For 2010 I am adopting Undine’s resolutions.
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There is one more thing to say, since there are some weeks in which I spend more time processing what happened the week before than I do participating in further events.
The reason it is hard for me to move ahead after some major form of mistreatment is that mistreatment negates one’s personhood. Then one is not a person, or one has hidden one’s person, and there is nobody to actually undertake that moving ahead until the person comes back.
I spend a lot of time trying to convoke that person to come back but I do it roughly. I say, what? why did you leave? come back, right now! Really, what would work would be to say, all right, the coast is clear, you can come back now. I understand perfectly well why you went away. It was a good idea! But look, the sun is out again, let us have tea.
The point being, in other words: when people get mistreated the useful response is not to mistreat them for having been mistreated or for having reacted to it. And yet I do this to myself constantly. In 2010 it is my intention to let up on that.
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The problem with Reeducation — the fundamental problem I come upon again and again — was its assumption that one was now taking a look at oneself for the first time. It expected resistance to that project, which is why it was so intent upon promoting self doubt. Yet the initial assumption is flawed.
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My meditation for 2010 is to learn not to mistreat myself. In Reeducation we learned to mistrust and mistreat ourselves but that was an error. For me this means that every breath has to be the breath of life.
My realization is about tolerance. Reeducation was about accepting difficult situations and functioning in them. That is very different from noticing the badness of bad situations and realizing one must protect oneself.
I believe that latter strategy is the better one by far. What I have learned today about the first is that that kind of tolerance only leads to enmeshment. And enmeshment steals your soul and keeps you trapped.
And when you find you are too scared or guilty to say no easily to something, even when no is what you want to say and you know it is also the only answer that makes sense, you are enmeshed.
And it is the enmeshment that you must “take responsibility for” because you are the one who is caught. You have to free yourself unilaterally because negotiating a release only ties you in.
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I have theories on why it is the case for me but what interests me for the moment is the fact. Every time I come to Brazil on a medium length working trip I find myself on the telephone to the United States saying: “No, that will not be acceptable, I will not tolerate that.” This is a very good thing about my voyages to Brazil.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
“Every time I come to Brazil on a medium length working trip I find myself on the telephone to the United States saying: ‘No, that will not be acceptable, I will not tolerate that.’ This is a very good thing about my voyages to Brazil.” Oh yes!!
It is so important to clear one’s head somehow. And even if she is not quite “back” yet, you have cleared space for her return— space in which the mind can (and will) play and synthesize. I increasingly feel in my bones the value of disengaging from “these people,” letting “them” just figure it out. Time away is really help for this. But concrete strategies can be pursued in daily life too and indeed must be, as you so often point out in many ways.
Lots of good insights of a breakthrough nature!
The point being, in other words: when people get mistreated the useful response is not to mistreat them for having been mistreated or for having reacted to it.
Of course, to any reasonable human being, this ought not to appear like a radical or revolutionary sloagan. But we are living in a patriarchy, which believes and perpetuates the opposite. Therefore this reasonable statement is a revolutionary slogan.
I find so often in the past people have put themselves at a real disadvantage in relation to me, just by not taking the simple principle stated above to heart.
Supposing I express, let us say from my outlandish (because) feminist perspective that I am really disgusted with a certain person in my sphere of influence:
“X picks his nose and eats it! He crawls around on his belly like a snake and utters ‘I am ill! I am ill!, all the time!”
Ok—the contents of my critique of a particular patriarch are pretty random here, but it is to illustrate my point that what other patriarchs hear, and what they ought to hear, are two entirely different things.
Rather than hearing, “Jennifer is disgusted with this particular patriarch and thinks his behaviour needs adjusting,” they hear “Jennifer is reacting to the power of this particular patriarch. He has some good juju going. Seems he has found a way to control women that we should all emulate!”
So you have patriarchs in the mode of emulation, behaving like borderline personality is a good thing, and very attractive to me, and so on.
No, it really isn’t. And there is no juju in it.
It just isn’t.
Also, the more you can think in terms of forces that do certain things, and the less in terms of morality, the more you will find your ability to deal with things on your own terms.
Instead of thinking, “I was immoral to be weak,” think “something slipped through my guard there, and it was bound to happen sooner or later, given the lack of force that women have, as a group, in society, and given my past injuries that were also caused by an imbalance in forces. ….The people who take advantage of this are ignorant fools, who know absolutely nothing at all. I will regain my force.”
YES to all! We were talking about this last point in real life today – in the case of women, all strategies fail at some point, and it is forces not moral failings of ours – although Reeducation would like the latter, of course.
Like!
It is a moral failing of those who abuse and who insist on viewing others instrumentally. I agree too with the idea of taking self-inventory out of the moral register vis-a-vis oneself and thinking in terms of strategy working well or not so well.
YES … and self inventory is just so TIRING and BORING after a while, and misses the point. Although again, Reeducation would hate that idea.
YES … and self inventory is just so TIRING and BORING after a while, and misses the point. Although again, Reeducation would hate that idea.
One of the more advanced shamanistic techniques I have learned is that if you do not fall for the first bluff or the authoritarian moraliser, he plays himself out in such a way that his authoritative mask slips, and you can see clearly, sometimes for the first time, that he was a one-trick pony — at most having two or three tricks up his sleeve.
The advantage that a shamanistic thinker has is that of not fearing to go very much deeper into the human psyche than the moraliser is capable of going. So a shaman can always go very much deeper into self-awareness and wait for the moralist to play himself out.
Also, what is interesting is that the moralist believes himself very astute. He makes two or three jabs and believes himself to have won an argument. Simply, he has no idea that there are deeper perspectives, and that one can easily take the few jabs on the chin because one’s views and strategies are more extensive than those that he is capable of having.
I do not really have trouble seeing it, though — but with being in systems where that really is the power. It is why I did not get these problems until after age 30, in professordom, with health insurance, etc., that is where the system truly falls into place. So there is seeing and then there is making sure people do not realize you have seen, I think that can be important … and in my case, doing something about it without negotiating.
Good point on how these people are moralists.
I am slightly intoxicated now, from Mike’s party. Yes, of course, seeing is not the answer where direct pressures apply. You can “see” all you like that the jailor is wrong, but you are still in jail. It is another dualist or idealist notion that just on the basis of “seeing” (ie. “intelligence”) one automatically frees oneself from the prison.
That way of thinking is totally wrapped up in moralism, all the way through, ie. “if I have the correct morality, nobody will be able to oppress me anymore!”
It just isn’t true.
Rather, what is possible is to see that one is being oppressed. Perhaps, on the basis of this seeing, one does something about this oppression, or one does not.
AHA so that idea (the truth makes you free in and of itself) is dualistic and moralizing too, of course!
Yes, the truth does not make us free. It merely gives us knowledge. There is a second step, then, to decide if we can act upon this knowledge, and if we want to, and so on. Many of us are simply not free to act on what we know. For instance, I may know that I am not happy in my present job, but I still need the income it supplies. So I am not free to adjust my circumstances in relation to my knowledge.
I think there many people subscribe to various modes of wishful thinking that we can make reality different by being truthful to ourselves — but that is generally a way of blaming the victim.
“Why aren’t you living in better circumstances? It’s because you’re lying to yourself!”
Not very funny.
Regarding what I said before, about allowing yourself to feel the pain of your experience, it is linked to the outcome that you no longer try to save others from their ideological faults. When you allow yourself to feel all of the pain they have caused you, you realise that they cannot be redeemed, and so you stop trying. It is a kind of knowledge of the truth — that they and you are very different people. Importantly, though, it breaks the emotional link connecting you with them. The bridge between you and them is exploded, and they cannot reach you anymore. You just have to allow the pain that you experience to do that job.
http://neuronarrative.wordpress.com/2009/12/29/power-makes-the-hypocrite-bolder-and-smugger/
I am thinking that sometimes, when a situation is already full of thanatos, embracing thanatos vis-a-vis the situation is a good thing to do. It produces disintegration of the current consciousness (vis-a-vis that situation). You let it go — you are not fighting against eros, to erect something that is on its death bed. You go with the flow, and let it die.
I think what rude and hostile people do, when there are still redeeming aspects in them, is to get our eros to fight against our thanatos, to keep them alive in our heads. We so want to “believe” in them, because part of our own self-image is invested in the relationship. So we keep resurrecting ourselves in the relationship, when we need to let it die.
Embracing thanatos purely, instead of fighting it off with eros, puts us in a world of pain and loneliness. But then our sense of the relationship finally dies — and we are free of it. More importantly, we are also free of the inwards psycho-social dynamics that governed the death-bound relationship, to begin with.
Yes — this is the point of it (of actually feeling the pain).
That was to the first comment — this is a good point too, about not investing eros in someone else’s thanatos — etc.
That was to the first comment — this is a good point too, about not investing eros in someone else’s thanatos — etc.
Perhaps this is why women are misunderstood as masochists, — because we tolerate too much, thinking that it is as much as we can expect to have our ethos mixed up with someone else’s thanatos. But actually, we exercise our toleration with a certain feeling of contempt, or subtle superiority. Thus we compromise our own standards by relaxing them for the other.
Freudian slip — I meant eros not ethos.
But in a way….
I sort of like that slip! Also good point on women being SEEN as masochistic for this reason.
Power making hypocrites more smug, AHA but we know this!!! Just look at any corrupt member of your university’s administration…
Last night (and the whole of yesterday) I was really hungover. I therefore consumed a lot of caffeine to wake me up, which gave the unfortunate effect of speeding up and slowing down at the same time (ie. it didn’t overcome my hangover).
I felt really very bad. But actually I am used to functioning very efficiently within extreme modes, due to my sparring training.
Anyway, I went through and “did things” — minor things really. I randomly picked some sections from my memoir as sample readings. I got a really weird impression of myself from those, and I consequently wrote another short reflection. I had forgotten that I wanted to write this sort of reflection, because I forgot that I was never writing the memoir as myself, but as my previous self. Whereas I suspect most women would realise this, I do not think that many men would perceive so readily the artistry and deliberateness that went into that approach. I was in danger of forgetting it myself. To conflate myself with my previous self would not be desirable, or truthful.
Later that night, I confronted my future, and realised that I am 100 percent committed to trying to make Break Free work. I realise that if it was an easy task, I wouldn’t desire it so much. I desire it because it is very difficult.
Break Free, excellent.
My Brazilian friend is convinced I should start writing seriously.
You should.
She means a novel.