One of my current areas of fascination is the impact of technology upon human development. I've spent a great deal of time on this in the past couple of years. That's another story in another place. I love the way psychiatrist Jerold Block puts this:
"Increasingly, I am seeing the computer being used as a functional defense and/or outlet for aggressive and sexual impulses. As such, it is useful; the computer seemingly allows one to act on their frustration without harming others or their relationships. In a sense, the computer becomes an ideal partner - a relationship - always available and eager to participate, never judgmental.
"... Therapists need to start paying close attention to how the computer is used and what is being created there. Many of the activities one engages in while on the computer might be considered “artistic.” As a result, that work might be less inhibited than their more formal interpersonal interactions. Thus, a therapist might get a better sense of what is happening in their patient’s mind by looking at what is happening when they get on the computer." - Jerold Block, M.D.
When I'm in a certain dark place (harharhar) I read certain authors just because it makes me feel less alone. Last night I picked up a James Lee Burke (one of the best for grief, trauma, and magical thinking...)
"Sorry for the profanity and being so rude. I'm really not an asshole in real life. I'm pretty shy and quiet." - young man's response to me after I wrote to him privately folowing his written abuse to someone else in a forum.
Anonymity has such an interesting effect on how people behave. I'm specifically referring to internet behavior. The things people write sometimes confound me.
I am often shocked by the way people communicate to one another in blogs, forums, online games, youttube, myspace, and various other virtual spaces. At their worst people write insulting, degrading, racist, sexist, and threatening things to others. In many cases the desire to one-up others displays condesension that can cut like a knife. Others seem compelled to desperately seek intimacy and create communities that give (to me at least) a feeling of false bonding and pseudo-mutuality.
I always wonder who is behind the words - an angry 14 year old adolescent acting out rage and sexual frustration online? A lonely depressed housewife? An unhappy intellectualized grad student who enjoys kicking an autistic 16 year old because it's safe and easy and gives a feeling of power? A narcissist who can never find the recognition they crave in primary life?
And of course I ask, what are my motivations? Before I sound too righteous I should confess that I am guilty of some of the things I'm complaining about. I have a dark side which I can't deny. As someone told me recently, I am not a sweet cupcake. My dead husband once told me I was "snippy, snotty, snooty, and snarly", and at the time I couldn't disagree with him. I'm still thinking about that and trying to get clearer on my boundaries. I do know I have made a commitment to never say anything to anyone I wouldn't say without looking into their eyes, nor anything I would be embarrassed for my husband and children to read. In fact, I've always preferred eye contact. If I'm still considering empathy to be part of my higher path, sound byte communication does not generally facilitate it.
I think that if people had to look one another in the eyes and could not hide behind their avatars/net names/etc. they'd pause. That might be a good thing for all.
It is said that seeing is believing, but often it’s the other way around. We do not form our beliefs on the basis of what we see; rather, what we see is determined by our beliefs. We see not what is there, but rather what we want to see or expect to see. - Errol Morris
I've long been a fan of Errol Morris and his films, starting with "The Thin Blue Line" and most recently "The Fog of War." Both deal beautifully and dramatically with issues of perception.
People fascinate me, particularly their perceptions of reality and why they see things the way they do. This excellent article is timely, as I've recently been fixed on the topic of the world as a giant Rorschach ink blot.
When I meet someone, I'm automatically interested in their history, and what's been described in several branches of phenomenological psychology as the field in which they have developed and continue to live. One's field contains the mental and physical dynamics that contribute to an individual's sense of identity and subjective experience. Is the world a safe or dangerous place? Am I a competent person? How do I relate to others? How do I suppose others will relate to me? How do I interact with and interpret what happens in my environment?
I can't help anyone if I do not have the ability to enter their field. If I don't understand their field it's very easy to inadvertently do damage. I can't understand anyone's behavior if I don't strive to enter their internal frame of reference, their reality. Once I enter it, it is not my place to attempt to argue them out of it, but to mirror their experience and if they desire, explore if it's possible to assist them in making a shift in the field that is more comfortable for them.
What I'm describing has a lot to do with the construct of empathy, and another reason why it's so hard to do no harm.
Solaris is one of my favorite films, one I can watch over and over again because that is how I do my own therapy. When people wonder what it "means" all they have to do is note the line that jumped out at me the first time I saw it. Rhea: "Imagine a place where we could live inside this feeling forever..."
I've been surrounded by death for the entirety of my life. My life has never separate from death. I don't have answers, but I have so many feelings about it. And it's the feelings that matter.
Thomas' poem is integrated into the story:
And Death Shall Have No Dominion
And death shall have no dominion.
- Dead men naked they shall be one
- With the man in the wind and the west moon;
- When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
- They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
- Though they go mad they shall be sane,
- Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
- Though lovers be lost love shall not;
- And death shall have no dominion.
- With the man in the wind and the west moon;
- And death shall have no dominion.
- Under the windings of the sea
- They lying long shall not die windily;
- Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
- Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
- Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
- And the unicorn evils run them through;
- Split all ends up they shan't crack;
- And death shall have no dominion.
- Under the windings of the sea
- And death shall have no dominion.
- No more may gulls cry at their ears
- Or waves break loud on the seashores;
- Where blew a flower may a flower no more
- Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
- Though they be mad and dead as nails,
- Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
- Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
- And death shall have no dominion. - Dylan Thomas
- No more may gulls cry at their ears
I discuss with the teen girls I see regularly the irony of a culture that teaches them from the time they are old enough to be parked in front of a television set that their power as a human being comes from their sexuality, then when they act that out behaviorally (I don't need to give examples do I?) calls them "whores" who "asked for it" if they are raped.
The scary thing is that they have integrated both messages simultaneously and will agree with the message that in most cases where a young woman has displayed poor judgment and was subsequently raped "She asked for it."
No wonder they are so confused. They have no idea what's in their own heads or why it's there.
"Bad judgment is to be avoided whenever possible, but it is part of being young" I say (well actually it's part of being human), "but that's very different from doing something to someone else that causes harm. Bad judgment is not crime."
(These thoughts were prompted by material I found while perusing youtube. I don't know if it's good for me to know what's on youtube...I suppose it is if I'm to maintain any relevance in the lives of teenagers)
If we live in a culture where anxiety, depression, ADHD, PTSD, etc. have become "normal", shouldn't we ask ourselves a few questions?
Has it always been this way and are we just labeling more now? Has our culture become overly "psychologized?" Are these problems really increasing? If these problems are increasing, why?
It seems like nearly everyone requires some type of psych med to function, their kids are being medicated at school, and their elderly parents are medicated at the Alzheimer's residence. I'm not focusing right now on the prescribing practices, though that's something to carefully consider. At this moment I'm looking at a culture that has changed so much in the past couple of generations that it's making people sick. People really are suffering.
When we look at the developmental needs of human beings across the lifespan I don't think that overall they are being met. Children are not being given an adequate architecture of support and ultimately there are very serious costs for that. 100 other reasons pop into my head...
I'd like to write about them, but I'm too tired from spending eight hours a day trying to figure out what to do to give people a path toward feeling better and functioing
Culture is the place and space where a society tells stories about itself, where values are articulated and expressed, where notions of good and evil, of morality and immorality, are defined. In our culture it is the stories of advertising that dominate the spaces that mediate this function. If human beings are essentially a storytelling species, then to study advertising is to examine the central storytelling mechanism of our society. The correct question to ask from this perspective, is not whether particular ads sell the products they are hawking, but what are the consistent stories that advertising spins as a whole about what is important in the world, about how to behave, about what is good and bad. Indeed, it is to ask what values does advertising consistently push - Sut Jhally
They're anorexic Suicidal. On prozac or adderil, or half dozen other drugs. The will do anything to be cool. Anything.
They live to be hot, because that's what boys like. They are twelve years old, and my clients, and our daughters. They watch a lot of TV and spend most of their time alone, with peers, or immersed in the media. They've got laptops and broadband connections and cell phones and texting, yet they are so alone.
I wonder sometimes if anyone is paying attention.
The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows
The government is corrupt
And we're on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn
We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death
The sun has fallen down
And the billboards are all leering
And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles
It went like this
The buildings tumbled in on themselves
Mothers clutching babies picked through the rubble and pulled out their hair
The skyline was beautiful on fire
All twisted metal stretching upwards
Everything washed in a thin orange haze
I said, "Kiss me, you're beautiful..
These are truly the last days"
You grabbed my hand and we fell into it
Like a daydream or a fever
We woke up one morning and fell a little further down
For sure it's the valley of death
I open up my wallet
And it's full of blood - Godspeed You Black Emperor
The Lords Of Shouting
Everything shouts.
The television shouts through a thousand channels. Flickering through a thousand frequencies, making my own cut-up from the sound and vision until you leak through. A second of a voice that could be yours, a glimpse of eyes that could be yours, a moment of a song we heard together. The ache crawls into my hollow bones and the ruthless walls close in. I stand up naked in the pale blue moonlight of the TV screen and ascend. Tonight I'm a mutilated angel, using the cold concrete stairs to reach the sky, hunched over from the wounds where my wings used to be.
Radios howl. Keyboards clatter out of phones, calls and texts and emails. It's a loud world now. But not loud enough that you can hear me tonight.
In ancient Biblical lore, The Lords Of Shouting would gather at every sunrise, ten million five hundred thousand angels, and sing to God's glory as light flooded Heaven.
And I sit here on high, alone, as the world sings you into existence every morning. Up on the roof, shouting your name. Here on my own, the future behind me, wanting to shout out of ten million five hundred thousand mobile phones in this endless 2am. A Lord Of Shouting alone in the middle of the night, howling across an ocean and a continent to where the sun is going down. Wanting to shout the sun back up into the sky, kicking stars out of the way and making you see. Wanting to shout that I'm sorry, that I want you back, that I never should have gone. Wanting you to hear me shout your name.
I am a Lord Of Shouting tonight. But you can't hear a thing.
Warren Ellis 2003
