What if we were many (inside)?

The idea of us having two faces or two sides is pretty common (and fascinating). A part of shadow, or a “the contrary of me, inside me”, anything schizophrenic…

So maybe we really have “another me” inside us. Most of the time, the idea says that the other one is very different. A quiet person has a tyrant inside. A mean human has a shy kid hidden in their head. Etc.

Sometimes it’s funny to extend and combine. For example, take the couple Lennon/McCartney, the tortured intellectual/happy fellow genius songwriting couple of the Beatles. When you read a little more about them, you see… the contrary.

Well, OK. Then you pull the string and ask some questions :

• When does the other one come out?
• How? Who triggers it? Why?
• What is needed? Music? Events? Alcohol?
• What if we all fall in love with the one who can see inside us? Who says “Hello you’re interesting” to everybody else they find inside?

 

Because yes : What if we were many (inside)? What kind of dance is it? It’s a metaphor, OR COURSE, but what does it show?

What if someone inside, hidden and protected (of course, protected!), one day takes the lead?

What if someone inside is suddenly missing, dead or sick or weakening?

What about three? Four? What if it was an accurate way to talk about us? Therefore what?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Both Sides NOW

The “Part of Shadow” according to C.G. Jung : an investigation

Works that create an irrepressible need to express yourself

Works that create an irrepressible need to express yourself

Take music, for example, you can study it in many ways : historically, genres, energy, impact on society, lyrics, etc…

There’s a book I love (Francis Wolff, Pourquoi la Musique ?) which studies the impact of music on human kind. What music does to us.

Any work of Art can be studied that way, a book, a sonata, a painting or a poem.

What does it do?

1. Emotion
2. Remembrance
3. A need to dance
4. A need to know more about the artist
5. A need to get more of her/him!
6. Relief
7. Calm down
8. Focus
9. Meditation
10. Understandings of the things of life
11. Knowledge
12. Beauty sparks

 

Etc…

Some artists are so… peculiar that they can trigger this : “An irrepressible need to express yourself”.

Why? How? How does it work?

I read it about Proust, and I agree : it’s because his huge Lost Time group of books, besides being a fantastic work of literature, is also a big, constant river of ideas, of “tropisms”, little movements of the mind. It touches little parts of your brain you know very well but, well, nobody talked about it to you before. Therefore you have the constant impression that this guy knows you very, very well. It can become a drug (and it is !).

This puts you into a movement. You need to move, to work, to write, to tell. Your well set big trunks of ideas, in your head, begin to move. Things get alive. They want to get out.

Also, there’s the risk of mimicking the artist who triggered it. Get over it. Don’t care : the flow is here, ready to do its flow thing.

Work, work, work. And thank the person who, in the past, had the talent to open your desire to express.

Who are the person who did this to you?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

 

Proust crée chez son lecteur un besoin irrépressible de s’exprimer.

“My little wallet of enthusiams” : How to fight Anhedonia?

Jim Harrison says somewhere that with the years our “wallet of enthusiasms” becomes thinner.

Well, this speaks to everyone, right? From a truckload to a wheelbarrow (“une brouette”), then to a small briefcase, to a wallet, that’s it. At 50 you don’t jump around screaming in joy about whatever new comes to you, like at 20!

“The moment when things you do become absurd” is probably something I should wonder about more. A kind of “inverse epiphany”, the sudden WTF moment…

• Sudden Absurdity Syndrome

There’s this moment when you watch in an awe the others keeping being happy and goat-jumping at anything new. Are you becoming just grey?

• Big Boredom

So I just learned about Anhedonia, reduced motivation or ability to experience pleasure, and I think it’s about it.

There’s the good old temptation of getting “stoned”, or to being “entertained” until death, Netflix like, or trying weed or booze, or worse : become workaholically busy like a running headless chicken. Put a lit on enlarging boredom…

You can also FOCUS on your little wallet. Think about it : what makes you enthusiastic, the “like a kid” state? Art exploration? Creativity? Writing (about what?)?

• Gleaning in loop : the “Gathering Seashells” Type

Could one find a new thin paper, in their wallet? One activity you never tried?

Of course I feel this! Therefore what?

What puts me in the “happy child” state? I thought about it and found two things :

1. Taking pictures, walking outside the-nose-in-the-wind.
2. Exploring geniuses (I’m with Fellini and Schubert these days).

• La Dérive is the French “drift”

Someone told me recently (he’s a bit older than me) that he for now focuses on geniuses only. What would be YOUR list of geniuses?

Proust, Welles, Picasso?

These days I’m with two geniuses. Fellini for cinema, and Schubert for music. Both need organization and efforts.

1. Fellini comes from realism to crazy surreal monster films. It’s complex, evolving, multi-layered, a whole exploration is needed to understand : films, bonuses, interviews, biography and many books. At THIS level on invention, it becomes almost toxic. It haunts you (like when you explore Proust, Mahler’s music or Manet’s paintings). And it’s so much fun too!
2. Schubert is complicated : he died young, but composed many many musics, chamber music, piano and 9 symphonies! As usual, for a composer you don’t know, you have to listen to many things almost randomly – to discover if you’ll like it, to sponge it into your head. I bought books, a huge biography, and found my entry : the Great Symphony, his last, which obsesses me so much that I listen to different versions all day long. They I read pages of classical music fan forum (in French : http://classik.forumactif.com), smiling at all the passion people put into this…

Anhedonia’s here, but I fight, and it works! If you see me mimicking an orchestra director in front of my Macintosh : I’m good.

What’s next? What about you ?

A field you don’t know, and you’ll explore it. What is it? A language? A painter? A country? An author? Who?

Thanks for reading!

“What’s the point?” : Anhedonia, a reduced wanting

I needed to be in my fifties to hear about this concept of “anhedonia“, a diverse array of deficits in hedonic function, including reduced motivation or ability to experience pleasure. (Wikipedia).

Inability to experience pleasure, but also reduced

1. motivation
2. anticipatory pleasure
3. consummatory pleasure

Well : the wanting and the liking are reduced. A big lost of interest!

This preliminary itself is interesting : it’s NOT depression. It’s just what we call in French “à quoi bon ?” : what’s the point, what’s the use, what good would it…, etc…

Association with boredom, a will to stay in bed, a will to sleep all the time! You can feel this even without being sad!

If one makes, in a good movement, an effort – like me with this article – one will stop very soon, because… what’s the point, right?

It’s sometimes a bit surprising, because in the past you LOVED to do it, right?

Then there’s probobly a seek for… oblivion. Video games? Stupid sports? Alcohol?

It can be helpful, after all, and more if you feel guilty! (because in our societies, one has to be busy, right?).

Anything vain will maybe help, like driving your car in the night, anywhere, for hours, with music.

And there are the old tricks : call a friend, get drunk, pick up a randombook, listen to some music, trance (go dancing?), shopping. It can work!

But most of the time, you don’t care about all this anymore… either!

Of course here I don’t talk about “major depressive disorders”, where you stay in bed crying or in catatonia for months.

No, it’s just the “not in the mood now”, a social detachment, random indifference…

We’ve all been there, right? Our mind like a Steve Reich music…

I am also convinced it can be linked to a loss. When you’ve been at war, for example, you’re into a “mode”, and then when you’re home you’re just… not bored, but not valued, not understood, alone, and you don’t understand what people do anymore. And lifting weighs seems suddenly… what’s the point?

What happens after a break up?

Wiki says : “There is no validated treatment for social anhedonia.”. Voilà !

I just found another word to explore : “Avolition”.

How do you deal with that? What if it becomes a constant mode? How to get out?

For me :

• I do a little step anywhere. It can trigger…
• A good book. There’s no better trick.

Thanks for reading!

Astronomers, astronauts, Hopper’s letter and the banality of life

In an old French movie we hear :

• “Deux intellectuels assis vont moins loin qu’une brute qui marche”.
• (“two sitting intellectuals don’t get as far as a walking brute”)

I read this and I smiled, because, darn it, I’m one of the two sitting guys!

So, well, listen : I went to my mother’s house this week-end and I helped her in her gardening activities : I weed-eatered a big part of the garden to prepare it for tillage.

Happily, her string-trimmer was on batteries, and lasted like 15 minutes before I had to stop. Phewww.

I hate to “do” these things. I hate DIY and odd jobs. It’s awful! I feel sad, and dirty, I’m bored. I am terribly bored. I want to be after. I want to go home.

In a garden, I want to read a book, to have a conversation, to take photos, or watch the buzzing world & butterflies.

I’m a cat person – in MBTI I’m INTFJ and my enneagram is 5 : The Observer – I’m perceptive, I watch and think, instead of… doing things.

Reading, writing (in the morning), eating, sex (evenings), taking photos – my entertainment thing is NOT linked to displacement – which, for me, is a dumb way to kill the banality of life.

And but yeah, Hopper’s letter :

…how life works. It’s moving. Always moving, whether you like it or not. And, yeah, sometimes it’s painful. Sometimes it’s sad. And sometimes… it’s surprising.

Maybe I fear surprises? Why is that? Always moving? Nope.

Make mistakes, learn from ’em, and when life hurts you, because it will, remember the hurt. The hurt is good. It means you’re out of that cave.

Mmmmh I think I prefer the cave, now. Hurt not good. I’m OK!

Have a nice day!

Complementary Partner?

When you’re young, you like simple, you like big statements. “Life is sad”, or “I’ll find my prince”, or “I wanna be an actor”.

Some people stay there, it’s why they love categories. They REALLY think they are INTJ – and if you say that sometimes you are also an INFJ, they say you don’t understand the concept. They use boxes and labels. For themselves.

Big question I had when I was in my twenties : “What’s better, to find a complementary partner or a same as you partner?”.

With easily guessed consequences :

1. If you marry someone like you, it’s easier, you party together, you love the same movies and musics, and your sex life is paradise.
2. If you marry someone not like you, it’s a mess : quiet vs loud, classical music and hardcore rap, reading in bed and motorbiking in the mud.

After all : BooksTeaCat, SportsBeerDog & their Social Interactions Necessities

Then you grow up and you live and the constant rain of complexities, disillusions and surprises end up to your upgrade : it’s A Matter of Levers – simplicity is senseless.

As we are moving forward in our days, we change, we plug to possibilities, we have many speeds, many joys, many powers and weaknesses, we have many intensities, and feelings.

(And it’s the same for your partner, silly!)

Whoever your partner is, the result is a mess, right? So what? That’s life! Amor Fati!

Oh snap : When you hate someone and 3 mn later you deeply love this person

1. When your other is a lot like you, it’s great : my lover is a cat person, a book lover, a quiet person, and she has no car (oh this is perfect!) – we evolve in the same aquarium. And I can write or take photos as much as I want!
2. When your other is a lot NOT like you, good. Why did you choose this person? How do you dance? Isn’t complementary perfect? Don’t you like to read alone when your spouse kills ducks in mudfens? Don’t you have a friend to talk to when your lover is a man of zero words? And also don’t we all need to be disturbed?

What’s the secret here? To stay yourself, of course. Not to bend too much, at the risk of losing your inner light…

Mmhhhhh…

“Opposites attract, but similarities bind”. Is that true?

The “Let’s make it a dance” tool says this : “When it’s difficult somewhere but you have to insist and you have to stay in the system, just accept and absorb the difficulties – and invent a dance. Your dance. It’s a mess, but you can dance it, smile, and climb the stairs”. And ignore the others. Nobody can understand your own dance. It’s a secret.

Sorry, this article is a mess, tant pis. I don’t even know where it went. Hence, I found a picture of my Eliette playing watergunning (or squirtpistoling) with a friend, voilà.

Bonne journée ! Thanks for reading!

Everything that goes wrong goes right

Are our Fears camouflaged Desires?

Empathy – and words linked to it

Empathy? I wrote an article about having too much of it : The “Too Much Empathy” Syndrome

The ability to feel (or guess) what another person is feeling, believing…

We thinkers like to examine it, but I realize there aren’t so many books about it.

My first idea is it’s because it’s a big-deep quality. It’s like being dexterous or green fingered, and being clumsy. You can’t, really, change that.

1. One can not develop their empathy.
2. One certainly can not make someone develop their empathy.

My second idea is that though we all have, built in our deeprofound mind, a prehistorical dose of empathy – some people only, then (education? culture?) can develop the flowers of empathy from it, some others don’t. It’s dry. That’s it.

Another word? Attention. If you have empathy, you watch people around you, your kids, your love – you have a like perpetual computing algorithm which “guesses and reports” what probably happens in others’s heads. You read them continuously.

Another word? The decentering process. To have empathy you have to decenter. The next word is selfishness, then.

Another word? Relational Intelligence. A dance between a dry empathy which we need to understand the others’ intentions and feelings, and a warm empathy which is deeper and linked to love.

Maybe one can develop the first one? A rational empathy, is it possible?

Then it leads to empathy as a tool, in management, teaching, or therapy. It becomes, then, a… lever (or a leverage, which one’s the best?).

How to we detect a lack of empathy? How does empathy rejoin the love of stories? And what about “types of conversations”? Where and how does a lack of empathy become an… asset? What about justice, or police? What about mother/baby? And father/baby? What is vicariance, and how is it used in pedagogy? What is the “pleasure to help”?

A teacher who has empathy knows how to interest his class, then he has their attention, then they learn…

Thanks for reading!

Ohh I found a book on my shelves, “A History of Empathy”. I’m on it, OK?

The wish for mentor

Mentor sounds good. It’s not a guru – where you feel it’s toxic, too much, manipulation. It’s not a guide. It’s maybe in the middle…

It’s not a muse, nor an authority, it’s not a coach, not your parents, or disturbers.

I’m reading Irving Yalom‘s autobiography, where he tells his constant need, during his growing life, for a mentor. An adult person who would have “detected” his uniqueness, his talents, his whatever makes one special…

Then, this person would guide you a little, would show you things you should know, and would probably tell your parents (who aren’t aware, of course).

It’s a cousin-pattern of many things, linked to Types,

• like the teacher who unblocks you with a single phrase,
• the uncle who offers you a magnifier (or a telescope),
• the best friend who marks/scars you forever with a single innocent observation,
• the soul-mate lover who disturbed you so much you’re reconfigured in the whole of you, or almost.

Wishing you had a mentor is almost a Type in itself : overthinkers, introverts, shy people, book lovers, quiet seekers.

Everybody needs attention and understanders (and I think it’s why some love stories are so intense), good conversation lovers, listeners, good askers. Here, it’s something else, right? Not sure…

Every other helper I listed here can embody the role of the Mentor… one needs. Someone who gets you, even in a 2 seconds sentence,

1. points you out to others
2. shows you possible paths (doors, windows)

 

Well, we should NOT need that, but… we do what we can!

Have you met a mentor? Have you been a mentor to a kid? Should you? How?

 

Thanks for reading!

Watzlawick wrote somewhere that when something is bad…

Watzlawick wrote somewhere that when something is bad, the contrary is not necessarily good.

The idea of “choice” is really a problem, right?

1. If you INSIST, you’ll maybe fail : “More of the Same Thing”, when insisting is a failure
2. If you QUIT, you’ll maybe fail too. Or succeed. You have to try!

There’s this : if you walk on one path, you’ll never know what you could have discovered on the other one. One just imagines (convinces oneself) it’s the good choice.

In a way, it’s understandable. A choice, and you close a part of your brain. It’s simpler.

The Frenchness in me is a bit mischievous, and tells me that in front of a choice, I’d choose both – “Bake Two Cakes”, or the dangers of segmentarity

But the crux (I just learned this crux word, and I’m happy!) of these problems is Haecceity.

Insist on A and Quit B, and you just close possibilities, that’s all.

Life is not made of A or B, but to plug with possibilities, it’s constantly moving along the day, along days. Therefore big choices (apart of choices like “I quit smoking”, which is obviously clever) are maybe mistakes : one should always be prepared to play with propositions of life. Don’t you think?

But some days, we are tired, I agree.

Have a great day!

Inner volcanoes/Inner glaciers

I found this little tool in a Walter Murch book (“In the blink of an eye”). Murch is a film editor, a kind of genius – he’s the guy who edited Apocalypse Now. He quotes an Ingmar Bergman paragraph, who explained something about… Igor Stravinsky.

Stravinsky wrote a lot about interpretation, performance.

As he had a volcano inside, he was preaching moderation. And then he couldn’t tame his volcano, and some concerts were… fiery – which was very surprising for his readers!

Murch tells that we seek balance in our lives.

1. Therefore when we realize we have a volcano somewhere inside us, we try to temper the eruptions!
2. And the one who has a glacier inside will advise passions unbridling.

The danger, tells Bergman, is to read Stravinsky the wrong way : to moderate the glacier, or to wind up the volcano.

I think of this Polish idiom : “One shouldn’t butter the butter”.

 

I knowww it’s not a tool, it’s a seed for overthinkers…

When do we have to think this way? What are our volcanoes? What are our glaciers? Do we handle balance? Do we do it the correct way?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

The Dreadful Need of Weakness

I read somewhere that Beckett talked about “l’affreux besoin de faiblesse” – the dreadful need of weakness – we all have inside.

When you’re 18 and you have to write about this idea in philosophy course, you fulminate against the teacher, right? But this morning I found it really… arousing.

It’s different if you think about yourself, or about… someone else.

Our need of weakness, when it becomes a necessity to let go, or to choose closure, loneliness and quietness : no events, a life all bland. Can I say “eventless”?

Or when you give in to your flaws : love of good food, or cigarettes.

Vocabulary :

1. Postponements : procrastination as a need of weakness. “To hell with it”, as a need of weakness.
2. Lies : because we don’t want to deal with consequences. When we say what the other needs to hear… to have peace.
3. Drifts : waiting time, hands over reins… just to see what happens? Or for the pleasure to see decisions made by others? Or to witness how something will crash…
4. Relapses : stop smoking, but…

 

Other words?

And why this need of weakness? To regroup? To stop? To be looked after?…

What do you think? When does it happen? How do you detect and accept it in other people around you?

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

Soil Festivities (or taming)

That’s an old tale : watch inside a home, or even a bedroom, and you’ll guess a lot about the owner.

Then the contrary : hear the “judge” know-it-alling about it, and you’ll guess a lot about his mind…

1. If it’s a mess, you too much easily could tell about a messy brain – maybe the owner’s mind is not completely orderly. Maybe he suffers, or maybe he’s a genius artist, maybe he’s silly. See? You can say everything thus nothing, in fact.
2. If the bed’s done like a funeral one, and the pajamas are perfectly daily folded on “this” chair (and not another one), THEN you can tell…

Today with you, my reader, let’s gossip the same way about a garden.

When I think about a garden, I think about peace and silence, butterflies and dragonflies, about the grass I could walk on post commuting evenings. I think flowers, curiosity, trying to plant and take care about unknown species, watering, welcoming birds, combining these green/colored friends together for harmony, I think breathing little winds and smelling roses (and the earth, the soil).

Soil Festivities is the title of a great album of Vangelis.

Then I hear some people about their garden. All they talk about is invasion of spiders and nasty caterpillars, chaos to be contained, trimming everything around and cutting/pruning trees. Everything’s a enemy. They want order, taming, obedience, snapping scissors on short grass.

Tonight I realized they maybe want to repair, to fix, to contain nature, instead of repairing, fixing, containing events of their now life or past life, probably… right?

 

(Crummy psychology, I know. I’m sorry. I wish I had a garden to wander in. I’m jealous, that’s it!)

 

Today I took this picture. I offer it to you. Thank you for reading!

 

“Intentions vs Dispositions” & Widenings

ONE

Bourdieu explains this concept (which is a GREAT dial to watch) in his conferences about Manet.

To make is short, he says that when an artist “makes” something (a movie, a painting, etc), audience and critics talks about his/her INTENTIONS.

As if artists knew exactly what they do and the impact their work will have!

Kundera said that sometimes he receives a thesis written by a student about his books, and explains that he had no idea all these ideas were in them !

TWO

Bourdieu opposes Intentions to Dispositions. Manet’s work is not “a crystal clear intention to have this impact”, but it’s more like a bouquet of tendencies, an aggregate of his childhood, his education, training, his time, his friends, his changing or searching personality, his work too, the building of it, etc.

THREE

I think we can watch this pattern, widening it to human relations in general. There, it plugs to the second agreement. People don’t do thing with big “intentions” towards you, but they deal with their own dreams and values, linked to you or not.

FOUR

It’s linked with the idea of Umberto Eco & the Open Work, and Intertextuality (“the meaning of a text does not reside in the text”). In short : the audience reacts, but they probably don’t get the “intention” of the author (if there’s one). The audience builds its own system of reactions, according if necessary to the imagined, supposed “intentions” of the author.

Same in life, right?

FIVE

Disposition is the “tendency of”, the trend. A human being will is a complex system, a changing aggregate. You watch, then, the… Propensity. The natural tendency to move this way, to act that way.

You have no idea how a scandal it’s been for Manet’s work : Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, and Olympia. Bourdieu smiles : maybe someone asked the painter, one evening in spring, on a terrace in Paris with a beer “What do you do this day?”. “I paint”.

SIX

“Haecceity” !

Endless Amendments : Reality

SEVEN

We’re not islands, but we are, in a way.

Intentions do exist, yes, but for ourselves. I love this example (from Kundera again) : the intention of knowing.

CONCLUSION

Watch someone act (crazy or not). Understand it with dispositions (the whole system this person is in, education, wounds, life, milieu, changes, desires), not with intentions.

 

Have a great day!

 

 

 

 

Endless Amendments : Reality

There’s a tree, in front of you, while you walk.

Perception. Your eyes send images to your brain. “It’s a tree”.

In a second, you brain has the image, thus the word and the concept linked to it.

You brain has a powerful tool : Analogy.

If it “looks” like a tree, thus you decide it’s probably one. Then you watch and fix, adapt.

Analogy is pretty good for representations, drawings…

If you hear something behind you, your brain computes immediately a 3D-Map of what is probably there. Then your turn around and your eyes fix, amend the “reality”.

Successive drafts, like instant sketches…

Endless Amendments…

 

Yes, it’s splitting hairs the French way, to imagine dials. Donc :

1. What if a word was a tack? And a strong one…
2. What happens when our senses send us something else than the tacked word?
3. How do we know that all these are the Letter A?
4. Who are those who think with preconceiveness?
5. Why am I wary of words (as labels)?
6. What are hallucinations?
7. Why should we train ourselves to endless improve, enrich, amend what we think we know?
8. What is movement, here? Haeccity?
9. What is to plug with possibilities and propositions?
10. What does “She’s mean” mean?
11. Really?

 

Have a great day!

 

 

 

Irrelevant Fishes & Tetris Moods : Humans as Problems to Solve?

My previous article quoted S. Shore about photography :

“A photographer solves a picture, more than composes one.”

 

At first you want to think that it’s wrong – or at least “too easy”, but you have to admit there’s something intriguing here. To “solve” a picture… To find its balance, maybe? It’s stayed as a seed in my brain.

 

In the eighties I was in University and a friend of mine told me this story :

“I played so much Tetris these last days that this morning, as I was interviewed by a guy for a job, I saw all of his questions like Tetris tetrapods : I just had to move them, rotate them until they fit into my brain”.

 

OK, this is a puzzle. Here are some pieces :

1. The idea of “solving” a photography
2. Communication from another human being seen as a Tetris game (four square blocks geometric tiles moved sideways and rotated until it fits with no “gaps”)
3. Marcus Aurelius’ constant pattern telling that the problem is not reality (therefore “the others”) but the way we react or not – which depends on us only
4. The third Toltec Agreement : “Don’t take anything personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering…”

 

See my workshop table? Some of you will get me, will see me coming. Recenter. You decide. Logic against feelings. The limits of all this. Watching/listening to others. Empathy. Etc.

I’ll have to write a bit more to sort all of it.

Some say that to blog is a way to learn things, right?

The 3rd Agreement risk is to consider others like irrelevant fishes in an aquarium, or something like “the weather” – but it can be an asset. Could be.

(to be continued)

 

Have a nice day!

Instagram : itspeteski

When you don’t manage to console someone

“Quand on ne parvient pas à consoler”, we say in French. This alone is a problem to translate. “Parvient” is from the verb “parvenir”. Dictionaries translate it with :

• To succeed
• To manage

But it is NOT that meaning. It is not a “success” (with what, a medal, a fanfare?) to console a crying person (it’s not fixable). And “to manage” (organize, control, etc) has little to do with listening to a terribly sad somebody.

So there’s a word lacking here. A mixed of “to reach”, “to achieve”, “to manage with invisible wills and means”, “to get through”…

 

Achieving comfort of somebody’s grief or sorrow need a whole harp : listening means, empathy, silence, freedom, focus, acceptance and maybe conversational skills…

Becoming a father I learned that children have terrible grieving moments. Despair which comes from the heart, in the deep. Kids need security, and when they are afraid to lose it, it’s terrible. It’s one great joy when you console your child, in front of a tree moving in the wind, or during a walk, or on a chair. Listen, talk, look, hug. As a mother, a father, you need to be here, and you find your own ways.

 

When I read books about self help, or psychology, or mental care, I’m always very interested by a passage or a chapter about “how to listen“. Specialists think about it very closely (maybe I’ll write about this alone, one day).

Sometimes, you don’t manage to console somebody. Grief and sorrow… Because…

• It’s unconsolable
• You’re not ready
• You’re too close
• You are tired
• You are annoyed by it
• You’re overwhelmed
• You’re sad too
• You don’t understand
• You’re not strong enough

 

Sometimes you think you fail. Even if we can’t talk about communicating vessels, you’ll catch a part of the sadness.

Well, I think the main thing is the fact… you’re here to listen, right? If we think we didn’t manage to comfort the other one, maybe we did. A little. Because we were there.

 

Have a nice day!

Instagram : teladipinta

“I’ve never said that!”

There are dozens of articles about manipulators, but I loved this one :

http://iheartintelligence.com/2017/08/23/end-emotionally-draining-relationship/

The author lists 4 signs, which are :

1. Twist what you’ve said in their favor
2. “I never said that!”
3. Play the victim
4. Belittle all of your problems

It’s a great article, and today I focus on 2.

“I’ve never said that!”

When you hear it from a person you love, you immediately fall from horse. Then you wonder what’s happening…

• Why so much bad faith?
• Are you victim of hallucinations?
• Why does he/she lie?
• Maybe he/she really forgot?
• You’re emotionally manipulated then : what for?
• To get something?

Then you hear :

• “You got me wrong”
• “You’re too serious”
• “You invent stories”
• “You try to manipulate me”
• “I was joking”
• “You expect too much”
• “You’re always complaining”

 

Well, etc. You are a prey, that’s it. You’re confused, and that’s the purpose of it…

“They will convince you you are just inventing problems. That you are seeking to find them.That you are ungrateful. You are weak. You are stressing them out. You are just not good with finding solutions. You focus so much on the bad. You exaggerate. And so on.”

 

The manipulator will always accuse you of what he/she’s doing. You’re dramatic. You use him/her to entertain. They have “trust issues” exactly when you shouldn’t trust them. Etc.

 

As you’re intelligent, you notice all this, your “knowledge of the other” is growing and you begin to pack your ideas in your mind to stay safe. But then, of course, the manipulator changes his/her face. Becomes a treasure again (although never sorry for what happened). You melt. You’re done.

If you’re married there is no solution. Find your own way to escape (hunting, biking, muscling, whatever) and try to explode in rage the less you can. Murdering your demon not good. Jail not good. Breathe.

 

Oh, to finish this. There’s only one thing to understand if you don’t already know it : they will NEVER accept they’re like that. It’s maybe the dark core of all manipulators – there is no cure, ever.

 

You can also read : Signs of Bad Signs : our shades of narcissism and Narration of cold sadism as low form of gaiety : a narcissistic tropism

Thanks for reading!

 

Instagram : _bodylanguage_

 

Surprising Reversibilities

– I owe you so much!
– No no no, it’s I who owe you…

 

1. A therapist takes care of his patient.
2. Stravinsky or Hindemith were influenced by Bach.
3. Someone is watching and analyzing a painting.

All these three examples are simple and clear. You can draw the arrow, right?

We thinkers like to go deeper, though. To find nuances, subtleties :

1. There are many ways of listening, of helping someone…
2. What are the elements which makes us notice the influence?
3. What do we seek – and find in Arts? An emotion? Links?

You can spend months on each, reading books. Refining concepts is a bliss, right? Good!

 

Today I study one thing : reversibility. It’s meeting a surprise “the other way around”, and it’s charged with intensity :

1. A therapist suddenly talks about himself. Instead of listening, he tells his own story. The patient is suddenly captivated. This is a well known trick in this field! Psychotherapists say it gives a stronger link (therefore a power) on a patient. Adding humanity in the bond is a strange and powerful idea…
2. Many specialists come to a point where they see where is Bach in Hindemith, but also that there is some Hindemith (1895-1963) in Bach (1665-1750). Two centuries before, OK, but you can study this the other way around – even if you think it’s “not OK”. It’s a game for spirits, to study how the now can be seen as an influence for the past.
3. An Art lover studies a painting, a music, and he realizes it works in the other way : the piece of work moves him, changes him, teaches him, overwhelms him. You explore yourself through another person’s work. You are amazed by unconscious and historical forces at stake. Your skin (or your guts) are activated. Astonishment is a trigger for your brain. Then, maybe, you’re… slaked (and this can be in MANY ways), right?

 

A child comes from a mother, a father. But parents are also transformed by the coming. In the end, the person who is a child gives parents… motherhood and fatherhood.

Mhhh I like that. You feel that I touch something here, oui? Where, in what other examples can you imagine this reversibility process? Business? Couple? Creativity? Ads? Poetry? Where, when it’s obvious “things are going this way”, could you reverse something? Therefore what?

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

Seeing to Finesse amid Chaos

There are many levels and kinds of chaos. You can be in the middle of a furious battle or a sales assistant in an overcrowded store near Christmas time, it’s chaotic.

There’s a dial to watch on every agent working in mayhem. From 100 (“I use my skills and I understand & master everything in my field”) to 0 (“I give up, I crash, I cry, now fuck this shit”).

It’s interesting to watch the cursors and levers (“I activate”) and dials’ needles (“I see what is happening here”), between efficient overactivity and sarcastic sloppiness.

In this blog I already studied three different states :

1. “Staggering State” & Observation Amusée du Chaos
2. The “Titanic Octet” state : stop panicking & arrange twinkles
3. The Hummingbird Tale

 

Ernst Jünger (German) was in continuously bombed trenches during WWI, and he was reading Léon Bloy, an angry French author, and noticed how the birds were back to singing, slowly, after a night of explosions.

Seeing to Finesse amid Chaos is a state of mind. It’s a security inner mode. A way to keep safe and calm when a part of you wants to scream. It’s to restore a Middle Age painting in one besieged city. To order, in December, a single book about the letters between a musician and a philosopher in the middle of piles of cardboard boxes full of best sellers. To study the youth of Goethe in a city ravaged by plague. It’s a long conversation about Pondichery, India, next to an overexcited screaming foam party…

Stay safe!

Have a nice day!

Photo : B. Plossu

 

Do you think different?/Are you gifted??/Do you think too much???

Self Help books are written… to help you, right? You feel “not enough” this (happy, fast, effective) or “too much that” (sad, angry, etc). Well, these are done to hold you hand, give you knacks maybe, show possible paths…

I love some of them, a special category, when they attack the problem the oblique way. They tell you to wait, or to stop paying attention, or make you think about the real importance of being always “happy” (well, the contrary of the others, right?).

https://afrenchtoolbox.wordpress.com/2017/02/10/opposite-coursewrong-foot-another-type-of-self-help-be-happy-books/

 

There are many self-help books about how… you feel different. I explored a little this area, and found three possible ways around gifted people.

(In fact, if you were really a brainiac, it’s another thing. I want to talk about this common feeling of being “slightly different”).

You can feel :

• Gifted. You’re just faster, knowledge hungry, you’re a thinker, etc…
• You think too much. You notice everything, you’re focused. You love words.
• You think different. Globally, in the oblique way.

Hey, well, yes : I KNOW you’re not “this OR that”. It’s about shades.

Imagine a orthogonal spatial system of axes. X is the gifted one. Y is the “think too much”. Z is “think differently”. And you’re somewhere in this mess, little human being!

Most of these books tell you this : you have the right to be like this. So there! And of course that you have to know yourself, to know how you operate, included “with others”. More : they have to make you understand that you must not try to tame it. Use it. Use it!

You know you’re a mess, and a pain in the neck when you’re in a group, with your “questions”. 

Socrates said “Know Thyself!”. Wasn’t he right?

 

Thanks for reading. Have a nice day!