I dislike invasion very intensely, yet I am easily invaded. This became evident in the third grade when I could not handle a classroom bully. My mother realized it was destructive and asked whether I would prefer to home school for the rest of the year. I said yes and experienced a great sense of relief. In the fourth grade I stood up to a bossy friend who many years later wrote a Christmas card saying that this event had changed her life.
The question of invasion kept recurring, however, and it is why I always planned to seek professional advice on it when I could afford this. I ended up in Reeducation. Reeducation, which it took me a long time to understand, was actually a combination of popular psychology/self help and the Twelve Steps. It took itself more seriously than that, however, and I expected it to be more serious than that. The confluence and conflict of these errors created a great problem.
According to Reeducation, my issues about invasion had to be about sexual abuse. Since I must be a sexual abuse victim in denial, my degree of success and happiness in life was false and invalid. Reeducation wanted to hypnotize me and recover my repressed memories. One might say that it was bent upon reconstructing me as a certain kind of victim and that it demanded I develop certain signs of this.
There are more details to recount, of course, and I have posted about other aspects of this episode before. And as we know, this blog exists to raise me up from the ashes of the Reeducative experience. Today I have three things to point out as keys: a) Reeducation’s insistence on an embrace of “powerlessness;” b) the effects of drugs and the excuses made for them; and c) post-traumatic stress syndrome.
ON POWERLESSNESS
ON THE EFFECTS OF DRUGS AND THE EXCUSES MADE FOR THEM
According to Reeducation I was “too powerful” because I had earned a PhD while still young, had a good job, had moved across the country by myself, and was not afraid to explore this new area by myself. All of that had to be false because the sexual abuse victim I really was would not be able to do those things. I needed to drop them all and embrace my victimhood; then I would finally become able to handle invaders.
This was presented in a much more subtle way, of course. The imperative to renounce my life was very depressing. I was the one who requested drugs, and was prescribed a tricyclic antidepressant. This drug was very effective as a pain killer and I can see why it is prescribed for chronic pain. I noticed, for instance, that on it, I could sit for hours in uncomfortable positions and not feel a thing. The drug also caused passivity, fatigue, and severe cognitive impairment. I was told that this was the REAL ME which was finally being revealed through drugs and “therapy.”
I had to be patient, I was told. My concerns about severely impaired functioning at work were dismissed as phantom fears. In vain I showed my Reeducators my contract, indicating to them which parts of it I was not fulfilling. They told me I was only imagining that those parts were important. Not making tenure was one of the best things that happened to me during that period, because it affirmed for me that my own assessment of reality had been correct.
ON POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS
In that era a friend who had studied these matters on her own told me she thought I had caught post-traumatic stress disorder from these experiences. I did not accept this because I thought it was too self indulgent. Post-traumatic stress belonged to veterans and torture victims and I had no right to dramatize myself in this way, I thought.
However, I think she was right. I think that I still have it, although it is less severe. I think I caught it from Reeducation (that is, I do not think Reeducation merely “revealed” it). I think it is “denial” to try to say that what I go through is anything else, or that I go through nothing. Trying to handle it as though it were anything else has never resulted in progress.
I am not saying that I was perfect before Reeducation and I am hardly so unsubtle as to claim Reeducation is the source of every difficulty in [my] life. I am only saying it added significantly to them and that I am sure the way out is to look squarely at the lasting effects of post-traumatic stress rather than to seek other interpretations of the matter.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Sometimes things are clearer if we can put the mechanism of ego aside for a time. When we deal directly with injuries to the body, we do not automatically transport the ego in as a mediating device. We do not tend to say, for instance, “Oh, I hurt my knee. I must think I am really special to demand a bandage for it.” Any claims concerning the needs of the body are rightly considered practical and reasonable. Similarly, in the case of having PTSD, one does best to avoid mingling knowledge of this fact with ego demands. One shouldn’t look for a motivation for having a condition that one cannot help but have. There is nothing here whatsoever for ego to feed from.
True; also interesting how easily one can be moved to censor that.
It’s a cultural thing. Hard to believe now, but for a very long time I tried to adapt to “Western” culture by becoming more narcissistic, only to find that the metaphysics of ego gets in the way of linear and consistent thinking. It’s not for me, but I think it is part of a culture that practices repressive desublimation.
People who are traditionally “successful” seem to be narcissistic like that and I’ve also thought I should become that way, but I don’t WANT to — and it does seem to require a convoluted and distorted way of thinking. Repressive desublimation, yes — I hadn’t thought of the connection, but yes.
These are the things I think of as “white” and “American” and that you call “Western.” In the face of them I feel quite “Asian” although I am of course not! 😉
and Mike appears to be “European” to most Europeans…
Seriously, tho, I think I am no longer sufficiently in touch with that which is white and American to really feel any emotional impact from it nowadays. I find that I am reading and experiencing things quite differently, without the same excruciating sensitivity to various psychological aspects that used to make we wonder if I was an alien.
Yes, they take me for all sorts of things, also — except Asian which I probably am. (I am joking!)
I think I might be in the process of realizing that I AM an alien and seriously embracing this. On this blog, as we know, I am Mayan and I speak from the grave! 😉
What is hard to do is to acknowledge oneself as unimportant, subordinate, although that, in fact, is the existential position of almost everyone. We’re all supposed to strive and succeed, and by god, I, for one, find contemplating that kind of behavior in others tedious beyond belief. And I laugh at any notions that I am anything but a person of modest talents in a crowded world.
My age, partly, but I really believe this.
Or you can be a person of great talents, but many people have great talents.
I have never found destructiveness toward others necessary to my own happiness but it appears that a lot of people do. Reeducation presupposed that and tried to “decenter” it, at the same time as some other form of narcissism was required. I didn’t understand it because I didn’t understand why I should consider myself so important, on the one hand, yet not allow myself authority over my own life, on the other.
This was the big paradox I think Jennifer calls Western and I would call authoritarian generally: you displace yourself onto a low rung some kind of ladder of authority, but consider yourself very important on that rung, and keep looking upward.
It is downright weird but I feel the need to define it so I can see what the presuppositions are of people who presuppose this model of being or want to coerce others to it.
It’s a shame that those who do have to accept a position on lower rungs in a hierachy — these people being the majority — are generally treated so poorly, as a reward for those higher up for “paying their dues”. I think this is the source of all the resentment and feelings of “but aren’t I better than that?” Because generally, most people actually ARE better than how they are treated at the bottom rungs. Above all, they are more fully rounded humans than they are being treated as being.
That is true and the idea that one owes a debt of “dues” is connected to the idea of slavery.
Also, as you say, “To lack power in life is to withdraw into self-hatred, and to generate a toxicity that destroys all happiness and pleasure.”
http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/2010/05/views-of-women.html
Yeah, the dues idea is really insidious. And psychologically speaking, it IS slavery. If you don’t have a right to express an independent personality on its own terms, but have to earn that right, bit by bit (which means that you never do acquire independence, but believe that you are always on the verge of acquiring it), well that is the state of things for most people.
YES, and that is important, and I have a writing career idea for you: write that comment up as an article, and some of your other blog posts. This comment and many others you make are in fact very accurate descriptions of what goes on (but that we are taught to ‘naturalize’). One knows this in a general way from Marxism and so on, but what is interesting about your comments is that they pick up so well on specific examples of it.
Re women structured psychically as men, yes, I mean that actually think of themselves the way men do (along the lines you describe).
But in a way these are kind of esoteric truths, not because they exist in the realm of ether (they do not) but because they are so difficult to see, even when right in front of us. You and I have been discussing these kinds of topics for years, and so we understand each other. The fact that we are also intellectual and self-aware, as well as having had similar experiences (due to our gender, and being underestimated) is in fact what facilitates our ease of communication about these kinds of issues. Others would need to come to a similar understanding only through receiving some hard knocks in the University of Life.
Overall, it is hard for people to get themselves out of the position of needing approval from their authorities. If they were easily able to
1. see that they were reliant upon approval
2. find a way to get out from under that need without suffering ferocious attacks from superego
We would be able to have a much more humane society.
But these two things are the most difficult of all things to do.
And they are both linked to each other. We fear to see that we are slaves because of what this perception would require us to do as the next step towards freedom. We would have to confront our own already formed superego and bring petitions against it as to why we should be “free” to do something different.
But superego never values any argument to do with “freedom”. One can only become free by asserting one form of mastery against another.
The other aspect to be aware of is not being interpellated into a dominance and submission relationship, on the basis of subtle psychological cues. For instance, when somebody implies you are trying to dominate, when you are really only interested in communicating something in a far more open-minded and negotiating manner than is being implied. Or alternatively, the speaker could talk down to you, by implying that you are the kind of person who needs and desires pats on the head. In such instances, you have to really see clearly enough, and have enough will power to ignore these cues and stick only to the facts.
What is actually happening is that a person who is invested in authoritarianism in one way or another is capable of infecting you with their perspectives, via their lizard brain convictions. (You pick up on the cues with the deepest part of you mind, and feel interpellated into different roles, depending on how the authoritarian sees you.) You need to deflect this interpellation like you were deflecting a punch in sparring. You need to realise that it is not friendly, but that it isn’t necessarily consciously intended on the part of the other person either, to interpellate you.
“You need to realise that it is not friendly, but that it isn’t necessarily consciously intended on the part of the other person either, to interpellate you.”
So that, if you deflect them and they are upset and think this needs discussion, you should realize that “discussion” will not help?
I am not sure. My way of thinking is to always ignore the subtext, unless you genuinely are on intimate terms with the person, and care about them. But there is a kind of false intimacy, an institutionally based one, which involves interpellation, and you can tell that it is false because the parties have put in little real effort in order to become acquainted with one another, but simply assume that the other person is on a particular wave-length on the basis of the institutional hierarchy and how that generally functions. So if a person is upset with you for not functioning as they had anticipated — but no genuine intimacy has been built up — then that person has not right to be upset with you. They only have that right if there has been a genuine misunderstanding — ie. one based on the history of the relationship, which has been built up over time, and with the conscious and purposeful investment of both parties energies.
Well I would have thought the latter was the situation but it was perhaps not and this is why I am surprised. Ah, well.
Psychological vampirism is so common — and it mainly practiced by right wingers, those who claim that they are the principle example of not being parasites. The fact is that they are extremely parasitic – most especially on women. They try to draw their psychical energy, whilst giving little or nothing back. Authoritarian left wingers, on the other hand, tend to try to squash the spirit out of anyone whom they deem to have too much of it. It’s not even that they try to appropriate it (steal it) for themselves. They just don’t want to be reminded that there are those who have greater vitality than they do, so it’s crush, crush, crush.
Vitality, that’s it — perhaps it is a comparatively greater degree of vitality this person sees.
It seems to be the source of the problem because vitality itself creates a certain independence of mind, and then those who are busy “paying their dues”, because they think that is the way life works, consider these more vital types to be kind of queue jumping. They don’t realise that there isn’t a queue, except in their own minds, or that the other person is pursuing the meaning of life on an entirely different basis. They think, “this is the queue, and it is defined by misery, and that other person is jumping ahead of me.”
And then that difference in interpretive frameworks is what makes mutual comprehension difficult.
I think there are basically two mutually exclusive frameworks. The first is based on morality and has to do with a felt need to pay one’s dues, which generally leads to accumulating resentment, depreciation of self, and dysphoria, as time wears on. The other framework is based on well-being, and uses that as its measurement. The first approach takes a very cynical perspective on the second one — because it thinks that an orientation towards well-being would be an invitation to laziness, self-indulgence and antisocial attitudes. In fact, this is psychologically incorrect. Self-mastery is one of the very necessary elements for acheiving self-satisfaction. And this need for self-mastery in order to achieve well-being tends to preclude those named negative characteristics.
The second perspective does not understand the first one, either, because it cannot see why anyone would not grab at the chance to achieve self-satisfaction on one’s own terms.
That is more or less what I’ve figured out, although you’ve stated it more clearly.
This was what the conflict with Reeducation was about, of course, and all the conflicts I have are at bottom about that.
I had this conflict as well with my dissertation director! I’ve had it at quite a few important junctures! 😉
Don’t expect these misunderstandings to go away. I think that the two aspects are part of Christian culture and its secular countercurrents. I think what is necessary is NOT to bridge the gap in communication between the two points of views, but to make very sure that they are not bridged. So one can say certain things to try to reassure those who are driven towards safety and conformity. But one should never spill the beans, as it were, by saying what one really thinks. Rather, one must learn to pass invisibly through dangerous currents.
I think that’s exactly right.
My attempts to live on the right side of this post Reeducation are also odd. Lately I’ve had an episode of interpellation to the other and have been trying hard to resist, with the result of having turned the well-being model into a duty. ! 😉