Resentment

Hola Mi Gente,
I didn’t watch the reality show spectacle called the presidential debate last night, but looking over the transcripts, I came to the following observation:

If you substitute “me” for every time Hillary Clinton said “American,” during last night’s pathetic debate, she would sound exactly like Donald Trump. That’s because for the Clintons “America” means what’s in their best interests and how they can use public service for personal gain.

Resentment and Forgiveness

We forgive not as an act we perform for others, but rather something we do for ourselves in order to move on and grow.

Imagine someone calls you an self-centered asshole. Immediately, you start thinking. How dare they call me a self-centered asshole? They have no right to call me a self-centered asshole! How rude to call me a self-centered asshole! I’ll get them back for calling me a self-centered asshole. And then you suddenly realize (if you’re even a little awake) that you have allowed them to call you a self-centered asshole another four times.

Let me wait a second to see if this sinks in... got it?… Okay.

Every time you remember what they said, you are reliving -- allowing them -- to call you a self-centered asshole yet again and that’s a major problem.

If someone calls you a self-centered asshole and you let it go (sooner rather than later), then it ceases to bother you. There is the solution.

The problem here being why allow someone to live rent-free inside our heads? Why allow other people to control our inner happiness?

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization...

Transference

Hola mi Gente,

The big news today is the Cleveland Cavaliers, led by LeBron James, won the NBA championship after being down three games to one -- the first team to overcome those odds. LeBron James is often the public’s fave player to hate, so I’m glad he won another championship. If he stays healthy, he will be considered one of the greatest players to play the game.

The Map is Not the Territory

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

-- Simone Weil

Yesterday, I briefly mentioned the concept of transference. Transference is one of the cornerstones of psychoanalytic theory. Literally whole libraries could be filled on what has been written on transference, so it would be hard to give a simple and straightforward definition without falling into the trap of oversimplification. But that’s never stopped me before right? The way I was taught transference is quite simple: transference is a map you create out of your experiences in order to understand and navigate your world. What happens is that sometimes we use old maps that haven’t adapted to the current reality. This, in turn, creates pain.

Transference is important when attempting to understand online behavior and relationships because the potential for transference is huge. One year, I was able to organize an online group for a weekend in NYC. Over 100 people participated. People came from as far as the Artic Circle, California, Puerto Rico, Florida, Hawaii, and Texas, just to name a few places. We had a great time. However, there was a small group (that didn’t participate) that began accusing me of the most ridiculous things. I was shocked when it was brought to my attention that at least one or two people were spreading the rumor that I was hypnotizing people! LOL

::blank stare::

Simply put, transference is the tendency to recreate in our current relationships the patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that were formed early in our life, most importantly in the relationships with our parents and siblings when we were children.

Let’s do a quick exercise:

Think of your significant other, or your romantic relationship, or even a close friend. Think about some important personality characteristic of that individual -- a characteristic or trait in that person to which you have a strong positive or negative emotional reaction. Now think about one of your parents, or perhaps a brother or sister. Do they have that very same characteristic, and are the reactions you have to that aspect of them similar to those concerning your current close relationship?

I don’t need an answer... it’s an exercise. I’m just trying to better illustrate a concept.

I’m no Freudian (who is?) and one of the more salient critiques of psychoanalytic theory is that it places too much emphasis on the effects of childhood and family dynamics on the evolution of one’s personality. I happen to agree with that critique. Certainly, one’s personality continues to develop and change throughout the lifespan as a result of our friends, lovers, and new life experiences. It is not solely determined by how our parents raised us as children.

While we are not simply the products of our families, it still stands that our parents (or other parental figures) and siblings did indeed spend a great deal of time with us during our formative years, when our minds were young, impressionable, and eager to learn about how we humans relate to each other. Based on our relationships with them, we created maps or templates in our mind (schemas) about what makes up the expected ways in which people will behave in relationships. Modern research seems to bolster this claim: Our neurology is like a feedback loop and there is a strong “neurological imprint” created in early childhood. In other words, how we are nurtured (or not) as children has a direct impact on how our brains are formed, which synaptic connections are created, and in that way we are literally created. 

During childhood we formed basic impressions about the kinds of needs, wishes, fears, and hopes that shape relationships and our image of ourselves in those early relationships. Often we don’t realize these are our maps. They may be very different than the maps taking shape in the heads of other people. I had a good childhood friend of mine who was Irish-American and he was shocked and even surprised at how demonstrative my family was emotionally. He came from a family that rarely indulged in public shows of affection. I’m not pointing out this to say his was a better or lesser upbringing, but to articulate how his relationships expectations would be different from mine.

As we mature we carry these maps with us and, operating at an unconscious level, they influence the choices we make and the kinds of people we get involved with, as well as how we experience those people. For example, think of your first boyfriend or girlfriend, and how similar that person might have been to one of your parents (usually your opposite sex parent). This dynamic is often expressed in popular culture. For example, there was the song that claimed the man wanted to marry someone just like their mother. We often attach parental-like labels to our loved ones.

These maps also shape how people select and experience things in their lives that are inanimate, but are so integral to our needs and emotions that we want to instill them with human characteristics. As humans we can’t help but personify the objects of the world around us. It’s part of our neurobiology. We use our internal maps to humanize and shape our experience of cars, houses, pets, and yes, computers.

I mention computers because they can be a basic object for transference in that they are more likely to be perceived as human-like. Unlike TV, movies, or books, computers are highly interactive. We ask them to do something and they do it -- at least, they usually do. With the new generation of highly visual, auditory, and customizable operating systems and software applications, we also have a machine that can be tailored to reflect what we expect in a companion.

Computers, especially when used to engage social networking sites, are especially enticing objects for transference because they are vaguely human in that we believe there are humans at the other end attached to the computer. We develop relationships with people, read their “text,” and then create an image of those individuals. However, without ever meeting these people, where do we fill in the gaps? We fill it in from our experiences -- especially our early childhood experiences and subsequent important experiences. In short, we transfer our inner maps onto the text we’re reading.

One of the first things you discover as a therapist is that if you maintain a relatively neutral posture with your clients, the clients would begin to shape their perceptions of the analyst according to their internal models from childhood. When faced with an indistinct, seemingly malleable “other,” we automatically fall back on our familiar mental maps about relationships and use those maps to shape how we think, feel, and react to this new, somewhat unclear relationship. This whole process often is unconscious. We are so used to these old maps that they automatically start to mold our perceptions and actions without our really thinking about it.

If you don’t know me except for what I divulge here, then how can you attach any personality characteristic to me? Sure, there are actions that take place via cyber space: people meet, have sex and sometimes play out those confrontations in very ugly, humiliating, and public ways. But I am not one of those individuals. My personal life is mostly outside of my readers’ knowledge, so all that anyone knows about me is what I choose to write about. Anything else a reader might surmise is for the most part made up.

According to people I have never met, I am a hypnotist, a racist, a sexist, and a pedophile (there are more, it’s hard to keep track). But are any of these labels true? No one here can attest to the validity of any of these labels. In fact, these recriminations are actually projections -- transferences -- of the people attaching these characteristics. In effect, the individuals who go through these extremes are merely expressing their own experiences as filtered through their transference issues.

In this way, a woman suffering from low self-esteem who was physically or sexually abused by an alcoholic father may react disproportionately to something I might write about sex. To her, if I am advocating for more liberal means of sex education for young children, I am a pedophile. There are no corresponding facts to corroborate her hysteria, except for the action taking place in her mind. Furthermore, transference can be used to understand how persons play out there sexual lives in often humiliating and (online) public ways. How many of us have witnessed the consequences of a real life meeting gone awry and the subsequent social media posts detailing those meetings?

Or, if I write about racism, transference may compel a reader to call me a racist. The same can be said about anything any one of us write. When you attach a personality characteristic to someone you’ve never met, you’re actually saying more about your own experiences than anything else.

Those who demonstrate the most transference are the first to label it as “psychobabble.” However, I would submit that transference is important for understanding online relationships because the experience of the “other” person often is limited to text, there is a tendency for the user to project a variety of wishes, fantasies, and fears onto the figure at the other end.

Truth or reality is avoided when it is painful. Our old maps may seem comfortable, but if we’re going to be happy, we must revise our maps in order to overcome pain or dysfunction.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

White Blindness

Hola mi Gente,

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton, who has never supported the $15 per hour wage movement, used one the movement’s biggest victories as a photo op. No shame whatsoever. 

* * *

Blindness

Just because a man lacks the use of his eyes doesn't mean he lacks vision.

 -- Steveland Wonder

Some of my readers will recognize the title of today’s essay, which is lifted from Blindness, a novel by Portuguese author José Saramago. The novel was made into a film (click here) that was released a few years ago. Blindness is the story of a city hit by an epidemic of “white blindness” that spares no one. Authorities round up the blind and incarcerate them in an empty mental hospital, where a criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations, and assaulting women. The story is a brilliant allegory of the loss of the ability to envision and confusion, and a stunning revelation of the horrors of the modern world. However, while Blindness captures the reader with its commanding rendering of humankind’s worst appetites and weaknesses, it’s also an exposition on humankind’s ultimately indomitable spirit.

Sounds like an election year to me! LOL!

My topic today is difficult to explain, though it is certainly something with which we are all familiar. The difficulty lies in the fact that it’s so obvious. There are, it seems to me, vast swaths of our lives that are missing from our awareness. We share a similar experience with the characters in Blindness: we all suffer from blind spots, literally and figuratively. The difference being that our blindness isn’t caused by an unknown plague, but is due internally to causes deep within our consciousness and externally by a vast media apparatus that manufactures consent. Our failure to experience fully crucial aspects of our reality results in gaps in the beam of awareness that defines our world from moment to moment.

My topic then is how we do not notice. In other words, my topic is about the pieces missing from our awareness – the holes in the fabric of our attention.

I’ve always been fascinated by the physical blind spot. I find it an apt metaphor for our inability to see things as they are in reality. In physiology, the blind spot is the gap in our field of vision that results from the way the eye is constructed. At the back of each eyeball is a point where the optic nerve, which runs to the brain, attaches to the retina. The point lacks the cells that register light coming into the eye. Therefore, at this one point there is a gap in the information transmitted to the brain. The blind spot registers nothing.

Usually, what is missed by one eye is compensated for by overlapping vision in the other. That’s why we don’t notice our blind spots. But when one eye is closed, the blind spot emerges. Seeing the blind spot is fascinating to me because it offered a concrete example of a more psychological parallel. As an example, many adults of alcoholics relate that in their families there were clear “rules.” One being that there is nothing wrong and the other was “Don’t tell anyone.” Families in the grips of addiction are extremely secretive; no one must talk of the monster that lurks in full view. These tacit rules teach us something -- it teaches us to create a psychological blind spot. Moreover, it’s not just families of alcoholics, I sense that there are many things kept hidden in families -- the shameful secrets, the unspoken failures. 

In some ways, this type of blindness is a defense mechanism. Our psyches need protection from the full onslaught of a cruel reality. This form of personal self-deception helps defend us from unnecessary trauma or psychological pain. However, when it becomes a societal pattern it serves to blind us to inequality and social injustice. 

One of the cruelties we inflict upon ourselves as a society is by limiting the boundaries of the possible. In a society in which the media is controlled by perhaps four or five corporations, the national dialog is seen mostly through the prism of capitalism. Anything beneficial to corporations is deemed possible and good, but benefits to the 99% of the population, issues such as free higher education or healthcare as a human right, are seen as ideological nonsense -- or “unicorns and rainbows” as supporters of neoliberal candidate, Hillary Clinton, like to put it.

As I look around these days, I see much in the way of blindness. We all welcome blindness: we don’t want to face the harsh realities of a politics bought and paid for by the power elite, so we turn our attention away and buy things or watch “reality” shows on television. We don’t like the tension of political reality, so we step away and ignore those inner tensions that exist anyway. Unfortunately, those tensions don’t go away, they fester in our bodies and we either try to feed them (obesity) or starve them (anorexia), but try as we might, the plague of blindness persists.

Not all dialogs are pleasant, or even polite. However, dialog we must if we’re going to emerge from our collective blindness. We must awaken to a coherent vision of the kind of society we desire or condemn ourselves to stumble in our blindness as slaves in a society created by those who would rob us of our very humanity.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Sunday Sermon [Defensiveness]

¡Hola! Everybody…
I liked the way it was in high school when you just simply asked someone to be yours. It was either a “yes” or a “no,” and that was that. No ambiguity, there it was in stark black and white:

Boyfriend/ Girlfriend

“She’s my girlfriend.”

“He’s my boyfriend.”

LOL!

She called to tell me she was coming and that was that. I have to love her tenacity. As I begin to write this, she’s sleeping, but I’m up, so, like, who’s yo daddy, now?!! LOL

I thought it was Monday…

* * *

-=[ Defensiveness ]=-

I learned a valuable lesson when I took to heart (and integrated) the following advice:

If it bothers you that much, then there’s something there you need to look at more honestly.

I wanted to defend against that advice because (goddammit!) there are exceptions to the rule!

I have since learned that even when you feel justified, it is always best to look honestly at whatever issue is renting space in your head. It could be that there’s nothing there. On the other hand, it could be that perhaps you’re annoyed because there’s an element of truth.

Sometimes…

U believe what’s important is that energy that raises the need to be defensive about anything. As soon as we go there, we’ve aligned ourselves with delusion. We’re grasping at castles in the air. In Buddhism, attachment to this notion of “me” is considered the most profound of all suffering. And it is this attachment that often causes us to defend. We will fight to the bitter end to defend who “we” are.

But who are you, really?

::blank stare::

Fear compels us to put up our defenses. It gives us the illusion that we are safe, hidden here behind all the armor. But genuine safety occurs only when you lay your defenses down. Living openly is to know true peace and safety. This is joy… Christians call this state of mind grace, and spiritual traditions from many cultures throughout history have called this by many names.

To defend your self must be frightening, isn’t it? I mean, what if you’re… wrong!

OMIGAWD!

Defense comes from fear, and every time you increase your defenses, you increase your fear. You walk around thinking it offers safety and all it does is it makes you more anxious, and more depressed. It’s like Microsoft always having to pull out patches because it refuses to open up its source language. Yet, all open-source software is light years ahead of Microsoft in terms of security!

I just thought of that analogy! Dang! LOL

Defenses are the fool’s gold of those mad with the need to defend themselves. In actuality, if you want safety, peace of mind, and boundless joy, all you have to do is drop the bullshit defenses. Think of how much more energy you will be able to spend on creative shit when you stop defending your bullshit.

Moreover, believe me: most of the shit you’re defending is bullshit, but you will defend it to the very end. Or maybe not. Perhaps when you’re old and wrinkly, you’ll finally get it. I hope you get it before then.

If you want truth and certainty, as well as a sense of purpose al that is required is that you drop the defenses. Perhaps there is some truth that you’re spoiled, self-centered, and a terrible and inconsiderate lover!

So what?!! Welcome to the real world, Brainiac, we’re all imperfect up in here, though we spend a lot of time and energy denying it.

I like the way put it down south: you can put lipstick on a pig but… LOL!

You create the world you live in through your mental grasping. We create all these stories to defend our sense of self, but that’s all a lie, and you must know this somewhere deep inside. Want to know why people create fantasy lives on the internet? One of the major reasons is that their defending themselves from some irrational fear. They are mad with fear.

The good thing is that your defenses will not work… ever. You will be exposed… always. But you’re not in danger, sweetie, you never were. You have need for the defenses. When you truly recognize that you are safe, the obstacles to your happiness – your defenses – will disappear.

Now, I have to pay attention to the Kitten and go to the beach…

Love,

Eddie