And today’s psychology vid is :
And this time, I am going to make notes WHILE I watch it!
Oooh, how exciting!
A. Neurosis as a failure to adapt
That tracks, at least for me. I started off the queerest of ducks and never adapted to the world around me. Possibly because I built a little world of my own inside my head.
And things are so much easier there.
B. “…fills us with guilt for a life not lived…”
Ouch. Yup. That’s one form of guilt I have made no inroads against. When I think of the decades of life I have spent doing very little it horrifies me and no matter how much I tell myself that it wasn’t by choice because I’ve been sick, I never really believe it.
Maybe I just don’t want to face having that little power over my life. I dunno.
It still feels like I have wasted my life. And yet, I know that, on a deep level, that’s the exact kind of thinking that had led to my wasting my life.
Wrote that as “wasting my light” the first time. Paging Doctor Freud.
I have so much I could do in this world if I didn’t have this albatross of depression hanging around my neck, weighing me down, holding me in place.
Maybe my claustrophobia is just a conscious expression of the feelings of being imprisoned I dare not face.
They could destroy me.
C. “…because of cowardice, laziness, self-doubt, or just plain stupidity, the individual evades the challenge rather than facing up to it… ”
Um, harsh much? So what, I’m just too stupid to be sane? Ever occur to you that some challenges, like say being raped as a toddler, are simply more than anyone can handle? Especially all by themselves , without the ability to even come close to be able to put what happened into words let alone have anyone to tell them to?
I mean Jesus Christ, Jung, have a freaking heart.
D. “…defense mechanisms to force the problem out of conscious awareness…”
Yup, that’s what it does. What else can you do if a problem is too much for you to handle? Just lay down and die? You have to push it aside to be able to deal with reality and get on with life.
It’s a terrible long term strategy but what can you expect? I was four.
E. “,,,compulsive action to keep oneself distracted…”
Like playing video games. For instance.
F. Anxiety states as expressions of subconscious pain
That makes sense to me. No matter how good a job the metaconscious mind does at making the trauma disappear, the emotions are still there in the mind waiting to be expressed, and if they can’t be expressed consciously, they leak out subconsciously.
G. “…atrophied collective adaptation…”
That’s me. all right. I never adapted to the collective. Instead, I remained my own fiery little ball of individualism no matter the cost.
It would have taken a truly extraordinary educator to crack my shell and get me to slow down and listen and try to fit in.
Fuck fitting in. How about YOU motherfuckers adapt to ME?
As you can see, nothing has changed.
The brightest of lights…
…casts the darkest of shadow.
I ask myself, why was I so determined to be self-determined? What made me so stubborn as to refuse to conform to anything ever, in effect? Why did I not feel the sam pressures to be liked and fit in as everyone else?
Lack of kindergarten, for starters. Without that golden time to socialize in a low pressure, low stress environment, I did not get the very foundational social education that all the other kids did.
Who knows, I might have started to figure this shit out.
But maybe not, because there’s that other alienating factor, the one that has dominated my entire life, and that’s my intelligence.
Maybe I would have been just as alienated in kindergarten. Maybe the things the other kids did would have been even less appealing to me. Maybe I still would have gotten along better with adults, whom I could dazzle and charm, than with kids my age.
See, there’s a definite causal link between my high IQ and my defiant stance. Truth is, I just had the same drive toward individuality as any kid – but with the high IQ that made me impossible to truly discipline.
I had no fear of authority. Grownups couldn’t make me conform or comply by force, either emotional or intellectual. I was naturally a sarcastic little smartass.
I was superbly equipped to completely resist the forces of social education.
The teachers and I were just lucky that I was a naturally cooperative kid. If someone asked me to do something and I could, odds are I would do it. My childhood before school had raised me like that.
So I wasn’t a brat at all. Sure, I neither recognized nor respected adults’ inherent authority over me – that would have been absurd.
But for the most part I did what I was supposed to do. After all, the school work was incredibly easy for me, so why not do it? It at least provided some mild relief from the oppressive boredom of my childhood.
And on paper it made adults happy. And I wanted them to be happy with me.
Deep down, I am very much a people pleaser. When you are as empathic as I am, it’s very simple : making others happy makes me happy because I feel what they feel.
So to loop back in the general direction of the question, I think I was no more stubborn and defiant than the average kid.
The problem was that unlike the other kids, I had nobody who could make me fall in line and that means I lost out on a hell of a lot of social education.
There’s a reason it takes eighteen years to become an adult. A lot of what you will learn in school besides the academics requires you to be subjected to a structure which you then internalize as you grow up.
I could defy that structure any time I wanted and get away with it. To me it wasn’t even really there. I saw it apply to other kids but it never touched me.
And I missed out on one hell of a lot because of it.
In summary, I was just plain too smart for my own good.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.