Posted by 64bowtie on November 3, 2004, at 16:30:13
Overcoming Distortion
Abstract reflection, remembering, tends to flatten time when not done carefully and with purpose. It takes discipline to create historical time and chronologies. Sadly, hard work or not, memories not framed correctly in time, are by definition a distortion of whatever happened. If we then overlay a feeling onto the distortion, inevitably we create chaos, and faulty opinions and false beliefs.
This observation is supported by the obligation/expectation model of parenting. Be clear that there is a reason or purpose of limiting vision of how parents effectively manage kids to a study of approval/disapproval and obligation/expectation as apply to being a guidance tool. Kids can’t employ three-dimensional anything to anything. Actual logic transcends feelings without avoiding feelings. Parents are equipped by nature to operate at this necessary 3-D level. Kids aren’t.
If this is true, and if that is true, then this other thing must be true, cannot successfully be felt in real time by anyone. Reasoning by feeling is valid, just isn’t logic. Logic can give us this relationship of “this” to “that” and “those”, however. If we attempt to feel the steps along to this resultant, it takes six “if-then” feel-good/bad relationships to create the one relationship we get from “if-and-if-then” three-dimensional logical relationship. By age 12 to 13, kids actually are normal if they start reasoning at this 3-D level, experimenting with true logic.
Test the theory: Ask an eight year old to write a story about three kids that just met on their first day of school (third grade, let’s say). They can go on and on about how each two-some interacted in different sub-stories. What they can’t do is leap to the importance of all three meeting each other, forming a unit comprised of the three of them. Many authors make the mistake of focusing on kids doing this, a 20-20-hindsight for the author. Truth is, no three kids will ever volunteer the interdependence of the threesome. Only delayed abstract reflection feels like that was the way it actually was.
When we manage our adult life built on distortion, wrapped by more distortion, enmeshed with distortions owned by our significant others, we know chaos, on top of chaos, inside more chaos; the giant “ball of twine” that is our lives. After 30 years of ever-increasing hard work and study, unraveling my “ball of twine” life has rewarded me with freedom from dysfunction, and happiness in unencumbered vision and perceptions. I still battle distortion. I’m still enmeshed a little, here and there.
Rod
poster:64bowtie
thread:411218
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20041026/msgs/411218.html