Wow. You packed a whole lot of yourself into a very short post. Thanks for this.
I love the paragraph that describes your reasons for running away, especially this: "Serious trouble was good: it meant that people would start taking options away from me and things would work out".
Beautiful. This is the proverbial cry for help, right? But the way you describe it makes it seem like a perfectly logical, albeit destructive, strategy for dealing with powerlessness. A lot of people do this "running away" thing all the time-- many of us do it daily-- often without realizing it. For the really unlucky ones, running away is built in to our reflexive psyche, so it corrupts every attempt at resolving conflict.
But then, like you say, sometimes it's possible that you have no better option. That's a hard one.
One of the lessons learned was that there was another option, he simply didn't see it (ie. tell his commanding officer about his problems -- ask for help).
Running away was the best option he could conceive of, not the right one.
I love the paragraph that describes your reasons for running away, especially this: "Serious trouble was good: it meant that people would start taking options away from me and things would work out".
Beautiful. This is the proverbial cry for help, right? But the way you describe it makes it seem like a perfectly logical, albeit destructive, strategy for dealing with powerlessness. A lot of people do this "running away" thing all the time-- many of us do it daily-- often without realizing it. For the really unlucky ones, running away is built in to our reflexive psyche, so it corrupts every attempt at resolving conflict.
But then, like you say, sometimes it's possible that you have no better option. That's a hard one.