Heroes and Villains

Everyone's great cause projects them as our future's therapeutic hero. So all against our health-intending causes reject us as potential victimizers, ostracizers, impeachers, disenfranchisers, excommunicators, criminalizers. The trick is to see antagonists, sources of trauma, as part of protagonist causes you, resource for therapy, actively seeking out each other as possible co-redeemer heroes resolving differences together, with good faith in divinely interrelated sacred causes. I live with a fifteen year old daughter with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the emotional intelligence of a five year old on her best day. This provides daily exercise practicing this trick of sharing my protagonist identity with her antagonistic causes, needs, wants and egocentric demands, regarding her sacred and natural causes, Which usually have something to do with eating and exercise and baths and diaper changes and positive social interactions, Usually with YouTube comrades with sacred and natural causes involving eating impolitely and dancing while singing obnoxious songs, repeatedly and personal hygiene issues, offensively and other humorous entertainment productions. She most loves to find ways to embarrass me. I had to put a lock on the bathroom door, high enough so she can't lock me out but just right for me to lock myself in. After a few times of having her follow me upstairs to see if she might catch me using the toilet or, even better, naked in the shower, with the door unlocked, and participating in an ongoing dialogue about privacy rights, more relentless than merely ongoing, heated discussions about why she is outside while I am hiding inside, I announced to her, one day, as I was heading toward the stairs, that I was going upstairs to poop. "Do you want to come and watch me?" She looked up from her military-grade bomb-proof laptop, started to get up off the couch, then sat back down, No! Why would I want to do that? Exactly, when I stopped hiding I was no longer her sacred cause to seek. I suppose we might imagine larger stages for co-redemptive ecopolitical invitations. It helps to have a healthy sense of humor about your own divinely-inspired protagonist causes for true peace and authentically restoring justice. Showing your antagonists, your deniers, your ugly offenders, your sources of trauma, and intrusive curiosity this more therapeutic side of your good-humored position may be just enough for them to realize you're not quite so humorless and hopelessly abusive or neglectful of their healthy included best interests after all. So, maybe it's OK to lighten up and watch to see who laughs last and longest together. Or, as in this domestic case of rights to privacy, laugh quietly and more peacefully apart.