This post will be out of place. It will not be in content consonant with the tone of the articles or essays that either tend to grab my attention and therefore end up being reblogged, here, or tha…
Source: Maundering Reminiscences: Growing Up Under Domestic Violence — written by Norm
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Susan,
You wrote:
First, if I’ve upset you, I apologize. I was not making an accusation. I was making “explicit” the manner in which “conditioned” reactions operate in a person (in this instance, “me”) always on the basis of “past” experiences, and how one can either remain at the level of the “reactions,” to experience at “face value,” so to speak, or to “step back from them” to evaluate their possible meanings in a given context.
The childhood experience of being “mocked for being French” was something that really happened to me and that left a deep impression on me, that “conditioned” me in terms of “what I could expect from other people.”
That “conditioning” remains with me to this day and it is triggered in “contexts” that “echo” past encounters.
Thus, at one level, a person (whether myself or you or anyone) often relives in the present what is actually the “past.”
Psychologists call this the phenomenon of “transference.” If one isn’t fully aware that that’s how one’s perception often operates, then it may be difficult for one to recognize that a “triggered” emotional response (and all such responses are “triggered” and as “triggered responses” are “transferences”) is “inappropriate” to a “present” encounter.
What my comment does is “parse” the automatic “reactions” to “stimuli” that “I” experienced and how, faced with a “paucity” of information, I had to “interpret” the reaction (the “reflex”) to dampen its “effect” so as to better grasp or approximate to the actual and present content (i.e., not that of the “old content of my childhood”) of our (Norm’s and Susan’s) emerging “relationship,” of if you will, emerging “friendship.”
Note how I ended my comment:
So whatever may be my “tentative” appraisal of where we stand with respect to one another, that tells you less about “you” than it tells you about “me,” my past experiences, how these shape my present perceptions, and how in the present, in a moment of “reflection,” I interpret my “perceptual reaction” so as to adjust it to a current — and not a past — situation.
I don’t know if any of this will make any sense to you, but I really am trying to make a point, and the point has nothing at all to do with you or the quality of who you are as a person.
Again, I hope that I haven’t caused you undue duress. That certainly was not my intention. And yet again, we have an example of how “misunderstandings” over complicated issues can land us into trouble.
You will forgive me. AT least I’m hopeful that you will.
Do try to get a handle on what I’m trying to underscore — clinically and academically speaking . . .
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