Monday 11 October 1999
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Pic of the day: The Furby made me do it! (Ehh..) ... Well, I am taking a minority view in a debate. So what else is new? The debate is on a journal-related mailing list, and it is directly related to writing this diary. My view is that venting is baaad. Venting, in this connection, is to write about strong emotions that one has, in order to feel better. You can write about strong emotions because you think they are an important part of your life and you want to portray your life. That is another thing entirely. Venting is usually about "negative" emotions: Irritation, anger, hate, envy, despair. The idea is that after you have written about it, you will feel better, as if a pressure has been let out.Surely venting is not a diary-only phenomenon. I will occasionally hear (usually two women) on the bus, where one describes a situation to the other. And describes it in a way that is far from flattering to the third party, which is not there. And it was as I was within earshot of such a venting session that it struck me with glaring white clarity: They are making reality. ... There is reality, and there is reality. To all but the most simple, there are at least two realities: The personal and the shared. Personal reality is what I know to be true when I am alone. Shared reality is what I know together with others. Different groups of people have shared group realities, which need not be compatible. Look at an the group realities of different religions, or different political movements. You may wonder whether they live on the same planet! But for this argument, one shared reality per person is enough. There is power in telling. Christian churches have a sacrament of confession (some more than others). You go to someone you trust, typically a priest, but in some cases the entire congregation. And you confess your sins, be they great or small, or even just temptations. And something happens. Somehow the telling itself is a price you pay. The humiliation of confessing can be quite palpable, but there is also a rush of freedom. That which was locked inside you had a power, which it loses when revealed. As Soren Kierkegaard said, the demonic is the closed. Ah, but he may have missed half.The opposite works as well. When you have done a good work, and you boast about it ... there is also an exchange. The later so famous Jesus said about these, they have already got their payment. They have cashed in, so to speak. Their "good secret" elevated their personal reality over the shared reality. Now by telling the two are aligned again, and they sink back to their place. Yet it does feel good. I have tried. ... Now that we know there is power in telling, what about venting? It is to be expected that this too affects both personal reality and shared reality. Personal reality will be deflated as it opens into the larger shared reality. But it will also be cemented. By telling, we make the tentative truth into hard truth. Sometimes it may take repeated telling, but with each telling it becomes more true. From being a secret, what is told becomes a fact. But is it a fact? Of course, we may be making it all up, in which case personal reality will not adjust, and we will have two different minds about the same thing. I shall not go into this at all, because it is obvious to my highly intelligent readership that lying has severe costs to the person who does it. No, what I think about is the most common of self-deceptions: "They made me do it." "It was he who did so that I did it." This phrase is sure to be familiar to any parent, older sibling, teacher or casual bystander where small children are involved. Why did you pinch your little brother? Because of something he did. So I had to pinch him. He made me do it. Yeah, right. Somehow your little brother has such mental powers that he can move your hands? Not likely. Yet incredibly, this pathetic excuse lives on in many adults, too.It is rather easy to see this deception in the extreme cases. The child abuser, the rapist: As sure as morning follows night, these perverted souls will puke up the toddler excuse. "It was because she..." Yeah, right. Off with [offending body parts]. Yet, the problem is in the head, and it is shared by us all, until gradually daylight seeps in. When I was a teen, one day I sat in the old rocking chair back home on the farm, and I read a small tract by Elias Aslaksen. It was called "The way to handle it" or something like that. Basically what I read was that nobody else can raise your hand. They can do things to you, but they can not make you do things. (Now in all honesty, sometimes your choices are extremely limited. Still, you will know that you did the best that was possible in the situation. Or if you did not, a part of you will know that, too.) On that day, the morning dawned on my mind. Though it has been partly cloudy since ...If I feel anger, or hate, or envy: These emotions are like warning bells. They show that I have projected a part of me on someone else. This is a concept of psychology, and a quite useful one. We tend to make connections in our mind, where we take our own guilt or pride and tack them on others. To work, it must be believable. With a healthy mind, it wouldn't work to just project something important on a passing stranger (though it actually sometimes happens in cases of falling in love). (I said "healthy mind", didn't I?) But in close relationships, projection is the order of the day. So what I see in the other is really a part of myself. This explains why they could make me do it: They are carrying a part of myself. Now when I share with others, I also cement this truth. For each telling, it becomes harder to withdraw the projection. When you have told a thing often enough, it becomes very hard to suddenly say "Uh, wait, the opposite is actually true". This is why you go around telling everybody that you have quit smoking. If you promise yourself to give up a bad habit, chances are that you will "forget" it pretty easily. When you have told everyone, it becomes reality, and your success or failure is in the real world. Again, the power of telling.I hope this all explains why I think venting should be used very carefully and only in a limited, therapeutic setting. And probably I have inadvertently told you something very different from what I set out to do. Such as why I started to write an online journal in the first place. |
Due to space limitations, no boring details of my life today. |