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<blockquote data-quote="Copabanana" data-source="post: 679547" data-attributes="member: 18958"><p>I laughed here. Thank you. There were two different experiments.</p><p></p><p>The first was by Stanley Milgram, I think his name was. The second was the Stanford Prisoner experiment (by Philip Zimbardo, a Psychology professor there, where students were randomly assigned to be either guards or prisoners.</p><p></p><p>I knew the man who had run that experiment at Stanford. His name is Craig Haney. He was a graduate student in Psychology at that time. The participation in the experiment changed the course of his life. He decided afterward to study law and since that time, maybe 40 years, he has worked for prisoners' rights and prison reform.</p><p></p><p>When they had set up the experiment, they had expected some effect, but nothing like they got. How rapidly and completely each individual in each group gave up their personal will and descended into sadism or abandoned their own autonomy and self-respect. They sacrificed themselves on cue. How do you walk that back, knowing this?</p><p></p><p>They were horrified, those that watched. The experiment was a profound success, and at once a lamentable tragedy.</p><p></p><p>What seemed to injure the participants was that they came to doubt themselves. Their identities that they thought were their own. They come to see themselves as constructs and to fear who they could really be. Because if you can give up yourself so easily, lose who you are, and throw it away? Who are you?</p><p></p><p>Which is a perfect segway into this:</p><p></p><p>See. All life really is is a series of choices that define us.</p><p></p><p>The problem is that we do not necessarily know what is at stake. So there is serendipity involved. Or maybe intuition.</p><p></p><p>Because those students had no way of knowing that they might be irreparably harmed, and their lives changed by that one choice. Like your D H going to Vietnam. It was an innocent choice, to do good and be responsible. And from that came, all of the rest. His life.</p><p></p><p>I am remembering here a sad story: When I was say 21, I acquired a big black puppy in front of a grocery store. Max, I named him. He became way more than I could control. At some point I decided he was a black and tan coon hound, because he was a fantastic tracker. I would leave him at home, and walk to the University maybe 8 blocks away, and then cross the campus, another 8 blocks. I would ascend in the library elevator 3 stories. Begin to study, and an hour later, Max would show up. He had tracked me, rode the elevator up, and appear.</p><p></p><p>He had become aggressive too. I was over my head. So my step-father located a ranch family who were interested in adopting Max, and I assented, sadly. I realized this was a great chance for Max, to hunt and live on a large ranch. I drove with him and presented him to the family and said this: If you decide to not keep him, I request that you contact me so that I can take him. You see, I felt responsible for him. They agreed.</p><p></p><p>Two weeks later I called to check on him. He was gone. Where is he? Well we gave him to xxx and we think he is living in xxx. We do not know the name or the address. Or the phone number.</p><p></p><p>I was bereft. I drove through the streets of that time, hoping I could spot him, without success.</p><p></p><p>I became depressed. I felt that I had failed Max and I had been betrayed. That my best efforts to take responsible for him had been ruined beyond my control. I knew that it was not my fault but who else to blame? I had been betrayed, and I had no control what so ever. I felt as if I had abandoned my child. I became very depressed.</p><p></p><p>I called a university in a nearby city that had a clinic and requested an appointment. The intake psychologist told me there was an opportunity to be seen more quickly if I agreed to be part of a teaching activity. I would be seen by the professor. Not knowing what it could be, I said yes.</p><p></p><p>When I arrived at the university for my appointment the set up was that I would be interviewed by the psychiatry instructor for the medical school. The students, it was like a seminar, viewed the proceedings behind a glass window. I knew they were there, I could vaguely see them.</p><p></p><p>The psychiatrist began the therapy. I remember his wanting to make my grief about something in my childhood, in my life. I kept repeating, it is about my dog. I believe I let my dog down. I let myself down. (I was no more than 22 years old.) Who does your dog represent, he asked? My dog. I answered.</p><p></p><p>He kept forcing it. I kept resisting it. There was more than one session, each with the same goal, to get me to cop to whatever it is that the psychiatrist thought was the truth. I kept refusing to give up the right answer.</p><p></p><p>I kept saying: I had a responsibility to my dog, which I wanted to keep. I was lied to and there is nothing I can do to fix this. I am depressed because I feel the victim of a circumstance that is not in my making. That I cannot fix.</p><p></p><p>Well, my situation had gotten worse, because remember, all of this was being witnessed by students not too much older than I. Now, my problems were compounded because I felt shame. I felt self-hatred because I had agreed to submitting to this. I felt shame at my own sense of self-importance, and perhaps even exhibitionism, that I had agreed to this abusive set up.</p><p></p><p>So after a few sessions, I forget how many, I refused to go back. I told the procurer-psychologist that I would no longer return to that instructional setting, but that I needed to continue with a therapist in actual therapeutic conditions, not on display. I insisted that the teacher see me as a patient, to deal with the mess he had helped me make of myself because of this circus-exhibition that I had agreed to, in order to get treatment. He refused.</p><p></p><p>I would never return. For years I felt shame about my part in this. It is one reason that I mistrust and disrespect psychiatry. But still seek them out still. Why?</p><p>What you refer to here Cedar, is being accused as heretic, or accusing ourselves as such.</p><p></p><p>What is a heretic? A non-believer or somebody that betrays the true G-d? I will look it up when I leave here. I remember that the colonies were settled by many who had been denounced as heretics.</p><p></p><p>So this would make sense, if the mother seeks and demands god-like powers, and she is disobeyed, even in our own minds, this would be tantamount to heresy.</p><p>Is this the heresy? In our own heads, having drawn a line in the sand?</p><p>Because we would not believe in nor accept our mothers' powers and defied them, even if only in our own minds?</p><p></p><p>Is this the crime? Defiance.</p><p>I had never thought of it this way. I ran after her to tell her who I am. I proclaimed it. (I am still slightly embarrassed, but better that than afraid.)</p><p>What a good, good woman to tell you. I am sorry for her. She was a victim of your mother.</p><p>Yes.</p><p></p><p>How profound is that, Cedar? You are speaking here about your sense, your belief that your family is actually not all that interesting to you. You are feeling a bit superior here, I think, and wondering if that is your crime. You are speculating that your family dinner, in all of its elegance, might well have been to compensate the rather mundane guests who would show up. Actually boorish and boring. So was this a part of the heresy, too? That we did not really embrace their creed, love of self and for the self, without limit? Not stopping at anything?</p><p>So, is this the crime, Cedar, knowing your own feelings about them?</p><p>"people who would do what they did because that is who they are" and who they were was all we had. Imagine what that kind of ambivalence would cost a child. Seeing and not seeing. That is why we do what we do with the sisters. See them, watch them, recognize once. And then we undue what we have seen, un-know what we know. Because a child would not have the capacity to hold that kind of understanding within her, without handling it with a defense mechanism: most likely denial.</p><p>And that child would then attack herself for the crimes she had seen, possibly, quite possibly committed against her very self.</p><p></p><p>So they would be her crimes. Because of course she could not feel them to be her parents'. Because she would have nobody and nowhere to live. So by internalizing what she had seen and known, she would feel this to be her own crime. That she is concealing. When in fact she had been its victim.</p><p>Yea. Cedar and Dolly!!!</p><p>We become perpetrators against ourselves and there is no way out. Are you still beating your wife?</p><p></p><p>D H lived that false accusation for real. How very, very hard. M lived that, too, at the hands of his wife. Who told all of his children that he had done wrong and bad things. To her and to them. Which everybody knew were not true. And for years M had believed he had lost his kids.</p><p></p><p>It is this that he cannot forgive.</p><p></p><p>His wife is ill now (let me restate here that he has not seen her for 12 years or so and does not speak to her. He has requested a divorce but she will not assent nor speak to him about it. She has an enlarged heart.</p><p></p><p>I cannot but believe in my secret heart that this is a manipulation. (Except M does know she has a heart condition. Then why does she run in marathons?</p><p></p><p>Why do his children keep calling him to tell him? He says, What can I do? And then another kid calls to ask for money to pay for the birth of her next child. He asked her? Where is your husband, the father? Yes. This is profound. I do not quite understand it, but I know it to be profound.</p><p>I felt it was my own fault.</p><p>Yes. And all kinds of instructions and consumer warnings and threats.</p><p>I cannot fathom it Cedar. Honestly, I cannot. What enormous courage. How do little tiny girls have the courage, even know that they can defy, become heretics in their own minds. At the expense of themselves but not their everlasting souls?</p><p>Yes. This is the essential nature. All that had to happen for Dolly, was that her essential nature unfold.</p><p></p><p>That is why the recent posts of New Leaf are so important. Because there are self-accusations being made about essential qualities, that may be good or may be very bad.</p><p></p><p>We have each of us already mis-labeled those qualities in ourselves. And we claim we are confused about their aspect in others. That is what has to be cleaned up.</p><p>In each of us.</p><p>My sister looks for real. She acts like Hillary Clinton. Unless you think Hillary Clinton is bluffing. I do not think so.</p><p></p><p>I think these people are constructed differently. They are segmented. Like those circle diagrams, the overlapping circles, which have a name I have forgotten. Their senses of themselves as in the world do not overlap. Ours do. We can drill down and we do. Their shame, conflict, whatever, do not converge. It is not a bluff. It is that segment that they are able to manifest, which is un-modulated by shame, or guilt, or anxiety. It may be a sham, but it is not a bluff.</p><p>But I still do not understand why I did it. Was it to show up? Was it defiance of the shame and fear? Was it to show myself who I really am? I guess. If I am the only audience that there really is.</p><p>So, that is what you think I did. I made a decision to be real and to speak for myself.</p><p>Yes.</p><p>Yes.</p><p>Yes. Or the necessity to run away, or to recognize that there was nobody there that really loved us or protected us. We could not do either. So we undermine our real perceptions and our real selves.</p><p>But you chose for them, because you could not choose for yourself. If you had, you would have felt alone in the world. You were too little to be alone in the world, Cedar, and so was I.</p><p>I hate secrets. Is it more than you have hinted at, that you knew them to be "not much?"Or is it that you hated them and held them in contempt and that all of the fantasy about the family dinner was just so much perfume to cover up the stench.</p><p>Well, this is the most interesting of all.</p><p></p><p>Do we construct the idea of the vicious crime against ourselves as a kind of stop sign, a deterrent, so that we go no further.</p><p></p><p><em>This is your brain on drugs</em>. Remember those commercials. With the egg being fried in the pan.</p><p></p><p>A threat. Actually not that effective. I doubt if any one person was deterred. Were we? Or is just all a grand theater, to give the appearance <em>to ourselves of self-destruction so it looks to us that we have complied</em>, when we have done no such thing.</p><p></p><p>Thank you, Cedar. Excellent post.</p><p></p><p>COPA</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Copabanana, post: 679547, member: 18958"] I laughed here. Thank you. There were two different experiments. The first was by Stanley Milgram, I think his name was. The second was the Stanford Prisoner experiment (by Philip Zimbardo, a Psychology professor there, where students were randomly assigned to be either guards or prisoners. I knew the man who had run that experiment at Stanford. His name is Craig Haney. He was a graduate student in Psychology at that time. The participation in the experiment changed the course of his life. He decided afterward to study law and since that time, maybe 40 years, he has worked for prisoners' rights and prison reform. When they had set up the experiment, they had expected some effect, but nothing like they got. How rapidly and completely each individual in each group gave up their personal will and descended into sadism or abandoned their own autonomy and self-respect. They sacrificed themselves on cue. How do you walk that back, knowing this? They were horrified, those that watched. The experiment was a profound success, and at once a lamentable tragedy. What seemed to injure the participants was that they came to doubt themselves. Their identities that they thought were their own. They come to see themselves as constructs and to fear who they could really be. Because if you can give up yourself so easily, lose who you are, and throw it away? Who are you? Which is a perfect segway into this: See. All life really is is a series of choices that define us. The problem is that we do not necessarily know what is at stake. So there is serendipity involved. Or maybe intuition. Because those students had no way of knowing that they might be irreparably harmed, and their lives changed by that one choice. Like your D H going to Vietnam. It was an innocent choice, to do good and be responsible. And from that came, all of the rest. His life. I am remembering here a sad story: When I was say 21, I acquired a big black puppy in front of a grocery store. Max, I named him. He became way more than I could control. At some point I decided he was a black and tan coon hound, because he was a fantastic tracker. I would leave him at home, and walk to the University maybe 8 blocks away, and then cross the campus, another 8 blocks. I would ascend in the library elevator 3 stories. Begin to study, and an hour later, Max would show up. He had tracked me, rode the elevator up, and appear. He had become aggressive too. I was over my head. So my step-father located a ranch family who were interested in adopting Max, and I assented, sadly. I realized this was a great chance for Max, to hunt and live on a large ranch. I drove with him and presented him to the family and said this: If you decide to not keep him, I request that you contact me so that I can take him. You see, I felt responsible for him. They agreed. Two weeks later I called to check on him. He was gone. Where is he? Well we gave him to xxx and we think he is living in xxx. We do not know the name or the address. Or the phone number. I was bereft. I drove through the streets of that time, hoping I could spot him, without success. I became depressed. I felt that I had failed Max and I had been betrayed. That my best efforts to take responsible for him had been ruined beyond my control. I knew that it was not my fault but who else to blame? I had been betrayed, and I had no control what so ever. I felt as if I had abandoned my child. I became very depressed. I called a university in a nearby city that had a clinic and requested an appointment. The intake psychologist told me there was an opportunity to be seen more quickly if I agreed to be part of a teaching activity. I would be seen by the professor. Not knowing what it could be, I said yes. When I arrived at the university for my appointment the set up was that I would be interviewed by the psychiatry instructor for the medical school. The students, it was like a seminar, viewed the proceedings behind a glass window. I knew they were there, I could vaguely see them. The psychiatrist began the therapy. I remember his wanting to make my grief about something in my childhood, in my life. I kept repeating, it is about my dog. I believe I let my dog down. I let myself down. (I was no more than 22 years old.) Who does your dog represent, he asked? My dog. I answered. He kept forcing it. I kept resisting it. There was more than one session, each with the same goal, to get me to cop to whatever it is that the psychiatrist thought was the truth. I kept refusing to give up the right answer. I kept saying: I had a responsibility to my dog, which I wanted to keep. I was lied to and there is nothing I can do to fix this. I am depressed because I feel the victim of a circumstance that is not in my making. That I cannot fix. Well, my situation had gotten worse, because remember, all of this was being witnessed by students not too much older than I. Now, my problems were compounded because I felt shame. I felt self-hatred because I had agreed to submitting to this. I felt shame at my own sense of self-importance, and perhaps even exhibitionism, that I had agreed to this abusive set up. So after a few sessions, I forget how many, I refused to go back. I told the procurer-psychologist that I would no longer return to that instructional setting, but that I needed to continue with a therapist in actual therapeutic conditions, not on display. I insisted that the teacher see me as a patient, to deal with the mess he had helped me make of myself because of this circus-exhibition that I had agreed to, in order to get treatment. He refused. I would never return. For years I felt shame about my part in this. It is one reason that I mistrust and disrespect psychiatry. But still seek them out still. Why? What you refer to here Cedar, is being accused as heretic, or accusing ourselves as such. What is a heretic? A non-believer or somebody that betrays the true G-d? I will look it up when I leave here. I remember that the colonies were settled by many who had been denounced as heretics. So this would make sense, if the mother seeks and demands god-like powers, and she is disobeyed, even in our own minds, this would be tantamount to heresy. Is this the heresy? In our own heads, having drawn a line in the sand? Because we would not believe in nor accept our mothers' powers and defied them, even if only in our own minds? Is this the crime? Defiance. I had never thought of it this way. I ran after her to tell her who I am. I proclaimed it. (I am still slightly embarrassed, but better that than afraid.) What a good, good woman to tell you. I am sorry for her. She was a victim of your mother. Yes. How profound is that, Cedar? You are speaking here about your sense, your belief that your family is actually not all that interesting to you. You are feeling a bit superior here, I think, and wondering if that is your crime. You are speculating that your family dinner, in all of its elegance, might well have been to compensate the rather mundane guests who would show up. Actually boorish and boring. So was this a part of the heresy, too? That we did not really embrace their creed, love of self and for the self, without limit? Not stopping at anything? So, is this the crime, Cedar, knowing your own feelings about them? "people who would do what they did because that is who they are" and who they were was all we had. Imagine what that kind of ambivalence would cost a child. Seeing and not seeing. That is why we do what we do with the sisters. See them, watch them, recognize once. And then we undue what we have seen, un-know what we know. Because a child would not have the capacity to hold that kind of understanding within her, without handling it with a defense mechanism: most likely denial. And that child would then attack herself for the crimes she had seen, possibly, quite possibly committed against her very self. So they would be her crimes. Because of course she could not feel them to be her parents'. Because she would have nobody and nowhere to live. So by internalizing what she had seen and known, she would feel this to be her own crime. That she is concealing. When in fact she had been its victim. Yea. Cedar and Dolly!!! We become perpetrators against ourselves and there is no way out. Are you still beating your wife? D H lived that false accusation for real. How very, very hard. M lived that, too, at the hands of his wife. Who told all of his children that he had done wrong and bad things. To her and to them. Which everybody knew were not true. And for years M had believed he had lost his kids. It is this that he cannot forgive. His wife is ill now (let me restate here that he has not seen her for 12 years or so and does not speak to her. He has requested a divorce but she will not assent nor speak to him about it. She has an enlarged heart. I cannot but believe in my secret heart that this is a manipulation. (Except M does know she has a heart condition. Then why does she run in marathons? Why do his children keep calling him to tell him? He says, What can I do? And then another kid calls to ask for money to pay for the birth of her next child. He asked her? Where is your husband, the father? Yes. This is profound. I do not quite understand it, but I know it to be profound. I felt it was my own fault. Yes. And all kinds of instructions and consumer warnings and threats. I cannot fathom it Cedar. Honestly, I cannot. What enormous courage. How do little tiny girls have the courage, even know that they can defy, become heretics in their own minds. At the expense of themselves but not their everlasting souls? Yes. This is the essential nature. All that had to happen for Dolly, was that her essential nature unfold. That is why the recent posts of New Leaf are so important. Because there are self-accusations being made about essential qualities, that may be good or may be very bad. We have each of us already mis-labeled those qualities in ourselves. And we claim we are confused about their aspect in others. That is what has to be cleaned up. In each of us. My sister looks for real. She acts like Hillary Clinton. Unless you think Hillary Clinton is bluffing. I do not think so. I think these people are constructed differently. They are segmented. Like those circle diagrams, the overlapping circles, which have a name I have forgotten. Their senses of themselves as in the world do not overlap. Ours do. We can drill down and we do. Their shame, conflict, whatever, do not converge. It is not a bluff. It is that segment that they are able to manifest, which is un-modulated by shame, or guilt, or anxiety. It may be a sham, but it is not a bluff. But I still do not understand why I did it. Was it to show up? Was it defiance of the shame and fear? Was it to show myself who I really am? I guess. If I am the only audience that there really is. So, that is what you think I did. I made a decision to be real and to speak for myself. Yes. Yes. Yes. Or the necessity to run away, or to recognize that there was nobody there that really loved us or protected us. We could not do either. So we undermine our real perceptions and our real selves. But you chose for them, because you could not choose for yourself. If you had, you would have felt alone in the world. You were too little to be alone in the world, Cedar, and so was I. I hate secrets. Is it more than you have hinted at, that you knew them to be "not much?"Or is it that you hated them and held them in contempt and that all of the fantasy about the family dinner was just so much perfume to cover up the stench. Well, this is the most interesting of all. Do we construct the idea of the vicious crime against ourselves as a kind of stop sign, a deterrent, so that we go no further. [I]This is your brain on drugs[/I]. Remember those commercials. With the egg being fried in the pan. A threat. Actually not that effective. I doubt if any one person was deterred. Were we? Or is just all a grand theater, to give the appearance [I]to ourselves of self-destruction so it looks to us that we have complied[/I], when we have done no such thing. Thank you, Cedar. Excellent post. COPA [/QUOTE]
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