Category Archives: mental health

Narcissicism and care-giving

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The recent Penn State University sex abuse scandal has brought to the fore again the psychological profile of sex offenders.  The following link connects to a Washington Post story by a Jesuit priest who elaborates on the narcissism of sexual offenders, in this instance,  but also in the Catholic Church sex abuse saga which still rears its ugly head from time to time.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/a-priests-view-of-penn-state/2011/11/13/gIQAcevnHN_blog.html

I think that narcissism is a human trait and that all of us should consider its relevance in our own life.  It is a challenge to get to the point in our maturity where we consider from day to day, “This is not all about me” whatever “this” might happen to be at the particular moment.  There is always a context and it is human nature to interpret any phenomena in a self-flattering, egotistical manner.
Being a professional care-giver by training (and disposition), I have learned to monitor myself from time to time and issue that reminder:  This is not about me!   It is so easy to care for some of us, especially we bleeding-heart liberals, but what we don’t want to realize is that this “I feel your pain” tendency is often just simple co-dependency.  We are sometimes just feeding on the anguish of our clients or charges.
And then there is the Jerry Sandusky sexual offender profile, where this “feeding” is not just simply naivety and immaturity, it is outright predatory.  This is garden-variety, plain-and-simple, evil sociopathy.  He purported to care, behaved in a “caring” manner (to all appearances), but he was a wolf in sheeps clothing.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/a-priests-view-of-penn-state/2011/11/13/gIQAcevnHN_blog.html

The following posting is in reference to material from the blog posting of 11/3/1, “Paean to Ayaan Hirsi Ali.”

When Ali was five, her grandmother orchestrated a “female circumcision” on her, seizing the opportunity provided by Ali’s father’s imprisonment.  Her father had opposed the procedure.  First, it is interesting to note that her father opposed this procedure and was able to prevent it when in the household even though it was a cultural/religious mandate.  I’m curious how he could have done that but am pleased that he did.    Second, can you imagine the balls of that grandmother????   Wow!  In some perverted fashion, she was a version of a “women’s libber” in that she acted contrary to the specific wishes of Ali’s father, a man. (And, this compliment is intended to be wry.  I’m not approving of anything that beastly woman ever did.)   But, of course, she did this in subservience to a “higher truth” which was the unequivocal mandate of the Koran.  It must have been an interesting moral dilemma for her but “moral dilemmas” are more easily resolved if you have a command from On High that you are obeying.

BUT, can you imagine having swallowed any cultural mandate or decree of Holy Writ to the point that you would brutalize a five year old girl, your own granddaughter?   And the brutality was not only physical, but sexual!  What a warped sense of personal and sexual identity it would give any girl.  No wonder that women in cultures of that sort are so subservient.   I would hope that if “God” should ever weigh on me to commit any deed so offensive to basic common sense and contrary to any basic human decency, I would readily tell him to “Fuck off.”  But, or course we routinely read/hear/see in our media gross examples of human stupidity in blind obedience to “God” speaking to them.

I think that it would behoove each of us to just take a time-out anytime “The Spirit is upon me” or “God is speaking to me.”  If we have any thoughts of this sort, we should be given pause for in these communications often lies the portal to gross stupidity and even brutality.  But in that moment, the “old brain”, that reptilian brain…..dare I say “Sataaaan”….is clamouring in our brain and we have a tendency to “know” that we are receiving the truth.  But, even if so, what harm would it do to pause and perhaps get feedback.

And I do think that each of us can say on occasion that “God is speaking to me” or “The Spirit of God is upon me”—I don’t doubt this in the least.  BUT, does it do any harm to give pause and consider the message?  I wish God would impose an early-warning system in our neurological depths and that anytime He was about to speak to us, we would hear…and perhaps see….a “WARNING” message like we see on our car’s dashboard when the engine is overheating.The issue here is meta-cognition.  So often it is lacking.  So often it is turned off when cultural mandates, i.e. the Word of God, is involved.  And I think God is then insulted, that we feel we have to turn off our brain when he is “speaking” to us or even when he is speaking to us.  God is not stupid.  But we often are.

I close with Goethe who in Faust noted, “They call is Reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

narcissism temptation with all care givers.

all of us are healers when we can forget about ourselvesd.

Wrestling with God

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One of my favorite contemporary novelists is Marilynne Robinson.  Housekeeping is my favorite of he novels and it has been made into a movie with the same name.  It was a wonderful movie and the novel is even better.   She has also written Gilead and in that novel she made the following observation:

In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable – which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us. (my emphasis)

It is the “spaces between us” that intrigues me and compels me.   Human culture is the contrivance that unites us, it is the “veil we spin to hide the void” (Norman Brown) but spirituality is a quest to delve deeper, to penetrate that very necessary and essential fiction of our enculturation and dance, from time to time, with the emptiness.  I insist that it is in this “emptiness” that we find our Source.  Or, better stated it is in the wrestling with that emptiness, i.e. “wrestling with God” that we find our Source.  Technically, it is not even “human culture” that unites us, it is the emptiness.  Very Zen, huh?

Cognitive arrogance

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I discourse frequently about cognition and its limitations.  This is no accident as it is very relevant to me personally.  So much of my life has been limited by various cognitive grasps of reality which only later do I discover to have been very confining and….ahem….very narcissistic.  The key is, not to attempt to discard cognition….as if that were possible in the first place…but to recognize that there is a world out there beyond our cognitive grasp of the world and that in embracing that “world out there” we become a little bit more humble and tolerant of those who look at things differently.

Here are a couple of quotes I’ve ran across recently on the subject:

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. — William James

I happen to feel that the degree of a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can bring to bear on the same topic. — Lisa Alther

It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape — not from our own time, for we are bound by that — but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our own time. — T. S. Eliot, Unknown 

And this last one I came across 30+ years ago but just cannot remember the author.  He said, “Our thinking is the belated rationalization of conclusions to which we have already been led by our desires.”  To summarize, he was saying, “We think just what we want to think.”

Richard Rohr on ideologogy

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Following up on yesterday’s post, and on a recent post on ideology, I offer you the daily-posting of Richard Rohr:

We are all powerless, not only those physically addicted to a substance. Alcoholics simply have their powerlessness visible for all to see. The rest of us disguise it in different ways and overcompensate for our more hidden and subtle addictions and attachments, especially our addiction to our way of thinking.

We all take our own pattern of thinking as normative, logical, and surely true, even when it does not fully compute. We keep doing the same thing over and over again, even if it is not working for us. That is the self-destructive nature of all addiction, and of the mind in particular. We think we are our thinking, and we even take that thinking as utterly “true,” which removes us at least two steps from reality itself.

Addiction to our mind is subtle but its reach is incredible.  We then find ourselves failing to adhere to the wisdom of Buddha, who said, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”  The “word” is not the “thing.”  Words are but pointers.  We don’t own “the Truth”.  But, this does not leaving me doubting the presence of Truth in this void, doubting only grasp of it.  Or, as said yesterday and so frequently, “We see though a glass darkly” or “we hold this treasure in earthen vessels.”

Humility, finitude, limits

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A passionate concern of mine is that we don’t see reality, we only “see through a glass darkly” at best.  One might even say that I am obsessed with this notion as I have found it a valuable insight in my life and believe that it could be relevant to others.  This insight has an humbling impact on me, helping me to realize that when I discourse, or “hold forth” as in this blog, I am not presenting Truth but merely my own perception of “truth.”  If suddenly, the world discovered me and understood this perspective and said, “Aha, this is It!”, then civilization as we know it would immediately collapse.  For this is a perception that is not valid for everyone and certainly not valid for the billions and billions of people who keep this “dog and pony show” afloat with their “less enlightened” outlook on life.

I’ve quoted Anais Nin before, “”We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”  And so what we see in the world, what we say about the world, says a whole lot about us.  Our version of reality is just that, “our version.”  Just yesterday in Huffington Post, I discovered Gangaji who noted: 

People who live their lives unaware that they are telling themselves a story consider their thoughts to be descriptions of reality. If someone else has a conflicting description, that person is considered just to be wrong. It is a leap into maturity to realize that our descriptions of reality are our versions of reality. Certainly there is nothing wrong about a version of reality, but the recognition that it is a version, rather than reality itself, is humbling to our version of ourselves!

And so it all comes down to humility.  Can I find the Grace of God which will allow me to humbly accept that I am a finite being, with a finite grasp on the world, and therefore be a bit more open-minded about those who see the world differently?  T. S. Eliot declared, “The only wisdom we can hope to find is the wisdom of humility.”  And then he added, “And humility is endless.”

 

Rules for speech

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A fundamentalist preacher from my youth once posed three rules for speech:  Is it true?  Is it kind?  Is it necessary?

Hmmm.

This should give us pause from time to time.

Just for the record, the above bromide was brought back to my attention today by Steve Roberts (coolmindwarmheart.com) who attributed it to Eknath Easwaran and an old Arab proverb:  The words of the tongue should have three gatekeepers.

 

conflict habituated relationships

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Mobi Ho, in his introduction to  book, Thich Nhat Hanh’s, The Miracle of Mindfulness, describes how the disciples of Hanh attempted to facilitate reconciliation in Viet Nam after the war ended in 1973.  He noted that these disciples “persistently refused to support either armed party and believed that both sides were but the reflection of one reality, (my emphasis) and that the true enemies were not people, but ideology, hatred, and ignorance. (my emphasis)

How can opposing sides of any issue be merely “the reflection of one reality”?  Even more so, how can this be the case when both sides are armed to the teeth?  Ho believed that the answer is because both sides of the conflict were slaves to “ideology, hatred, and ignorance.”  T. S. Eliot described these peoples as “united by the strife which divided them.”

This is also relevant to the field of mental health.  In my trade, we have a term for couples who are joined at the hip in intense conflict and would never leave each other for any amount of money:  conflict habituated relationships.  I once knew a couple who spent the last 35 years of their life, living at opposite ends of the same house.  They hated each other intently and ravaged the lives of their children.  But they could not do without each other.

I believe that Ho was very astute in his observation that the real issue in conflicts like these is “ideology, hatred, and ignorance.”   It is as if the people are “the toy of some great pain”.  (I think that quote comes from Ranier Rilke).

And, to conclude, I can’t help but apply this phenomena to our current Congress.  I fear that the real issue is that many of them are mere ideologues, filled with “hatred and ignorance” and are willing to “ravage the lives of their children”, i.e. the American citizenry.

And one further point.  Ideology is ideology.  Be it conservative or be it liberal, ideology is ideology.  The point is to have ideas, of course, but not be so blind as to bludgeon other people with those ideas.

The Shadow and Identity

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Maturity involves acknowledging the shadow side of our life, embracing it even, and learning to live with it all the while disallowing it from predominating in our life.  It is there.  We can deny it, even put our blinders on, but it is still there!  Even those who live an Ozzie and Harriet life still have a shadow side.

And relevant to this shadow side, I’d like to share today’s posting from Richard Rohr:

Expelling what you can’t embrace gives you an identity, but it’s a negative identity. It’s not life energy; it’s death energy. Formulating what you are against gives you a very quick, clear, and clean sense of yourself. Thus, most people fall for it. People more easily define themselves by what they are against, by who they hate, by who else is wrong, instead of by what they believe in and whom they love.

Gilgamesh and The Shadow

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I finally got around to procuring and starting to read a book that has been around a long time—If You Meet the Buddha On the Road, Kill Him:  The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients.  (Sheldon Kopp, 1972)  This is a must-read for all psychotherapists and psychotherapy clients.  It delves elegantly and eloquently into the essence of therapy and the intricate boundary complications between a therapist and his/her clients.

One of my favorite anecdotes from the book is his discussion of the Gilgamesh myth and an early example of the shadow.  He describes how Gilgamesh was an oppressive tyrant who became so overbearing that his subjects consulted a goddess, Arura, and asked her to intervene.  Arura, displaying feminine wisdom, knew that the answer was to create a double for Gilgamesh who would wrestle with him and teach him that he too was a mere mortal.

And that is what our shadow does—reminds us that we from the dust of the earth like all people and creatures.  We want to think that we are noble far beyond the herd but if we openly acknowledge our shadow when we look at “them”—those people who embody all the things we loathe—we have to humbly confess, “There go I but for the grace of God.”  Or to quote a favorite bromide of mine, “What we see is what we are.”

Let me quote Kopp:  Each of us has such a shadow from which he flees.  Each man is haunted by that specter of a double who represents all that he would say “no” to in himself.  To what extent I deny my hidden twin-self, you may expect to see my personality twisted into a grotesque mask of neurotic caricature.

And here are a couple more gems from Kopp, “All of the significant battles are waged within the self.”  Or, as W. H. Auden put it, “We wage the war we are.”  And then Kopp notes re a client of his, “He prefers the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar insecurity.”  Shakespeare put it this way, in Hamlet, noting that we prefer to “cling to the ills that we have, than fly to others that we know not of.”