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?

[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.