Saturday, September 19, 2015

"My experience of you" vs. "real you"

It's funny once you become aware of something and it's on your radar, you start both (1) seeing other instances of it and (2) you understand what's going on in those instances. For instance, I remember at one time in my life not understanding the meaning of the Fleetwood Mac song Landslide, and I also remember there being a very specific (although I've forgotten it now, ha) moment in which I suddenly understood it and it applied perfectly to my situation at that time.

I've always liked this Bjork song, but a few months ago I finally understood it:


I watched the first episode of the Netflix comedy Grace and Frankie, sort of an odd couple dynamic between two women whose husbands leave them for each other. Frankie is hippy dippy, Grace is rich white lady. But it also had an example of the sort of defining someone's identity that I mentioned in the last post:

Frankie: I lost my best friend. You don't even like Robert. 

Grace: You have no right to judge me. You don't know us. 

Frankie [clears throat] I'm sorry, I was judging by my experience of you, not the real you. That was wrong of me. 

I thought, that's a good distinction to make -- judging by our experience of a person versus whatever the real them is. We would never assume that we know all there is to France and French people after watching a French film or visiting Paris. Why do we feel so sure of ourselves in terms of our ability to judge someone's character after seeing a similar small sliver of the real them.

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Defining others = emotional abuse

One thing that I liked about the way the neurofeedback guy approached the whole dream interpretation thing, though, is that he didn't try to tell me who I am or what my dream meant. He asked me. My therapist is also huge on that -- will let me drift and drift and drift for months and years even until I learn a particular principle for myself. He says it's because that's essentially the best (only?) way for lasting change.

Sometimes I see people in life and here trying to tell people their truth, and I certainly have been 100% guilty of that in the past. I'm not sure if the impulse to dictate someone's truth is more likely to come from a largely ignorant or mislead desire to help or from a more ego driven desire to tear someone down or to build ourselves up as the keeper of Truths (capital T) about the world and other people. One thing that I have learned from therapy is how sacrosanct people's concept of identity is, and how so many behaviors can be traced to their identity, often negative behaviors occur when people believe that their identity is being threatened or has been mangled somehow. And one major type of psychological/emotional abuse is for the perpetrator to pretend to have the power to define the people in his or her life -- either as explicitly negative things like being stupid, no good, incompetent, ugly, or even as things that appear to be neutral but still are oppressive because some outside force as deigned to tell you what your thoughts, feelings, motives, etc. are and to try to impose their view of the world on you. These efforts are as emotionally violent to a person's sense of self or identity as punching them in the face, in fact most people would probably prefer to be punched in the face and have that unwanted invasion of one's personal space than they would an assault on the very thing that makes life seem worth living for most and what Victor Frankl credits in part to his survival in the concentration camps -- the no matter their circumstances, they still have absolute control over how they choose to view their circumstances and the power to define for themselves what they know to be basic and unassailable identity truths.

One reader posted in the "resources" post a book from this psychologist, that has coined the term "verbal abuse" and has written several books on the phenomenon:



It's interesting, she suggests that men who do this are much more likely to be trained out of it -- she believes because they have been accidentally trained into it as part of their socialization to be a "man" in this society. My brother said something like that to me once -- that he realized that he was a horrible boyfriend and was always undermining his girlfriend's sense of self in subtle ways to get her to be more what he needed and wanted her to be. After he realized what he was doing, he was able to stop. But there are others who have slipped into this behavior who apparently are not self aware enough to stop. She believes that most women emotional abusers fall into this category only because they're less likely to have stumbled into the behavior accidentally from a place of otherwise psychological normalcy. Consequently, if it shows up in women (despite all odds), there's likely something fundamentally psychologically wrong with them that is causing both the impulse to define others in this way and also is likely preventing some self-reflective insight that would help them see the truth of their behavior and get them to stop it. 

Sunday, September 13, 2015

Dream interpretation

This is the dream description I sent to the neurofeedback practitioner:

A bad guy (or multiple?) are after me for most of the dream. It gets resolved, and the bad guy gets caught. For some reason, he has hands that are like just flat circles, like the shape of a thick hamburger patty -- like a skin and flesh mitt that has been placed over his hands or that his hands have been burned and deformed intentionally that way by whatever "good guys" got him (cops?). His face is also deformed and scarred. I think his lips have been fused together so he can't talk. I think this is part of his punishment somehow for being bad, that they tried to neutralize his ability to do harm while still allowing him to exist. He doesn't get locked in prison, though, he gets locked in a walk in closet in a master bedroom suite of what sort of looks like my parent's house. I'm also staying there. Some night some time after that, we go to check on the bad guy, but he's not in the closet (we don't realize this at first for some reason, even though the door is open, maybe we think he's hiding). Then I notice bloody footprints from the sliding glass door entrance from the bedroom to the outside -- footprints that go to the closet, and then continue into the house. The other bad guy let this one out and now they're both on the loose. That's about when I wake up.

His interpretation was to ask me what the "bad guys" wanted from me. I told him that it felt like they wanted to make me like them, to disfigure me, so that I wouldn't be fit for a normal life anymore and then I would have to be with them. It reminded me a little of what the protagonist/antagonist in Boxing Helena is trying to do (that film has had such an odd lasting impression with me that I either watched that film either way too young in my development or it struck some chord of truth with me that resonates and haunts still today, I wrote about it a little here). He loves the object of his desire to much that he wants to ruin her for anyone else. Or the Crazy Love documentary, in which a woman whose ex-boyfriend that hired thugs to blind her by throwing lye in her face ends up marrying him because he was the only man “who she knew saw her as stunning rather than blind and disfigured.” I was afraid to become this woman, or to have people attempt to make me become this woman.

The neurofeedback guy suggested that maybe these bad guys  were not trying to make me like them so much as they already were parts of me that I (at one time) didn't want to be -- that they were really just aspects of myself that I had disassociated from and they were haunting me because that's still who I am at some level but have chosen not to deal with it. I actually found that to be a pretty compelling interpretation. It felt right to me, and it's odd, the dream was actually a nightmare -- it was hard to fall back asleep from it and it still haunted me a little in the days subsequent. But the moment I saw those bad guys as just these castoff parts of me, it was a light had been flicked on, so quickly did my paradigm shift. Instead of fear and confusion, I felt compassion and sorry that I had done this to myself -- I had mangled my own self. I was sorry for my childhood self and my teenage self and my young adult self and every other self that I have contorted and distorted to fit whatever my purposes were at the time (to appear to fit in, to get something out of a situation, to achieve something or maintain something that society requires a certain degree of conformity for). I sort of resolved then and there to not do that ever again, as much as I could help it. I started to think of the things that day or week that I had been trying to ignore, suppress, or repress about myself. I started doing little things to try to more openly acknowledge and express those aspects -- something as similar as getting in touch with certain friends or acquaintances or reading articles about those worlds.

The whole thing was such a revelation to me that I now wonder if dream interpretation typically has such drastic results, or if this was just a one off? It also made me think of how many other things about myself that I am oblivious too.

I have a few more thoughts about how the neurofeedback guy let me come to my own truths and didn't try to tell me what my truths are that I'll put in the next post.

Thursday, September 10, 2015

Anachronisms and hubris

I've been watching a period television show (The Knick!) that deals a little with mental illness in one of its side characters. I love period shows in general for the anachronisms. I think it's so easy to assume that whatever we are up to as a society is the best there is to offer (one of my favorite cheesy songs is Everything's Up to Date in Kansas City), but who knows what thing we do now is going to cause future generations to cringe at us for being idiots.

The Knick is often cringe worthy with the old fashioned medicine, depiction of race or gender relations, public shaming, slanted morality, etc. But the episode dealing with the character suffering from mental illness reminded me of one of my favorite SNL skits, "Rick's Model T's", in which Crazy Rick sells used cars with his actually crazy wife: "Don't make me put you back in the attic. . . . Damn it Daisy, I wish I had a more legitimate treatment option other than the attic, but that's just where medicine is at." I have a personal belief that we'll think of our current treatment of sociopaths as the rough equivalent of putting people up in the attic. I know others think that this is the best we can do as a society for sociopaths (or that sociopaths should have it worse than they do?), but I don't know, I still cringe at it.


Somewhat relatedly, I like the opening scenes of A Private Universe, in which Harvard graduates and professors confidently explain the changes of seasons all wrong.



I've tried to recreate this scene a little bit, but millennials in particular all give the right basic answer. They seem surprised that anyone ever thought that the closeness of the Earth to the sun could possibly explain the seasons (why is winter in the northern hemisphere summer for the southern then?). But it's of course not interesting to me so much about what people do or do not know, but whether they are able to recognize what they do and do not know -- how open is their mind, how good is their self-awareness, how humble is their sense of fallibility?

Sunday, September 6, 2015

Neurofeedback

I have been putting off writing about this because I wish that I knew more and could tell you more, but I also feel like better something than nothing. This past summer I did a round of 15 sessions of neurofeedback along with a friend who really wanted to try it and wanted sort of a buddy in the process, but also because I have always struggled to fall asleep and stay asleep and this was recommended to me as a potential help. I don't really want to try to describe the process completely or even my experience with it (nor give the impression that I endorse it) but I do want to relate a little of my experience with it.

I first started with a QEEG mapping of my brain, essentially (and forgive my ignorance) where they put a cap on your head are tracking your brain waives with all of these nodes placed in different areas of the scalp. This UCLA professor kind of describes its use in neurofeedback here. One thing that I found incredibly credible about the results was that knowing nothing about me (I never told him about my diagnoses of anything), my practitioner told me, in this very cautious way, "I don't want to alarm you or anything, and this is definitely something that we can see in the "normal" population but it is much more common in the autism spectrum, but your empathy and emotional processing regions have abnormally low functioning. Do you ever feel like you are disconnected from your emotions or other people?"

So even though my primary focus was on sleep, brain efficiency, and perhaps increased creativity (if any of these were possible and I was just making a wishlist), my practitioner became pretty fixated on working on the emotional processing. Sometimes he wouldn't tell me outright that was what he was doing for that particular session, I could just tell from the types of questions he would ask me. Sometimes he told me but said that he thought it was necessary to get that up and running before we targeted other things on my wishlist.

Things I appreciated about the experience:

  1. It was a little validating to hear that my brain actually is demonstrably mapped out to be crapped out (at least according to these metrics) when it comes to empathy. 
  2. Making the little green boat move with my brain waves while keeping the red and yellow boats still in the little electronic regatta made me realize: (1) my thought patterns are a lot more fixed and beyond my control than I realize and (2) because I consciously process so much information as it comes into my brain, I am less open minded. By the latter I mean that my very mechanism of trying to consciously process as much information as I can rather than letting the subconscious deal with it requires me to quickly categorize the data as being interesting or important or not, and always according to my pre-existing criteria. I've always thought that this made me function higher cognitively because less is getting past me, but I realized that it also has the weird but predictable effect of making me search for familiar patterns and thus be closed minded to truly new things, concepts, or types of information. 
  3. Certain sessions (again forgive my ignorance) where he wasn't tracking my brain waves but feeding my brain certain waves could be an absolute trip. Once I felt for all the world like I was on an opiate.
  4. I slept really soundly and deeply after almost every session in what felt like deep, restorative sleep. 
  5. I did sometimes feel waves of affection or other very strong emotional moments of truth, either during the sessions or in the days between the sessions, that suggested that there is still (for me) a capacity for less muted emotions. 

I didn't continue after 15 sessions because my talk therapist suggested that the problem with the neurofeedback technology and techniques are that the brain changes are there, but that they don't last. Again, I did not do any research to verify that claim, so forgive my ignorance.

Even if the effects did not last, there were certain realizations I made during the process that have lasted. I understand better how my brain takes in raw information and that my most efficient brain processing is not to try to earmark or categorize everything as it is coming in (as I naturally default too now), but rather to try to passively let the information come to me in whatever form it chooses to take -- as if there is a direct tunnel of information from the source straight to my brain and I just need to keep that tunnel clear, not force anything. I realized that I do have strong attachments to my loved ones, even if that feeling of attachment or love does not always seem very accessible to me. My practitioner was also a dabbler in dream interpretations, and I learned that whether or not dreams actually have meaning, there was sometimes useful information to glean from the analysis of my dreams. Maybe I will discuss one particularly clear example in a future post. 
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