Be my Psychologist for a day---->

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by man on the hill, Aug 12, 2003.

  1. man on the hill Registered Member

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    I feel like no matter how hard I try, I don’t have control over my actions or my destiny, which gives me an excuse to withdraw from the world and it makes it easy to say, If I don’t have control then nothing is my fault. I don’t have to take responsibility for a thing I do that might be considered wrong. If I fail, it is OUT of my control.

    On the other hand, there is the feeling that I do have control over my destiny and actions, which would obligate me to be apart of society. It would obligate me to be normal. It would obligate me to follow the trends. It would obligate me to take responsibility for everything I do that might be considered wrong. My failure would be my fault no one else’s, because my destiny was IN my control.


    I don't want to feel like I belong to any of these scenarios, (though I go back and forth remaining primarily in the first one)

    Note: the first one can be considered paranoia/psychosis
    the second one can be considered the norm or how people “should” feel.

    Please feel free to be my psychologist today and don't be shy to reply how you personally relate or unrelate to this.
     
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  3. moementum7 ~^~You First~^~ Registered Senior Member

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    Totally Relate.
    This probly has nothing to do with you, but in my own circumstances,my teenage years, I was some how led to beleive in the whole(the world is going to end ) thing. This led me to focus very strongly on the very fundamentals of life,existence and everything else that had some shed of meaning to me.

    Because of this I was very afraid, or maybe I just didn't think it was worth it to want to become somebody just to have to face the inevitable so quickly anyways.

    And I can see how it still affects me today. I am very aware anytime a topic of possible world altering circumstances come up.

    Man this life thing is one heck of a learning curve, I can tell you that.

    I know exactly what you mean about "If I don't try my best then I can always have that excuse of why I didn't succeed.Instead of having to face the fact that I did try my best and failed.

    I think the worst lesson,or not the worst, kind of ,but not really..... is the fact that if you want to take control of your life it takes effort.I mean it.Absolute, nonrelentless effort to continually choose to focus your mind.
    Whats the alternative.......continuing to bounce back and forth between the two realities.
    That sucks I know.
    Confidence...self doubt....confidence....self doubt...and on and on.
    Unfortunately it will continue to snowball towards doubt at an accelerated pace the longer you put off the reality that no one else can do your living for you.You must learn to think for yourself. This means effort,a commitment to focus your mind.
    The last thing I want to do is sound like I am preaching, so I hope this was as enlightening for you as it was me.
    Peace Out
    Thats How I relate my own life to yours anyways.
     
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  5. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    OK, I'll play therapist. What makes you feel this way? Apparently you don't feel this way all the time because you go on to describe a quite different feeling. Or perhaps what you're saying is that you have both feelings at the same time, but sometimes one dominates the other. Is there something in your external world that triggers this reaction? People you're around, tasks you do? Maybe just your circadian rhythm, you feel different at different times of day? The first and most obvious thing to do is find a correlation between the temporarily dominant feeling and... well just about anything. If you're reacting to something and you can figure out what it is, you can then try to figure out why you react that way.
    Doesn't sound so unreasonable. You go on to categorize it as a paranoid psychosis, but you're being too hard on yourself. We all feel that way sometimes, in fact some of us feel that way a lot of the time, but we're neither paranoid nor psychotic. Maybe neurotic, at worst.

    You have to consider everything in context. These days it is quite easy to feel that we have no control over our lives. I don't know where you live but even those of us who live in countries that brag about being beacons of democracy are starting to feel like our government does not represent our philosophy or our interests, is not accountable to us, and has managed to escape from our control. Many a rational person would agree that to a large extent we have no control over our lives.

    Of course that's always true. What matters is whether we have control over the particular part of our lives that we want to control. "Freedom is that particular form of slavery which we happen to enjoy," to quote Oscar Mandel. If you wake up one day and feel like you'd really like to be able to help parents in the Mideast find a school to send their children to that isn't funded by Osama bin Laden, and then you pick up the paper and learn that our President is doing everything he possibly can to make the maximum number of people in the Mideast despise us (as well as several other huge areas of the globe), it's not unreasonable to feel powerless. If you wake up the next day and feel like going to a movie and your newspaper shows listings for 75 theaters in three states, you don't feel so powerless.
    I don't follow that logic. If you have control over your destiny you might decide to assert it by building a cabin in the middle of Alaska and staying as far removed from society as possible. Your statement implies that you have an intuitive bias toward being part of society, you accept that as "normal" even by your own personal definition of the word. So you've told us something about yourself. You have a social instinct. It's so strong that even for the sake of argument you don't consider becoming a hermit to be worth discussing.
    Another leap of logic. Feeling a need to be part of society is a normal feeling, but it's not a sufficient condition to qualify you as a complete normal person. Most of the people who like to spend their days shouting bibilical quotations seem to prefer to do so on crowded street corners. They're obviously social creatures but they're several sigmas off of normal.
    You're building a chain of weak links here. These conclusions don't follow from these premises. When you say that a certain condition would "obligate" you to do something, and it really won't, and you're obviously a highly intelligent denizen of SciForums who understands syllogisms, it sounds to me like you're saying that you feel the obligation, and you're searching for a logical way to rationalize it to your circumstances instead of taking credit for having an instinct that might get you branded as (gasp) somewhat normal.
    Again, faulty logic. Taking responsibility for everything you do, whether other people consider it wrong or not, is just a really normal thing for a healthy human being to want to do. We all have a personal code of ethics. Some of it is hard-wired, some of it we learned by watching our parents and other elders. But it's in there and most of us don't actually need Moses or Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha or Lao zi sternly telling us that we must be good people. Civilization would not have survived us, much less vice versa, if that weren't true.
    Now you've gone too far in the other direction. Shit happens. Bad things happen to good people. We all screw up despite our best intentions. However you want to put it, we don't have complete control over our lives and our destiny. By being part of a society we grant to a lot of other people the ability to have a certain amount of control over the consequences of what we try to do, and even over the way we think and the things we think are right to do.

    You've got a real dichotomy of extremes here. Part of you feels like you have no control at all over your life, which is understandable but not at all accurate. Another part feels like you have absolute control over it, which is also understandable and just as inaccurate.

    Many of the prophets I maligned above would have something to say about this, but I guess I always fall back on Lao zi because what little I know about the Dao makes good sense to me. You've got two extremes competing for dominance. You will never actually let either one achieve permanent superiority, that's why you waffle from one position to the other. The reason is that as a smart person with a reasonably well adjusted personality, you know intiutively, even unconsciously, that it is not "right" -- or as you would say, "normal" -- to live at either of those extremes. The Daoist view would be that your only hope of success and internal peace is to realize that both of these feelings are normal, but complete normalcy only comes from being able to integrate them and hold them both at once. One will be stronger one day, the other the next, life is not about constancy. Once in a while one will dominate for a day or a week, life easily survives and even benefits from the occasional extreme. But you have to keep your yang and your yin in balance. I'm trying to figure out which of your extremes is the yang and which the yin, but it's a little beyond my five cent Daoism. I would guess that believing you have complete control over your life is the yang, but for a nickel therapy session you get no guarantee.
    That's a good healthy sign. It would be unhealthy to completely subjugate one of these two powerful feelings to the dominance of the other.
    So you're more of a passive personality than a control freak. OK. Nothing wrong with that. If you take the Myers-Briggs personality profile test like half the people here do, it will probably show the same thing. A Jungian analysis would probably find that Apollo is not one of your stronger archetypes.
    I hope I blew that one away earlier. Both are normal, each has a certain kind of strength and a certain kind of weakness. What's abnormal is to try to suppress one or the other. What's healthiest is to find a way to allow them to coexist without either of them, or you, their host, feeling too much tension in the relationship. Perhaps being told that what you've got going here is neither wrong nor unique nor abnormal is a good start. Feel relieved and don't dwell on it. We do much of our best inner work unconsciously, I guess that's why its called "inner work."

    To move up to the ten cent analysis, one of the things I see is that you've unintentionally restricted yourself to charting your attitude on a one-dimensional scale. You either feel that you have no control or that you have complete control. I've told you to find a middle ground and that will be helpful, but you're still constraining your study and your expansion of your consciousness to a single dimension.

    What you need to do next is expand that one-dimensional space. The Greek/Roman pantheon, Shakespeare's casts of characters, and Jung's archetypes all arrive at the same number of dimensions to the human spirit: 23. (And may the goddess help me, I'm still not sure if I've got that number right. It's somewhere in the twenties and it's odd.) Do you ever feel a strong instinct to care for other people, to be a leader, to protect your community, to learn, to hunt and gather food, to create art...? Those are some of the other 22 dimensions. Actually your control-vs.-no-control axis is really an amalgam of several of these archetypes. They all have a controlling vector.

    Perhaps what you're feeling is the individual aspects of your spirit flexing their muscles and vying for attention on any given day. All you've been able to identify and put into words is the battle for control. I'll bet you were raised in a home with a strong belief in one of the Abrahamic religions. Their damn monotheism has reduced the model of the human spirit to one dimension: good versus evil. Whether that's the root of it or not, you need to grow out of that model and begin to feel all the different components of your spirit and not judge any of them as good or evil. Some are stronger than others, that's what makes each of us unique. Some are stronger than others on different days, that's what makes life interesting, and incidentally renders us capable of handling more than one kind of day.

    That comes back to me asking what it is that makes you feel like you have no control. What particular part of your life would you like to have control over, and why do you believe you don't have it on the day in question? And conversely, when you do feel in control, what exactly is it that you would like to do with that control on that particular day? If there are certain things that you consistently feel an instinct to control, you're getting a measure of your personality, your spirit. The next step is to build yourself a life in which those dimensions are important and in which a person whose life pays a lot of attention to fluctuations in those dimensions would be fulfilled.
    OK, check that one off.
    Better than that, I hope I've made a convincing case that we all relate to this. We all have the same assignments: Achieve balance. Identify the aspects of our spirit that seem most important to us and are the most active. Find a path that will satisfy a spirit that lives in those dimensions.

    I'll waive the ten cent fee if you promise to do your homework and check back in a couple of days to see how it's going.

    Peace
     
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  7. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    You didn't ask for help so I'm not going to inundate you with it, but I hope you don't mind my comments on some of the things you said that resonate so well with Hill Guy's case.
    I don't know if it was a religious thing or if you're of my generation and grew up doing duck-and-cover H-bomb drills in school. But the end of the world has been a very strong motif in our culture since Hiroshima. It's one of the strongest archetypes, Armageddon. Even physics got into the act, for many years wondering whether the whole universe has a wholly disconcerting type of symmetry, coming into existence in a Big Bang and then vanishing forever in a Big Crunch.
    Ain't nothin' wrong with that. An astute person should probably be aware of any possible threats to the survival of himself and all of human civilization. You never know when you might be able to help out and change destiny.
    Some of our favorite bits of philosophy come from Saturday morning cartoons. Chuckie on "Rugrats" once said, "Boy, life is sure strange. Sometimes I think it's just about the strangest thing there is."
    Another one-dimensional scale for measuring life. You too have abstracted one vector out of all the 23 dimensions. Whatever you're destined to be, whether it's a messenger, a nurse, or a rock star, there will be times when it seems fairly easy and times when it seems impossible.
    And if you don't get a handle on those 23 dimensions. Not understanding the choices you have will cast your whole life in doubt.
     
  8. moementum7 ~^~You First~^~ Registered Senior Member

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    23 Dimensions?
    I'm listening.
    Please go on.
     
  9. ripleofdeath Registered Senior Member

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    2,762
    yeah what he said ... sorta

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    darn that one dimentional religouse thing-a-ma-jig

    its just soo 3 dimentional
    dimensions 2 and 3 being death and god

    nothing worse than a parent that teaches that all is ok
    and its realy up to you so dont realy think too hard and have another mashmellow thought to stuff in your head of cotton wool
    or
    god is the only way obey my hypocracey build your mind of hard britle chocolate
    too much heat it melts
    a small crack it starts to fall apart

    they both create the perfect disfunctional soldier
    the victim perpatrator

    Fraggle Rocker
    any chance you could list the 23 thingeys

    groove on all

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  10. moementum7 ~^~You First~^~ Registered Senior Member

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  11. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Damn, this is about the third time somebody has asked that. I owe it to you guys to do my own homework. I promise I will look this up somewhere and get back to you in a couple of days.
     
  12. man on the hill Registered Member

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    22
    :m:
     
    Last edited: Aug 15, 2003
  13. moementum7 ~^~You First~^~ Registered Senior Member

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    Thanks Fraggle.
     
  14. ripleofdeath Registered Senior Member

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    2,762
    man on the hill

    how old are you and are you currently studying or working and if so what

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  15. man on the hill Registered Member

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    Ripleofdeath-
    I am currently a failing student in highschool.
     
  16. ripleofdeath Registered Senior Member

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    2,762
    man on the hill

    ok
    to fail in high school is not the end of all things
    some people think failing is to not go to the prom
    some think it is to not be in the IN crowd
    some think it is to not be selected for a specific sports team
    some think it is to not achive the academic goals that are set by them their peers or basic school pass marks/exit exams

    the reality is that most people fail most of the time in most things
    that is the nature of the concept of learning through playing games and genral life experiences

    there is one skill that is required for you to move forward no matter what you choose
    and that is to try and look for a possative thing that you learn
    during the process

    it seems all to apparent that you have spent farr too much time with people who care little for your own well being and are self serving with their preaching
    teen years are difficult enough without such ideas that undermine
    your current motivations

    you need to look to your self for achivements
    the issue you are strugling with is founded on false truths
    and is contaminated by selfish self indulgent people

    they have loaded all their fears onto you and expected you to deal with them as your own
    that is one of the nastyest things an adult can do to a child or teenager

    maybe your parents are christians?
    do they go to church every week?

    you need to follow your own path to self discovery
    look for small achivements in every day
    they are there if it is just making a cup of tea it is still an achivement
    build upon your succes and dont be drawn into other peoples
    ego centric struggle to self justify their way of thinking
    or attempt to try and feel superior to you by undermining your confidence in yourself
    that is what the christians you speak of have done!
    and it is most likely your parents have contributed in many ways

    good luck
    give me an update about your parents
    tell me of their religouse practice if you like

    why are you not involved in any sports?

    groove on

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  17. man on the hill Registered Member

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    My parents arn't very religious at all. Actually, In my earlier years I have tryed to preach to them.
    I've played soccer for 11 years but this might be my last due to bad joints and such.
    I would really like it if this thread didn't envolve so much of my personal life. I know I have said some pretty damn personal things but I think I am going to stop.
     
  18. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    Jungian archetypes

    This hasn't been an easy search but then Jung would undoubtedly say that easy tasks don't make us grow. Here's the most interesting website I've found on the subject so far.

    http://www.hermetic.com/webster/polytheism.html

    It is by no means a nicely organized list by name of the 23 archetypes that define the dimensions of our spirit, and in fact it doesn't even give a number. But at least it goes into some detail on the different kinds of instincts we are born with and how they are manifested in our legends.

    Do a Google search on "Jungian archetypes" + "Greek gods" and you'll turn up some good reading. Some of it is flaky but most of it is thought-provoking. With a little luck you might suddenly recognize bits of yourself in one of the portraits.

    Bear in mind that there are a lot more archetypes than these. Types of events, animals, there must be hundreds of them. The Shadow and the Anima/Animus are a couple of the four or five really basic ones that would be good to study as an introduction to Jung's paradigm. They have to do with how we manage the interaction between all the others.

    I see that I guessed right about your early grounding in Christianity. It gave you a nice simple model of your spirit with only one dimension, and a roadmap that helpfully points you in the right direction by labeling the other direction "evil." You are obviously outgrowing the usefulness of that paradigm but you're not happy about forgoing its simple, easy comfort.

    Jungians have a saying which I assume was originally said by Jung: "The birthing process is always painful. There can be no birth of consciousness without pain."

    Trying to hang onto the familiar Christian model of your soul is as impossible as trying to keep a baby from being born. It's just going to happen. It's perhaps more analogous to the metamorphosis of an arthropod than the birth of a mammal. You're growing out of one stage of your life where you lived within some very simple parameters, into a new stage where everything is richer and more complicated. You're beating your wings against the walls of the cocoon and that's scary and frustrating. But when you finally get out and start flying around, you'll probably enjoy it.
     
  19. ripleofdeath Registered Senior Member

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    2,762
    man on the hill

    the contradiction you must deal with is that you need to think about personal issues more deeply than you have mentioned so farr if you wish to get at the true nature of the real issues

    if you can afford it and have the patience and courage i would suggest you find a good counselor to discus ideas like this that
    a great deal of people have little to no experience or non biased
    preconceived ideas on

    Fraggle Rocker
    makes some good points
    you are trying to understand things that are often beyond normal conversations with friends and family

    im sure you dont need someone to pretend they are listening for 30 mins then pat you on the arm and say
    well it should all work out just dont worry about it
    you are worrying now
    so you need to deal with that
    from that point
    then move forward

    PREACHING to parents about anything is useless unless they respect you first
    then to assert that you are preaching to them suggests you are trying to force them to think something they do not believe in
    that also dosn't work

    you should attempt to DISCUSS things with your parents
    NOT preach
    most people dissagree on several different issues with their parents that is normal not abnormal

    look to be a student of life rather than a student of any particular
    single mind-set

    good luck
    keep grooving

    groove on

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  20. moementum7 ~^~You First~^~ Registered Senior Member

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    Thanks Fraggle
     
  21. ele Registered Senior Member

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    187
    Life isnt logical mate. Sometimes you can control things- certrainly you can make and enact certain decisions without much challenge- say to have a roll for dinner for instance. sometimes you are rewarded for good actions and sometimes people seem indifferent to them and sometimes it seems fate hates you and makes you suffer when you try to be good. sometimes you have less power than you might like, for instance with reapect to an institution such as a university's power over you or a workplace's.
    The power they haev is with reference to what you want. If you change what you want they no longer hold the power in these situations. However, often you willf ind it difficult to stop wanting to pass a course or to get a qualification. Then you need to decide to try to get what you want, but be prepared to accept whatt hey want if they wont listen to the power of reason.

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    Hope this helps.
     
  22. moementum7 ~^~You First~^~ Registered Senior Member

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    *Life isnt logical mate.*

    You seem to be a very strong candidate for that argument ele.lol
     
  23. Cris In search of Immortality Valued Senior Member

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    9,199
    Man on the hill,

    There is very little in life worth taking seriously, except perhaps death.

    Life is an experience. Observe, take part, and enjoy whatever happens.

    Consider life as a very long road. There will be many obstacles on the road and many distractions to either side. The biggest issue with such a road is that we don’t have a map of where it is going or the obstacles or the distractions. So without a map you have no choice but to be an explorer.

    The obstacles are challenges that allow you to learn and grow. Never look at an obstacle as a problem but rather as an adventure. They are parts of life so enjoy them. And remember that the more obstacles you overcome then the easier they seem to become.

    Distractions are pauses in life where there is comfort and enjoyment, but these often do not last very long. Do not hold onto these when the enjoyment is gone, get back to the road and move on. You will recognize these from experience. But many do not have the courage to recognize that the fun is gone and they long for it to return and it never does.

    Your only destiny is what you make yourself; don’t expect anyone to create one for you, you will drift aimlessly otherwise. The real fun in living is the journey along the road of life.

    There is no failure except in no longer trying.
     

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