Opinions, art, debate
You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.
Carl Jung.
The very special cookies who prattle incessantly about how they can never be influenced, persuaded or tricked are imaginatively excluding themselves from the normal fabric of human relationships. They are fragile. Everything around them crumbles on contact.
Turns out, my colleague was right, there was a parade.
People routinely get upset when I say that the US army is pathetic but look at this. These soldiers are sluggish, slouched, low-energy. Many of them are overweight. They look like prisoners of war marching towards captivity.
If you watch this and feel that the soldiers project strength and confidence, then you probably need eyeglasses.
You cannot get rid of emotional pain if you understand it as originating outside or your self.
I suggest going at it from a different direction. Decide which people will be in your life forever. And build relationships based on that. Is the husband in question a forever husband or a temporary companion? It’s your decision. The power lies with you. I promise that the moment you decide that you found your forever husband, you’ll have an entirely different relationship with him than with any temporary companion.
Once you got your forever husband (wife, relative, friend, etc), you will relate to them in a way that’s on a different planet from how you relate to the disposable and interchangeable people in your life.
The approach I propose is better because it’s not reactive. You don’t sit there, waiting for something to happen that will prompt you to end the relationship. There’s nothing that can end the relationship like there’s nothing that dan end your relationship with your forever head or your forever left shoulder. The forever head can have a massive headache and the forever shoulder can get annoyingly arthritic. But they are there for good. You can similarly have people in your life who are there for good. These will be very, very few. Isn’t it great, though, to have people like that?
As an exercise, I suggest sitting down right now and making a list of your forever people, the people who will witness your life from today and until one of you dies. The feeling of freedom and peace once you know for sure who’s there till the final point is like nothing else.
None of this, of course, works in the one exceptional case of parents. You will be in a relationship with your parents—whether they are living or dead—irrespective of whether you want it or not. You can decide never to see your mom again, yet you’ll continue suffering from the anxiety she seeded in you when you were an infant. So that’s one thing that was decided for us. All the rest of the forever people are up to us.
There was no serious interest in communism in the USSR after 1943-4. In those years, all of the sincerity people had put into the communist cause evaporated. Cynicism set in. It never went away after that.
So how did the Soviet people become disillusioned with communism?
The war was brutal. Horrific losses. Stalin’s army had prepared for an offensive, and defensive warfare was something it couldn’t do on any level. The civilian population sustained terrible damage. Hunger, terror, bombings.
And at that exact time, a very visible and in-your-face class divide appeared. People would evacuate their young, send them to school in the safe depths of Siberia. And in the same school or the hallways of the same university, some kids would faint with hunger while others would throw uneaten salami sandwiches into the trash because they were too sated. If you want a literary depiction of this sudden class divide, I recommend Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle or his Cancer Ward.
In the 1920s, a party apparatchik would show off his worn coat and his shoes with holes in them. After 1943, he’d show off his expensive suits and his wife’s furs.
I keep saying 1943 because that when it became clear the war was won.
The war made it OK openly to want to be rich. It made it OK to despise people who didn’t have chic new things. It made the pursuit of material goods an obsessive and all-consuming game for the Soviet people.
By the time my generation came around, nothing but the most hardcore cynicism was possible for people who were neither very elderly nor mentally impaired. I can’t imagine anybody seriously bringing up Communist ideas after 1950 in my grandparents’ or my parents’ generation.
I still don’t use the words “sincere” and “earnest” as compliments. This is how many generations it took for people to recover from the early Soviet fervor.
People live in completely different news streams.
I met a colleague at the farmer’s market. A lovely gentleman, very left-wing, of course. He started talking about some parade in Washington (or NYC?) that either recently happened or was about to happen. The parade clearly meant a lot to him. He spoke as if I were supposed to be aware of all the details, numbers, amounts.
And I had no idea what he meant. I live on my newsfeed but nobody I listen to, read, or follow has been talking about this event. I’ve been out with a friend who’s very politicized, and nothing like this got mentioned. My information bubble and the information bubble of a colleague who works in the same building are distant like planets in different galaxies.
OK, one more, and I promise to stop:
Real psychotherapy isn’t about giving answers.
It’s about surviving the not-knowing — together.
This is another realm where AI fails.
Therapy is the alchemy of two nervous systems in dialogue. No algorithm, however advanced, can replace the patient–therapist field.
This is so well-put.
It’s terrifying that neurotics will turn to AI for a cure and end up getting their destructive beliefs reinforced.
I have one more quote from @BrightonPsych that resonated with me deeply:
Our culture increasingly celebrates exceptionalism. But the capacity to be ordinary—to embrace the rhythms of everyday life—offers a profound kind of freedom from the exhausting search for external validation.
The ordinary, the routine, the daily rhythms of life – that’s where the best parts of existence are located.
Adult love begins with the recognition that others are not here to meet our unmet childhood needs. That’s not a tragedy—it’s the beginning of true relatedness and intimacy. Adult love means relinquishing omnipotence. We must give up the fantasy that someone out there will finally “see” us, “complete” us, or rescue us from our inner world of abandonment.
@BrightonPsych
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