[Image at right from the Celestial
Heavens/Might and Magic site]
In a comment the other day over at the Querulous Squirrel’s treetop lair, I ad-libbed a suggestion for people facing what are commonly called “nervous breakdowns”: name them. Please forgive the self-citation (which feels to me like a breach of Interweb etiquette):
Every “nervous breakdown” should have its own term, because every one is different from every other — and its, um, its significance is too great to let it go unnamed.
Somewhere, no doubt, someone has collected the names of all the demons and imps of Hell. Maybe every one of us who’s had a “nervous breakdown” should consider assigning it the name of a demon…
I did some looking around and found just such a (brief) collection. It’s here. As I described it in the rest of that comment:
…names and descriptions to fit many moods and ways of regarding a breakdown, from the scary to the wry. There’s even a Leonard. “When I first met Leonard, he scared the living crap out of me. Now I know he’s just the biggest jerk I ever met.”
Then today I encountered, at Colleen Wainwright’s communicatrix blog, a post about (in part) remembering trying times gone by. In that post, Colleen referred to someone she called “The Resistor.” As you can see for yourself in her post, The Resistor is/was not one of her best friends. His or her story — what The Resistor had done to Colleen in the past — just sounded too interesting to ignore. I had to learn about that “that rat bastard” for myself, so followed the link she’d conveniently provided… and discovered that The Resistor wasn’t a person. The Resistor was (is?) a feature of Colleen’s own internal landscape.
I’ll turn the mike over to her for a moment:
The Resistor needs no one and nothing — except something to push against, and everyone else does a damned fine job of providing fodder. The Resistor is very well developed, very smart and very, very strong…
It is indifferent to pain, although it seems to find it interesting or even amusing. But it doesn’t derive pleasure from causing pain. Far from it. It enjoys pushing back, period. Hence, the Resistor’s particular gift at shape-shifting (and, perhaps, a wee bit of pride in its highly refined abilities in this area.)
…[My hypnotherapist] tried every way he knew of to bring the Resistor to the side of Light, much to the amusement of the Resistor, who patiently, if a little condescendingly, kept insisting that was not a possibility.
Can I possibly tell you how much I love this picture of The Resistor?
(While you’re there, by the way, be sure to visit via her generous linkage her posts on the other denizens of her self, as revealed through hypnotherapy: Monkey Brain, The Edge, and the rest.)
