Perhaps, not so extreme

Before I write about why It is good to find a therapist who has some of my views, I would like to make slightly clearer what my views are.  That is why I write this blog anyway, to figure that out for myself.

So, we were driving back, over the weekend, on the coastal route.  We stopped along the way to see a friend, who happens, of all things to be a religious leader.  She is a good friend, and we know and accept each other.  She is even a Yankee fan, and I still call her a close friend.

We arrived at the time she was about to do some religious leading, so we attended.  She was doing an admirable job of leading, and I was not following very closely, but I was turning the pages in the book of prayers.  In the book I came upon a quote, but I can't find the quote anywhere though Google, so I will have to paraphrase it -- but maybe it was just put there for ME to see, or maybe they paraphrased it themselves.

Anyway, it was from Martin Buber, and it said something like:

"If people come to you and ask for help with their troubles, do not say something pious, and tell them to pray, and that God will provide.  Act as if there is no God, and that it is up to you to do all that is in your power to help them solve their problems."

That is the kind of religion I can be comfortable with.

Also, I said that I have a great deal of difficulty with Patriotism, especially when it leads to war.  Well, that is certainly true, but that does not mean that I am necessarily a pacifist.  I strongly believe that every country and every society has more than it's share of assholes.  And that there are people in other countries who do want to blow us up and take our money and rape our women.  We are a rich and aggressive country; so we need to defend ourselves.  Too often we are jerks about it, and do it badly, in the wrong places and for the wrong reasons. But we do need to watch out.


What do I think is important?

Basically, life.  I think that being alive is amazing, and can be full of fantastic, fun and satisfying experiences, sometimes, when it isn't tedious and boring, or it isn't full of pain and suffering.

Life, especially human life, is very precious, and should be treated that way.  No one life is more important than any other.  You have the responsibility of living your life as best as you can, in a way that you have determined.

We are all united by our insignificance --except to ourselves and those we love.

Floating down the wrong tributary

Took off from work again.  My wife tells me to do it; to practice for when I get old, although she tells me that I am old.  But I'm not.
So we took off and drove out of New England and headed South.  We are here, on the water, tomorrow I will cross the Bridge-Tunnel as I have long wanted to do.

But yesterday, waking up hungry, we decided to eat a regional breakfast, but since we couldn't find that we stumbled into Denny's, a place I had only been in once before.  The service was fine, the breakfast was everything they said it would be. Except the company was different.

Two men sat behind us, and after a while my wife and I stopped talking and began to listen to a conversation that is not what we hear in our social circle, although it may be more common in yours.
One man seemed to be about sixty and the other seemed close to seventy.  They were dressed neatly in clothes that could have come from Wal-Mart. They talked openly and with feeling.  They were talking about a man they knew who was in a bit of trouble.  The man's business was not doing well and the land he had for sale was not selling.  That left him unable to support his wife, and her son, who was in a wheelchair.  But the man also was spending a great deal of time with another woman, and this was not good.  The two men having the discussion were upset because they felt that the man about whom they were talking was headed for hell, and if the moment of the rapture occurred, he would be left behind, and therefore doomed. They were not sure how to deal with him and his situation.  One of the men wanted to approach him and warn him, but he felt sure it would ruin their friendship.

Now, I realize that this conversation was a bit extreme, but it again brought up to me how much I do not buy into many of the most important mind-sets that define most Americans. My thinking is partly a result of what I do, and what I do is the result of who I am.  Despite my efforts to get along, I am still out of step, off the main-stream, floating down my own tributary towards my own distant, probably unattainable sea. This is unsettling to me in two ways.  First, how far out of the mainstream I am, and second, how loose, sloppy and lazy the thinking of the mainstream is.

So here is the part where I drive many of you away.  Where I ruin any chance I have of getting anything published, because as an agent I once had said to me: you write very well, but you are much too complex, and you don't reward your readers with happy endings.  People would much rather read about clear paths to happy endings.  That sells.  Your shit about the world being very complex and most things ending with limited compromises with reality does NOT sell.

True.

Why? you might ask, then do I persist.

The short answer lies most clearly in the things that I do not accept.  Yes, I understand the utility, the need, and the natural affiliation for certain things.  Yet, I cannot participate. I just can't.  I never have been able to.  I gave up trying in seventh grade. ( Perhaps I am still just an obstinant adolescent.)

The best examples that quickly come to mind are these: patriotism, religion and video games. These are becoming almost universal activities, and yet I have great difficulty joining in. Again, I understand them.  I see clearly why people join in. I see the joy, the fellowship and the comfort that is gained with participation.

But I can't do it.

To me patriotism and religion are just a bill of goods that are sold early and often by the powers that be to get the masses to go along with the program.  The program that is being sold is one that benefits the powers, almost always much more than it benefits the masses.  Yet patriotism and religion are sold in a way that if you don't buy into the concept, there is no place for you in the group. That is a powerful selling device, scorn and exclusion.

But why should I believe that my country is the best in the history of the world just because I happened to be born here? And this God-stuff is really about getting people to believe in the totally unbelievable.
They tell you to have faith, don't question the incomprehensible. Once they can get you to do that, then they can sell you anything.  You can fly.  You can be born again.  You will live in heaven.  You can charge it now and pay later.  You can buy that house you can't afford.  You can even believe some of the incomprehensible stuff that Sarah Palin talks about.

And yes, our soldiers are brave and valaint people, who sacrafice for the good of their country and do their assigned duty despite great and constant danger.  But I can't stop thinking that rather than their being out there defending our freedoms, they are out their defending the corporate economic structures.  These are kids that I have seen in therapy, who had trouble in high school, had trouble following the laws, and some trouble getting along with others, who respond well to the high level of structure in the military, who hope for a boost in life that they cannot find on their own, so the opt for three to twenty years of going off to foreign lands to kill people they don't know, for reasons that really are not that clear.
The reasons that are given them are often similar to the things they heard from their religious leaders.  That we are the good and the righteous, and they are the forces of evil.  Have faith.

The video game thing, is really a generational thing.  I can't get into wasting my time playing virtual basketball when I could be playing basketball.  I don't get a thrill being a virtual pimp.  Maybe a racing game or a flight simulator I could do for a while.  But, even though, as I said,  I'm not religious, I have this guilt about wasting time.  I feel that the best way to really waist time is to watch college football, especially two teams you have barely even heard of, but they sure can run up and down the field.

So that's me, sitting way over here on the side.  I can even get upset at how everyone feels good about putting on pink ribbons to fight breast cancer.  Not because that isn't a good idea, but because the money goes mostly to the big cancer research institutes that are seeking treatments for the cancer that women get, and not to prevention.  Real prevention would attack the toxins and pollutants that run rampant though our food, air and water.  But few people are is looking at that because that would point out the need for change.

Well, this has gone on too long already. I have more concerns, but who needs to listen.  As the man said (Voltaire) 'Surely, this is the best of all possible worlds.'  We are fine, you and me.   ( unless we are the ones with cancer, or the ones wounded in the army, or condemned by the church for being turned on by the wrong kind of person, or... but hey, enough all ready.

Next time I will tell you why, even though I am not the greatest follower of American credo, it would be to your advantage to consult with a therapist like me, if you ever feel the need to consult with a therapist at all.

Recollections (revised) Part 1A

I don't talk about dreams much in therapy.  I don't ask about them, nor do I think that they are the window into the unconscious. But sometimes they do trigger interesting discussions.  In many ways they are kind of the neurological cleaning out of the flotsam left in the brain at the end of the day. For me, I know that I have to be more careful about what I read after I get into bed.  I often fall asleep and then suffer with blurred visions of the Taliban or Sarah Palin running through my mind, disturbing my rest.

But I had a dream the other day which was clearer than most and the feelings that came with it stayed with me for a while, making me wonder what is going on in my own head.  In the first part of the dream I was an MC of a big party, like a wedding or something.  I was making all kinds of clever cracks, entertaining everyone.  But that quickly morphed into a scene where someone, a good friend, was telling me how I had insulted his mother, and that she was very hurt by things that I said.  The dream then quickly shifted to an image of me and this same kid, whose mother I had insulted, riding on a bus.  He was saying to me something like, "isn't this great, we are finally growing up and going off to college."  I sat there, on the bus, on one of those plastic seats of city buses.  I was nodding in agreement, but I said, yes this really is great, but I feel as if I have done all this before."

When I awoke from the dream I was in a good mood.  I remembered those parts of the dream very clearly and I loved the irony of the last line.  I enjoyed how good I was at recognizing, as I rode of to college, that I had already done that, even though, in the dream, I was confused by what I was feeling.

All of this made be reflect upon what I was really like when I shuffled off to college. What I remember clearly, was that unlike in the dream,  when I went to college the real time, I had little insight and even less  perspective.  I was really pretty clueless about how the world worked, and what I could do to make it work better.  I was having a tough time figuring out where I fit into the whole scheme of things.

I already had developed a very quick and sarcastic wit, mostly because I needed something to protect me, as I was very skinny and did not project an image of physical power.  But my wit was very unconventional and disarming.  One of my high school teachers told me that I was really funny, even if most of what I said went right over the head of most of my classmates.  He added that he hoped that the things I said would not get me killed some day, if per chance, someone did get the joke.

But even in high school my attitude about the world was becoming established. Because I was slighter than most of the boys, and this was because I was younger than most of the boys due to my mother sending me off to school early,  Look, she said, he's smart enough and he's just wasting his time being a pain in the ass at home.  So they started me at school two days after I turned five.  I didn't have to wait for the next year.  I was about ten months younger than most of the kids in my class, which, in fourth grade, is a lot.

I think I had to protect myself by paying closer attention to what other kids were doing and thinking.  I got to be a pretty good at predicting what people were going to do.  I could tell what songs were going to be "hits" the first time I heard them.  I could tell which I my friends were going to be dumped by their girlfriends.  This sense of observation developed to the degree that I began to be a ble to tell which of my teachers really didn't know what they were talking about. I had some really good teachers, and some who were real phonies. Some of them knew that I knew, and that wasn't helpful for me in school, but I knew that this kind of knowledge was what I really should be leaning.

The more I paid attention, and by my Junior year, it was a lot, I developed an awareness that most people were being played for suckers.  They were being lured to put their efforts, beliefs and money into things that were either, illusionary, worthless, harmful or nuts.  At the time it was things like big houses, constant new cars, and bomb shelters.  I also was confused by all the fuss made about religion and patriotism.  I didn't get it.  For me it just didn't make sense to get all worked up because I happened to be born in a certain place.  I mean, I am that different from the people who happened to be born over there?

I didn't get it .  And no one did a very good job explaining it to me.

So I made a lot of sly, kind of sideways remarks. I knew enough not to say anything directly, especially about religion and patriotism.  I could tell that could get me in real trouble.  So I remained, just kind of confused. I had no solution.  I had nothing else to offer in their place, so I kept a lot of it quiet. I didn't really know what to say.

I also realized, that few other kids that I knew even gave these things a thought. They did what was being done around them.  They just kind of accepted that this was the way it was, and went on.  Most of my friends were much more concerned with hitting a baseball and getting their hands up under a girl's sweater.
With that, we shared a common interest, so I was accepted and did Ok.

Because of my confusion I was voted the "most individualistic" kid out of about 700 in my class.  That meant that people thought I was weird, but I guess I was clever enough to make it seem interesting.

And that's why I became a psychologist. 

I thought, geez, if what I'm thinking about is so weird, what the hell is everyone else really thinking about?

For the past forty years, people have been coming in and telling me.  So that part has worked out.