feel like the proverbial cat stuck out on some ever-diminishing tree branch, said branch quivering in every slightest breath of wind, trying to knock me loose. I cling, I cling, desperately.
What if I fall? What then? Will anyone catch me?
Experience to date says, pretty much, No, you're on your own, kid.
Makes me wonder what sadistic bastard came up with the words to the 'Rockabye Baby' song...
Sunday, May 31, 2009
nature, nurture
I remembered reading somewhere that experience can impact genetic structure as much as the genetic hand we're dealt can affect life experience. From an article that supports this view (bold mine):
Garbage in, garbage out, as they used to say.
From another linked article in the series:
***
Also, from a discussion group on complex PTSD and bullying, a commenter had the following to say (I'm copying huge chunks of it to preserve it, just in case something happens to the forum):
More from his next comment in the thread:
Being a parent is the ultimate responsibility.
Experiences that trigger gene expression range from our environment (including the air we breathe, the food we eat, and how we are loved and held etc.) to the molecules in our body (hormones, pepetides, neuro-chemicals and more). For example the environment will include touch and eye contact, both of which are linked to specific sequences of gene expression. What’s most important, is what your baby feels emotionally: the turning on and off of cascades of gene expression begins within seconds of receiving psychological signals and may continue for hours, days, weeks – or even a lifetime.Bingo. Nurturing and attachment matters, no matter how many parents try to argue otherwise. It's not about 'blame' - it's the fact that all babies are hard-wired to be directly influenced and literally shaped by the people who spend the most time caring for them, usually their parents, and especially the mother. The person who spends hours, days, weeks, months in intimate, close bodily contact with this infant, gazing into her eyes (or not), responding to her needs (or not), has an absolutely huge impact on what kind of person this child turns out to be, and how well she's able to manage in the world. Literally, these early experiences program the child's brain, teaching her (or not teaching her, as the case may be) to recognize verbal and non-verbal signals from her environment, and respond appropriately.
[...]
When your baby feels loving kindness and caring, certain genes are expressed that actually assist the production of new brain cells and wiring between groups of cells that allows a positive outlook. Love in infancy inclines us to feel love, and to be loving, in adulthood.Other specific genes are triggered in times of stress and anxiety. The experience of stress can turn off the interleukin-2 gene. This begins a cascade of events and has numerous results including reduced functioning of the immune system, which leaves a person more vulnerable to infections. Positive psychosocial experience, on the other hand, can turn on the interleukin-2 gene within an hour or two, to facilitate molecular communication, healing and health. Emotionally supportive experiences within a loving group (the family) optimise immune function.
Excessive psychological stress may lead to numerous changes in gene expression that effect many body systems. In a state of stress several hormones including cortisol are released. These can reset genes that govern body rhythms and also disrupt the behaviour many body organs, including the heart, liver or kidney, and to disturb blood pressure, sleep-wake cycles or digestive rhythms. You see this in action when your baby feels 'separation distress'.
Garbage in, garbage out, as they used to say.
From another linked article in the series:
Your baby is driven by his limbic brain, which is separate from the intellectual brain and is the seat of emotions. The limbic brain is functioning, sensitive and taking part in every brain process even before birth, and it ensures your baby has seven basic drives. These drives are common to all humans. You have them, your baby has them, your mother has them. We all do. They are present before birth. They drive us every second of our lives.
Separation anxiety
Anger (rage)
Fear
The urge to bond
The drive to care for and nurture another
Playfulness
The drive to exploreEach one of these drives plays an important role - to urge your baby to form relationships and keep close to his parents or carers.
To feel is to be alive
Feeling emotions is a sense as important to us as vision, hearing or touch. Each emotion tells us how we need to act so that we will survive and thrive. For your baby, whose brain and body are immature, the emotions are strong and send powerful messages, but he is limited in his capacity to meet his own needs. He needs you to meet his needs. He needs you, or another primary carer, with him, so he can learn how to deal with his strong feelings.
Neuroscience has shown that the key to safety, as well as to growth, is to be in relationship. It is of vital importance to feel loved, listened to and understood. For brain regulation and growth, and for the development of a sense of self, your baby needs to feel felt: there is a measurable impact on the limbic brain in relationship. Your baby needs to know that his feelings are acknowledged and accepted. He needs to feel loved: for who he is, rather than for what he does.
When your baby feels alone for too long , he goes into a state of separation distress - one of the emotional urges. This important emotion drives him to cry so that he can be connected once again. No wonder - science has shown that your baby needs you for survival, and the sensation of distress at being separated , and the behaviour this triggers, helps to ensure he gets what he needs.
Babies who are in a prolonged state of separation distress show a wide range of negative effects. A baby has extreme difficulty in dealing with such an intense and extended forceful emotion. The brain, in an attempt to cope and maintain equilibrium, triggers changes throughout body and brain that lead to a kind of 'shut-down'. The measurable effects include disruption of temperature regulation, an increase in pain sensations, levels of stress hormones rising by up to 10 times their normal levels, compromising of the immune system and disruption of normal sleep. This is also known as 'protest-despair' - the response that's very common when a baby is left to cry and eventually becomes too exhausted to continue crying, or simply gives up.
The impact of prolonged or repeated separation despair on the brain includes patterning of neural networks that relate to the experience of separation. Whatever pattern is reinforced is likely to persist and will determine future behaviour. Having experienced extreme or repeated stress, neural networksin the limbic brain, including the amygdala (the seat of fear), function in a way that inclines a baby to reach a state of high anxiety more rapidly than normal. There is also a reduced ability to trust and to feel safe.
High levels of exposure to stress hormones including cortisol and adrenalin actually predispose body cells (including cells in the brain, the gut, the muscles and so on) to react quickly to stress in the future. In adulthood, the patterns of neural networking, and the sensitivity of body cells, persist. The grown-up baby may still be more anxious than usual.
***
Also, from a discussion group on complex PTSD and bullying, a commenter had the following to say (I'm copying huge chunks of it to preserve it, just in case something happens to the forum):
Our problem is that we are too rational for our own good, and we expose the lies and stupidity and fiction of the world with our every move and breath. That is why we are hated, told we are wrong and broken and crazy, that we must not trust our senses.That last line is incredibly powerful for me, like a blessing of some kind, a gift - a forgiveness, or release, from the shame for all the ways in which I've never managed to live up to the impossibilities that were expected and demanded of me.
Rules are for equals. Authority is a master/slave relationship. We can have rules without authority. You are right to be angry when someone tries to control you like a slave for their own gain.
[...]
Authority is the exact opposite of rules.
[...]
RE: DSM
It is crap. Absolute crap. It has nothing to do with science or helping people, and everything to do with the petty political agendae of the medical associations (aka unelected and quasi-governmental arms of the state) governments, and pharma companies. For instance, every psychiatrist knows that the effect of antidepressants is mostly due to placebo effect. If they cured you, then they couldn't keep billing you or your insurance company, could they?
A meta-analysis of nineteen nineteen double-blind antidepressant trials published in the American Psychological Association's online publication, Prevention and Treatment (Guy Sapirstein PhD of Westwood Lodge Hospital, Needham, MA, co-author) in 1998 caused an uproar in professional circles when it was revealed that the placebo effect accounted for a mind-boggling 75 percent of an antidepressant's result - any antidepressant, you name it.
Four years later, the July 2002 Prevention and Treatment published another study by Dr Kirsch that analyzed the FDA database of 47 placebo-controlled short-term clinical trials involving the six most widely prescribed antidepressants approved between 1987 and 1999. These included "file drawer" studies, ie trials that failed but were usually never published.
What Dr Kirsch and his colleagues found was that 80 percent of the medication response in the combined drug groups was duplicated in the placebo groups, and that the mean difference between the drug and placebo was a "clinically insignificant" two points on both the 17-item and 21-item Hamilton Depression Scale, regardless of the size of the drug dose. The placebo factor ranged from a high of 89 percent for the Prozac response, according to the study, and a low of 69 percent for the Paxil response. In four trials, the placebo equaled or achieved marginally better results than the drug. In the nine expert commentaries published with the study, none of the commentators disputed the study's main findings.
[url=http://www.mcmanweb.com/article-18.htm]Source[/i]
ADHD, PTSD, AS, Nonverbal Learning Disability, these are all just fictional constructs we use to organize various traits and symptoms which cluster together. In other words, diseases which can be defined into and out of existence on someone's subjective say-so. Homosexuality was in earlier editions of the DSM.
[...]
Teachers HATE children. Doctors HATE sick people. Guidance counselors HATE success, or they wouldn't be fakkin guidance counselors. The only difference between them and the people that shoot up public places is degree - "I used to be weak, now I am the one who gets to abuse power."Life's losers boss us around for their own gain.
They falsely define our problems,
give us fake solutions to problems they caused in the first place, invalidate our senses and belittle our wonderment,
put us on pedestals and vent their rage on us
when we fail to perform to those unrealistic standards.
Never underestimate the lengths that insecure people will go to to tear you down.
Never forget that the insecure are the ones in charge.
Never forget that sometimes to survive, we need to learn to blend in and be faceless.Never forget that all you have for sure is you,
and your wonderful, gorgeous mind.
More from his next comment in the thread:
What happened to you was so unjust. It was wrong. It was not abusive simply for the physical aspect, it was abusive because it was all based around a lie, the lie that the poisoner is the healer, that the man who hates you is the man who loves you, a lie you were forced to believe for the sake of survival.It doesn't really matter who he's speaking to in these comments - the words themselves are so powerfully healing (for me, at least), an acceptance of the pain and rage, fear and fury, all tangled together, that we get caught up in when someone we have no choice but to 'love' (such as a parent) abuses, or fails to use properly, that position of absolute power. It doesn't matter whether said parent understands or acknowledges their power; that power exists regardless of the parents' ability to grasp just how much influence they wield over their developing child's mind, heart, and soul.
No wonder you felt as you did. You'd be weird if you didn't. You've been trained in a brutal, Pavlovian manner that your thoughts are not yours to have, that certain ones are allowed and not allowed. In law, there are two concepts, called "mens rea" and "actus reus", or guilty thoughts and guilty acts; both must be present for there to be a crime.
Your anger and pain is righteous.
There is no such thing as a bad emotion. We have them for a reason. I know its especially hard for women to express anger without guilt due to social conditioning, but if you can immerse yourself in your anger and channel it to useful ends, you've got it 90% licked.
Being a parent is the ultimate responsibility.
my heart hurts
Literally. I feel pain all around my heart today - I think it was the kindness of my neighbor yesterday, and the desperate seeking of my system (me?) to find someone who will give me more of this kindness.
Because, you see, what I need, the way a plant needs water, is to be held. Plain and simply. Nothing more, nothing less. The person doesn't really need to do anything, in particular, except just be there, without asking for anything in return.
And that's the dilemma, isn't it? As adults, we aren't allowed to ask for this kind of relationship. We can pay for someone (like a shrink, a doctor, or maybe a massage therapist) to pretend to care for an hour or so (at usurious rates); and if we're lucky, maybe we'll have some affinity for that person (or they'll have an affinity for us) that allows us to experience some kind of connection, at least temporarily.
But the problem is, it doesn't meet the basic human need to belong, to fit in, to find somewhere where you are accepted, loved, and wanted unconditionallly. Not for what you do, not for what kinds of hurdles you are able to leap to prove your worth, but because whoever it is simply values you for who you are.
In my lifetime I have found so few people who fit into this category (and I'm sure it's true for everyone?)
When you lose one of these people from your life, the pain can be so immense as to make you almost stop breathing. I think in some cases it can literally make your heart stop. Like those stories you hear about someone's husband dying and then dying herself shortly thereafter, from heartbreak.
We don't seem to believe in that, anymore, in this 'modern' world - that people can be that important in our lives. We seem to be expected to replace people the same way we replace shoes, or cars, or whatever - a disposable mindset, attaching no more value to humans than we do to things. The consumer way of thinking.
Anyway. I think that's what's happening today: The kindness of my neighbor reminded me how hungry I am for that kind of kindness, the kind that doesn't seem to ask anything in return, or expect anything. The kind that doesn't seem to be temporary cessation of hostilities (as with my family's accusations of me being 'too sensitive'), but rather a true generosity of spirit.
Maybe I'm making much ado about nothing. But the feelings yesterday seemed to stir up the old mud around my heart, sending little spiky shards of old pain re-circulating. Things I thought I'd laid to rest long ago apparently still have the power to poke holes in that leaky old pumper of mine.
Because, you see, what I need, the way a plant needs water, is to be held. Plain and simply. Nothing more, nothing less. The person doesn't really need to do anything, in particular, except just be there, without asking for anything in return.
And that's the dilemma, isn't it? As adults, we aren't allowed to ask for this kind of relationship. We can pay for someone (like a shrink, a doctor, or maybe a massage therapist) to pretend to care for an hour or so (at usurious rates); and if we're lucky, maybe we'll have some affinity for that person (or they'll have an affinity for us) that allows us to experience some kind of connection, at least temporarily.
But the problem is, it doesn't meet the basic human need to belong, to fit in, to find somewhere where you are accepted, loved, and wanted unconditionallly. Not for what you do, not for what kinds of hurdles you are able to leap to prove your worth, but because whoever it is simply values you for who you are.
In my lifetime I have found so few people who fit into this category (and I'm sure it's true for everyone?)
When you lose one of these people from your life, the pain can be so immense as to make you almost stop breathing. I think in some cases it can literally make your heart stop. Like those stories you hear about someone's husband dying and then dying herself shortly thereafter, from heartbreak.
We don't seem to believe in that, anymore, in this 'modern' world - that people can be that important in our lives. We seem to be expected to replace people the same way we replace shoes, or cars, or whatever - a disposable mindset, attaching no more value to humans than we do to things. The consumer way of thinking.
Anyway. I think that's what's happening today: The kindness of my neighbor reminded me how hungry I am for that kind of kindness, the kind that doesn't seem to ask anything in return, or expect anything. The kind that doesn't seem to be temporary cessation of hostilities (as with my family's accusations of me being 'too sensitive'), but rather a true generosity of spirit.
Maybe I'm making much ado about nothing. But the feelings yesterday seemed to stir up the old mud around my heart, sending little spiky shards of old pain re-circulating. Things I thought I'd laid to rest long ago apparently still have the power to poke holes in that leaky old pumper of mine.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
puritanical poison
I read something once about how behavior patterns get passed down in families through generations - that a coping mechanism that served well during a time of stress, such as a famine, drought or other hardship, could end up being perpetuated out of nothing more than habit forevermore, unless somebody, at some point, does something to break the chain.
What we call 'dysfunctionality' is really just something that somebody learned how to do to deal with their current situation. When the situation changed, somehow the behavior carried right along, as if nothing had changed at all.
That's how it is with humans: Most of what we learn, we learn from our parents (or other adults in our environment), up until an age when we start being more influenced by our peers; but by then, some of our basic relational 'wiring' has already been pretty well set in stone.
It seems that there must be exceptions to this, but the tendency for children to imitate their parents in all ways - mannerisms, speech patterns, ways of coping with stress, expressing various emotions (or not expressing them) - seems to be an innate part of how humans learn.
What we call 'dysfunctionality' is really just something that somebody learned how to do to deal with their current situation. When the situation changed, somehow the behavior carried right along, as if nothing had changed at all.
That's how it is with humans: Most of what we learn, we learn from our parents (or other adults in our environment), up until an age when we start being more influenced by our peers; but by then, some of our basic relational 'wiring' has already been pretty well set in stone.
It seems that there must be exceptions to this, but the tendency for children to imitate their parents in all ways - mannerisms, speech patterns, ways of coping with stress, expressing various emotions (or not expressing them) - seems to be an innate part of how humans learn.
happy!
Went skateboarding today! My first time ever, in my whole life! And I didn't fall down, not even once! It was very cool.
My downstairs neighbor (I live in a duplex) took me out for a 'roll' in the Park'n'Ride lot down the street from us. He was amazingly patient with me - in fact, I think he's the very best cheerleader I've ever had in my whole life (in terms of showing me how to do something).
He did everything perfectly - held my hand (literally) when I needed it, making no big deal whatsoever of whether I wanted to hang on to him or not - he was totally there whenever I needed him, and totally not there when I didn't. So cool. Why is it so rare to find this kind of experience with other people? I felt like I could be a little kid with him, exactly the way I never could when I actually was a little kid. My dad would never have put up with that kind of 'neediness' - he didn't have the patience for it. He expected me to get things right the first try (so I almost always did - the cost of failure - well, I don't actually know. I think I never 'failed' around him).
Anyway. I'm going to let the WAY COOLNESS of today OVERWRITE the old stuff. So there, old stuff! Take that!!!! :-) :-) :-)
My downstairs neighbor (I live in a duplex) took me out for a 'roll' in the Park'n'Ride lot down the street from us. He was amazingly patient with me - in fact, I think he's the very best cheerleader I've ever had in my whole life (in terms of showing me how to do something).
He did everything perfectly - held my hand (literally) when I needed it, making no big deal whatsoever of whether I wanted to hang on to him or not - he was totally there whenever I needed him, and totally not there when I didn't. So cool. Why is it so rare to find this kind of experience with other people? I felt like I could be a little kid with him, exactly the way I never could when I actually was a little kid. My dad would never have put up with that kind of 'neediness' - he didn't have the patience for it. He expected me to get things right the first try (so I almost always did - the cost of failure - well, I don't actually know. I think I never 'failed' around him).
Anyway. I'm going to let the WAY COOLNESS of today OVERWRITE the old stuff. So there, old stuff! Take that!!!! :-) :-) :-)
Friday, May 29, 2009
it may be
that we simply don't feel understood until we encounter someone who speaks our language, whatever that may be - words, touch, music, dance, some combination thereof, or something completely different.
heroism
Calling someone 'brave' and 'heroic' when they're just doing what they have to do is patronizing to that person.
I know most people won't understand this, and may even feel insulted by it; but just because I am in a position to face making what seems to you a daunting choice, doesn't mean that I see what I'm doing as anything other than simply the next task in front of me in order to get where I'm going.
I have been called 'brave' a number of times when I've told people about some of the difficult journeys and choices I've made while facing up to some really old, extremely painful emotions.
Wow, that's brave, they'll say. As if I had any other choice.
What they don't understand is, the kind of person I am, the kind of life I want to live, requires that I take this step. It is not optional. If I don't take this step, I will not get where I am trying to go.
What they don't realize is, there's no other way to get there from here.
I know most people won't understand this, and may even feel insulted by it; but just because I am in a position to face making what seems to you a daunting choice, doesn't mean that I see what I'm doing as anything other than simply the next task in front of me in order to get where I'm going.
I have been called 'brave' a number of times when I've told people about some of the difficult journeys and choices I've made while facing up to some really old, extremely painful emotions.
Wow, that's brave, they'll say. As if I had any other choice.
What they don't understand is, the kind of person I am, the kind of life I want to live, requires that I take this step. It is not optional. If I don't take this step, I will not get where I am trying to go.
What they don't realize is, there's no other way to get there from here.
most 'talk' is used to establish status
As I read ballastexistenz' writing, the thing that strikes me over and over again is that I think we are both confused by the 'meta-messages' of most so-called conversation. She may disagree, of course - but I think the reason speech is so difficult for her (this is all speculative, an emerging theory, right?) is because while she's generally trying to communicate an idea, an experience, perhaps a feeling - in other words, information, most people only appear to be sharing information. What they're really doing under the surface noise of the apparent topic is vying for status. They're establishing their place in the pecking order.
Now, why do some people use almost all conversation this way, and others don't? I used to think it was primarily a gender thing, that men were far more concerned about status than women, but I've realized this isn't true.
These days it seems to me that some people simply aren't aware of the attempts of others to categorize them into 'higher' or 'lower' than themselves; thus, much so-called 'communication' can be entirely befuddling to those of us who are actually trying to communicate.
So my 'resonance' with ballastexistenz seems to be in this area - my sense is that we both generally use conversation to communicate, whereas many of the people we're actually trying to communicate with are often not trying to communicate at all, but are instead trying to decide whether they're more or less important than we are.
When you refuse to play this game (in my case I think it's becoming a conscious choice) or in BE's case, I think maybe she really can't play the game - or at least, she's unable to play it in the dynamic, in-the-moment way required for 'normal' speech - people tend to discard you as irrelevant. Or possibly they become curious - I sometimes feel as if people talk to me to see if they can get me to conform, if they can somehow persuade (?) me to behave the way they expect me to.
And why do they do this? I don't know. They seem to lack the flexibility that allows for different ways of being, different ways of thinking. They seem to have an extremely narrow comfort zone, and can hardly function at all unless everyone around them is acting the same way.
Maybe it's just because I was the oddball in my family - I was the one who didn't conform, so I'm really used to being surrounded by people who aren't like me. Whereas everybody else in the family (or, the men, at least, who outnumbered the women) was used to being surrounded by people who were just like them - who thought the same way, acted the same way, sought the same goals and rewards in life. More or less - at least enough so that they could feel comfortable with each other and not seem to be in constant conflict about their basic assumptions about life.
Women who succeed are the ones who, for whatever reason - temperament, intelligence (or lack thereof), upbringing - are more willing to conform to the expectations of the men who, by and large, shape the world we live in.
Men are complaining a lot these days because women are finally, at long last, beginning to have enough power in the world to influence the way things run, and finally men are getting a little uncomfortable - they're having to share the driver's seat, and are finding it quite crowded. And men suck at being passengers - except for the mildest among them, most seem to like to be in charge all the time. The ones I like best are the ones who, literally, will hop into my car with me driving and not make a big deal about it. The ones who always insist on driving, no matter what, are a big fucking pain in the ass. Sure it's nice to be a passenger sometimes, but I like it to be a choice, not a position 'assigned' to me by some guy who presumes he's in charge.
All communications convey information about power and respect for the people with whom we're conversing. The level of politeness one uses, kindness, tone of voice, gestures, facial expressions - all of these show whether the person values you as a human being or whether they are just using the interaction as a way to increase their own power, status or position.
I was just reading a post on ballastexistenz' blog where she's talking about a lawyer who apparently doesn't like people like BE self-advocating.
The question is, why do people like BE bother this man so much? First I would want to know why he's involved in autism 'advocacy' in the first place - why does it matter to him? And once you know the answer to that (which I don't, and am not sure I care to do the research to find out - he sounds like a pretty slimy and intractable type), you might be able to figure out why he's so set on keeping people like BE 'in their place'.
Sometimes people like this lawyer get involved in something like autism because they find themselves unable to exert any real power elsewhere in the world. They think they can come into this field and become 'heroes', and throw their weight around in a way that they can't manage elsewhere.
And yet they encounter someone like BE who on the surface appears to be only minimally able to cope with the world in standard, 'normal' ways, and who yet possesses a sharp, incisive mind that can run circles around this power-mongering lawyer.
So what happens inside his little pinhead brain at this point? Well, he sees her as a threat to the little fiefdom he's trying to establish. He's not interested in her, or indeed any autistic person, as a person at all - he's only interested in establishing some power for himself in a place where no one else seems to be trying to take hold of the reins.
***
I keep looking for the commonality, for what exactly it is that is drawing me to BE's writing. It's something about the cognitive dissonance of the message a person appears to be conveying versus the underlying social message they're actually conveying.
For instance, as a musician, if somebody says to me, "Wow, you're great," they may mean, simply, "I really like listening to the music you play," or they may mean, "Wow, I really wish I was a musician who could play music like you do, and if I hang out around people like you, maybe a little of that will rub off on me, so I'll say nice things to you so you'll let me hang out with you and thus I can get a little closer to my goal." Or something like that - since I don't really know why people say stuff like that, my guess at their 'thinking' is pretty fuzzy.
I feel as if I'm unable to resolve the conflict between the surface message and the underlying message - the surface message always feels like a lie, a manipulation, a power play. I am unable to ignore it.
And since I have no desire to be manipulated by other people into whatever position they think I should be in - whether upward or downward, either one feels like they're 'pushing you around' in some way - I don't like the underlying 'power' messages, either.
It seems like people are constantly doing this - constantly trying to get you to conform to their view of how the world should be. As if we're each playing the starring role in our own play, and we try to get everyone around us to play a particular part, often something as simple as a 'prop' or stage set - a background, maybe, or a piece of furniture to be moved around.
How do people get to be this way, where we only see others in terms of their utility to us, rather than as people in their own right?
I'm not exempting myself from this way of behaving - I think I do it, too. But I think it's destructive and damaging - whenever I become aware of someone else doing it to me, I get angry. So I imagine that other people must feel the same way? Guess I dont' know.
Now, why do some people use almost all conversation this way, and others don't? I used to think it was primarily a gender thing, that men were far more concerned about status than women, but I've realized this isn't true.
These days it seems to me that some people simply aren't aware of the attempts of others to categorize them into 'higher' or 'lower' than themselves; thus, much so-called 'communication' can be entirely befuddling to those of us who are actually trying to communicate.
So my 'resonance' with ballastexistenz seems to be in this area - my sense is that we both generally use conversation to communicate, whereas many of the people we're actually trying to communicate with are often not trying to communicate at all, but are instead trying to decide whether they're more or less important than we are.
When you refuse to play this game (in my case I think it's becoming a conscious choice) or in BE's case, I think maybe she really can't play the game - or at least, she's unable to play it in the dynamic, in-the-moment way required for 'normal' speech - people tend to discard you as irrelevant. Or possibly they become curious - I sometimes feel as if people talk to me to see if they can get me to conform, if they can somehow persuade (?) me to behave the way they expect me to.
And why do they do this? I don't know. They seem to lack the flexibility that allows for different ways of being, different ways of thinking. They seem to have an extremely narrow comfort zone, and can hardly function at all unless everyone around them is acting the same way.
Maybe it's just because I was the oddball in my family - I was the one who didn't conform, so I'm really used to being surrounded by people who aren't like me. Whereas everybody else in the family (or, the men, at least, who outnumbered the women) was used to being surrounded by people who were just like them - who thought the same way, acted the same way, sought the same goals and rewards in life. More or less - at least enough so that they could feel comfortable with each other and not seem to be in constant conflict about their basic assumptions about life.
Women who succeed are the ones who, for whatever reason - temperament, intelligence (or lack thereof), upbringing - are more willing to conform to the expectations of the men who, by and large, shape the world we live in.
Men are complaining a lot these days because women are finally, at long last, beginning to have enough power in the world to influence the way things run, and finally men are getting a little uncomfortable - they're having to share the driver's seat, and are finding it quite crowded. And men suck at being passengers - except for the mildest among them, most seem to like to be in charge all the time. The ones I like best are the ones who, literally, will hop into my car with me driving and not make a big deal about it. The ones who always insist on driving, no matter what, are a big fucking pain in the ass. Sure it's nice to be a passenger sometimes, but I like it to be a choice, not a position 'assigned' to me by some guy who presumes he's in charge.
All communications convey information about power and respect for the people with whom we're conversing. The level of politeness one uses, kindness, tone of voice, gestures, facial expressions - all of these show whether the person values you as a human being or whether they are just using the interaction as a way to increase their own power, status or position.
I was just reading a post on ballastexistenz' blog where she's talking about a lawyer who apparently doesn't like people like BE self-advocating.
The question is, why do people like BE bother this man so much? First I would want to know why he's involved in autism 'advocacy' in the first place - why does it matter to him? And once you know the answer to that (which I don't, and am not sure I care to do the research to find out - he sounds like a pretty slimy and intractable type), you might be able to figure out why he's so set on keeping people like BE 'in their place'.
Sometimes people like this lawyer get involved in something like autism because they find themselves unable to exert any real power elsewhere in the world. They think they can come into this field and become 'heroes', and throw their weight around in a way that they can't manage elsewhere.
And yet they encounter someone like BE who on the surface appears to be only minimally able to cope with the world in standard, 'normal' ways, and who yet possesses a sharp, incisive mind that can run circles around this power-mongering lawyer.
So what happens inside his little pinhead brain at this point? Well, he sees her as a threat to the little fiefdom he's trying to establish. He's not interested in her, or indeed any autistic person, as a person at all - he's only interested in establishing some power for himself in a place where no one else seems to be trying to take hold of the reins.
***
I keep looking for the commonality, for what exactly it is that is drawing me to BE's writing. It's something about the cognitive dissonance of the message a person appears to be conveying versus the underlying social message they're actually conveying.
For instance, as a musician, if somebody says to me, "Wow, you're great," they may mean, simply, "I really like listening to the music you play," or they may mean, "Wow, I really wish I was a musician who could play music like you do, and if I hang out around people like you, maybe a little of that will rub off on me, so I'll say nice things to you so you'll let me hang out with you and thus I can get a little closer to my goal." Or something like that - since I don't really know why people say stuff like that, my guess at their 'thinking' is pretty fuzzy.
I feel as if I'm unable to resolve the conflict between the surface message and the underlying message - the surface message always feels like a lie, a manipulation, a power play. I am unable to ignore it.
And since I have no desire to be manipulated by other people into whatever position they think I should be in - whether upward or downward, either one feels like they're 'pushing you around' in some way - I don't like the underlying 'power' messages, either.
It seems like people are constantly doing this - constantly trying to get you to conform to their view of how the world should be. As if we're each playing the starring role in our own play, and we try to get everyone around us to play a particular part, often something as simple as a 'prop' or stage set - a background, maybe, or a piece of furniture to be moved around.
How do people get to be this way, where we only see others in terms of their utility to us, rather than as people in their own right?
I'm not exempting myself from this way of behaving - I think I do it, too. But I think it's destructive and damaging - whenever I become aware of someone else doing it to me, I get angry. So I imagine that other people must feel the same way? Guess I dont' know.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
kids pick up on the cognitive dissonance
of their parents' contradictory behaviors.
For instance, if your dad is always giving lip service to the ways in which girls have it so good in the world, how we're all equal and everything, all these great opportunities, and whatnot, and yet every day of your childhood you see him treating your mother like shit, guess which message we're going to really 'hear'? That's right, Watson. Brilliant. But somehow when we were little you thought you could slip all this stuff past us. You could get credit for being a 'nice guy' while in reality you were being an asshole, a real jerk.
Which is why I still have trouble sorting the assholes from the good ones even today: My perceptions got skewed as a kid. They intentionally scrambled my wiring with their bullshit parental (and cultural) propaganda.
Of course I don't really think he was conscious of all this, most people aren't. But if I'd had the ability to call him on it way back then? His ass would have been grass. And I think he knew it. So he did everything he could to keep me continually off-balance, doubting myself, so that he'd never be subjected to my instinctive truth-radar (which I think all kids possess and have beaten or warped out of them by the time they've reached about the age of 8 or 10, maybe even earlier).
For instance, if your dad is always giving lip service to the ways in which girls have it so good in the world, how we're all equal and everything, all these great opportunities, and whatnot, and yet every day of your childhood you see him treating your mother like shit, guess which message we're going to really 'hear'? That's right, Watson. Brilliant. But somehow when we were little you thought you could slip all this stuff past us. You could get credit for being a 'nice guy' while in reality you were being an asshole, a real jerk.
Which is why I still have trouble sorting the assholes from the good ones even today: My perceptions got skewed as a kid. They intentionally scrambled my wiring with their bullshit parental (and cultural) propaganda.
Of course I don't really think he was conscious of all this, most people aren't. But if I'd had the ability to call him on it way back then? His ass would have been grass. And I think he knew it. So he did everything he could to keep me continually off-balance, doubting myself, so that he'd never be subjected to my instinctive truth-radar (which I think all kids possess and have beaten or warped out of them by the time they've reached about the age of 8 or 10, maybe even earlier).
I keep encountering these gems
over at ballastexistenz' blog, that perfectly capture some experience or feeling that I've had. This one caught my eye just now:
But it goes deeper than that, for me - for me the roots are in the way my father always treated me, as if I deserved nothing, as if I was taking up space that was meant for someone else.
(Warning, this is going to go sideways now...)
He loved to tell the story of how they expected their first child to be a boy, had a boy's name picked out and everything, were going to name it after my dad's favorite brother. When I showed up instead, he made a big deal of how it was So much trouble to come up with a new name that they couldn't be bothered with a middle name, and gave me just an initial instead.
It's always shocked me that mom just went along with this story, as if it didn't matter - as if dad's thoughts and opinions were so powerful that she could just never stand up to him. It was as if she was in awe of him, or something.
So I was the kid who was born a nuisance, who was considered a trouble-maker for being born with two x chromosomes. Poor little kid! Dad had it in for her right from the get-go...
Now things might have been ok if I hadn't unmitigated temerity of being annoyingly precocious - dad grew up with an older sister who (I'm guessing) made his life hell because she was quicker, smarter and more perceptive than he was (not to mention older); he also had a mom who was sharp-tongued and unafraid to subject her family to its edge ('nearest and dearest' held no water with grandma).
Damn that smartass little kid! Always showing me up! Just when I got the idea she might be shy and self-effacing, and maybe just a cute little critter to show off to friends and family (like a pet, Dad???) alla sudden there she is, sharp as a whip (or sometimes a tack), makin' me look like an idjit, and she's not even three years old yet! Got to take her down a peg or two, or she'll soon be insufferable.
And so began the 'hacking-away-at-the-daughter's-sense-of-self' routine. It became a daily ritual: Any time I showed any slightest sense of pride in something I did, needed any attention of any kind, or simply even asked for help, I was met with the rudest, most scathing, caustic contempt you can imagine. It was like being boiled alive in an acid bath every day...
Mom just stood by and watched, because of course she'd grown up with the same thing, and so she probably couldn't even see it for the destruction it was. Any time it broke through her fog of blind denial, it was probably such a painful reminder of her own childhood that she immediately just shut it out, literally turned her back and walked away, and left me alone with my raw, painful, unsoothed little nerve endings all jangling and fearful. I soon learned to hide all that away, to the point where I never even knew what I was feeling; it got to the point where I couldn't have described it even if asked. I was totally and completely cut off from anything remotely resembling a feeling - I had no way whatsoever to cope with any of it, and didn't try. I escaped instead into my books, which were alternately terrifying (I seemed to choose stories which echoed my experiences of the weirdness and unpredicatability of my childhood) or beautiful, lovely, peaceful escapes from the torment of having two parents who didn't have a clue how to properly nurture and care for a little girl.
Linking it back to the original quote, and to my speculations elsewhere about power plays and such, I'm thinking I had any aspirations toward any kind of 'power' hammered out of me in the most brutal ways possible from very early in my childhood, such that I didn't feel entitled to have any power whatsoever, up to and including any sense of myself.
My father saw to it that any time I began to try to 'own' some of my own power, he took it away from me, knocked me down, verbally and emotionally; I think the only reason I survived intact is that I learned to hide my 'power' away from him so he couldn't hurt it. I became 'invisible' to escape his wrath. And I'm sure no one else saw his 'rage'; everyone else saw him as a gentle man; I showed a picture of him to the therapist yesterday (the one I was interviewing), and she said he looked 'playful'. Which annoyed me, because I realized she was right. He was playful, even sometimes with me; but this was within a context where there was so much pain so much of the time for me that I could never really enjoy it - I was always on guard, never knowing when he would suddenly turn on me and cut me down.
So ballastexistenz' quote struck home because, whenever people are actually nice to me, there's this huge part of me that just feels like I don't deserve it, and I'm fearful that that kindness will be taken away arbitrarily and unexpectedly at any moment, with me never knowing why, or whether there's something I've done that precipitated the change in attitude toward me.
Another quote from a commenter further along in that same thread:
When I go to a medical professional who treats me the same as any other patient, I feel like an interloper in a world I’m not technically allowed into, and wonder when they’ll discover I’m not allowed and throw me back.The way I relate to this statement is in a totally different context - in the music world. I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop - for them to notice that I don't have the same 'credentials' (training) as my colleagues, and to rescind the opportunities they've given me up til now.
But it goes deeper than that, for me - for me the roots are in the way my father always treated me, as if I deserved nothing, as if I was taking up space that was meant for someone else.
(Warning, this is going to go sideways now...)
He loved to tell the story of how they expected their first child to be a boy, had a boy's name picked out and everything, were going to name it after my dad's favorite brother. When I showed up instead, he made a big deal of how it was So much trouble to come up with a new name that they couldn't be bothered with a middle name, and gave me just an initial instead.
It's always shocked me that mom just went along with this story, as if it didn't matter - as if dad's thoughts and opinions were so powerful that she could just never stand up to him. It was as if she was in awe of him, or something.
So I was the kid who was born a nuisance, who was considered a trouble-maker for being born with two x chromosomes. Poor little kid! Dad had it in for her right from the get-go...
Now things might have been ok if I hadn't unmitigated temerity of being annoyingly precocious - dad grew up with an older sister who (I'm guessing) made his life hell because she was quicker, smarter and more perceptive than he was (not to mention older); he also had a mom who was sharp-tongued and unafraid to subject her family to its edge ('nearest and dearest' held no water with grandma).
Damn that smartass little kid! Always showing me up! Just when I got the idea she might be shy and self-effacing, and maybe just a cute little critter to show off to friends and family (like a pet, Dad???) alla sudden there she is, sharp as a whip (or sometimes a tack), makin' me look like an idjit, and she's not even three years old yet! Got to take her down a peg or two, or she'll soon be insufferable.
And so began the 'hacking-away-at-the-daughter's-sense-of-self' routine. It became a daily ritual: Any time I showed any slightest sense of pride in something I did, needed any attention of any kind, or simply even asked for help, I was met with the rudest, most scathing, caustic contempt you can imagine. It was like being boiled alive in an acid bath every day...
Mom just stood by and watched, because of course she'd grown up with the same thing, and so she probably couldn't even see it for the destruction it was. Any time it broke through her fog of blind denial, it was probably such a painful reminder of her own childhood that she immediately just shut it out, literally turned her back and walked away, and left me alone with my raw, painful, unsoothed little nerve endings all jangling and fearful. I soon learned to hide all that away, to the point where I never even knew what I was feeling; it got to the point where I couldn't have described it even if asked. I was totally and completely cut off from anything remotely resembling a feeling - I had no way whatsoever to cope with any of it, and didn't try. I escaped instead into my books, which were alternately terrifying (I seemed to choose stories which echoed my experiences of the weirdness and unpredicatability of my childhood) or beautiful, lovely, peaceful escapes from the torment of having two parents who didn't have a clue how to properly nurture and care for a little girl.
Linking it back to the original quote, and to my speculations elsewhere about power plays and such, I'm thinking I had any aspirations toward any kind of 'power' hammered out of me in the most brutal ways possible from very early in my childhood, such that I didn't feel entitled to have any power whatsoever, up to and including any sense of myself.
My father saw to it that any time I began to try to 'own' some of my own power, he took it away from me, knocked me down, verbally and emotionally; I think the only reason I survived intact is that I learned to hide my 'power' away from him so he couldn't hurt it. I became 'invisible' to escape his wrath. And I'm sure no one else saw his 'rage'; everyone else saw him as a gentle man; I showed a picture of him to the therapist yesterday (the one I was interviewing), and she said he looked 'playful'. Which annoyed me, because I realized she was right. He was playful, even sometimes with me; but this was within a context where there was so much pain so much of the time for me that I could never really enjoy it - I was always on guard, never knowing when he would suddenly turn on me and cut me down.
So ballastexistenz' quote struck home because, whenever people are actually nice to me, there's this huge part of me that just feels like I don't deserve it, and I'm fearful that that kindness will be taken away arbitrarily and unexpectedly at any moment, with me never knowing why, or whether there's something I've done that precipitated the change in attitude toward me.
Another quote from a commenter further along in that same thread:
Impertinent is a good word. I always liked “uppity,” because it was basically invented to describe people who didn’t believe in their own inherent inferiority and refused to accept discrimination.
peoples' responses affect us more than we know
As I'm reading ballastexistenz' blog and the comments, plus some other blogs she's linked to, I keep thinking that there's a reason she and some of the other autistic people lose their abilities. I know nobody wants to 'blame' anybody else, and probably people also don't want to feel vulnerable to other peoples' behaviors over which they have no control (guessing, here, on all counts. This is all speculation).
I think that when people don't give you the response you 'expect', such as eye contact, a friendly glance, a nod, or whatever seems appropriate to the current social context, it affects you on a physiological level.
And since fundamental attribution error seems to underpin almost all human interaction, people tend to blame themselves. Or maybe they think, when other peoples' behavior affects them negatively, in a measurable, physiological way, that it's just 'something that happens', that it's a normal part of the progression of the 'disease' or whatever categorical word I should be using.
Or maybe they really don't think about it all, and yet it still affects them physiologically. I think that's what I'm trying to get at, here: That even when so-called 'negative' interactions are not consciously perceived, some part of us still perceives it and responds with an 'impairment' of some kind. In other words, the 'negative' (or unexpected) response from the other person gets in the way of us functioning properly, or perhaps to our personal 'optimal', because it literally affects our body systems.
As I'm reading these stories, I'm seeing, over and over again (or think I'm seeing), that when peoples' situations change, so do their behaviors. Over and over I see descriptions of how a person freezes up when they're subject to unwanted scrutiny, for example. I know this is true of me, and I don't think I'm particularly autistic. In fact, as a performer, I find that the kind of scrutiny I perceive myself being subjected to makes all the difference in the world to my performance.
For example, if someone seems like a friendly and supportive listener, someone who will still 'like' me as a person even if I screw up or don't play everything perfectly, it's suddenly as if I have wings. I can fly! But when the scrutiny seems hostile or unfriendly, or judgmental, suddenly it's as if I have three left feet and my shoelaces tied together - I'm falling all over the place, mostly on my face. Very unpleasant, and a vicious cycle, very hard to break out of once it's started. (Occurs to me here: Are some of us more sensitized, and therefore sensitive to, the negative facial expressions of others? This has occurred to me many times, and I've looked up many studies, but seen no conclusive evidence. The ways it seems to me is that a child who is repeatedly exposed to hostile or unfriendly glances begins to be hypersensitive to this kind of expression in their environment, almost seeking it out, in the sense of becoming hypervigilant to avoid such unpleasantness. It's like an early warning system, to keep you away from people who would do you 'harm' in this way. People who are not exposed to such unfriendliness on a regular basis tend to be less wary, and the cycle spins the other direction for them. The question, then, is: If you become consciously aware of these feedback loops, can you influence them? I would say yes, based on experience. Such a theory is the basis of every self-help book ever written, right? Starting with that old one, How to Win Friends and Influence People, which is the first one I ever remember consciously noticing. Oh, except maybe I'm OK, You're OK.)
I would have to comb through everything I've read over and over again to find examples to explain what I think I'm seeing; but the story about the kid with the dog becoming 'normal' after initially being diagnosed as autistic; the stories about autistics being in supportive environments and suddenly gaining a lot more functionality.
I mean, we're affected by all this stuff. It's not just in our minds; it's in our bodies. The two are not separate, they are one, a whole, integrated system that doesn't work in the arbitrarily split-off ways we use for ease of talking about them. In fact, our way of talking about them interferes with our understanding of them, I believe. It would almost be better if we threw out all our ideas and preconceived notions altogether and just started paying attention. Easier said than done for creatures whose entire 'intelligence' is based on pattern-matching...
The reason all this matters to me is that I know from my own experience that the environment I'm in has a huge impact on my ability to function. My current house-bound, near-agoraphobic state has to do with my utter lack of trust that any of my most basic human needs for connection, recognition and fitting in, that is, not being shunned (in that primal, lizard-brain way that was so essential to human survival in tribal/clan days, and still remains hard-wired into our body systems even though we no longer live like that) - that any of those needs will be met.
It's like a car that looks like a modern, computer-driven juggernaut on the outside, but has the innards of a Model T.
I think that when people don't give you the response you 'expect', such as eye contact, a friendly glance, a nod, or whatever seems appropriate to the current social context, it affects you on a physiological level.
And since fundamental attribution error seems to underpin almost all human interaction, people tend to blame themselves. Or maybe they think, when other peoples' behavior affects them negatively, in a measurable, physiological way, that it's just 'something that happens', that it's a normal part of the progression of the 'disease' or whatever categorical word I should be using.
Or maybe they really don't think about it all, and yet it still affects them physiologically. I think that's what I'm trying to get at, here: That even when so-called 'negative' interactions are not consciously perceived, some part of us still perceives it and responds with an 'impairment' of some kind. In other words, the 'negative' (or unexpected) response from the other person gets in the way of us functioning properly, or perhaps to our personal 'optimal', because it literally affects our body systems.
As I'm reading these stories, I'm seeing, over and over again (or think I'm seeing), that when peoples' situations change, so do their behaviors. Over and over I see descriptions of how a person freezes up when they're subject to unwanted scrutiny, for example. I know this is true of me, and I don't think I'm particularly autistic. In fact, as a performer, I find that the kind of scrutiny I perceive myself being subjected to makes all the difference in the world to my performance.
For example, if someone seems like a friendly and supportive listener, someone who will still 'like' me as a person even if I screw up or don't play everything perfectly, it's suddenly as if I have wings. I can fly! But when the scrutiny seems hostile or unfriendly, or judgmental, suddenly it's as if I have three left feet and my shoelaces tied together - I'm falling all over the place, mostly on my face. Very unpleasant, and a vicious cycle, very hard to break out of once it's started. (Occurs to me here: Are some of us more sensitized, and therefore sensitive to, the negative facial expressions of others? This has occurred to me many times, and I've looked up many studies, but seen no conclusive evidence. The ways it seems to me is that a child who is repeatedly exposed to hostile or unfriendly glances begins to be hypersensitive to this kind of expression in their environment, almost seeking it out, in the sense of becoming hypervigilant to avoid such unpleasantness. It's like an early warning system, to keep you away from people who would do you 'harm' in this way. People who are not exposed to such unfriendliness on a regular basis tend to be less wary, and the cycle spins the other direction for them. The question, then, is: If you become consciously aware of these feedback loops, can you influence them? I would say yes, based on experience. Such a theory is the basis of every self-help book ever written, right? Starting with that old one, How to Win Friends and Influence People, which is the first one I ever remember consciously noticing. Oh, except maybe I'm OK, You're OK.)
I would have to comb through everything I've read over and over again to find examples to explain what I think I'm seeing; but the story about the kid with the dog becoming 'normal' after initially being diagnosed as autistic; the stories about autistics being in supportive environments and suddenly gaining a lot more functionality.
I mean, we're affected by all this stuff. It's not just in our minds; it's in our bodies. The two are not separate, they are one, a whole, integrated system that doesn't work in the arbitrarily split-off ways we use for ease of talking about them. In fact, our way of talking about them interferes with our understanding of them, I believe. It would almost be better if we threw out all our ideas and preconceived notions altogether and just started paying attention. Easier said than done for creatures whose entire 'intelligence' is based on pattern-matching...
The reason all this matters to me is that I know from my own experience that the environment I'm in has a huge impact on my ability to function. My current house-bound, near-agoraphobic state has to do with my utter lack of trust that any of my most basic human needs for connection, recognition and fitting in, that is, not being shunned (in that primal, lizard-brain way that was so essential to human survival in tribal/clan days, and still remains hard-wired into our body systems even though we no longer live like that) - that any of those needs will be met.
It's like a car that looks like a modern, computer-driven juggernaut on the outside, but has the innards of a Model T.
patterns
teasing them out, teasing them out...
drawn to unresponsive people
learning to resist needy/clingy/ungiving people
Unresponsive: To me this is someone who initially acts friendly toward me, as if there is something they like about me; but when I approach them in turn, they seem unresponsive. Suddenly whatever interested them no longer interests them.
Weirdly, what I think about this pattern is that the people who act this way initially saw me in the 'one-up' power position, and they approached me because they wanted something from me, and thought I could help them. When it turned out I couldn't help, or didn't want to help, they lost interest. It may be something as simple as allying with me because I seem to have some power and influence (I'm thinking particularly of times when I've been concertmaster of an orchestra).
I think I frustrate these people because I refuse to abuse my 'power'. Often as not I'm unsure as to why I've been put in that position in the first place, so I don't take it for granted - it always seems likely to me that something so fickle can just as easily be taken away as given. So I try not to attach too much importance to it, but just to do the job as well as I can for as long as I have it. Often I will feel relief when my lack of enthusiasm ends up losing me the un-sought-after position, because then I'm no longer expected to do whatever it is they thought I could do in the first place, no longer expected to jump hurdles I can't even perceive, let alone know how to jump properly without getting hurt in the process. Sometimes I just walk around the hurdles, ignoring them altogether, as if I don't know what they're for. This annoys people no end (smiles with amusement to self). I don't know why they bother - the hurdles are unnecessary, they're - what are they for, anyway? I guess I've never really understood, I just know at a gut level that they're arbitrary and meaningless and people put them there just to see what will happen. Usually they don't think that you'll just walk around them, though. They expect you to have some kind of reaction.
And then the needies: The needies are ok with me in concept, because as far as I'm concerned we're all needies and clingies at some point - that's just the nature of any creature that has needs.
The trick is when needs and power plays get tangled up, then people who crave power figure out ways to get their needs met that don't interfere with their desire for power. So it appears that they don't have any needs; the truth is that they've just been tricky enough to get their needs met secretly, while nobody was looking. One problem with this approach is that it begins to appear, fairly quickly, that these 'powerful' people not only really don't have needs (which makes them even more powerful because people without needs can't be easily manipulated), but the people around them begin to believe the story and start blaming themselves for having needs. They blame their needs for their lack of power, and get the cart firmly entrenched in front of the horse.
Our whole culture operates this way right now, as I've tried to explain a thousand times already: Our hyper-individualism is held up as the 'right and proper' way to be, making it invisible that no man is an island, and enforcing the Emperor's New Clothes perception that all these folks are autonomous and self-sufficient when in fact they're all entirely dependent on a massive, complex set of support structures that have become entirely invisible because of how we think about things.
In other words, framing is everything. The way we describe a thing tends to become the thing itself over time.
drawn to unresponsive people
learning to resist needy/clingy/ungiving people
Unresponsive: To me this is someone who initially acts friendly toward me, as if there is something they like about me; but when I approach them in turn, they seem unresponsive. Suddenly whatever interested them no longer interests them.
Weirdly, what I think about this pattern is that the people who act this way initially saw me in the 'one-up' power position, and they approached me because they wanted something from me, and thought I could help them. When it turned out I couldn't help, or didn't want to help, they lost interest. It may be something as simple as allying with me because I seem to have some power and influence (I'm thinking particularly of times when I've been concertmaster of an orchestra).
I think I frustrate these people because I refuse to abuse my 'power'. Often as not I'm unsure as to why I've been put in that position in the first place, so I don't take it for granted - it always seems likely to me that something so fickle can just as easily be taken away as given. So I try not to attach too much importance to it, but just to do the job as well as I can for as long as I have it. Often I will feel relief when my lack of enthusiasm ends up losing me the un-sought-after position, because then I'm no longer expected to do whatever it is they thought I could do in the first place, no longer expected to jump hurdles I can't even perceive, let alone know how to jump properly without getting hurt in the process. Sometimes I just walk around the hurdles, ignoring them altogether, as if I don't know what they're for. This annoys people no end (smiles with amusement to self). I don't know why they bother - the hurdles are unnecessary, they're - what are they for, anyway? I guess I've never really understood, I just know at a gut level that they're arbitrary and meaningless and people put them there just to see what will happen. Usually they don't think that you'll just walk around them, though. They expect you to have some kind of reaction.
And then the needies: The needies are ok with me in concept, because as far as I'm concerned we're all needies and clingies at some point - that's just the nature of any creature that has needs.
The trick is when needs and power plays get tangled up, then people who crave power figure out ways to get their needs met that don't interfere with their desire for power. So it appears that they don't have any needs; the truth is that they've just been tricky enough to get their needs met secretly, while nobody was looking. One problem with this approach is that it begins to appear, fairly quickly, that these 'powerful' people not only really don't have needs (which makes them even more powerful because people without needs can't be easily manipulated), but the people around them begin to believe the story and start blaming themselves for having needs. They blame their needs for their lack of power, and get the cart firmly entrenched in front of the horse.
Our whole culture operates this way right now, as I've tried to explain a thousand times already: Our hyper-individualism is held up as the 'right and proper' way to be, making it invisible that no man is an island, and enforcing the Emperor's New Clothes perception that all these folks are autonomous and self-sufficient when in fact they're all entirely dependent on a massive, complex set of support structures that have become entirely invisible because of how we think about things.
In other words, framing is everything. The way we describe a thing tends to become the thing itself over time.
perpetual mismatch
when nobody around you ever seems to want to do the same things you want to do, you end up eventually feeling like a freak.
People say, well it's up to you to find people who match you.
Right. Like I have control over the whole fucking universe.
Been there, tried that, over and over and over again.
You know what? It's bullshit. It doesn't work.
The people who give that advice don't want to recognize that they've been lucky - fundamental misattribution error at work again. People taking credit for things they have no control over, and thus, conversely, blaming people who didn't have such good luck for their own misfortune.
Fucked up, is what it is.
People say, well it's up to you to find people who match you.
Right. Like I have control over the whole fucking universe.
Been there, tried that, over and over and over again.
You know what? It's bullshit. It doesn't work.
The people who give that advice don't want to recognize that they've been lucky - fundamental misattribution error at work again. People taking credit for things they have no control over, and thus, conversely, blaming people who didn't have such good luck for their own misfortune.
Fucked up, is what it is.
therapy is a form of social control
Labeling people as 'mentally ill' is a way for those in power to maintain their power.
People 'whine' and 'play the victim' and 'play the martyr' because they have no other choice.
If they felt that they could get away with strutting and preening and being the center of attention the way that you do, guess what? They'd fucking do it in a heartbeat.
But women, and men who are perceived to have anything remotely resembling womanly, feminine or female attributes, characteristics, behaviors, traits, what have you - are perceived by 'the powers that be' (namely, men, in a patriarchy) as non-human.
How often have you heard that a woman is "cute when she's angry"? What's behind this form of disrespect? You got in in one - the person (usually a guy) making the comment is trying to make the woman feel like an idiot for expressing that she's upset about something.
And if she really gets angry, to the point where she actually frightens someone? Then she's a 'castrating bitch' or some equally annoying shit.
A woman can never simply be perceived as angry, with said anger having a real and justifiable cause in the real world, based on real events. It's always something she imagined or mis-perceived - something that's "only in her head" and therefore doesn't really exist.
How much more demeaning can you get than to deny that a person experienced their very own experience? Answer: Not much. Denying someone's real experience is about as insulting as you can get.
Sometimes I think everybody, including other women, see women largely (or only?) in their roles as 'caretakers', as people whose sole function in life is to take care of other people.
So any time they (we) step outside this role, we're seen as abnormal or dysfunctional. We're failing to conform to their expectations.
Basically, men expect you to be like their mother. When you're not like their mother, it would never occur to them to question their expectations - after all, this is a male-dominated world, men get to make the rules, and women just have to live with them. So if a man says the way you're behaving is 'abnormal', then so be it. You're fucked. Best to just suck it up and conform, lest you end up being one of those human punching-bags we read about so often in the paper.
/snark/sarcasm
People 'whine' and 'play the victim' and 'play the martyr' because they have no other choice.
If they felt that they could get away with strutting and preening and being the center of attention the way that you do, guess what? They'd fucking do it in a heartbeat.
But women, and men who are perceived to have anything remotely resembling womanly, feminine or female attributes, characteristics, behaviors, traits, what have you - are perceived by 'the powers that be' (namely, men, in a patriarchy) as non-human.
How often have you heard that a woman is "cute when she's angry"? What's behind this form of disrespect? You got in in one - the person (usually a guy) making the comment is trying to make the woman feel like an idiot for expressing that she's upset about something.
And if she really gets angry, to the point where she actually frightens someone? Then she's a 'castrating bitch' or some equally annoying shit.
A woman can never simply be perceived as angry, with said anger having a real and justifiable cause in the real world, based on real events. It's always something she imagined or mis-perceived - something that's "only in her head" and therefore doesn't really exist.
How much more demeaning can you get than to deny that a person experienced their very own experience? Answer: Not much. Denying someone's real experience is about as insulting as you can get.
Sometimes I think everybody, including other women, see women largely (or only?) in their roles as 'caretakers', as people whose sole function in life is to take care of other people.
So any time they (we) step outside this role, we're seen as abnormal or dysfunctional. We're failing to conform to their expectations.
Basically, men expect you to be like their mother. When you're not like their mother, it would never occur to them to question their expectations - after all, this is a male-dominated world, men get to make the rules, and women just have to live with them. So if a man says the way you're behaving is 'abnormal', then so be it. You're fucked. Best to just suck it up and conform, lest you end up being one of those human punching-bags we read about so often in the paper.
/snark/sarcasm
noticing how the playing field is sloped
men are considered the 'standard'; women are the 'deviation' from said 'norm'.
Carol Tavris: Mismeasure of Woman
Simone de Beauvoir: Second Sex
Barbara Ehrenreich: For her own good: Two centuries of the experts' advice to women
Elaine Morgan: Descent of Woman
Carol Tavris: Mismeasure of Woman
Simone de Beauvoir: Second Sex
Barbara Ehrenreich: For her own good: Two centuries of the experts' advice to women
Elaine Morgan: Descent of Woman
expectations
expectations are shaped by experience - they don't just materialize out of thin air. And they can also be shaped by what we perceive around us - what others have (possessions, experiences, circumstances), what we see in movies, books, magazines, etc.
The expectations I'm talking about are the ones that cause us to be disappointed by what actually happens in our lives.
There was an article I read I while back (haven't been able to hunt it down, so am going to have to paraphrase and may be mis-remembering some of it) that was talking about children's learning experiences and what keeps a child either focused or bored in a classroom.
It was talking about expectations in terms of how we match our current experience to previous experiences; but also, there's an innate expectation of being able to do something with a certain amount of competence - that is, if a teacher is showing you something on the blackboard, for example, and she's a third-grade teacher and you're a third grader, there's an unspoken assumption by everybody in the room that because she's teaching you that thing, at that time and in that place, you should therefore be able to understand it.
What happens, then, when you're unable to understand it? The circumstances of the situation compel you to believe that it's your fault. Which doesn't feel good, which instantaneously triggers an entire chain of chemical reactions inside your body that prompts you to look away from this negative stimulus, thus prompting the reaction of disinterest, boredom, or apathy.
Now, this apathy is not an innate condition. It is your natural reaction to being in an environment that is mismatched to your internal conditions at the moment; in other words, some basic need is not being met for you. And you respond the way your organism is designed to respond: By turning away from the inappropriate stimulus.
But what happens next is the problem, and there are so many problems it's hard to know where to start listing them: In an average classroom, the one-teacher-to-thirty-or-so-students ratio is not going to allow the overtaxed teacher to notice these minute, moment-to-moment reactions/needs of all her charges. She's going to miss most of them, simply because there are thirty of you and one of her. The ratio is just wrong. So the situation is impossible to begin with; it might be alleviated somewhat if the 'classroom' was structured in such a way that more freedom was possible - say that instead of students in desks facing the same way, all focused on a single stimulus (teacher) who may or may not be providing what's needed at that moment for your best growth - say that instead there were many options for you to find just what was needed at that moment. For example the freedom to leave your desk and explore various stations around the room that contained things that might be interesting to you and might teach you various things that you'd like to know or discover.
Now how does this tie into the expectations thing? Well, it's meant to illustrate that, while we talk of expectations as if they're something that we have complete, conscious control over (which is how many self-help books talk and seems to be what the whole therapy movement believes), in fact, expectations are largely unconscious and not subject to conscious control.
This means that expectations may actually be an expression of needs in some way. That is, our expectations show that, given the environment in which we find ourselves, this particular thing is what we expect to happen next, given the experiences we've had to date. There's a kind of logic to our expectations that comes from our intuitive, unconscious extrapolation of what we've experienced up to this point. (I hope any of this makes any sense - sometimes it feels like I'm typing from someplace sort of beyond myself, and I can't really tell what I've written, or whether it makes any sense, til I've got a bit of distance from it - sometimes even just a few hours later I can come back and look to see what I've said. Or day, or weeks.)
When expectations are dashed, it's a big deal. It's not just that we've misunderstood what's happening around us and failed to take certain things into consideration; it's that our environment (including our relationships) has simply failed us in certain basic ways. It's a kind of betrayal, a letdown. It saps our energy and enthusiasm for putting ourselves out there again, because we can no longer trust our world, our relationships, our intuition. It no longer feels safe.
***
Ok, so now I remember why I got on this whole subject in the first place.
My concern is that people will read this ('this' meaning the blog) and go, Jesus, what a whiner! She has no problems - she's so fucking privileged, she can't even see it! I mean, she wasn't beaten, or molested, or locked up in a room somewhere. I mean, this is so fucking pathetic I can't even believe I'm reading it!
And I would argue that people experience trauma depending on what their expectations are.
For example, maybe a person born to a poor family in a blue-collar neighborhood during the Depression wouldn't expect much; they'd be happy as long as they were getting what everybody else seemed to be getting. That is, if everyone around them was surviving on breadcrusts, they'd maybe be hungry a lot, but they probably wouldn't see it as unfair. Because, hey - their parents were eating breadcrusts, their neighbors were too. So it wouldn't seem 'unfair', it'd just seem to be the way things were.
But if you grew up in a comfortable middle-class family in a middle-class neighborhood where nobody ever seemed to be short the odd dollar necessary to buy a new pair of shoes or a bicycle when you got to be old enough to ride one - well, your expectations are different. And when you get to an age where most of the people around you were being sent to college and supported to get what they needed to do well in the world, and yet for some inexplicable reason your own parents weren't providing the same support for you - what happens inside your head?
Well, first you try to find an explanation. Obviously they expect you to go to college; obviously they expect you to get a job and eventually go on to do the things they're doing - buy a house, get married, raise a kid or two. That's what we do in this culture, right? That's how things are done.
Yet, somehow, something's not right. Something doesn't match up. You can feel the pressure, the push (invisible, but powerful) to get out there and make something of yourself. But somehow you don't feel that you have the resources to do this thing.
And yet, they act as if those resources are all internal - as if you should just know what to do. As if you were born with an instruction manual for how to live life and all you have to do is go look it up, like you would go to the dictionary to look up a word.
And so you try, you do your very best to do what they seem to expect, which is to just know things that you couldn't possibly know, or do things that you have no experience with.
They don't answer questions; they don't offer advice. They seem to be in no way aware that you simply don't have the tools to do what they seem to be expecting of you, and that you feel like a gigantic failure because of this impossible double bind they've put you in.
It's like that saying of "Responsibility without authority" - you're expected to be able to do something that requires a certain level of (I'm stuck here - I know that I have to untangle this internal message, because if I can decipher the unspoken/unwritten 'code' that was handed down, all unknowing and unconscious, by my parents, then maybe I can get myself out of this impossible, infernal, eternal double bind that keeps me trapped in emotional immobility, blaming myself for things that aren't and weren't my fault, things over which I had, and continue to have, no control).
It's that thing that's referred to as fundamental attribution error, where we attribute successes and failures incorrectly, giving credit where no credit is due, and conversely, assigning blame where no blame should be given. It's such a basic bug of human nature that it's damn near impossible to suss out and figure out what really happened.
Deciphering my own error code: I was expected to be self-sufficient and autonomous without being given any of the tools that allow one to become self-sufficient and autonomous.
One more time: Responsibility without authority. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The expectations I'm talking about are the ones that cause us to be disappointed by what actually happens in our lives.
There was an article I read I while back (haven't been able to hunt it down, so am going to have to paraphrase and may be mis-remembering some of it) that was talking about children's learning experiences and what keeps a child either focused or bored in a classroom.
It was talking about expectations in terms of how we match our current experience to previous experiences; but also, there's an innate expectation of being able to do something with a certain amount of competence - that is, if a teacher is showing you something on the blackboard, for example, and she's a third-grade teacher and you're a third grader, there's an unspoken assumption by everybody in the room that because she's teaching you that thing, at that time and in that place, you should therefore be able to understand it.
What happens, then, when you're unable to understand it? The circumstances of the situation compel you to believe that it's your fault. Which doesn't feel good, which instantaneously triggers an entire chain of chemical reactions inside your body that prompts you to look away from this negative stimulus, thus prompting the reaction of disinterest, boredom, or apathy.
Now, this apathy is not an innate condition. It is your natural reaction to being in an environment that is mismatched to your internal conditions at the moment; in other words, some basic need is not being met for you. And you respond the way your organism is designed to respond: By turning away from the inappropriate stimulus.
But what happens next is the problem, and there are so many problems it's hard to know where to start listing them: In an average classroom, the one-teacher-to-thirty-or-so-students ratio is not going to allow the overtaxed teacher to notice these minute, moment-to-moment reactions/needs of all her charges. She's going to miss most of them, simply because there are thirty of you and one of her. The ratio is just wrong. So the situation is impossible to begin with; it might be alleviated somewhat if the 'classroom' was structured in such a way that more freedom was possible - say that instead of students in desks facing the same way, all focused on a single stimulus (teacher) who may or may not be providing what's needed at that moment for your best growth - say that instead there were many options for you to find just what was needed at that moment. For example the freedom to leave your desk and explore various stations around the room that contained things that might be interesting to you and might teach you various things that you'd like to know or discover.
Now how does this tie into the expectations thing? Well, it's meant to illustrate that, while we talk of expectations as if they're something that we have complete, conscious control over (which is how many self-help books talk and seems to be what the whole therapy movement believes), in fact, expectations are largely unconscious and not subject to conscious control.
This means that expectations may actually be an expression of needs in some way. That is, our expectations show that, given the environment in which we find ourselves, this particular thing is what we expect to happen next, given the experiences we've had to date. There's a kind of logic to our expectations that comes from our intuitive, unconscious extrapolation of what we've experienced up to this point. (I hope any of this makes any sense - sometimes it feels like I'm typing from someplace sort of beyond myself, and I can't really tell what I've written, or whether it makes any sense, til I've got a bit of distance from it - sometimes even just a few hours later I can come back and look to see what I've said. Or day, or weeks.)
When expectations are dashed, it's a big deal. It's not just that we've misunderstood what's happening around us and failed to take certain things into consideration; it's that our environment (including our relationships) has simply failed us in certain basic ways. It's a kind of betrayal, a letdown. It saps our energy and enthusiasm for putting ourselves out there again, because we can no longer trust our world, our relationships, our intuition. It no longer feels safe.
***
Ok, so now I remember why I got on this whole subject in the first place.
My concern is that people will read this ('this' meaning the blog) and go, Jesus, what a whiner! She has no problems - she's so fucking privileged, she can't even see it! I mean, she wasn't beaten, or molested, or locked up in a room somewhere. I mean, this is so fucking pathetic I can't even believe I'm reading it!
And I would argue that people experience trauma depending on what their expectations are.
For example, maybe a person born to a poor family in a blue-collar neighborhood during the Depression wouldn't expect much; they'd be happy as long as they were getting what everybody else seemed to be getting. That is, if everyone around them was surviving on breadcrusts, they'd maybe be hungry a lot, but they probably wouldn't see it as unfair. Because, hey - their parents were eating breadcrusts, their neighbors were too. So it wouldn't seem 'unfair', it'd just seem to be the way things were.
But if you grew up in a comfortable middle-class family in a middle-class neighborhood where nobody ever seemed to be short the odd dollar necessary to buy a new pair of shoes or a bicycle when you got to be old enough to ride one - well, your expectations are different. And when you get to an age where most of the people around you were being sent to college and supported to get what they needed to do well in the world, and yet for some inexplicable reason your own parents weren't providing the same support for you - what happens inside your head?
Well, first you try to find an explanation. Obviously they expect you to go to college; obviously they expect you to get a job and eventually go on to do the things they're doing - buy a house, get married, raise a kid or two. That's what we do in this culture, right? That's how things are done.
Yet, somehow, something's not right. Something doesn't match up. You can feel the pressure, the push (invisible, but powerful) to get out there and make something of yourself. But somehow you don't feel that you have the resources to do this thing.
And yet, they act as if those resources are all internal - as if you should just know what to do. As if you were born with an instruction manual for how to live life and all you have to do is go look it up, like you would go to the dictionary to look up a word.
And so you try, you do your very best to do what they seem to expect, which is to just know things that you couldn't possibly know, or do things that you have no experience with.
They don't answer questions; they don't offer advice. They seem to be in no way aware that you simply don't have the tools to do what they seem to be expecting of you, and that you feel like a gigantic failure because of this impossible double bind they've put you in.
It's like that saying of "Responsibility without authority" - you're expected to be able to do something that requires a certain level of (I'm stuck here - I know that I have to untangle this internal message, because if I can decipher the unspoken/unwritten 'code' that was handed down, all unknowing and unconscious, by my parents, then maybe I can get myself out of this impossible, infernal, eternal double bind that keeps me trapped in emotional immobility, blaming myself for things that aren't and weren't my fault, things over which I had, and continue to have, no control).
It's that thing that's referred to as fundamental attribution error, where we attribute successes and failures incorrectly, giving credit where no credit is due, and conversely, assigning blame where no blame should be given. It's such a basic bug of human nature that it's damn near impossible to suss out and figure out what really happened.
Deciphering my own error code: I was expected to be self-sufficient and autonomous without being given any of the tools that allow one to become self-sufficient and autonomous.
One more time: Responsibility without authority. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
no such thing as self-empowerment
This term 'empowerment' has always bugged me - it smells like bullshit.
Let's start from the beginning: If power is the ability to influence other people to do something you want, then feeling dis-empowered is the sense that you are unable to persuade, or possibly coerce? people to do what you want.
There have been times in my life when people have reacted to me as if I was incredibly powerful, and I'm not sure why; my recollection is that I was just so angry about something that the usual things that held me back no longer worked, and I was just letting my anger flow freely and powerfully.
But I was never physically violent; I never threatened anyone in any way. And yet I had someone run away from me and hide behind a door as if he thought I would attack him, even though I'd never once struck him in the five years we'd been together. I'm not a violent person, not given to breaking things or throwing pots and pans or dishes or what have you.
Needless to say, I was shocked at his reaction, and have never understood. Yet there have been other times when I was in a hurry or distracted or just really, really busy where someone has turned and seen me coming and practically leaped out of the way, as if I were this big powerful bulldozer or something. Which is really shocking to experience when you're used to seeing yourself as this normal-sized, ordinary, average person who's not doing anything out of the ordinary - just going through your busy day trying to get lots of things done. (Aside: It's amazing to me how often people will take your inattention to them as a personal affront - as if the fact that you're paying attention to your task rather than to them is meant to be a challenge or something. So instead of helping you by holding open a door or getting out of your way, some of them seem to take pride in actually hindering you, actually tripping you up so that you can't go wherever you were going, do whatever you were doing. Passive-aggressiveness at its finest.)
And yes I realize I've just argued/articulated both sides of the same coin there. Guess that's the way it is, being human: The constant double standard of do what I say, not what I do. Hard to break that one, but I'm trying.
Ok, back to the original topic.
So, I know I can be powerful, but the times that people have most strongly and obviously reacted to me 'being powerful' seem to have been at times when I was totally unconscious of having any particular power to wield.
And yet, conversely, the times at which I've most needed that power, I've often felt myself having to resort to working up some kind of grievance, focusing on what it is I'm angry or resentful about, and letting that feeling give me the power to overcome my fears and insecurities of being taken advantage of or otherwise not getting what I need.
It's something to do with deserving, as in, Do I deserve to be treated a particular way, do I deserve to get that need met?
Where does the idea of what we deserve or don't deserve come from? I would say, as expected, probably from the parents, at least initially. Reinforced by the culture and gender and class expectations.
So if I feel clearly entitled to something, or if I have no insecurities about going after a particular thing, then my power is not blocked.
But if something falls into one of the many categories in which I have been intentionally disempowered by others (see the post on having wings clipped by parents, for example), I have a hell of a time feeling that I deserve anything whatsoever.
So then what? What does this empowerment thing mean in this context?
I contend, once again, that any 'problem' that has its roots in a relational power imbalance must be resolved via a relationship that repairs said imbalance.
Once again, it's experiential: Feeling like nothing and nobody comes from how others treat you; in order to repair this negative self-view, someone must come along who sees how cool you are, and who treats you that way, in public, for all to see.
Let's start from the beginning: If power is the ability to influence other people to do something you want, then feeling dis-empowered is the sense that you are unable to persuade, or possibly coerce? people to do what you want.
There have been times in my life when people have reacted to me as if I was incredibly powerful, and I'm not sure why; my recollection is that I was just so angry about something that the usual things that held me back no longer worked, and I was just letting my anger flow freely and powerfully.
But I was never physically violent; I never threatened anyone in any way. And yet I had someone run away from me and hide behind a door as if he thought I would attack him, even though I'd never once struck him in the five years we'd been together. I'm not a violent person, not given to breaking things or throwing pots and pans or dishes or what have you.
Needless to say, I was shocked at his reaction, and have never understood. Yet there have been other times when I was in a hurry or distracted or just really, really busy where someone has turned and seen me coming and practically leaped out of the way, as if I were this big powerful bulldozer or something. Which is really shocking to experience when you're used to seeing yourself as this normal-sized, ordinary, average person who's not doing anything out of the ordinary - just going through your busy day trying to get lots of things done. (Aside: It's amazing to me how often people will take your inattention to them as a personal affront - as if the fact that you're paying attention to your task rather than to them is meant to be a challenge or something. So instead of helping you by holding open a door or getting out of your way, some of them seem to take pride in actually hindering you, actually tripping you up so that you can't go wherever you were going, do whatever you were doing. Passive-aggressiveness at its finest.)
And yes I realize I've just argued/articulated both sides of the same coin there. Guess that's the way it is, being human: The constant double standard of do what I say, not what I do. Hard to break that one, but I'm trying.
Ok, back to the original topic.
So, I know I can be powerful, but the times that people have most strongly and obviously reacted to me 'being powerful' seem to have been at times when I was totally unconscious of having any particular power to wield.
And yet, conversely, the times at which I've most needed that power, I've often felt myself having to resort to working up some kind of grievance, focusing on what it is I'm angry or resentful about, and letting that feeling give me the power to overcome my fears and insecurities of being taken advantage of or otherwise not getting what I need.
It's something to do with deserving, as in, Do I deserve to be treated a particular way, do I deserve to get that need met?
Where does the idea of what we deserve or don't deserve come from? I would say, as expected, probably from the parents, at least initially. Reinforced by the culture and gender and class expectations.
So if I feel clearly entitled to something, or if I have no insecurities about going after a particular thing, then my power is not blocked.
But if something falls into one of the many categories in which I have been intentionally disempowered by others (see the post on having wings clipped by parents, for example), I have a hell of a time feeling that I deserve anything whatsoever.
So then what? What does this empowerment thing mean in this context?
I contend, once again, that any 'problem' that has its roots in a relational power imbalance must be resolved via a relationship that repairs said imbalance.
Once again, it's experiential: Feeling like nothing and nobody comes from how others treat you; in order to repair this negative self-view, someone must come along who sees how cool you are, and who treats you that way, in public, for all to see.
don't let the bastards get you down
Is refusal to conform a personality disorder? Or is labeling it as a personality disorder just another attempt by the haves to keep the have-nots from getting any (power, that is), which means that the haves might have to give up a little of their unearned (and unfair) power?
God those fucking underminer voices are obnoxious! My favorite image for dealing with them is that they're these cartoon mole characters that live underground in this massive network of tunnels and they keep popping up when you least expect them, a manhole cover perched on their hard hats as they poke their annoying little ratlike heads up to give you some negative message or other.
How do I deal with them? A sledgehammer, of course! Bam, right on the manhole cover. Don't care whether some soft, sensitive bit gets caught in the edge and squashed in the process. Serves them right.
God those fucking underminer voices are obnoxious! My favorite image for dealing with them is that they're these cartoon mole characters that live underground in this massive network of tunnels and they keep popping up when you least expect them, a manhole cover perched on their hard hats as they poke their annoying little ratlike heads up to give you some negative message or other.
How do I deal with them? A sledgehammer, of course! Bam, right on the manhole cover. Don't care whether some soft, sensitive bit gets caught in the edge and squashed in the process. Serves them right.
triggers
Going to interview another shrink today. On the phone I mentioned my hypersensitivity to certain noises, particularly loud ones, and she mention a book called Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight.
But I think I'm going to stick to my guns here and follow my own path. I don't want to be 'fixed' about this - instead I want to listen to whatever message my psyche is giving me through these body signals, and see what I can learn.
For instance, it's occurred to me that the hearing sensitivity has to do with the number of events where someone's said something mean or otherwise expressed aggressive anger toward me with a loud sound, like a car horn blaring for a prolonged time from two feet away outside my open window, and I couldn't get my hands over my ears quick enough. And being a musician in a lot of unsatisfying situations where either the sound I was producing was unpleasant to me or the sounds everybody else was making were unpleasant to me - it all seems to have tangled together to produce a kind of indiscriminate reaction to all loud noises.
Like for instance my noisy neighbor with the horrible voice (very loud, very nasal, with a completely flat affect) who attacked me verbally for something that wasn't my fault: I just think he's an asshole and ignore him, basically, but the sound of his leaf-blower is like a giant, annoying mosquito that I want to kill, and I have to get out my ear protectors (the kind that target shooters use) and cover up my ears til he stops.
Same with weed eaters - that annoying whine is one of the most destructive sounds I can imagine - I can't tell you how many times I've seen some beautiful stretch of greenery decimated by the wielder whose sole goal in life is to reduce everything green within reach to a uniform height of one inch tall, regardless of whether said green thing is a weed, grass, or some fabulous flowering perennial that's been slowly, painstakingly growing its little shoots for the last 6 months and is now chopped down to nothing, to have to wait til the next growing cycle to try again. (Ooh, that image cuts a little too close to the bone).
So my amygdala? appears to lump loud whiny sounds - leaf blowers, weed-eaters, loud planes (I live under the flight path and I'm quite sure many of these asshole pilots are flying way lower than the regs allow), loud, aggressive-sounding voices (especially male ones) and insensitive music-playing together in one lump of 'this-is-scary-loud-destructive-dangerous and I will now ('I' meaning my amygdala or whatever other bits of my neurochemical system are responsible) pump large quantities of fear chemicals into this body, causing it to tense up and or freeze.
The 'freezing' happens, I'm convinced, because many of these 'triggers' are things over which I have no control - I can neither fight nor run away from them, so though my whole body system gets triggered, my ability to 'work out' the physiological reactions tends to have to be sublimated or indirect. I can cover my ears, but I can't stop the sounds from being made in the first place, and I can't escape them, either, not in any real sense. Men use loud, destructive tools and equipment everywhere you go; everywhere you go there are loud, aggressive men who want to dominate you (and sometimes women seem to, too); and the music thing - well, girl's gotta eat, right? I've already disconnected myself from the corporate money-generating world at large to escape intolerable situations; the music, while often frustrating and painful, is nowhere near this level of intolerability (yet, and I sure hope it doesnt' go there!)
My brother thinks I can just 'medicate' myself out of this; but why would I want to? My sensitivity is a large part of who I am. When I'm not around other people, being sensitive to sights, sounds, colors, touch, feelings is what makes the world really cool and fascinating! It's just that when other people are around, they're always creating this jarring, jangling fog of meaningless sensory stimulus that communicates nothing and at the same time blocks out or interferes with the stuff that I'm wanting to pay attention to. So I have to pay attention to their stupid, shallow, meaningless noise instead of the things I care about.
I don't want to spend my time and energy conforming, life is too short! I want to spend my time and energy being me.
(Another thought about the Too Loud etc. book: I think these books are written more for the families and friends of the atypicals than they are for the person who actually experiences the world this way. The so-called neurotypicals (NTs) want the atypical to conform to make the NTs experience more comfortable. In most cases the NT could care less about whether the atypical is comfortable or not. I think I could be ok with this if it didn't always feel like such a one-way street, where the NT is never the one doing any of the adjusting.)
But I think I'm going to stick to my guns here and follow my own path. I don't want to be 'fixed' about this - instead I want to listen to whatever message my psyche is giving me through these body signals, and see what I can learn.
For instance, it's occurred to me that the hearing sensitivity has to do with the number of events where someone's said something mean or otherwise expressed aggressive anger toward me with a loud sound, like a car horn blaring for a prolonged time from two feet away outside my open window, and I couldn't get my hands over my ears quick enough. And being a musician in a lot of unsatisfying situations where either the sound I was producing was unpleasant to me or the sounds everybody else was making were unpleasant to me - it all seems to have tangled together to produce a kind of indiscriminate reaction to all loud noises.
Like for instance my noisy neighbor with the horrible voice (very loud, very nasal, with a completely flat affect) who attacked me verbally for something that wasn't my fault: I just think he's an asshole and ignore him, basically, but the sound of his leaf-blower is like a giant, annoying mosquito that I want to kill, and I have to get out my ear protectors (the kind that target shooters use) and cover up my ears til he stops.
Same with weed eaters - that annoying whine is one of the most destructive sounds I can imagine - I can't tell you how many times I've seen some beautiful stretch of greenery decimated by the wielder whose sole goal in life is to reduce everything green within reach to a uniform height of one inch tall, regardless of whether said green thing is a weed, grass, or some fabulous flowering perennial that's been slowly, painstakingly growing its little shoots for the last 6 months and is now chopped down to nothing, to have to wait til the next growing cycle to try again. (Ooh, that image cuts a little too close to the bone).
So my amygdala? appears to lump loud whiny sounds - leaf blowers, weed-eaters, loud planes (I live under the flight path and I'm quite sure many of these asshole pilots are flying way lower than the regs allow), loud, aggressive-sounding voices (especially male ones) and insensitive music-playing together in one lump of 'this-is-scary-loud-destructive-dangerous and I will now ('I' meaning my amygdala or whatever other bits of my neurochemical system are responsible) pump large quantities of fear chemicals into this body, causing it to tense up and or freeze.
The 'freezing' happens, I'm convinced, because many of these 'triggers' are things over which I have no control - I can neither fight nor run away from them, so though my whole body system gets triggered, my ability to 'work out' the physiological reactions tends to have to be sublimated or indirect. I can cover my ears, but I can't stop the sounds from being made in the first place, and I can't escape them, either, not in any real sense. Men use loud, destructive tools and equipment everywhere you go; everywhere you go there are loud, aggressive men who want to dominate you (and sometimes women seem to, too); and the music thing - well, girl's gotta eat, right? I've already disconnected myself from the corporate money-generating world at large to escape intolerable situations; the music, while often frustrating and painful, is nowhere near this level of intolerability (yet, and I sure hope it doesnt' go there!)
My brother thinks I can just 'medicate' myself out of this; but why would I want to? My sensitivity is a large part of who I am. When I'm not around other people, being sensitive to sights, sounds, colors, touch, feelings is what makes the world really cool and fascinating! It's just that when other people are around, they're always creating this jarring, jangling fog of meaningless sensory stimulus that communicates nothing and at the same time blocks out or interferes with the stuff that I'm wanting to pay attention to. So I have to pay attention to their stupid, shallow, meaningless noise instead of the things I care about.
I don't want to spend my time and energy conforming, life is too short! I want to spend my time and energy being me.
(Another thought about the Too Loud etc. book: I think these books are written more for the families and friends of the atypicals than they are for the person who actually experiences the world this way. The so-called neurotypicals (NTs) want the atypical to conform to make the NTs experience more comfortable. In most cases the NT could care less about whether the atypical is comfortable or not. I think I could be ok with this if it didn't always feel like such a one-way street, where the NT is never the one doing any of the adjusting.)
a mother who gets it
On this thread, a commenter from ballastexistenz wrote:
When Ben was in second grade, I remember him spilling water on the bed. Rather than tell him to go get a towel, I decided to just watch him.
He left the room, came back, felt the wet bed, left the room again, came back, sat down, and felt the bed. On the third try, he got a towel and soaked up the water with it.
I remember thinking at the time, he must do that hundreds of times a day, and told his teacher about it. It was no wonder it took him so long to complete a paper…one of his diversions was to look through his book. The teachers could never understand why he did this.
Strangely, when he was in his resource room with a teacher he loved, he had no problem completing vast quantities of work. This same teacher felt it more important to get to know his children before asking anything of them. He also cleared out a place for Ben to sit, and made no demands of him.
I thought this was amazing - this tiny little story illustrates so clearly that what most of us need is just to be left alone, to find our own way in our own time. And that given the right environment, most of us can do amazing things! They may not be amazing in terms of what some other person can do, but they'll be amazing in terms of allowing us to make the very most of our own ingrained capacities, to explore those capacities to their very limits.
Why is it that so many people don't get this? Why do people always interfere? Either by getting in the way of a thing happening, or by trying to force something to happen that isn't meant to? Maybe it's because those people themselves were never allowed to flourish in an environment that supported them properly. So they're still trying to make up for lost time by intervening in the processes of others?
And another comment from another poster, in the same comment thread:
I don’t understand people. How can they be so incurious that they never discover things like this? How can they not want to know? How can they not want to understand? I’m beginning to agree with the assertion of many autistics: Neurotypicals are freakin’ weird.I totally agree. Not just about autism, but about dang near anything you care to mention. NTs seem maddeningly incurious about the world as it exists beyond their incredibly narrow definition of 'normal'.
A quote from a CNN interview with Amanda from ballastexistenz, Living With Autism in a World Made for Others:
And what does Amanda think is the hardest thing about living with autism? "Having to navigate a world that is, on all levels, is built for the abilities and deficits of people who are not built remotely like me."Though I don't think I'm autistic, I feel that I relate strongly to this comment - it feels as if the world is made for others who perceive the world much differently than I do, and that I spend most of my waking energy trying to figure out how to fit in well enough just to manage to do the very simplest of tasks. Sometimes the energy involved in 'passing' is so overwhelming that I can't be bothered - rather than go to the grocery store, I'll scrounge around for that last can of tuna or eat an entire package of crackers just because that way I won't have to spend hours preparing myself, mentally and physically, for dealing with what feels like an onslaught of unwanted interaction with strangers. I try to go to familiar places with friendly faces for just this reason, even if it means going quite a bit out of my way to do so. The 'reward' of a smile from a familiar acquaintance makes the hours-long preparation for leaving my safe 'nest' worthwhile.
When I refer to 'passing', this is both in terms of stifling/supressing most of my normal (natural to me, instinctive, automatic) ways of being and the fact that I don't like having to work so hard to conform to the expectations set for women in terms of appearance. It's exhausting. By the time I've managed to jump most of those hurdles, I'm often so tired I don't even want to leave the house.
But this also reminds me that sometimes we define normal by being who we are - that by just insisting that your own way is perfectly acceptable (as long as it's not actually harming other people), you can sometimes get people to accept you and broaden their definitions of 'normal' just because they've finally got used to you being the way you are.
***
It occurs to me that this points up the whole power dynamic I was trying to get at with the previous post: Power is generally defined as our ability to get others to do what we want. Being allowed to be the way we are and not being forced to conform to others comfort zone expectations is a reflection of power, too: Our ability to persuade others to leave us alone. Often, though, this has nothing to do with us, per se - it's more about the other person's curiosity, openness, and resonance with some aspect of something they see in us. People are open to 'odd' behaviors when the person doing the behavior somehow reminds them of themselves...
In which case the power isn't inherent in the person with the 'odd behavior'; instead it still resides in the person doing the observing.
Which again argues for the idea of, "Just be yourself as hard as you can."
***
Found yet another quote that I want to keep track of - not sure this is quite the right place for, but here it goes. Yet another one from ballastexistenz, quoting from someone called Lady Bracknell's Blog:
Reminds me to be careful in comparing myself to what I'm reading on ballastexistenz' blog. I find I resonate far more to what she writes than to what I see on many other blogs - as one of her commenters wrote, I feel more at home there. But reading the CNN articles, I realize that if I actually met Amanda, I might have a totally different sense of whether I resonate or not. I keep thinking I'd like to go somewhere where I can see and interact with some people who identify as autistic, to see what it feels like. To see if I feel some resonance or not. Because right now I don't feel like I really fit completely into either world. And I don't feel any great need to acquire a 'label', either! But it might help understand the struggles I deal with trying to cope with the world of so-called 'normals'.The problem for us crips is that almost all impairments are an extreme form of something which everyone experiences at some time. Which means that they think they know what our lives are like. Either because, as in the example above, they are so much the centre of their own universe that the concept of there being anything they haven’t experienced is inconceivable to them, or because they can’t understand experiences which are outside their own frame of reference. (Which is where the, “Well, she can’t be in very much pain if she’s laughing that much” reaction comes from, I think.)
Once a year, as a result of my diabetic retinopathy screening test, I spend several hours with my pupils artificially enlarged, which means that I only have peripheral vision, and that the light hurts my eyes. This does not entitle me to contact my visually-impaired friends and colleagues and tell them I know what their impairment is like. I don’t. I know my vision will be back to normal in a couple of hours. I lie down in a darkened room until that happens. I take time out from my daily life until I can see again. I don’t have to develop strategies for every minor task so that I can complete it safely with restricted vision. The only thing I have learned is what the view is like when you have no central vision.
power and comfort zones
the ability to create a comfort zone
the ability to get others to respect your comfort zone
when comfort zones clash
lions, christians and heretics
people who claim to need no comfort zone do so because the world at large already caters to their needs, is already shaped to fit them, because they are the ones with the most power and have thus made it so. A self-perpetuating cycle.
Some people pretend to be 'fine' because they know that doing otherwise plays into the power game of the bullies who will then accuse you of being weak and 'playing the victim'.
The pretender may have to go through all sorts of contortions to maintain the fiction that he's 'fine': He may be a drug addict, an alcoholic, a chain-smoker; all these are coping mechanisms to cover for the fact that most of his life is spent pretending he's fine when he's actually not fine at all.
The small child in The Emperor's New Clothes represents that in us which sees the truth and longs to call it out. The adults all around him resist the truth, in fact can no longer perceive the truth, because telling the truth is too risky.
What is at risk, exactly? At worst, perhaps the Emperor may have you beheaded. And once someone has been beheaded, there don't actually have to be any further beheadings in order for people to begin to do whatever's necessary to avoid being beheaded, including pretending not to see what you really do see.
After all, a little selective blindness is a relatively small price to pay for keeping your head attached to your body, eh?
So maybe bullying is just another way to enforce the comfort zone of the person with the most power in any given situation?
the ability to get others to respect your comfort zone
when comfort zones clash
lions, christians and heretics
people who claim to need no comfort zone do so because the world at large already caters to their needs, is already shaped to fit them, because they are the ones with the most power and have thus made it so. A self-perpetuating cycle.
Some people pretend to be 'fine' because they know that doing otherwise plays into the power game of the bullies who will then accuse you of being weak and 'playing the victim'.
The pretender may have to go through all sorts of contortions to maintain the fiction that he's 'fine': He may be a drug addict, an alcoholic, a chain-smoker; all these are coping mechanisms to cover for the fact that most of his life is spent pretending he's fine when he's actually not fine at all.
The small child in The Emperor's New Clothes represents that in us which sees the truth and longs to call it out. The adults all around him resist the truth, in fact can no longer perceive the truth, because telling the truth is too risky.
What is at risk, exactly? At worst, perhaps the Emperor may have you beheaded. And once someone has been beheaded, there don't actually have to be any further beheadings in order for people to begin to do whatever's necessary to avoid being beheaded, including pretending not to see what you really do see.
After all, a little selective blindness is a relatively small price to pay for keeping your head attached to your body, eh?
So maybe bullying is just another way to enforce the comfort zone of the person with the most power in any given situation?
Sunday, May 24, 2009
linkage
I like the following (partial) quote because it backs up my notion that American ideas of hyper-individualism and autonomy are simply wrong. I've cut out some of the religious language because I find it annoying, but otherwise, I find the ideas pretty applicable.
Search string: "Does everyone abuse power if given the chance?"
Abuse of Power; Beyond the power analysis: Boundaries and attachment (bolds mine)
While searching for a Google books link on a Carol Tavris book for a friend, I came across this interview with her by American Scientist. In it she talks about cognitive dissonance and how people tend to adjust facts/reality to keep their self-concept (whether positive or negative) relatively stable regardless of external factors (bolds mine):
Search string: "Does everyone abuse power if given the chance?"
Abuse of Power; Beyond the power analysis: Boundaries and attachment (bolds mine)
Human beings need other human beings as much as we need air and water. The attachments we form with family, friends, and trusted others like[...], teachers, students, and colleagues are not imaginary and not ephemeral. [...]Power analysis points out that relationships contain elements of authority, conformity, and fear; an understanding of human attachment suggests that the same relationships also contain caring, comfort, security, and affection. When someone we love treats us badly, we want the behavior to stop, but we do not want the loved one to go away. It is an observable fact of human nature that this is true no matter how bad the behavior is. Loss of an abusive parent [or] partner [...] is still loss.***
Children adapt to abusive or unavailable parents by developing patterns of anxious or ambivalent attachment. These children approach their parents with anxiety and caution or appear to avoid or ignore them, in an attempt to protect themselves psychologically and perhaps physically. The bond that forms in these troubled relationships is if anything stronger than in healthier relationships. Love is still there, mixed with anger, confusion, and fear, all of them made more intense and urgent by strong doses of anxiety and doubt.
While searching for a Google books link on a Carol Tavris book for a friend, I came across this interview with her by American Scientist. In it she talks about cognitive dissonance and how people tend to adjust facts/reality to keep their self-concept (whether positive or negative) relatively stable regardless of external factors (bolds mine):
We know from studies that the overwhelming majority of people believe themselves to be at least moderately competent, smart and ethical. So most of the examples in our book illustrate the dissonance caused when such individuals are faced with evidence that they just did something incompetent, foolish or unethical. But dissonance will also apply to somebody who has a poor self-concept, and who then gets evidence that they actually did something terrific: Their self-concept remains the same, and they dismiss the compliments as being phony or untrue. That is what is so powerful about understanding dissonance. We will put ourselves into contortions to preserve the beliefs that are most central to us—even when they're just clearly wrong.
Now, another aspect of this is the problem for people who don't reduce dissonance enough. One of the things we say in the book is that the ability to reduce dissonance is adaptive, precisely because it allows us to sleep at night. You couldn't get anything done if you had to keep reassessing every decision you made and every belief you held 40 times a day. It's beneficial to stay with a set of beliefs that guide how you live your life. And it's also a fine thing to be able to reduce dissonance after you've made a decision and bought that car and married that person and moved to Cincinnati, so that you won't beat yourself up about everything that you might have done wrong. The people who don't reduce dissonance enough suffer from regret and remorse, and it can be just as dysfunctional for them not to reduce dissonance as it is for other people to reduce dissonance too quickly, too mindlessly.
This issue leads to a great existential question: What happens when the action we've taken has really been a devastating one to ourselves or others, whether it's in the course of our professional lives, our private lives or a war? How do we live with the realization that we committed a devastating mistake, caused devastating harm? How do we forgive ourselves? What do we do to not just bury the dissonance—but to accept what we did because it can't be undone? How can we understand what we did wrong, and not just make a superficial apology, but learn in some deep way from the harm that we caused, so that we don't make the same mistake again? That's the goal.
bullies really do think differently from non-bullies
One of the worst things about bullying is that it keeps you constantly on your guard, you can never relax. You never know whether the friendly-for-the-moment conversation you're having will suddenly turn nasty, like unexpectedly stepping on a bee, or finding something horrible in your food. It's a way of keeping you off balance - catching you off guard, then tripping you up. Like somebody who delights in tying your shoelaces together, over and over and over again. And the rest of the time they may have fairly normal conversations with you, so you never know when to expect it, and you aren't really paying attention, because you're by nature a fairly trusting person.
The bullies think that trustful people are stupid. That they're suckers and weak, that they deserve to be hurt just because they're not naturally suspicious of other people. Gullible, you say? Maybe. I think there's a difference between gullible and trusting. Not sure I can articulate it just now.
Well, guess what, assholes: Your tactic has worked. Finally, after all these years? You've worn down my sense of trust to the point where I trust nobody, never feel safe. And now I get accused by various people of being 'high-strung' or 'wired all the time'.
No shit, sherlock - how the fuck do you think I got this way???
Y'know, it's weird - if I were an animal, say a cat or dog, and I was easily startled and shied away from people a lot, most folks would fairly quickly figure out that the animal had been traumatized at some point. It's not fucking rocket science, right?
But why is it, when it's a human exhibiting the same exact behavior, that so many people can't figure out the connection? No, instead they say, "Oh, she's just fucked in the head. She's always been that way." Jesus fucking christ. The utter, complete injustice of it fucking pisses me off.
The bullies think that trustful people are stupid. That they're suckers and weak, that they deserve to be hurt just because they're not naturally suspicious of other people. Gullible, you say? Maybe. I think there's a difference between gullible and trusting. Not sure I can articulate it just now.
Well, guess what, assholes: Your tactic has worked. Finally, after all these years? You've worn down my sense of trust to the point where I trust nobody, never feel safe. And now I get accused by various people of being 'high-strung' or 'wired all the time'.
No shit, sherlock - how the fuck do you think I got this way???
Y'know, it's weird - if I were an animal, say a cat or dog, and I was easily startled and shied away from people a lot, most folks would fairly quickly figure out that the animal had been traumatized at some point. It's not fucking rocket science, right?
But why is it, when it's a human exhibiting the same exact behavior, that so many people can't figure out the connection? No, instead they say, "Oh, she's just fucked in the head. She's always been that way." Jesus fucking christ. The utter, complete injustice of it fucking pisses me off.
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