This is one of the longest and most unwieldy anti-Reeducation posts I wrote in July. If you are tired of the topic I recommend my favorite recent post, New Orleans Noir. Also, nobody has commented on Puden, partly because it is strange and partly because it is in Danish. It is, however, there to be deciphered, as relief from Reeducation.
This post seems like old news now but I am posting it anyway, with this preface: in the past week two different people, one virtual (a blog commenter) and one IRL, have said, “It is good that you are able to speak frankly,” and “It is good that you are not afraid to talk about things.” It occurs to me that this was one of the reasons I was so frustrating for Reeducation.
Reeducation very much wanted us to be unable to be frank and afraid to talk about things, so that it could be the first one to teach frankness. It was all very macho somehow, this desire to be First. In any case, Reeducation kept saying, if you are willing to see and say this so easily, there just must be something you are hiding. Getting badgered like that so much was one of the main reasons I slowly caved in. The problem here is the formulaic presupposition: if you have just arrived, you must have rock-hard defenses and very high levels of fear.
I
One of the problems I see in Al-Anon and 12 step programs generally, and especially as they were presented to me in Reeducation, is the difficulty of interpreting, for people who have just been told they should relinquish power, that their perceptions are faulty, and that they should seek outside guidance and possibly divine intervention, of interpreting certain key terms and buzz words in a way which will be meaningful and useful to them. I do realize that the 12 step slogans are supposed to be shorthand for very deep concepts, but I disagree utterly: I believe they are techniques for stopping thought, or distracting it from the matter at hand to the interpretation of the slogan.
“Acceptance” is an example which comes to mind. At the moment, what is at last making it possible for me to heal from Reeducation is my acceptance of the fact that for me it was a bad thing, and that being there was a mere error on my part. “Acceptance” in this context is freeing. In my first, very serious Al-Anon stint, however, I was exhorted to accept that I was a fatally flawed person, accept the imagination of a truly terrible past, accept a sharply impaired present and a bland, mediocre future. The mantra of “acceptance” was what hammered these nails into my coffin. The imperative to study and comprehend “acceptance” was a great distraction from looking at the actual material I had to work with. And such, once again, are the problems of fitting ourselves to rigid formulae.
II
The paradigm for my Reeducation generally was that (a) you must have had some very terrible thing happen to you early on, whose memory you have repressed; (b) you present symptoms of this, which your therapist can see and you cannot; (c) they suggest and explain this to you; (d) you are in denial and resist these ideas for a very long time, because you want to protect your parents and your false self-image; (e) at last some memories break through. At this point you see, understand, and are freed.
There are things to criticize about this paradigm, especially that last part: it is not self-evident that you will be freed by merely “seeing.” The rest of it is perhaps all right, if it in fact fits the particular case, although I did find it odd that “repressed memory syndrome” should be so central to the standard menu. What strikes me most however, is the insistence on denial and resistance. What if not everyone is so wedded to these? What about people who are merely unaware?
III
One of the principal questions I had for Reeducation when I started it in my early thirties was about feeling more comfortable with my “family of origin.” I had never been comfortable or at ease, the way I had seen other people be with their families. It was not normal to be so uncomfortable, and I must have some “issue.” Since elementary school I had wanted to attend Reeducation so as to learn how to relax around this group of people. “It is an alcoholic family,” said Reeducation. “Those families are never comfortable. That is why this is happening.” “O,” said I, “I understand.” I had been unaware and uninformed, but now things made sense.
My “getting it” so quickly greatly confused Reeducation. The “appropriate” reaction to this news would have been to kick, scream, and “deny.” Since I merely said “O, I see” and turned rather meditative, it became “clear” to Reeducation that I was “unfeeling” and also “in denial” about some yet more Gothic truth.
And being “unfeeling,” as it finally turned out, was essentially about not living in fear or anger. But Reeducation very much wanted to be the one who had taught us to live that way. When you arrived, you had to be in the grip of fear and anger. If not, you were in denial. New ways of making you feel fear and anger would be found.
III
In my more recent stint, I attended Al-Anon faute de mieux because I was involved with an emotionally abusive person who was also a poorly managed diabetic with, let us say, traces of alcoholism. He had multiple close calls with death from low blood sugar, in addition to a diabetes related arrest. He was verbally abusive enough – to other people before he turned this on me – that when I got the call from parish prison, my first thought was not that he had had a diabetic crisis and been misread as being “on drugs.” My first thought was that he had cursed someone out or threatened them.
I then realized that it could have been a misunderstood sugar crisis (it had been) and that in any case he would not receive insulin in parish prison. So I went down to the bail bondsman and got him out, but I also started going to Al-Anon. It helped me to realize that, whether or not my friend was actually an alcoholic, I was reacting to the situation in ways that are common for people involved with alcoholics, and that the confused feelings I had were in fact related to this situation, and not to some other situation or to something else yet more nebulous.
Meetings in which we discussed acceptance of people’s faults and the need to become less judgmental and more tolerant of them while also investigating and admitting more of our own failings, however, actually made it harder for me to accept that I was in an unacceptable situation. Here I am not complaining about the concept of “acceptance,” which I believe I finally understand, but once again, about the overuse of slogans and formulae.
IV
What is so ironic about the entire experience is that where I did participate perfectly in the neurotic phenomenon of denial was through my denial that Reeducation could be going so badly, and my insistence that the problem was with me. In this instance, to “come out of denial” did mean a great deal of thrashing around and a large dose of resistance. And to accept reality was in fact the cure. The reason this was so hard to do, of course, was that the reality I needed to accept was the one reality which was unacceptable in Reeducation: that my instincts were good, and my judgment sound.
A relevant question on “denial” might therefore be, what are you denying? In the case of my father, I had never doubted that he had a drinking problem or that he could be abusive. What I did not understand was the degree to which these things affected his stability (or reflected instability) even when he was not in those modes. And it was the constant chant, you are (or have been) in denial! that interdicted the more interesting question, what are you unaware of? what have you not seen?
As I keep saying, formulae fit when they fit. They can be altered like patterns for sewing. And some formulae do not fit, and some patterns for sewing are so far from your size that it is easier to make a new one than to modify the one you have been handed. This seems elementary but I find myself repeating it again and again as though it were a brilliant insight, because I have heard for so long that one size really does fit all.
V
What was your part in it? This is a standard question in Reeducation which sounds rather like, but does not quite mean what did you do to deserve this? My part in it was that I was accustomed to being spouted at, and I let Reeducation spout at me. I was not good at recognizing spouting for what it was. I was accustomed to assume people meant what they said and thought before speaking. I assumed Reeducation had thought deeply about things, and was not just trying this tactic and that.
I assumed it sought knowledge, and not just the confirmation of its paradigm. I ignored evidence which clearly suggested the opposite, assuming I had merely misinterpreted something or had not yet understood. And Reeducation recommends obedience and humility, but I seem to have had an excess of these qualities.
ADDENDUM ON “INNER CHILD” THEORY
Very important to Reeducation also was Alice Miller’s concept of the “inner child.” In my Reeducation, you were supposed to re-experience childhood traumas so as to see them for what they were. The re-experiencing was bad enough, but the kicker was that you were supposed to come to understand that those experiences, and only those were the deepest you. What you brought into the world with you, for example, did not count. That was why I kept saying to the Reeducators, “but this seems like psychic suicide, are you sure it is a good idea? This question, of course, was seen emerge from the desire to stay “in denial.” However I still think it is a good question – in fact, I like it better than ever.
ADDENDUM ON TACKINESS
Reeducation said that what I would have called tackiness and immaturity were not only common but norms, and not only norms, but desirable – desirable because they were not only norms but universal truths of the soul. They were what you would discover in yourself if you dropped “denial.” Only if you could find and become one with your inner tackiness – not just your inner child – would you be considered worthy of progress to higher planes.
When I expressed doubt about this I was called elitist. And that was how I got coerced or blackmailed into listening to the patter. I was right, however, and I was precisely not being elitist. It takes elite status and privilege to have time to get as hysterical as Reeducation felt was proper.
GENERAL SUMMARY
What Reeducation told me was that as a small child, I had been nothing except the negative things that had been done to, with, around me. The talents I had brought with me did not count, and the positive things done to, with, and around me did not count, and my having overcome any of the negative things also did not count. If I were truthful, I would admit that I was a distillation of all of my negative experience, and nothing else. I would also admit that there were probably more negative things than I was aware of, and I would be willing to take these on as well.
Because of these negative things which had happened, and these other negative things which might have happened, everything positive I had done in my life since was a smokescreen, a false identity, a form of denial. That I had accomplished as much as I had, only showed how deep my problems were. At the same time, I should have accomplished different things than what I had. Accomplishments of a type more familiar to my Reeducators would have been more acceptable.
This is of course insanity. But these theories were in Al-Anon, in psychotherapy, in the newspapers and magazines, and in the mouths of my professor friends, many of whom were also in some form of Reeducation. And the literature my group was given to read was full of examples of high achievers who had given up their dreams and found true happiness as shop-girls and delivery boys. To have interests, ambitions, desires, things one wished to do with one’s life was not considered acceptable.
People who were accomplished not because someone else had forced this upon them but because they had pursued an interest and in some cases, fought for it against the grain, were undesirable. We were to be made invisible – or to be “disappeared.” Reeducation was a set of lessons how to disappear ourselves, so that the authorities would be innocent and would also have their values affirmed. As they took people more like me in and liquidated us, the circle of their power became more complete.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
It all sounds really strange — I mean totally, really, fantastically strange: Your rational confrontation with the mindset that many would consider “normal” — I mean.
Ah, I am so half asleep this morning. For some reason, I was very relaxed yesterday, went to training, overtrained, and I cannot wake up today.
Anyway, here is a stab at my own family of origin problems. Actually, it is more than a stab. I think I have got it through the heart with a wooden stake, finally.
So the mindset I was confronting is so widely considered “normal” ??? It seemed so utterly insane, but then it did believe itself to be normal, and it seemed to be quite widespread. But it is so irrational … and I say this as someone who scores high on “feeling” and low on “thinking” in those psychometrics tests!
Well, I think that you said, yourself, that it was somehow considered normal, as so many of you other professorial friends were attending similar reeducation sessions. This is the kind of norm of the mode average, then, I would think.
Funny about the feeling thing, too. I do get the sense that what I mean by “emotional” is often very different from that which is normally meant by the term. Obviously, it has a pejorative meaning for most people, because to be emotional is to be out of control. I wonder if such people ever ask themselves what it really means to be ‘in control’, however. What is it that is ‘in control’? Who is it actually ‘in control’ of?
Aha. By “emotional” I mean feeling but many people seem to mean “histrionic” by it. Reeducation codified this: if you were not histrionic, you must be divorced from your feelings.
Now I see: another reason Reeducation was so hot and heavy on “feeling” – it was bad in Reeducation to be “thinking” – was that Reeducation was trying to validate the officially less prestigious, feeling side of things.
Reeducation was also big on saying it was bad to be in control and good to lose control. That would be an antidote to “thinking” as a way to control or limit access to feeling.
So its whole beef with me – that I was too good at thinking and too “controlled” (i.e. not histrionic) – was based on the idea that one would consider it uncool to discuss feelings or to not be “in control.” It was trying to validate those things, so that we would feel comfortable dropping masks and expressing feelings.
The problem with all of that is the assumptions and misreadings involved – if you do not fit the paradigm and worse, if you do not recognize and understand it (as I did not), you end up in severe trouble.
hm. I think there are many people for whom ‘control’ means not having any access to emotions. It’s something I sense as a kind of anti-empiricism (although this is probably not the best term to describe it). Maybe Kant’s term (from a link you posted earlier), “The Understanding,” might be more appropriate. Anyway, there is a tendency to avoid observing one’s environment and responding to one’s observations. This is called “control”. However, it is a feature of those who think only in binaries, dichotomies to think that if one side of the dichotomy is bad, the other must be good, and if one side is glorious, the other must be evil, and so on. I find that those who do not have very good access to their own feelings and sensibilities tend to think this way. The emotional control freaks are also the dichotomy freaks — and Reeducation was also both.
Here is an interesting piece from the book by Bruce Moore-King I am reading. It tells of the Rhodesian war. It seems to me that “selective memory” is a form of emotional control that works well with dichotomising ‘their side’ as evil or inept, etc. and ‘our side’ as above board.
“People have asked why I wrote this book. They have also offered their own convenient answer — war guilt, the fact that I was involved in atrocities of war. Callous though it might sound, I am not consciously aware of any guilt. Looking back I feel only a powerful generalised horror.
A long-time friend and ex-regular soldier quieried my descriptions of the war. As an officer, he said, he understood his function an duty to be the protection of civilias, black or white, in the operational areas. Were my experiences peculiar to one unit, The Grey’s Scouts, he asked.
[…]
NO,my experiences were not peculiar to any one unit. Included in the units i have worked with was the one to which my friend belonged. They were among the most brutal I ever encountered. Such is the power of selective memory and convenient myth that he does not choose to remember. Then I understood my function and duty to be to find and kill the enemy.
In the end, the analysis is of no relevance. It is my argument that stands. And that cn only be countered with reason and fact. We cannot adjust to the reality of our present and future if we do no acknowledge our past and present. At some point in our lives we all have to lift our heads out of the sand, or else die hollow, ignorant and meaningless, with just our backsides showing to the rest of the world
Harare
October 1988
This book sounds very interesting. And yes, check: dichotomous thinking is associated with lack of access to emotions. (And – sideline – I’d love to figure out Kant some time – I am not sure why, it may have to be a project for my old age.)
Anyway, this means Reeducation would fit my ex who has a limited range of emotions that he has direct access to, and who uses reason – or rationalization – as a way to block emotion as much as to actually figure things out. He would deny all of this but it is as plain as day to the outside observer: neglect and violence in childhood, angry at the world now and the anger is a cover for fear; sees things in terms of good/bad, friend/enemy.
Reeducation would say, come out of denial, drop rationality and control for a moment and let your feelings come out, look at them and acknowledge them, have pity for your inner child and embrace it, integrate with it, realize that you do not now have to protect or punish that helpless and abandoned being so harshly, or project the introjected image of your parents everywhere; now, having given up power over others and reclaimed your personal power, go back out and interact with the world in a more nuanced way. I see how it would work, at least theoretically.
This Reeducation plan then seems to be designed for that precise paradigm (and I don’t even know for sure that it really fits my ex that well; he would certainly say that the imposition of this paradigm was an act of violence). But the exercise does at least help to discern what sort of person / problem Reeducation expected to find.
[– HMMM. It seems that it was mostly for people with really serious problems they just couldn’t see … people who could not face their own role in their disasters … and so on.]
Yes. I think it fits a common western type. Also, I feel that whenever I express the idea, “well, I’m a non-westerner” (and people look at me with either incomprehension or aghast) then what I am really saying is “I don’t like to dichotomise my thought.”
Im my childhood and for quite a few years in my teens and who knows long after, I found western thinking really hard to understand — because it was based on a system of dichotomised thought that I had not been brought up with. Well, that was it in part. Also I had not been very used to horizontal competitiveness and such. I automatically assumed my peer was somebody I should defend against the generation above and below. I had no notion, for the longest time, that my peer was somebody in tacit competition against me!!
Oh well. I wrote this as a reflection to your previous comment on my blog. It is the reality I have experienced, although abbreviated. Actually, reading Moore-King’s book recently has given me a lot of this newer perspective, especially because he brings out the indifference of the generation above his (his own parents’ generation) to the suffering of his own, whom they had sent to war. I think this intergenerational antagonism (and bad faith) is very telling, and explains a lot about my own life’s experiences.
Anyway, about Kant– I’m very suspicious of the child. I think that he prescribes an emotional detachment that limits us in our direct access to our own realities and our own interpretations of our reality. He therefore promotes an ideological or (in Nietzsche’s terms “theological”) way of thinking, rather than one which is natural (or, perhaps ‘materialist’ in the way that Antonio Damasio’s brainwork is ‘materialist’)
OK, I am going over to read your post. Kant, yes, the reason I am interested is because of that problem – and he’s influential – I’d like to really understand so as to really critique.
Not Western, yes. It appears that I am less Western than I would have thought – I am not sure how that could have happened.
Here is another minor thought I had on Reeducation and this idea of “inner tackiness” – it assumed that if you had had any type of problem in childhood, you would not have gone through the competitive and otherwise tacky adolescent stage which corresponds to secondary school, but would have remained at the emotional age of a primary school student. Therefore you would therefore either be in a belated and tacky adolescence now or need to go through it now so as to finally get it over with.
But: what if that tackiness and competitiveness is neither necessary nor natural? Reeducation did not seem to have thought of that.
The takiness and competitiveness is not natural. It is western. It is not Japanese, from what I can tell. No, just western.
When I got bullied at work, part of the reason I didn’t see it coming from a lateral direction is because I was non-western. I was tribal. I expected to be oppressed by those who had authority over me, but I did not expect it from my peers. Actually, I was protecting one girl — an obese woman (but really a girl in her early twenties) whose work was considered incompetent. (The authorities had started to bully her as the most vulnerable.) But she foolishly attacked me, so I removed the defensive barrier, and they got rid of her within a few weeks. But this is a westerner — and this was the message I got from that situation: Westerners? — stupid to the core!