Sadist: someone who obtains pleasure from inflicting punishment
If you've ever been really mean to someone and enjoyed it, you have donned the hat of a sadist. I remember the first time I saw the word. I was in grade school and thought it meant someone who was sad. As an adult with a love of the vernacular, I don't think I was too far off the mark. Unless you have some sexual fetish, most people behave in sadistic ways subconsciously. The ones who don't are psychopaths and either locked up or government leaders (see Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush).
But what if you met someone and for whatever reason decided to cultivate a friendship with them only to learn, fairly early on that they inexplicably derived some sick pleasure from berating you? It's perplexing. And it's one thing if this person was simply insensitive which is what I chalked it up to at first. But it's another thing altogether if they admit that they like being verbally and emotionally abusive to you in particular.
For all my talk about self-love and loathing, I honestly didn't believe I was a masochist. However, a series of recent encounters have proven otherwise. But this new friend, one whose opinion I valued kept telling me that the reason he was dismissive, dogmatic and, well just plain mean was because I enjoyed the abuse. I found this absolutely maddening. I vacillated between completely ignoring this person and trying to be genuinely nice to them in an effort to reverse this abusive “dynamic” we had established.
Don’t get me wrong. I love a good debate and certainly don’t mind being challenged. But I was accused of being a self-loathing human being on a constant basis and on a couple of occasions told I was an alcoholic. I found the former disturbing and the latter ludicrous. All of my friends disagreed with the assessment and encouraged me to cut off the friendship or fulfill my abuser’s desire to have a pathetic punching bag available at whim.
So I did. I stood up for myself for the umpteenth time but with the resolve of burying this bully once and for all. And now that I have, I feel so hurt and resentful which is actually the same as I felt when we were friends. If there’s any truth to his accusations about me being a masochist they probably stem from the fact that having “been there, done that” in all sorts of relationships, my threshold for bad behavior is pretty high. But what I can’t wrap my head around is what kind of a person knowingly inflicts pain and then proudly stands behind his handiwork. My sister put it best when she said, “You need to distance yourself from this guy who is sending you to a very bad place where the monsters live.”
She’s right. We all have monsters or the ability to become them. In this case, I allowed self-doubt to stand in the way of self-preservation. And what I’ve learned is this: friends don’t make friends feel like shit and mean people suck.
