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

[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.