Toxic inheritance

Dannyboi-UK

Support, about how new people are welcomed, helped, integrated reminded me of when all that goes very wrong.  There are countless other stories here of guys coercing, harassing "teaching" new women but leaving them troubled, in tears or just with the mistaken belief that their dance has improved when in fact it has gone backwards.  

Somewhere in the archives here is a story I can't now find about when one of the old guard of tango dancers in the city, who have now nearly all moved on - and an organiser themselves - told me that the good experienced dancers didn't dance with new people. At two years of experience I was not quite as new. They didn't dance with new people because nobody had danced with them as beginners. Man hands on misery to man / It deepens like a coastal shelf. People had to learn the hard way, prove themselves and have something to aspire to. This of courses was not true. Most experienced men danced with new women. Though it was about ten years ago I still remember my shock, dismay and horror at that conversation - and hiding it because I knew, even before it was proven to me and everyone else, several times that this was perniciousness - very substantially - embodied.

This was the same attitude - some call it tough love - that I experienced on my second placement in secondary school. Deliberately not helping the student teacher, undermining them, piling scores of points of of criticism per week on them and calling it help", fake smiles, making life hard for new people, as if it wasn't hard enough already. After the stalker incident put paid to that anyway, I just felt enormous relief at not having to go back to that most toxic of environments. It was sad that such an

outdated attitude still persists in organisations in the twenty first century and frankly appalling that such people are in charge of young minds.

I think, I pray, such "welcomes" are mercifully rare, yet I fear they are not.

Like new plants, new people are vulnerable and need support and probably company.  Otherwise their life in whatever it is they are beginning to learn is short and stunted, they soon wilt, die off and the only ones left are the lonely, imperious royalty.