[lit-ideas] Re: Stand Close to Me
- From: Andy Amago <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2007 01:47:53 -0500 (GMT-05:00)
-----Original Message-----
>From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
>Sent: Jan 29, 2007 12:18 AM
>To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Stand Close to Me
>
>Whoops. That should have been "tails of the normal distribution."
>Wonder what kind of Freudian slip substituting "tales" was.
>
>John
>
>On 1/29/07, John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Andy, I actually agree with about 80% of what you say here.
>>
>> On 1/29/07, Andy Amago <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> > Maturity comes from a sense of safety in childhood. Children who don't
>> > feel safe (are beaten, abused in any form, including and especially
>> > sexually) who are scared all the time, cannot grow up emotionally. They
>> > become frozen at the time of the trauma, whatever the age. Their bodies
>> > grow and their cognitive ability grows, but emotionally they're stuck at
>> > the age of the trauma, even if it's passive trauma.
>>
>> This is likely but not inevitable. When my daughter was a toddler, we
>> were living in New Haven, CT, where my wife was a graduate student at
>> Yale. An anthropologist as well as a dad, I talked about this issue
>> with some folks at the Yale Medical School. I was told that doctors
>> are continually amazed by kids at the tales of the normal
>> distribution: those who grow up in great environments and turn out
>> rotten anyway and those who grow up golden in lousy environments.
>>
>> >
Medical school people are hardly the ones to ask for advice on child rearing.
When there's a rotten environment and the kid turns out well there's usually
something compensating somewhere. Also, most kids from rotten environments
don't turn out that well, or they're very compromised anyway. Also, things
look great on the outside that aren't so wonderful on the inside. Case in
point: celebrities, the Royals, the sociopaths who run our corporations and our
country and plain ordinary people who don't divulge their internal demons but
who function just fine on the outside. The old expression is, the job is the
last thing to go. If we go to medical doctors for advice on emotions, then
let's go to psychotherapists for advice on livers and ear infections.
>> > It also speaks to the fact that we don't have a choice of who we fall in
>> > love with, because when we fall in love we're simply recreating the
>> > conflicts we grew up with. None of us realizes we have a conflict until
>> > we hit a crisis point. That's why crisis is good, because it shakes
>> > people out of the doldrums. Al Gore uses this concept in his movie on
>> > global warming when he has the cartoon frog heating up in a beaker of
>> > water. The frog will just sit there until the water is hot enough that it
>> > jumps out.
>>
>> I haven't yet seen the movie; but the usual image of the frog in the
>> beaker is that the water slowly gets warmer until the frog, who hasn't
>> noticed what's going on, is cooked, i.e., dead.
>>
>>
>> >
Correct. Even as I was typing it I had this imagine of Al Gore reaching in and
pulling out the frog. It makes the case either way, that people simply die in
their situation unless a crisis precipitates change.
>> > The bottom line is, maturity comes out of a sense of safety in childhood,
>> > and there is precious little safety for children out there. It's bad
>> > enough here in the U.S. Just imagine what it's like for those poor kids
>> > in Iraq or Palestine or South America with their never ending revolutions
>> > or in Africa, that was originally ripped to shreds by Europe. And now we
>> > want to traumatize even more people by invading Iran. We need to be
>> > spreading peace, not war, helping societies improve. Instead our mature
>> > war mongering selves only want to beat everything into submission.
>>
>> Can't help asking: Is this why you keep pounding away, insisting that
>> we all accept your view of things?
>>
I don't understand your question. And why do you call it pounding away and
"[my] view of things"? Is this not self evident, that people don't exactly
flourish in situations of PTSD, and there's a lot of PTSD out there? Always
has been and growing ever worse? Does this not speak to a self perpetuating
cycle; PTSD creates distressed people who create more PTSD? This is hardly
"my" view of things.
>> > Think Mrs. Robinson.
>>
>> Ah, Mrs. Robinson. Very attractive that one. But among my adolescent
>> fantasies, Emma Peel remains supreme.
>>
Boy, are we talking at cross purposes. Mrs. Robinson was seducing someone half
her age. She's depicted as an angry, possessive, broken down drunk. Hardly
attractive. I wasn't talking about adolescent fantasies but about sex abuse.
Emma Peel is a cartoon character. Maggie May is more to the point.
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