The model of the psyche used ubiquitously in all the academic texts expresses that emotions are difficult to control, especially in their natural state. It seems to require the mechanism of civilization to keep them regulated. Such views are expressed through Freudian psychology and anything linked with it. This also seems to be the theory underlying contemporary educational practice.
To view the natural state of human beings as emotional and out of control, requiring dampening, controlling and diverting mechanisms, is entirely opposite to my self-understanding and experiences. To say so is to go against the contemporary orthodoxy, but I am fundamentally calm when I am left alone -- even as a child, I always seemed to be so. It's civilization I find demanding, because it always seems to coax from me various states of emotion that are deemed appropriate to specific situations. I've tried to produce these emotions on demand, in the past, and I've always had to fight myself in exhausting ways.
Speak to me calmly and quietly and tell me what's required in any given situation, and I am most likely able to respond effectively. But when change and adaptation is addressed as if it were a fundamentally emotional issue, I find I don't know what to make of it. I'm inclined to use my rational mind to adjust, but then I am told to think in terms of how to manage people's feelings. It's like being told I must do everything with my left hand when I'm right handed.
Those who instructed me thus must have believed they were doing right by addressing themselves to what they took to be my underlying emotional nature. But my real, underlying nature is rather more rational and detached. The only way I can interpret an instruction meant to speak to my "emotion" is to first enter the social realm where these emotions have strong currency. Then I need to try to work out conclusions of my own as to why certain cultural weight is given to certain specific actions.
Working things out back to front like this is very confusing and takes a huge amount of emotional effort. Before long, I am exhausted -- and I seem not to have made much progress with the whole problem.
It then becomes necessary for me to withdraw.
2
Because Western society maintains this model of what would be in my terms a "back to front soul", the very language that I would like to use to describe the problem also becomes corrupted -- and I become choked.
It is necessary for a paradigm that has it's image of the psyche in reverse to maintain that I must have "emotional issues" that prevent me from adapting to demands. It may be assumed that the forces for good in society are morally bound to wear away a powerful ego that will not succumb more easily to normative social demands.
This attempt, by those who wish to be of help, to wear me down in order to improve my situation was ongoing until recently.
Addressing themselves to what they saw to be my fortress of resistance, they attempted to bring me down to Earth, by saying I wasn't as great as I thought I was. (What they thought I thought I was, obviously, was something great.) I had a lot of this, "You're not so fine as you think you are!" and I've always wondered what it was supposed to mean on a deeper level. When I have had such statements addressed to me, they have arrived at the moments when I have already become flummoxed. Right at that point, when I am fully out of my depth, I will be told I need to realize that I am not fantastic. This is supposed to help as if it would behoove me to acknowledge something, anything, apart from my awareness that I am sinking.
The danger of asking for guidance is to get morally reprimanded. To ask for support with a complex issue produces the same result. The response is addressed not to my intelligence, but to what is presumed to be my emotional state at the time. Then, I have to go through all the backwards steps of analysis to try to gauge why someone thought that a particular state was my specific emotional state at the time. I generally can't figure this out.
If I try to express that I can't figure this out, I am told I have another emotion: self-pity. Apparently I am wallowing in it, and that is why no problems can be addressed either now or in the future.
3.
My experience is that Western society has always demanded that I transform myself by moving onto an emotional plane. It demands that my primary level of processing ought to be much more emotional. If it were, then social censure and criticism would shape me in the way I ought to be formed.
The assumption must necessarily be that I am not yet fully formed, but in a state of molten fury. Others need to take control and give me meaning, shape and direction.
I am told, by the way, that this has nothing to do with gender roles in Western society. Rather: that attributing emotional states to each other is what all members of society do to everybody else, that there has never been anything strange about my situation. If I think so I surely am "just being emotional".
4.
The attitude that many people had, that they already simply knew what was inside my head, without having to find out, gave them a supernatural aura for me. I honestly supposed that maybe they did actually know something I had not discovered yet, about myself. This wrongful supposition (as it turned out), nonetheless gave me much incentive to try to discover the architecture of Western emotionalism. Perhaps, with all my effort, I could even become its cornerstone.
This project has since been abandoned as so much brick and ruin. In place of the towering radiance of Western omniscience, I now impose a simple placard in my mind, with just a few words scribbled. They are: "projective identification". In simple language, Western culture has only ever conveyed one phrase and it is: "YOU are the emotional one!"
Had I deciphered this meaning and attitude from the beginning, I would not have wasted all my time. But it was the last thing I had been expecting, frankly.
5.
Western culture is a tar-baby. The more you fight it, the more it sticks to you. This is what occurred, but this was all my fault.
6.
To be cast into the wilderness is not a hardship -- not like Western culture deems it to be. It's not even all that difficult. The pervasive idea that personal experience is just a forest fire of undifferentiated emotions is clearly wrong.
To view the natural state of human beings as emotional and out of control, requiring dampening, controlling and diverting mechanisms, is entirely opposite to my self-understanding and experiences. To say so is to go against the contemporary orthodoxy, but I am fundamentally calm when I am left alone -- even as a child, I always seemed to be so. It's civilization I find demanding, because it always seems to coax from me various states of emotion that are deemed appropriate to specific situations. I've tried to produce these emotions on demand, in the past, and I've always had to fight myself in exhausting ways.
Speak to me calmly and quietly and tell me what's required in any given situation, and I am most likely able to respond effectively. But when change and adaptation is addressed as if it were a fundamentally emotional issue, I find I don't know what to make of it. I'm inclined to use my rational mind to adjust, but then I am told to think in terms of how to manage people's feelings. It's like being told I must do everything with my left hand when I'm right handed.
Those who instructed me thus must have believed they were doing right by addressing themselves to what they took to be my underlying emotional nature. But my real, underlying nature is rather more rational and detached. The only way I can interpret an instruction meant to speak to my "emotion" is to first enter the social realm where these emotions have strong currency. Then I need to try to work out conclusions of my own as to why certain cultural weight is given to certain specific actions.
Working things out back to front like this is very confusing and takes a huge amount of emotional effort. Before long, I am exhausted -- and I seem not to have made much progress with the whole problem.
It then becomes necessary for me to withdraw.
2
Because Western society maintains this model of what would be in my terms a "back to front soul", the very language that I would like to use to describe the problem also becomes corrupted -- and I become choked.
It is necessary for a paradigm that has it's image of the psyche in reverse to maintain that I must have "emotional issues" that prevent me from adapting to demands. It may be assumed that the forces for good in society are morally bound to wear away a powerful ego that will not succumb more easily to normative social demands.
This attempt, by those who wish to be of help, to wear me down in order to improve my situation was ongoing until recently.
Addressing themselves to what they saw to be my fortress of resistance, they attempted to bring me down to Earth, by saying I wasn't as great as I thought I was. (What they thought I thought I was, obviously, was something great.) I had a lot of this, "You're not so fine as you think you are!" and I've always wondered what it was supposed to mean on a deeper level. When I have had such statements addressed to me, they have arrived at the moments when I have already become flummoxed. Right at that point, when I am fully out of my depth, I will be told I need to realize that I am not fantastic. This is supposed to help as if it would behoove me to acknowledge something, anything, apart from my awareness that I am sinking.
The danger of asking for guidance is to get morally reprimanded. To ask for support with a complex issue produces the same result. The response is addressed not to my intelligence, but to what is presumed to be my emotional state at the time. Then, I have to go through all the backwards steps of analysis to try to gauge why someone thought that a particular state was my specific emotional state at the time. I generally can't figure this out.
If I try to express that I can't figure this out, I am told I have another emotion: self-pity. Apparently I am wallowing in it, and that is why no problems can be addressed either now or in the future.
3.
My experience is that Western society has always demanded that I transform myself by moving onto an emotional plane. It demands that my primary level of processing ought to be much more emotional. If it were, then social censure and criticism would shape me in the way I ought to be formed.
The assumption must necessarily be that I am not yet fully formed, but in a state of molten fury. Others need to take control and give me meaning, shape and direction.
I am told, by the way, that this has nothing to do with gender roles in Western society. Rather: that attributing emotional states to each other is what all members of society do to everybody else, that there has never been anything strange about my situation. If I think so I surely am "just being emotional".
4.
The attitude that many people had, that they already simply knew what was inside my head, without having to find out, gave them a supernatural aura for me. I honestly supposed that maybe they did actually know something I had not discovered yet, about myself. This wrongful supposition (as it turned out), nonetheless gave me much incentive to try to discover the architecture of Western emotionalism. Perhaps, with all my effort, I could even become its cornerstone.
This project has since been abandoned as so much brick and ruin. In place of the towering radiance of Western omniscience, I now impose a simple placard in my mind, with just a few words scribbled. They are: "projective identification". In simple language, Western culture has only ever conveyed one phrase and it is: "YOU are the emotional one!"
Had I deciphered this meaning and attitude from the beginning, I would not have wasted all my time. But it was the last thing I had been expecting, frankly.
5.
Western culture is a tar-baby. The more you fight it, the more it sticks to you. This is what occurred, but this was all my fault.
6.
To be cast into the wilderness is not a hardship -- not like Western culture deems it to be. It's not even all that difficult. The pervasive idea that personal experience is just a forest fire of undifferentiated emotions is clearly wrong.
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