Betrayal, loneliness, distance…

Among a lot of other things I have been thinking on having nothing to say to a human being standing near. The feeling of loneliness this can create.

Struck me that Jennifer Freyd had said something on this theme I thought (about things you can’t talk about).

She writes in the chapter “Removing Blinders, Becoming Connected” at page 194 in her book “Betrayal Blindness – The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse”:

“If you are blind to the evidence that your intimate partner is having an affair, you may manage to keep the relationship from ending. But what sort of relationship is it, and what purpose does it serve?”

Having nothing to say to each other, becoming distant because you exclude (or have to hide) important things…

This has nothing directly with me to do.

The dizziness of freedom, more about contempt for weakness and blaming the victim…

Earlier many human beings were spared from the painful choice situations because everything was embedded in a frame that was commonly decided. Assuredly this was on good and bad.

Now a new sort of loneliness is forced upon a lot of people – we are forced to choose (is this freedom? Or what sort of "freedom") and "judge" about almost everything, from the color of the toothbrush to the choice of phone company and pension insurances. This is called forced reflexivity by sociologists.

The numbers of choice-situations have become more, increased (a lot), and also become more complicated. Compared to earlier.

The responsibility weighs heavily upon the individual.

Sisyphus’s torment is rather confusion more than heavy work.

The autonomous human being the existentialists were talking about is in its way becoming replaced with the constantly insecure human being. She isn’t the one choosing between clear alternatives, but rather more and more irresolute and hesitating (if she doesn’t hide this both to herself and to other people).

Addition: who are gaining most on this insecurity and confusedness?

The choice situations don’t correspond with assets of time for reflections. Sisyphus the younger is at risk of becoming hit by paralysis over how to act.

If Sisyphus the younger becomes sick, stressed to pieces or unhappy depends entirely upon himself. And if he becomes unemployed this is due to lack of success in getting a winning personality and thus being capable of walking successfully from an interview after having written an impressing curriculum vitae. If he is insecure or being in agony over the future it’s because he isn’t good enough at getting friends, he fails thinking positively, that he hasn’t succeeded in the art of making impressions on other people OR because he has problems expressing himself.

Quickly the new market’s entrepreneurs and life style coaches are there to exploit Sisyphus the younger's situation. New markets are profiting on and maybe even trying to increase his feelings of insecurity and confusedness.

My addition: yes, for the ones who can afford these coaches and can pay for advices and therapy. The others are left behind, entirely. And this is their fault entirely. Has nothing with structures to do!?

No wonder if people resort to magical thinking? And also see the leaning back indifference in a recent posting; "Indifference as hidden violence..."

Struck me, we have an expression here called "collective punishment"... And it seems as this expression isn't ours exclusively!! :)

When I was searching for a special article I found this one "Rich Get Poorer. Poor Disappear" ending like this:

"If that sounds politically unfeasible, consider this: When Clinton was cutting welfare and food stamps in the 90s, the poor were still an easily marginalized group, subjected to the nastiest sorts of racial and gender stereotyping. They were lazy, promiscuous, addicted, deadbeats, as whole choruses of conservative experts announced. Thanks to the recession, however – and I knew there had to be a bright side – the ranks of the poor are swelling every day with failed business owners, office workers, salespeople, and long-time homeowners. Stereotype that! As the poor and the formerly middle class Nouveau Poor become the American majority, they will finally have the clout to get their needs met."

Chomsky on applying standards on ourselves we apply to others (hmmm...):

Avariciousness…

[Slightly edited October 1]. Quickly written after a long day at work: The Swedish leader-writer and priest Helle Klein writes in her blog that she thinks the economism gets both material and existential consequences.

She wonders how what’s now going on in the current financial crisis will end.

“The greediness digs its own grave – unfortunately many small-savers [??] are drawn with in this crisis.”

In a leader chronicle yesterday she writes about that “The Capitalism Destroys the Love.”

The Swedish debater and journalist Dan Josefsson said at the book-fair in Gothenburg recently that:

“Loneliness is a malignant tumour on our society.”

He and a psychotherapist have written a book together called something like “The Secrecy –from glance to lasting relation” (if we just "take ourselves in the collar" as we say here and become the clever girls and boys we will manage it!!! My interpretation from what I read about the book. Of course; all who haven't been so badly hurt will manage this, but those who were more badly treated... What about them?). Addition October 9: the home site for this book, see here.

In the book flood from this year’s fair (mass?) the need of help with relations appears. The human beings of today seem to have difficulties with the love –not with sex, kicks of happiness or enjoyment, but with lasting and deep relations.

Of 9 million people in Sweden 2, 5 million are living in one-person households. Over 1, 5 million of these have hardly any contact with their families. 200,000 say they don’t have any friends.

A lot of people call help-phones. All sorts of people are calling: young, old, people born in Sweden and abroad, men and women. Many carry a huge agony. The dismounting of the psychiatry is shown clearly. Other people are struggling with their addiction(s). Strikingly many women are drinking too much. But obviously many are merely alone. They have nobody to talk with. They are longing for connection beyond themselves.

Loneliness is the Western world’s big problem child. We have everything, but not. The affluence of things has to compensate for broken relations (but more and more people don’t have material things either, we are returning more and more to the class-society again).

However, all those offers of therapy, lifestyle coaching and self-realization say that we have to change ourselves, not the society * (the tendency to blame ourselves is strengthened! Very practical for the ones in power on all levels).

If one topic of conversation in our time is the loneliness, the other is the financial crisis. The bank system in USA is breaking down and the confidence for the societal economies is crashing.

The greediness, avariciousness has dug its own grave.

Maybe these two societal phenomena – the loneliness and the greediness - belong together?

“The capitalism is a condition in the world and in the soul”

Franz Kafka once claimed.

His provoking metaphor hold things together we use to hold apart – the economic and the existential aspects/things.

One of Klein’s teachers at the university, Per Frostin, once wrote an essay with the heading “The Capitalism Chokes the Love.”

He searched for the talk in society and church about the economism’s and consumism’s influence not only on the societal solidarity but also on our ability to maintain loving relations, enter into marriages and devote ourselves to family life.

This essay, published more than twenty years ago, feels more burning today than ever Klein thinks.

Our quarter-of-a-year-capitalism is not only a neoliberal economical system but also an ideology with a view on man which says: go in for, invest in yourself, and seek for the largest profit for your own sake.

Those ideals are the opposite of solidarity and love. The calculated egoism is breaking both the societal economies and human-between-relations down.

What has Alice Miller said about these things?? Is material things a substitute for other things? For instance love?

* In many circumstances quite moralistic - and not least unemphatic.

"I can - why can't you???"

Addition October 1: read this article too (in Swedish). And earlier posts on self-justification (the right to abuse?). And under the label moderators. See the blog Freakonomics on "In the Battle of the Sexes, Partians Outearn Peacemakers."

The American psychotherapist Jean Jenson writes that

"And the best is that the better our mental health becomes, the more we dissociate from power exercise and violence [in whatever form]."

And it was that with perverted needs and substitutes... Denial of needs "I don't need..." And as I don't have any needs I can't get hurt. And see the phenomenon divide and rule. Something we probably learned as children: siblings were played out against each other, more or less deliberately and/or consciously. A power-tool.

Read George Montbiot in "Congress Confronts its Contradictions."

How would we have reacted and resonated and how would the society and world have looked like if a sound development had occurred, i.e., if we had been truly and genuinely respectfully treated as very small kids and up? If more people had been? Because this kind of truly respectful (non-authoritarian) treatment is very rare?

A Swedish journalist said something about conservatism...

Arthur Silber wrote something interesting:

"When people say adults behave and think like children, what they more properly mean is that they behave and think like children who are profoundly damaged -- children who are already made emotionally numb by the typical kind of emotional abuse to which most children are subjected many times a day, children who have been forced to deny their own pain simply to survive, and who are therefore unable to grasp the pain of others. Most adults were once such children; one of the ways the damage reveals itself when they become adults is the denial described above... /.../

Many children believe that 'wishing will make it so,' just as they believe that there are no consequences for their actions that cannot be undone. But again, children who believe this are those children who are already damaged. Healthy children do not think in this manner. But most of us were greatly damaged as children, and most of us deny what ought to be unavoidable truths because we learned to do this in our earliest years of life./…/

…most Americans -- and our entire governing class and almost all commentators and bloggers -- refuse to grasp them. It is as if these ideas are written in a dead language. Certainly, the language is dead to them, for they have made themselves incapable of understanding it. To recognize a truth of this kind threatens the mechanism of denial that lies at the very center of their sense of themselves, at the very center of their identity. So the truth cannot be acknowledged.”

With a (very?) low status…

In a review on a dissertation “Att leva som utbränd” or “Living as burnout” by Mia-Marie Hammarlin it stands (my maybe a little free translation):

“Being burnout is feminized with the help of media, where the word ‘burnout’ gets a clear low status face – the middle age woman in public sector. Men retire to loneliness [solitude] and seem to be afraid of the connection with shame [and nerve weaknesses]. ‘Real chaps don’t get stricken with nerve weaknesses.’”

This review triggered a lot of thoughts and emotions, not only connected to the topic burnout. Here are some of those reactions and thoughts. It resulted in a lot of threads. And will maybe result in more postings than this one. So this posting is loudly thinking once again, and in many directions.

Even if it isn’t straight outspoken one can hear (or is this projection, a symbolic reaction/interpretation from my part?):

“What weakling you are! Why not just… One can seek oneself to other environments! To get more healthy and sound you have to seek yourself to a healthy and sound environment![what that is? If it exists and where.]”

The contempt for weakness - and for all those incapable of controlling themselves!! Something we have seen here around the debate about social insurances, things I am reacting very strongly and angrily at.

Women are since long schooled to stay (vistas) in powerless places it stood in the review. 35 years ago women overly trained in a traditional patriarchal pattern went right out into the public sector and was locked in there. Their own fault? How stupid of them! Blaming themselves too: How stupid of me! My own fault! I should have been able to handle it better! See the Primary defence.

The author of the dissertation seems to mean that being burnout is deeply embedded in sex and class problems. And wonders if depression and diffuse aches and pains can be an expression for female dissatisfaction, if these things can’t be seen as downright political actions, as a sort of demonstrations.

I don’t know, maybe they are, but if so not consciously?

And the reviewer writes that she wants to scream

“OF COURSE!”

as a reply, and she also hear a choir of female anger, furiously filling in in her scream.

Yes, reading this triggered a lot of thoughts and probably emotions around things that have happened and things I have experienced recently!!

About blaming the victim, false power denial of needs, lack of empathy and understanding/enlightenment - and once again - contempt for weakness.

And all these phenomena are there for to protect the ones reacting (reacting with contempt and rejection, wanting to educate and maybe also punish the ones not having any “stake” as we say) against the truth, a too painful truth, a SO painful truth so we need to protect ourselves against it. Seeing it from the Miller-point-of-view!

But these protections (or defences) turn to problems, not only for ourselves but also for other people (self-destructiveness and destructiveness), so if not sooner we ought to work on this now as adults. Because they can result and have resulted in political decisions with grave and severe consequences and continue to result in such things.

Thinking further and loudly in an attempt to understand and grasp these phenomena (how can people be so stupid and insensitive?): And contempt for weakness is also a protection: a protection against the realization and to this connected feelings on HOW in fact powerless the child once was and how this power and helplessness was used by the ones that were/are supposed to care for us the most. Realizations we and many want to avoid at all costs. With all what that means.

In circles where people are supposed to be enlightened I have heard things in the style and with the meaning (in my feeling and interpretation):

“But take yourself in the collar!! The question is about seeking oneself to an environment which is healthier, with healthier people.”

And if one doesn’t succeed in this… Then one is only to blame oneself?
And I have heard from those (men) that it’s the mothers’ fault how things are. Yes, that’s true, the mother is the first one in a child’s life… Does this mean that dads – and men – have no responsibilities thus?

But don’t we all have responsibilities each one of us, and the same responsibilities and should also have the exact same demands on us, no more or no less, whether we are women or men? And especially as or if we are grown ups! We all have responsibilities to contribute in making things better, and each of us have a responsibility for ourselves? And exactly the same responsibility?

But then, if we actually have those means in all circumstances is another question and to what degree? The structures can contribute to less power – in some circumstances? Oh, what am I after?

The more power you have the more harm you can do? And some don’t have any other power than the one over their children!

Fields of Gold.

You'll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You'll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we walk in fields of gold
So she took her love for to gaze awhile
Upon the fields of barley
In his arms she fell as her hair came down
Among the fields of gold

Will you stay with me, will you be my love
Among the fields of barley?
We'll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we lie in fields of gold
See the west wind move like a lover so
Upon the fields of barley
Feel her body rise when you kiss her mouth
Among the fields of gold

I never made promises lightly
And there have been some that I've broken
But I swear in the days still left
We'll walk in fields of gold
We'll walk in fields of gold

Many years have passed since those summer days
Among the fields of barley
See the children run as the sun goes down
Among the fields of gold
You'll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You can tell the sun in his jealous sky
When we walked in fields of gold
When we walked in fields of gold
When we walked in fields of gold