Reactive rage ( as distinct from instrumental rage) is usually an infantile and crude attempt at power and thus clumsy, inept and foundationally weak . Pulling away from it, in the sense of gaining objectivity and detachment already gives one an advantage over it.
Westerners are full of this reactive rage, and seem to believe they can frighten me with it. But I was brought up in a militaristic culture, blah, blah, blah....
I remember the very first topic discussed in my first abnormal psych class was the difference between eccentricity and mental illness. "Normalcy" in clinical psychology is to be defined more by what it is not ( a currently existing category of mental disorder) rather than what it is ( a collection of many highly varied traits). Yet, over the decades it seems that the profession of clinical psychology , ironically, in it's own neurotic attempt to categorize everything, has been steadily encroaching on everything that was previously in the territory of normalcy. The result is that the discipline is beginning to lose all credibility- at least that is the position coming from sociology , neuroscience and other psychology disciplines like social psychology.
Many have sensed this and made some feeble attempts to scale back some of the pathologizing by omitting new things from the DSM. Yet some of the things they proposed to omit, like NPD, were based on how much of a population falls into such a categories, forgetting entirely about social and historical context. It as if they have no understanding that civilizations and societies change. Since the lack of broader context has been such a huge failing in the discipline as a whole, increasingly it just looks like they seem to be drawing lines arbitrarily. If what's popular is the arbiter of what's normal, then the whole enterprise is a pseudo-science.At the very least, it's merely a description of what the general mental state/ mind-set of current society is. But this says nothing specific about an individual's potentials other than that he is a product of his milieu.
Unlike social psychology, clinical psych misunderstands the significance of power dynamics in relationships because they refuse to see that they arise out of a broader complex system. This creates an even bigger confusion about distinctions between a person's agentic power and responsibility and the power of larger forces. A person who's gone through abuse often struggles with making that distinction themselves... and it's a crucial one because it determines what's possible from what's outside the person's control. If the line of demarcation for personal agency is drawn too far out, then further injury results in the form of guilt and shame . If it's the line is drawn too limiting of personal agency then, people feel stuck in victimhood. The ability to regain power over your own life ( and also not become harmful to others) depends on how you get the balance right in estimating those distinctions.
Yeah, what I see is Westerners aggrandizing themselves and normalizing their own cognitive preferences at my expense. This is, in itself, narcissistic. My cognitive preferences are surely very, very, different, because my experience was informed by early exposure to emotional and material austerity. This does not make my cognitive style bad or evil or outside the range of health. Quite the opposite in fact as I am able to sustain myself separately from others with great effectiveness, and I wll even thrive with very little external sustenance for a very, very long time. But if I am supposed to understand myself as bad, or sick, or evil, then I am afraid the self-aggrandizing Westerners have a very bad enemy on their hands.
This is very well stated indeed. Excellent. Thank you for commenting here.
Yes, in fact when I notice that somebody is overlooking power relations, I do what I can to make power relations more salient or palpable to them. Basically I mirror back to them what they are doing to me. A really big one, I have found, it to treat them as if emotions were not important. "I'm sorry, are you angry at me because I seemed to be going along with you for a while, but now I am not? Well emotions aren't at all important, so I cannot help you there."
Many have sensed this and made some feeble attempts to scale back some of the pathologizing by omitting new things from the DSM. Yet some of the things they proposed to omit, like NPD, were based on how much of a population falls into such a categories, forgetting entirely about social and historical context. It as if they have no understanding that civilizations and societies change. Since the lack of broader context has been such a huge failing in the discipline as a whole, increasingly it just looks like they seem to be drawing lines arbitrarily. If what's popular is the arbiter of what's normal, then the whole enterprise is a pseudo-science.At the very least, it's merely a description of what the general mental state/ mind-set of current society is. But this says nothing specific about an individual's potentials other than that he is a product of his milieu.
Yes, in fact when I notice that somebody is overlooking power relations, I do what I can to make power relations more salient or palpable to them. Basically I mirror back to them what they are doing to me. A really big one, I have found, it to treat them as if emotions were not important. "I'm sorry, are you angry at me because I seemed to be going along with you for a while, but now I am not? Well emotions aren't at all important, so I cannot help you there."