Colqhoun's Story

[zustifer]

YES I CAN POST

Here's a pretty neat article (though not terribly meaty) about people's ideas of their own 'life narratives'. I'm amused to find that my conscious mind is at about the level of a preadolescent in this regard:

[M]ost people do not begin to see themselves in the midst of a tale with a beginning, middle and eventual end until they are teenagers. “Younger kids see themselves in terms of broad, stable traits: ‘I like baseball but not soccer,’ ” said Kate McLean [.]

Are you guys better at this?
It's also unsettling, later, when it's brought up that people who see their life problems as being outside themselves (even psychological ones) have a better chance of overcoming them.

They described their problem, whether depression or an eating disorder, as coming on suddenly, as if out of nowhere. They characterized their difficulty as if it were an outside enemy, often giving it a name (the black dog, the walk of shame). And eventually they conquered it.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

The latter is something that makes unbeliever-me very uncomfortable about Alcoholics Anonymous and the idea that you have to believe in something greater than yourself in order to stop fucking up your life.

As for the first one, i've striven to move away from that sort of black-and-white viewpoint for the last fifteen years or so. What makes you say that you're stuck at a preadolescent mental level?

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Oh, which view are you saying is black and white? I just meant I'm better with stable traits than I am with narrative (viz. the Robocop chart (http://bubbl.us/view.php?sid=10299&pw=yagQrcq8SV.IUOTJQcWFZZGNKRTJTLg)). I think I was being more tongue-in-cheekily self-deprecating than anything, but if you know more about this, please tell!

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

[hey, i was gonna reply to this... now i am!]

I meant the "“Younger kids see themselves in terms of broad, stable traits: ‘I like baseball but not soccer,’ ” said Kate McLean" bit. When you're a kid, things don't have shades. If you're asked what your favorite something is, you're often quick with an answer. As an adult, it usually ends up being, "Well, i dunno.... it depends on stuff."

I think it's weird, though, because i think adults tend to see themselves in terms of broad, stable traits, too, and with more reason, since we're older and more set in our ways. Anyway, it's probably just a matter of describing the differences in terms i find more acceptable, because i'm a huge jerk, or something.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

No, that's a good point.
The only examples I can think of in regards to 'favorite thing' have to do with a lot of recent sampling of those things; like, you are constantly eating skittles, so you are given loads of opportunity to decide which color is the best. (If your favorite changes from red to purple over a summer, this might still be noteworthy, but maybe the new hierarchy is more important than the idea that you got sort of sick of red ones? I don't know.)
And you're always in contact with your toys, so it's easy to work out which is your favorite. It's not as if we, adults, are just constantly, uh, what, going to restaurants? movies? that sort of thing. Gaps between experiences make comparisons harder.
I suspect this just means that whenever we form an opinion about what we like, though, that we keep it indefinitely.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The psychological function of the Higher Power business may be to do the same kind of trick as the third-person viewpoint--to get past the block of thinking "oh, come on, how could I manage to do that?" It's easier to swallow if you imagine God's grace coming down and changing you instead of you changing yourself.

A while I ago I was thinking along these lines about the actual function of faith, and the value that might be extracted from it apart from committing to some arbitrary metaphysics. I think a large part of faith might be a sort of abstraction mechanism that lets us attack large problems without being emotionally overwhelmed, by arranging to worry about only one piece of the problem at a time. Believing in gods might just provide an easier hook to hang this on.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Obviously, what I have just formulated here is the Dumbo's Magic Feather theory of religious experience.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The first person/third person thing rings true. I tend to judge my own moral failings and mistakes much more harshly than I would the same things done by somebody else. To some extent I think that's justified--my own behavior is what I can control, so it makes sense to give it more scrutiny--but I can carry it beyond all reasonable bounds; I still sometimes castigate myself for things I did when I was 8-10 years old, and some things I did and said in my late teens and early twenties, 15-20 years ago when I knew significantly less about the business of living, still evoke such raw feelings of shame that they're hard to talk about.

Visualizing my actions in the third person would tend to make me judge myself as I would another person, and I'm much kinder about that.

On the other hand, there are also people for whom it's the other way around, who judge themselves much more kindly than they do third parties. I think they are colloquially known as "assholes". I wonder if the exercise would be as therapeutic for them--it might dampen their assholery.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the third person concept was probably my favorite thing in the article. Pleased also to have another tool to deal with social weirdness.