At the end of their long estrangement as brothers, Jacob and Esau met again. Genesis 33 tells us that Jacob saw Esau approaching from the distance with 400 men and, afraid that Esau would order his men to attack, arranged his household strategically so that those most precious to him would be the most likely to escape. Most Christian translations say that when Esau met Jacob on the way, he ran and “kissed him on the cheek,” but an accurate Hebrew translation is more sinister and surprising, as well as being upheld by rabbinical teachings and Jewish tradition: The rabbis teach that Esau fell upon Jacob’s neck and bit him, vampire style!

I’ve been interested for a while now in the current American preoccupation with vampires, which began roughly around the time that Anne Rice’s Lestat series became best sellers (1976), and has culminated with the Twilight series in print, and True Blood on HBO. Esau’s legendary role as a would-be vampire would be disconcerting had I not done as much reading and mulling over these brothers as I have; but I keep returning to the New Testament admonishment that spiritual folk should not allow themselves to develop a character like Esau’s, or to let an Esau thrive in their midst. “See to it,” Paul wrote, “that there be no immoral or godless person like Esau among you, who sold his own birthright for a bowl of soup.”

What is a vampire, if not a person whose birthright–his experience of being fully human–has been lost? What is a vampire, if not a once living person who succumbs to another blood sucker and must forever after live off the literal lifeblood of others, having no true life of his own? Isn’t this the perfect metaphor for our somnambulent American culture with its reality TV, true crime best sellers, celebrity tabloids and gossip magazines, thinly-disguised Facebook and MySpace voyeurism, and constant inane tweets where meaning must be communicated in 140 characters or less?

Recently I’ve been in several different social settings in which I noticed people sitting together eating, at the theater, and even at sporting events while texting or tweeting furiously, or otherwise engaged with their cell phones. This behavior amuses and appalls me at the same time. I wonder if people are conscious to what they’re doing? And what are we doing, if we are not trying to infuse ourselves with life from others when we text message and update our Facebook status in the midst of crowds, at restaurants where we’ve met friends for dinner, while watching a DVD with friends or family? We have this great treasure of human spirit in these temporal bodies, such wondrous possibilities of becoming and being, but so many squander it by living in the shallows. Even in the midst of other people, many will seek to escape life in the moment, with the people who are present.

Anne Rice has said that she wrote her vampire series during a time in her life when she was without God, alone in a universe of fellow dead, and that the anguished cry of her spirit was given voice through her vampire series. That her work resonated with millions of Americans–her books have sold over 100 million copies–does not surprise me. We are a generation of people to whom God is dead, from whose major religions all numinous symbols have been removed, for whom “mental health” simply means being undiagnosable and well-adjusted to a culture that is spiritually and psychologically ill.

I have a particular fondness for the work of Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross because of her model of grief, and find that regardless of how great or small the loss I’m experiencing, her model serves me well by reminding me that my reactions are normal and to be expected.

By now, most of us know the stages of grief she observed among her dying patients: shock and denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Of course, one doesn’t have to be dying or among the dying to experience these emotional and intellectual reactions to loss. Whether you’re in the ticket line and have someone cut in front of you or whether you’ve been diagnosed with metastatic cancer, you will most likely go through most or all of these reactions to a loss. The size of the loss isn’t as relevant as the fact that we can be so predictable in our responses along the path to acceptance.

Take, for example, the March event to which my husband and I found ourselves uninvited.  I discovered that several people in our family had been invited to a function from which we’d been excluded, and my first reactions were a sinking heart (“Oh, no!”) and “realizing with a start” the facts of the situation—the reactions of shock and denial. This was followed by anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. From this example, you can see how the grief we experience over our losses, whether small or great, takes a worn path.

If you’ll think about the last reaction of shock or “Oh, no!” you had, you will probably be able to play your initial “Oh, no!” reaction forward and see how it ended in some sort of acceptance, even if only a grudging one. You may also be able to accept that nearly every “oh, no!” reaction is part of a response to loss. Many times we don’t acknowledge our losses as we go through the day, and finally erupt by day’s end in some surprising way because we’ve been unconscious to our own suffering. I’ve found that the more aware I am of the losses I experience throughout the day and the claims I have that back up my sense of loss, the more I am able to contain myself rather than projecting my unsolved mysteries outward.

When I first realized we were in the process of being cheated, the head’s-up came in a most extraordinary way through the person who has caused me the most pain in my life, which is my own mother. My brothers do not share this pain and in fact experience my mother quite differently than I do. They point to other familial sources for the etiology of their pain. This has made my family of origin losses harder to bear, as I have to bear them without any family sympathy at all. Even so, the grief I’ve experienced over being my mother’s daughter is real and is at the root of many of the disproportionate emotional reactions I have had. Just as children playing hide-and-go-seek must tag home before they’re safe, so must I tag my concept and experience of  “Mother” before I can proceed to untangle many a knot that appears in my life.

These people who cheated us could not have arranged a more elegant way of alerting me to the impending doom of our relationship, for delivering news of what they were planning through my own mother, who is quite emotionally distant and uninvolved in my life, was an extraordinary coup for them. The news traveled, in fact, from our deal-breakers to someone who is most beloved and trusted in my life, to my mother, and finally to me. I write about this because I have not only experienced this astonishing pattern of betrayal a few times in my life, but have furthermore observed it in the lives of others enough to recognize it as a pattern. Just as one can predict the path of grief, so too one can predict the path of betrayal. There is dark magic at work.

As I wrote in my entry about being uninvited, I no longer pussyfoot around conflict as I did when I was younger, less enlightened, and more anxious about being viewed as “nice” or “good,” “loving” or “kind.” These days, I deal with situations head-on, which I find preferable to being deceitful and fake. So, after receiving this elegant invitation to my own bereavement, I double-checked the facts of the matter and then confronted our partners. Once I illustrated the way the situation had unfolded, even they were shocked. They had never dreamed that news of their intentions would travel so quickly, much less to the very person who would elicit the most significant emotional reaction in me. They were enlightened enough to know how this looked.

They didn’t mean for things to happen this way, they said. They would never want to hurt me. This is what they said, but of course I don’t listen only to words any more. Intentions mean next to nothing to me these days, for nearly everyone will swear to his own good intentions. It says in Proverbs 20:6, “Most men will proclaim their own goodness, but who can find a truly trustworthy man?” A trustworthy man has more than good intentions. A trustworthy man produces what Buddhists call right action, good action. This is why Jesus said, “Judge a tree by its fruit.” Or, as Carl Jung said, the meaning of the behavior is in the behavior.

So when our partners with whom we covenanted protested their innocence and their many good intentions, I was not fooled. I believe that large parts of them want to feel good and perhaps, in theory, even to be good. I believe that they would not want someone else to do to them what they’ve done to us. But I know with conviction that they are spellbound by the deepest possible unconscious voodoo. Otherwise, they could not have drawn so much archetypal Bad Mother juju into the situation. Otherwise, they would have heralded a change in their intentions in a different, more conscious and caring way. Otherwise, they might have done any other manner of things with good end results. Instead, as we all do when we are driven by spellbinding forces unseen and thus unacknowledged, they made a mess of things.

“For they sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind” (Isaiah 8:7).

cheat (v.):

1. to defraud; swindle. 2. to deceive; influence by fraud. 3. to elude; deprive of something expected. 

This year I have spent a substantial part of the year experiencing being cheated. In a written agreement with other adults, my husband and I have been defrauded. We kept our end of the deal, which was struck among fellow Christians, witnessed, and came with all the trappings of civic and religious ceremonies. Then, after we had spent years keeping our end of the bargain, our partners in covenant reneged on their end of the deal.

I, in particular, paid a high price to keep my end of the covenant, spending countless hours doing healing work at the expense of my substantially-sized family. The price I paid within myself is one of the highest I can ever recall expending. With my husband I made a choice out of fear and trembling intermingled with great hope, knowing that the rewards for success would be as substantial as the deprivations of failure. In spite of the risk, and true to my often naively hopeful character, I chose the leap of faith. I have always thought that anyone–yes, anyone–can be healed, restored, and redeemed. I’ve been willing to serve as a conduit of grace as God called and enabled me. And He did call. I am as certain of that as I can be certain of anything in my life.

But still I was cheated.

My husband and I made the decision to enter into covenant with these other adults in spite of the fact that several of our most trustworthy, wise, and sane confidantes and adult children advised against it. My parents, too, warned against it and my father stated that he would not participate until the people with whom we had covenanted proved themselves. “You don’t enter into a deal with someone before they’ve proved themselves,” he said. We countered with the evidence of many years’ worth of relationship, but his retort was that it was obvious who was getting the better end of the deal. “When you come out of this deal as happy and well situated as they are,” he said, “then I’ll consider changing my opinion.”

We have come out of the deal and we are not happy or well situated. In this win-lose deal we struck while hoping for win-win, we are the losers. I’ve been waiting for some six months now to see if the loss I see is, in fact, what I see. I’ve talked with our partners and told them that my husband and I not only feel cheated, but according to our five-page written agreement, actually have been cheated, our covenant broken. “You can’t break a covenant,” our partners have glibly replied, citing Biblical teachings on the irrefutable character of God-made covenants and ignoring the obligation of Christians to be people of their word, to go the extra mile, to apologize when they hurt others, or to do a great many other things that Christians are told we should do.

Maybe they felt we let them down first, I thought. So I went to our partners again and asked whether they thought we had kept our end of the deal. “You kept your end of the deal,” they said. “We have no complaints we haven’t voiced.” But still our partners have not budged. Still we are cheated.

Some years ago, my husband’s grandfather died, leaving his heirs land and other property worth millions of dollars. Before his death, my husband and his granddad had walked this land that had been in the family since the Land Run, and his sweet old granddad told him, “this part will all be yours, the home place, your great-granddad’s homestead too, because I know you’ll care for it.” He put his property into a trust and retained his two most trustworthy sons to administer it.

About a year after the trust was established, my husband’s grandfather went into a nursing home. While he was there and still in his right mind, one of his two trustee sons was murdered by vagrants passing through the area. Now only one son was left, the son who later developed Alzheimer’s and could not be relied upon in any way. And then my husband’s granddad died, and the remaining sons took charge and cheated my husband out of his inheritance as we sat by helplessly, in spite of having hired attorneys and gone to court and spent four years trying to litigate our ways out of being cheated.

It was easier to watch my husband go through being cheated out of his inheritance than it has been to be cheated myself. Being cheated has left me with such a bitter taste in my mouth, so much sorrow and humiliation in my heart. As King David said in Psalm 55, it doesn’t bother you as much when it’s an enemy who cheats you, but when it’s someone you trust, someone you’ve gone to church with, someone who has lived under your roof and with whom you’ve been intimate–oh, my. Oh my, oh my. When one you broke bread with cheats you, one who “dips his bread with me” at the table as Judas did with Jesus, then you know you’ve been cheated. Then you know you’re moving into God territory, for who has been more defrauded than God?

Everyone has been cheated. Everyone has had someone else make a promise they later broke. Everyone has been on the switch end of the old bait-and-switch cheat. You marry someone you thought you knew, and six years later you discover he’s had an affair. You raise your children with every value you can muster, and when you finally have an empty nest and can look forward to a comfortable retirement with your spouse, your oldest child is diagnosed with schizophrenia. You have to raise your grandchild. You get cancer. You finally retire and go on the world cruise you both always dreamed of, and your husband dies in Ireland, on the first leg of your journey. Your child is born handicapped and you learn you will always have to take care of her. Or, as actually happened to a friend of ours, the healthy kidney is mistakenly removed and the diseased one left. “You’ll have to be on dialysis unless a donor is found,” they said. At some point or another in life, everyone is cheated.

Even when they haven’t actually been cheated, everyone feels cheated from time to time due to expectations. Psychoanalyst Karen Horney wrote at length about expectations, which she called “claims,” and their use by wounded folks. She said that we often have unspoken expectations and go through life imposing them on others without getting enough reality checks to discover whether or not our claims or dues are, in fact, reasonable. What is owed is the stuff of psychology and religion.

What do you owe me? What do I owe you? What did I give you, and what must you give me in return? How do the laws of reciprocity, of sowing and reaping, apply?  Is an outcome, a hope, a dream, an expectation, a contract, a covenant something I should be attached to? Or does all attachment lead to suffering, as Buddha taught?

Can a person ever be truly free of expectations? Ought we be? Is being free of expectations a worthy goal? What do we do when we’re feeling cheated, or when we have, in fact, been cheated? What can we do with our feelings of sorrow, humiliation, shame, astonishment, and anger?

These are all feelings and ideas I’ve been grappling with for most of this year, and now I’m going to grapple with them in a most public way.

Recently I wrote about the difference between personality type and personality disorders. Originally called “character disorders,” a personality disorder is “an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture, is pervasive and inflexible, has an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, is stable over time, and leads to distress or impairment” (from the DSM-IV). The personality disorders we recognize today are listed here.

When most people think of the word “character,” I imagine they think first of a person’s moral fiber, his ethical nature. When clinicians talk about character disorders, they refer to problems with the aggregate qualities of an individual’s personality: who is he, when we sum him up? Over the years, my observation has been that character disorders are right behind addictions for the amount of human suffering they cause. Some people’s experiences are that they may even cause more suffering, since they are not as easily identified as other mental disorders and frequently go undiagnosed. We only know that someone causes us discomfort and pain, that being around them is hard, and that we have to watch what we say and do around them. They are not safe people, even if they are predictable over time.

I am convinced that many people’s childhood wounds are caused by having had a character disordered parent. Also known as neuroses, character disorders are marked by rigidity, an inability to yield when given the choice, and an almost complete blindness to the other person’s perspective, suffering, or emotions about an event, often caused by the character disordered person.

People with character disorders or neuroses (what I call “character disorder lite”)  act in ways that cause more problems than they solve–usually for other people more often than for themselves. Almost everything they do, in fact, is about them and results in their getting what they want and need, almost always at another person’s expense. Their blindness to other people’s concerns and needs is usually the result of a deeply held belief about the world, though not necessarily a conscious belief. Their belief in the world as they see it is so strong that any evidence to the contrary is discounted: this is the hallmark behavior of the personality disordered.

During the first decade of a character disorder’s bloom, the ill individual will have many opportunities to have her flaws pointed out to her, usually first by close friends and later by relatives. This pattern occurs mainly because a personality disorder develops out of a misbegotten childhood, in which a child’s parent or parents are themselves doing a disordered dance. The parents may play good cop-bad cop, with one parent the sick one and the other the rescuer or enabler, or each parent may have his or her own obvious disorder. In spite of their problems, though, unlike those with substance-abuse, psychotic, or even mood disorders, the personality disordered manage to keep their children in school, hold down jobs, and even to achieve socially-desirable ends such as education or advanced training, all while the character disorder ticks away like a timed bomb.

Usually, close friends or romantic partners are the first to realize that the character disordered are nutty, mainly due to the disordered person’s inability to yield, compromise, or otherwise see things the other person’s way. A romantic partner who needs a nutty spouse because of having had a nutty parent can serve as a good foil for the character disordered person: the relationship just feels right.  There will be a rush of romance, a deep spiritual connection, something bigger than life and more meaningful; the two become enmeshed and appear to others like a two-headed beast. Where one goes, the other follows; everything is romance and adventure except that the two have undertaken a quest of character without actually having any personhood at all.

Within 2-5 years of entering a relationship with a character impaired person, you know it. You know something is wrong, because the first year’s excuses and apologies have worn off  and the rigidity of your partner, friend, colleague, neighbor or loved one is remarkable. They do all the taking and very little giving. The giving they do is for appearances sake and involves no real sacrifice, for there is always something better to be gotten as the result of any “sacrifice” they do make. They are like vampires, and I’ve thought for a long time that the reason why the vampire is an enduring mythical creature is that our world is full of vampires. They suck the life out of others while giving nothing lively themselves.

Naturally, being the host comes to be a problem for others. The host either falls ill and becomes a vampire him- or herself, or struggles for freedom. Interpersonal conflicts are inevitable whenever the disordered come into prolonged contact with healthy people. They want to play a healthy person but they never can quite pull it off, for there are no substitutes or fakeries for realness.

The inability of the character disordered to yield sacrificially, even when appealed to in the most heartfelt ways, is a hallmark of this personality. They may be aware of the problems experienced by those around them, but they cannot make a connection between these problems and their own behavior. The problems the other person experiences are not their fault; the fault is always with the other person. This is true even when the other person is a person of reputation, experience, or quality to whom the disordered formerly turned for advice or help. Clinicians have written reams about how notoriously difficult it is to treat the personality disordered. They, of all those with mental disorders, are the most likely to get just “well” enough to function again and then to terminate therapy or any healthy relationship they have. They may return a few times a year for consultations, but you will never see a personality disordered person remain in therapy consistently longer than one year. Like addicts, they cannot maintain healthy interpersonal relationships as judged by everyone in the relationship for more than a year at a time. They can fake anything for about a year, or even long enough to get a degree or get the job or land the promotion: but a fiasco will occur and the result will be the loss of trust, relationship, and love.

Friends, partners, spouses, and eventually family members will all come to see the character disordered as difficult, rigid, and someone who cannot be appealed to. They will struggle with the emotional vampire and try to get them to change. There will not be change, for the hallmark of a personality disorder, according to the DSM-IV, is rigidity and persistence of personality traits. They just don’t see that they are the cause of the problem. When negative consequences to their rigid choices and decisions are experienced, they still are not to blame. They march on to the tune of their individual score and make more bad decisions based on an erroneous world view that can only create more negative outcomes.

And much of the problem is about outcomes. The character disordered, lacking clarity, the humility to accept wise advise based on the experiences of others, and being highly defended against changing their own unconsciously-held but deep beliefs about the world, inevitably experience poor outcomes. They buy a house, a car, a dog, marry a person, undertake a career, take a job, adopt a child, invest in a mutual fund, or make some other major decision that others who know them best advise against, have unhappy outcomes as the result of their own choices, have emotional reactions against others for their bad advice, experience all sorts of problems with maintaining what they bought, living in it, driving it, working there, raising the child, caring for the dog, etc. so later sell it, regret it, quit it, give it away, or get rid of it, and all the while never realize or recall that everyone told them so. They went to people who didn’t know them very well for advice and got whatever seal of approval they wanted, let what they did affect everyone who loved them (but didn’t care), and were not to blame for the outcome. There is never a character-changing realization of cause and effect, of sowing and reaping, or of win-win interpersonal relationships, because the true unconscious goal of the character disordered is eternal unyieldingness, of going their own way.

God-like, they cannot change.