A thought I had about Parse today, and why I feel stories about him are worth telling even if he is a problematic white boy, and also why other people simultaneously hate them–

The big breakthrough Marsha Linehan made with Dialectical Behaviour Therapy that made it successful, and made Borderline Personality Disorder the first “curable” disorder in its category, was that she underwent a major shift in thought.

Before her, clinicians looked at people who had trouble regulating their emotions, who got hung up about idealized versions of people, who saw things in extreme black-and-white, and whose relationships with people swung violently between extreme passivity and extreme aggression, and thought, “They are choosing not to behave healthily.”  They devoted a lot of time and energy to trying to convince their patients to use healthy coping mechanisms.

I see this attitude a lot from people who dislike Parse. “He’s an adult, he should get over it.” “He needs to smarten up.” “It’s time for him to snap out of it.” 

Linehan, using both her research and her personal experience of having BPD, brought the perspective to the work that her clients didn’t know how to behave healthily. Emotional self-regulation and negotiating relationships are like your ABCs and tying your shoes: They have to be learned, and they’re much easier to learn when you’re young. If you reach adulthood without acquiring them, you will struggle so much more with basic daily tasks, and acquiring those skills will be an incredibly difficult and painful process. A lot of Dialectical Behavioural Therapy is explicitly teaching skills like “how to calm down when you’re angry” or “how to tell someone else what you want from them”–things people with BPD were overwhelmingly punished for or discouraged from doing when they were young, and therefore never learned.

So for myself, I missed out on a lot of those basic developmental lessons too. Psychologically speaking, I never learned to tie my shoes. As an adult, I struggle to learn basic skills when it comes to relating healthily to other people. I have islands of competence separated by oceans of trauma and neglect.

Stories about Kent Parson are, for me, like stories that incidentally teach kids their ABCs and how to tie their shoes. I read and write them partly as fiction, but also partly as social stories, Mary Frances Learns to Assert Herself, as acts of expressing and consolidating the lessons I’m trying to learn about how to be human. Here’s how to learn to deal peacefully with someone who caused you immense pain but not out of malice; here’s how to tell people you’re unhappy even when nothing is “wrong”; here’s how to break out of passivity and isolation. 

When I listen to people who did get those lessons in their childhood, who know how to manage their emotions (even if they’re still depressed or traumatized, they have basic self-soothing skills) or how to navigate relationships without damaging anyone, it sounds like the Parse fic I love feels grating and unhealthy to them. Why fixate on stuff that any ordinary adult should know anyway? Just tie your shoes, get up, and start walking! Don’t sit around throwing pity parties about how often you keep tripping on your laces.

Because we come to this with distinctly different experiences and needs, even if we haven’t been able to articulate it.