In this talk, FIML is logos. It uses word to bring order out of chaos. FIML brings meaning and clarity to primary interpersonal relations and thus also to individual psychology. You need to want to do this, to be a hero for yourself and others. You have to want to bring meaning and order out of chaos. It’s not easy to do FIML but there is nothing else as interesting or worthwhile on the interpersonal level. I hope JP will take up FIML and introduce it to a wider audience. I do not agree with his statements about bringing out the Jungian shadow. I do agree we must discover our essence or authentic being, but this can be done without myths or shadows through FIML practice. As mentioned in other posts, FIML does not tell you how to be or what will happen to you when you practice it but it will show you, eventually, your authentic being, the essence that underlies your social persona. ABN
Tag: psychology
Arm’s length communication can be dangerous
By arm’s length communication I mean “our deepest levels of meaning, emotion, and intention are either implied or more often concealed from the person(s) we are speaking with.” (see: Communication at arm’s length)
When we do arm’s length communication too much, we retard both psychological and sociological growth. We harm both ourselves and others.
Arm’s length communication is often a type of “sociological communication.” That is, communication that holds cultural, sociological or historical assertions above individual psychological experience. This can be a good thing and it can be a bad thing.
It’s good when it helps us see and bad when it blinds us. Bolsheviks were blinded by sociological fantasies that led them to murder tens of millions. It is good for us to understand that today, especially as our society is being torn apart by arm’s length fallacies.
I will now present an example of this tragedy as it is playing out this morning. What happened is Trump allegedly asked an intelligence analyst of Korean extraction, “Where are you from?”
As someone who has extensive experience with East Asia and Asian-Americans, I am aware that this question drives many of them up the wall. One example:
This makes my blood boil. It must have been so awful to be standing there having her expertise invalidated and trivialized. (Source: asianamerican)
As an ordinary American, I am also aware that this question with precisely that wording was extremely normal well into the 1980s and beyond. A younger friend I discussed this with this morning said she still considers it to be a normal question.
“Where are you from?” means what is your ancestry. When most Americans ask this of each other it means what is your ethnic background, what ethnicity or mix of ethnicities do you identify with or feel close to. It does not mean I think you are a bad person or are not an American. In a nation of many immigrant groups, it is a normal thing to ask. Indeed, it is the quintessential American question. Or used to be before SJWs came along.
Information about your ancestry or ethnicity says something (arm’s length) about your psychology and some levels of your “identity.” Isn’t it ironic that a commenter on an Asian-American site would be incensed that the president asked someone about their identity and then proposed that that identity might well-serve US national interests?
Here is another comment from a South Asian that says the opposite:
Being a Chinese speaking South Asian that type of response isn’t surprising. (Source: AZNIDENTITY)
Having lived in East Asia for a long time, I am well-aware that “Where are you from?” is almost always the first question anyone asks me in that part of the world. Chinese, Japanese, Australians, Europeans, other Americans all ask it. It can become boring to answer when the query is rote arm’s length stuff coming from someone who obviously does not care, but that is nothing to be offended by.
We are in a semiotic pickle and I don’t know what to do about it either. There are many other examples of the above, most of them stemming from identity politics in one way or another.
What is happening is that arm’s length identity concepts are being idiosyncratically defined by identity groups and then the demand is made that those definitions be known and accepted by everyone else or “blood will boil.”
Tunnel vision and mental illness
For a period of my life someone poisoned me with drugs that affected my brain and thought processes. I don’t know what the drug was but I definitely know it happened.
That experience is the basis for the following speculation: a lot of mental illness is fundamentally characterized by tunnel vision or what I might rather call “bright room” vision.
At the time I could not see it but looking back after the poisoning stopped I can see that my brain compensated for the poison’s toxic effects by ignoring large areas of information. This was not a conscious decision. It was just what my brain did to survive.
In this sense, my brain was in a tunnel or a bright room outside of which I could see virtually nothing. I think of the tunnel as fairly bright. That part of my world was clear enough to me. What was missing was the much larger world outside of the tunnel.
If you have ever been in an underground train station with lit tunnels going to various trains (like Grand Central Station in NYC), that is a good example of this metaphor.
Now, think about people you have known who are suffering mental illness, especially those who are not aware of their plight. Do you notice that for many of them what they see is like that tunnel? It’s bright and the way is sort of clear, but the larger environment around them is highly reduced. For me, it was more like a bright room with a fair amount of stuff in it and people and things going on, but all I could see was the inside of that room and almost nothing beyond. Outside the windows everything was dark.
I was not fantasizing the room or actively deluded by it as much as confined to it, unable to be aware of what was outside it. My brain was ignoring large sections of reality to hang on to whatever I could.
Consider a long-term alcoholic, a victim of self-poisoning, whose eyes still glow. I think what people like that see is a bright room or tunnel and not much else. How else can someone who has been addicted to alcohol for fifty years still deny it? It’s because that larger awareness is not inside their bright room.
Consider a narcissist in roughly the same way. I would maintain that they really cannot see what they are doing in the wider context of all the people they are harming because they only see the bright room around them, the bright tunnel before them.
Borderline, neuroticism, and bipolar, especially in the manic stage, are much the same.
I am not saying that all mental problems have this bright room/dark world aspect but I believe many of them do.
Incidentally, all psychologists and medical professionals should always consider poison as a significantly probable etiology for all mental illness.
Can’t see the trees for the forest
Examples of not seeing the trees for the forest are flyover assessments of sociological regions or general assessments of human psychology.
A more detailed example of this pertaining to psychology might be the following description of Borderline Personality Disorder:
People with borderline personality disorder are unstable in several areas, including interpersonal relationships, behavior, mood, and self-image. Abrupt and extreme mood changes, stormy interpersonal relationships, an unstable and fluctuating self-image, unpredictable and self-destructive actions characterize the person with borderline personality disorder. These individuals generally have great difficulty with their own sense of identity. They often experience the world in extremes, viewing others as either “all good” or “all bad.” A person with borderline personality may form an intense personal attachment with someone only to quickly dissolve it over a perceived slight. Fears of abandonment may lead to an excessive dependency on others. Self-multilation or recurrent suicidal gestures may be used to get attention or manipulate others. Impulsive actions, chronic feelings of boredom or emptiness, and bouts of intense inappropriate anger are other traits of this disorder, which is more common among females. (Source)
I have no doubt that this general description of the “forest” of BPD is somewhat useful as a flyover take on a psychic region that seems to have its own reality within American culture. The same link concludes that “there is hope” for personality disorders if we come to “understand that they are illnesses.”
Thus, a general remedy is assigned to a general “illness”; a semiotic contortion is assigned to the category “hope.”
TBH, as a Buddhist I must say you really should “have difficulty with your own sense of identity” because there is no such thing. Sentience in all its guises is dynamic and ever-changing.
You actually do not need a “self-image” at all. So if the one(s) you keep trying for are “unstable and fluctuating,” you are probably seeing reality more clearly than people whose “self-images” are stable and not fluctuating!
The fundamental problem with BPD and Narcissistic Personality Disorder, two of the most difficult disorders to cure, is in the trees. It is good to see the forest and know where it lies within the terrain of the sufferer’s culture, but the problem of any individual suffering from either of these disorders is always going to be in their trees.
So what are the trees? They are the actual signals received by the person, sent out by the person, and used internally by the person.
Those are the units that best describe what a sentient being is and does. If you can’t fix the trees or treat the trees, the forest will never be healthy.
Psychological optimization
Biologically, human psychology in a vast network of interconnected cells bathed in blood and chemistry.
Intellectually, we typically reduce this enormously complex system into terms that reflect types of behavior, such as narcissism, anxiety, dark triad, bipolar, OCD, self-esteem, etc.
While these reductions are helpful for understanding human psychology and showing us where to focus our attention, they cannot be expected to optimize our psychology.
To date, the human brain is the most complex thing we know of in the universe.
Once you have seen through your mom’s narcissism and its effects on you and have consequently been able to overcome much of your anxiety, are you then psychologically optimized?
Of course not. At best, you are then able to function better and feel better and, with luck, forgive your mom whose persistence in her narcissism was due to her enormously complex brain, same as yours.
So how do you optimize? Or how could your mom have optimized before you were born?
Clearly, it would have taken her years to correct her narcissism, let alone optimize her psychology. Same goes for you.
This is why all people need a system that works every day for many years. There is no other way to do it because optimizing a complex system requires tinkering at all levels over a long period of time and cannot be done quickly or be based simply on top-down category assessments.
The FIML systems works every day for many years gradually optimizing one part after another of our complex psychological systems. With current technology and understanding, I do not believe there is a quicker or more thorough way to do that.
An impediment to doing FIML is few people realize that their psychology is far from optimized. A sad aspect of doing FIML is realizing that you live in a world like that.
Fourth wave cognitive behavior therapy
The third wave of cognitive behavior therapy is a general term for a group of psychotherapies that arose in the 1980s, inspired by acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).
To me, third wave therapies seem more realistic than older therapies because they accept emotions as they are and pay close attention to how they function in the moment.
The link above is well-worth reading. The frames of these therapies are also well-worth considering.
FIML, which I am calling a “fourth wave cognitive behavior therapy,” differs from third wave therapies in that FIML does not use a professional therapist. Instead, partners become their own therapists.
Moreover, how FIML partners frame their psychologies or generalize their behaviors is entirely up to them. Similarly, their psychological goals and definitions are entirely in their own hands.
At its most basic, FIML “removes wrong interpretations of interpersonal signs and symbols from the brain’s semiotic networks.”
This process of removal, in turn, shows partners how their minds function in real-time real-world situations. And this in turn provides the tools and perspectives to reorganize their psychologies in whichever ways they like.
FIML is based on semiotics because semiotics are specific and with practice can be clearly identified and understood. They give partners “solid ground” to stand on. Words, tone of voice, gestures, and facial expressions are some of the major semiotics partners analyze.
Using real-world semiotics as an analytical basis frees FIML from predetermined frameworks about personality or what human psychology even is. With the FIML tool, partners are free to discover whatever they can about how their minds communicate interpersonally (and internally) and do whatever they like with that.
The other side of narcissistic sexual aggression
Sexually aggressive, narcissistic men destroy male rivals whom they perceive as threats.
Example: potential male rivals of Matt Lauer were “killed off” by the deposed star.
Matt killed off, in their infancy, every man who could succeed him at the time that he was ready to hang it up — so there’s nobody to take his place. And now NBC is paying the price. (Source)
Narcissistic women are the same. Anyone who threatens a narcissist’s “supply” is in danger of being destroyed.
Malignant aggression is a core feature of narcissistic behavior. It can range from career sabotage to murder, from gaslighting to poison.
It is not likely you have never dealt with a narcissist. The worst kinds are called malignant narcissists, but all narcissists exhibit aggression against rivals or former friends who have seen through their game.
Don’t be fooled by their popularity. As Lauer shows, popularity is their drug and they often are very good at “impression management” which keeps them center stage.
An example of how serious anxiety can be
The following video illustrates how serious anxiety can be, causing more problems than what prompted it.
Fast forward to where the woman gets out of her car.
Due to holding public office, she was forced to apologize. She is also being publicly ridiculed for her anxiety attack which is being interpreted as fake and/or outrageous.
I am reasonably sure the woman, Ulster County Legislator Jennifer Schwartz Berky, is not faking.
If that is so, her behavior illustrates:
- how serious anxiety can be
- how little can cause it
- how easily it can be misinterpreted
- how it causes more harm than good
Recently, I have been reading about anxiety and narcissism, particularly the significant harm narcissistic parents cause their children.
During her lamentations, Berky claims PTSD, which can result from a childhood spent with narcissistic parents. The other common bad outcomes are depression, anxiety or both together.
If I had not been doing so much thinking about these conditions, I probably would have laughed at Berky and moved on. Instead, I feel sorry for her.
I got my first traffic ticket when I had been an adult for many years. I did not act like Berky, but I did feel upset and thought about the incident for days after. All Berky did was have a more severe version of that same reaction, which most us have experienced at one time or another.
Too often in America we find a bully and then bully them through media. Rather than laugh at Berky, I think we should thank her for providing an excellent example of how serious anxiety can be.
Identity as simplification of sentience
Most identities are fundamentally category headings that simplify and organize consciousness.
In Buddhist terms, identity is empty.
Being empty does not mean identity does not arouse strong instincts.
Strong instincts arising based on identity are the poison fruits of delusion.
In this world where so many strive to have fierce identities, you have to be careful.
Though you do not need an identity yourself, you do have to be mindful of what others may do with their identities.
Identity politics is an inevitable result of many people striving to take on the same identity. Like identity itself, identity politics simplifies consciousness and arouses strong feeling.
Many people who have strong identities—be they individual or group oriented—conceal motives based on their identities, which they may also conceal in whole or in part.
This is the very nature of delusion and a major basis for understanding the First Noble Truth, the truth of suffering.
Why psychometrics and general ideas about personality inhibit psychological optimization
The short answer: psychometrics invariably yield bell curves.
The medium answer: general ideas about personality are derived from psychometrics.
The long answer: probably no one has ever been in the middle of all psychometric bell curves—curves for empathy, perseverance, intelligence, musical talent, athleticism, sexual satisfaction, “extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, or neuroticism.”
If you are on either side of the bell curve for anything that is significant to you, you will be measuring yourself against a standard that is not right for you.
And even if you are in the middle for everything, no one else is.
It’s fine to have a look at what some researchers find on some test, but it would be close-minded, not conscientious. probably neurotic, and highly disagreeable (to you and others) to do more than use those data as a mildly interesting sociological marker that doesn’t tell you all that much.
Without question psychometric data will inhibit your psychological optimization if you take them too seriously.
If you are to the left of any “good” metric, knowing the center of the curve might inspire you to try harder but it might also inspire you to try too hard at something you will never be able to do well. If you are to the right of any “good” metric, the center of the curve may cause you to hold back.
And who gets to say what is a “good” metric? At best some other metric. At worst a soft consensus among experts who have been acculturated into thinking that way.
Psychometrics are helpful for general classifications of individuals who cannot care for themselves or who have no one to turn to or who cannot achieve any happiness on their own.
For individuals who are self-reliant, understanding how your mind actually functions in real-time real-life situations is the only way to optimize your psychology.
Psychology is warped by too much reliance on patterns and types rather than how people actually function
You will never figure yourself out by answering questionnaires or trying to match yourself with a psychological metric or type.
Beyond that, you will absolutely never optimize your psychology and life using those methods.
The right way to grasp and optimize your psychology is to understand how it functions in real-time real-life situations.
To do this you have to take control of your own life and use a technique like FIML that allows you to observe yourself in real-time real-life situations.
I honestly do not think there is any other way.
Anxiety and default brain states
Our brains/minds have default states (plural) that we tend toward for a variety of reasons—pleasure, boredom, habit, even a systems checkup.
Default states are generally based on instincts like hunger, sex, fear, love, anger, disgust, humor, aesthetic joy, etc.
Humans tend to dress default states up. Instead of just eating something when hungry, most of us take time to prepare something good or pay someone to do that for us.
Everybody knows what we do with sex. Love, anger, hate, humor, disgust, fear, curiosity, thoughtfulness and so on are not very different in the many ways we dress them up.
Anxiety can be usefully understood as one of the default states of the brain/mind/body.
Anxiety is based on fear. We need this state in its basic form. If we are attacked by a wild dog, we need to be able to dump adrenaline and cortisol into our system quickly.
In many cases, though, anxiety takes on a life of its own and arises even when we are not in real danger. I think this indicates a default state that we can become habituated to in much the same way that we can become habituated to overeating, drunkenness, hate, anger, or unreasonable trust, love, or desire. Additionally, some bouts of anxiety can be understood as the system simply running a checkup.
People watch horror films because we like feeling afraid. It focuses the mind. We take risks because risks make us feel alive. Like horror films or danger sports, risk-taking focuses the mind.
Anxiety also focuses the mind. I think we like this aspect of it in many cases. It stimulates the brain and body, providing a level of clarity that feels very good, especially if we are hanging from a rock 500 ft above the ground.
Sometimes when we feel anxiety we can go out and do something, go running, ride a motorcycle, go surfing. When we do something that requires high levels of mental focus, we use our anxious state for what nature “intended.”
For myself, I notice that thinking about anxiety helps me put it in its proper place. I also notice that something unexpected—a health scare or good news—can immediately change my mental priorities, greatly demoting anxieties that had seemed so real just moments before.
Anxiety and desire
There are many similarities between anxiety and desire.
- Anxiety is the strong word for something we do not want. Desire is a general word for something we do want.
- Anxiety is based on fear, desire on pleasure.
- Both are forward-leaning mental and emotional states involving planning, imagination, and expectation.
- In their basic states, neither is a problem until it becomes excessive.
- Most of the time most people know when a desire is excessive.
- It is harder to know when anxieties are excessive, probably because they are fear-based and we instinctively use more resources to avoid danger.
- If a desire is excessive, we can often reduce it by doing the Contemplation on Uncleanness, by contemplating what’s bad about it.
- Anxieties can be reduced by contemplating how many of them have been wrong in the past and how little good it does to feel anxious.
- A main job of the conscious mind is to scan the world for danger. All animals do this.
- As semiotic, social animals, humans experience many fears in the semiotic and/or social realms.
- We cannot avoid scanning for danger because real dangers do exist.
- Anxieties occur when the perception of danger is disproportionate.
- If possible, it is best not to use drugs to control anxiety.
- Anxiety stimulates the brain and nervous system and within reasonable ranges is probably good for both. Anti-anxiety drugs dull us, though occasional usage in some situations is probably a good idea.
- Anxiety can be rewarding when it is relieved. It feels wonderful when it goes away.
- The far side of anxiety—when you see the oven was not on—feels good and may be a major reason many people subconsciously indulge in anxiety. Its resolution fulfills the desire to not feel that way.
- Anxiety focuses the mind. When one anxiety is removed, another often appears.
- As an instinct (that consciously scans for danger), anxiety when excessive can be understood as being an indulgence or “fetshization” of an instinct.
- In this, it is somewhat similar to over indulgence in other instincts—gluttony, drunkenness, sex addiction, greed, laziness, and so on.
- We probably fetishize instincts because it is a fairly easy thing for us to do. As semiotic animals, that is how we play, that’s what we know how to do.
- Definitely best to avoid identifying with anything but especially fetishized instincts.
- In Buddhist terms, identifying your transient sentience with anything is the basis of forming a self.
- A good deal of anxiety involves fears pertaining to the self, to its stories, identity, instincts, memories, desires, and so on.
- It is good to pay close attention to whatever is making you feel anxious and also to mildly stimulate anxious feelings when you are not anxious. This helps you see what anxiety is and how it functions in you, how it becomes excessive and why.
- It is also good to discuss this topic with a friend because this helps us become more objective about it.
- When we can expand the semiotic context of anything, we change it.
Poor precision in communication distorts motives
And distorted motives warp human interactions, which in turn degrade individual psychology.
There is no way around it—the ways almost all people communicate are much cruder than their brains are capable of.
And that is the cause of most of what we now call (non-biological) “mental health” problems.
Here is an example: I want to say something very complex to my primary care doctor. I can give her the gist in a minute or two but I do not want to have that go on my medical record.
So I ask her if I can start a discussion that she will promise to keep off my record.
She says, “I’ll think about it.”
A week later I get a letter from her nurse saying she is not willing to do what I asked.
No reason why was given. Do rules prevent her from doing that? I have heard of doctors allowing patients to keep some concerns off the record, but who knows what the reality is? Do you?
If I insist, will that go on my record? Did what I asked in the first place go on my record? My doctor is trapped within or is voluntarily following some guideline that is most decidedly not in my best interests.
This same sort of thing can happen interpersonally. If I raise a topic that is psychologically important to me with even a close friend, I have to wonder will they understand? Will they allow me to expand the subject over a few weeks or months or longer? Will my initial statements change our friendship?
The basic problem is how do you discuss complex psychological subjects with others?
One of my friends works in alternative health care. She knows what I want to bring up with my doctor and admits that even in her professional setting where patients have an hour to open up, there is not enough time.
Back to my primary care doctor. I saw her again a year later and she asked if I remembered her. I said, “Of course I remember you.” She said no more and neither of us raised the off-the-record topic. An intern was with her.
I wonder what she thinks of me. Did she interpret my slightly nervous behavior when I first asked as a “sign” of something? Does she think I am volatile or bipolar or just nuts? (I am not.)
I am 100% sure that she cannot possibly know what I wanted to bring up with her. In this case, I have all of the information and I want to give it to her but she cannot or will not allow that unless my initial fumblings toward a complex subject are made public.
Even a close friend could find themselves in a similar position. And I wonder if I have done that myself to someone. Most people most of the time are not able to scale those walls that divide us.
On either side of the wall is a complex person capable of complex understanding, but one or both persons cannot scale the wall. My doctor is smart enough to have become an MD and yet I cannot tell her about a complex medical condition that is of great importance to me.
I know that I do not want to open the subject and risk a shallow public label (a common hindrance to many potential communications). I honestly do not know what my doctor is thinking. Maybe I will try again the next time I see her.
EDIT 12/16/2020: I didn’t try again. After much thought, I decided to switch doctors. And I will not bring this subject up with my new doctor. It’s a sad reality that trying at all ruined (in my mind) my relationship with my first doctor and convinced me that the topic is not one I can discuss with any medical professional in a professional setting and maybe in any setting.
Something most white people don’t understand
From a recent email:
Like the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, Vietnamese consider their compatriots as not just belonging to the same race, but family, and in the most literal sense, too, for they call other Vietnamese, “đồng bào” [“same womb”], which is derived from the Chinese, 同胞. This notion is obviously more myth than science, for the Vietnamese nation has absorbed plenty of foreign blood through the millennia, via the usual channels of conquest and immigration. Without the bonding concept of đồng bào, however, Vietnam would have disappeared eons ago.
Vietnamese citizenship, then, is much more than a legality, but established through the age-old recognition that people who appear similar and, even more importantly, speak the same language naturally belong together. Often, they must also fight together to resist being swallowed up or destroyed by another race. Race consciousness is at the heart of racial survival. (Source)
American Buddhist Net 