an explanation of me
Post on 07-Apr-2018
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not been allowed to grow. I remember being very interested in many things in a library one
time during a research paper on Linus Pauling. I just looked at all the books and felt
overwhelmedlike why try,I am interested in so many things and I will never be able to read
all these books.just give up and float. I was told by people what are you doing here several
times across my retail career. Another comment was who are you? I see now that my speechand education drew a picture that did not fit. For as little literature as I read, I did read
periodical type literature and snippets on the internet. It is shocking how what little I did know
seemed like a fountain of knowledge to others. People saw this and saw something wrong. It
made them feel uncomfortable it seems. Possibly crossed some insecurity boundaryeven
among managers. I was teaching department heads GMROI, and when a district manager found
out, he chastised me, and said they dont need to know that. For the uninformed, in retail, that
is the key figure that needs attention and observation to effectively run a business. Anyway, if
you dont fit you dont assimilate. You are not like them. I used to read aphorisms at the
morning meetings as a pick me up, something to think about during the routine of the day. Only
later did I discover that there were some who did not understand them. A man cannot speak
but he judges himself. With his will, or against his will, he draws his portrait to the eye of his
companions by every word . Emerson
A further concept by Ayn Rand is listed below, which explains quite a lot about what I have
stated above:
Notice how theyll accept anything except a man who stands alone. They
recognize him at once. ... Theres a special, insidious kind of hatred for him.
They forgive criminals. They admire dictators. Crime and violence are a tie.
A form of mutual dependence. They need ties. Theyve got to force their
miserable little personalities on every single person they meet. The
independent man kills thembecause they dont exist within him and thats
the only form of existence they know. Notice the malignant kind of
resentment against any idea that propounds independence. Notice the malice
toward an independent man. ...
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But as soon as there is any departure from simplicity, and attempt at halfness, or good for me
that is not good for him, my neighbour feels the wrong; he shrinks from me as far as I have
shrunk from him; his eyes no longer seek mine; there is war between us; there is hate in him and
fear in me.Emerson
Falseness is a real problem for me.
My childhood was filled with an example of a mother who was a fake, and I was an observant
person who saw a lot the sham of her life and grew to hate this type of behavior. I remember
the pride in her explaining how her children could shop/clean clothes etc. at such a young age,
but I knew it was more a manipulation to allow her to avoid the work herself. I hated this lie.
Praise for her and us under false pretense. I was young, six or so. I today still cant stand this
deception in people toward people. I always related to people at work best who were in lower
positions, that did not put on airs, and political behavior. They were real and did not need to ply
and higgle for the attention of others to advance the cause on politics rather than performance.
The sycophant is a real problem for me and they are rampant and abundant. What to do?
School for me, lacked this component. I performed the work, was judged on clear qualities
defined beforehand, and delivered. The work world was defined on performance to a degree
but on a sliding scale that favored what are you going to do for me. Clearly, my disrespect for
authority was an impediment.
Anger
I also saw my fathers great disappointment with who he was. Always talking about how bad
things were. My parents were frequently angry with each other. I, having a room next to them,
saw/heard more of the anger than my brother. Outright fighting with physical violence was
evidenced. On vacations the violence was insane and we had to endure it in such a confined
space of a car. It was a thick, visceral, palpable negative energy. I can remember it as clear as it
was yesterday. Screaming, red-faced yelling, storming off, wondering when she would come
back, if she would come back. The tension when we were all back in the car. Hours of quite
anger. I remember the touch of my father, and this was only to direct or make me do
something, as a burning sensation even before the hand reached my body. I would learn to shift
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my body to escape this horrible feeling. My mother made my brother and me fight till our
pajamas were torn from each other to get the fight out of us. We had apparently been
fighting and picking at each other and she had enough and did not mange us otherwise. No
doubt due to the wonderful role models we had. So we learned discipline by hating and hitting
each other. I remember a terrible summer when my mother was teaching my brother how toswim. I caught on to physical things quicker than my brother. Swimming was fairly easy for me
to learn. My brother had a hell of a time and my mother was so angry at teaching him it was
what I now know resembling concentration camp mentality. Yelling, forcing, punishing till
coughing up water, from exhaustion, and swallowing water while trying to catch his breath over
and over and over. It was embarrassing for him and me for other strangers saw this spectacle.
When I was bad I was put in a corner. I can still smell the paint combined with my breath. It
was pretty often. I was told until I behaved I was going to stay in the corner. I learned to
swallow the problem so I could have control of my life and do the things I wanted. So, I told
myself that I would get revenge later, turn on the smile and get released. I did later get
revengestole her precious watch. She never found it. Kids dont behave badly for no reason in
my opinionget to the bottom of itwhat behaviors are affecting this behavior seems logical.
This method was a destructive one in my opinion. On one occasion, I was cleaning the toilet. I
was 8 or 9 years old. My father came to check its cleanliness and saw a drop on the back side
of the seat on the porcelain between where the toilet meets the tank. He told me it was not
cleaned. I replied to him it was. He said then you are going to lick that drop up. If it is clean then
it should not matter. I told him it was a drop from the brush, but I would not lick it up. He tried
to force me. I escaped and my mother intervened. There was a separation between us for a
while. Another occasion to image destruction was when I got a new shirt. It was yellow. My
father saw it on me and told me that only girls wore yellow and pink. I was now somehow not a
male because I liked yellow and wanted to wear it. What was sure was that I was less because
of my choice in my fathers eyes. It may seem like something little and inconsequential, but I
still remember it well to this day with distaste.
More anger was visible in the relationship between my paternal grandmother and my mother.
It was clearly hate. Tension again on the vacation travels. One particularly bad one was the visit
to the Mt. Rushmore. There were raised voices, huffing, gritting teeth, clenched jaws. Then
there was the hate for my aunt by my father. So much and so bad was this hate that he would
not come on vacations here with us. Under protest he would come for a day or so and thencontinue for the rest of the vacation if it did not involve my aunt. The message between them
was clear, and glowing like neon. This lasted even to this day as far as I know. Then there was
the hate my father had for my maternal grandfather. He could be a pill at restaurants, as he
treated waitresses like less than human beings. Yelling, and demanding royal treatment while
he demeaned them. In private he was full of fire, but I saw respect for people in the house for
the most part. To put it in summary, there was a lot of anger and hatred among the adults
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closest in my life. My paternal grandparents also had a strained and distant relationship. On
one occasion, my mother told me that because of the power my grandfather held over his wife,
she retaliated by refusing physical relations for years on end. What a terrible existence for both.
You could see in both of them a sadness and hardness. They both were not seen with smiles or
laughing on a regular basis. A more accurate description would be to say it was a rare occasion.I did not see them much, except a few summer vacations, but that is what I saw. Despite this
environment, my brother saw it as a refuge from our family and spent part of the summer here.
I seemed to help. He seemed more at peace when we picked him up.
Money was and is always a representation of something else. Its never about the money itself.
Money is important only in what it represents. For the most part, it represents choice. What
drives your choice is the problem. Your makeup (innate temperament, environmental influence)
are the root of the success or failure with money and all else. When I was 10 years old I learned
something. I thought we were ok financially, but some things did not fit. It seemed like we were
scraping by in some respects, but evidence of enough money was visible in other ways. My
Mom seemed to have to really shop for food carefully, but some other purchases were freely
made. I learned at 10 that my parents had property. They had sold it and made a good amount
on it because we were moving to a much bigger house. One of my first inklings that things
were not as they seemed. I learned later that my father put my mother on a severe budget.
Held her hostage to his whims of generosity. Christmas was an example of how tight he could
be. Very light from him, generous from other family members. There was an agreement later
that I would be paid for the lawn since he would pay someone else and it would be my
allowance. Ordinarily a good system. An early introduction to the labor-for-money lesson about
how the world worked. The only problem was he would not pay. It was not the money per sebut the lesson I learned was his word was worthless, that he played with me, and ignored my
requests. Lack of respect immediately comes to mind. Of course now I know, he did not respect
himself. But, then, since I only related to things from my perspective, I f igured it was something
about me. Did I not deserve the respect for some reason? Why would he treat me this way? I
learned later that my mother, in order to have some independence and a sense of her own
control of her life, took from the budget for groceries and stashed an amount from the grocery
budget to a secret account for herself. Quite an environment to live in. I, after reading What is
Man, understand a lot more about peoples motivations. He clearly did not feel good about
himselfvisible by sleeping all day on days off, angry on the day off he spent awake in thehouse, taking lozenges all the time, vocalizing how bad things were. If you treat people badly it
is clear that you have a problem with yourself. It is how you see the world, so it is how you
relate to it. The observation is so clear to me when I look at people now. If only more people
knew to look at the actions of people from this perspective and this knowledge, I think a great
deal of misery would be avoided and possibly a few people could get right with themselves.
Toward the end of my existence in the house, one evening I was in the kitchen and my brother
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was also standing there. It was on this occasion that my mother started in on my brother. She
did it frequently. He had less fight back in him than I did. She was demeaning, harassing, and
hassling. I had enough of the badgering and lit into her verbally to stop. She resisted. I finally
exploded. She got incensed and stormed back to her bedroom. I managed to restrain her by
using one hand to immobilize her arms and the other to immobilize her legs. She was in effectstraight jacketed till she calmed down. My brother told me she never did talk to him that way
again. A minor success.but I did not know until 20+ years later. The last outrage was one
evening when I was being hassled by my father. The exact topic I do not know. I finally grabbed
his arms, did a backwards somersault, and used my feet on his torso to throw him over me.
Then I grabbed a knife from the kitchen drawer and told him to stay away from me. There are
few times in my life that this much anger came to a head. But I sure needed to get a message
through. It did work. But, like my brother told me recently, he said to my father, why does
everything have to get to a crisis situation for him to react. It paints a picture of what being a
partner must have been like. I can only imagine it must have been like Dantes ninth circle of
hell.
I also noticed disturbed (maybe OCD ) behavior during his time between work when he was
calling on the phone for stock/financial trading on a regular if not daily basis. He would always
reach down to his foot with his right hand as if to pull up his sock or touch this pants leg right
before a call. It was a weird behavior that I noticed. I had never heard of OCD then. More
recently his girlfriend has described similar tendencies of repetitive unusual behavior regarding
hand washing and dry towels. Seems like an obsession with cleanliness to some degree. To look
at something that is you, and deny that it is you seems like a ludicrous position. But, in fact it
happens all the time. We are just not aware of who we are until we visit with others andconnect with them. Another unusual behavior is breaking for green lights under the expectation
that it could turn yellow at any minute and he would be prepared. Some might say, well, safety
first. I respond, the system has safety built in, that is why you dont need to break for every
green light. There must be some irrational reasoning for this behavior.
A more recent example of behavior employed to reduce you is the following. We were sitting in
a restaurant. My brother and he were engaged in a discussion which progressed into an
argument. My brother started getting emphatic. His eyebrows were arched, his eyes were
enlarged, his arm raised with a pointed finger extending from his clenched hand striking out
upon points made. My father sat calmly, with the smile of a villain. He talked calmly, and
though neither point seemed to disqualify the other, my father, with his smile, that says, you
fool, look at you, losing your composure, you clearly have no standing as I am superior to you,
and since you look like you are losing control, you are not a winner in this discussion. I watched
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the defeat in my brother, as he retreated and the argument ended. Winners of wars are
perceived to be right. But, in fact, it only represents a more effective skill or achievement in
beating the other down. Correctness of position is not necessarily articulated by war or
argument. It is often a measure of something else entirely.
Authority needs to have trust with it to be an authority, otherwise it is something else. So, I
would entertain a mistrust and cautious observation of authority figures from very early on.
True to my parents, many authority figures do indeed manifest a clear disregard for trust in my
experience. In grade school I had a subscription to Discover magazine. I enjoyed the biology
sections most of all. I would read and absorb as much as I could. I became more informed than
my teacher. I found myself correcting and adding to her lessons. I remember her face. It was
puzzled hurt. She allowed me of course, to add, and the class was impressed, but she was
made to feel embarrassed. Today, I see the challenge to authority, and the need for self lift inthe action. She was a nice teacher and I knew she would not do anything about it. I sadly took
advantage. Eventually, the material left Discover Magazine behind and she regained her
position. Did this behavior change as I matured. NO. In fact, if I saw stupidity, indifference,
posturing, I let you know..in, for the most part, non direct ways you could not clearly define as
the target, or protected by company policy, but clearly an attack. The price was paid in a similar
manner.
While I am on the subject of authority, I would like to relay a story about dumb it down 101.At my first retail big box job this was not evident in the early years. Later down the road it was
clearly present. Dumb it down was a class taught to district and regional managers to offer
polite niceties to management and associates below the store manager to elicit a show of care
and concern. Then, they were trained to distance themselves from you to avoid conversation
that might offer opportunities to call into question operational issues or any issues you might
have, as this would delay company initiatives. I can tell you this is true. It was the Steppford
wives of retail management. A greeting that was exactly the same each visit from both parties.
Then a brush off and distance. It is clever, because you dont really know what is going on. You
are greeted, as if there is concern and care, but really, there is no concern. In fact, the concernis to avoid you on any level but a supremely superficial level. The reason it is called dumb it
down is because they think that all these people are dumb and that the concerns are nothing
but complaining and whining and if you do this they will not even know what hit them and they
are so dumb you can control them with this simple deflection. Most people dont clearly
identify it, but people dont need to intellectualize to know something is up. So who is really the
dumb character in the role playing?
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Distance
Seeing how they were both miserable people, and not comfortable with who they were, it is
not surprising that they were distant with their children. The Law of Attraction can be a cruel
thing. As an aside, PrettyWoman and Failure to Launch are great representations of this law.
This distance did not allow, also, for friends in their lives. I can hardly remember an instance
when they had friends over. This distance translates to children as disinterest and allows for a
great disability in socialization skills for the kids. They dont learn the skills of understanding
themselves by weaning away from the father/mother approval of things toward the learning of
many ideas from other people and books. Neither of us matured in this way to a healthy degree.
I fortunately had a soft side that women identify with and had girl friends that helped me
socialize more effectively than my brother. One girl in high school called me on my shyness,
believing it to be cockiness, and I learned how my behavior was understood. I did not learn
boundaries of social skills as clearly or as definitely as I should have. I was also lonely. I
remember in 5th
grade staring at pretty girls, hoping for a connection, being thought of as a
little weird. Still, I did it. Later, girlfriends were very important for me. More of a need for
connection to make up for distance I think now. I put an extraordinary amount of energy into
the relationships. To the exclusion of my friends to a large degree. This was not appreciated I
would find out later. At the time I had no clue that I had abandoned them. All I knew was the
fulfillment I felt from closeness with women.
Extreme behavior
My mother showed it numerous times. Playing the piano till her fingers bled was just one
example. This was week after week after week. I did not know different per say, but
somewhere I knew this is a problem. She bought diet sodas by the 25 case load. What was that
about?
Inferiority
I am sure part of me shut down due to the anger. I never had quite the memory for vacation
events as my father and brother. So, because I did not I was made to feel inferior as they would
regale each other with events and stories. I have a good memory for many things so I believe
there was a subconscious cleansing for me. Or, just a difference in makeup. Vacations were
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hellish due to the thick tension of hostility. Not less.different would have been a good thing
for me to hear, absorb and believe. I also did not have a chess mind or interest. My father and
brother did. So, for all the distance, at least in later years they could connect in this one way. I
did not. More distance.
Shame
My mother was overweight most of her life as I knew her. 250-300 pounds plus and only 5 3
or so. You could not go down the hall at the same time. She was too wide. Of course she had a
lot of shame. I did too from neighborhood kids. We were cloistered as children, I am sure due
to this to some degree. She exuded more extreme behavior when loosing this weight, being a
spectacle again, running around the neighborhood.actually speed walkingbut it lookedridiculous. More embarrassment.
Having seen how wrong all this was, I again have a tremendous distaste and sensitivity for when
I see something being done incorrectly, which seems so obvious to me. There were a few
successful mangers I clicked with, they ran good store operations, were connected with their
people, and friendly. Just the things I needed..and respected. Seems like they are a minority
though. Seemed like store managers often were in the position for reasons other than good
managerial skills. Seemed like Texaco had the same or worse system.
I graduated with honors from College, but had no real interest in the chosen degree. I did not
pursue work for a while and could use the downturn in the oil patch as an excuse. I was holed
up in my room for some time. Lost, isolated as much as possible. Finally, I submitted resumes
and pretty easily got jobs. But I did not fit. Reasons listed above. Disappointment.
So, what happened. I was constantly disappointed. I thought it was me as a failure and started
to hate myself like my parents did. I lost confidence. I became angry as my parents. I swallowed
it several times throughout the years. I remember not being able to put a finger on why. But, I
had no direction..no passion was ever developed. I had no one to show me or care enough to
point out the interests or expose me to enough to see what sparked me and guide me that
direction. I could do just about anything, woodwork, mechanic, weld, fix appliances, work with
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computers, teach myself just about anything I was interested in. But, these were just skills, not
meaningful things.
Years later I learned from intercepting emails from my mother to an old high school boyfriendthat she felt very alone all her marriage, that my father was distant, cruel to her in emotional
ways, that she never showed herself without clothes to him, that sex was a horrible duty and
dirty to her because love was absent, that her children were duties at most in her mind and she
did not even mention our names in correspondence. The overriding theme in the emails was an
extreme loneliness and desire for some kind loving connection. It is a heartbreaking reveal. I
learned of her distant relationship with her father especially, but also her mother. She saw a
close relationship with her sister and mother and was hurt by it. She spent many lonely years
married and the first years in Utah were brutally spent with lots of anger between them. She
finally had a nervous breakdown at my cousins graduation. Embarrassing the whole family asshe barked like a dog in at the ceremony. This was the beginning of a tremendous spiral down
through meningitis, going walkabout across the country without notice or information,
possibly having a girlfriend, finally becoming diagnosed with bipolar disorder, trying to self
correct, becoming diabetic, and finally after refusing treatment, getting in accidents from
blackouts during driving, and being institutionalized. Now if this is not enough to cause SHAME
in a child and not want to think about anything I dont know what is. Could this happen to me?
Is this genetic? I have come to believe the severely harsh lonely years with my father drove her
to desperate measures for affection and meaning. She searched many mystical solutions:
crystals, pyramids, Transendental Meditation, colonics, Chi Kuhn etc, etc. All to no avail. Shebroke..pure and simple. She is a twin, and while there are similarities, her sister is far more
stable and normal.
My last visit to see my mother was revealing. I hardly recognized her. The most shocking
observation was her eyes. They had lost the sparkle. They looked dead. She was still the
severely-consumed-with-hatred-and-misery-person she was before though. She always tried to
control people and even now, from a bed, she made my brother and father squirm by analyzing
body language. She said how my father was hiding something and uncomfortable by having hisarms crossed on his stomach, and he quickly squirmed and adjusted ( just like she wanted him
to). My brother was supporting his weight on both arms on the end of the bed and his face
looked strained. She pointed out his discomfort and he squirmed. I had a kind of peace at
seeing and hearing again what I had remembered as the cold , manipulative, hurtful person she
was. All my reason for coming back had been justified. The behavior was real, and as bad as
imagined. She made comments as to my value being very low since I was not earning money.
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She commented that I was not a success because I had not earned much money. There were
other demeaning comments. Top it all with my fathers interpretation: well shes still sharp,
her mind has not gone. Totally oblivious to the nature of the behavior and the intended hurt.
My brother did catch on though. He could see it.
So, back to the career, I entered the workforce at Texaco, and earned good money, but
discovered the job had changed from the degree, and I was not that enchanted any way. Now it
was worse, just a paper shuffle. Some creativity, in contract negotiation and preparation, but
generally non fulfilling. Scouting was good, but it was temporary and being phased out. So I got
great performance evaluations, but I was miserable. Long hours, commuting 1+ hours each way
to avoid the crime-ridden neighborhoods, we lived far out in civilized neighborhoods. What
time is left to develop yourself? None. On top of that you see your friends get pushed out
through layoffs. You watch the humiliation. People pack up in front of their friends andcoworkers and get shuffled out like some piece of trash in a hallway. During the process of
these several forced attritions you see people so afraid..talking to each other trying so
desperately to determine if they will be hit this time. Some contemplating leaving just to avoid
the embarrassment, should they be selected. Its a grueling process and it stays with you. It also
does not get easier with each process, like sometimes happens with experience to hard things.
Its probably a good place to note here that some repulsion to education would result from
seeing the kind of people my parents were, and make the connection they were educated.
Proudly educated as well. If this was what education was responsible for, I surely would not like
this. Education was touted as producing better people. An education turnoff was probably
initiated very early on. Childs World preschool, punished me early on by making me take soap
into my mouth and hold it until my saliva combined enough for it to leak out of my mouth with
the soap dissolved and a little foamy. All this because I wanted to talk and communicate, rather
than listen to the teacher and stop talking, or I just enjoyed talking to other kids. Further
repulsion toward books was the view I had of my brother who was always holed up in his room.
He read, but that did not seem like a good way to live. So removed from everything. I enjoyed
the outdoors, biking, walking in the woods, playing with our dog. A balance would have been
the answer. At the time it seemed like a really bad thing. Then top this off with a school system
that consistently ranked at the lowest end of the scale for many years on end.
Now that I did graduate, and made some direction to move on, my father directed me toward
Texaco. A place he was clearly miserable, not present as a father except for one day, and often
those days were filled with chores directed by an angry, overriding, uncommunicative,
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dictatorial, task master. The screwed up eyebrows with furrows above, the clenched jaw with
the lower jaw jutting out and a tightly closed mouth and the glare in his eyes. That was the face
we saw one day a week. Could this be the action and wish for a child of your own?
So, why direct your child to Texaco. To repeat your misery? What kind of parent wishes, and
pushes that direction? I can presume one that is stupid. I hope it is one who is misguided, or
lacks vision. Or is it one who rather delights in watching the pain he went through manifest in
his son as well. That would be the ultimate punishment and lack of care for his child. Being
uncommunicative, my father offered little in the way of advice or guidance. One line was
offered: Do a good job and they will pay you what you are worth. Clearly an aphorism worth
less than the torrid breath used to speak it. It is enough to say that this is not even 5 % of the
equation that I saw. Think about it. Most job duties are not so complex they cant be
performed reasonably well by most anyone. So, what separates most people, in the eyes of asupervisor? It is the personal attention you provide the supervisor. The suck up. Occasionally
there are opportunities to shine on performance alone but too many supervisors respond to
the personal attention as the differentiation come review time. Having been on the awarding
end of increases, I can tell you that outstanding performance gets a 1% to a maximum of 2%
increase above the average performance increase. Thats not commensurate with outstanding
performance. Fortunately, I ran across, for a short while a corporate CEO and local manager
that bucked this trend.. But I digress. So you jump on the treadmill with all the other rats and
watch those around you sacrifice their life for the company, put up the false self, posture, and
sellout. You could tell the few originals, very few, but there were some. You were friends withthem. But they were stagnant because they did not suck up. It appears that many are not
shown the right way to live. Part culture, part parents. Maybe the parental part is a large part
culture.
I never liked hearing I love you from my parents. It did not happen often. Living away I heard it
on the phone more. I felt really uncomfortable with it. It seemed fake. It seemed like something
was expected in return. It seemed like its meaning was not what it was intended to be from my
experience with those words. It came from a totally horrible place, so how could they
understand the words in the best way, the right way, the proper way. I submit they could not.
They did not live it.
There are at least 3 laws that people operate by from what I can determine: Law of Suggestion,
Law of Compensation, Law of Attraction. Through looking back at my life and observation of my
own and that of others, I can say they are true and proven by empirical evidence.
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Suggestion: we are more like lemmings than we ever care to admit. Look at the influence of
parents, friends, media on your behavior. Good, kind, caring parents produce good kind caring
children for the most part. Angry, abusive, unkind parents produce the same kind of children.
Often the exceptions are from other childhood influences of a good nature or bad nature. In
conjunction with suggestion is Consensus. This is acceptance of a trusted person/entity in their
appraisal of you in some way. One person can represent consensus and form in you an opinion
of yourself or your actions that can last a lifetime.
Consensus: If we look around, we determine the correctness of an action or observation, based
on others much of the time. Look at the true innovators and forward thinkers of our history and
we see the fallacy of this. They prove time and again that trust in yourself (confidence) is the
key. Confidence in being wrong as being just a stepping stone to success seems also a prevailing
attitude. If it is an attitude, that can be controlled by you. Nevertheless, law of consensus rules
most peoples lives and whenever we are ruled, the least of us is available, not the most.
Compensation: this is a complex one that Emerson wrote and is must reading for everyone in
my opinion. It is about how things work in the human relations world.
Attraction: we attract people like ourselves and what we think about. Plain and simple.
I survived the law of attraction with reason. I have a strong self preservation instinct (no doubt
from all the anger I saw) so I rationalized my mate attraction and luckily came across a gem.
This is not to say she was not physically attractive. She was/is. Attraction has a lot more to do
with other non physical and some indefinable things. I knew what I liked, what was good for me,
and what was not good for me now that I had dated a few women and a couple were for a term
of years. I found a woman who is a strong nurturer, with immense patience, a strong sense ofbalance and self, with a great mother influence and an intelligence and curiosity that was
similar to mine. Key to her is her strong self respect evidenced by hardly any moments of anger
in her life despite trials of immense proportion. So, I was able to break the cycle. I found
someone attractive, who is committed to growing, and capable of lasting love and commitment,
and strong in her own right. This was different from previous relationships. A true life success.
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So, to return to the work treadmill, my brother and I were lost without direction. We floated
along, getting raises, moving along, but feeling unfulfilled. I made a move to retail. At first it
was definitely a good move. It allowed more choice in where to live. I could get out of Louisiana.
My children could get a better exposure to education, environment, and family that was
balanced, and normal. My parents were the exact opposite of what I wanted them exposed to.
The retail I chose had good management and the leader of the company understood the
reward for respecting your people and showing it in many ways. Intelligent management was
the key to my success. I had a smart, people oriented, kind, and teaching kind of manager. It
was 9 months of bliss. I flourished under him. He hired smart people, driven to succeed and
paid them very well. The store worked better than a Swiss watch. Because I was happy, and I
had the autonomy to run the department as I saw fit, people were drawn to me. Mostly women.
Kind soft spirit I guess. Several of the women came to offer their help when there was downtime for them. The store manager called it a Love Fest that I had going on over there. This just
meant that they all wanted to help me. I was happy there, pleasant, and appreciative and
people were drawn to that. There was a stress in other department managers. It was a perfect
storm of the good kind for me. All things worked properly. I was promoted from that store, as
were every other department head in the store eventually. This is a remarkable feat. It was
entirely due to leadership, belief, and good support from management. This store manager was
an independent, rule breaking, kind of person. The current CEO provided fertile ground for this
kind of person. He encouraged independence and few rules to go by. After being promoted to a
problem store, which the management team fixed, we heard that the CEO was retiring and anew CEO was being sought. This was the beginning of the end. He changed so much so quickly
and for his pocket, it just destroyed the morale, the profit, the future, and your dreams. One
side note. It was well known and observed that many store managers were terminated within a
couple of years of becoming a store manager. The ones that did last longer, often, showed the
stress in illness, graying hair, and body injuries. They had to answer calls on their days off, come
in on days off, and it seemed like they never really had a break. This did not appeal. The closer
you got the worse it looked. It is important to note that the store manager that promoted me
soon thereafter, upon this new CEOs reign, became displaced. He no longer fit. He left a short
time later, but not without some fireworks. This company was his savior from a life of hard
times. It was also uncommon, as in corporate America, conformity and compliance was the rule.
He was a bit disenfranchised.
Skip to employment at a small hardware store. I met, after a year, a head cashier who
transferred in to our store. I liked her, she was friendly, but sensed some problems. No
particulars here. The point is that we clashed hard at one time over a presumed allowance of
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theft, then through my efforts, tried to reconcile. It was determined that theft was occurring
and company policy changed. She had a short career so far, but there were serious bumps
already.
Later I was directed to her Facebook/MySpace site by a coworker shortly after this effort. I
learned there was a quite different person from who was at work. This person did not seem so
angry. She had an interesting personality. She was involved in life and had passions. As I got to
know her and tried to offer her help with her socialization problems with men ( offering how
men saw the world and women), I soon discovered that she was actually helping me! There
were many conversations where I just listened to what she wanted to talk about. It seemed to
be something she really needed. I knew something about this girl could help me, but it was
really low level. I knew she was sharp and misplaced. I knew she was hiding something. Like me.
Law of attraction. I see this now but operated on instinct then. Turns out we have some
uncanny background and mental material. I learned her parents both had low opinions of
themselves. She had an abysmal opinion of herself. Her parents separated for a while and it
sounded like the mother needed religion for a personal soothing reason, and the father drank,
and considered himself at best the level of a dogbut not in a good way. Her siblings had image
problems as well, but seemed less serious. Her fathers greatest and most forefront thought on
his mind when I had the occasion to talk to him for just a few minutes was..concern for his
daughters anger. He cared deeply for her and did not want to see her so angry. I so fervently
agree.
It has been posited that marriage is a dead institution because of a failure rate of 50% or
greater. I propose that it is not the institution that is at fault but the happiness of the individual.If one reads the Meaning of Sex, by Ayn Rand, they will have the clearest view of happiness (self
esteem) and how it relates to relationships and their success. If you look at much literature,
news worthy life, television shows, and movies, the pattern is clear. The person who is unhappy
with themselves cheats to get a short fix of feel-good from a desperate need. He cannot get it
from the one he loves because he hates himself so much he feels like he is not worthy of the
relationship or closeness from the loving one. It is an answer to the behavior you see all
around you in such a clear and self evident, self proving description I think it should be taught
to all people for consideration. Forewarned is forearmed. Now, to make it clear, I did not
succumb to this action as I am sure some readers may interpret. However, it was a question
brought up, and I could not support an answer. One interesting side note. I have found it a
curious thing through life when asked how many medications I am on, that following my none
response, is a what, none, that is really unusual. This is quite a statement to the general
population condition. Many are medicated.
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Here is Ayn Rands excerpt for The Meaning of Sex:
Do you remember what I said about money and about the men who seek
to reverse the law of cause and effect? The men who try to replace the mind
by seizing the products of the mind? Well, the man who despises himself
tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventureswhich cant be done,
because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a mans
sense of his own value. ...
The men who think that wealth comes from material resources and has
no intellectual root or meaning, are the men who thinkfor the same
reasonthat sex is a physical capacity which functions independently of
ones mind, choice or code of values. They think that your body creates a
desire and makes a choice for youjust about in some such way as if iron
ore transformed itself into railroad rails of its own volition. Love is blind,
they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all
philosophers. But, in fact, a mans sexual choice is the result and the sum of
his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive
and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he
sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. No matter what
corruption hes taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most
profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive
but his own enjoymentjust try to think of performing it in a spirit of
selfless charity!an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in
self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of
desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body,
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glory can there be in the conquest of a mindless body?
Anyway, she opened me up to books, ones that taught about people and behavior. Shop Girl by
Steve Martin, and Malcom Gladwells books. She was interested in Greek God Mythology, andpoetry. She identified so much with some literature it became part of her DNA. It was available
at an instant, and word for word. I saw how she used the Socratic method in questioning me,
and others, played like she was asking what if questions, in a non serious manner, but really
in search for deep meaning and getting into the lives of others to form her opinion of herself
and them. She really intrigued me. She could be the one who opens up the world for me. And
she did. She was a little too power hungry and used information to act as an informant to
bolster her position with the store manager. She was very insecure. Me too, just in a different
way. She was a master manipulator. I could learn from her though.. the positive things. One
occasion of manipulation on me was after an effort I made to allow me to help her move as itsounded like she was in a bind for time and people to help. I tried the kindness route, the
irritate route, the help-me-help you route. She would not budge and could not define for me
why she would not let me help her. She in fact said I dont know why. So I left it at that. I went
out to the sales floor and finished some duties and she came out a few minutes later and
offered a friendly reminder of a task I was going to do. Operating on the selfish principal I
figured that it was not the kind gesture it appeared to be. I was just beginning to read people
better, having read Blink and other articles on body language. She was in fact just trying to
misdirect me away from her as she went to the store manager to ask for his help moving.
Nevertheless, even through all the manipulative motions, we grew as people as she put it onetime when there was a mutual apology. I knew she was sharing information about me that I
told her in confidence. She was too insecure not too. And, I could read people pretty well and
watched their behavior. I could not take her exposing me as I gave her information about me. I
kept much information secret. She told me much about herbut refused questions that were
not of her free flowing choosing. I respected her privacy on all matters she relayed. She was
hurt by my holding back and dug and picked and observed. Quid Pro Quo was ordered. Now
that we were friends she could point out my various faults in angry or mean behavior more
freely. There were a few to be sure. I was an angry person. The assaults became too many, so I
had to leave when combined with my other disappointments. Here I was helping her, and there
was some resentment of me in some way, or maybe just power positioning, or just destructive
behavior. Who knows? It may have been that I did not share that much about my family or me
for that matter. It did not seem to be an interest with her, but later it became a high interest.
Of course, I could not share much. I was not proud of much and did not feel I could or should. I
surely would not want it spread and she told me clearly she did not keep secrets well. All this
was on top of many problems with leadership in the company, in the store, and above the store.
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The overriding issue concerning the company was the forced sale of ESPs and memberships.
For this you had to use your charm and relationship with customers to sell a product that was
to no advantage except the company in nearly all cases. This was, to me, in direct conflict with
my sense of morality to people I had a relationship with. I still have regret about those sales. I
feel like I used my best for the worst. However one defines sinsurely this would be the case.
Further motivation to leave was that at this point, I was on the right road as I had made some
behavioral changes at home and could see progress. Shortly before I left she vented about her
bulimia, and people being mean to her ( name calling about personal appearance) and about
her shame in school about them (her siblings too) smelling like smoke because they heated
with wood, etc. The anger during this episode was like Oscar Wildes Picture of Dorian Grey.
You could see the damage to her come through her face. I hurt so bad for her. She told me of
her life, so much like Kerry Cohen in Loose Girl. I watched her behavior in pursuing men. I hurt
for her so much I could barely take it. The anger over another head cashier, her equal in
another store that she replaced in our store.so much like her. Retail, as I look at it in my mind
now, has a preponderance of low self esteem people. The big box paid more, especially under
good leadership, and as a consequence, we hired a better, more secure, stationed person.
Although, as I look back there were plenty examples of low self worth people here as well, even
in the better environment. Studs Terkel wrote a book containing interviews with employees of
many walks of life. In particular he talked to manufacturing employees. One glaring standout
was that management had a different opinion (higher) of the work environment than the floor
worker. There was a clear disconnect. I find the modern retail environment has a lot of parallels
to the factory environment. The small box did not have this advantage of higher pay for
workers. But ironically, it allowed less anonymity. Propinquity, attraction by closeness, workedhere to my ultimate advantage. This was the start of getting past my faade and finding out
what my possibilities were.
Its a curious thing, confidence. It does not affect your entire persona. Its compartmentalized.
She had great confidence in her job duties, but when in university, where structure was absent,
no confidence and a meltdown. In line with details elsewhere in this text, she operated in
mimicry behavior when she entered the retail workforce and copied her friends behavior and
ran up lots of debt since her income did not match her friends. The law of attraction led her to
lots of other people who found comfort, or relief from sexual exploitation. She copied them.
She has a lot of confidence in manipulating men. I watched her work one manager through
sexual discussion. At one time he was making her feel bad about her appearance in several
ways. She was distraught by it. I offered that it was to get attention. She made a childhood
observationyou mean like pulling pig tails, I said yes.like that. She often reduced behaviors
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to childhood instances. Smart girlmore than she knows maybe. If someone is giving you
negative attention, it is still attention. For an insecure person this is a great way to operate. If
you show positive attention and get shot down it hurts. If you use negative attention you most
likely will fire him up and get attention back. If not, you save face and consider it a victory. Also,
negative attention, if you dont like yourself, can be a victory, as it supports your view. If youtruly dont like someone, you dont give them any attention at all. This may seem
counterintuitive but it stands to reasonto evidence.This to me is an example of the hate and
love being two sides of the same coin. At this point she worked him with sexual
discussionputting him in a place to be advising and he rolled over like a pup and smoothed
out. Before this, she was trying to get my buy in to make him stop and worked me on an
intellectual level, ( I had not responded in the same way to sexual discussion) and asked my
opinion about a paperwork issue. I offered a solution but you could tell she clearly did not need
or really want my idea. It was just to get support the way she thought I would respond. When
she thought one manager had given me information about a ploy she had planned to try
against me, she immediately confused him and knew just how to do it by shaking him with his
confidence in his memory. On one occasion she tried to see if I would take more cash during a
register payout. She had heard erroneously that I had done this to a cashier, and her method
was spectacular. An actress in full immersion in the role. She flipped her hair and acted with
abandon to indicate she was not paying attention, but fully aware all the time. I suspected she
was up to something and immediately put the $10.00 extra dollars she slipped me back in the
drawer. So confident in some ways, her ability to manipulate, her intellect at conjuring, her
structured work, but so little in other ways. Its a puzzle. Speaking of intellect, this young lady
also asked the deepest questions. She was a thinker, clearly. Although she would explain away
her interest as a way to pass the time during thoughtless activity, she clearly was thinking about
things. Here is a list of some topics discussed: Religion and/or Gods existence, sex and all that
goes with it ( power, pleasure, sado masochism, interracial, prostitution, immorality diseases),
determinism, socialism, communism, social ideology, theory of selfishness vs. altruism, self
preservation vs. the moral imperative of your actions, womens rights, judgementalism vs.
observation/communication, and the egos of men.
She had connection with books and all the comfort they allow, without the sincerest people
connection. I had the sincerest people connection without the book awareness that allows you
to define who you are, others are, and the interrelation of everything else. One without the
other seems to me is a disconnected existence. The value of both is enhanced by the other in
ways that are not possible to clearly explain satisfactorily. You just have to experience it. I make
an analogy: its like having tools, but nothing to work with, or having something to work with
but no tools.
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prompting. He did not think this related to him. He frequently professes to be a rationally
driven person. This specifically addresses tickets and rational mindedness. Yet, in his mind there
was simply no connection to how this related to him. I do not think this is unusual. I think
others see us differently than we see ourselves. And, I think, depending on the person, the
other vision, is bound to some accuracy we care not to admit. Further exacerbating the issue isthe reluctance of others to say something. This in my opinion is a great tragedy. I think a lot of
behaviors could be addressed and remedied if more people allowed themselves to talk to
people about behaviors they see that are missing the mark. The delicate approach must be
used though. If it comes across as judgmental it possibly becomes worse than nothing said at
all. I am certainly not the only one to arrive at this conclusion. I particularly like Walt Whitman.
This is a partial reprint of a poem he wrote that is particularly relevant. Poem of You, Whoever
you are:
You have not known what you areyou have
slumbered upon yourself all your life,Your eye-lids have been as much as closed most
of the time,
What you have done returns already in mock-eries,
Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do notreturn in mockeries, what is their return?
The mockeries are not you,
Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk,
One of the most valuable things to me has been hearing conversations not meant for my ears,
but specifically about me. It is here that the truth is spoken. Since you are not there, you are
hearing it as an observer, and it sifts into the mind a little differently. You dont get defensive,
or interrupt. You just think.is this true, are the comments accurate, why do I do this behavior,
is it motivated by aggression from another person, what prejudices does the other person have,
is this something I can change, and, should I change. The reality check this provides is eyeopening. People in my experience dont speak the truth, business or personal. It is a constant
protectionist attitude, that eliminates authenticity. Politics for power, money, treatment, and
attention rule the actions of adults misguided by a society that favors the image these things
represent. Its a false image. When they get there the atmosphere darkens. But the treadmill
keeps going, if not a little faster. Unfortunately, the information that is kept quite is both
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negative and positive. There is a similar parallel in families, at least my family. It turns out from
attending a school meeting that other parents have this same issue. One parent commented
that she did not find out information from her child, and that she had to talk to teachers to find
out what was going on. I find in correspondence, like emails, and school assignments that the
real condition of the soul is expressed. Here the relationship is held forever in a state ofdiscontent, rather than allowed to proceed from a mutual understanding. What pain is endured
for no other reason than not communicating I cannot even fathom. I can surmise it is great by
my own estimation of the looks, the lack of looks, and the lack of conversation. On a
philosophical note there is a statement that is appropriate here: The notion of secrecy is central
to western literature. You may say, the whole idea of character is defined by people holding
specific information which for various reasons, sometimes perverse, sometimes noble, they are
determined not to disclose.
Loose Girl and other resources point out a useful tool. If you hate someone, take a close look. It
is probably something in yourself you do not like about yourself. I have found this to be true. I
identified with her, enjoyed her brain, (for she challenged me to think about the things we do
every day and just accept it), and how much she was helping me understand myself. I could not
take seeing myself in her, and her damage herself.on purpose, yet without in her mind,
alternative recourse. What a pathetic set of circumstances.
The key moment for me was after I had exchanged some tidbits about smoking marijuana and
13 car accidents, (most very minor, obviouslyIm still here and undeformed of body) she said
so you had a bad childhood, huh? I of course immediately said what, no, I had a good
childhood. I believed then that I did. I had none of the news worthy poverty, or physical abuse.
I lived in the suburbs, had a car in high school, dated, had success in school, regular meals,
money and a job in high school. I did not know then the effect of my experiences. I was also as
the saying goes too close to the forest to see the trees. I have since learned through the
glimpse of this young lady and many books later that behavior we received was in fact
detrimental to development. I was always blamed for bad behavior as I was growing up. It was
my fault somehow that I was angry, got in accidents. The consensus of a parental statement is
powerful. I was screaming nonverbally about the messed up environment. I later screamed
verbally and physically. I think people really do behave according to the law of every action has
an equal and opposite reaction, with emotions as well. This is why kindness breeds kindness
and anger breads anger. I think maybe some magnification does happen though depending on
the personalities (sensitivities) involved. One note of interest was when I pulled out onto a road
about halfway.when I saw a motorcycle rider coming toward me. It was too late to move, and
he hit the front part of the car and flew across the hood and landed some 30 to 40 feet in the
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grass. He turned out to be relatively unscathed. Now, I knew I should feel bad for this. And, I
played the part. Moping, staying in the room as if depressed. But, I really had no connection to
this other than an observer. I did not feel bad. I still dont and wonder why? It seems
sociopathic, but I do have extreme sensitivity to seeing pain in my wife and kidslike cleaning
wounds, or minor physical therapy for my wife to aid in her recovery from an injury. I think thisis enough to offer evidence against sociopathy.
This is the tip of the iceberg really. There are many other incidents. To the party that says, tell
me more, which is nothing more than a veiled interest, but rather a way to discredit should
more anecdote be unavailable, I respond with this parallel. The iceberg is made up of many
days of inconsequential little layers of daily snow and ice. It builds quietly and uneventfully into
a massive object of immense weight and size which is as oppressive and as immovable as most
anything on earth. This is the effect of daily life on the person. He can hardly distinguish all thatoppresses him and the immensity of it all for its slow but consistent growth upon him. But here
is the really tricky abuse. They are intelligent people, my parents, so mind games happened as
well. These are the things you cant point to exactly, so you are defenseless in a way at a young
age. You just know you are being screwed with and all you can do is get angrier and angrier. It is
a cruel kind of torture when your mind is being manipulated and you cant see a direct path to
fight it or express and point to it directly. This really eats at you because now you feel helpless
at even fighting the hate and anger coming your way. Once you do, you appear as the instigator
of the assault, so now you are definitely the problem. Kind of like being put in jail when you are
innocent I think. All the evidence points to you, you know you did not do it, and you have nodefense against it, and you know you are going down for something you did not do.
Without going into much detail, I stole candy and deep fried apple pies at around 6 years old. I
was caught after a while. The punishment was to be fed out of a bottle like a baby and
restriction, yelling, and, spanking. I also played with fire, literally. I nearly burned down a club
house in the back yard. Both these actions speak to severe behavioral treatment and a poor
adjustment to it. It is not a puzzle now. I dont think it was then, but this is really not a matter
for now. It is just another piece to the explanation of me. There have been enough
autobiographies written that line the library shelves now that clearly indicate, without the need
of psychologists, that poor parental involvement leads to this behavior and it is almost a
guarantee if both parents are at issue. Usually, if one parent is involved to a healthy degree the
children manage well though with some effort.
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At 10 years old, I was in class in the morning period. I was sitting quietly as the children filtered
in. All of the sudden, there was a commotion at the front of the class. The children started
gathering around. I went carefully up as well. At this time there was pushing and shoving. Soon
it grew into fist throwing and finally one kid went down. Then, the kid standing took the hair of
the kid on the ground and with a swift motion jammed his knee into his face about three times.The kid was out. The only feeling I can remember is one of awe, and the consequent wish of
boy, I wish I could do that. The absolute power and victory was impressive. The problem was
he was suspended, maybe expelled. I better not do that after all.
One last anecdote of my behavior was in my teen years. I was 16 or 17. My friends and I were
pulling into a shopping center to listen to stereos at a high end stereo store. We pulled into a
spot and were immediately approached by an angry person in an old faded gold/brown station
wagon. He was wild looking, with hair slightly electrified, unshaven and a rough appearanceoverall. I couldnt swear to it, but a damaged Vietnam vet would be a good guess. We had
taken his spot. I immediately refuted him. He escalated to vulgarities. I intensely threw
expletives back and he was now going to his station wagon in a fast angry arms- flailing walk.
He was getting his car jack. The big ones used in the 70s. He started to raise it as if he was
going to come at me with it. I, in my angry youth, finally having a chance to release, threatened
him with his own action. I told him, go ahead, do it, you may hit me, but you will go to jail, Im
under 18!. Go ahead! Youll go to jail! Reasoning with this man was a 1 in a million chance. But,
somehow, he did reason it was not worth it. My friends thought it was an amazing display after
wards. But, now, I have a different view.
I am on a path to recovery. If it was not for meeting this outspoken head cashier with similar
background and personal makeup I probably would never have changed. This would have been
a travesty for my entire family, including extended. The effects this lady has had are truly hard
to measure. Its enormous and probably (hopefully) will affect generations. My brother is much
better now that he has a handle on why he was behaving the way he was. He was told several
times by his partner, but it did not sink in. The source and the way the words are put in context
matter beyond measure. Its the difference between acceptance and not.pure and simple.
I am trying to explain a way directly to rectifying the self image. I am studying the famouspeople like Oprah who have self image problems. They all still have self image problems, but
get some boost from fans. This is not a solution. I think it is a band aid not available, nor
desirable to many people. I am hopeful that intellectualizing the three laws and primarily the
law of suggestion will be an answer. I hope it is an answer for Kerry Cohen and others like her
or anyone with self esteem issue resulting from behavior that demeans. I must say at this point
I understand why House Speaker Boehner cries, while it seems a mystery to most people. I find
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myself tearing up or getting a tight throat and a strained voice when I see a sweet kindness that
is touching, especially toward children.
If, as Mark Twain posits, in his What is Man book, is true, and it seems to hold water based onmy observations of life, this is an answer. Therefore, as young people, (and older as well) we
are highly suggestible machines, and we are programmed as it were for behaviors by behaviors
seen. Furthermore, people operate in self mode all the time. All actions are from a self
perspective. Therefore, all actions toward you need to be considered before you believe it is
actually any real reflection of you. Take for instance a bully who picks on others. The person
being picked on is just a release for the anger in the other. We take it as a fault in ourselves
because we only think in terms of self. But, clearly the bully is just releasing his anger and that is
no reflection in any way of your value. The same is true of good deeds. This makes actions
toward us confusing. We see good actions toward us as a boostabout us. So, we see badactions toward us as a detriment. In fact, good actions frequently are really about how the
other person feels about themselves. If you feel great about yourself you release that to others.
If you have self- esteem, ( again it is about the self and if you rely on outsiders, you will never
get the self defined) these comments are mere comments and should be appreciated for what
they are.comments, not directions to how you feel about yourself. So, how do you get self
esteem. Seems to me the best answer is something like this. Read, read , read and get an
identity about how you feel about the important questions in life to you. To quote: the chief
importance of knowledge by description is that it enables us to pass beyond the limits of our
own private experience. I think parents can help, but this is the source of the problem in thisdiatribe so I dont approach this angle here. Spirituality has been defined as your relation to
the universe. I like this definition. Become an intellectual on what drives you. Get clear
definitions of marriage, morality, purpose, meaning, selfishness, human rights, and politics to
name several. It seems hard to imagine an intellectual with self esteem issues. This information
also allows connection to others in deeply meaningful ways that construct memories. This
certainly adds meaning and depth to the self.
The Latin phrase says it all to me: I carry all my things with me. That is a secure mindset, but it
requires a lot of intellectual pursuit.This concept is the essence of confidence, clearly defined
ideas and definitions of the important things to them and no need of others approval for self
evaluation. This is not to say that it is not appreciated, but rather their image is theirs and not
an evaluation of them from someone else in the form of compliment or derogatory comment. If
we rely on others for our image then obviously it will vary by the others we are in contact with
who project their own image on to us since we only see in others what we identify with. This is
no way to have an image and would be very confusing to adjust to since it will always vary from
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day to day and person to person. Think about a compliment.....you are a kind person.....I assure
you that person thinks they are kind at the moment and sees that in you. Meet an angry person
( anger has been defined as it is all about me...attention attention) and they will project that on
you. One outstanding feature of the great people of this earth was the well read nature and
often their documentation of their ideas in the form of a journal. The documentation cementsand confirms your ideas and thoughts and direction. Reference the neural/synaptic thickening
that occurs with repetition and the working in the mind of an idea.
Put another way is the following:
Definitions - it has become a running theme through reading that a clear problem for people is
definitions. If you don't have a really good idea of a definition of some ideas ( love, politics,
passion) you will assume the influence others have over you and accept their definition rather
than search it out for yourself and get comfortable with it. Reading is one way. This is talking
to people, working their view to what works for you. I saw an interview with Tim McGraw whohad as a definition of himself a father who was an alcoholic. You are defined by your parents as
a young person. We are mimickers. But in this case he saw his real father and chose at that
moment to redefine himself in those terms. He immediately got confidence. Definitions are
crucial to happiness or at least having a choice in the path you take. You have to have clear
definitions of who you are to be confident. Think about what makes you feel good.....it's when
you do something you are confident with.
Now, on motivation I have this to say.The motivation for any action toward you is never aboutyou. It is always about the other person. This is why it can never work to base your opinion on
others...it is impossible for it to be about you....although you think it is. Think about hateful
statement, practical jokes, mean behaviors, favors, kindnesses. They all stem from the other
persons motivations. Two great movie examples are The Reader, and Ordinary People. The
child in both assumes the blame for the parents distant, difficult behavior. Of course in both
cases as in life, it is not the case, but the condition of the adult from traumatic treatment. It can
be a vicious cycle. This is monumental to know and internalize in order to understand that
your value can only come from the comfort you get for yourself in gaining knowledge about the
things you think about that matter to you.
In Dr. OZs book, there is stated the ever increasing evidence of mimicry as the primary tool of
learning and the most effective in brain formation. A truly convincing show of the sublime
power of suggestion is laid out in the brown-eyed blue-eyed experiment performed in 1968 by
a school teacher where she turned students against each other in a matter of minutes and a
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leap to suggest there is monetary motive to let it be. Especially, since there is a great many
people that dont make this jump and stay in subservient, low wage, low intellect jobs that the
service industry ( our economy) is made up of. In effect, there is monetary reason to suggest
that we are perpetuating this behavior if not outright supporting it.
The following is from New Yorker Magazine. It addresses in a fresh manner many of the topics I
bring up here: suggestibility, education, consensus, law of attraction, and certainly the law of
compensation.
Occasionally, you meet a young, rising member of this class at the gelato store, as he hovers
indecisively over the cloudberry and ginger-pomegranate selections, and you notice that hissuperhuman equilibrium is marred by an anxiety. Many members of this class, like many
Americans generally, have a vague sense that their lives have been distorted by a giant culturalbias. They live in a society that prizes the development of career skills but is inarticulate when it
comes to the things that matter most. The young achievers are tutored in every soccer techniqueand calculus problem, but when it comes to their most important decisionswhom to marry and
whom to befriend, what to love and what to despisethey are on their own. Nor, for all theirstriving, do they understand the qualities that lead to the highest achievement. Intelligence,
academic performance, and prestigious schools dont correlate well with fulfillment, or evenwith outstanding accomplishment. The traits that do make a difference are poorly understood,
and cant be taught in a classroom, no matter what the tuition: the ability to understand andinspire people; to read situations and discern the underlying patterns; to build trusting
relationships; to recognize and correct ones shortcomings; to imagine alternate futures. In short,these achievers have a sense that they are shallower than they need to be.
Help comes from the strangest places. We are living in the middle of a revolution in
consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists,economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the human
mind. Far from being dryly materialistic, their work illuminates the rich underwater world wherecharacter is formed and wisdom grows. They are giving us a better grasp of emotions, intuitions,
biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those thingsabout which our culture has least to say. Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of
theology and philosophy.
A core finding of this work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking.
The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconsciousmind gives us other, more supple ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides
a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion overpure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic,
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perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to goalong with the conventional surface one.
To give a sense of how this inner story goes, lets consider a young member of the ComposureClass, though of course the lessons apply to members of all classes. Ill call him Harold. Hisinner-mind training began before birth. Even when he was in the womb, Harold was listening for
his mothers voice, and being molded by it. French babies cry differently from babies whoveheard German in the womb, because theyve absorbed French intonations before birth. Fetuses
who have been read The Cat in the Hat while in the womb suck rhythmically when they hear itagain after birth, because they recognize the rhythm of the poetry.
As a newborn, Harold, like all babies, was connecting with his mother. He gazed at her. Hemimicked. His brain was wired by her love (the more a rat pup is licked and groomed by its
mother, the more synaptic connections it has). Harolds mother, in return, read his moods. A
conversation developed between them, based on touch, gaze, smell, rhythm, and imitation. WhenHarold was about eleven months old, his mother realized that she knew him better than shedever known anybody, even though theyd never exchanged a word.
ILLUSTRATION: PHILIPPE PETIT-ROULET
Harold soon developed models in his head of how to communicate with people and how to use
others as tools for his own learning. Thanks to his moms attunement, he became confident thatif he sent a signal it would be received. Later in life, his sense of security enabled him to go out
and explore the world. Researchers at the University of Minnesota can look at attachmentpatterns of children at forty-two months, and predict with seventy-seven-per-cent accuracy who
will graduate from high school. People who were securely attached as infants tend to have morefriends at school and at summer camp. They tend to be more truthful through life, feeling lessneed to puff themselves up in others eyes. According to work by Pascal Vrticka, of the
University of Geneva, people with what scientists call avoidant attachment patterns show lessactivation in the reward areas of the brain during social interaction. Men who had unhappy
childhoods are three times as likely to be solitary at age seventy. Early experiences dontdetermine a life, but they set pathways, which can be changed or reinforced by later experiences.
For several months when he was four, Harold insisted that he was a tiger who had been born on
the sun. His parents tried to get him to concede that he was a little boy born in a hospital, but hewould become grave and refuse. This formulation, Im a tiger, may seem like an easy thing,
but no computer could blend the complicated concept I with the complicated concept tigerinto a single entity. As Harold grew, he was able to use his imagination to blend disparate ideas,
in the same sort of way that Picasso, at the height of his creative powers, could combine theconcept Western portraiture with the concept African masks.
Throughout his life, Harold had a superior ability to feel what others were feeling. He didnt
dazzle his teachers with academic brilliance, but, even in kindergarten, he could tell you who inhis class was friends with whom; he was aware of social networks. Scientists used to think that
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we understand each other by observing each other and building hypotheses from the accumulateddata. Now it seems more likely that we are, essentially, method actors who understand others by
simulating the responses we see in them. When Harold was in high school, he could walk aroundthe cafeteria and fall in with the unique social patterns that prevailed in each clique. He could tell
which clique tolerated drug use or country-music listening and which didnt. He could tell how
many guys a girl could hook up with and not be stigmatized. In some groups, the number wasthree; in others seven. Most people assume that the groups they dont belong to are morehomogeneous than the groups they do belong to. Harold could see groups from the inside. When
he sat down with, say, the Model U.N. kids, he could guess which one of them wanted to migratefrom the Geeks and join the Honors/Athletes. He could sense who was the leader of any group,
who was the jester, who played the role of peacemaker, daredevil, organizer, or self-effacingaudience member.
y from the issue
y cartoon banky e-mail this
One of Harolds key skills in school was his ability to bond with teachers. Weve spent ageneration trying to reorganize schools to make them better, but the truth is that people learn
from the people they love. In eleventh grade, Harold developed a crush on his history teacher,Ms. Taylor. What mattered most was not the substance of the course so much as the way she
thought, the style of learning she fostered. For instance, Ms. Taylor constantly told the class howlittle she knew. Human beings are overconfidence machines. Paul J. H. Schoemaker and J.
Edward Russo gave questionnaires to more than two thousand executives in order to measurehow much they knew about their industries. Managers in the advertising industry gave answers
that they were ninety-per-cent confident were correct. In fact, their answers were wrong sixty-one per cent of the time. People in the computer industry gave answers they thought had a
ninety-five per cent chance of being right; in fact, eighty per cent of them were wrong. Ninety-nine per cent of the respondents overestimated their success.
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Ms. Taylor was always reminding the class of how limited her grasp of any situation was. Sorry,I get distracted easily, shed say, or, Sorry, sometimes I jump to conclusions too quickly. In
this way, she communicated the distinction between mental strength (the processing power of thebrain) and mental character (the mental virtues that lead to practical wisdom). She stressed the
importance of collecting conflicting information before making up ones mind, of calibrating
ones certainty level to the strength of the evidence, of enduring uncertainty for long stretches asan answer became clear, of correcting for ones biases. As Keith E. Stanovich, a psychologist atthe University of Toronto, writes in his book What Intelligence Tests Miss (2009), these
thinking dispositions correlate weakly or not at all with I.Q. But, because Ms. Taylor put suchemphasis on these virtues and because Harold admired her so much, he absorbed and copied her
way of being.
By the time Harold was in his mid-twenties, he was well on his way toward a happy andfulfilling life, and the building blocks of his happiness had little to do with the lines on his
rsum. Theres a debate in our culture about what really makes us happy, which is summarizedby, on the one hand, the book On the Road and, on the other, the movie Its a Wonderful Life.
The former celebrates the life of freedom and adventure. The latter celebrates roots andconnections. Research over the past thirty years makes it clear that what the inner mind really
wants is connection. Its a Wonderful Life was right. Joining a group that meets just once amonth produces the same increase in happiness as doubling your income. According to research
by Daniel Kahneman, Alan B. Krueger, and others, the daily activities most closely associatedwith happiness are socialhaving sex, socializing after work, and having dinner with friends.
Many of the professions that correlate most closely with happiness are also sociala corporatemanager, a hairdresser.
Young American men are not exactly famous for being in touch with their emotions. But Haroldsensed that he was a social animal, not a laboring animal or a rational animal, and one day he
went on a blind date with the womanlets call her Ericawho would someday be his wife.Given the stakes, we might pause over this incident, to show in slightly more detail how the
inner processes of the mind interact with the conscious ones.
Harold and Erica got their first glimpse of each other in front of a Barnes & Noble. They smiledbroadly as they approached, and a deep, primeval process kicked in. Harold liked what he saw,
from the waist-to-hip ratio to the clear skin, all indicative of health and fertility. He enjoyed thesmile that spread across Ericas face, and unconsciously noted that the end of her eyebrows
dipped down. The orbicularis-oculi muscle, which controls this part of the eyebrow, cannot beconsciously controlled, so, when the tip of the eyebrow dips, that means the smile is genuine, not
fake.
Erica was impressed by him: women everywhere tend to prefer men who have symmetrical
features and are slightly older, taller, and stronger than they are. But she was more guarded andslower to trust than Harold was. Thats in part because, while Pleistocene men could pick their
mates on the basis of fertility cues discernible at a glance, Pleistocene women faced a morevexing problem. Human babies require years to become self-sufficient, and a single woman in
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her chest into view. She would have been appalled if she had seen herself in a mirror at thatmoment.
And through it all the conversation flowed. Youd think, if you listened to cultural stereotypes,
that women are the more romantic of the sexes. In fact, theres evidence that men fall in love
faster and are more likely to believe that true love lasts forever. Though men normally spendtwice as much time talking about themselves as women do, in this conversation Harold wasactually talking about Ericas problems. Surveys by the evolutionary psychologist David Buss
suggest that, for both men and women, kindness is one of the most important qualities desired ina sexual partner. Courtship consists largely of sympathy displays, in which potential partners try
to prove how compassionate they can be, as anybody who has seen dating couples aroundchildren and dogs can attest.
Of course, there are less noble calculations going on as people choose their mates. Like veteran
stock-market traders, people respond in predictable, if unconscious, ways to the valuations of thesocial marketplace. The richer the man, the younger the woman he is likely to mate with. A
mans job status is an outstanding predictor of his wifes attractiveness. Without being aware ofit, Harold and Erica were doing these sorts of calculationsweighing earnings-to-looks ratios,
calculating social-capital balances. Every signal suggested that they had found a match.
+
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++The greatest happiness love can offer is the
first pressure of hands between you and your beloved, Stendhal observed. Harold and
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