more desperately than romantically

FROYOYO: Langdon & Garcia Series 5/? 'Bummer'

(Also Langdon when he eventually sees Robby):

it's pretty clear she was talking about the lorazepam, no? she couldn't open the cap, langdon said she was doing it wrong. she noted the unusual dose and that they should (if as much lorazepam had been given as langdon said) move to anti-seizure meds, he said it was normal and she was wrong, she is an intern who needs to learn to trust him, her superior. altering or denying someone's objective reality to the point that they question whether they're perceiving reality is... gaslighting.

like, we can talk about her fascinating and self-defeating trauma responses without pretending that langdon only crossed a line with santos by yelling at her re samira's patient, you know?

i am of two minds about calling that gaslighting! the op made it very clear (maybe it was in the comments and not in the text of the post itself?) that they subscribe to the definition of gaslighting that requires long-term planning and action, as in the original play/film where the word comes from. something shorter-term is not gaslighting. and i tend to agree and think that the word is used WAY too casually these days (as are almost all words that derive from therapeutic contexts).

that said: it's still lying, and it's still manipulative, and i totally agree it wasn't okay and she has a right to be upset about that. i think the two things that he actually did wrong with regards to trinity were the yelling and the lying. up until then, his, "woah, dude, it is NOT okay for you to be taking action before running your plan by a senior resident or attending!" reactions were 1000% legitimate.

what i think is interesting about trinity's narrativizing is that she can't just say, "wow, this guy was a manipulative asshole to me. i don't like him, i'll never like him, and i hate that he's back." which would be an okay thing to think, even after he apologized! (i'm jewish, so i don't think forgiveness is an obligation.)

instead, she has to push it much, much further than that.

it starts with a perspective that i strongly disagree with but that reflects a pretty common worldview: he's just not an asshole, he's a criminal. it doesn't only suck that he's back, he should be in jail. maybe she's a carceral kind of person who buys into retributive justice frameworks and thinks it's fine to lock people up to punish them. despite what tumblr would have you think, that is still the predominate opinion at least in the u.s. (i won't speak to the rest of the world) and given her clearly-demonstrated anger at the men who violate her sense of morality, that well may be what she believes. (her sense of proportion is off, though. what frank did is nowhere near on the same level as what she thought that dad in season 1 was doing to his daughter. i wonder if she would admit that? or if any violation made by a man against a woman, especially a younger woman or a girl, is the same in her eyes? we don't know that yet! we may never know!)

but from there, as the original post said, she creates this elaborate narrative wherein her decision to do the right thing (which was indeed the right thing!) explains every negative thing she perceives as going on in the e.d. it's so convenient! she doesn't have to look at her own behavior, how she treats people! instead, she can say, "oh, people are holding me at a distance because i did the right thing." she gets to be a martyr instead of a person with agency.

and i also find it so incredibly interesting that she perceives people as disliking her in the e.d. which we don't even see demonstrated beyond mel? mel clearly has (totally justifiable) Issues with her, but i don't remember seeing anyone else demonstrate negative feelings towards trinity. the question of why she perceives that is so interesting!!! and clearly a trauma response!!!

and we see this tendency towards martyrdom with baran, too, where baran's (completely legitimate and indeed required from an attending) commands to catch up with charting. now, i kind of feel like baran shouldn't have gone straight to "repeat your r2 year" threat, but this is another case where the person criticizing trinity is completely correct and would say the exact same thing to anyone else in the e.d. who was behaving like trinity was, but to trinity, they just have it out for her.

what it makes me wonder is: is trinity capable of taking any kind of criticism/correction at all? we saw her reaction to samira being harsh in season one, her expression belying her stated possession of "rhino" skin. she doesn't seem to hold that against samira in the same way she does frank and baran, though maybe it's just because we haven't seen them interact as much, or maybe samira never did it again, so over ten months trinity kind of got over it.

trinity is clearly a person who was so deeply and profoundly hurt in her childhood/adolescence that she's incapable of seeing herself as anything but a victim. she truly was a victim for so long and in such unthinkable ways that it's come to dominate her understanding of herself and is central to her identity. she believes herself to be incredibly tough, and in one sense, she is: no one could have lived through what the text alludes to her living through without being tough. but in another sense, she is as much of a "petunia" as mel. she also can't see herself as being in the wrong (which is a common reaction to being a victim for a formative amount of time). she's mentally still stuck in the horrifying experience(s) she had when she was a kid. she's shown incredible resilience in getting as far with her education/career as she has. but she's emotionally stunted and has not moved on at all.

i desperately want her to go to therapy and heal!!! i strongly believe she can become a better person!!! the show, for all its flaws, also believes that people can heal and become better people, as we see with frank himself. but the writers wasted a lot of potential with her this season--she has no arc at all, her issues never come to a climax/tipping point, her story goes nowhere.

i really hope this is just a sophomore slump and next season we'll see her actually have to face her own weaknesses. the writers seems to care about her more than they do about, like, samira, so i think there's a chance she'll get a better arc next season. it would be super interesting to me if that arc is facilitated by interactions with frank since i think they're interesting mirror characters, even though he's so much further along the path towards healing than she is. i kind of doubt the writers will go there, but it would be so fun!

yeah, this too! how is the way frank treated trinity in the yelling scene any different than the way robby treats samira? (the only differences are that robby is the actual boss, not just someone higher-ranking, and that robby does this all the time, whereas this is a one-day thing for frank and trinity). samira was also really harsh with trinity in the "rhino" scene. this is an incredibly intense environment full of people with big personalities who are constantly overworked and stressed out. people are going to be assholes to each other, and while that is inappropriate and they should try not to do that, it's clearly part of the culture.

frank went too far with the yelling. and the lying/manipulating about the lorazepam was flat-out wrong. but he does genuinely apologize for it and learn from his mistake (and there was the mitigating factor of addiction) and seem to try not to behave that way anymore. whereas some other people in the e.d. are continuing to be every bit as big of assholes without trinity caring at all.

we're all bringing our own perspectives to the show, and our willingness to forgive a character's bad choices pretty much boil down to "do i like/relate to this character or not?" and not so much to objective facts about the character. i'm very open about the fact that i have a huge grudge against robby because he's mean to my faves and because he's angry-dad coded in a way that triggers my own trauma.

and i'm fine with the people who are always going to hate frank because they love/relate to trinity or because they just hate privileged white dudes or whatever. legit reaction to have! just as it's legit that some of my mutuals hate trinity because of how she treats their faves!