They might be art now, but don’t be mistaken because they were never written for the sake of art.

Even more relevant today, a lover could never read any greater piece of literature than by an author whose professional title is, “Sugardaddy.”

Since health care is the big topic these days, we can use it as example.  The thought experiment revolves around the idea as to how we look at socialism.  The idea is that socialism coerces others to pay taxes for something like, health insurance.  It could be – and mostly is in this country – seen as taking away a freedom.  The freedom to not pay, or have health insurance.

But that is inherently the rub.  We already pay taxes for many other things that we can’t opt out of.  And more topically, we make rules that are based on our health, as well.  Laws on drugs is a good example of the system having rules, supposedly for your own good.

All that aside, the thought experiment of a “societal subsidy” revolves around this question.  If we have so many other restrictions regarding health, why isn’t health insurance mandated?  The possible answers don’t leave me feeling super great.

Maybe our idea of freedom is selective and malleable.  And right now, health care, or not having health care, is one of those freedoms.  Or, maybe congressmen feel that everyone does need health care, but they would rather people spend their money on anything else so that it will prop up our consumer driven economy.  Maybe if we were to enact it, it would cause the country to go so much further into deficit that it would practically destroy the country; so, they would rather people just in debt the next generation with unpaid Emergency Room bills.

Come up with a reason; it doesn’t leave you feeling great.  But the idea of freedom seems to move around so much that it leaves the user of the word having to explain it every time its uttered.

The point is this, if you’re going to argue against universal health care, or a law mandating health insurance, then you need to address all the other mandates and taxes the government enforces.

If we incautiously interpret these numbers as causal – in fact they are merely correlations – then we could conclude that 20 years of marriage is compensation for up to 40 years of widowhood. Ten years of marriage more than justifies 40 years as a divorcee.

Indeed, most of the time, the love outweighs the pain.  For me, in the condition I’m in right now, this is something to be happy about.

Will and I have discussed events abstractly to this in a recent correspondences. These paradigms are important to be aware of because when the world, or other events, don’t go the way we thought they would, we deal with feelings of rejection.  But, I think if we are aware of the paradigm, and aware of why we feel the way we do, that leads us one step closer to closure, and more importantly evaluating and adjusting (if need be) our paradigm.

When dealing with relationships, the mind starts to get used to these thoughts. A paradigm forms. Now, through practice and osmosis of colegial friends and good memories, one could think to themselves that a relationship is definitely possible with someone.

The problem occurs when you make that venture because the paradigm shows that you can. Everyone has told you that you are awesome. Then, bam, it doesn’t go that way. The paradigm is shown to be lacking. If I were awesome, then why didn’t it work out? Your mind starts to wonder how it all happened. Is the paradigm wrong? Was there something else I missed?

Now, all of a sudden, despite the length of time before hand when you were fine, your thoughts wander. For lack of better answers, you start to chip away at yourself. Now, no matter what circumstances abound, it’s you who’s on trial. This is how the mind works when it looks again for grounding. This is why when in the dumps you’ll see people contact their exes looking for meaning, yet again. What happened back then? What did I do wrong?

When one’s paradigm is hit hard, it takes an exceptional amount of time to either find the circumstances surrounding why everything happened the way it did, or convince your own self that it didn’t matter in the first place.

Or, what happens if you’re seeking acceptance from a religious group.  You go through all the steps to be “saved,” only to find out later that they express you still aren’t quite accepted.  You still, apparently, have a ways to go.  The entire paradigm they feed is that of acceptance and growth within a community.  So, if and when they all of a sudden decide to state that they don’t think you’re into it, imagine what a mind job that is.

Once again, you go through an entire process of trying to reconcile the messages you were being fed, with the actions that happened later.  Again, you are now thinking to yourself, where did I go wrong.  Was it my wrong interpretations of their statements?  Did they go back on what they said?  Have I erred in my actions?  When we start asking questions like these, it’s easy to feel hopeless and ungrounded.

And those questions work in both scenarios, and tons of others.  That’s how you feel rejected.  It’s being lost in between two paradigms and trying to find out if either one of them was right.  Alas, it’s no wonder how statements like, “It is what it is,” come to be said so often.  I have no doubt people are willing to say anything to move on from such a thought process.

But maybe in figuring out that this is the thought process, we can actually start to understand how normal these emotions are and that this is the exercise our mind and psyche is currently going through.

Sure, it will get better, but we have to relearn how to think about ourselves again.

…adaptation is better accomplished by someone who appreciates a work than someone who loves it so much that he wants to improve it

It struck me to the point where I would even say that a relationship, which involves someone trying to improve the other, also is most likely to be just as tenuous.

A few things need to be said here regarding what Abbey wrote. First, it is utterly and absolutely personal.  One could feel guilty about commenting on it, if they so chose, for fear of coming off as adversarial, or patronizing.  Her story at the end shows that this is something she’s given a considerable amount of thought personally.

However, she projects.  Abbey makes this about everyone, including me.

So in effort to avoid the dramatic effects associated with the reality of getting older/being old, I suggest that we face aging head on.

Alright, what do you got?

With each year, we should acknowledge and embrace the grief that comes with maturing so that it does not come back to bite us in the ass when we’ve suddenly hit 50 and for the very first time, realize that we’re all washed up and serving a life sentence in the middle of suburbia.

It’s funny, when the topic of aging comes about, it really does become a topic within itself so that you begin to lose sight of the big picture.

While one might think about aging, I’d rather be thinking, what do I want to do with all my time?  Can I still do that when I get older?  What decisions do I need to make to continue living the way I hope for as I age?

Why is Scott Adams the only one asking those questions?

Abbey wrote about scenarios of mid life crises and the lot.  I couldn’t help but think of the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.”  I wonder how anyone else would take what she wrote.

I guess while I don’t particularly disagree with anything that Abbey wrote; maybe I would just think it better to focus on the questions that Scott and I ask.  The only item that really bothers me is that I don’t know why she wrote it.  For me, Abbey is one of the nicest, intelligent, and beautiful people I have ever met.  And no amount of aging will ever change my opinion of her.

Abuse can be insidiously subtle. Emotional manipulation through verbal abuse is learned, of course, because it leaves no visible bruises. Mentally, though, the victim suffers while you’re not even aware that you’re abusing him or her. You love this person, or you think you do, and you’re a good person, or you think you are, so, the words that come out of your mouth cannot be abusive.

Except, they are when you transfer your mean words from their desired target to the blank slate you’ve turned your partner into. (When you’ve thoroughly learned your partner’s history and forget that he or she has a future independent of you, you partner’s become a blank slate and can now be the target of your abuse. But that’s another post.)

To avoid being abusive, you’ve got to know what triggers your anxiety and know which strategies enable you to cope effectively with the anxiety. You’ve, like most people, assembled your life in such a way so that you are able to avoid those anxiety triggers entirely. Unfortunately, when you are unwillingly thrown into an anxiety-provoking situation with which you lack the appropriate level of experience, depending upon your temperament, you respond with either fear or anger.

Let’s say your boss has just defined you as incompetent. You’ve worked your ass off to, in part, avoid the anxiety that is produced by feelings of inadequacy. Since calling your boss an SOB or crying and begging your boss’ consideration are both symptoms of incompetency, you can express your fear to your partner by becoming dependent on him or her and you can express your anger by abusing him or her. With that, you’re communicating, “Don’t go, I need to hurt you to feel better.”

So, you must compartmentalize your life just enough so you don’t treat your partner as you would like to treat your boss. But you must keep the window shades open so that your partner can see what’s inside. It’s difficult, but you should conceive of your partner (and yourself) as a human being whose present existence is a momentary intersection of past and future. Because you’re not wholly one concept, and neither is your partner, to exist in harmony with your partner, you must be able to combine and separate those concepts in order to cope effectively with life’s demands.

Hilary Bok (hilzoy) has a fine post about the psychology behind why the victims of abuse remain with their abuser.

The author is right; I do have a problem with this, intuitively.  Specifically, the dichotomy he, most likely inadvertently, employs with “keeping work at work.”

If your partner doesn’t know what is going on at work, or how you are dealing with it, all they will do is assume that you have a great job, and that nervous twitch you are getting runs in your family.  In my opinion, what happens at work needs to be spoken about.  As soon as you start going “Walter Mitty” on your family, get ready to start saying hello to a bunch of other things you get to just “keep at work.”

At its crux, the “leave it at work” motto ends up sucking big balls because you end up compartmentalizing parts of your life that make up the “whole of you.”  What else are we “not going to bring home” there buddy?  Face it; people spend at least half of their waking hours, five days a week, at work.  To leave half of your conscious life away from your family is undoubtedly an inadvertent message he wrote.

Want proof?  Look at how people drive.  The nicest most well adjusted people can either drive at egregious levels of the speed limit, and make traffic maneuvers with dangerous disregard for their fellow motorists, or the most meticulous anal retentive man or woman can drive  with blatant ignorance, constantly changing speed, or moving into your lane without checking their own blind spot.

Those drivers are doing exactly what he is saying, they leave certain qualities of their life…I don’t know where, but not in their car.  For them, driving simply is not a priority in terms of “good habits to employ.”

At the end of this, all I know is that I’m wishing he wrote his blog post better (maybe out of work newspaper editors should solicit their services to some blogs).  I don’t think that he means specifically, “don’t talk about work…ever.”  But, why could he not write his example better?  Hows about saying or suggesting something like: To keep your emotional breakdowns from taking control of you at home, make sure you keep your spouse informed of how you feel about your work?  Chances are that talking about it with them will not only make you feel better, but also give them a real connection to you other than the 3 hours a day you see each other awake.

Compartmentalizing your life is the entrenchment of cognitive dissonance.

I ask my colleague, Will, what do you think?

Anyway, over the years, I’ve collected links to some syndromes that I would like to witness in their raw form. This is because I think these are phenomena that, when conceptualized as mere aspects, assist a clinician in mapping out a constellation that represents the contributions that a person receives from the respective biological, familial, cultural, and societal portions of his or her life. As well, any manifestation of these conditions would require a creative and collaborative approach to treatment.

The first related to art and is know as Stendhal syndrome:

Stendhal syndrome, Stendhal’s syndrome, Hyperkulturemia, or Florence syndrome, is a psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly ‘beautiful’ or a large amount of art is in a single place. The term can also be used to describe a similar reaction to a surfeit of choice in other circumstances, e.g. when confronted with immense beauty in the natural world.

At times I’ve found myself overwhelmed by my surroundings but this response has always been due to noise and heat. Though, at least I’ve never considered myself an animal:

Clinical lycanthropy is defined as a rare psychiatric syndrome which involves a delusion that the affected person can or has transformed into an animal, or that he or she is an animal. Its name is connected to the mythical condition of lycanthropy, a supernatural affliction in which people are said to physically shapeshift into wolves. The word zoanthropy is also sometimes used for the delusion that one has turned into an animal in general and not specifically a wolf.

The Greeks probably were not the first to command one another to “know thyself.” However, I’m sure that their version of this simple philosophical statement collided with those who suffered from the following:

Anosognosia is a condition in which a person who suffers disability due to brain injury seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability. This may include unawareness of quite dramatic impairments, such as blindness or paralysis. It was first named by neurologist Joseph Babinski in 1914, although relatively little has been discovered about the cause of the condition since its initial identification. The word comes from the Greek words “nosos” disease and “gnosis” knowledge.

Incidentally, Diogenes was a Greek man:

Diogenes syndrome, also known as senile squalor syndrome, is a behavioral disorder characterized by extreme self-neglect. It usually affects the elderly who live alone. Its symptoms include body odor and other signs of severe hygienic neglect. Physical diseases relating to bodily neglect usually accompany the syndrome. Diogenes syndrome usually manifests itself in association with compulsive hoarding, the pathological collection and storage of objects, mainly other people’s refuse (items possibly thought to be useful by the sufferer).