Reading

So, I'm reading another psychology book.  I know, I know, you're all stunned by that revelation.  Honestly though, it's intriguing and a little scary too, in a comforting kind of way.  Does that make any sense?  The psychologist that wrote the current book I'm on specializes in the treatment of trauma survivors and it's odd, yet somehow consoling that I've found myself various times throughout the first hundred pages thinking, "oh, I do that too" or "wow, I'm not the only one with the brain of a 90 yr old" or "ah, so maybe that's why I do that."  Arm yourself with knowledge, as they say.  There are a few passages I've particularly identified with.  I guess I can share some.  I marked a few as I was reading.  I do that when I read these books and find something I can relate to.  It makes me feel a little more stable and a little less alone in the weird world of my mind.  Here are just a few, all from The Myth of Sanity - Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness by Martha Stout, Ph.D. which I'm reading now:

"Perhaps worst of all, as time passes we often feel that we are growing benumbed, that we have lost something - some element of vitality that used to be there.  Without talking about this very much with one another, we grow nostalgic for our own selves.  We try to remember the exuberance, and even the joy we used to feel in things.  And we cannot.  Mysteriously, and before we realize what is happening, our lives are transigured from places of imagination and hope into to-do lists, into day after day of just getting through it. Often we are able to envision only a long road of exhausting hurdes, that leads to somewhere we are no longer at all certain we even want to go.  Instead of having dreams, we merely protect ourselves. We expend our brief and precious life force in the practice of damage control.

And all because of traumatic events that occurred in the long-ago past, that ended in the long-ago past, and that, in actuality, threaten us with no present danger whatsoever.  How does this happen?  How do childhood and adolescent terrors that should have been over years ago manage to live on and make us crazy, and alienated from ourselves, in the present?

The answer, paradoxically, lies in a perfectly normal function of the mind known as dissociation, which is the universal human reaction to extreme fear or pain."
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"Prior to recovery some trauma survivors study, buy and stockpile weapons against outside threats.  Sometimes a certain special weapon will be concealed and carried with the person, as routinely as someone else might wear a wristwatch.  The concealed mace or knife or gun seems to be a defense against a horrible, nameless danger that never materializes, but is constantly expected, a testimony to the monstrous threat the individual knew in the past, and was unable to defend herself against." 
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"In Julia's case, though she had no questioned her poverty of memory for the past, she had begun to suspect even before she came into therapy that she was losing time in the present.  Probably this is because there are more external reality checks on the present than there are on the past.  From other people - and from radio, television, the internet, date books - there are ongoing reminders of the present time of day and the day of the week.  Markers of time in the past are less immediate, and sooner or later most dates and chronologies for the past begin to feel amorphous to us all.  It is hardly amazing that one should have forgotten something that happened twenty years ago.  But if a person lets on that she has no memory of an event that occurred this very week, friends and associates are unlikely to let such a lapse go unremarked."

Mich Has Been Thinking

So, I've been thinking. I know. *gasp* Thing is, I've been reading a few psychology and behavioral books lately and I now find myself wondering more and more about society, specifically western society.

I read a book recently titled The Sociopath Next Door and in it the psychologist discussed how the tendency to become a sociopath is merely 50% genetic, at the most. Then the other 50% is what exactly? Learned? It seems more than likely when you look at the fact that eastern countries, where the group as a whole is focused on more, have a lower case of sociopaths than those in the west. What are we doing to ourselves? And when did the focus shift from caring about each other, to caring solely about ourselves, or was it always this way? And I don't mean caring about your best friend or your husband or your child. I mean caring about others simply because they are human, strangers and loved ones alike.

For example, not to rip on my husband, because I do love him and he is a good person, but he's very resistant to helping others sometimes. Partially because he feels they should learn to help themselves, but also because it's not something he feels should be his problem. When we discuss the fact that I help out our elderly neighbors when they need it he seems a bit puzzled as to why I feel the need to help in the first place. He'll say things like, “why can't their kids do it?” or “they can hire someone.” Yet, if one of his friends needs help, he's always the first too offer assistance. We've helped move friends of his on various occasions, loaned money, allowed a few of them to crash on our couch when they needed to. Now, I know the difference is that he has an emotionally attachment to his friends, but shouldn't we all have an emotional attachment to each other simply because we're all people? Am I the only idealistic loon that feels this way?