So, I've just read Charles Murray's "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010". Also devoured the "Tao of Jung" in an afternoon, recently. Next on the list is another neuroscience book: "Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are". It won't be available until Tuesday. Yeah, I'm a glutton for punishment. But I've also watched Groundhog Day, 3 times in the last week, too.
Personally, hubs & I are beginning to change how we're talking to each other and actively beginning to work through some changes. I've made some micro-progress on those habits I've wanted to change and since in the past, any attempts immediately backfired - dramatically - due to some inner resistance (the strength and depth of the resistance to those kinds of changes in ole Twigs) I've noticed something's different now. Maybe it's hubs' support? Anyway... that path is getting easier; like my "muscles" are adapting to what's required to make those changes. One micro-change here... helps me with another one over there...
We're gradually getting to know people and be involved in our local community - in some ways that weren't open to us previously. Our roles now, are completely different. All NEW STUFF. For the last half of last year, I've been working on boundaries, with my Bro... and navigating some business things in the process... so that it's not a source of crisis-level anxiety anymore, even though much remains the "same" as before. My mom no longer calls every week; or even every other week... and it's pretty amazing how much that helps!! And there have been a lot of really, really good discussions here on the board lately. Things that have pushed me to think just a bit beyond the details of my own story... and try to see these struggles and obstacles and confusions from a "we're all in the same boat" perspective. Looking for those "common threads" - those things that resonate in other people's stories or posts - within me and I hope, sometimes anyway, vice versa.
So, while it looks like I've just been filling my over-active, over-hungry brain with "stuff" to keep it busy... it's been more intuitively intentional than that. And I've noticed that the "professor" in me... is ready to lecture or write essays about some of the connecting ideas... the crossroads between what looks like completely unrelated subject areas. Maybe it's the artist, too. (Could be the BS artist too!) But, I like the way you all illuminate, expand, point out things I might've skipped over too quickly... the free-flowing discussion that grows out some of the ideas I have ... I really can't just talk to myself and have anything other than a limited, dorky conversation, you know? I like to think some of these topics are kinda like the artsy "salons" of the early 20th century... or beatnik coffeeshop conversations... nothing "verboten"... lots of streams of consciousness... creating a group zeitgeist... a communal set of ideas or collective "consciousness"... maybe understanding. (Coz I really AM limited if I think about this stuff all by myself).
So the first "crossroads"... is the idea of COMMUNITY.
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Murray's book on the changes in America (because despite the title, it applies to all kinds of people)... he brings up a lot of data, social history, to kinda prove his points and support his theories about what has changed in society, so he has to talk a little bit about community. I don't want this to turn into a discussion of the book itself and his Libertarian ideas... but it struck me while reading it - that ideas about community overlap with my story - the he said/she saids - and also touches on what some other people have been posting about recently. Even my relationship thread falls into that - a relationship between 2 people is still a "community". So is a "family unit". So is that "primary attachment" of infant and mom. I'll even go so far as to consider my conscious self and doing inner child work... and fighting through unconscious resistance to "letting go", "moving on", and changing those engraved lifestyle habits... as one of the smallest example of community. Sort of the "molecule" of community.
Bones has been thinking about how she needs a community to help her with some practical, life-sustaining things. Hops talks about how important her UU community is to her. Starlight, (in a moment of frustration, maybe?) said she wasn't completely sure "who she is". SFalken has been battling his parents attempts to leverage various people in his community... to coerce him to bend to their whim and will. And of course, together, we make up a community, too. And we all know this online community has been really important to us. And what I realized I needed to bring up for your insights, thoughts, reflections, etc is just how there is a parallel between the concept of community and our own individual paths of healing... and the obstacles we run into.
I have to skip the molecule idea and come back to it. But starting with Star's question for herself... I wondered: how do we KNOW who we are? "Community" - in all those ways it exists - seems to be what works for me, as an answer. How people treat us... helps us create a story... an inner narrative... about "who we are". Moms are obviously the first and a very, very, very important "community" for those new, infant, human beings. Moms not only set the tone of and regulate our environment for us... Mom's own state of mind, emotional "weather", etc influence that environment independently of any input or causes from the baby-us... but the baby-us doesn't know that. As babies, we're entirely subjective, self-centered little blobs of new "us" awareness. Everything HAPPENS to us, because we're babies. There is us and what that feels like - and we need to learn the rules and expectations and incoming sensations of the Mom-community... the Dad-community... the siblings... as we begin to grow and our brains develop. And it's all that outside community stuff that gets digested and recycled into "who we are".
EXCEPT. There is that molecule of us. Thinking/Feeling... Conscious/Unconscious... Intentional/Reflex. Each one of us unique... not just because of genetics... but also because of how those neural "connectomes" are formed in reaction to and from feedback from our environments... and oh yeah: the places - communities - in various parts of our brain where they formed. The ability to be self-aware... to see, feel and think about ourselves... might be even a more basic, fundamental "community" than the mom-infant. What people have called the "self" and the various explanations of what self, consciousness, self-awareness IS. Psychology has quite a few different theories about this. So does spirituality.
And this is a good point to add a post-it for the ideas of "free will" and "boundaries". For a "self" to be a separate, individual unit from the community it exists in... it needs and pre-supposes that there are boundaries between self and community. The community may impose standards of behavior and values on the individual... but "free will" enables the individual to choose to conform or not. Even, whether to engage with - interact with - the community around oneself. And that relationship of course, is going to wax and wane... continually.
I suppose that I - at one point in Twiggy's story - made a free will decision to self-define myself as: say, a misfit... a product of what we called in the 60s "a broken home" -- but it was already more dysfunctional than that before the SHTF (I just wasn't painfully aware of that until AFTER)... and I self-selected a community of the "bad kids" for myself... coming to the conclusion that I wouldn't be accepted by my existing community of friends; that people wouldn't understand and I sure couldn't explain (at the time)... and from that point on I pretty much disengaged from as much of the support-network side of "communities" around me... or only superficially participated in them... as in working a job in such and such a place. I wasn't overly successful at being a part of that community -- because of those unconscious inner cravings for belonging, connection, & oh yeah - positively reinforcing community - and "who I really was" fit a lot better in other types of communities - the creative, scientific, technical, academic, even spiritual. I was pretty much a flop as a bad kid... but because of that self-definition; that 60's cultural definition of "a kid from a broken home" (which my mom used to sort of handcuff my motivation and ambition)... I didn't feel like I belonged anywhere - I felt like an "outsider" artist before the genre existed.
Murray points out one of the biggest social community changes that began spreading, around the same time. "Non-Judgementalism" started being incorporated into social values across communities - in that: respect for other cultures, other communities, people different from our COO (community of origin) meant tolerating behaviors that didn't meet the "old-fashioned establishment" values. This new "virtue" - a live and let live tolerance - extended even into accepting things that were morally questionable (he uses the word "unseemly") because who were we to judge another if their culture, community, standards were different? Sounds like this is a good virtue, right? It doesn't need the quotes I put on it, right?
I see at least two problems with this: one is that non-judgementalism has been taken to such an extreme (political correctness is one example) that it's absurd in the context of standards of social behavior. If you accept everything... then how do people "know" what the rules of behavior are? The meaning, the rules... are conditional and situational... and oh yes, always changing. This was one of the crappy dysfunctional things I grew up with in my FOO. It can't be a good thing for communities or society at large, to function this way. It's the: "I know porn when I see it" way of not offending anyone with a standard or value, because one doesn't define one's own standards. What I experienced internally in that environment (molecule in petrie dish) - was judging myself based on what I "assumed" were the standards (sans mercy & empathy & understanding) of that other "upright, virtuous community". My ignorance of that "other" community created a pretty harsh picture... a bias... because I didn't have any real information or experience at that time. Later... I learned, but the "damage" had already been done and it was lost somewhere in the jumbled chaotic disaster-level mess of my brain. Sort of like buried toxic waste... it kept oozing out.
The other problem is... if each of us decides what is right, what is wrong... and there's 15 different variations on that in our community... a.) how does that community of 15 agree on the definitions of right/wrong for the group? and b.) that immediately creates 15 "wrong definitions" in whatever minor details of deviation exist from the "collective definition"... even in the best case scenario where a consensus definition is created. Taken yet more personally - what I'm left with is a responsibility to "judge" for myself. Which immediately creates a conflict with that "virtue" of non-judgementalism... [OH HELLO - it's my old friend, "double bind" again.]
"Judging" has taken on such negative, egotistical, unfair connotations... that it's original meaning is almost lost today. Discernment, choosing, deciding what values and behavioral standards are... are all necessary for responsibility and levelling the playing field for all the community's participants to be able to engage in the community productively. It creates mutual TRUST... because the individual doesn't have to guess about what's expected of him/her... and doesn't give up in total frustration from trying to guess... what the rules are, to be a valued member of the community... to belong... to have access to the resources one needs to live... to be valued.
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No, I don't know that I 100% believe all of those thoughts that connected all those ideas at this point, that I just wrote. I don't have a CLUE where these thoughts might be going... or if it's even worth talking about here; or if any of y'all might be interested. But where the ideas intersected with some of the personal stuff we're dealing with in our community here... I saw some tantalizing possibilities for thinking about our personal struggles as individual molecules acting/reacting/combining and being affected by the larger social environment... which itself is changing and evolving in ways that are difficult to define or describe.
I suspect that a lot of my "issues" and "struggles" are due to my particular relationship - trust in particular - with all those various forms of "community" all the way from the molecule level... on up... and comparing and judging myself to values/standards that either no longer exist (in reality) or to "new" ones that I don't completely understand yet.
Because another thing Murray pointed out in the book that made absolute sense to me: is that when all those decisions about free will, who I am, and how I'm to act are all dictated from outside of me and I don't have to figure that out for myself - judge, in other words - then I also don't have any responsibility for that (I can blame my neighbor, the Prez, "society", "the way things are" all day long and get plenty of sympathy and commisseration). The flip side of that unfortunately... is that I also don't have an iota of motivation or energy to become what I am - in potential - who I could be. I'm STUCK in a form of futile helplessness... and easily over-whelmed by anything that requires effort or "getting out of my comfort zone" or trying something new.
OK. That's plenty long. It's y'all's turn now. I gotta finally get breakfast, before it's lunch time again.
