I dreamed last night that I had been scheduled for three surgical operations which were unnecessary. At the very last minute — I was already seeing attendants in surgical uniforms — it was revealed that the diagnoses had been someone else’s dream, and that I could opt out if I so chose.
I opted out. I would like to say I woke up Mayan and will do so from now on. I might have to be Siegfried.
I am so tired of fighting the ways of thinking about the self I was taught in Reeducation. And yes, I know they stuck on that occasion because people had tried to teach me these things before. I am aware of everything and I do not need to have a caricatured “reality” revealed to me by entities who, if experience serves, will say that if I do not subscribe to their precise views then I am “in denial” — and who, if experience serves, will exert pressure to conform by alleging that not to do so is to “feel unjustifiably superior to others.”
I am so tired of these rhetorical strategies and the beliefs they defend — beliefs which seem to be dominant here, or now, but were not in my country of origin. I cannot realize it at this precise moment, but I want to leave the East. In my noon reverie I have those Sangre de Cristo Mountains coming into view, pressing on ahead, the first range of home.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
The shamanic solution would be to destroy this “self” (the one that has learned reeducation) if you do not like it.
This is easier said than done, perhaps. There are things that destroy a self and things that do not. For instance, I have learned that running on the treadmill — no matter how fast — does not destroy the self. Punching the free bags does do so a bit, but nothing so much as engaging in free sparring with somebody whose skills you actually fear.
I think it is the contradiction — of not going WITH one’s fear and therefore in accordance with one’s existing personality, but against it, that destroys the presently existing self.
Ultimately, then, if you want to destroy a self that you are unhappy with, you have to actively contradict it by replacing the typical emotional reaction with the opposite (or different) reaction.
Really, really, I suspect that any training in Western rationality does not help with this at all. But those of us who can engage in a certain level of self-hypnosis, of lucid dreaming, can achieve this rather well.
You’re quite right. Either that or shepherd the person who was caught in it in a better direction … or a combination of these. It’s much more proactive than just fighting off the invader as I have been doing.
The most irritating part of the Reeducated self is that it has to defend itself. It has to convince both itself and the invader that the invader is wrong and should lay off.
One useful strategy for me is to call off that kind of defense and give an emphatic YES to whatever the accusation is, and not care. YES and it’s great. YES and that means I can’t talk to you. YES + something positive they don’t expect.
Destruction sounds very negative, I know, but it is actually much quicker as a process, in solving a problem than is “shepherding”. I think that destruction has had altogether too bad a rap. Psychoanalysis describes processes of normalisation that sound remarkably like destruction. Zizek, in particular, speaks of stages of maturity as being stages of “trauma’. Lacan and Freud speak of “Castration”. So the everyday processes of life necessitate a hell of a lot of destruction (that we take in our strides, in a lot of ways).
Shepherding, by contrast, sounds like a long, drawn-out process.
but saying “yes” is also already a kind of destruction of one’s interest in how others perceive one — that is, it is a destruction of one’s publically conceived self.
Also:
I think that there is a problem inherent with the very paradigm of “shepherding” , in that it will produce certain results that are logically consistent with its notions. For instance, you have acquired an aspect to your identity that is not serving you well — let us call it ‘reeducation’ for that is what it is. How did this come to be adjoined to your personality? Was it actually “shepherded” into place, or did it arrive by another method?
I think, in any case, that no matter how the reeducation adjoining-bit to your identity arrived, it did in fact arrive, and thus transform the identity.
What I can learn from this is that identity is by no means pristine. It is affected by forces, for better or for worse. And it changes.
But “shepherding” implies a paradigm that wants to take care of “the whole” personality, as if it were pristine, and as if it were NOT subject to radical alteration (which your experiences have already taught you is untrue.)
That is why I distrust the paradigm implied by shepherding. It doesn’t seem to allow that what happened to you could have happened to you in the first place — therefore it is not in a position to apply a cure.
Anyway, the key to escaping reeducation is to release a HUGE amount of emotional energy towards it, in a way that is NOT reactive or in terms of your normal emotional reactions, but creative.
Comments 1 and 2, yes; slowness I don’t mean but I do mean calm. Rather than “shepherd” I can use the words “fiercely protect” or “let grow back.”
The piece of my superego to which Reeducation attached itself is very, very old and I know where I got it. I had it well enough withered at the point of entering Reeducation that I thought it a good time to enlist Reeducation’s help to enable, precisely, its destruction. Unfortunately, Reeducation got that piece of shadow to grow huger and scarier than it had ever been in the first place.
I do rant and rave at people who see it and want to grow it further and it is to some extent too great an investment of energy. But I really can’t help feeling whole and I am interested in protecting even that piece of self from those who would like to exploit it, so that it rests in its place and overshadows the present less and less. This was the process I was using before, and it had been working very well. But I take your point(s).
*
Interesting conversation tonight with an IRL friend on “profiling.” He looks healthy but knows he has a heart vulnerability, has trouble getting doctors to even test for it because they “profile” him in a certain way. He said out of the blue, “You know, psychologists do that too, they make a snap judgment on the first visit and then they go to work shaping the patient to conform to this.”
I thought, bingo: that was really all Reeducation did with its “I know your background must be X, so you must be Y…”. Simple, but hard to see and frustrating to deal with. And not at all scientific.
Ok. The wholeness thing is a good thing actually. But sometimes it pays not to look at it that way when one wants to get rid of something that one doesn’t like. There’s a danger in being too precious, in protecting too much, and then you end up protecting parts of the self that cling to other bits that are unhelpful.
For example, in getting rid of my “shyness” I also had to be pretty ruthless towards my background and upbringing in Zim, which I was inclined to sentimentalise. But the shyness and the sentimentalisation were actually the same thing.
Also there is a danger of falling for the paradigm of a personality that has volition — that being the contents of the paradigm and nothing more.
An old friend of mine said, “You have freed yourself from bondage, and I’m just doing it a bit later.”
I thought to myself that she cannot do so, ever, because she would need to expend a tremendous amount of emotional force to do so, and that simply isn’t in her.
Later she said to me, “We are all in some kind of bondage or another and can’t really escape it.”
But this was a misunderstanding of what I’d been trying to tell her.
And really, what it comes down to, when you are trying to transform is the amount of energy you have available to expend in order to do so.
And it has to be something other than negative and reactive energy.
I still think the best thing to do is put positive energy elsewhere and protect that piece of superego from people who want to help it grow. I have a really wu wei sort of attitude about it. It’s not an enemy or foreign, it’s just a weak point. What I’m interested in going cold turkey on is people interested in exploiting it, and the complicity I learned to have with such people, and in not starving my stronger core. That attitude I *can* identify as a foreign body I’d like to drop.
P.S. And it isn’t easy … it means dropping stuff like pity, moderating self doubt, etc., dropping exactly all the things Reeducation attached itself to. Me, I like words and math, my mind has an Aquinas like orientation, very exact, and I have to name the stuff to see it.
The most violent idea of Reeducation was that that piece of superego was “real” and every other part of my self was an illusion. I think it’s all real — even the nice side of psychopaths is real.
I could go on but the conversation feels too large for a blog comments thread.
ok– it seems like you’re on a good track.
I’m going to pour myself a hot bath and consider what dinner will be tonight.
Actually it just hit me (again) what the “self” (is one) to be destroyed is:
+ the one that is concerned about the authorities who say “you are not who and what you think you are, we know you better than you know yourself”
and also
+ the one who was at last taught that this dictum was true: “it is not only not all right to be who you are — it is worse than that — it is that you cannot be who you are and survive”
Those were the things I “learned” in my childhood Guantanamo, mistrusted, and then discovered to be false in school — only to have them re-presented in Reeducation as Truths one could not deny/run from, but must face and manage.
I’d love to destroy those voices right now, stomp them into the ground and not look back.
My usual way of burying people is to imagine I push them off the pier. They can swim up again but not onto MY pier.
In the Popol Vuh, though, you have to do something more thoroughgoing. Somehow the image I have, though, is of stomping them into the ground like bugs.
*
Meanwhile. Can you believe I actually have a new colleague whose behavior has elicited from me the next post? It is surrealistic in the extreme.
Scary new colleague — sounds like a political player who is quite okay with rubbing people up the wrong way so long as the overall effect is to look influential in the eyes of others.
——-
The self to be destroyed is always the one that is binding up your energies and limiting your choices. Once that one is destroyed, you will have much more energy and freedom to do things that you did not do before.
But you can’t destroy it with reactive energy — only with creative/playful energy. And it has to be intense.
Self to be destroyed — ah then, we’ve been agreeing all along.
Hmmm — my oldest to-be-destroyed self just accepted things, I do believe. Did not get outraged.
It got added to it an outraged one, but which is not always allowed to be outraged at the right things.
Interesting.
Colleague — yes, I suppose that is what ze imagines ze is doing. Really ze’ll just irritate everyone until he leaves, is my prediction. Too bad
because ze could be good. We’ll see.
So a shamanistic way of dealing with this is to give yourself permission to be outraged at the right things.
However.
You are not to be outraged in a conventional way, in a way that exacerbates the sense of injustice done to you.
Rather, you are to be outraged in a way that actually MOCKS the whole scenario that produced the injury in the first place.
You are to say extremly ironic and hilarious things, mocking both your own all to earnest responses under the situation of reeducation, as well as the intellectual and emotional limitations of the people who put you there.
You are to keep going until everything about it makes you laugh.
But you must have intense fun with it — and somehow you must manage to do it publically.
This will ( I say this ironically) reverse the spell that has been cast on you.
Yes — the mocking strategy does work.
The other thing that occurred to me was that Reeducation’s strategy for destroying the self I liked was by saying it wasn’t real. The only real part was whatever bit o’pain there was plus what R. wanted to project. This was much more devastating, obviously, than being told that what one is, is not liked, no matter how cruelly that is done. And it was supposed to be curative or something, so I considered it … with the result of chronic shame, self doubt, self hatred, and so on that I know are irrational and am able to shake some weeks, but which linger — in part because I still try, or tried until this week or so, to be “fair” to people who really live along a certain model and so on. But the thing is that NONE of it is real, or even if some of it is, it is not useful to say so. I figured that out before — none of it is real, Reeducation had to be thrown out of the window entirely — but that is also the shorthand way of dealing with the periodic sieges of Reeducands I get. Their discourse has already been deconstructed, their theories have already been discredited and abandoned, now all of this just gets to be not real and sort of funny.
Had the same thing with regard to my father, who told me I could neither speak nor think properly. So sometimes I write an academic paper, and think, “Maybe there’s nothing there — neither words nor ideas!”
That makes it difficult. And especially when I am very tired (eg. after just finishing a paper) and my defences are therefore low.
But I guess the point is you need to beat back those accusations by never giving them an inch in terms of actual reality. Don’t allow these negative ideas to hypnotise you — keep producing strong work.
Ha! Here’s how I could parody Al-Anon, with having an alcoholic parent being the equivalent of being from Louisiana:
“I am from Louisiana. There is a high cancer rate here. Therefore I must have cancer. If I do not have cancer or say I do not, I am in denial. I only imagine I do not have every symptom of cancer. I imagine this so I can allege superiority to other Louisianians. If I were properly humble, on the other hand, I would admit I have cancer. I would then pray to God that it might go into remission. This would work, as long as I truly believed in the power of prayer and kept praying.”
Honestly, nobody would believe this logic if it didn’t come from the hallowed 12 steppers.
Good!
But you know the way you would do that shamanistically is not online or through the intellect, but by taking on the role of someone who has cancer.
So somebody says to you: “You look a little down. Is there anything the trouble?”
And you say: “Yes, I’ve just concluded that I must have cancer. There’s no two ways about it. It must be true.”
And they say, “How do you know?”
And you say: “It’s Louisiana. It’s eating my brain.”
and so on.
But you must do it in such a way that you can laugh inwardly.
This is the shamanic way — not intellectual, but acting out the parody, as a real event, that mocks the reality of the prior event.
Ha! That’s funny and fun!
Be sure to only try it on those whom you want to show a certain amount of contempt for.
I’ll have to work on it — work out how to do it. The first times it will not be done aloud.
There is a way in which I already do it at work, although I didn’t start doing it shamanically, but defensively, i.e. as a way to laugh off, and get others to laugh off and see the ridiculousness of, a destructive rumor which had been started. It did work well enough, but with this shamanistic attitude it would have been perfect!
Good luck.
Another advantage of the shamanic attitude is that it tends to set up a smokescreen so that psychological vampires cannot read you like a map.
That is an advantage.
There was another comment from you that I approved but that the system ate. It was about not giving those assessments / accusations / projections an inch of ground, and just producing strong work.
That is key and I agree. The problem I have though is that one is supposed to see both sides. Consider what they say. (But upon reflection I think that exhortation doesn’t apply because I am not one of those who does not see both sides.)
Shamanic work is already about seeing two sides.
Shamanism is a form of doubling of the self. What is happening is that the comic self rises above, and transcends the tragic self. This, too, is very Nietzschean. So there is nothing wrong with seeing the tragedy of life — the fact that some people are very limited and are likely to remain that way for the rest of their lives, and that they hold the rest of us back, and wreak havoc in our lives. Yes, it is very tragic. Yes, it is inevitable, and real as real can be. We can easily enough see that side of life.
However, the transcendent side of the shamanic self wants to turn it into a comedy, nonetheless. It sees the other side, that most people cannot ever see. From this perspective, people’s limitations — including one’s own — are very, very funny. The human bunglings, and the human misreadings, as inevitable as they are, are funny indeed.
OK then this was what I used to do — not perfectly, as I had more or less invented it myself and was still working on it, wouldn’t have called it shamanic then.
But it was why Reeducation thought I had “no feelings.” Not being stuck in the tragic.
Not quite shamanism though.
Here is a quote from shamanic solitudes:
[…E]motions felt by the shaman can suddenly appear. this happened with the shaman Ram Rai, who, during the dance, saw from far off the photo of his recently deceased brother, standing on a shelf. Ram Rai burst into tears. These were not the tears of Laladum [the wood nymph with back to front feet], but the tears of a man, who re-emerged at that particular moment. But this too is part of the ritual. It is not an anomaly. It is simply the irruption of a new fragment that makes up the shamanic ritual’s complexity, providing for the fact that, among the various actors taking part on the stage, besides the gods, there may also be the “man-shaman”.
The shaman’s body always projects a double shadow on the ground. A subtle tragiv vein seems constantly to underlie every shamanic reitual performance. Just so. Without leaving any way of distinguishing between the faces and the masks.
so actually what I’m saying is that its not a complete transcendence that takes place, but more of a doubling, with one part “journeying” and disassociating from the other part.
Yes.
*****
Notes from today, not so exalted and shamanic.
1. It’s true that I keep wondering how did this happen to ME? although I know several perfectly reasonable and very satisfactory answers. But continuing to ask this question is perhaps the most basic of the effects of Reeducation, according to which anything that happens, you have caused or “attracted” in some way. There are elements of truth to this, of course — one is more or less vulnerable, one can make errors, and so on.
But the point is that one of Reeducation’s main snares is to get people to go round and round in that question. (Reeducation is perfectionistic in that way.) Reeducation’s point is that if it happened, it is going to happen again, so one must find out what was wrong with one to cause it, and this all is just not necessarily the most useful line of questioning for people who are more or less aware and capable.
2. Part of my shock about it all was that the Reeducated depression, the decision about that book, and my discovery of a career passion other than this one coincided. They are all imbricated with each other in various practical senses, of course, but it occurs to me that they are nevertheless possibly unrelated despite coinciding temporally. Thinking of it all in that way enables one to evade circular questioning of a type similar to that indicated in point 1. It is more free.
*
Reeducation. My presenting issues: (1) history of weird, short but traumatic friendships with other women who have some sort of wound and are trying to heal it … with whom I typically made allowances for weirdness because they were officially worse off than I … and I would end up being the one traumatized. (2) the chronic discomfort in my original family, which I thought was due to some flaw in me.
Assessing Reeducator (I liked her): I see that you are enmeshed in a family system and that you fear *extreme* violence. I see that you do well despite this and are quite aware, so I think that all in all you would benefit from psychotherapy.
Me: “Enmeshed in a family system,” that is an interesting concept. I can see it. Fear *extreme* violence, I am glad you see that and can note it in a matter of fact manner as a major issue.
Her: OK, so on to reading M. Scott Peck and seeing the actual Reeducator.
Me: Encouraged and hopeful, reads M. Scott Peck. He says most people lie and don’t try and so on. I say, all right, I will not lie and will try and will give it a real shot.
Reeducator: Well you do not see it, but I see alcoholism, abuse, and neglect in your original family.
Me: Wow. I see what you mean although I would not have said that. I get it. And. I do not feel this but I can see in an abstract way that if those things are true, and I do feel they are, then it means everyone, not just a few “culprits” so to speak, is implicated as an active contributor, at least in some small way, to the whole situation. I am not saying that as a criticism, but just as a description of how the system must necessarily work.
Reeducator: Wow. I am glad you came up with that yourself. Otherwise I would have had to explain it or try to show it to you, and it would have been a lot harder. And. I notice you mention as meaningful, as a singular and amazing event, something a friend’s mother once said to you. What you describe her to have done is to *show you unconditional love.* That this was such an unusual experience for you is telling.
Me: So my background is more problematic than I realize. I see.
SO FAR, SO GOOD — ENOUGH FOR ME TO THINK IT WAS ALL RIGHT. THEN, PROBLEM A:
Reducator: Yes, and since it was easy for you to see all these things, there must be other things that will be harder for you to see.
Me: I don’t think so, not in terms of secrets or facts I don’t remember.
Reeducator. Well. We’ll see. Now for the program.
PROGRAM, PROBLEM B: AND THIS IS THE PROBLEM I STILL HAVE AS A REFLEX, BECAUSE YOU HAD TO PRACTICE THE PROGRAM EACH DAY AND WRITE ABOUT IT EXTENSIVELY.
1. You are too powerful. Be more powerless.
2. You are not sad enough. Grieve.
3. You do not feel deeply enough. React more strongly to small things and become more distraught. *If you do not it will be a sign you have a serious mental illness, requiring drugs and close monitoring, so DO IT.*
4. You do not assign enough blame in the right places. You tend to say, this happened, and in part it just happened, and in part so and so was a bit out of line, and in part I might better have reacted differently. It is too fuzzy. You must ask “what did I do to cause this?”
This was the four point plan one was supposed to make into a habit and which I did make into a habit — and I do it without realizing it, which is how I get into these knots without knowing it.
Actually these four points are four abusive points.
So when I do them, it is self abuse. And abuse makes me dissociative, so I disassociate while doing these points. Then, first, I have to come back from dissociating. When I return, I am somewhat destroyed and do not know why.
That is why these four points must be very consciously dropped. It is important to recognize each of these activities as it kicks in, so as to kick it out before it takes hold.
*
What I used to think before Reeducation (I always used to get up early because I was looking forward to the next day, couldn’t wait): Oh, good! Awake again! I can do more things!
Then, in Reeducation, it became: Oh dear, must I wake up again, and be me again? I want to put it off. No matter what I do today, I will still have to be myself doing the things, so what is the use … I cannot get away from being this terrible person … !
[Being in that state, of course, is what lost me the possibility of continuing to live in N.O., so added to that was oh dear … not only must I be myself as I now am, but I must be myself in the current situation! And I must still do those so called spiritual exercises, which will supposedly cure me of all of this!]
Very disheartening and of course all wrong, but the problem is that so called spiritual practice, those four points. [This Reeducator was just an MSW, mind you, he had no qualifications in spiritual practices.] But those four points were a problem, the problem, because they were a practice.
Voila.
And — related — since this whole episode in my battle with Reeducation started from that comment from the CS — the reason I don’t believe in Al-Anon / CoDA / etc. as prerequisite programs for leaving an abusive relationship is that to leave one such, you have to get strong, whereas these programs are weakening and keep on saying essentially what the abuser does: you’re the flawed one, it’s your fault, you are the one who wanted it, and so on.
Also, it is a fallacy that people get into abusive romantic relationships because they are “addicted” to them. They may live in a culture that is largely abusive and have chosen the least abusive of the abusers to protect them from the worst — that is what people of my mother’s generation RECOMMEND and TEACH, for instance. Or they may have other abusive situations not of their choosing, and that they can’t just leave (my case — a whole abusive situation at work that my X actually helped with, that’s how I got involved with him, not that he wasn’t taking advantage of the situation but still, I hadn’t chosen who my senior faculty would be, had not “sought out abuse” from these people, etc., and am not their only victim.
Finally — it’s sort of like the theory on WWI that it was the war to end all wars. It simply isn’t the case that you can say, I’m going to stay in this one until I am no longer abusable, so this will never happen again. It isn’t under your control because the whole culture supports abuse of women. And you can’t expect yourself to get it right the first time — especially not if you stay in a situation that weakens you by the day. I didn’t leave my X because I’d gotten stronger, but because I’d now gotten so weak that I knew I’d be disabled from working if I got any weaker, so I really couldn’t afford to sacrifice myself for his sake any more.
Sometimes, when the whole world seems abusive and your energy reserves have become severely depleted, it is “the devil you know” that you return to, rather than the devil you don’t. That is how it was with me when I returned to stay with my parents again for a while, after the workplace abuse. I just didn’t have the energy to look for a rental apartment, which I would have to share with others, when just such a situation had turned out very badly for me before (with a very psychologically sadistic housemate and main leasee). And my health had been really, really compromised.
I think that someone might look at this situation from the outside and say, “oh what a silly little cow”, but really, where is this perfectly idealised world, in which things always work out well, for the non-cows?
And it bear to keep in mind that the whole culture — unless one is very, very lucky — does in fact support the abuse of women. One’s choices only look very, very bad in the light of an assumption that this isn’t so — but it IS so.
Also I have just read your top (upper) comment, and I don’t have anything very specific to add, other than a point that both Nietzsche and Freud point to — which is that a sign of health is psychological plasticity, and a sign of diminished health is rigidity.
I think that basically you need to find your own way to expand, practically, upon this theme, and not rely too much on outside assistance, which was, as it were, your original failing.
Perhaps it is possible to get a feeling for situations that are more expansive and allow one to express one’s plasticity, and situations that are the opposite.
Like I have said, the way that I began taking these measurements was via experimentation with saying and doing things that I would not normally say or do. Do deliberately break the pattern of one’s own dour seriousness and earnestness was what worked for me.
But really, you need to find your own way.
For me, it’s just, remember that extreme violence may NOT ensue if I try to limit who I am … and that that is its own form of extreme violence anyway. Just being aware of what that 4 step Reeducative practice IS and that I still slip into it even though I have officially abandoned it as a theory years ago REALLY helps. Plasticity vs. rigidity, yes, that was one of the things I pointed out to Reeducation way back when, but that is one of the things it did not understand and called me “elitist” and an “intellectual snob” for suggesting.
(Honestly, it may be that Reeducation was just mad because I had some basic ideas about psychology and so on that it didn’t.)
On the whole culture supporting the abuse of women, YES. On the devil one knows, yes … although I’d say, the devil one can manage as opposed to those one can’t withstand. Unless money is no object there really are times when there are no truly good choices.
The idea that you must limit who you are — or else extreme violence — is the quintessential dynamic of the superego. That is why my way of breaking free from it was to explicitly disobey some of the minor commands of superego, to see what the results would be.
and of course each act of disobedience produced a weakening of the dogma of superego, that says, “thou must always remain the same”.
That is interesting, re superego … clearly I should have studied more psychology than I have. But yes, the methodology works. I don’t experience them as commands of the superego, or as commands of my own … I experience them as warnings others have given, or requirements they have set. It is actually quite easy to set aside the dicta of Reeducation (now). I see that in these terms, what I went to Reeducation for was to get rid of other internalized dicta. What I got from it was a strengthening of these, for Reeducation claimed they were not internalized but erroneous dicta, but rather “the real me” that I must “accept as a truth I cannot transcend” and a bunch of stuff like this (derived, I suppose, from a weak reading of Alice Miller).