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Social Dis-ease
A Journal of Self Therapy



part one
2001
 part two
2002
part three






Prolegomenon

The Overall (Eventual) Plan for this Manuscript
(which may never be fully realized)

8-19-1c

There is much about even the most ordinary stuff I write that could be considered therapy. In fact, art in general can be considered therapy. No one should be surprised to hear that an image of an artist is a good metaphor for a mental patient. (I'm being facetious, but you know what I mean.)
This material, however, is mostly of a therapeutic origin, i.e., its intent when written was therapeutic. This first section is my most recent, most cogent, attempt at this experiment. It is, perhaps, the final episode. Any additional therapy writing will be, I suspect, not much more than addendums.
The second section is those false starts and random journal entries from my past, i.e., essentially insightful, but ineffective therapy. [The first section is effective, if an at least partial failure, i.e., it would have worked if I had let it. (The jury is still out on this point. Maybe I will let it, later on.)]
The third section will be comprised of addendums. In other words: Section one: the present, quickly becoming past. Section two: the past. Section three: the future, to become the present, and then the past. This is the nature of effective therapy: it becomes the past as the present deals with it.
[The past is only truly in the past when the pathology is left behind, in other words, when you are healed.]
The fourth section is not a section at all, but further addendums and studies/projects presented piecemeal in the monthly journal format. Since, because they are/will be diversely located, they are not directly accessible from this document and must be located randomly in my monthly postings in thoughthistory.



Prelude
It is no measure of health to be well-
adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
--Krishnamurti

8-7-1a

Self-therapy is a dubious proposition. On the other hand, the process of life itself is a form of self-therapy, when it is not psychopathology. When one sets out upon intended self-therapy, whether it is a formal discipline or a more informal process of self-discovery, one seldom thinks to ask if it is necessary. It's assumed that it is, otherwise why come up with the idea in the first place? There is always a question here begging to be asked: "What is wrong with me?" Yet, to pose the question in that way is to prejudge the situation. Maybe there is nothing wrong. Maybe a pathology is assumed because the questioner simply happens to be different from the social situation in which he happens to exist. Or maybe not. Or maybe, all pathology is merely this difference.
Why does self-therapy work? An analyst exists within each of us. It can be deeply buried so that we may never find it. (For some reason, I've never had this problem.) It's that core of reason existing beyond the problems we have, developed despite any pathology we develop (or lying dormant, to be discovered and provoked). It is half of a schizoid split we all possess, the observer, the inner guide. Developed to its full potential, i.e., "trained," it can lead our other half, the more or less split-off self, to health and unity. This is the aspect of self I interact with when I do self-therapy.
My preferred form of self-therapy is a kind of self-psychoanalysis, which is sort of a self-contradictory concept. It assumes that what is achievable via the dyad of patient-analyst is also achievable in a monadic mode, that a sort of self-transference and self-countertransference is possible. This is, of course, not true. But then, Freud did it, analyzed himself. But we can make the case that he did not psychoanalyze himself, no matter what he may have thought. (Time has revealed that he did think some stupid things.) Whatever the case, and with whatever degree of efficacy, I use psychoanalysis as the basic theory of my self-analysis and therapy---because I am familiar with it, and because it speaks to me in a way that other therapies do not. [I didn't always work this way. I have used each methodology, as I have learned it, behaviorism (contingency management), phenomenology, gestalt, cognitive, etc.]
I am trained as a behaviorist (it was "in" when I was in school), yet contingency management feels lame to me when it comes to dealing with the kinds of "problems" I am facing. Yes, behaviorism works---for other people. For self-application, I am no longer interested in programming myself to achieve certain definable effects. If anything, I am interested in deprogramming myself. But in order to do that, I must first discover what the conditioning of my early childhood is.
In my later years, I have transitioned out of the school of behaviorism and into the school of phenomenology, which I have always been interested in, but in which I had never in my younger years felt comfortable with. Feelings and other such vaguely definable psychic entities, having been far more highly repressed earlier on in my life, were too far removed for me to be concerned with. But now, I see them much more clearly, as a result of the continuing therapy of life. Now I am ready to begin anew (more formally; I've been doing this erratically for many years). [But then, I always think I'm ready to begin anew, and formally, when everything I start out to do with such formal control eventually deteriorates (or advances) into a mish-mash of difficult to differentiate affects. This is my real therapy, the ever-renewing efficacy of life, where feelings arise out of the ashes of the mature, dead phoenix of reason and control.]

It is necessary at this point to wonder why it is I seek to analyze myself. What's the purpose? Years ago, when I began this search as a not-so-well-defined program (lots of small programs, but no overall strategy), I thought that I had some clear-cut goals: social adaptation, the development of social skills, the elimination of social anxiety, etc. (In a sense, maybe, I have achieved those goals, but since I am not sure of this, I continue onward.) It may be that, having gained a degree of insight into who and what I am, I no longer see change as an option; that is, I no longer really want it; not so much. As I understand better the nature of the world and myself, I think that maybe I have been all along the way I am supposed to be. If this is true, then, of course, I need no therapy. But I don't know if this really is the case. I am not anywhere near so certain as I had been when I was younger. Not that I was all that certain then, but I thought I was. Uncertainty, like a lot of other definitive traits, can exist unconsciously when you believe the case to be otherwise.
In order to determine if therapy is what I really need, or want, I have abstracted (from throughout the Thomä work---see sources) several stated therapeutic goals in order to compare them to my personal situation. (There is no order or logic to these abstractions):

1) "The patient seeks and hopes for an improvement or cure of his symptoms and difficulties, that is, he hopes to achieve a positive change..."

Well, sure. But a change to what? Yeah, I have, if not such clear-cut symptoms, certainly difficulties. But everyone has difficulties. Anxiety has been one of them, but I am not so anxious any more. I have resolved this problem, maybe in not so adaptive a way, but it is my solution, tailored to my life and style.

2) "We believe that the psychoanalyst must never lose sight of the goal of creating the best possible preconditions to facilitate the patient's integration and synthesis."
And,

"The reestablishment of 'severed connections' is the primary goal of analysis, and the analyst's interpretations facilitate the synthesis."

And,

"We share the enthusiasm of a patient who once said, 'If such connections are established, then I expect I will be able to say, 'Okay, goodbye, I'm healthy.' "

Well, as I've said, I may be there already. But wherever I am, I am certainly not yet fully integrated and synthesized. I no longer experience "difficulties" in the way I had when I was younger. In other words, I am "healthy," whatever that means. But if the goal of therapy is integration and synthesis, that is a goal of a different kind of therapy. That is the spiritual pursuit I have undertaken, which is not so separate a thing from therapy, but which is more, if you will, "normal." You can be normal and still want to progress.

3) "...analytic work deserves to be recognized as genuine psycho-analysis only when it has succeeded in removing the amnesia which conceals from the adult his knowledge of his childhood from its beginning (that is, from about the second to the fifth year.)"

This is certainly not true of my own self. I am still pretty much confirmed in my personal early amnesia. So, if this is to be the definition, I need far more self (or other) therapy, whether I am well or not.

4) "How does the patient become more self-secure in order to overcome his helplessness, like the dreamer who finally masters his repeated nightmares?"

If the issue is security, I certain need more therapy, though I have come a long way in this regard. I realize now, through my past therapy, how insecure I have been, and how I have set about to construct a fragile security out of, not social position, but financial independence. I know that this is the "wrong" way. But is it? Is being socially well-adapted a necessary goal or function of life? I search for an answer to this question, already knowing that the traditional response of psychological and general literature is that it is expected that I mature into better and better social adaptation. I don't want this to be true. Well, I do and I don't. This is my basic conflict. But how much of that conflict is "natural" and how much is introjected by society into a brain/mind/soul that would otherwise be fine without it? The superego can be a nasty thing.
As for mastering security like nightmares, I have always from early childhood been comfortable with nightmares. I'd awaken nights scared out of my mind and loving it, knowing the dreams were not real (although as it turns out, they were more real than I ever knew, which is even more satisfying to me). If I could manage to master (in)security like I had mastered nightmares (I no longer have them any more, which is kind of sad), I would be a great success. There would have been no compromise. I would be free.

5) "In each individual case, the prescribed mixture of therapeutic agents must be adjusted in order to be able to realize the aim of psychoanalytic treatment, namely to achieve structural changes through the interpretation of transference and resistance."

Is this goal realizable by working alone? Is this goal only realizable via the interpretation of transference and resistance? Are there other ways, other valid therapies (and self-therapies?) I suspect that there are. Maybe my hybrid form is one of them.

6) "Freud said: 'The aim of psychoanalysis is absolutely uniform in every case: complexes have to be uncovered which have been repressed because of feelings of unpleasure and which produce signs of resistance if an attempt is made to bring them into consciousness.' "

Of course, this is true. But why, if there is no real problem (of adaptation)? This is the question, though, isn't it? Is there a problem of adaptation, if I am happy living the way I am living and able to afford it? I don't bother anyone. I am self-sufficient, to a fault. And maybe this is the departure point for the therapy: Why must I be so goddamned independent? Because I was so dependent as a child and grew up not liking the condition? This is the basic question I must investigate. When I was young, I thought I wanted to be independent. Hooray! I'm a success! Why do I, then, need therapy? Success is never what it's made out to be. And so, the therapy goes on.


prologue

7-13-1b

An unknown high school [a place to learn; thus, therapy], which is also 6023 basement, but huge: there are stacks of LPs around, in and out of boxes. One of them has a song on it that I wrote and sung. But I don't want anyone to hear it. [I write, but don't care so much to reveal what I've written.] But a friend of mine, who is, at first, Wayne R, but later transitions into David M   [the last names rhyme and are internally assonant], when the dream transitions from 6023 to 1728 [previous home addresses; is there a correlation to be made here?], plays the song over the campus radio station (he's a DJ there). But I have had an implicit (i.e., unstated in the dream) understanding with him that the song was not to be played, that it was to be kept secret. I learn of this playing just as it is about to be played, and I hurry to the record player to try to stop it, but I cannot. I get really pissed and leave. Everyone at the school is very happy to have heard the song and they do not take my desire to be secretive about my art seriously. Thus, I am not only pissed at W/D, but at everyone else too. W/D is a proxy for the whole population of the school [the world], students and teachers alike. [But the school is also my mind, thus a conflict ensues within it: the ego wants to hide away, but another part of me wants to be revealed. It seems like this should be reversed. The ego should want to be revealed. Or, the ego is split, between the two modes, revelation and withdrawal. That would make W/D representative of my ego, which is probably true, because I seem to want to deny it. I am, repressed, a gregarious person. I know this to be true, but it is not so conscious. When I am caught off-guard, that is when there is no anticipation of social intercourse and yet it comes upon me naturally, without my planning it or even being aware of it, I do pretty well socially. I can be disarmingly charming. The anxiety that will (still) interfere with social interaction is always developed beforehand in anticipation. This is why I wait to be approached. When people will come to me and present their presence in such a way as to enable my acceptance or rejection of it, I do well. I may still choose to stand aside and stonewall them, but that is usually out of an unconscious or semi-conscious perception I have of a hidden agenda that they wish to manipulate me with. The point is, there is no active search for the agenda, and no active agenda of my own to avoid them. I either avoid them or not in the present, and if everything goes well, if agendas do not clash, if personalities mesh and the approaching party does not reveal any attempt to belittle or manipulate, I can be a very gregarious person, even to the point of intimacy. But it's a spontaneous and often momentary phenomenon. It does not persist, at least not any more. When I was young, I developed friendships in this way. But now I am too conscious of the process, too wary, too able to see others' flaws and pathologies, how they will suck me into their world/mind and then drop the other shoe. This other me, the gregarious ego, is represented by W/D.]
I go to the front bedroom at 1728, which is also a different school, the first floor of another high school, or another part of the same high school. I have exiled myself here, moping, to be away from everyone. [This could be a metaphor for my later life: I lose my job because my "friends" betray me, and I "retire" and hide away in my house, a regression (thus the change to 1728, a childhood home. I consciously decided that I wanted to be like I used to be, before I made the mistake of trying to adapt to the world in order to insure/secure my future/social position.] Roger [an ex-boss, an authority figure, the super-ego] brings W/D to see me, hoping to make peace, but I resist him and the few other students, all girls, who also come to see me. I am adamant re my stoic, stalwart stance. I will not budge an inch. R gives up and leaves, but W/D stays, because he has been "assigned" to this role/place. The girls are playing a game, which involves one of them being tied up with long chains of small twist ties [social interconnections/manipulations; very cleverly picking up on the play of words] strung together. As they try to involve me, I grab at the ties, trying to break them, but they will not separate, and maybe I am becoming too rough in my attempt to pull the ties away and free the girl (not out of a sense of benevolence, but vindictively, to upset and disturb, or stop, their game. [The game is the playful, flirtatious attraction they create. I always try to show the women I'm involved with what they're up to unconsciously, and they never want to hear it. They get pissed at me as I drive them into denial. They tie themselves up in their games and thus prevent real intimacy. Also, another interpretation: I try to break ties, social and sexual, because I do not want to feel rejected later.] I drag the girl away from the others and carry her off through the halls of the school. At first, she resists me, but as she becomes comfortable with me, we make the abduction into a game of our own. [I change the rules of the game, turning the conventional mating ritual into my own idiosyncratic one, in an attempt to subvert/avoid the instinctual responses, to make it all more conscious. I would have a woman "go away" with me, leave the real world and enter my private one.] We can hear the other kids roaming the halls looking for us, seriously believing I am going to hurt the girl. [In their minds, my method can't be good, because it is not based on the conventions of unconscious scripts blindly played out.] [I begin to awaken.]
fai: We hide in a large locker. Close together, we feel the attraction that was previously repressed.
rai: I begin to explain to her in whispers the truth about the courtship game, about how guys are not psychologically motivated in the same way as girls, how they are capable of displaying what appears to be love, when it is only animal lust, how girls will fall for this, even, or especially when the guy is unconscious of the nature of his true feelings/responses and believes he is in love. I go into great detail, and the more I talk, the more I understand that she is falling in love with me, which I try to explain to her is merely an instinctual reaction. I kiss her, knowing I am playing into her game. We are pressed up tightly against each other when W/D, standing outside the locker door, listening with several of the girls, suddenly jerks open the door when we have stopped talking and discovers us kissing. Then, everything is all right. They see us kissing, and they decide that I am not going to hurt her, which is a lie. They are attending to physical hurt, and don't see the potential for psychological damage. They shut the door and leave. I try to explain to the girl that if we have any kind of sexual contact, she will become enamored of me, and I do not want that. I don't want it in the same way that I don't want to forgive W/D and the other students: I have an agenda toward loyalty and social unity, but on my own terms, in my own way, and if I commit to one woman (which I would do, but only physically), then I lose the opportunity to affect all women, psychologically. I experience a genuine affection for her as I hold her, which I realize is transferable to all women. Ideally, it should be transferable to all men too, but I'm not so far developed that I am able to separate out the sexual components. Affection, for me, has sexual overtones, and although I work toward separating them out, I have thus far not succeeded. This is a big difference between the male and the female psychology. Women separate them more easily and readily. Women can be affectionate without being sexual. But, on the other hand, women have more difficulty separating love and sex when they are sexually attracted/aroused.
I try to explain this all of this to the girl, but I don't think she's getting it. So, as a reward for so patiently listening to me, I give in to her game and reach down between her legs and satisfy her, and I can see that she's falling in love with me, which I try to tell her is not what a guy would do, that he could feel the same way about any girl who would do what she is about to do for me. Also, while we are in the locker, we talk about why I got mad at everyone. I tell her that, by being mad, I am able to call more attention to myself. If I had willingly allowed the record to be played, I would have gotten a small amount of attention [like with my novels], and then the fame would have died off. But if I make a big deal out of it, and refuse to give in, then I command a longer attention. I make it into more than it is. I gain a notoriety, even involving R (who implicitly is the principal) trying to make peace by getting W/D and I together and leaving us together to work it out after he decides there is nothing he can do. [This could have been a dynamic functioning in the workplace: I get into trouble to draw attention to myself in ways I would not otherwise get. This also functions more generally in my life: by stonewalling people, by hiding away and being reclusive, I command an attention that I would not get being a more ordinary person. It's a passive-aggressive act. (Hiding away and getting angry are results of the same motive: hurt. Anger is past hurt, repressed and expressed in an opposite mode. Withdrawal is that same hurt, more directly, if unconsciously, expressed.] [I begin to fall back into a sleep state.]
fai: We go out to the others. W/D comes up to me and apologizes for what he did, saying he never should have done it, but he thought he was acting in my best interest, doing what he thought I wanted done, despite what I told him, because it would have been what he wanted to be done if he had written and recorded a song. [The gregarious part of my ego apologizes to the introverted part. Is this a healing?] He says this in such a sincere way that I forgive him. I tell him I will forgive him if he keeps it a secret why I did it. He asks why, and I tell the girl to tell him. Then, I realize she might tell him too much, so I whisper to her "Don't tell him about the..." [I forget the other secret I told her that I did not want her to reveal to him. At the time, I felt that it was important. Repression.]. She explains to him how I used being mad to get more attention, and we make a pact to keep my secret. I know she will because she loves me, and I know he will because he has learned his lesson.
[At first, when I begin to write this out, this whole "explanation" of why I got mad looks to me like a rationalization. But as I think about it, I realize that it's a revelation of what I do, unconsciously, as explained above. My attempt to define it as a rationalization is my mind sneakily trying to re-repress the insight.]
[addition, 8-15-1 : As I reread this, I realize that all of the "self-therapy" that I did during the first half of August is prefigured here in this piece. I did that therapy without any conscious awareness of the contents of this work.]



preliminaries


6-23-99c

Other examples of countertransferential interference pointed up by Reich were unconscious aggression, which could cause the analyst to be overconciliatory, and unconscious guilt, which could be expressed as boredom or overeagerness. (Slaker p.23)

My overconciliation (as a child, and even as an adult) is an expression of unconscious aggression? I can see that. I seldom feel aggressive, but I am, acting out in a hostile manner, but less angry than hurt [esp. at work when I felt "justified": it was my job, it was the way I was justifying myself to the society, it was what I was supposed to do, as opposed to what I felt like doing, retreating, hiding away from the conflict, or being conciliatory in the face of it, not making waves---but I had to take a stance, I was responsible for what was being done, I was a supervisor, and thus I was "allowed" to take an assertive/aggressive stance (in fact, often, it may have been "required") whereas otherwise, based upon early childhood programming/ psychology, I would have acted more typically like who I had been earlier in my adult life.]
I went along with everything in a conciliatory fashion for a long time in my life, until I began to realize that if I did not try to take responsibility, I was going to be left behind. (I was wrong; I might have been left behind, but it would have been a better thing for me if I had been.) [I am now left behind, and look at me, the worse for wear, but happy.] But even in the job, when I became more assertive to the point of aggression, I was being conciliatory, just going along with what it was that the company wanted me to do: I adopted the ("evil") company's overbearing, overly-demanding (etc) manner as the pattern I emulated. The owner and his attitude [he disguised it well, less so early on, but much more convincingly toward the end, couching it in its token opposite; but it was very apparent early on, and it was this behavior and "training" (actual) that I took my cues from, and I never saw the attitude change, I recognized it as a consistent pattern, despite the overt behavioral change to the contrary] is exactly that of Steve Jobs in The Pirates of Silicon Valley. Thus, overconciliatory behavior at that company led me to aggressive expression in the name of work, allowing me to transfer early unconscious aggression into action. (But, yes, it was my own doing. I am responsible for my behavior.)
This loosening up of the early-developed strictures, thus allowing a more aggressive orientation, generalized to other areas outside of work, once I viscerally understood that it was a possibility. Even now, not working at a job, I still have to guard against a flare up of aggression in stress situations---which is the general environmental condition in which the behavior was conditioned (shifting momentarily to a behavioral explanation.)
What is the nature of this unconscious aggression? Rebellion against authority, which I repress, thus becoming falsely conciliatory, going along, out of fear, a fear of acting out and being censured, or even physically dominated. This rebellion still functions today. During my young adult years I tamed it with marijuana, which (ironically, given that I could have gotten into trouble for possession) probably kept me out of a lot of trouble. Interestingly, it was when I stopped smoking it that I began to increasingly experience problems in my job. I couldn't function on pot too well in the logic-related aspects of my jobs, but it kept me conciliatory with my co-workers. When I stopped smoking it, my aggressive behavior increased as the levels of stress built up. And the final straw was the overly demanding "ethos" (as it were) of my final job.
Okay. I can accept this explanation. It's a healthy thing, to have it out in the open. I have always known that I rebelled against authority, but I never realized that the overly conciliatory behavior was an expression of the same thing. I rebel to this day against an authoritarianism that I will see within myself when I will allow myself to be put into a position of authority. I rebel against myself, against that father-object in me, I suppose. As a counteraction to this, I search for (true) democracy (equality; not this farce that passes for it in this modern western world), more like (original or gnostic) Christianity than anything else, global perception, where everyone knowing everything cannot help but act properly, because improper behavior will be seen and understood as such.
Overeagerness/boredom plays into this unconscious aggression very obviously: I pursue with a zealous dedication that which I take on, my job, my "real work," my life in general; I work it all to exhaustion. This is aggression, disguised as zeal. It is also unconscious guilt? Guilt of what? What do I feel guilty about? Not being good enough, of course. I overcompensate to make up for feelings of inferiority. I feel guilty about not being as good as everyone else. (I know I am every bit as good, if not better than others; but this is a conscious addendum, not a "gut" feeling. If anything, this is also overcompensation, substituting superiority for inferiority. What we maintain we are is the opposite of what we repress.)
This schizoid split of overeagerness/boredom (ennui) predominates my life, although in recent years I have seen a decline in the overeagerness---a reaction perhaps to my "retirement' and the perception I have of having "failed" at my job, even though I know that I did not, that I did it perfectly and that it was only politics and a lack of networking, brought on by increasing stress, that caused my ultimate dismissal. (Of course, networking is a vital trait in a management position, and I had always been weak in this area; but if this is a "failure," then I accept it as such graciously, because I never really wanted much to network anyway and am happy to be out of it at last.)
The inferiority subsumes all of this, guilt, boredom, overeagerness, aggression. And what about anxiety? Where does that fall in this paradigm? Which comes first, the chicken or the corporate raider?


6-17-1b

She (they) talked me into going places and doing things that I knew ahead of time would intimidate me and make me extremely uncomfortable--and they did. It wasn't her (their) fault, it was mine. I had to learn to stand up for myself and resist her (their) manipulations (like acting hurt, or pouting, or... whenever I would express a reticence to participate.) I had to learn how not to feel guilty for acting (or not acting) on my own judgment and opinion. Finally, I am where I always should have been. And as a result, I am alone--because no one wants to have anything to do with you if they can't twist you to their will. These are major themes in my life, social anxiety and manipulation. I know how I've manipulated people, in a passive-aggressive way, getting what I've wanted by pretending not to want it. I go to great lengths now to try to avoid this type of unconscious behavior. (But I still catch myself doing it). And I go to greater lengths to prevent this kind of behavior being directed at me. (I'm beginning to think that maybe it's not so wrong to be manipulative, that maybe it's okay to get what you want in that way, that its others' responsibility to protect themselves against my manipulations as much as it is mine to protect myself against theirs.) The world is one big manipulative machine, I think--and feel. This is my social orientation, and it has been for as long as I can remember. It's an adaptive process that has nevertheless resulted in a fair amount of paranoia when I have let it get out of hand (during times of extreme stress or under the influence of drugs). The question I now face is: Is this, at this point in my life, still an adaptive orientation, or am I at the point where I can let it go? Maybe even being able to ask that question indicates an answer. And yet, I like the way I am. I like to complain about having to live in a world filled with manipulative people. (I complain about myself. I'm projecting.) I like hiding away from people most of the time and living on my own. It makes me so much more grateful for other's presences--sometimes. So, I guess I have a long way to go yet still. Or do I? Have I already "adapted" way too well?


6-21-1b

A large room much like old atc, but newer: Mark Hoffman is painting multiple canvases, going from one to the other using the same color paint, adding elements, designs, shapes, etc., to each. I say I like painting. He says he doesn't. I admit, in an apparent (i.e., unconscious) attempt to be appeasing (which is apparently something I used to do a lot, despite my conscious desire to be arbitrarily different and independently opinionated), that I do not like it either, but I like the finished products. [What I really like here is the way Mark is going about his work, moving from canvas to canvas, creating. But then, Mark is me, in some idealized form.]
Earlier, Ceil (and Wayne?) is conducting experiments, screening clear coating over images to see if it will stick. I am also directing similar experiments to see if the coating will peel off, wanting the images I coat to come off with the dried coating, to be used elsewhere as a decoupage-like process. Roger is directing Ceil's project, by-passing me, because he is not happy with the job I have been doing. I confront Roger, asking him if he would rather that I quit, since he doesn't seem to want to support me. [This is what I should have done, instead of just going along with the program. But I was too overwhelmed with it all, too hung up on keeping the bullshit job. I should have just said what was on my mind, like I did years later after I was fed up with it all, and let happen what eventually happened anyway. I know better now. It's not worth the diminishment of your self-esteem to keep your mouth shut and go along with a program that works to demean people in the name of employee cooperation. The company wanted "cooperative" employees, by which they meant "compliant" ones. I repressed my artistic nature for years doing the kind of work they wanted me to do, keeping my mouth shut and letting them think I agreed with them. I got a lot of money for it, but I suffered a lot as a result. I know better now.


7-21-1d

I hate to be wrong. I'm just realizing how important this is in my psychology. It's a fact that I've known of for a long time, but always ignored, relegating it to a fictive sphere of unimportance. (There is no such sphere. Everything's important.) Because I hate to be wrong, I have become very cautious and reticent to speak to promote my ideas. (If I am wrong and someone points it out, or worse, if I later see that I am wrong, when no one bothered to correct me, I am devastated.) This must go all the way back to childhood, because I've always been this way. When I am corrected, I am chagrinned. I hate to be corrected, because I hate to be (shown to be) wrong.
My maturity, what there is of it, is demonstrated by my willingness to be corrected without becoming angry, frustrated, and/or withdrawn. This is a more recent development in my life. I never used to be this way, willing to be corrected that is. I've always complied with authority, but never willingly, only out of fear and common sense. (My compliance is passive-aggressive. I only comply out of necessity when confronted, and then I go on to do whatever I want, being extra careful not to let the authority figure know what I am up to, withdrawing from society into myself, or into areas of society less capable of being influenced by the authority.)
I must learn to be gracious when I am shown a different truth than the one I think I possess. This is the intent of authority---to "educate" (propagandize.) I must learn to be humble and self-effacing when I see how I have been wrong, and I must do this without withdrawing. In this way, maybe, I will learn to better tolerate authority. (Oh, I hope not.)




7-21-1e

The narcissism of the sleeping state and the regressive form of thinking in dreams may correspond to a loss of interest in the external world if "interest" and "external world" are understood in the way that the distinction between subject and object seem to decree; we believe, however, that the interest is linked with the external world in a deeper sense, eliminating the subject-object, I-you differentiation in order to achieve identity via identifications. (Thomä & Kächele, 1994, pg. ref. lost)

So, my motive to achieve a more global mode of being (via meditation, Zen, TM, as well as via dream investigation and hypnagogic experience) is psychotherapeutic, and possibly even regressive. My search for identity (I have always known this; even when I was not conscious of it, as when I was a child, I knew it, in the sense that I behaved as if from this motive) has driven me away from the consensual world toward a world of my own making wherein I may achieve a spiritual or psychic identification with others, both theoretically, as in my conscious search for methods of non-egoistic connection, and behaviorally, which accounts for why people will see in me the ingredients of an intimate friend, even when I am not conscious of these elements in myself and only become aware of them long after the fact in introspection.




7-29-1a

[a further elaboration of the attention theme of the prologue]:

A building downtown, as if it were old atc, but in a different place, or maybe even in Oakland: the press room is in the 2nd basement, which is filthy and cluttered with huge machines. It's a nightmare of a place. At first, I'm the supervisor, observing printers as they print polyethylene. The ink isn't adhering well and I think, as I test a few sheets, that it's very borderline. I wonder if it's going to cure. I understand how the printers make compromises by essentially guessing and hoping that they have good adhesion. Then, I am a printer. I face the same adhesion problem, and I don't like it any more as a printer than I liked it as a supervisor. The girl, a big girl (i.e., fat) who works on the press next to me has talked to me throughout the day, and at the end of the shift, she tries to get me to go home with her by offering to make me dinner, etc. I thank her, but I say I'm tired and all I want to do is get home and get some sleep. She thinks I've been flirting with her, but I can't remember having talked to her or even been aware of her existence, despite the fact that I know she's been talking to me all day. She's offended because I refuse her invitation, and she goes away pissed. [This may be a reason why women always seem to get mad at me eventually. Of course it is! Not only when I will intentionally not pursue them when I am attracted to them, but when I don't even realize that they are attracted to me and have been trying to relate to me in more than the ordinary, casual way I'd thought we were relating.] I find Rita and tell her that I quit. I'm fed up, with the difficult, all but impossible work [and presumably with the way people try to manipulate me into approaching them and bending to their agendas (which is also difficult and all but impossible work, i.e., relating to people on an intimate level, when they will play games to all but avoid real intimacy]. At first, she thinks I'm joking and refuses to take me seriously. But as I walk away without giving her an argument or even considering her any further, she begins to get the idea that I'm really quitting and she follows me, trying to find out what's wrong so that she can convince me to stay. I walk around looking for an escalator going up. Six escalators, the old kind with wooden treads, like in old department stores, all packed into a central area, are almost impossible to get to through the clutter, and they all seem to be going in the wrong direction, although only a few of them go down. Finally I find one in the middle going up and I ascend through two floors to the ground floor with Rita following me, trying to convince me not to quit. I like the way Rita tries to cater to me, and I begin to feel sorry that I'm cutting myself off from this source of attention. But I'm resolved. I'm a bit hesitant about leaving, but I know it's what I have to do. I feel insecure about leaving, but it must be done. On First Ave., behind the real old atc (which turns out to be a few doors down from the place where I exited on Second Ave.), I meet Kevin and Isaac, who are sitting outside on a break. They're glad to see me and look up to me. [More attention.] When they find out I've quit, they can't believe it and at first they think I'm joking. I'm carrying a large amount of money around in a brown paper bag. Kevin or Isaac remarks about it, wondering why I've been carrying all my money around. It's a kind of rumor that's been passed around about me. I tell them it's not anywhere near all of my money, and I don't carry it around every day. I only have it today because I was planning on buying something.
[By withdrawing from people, I command more attention than if I were straightforward and direct with them. Although I would never stoop to so obvious a practice as overt pouting, this withdrawal is is actually a disguised form of it.]



8-2-1a
Verona, 2nd St., intersection¥: I can't remember what happened here, as if this is an "empty scene," merely an impression of being here, but also as if it transitions from the traveling carnival scene (described later.)
An old town [light business (shops)/residential area], as if it had been flooded years ago and abandoned, but is now beginning to be reconstructed, as if it's still in the early planning stages; on the river flats west of Verona where the GE shopping center now is: I am Richard Pryor, director of the reclamation operation. [The town is my mind/self, devastated, and I am now directing its reclamation. (Richard Pryor reclaimed himself from a devastating life of drugs, but they took their toll.)] People (workers) [sub-aspects of my self/doubts, fears] are dejected at the deteriorization of the area and feel that reclamation is impossible, but using my foot (shoe), I draw small rectangular blocks in the sandy soil in front of a place where a building had once stood, at the beginning of the block immediate adjacent to the river, but on its non-river side. The rectangular blocks, I point out to them, represent bricks of the new construction (and at the same time, houses and a sidewalk). This image with its verbal description motivates them and makes them happy. [I motivate myself to rebuild my life, via dreaming.]
On the other side of the "town," nearer the blvd. (except that it's not there), Mike Madden and db have arrived to pick me up. {Both Mike and db were "abandoned" by me, i.e., re my attention to them, after they "left" me. This is a pattern in my life: disregard anyone who "leaves" me, even to the point of totally stonewalling them physically/emotionally. I noticed this, after the fact, in my behavior when Mike announced that he was moving, as I deflected his good-bye speech with my concern over the computer that Steve was throwing out, that I wanted to go and get before someone else got to it. Apparently, Mike wanted to make a big deal out of the departure scene, but I short-circuited his attention. I did the same thing, far more consciously, when, on Jennifer's last day of employment, I avoided her until she left the building. And when people from my past return, it's as if I didn't know them so well. This is "functional," i.e., I actually don't remember how important they were to me, how "intimate" I really had been with them. (In part, this is because I did not attend so much to the intimacy when they were "with me," taking it for granted. I always feel (assume) that people will remain forever, and when they do not, I feel (unconsciously) betrayed. When Rita "sold me out," the betrayal I felt could be a result of this same motive. I felt this, and acted upon this motive, when db waved me down at the end of the road and "returned" her keys to the house and truck (because her new boyfriend was jealous that she had them). I stonewalled her [I was actually consciously pissed (hurt)] and wouldn't allow any intimacy at all, treating her as if she meant nothing to me any more. I treated her "matter-of-factly," took the keys, dismissed her, and drove away. I've compared this elsewhere (several years ago) to Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part 3. I have been, affectively, as tough as he. Thus, Mike and db represent this abandoned friends/lovers theme. But why are they returning? To point out to me how I have acted toward my past associations? Maybe, but I still think I have been right in (most of) what I have done; I still believe in this "philosophy" of stoic toughness. But, if I am to reclaim myself, I must be more open-minded. How? Like John Russell in Hombre when he lightens up and agrees to go down the hill to save Mrs. Favor and ends up getting killed? This is what happens to you when you soften your stance and allow society to determine your destiny. It's better to remain in control of your own self. Do I, then, really want reclamation? Certainly not consciously, but my unconscious mind seems to be telling me otherwise.} They meet me in a small building, like a guard shack. They've brought two cars¥. One car (truck?) is set up to tow a trailer, on top of which is my boat. [My boat is a symbol of my freedom, but it is also a symbol of my fear. (They are one and the same thing.) I wonder how we will take the other car back with us. [The obvious logic of two drivers doesn't occur to me; as does not that of them having brought two cars despite the fact that they arrived together (presumably in one vehicle.)] As if in answer to my doubts, and despite the fact that there is no imagery for this (i.e., there is only the image of the towing car/truck and the trailer, I conclude that the first vehicle tows the second, and the second tows the trailer. We proceed (without imagery) to the next scene, but as if we go directly to the scene after. In other words, both this scene and the next scene transition into the scene thereafter at the same time.
Army locker room¥: this is only a token scene, as if it were a dreamed association to past dreams. Nothing really happens. I'm just a presence in the locker room. [Previous Ds: I'm trying to pack up the contents (army clothes, etc.) of my locker to take it home, but there's too much of it to fit in my duffel, and there is no lock on the locker.]
Transition to:
Hilltop, area unknown, out in the countryside, as if in an area west of Pgh.,¥ [if it's in a "nowhere" area, then west is really north] in the flats prior to or beyond the airport, but not: just below the knob of the hill, on an elevated flat to the south(west) of it, a father and young son demonstrate some kind of sports (land skiing) equipment, but what they're really demonstrating is their relationship. (They "ski" only on the upper areas of the hill. This is not a demonstration per se, i.e., they do not intend for it to be such, they are just relating, but this is the idea that I get about it. They slide down the hill, supposedly on this sports equipment, but I don't see any equipment. [The equipment is a logical extension of the equipment in the locker room in the previous scene, which has transitioned into this one w/o scene change.] I hold this "demonstration" up as an ideal, while at the same time I feel that it is a bit naive and juvenile, or overly sentimental. This hilltop is some kind of an entertainment area, a vacation area of sorts. There's a small shack on the hilltop (which wasn't initially there) that is like a concession stand. To the east(south) is a huge drop-off, steep, but not a cliff. I sit below the hilltop on the small flat plateau for a while, contemplating a French drain, a knuckle of which is exposed, just at the point where it begins to drop down into a valley toward the west(north). There is something important about this drain. It's related to the guy and his kind, as if some ephemeral thing they exude is like the run-off water from the hilltop. We go up to the hilltop. Apparently, I have been brought to this place in a car by a Walter-Matthau-like character who was previously an agent-type guy who licensed/rented me the traveling carnival [see first scene] (via which I never made any money and regretted having spent a good part of my life occupied with its management. [This could be a symbol for my writing work, or it could be a symbol for the job(s) I had.] [The carnival doesn't have a "past" in the dream, i.e., it's as if I dream it here for the first time, inventing it as a past, as if I had dreamed it earlier. But, paradoxically, this does not apply to Walter and his fiduciary relationship with me re the carnival, which seems to me to have actually been dreamed earlier.] A seedy character, a sort of manager of this hilltop "resort," and I walk through the shack. It has two rooms, or maybe three. The "back" room is filled with leaking pipes and complicated machinery which is some kind of an engine or power plant. [waking association, for which there is no evidence in the D: ski-lift engine] Water [later association: water = my motive to "work"; thus, the engine is my work mechanism, which is "leaky,"
[unfocused; implicit in this idea is that the water runs or is pumped by the engine] dripping from the pipes drains off down the hillside via the French drain. [The guy and kid expend energy, which drains away down the hill, in the same way I expend energy when I write, but their energy results in a relationship, whereas mine is "wasted" being an isolated activity. I don't really consciously believe this, but...] There is a problem here that we are contemplating, i.e., the "manager and I: The deteriorization of the place, its moldy, creepy-crawly nature. Walter is leaving in his car (an old model, big car, like an Olds, or Buick, but old; it's seen better days.) I hurry after him, thinking he's going to leave me. I know that this is what he intended to do, but because I chase after him, he stops and joins us in our contemplation of the "problem." [Walter is my financial self, my superego. It wants to leave my id/ego to its own devices, but I (ego) won't allow it and employ it to my benefit.]
This dream has no real "appeal" for me. I didn't want to write it out, except that it seemed "important." It's affect, although dark and sinister, is "significant." I want to call it a nightmare, but I have to classify nightmares as embodying fear, and there is no fear herein, just a sort of "disgust."




8-6-1b

Rodi Rd. at intersection with Hoover Rd.¥: my (maternal) grandfather is dying, and so he has decided to kill himself. But he is bedridden and can't accomplish it, so he has talked my mother and my aunt into doing it. I object, and I say everything I can think of to convince them not to do it. We go up in elevators from the intersection to a hospital room where we run into gunmen who threaten to kill us. I resist the threat, and one of the gunmen shoots me in the chest. I fall down, but I do not die. The guy thinks I'm dead. I get back up and kill him instead with a gun that has been dropped that I pick up.
analysis: grandfather=superego. It wants to be killed. I want to kill it: I hate all authority, even my own. The impetus of my life has been to overcome the demanding effects of society, in short, the superego. Thus, I have been "poisoning" it, and it is dying, so rather than continue to suffer, it wants to be put out of its misery. This is me wanting to be free of the residual restraining effects of what I've been calling "society," when it is, after all, only my own self (superego) projected. How do my aunt and mother figure in here? My superego is the offspring of my mother, that which I (as superego) inherit. Thus, I am my own grandfather, enlisting my daughter/mother to kill me off. My aunt? I don't know. Extended family? I'm stretching this a bit thin. Either there is not enough here to base an evaluation on, or I just don't want to know.




8-7-1c

I "cured" myself of the "pain" (anxiety, etc.) by leaving the world. I found this solution, this compromise, as a child, but I gave it up to become an adult, intentionally setting about to "re-enter" (or enter for the first time in conscious earnest) society, in order to establish myself in the business world. Previous to that decision, I was socially involved only minimally, maximizing my "out" time in whatever way possible. Now, again, I find myself self-isolated. Being separate, I feel more together, not only integrally within myself, but socially as well. This seeming paradox is logical: I can feel more comfortable with society when it is exerting minimal pressure on me. There is no demand now to participate, conform, and perform. I do it if I want to, and if I don't, I stay retreated. Is this, then, a "cure?" Of course it isn't. But it is a solution. Whatever it is that motivates me to stay away, fear of rejection, once bitten, twice shy, whatever, is satisfied. It (the social anxiety) seldom rears its ugly (and it is ugly) head any more. But only because I do not entertain the factors that provoke it. I no longer feel I need to ask of society what it is I would have wanted of it years ago. I am become an independent entity, attached to society only to the minimal degree necessary to survive. This is functional, but it is good? I don't know. My philosophy/psychology of "waiting" and "detachment" is satisfied, but that theory is not so much a cause of the "cure" as it is a derived from it, ala Bem. (You unconsciously observe your behavior, then conclude how it is you are.) I idealize the theory because I am the way I am. This is how I want to be, because it is the way I am. Any other conclusion is an admission that I am a failure. In order to have been a success, I have to have wanted this present condition. And I have. It's always been an implicit goal of mine to have all my time to myself, to do, or not do, whatever it is I wish. But something, some desire, or need, nags at me, a need I want to relegate to an evil world that I want to feel is better off left alone. In the best tradition of Zen, I remain detached, "enlightened" (to a degree, if that is a possible condition.) I am the Buddhist monk living isolated in my monastery, meditating, studying the scriptures (which happen to be, in my sub-culture of one, modern psychology and late nineteenth century philosophy.) This is all a rationalization, I know. But it's a nice one. I like it. I don't want to be without it. And I do, after all, have a choice. It's not as if I am cornered into this style of life. I can go out into the big bad world any time I want to. Sometimes I do. It's just that I don't want to so much any more. I'm happy. Why should I then want to go fucking around with my psyche, dredging up old trauma, trying to figure out why I am the way I am? The simple answer is because I want to know myself better. The more complex and probably truer answer is because an inner motive drives me to it. Something unconscious is at work here, an impetus to dig inside to find the truth, even if it upsets my otherwise idyllic life. This is what I do, after all, stir myself up investigating my inner being. This is what I've always done. This is how I got to be everything I am today. This is why I became a psychologist in the first place, not to help other people, but to understand myself. So then, I am fixed in the course I am on. I am content with my life as it is, but I am bound and determined to discover every minute detail of how it is I got here and how I can better serve myself, if not mankind. (We each serve mankind best by serving first ourselves, otherwise we are self-sacrificing fools who believe that the world is more important than we are, the ultimate low self-esteem position. Another rationalization. And anyway, serving yourself first should [superego] be the preliminary to serving society, but with me the end-goal is to have served myself. And yet, I would gladly serve society if it allowed me to serve it in the way I think is proper to my personal psychology, as a writer, for example. Yet another rationalization. Society has its own way of determining how it is to be served. It doesn't seem to need (or maybe it does, but it doesn't want) my input. [This is all sour grapes?]




8-10-1a

"He's not really my type."
"Hmm. Could be a good sign."
"It is?"
"Well, sometimes our type is someone who perpetuates unhealthy behavior patterns."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, we're oft times attracted to someone who reinforces our dysfunction. In your case, I'd say someone who is unavailable, basically narcissistic like your father, or someone who's critical and doesn't really understand and appreciate you for who you really are--like your mother. Or someone who, assuming you even dare to show your real self, will ultimately abandon you--like your mother and your father, thereby proving your greatest fear, that you're unlovable."
 
from The Shrink Is In
I'm continually fighting the repression (resistance) of the insight that my real problem is that I want to be alone. I idealize this "desire" [an alteration of a more primal desire?] and the condition that the problem creates, i.e., isolation. My rationalized compromise with the world is that I tolerate and have even grown to like the condition of isolation, if the world will but leave me alone. In fact, this is no compromise at all. I lose in this situation, but I pretend I win. [The real compromise is that I withdraw from society in order to eliminate anxiety. I can't have social benefits, but I can live free of the syndrome.] And in the pretense, I create a personality that is asocial. Yet fantasies reveal that I desire an active social life--but on my own terms. And where can I establish the conditions that permit me to exist on my own terms? Why, in fantasy, of course. [desire > frustration > fantasy gratification]
Desire. This is the key to following the insight. My "philosophy" (Zen detachment) dictates [superego term] that I eschew (repress) desire. I do this in order to hope for "enlightenment" or "salvation." But there is none apart from the world. And the world is one of desire. It's a condition built into the scheme of things. (This is the conclusion the young monk comes to in the Chinese film Why Did Bodhi Dharma Leave for the East? He leaves his family and "the world" searching for enlightenment and returns to it at the end of the film having realized that desire is an essential part of the world and enlightenment consists of embracing it as an essential part of all things.)
So, what is desire anyway? It's the most basic of motive forces. It's libido. We desire the mother, but because of the incest taboo, we cannot have her. Frustrated, we substitute other "objects" for her, other people, other things. Our psychosocial history thus becomes one of searching for the substitute mother, the one whom we can possess when the real world says we can't. When we desire, anything, inevitably we desire the mother.
To become "independent" (a fiction), thinking we are advancing, we (some few of us) eschew desire. Thus, we become consciously motherless. Our real mother dies. We do not feel the loss so much, because we have broken the bond of desire. Or have we? No. We have substituted the search for mother-love with the search for...whatever, that which we are searching for. Something, "out there," will satisfy us. The search for "enlightenment" or "independence" or anything, is desire. We have, in fact, not given up the need at all. We are no different than we have ever been. We are, always, children, searching for our mothers' love.
I desired my mother. [Don't be so smug. So did you.] I repressed the desire when it was frustrated and I began to desire mother-objects as replacements. At one early point, my mother "abandoned" me. I felt rejected. I struggled with the "rejection" for years, finding it eventually in every (object) relationship. [I lost a wife, lovers, jobs, friends; therefore, all of life is fickle, disloyal, uncommitted.] A point came in my life where I consciously "realized" (provoked by the extremity of stress and depleted cortisol reserves) that the path of "rejection" was a dead-end. I retreated full-time. Up until this time in my life, relationships with the (object) world had been flirtatious affairs. I pursued objects, found the "rejection" (repetition), tried again, continually attempting to gain the mother-love in every pursuit. I wanted acceptance (mother love.) I wanted to be who I was, not what others wanted me to be. (My mother withheld her love until I conformed to her expectations.) I grew to resent the fact that I could not be in public who I really was in private [an incest desirer; all attempts to express my "real" self are attempts to possess my mother, to "win" her with an expression of my real self. (Any attempt to win her affection with constructed ploys, such as with standard novels, for example, or conventional writing styles and formats, is futile, because even if they work, they are not expressions of my real self, but facades I create in order to appease. The same is true in employment: I act a role, in order to keep a job, but the role is not me, and so the employment is unsatisfying because it--the company, the boss, the workers--cannot accept me for who I am; I must be a character in a fiction.)] Anyone who did (does) not accept me unconditionally was (is) suspected, not to be trusted. But very few people, if any, accept others unconditionally. And yet, I need the unconditional mother-love. [This cycle is broken, if ever it is, when you yourself accept others unconditionally. This is not a permanent solution. It's a process. You always backslide, slipping into distrust, thus provoking it in others via expectation and a self-fulfilling prophecy, or simply allowing yourself to open up to unscrupulous and manipulating people, which eventually you become aware of and shut the relationships down in order to avoid being taken advantage of. But unconditional acceptance doesn't have to be a stupid thing. You can be accepting without being vulnerable to manipulation, vampirism, and threat, by taking a non-approaching yet fully accepting stance, ever-ready to establish a defense, yet never allowing your unqualified openness to fail. At first, it seems that total acceptance and a non-approaching defensive readiness are opposite conditions. But they are not. A perfect balance between the two is achievable. It's a very narrow path, but it's possible to walk it, and even if you wander off, it is easily found again.]
I hide away when I feel threatened (by rejection.) [When someone tries to manipulate you, that is a threat. They are withholding mother-love (unconditional acceptance), implying that you will get it if you are a good child and comply with what they want you to do. But, depending on who they are (in reality), you may not ever get anything. Some people will reward you, but most are so caught up in their own unconscious agendas that they continue on without another thought of you after they have gotten what they want, after you have complied. (This is a countertransference, or a projection on my part. I do this.)] Withdrawing into isolation is an attempt to avoid the feelings of rejection after I've attempted to get love/acceptance from my mother-objects. The solution to the isolation problem, simple unconditional acceptance, works effectively because you choose not to expect anything, finding what you need, acceptance, within yourself. Self-acceptance is what it's all about. Maturity is release from the repetition of object relationship. When this happens, you no longer feel you have to hide away, because you no longer feel you need to be searching for an external love in the first place, therefore you need not fear rejection when you do not get the love, or when you get it and it is subsequently withdrawn. This is a difficult non-agenda to maintain, as you become sucked into the game, at first getting the love you desire, becoming happy with it, then having it withdrawn. It's hard to keep in mind that you do not need it from external sources [Freudian typo: forces] when at first you find it so willingly given. But you can accept without bias the partial forms of love that (some) people are willing to give, you can give (as much as possible) your own partial forms (practicing unconditional acceptance doesn't mean you will be perfect at it), and meanwhile you can be complete within your own self, so that you do not desire that thing you started out desiring, the ever-illusive mother-love.
See also: similar material




8-10-1b

Two dreams in two days about Eileen:
1) old atc, but changed: I am emptying out the watch pocket of my Levis onto Eileen's desk. It contains an amazing amount change, far more than the pocket could hold in reality. Eileen is changing the pennies into silver for me. A boss (Bob Halsaver? If so, he wasn't really an employee of the company, but he was Eileen's husband, whom she met as her supervisor where she worked previously) comes up and reprimands us (her?) for doing this, implying we shouldn't be doing this during work hours. I tell Eileen that I wasn't emptying out the money in order to get it changed, I was just dumping out the pennies in order to get at the larger coins nearer to the bottom. "Oh," she says. Throughout this whole episode, the idea of "change" is predominant, along with the idea of "exchange." Eileen and I exchange something, symbolized by the change. This is an intimate process. It feels nice, as if we are communing in a way that is perfectly natural. But Bob? doesn't like this. It's too intimate for him. He feels that Eileen betrays him? And I (as a defense?) say that it's not my intent to exchange (which it isn't, but if it happens, then I am happy about it.) In other words, I accept what people do for me, but I do not initiate requests for it. My intent is to just dump out my "change" for what it's worth (to get at higher denomination (more profound) change deeper down, and if someone else can take advantage of the change I dump (Eileen wanted the pennies. She liked to spend them when she went shopping. She likes "small change"), that's good.
We both change. I get fewer higher coins; she gets many lower ones.
We exchange change. Mine is more profound, hers is superficial?
2) old atc, but changed, but not so much as in the first dream: Eileen and I are at my home (6023?) working on folders containing attendance records? We take them into work. Roger begins to review them. I am in charge again (which feels tentative.) Roger wants to know where my attendance record is. I ask Eileen if she has a record of my attendance, but she says, no, she doesn't. I tell him I have the information at home, but I'll bring it in. He wants to know, specifically, what days I took as vacation and sick days. It seems I've been off for an extended period of time. (This time off equates to the years since I've left work.) Now (not rai), I want to say, "Fuck you, dickhead! It's none of your goddam business what I'm doing since I left." [Roger is authority figure? Ineffective superego? Trying to "control" this situation? What situation? Control fantasies are superego functions? Probably.] Besides, it would have been his responsibility to keep my attendance records, not mine. This is typical of how he relegated rather than delegated his authority. [So, is this what I did (do?) too, if I am projecting? I don't think so.




8-11-1a

[I think it was a mistake in the following piece to have postulated two forms of anxiety. I should go back and rewrite it to correct this, but it's too much work. (I am a true postmodernist, after all.) "Ontological" anxiety is probably the same thing as "conditional" anxiety. Both proceed from rejection. The earliest rejection, if it exists (and it probably does), is probably not the fixating point. In fact, the point I was trying to make here is that the fixation doesn't fully occur until much later. Its onset is gradual. I am anxious as a young child, but I am adaptable until adulthood. And even then, I am able to recall excitement, in specialized, non-social (and even some limited social) situations.]

Before we are born, we live in a paradise. Everything is provided for us without reserve. We are a part of a larger entity (the mother) whom we must feel is a benign and nurturing god. Then that day comes when we must forcefully leave it all behind. [My entering into adult society, i.e., going out into the world, getting a job, leaving home, etc., is analogous to the birth event; it's something I do not want to do, and its trauma is, arguably, as great.] This event characterizes the rest of our time on earth. [The trauma of birth repeats itself throughout my life, symbolized by my caustic and tentative association with society. And, therefore, anxiety is a residue of birth--an earlier manifestation of rejection by the mother: she didn't want me and so expelled me.] We are henceforth separate and searching, consciously or not, for that which had formerly nourished us. We make this search our occupations, preoccupations, and religions, as well as the primary basis of our relationships.
And yet, when we are first born, after the initial shock has worn off and we stop crying long enough to begin the search, we look upon the new environment with a sense of wonder and excitement. Whether we will carry this earliest adaptation with us throughout life depends upon how we are treated at this time. If our adaptation to the state of separate being is a nurturing one, some of the earliest residue of excitement stays with us, and we continue to be, during many moments, happy to be alive, excited at the prospect of new events; if, however, we meet with the stress and anxiety of others, we quickly learn to associate that condition with our own, and we introject that condition, experiencing excitement at new things as an anxiety, being uncertain as to what will result from unknown events. [This is an ontological (as contrasted with conditional) anxiety (see note at beginning of this piece), which proceeds from a developed fear of punishment or perceived rejection that creates an anticipation more of the same. Both forms of anxiety have the same effect, to shut down the excitement.] The more fixed we are at this early stage, the less able we will be to call up the excitement when subsequent events in our lives warrant it.
I can easily recall excitement when I put my mind to it. And I can, with a great deal of conscious effort, turn social anxiety into an excitement, although it takes a great deal of energy resources to maintain this disposition, sometimes resulting in nearly as much stress as the anxiety itself. But, in general, I am predisposed to a state of non-excitement. This is an early adaptation. I can recall moments of true excitement in my childhood, moments when I faced new things out of a secure environment, but generally even the thought of new conditions or events left me anxious about them, even to the point of actual fear, which would later escalate into paranoia--even before I began to ingest drugs that would accentuate the experience.
[Also, there is the idea of being genetically predisposed to being "sensitive," which would be a predetermining factor in how a newborn reacts to initial nurturing (and non-nurturing) experiences.]
I think that it may be this ontological anxiety, more than the unconscious perception of rejection itself (causing conditional anxiety), that is the cause of my retreat into isolation, which is, for me, a natural extension of the initial birth separation, and only secondarily a movement away from a rejecting world. In other words, I retreat more from anxiety than from rejection per se. Yes, I do not like rejection, but I will function quite socially despite it. I always have. I remain unconscious of most of it until a later time when I can look back from a position of relative safety, from a conscious rationale that "the past is past," which, of course, isn't true. The past is always with us; we carry it along to form the present context. But it's a nice fiction I can maintain to ward off the worst of the effects of past rejection and present anxiety. I may feel (unconsciously or even consciously) guilty about having been rejected, thinking or feeling that I had done something wrong to warrant it (which may have been how I felt when my mother "rejected" me), but I fight this attitude successfully. I assert my right to live as a free individual, and although I am bothered to distraction by rejection, I do not allow it to interfere with my social agenda. But ontological anxiety will interfere with any social agenda I may want to adopt, often severely.
So, the "rejection" is not the cause of the (worst of the) anxiety. Anxiety and feelings of rejection are related, but separate conditions. They work together to produce the same effect, isolation. Ontological anxiety began earlier (near or at birth?) and became more fixed later. The feelings of rejection, beginning at perhaps age one or two {or maybe earlier, but the evidence I have [crib incident; to be linked to as soon as I find where I wrote about it], pinpoints it at this age}, reinforced the sense of separation, but it is the ontological anxiety that drives me deeper into isolation. The rejection itself would not do this. It backs me off, when I manage to experience it first hand and not ignore it (I am an unconscious expert at ignoring it in the present), but it doesn't drive me into isolation. In fact, it may reinforce my resolve to be myself, an "independent" entity--which is a form of separation, but a form that exist "within" society, as a functional, if separated, being. I can see here how anxiety and rejection result in the same condition in different modes, rejection causing a social separation of "being," which is a pretty normal state experienced by many (most?) people, but anxiety causing an actual physical retreat to a position "outside of" society [which I often label "the world."]
[Modification: anxiety and rejection are not two separate things: anxiety proceeds from rejection by creating a fear of future rejection. Then, there is a separation of response into two "adaptations": 1) a "social" (normal) one (independence), and an asocial one (isolation.) Stress increases the likelihood of choosing the isolation as opposed to the independence mode.]
I am beginning to realize that I may be defining a "syndrome" here: the anxiety/rejection syndrome, which is an extension of the DWAFP syndrome, an x-axis parallel to the DWAFP y-axis, attached to it at the A. The upper extreme is "society" and the lower extreme is isolation. Thus, worry, doubt, anxiety, fear, and paranoia can exist within or without society. Excitement doesn't figure in here because if I manage to transform anxiety back into excitement, the syndrome is negated.



When this transformation is achieved, when I am excited, I am healed, temporarily. I am "enlightened." There is no reason to pursue the illusion that I will find a great and wonderful "global" condition "out there" somewhere because it is, as it always has been, within. Heaven, or the Void, or Satori, or whatever, is the condition we once were before we became separated. How obvious. We are searching for nothing more than our mothers. We want the illusive mother-love, the total acceptance we knew intuitively before we were born and have been searching for ever since. What better unconditional acceptance than to find within ourselves the excitement of the present state, our own internal mother, our connection with the universe.
The here-and-now, present existence, divorced temporarily from the then-and-there of psychic trauma, can be experienced, and lived. Now, if only it could be sustained. That is the goal of a life, to sustain the freedom you find as you analyze the past for clues as to how you lost it.




8-11-1b

Photronics: but the employees and operations are of atc. [Combining these places makes me wonder if this is not meant to be generalized as "business" or "work." But that explanation may be too general.] Linda comes "up" from the art department, which is actually the imaging rooms (on the same floor.) She has a film positive that she asks about, comparing the process of imaging that we do with her "art dept" process--specifically something about line width, or line width loss. I use the example and her inquiry as an opportunity to "instruct" my employees (Mike K., Kevin?). We go into the drilling room, which is actually screen making. I begin to explain how light from the exposing process travels actinically along the image edges, undercutting the lines and narrowing their width, but I don't get too far before Linda finds a reason to have to leave. And then Kevin, then Mike also find reasons to leave, as if they pretend they don't want to leave, but are required to be somewhere else. I have a motive to finish my explanation, but no one is left to explain it to. I go into the imaging rooms to find Linda in order to continue, but she isn't there. I feel very frustrated that I have been cut off short. I go out into the main part of the shop. Someone brings me large piece of plywood with a small connector through it. It is put together in a specific way that I know to be wrong; it is almost right, but some of the small components are misplaced. We begin to take it apart as I explain how it is supposed to be, but again the person I am explaining it to has to leave, and I am left frustrated in my explanation. Mike comes along, regretful for having left earlier, and he tries to make it up to me by helping with the connector. We take it apart and then he has to leave again, and I can't find the pieces to put it back together. They are lost among the clutter. I try not to get pissed at the absent Mike, who was well meaning, but ineffectual. Maintenance employees have also become involved in the project, which confuses it even more.
bai: I have a meeting with a boss, who criticizes the construction of the connector. He is totally wrong, and as he dismantles it and reconstructs it, putting it back together in exactly the same way that I had it put together in the first place, everyone realizes that I had been right all along. The "apology" he makes is a mere statement of the fact that he guessed I had been right all along, but he just wanted to make sure, which I don't think is an adequate apology, given the circumstances.
analysis: People leaving during my explanations = rejection. My frustration is actually at myself, for my inability to explain myself adequately, not on the job, but to myself (i.e., via self-therapy). I feel rejected because I can't effectively analyze myself? Or vice versa. The connector = that which joins me with people; it is put together wrong. My relationships are based upon a model that is almost, but not quite right, some of the components being misplaced. I was cut off short of finishing my "tasks," at each job I held. Had I been allowed (or allowed myself) to continue, I would have developed the proper expertise, as I put all of the pieces into place. Bosses are poeple who are overly-critical when thye don't know themselves so much what they are doing. This is as much projection as it is a statement of fact. I, too, was a boss, learning as I went along, as are we all. My distain for authority is self-criticism, and my frustration with the inadequacy of authority to solve the world's (human) problems is a projection of my own inadequacy. (But that doesn't mean that authority should not be held suspect nonetheless.)




8-11-1c

I want unconditional acceptance. And short of that, I want positive attention, i.e., partial love/acceptance. And short of that, I want any kind of attention? Maybe. Let's investigate this:
I have been a "bad" boy because, given the withholding of unconditional acceptance and given the very intermittent and undependable nature of partial love, I opt to call attention to myself in any way I can, even as I ostensibly withdraw and separate myself from people. [I conjecture this; I don't know, or I don't want to know, that this is true (so it probably is.)] In fact, the act of separation itself is a form of calling attention to myself. If I wanted to remain anonymous and truly isolated, I would feign conformity in order to disguise my difference. [I've often used this ploy, especially when I was younger. I often used to not want to "rock the boat," being too afraid of confrontation. My conscious desire to be different didn't settle in until my late teen and early adulthood years.]
This is a schizoid orientation: to be separated, anxiety-ridden, fearing rejection and at the same time seeking attention, wanting to be assimilated--or rather, to be assimilating, introjecting others. I had this latter problem for a long time when I was younger, adopting specifically chosen special others' beliefs and structures (identification, introjection, incorporation, internalization), even as I influenced them toward my way of thinking, effecting an intuitive communion--before I gave it up for its opposite extreme of isolating everyone. As I grew older, I grew more wary of this process of a tentative communion (you might call it intimate friendship), as I became caught up in the social games and, being thus open, was thereby easily made a foil for others' projected faults. Now, I wish I had that old means of communication back. Or maybe not. I do wish it, but that's a conscious game I play to make myself believe that I don't have that ability, when, in fact, I still do. It will still function, when I allow it. This identification process will still work today, albeit with far less intensity--because, through experience, I have become wary of others' superstitious behavior, i.e., not so much impresses me any more since I've learned how dangerous people can be with their unconscious agendas. I avoid the process now, mostly by avoiding close contact with people. Communion is, always has been, easy for me when I am among people. It's the effects of an incomplete communion (which it almost always is, being a mostly unconscious process), that gray area between the ideal (unconditional acceptance) world and the real (partial love) one, that is difficult for me to endure.

8-11-1d

In Freud's view, past, unconsciously preserved wishes lose their effect when they reach consciousness.
 
Thomä and Kächele,
Psychoanalytic Practice
If this is true, then I am, at least in part, "cured." The problem here, which Freud may not have considered, is: What happens when the unconsciously preserved wishes slip back out of consciousness? Do they then become effective again? This is the same thing as asking: Can a person backslide? And the answer is: Of course. So, the task, it seems, is to hold the unconsciously preserved wishes in consciousness after they are uncovered, at least during those moments (which will be many) when their effect is felt in the present situation, until such time as a "new beginning" (Thomä, p. 274) may be initiated (if it ever is; if we can ever be freed from the initial programming.)

8-12-1a

Theory

The existence of anxiety presumes a wish. (Thomä, p. 284)

Primal excitement: "There is someone else beside myself."
Primal wish: "I want her."
Incest taboo: "I can't have her."
Excitement becomes anxiety: via perceived rejection causing anticipation of more of the same.

This morning at dawn, before I fell asleep and slept half the day away, I felt an excitement about life I haven't felt in years. It could be the height of summer that makes me feel this way, because I remember feeling this way a lot in summer, especially when I was younger. But I don't think this is the cause. I theorize that it's the direct result of the therapy, that bringing all the stuff about early childhood desire and rejection into consciousness has provoked the feeling. This is therapy working, I think. It feels good. Although it verges on the edge of anxiety, it won't go there. But I feel that if I would add a little stress, or experience a negative encounter, I could suddenly revert (regress) to an anxious state of mind.
I remember that I have felt this way, excited, off and on, throughout my adult life, more earlier than later, and later usually as a result of extended bouts of meditation when I manage to develop a "now" state of existence. This is the antithesis of neurosis, I think. It hasn't until now occurred to me that neuroses set in later in life for most people. Yes, there are children who become neurotic (and it can be said that all people become neurotic in childhood), but the symptoms of neurosis do not generally manifest themselves until later in life. Thus, when I have felt excitement, off and on, I have been temporarily coming out of a neurotic state of mind. This usually happens when I'm alone (although I can remember times when I have felt it when I was with people, close friends) or when I'm with a lot of people who are strangers and there is no necessity for me to interact with them, i.e., when I can be "alone" within a social group.
The feeling is with me now, and seems to be a stable affect. I feel it in the center of my being, in my chest and stomach, and in my psyche. It's a pleasant feeling, unlike its anxious counterpart, which feels exactly the same, but different, because I place a different value on it, i.e., I don't want to feel it. Anxiety and excitement are not at all different states; they are exactly the same feeling. The difference is that, when I am excited, I want to feel that way, and when I am anxious, I do not.
This state, I can see now, has been coming on gradually for days, but yesterday it has been hastened by an encounter:

8-13-1a

Since regression promotes fantasizing, the result is a certain tendency toward acting out, toward repetition through acting out, which runs counter to the demand that the patient verbalize and mentally rehearse actions.
 
Thomä and Kächele
Psychoanalytic Principles
I know a woman who works in a grocery store (only by seeing her; we have never spoken to each other, but we are aware of each other's presence when we are in proximity) who would like to know me better and has made a few less than subtle, but wordless, overtures to that end, which I have ignored--or maybe ignored is the wrong word, because internally I have certainly not ignored them. Maybe stonewalled is a better word. (Hey! It's just occurring to me that Stonewall Jackson would be a fitting nickname for me. I wonder why I never thought of that before.)
Yesterday, I saw her again. A guy was with her, casually talking to her, as I walked by. I heard him ask her something about her brother, like "Oh, is he your brother?" or something like that, which in conjunction with other things he said led me to believe that he did not know her so well. I continued on with my shopping, assigning the experience to the category of "Who cares about her anyway, all I want to do is get this shopping done and get back home." A few minutes later, I see the two of them again, walking along in my direction. My shopping takes me away from them, at right angles to their direction of travel. A few minutes later, I see them again. This happens twice more, as if they are following me--except that they are so casual in their walk and involved in conversation that I could attribute their continuing presence to coincidence, except that they are not shopping, but simply walking through the store. If this would have happened at a different time or under different circumstances, it could be just the type of situation that would provoke a serious case of paranoia [an escalation of the anxiety within the DWAFP syndrome.] But as it is, being preoccupied within my mind, I am only mildly interested--until . . . As I stand in the checkout line, as the checker totals my purchases, I happen to glance toward the entrance, and I see the two of them hovering near it. Just as I look their way, the guy puts his arm, his forearm, around the woman's shoulders, but a bit awkwardly, because he is half-facing her so that it seems like an unnatural movement. He only leaves his arm there for the very briefest time before he removes it. Then, just at the split-second I am looking away from him (because I seem to want to recognize the act as a game she is playing that I do not want to have anything to do with), with his other hand, he waves at someone in my direction. If I had been looking straight at him, I might have felt that he was waving at me and been required to wonder if I should acknowledge the gesture or display some body language of my own as to whom he was waving at, like turn around to see if anyone behind me was waving back. As it were, since my eyes had dropped away from him just as he waved and I went along with my business, relegating the couple to the wide world of insignificance (an unconscious pose on my part.) The entire arm-around-the-shoulder-and-wave incident couldn't have last more than a single second. I expect them to still be standing near the door when I get there a minute or so later, But they are gone.
I wonder on the way home what I would have said had they (he) confronted me. But what could he have said, not knowing me? And how could I have responded, uncertain of his (i.e., her) intent. Had this been merely a coincidence of circumstance, the "following" and the wave, or was it truly, as I believed (intuited), another attempt of hers to try to get me to approach and pursue her? Or something else? I've experienced this kind of thing before, a lot. Women, when you will not chase after them, especially when they are trying to attract you, will resort to trying to make you jealous by cavorting with another male. (I can imagine her, either directly or via innuendo, engaging the guy's cooperation in this game.) It amazes me that women think this will work? I guess, though, that they feel this way because it does work. It plays into an instinctual response: woman flirts, flirting doesn't work, woman flirts with someone else, first guy gets jealous and a "Let's You And Him Fight" game ensues, with the woman free to choose the winner or the loser. But it never works with me. It never has, and not because I conscious arrange a strategy in order to protect myself. It's so programmed into me that it's automatic, so automatic and unconscious that it almost seems as instinctual as the true instinctual response. When I perceive that a woman favors another man, even when her intent is to further attract me, I remand the play. She should try another tactic. I will not become involved under these circumstances. I would like to think that this is an innate intelligence at work, but it's not. It's that basic fear of rejection working, this time in my favor. Many men might feel that my option to not play the game is a move not in my favor, but I disagree. If it is your intent to "play the game," then, yes, you lose when you opt out of it. But if it's true intimacy you want (or are motivated to find unconsciously), then making this instinctual move will not likely lead to it, or it will lead to it as a short term ploy only, to be set aside, again and again, when the sexual motive is satisfied or wears off. It's like the situation of the woman who cheats on her husband. Yes, she will go to bed you. But why would she be faithful to you? She wasn't faithful to her husband. You simply become the next guy in line. If all you want is sex, fine. Go ahead and play the game. But if you want a committed intimacy, don't go there. It will only lead to heartache after heartache as she repeatedly tries to attract you by playing with the instincts of other men.
This is the final straw for this woman and me (if there ever was a hope at all.) I wanted her to be an ideal. (I want every woman I know, or know of, to be an ideal. I am a hopeless romantic--but not in the way that women want men to be romantic.) She has become (actually, has always been) just another ordinary, instinct-bound woman, incapable of self-insight, uneducated, caught up in the social game of finding a husband and living out her mundane life amid dirty diapers in a nice suburban home. But, after all, what should I have expected? She works in a grocery store.
But there is a bigger (deeper) picture here: It has been a longstanding (non-developmental; in fact, devolved--I was much better at it in the earliest part of my life, before I become so aware of it) behavior of mine that I "contact" people, in the same way that I contact the environment, without thinking about it. (When I was young--during my pre-teen and teen years, and I suspect earlier, although I have no memories of it then that I have unrepressed--the phenomenon was at its most profound.) In fact, the more aware of it I become, the less it spontaneously happens. This is generally something I do without thinking about it. I "open up" to the world and take it in, usually without a conscious awareness of it in the moment, but sometimes (more so the older I get) with an awareness that makes me even more appreciative of the "talent." If I can manage to think about it in the moment, I might be able to negate the behavior, but why would I want to? I spend enough time separated, cut off from the world. And some people go to a lot of effort just to experience moments like this that I will encounter spontaneously. To be able to experience the world in immediacy and to contact specific "souls" directly without any mediating variables such as verbal or conventional stereotyped behavior is a gift I would never want to lessen the occurrence of.
But, people, especially women and gay men, will misinterpret this gift (or interpret it correctly at a level below my awareness, ala an unconscious agenda of mine having to do with the rejection/anxiety syndrome, a latent motive to contact people that is subverted by my defense against the anticipated rejection.) These people will want to act on what they feel is a mutual "understanding," for lack of a better word. [Maybe a better word is communion, except that, although that word may capture the immediacy of the phenomenon and the spirituality of it, I don't think it captures the integration of the spiritual/material field of being with the mutual consciousness that suddenly "pops" into awareness (re people) or the self/world integration (re "environment," again, for lack of a better word.) "Field" is a better word, but it is not so easily understandable as communion or environment, which is erroneous, in that it connotes or even denotes a place "wherein" one exists, and not a field within which one exists as a continuous, more or less undifferentiated part.)]
People want to apply conventional (instinctual) standards of behavior to this phenomenon, standards that will inevitably lead to a restriction of the encounter, a leveling down of it to a point where they can understand it as an ordinary human experience, which it is, but only for the most part unconsciously. This is the inevitability I struggle to avoid: I do not want my existence in this world to become any more consciously consensualized. Thus far, I have compromised enough. I want the rest of my life to be devoted to advancement, whatever that means. I want, more and more, to experience the infinity of being that disguises itself as human existence. And my method for provoking this experience is (at least some significant degree of) abstinence, or detachment. (I am not perfect at this method, but who is? A few priests living in the mountains of Tibet, maybe.)
People misinterpret my drive toward a detachment that incorporates an undetached experience of the entire "presence" of life, a wish to remain "in contact" with it (an apparent contradiction, but it's not; we experience more universally by limiting the specificity we define and pursue), as a desire to remain aloof (which it is not; no matter what we do from this point on, we will never be more intimate and can only hope to remain as close in the future as we now are, no small task given the limiting nature of involvement in a "physical" world), to not become involved (again, we are already as intensely involved as we could ever be, if we only realized the moment's full experience), even to reject them.
"Aha!" you say. "This is why you do it! This is why you want to be detached!" Maybe. This may very well be my motivation. But even so, it is no less valid a purpose for it. But just to be complete, let's examine this thread:
I stonewall people because I am acting out the repetition of my early withdrawal as a result of having been rejected by my mother. I find in "perfect" encounters a momentary instance of unconditional, uncompromised, unlimited acceptance. I know from experience that this moment can only deteriorate when it is called into the service of "real" world pursuits. The experience upon which I base my prediction is not only that of the genesis event and all of its subsequent repetitions and mutations, but of new events experienced as these real moments that have degenerated into repetition events and into purer instinctual (id) events out of which the other person's repetition events arise. (In other words, if a deteriorating relationship occurs, it is not my repetition alone that causes the deteriorization.) Is it hopeless then to try to establish a relationship with anyone? That depends on how you look at it. It is certainly hopeless if what you want is to establish and maintain a perfect state of momentary connection within a "detached" mode of being. [It occurs to me, as I reread this, that what I am intellectualizing about here is nothing more than what women will experience as simple "love," or the initial phase of it, an experience that men are woefully inadequate at, because they interpret the experience from a more physical/sexual point of view. But this ideal that women will experience deteriorates for them too, despite the fact that they can call it up again more readily. I guess what I really want is to be assured that I will not step into a situation that will distract me for years from my "advancement" as I begin to react like a typical man.] But I also exist, more often than not, in a "real" world of flesh and blood. And all relationships established in this lower state will embody imperfection. I have a choice in any experience: to walk the fine ("non-involved," i.e., verbally, behaviorally, physically, etc.) line required to keep it at that higher state or to pursue a more limited agenda. If I choose the latter, I leave myself open to not only my own repetitions, but those of others as well. So, to choose a relationship where, after an intuitive, studious period of non-engagement, I have come to understand the complexities, especially when those complexities are traps I've been caught in before (and it seems that all potential relationships contain those traps; maybe I'm associating with the wrong groups/kinds of people) is just so much foolishness.
You could say that, given the experience I have at these types of relationships, I might lead one of them toward a more complete fulfillment. Maybe so, but it's sooo much work. (Maybe I've just experienced too much bullshit to ever establish another "intimate" relationship.) If I am going to engage in that type of commitment, I may as well choose something I haven't seen before, that I may learn and advance. (The trouble is, I never encounter conditions I've never seen before any more. (Maybe I'm getting too old and jaded, or, again, maybe my circle of acquaintances is too small.)
Or you could say that I have something to teach others and to engage them is to begin the education process. Maybe so, but, really, others don't want to learn, especially about themselves. I've given up expecting others to be as curious about their unconscious selves as I am. (Again, too limited an acquaintanceship maybe.)
In any case, I can't afford to become involved with a woman who, when faced with my stalwart and apparently detached behavior, will begin to play instinctual mating games, blindly, or perhaps even consciously, believing in and conforming to their expected rules and results.
And finally, re the deeper picture, there is the mechanism of empathetic reaction (which is what this piece has been all about, if you haven't yet ralized it.) As a reaction to her "play" to make me jealous (if it was that, really, and if I have not misread the entire incident, which I don't think I have), I felt that I wanted to "show off" for her. I engaged, at the time and later, thinking back, in some of my standard fantasies, imagining that I encounter someone who knows me well and who details various cavalier lives I lead, having returned from parts unknown, etc. My fantasy tendency is evidence of regression and, thus, of a transference (or countertransference.) I recognize these fantasies as attempts on my part to fend off the rejection I feel in response to her "rejection" of me by displaying her new "boyfriend." But acting out is inhibited in me by my motivation to remain isolated, but acting out is not inhibited in her. Her demonstration is an acting out (in the more general, non-analytic, non-negative sense of the term.) As I examine this motivation further, I understand that I am adopting the same play that she has adopted: I am fantasizing acting out to demonstrate what she has been attempting to demonstrate. This is her state that I have introjected. I am identifying with her psychic reality. (I can imagine less reserved, or less inhibited men responding to her by demonstrating a bravado, macho persona similar to the one I fantasize. I've seen this behavior many times. It turns me off to the whole process of male-female relations. Why can't we approach each other as clear, levelheaded, insightful adults? The simple answer is: because that's not what we are. By my fantasy, I am saying to her:
"Look at me. I am worthy and not a matter for your rejection," which is an empathetic reaction (and, at the same time, my transference.) And she, in her behavior, is saying to me:
"Look. I'm important. I'm desired. I feel rejected by you, but you're the stupid one, not me (because that's the way you make me feel..." [no one makes anyone feel anything] "...by not wanting to get to know me.)"
She doesn't understand. It's plain to see. She misinterprets.
Everyone misinterprets, me...and everyone else.
Or else, it is I who misinterprets. It is I whose "game" it is.
This very well could be my rejection that she is playing out empathetically. But, in order to relate, we must have this thing in common:
We are mutually compatible re our transferences. It's not a question of whose rejection it is that we feel. It is our rejection. It's not even a question of who the initiating party is. If it is not her, if she is genuinely intent upon establishing a true intimacy (via games, leading up to and then backing away from it), she will get to the rejection soon enough, as she encounters it in me at a moment when I have not successfully transcended it. (I can't remain in this "perfect" state forever; or is that a self-limiting definition?) If I don't establish the object relationship out of the immediate moment, but am able to remain in intimacy, yet it will be established, eventually. Better to know now than later. Better to forego the cheap thrills than to suffer the pangs of an inevitable deteriorization. And, if this is (at least in part, at the very least provoked by) my pathology, then the real course of events should be not to find another in along line of relationships that will turn out much the same as before, but to engage in a therapeutic process, so that I may be freed of the provocating motive. But is this ever possible? Do we ever become freed of how we are initially programmed? Maybe not. But by becoming "intimately" aware of our particular initial conditions, we can perhaps head them off early enough in any given relationship to give it a chance of success. I am not so optimistic as I sound here. This can only work, I believe, when both relaters work together on the therapy, and with the same high degree of intensity.
It's hard for me to see how we ever manage to maintain relationships at all. Of course, we maintain them in an atmosphere transference and countertransference, repeating our earliest orientations. And I am tired of engaging in this process. I guess the real answer to my relationship woes is to find someone who is in serious therapy and is able to understand the intricacies and the jargon. But do I really want to hook up with someone who feels the need to be in therapy? Do I really want to be with someone who is as screwed up as I am? [Actually, I'm not all that screwed up, as psychological "problems" go; Most people exist at my level of "neurosis."] This is a trick question. If I answer "yes," then I allow myself to become engaged in a relationship that is a therapeutic process (as opposed to an intimate one), thus limiting our potential for true intimacy. If I answer "no," then I set up a propensity toward mutual object relations.
It's a vicious circle. And it's probably one big excuse anyway for not ever allowing myself to get close to anyone. Even my desire to experience and maintain without deteriorization the "perfection" of that initial rush of "unconditional acceptance" (if that's what it really is) may be nothing more than this same excuse. And anyway, the experience doesn't last, with any one person. It should, but it doesn't. As soon as they get the idea that I'm not "serious" (actually, the truth is, I'm too serious), they give it up. They don't want to feel what they feel when they encounter me, if they feel that I will not respond to them (via the games they want, at least eventually, to play.) They will sometimes, after they've erroneously (I hope) concluded that I am playing games with them [which I am not; I'm trying my best to avoid them. Or am I?], go to great lengths to avoid me, and frequently they will, at the very least, avoid eye contact.
But here's another idea: maybe they wouldn't want to play the games if I didn't remain "detached." Maybe we would progress toward intimacy without the games. What am I thinking! Of course they would want to play the games. Eventually, everyone does. So, here's a good argument for serial monogamy, a practice I would pursue if there were not other factors besides personal psychology that have stopped me from continuing my lifelong pursuit of women. Money factors. Lifestyle factors. Self-esteem factors. I haven't gotten into that area at all. How does that relate to rejection? Well, maybe I have already dealt with that issue. Rejection and low self-esteem go hand in hand. Anyway, I'm tired now. If I haven't exhausted this subject (I never will), I've exhausted myself. I think I'll take a vacation. Maybe I'll go to another town and carry on a short-lived, casual affair. (I'm joking. I would never do that. But I'd fantasize about it, which is almost as good as the real thing.)




8-16-1a

Socially Interactional Mutual Psychology (SIMP)

People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid.
 
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
Because I (often unwittingly) allow myself to open up to people, I allow reactions and counter-reactions (which are frequently transferences, as is typical of human behavior). These reactions/transferences are further enabled by my propensity toward silence. (Abstinence from verbalization creates frustration in the other, which permits regression.) When I later analyze these transactions, they provide me with insight into what I would have become involved with had I become involved. But, won't this tactic, if followed to its logical conclusion, inevitably exclude everyone, as I discover each person's transference and deign to demur to a mere abstinent presence instead of establishing a normal social intercourse? Not necessarily.
First, there could be transferences that I like, whose structure I might like to interact within, which after I discover them could lead into a typical object relationship. (In other words, I would allow it, maybe, if I knew the consequences well and in advance.) Since my goal/purpose is to find reality/truth, I doubt that I would find transferences that I like. But I'm sure that I don't know them all, by far, and who knows what I might discover in the future, as I learn more about my own self and realize that there is a pattern I might like in others.
Second, I might run across someone who is capable of transcending her transferences so that she remains totally in the present. That would be a scary occurrence. It's what I'm searching for, but am I really? (If all searches are for mother-objects to provide unconditional acceptance, then if I find it, am I enacting a transference? No, because I will have found the unconditional acceptance, which no mother-object or even less-than-perfect mother (and they're all less than perfect) can provide. My search has ended. (It ends a lot, but the findings are never permanent.) Having received (temporary) unconditional acceptance, the ball is now in my court. I must respond. Or rather, I must co-exist, without any kind of response that will lead to a deteriorization into transference. Is this even possible in this world of imperfection? If it is, then I will have found what I am looking for. If it is not, then my choice is to either remain aloof or to choose a less-than-perfect, but amenable, object relationship.
My method for accomplishing the revelation of transference is silence. This is more than a mere method however. In its most ideal form, at those exact fleeting moments of perfect, before an expectation will set in, before the interchange begins to regress into object relations, silence promotes mutual interaction at the most profound level. Most of this interaction may be unconscious. We exist at this level all the time when we are together, but think we are separate and not interacting. But I'm concerned here with those moments when we become aware that we are not alone, nor separate. Silence may extend these short moments. Verbalization interrupts them. We may reestablish them between verbalizations, which leads to a "flirting" situation. (I mean this in a broader sense than sexual. Once sexual flirting has been established, deteriorization has already begun.)
However, silence is also a way I have of enabling my transference and that of the person with whom I am interacting, so that I may later study and interpret the results. Silence encourages the other toward verbalization or acting out. This is the second functional level (the first being the method mentioned above), which may be seen as a kind of unconscious social therapy, with both participants being analysands, although both may function also as each other's analyst. [I, being in most interactions the more psychologically experienced (since my small social circle tends to almost exclusively include only less sophisticated people, probably an unconsciously intentional ploy), tend to consciously adopt this role of "analyst," especially in retrospect. But I don't trust it. There is too much potential for megalomania when I will see myself as "helping" someone else. (This is why I have never become a practicing clinical or personal psychologist.) It is better than I concern myself with helping just myself.] At this level, we all work, in dyads (and I suppose in larger groups also, but that is not my interest here) to advance each other's development. This is the purpose of social (as opposed to analytical) transference, where the purpose is one-sided, even if the real results may be mutual advancement.
At an even lower level, I use silence as a manipulative device. This is inexorably intertwined with the second level functions and is a matter for an extended analysis, which I hope to do in later days and months. For now, let's leave it at this: I use silence as a tool of power, when I feel that responding will lower opinions of me, or to establish myself in a superior position when I feel inadequate, or to establish patterns of rejection (i.e., to guard against a fear of rejection), or when I perceive that an interaction might lead to feelings of being overwhelmed by the manipulations of others. In short, it's a defense mechanism at this level. ("Instinctual manipulations" will occur within regressions and transferences, both my own and those that I provoke in others.) Silence leads to a polarization into omnipotence/impotence, or powerful/powerless. I withdraw/am silent because I initially feel helpless (manipulated.) Silence works to equalize the power by reestablishing in me a sense of control. But I can see how I may on occasion take this too far, how I can unconsciously gloat in my silence, in effect, daring people to provoke me into breaking it. My silence reveals a motive: I want people to pursue me (as I, surreptitiously, pursue them, for their attention/acceptance.) Especially, I want women to pursue me, but directly, not via games. Then, I have the option of accepting or rejecting them. Initially, I will always reject, and not only out of a transference. I wait, to see what they are "up to." At first, it's merely a practical matter. It only later (sometimes quickly) escalates into a projection of rejection. Or, at best, I will stonewall them, neither accepting nor rejecting them, until I feel that enough of the facts are in. I see this posture as a kind of test: How serious is this person? Will she continue to pursue me in the face of my non-committal stance? Does she really want to get to know me, or is she just another stupid girl who will give in to her self-doubt and instinctual response to defer to the male perspective and retreat to await being chased? If she is just another girl, she should know that I am not just another guy.[Low self-esteem/fear of rejection motivates me to make a point of this.] She's got to be serious and overcome her typical demurring female stereotyped behavior in order to "win me over." But once, if ever, she does, once she gets through to me, I tend to want to then pursue her, which I will do, but only if she pursues me back.
This waiting for "proof" of her serious intent on my part is a typical female agenda. In other words, I want a role reversal--in order to negate the typical male-female dynamic that seems always to lead away from intimacy into games. This is an unconscious agenda that I have made conscious by observing my behavior. It's not a tactic so much as it is my psychology.
I want real life, reality, or nothing at all. [I know that this stance is unrealistic. I know that this motive, which is both an ideal and a pathology (and probably, the ideal itself is an aspect of the pathology), prevents or inhibits, even sometimes consciously intentionally, my ordinary interaction with people as it further enhances my isolation. (Cf., e.g., my aversion to small talk and my conscious attempt to avoid it.)] I see silence, in its best manifestation, as a way to achieve a more profound (less stereotyped) immediacy. And it works, often, despite the pathological overtones. This is neither megalomania nor "spirituality," but a real world interaction, a physical experience of the mutual existence we are always immersed in, predominantly unconsciously. We may experience this consciously, if we maintain our silence. If a person does not respond verbally to my silence, then the interaction may remain in immediacy longer. Silence promotes subject-object fusion (Thomä, p. 295), especially that of the pre-genesis (re the neurotic symptoms) state, or that of the "global" consciousness of the earliest existence (if that is different from the former.) Fusion, of some sort, is my primary goal, fusion with the environment, as e.g., Satori, fusion with the "universe," as a "spiritual" experience, and especially, fusion with people, as the most profound of interactional experiences. Any experience short of this goal I tend to see as a failure of my most important motive, even when they are quite pleasant experiences in and of themselves. Interruptions of the silence act, in my experience, merely initiates a lower form of interaction.
But, if regression and transference must occur, then silence can promote it, so that it is analyzable, so that I may (later) discover what is really going on, thus developing a knowledge that allows me to avoid what otherwise might become a noxious situation. In the present moment within a transaction, unless I am very comfortable with the social situation or know in immediacy what to say intuitively (as opposed to instinctually, which I always seem to have an unconscious sense to avoid), I revert to silence.
"...the analysand's ego is supposed to function under the mature conditions of verbalization and introspection..." (Thomä, p300?) Not only in analysis is this "supposed" to occur, but in real life as well. We want to think that we use words to explain to each other in a straightforward way what we mean. But we don't. We use them, mostly, to enable our transferences and other unconscious agendas. As for myself, verbalization and introspection is best reserved for times alone (writing/fantasizing) and the immersion moment, ideally, is allotted to meditation or to mutual social experience. But this latter experience doesn't always happen as I find myself, when out among people, caught up in an internal dialogue and completely shut off from my surroundings. But when I am roused out of this state by certain interactional circumstances, I am in the moment totally for as long as the interaction takes, and then I am out of it again, and then in it again, off and on, back and forth. Verbalization in these instances is mostly irrelevant as an interaction occurs as if separate from that which is said. Of course, the verbalization that the quote above addresses is meant to reveal the transference details (via free association) within an analysis, and in my "social therapy," at best, it is ignored, and at worst, it interferes, creating the transference that is not (immediately) desired. But later, verbalization, in conjunction with introspection, can take the form of "analysis writing." This is the verbal form of my therapy, which is a documentation of actual therapy (both the introspective and immediate forms.) This is what I'm doing now.




8-20-1a

This has been an ongoing experiment: how long will people not approach me (specifically my brother and sister)? Or how long will others not strive to break through my isolation? [Links to be added shortly.]




8-20-1c

In order to change in therapy, you must feel the connection to the past conditioning/fixation. (This is not operant conditioning, but psychoanalysis here.) Insight into/understanding the problem is not enough. You've got to "work through" to an abreaction. This is what brings the change about. For example, when you see a woman rejecting you, you've got to feel what she is feeling--because she's feeling via of transference/empathetic reaction what you are feeling (or vice versa), but repressing. Seeing her feel it provides you with an opportunity to release the feeling from repression. This is the function of an empathetic reaction. Someone reacts empathetically to your unconscious agenda (or you react to theirs), you watch your own internal psychology being played out in the real world (or theirs within you, consciously), and you have a choice: you can deny and project the material (back) onto them, or you can see it for what it is, your agenda (or theirs that you assimilate because it resembles your own that you repress. [This doesn't mean that the person onto whom you are projecting doesn't also have the problem, assuming that the problem is yours to begin with (and it almost always is, because these types of dynamics play out within dyads for a reason.) The reason she can empathize in the first place is probably because the problem, or something very similar to it, exists within her own psychology. It would take a very special person, probably working consciously, to mirror a psychology that did not exist within his/her own self.]

8-21-1a

Special processes of generalization are required to integrate endopsychic processes by means of feedback.
In psychoanalytic therapy this occurs in the process of working through. Deeper analysis of the unconscious past determinants of the genesis of the incapacity is postponed in favor of the integration or reintegration of psychodynamic details.
 
Thomä & Kächele, p. 317
We have, during the first part of the analysis, gained an insight into perhaps many problems, fixations, pathologies, "incapacities." We postpone work on them in order to integrate by "working through" that one (or few) that seem(s) to be most important. My one pet-problem is (has been) social anxiety.
General anxiety can be caused by a backlog of unassimilated ideas and perceptions (Thomä & Kächele, p. 318): I can feel this working in me, but the anxiety seems unrelated to the basic social anxiety problem, which I have decided is definitely fear of rejection by the mother (& father?) object. I experience a present state anxiety when I get too far ahead of myself re learning, the accumulation of learning materials (e.g., books that go unread, internet downloads), etc. Or a better example is unprocessed e-mails. When my inbox has a hundred messages, I feel very anxious.) This anxiety is resolved by putting a temporary hold on "advancement" in favor of getting "caught up" by assimilating the material (which is the real advancement.) But this process of falling behind and getting caught up is "normal" anxiety and its resolution. I can't see how it is related to social anxiety--at least in my case--except that coming to too many insights without working them through causes additional (unrelated) anxiety.
In therapy, we can go too far with insight, finding all kinds of difficulties that must be worked through, but being unable to handle them all at once, so that we may feel overwhelmed. Too many interpretations cause a failure to assimilate, or even cause de-assimilations. In this case, in order to prevent confusion or disorientation leading to unrest and anxiety, we work through just one and leave the rest for later. I have chosen, (a long time ago, and without having given the choice much conscious thought) social anxiety. It is natural that I do this because, even before much insight, I knew this to be a problem. It may not be so much of a problem now, which accounts for my flexibility re what I will choose to examine in my self-therapy. So, before I go on to the search for an abreactive experience, let me qualify my definition of self-therapy a bit:

8-22-1a

To put it another way, one might say that the patient finally becomes convinced that he is continuing analysis only because he is treating it as a new but still a fantasy source of gratification, which in terms of reality yields him nothing. When he has slowly overcome his mourning over this discovery he inevitably looks round for other, more real sources of gratification.
 
Ferenczi,
"The Problem of Termination of the Analysis,"
p85
Is this what I'm doing with my self-therapy, using it as a fantasy-escape, because it makes me feel good (as opposed to enabling healing)? Maybe. (It's only recently that I've come across the idea of abreaction as a possible solution to this problem that I didn't know I might have had.) In any case, at worst, my interpretive writing is a catharsis therapy, and as such, it serves a purpose. It might seldom, if ever, get to the root of the real problem, but it feels good, goddammit. It exorcises, if only temporarily, the nasty little demons that otherwise will haunt me and make me feel like shit. In this sense, the fact that the process might be a symptom of a deep-rooted problem I am not getting to, the fact that this might be a way I have of avoiding deeper insight, is not irrelevant, but merely unfortunate. Anyway, if there is any validity in this perception, it is only half-truth. Some insight does occur. Now, if only I can take it to the third and final stage.
Stage one: catharsis (which, according to psychoanalytic theory is to be avoided, so that the deeper transference neurosis can be established and interpreted.)
Stage two: insight and interpretation.
Stage three: abreaction.
Extended analysis can be, and often is, especially among training analyses, more a quest for self-knowledge than analysis per se. It is in this sense, more than any other, that I engage in self-therapy. The catharsis via my psychological writings is important, but not any more important than other types of writing or even of the fantasies I engage in. It would be more fruitful, I believe, to analyze the fantasies, which I intend to do--but I always end up putting them off until later, which is more evidence for the superficial nature of my therapy. I want all of this to be a search for self-knowledge. It is for a very good reason that self-knowledge is considered the fourth step in the interpretation, insight, abreaction series: there is an order to be followed. You go after self-knowledge after you have reached the more important fixated material that is causing more immediate problems. My whole self-therapy thing may be a joke, except that I like to do it. [This little aside notwithstanding, I go on with my self-therapy/education.]

8-22-1b

Before a "cure" can be effected, an abreaction must occur. Thinking about this re social anxiety, I come across an experiences/feeling I remember having as a child and young adult. I still have this experience, but I don't think I can call it a 'feeling' any more. Either the feeling is repressed, or it has been, via therapy, purged of its affect--probably the first, but maybe not. I may have become so used to the "problem" that I have adapted to it, as a way of life. That is, I still function within the framework of the object relationship/transferences, but the affective components are dulled to a point where I can disregard them, even as repressed emotion. But, if I am to understand the repression (if that is what it is) in completeness, if I am to have that self-knowledge, I must reconstruct it, even if all I am doing is creating an empathic reaction with my own former (childhood) self.
The abreaction: I remember 'moping' as a child; I remember a feeling of not wanting to participate, of keeping myself at a distance when I really want to be a part of what is going on. This is a "delicious" pain. It hurts, but at the same time, I see the attention it provokes in people, which I enjoy. In other words, I create that attention, and this is very empowering. But this attention only goes so far. If I persist in my absence/isolation, eventually the attender will give up and go away. As a strategy (as opposed to a "cure") I could initiate the withdrawal mode for a short time, take it to the point where the effect of calling attention to myself begins to wane, then suddenly reverse course and join the crowd. I have done this in the past. There are typically two reactions to this: 1) The attenders are grateful that I have decided to join them, but this gratefulness also wears off the longer I stick around. 2) The attenders can begin a withdrawal of their own, prompted by an empathetic reaction and/or a transference or simply out of a feeling that, after all, I have become too close for comfort, i.e., they didn't really want what they thought they did, my intimacy--or they out-and-out wanted just to flirt.
As I say, I could develop this strategy. (I have used it, sparingly, in the past.) But I see it as conscious manipulation, and I don't want to go that way. I've used conscious manipulation in the past, in my business dealings, using my knowledge of psychology to bend people to my will. I didn't like it--or rather, I did, taking a perverse delight in jerking people around by their emotions/transferences. But I've always felt that it is wrong. I never would have done it except for the necessity I felt to accomplish my business goals. This is how business, at its best, operates. (At its worst, it functions more unconsciously, people jerking each other around in an unconscious game of one-upmanship.)
I haven't as yet, however, settled into a mode where I can call up this memory on a feeling level. I have the feeling that it still functions, being identical with the rejection/social anxiety problem, but I haven't made the emotional connection. (Refusing to answer the phone is probably a manifestation of this same motive, as is also my "philosophies" of waiting and letting others come to me. Cf. 8-20-1a & 8-23-1b)




8-23-1a

The ability to change is often more limited than we want to believe. Gaining knowledge of his own limits may often be more important to the patient than chasing after a utopia...[W]e therefore content ourselves with putting the patient in a position to structure his life in a way that is more congruent with his desires and limitation than before treatment. Freud's (1993a, p.80) words "Where id was, there ego shall be" describe realistic goals of analytic treatment when the ego has reacquired insight and the ability to act.
 
Thomä & Kächele, p. 327
I think the major work of my self-therapy is coming to a close. I think I fit all of the criteria for a successful therapy, considering the quote above. I'd come to this conclusion a few weeks ago. I may not want to change, even if there is a reason/need to. It may have been a mistake even to have attempted it--except that I made a lot of money as I tried. And anyway, I did change, somewhat. But that change may have occurred anyway, more naturally, without my having forced it upon myself, so that I experienced a backlash, so that it took years to recover from the stress that it created, which resulted in an even more extreme anxiety and withdrawal (not to a place within myself, as had been my penchant all my life, but into an actual absence from society) than that which I had experienced before the "change" took place. I think that I can go out now with more self-confidence, measuring my social involvement, retreating intelligently to rest and recuperate. (This is hyperbole; I've been going out all along, not on a daily basis, but in a measured way, and with a gradually increasing measure of self-confidence--something I had always had, but artificially induced, intentionally programmed, to get myself up and going, overlaying doubt. I think much of the doubt is gone now. This is not a sudden change, but a gradual one. This is a fuller realization of the change that has been taking place.) I've gotten myself to a position where I don't have to be continually "proving" myself and where I do not need to demand high production from my work. Yes, I am living a sane life now. And I need no longer feel any social anxiety. In fact, I haven't felt it for quite a while. (As I've said, this may be because I have removed myself from the mainstream of society, and if this is so, then I accept the limitation, that I can exist apart. This is a conclusion I had reached years ago, but I see it now justified, clarified as opposed to rationalized, as a result of the therapy.) I still feel a certain 'shyness' (for lack of a better word), which was a hallmark of my youth, which endeared me to many people, and which escalated into anxiety as I forced myself (was forced by the circumstance of needing to make my own way) to enter the adult world. It is this 'shyness' I now accept. It's nice. I no longer see it as a disability. I have a laid-back, almost innocent temperament. I'm no longer innocent, but I retain the temperament. In a sense, it is a limitation, but in another sense, it is an asset. It attracts people to me, and it prevents me from going too far (which became a problem after I forced myself to "change"), whereas the "therapy" [not the current session, but that which I concocted as a young adult and continued for a long time in my life, a contingency management program, a ten-step desensitization plan designed to acquire "social skills"] pushed me away from this asset of my temperament/personality toward a caustic, reactive (even as I tried to make it proactive), even hostile A-type business success caricature. Now, I am relieved of this burden I saddled myself with, having been someone I am not. I have accomplished the goal I set for myself some seven years ago: I have reclaimed my youth. You're wrong, Mr. Wolfe. You can go home again. I've got it back, the 'shyness,' without the overlaid veneer of "sociability" that I trained myself to adopt in order to survive and prosper in a business world. But I get back what I'd had with bonuses. I feel a certain comfort now when I go out. (I still feel the stress when I stay out too long, which may lead again to the same old problem if I am not careful.) [Limitation #1: stress, which is a warning message--"You need to take a break, retreat, rest, and recuperate, a message I'd "learned" to push beyond, in order to "accomplish" things. I know now that I don't have to push myself so hard. I can let it go and not give in to the crazy demands of the business world full of overly driven, ungrateful employers.] I feel the 'shyness' [Limitation #2: 'shyness,' which is also an asset; it all depends on how you look at it.] I have an expanded awareness of my situation in this life. And I feel excitement again. This is the real cure. I love life again. I never lost this love, but I lost a lot of the feeling for it, life. It had become an intellectual concept. Now, I can actually feel it again.

8-23-1b

I think, and they respond. I've experienced this before, an undeciphered bond, a real connection I ignore.
After months of no contact, suddenly Jim calls me, (ostensibly about a computer problem) and Dianne sends me an e-mail, about nothing in particular.) Or are these, after all, just coincidences?]


8-24-1a

The old neighborhood, on the road above the alley: medical files are stored along the side of the road in open file boxes. Each file folder is huge, about 24x36." I search through them, looking for mine, and when I find it, I take it, telling the person in charge (a non-descript person/entity) that I'm keeping it because security here is non-existent. [I want to remove files from the Website, so that others can't read them? But if so, those files as, themselves, a symbol of some deeper process.] Anyone could walk along here and take what they wanted, which I just demonstrated. Legal proceedings are begun to get me to give back the file. Here, the person who is in charge becomes more descript. He is a guy of about thirty with a stocky build who stands in Nicholson's driveway. He takes me to court, which is further down the alley, nearer to 1728.
I go to a mansion-type place with expansive grounds. In a sense, there is no house, but only grounds, country lanes which are hallways. It turns out to be an institution for people with mental problems. I walk down this long hallway/lane, looking for something/someone. [I'm still looking for a (my?) file folder.] Folders are lined along a wall with windows on the right. Lots of people walk by and mill around. Some of them are inmates and some are doctors and attendants, but you can't tell them apart. At first, I think that the people in white coats, the attendants, are workers, but it turns out they are "trustees." [This is from the film Brubaker that I watched again the other night.] I continue on, encountering these attendants/inmates, asking them, when I think they are not inmates, if they can help me locate the file/patient. They are pleasant enough, but they are helpless, i.e., they try to help, but cannot. I go down to the end of the hall to a file room on the right that is filled with workers. In this room are the same kinds of files as I'd found along the road in the first part of the dream. I'm with a patient, a young, very emaciated guy. It seems we're trying to locate his doctor for some reason, or his doctor's file folder. I think we're trying to get the guy released, as if he doesn't belong here. [I am trying to release myself from my "mental" problems. I am emaciated, i.e., psychically undernourished.] We ask, as I have been asking all along, where we can find the doctor. No one knows or even seems to want to help, everyone is busy, preoccupied. Some of these people are actual employees and not inmates and some may even be doctors, but they are not anywhere near as pleasant as the attendants/inmates were. They are brusque and dismissive. By myself, I locate the file for the doctor. I take it and leave the room. [It may be that I didn't encounter the guy I'm trying to help until after I found the file, as if the file and the guy are the same thing/person. [The guy is me, just as the file in the first part is. It's my (medical/mental?) history. I'm "stealing" this file, as I did then. And the file of the doctor is also me: I am my own doctor (psychologist.) But the "doctor" is a "non-entity," or "non-descript" (as in the first part), or not even available to be seen, which seems to indicate that the "doctor" part of me is buried deeply, or is so abstract as to be invisible.] I want to leave this place, but I don't go back up the hallway toward the front (as if I feel I won't be able to get out that way, but I don't think or feel this consciously.) I, we, go toward the back, deeper into the institution [Laing: go deeper into the problem to become sane], into the area where the laundry and housekeeping areas are, where we find a long corridor leading up an incline and out toward the street, a service entrance whereby supplies are received. At the entrance from the street there are guards posted, but they aren't paying too much attention to what's going on. I am carrying the guy in a large, plush white towel, with only his head sticking out. He seems even more emaciated than previously, being, for all practical purposes, nothing more than a towel and a skinny head. I'm afraid the guards will see his head, which I carry under my left arm, away from them. But as I pass them, they pay no attention, and we exit onto the street, which is similar to the main entrance to St. Francis Hospital.
fai: in a court trial, I am called upon to defend my theft of the file/person. [I "steal" my "inner identity" from my unconscious mind?] At first, I have a court appointed attorney, but he doesn't know what to ask, how to rebut, as the skinny guy on the stand is being questioned. I pass the attorney notes during the direct examination, but I can't coach him while he's cross-examining him, so I tell the judge that I want to defend myself, not because the attorney is incompetent or doesn't want to accede to my wishes, but because he's young, just out of school, and has no experience, that I have experience that he just cannot know or make use of. [The attorney is me when I was young. So is the skinny guy (when I was even younger).] The judge allows it, and the attorney asks if he can remain in the court as a spectator, which the judge says is okay. I cross-examine the skinny guy, eliciting from him his opinions about his stay in the institution. He says he didn't mind it so much, but that he'd rather be outside. It seems that this is a dual trial: 1) Should he be sent back to the institution? 2) Should I be made to give back the files and punished for taking them? At one point, the guy becomes a girl, but after a few series of questions and answers, I decide that I want him to be a guy again. The subject of sex is brought up. Apparently, he(she) had been sexually exploited in the institution. He is asked if he enjoyed it, and he says yes, he did, but it was exploitation nonetheless. He admits that he cannot survive out in the world on his own and must be dependent upon me. The judge asks me if I'm willing to support him, and I tell him, yes, I can, until he is able to establish his own support. The judge asks if I think he will ever be able to do this, and I say, yes, with a lot of support--which, by the way, is what the institution should have been doing for him instead of allowing him to vegetate in an atmosphere of nonchalance. The judge releases the guy into my care and postpones final decision until we see how the guy does out in the world. A hearing is set for two months hence, at which time the problem of the theft of the files will be considered, depending on the outcome of the guy's "rehabilitation."

[This dream needs to be more fully analyzed.
And maybe, one day, I will do it. (Repression?]




8-27-1d

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
 
T.S Eliot,
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Sometimes, I feel like this is a serious problem; other times, I feel like it isn't a problem at all. Is not going out merely the practical strategy that I maintain it is, or is that just an excuse I use to avoid encountering society? And, isn't the security I want, the financial hedge I erect, a problem in itself, the symptom of a pathology of avoidance? I see the danger in being out (physically and psychologically), but I don't avoid going out for that reason. If I had more than enough money so that I never had to worry about it, I'd go out all the time. I would probably go out, despite the "danger" I perceived, just to waste time, to avoid the introspective work I know I should be doing. In a sense, having limited resources tends to keep me directed toward that which I know I should be doing. Now if I would get rid of the tv and the Internet and... But all work and no play... I guess I am, at that, a pretty dull boy--at least in comparison with the way I used to be, when I was going out all the time. So, even if it is a problem, not going out all the time has its advantages too. It keeps me focused on that which I want to and need to do. If it's a problem, it's a good one. And if it's a pathology, still, I am functional, within my own non-social definition. The bottom line is: if society had something to offer me, it would be a different case, but as I see it now, it hasn't thus far offered me all that much more than grief. At best, it's a neutral proposition, which I would gladly put up with if they gave me enough money to put up with it within the structure of my own personality. But if what they want is for me to change, to fit into their round holes, well, that's a whole other thing, isn't it?

9-4-1c

I may never have gotten to the oedipal stage. (Unlikely; more likely is that my therapy hasn't yet gotten to it.) It seems to me that I so profoundly perceived a "rejection" by my mother that I established too strong an empathy with my father, which characterized my childhood. I worshipped him [a basis for narcissism?] (Much more as a daughter would than as a son. Hmm.) This all changed at adolescence (naturally; typical rebellion stuff) and eventually deteriorated into a sort of loathing I felt toward my father in later (adult) years--based on my perception of his weakness, debility, and "surrender" to his aging process (rheumatoid arthritis, but he could have fought it better instead of giving in so completely to it), and most importantly, toward his attempts to stereotypically or superficially relate to me. (But, to be fair, I probably wouldn't have responded any better to a genuine affection.)
So, maybe, I experienced a long delay in the oedipal conflict. Maybe it doesn't occur until late adolescence or early adulthood. (Is this even possible?) That would explain my generally delayed development across the board: social skills, social adaptation, intimate relationships (and relationships in general.) [My fantasies are an attempt to reconstruct my childhood and adolescence, to recreate it in a more normal sense (despite the most prevalent one wherein I do not have a father. He abandons us early on. Thus, I win the oedipal conflict and develop an intimate relationship with my mother. (That is one rejected version, but the intimacy is implicit in the more sanitized versions.) But even this is a lie (fantasy), a fantasy within a fantasy. We, my "mother" and I, construct a fictitious father, because she is not really my mother, but a young adult latent lesbian without a family whom I've chosen to take care of an orphaned me, to pretend to be my mother for social purposes. Together, we invent a fictive past.]

9-5-1a


re the search for direction:
This can be a general or a specific search. In one sense, the search itself is a direction, as when it tunes you in to a specific environment that you can then generalize as a "now" state, thus establishing a meditative orientation. This is the "primary purpose": to live, in the moment. Anything short of this, i.e., specific purposes, may be rewarding, providing direction re activity, but is too easily lost and must be occasionally re-defined as activity changes the specific environment or the perception of it. But the primary purpose is forever sustaining; all you have to do is remain in it--no easy task when specific purposes will keep presenting themselves or lack of them will misdirect you into states of worry, doubt, anxiety, etc. (in general, into distraction.)


9-5-1b

more direction:
Exercise: In a large (social) group, "open up," without talking, allow people to approach you (i.e., psychologically permit it), engage them as they bring to you what you have been waiting for (if they will), which may be not so much content as simply the approach itself, remain attentive to their presentations/agendas, respond only when absolutely appropriate, letting your own ego-ideas flow past without intruding them into the "conversation," and above all, not interrupting or misdirecting their presentation, maintaining instead the meditative state of conscious communion.


9-5-1c

According to Fürstenau, each phase [of his progressive model] is described from the general points of view of "working through the rigid patterns which the patient carries over" and "constructing a new pattern of relationships."
In the first phase the analyst fulfills a maternal role for the patient; he behaves in a way intended to provide security.
In the second phase the patient unravels his symptoms; he still has little interest in understanding unconscious connections, but makes important discoveries with regard to the analyst's reliability and firmness.
In the third phase negative aspects of the early relationship to the mother are dealt with.
In the fourth phase a turn to oneself takes place by handling the concealed aggressions and affronts from the early mother-child relationship; this is accompanied by improvement in the diffuse depressive symptoms. In the analytic relationship, the patient learns that the analyst is interested in his secret fantasies without being obtrusive or making him feel guilty because of his narcissistic withdrawal.
In the fifth phase the patient's sexual identity is defined; analysis takes different courses for male and female patients. This theme is continued in the sixth phase, the phase of oedipal triangularity.
The termination of the treatment in the seventh phase is facilitated by newly developed relationships which the patient has been able to establish both to himself and to partners. The working through of mourning is the focus of attention. [ Mourning here refers to separation from the analyst, I think. -jj ]
Fürstenau distinguishes between two classes of psychic disturbances, which he calls the relatively ego-intact neuroses and the structural ego disturbances. The latter class includes psychotic, narcissistically withdrawn, asocial, addicted, and psychosomatic patients. ...[F]or the latter group there is no clear transition to the fourth phase and the second half of the process is dominated by the patient's alternating occupation with himself and with others. "Corresponding to this, there is a continuous alternation in the analyst's interventions between working on transference and resistance, on the one hand, and strengthening the patient's self, on the other"

Thomä & Kächele, pp.339-40

Although the authors criticize this model for the lack of generalization of its "sequence of phases," the first four phases certainly seem to apply to me, which may indicate that the final three phases is the direction I need to take, especially since I see myself already heading in that direction. In other words, although this model may not apply to everyone, I may be one of the select group to whom it does apply. Thus, a hint of my "problem" may be found herein. [This seems weak to me, but I'll pursue any lead that may take me to where I need to go, even if it subsequently must be abandoned.]
Although I may want myself to be included in the first class (ego-intact neuroses), I suspect a second-class residence: I am certainly not psychotic, nor addicted, nor psychosomatic; but I could fall marginally into the asocial category, and definitely into the narcissistically withdrawn one, although I want to know more precisely what that term really means. And I see no clear transition between the third and fourth phases of my therapy. I do see, however, an "alternating occupation with" myself and with others, as well as a "continuous alternation" in my work between "transference and resistance, on the one hand, and strengthening the...self, on the other." This is scant evidence to base any decisions upon, but I have for a long time seen other evidence of narcissistic tendencies. It is not so pronounced as other evidences I have followed up on, and so I have left it for later, but eventually, later always comes around. This evidence, however, could be as much zeitgeist material as more personally applicable to me. But in either case, it is applicable to me, but maybe as I exist more as a type of my time and place, than as an individual with specific, more idiosyncratic problems.
This thread takes me, as I project it out into the future, from my earlier therapy work, into dreamwork, into the current (mother-object) work, into fantasywork, which I've just begun, through the "personals" and similarities studies into a (hopefully) "normal" search for a relationship. [Probably not. Despite myself, I can't imagine wanting to pursue a "normal" woman, and "normal" men bore me.]




9-8-1a

Awaken from a dream feeling very insecure. Been avoiding for more than three days now financial (and other) work I have to do. Suspecting I'm not so healthy as I want to think I am. Making connections:
1) in the back bedroom of 1728 and at the same time, in an intersection like Peterman's Corners: we, the employees of the place where I work (atc?), are getting ready, lining up, to march in a marching band. The only person I recognize (now) is Ceil (and maybe it is Rita who directs this operation, but I don't recognize her.) Ceil is very insecure, introverted to the point of not speaking. I understand and do not press her to speak. I love her for this, i.e., I empathize. Someone must carry the colors and since no one else wants to, I reluctantly volunteer. [I choose to take the company's position?] I put on a red and blue revolutionary war-type uniform in order to do this. [An outmoded form of dress = an outmoded way of thinking?] In a lull, while we await directions, or the signal to start, or something, Ceil is lying on the floor (ground.) I lie down with her, aligned with her in the same direction, my head on her knees. She puts her hands on my shoulders and "holds" me, as if to communicate that she understands and is sympathetic. When we prepare to line up, a black guy [Mark Copeland?] hurries up to us, arriving late, and complains because he was supposed to be the color bearer. I say, "Go ahead. I only took the position because no one else seemed to want it." I give him the uniform.
2) 640: I awaken, late for work. It's seven o'clock. I struggle to get ready, torn between rushing out unprepared and going through the ritual of preparation (washing, putting on clean clothes, etc.) Rita shows up. She is outside the dining room window on the north side of the house, but she speaks to me as if she's inside the house. She wants me to drive her to work. (We don't work in the same place any more.) I tell her I'm late, but she doesn't care. She persists until I tell her I'll take her.
In the car (old Toyota), I drive her through a nondescript area to Monroeville Industrial Park. It seems she is going to drop me off and take the car. I don't like this plan. I don't want her to drive my car. I don't trust her. We are instantly back at the intersection of Rodi and Hoover. She wants to get some breakfast before we leave, even though I protest that we don't have time. By now, I am very late. We go into a small diner-type restaurant.
Back outside, Rita walks up the hill into an overgrown area [which is Hoover Drive.] We make our way through the brush onto an old paved road that is only partially visible, having been disused for years and become overgrown with vegetation. The farther up the hill we walk, the more visible the road becomes. Houses, sparse at first, become more plentiful. But they are cut off from this old road by overgrowth and only accessible from the other ends of the streets they are on that run perpendicular to Hoover. We walk back down to the intersection where we meet Sherry, but she is different. She looks exactly like Rita, except that something about her eyes makes her much more attractive. I have a squeeze bottle full of a special, delicate liquid soap. Rita wants some of it. She goes off to get a container to put it in. Meanwhile, Sherry wants some too and walks up to her house. I follow her, being very attracted to her. She explains to me that she's living in ____ (somewhere east, about thirty miles away.) We come to a small cottage-type house partially obscured by overgrowth. I wonder, if she is living in the east, why we're going here. She explains, in response to a question I never ask, that she's renting rooms here. Inside, we meet an old lady, who questions her, being the stereotype of a busybody landlady. Sherry tells her she's here to get a small bottle for some soap, and she goes upstairs, leaving me with the landlady, but after a short while, feeling uncomfortable, I follow Sherry upstairs. I know she's up there somewhere, but I can't find her. I think I hear her go up a second flight of stairs, so I go up, only to find two lesbians sitting at a table, reading and studying. They look up at me in an unwelcoming manner. I say I'm looking for Sherry. They tell me she's not up here. I go back down and search the second floor apartment more thoroughly, and although I know she's in here somewhere, I can't find her. We all appear again back at the intersection. Sherry and Rita have small squeeze bottles, about a fourth the size of mine. I fill them with soap from my bottle. Rita's bottle is identical to Sherry's except that it doesn't have a cap [like Sherry is identical to Rita except for the eyes.] I worry that the stuff'll leak out. ["Soap" is the stuff I give them, which fills them up, but it may leak back out of Rita, whereas it won't out of Sherry, because her eyes are like a cap??]
Ceil = me (re insecurity) I am like her, or I was, but I am more "advanced" now (and then) than she. She can look up to me because I have, to a great degree, overcome what she has not. This is a past me looking up to myself at a future date, comforting myself, because I understand how much worse it used to be.
Late for work = avoiding working at what I know I need to do. I wonder if all of those past dreams of being late for work have this same interpretation. Probably. "Work expands to fill the time necessary for its completion." Until I must do the work, I don't, and thus I avoid feeling better, when, if I could just do it and get it done, I would feel better right away. But, feeling better
a) is not necessarily being better; it could be an illusion, like financial security is an illusion. (But it's a nice illusion.)
b) may actually contribute to the problem if it delays an effective insight into it. Feeling fearful may drive me into a deeper insight, whereas "solving" the "problem" via action may further delay the insight therapy.
So, is it better to wait until the last minute while pondering the nature of the disturbance? I don't know. Maybe. But it sure is nice to be free of the negative feelings, even if the activity that frees me is further avoidance of the real problem by attending to the compensation.
Overgrowth = the "road" (re direction) is overgrown and hard to find.
A marching band must have an excellent sense of coordinated direction. Thus, I am getting ready to march with a band. That is, I am doing therapy.




9-8-1b

...we use "focus" to refer to the major interactionally created theme of the therapeutic work, which results from the material offered by the patient and the analyst's efforts at understanding. We assume that the patient can offer different material within a certain period of time, but that the formation of a focus is only achieved by selective activity on the part of the analyst. With regard to the process, we expect the joint work on a focus to lead to further major points of substance, which can be formed on the basis of the preceding work.

In the diagnostic phase of the initial interview (time T0), the analyst attempts to gain a first impression of possible conflicts, at this point independent of therapeutic interventions. When first therapeutic steps are tried in the further course of the initial interview (time T1), a first focal constellation (F1) is formed; its utility must be demonstrated in the first phase of treatment. In the identification of the substance of this constellation, we closely follow French's criteria for the description of the focal conflict, which require information about the source (unconscious, infantile stimuli), precipitating causes (recent and current events), principle forms of defense, and attempted solutions.
In contrast to French, we would not like to make a qualitative statement about the period of time a given focal theme is dominant. At some point -- we do not dare to be more precise -- the work on the first focus makes a second focus (F2) accessible. The work on this second focus leads...back to the first focus, which then again becomes the center of work, although in a qualitatively different form (F1´ ).

...other focusses [sic] (...F3, F4) are, as is easy to imagine, encountered and handled in the course of treatment, each providing a new means of access to the major transference issue F1.

The psychoanalytic process as we understand it lives from a diversity and openness which leaves room for creativity, but which has to restrict itself whenever it becomes concrete. The model [i.e., The Ulm Process Model that the authors propose] therefore does not dictate whether the next session will continue the same topic or whether another focus will be revived as a result of situational stimuli. In every session a situation inevitably arises in which a decision must be made as to which direction [my emphasis] to take. The analytic process lives in a dialectic tension between the conception that "the way is the goal" (von Blarer and Brogle 1983, p.71) and the fact that there is no such thing as aimless wandering. There will always be times when the two wanderers pause and become engrossed in a topic which appears significant to both of them.

Thomä & Kächele, pp. 350-2

I quote this material at length because it seems to echo what I have been attempting for so long to do with my self-therapy. I wander around the material, which seems to want to organize itself into themes, or focuses:

  • F1: rejection, or perception of rejection, by mother
  • F2: insecurity, caused by perception of rejection, as evidenced by the story of Mom throwing me into the crib and telling me to "Go ahead and cry." [which I have written of at length elsewhere, and which I will try to find and post later.]
  • F3: dwafp syndrome < insecurity
    • [A theory of mine (doubt, worry, anxiety, fear, paranoia) that I will post and link to from here later.]
  • F4: schizoid reaction: secure sometimes, when I can create a secondary security (money; writing; analysis and organization, i.e., control, "actual" and fantasized); competent v. pathologically insecure, which I feel as "fear" when I awaken out of sleep/dream states where the censors (reason) are not so well established and the fear is close to the surface. I function well, when I am in "control," i.e., when I write daily, when I organize my environment, when I maintain my financial hedge against the future. But when I begin to let this control relax, when things that should be done do not get done, I begin to fear again. (dwafp)

    • Money has become my mother-object. I remember, when I was still a kid, hoarding money, feeling that it represented some kind of power that I didn't need presently, but would need in the future. This is preconscious.

    You see how this works? I awaken disturbed and fearful, fears near the surface, I analyze the situation. I feel better. I feel in control now.
    This may not be psychological health, but it is stasis. The fear is not a threat now. It has been fixed, as a series of ideas and insights.
    I advance in this way, bit by bit, a bit of an insight each day I awaken out of a "bad" dream. (There are no bad dreams, only bad awakenings.)



9-25-1b

What did you go out into the desert to see?
A reed shaken by the wind?
 
The proper direction is that which presents no resistances, and short of that, if you must, for whatever reason, face resistances, the proper action is to stand firm without wavering, patiently and courageously waiting, until a new direction, free of resistance, opens.
A direction is found and taken for a short distance, through which it proves to be somewhat useful. But its utility wanes, the path ahead grows dim, as if dusk is darkling; eventually you begin to wander in the dark again, looking for a new direction.
In this way, you work your way along, in one direction, then another, then another, moving between more or less familiar goals that you temporarily abandon, sometimes for quite a while, when the direction toward them becomes unclear.



10-2-1b

Because I will, from time to time, secret myself away (depressed, I guess; I have all the symptoms, except that I don't feel depressed at all. I'm not the least bit sad; in fact, I'm happy when I can hide away and be with myself during these non-sociable times), I allow myself to slip into a condition wherein, if I will have to face society, for whatever reason, I will not want to do so, to the point where I will see any social necessity as anxiety. In other words, I condition myself to a state of absence and when I must leave it without my usual self-motivation to be out of my withdrawn state, I become anxious. I'm thinking that this is, if not a different kind of anxiety, at least a different cause of it from the typical social anxiety I had faced as a child. This is not true, I guess. What's different is not the affect, but the consciousness of it. I know I can overcome it if I will but face it and push through it. I have a certain self-confidence I did not have when I was younger. All it takes to overcome the "problem" is for me to assert myself, preferably in a positive way and in a positive direction. Thus, the problem, I think, is not one so much of anxiety as of motivation. I hide away because I feel lethargic. I don't want to do anything, or I don't want to do anything social, and the resultant isolation feeds upon itself, feeding back an unconscious self-impression that I am separate (when no one ever is, despite their physical state of being), and with it, the debility of thinking that people who are "different" from me cannot accept me as I am (an impression that is based in truth; many people are prejudicial and intolerant of difference). This process stirs up the old anxiety syndrome: if I go out (metaphorically, and therefore literally), I will be rejected. Thus, it is the old mother-rejection, after all. But I know how to deal with it. All I have to do is resolve myself to facing up to "society." I know I have the skills. All I have to do is apply them. But usually, when I am in this isolated state, I don't want to. I'd rather be alone. Still, if it must be done, so be it. One simple assertive act and I am back out in the world again. [And, being out, I begin to accumulate the effects of stress, so that (I know) if I stay out too long it will be detrimental to my physical and mental health. (All of this is nothing more than another example of that lifelong schizoid state of being, but I must be advancing, having learned to recognize it ahead of time so as to be able to head it off, in both directions.)] So, here I am, having done it, gone back out into the world, and acting as if that is a good thing, while workers are clearing away the rubble from what used to be the World Trade Center and Bush prepares to bomb the shit out of the militant Muslim world. Why would anyone want to be out in all that if they didn't have to be? The answer is: they don't. We all, every one of us, have our methods of seclusion: nice homes that we retreat into every night, warm beds, sleep (the ultimate seclusion; I love it), hobbies we work at in our workshops all alone. These are normal things. I isolate myself in the same way everyone else does. It's just that I happen to be far better at the process than most people. My extremes swing a wider distance, so that, when I am out, I am way out, and people (people who do not know me, who have not been influenced, by myself, or more probably by the opinions of others) think I am a most sociable person, because I am--at times. And I am even more than that, in my most self-defined successful moments, when I allow my ego to melt away to share the essence of another's personality. But this is not therapy any more. This is something else now. There is no therapy necessary for "spiritual" experience.


The previous is the last entry,
but there is much more to be interspersed.
TerrorNotes is the "logical" continuation
for those weirdos who are into logic.



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