Fun with projection

The other day I got bored and started bingeing through the archives of The Last Psychiatrist. This used to be a great blog and I've quoted it before; this blog (well, along with dating D) is a large part of what helped me understand what a narcissist is (and then realize that both Wife and Father fit that description too).
 
Part of what is so fun about TLP is that he introduces so many subsidiary topics in the process of making his main points: you can get a full meal just on the appetizers and garnishes. And so in the course of a post about why education has become such a boondoggle, he refers to the psychological concept of projection and then explains what it is. I quote at some length, both because it's relevant to what I'm going to say next and because he is way more entertaining than I am: 

It sounds like you project unwanted feelings onto another person, which is both wrong and impossible. It's not an action, it's a problem of perception. The unwanted feelings don't make sense coming from someone like you, so you conclude they must be coming from the other person.

To use the frequent example of "homophobia": a guy feels gay impulses and can't "handle it" but he doesn't get rid of them by putting them onto someone else, he confuses them as coming from someone else. He smells gayness, "Where is it coming from? Me? Impossible! Jesus washed my feet. Must be that guy." Sorry, wildman, whoever smelt it dealt it. Projection is the most primitive of defenses, circa age 2, and the description should make it clear it is a narcissistic defense: one's perception of the world is inextricably, concretely the result of one's inner states. There is no "objectivity" possible.

The purpose of projection is not to get rid of the feelings, but to explain their presence, to defend the self against a label: "I'm not gay..... even if I have gay sex once in a while." The point isn't to avoid gay sex, the gayness isn't intolerable to them-- e.g. observe the high hat Christians caught in various rest stops across our land-- but even though they've committed the act, it doesn't affect their identity.

 

What I find fascinating about this selection is how perfectly it reflects a conversation I had with Father late one night, several years ago, back when he was still alive. It was late at night and he'd been drinking — well, probably both of us had — and he was complaining about being fat and out of shape. At that point I was exercising regularly, so I asked him why he didn't just go to the local gym and work out, even if he started very slowly?

Father: Well I was going for a little while, but then I really had to stop.

Hosea: Why?

Father: Because it was such a major gay hangout.

Hosea: What do you mean?

Father: Well all the guys there were gay except me, and they used it as a pickup joint.

Hosea: You mean they were actually having sex in the shower?

Father: No, nothing like that, thank God. They weren't doing anything out in public. But you could just tell.

Hosea: Well did they stop you from using the equipment?

Father: No.

Hosea: Then why couldn't you just work out and ignore them? What's it to you what they do when they leave the gym?

Father: [swallowing and speaking with great difficulty] Because if I keep going to the gym while they are there too, they might think I'm one of them.

Hosea: But they are strangers. Who cares what they think?

Father: [in such a small voice it was almost inaudible] They might ask me to join them.

I stopped the conversation there, and changed the subject. Later I kicked myself for quitting then, thinking that there were two other things I ought to have said: first, So if they invite you why not just say No? and second, No offense but they are looking for someone fifty years younger than you are and in a lot better shape, so I think you're safe. But I let the opportunity slip away, and maybe saying those things would have been unkind.

But now I reread that conversation in the light of TLP's remarks above, and it looks obvious to me what he was saying. I assume that in reality it wasn't that the other guys there were flirting with each other; if they had been, that would have made this gym very different from any other I've ever been to. What makes far more sense is the idea that it was Father who was attracted by all the naked bodies there, who was appalled at his own attraction, and who quit going because he couldn't deal with the psychic stress.

To be clear, Father never said anything overt about being attracted by other men. Quite the reverse. On the surface he sounded very hostile to homosexuality, even as he also said, "I'm not homophobic. Don't be ridiculous! I'm an actor — some of my best friends are gay. It's just that ...." But he brought up the subject at the damnedest times, in ways that could sound obsessive. He spent years before Brother and I were safely paired off with women (Wife for me, and any of Brother's girlfriends for him) warning us about the risks of deciding to be gay. He had this theory that he repeated — again, at the damnedest times — that some guys decide they are gay when they really aren't, just because of a "formative early experience." The key to this theory, for him, was that these guys shouldn't let themselves get confused by their "early experience" or "youthful experimentation" because the risk is that they prematurely assume they must be gay and therefore never take the time to discover that in reality they are straight.

Of course this theory is crazy. I've never known anyone it describes ... unless of course it actually described Father himself. Unless it was autobiographical. Unless he himself felt a powerful attraction to other men — possibly reinforced by "youthful experimentation" of his own — and it scared the shit out of him. So that all his hostility was a wall he built up ... partly to keep himself from acting on his attractions and partly to keep anyone else from guessing.

He was way too smart for these beliefs to have been simple stupidity. This theory makes much more sense.

Sent from my iPhone

Banking

Met with Wife at the bank today: to take my name of our joint checking account, to close our joint savings accounts (both of them), to close some other miscellaneous accounts we don’t need any more, and to take my name off the safe deposit box. We checked it first: the only stuff in it is hers: her family Bible, some negatives of photos of her ancestors, and a few other ancient keepsakes.

 

Two accounts we can’t close right now. One is a line of credit in both our names; the only way to take my name off it is to close it completely and then let Wife reapply for a new one. They are going to get her some information about which credit products are available. The other is a savings account for Son 1 that really should be changed into an adult account (since he’s no longer a minor) but that requires him to be there. Some time this summer.

 

It was a “long lunch” … I guess I was gone from the office a couple hours. But it sure wasn’t hard work. We got to sit down the whole time, in a nice, air-conditioned office. We were pleasant to each other. Distant, of course, but pleasant.

 

Why am I so tired?

 

Must be getting old ….

 

 

Why isn't this a thing?

We all know there's a popular tradition that you celebrate your twenty-first birthday by going out with friends and getting hammered. (OK, that's not how I spent my twenty-first birthday ... but I know there are people who do. And the idea is sure out there.)

So why isn't there a corresponding tradition to celebrate your eighteenth birthday by going out and getting laid? Isn't it interesting that we as a society see the two transactions so differently?

Of course I can think of reasons, lots of them:

• Where would you go? Ummm ... a brothel? True, some states don't allow them. But Nevada does, just for example. So is there a tradition like this in Nevada? Not that I've heard of.
• With whom would you fuck? (Another eighteen-year-old? Disaster! A forty-year-old? That sounds creepy.) Right, but you have to start somewhere, with somebody. That somebody will have some age -- older, younger, whatever.
• People get more embarrassed about sex; the birthday celebrant is more likely to feel ashamed at specifically "going out for sex" -- and, if she's a girl, is likely to worry about getting a reputation as a slut. Yeah, but people do plenty of shameful things when they are shit-faced drunk: throwing up on their friends, wetting themselves, whatever it is. That's not enough to kill the tradition of going out for drinks now that you are "legal".
• Some people have a notion that sex should be reserved for when you are "serious" about someone, that it is too important to treat so cavalierly. And yet plenty of people treat sex just that cavalierly. Stereotypically one hears about frat boys fucking any girl that will stand still or that they can knock out. And girls get just as horny just as often; if they are (generally) choosier than their male counterparts, it's because the scene can get more dangerous for them. (Think of date rape drugs, physical abuse, pregnancy.) But notice also that if you went to a licensed, regularly-inspected legal establishment, none of those risks would apply. Would they?
• It's all the fault of our Puritan heritage! And that heritage had nothing to say about drinking? For that matter, the Puritans were all in New England; are the customs more libertine in the South?

And so on.

It must be possible to trace the history of attitudes towards sex and booze respectively, and thereby to figure out by what paths we got to where we are today. But I'm not convinced that the really fundamental distinction we draw makes that much sense.

What's more, ... follow me for a minute while I think this through. What if brothels were to sell "Eighteenth-birthday packs" -- a package deal that includes three sessions maybe a week apart with the same person, a professional who has prepared for exactly this job. The first session would start off with, How much do you already know?

• Do you know your way around your own body? Mostly the answer to this is likely to be Yes, but the depth of knowledge probably varies a lot. And if anonymous college surveys are to be believed, there are college-aged girls who don't masturbate successfully, which means that for those individuals (at least) a guided tour of her own body back when she's eighteen might have been helpful. Oh ... you did understand that I'm running this thought experiment for both sexes equally, right?
• Do you know your way around a partner's body? Implicitly this means "a partner of the opposite sex," on the assumption that you've already covered how to make love to a partner of the same sex with the previous question. And naturally if this were a common thing, a numerical majority of customers would want to know about the opposite sex anyway. Since one should never take anything for granted about the future -- in either direction -- knowing both is probably useful for everybody. [For myself, no, I've never needed to know what to do with a man who wasn't me. But it's notoriously hard to make predictions about the future, and plenty of people have had the "I never thought I'd --" experience.] 

Once that's out of the way, it's time for a guided tour of whatever the Birthday Celebrant doesn't know yet, including helpful tips on what a partner is likely to welcome in reality (as opposed to what s/he might have learned from pornography, for example). And then from there it's a question of practice and refinement. How far the Birthday Celebrant gets in the first hour will vary from person to person, but that's why the package includes a total of three visits.

Maybe the idea is crazy, but somehow it sounds almost sane and rational to me. Of course it's the kind of thing that would exist only on Beta Colony, but that's another matter. Maybe our society here and now is the crazy one.

Thoughts, anyone?
    

12,004 days

I got an e-mail this morning from my attorney’s paralegal. Attached was a scanned copy of the Separation Decree, signed and dated by the Court. As of last Saturday, the State officially recognizes our separation. From that day, counting backwards to the wedding, was twelve thousand and four days exactly.

What a funny number … so close to something so round. Let’s see … that’s 1714 weeks and six days. (That’s right, we were married on a Sunday. I’d forgotten.) It’s a little over 394 months. Or it’s just seven weeks exactly shy of thirty-three years.

Thirty-three years. Starting back when I was twenty-two. (See if you can figure out how old I am now!) People told us we were too young to get married. Even my parents told us that, though they were 25 and 21 when they tied the knot. I was the first of my college friends to get married, as Wife was the first of hers. 

What in God’s name were we thinking?

Of course I’ve long said that without the marriage I would never have gotten any older. Without it I would have stayed the same immature prat I was back then. Is that true? Who knows? Maybe there would have been something else that would have grown me up. There’s never any way to tell this kind of thing.

As I’ve been typing this, I’ve been thinking about my life in eleven-year blocks … all because of the conjunction of 33 and 22 a couple paragraphs ago.

When I was 11, my family moved back to the USA from living abroad.
When I was 22, I married Wife.
When I was 33, we bought a house and (a few months later) I got my first managerial job.
When I was 44, Wife started her affair with Boyfriend 4. A few months later was the night she was arrested. A few months after that, Boyfriend 4 came to live with us. Son 1 was nine years old at that point. Son 2 was seven.
When I was 55, … well, that’s today. The separation is signed and filed.

It’s been four years since I moved out of the house – almost five years since I told Wife I wanted a divorce. Eight years since I decided it for myself, and made her agree to separate our money.

Nine and a half years since I started this blog.

Big milestone.
__________

I learned some years ago not to make major decisions for a while after having to make one big emotional decision. Well I didn’t have to make any decisions today (big or small), and this is a day I’ve been awaiting for a long time. It should be no big deal, and in some ways it’s not.

But I still better not make any big decisions for the rest of the day.

Hope you all are doing well.

"American values" over on the Patio

Just a quick note that I published a short gripe over on Hosea's Patio on the subject of "deeply-held American values." What exactly are those, anyway?

Here it is: http://hoseaspatio.blogspot.com/2017/06/deeply-held-american-values.html
 

A bad year for cats

Ever since the boys were very young, we've had two cats. The same two, I mean. One per boy. We got them as litter mates when Son 1 was maybe three years old and Son 2 was two. (I might be off by a year.) One was a black-and-white male; the other, an all-black female. Right away the boys asked, "Which of us gets which cat?" Wife told them, "The cats get to decide." Sure enough, within a week Cat 1 was sleeping on Son 1's bed, and Cat 2 on Son 2's. That pattern remained fixed until we sold the house ... and maybe after, for all I know. Wife got custody of the cats.

The boys are both home from college for the summer, and they are staying with Wife. They made this decision for multiple practical reasons: she has an Internet connection (and I haven't gotten one yet); she has two cars, both automatic transmissions, and she hardly ever goes anywhere so they can use them (whereas I have one car, with a manual transmission, and I take it to work every day). Also if they stay with her they can keep an eye on her, in case she gets sick or delusional or crazy.

And she has the cats. Whom the boys love.

Yesterday afternoon, I got a text message from Son 1. He said that Wife and Son 2 had taken Cat 1 to the vet, who had diagnosed him with kidney failure and said he had to be killed. What about treatment? Not possible. If he weren't killed now, he would die anyway in a couple of days.

So now I guess she has one cat.

And I guess it is a good thing the boys are staying with her right now.
__________

P.S. The title of this post comes from my e-mail to Marie telling her about this. I chose it because Marie's cat, too, has been diagnosed with something life-threatening, though it hasn't required killing her yet. So clearly it's a bad year for cats ....
   

Plato's birthday 2017

Today is Plato's birthday, and Marie sent me a poem.

May Day

 

moving into darkness

moving into light

dusk to dawn to dusk

 

the day turns, and turns again,

and turns

 

moving into darkness

moving into light

winter into spring

into new winter

 

the year turns, and turns again,

and turns

 

All Hallows and the world darkens

the days shrink and chill

 

May Day and the world shines

nights retreat as leaves unfurl

 

and amid the shining, the knowing

that the world will darken again

 

and in the dark, the knowing

that the world will shine again

 

the world turns, and turns again,

and turns

 

dark is a turn in the dance

 

 

Later, talking about it, she said part of what was on her mind was that dark moods and darkness in your life turn and change just the same way that seasonal darkness does. So for her part she doesn't have to let a dark mood feel too important to her, because "Dark is a turn in the dance."