ONE MORE TIME…. with feeling !

by stanley

.....Have you ever thought how your life consists of repeat performances? If you are lucky you make the same mistake twice in a lifetime, but if you are like me you make the same mistake over and over.
.....I never learn!
......Well, maybe that’s not altogether true. I do learn, but very slowly. Take my relationships for instance. It’s only now, when many people would say it’s too late, something seems to have changed for me. I seem to have advanced from infantile dependency to mature dependency. Really quite good. But for most of my life I have repeated the same cycle, the same excitement of hope followed by the same dénouement of disappointment.
......After making a mistake – I mean an important emotional investment that goes wrong – it would seem you are a more sensible person if you carefully avoid the same mistake again. Unfortunately, if you are sensible enough to do this, your life becomes an avoidance strategy, where very little happens. The alternative seems to be intolerable repeat performances, same drama over and over. The archetypal image of this is the wife whose drunken husband repeatedly beats her up and from whom she retreats to a safe house – only to return to him again for the umpteenth time – with feeling!
......The hope for a better future is part of the deadly cycle of pointless repetition. Hope always comes before the first act of the drama begins. In fact, without hope the cycle would never start up again. At my age, having a limited future is a forced advantage. But for younger people who do have a future the problem is much more difficult. It tends to stimulate the infantile state, where no matter how bad life is, it most definitely won’t go on like that. One day my Prince will come. The future has everything.
......The philosopher Santayana said: ‘He who cannot remember the past is doomed to repeat it.’ Mostly we repeat it without remembering it in the right way. But therapy is more than just remembering. In therapy life’s repetitions are condensed. That’s why in therapy, without prompting, you return to the same problem area over and over, each time slightly differently.
......Freud worried about what he called 'The Repetition Compulsion'. But there has to be repetition because real change is slow.
.....One more time with only slightly different feelings – that’s realistic movement. There has to be repeat performances to gain any depth in life. Real change is not leaping out of your skin into a different lifestyle with the past just a thing of the past. Real change is slow and it carries the past with it; you gradually discover the past enriches you as it accompanies you on your journey, sometimes a very long journey. That’s why you can’t duck in for a few counselling sessions and fix things. The old psychoanalysts knew this. That’s why they thought in terms of years rather than weeks. And this is especially true now that we have a better understanding of the how the process works, the way things move forward in their own way, at their own speed, step by step, each step having its own emotional logic.

THE POWER OF THOUGHT

by Stanley

It is fashionable to blame your thoughts for the way you feel. But not to blame your feelings for the way you think.
Interesting
Why is that ?
Perhaps it’s because when something is wrong people don’t get the feel of it first. Their first warning is the way they are thinking. Even then they may not get the way they are feeling – or perhaps only much later. Quite natural then to assume that what come first causes what comes second. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, (the logical fallacy of ‘after this, therefore because of this’).
It is more useful to think of thoughts, everyday thoughts that carouse through one’s head, as epiphenomena – particles floating on the surface of consciousness that often have only an oblique connection with what is really going on. But this does not explain the illusionary transference of power into one’s thoughts.
In thinking about sympathetic magic, the belief that one’s thoughts and actions can effect both physical and spiritual actions in the world, Freud said that this was due to an archaic belief in what he called the ‘omnipotence of thought’ (die Allmacht des Gedankens).
Children seem naturally to believe in the omnipotence of thought: ‘close your eyes, throw a penny into the fountain, and wish’; and the utter seriousness with which children believe that a wish will convey itself through the air to Father Christmas.
This, Freud said, is a phase of infantile narcissistic development and also seen in adult regression in obsessional neurosis, where the same kind of magical thinking occurs as a very serious symptom.
Freud also pointed out that the feature of magical thinking and the omnipotence of thought in primitive magic was taken over by religion: ‘And God said: Let there be light, and there was light’.
Prayer and positive thinking are the most widespread practises of magic. Whether prayer actually works is a debateable. But there is an amusing story told by Richard Dawkins about an experiment in ‘intercessional prayer in a medical setting’ conducted by a certain Dr. Benson who was inclined to believe it could be beneficial.
‘Dr Benson and his team monitored 1,802 patients at six hospitals, all of whom received coronary bypass surgery. The patients were divided into three groups. Group 1 received prayers and didn't know it. Group 2 (the control group) received no prayers and didn't know it. Group 3 received prayers and did know it... Prayers were delivered by the congregations of three churches, one in Minnesota, one in Massachusetts and one in Missouri, all distant from the three hospitals. The praying individuals were given only the first name and initial letter of the surname of each patient for whom they were to pray. It is good experimental practice to standardize as far as possible, and they were all, accordingly, told to include in their prayers the phrase 'for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications'.’
The results show no difference in the recovery of groups 1 and 2.
Group 3, those who knew they were being prayed for, ‘suffered significantly more complications than those who did not.’ The experimenters wondered whether they had suffered from ‘performance anxiety’.

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. NY, Houton Mifflin, 2006

KNOTTED

I'm used to living a life where there is always something I have to do and where I look forward to a time where there is nothing I have to do. When that time comes I miss not having something I have to do !
Stanley