Hey! A guy brought up some questions

for Stef from the book I'm reading/working through on the Sunday show! [Which I missed on Sunday because I'd rather be out playing with the kids and doing yardwork on a beautiful day than hanging out in my basement, when I know that the show will be available as a podcast within a few days, and I'm not feeling as deeply troubled by anything as to need to call in myself. Of course, that was Sunday. If I'd had to deal the things I had to deal with this morning then, I'd have had cause to call in. But things seem better now, so I'll not go into that.]

Stef took four calls (in 2½ hours) - all brilliant - the first of which is on Self-Therapy. It constitutes a great review of the book that'll have you clicking my link to pick it up. Stef hadn't read it, but one of the FDR guys read a passage and asked what Stef thought of it. It wasn't all praise, he chides (hilariously) therapists and Buddhists for being too loose with the forgiveness for evil people.

Check out the podcast. (It's #1653, if you find you have to go here to look for it.)

Ask them 'why?'

Jay Earley, in his book Self-Therapy, asks me to name a couple of my protectors and answer some questions about them.

I think it will be easy to do. There are quite a bunch of them in the room, waving their hands and excitedly shouting, "pick me!" I'm going to pick two of the tough guys in the back, who aren't waving their hands: The Distractor and The Mumbler.

I'd like to make this funny, but I won't. The questions:

What is it's role in helping you manage your life and interact with the world?

How does it relate to other people?

How does it protect you from pain?

What is its positive intent for you?

What is it trying to protect you from?

Mr. Distractor ("Don't call me an "it.")
Mr. Mumbler ("Don't call me an "it.")

I'll get back to this later.

Author Alice Miller dies

I'm very sad, but she lived a long and fruitful life. I'm going to have to do a bit of fisking on this obit, though.

Apr 23, 2010 1:10 PM | By Sapa-dpa

Alice Miller, the author and psychologist who claimed that Adolf Hitler was bad because he was spanked as a boy, has died at the age of 87, says her Berlin publisher.

All right, that's just a sensationalistic "grabber." We'll let it slide here.

Miller, who was born in Poland, later lived in Switzerland and spent her last years in Provence in France, died on April 12 and was buried in strict privacy. This was not made public at the time, said Suhrkamp Verlag, the publishing company.

As a psychoanalyst she was convinced that corporal punishment and sexual abuse during childhood had lifelong effects on her patients.

Her views were controversial, with some arguing that the notion triggered a wave of false allegations against parents and teachers, after suggestible patients became convinced they were abuse victims.

Which is also controversial; the truth or falsity of the allegations, I mean.

In her 1980 book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, she proposed that Hitler's father traumatised the young Adolf with beatings and verbal abuse and taught him to despise himself and Jews.

She did not merely propose that claim, she cited proof that he was a brutally abused child. Her point was to prove her thesis.

Historians replied that the Nazi dictator's personality was not so easily explained, but the thesis was still widely publicised.

She didn't claim it was the whole explanation. And, by the way, "historians"? How many and how knowledgable are they about recent developments in psychology? Can't reporters ask these questions?

Her books about childhood trauma and giftedness appeared in 30 languages. Miller was born in 1923 in Lviv, which was then in Poland and is now a city in Ukraine.

Now here is a fitting obituary:

...[E]xposing the full extent of the psychological damage flowing from the justification of violence against children was Alice Miller's life's work and her great contribution to the world. She showed how people will go to incredible lengths, for their entire lives, for generations, just to avoid the natural feelings of humiliation, shame and anger that flow from being abused, and then having that abuse justified. People will do just about anything -- excuse, avoid, forget, invent whole ideologies -- if it will allow them to continue to repress those negative feelings, and continue to maintain the fiction of the justification.

What I learned from being the youngest of five children

Probably the biggest lesson I learned is that people who want to boss you around need to have their heads out of their rears. I never minded getting an order from somebody who knew what they were talking about, at least in the situation - their tone was important and could effect whether I resisted or talked back or not, but if they were right about something needing to be done I did it.

Yes, I assumed the authority to judge whether the thing needed to be done or not. The criteria were:
Could they hurt me?
Could they get away with hurting me?
Would they get in trouble for hurting me?
Would the consequences of their being in trouble roll down to me?
Was the matter at hand objectively important?
How important?
For what?

Each of those deserves greater elaboration, but I have to do other things right now.

Watch out for this mistake

From a review of All About “Heaven”: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife, by Lisa Miller, Newsweek's religion correspondent

...[T]here is an unthinking "respect" automatically accorded to religious ideas that throttles our ability to think clearly about these questions. Miller's book – after being a useful exposition of these ideas – swiftly turns itself into a depressing illustration of this. She describes herself as a "professional sceptic", but she is, in fact, professionally credulous. Instead of trying to tease out what these fantasies of an afterlife reveal about her interviewees, she quizzes everyone about their heaven as if she is planning to write a Lonely Planet guide to the area, demanding more and more intricate details. She only just stops short of demanding to know what the carpeting will be like. But she never asks the most basic questions: where's your evidence? Where are you getting these ideas from? These questions are considered obvious when we are asking about any set of ideas, except when it comes to religion, when they are considered to be a slap in the face.

Of course there's plenty of proof that the idea of heaven can be comforting, or beautiful – but that doesn't make it true. The difference between wishful thinking and fact-seeking is something most six-year-olds can grasp, yet Miller – and, it seems, the heaven-believing majority – refuse it here. Yes, I would like to see my dead friends and relatives again. I also would like there to be world peace, a million dollars in my current account, and for Matt Damon to ask me to marry him. If I took my longing as proof they were going to happen, you'd think I was deranged.

"Rationalist questions are not helpful," announces one of her interviewees – a professor at Harvard, no less. This seems to be Miller's view too. She stresses that to believe in heaven you have to make "a leap of faith" – but in what other field in life do we abandon all need for evidence? Why do it in one so crucial to your whole sense of existence? And if you are going to "leap" beyond proof, why leap to the Christian heaven? Why not convince yourself you are going to live after death in Narnia, or Middle Earth, for which there is as much evidence? She doesn't explain: her arguments dissolve into a feel-good New Age drizzle.

Hey, kids!

If you enjoyed this discussion, don't miss this one!

Oh! My! God!

It's pretty certain that I know victims of this pedophile. Or victims of his victims, at least. The two murderers I knew best were both Catholic boys. I knew one deaf boy who went to that school. His family left town. It seemed sudden to me, but we'd already parted as friends, so I wasn't paying attention.

No, I take that back. I don't know that he ever went there. I know for a fact he went to a different school. Whether or not there was any contact with the kids from Father Murphy's school I couldn't say.

But, since I heard about this, I've been thinking about who that I know might have been a victim of "serious" child abuse or molestation. I'm thinking of the sullen kids who became drug users and dropped out. One of the above murderes fit that bill perfectly. Another kid was just kind of boisterous in grade school turned quiet in Junior High and eventually went to prison for trashing the old school.

There were other kids. Kids who never liked me and I never liked them. In seventh and eighth grades they were the peckerheads who made junior high hell. Then they got into drugs and dropped out. I'm thinking the ones - the "burnouts" we called them - who lasted longer in school, weren't trying to bury traumatic memories.

I felt guilty in High School, I remember. Not about those kids and their problems, whatever they may have been. Back then, I was glad to have them out of my life. No, I felt guilty that I was smarter and stronger than almost everyone I knew, and I was guaranteed to go to Heaven. I didn't deserve any of that. There were people who worked out harder, studied harder and were tons better witnesses of the Love of Jesus than I was, but such were the facts.

Didn't take me long to blow all that shit up. Waiting to find out what Jesus had in mind for me to do with these gifts - and, particularly, what my idle hands found to do during that waiting - accounted for that.

And now... now that I know why those kids had those troubles, I feel guilty that I never reached out to them. I wasn't devoid of similar experiences. Some of us who'd experienced various kinds of abuse didn't use chemical drugs, we used Jesus instead. I'd say the evidence that I've seen, points to the theory that the severity, duration and type of abuse affect the outcome. I'm sure the professionals have beaten that dead horse to smithereens, but I'm just discovering the value of psychology myself.

Well, I gotta get the beanie ready for bed. (No school this week, so her mother and I aren't watching the clock.)

Update: You should go here to see what Stef has to say on this topic. You have the choice to watch his video, or read what he says in it. Or both. It's still a kick in the gut to hear my town spoken of in this context.

I've gotta recommend this guy

Dr. Dan Siegel. That's the audio page, you can navigate around from there.

[I figured I'd put this update here: Amusingly, considering that Siegel's work is all about how to make your brain work better, ...well, just look at this mess of a post!]

This is from his "about Dan" page:

Daniel J. Siegel received his medical degree from Harvard University and completed his postgraduate medical education at UCLA with training in pediatrics and child, adolescent and adult psychiatry. He served as a National Institute of Mental Health Research Fellow at UCLA, studying family interactions with an emphasis on how attachment experiences influence emotions, behavior, autobiographical memory and narrative.

Dr. Siegel’s psychotherapy practice includes children, adolescents, adults, couples, and families. He is currently a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine where he is on the faculty of the Center for Culture, Brain, and Development and the Co-Director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center. An award-winning educator, he is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and recipient of several other honorary fellowships. He is also the Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute, an educational organization that focuses on how the development of mindsight in individuals, families and communities can be enhanced by examining the interface of human relationships and basic biological processes.

Dr. Siegel has published extensively for the professional audience. He is the co-editor of a handbook of psychiatry and the author of numerous articles, chapters, and the internationally acclaimed text, The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience (Guilford, 1999). This book introduces the idea of interpersonal neurobiology and has been of interest to and utilized by a number of organizations, including the U.S. Department of Justice, The Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family, Microsoft and Google, early intervention programs and a range of clinical and research departments worldwide. He has been invited to lecture for the King of Thailand, Pope John Paul II, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

But there IS a way to make new people

Train children to have empathy.

Empathy is knowing what others are feeling. Sympathy is agreeing with that feeling. Agreeing is less important. Sometimes it's even dangerous.

The world is perishing because people ignore the feelings - the humanity - of others. We've imbibed too much of the attitudes of wife beaters [and torturers and psycho-killers - not to mention child abusers] from our culture.

One generation, taught kindness and respect by example by their parents, will completely transform the world. DeMause's research shows that those things have been improving at an accelerating pace since the beginning of history. It's not all hopeless.

I had another interesting dream last night.

Let's see what I can remember of it. I was reminded of it by another blogger who'll get credit for it if he wants it, but I don't yet feel free to reveal him here. If he looks here, he needs to check the place out for a bit and read the comments.

Anyway...

I was wandering around a park in a city somewhere. The place was secluded, but it seemed like there were houses beyond the trees. I can't remember how we came to set up our tent inside this enclosure (a wood frame around the bottom, plastic pipes rising from the corners which held clear plastic sheeting), but we were preparing to spend the night. The park was not crowded, but there were plenty of people around. I went to do something and when I came back the tent was not mine, or ours, or whatever. It was a big thing with flyes (not bugs; open flaps - there were no bugs and the weather was breezy and warm) and some guy that I knew I liked (meaning he was a friendly, cheerful guy, not that I had the hots for him) was lying on the floor. I didn't feel excluded from the place, but I didn't feel quite like I could make myself at home either.

Again I went to get something, probably something to sit on, and when I came back the place was as big as a small circus tent and people were putting a wooden floor under it. The guy - I think he was a light-toned black man, btw - was sitting up and getting ready to do some of the work. He did so. The place was becoming a center of activity.

Pretty soon it was a large barn with light gray-green walls and there was some sort of activity starting in it. Then there were no walls and all the people were putting in plumbing and installing appliances and wiring and such. Then my Dad, my Grandpa, my brother and some uncles started leveling the floor and I realized with some guilt that the thing had just been laid on the ground.

I got down in the excavation (I'm trying not to express any surprise, because I didn't feel any in the dream, but it hadn't been there before and I knew it - I kept going over all that as each phase of the dream proceeded) and I was helping with the jacks they were using; there was a scissor-jack and an electric hydraulic jack and another one that I never got a chance to look over. Dad, Grandpa and one or the other of my uncles or my brother were handling whichever jack I wasn't at the moment and discussing what needed to be done. I was doing my part wordlessly - I wasn't being ordered around. The knowledgable people just advised me.

Suddenly the floor started to shift and buckle. We all realized at the same moment that nobody had thought to put shoring timbers under the middle of the building. Everybody working inside bailed out and the whole thing turned into a pile of kindling. On the far end the ground looked kind of like a river had eroded away its bank under the building, but there was no river.

I was wondering how we were going to clean up the mess and start over - I was viewing the wreckage from above, floating over it - when I woke up.

BTW, I woke up alert and lively before the alarm went off. I'm told that that's a significant message from the unconscious in itself. So I went to start my day while trying to fix the details of the dream in my mind.

Original Sin! Now there's scientific proof of it!

I learned first about the University of Nottingham (isn't that appropriate) research from the Mises Institute, and now Kevin Hogan has beaten me to the punch on a follow up article. I should have know he'd be on it like a chicken on a june bug.

Kevin does a pretty good job expressing himself, but I've got to warn you, he hasn't read Eats, Shoots and Leaves. But I'll by-pass that issue and quote what he quotes:

"Anti-social punishment was rare in the most democratic societies and very common otherwise.

"Using the World Democracy Audit evaluation of countries' performance in political rights, civil liberties, press freedom and corruption, the top six performers among the countries studied were also in the lowest seven for anti-social punishment. These were the USA, UK, Germany, Denmark, Australia and Switzerland."

He adds: "Their results suggest that the success of democratic market societies may depend critically upon moral virtues as well as material interests, so the depiction of civil society as the sphere of 'naked self-interest' is radically incorrect."

Adapted from materials provided by University of Nottingham, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

University of Nottingham (2008, March 6). Cooperation, Punishment And Revenge In Economics And Society. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 7, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/03/080306183134.htm

The latter items in italics are Kevin's sources.

To see what I mean by "original sin," read how Kevin introduces the study. But, actually, I was keyed to my own analysis by the Mises Institute article Does Neuroscience Support Austrian Theory?

Oh! Crap! That's not the one that mentions the Nottingham Study. It is, however, very much the one that stimulated my thoughts as a matter important to my project of synthesizing the theories of Lutheranism, Objectivism and Libertarianism. I mentally filed (but, unfortunately, didn't physically file) the Nottingham study as evidence for my contention that Original Sin is, basically, the tendency to blame someone else for our own failings.

What did Eve do after she ate the fruit of The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? She blame the serpent. What did Adam do when he was caught? He blamed Eve. Did Cain shoulder the responibility for murdering Abel? He certainly shouldered the consequences, but I never read that he apologized.

Blaming somebody else and then stealing what they had a right to; that's the whole story of the Old Testament. The New Testament is saying, "Stop that crap! Right here! Right now!"

That's why I'm unwilling to let go of Christianity. It may be that we're carrying the "forgive and forget" message too far - or we think we should, and our history proves that we haven't carried it far enough - but it's a message that the world is literally dying to hear! And it's done wonders for Western Civilization.

Natural Spirituality

Whoever continually strives to achieve a clearer and clearer vision of reality and his or her place in it--whoever is pulled forward by a passion for such clarity--is, to that extent, leading a spiritual life. ...

Nathaniel Branden, The Art of Living Consciously.
Thanks to The Light of Reason.