My mother called one day in the late 1980s and told me that her mother, whom we called “Nana”, was coming to town for a while. This was remarkable, as none of us had seen her since “the troubles” in our family began. “The troubles” is what Nana called the blow up between her two children: my mom and her brother, Uncle Bill.

The split in the family was now five years old. Nana was on Bill’s side, mostly because Nana was in her 80’s and she needed him. He was a dutiful son, he helped her constantly with issues big and small. Now suddenly, Bill would have nothing to do with her. Nana had done or said something “disloyal” and Bill was unforgiving in his righteous anger. He accused her of being on my mother’s side, and no longer spoke to her. Nana sank into anguish. After a few months of bearing up on her own, she developed a bad case of shingles. Shingles is an insidious virus, dormant for decades before inflaming nerves and bursting out on your skin like a 3rd degree burn. She couldn’t care for herself, the rub of clothing as she moved was too much. She needed help, and mom and her three boys were all she had left.

I was in my late twenties, living in a six floor walk-up in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen at the time. Mom lived in her apartment on Central Park West where she had moved us after the long and arduous split from my father. This was a particularly bad time for a visit, as my mother’s second husband was hospitalized and gravely ill, and Mom was constantly shuttling across Central Park, meeting with doctors at Mt. Sinai Hospital, and returning to her home office to see clients of her psychotherapeutic practice. But Nana came, and stayed longer than she’d ever stayed before. She made more of these extended visits over the next few months. Except for the shingles, she showed no sign of ill health, but during one of these visits she suddenly died in my mother’s bed after lying down for a nap. We found her there, lying peacefully with one hand placed angelically on her chin, her expression almost relieved. Mom never said so, but I think she always appreciated that her mother felt good enough about her to die in her bed. It was a kind of forgiveness.

A mood of somber respect fell over Bill after Nana’s death, and it appeared for a brief time that it would render the battle moot. But the day after the funeral, at a family meal honoring Nana at one of her favorite Pittsburgh restaurants, Bill went off like a bomb. He screamed at us in rage for three hours, emptying the restaurant of its other patrons. We paused to order more food, and he screamed at us for several more hours. I left for my plane flight home, with him still screaming at my mother and younger brother. It was the last time I ever saw him.

Our family was a fraught bunch. There was a lot of fighting, and the fights were ugly, alcohol fueled affairs. Holidays involved round after round of toxic battles. Often these played out as political arguments, or some other petty dispute. But they could suddenly erupt into deeply toxic conflagrations in which past events were mis-stated, misinterpreted, or wildly exaggerated. Words were repeated out of context, as evidence of evil intent they never originally had. Ancient wounds that had gained mythic status somehow, were dredged up as weapons of shame and guilt. Anything that could possibly be misunderstood to someone’s advantage, was.

Uncle Bill, a lawyer, was aggressive and tyrannical. But “the Boys”, me and my two brothers, were rebellious young Manhattanites, and put up effective enough resistance that Bill despised all of us. So mom and Bill, and mom and us, and Bill and us… we had fights… the kinds of fights that can only create worse fights. My brothers and I called them the “Biggest Victim” fights, because they were all about who was the more victimized party.

Usually triggered by some petty remark, some small slight, or some invisible trigger you could never identify. It was all about who was most insulted, most justified in their anger. Who had the greatest injustice done to them. If you could prove you were the biggest victim, you won. It was a style of fighting that over the decades had developed into a highly addictive poison.

As a child, growing up and seeing this so often, it seemed obvious that the fights themselves were the problem. Not the fact of the fighting, but the way we fought: the dishonesty, the bad faith, the willful unfairness, the exaggerated claims, the intentional misrepresentations, the calling out of the slightest mistake as if it were the greatest offense.

When I was younger, I secretly tape recorded fights sometimes, to see if I could untangle it all, find the core problem and reveal it to everyone. But I couldn’t untangle anything. The fights were circular, they meandered and suddenly became violently about a new topic entirely. There was no winning a fight like that, and only later did I recognize that winning was never the goal. There was no goal. It was purely reactive, a reflex response to vent rage and inflict pain. All of this dishonest righteous rage was a symptom, not a cause. Like shingles, it was a sickness that hid deep in your nervous system until some trigger made it erupt, and suddenly you’re burning all over.

I have the sickness too. I go off sometimes. I’ve had to work hard to get a grip on it, and I still lose that grip sometimes. But the work has taught me a lot. Behind every one of these battles was a deep well of unexpressed or unexamined expectations and assumptions. The violation of one of these expectations, about values, roles, authority, rights, duties, responsibilities or boundaries, was almost always the trigger. There was a core issue, often more than one, that could potentially have been located, framed, and patiently unpacked if there was enough goodwill to do so. But, for Uncle Bill at least, that goodwill was long gone.

That kind of conversation, the authentic kind, was never had in my mom’s family. No one knew how to have it. Sadly, that skill is extremely uncommon. It’s not even really respected or taught, in America at least. If you want to figure out how to have authentic conversations about hard issues, even with yourself, you’re pretty much on your own. And knowing how isn’t enough. You have to make it your habit. My wife of 25 years, my two daughters, have had many fights. Some ugly ones. And forgiveness and authenticity is always the way back. Authenticity and forgiveness slowly heals the trust between people. In fact, they are the only things that do.

But as my mom’s family learned, if a grievance, once expressed, doesn’t lead to an authentic excavation of the issues at the core of the problem, it just leads to more anger, more misunderstanding, more offense. Once everyone is in the Biggest Victim business, there’s no end to it. Once grievance is incentivized, it spreads. It starts feeding on itself. And more and more people become engaged in a fight over who’s the biggest victim.

It’s hard for me not to see this all around me now: in our politics, on our campuses, on the left, on the right. From the trans-gender activists who are “triggered” by pronouns, to the alt-right marchers who claim that America is no longer safe for white males. From the annual Fox News “War On Christmas” complaints, to the activist students at Claremont College who hounded the Dean of Students from office over what was her clear attempt, if awkwardly worded, to be sympathetic to them. Like my uncle, these aren’t victims, they’re manipulators. And they’re everywhere. Even our president, who bullied and insulted his way into office, now angrily complains about being hounded by the Justice Department’s “witch hunt” and the “disgustingly unfair” media, as if he’s the biggest victim of all.

And amid all the tweet storms, and partisan cable news, gridlock and shouting, nobody can admit anything. No one can have the kinds of conversations that get to the core of the challenges we actually face. Those who try are ignored. We want to fight, we want to vent our outrage. We don’t want to do the kind of work that gets us through this. We are still all stuck at the level of mind that created the problem.

To grow out of it, we will all have to admit things we don’t want to admit. We will have to see the world through the eyes of people we don’t want to empathize with. We will have to take responsibility for being flawed. We will have to be vulnerable… to learn and fail in front of everyone. And then stand up, and learn and fail again. It’s humiliating, and it’s difficult.

It is much, much easier to just get righteous… to shout down the “oppressor”, to believe in conspiracies, to exaggerate, and cheat, and take grand offense at an innocent mistake, and post on the micro-aggressions forum. And to blame, and attack, and tweet rumors about your enemies, and try to convince everyone you’re the biggest victim. It gets clicks, and votes. It sells. Anger is an addictive drug, and it feels good. It is way more entertaining than taking responsibility for anything. At least in the short term.

But scale it up, and it blinds us as a society. And when we can’t see our way past it, we become lost. And it becomes just one more thing to blame others for.

But in the long run, life always shows you your mistakes.

The battle between my mother and her brother landed in court. Technically it was about money, but really it was about everything else. After over 5 years, of costly hearings and legal fights, mom “won”, for all the good it did her. Uncle Bill had spent most of the family money he controlled on himself. His mythic “Washington Attorney” persona was a fraud. As an estate lawyer, his only client was himself. His “double dealing” and other fiduciary violations were detailed in the court’s judgment against him. He was reprimanded by the judge and could have been disbarred if my mother had chosen to pursue it. But she was exhausted. We all were. Bill was past sixty by then, there was no getting back anything that was lost. We all thought it was over. All that was left was to heal and move on.