(And, yes, the first part of this post repeats what I said in comments.)
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One thing that keeps coming up in my reading is this idea of 'saving face'. I keep forgetting that this is really important to most people, including *me*. When I *remember* it, I sometimes wonder if maybe it isn’t actually the *main* motivator driving nearly *all* human behavior?
I've just spent the last several days reading MetaFilter (I find it a really useful place to get insightful ideas from a broad range of viewpoints, with generally fairly intelligent and respectful comments), and this idea of ‘saving face’ keeps coming up over and over again, in various guises.
What occurs to me is that what shrinks call ‘dysfunction’ might simply be some outmoded human behaviors that we *all* practice to varying degrees, driven by this very real and important need to keep our self-respect.
*** Bolded to remind myself that this is the *meat* of this particular writing, I *think*:
Nobody likes to be ‘wrong’, or feel stupid. It actually floods our whole body with shame chemicals, which is a situation to be avoided at all costs – if I’ve understood some of the things I’ve read properly, there’s an idea out there that we experience *shame* as a very basic, lizard brain ‘survival threat’, as in, “If you don’t chill out, your tribe is going to leave you out there alone in the jungle/desert/whatever and you’ll freeze to death/starve/get eaten by lions.” Being ‘shamed’ is *terrifying*, because it signals that, somehow, we’ve violated some basic tribal rule or ‘taboo’, and are, quite literally, in danger. As I understand it, anything coming from that level is pretty ancient and has nothing to do with modern ideas of ‘logic’ – it *seems* to operate almost entirely independent of any so-called ‘rational’ ‘thought’ process – far below that, at the level of pure, raw, gut survival instinct.
***
I think shame, and avoidance thereof, is such a *basic* motivator for *everybody*, that it’s hard to wrap the mind around it.
Partly because we *don’t* talk about this openly – it’s sort of like fish talking about the water they swim in: I think they really have *no conscious awareness of it whatsoever*, and yet it is utterly inescapable, it permeates *absolutely everything* we think or say or do.
Mind you, this is still a theory in process of building! And subject to change without notice as new ‘info’ becomes available.
But, it’s what I’m going with at the moment.
***
I'm beginning to question the whole idea of 'dysfunction' - it's starting to feel a little like yet another capitalistic scam wherein somebody creates a 'problem' that never existed before and suddenly there's this big hype and everybody needs to go out and buy some big 'product' in order to 'fix' the problem.
Maybe I'm just getting really cynical, but after nearly fifteen years of reading self help books and thinking there was something *to* the whole 'fixing' ourselves idea - well, I'm beginning to want to build a huge bonfire of all the 'self help' BS.
Being a fairly direct person myself (an ‘Asker’?) and disliking 'bullshit', I've always thought kind of like you said - that people just didn't *care*, and that *I* care 'too much'. A friend even said to me one time that he didn't think most people were (or liked to be?) as 'honest' as me. I wasn't sure how to take it - he didn't seem to be judging me, so much as just conveying his perception, which was really helpful to have reflected back to me.
***
I've scratched my head on this one a lot, and tried to look at it from as many angles as I can.
I think people are rarely aware of their underlying 'motives', and often really aren't even aware of their *behavior*, for crying out loud.
They just do what they do, kind of like brainless little mechanical wind-up toys (yeah, that wasn't very nice, but I'm pretty sure it's just us chickens here - hope you know that old joke punch line! If not I'll explain...)
...people just keep on keeping on, like the proverbial wind-up, until they bash into some immovable object, such as a person or situation they can't deal with in their usual ways. Note: I include myself in this category of, "People who do stupid,annoying shit because nothing has *forced* me to find a better way. Yet."
*That's* when change happens, when people can't get what they need *any other way* than by changing what they're doing or thinking.
This is equally true of me. I've spent the last 15 years *thinking* about how I think and what I do, because how I thought and what I did in the past just wasn't working for me. I just wasn't able to get what I wanted, or particularly, what I *needed* with my old ways.
So in *that* sense, dysfunctional *is* a useful term.
But, really, if *everybody's* dysfunctional, how useful an idea is *that*? It's like the whole God/guilt trip thing, that we're all 'sinners' or whatever.
I mean, who wants to be shamed and preached at like some little kid all their lives?
Not me, thanks. I do *much better* with a recognition that, on any given day, I'm usually doing my very best with the tools that were given to me - to survive, and function, and be a good person.
I think this is the tricky bit: I'm not sure I totally *believe* it yet, but for the moment, as an experiment, I'm *trying* to give people the benefit of the doubt and not *immediately* assume that they're just being thoughtless, clueless jerks. (though my rants here might suggest the opposite - it's more because I *have* to have someplace to blow off the steam that I don't feel comfortable with letting out in real life. Although, I think I'm actually getting better at it - finding the 'balance point' between not being a doormat and not having a 'chip on my shoulder'. Sigh, I *hate* that phrase. I only use for communication at this present moment, because I'm pretty sure you'll know what I mean - but that phrase's days are *numbered* in *my* personal universe :-)
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