So...I've been pretending to be busy for many a month now and nothing good has come out of it. Meanwhile, I've been suppressing my psychotic writing fits and avoiding thinking about any topic for more than 15 minutes. But, as it so often happens when you suppress urges, they manage to manifest as other behavioral aberrations: I've killed three hookers in the last month alone, and lost count of it before that.
And to spare those presumably innocent lives, I'll try and write something in a free-flow form, without much deliberate thinking.
As you've probably guessed, that part about killing hookers is rank bullshit. But I enjoy talking about bullshit, I enjoy seeing people bullshit, I enjoy psychoanalysing bullshit. Bullshit surrounds us as thickly and imperceptibly as the air we breathe. I don't mean bullshit in terms of lies, rather, as just idiotic shit we are better off being ignorant of. And one of those is the way people get you to open up, to spill the beans on something by guising themselves as pseudoacademic experts citing their own personal expertise. Now, to be fair, we are all psychologists. We all try to understand how people's minds work, and in doing so, understand our own. Having an understanding of the nature and attitude of people you interact with, and people in general, gives you an edge on manipulating them. But when the line between that understanding and the pretense of understanding begins to blur, you will end up shitting in the minds and lives of those you are attempting to manipulate.
Now, I feel an obligation to be specific. Remember, when you are down and out after life has completely fucked you over (we all have those moments, right?), a friend always very comfortingly tells you "talking helps, I'm here, you can share it with me"? That's bullshit. No, actually, it isn't total bullshit, because talking does help, but:
1. It comes with constraints.
2. The friend could:
a) Be genuinely trying to comfort you by letting you share your sorrow with them, or
b) Just be curious about your plight and is attempting to get you to open up. Morbid curiosity is part of us.
About the constraints: Talking about your situation or misfortune with someone helps only when the talking is done immediately post the misfortune, and the talking window is open only for a brief time period. I read about this in a Martin Seligman (a very respected, important and
real psychologist, also the former President of American Psychological Association, elected by the widest margin in all the history of the association)
book, so I'll get right down to the source:
Another widely believed theory, now become dogma, that also imprisons people in an embittered past is the hydraulics of emotion. This one was perpetrated by Freud and insinuated itself, without much serious questioning, into popular culture and academia alike. Emotional hydraulics is, in fact, the very meaning of "psychodynamics". Emotions are seen as forces inside a system closed by an impermeable membrane, like a balloon. If you do not allow yourself to express an emotion, it will squeeze its way out at some other point, usually as an undesirable symptom.
In the field of depression, dramatic falsification came by way of horrible example. Aaron Beck's invention of cognitive therapy, now the most widespread and effective talk therapy for depression, emerged from his disenchantment with the premise of emotional hydraulics. The crucial experience for Tim came in the late 1950s. He had completed his Freudian training and was assigned to do group therapy with depressives. Psychodynamics held that you could cure depression by getting them to open up about the past, and to ventilate cathartically about all the wounds and losses that they had suffered.
Tim found that there was no problem getting depressed people to re-air past wrongs and to dwell on them at length. The problem was that they often unraveled as they ventilated, and Tim could not find ways to ravel them up again. Occasionally this led to suicide attempts, some fatal. [...]
Anger is another domain in which the concept of emotional hydraulics was critically examined. America is a ventilationist society. We deem it honest, just, and even healthy to express our anger. So we shout, we protest, and we litigate. [...] If we don't express our rage, it will come out elsewhere - even more destructively, as in cardiac disease. But this theory turns out to be false; in fact, the reverse is true. Dwelling on trespass and the expression of anger produces more cardiac disease and more anger.
[...]
I want to suggest another way of looking at emotion that is more compatible with the evidence. Emotions, in my view, are indeed encapsulated by a membrane - but it is highly permeable and its name is "adaptation," as we saw in the last chapter. Remarkably, the evidence shows that when positive and negative events happen, there is a temporary burst of mood in the right direction. But usually over a short time, mood settles back into its set range. This tells us that emotions, left to themselves, will dissipate. Their energy seeps out through the membrane, and by "emotional osmosis" the person returns in time to his or her baseline condition. Expressed and dwelt upon, though, emotions multiply and imprison you in a vicious cycle of dealing fruitlessly with past wrongs.
The summed up point is, when shit happens, express it healthily to people close to you who you trust, express it soon after the incident and be done with it - that is of course assuming that you
want to express it at all. If you wish to keep it a secret and not share it with
anyone, freely abandon any fear that it'll outwardly manifest in other ways. As Seligman says, and he knows what he is saying, left to its own devices all those negative feelings will dissipate over time and will turn into nothing more than a faint memory of a bad incident. But dwelling over it, recollecting it to some curious bystander who is pretending to comfort you by claiming it'll make you feel good to talk about it or "blow out the steam" even long after the incident, is only going to make things from good to bad and bad to worse.
As I write all this, there's an avalanche of thoughts pouring into my mind over this topic, one particularly important (about the dangers and perils of reading psychology books by self-supposed "pop" psychology authors who do not have a formal training in psychology). And another important topic, a sort of online experiment if you will, I wanna cover about how easily we can be influenced by a cluster of similar opinions, but it's too much to write and I'll save it for another time.
So for now, over and out, goodnight!
