html
http://www.lyricstime.com/laurie-anderson-born-never-asked-lyrics.html
http://www.internal.org/view_poem.phtml?poemID=356

This weekend was Carter’s tenth college reunion. I have no idea whether she attended or not, but would hope that she did not spend it cowering in some private hell of her own making.