In a hurry?

However fast you run,

or however skillfully,

you can’t run away from your own feet.

 

Beware the sociopaths

The majority of psychopaths manage to ply their trade without murdering people. By focusing too much on the most brutal and newsworthy examples of their behavior, we run the risk of remaining blind to the larger picture: psychopaths who don’t kill but who have a personal impact on our daily lives.”

From:  http://sociopathicstyle.com   More:

Early in our support group work with the victims of psychopaths they identified their partner or ex-partner as the Psychopath in their lives. This then became shortened to the expression “My P did……”. They experienced themselves as the victim of a psychopath. In many cases this was true and the mental health professional they were working with accurately diagnosed their partner and helped them get out of the relationship and restore their lives. However, they continued to see themselves as victims and held onto their rage at their partner and their shattered lives. In order to move on it became essential for them to look at themselves and their participation in the relationship and the wreckage of their lives.

It was out of this dynamic that the Sociopathic Style™ was born. By continuing to identify themselves as victims and labeling their partner as a Psychopath they were continuing to live a relationship style that was Sociopathic in nature. When we point the finger at the other person and label them as “sick”, disturbed and evil, i.e. we“demonize the other”; our behavior is Sociopathic Style™ behavior. They continued to identify the other as, “my P”, but were able to see that they were Sociopathic Style™ participants in the process.

Keeping our heads off the ground by having them up our ass

We’d never get through the world if we knew it as it is: enormous and chaotic. We’d need a brain so large that we couldn’t keep our heads off the ground. The brain’s simplification of reality means that anything that gets into the mind is immediately overemphasized, whether it is an emotional slight, a change in the weather, or a matter of statecraft. So we give the most recent news that greatest weight in decision making. This  leads to frequent  and dramatic fluctuations in our thoughts and moods, and our fragile minds almost leave us little choice but to delude ourselves most of the time.

NO ONE FACES REALITY.

We all react to a simplified, filtered model of the world, a personal story we tell ourselves with respect to the world and our place in it.

From Healthy Pleasures by Robert Ornstein and David Sobel.

See www.ishkbooks.com

The Principle of Delayed Understanding

The title to this post came from a book I just read called The Church of 80% Sincerity by a guy named David Roche. He is a guy with severe face disfigurement with some interesting things to say. www.davidroche.com

Here is a quote I enjoyed, “Contrary to New Age belief, conciousness always lags behind reality. Here is proof: How many of you are still trying to figure out things that happened in your childhood, twenty, forty years ago? The best you can hope for is to minimize the length of time it takes to catch on. Perhaps this is not clear to you? Well there you go. More evidence of the principle of delayed understanding.”

I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to have our shit together RIGHT NOW. (the mantra of new agers)  Why are so many of us like this? Even those of us who obviously don’t have our shit together are probably not somehow ‘free’ but engaging in some habit that allows us to escape the nagging feeling that we don’t have it together. Roche’s quote points us to a potential culprit – The New Age movement.  If you think it doesn’t impact you, please know that Oprah is a big time promoter of New Age thinking, and you can’t deny her popularity and financial success. In other words, we all may be a lot more brainwashed than we realize.  

This principle of delayed understanding also relates to my last post on the vain brain. Our ‘delayed understanding’ of the real reasons we failed might be self-serving to our pride. But they also might be accurate. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. The vain brain may indeed have overestimated our abilities prior to initiating our efforts at something. In other words, we can’t escape the vain brain -EVER.  In fact, we probably ought to just accept that it is always functioning,   but examining past moments may give us some delayed understanding that will help us with future moments. Roche says to be happy with being about 20% full of shit.  As Emerson said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I guess then the bullshit factor gets too repulsive for old Ralph Waldo.

For me yesterday was not such a great day. I was irritable and in a funk.  I just felt out of it and I really needed to just rest for awhile. But I wouldn’t allow myself. It was a beautiful day and I didn’t want to feel the regret of wasting it. But I probably only needed an hour of uninterrupted down time. My fatigue didn’t make sesne to me so I just tried to ignore it. Looking back, I am probably tired because my wife has had poison ivy and had to go on predinisone. She is not sleeping well so I am not either.

GO VAIN BRAIN:  note my ‘excuse’ that my irritability was inevitable due to my wife’s poison ivy, and  my stubborn refusal to accept that I was tired yesterday because ‘I SAID SO”.

Retroactive Pessimism (a favorite of optimists)

One way to make failure easier to digest is to tell yourself that, in retrospect, the odds were stacked against you , and failure was all but inevitable.

Apparently researchers found this method, called retroactve pessimism, to be a favorite vain brain tactic of people who had charactersistics associated with the life strategy known popularly as optimism. This pessimistic strategy sneaks in the back door on these optimists, I guess, but this seems to account for much activity by our vulnerable brain.

Optimism enjoys a status that it doesn’t necessarily deserve in our society compared to pessimists, much the way right handers have compared to left handers. My grandmother was forced to learn to write with her right hand even though she is left-handed.

Dr. Julie Norem has done some interesting research looking at two very different approaches that successful people achieve goals. She calls them ’strategic optimism’ and ‘defensive pessimism’. Strategic optimists set their sights high, make big plans,  and though they often overlook those pesky obstacles that are bound to arise, are able through their contagious enthusiasm end up successful. Defensive pessimists are propelled by their fear of failure, causing them to bust their hump through meticulous attention to planning and preparation, and also are successful at least as much as the strategic optimists. It turns out that attempts to get someone who is naturally a defensive pessimist to adopt the strategic optimist style sets them up for failure. You can read more about this at www.defensivepessimism.com . Lack of success in achievement, at least in Dr. Norem’s laboratory, is associated with a pattern of avoidance, or trying to force yourself into a style that is not your own.

As Frank Zappa said from the song on the album of the same name , “You are what you is, You is what you am. You ain’t what you’re not. So see what you got. You are what you is. And that’s all it is.”

Some other therapist colleagues of mine, Doctors Barry Duncan and Scott Miller, have done great work over at the Intitute for the Study of Therapeutic Change. They have emphasized the importance of discovering your own theory of change, and have found in many studies of therapy encounters that the ability of the therapist to match his/her efforts with the clients already existing theory of change best predicts good outcomes for the client. For example, someone presenting for help with problem drinking who already believes that their drinking issues are caused by an illness are going to do better with a 12 step program than clients who don’t believe they have an illness.  On the other hand, if the client believes they have just developed some bad habits around drinking, they tend to have more success in behavioral modification programs. More from these guys at www.talkingcure.com  .

Taking Credit, Assigning Blame

“We are quick to assume that our successes are due to our own sterling qualities, while responsibility for failures can often be conveniently laid at the door of bad luck or damn fool others…the bigger the potential threat ( to your ego) the more self-protective the vain brain becomes…people think that others are more susceptible to the self-serving bias than they are themselves (allow yourself to take that sentence fully on board, should you need to.)”

Use this time to contemplate your denial about your own vanity  

The fact that I can’t think of any examples of myself using this vain brain method really kind of makes the point.

One way to get a handle on this one is to look at the media quotes of public officials after Katrina, as opposed to what I anticipate they will be after Gustav assuming fewer people die.

Diminishing the importance of a trait/skill

“If you are unambigously hopeless in an area of life, your brain gets around this by simply diminshing the importance of that skill.”

I remember this coming back and biting me in the ass. I used to work at my uncles’ nursery. One of our tasks, before the advent of machines that do it cheaper and quicker now, involved putting burlap on shrubs and sewing them using a needle and twine so the soil would hold together tightly around the root ball. I didn’t pay much mind to the quality of my sewing work, and frankly there was so much turnover of employees at the worksite that it was easy to convince myself that I was good enough at this task compared to most. I just didn’t see it as too important a skill. One day  my uncles were preparing for a show where some of their shrubs would be on display. They needed the root balls to be done up to a high standard of quality and  i was selected to help work on this project. As I saw some of my also chosen coworkers doing their sewing, I realized that my work was pretty inadequate compared to theirs. I meekly asked one of them to do a quick demo about how they did it. It was an amateur request, and everyone noticed. I wanted to be sure that I didn’t do  any crappy work and not meet the standard. It was an embarrassing moment, and it strikes me as an example of how the vain brain can minimize the importance of a skill.

“In a final clever enhancement of this self-enhancement, we believe that our weaknesses are so common that they are really just part and parcel of normal human fallibility, while our strengths are rare and special.”

When I was a freshman in college I surpised myself by doing very well in an English class that required me to complete some writing assignments. Some upperclass English majors that I knew were stunned. I felt pretty good, having felt pretty average in most other ways compared to many of my fellow students. “maybe I ma special and my mommy was right. “

The following year I took a higher level course with the same professor and nearly failed the course despite lots of effort. I was pretty crushed having never come close to failing in a an academic course. But I certainly seemed to be more interested in meeting and conversing with other students who said that bombing with this professor was very common, almost a rite of passage. We wanted to believe it.  Whether it were really true or not, it was a comfort.

My vain brain had a hard time with that professor. The whole experience drove me a little batty actually.  He happens to be a great writer himself – Franklin Burroughs, retired professor from Bowdoin College. Check him out at Amazon. I have read and really enjoyed his collection of short stories called Billy Watson’s Croker Sack.

Exploiting Ambiguity in traits/skills

If a trait of skill you’re being asked about is helpfully ambiguous, you interpret the question to suit your own idiosyncratic strengths.

Consider driving. Ask someone if they are a good driver, and if they are good at following the speed limit and using their directional, they will focus on that fact and not the 3 accidents they have had in the last 3 months.  Another driver who is able to whip into parking spots with exquisite precision will focus on that fact and not the multiple speeding tickets they get.

When asked, people will modestly and reluctantly confess that they are, for example, more ethical, more nobly motivated employees, and better drivers than the average person. The law of averages makes this impossible, of course.

All from CH 1 of Fine’s book with the experiments to back it up.

Keep in mind that your vain brain is protecting you by telling you that you wouldn’t be so vain.

What Carly SImon should have sung: “You’re so vain, you probably think this song is not about you.”

 

 

More on the way.