The thing about l!Stephen's strategy is that, while it's a bad one, calling it "a (twisted or not) form of repression" makes it seem like every problem goes back to repression. Clearly c!Stephen's strategy is repression taken to the extreme, but l!Stephen's problem comes from too little repression.
Like...okay, anecdote time. A couple of years ago I was on a group trip, an academic thing, where the organizers booked these big blocks of hotel rooms and stuck us in them in pairs. And my assigned roommate wouldn't bother going into the bathroom to change - she would just strip in front of me. So finally I said, "Look, aren't you at all uncomfortable with this?" To which she said, "No, I'm not ashamed of my body."
Not wanting to take the (repressive!) side of Your Body Is A Shameful Thing, I spent a lot of the trip quietly cringing, thinking damnit, woman, put some clothes on.
She didn't get to that point by repressing things. She got there by thinking that repression is bad, and therefore she had to avoid it at all costs, to the point of not having what I would think of as a sense of basic modesty with respect to a complete stranger.
The thing to say to l!Stephen is not "You're still repressing!", but "In trying to take down all your pathological walls, you have also taken down the legitimate boundaries that you need to be safe and healthy. You need to put those boundaries back up. And also your pants."
I don't know if he realizes that he's scaring people away. I think c!Stephen desperately wants someone to reach out to him - but he doesn't think he can trust them, so he keeps testing them, being angry and pushing them away in order to weed out the untrustworthy ones. Which ends up being almost everyone. Whereas l!Stephen wants people to reach out to him, and refuses to put up c!Stephen's pretense of pushing them away. So he tries not to do anything that would drive someone off, including being so rude as to suspect them of being untrustworthy. No matter who they are. (Thus his one canon appearance: "The terrorists are nice people deep down, I'm sure! They would probably come around to our side if we just sat down and had a conversation where we shared our feelings!") And he can't figure out why that very openness would cause people to draw away.
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Like...okay, anecdote time. A couple of years ago I was on a group trip, an academic thing, where the organizers booked these big blocks of hotel rooms and stuck us in them in pairs. And my assigned roommate wouldn't bother going into the bathroom to change - she would just strip in front of me. So finally I said, "Look, aren't you at all uncomfortable with this?" To which she said, "No, I'm not ashamed of my body."
Not wanting to take the (repressive!) side of Your Body Is A Shameful Thing, I spent a lot of the trip quietly cringing, thinking damnit, woman, put some clothes on.
She didn't get to that point by repressing things. She got there by thinking that repression is bad, and therefore she had to avoid it at all costs, to the point of not having what I would think of as a sense of basic modesty with respect to a complete stranger.
The thing to say to l!Stephen is not "You're still repressing!", but "In trying to take down all your pathological walls, you have also taken down the legitimate boundaries that you need to be safe and healthy. You need to put those boundaries back up. And also your pants."
I don't know if he realizes that he's scaring people away. I think c!Stephen desperately wants someone to reach out to him - but he doesn't think he can trust them, so he keeps testing them, being angry and pushing them away in order to weed out the untrustworthy ones. Which ends up being almost everyone. Whereas l!Stephen wants people to reach out to him, and refuses to put up c!Stephen's pretense of pushing them away. So he tries not to do anything that would drive someone off, including being so rude as to suspect them of being untrustworthy. No matter who they are. (Thus his one canon appearance: "The terrorists are nice people deep down, I'm sure! They would probably come around to our side if we just sat down and had a conversation where we shared our feelings!") And he can't figure out why that very openness would cause people to draw away.
Also, yes, l!Stephen is totally a Cameron fan :D