Reader Tit for Tat asked me what I’d like to change about myself. I’d like to start this series of posts by discussing something that I already mostly managed to change.
I’ve always suffered from intense levels of anxiety. In the midst of happiest moments, I’d find opportunities to skewer myself with worries and doubts. I can create worst-case scenarios out of nothing like I’m getting paid to do it.
Once, I was working on my research at the library. As I was photocopying an article, I imagined N saying something really vile to me. He’d never said anything like that and there was no reason for me to imagine this utterly improbable situation. In my fantasy, I responded to him. He said something even more offensive in return. The situation escalated into a horrible fight.
I was so hurt and traumatized that I burst into tears right in the library. Other patrons saw me shaking and sobbing and rushed over to offer assistance. Of course, I couldn’t explain to them that I was so distraught over a completely imaginary situation.
This wasn’t an isolated occurrence. I kept what-iffing myself into really harsh depressive periods.
People who suffer from intense levels of anxiety often deal with it by engineering the situations that terrify them. This affords them some degree of control over their anxieties. Actually living through a traumatic moment is easier than waiting for it to happen. So if you are terrified of rejection, you will do all you can to provoke your partner into dumping you. If you are scared of getting sick, you will sabotage your health. If you are afraid of unemployment, you’ll make sure you suck during job interviews. When the worst-case scenario really comes to pass, the anxiety-ridden individual experiences a momentary relief because his or her bleak worldview is confirmed.
A moment came when I couldn’t take living with anxiety any longer, so I set out to combat it. The very first step in this battle is always to recognize that anxiety comes only and exclusively from within. The external events don’t bring it into existence. You do.
Here are some activities that have been useful to me in my fight against anxiety:
1. Remove highly anxious friends and acquaintances from your life and surround yourself with calm, secure people.
2. Stop fixating on the future. Whenever images of future disasters start crowding in on your mind, do something that brings you back to the present moment. It helps to have an object (a toy, a souvenir, a small book) that you can touch during such moments and that will bring you back into the present. I used a napkin from my favorite coffee-shop to ground myself in the present, for example.
3. When an anxious moment assaults you, stop what you are doing, close your eyes, clear your mind, and breathe in deep for 5 minutes.
Of course, these are all just cosmetic measures. To get rid of anxiety for good, you need to find its roots. Remember that the first 3 years of our lives are the time where we form our sense of security in the world. Or we don’t. That’s where you need to go to find the root of your anxiety.
These psychological methods are, of course, not the only way of resolving issues of anxiety. In my next post on this subject, I will share with you how religion can be used for this purpose. Obviously, that method will only work for people who are religious.
Clarissa's Blog 
People I need to remove: my parents, all freshmen, all junior faculty, all instructors, and all first year graduate students.
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…also, all recent arrivals from countries where the normal form of interaction is not to talk about the weather or football or something but about how depressed/unhappy one is and how there will never be a solution for the problems. Countries and states where complaining is a sport as opposed to articulation of a problem to be solved.
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You are definitely on the right path here. This is precisely why I flee the company of my compatriots like the plague. I can’t listen to how everything is oh, so horrible any more.
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I like the way you have changed/are changing things in your life. It takes some steely resolve but it definately can be done. Im working the process myself, all the time. 🙂
I have a quote I put up on my daughters wall in her bedroom that will hopefully help her not have too many things to change.
“First we make our habits, then our habits make us”
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Same here. In my culture, complaining is the norm of social interactions. It took me a great while to rid myself of this habit, because in the US (at least in my circles) nobody cares to hear about your problems.
My mother always says “If you feel that everything is great in your life, put a pebble in your shoe to botther you.” This shows you that the culture I grew up in is such that people don’t believe in happiness and contentment, at least not as something that can last. If you experience them, you’d better be preparedfor them to end soon and tragically, because the natural state of things is that where some suffering is inevitable.
I am a very high-strung and anxious person. It proves useful in the sense that it makes me very driven at work, but on the personal front I am no fun because I constantly have something I worry about. My husband is the opposite, extremely calm. He actually drives me crazy by how he never worries about anything. He says “You worry enough for both of us.”
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GMP: I also have a very calm non-anxious husband and what really helps is to press myself against him and let waves of his calmness to wash over me. It really works.
I also used to think that worrying somehow repels bad luck. Like if you enjoy existence, you will be punished for that by misfortune. Very self-destructive.
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It’s not that nobody cares to hear about your problems: many Americans are chronic complainers and feel that it is a way to ward off bad luck.
In my case it is that I, personally, am traumatized from birth and before birth from hearing about how we were going to be on the street tomorrow, the house was going to fall down, my
father would lose his job, my parents could not afford me, I did not have the right personality to calm my mother, etc.
So, I feel it is my duty to calm suffering people and I even feel
that if I can help in this way, my father (that is, I) will be able to keep my job and the house will not fall down.
Therefore, I’m fine with talking problems through with people
who actually want to find solutions. But spending time as an
ear for recreational complaining makes me very anxious.
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I identify with your story completely. Completely. What’s positive is that you already have this very high level of awareness as to where the problem comes from and what situations intensify it and that’s huge.
You really help people (namely, me) with your blog. Especially the posts on dealing with negativity in academia. This means you’ve already warded off tons of bad luck in this way. 🙂
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Because of I often am unable to escape the negetivity of people around me (my co-workers are awesome, but sometimes students are not) I go within myself. If I can’t get my brain to stop thinking of the horrible scenarios I just start breathing. But rather than just breath, I think “breath in, breath out” as big as I can and allow it to fill up my mind. Not sure if that totally makes sense, but it works well for me.
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I think it’s a brilliant strategy.
Nice to have you here, Rachel.
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Thank you :). And thank you for following me, I think that’s really great of you.
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I’ve been suffering from acute anxiety for several months. I have found meditation helps a lot, along with therapy and limiting contact with certain stressful situations. Also, reading posts like this on Clarissa’s blog is a great help.
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Meditation is really good for those who are capable of doing it.
Also, I find that if I manage to drag myself back to my research that really helps.
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I panic and procrastinate when research looms.
Then I get to doing it and I feel really good and don’t really want to stop. When it’s over I feel satisfyingly enervated.
The mysteries of the human mind.
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Get regular massage. It directly affects your central nervous system and helps you destress which in turn decreases levels of anxiety. 🙂
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Yes, massage is definitely a fantastic thing. I attribute my success at the campus visit that landed me my current job to the fact that I got a really great massage right before meeting with the search committee.
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I have anxiety too. Getting out of Montana was a part of getting my anxiety down, because there were horrible people there who did horrible things to my blood pressure and anxiety (to the point where I ended up in the hospital once) and I’m coping much better in Victoria now. I also have been making an effort to eat better, go on a walk at least once a day.
I wish I had the guts to cut away *all* of the people who cause me anxiety, but I anticipate that by the time grad school comes around, I will no longer have to deal with any of them. 🙂
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I’ve realized that my anxiety manifests in psychosomatic ways: when I was young, it was the proverbial knot in the stomach, nausea, I couldn’t eat. The last iteration of this has been becoming hypochondriac. It happened when I defended my dissertation, got married and moved to a new city with the husband I had been dating for 11 months in July 2007. The hypochondria lasted for about a year (I think I was convinced I had breast cancer and lymphoma, plus something else). For me, the solution is first to identify how is the anxiety manifesting, and when I realize it, it’s easier to manage.
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My anxiety is about boundary invasions. I was raised to let other people use my time, mind, and to some extent body for whatever they needed – that was my job, how I was earning my keep. My Deep Issue is, if I had been born with a different personality I might have been able to calm my mother’s anxiety, but since birth it was evident I did not have that personality, so I need to be someone else.
The result is that I am a very private person and I am somewhat allergic to caretaking of any kind; I feel guilty about not being moved by pity and about not agreeing with just everyone, but at the same time I really feel I have paid my dues already.
Manipulative and passive aggressive behavior cause me anxiety because I feel I must fight the perpetrator for my life. I would be totally capable of killing them or of locking myself into a closet to hide from them. During much of my life I simply avoided these situations – it’s the reason I’d like a job in an R1, not so many freshmen and instructors to deal with, more time to do research alone, where I feel safe – but in the last 12-15 years that has not been possible so I have had to just deal with it.
Meditation is good but I have to get out of town to be able to do it because the closest places I feel safe enough are Houston and New Orleans. I have not found it easy to find a therapist who does not want to just pound down drugs. Changing my self concept, allowing myself to be that independent and intellectual type of person that was so unacceptable to my family when I was little, really is the only true fix.
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“My anxiety is about boundary invasions. I was raised to let other people use my time, mind, and to some extent body for whatever they needed – that was my job, how I was earning my keep. My Deep Issue is, if I had been born with a different personality I might have been able to calm my mother’s anxiety, but since birth it was evident I did not have that personality, so I need to be someone else.
The result is that I am a very private person and I am somewhat allergic to caretaking of any kind; I feel guilty about not being moved by pity and about not agreeing with just everyone, but at the same time I really feel I have paid my dues already.”
-Now I really feel like you are me. I’m coming completely from the same place. 😦
“Changing my self concept, allowing myself to be that independent and intellectual type of person that was so unacceptable to my family when I was little, really is the only true fix.”
-Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. This was why I said in the post that any remedy that isn’t based on early childhood issues will just be cosmetic. Meditation and similar things help to MANAGE the issue. But they don’t extirpate the roots.
I love my blog because there are such highly self-aware intelligent people visiting it. I’d have hated if in response to this post I’d gotten, “Oh, you are going to be fine” and “Oh, you are so wonderful.” Like many other bloggers do.
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P.S. *Realizing* it is anxiety helps. I’ve discovered that telling someone “I am suffering from anxiety, and yoga is no longer helping enough” is interpreted to mean “I enjoy controlled substances and I am looking for an excuse to be prescribed them.”
So, I spent a long time saying I did not suffer from anxiety because I wanted to be taken seriously. Also, I found the assumption that I “must be drug seeking” if I mentioned the word anxiety to be really bad for me (it’s one of those boundary invasions, manipulations, and passive aggressive behaviors that make my anxiety worse) so I would not say it because I knew that would bring on behaviors from others that would make me feel and perhaps actually get worse.
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“Meditation and similar things help to MANAGE the issue. But they don’t extirpate the roots.”
-Exactly. But I have found that many Americans, at least, are not interested in extirpating the roots, and many practitioners are against it / feel it is impossible / feel that to try it is just to complain and “justify your dysfunction.”
This is such complete and utter B.S. it takes my breath away, and/but I think it has to do with political and religious attitudes in addition to the propaganda from the “healthcare” industries.
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“This is such complete and utter B.S. it takes my breath away, and/but I think it has to do with political and religious attitudes in addition to the propaganda from the “healthcare” industries.”
-Finally, somebody who agrees with me on this! There is an entire machine in place aimed at keeping people from finding the roots of their issues. Permanently anxiety-ridden folks are easy to manipulate, their fears can be easily exploited, they can be counted on not to rebel or defend their rights (too much), and they are permanent paying customers for therapists and drug companies.
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My issue is one of extreme rage — not anxiety per se. If one must consider the foundational issue, the one that may have developed before the age of three, then rage is it. Actually, frustration about communication and not being taken seriously is it. Perhaps I found at that age that I was smarter than my parents? At least, I required communication that was more straight-forward and less vacillating and deceptive than they were prepared to give.
When my rage reached its height, due to its severe repression and being bottled up until my mid twenties, I caught sight of it at last, and realised I had something akin to an explosive device under my skin that had to be detonated effectively without me destroying myself. That was when I alighted upon the idea that I could destroy other people with it. I joined the army. The solution was well-intentioned, but I wasn’t suited to the army due to my low attention span. My visual memory is very poor indeed, especially when fatigued.
Anyway, I do martial arts now and have a lifestyle that affords me a high degree of independence. I’m not a hostile person — so long as I can vent my energy by joking around. However, if this safety valve of joking gets stopped up for long periods of time, the situation could become very dangerous again. Fortunately, my husband has the same character structure and is a committed joker.
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Rage, me, too, anxiety is about not managing it. Rage is about guilt tripping, manipulation, passive aggression, and false accusations.
I create anxiety for myself in two ways:
a) trying to adhere to standard advice that is not actually right for my situation; this feels dangerous because it should, I really am going down the wrong path and out to notice;
b) mentally yelling at myself – saying to myself the things that were said when I was a child.
What is shocking about (b) is that I do not hear what I am telling myself. I only start to feel horrible. If I can unfreeze my brain enough to talk, and have someone sympathetic to talk to, I can start to articulate what it is I am trying to tell myself. The irrationality and violence of it shock me every time – but at some level, it appears, I am telling myself these things constantly.
Originally I had thought psychotherapy would help untie the knot of guilt and rage I had. What it wanted to do, though, was (1) emphasize these, redefine them as essential character traits, and (2) then, teach me to repress them. The result of this effort was that I caught anxiety, so now I have anxiety which covers guilt and rage which covers fear.
The fear-guilt-rage is about my mother: I have to keep her alive if I am to stay alive, but what I must do to keep her alive will kill me. So I am constantly walking around making this choice: everything I do to live is something which kills my poor mother, yet I must keep her alive so I can live.
It is a recipe for anxiety and it is why I need psychoanalysis. But we do not have psychoanalysis where I live, so I blog.
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Hmmm. I don’t think psychotherapy will help, as in terms of its deep structures it is the philosophy of the ascetic priest — that is, it tends to have a deeply negative and pessimistic view about “human nature”, much akin to the Christian doctrine of “original sin”. Of course, a lot depends on the individual practitioner.
I am currently reading one of the classical psychoanalytic tomes, which is resting at the moment in the toilet area. I read a bit whenever it goes in. Some of it seems wise — like the suggestion that one can recover parts of the ego that had become sectioned off during childhood through the loss of ego during orgasm (the solution of losing one’s ego to regain it is shamanistic). Other stuff is patently mad, like the idea that asthmatics have an inability to separate from their mothers.
Generally, I think human language does not help us to untie any knots, but rather ties us into more knots — because language is dense, whereas ego loss is loosening.
Maybe you could try what I have recently done and get a blood pressure measurement device. I find that it works really counter-intuitively. If I try to make myself calm, I only succeed in raising my blood pressure substantially. However, if I allow myself to think the thoughts I actually have — which are generally those of rage — my whole system calms down and my blood pressure becomes astonishingly low (117/75, last night, upon pondering whom I would like to kill).
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“Generally, I think human language does not help us to untie any knots, but rather ties us into more knots — because language is dense, whereas ego loss is loosening.”
This reminds me of a TED talk I saw a while ago, by a brain surgeon/researcher who suffered a stroke. She loved the feeling, the loss of ego and the one-ness with everything…it all had something to do with different parts of the brain talking to each other (in her particular medical case anyway).
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My blood pressure is always 110/70, or 110/65 if I’m working out. If I allow myself to think the thoughts I actually have, life is easier, yes.
Language: just came from dinner with a colleague who revealed they’ve always felt their boundaries were
constantly trampled upon in this department. This named
the issue for me – I’d have said, I hadn’t been strong
enough to protect myself. Note the difference: my colleague
discussed it as a real situation that we had all undergone;
I had thought of it as something I suffered due to being
defective. Hirs is the more powerful way of thinking about
it so I do actually think language helps.
I think you’re right about the ascetic priest (this is
something you’ve pointed out before). It is why, ultimately,
I prefer to work on myself – heretical though it is 😉
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“trying to adhere to standard advice that is not actually right for my situation”
-You are very good at seeing that advice for what it is – an attempt to undermine and manipulate you. I think that is very valuable. I find it extremely difficult to see through such manipulations. I tend to take absolutely everything at face value and it never even occurs to me that some people might want to sabotage me on purpose. And it’s weird how this works because when it’s people from my own culture, I catch them at such attempts of manipulation immediately. It’s people from other cultures that I have a much more difficult time reading.
“Originally I had thought psychotherapy would help untie the knot of guilt and rage I had. What it wanted to do, though, was (1) emphasize these, redefine them as essential character traits, and (2) then, teach me to repress them. ”
-I find the state of psychotherapy in this country to be shockingly bad.
“It is a recipe for anxiety and it is why I need psychoanalysis. But we do not have psychoanalysis where I live, so I blog.”
-In the absence of an analyst, I acquired very crucial insights by discussing these issues endlessly with people online and keeping a diary. Blogging is an equivalent of a diary and, besides, it gives you great feedback.
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I really did start the blog as an alternative to awful US psychotherapy.
On seeing that advice for what it is, when I was your age
I was as you are. It took a lot of figuring to start realizing what is sometimes going on.
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However, if I allow myself to think the thoughts I actually have — which are generally those of rage — my whole system calms down and my blood pressure becomes astonishingly low (117/75, last night, upon pondering whom I would like to kill). (JFA)
Hmmm, interesting, I always thought Hannibal Lecter seemed remarkably calm. 😉
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‘Hmmm, interesting, I always thought Hannibal Lecter seemed remarkably calm.”
-He repressed his anger so much that it would erupt in really horrifying ways from time to time.
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I think that what the blood pressure gauge measures is repression. If repression is high, blood pressure is high. But conversely, is is low.
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“I think that what the blood pressure gauge measures is repression. If repression is high, blood pressure is high. But conversely, is is low.”
– Absolutely! I’m planning to write about this very soon.
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–And then finally: I think that if you suffer from anxiety, it is highly possible that you are not treating yourself well enough at an emotional level and should really look at what you’re doing.
–On rage, I am thinking about doing some kind of ritual to get rid of some of it, and/or to protect myself better from whom/what it is directed at.
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Well, really no ritual suffices in the long term but only as a short term measure. The long term measure is to understand that the rage doesn’t serve any purpose but chews up your energies. The short term measure is to project your rage into something — for example a punching bag.
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I’m so different from this, though – maybe it’s not really rage I have. I will think about it.
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Maybe not. My blood pressure kit tells me if there’s something on my mind, through a higher reading. Then I work through the things that it might be until I hit the bull’s eye. My bull’s eye today was 115/67, when I discovered I was really disappointed in myself for not training yesterday. I thought that through and thus the lower reading.
I do think that in general it is very hard to know what kind of emotions we have whilst we are repressing them. I’m discovering that a lot of mine are super angry emotions, although I do have other anxiety states, too. These are comparatively rare, for me.
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I’ve got more claustrophobia than anger, I guess, although anger tends to be a healthy sign. It’s the claustrophobia that eats me and that I have to remind myself is about situations I don’t really have to accept.
Relieving anger by doing stuff like punching things, as people do, has never attracted me. Calmly telling people to get out of my face, or just remembering I and not they are in charge of me, does a lot more for me.
My back hurts if there’s something wrong, my head hurts if I’m trying to subject myself to cognitive dissonance, and my throat hurts if there’s something I need to say. I never have anything happen to my heart or blood.
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Back aches are a sign of your entire system of being feeling undermined. Throat aches are precisely the evidence that you want to say things but feel silenced.
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Precisely.
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Back aches are also a sign of being a big stupid and not bracing yourself properly to pick up a heavy thing.
Throat aches are also a sign either of streptococcal infection or participation in overly enthusiastic oral sex.
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The problem is that some people pick up all kind of stuff, walk in the rain and snow in flip-flops and are perfectly fine. Others never pick up anything heavier than a sandwich and are torture by back pains.
In my family, my mother is the one who has carried heavy stuff all her life but it’s my father who is coddled into not picking up anything who has severe back pain issues.
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Nah I’m just bein a doof. I have frequent pains wrapping around my back and chest due to stress that cinches around me like one of those medieval torture devices where they turn the key and your bones crack.
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Ha – although looking above, yes I have rage, it’s at a whole other level of life. It’s just – I never have anything happen to heart or blood, and hitting stuff would not address it, so I don’t know. It’s more like: I need to remember I am more powerful than I realize, visualize this, not take the beleaguerers so seriously, and that’s really it.
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“I don’t think psychotherapy will help, as in terms of its deep structures it is the philosophy of the ascetic priest — that is, it tends to have a deeply negative and pessimistic view about “human nature”, much akin to the Christian doctrine of “original sin””
-In North America, it’s actually the opposite. Mostly, it’s the “accept yourself as you are because you are fantastic and everything is wonderful” kind of philosophy. As a result, people get addicted to this constant pseudo-positive reinforcement and attend therapists for decades! How ridiculous is that?
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That’s not my experience of psychotherapy in US. It was more: if you’re here at all, it means you have a deep, permanent flaw and need to keep revisiting it or finding more of them. Either you are in denial about it and need to keep digging for it, or you have found your permanent flaw and need to keep coming back to manage it.
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A deep permanent flaw that you need to be revisiting?
OK, this is even worse than I thought. I’m sorry but this sounds absolutely ridiculous. How can anything like this be helpful?
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It’s not helpful, it’s harmful, but I am pretty sure it is this model Jennifer means by her reference to original sin, etc., above in comment 26.
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In my case, as has always been the case, amateurs (and indeed on some rare occasions) “professionals” alike tend to analyse my identity, rather than anything I say or do. It’s totally the identity which signifies something to them,that is overarching. Then they try to reform my identity and straighten it into conformity with whatever is average, boring, quiet. In Australia, most intellectuals and everyday people are Procrustean thinkers in one way or another. It must be the boring, British heritage. There is also a lot of lower class Puritanism here and many have the guilty conscious of their grandparents who were sent into criminal exile and are just abiding their time in a hateful place until they die and can go and receive their reward in the sky. There’s an extreme disconnect between many people and the natural environment of the Australian bush, which I put down to this original hatred.
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Upon deep reflection, all my experiences have been the same. The ultimate lesson I have learned from all this: never attempt to communicate anything complex, because it can and will be used against you in the most astonishing of ways.
Most people’s response to complexity is to reflexive fear and looking for a way to cast blame on the messenger. Even professionals are capable of this to a remarkable extent. People have generally lost the skill to take a more detached stance and slowly analyse the components of a difficult situation gradually, without leaping to conclusions, quick fixes or the casting of blame.
The lesson is not to attempt to communicate unless you have something conventional to say.
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This has also been my experience. Your comment 50, above, is interesting as well.
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Upon reflection, it is probably the permissive nature of society, reflected in the self esteem movement in counselling that Clarissa mentions, that is responsible for giving rise to the “solution” of the harsh use of censure in “therapy”. In other words, I am suggesting that maybe the “therapist” is trying to medicate himself by means of such “therapy”.
I read in the book by Otto Fenichel that people sometimes find a permissive society very oppressive because it makes their morality more and more refined and hair splitting. So the imposition of an external imperative can come as a relief.
This may well be the case with many people today. Their neuroses are caused by a lack of moral standards, rather than having too much of one.
My case is, of course, the opposite — or has been until very recently — since the society I was brought up in was extremely authoritarian. Consequently, I don’t need anyone to act the big moral arbiter in my face. I don’t find that kind of pose radical or refreshing – not as someone might who has experienced a permissive society all their life might find it.
Rather, such an attitudinal posture returns me to much older coping methods. I can revert to these in a flash because, after all, I had achieved a very effective level of adaptation to my old, authoritarian culture. One puts up an emotional shield and says less. One saves one’s energies for any ultimate confrontation or show down. It is better not to speak too soon or show one’s hand.
I am extraordinarily well adapted to that method of behaviour, since it was ingrained in me since childhood.
Also, punishments that involve ostracism or having my nonconformity “noticed” don’t seem to bother me, since I have always cultivated an extremely high level of independence.
In short, and what I have taken the long road to saying, is that therapeutic techniques that might have been designed to give an overly sensitive/effete contemporary person a helpful kick of the buttocks do nothing like that for me. This is mostly because I anticipate the behaviour. I find it stereotypical of authorities — but apart from that, it doesn’t communicate much.
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So it is clear now that my issues had always been my repression of my rage, due to my extremely authoritarian upbringing and that trying to treat this kind of condition in a liberal democratic culture is near impossible, even if the background to it is thoroughly explained. People lack both the imagination and the cultural bridge to make any recognition of the actual issues possible. Part of the problem is that words have a different meaning in a different culture. For example, when I have used the word, “emotional”, I have often meant it in terms of something I had wanted to attain in order to overcome my previous repression. Yet in this culture “emotional” has the connotation of being emotionally labile, infantile and out of control. The very meanings of the words are almost the opposite to what I have wanted to convey. You would think that a sophisticated society could understand the need to transcend differences in cultural meaning, but apparently not.
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I’m not seeing a permissive society around me, to be honest. I see a society where every breath is regulated and people are so terrified of enjoying anything that they keep cultivating misery. Love, sex, friendships and human relationships are talked to death to the point where there is no joy left to them.
People vaguely realize that something is missing in a way of life where everything is about discussing experiences and recording them a lot more than actually living them (here is a blatant example: https://clarissasblog.com/2011/06/11/what-makes-a-day-memorable/)
Still, the idea that nothing but perennial misery is acceptable is so ingrained that they talk themselves into feeling miserable for absolutely no reason. I’ve lived in and visited some pretty poor countries where people lived 10 persons to a room and barely had potable water. But in none of those places did I ever encounter so many complainers and doom-and-gloom peddlers with completely apocalyptic worldviews as I constantly do here.
Here in the US, people call me “the eternal optimist” and always ask me how I manage to be so “positive.” I’m not, though. I just seem to be this way because I take small breaks from complaining every once in a while.
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Yeah, I see what you are saying. But maybe it IS kind of permissive and therefore the superego intervenes too much to make sure it isn’t, like Fenichel suggests. To put it in a different way, maybe things are just too easy and therefore they need to be made unnecessarily complicated, otherwise….. (superego will extract its costs).
I’m grateful that I was brought up in very different conditions, but it makes those kinds of weddings hard to understand.
Here’s my reception: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7ee2Rcu97U
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“To put it in a different way, maybe things are just too easy and therefore they need to be made unnecessarily complicated, otherwise….. (superego will extract its costs).”
-This might well be true.
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That looks like a fun wedding! Are you the woman in the red coat with amazing hair?
I want both the coat and the hair. 🙂
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In current US mainstream culture, the assumption appears to be that people do not have discipline and are not self aware. I do not know that people actually are this way but the assumption is made that for whatever ails you, the Rx is a stronger superego.
For example, look at academic advice which usually assumes advanced graduate students and assistant professors need larger superegos, and can conquer everything with time management. As though they got where they are without these skills.
The pendulum swings between “you need more discipline” and “you are too disciplined and need liberation” every 15 years or so, I think. In lean times, everyone is accused of being undisciplined. In fat times, successful people are told they should not be so disciplined.
This is what I have observed so far in life here.
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That was me, in 2003.
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Nobody ever “needs” more superego, because superego is a function of basic homeostasis (the ability to maintain psychological equilibrium and internal tension relative to the environment). The only people in the world who lack it are sociopaths and psychopaths.
Whenever people have assumed that this is what I’ve needed, I’ve always recognized: “I have enough self control to be able to kill you, if I have to — therefore I disdain to kill you.”
In other words, they confirm that my superego suffices me as a basic protective and self-defensive measure. I’m not falling apart.
However, someone who tries to make me feel more guilty than I need to feel is my enemy.
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The other thing, for me at least, on this is to learn how to recognize harassment and mistreatment. I was raised to accept them and I feel anxious when they are starting to reach lethal levels. Since I don’t think of harassment / mistreatment as such, I can’t point to the problem, name the problem, so I just know something bad is happening that I don’t know how to stop or forestall.
I’m not anxious about the future or about what might happen or might be happening – I just get anxious about things really happening in the present – so really, my cure for anxiety would be to learn how to stop taking c–p. C–p would include guilt tripping.
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My coping method is.. music.My little music player goes everywhere with me, I stream music from my computer, and I go to live gigs at least once a month. I have loads of music on my computer, too. I’ve been a little mopey ’cause I missed three gigs by a local musician I have a crush on. (Due to a terrible horrible sinus infection…grr.) Exercise works too, especially swimming. Birdwatching always makes me feel more relaxed too. I used to have guinea pigs, and they did wonders for my anxiety. Pets in general help. Also, tea. I take a fifteen minute tea break every day, and it always helps.
I tried, at different times, acupuncture, biofeedback, and counseling. I got nice naps during the acupuncture. It’s fine as long as you don’t look down. Biofeedback was boring and the doctor gave me the creeps. Counseling. meh. Didn’t like it then, wouldn’t do it now. The main problem is that they filter out what they actually hear, and turn it into what they think you should be saying. I did take a medication for the anxiety once, but it didn’t do anything.
Another coping method for the holidays is to go toy shopping, and donate the toy. Always makes me feel a lot better. I hate shopping for myself, but I like to go shopping for other people.
I don’t get this whole emphasis on very early childhood shaping *everything.* I know house pets with more personality than the average 6 month old, and until 4, most children have little to no long term memory and very poor reasoning skills. (Yes, Clarissa, I know you did, but one person does not an average make.) Unless a hugely traumatic event occurs before 4, the child isn’t going to be affected by any occurances before they gained long term memory.
Also, it’s very easy to tear down the original personality and start rebuilding from scratch as an adult. Ever see ‘Catch me if you can?” The reason that movie had such a huge following is that Americans like the idea of perpetual self-reinvention. I know I do. Outside of my family, no one knows the real me at all.
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“I don’t get this whole emphasis on very early childhood shaping *everything.* I know house pets with more personality than the average 6 month old, and until 4, most children have little to no long term memory and very poor reasoning skills. ”
– It’s very dangerous not to see personality in a small child. Very very dangerous. The lack of recall and reasoning have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the formation of personality.
“Unless a hugely traumatic event occurs before 4, the child isn’t going to be affected by any occurances before they gained long term memory”
-I wonder why this is so important to you that you keep repeating this meme so many times over and over again.
“Also, it’s very easy to tear down the original personality and start rebuilding from scratch as an adult.”
– And that is probably the funniest statement I have heard all week. Thanks, I needed a laugh.
“The reason that movie had such a huge following is that Americans like the idea of perpetual self-reinvention. I know I do. ”
-Dr. Phil also has a huge following. So does Paris Hilton or these Kardashian people. So what?
The relaxation techniques you discuss, though, are very good.
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It’s actually very difficult to do and very costly, but one can remould certain parts of the personality, although not all. If something has been lost or disassociated from, for instance, in adolescence, it can be possible to restore these aspects of the personality so that a person functions at a greater level of awareness. The ideology that human beings are perfectly malleable (or, indeed, that we all have “universal” characteristics) is entirely erroneous, though.
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“It’s actually very difficult to do and very costly, but one can remould certain parts of the personality, although not all”
-Exactly. I can only imagine how ignorant one need to be about oneself to believe that this self can be refashioned time and again at will.
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That is why I have given up the project of trying to adapt to thenorms of western society. I’m not sure I should have ever tried, although idid so because my knowledge of the world and social maturity seemed deficient in my early adulthood. I had great hunger to know and experience more than I had known. Be that as it may, trying to learn from people who had not had my much earlier range of experiences proved to be very bad indeed. I finally concluded that we were not even speaking the same language-that our notions of reality were very different on the basis of our very different childhoods. For instance, for me childhood was a revert impersonal time, where my most direct relationship had been with the natural environment. For most others, it seems their childhoods were times of dependency. If I assert that this impersonal state of mind is at the root of my being, people who have been brought up to experience the world purely in personal terms think that I’m trying to make myself over all “spayshal” and in a deeply personal way, whereas nothing could be further from the truth. I’m simply recognising that it is fairly easy for me to divorce myself from public opinion. But I can’t even express something as basic as this without people presuming that I’m trying to court public opinion by making myself seem different from others.
There is complete incommensurabiity in communication across lines of historical and cultural knowledge, so that what I say is regularly turned into the opposite of what I mean.
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” For most others, it seems their childhoods were times of dependency.”
-Oh yes. That’s why I hated my childhood. Nothing about what happened to me was chosen by me. And that really made me suffer. And today nothing angers me more than when people try to interfere with my plans. That complete dependence of childhood still rankles.
“But I can’t even express something as basic as this without people presuming that I’m trying to court public opinion by making myself seem different from others.”
-Oh, I know what you mean. 🙂 When I act, people take me seriously. Whenever I become earnest and serious, they think I’m acting.
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The last paragraph is true for me in a specific way, since when I’m most relaxed I become more impersonal. Personalities-mine or those around me- don’t seem to matter, & I fool around and say random things, which of course turn out to be very hurtful when people think there is any emotion or I’ll intent in what I have to say. My most relaxed state has almost no concern for individualism about it. It’s more to do with the ecstasy of the moment/being in immanence.
This must be such an unusual state as it freaks almost everybody out. Westerners can’t make sense of it, although when I speak to Japanese-especially the women-many of them seem to express this same state of mind.
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Because you don’t seem to get it.
It is, actually pretty easy to reinvent oneself. A large part of it is picking the image you want other people to have of you and making sure that all they see is the image. It’s like swans- all people see is the bird gliding serenely around; they don’t see the frantic kicking.
It’s partly because of that idea of reinventing myself that I like makeup and face paint. I don’t need to be myself when I’m working or taking in a show; I’m just someone in a mask. At work, I just need to be helpful and perky, anything else should be checked at the door. At the shows, I can wear what I want, no matter how outrageous, and if I’m really tired of being polite, I’ll go to a metal show and elbow my way around the mosh pit.
Depending on the show, I’m the punk chick, the goth girl, or the metal headbanger. None of those identities are the same as ‘Politicalguineapig,’ and even that entity is nothing like the real me. The ‘real me’ isn’t me either; that self disappeared a long time ago, and good riddance to her.
In that movie, Dicaprio was the ideal American: the person who can go anywhere and do anything. He changed identities at the drop of a hat, which is a very American thing to do. The European believes himself or herself to be fixed, immutable and changeless. The American is a chameleon,changing identities and selves as time or circumstances dictate.
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People born under late capitalism do see to have this plasticity about them. I think they overestimate it. It’s a lot more narrow than it feels, I presume. It’s very much locked into the zeitgeist of a particular time period and can’t experience reality outside of this mode of thinking whereby everybody is necessarily an actor.
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“People born under late capitalism do see to have this plasticity about them. I think they overestimate it. It’s a lot more narrow than it feels, I presume.”
-As Slavoj Zizek says (in my clumsy rendition): A member of a consumerist society has endless choices. The only choice s/he doesn’t have is to stop choosing. 🙂
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“It is, actually pretty easy to reinvent oneself. A large part of it is picking the image you want other people to have of you and making sure that all they see is the image.”
-You call that reinventing yourself?? I call that denying who you are to please some imaginary audience. This solves no problems. It just creates more.
“At work, I just need to be helpful and perky, anything else should be checked at the door.”
-Solving your psychological issues would lead you to having a job where you would bring the best of yourself and feel ecstatically happy and accepted. Just sayin’.
“Depending on the show, I’m the punk chick, the goth girl, or the metal headbanger”
-These are all boring childish labels. What’s the point of discussing this junior high school stuff? Here we are talking about serious psychological issues for adults who are interested in knowing more about themselves, not to be accepted by an imaginary high school crowd.
“In that movie, Dicaprio was the ideal American: the person who can go anywhere and do anything. He changed identities at the drop of a hat, which is a very American thing to do.”
-I’m sorry, this is boring. Are we seriously going to waste our lives on a discussion of a dime-a-dozen pop flick?
“The European believes himself or herself to be fixed, immutable and changeless. The American is a chameleon,changing identities and selves as time or circumstances dictate.”
– And what’s with the silly stereotypes? I know you are smarter than this. Just think about this logically. Most Europeans are multilingual. Most Americans are monolingual. Just in the past 2 hours, I listened to radio stations in 4 different languages. So who finds it easier to switch identities? How many languages do you personally speak fluently?
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Sorry. iPad autocorrected. Should have read “Ill intent”
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Who assumes different identities to solve a problem? Psychology is basically a nonsense field like statistics- it can be used to prove anything. And yes, it’s acting, but it’s a game- the intent is to have fun by fooling the audience.
I can see you don’t follow music at all; here, the place is infested with bands, and all sorts of adults take their particular musical culture seriously. I’ve met adults older than you at shows, from all walks of life.
As for the job; hey, I choose to be there, and it’s not like jobs are plentiful. I just prefer to check my personality at the door; I do that no matter where I work. I’m a very private person, and.. well, every once in a while we get kooks. It’s easiest just to smile and nod when one’s told something completely crazy, rather then simply tell them they’re bonkers. (Recently, I escorted someone down to our appraisal area who was convinced he’d seen pterodactyls over his property.) And, ya know: JOB, as in getting paid, or at least, convincing future bosses that I’m worth hiring. It’s not like they’re supposed to be all consuming passions.
Actually, the place I work at *is* very interesting, and I enjoy my time there. I just don’t think it’s neccessary to have my real self there.
As for languages: Eh, I speak bad Spanish, and can understand a bit of French. I do think politeness counts; even if someone speaks terrible Spanish or whatever, as long as ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ appear, the locals are likely to cut them some slack for the effort. I meant that no matter how many languages a person from Europe speaks, they always have one fixed concept of themselves. An American has no need for that.
What do you mean ‘dime a dozen’ flicks? It’s not a summer blockbuster with explosions everywhere. It’s a very engaging movie with roles that call for the actors to exercise their full range. Yes, it has two big names, but they disappear completely into their roles.
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Do all of your opinions come from movies and television?
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Actually, I know what causes me anxiety: being asked not to recognize whatever is really happening.
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No. I actually don’t watch that much TV. I just find TV and films to be a useful barometer of crowd psychology.
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Movies and television are useful barometers of what the companies that own the stations and the studios believe people will watch so that product placement and commercial advertising will be more effective at motivating more people to spend more money on the items and images the companies are selling.
Other than that, they are semi-useful barometers of the contemporary state of storytelling, including production and reification of ideological narratives.
If you watch the Weather Channel, television is a useful barometer.
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I disagree. A narrative requires an audience. The studios can endorse a certain narrative, but they can’t force audiences to buy that narrative. And while just one movie or show won’t tell you anything about the national mood, 5 or 6 of them can show you what people are thinking. For example, in the ’90s, people were really anxious about crime. Result: a huge number of cop shows. As technology improved, we got more and more movies about dystopias because people subconciously disapproved of the technological boom.
Novels can provide insight as well: Agatha Christie had a huge following because people wanted the rich to suffer in the 30s, and most of her books were about rich people killing other rich people, or unscrupulous people being punished because they came by their money in dishonest ways.
Gone with the Wind would be another example; it fed into several underlying themes. The butthurt of the South over the Civil War, the rising racism of 1930s America, the rich being forced to eat humble pie- it was a blockbuster because the audience recognized those motifs in the narrative. (Although, personally, it’s one of the few classics I could live without ever reading.)
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Ah, I can see that everybody is a literary critic now. 🙂
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I’m a book snob 😀 Although I normally prefer to hang out in the ghettos of the literary world; science fiction and fantasy have always been my favorites. I like mysteries, but not a lot of the classics: Dickens is too wordy, and Austen is too descriptive and sentimental. As for Gone with the Wind- yeah, I’ll pass on that feast of tripe. I like Twain better, because he didn’t try to gloss over the idea of slavery.
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Yes, ideologically Gone With the Wind is really bad. But it also describes events that are very understandable to those of us who lived in the FSU in the nineties. When the film was first brought to Moscow, it was huge. My mother managed to get us into the theater, even though the crowds were practically storming it. It was a big experience.
And if you don’t like wordy people, then why are you reading this blog? 🙂 🙂 🙂
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Unlike Dickens, you manage to keep your posts to a reasonable length. You also don’t let your adjectives run wild. I tried to read Great Expectations at eight.. not a good experience. Have you ever seen a snake trying to digest an over large meal? My brain felt like that.
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I used to be even worse than that. I’m improving, though. 🙂
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