SYW: Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you

Would I really do that? No, not deliberately. Okay, maybe a little bit deliberately if his or her sanity was driving me nuts, inspiring in me a homicidal hankering, and it was the only way to make them go away so that I didn’t get put away for… y’know, nudge nudge, wink wink.

My Machiavellian Intelligence Quotient is quite high (and no, I’m not proud of that, but it can be bloody useful sometimes) and sometimes I use it, but mostly I prefer to be dopey.

My Dopey Intelligence Quotient is also quite high, and it too can be useful and gets used, particularly if I’m dealing with someone suffering from Smartest Person in the Room (SPR) syndrome (aka. The Dunning-Kruger effect).

I can be an SPR too (again, this is not a boast), if need be, if dopey doesn’t work (if you’ve never done dopey with an SPR sufferer, the point of it is to make the SPR so utterly horrified that they’re in the company of such an idiot that they skedaddle), and then it’s game on, let the competition between SPR’s begin (they won’t win because I dgaf if I lose this competition, and I may deliberately lose – One-upmanship rule #x… yes, ‘x’ is a number… let your opponent win because you gain more from losing than from winning in this instance which means it’s actually a win for you).

When I warn people not to mess with me (which I don’t do often because the sort of people who inspire me to issue that warning don’t listen so it’s pointless), it’s not an empty threat, but it’s not really a threat either it’s more of a plea… please eff off now, I really don’t want to get medieval on your ass as my Lazy Personality Disordered-Order prefers to just chill and chat with the post-its on the wall above my desk, telling them that I will do that thing later (we both know I probably won’t unless I really have to).

“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”

― Carl Gustav Jung

That was a “longer than the scarf my gran knitted me” ( – something Crushed Caramel said to me about my posts which made me LOLOLOL! and think of…

   

   

… Who? Tom Baker as The Doctor) intro for this week’s Share Your World.

If you’d like to participate in SYW, and/or read the posts of other participants, please follow the following link to Melanie’s wonderful blog: Sparksfromacombustiblemind: SHARE YOUR WORLD 11-5-18

“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”

― Carl Jung

Is there one post on your site that is really special to you?  (credit for this one goes to CrushedCaramel )

One thing I’ve noticed is that very often my personal favourites are not those which others like (…I quite like that…) and by ‘like’ I don’t mean the Like’ button being pressed.

The majority of the people who view my blog come from outside of WordPress rather than from within the WP community, you have to log-in to ‘Like’ (apparently you also have to log-in to ‘Like’ even when you have a WP blog and are already logged in) which is really a faff (I’m a lurker too), and quite a few of my most popular posts aren’t really Like-able (they’re intense, heavy, issue-laden shadow works).

“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”

― Carl Gustav Jung

Or, more to the point, when people find them and read them they’re not there to be socially polite, they’re looking for something, an explanation, an answer, a way out of darkness, to clear the fog, they’re dealing with intense, heavy, issue-laden personal shadows, real life nightmares.

This is one of my favourites of those: Being A Child of Narcissists – Breaking the Silence

Here is an excerpt:

Narcissistic parents tend to look very good on the outside, they project the perfected image of the perfect parent who happens to have an imperfect child. They cover their asses efficiently, using their charm, their power to control how others perceive them and those whom the Narcissist considers an enemy (which is how a Narcissist views their child – the child knows too much) and their ability to hypnotise those who come into contact with them, in such a way that there is no escape for the child.

So if the child of a Narcissist speaks up and out against their parents, they will not be believed, and they will most likely be scolded by society for doing it. Their feeling that they are the bad one, defective, is reinforced. They retreat into silence. They are alone in a world full of people who are against them.

If you meet the child of a Narcissist, you will not pick up on any of this unless you are very sensitive and perceptive, and even then you won’t know what it is or why it is. You will probably conclude that there is something wrong with them, perhaps you’ll even brand them a Narcissist. It’s a trending accusation.

    

How Do You Deal With Negative People?  (Athling2001 gets credit for this one)

Chances are what I consider to be negative is not what you would consider to be negative in a person. Chances are you might consider me to be part of this tribe known as the Negative People.

The sort of people I tend to consider to be negative are what I would call False Positives (here’s a therapist’s view of this type of person Medium: The Danger in Fake Positivity and Spiritual Bypassing).

They’re the sort of people who have a big grin plastered on their face (but the eyes may negate the smile’s authenticity) and spout power of positive thinking (I bet they don’t know where that movement originated. Here’s a hint – it started long before the authors who popularised it) platitudes at everyone, especially those who really don’t need to hear that right now.

Here’s a visual representation of this type:

  

  

They’re always going on and on about how caring, compassionate, empathic, and POSITIVE!!! they are, but their walk isn’t in sync with their talk. Their walk is all about proving to themselves that their talk is authentic, true.

They’re the sort of people who tell a depressed person to cheer up as it can’t be that bad, and think of themselves as such great people for doing that, it’s not their fault the depressed person is refusing to do as the positive person told them to. You just can’t help some people!

They’re the sort of people who tell sad people to be happy. Anxious people are told to stop worrying. Angry people are told to forgive and forget. Pessimists are told to look on the bright side. People in pain are told to let go of their pain, besides there are others who have and are suffering more than them. Shy people are told not to be shy. Agoraphobics are told they should get out of the house. Nervous people are told to calm down. Lonely people are told to socialise more.

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”

― Carl Gustav Jung

Those people are negative to me because their positivity is all about themselves not about others – Oh look at what a beautiful shining ray of sunshine I am!!! So much better than all those dark clouds over there —-> point! point! point! poke! prod! Let me point out to you what’s wrong, bad, negative about you and then tell you how positive, right, good I am and prove it by advising you to stop thinking what you’re thinking, feeling what you’re feeling, and being the way that you are!

How do I deal with a False Positive when they bring their particular brand of negative my way and shove it in my face? I used to try to be polite and pleasant, help them to maintain their false front and positive facade, because they’re often clinging to it for dear life which is partly why they seek out negative people to save and then they can feel better about themselves, the slip into the abyss of their inner misery gets delayed a little bit longer.

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”

― Carl Gustav Jung

And for the most part I still do that, unless they decide to break me to then fix me. Then I may point out to them their hypocrisy and my negativity has them running for the hills as far away from me as possible which is exactly what I wanted, now I can relax and enjoy my day like I was doing until they turned up and decided to point out to me how negative I was and oh look look look how positive they are, yay, aren’t I glad they came to cheer me up.

This is one of my favourite posts about one of my experiences with a False Positive: Toxic Niceness

Here is an excerpt (I used to use very long paragraphs):

Many years ago I met a person who was all smiles. Kind, friendly, generous, considerate, sensitive, always willing to help those who needed it, and even those who didn’t. Everyone loved this person. I did too.

As I got to know them a bit better, it struck me that most of the stories they told me about themselves involved other people taking advantage of them, of their kindness and generosity. It sort of made sense, if you are very nice to everyone without exception, there are going to be people who take advantage of that, but there are also going to be people who appreciate it.

This person never seemed to have a good thing to say about anyone, it seemed like they were the only nice person on the planet. I thought perhaps that they had just chosen to tell me only about the bad things which had happened to them, rather than any of the good things, so I prompted them to tell me about some of the good people they had met, about those who had helped them. Apparently no one had ever helped them, which is why they were so dead set on helping others. So I asked them about the people whom they had helped, who had been grateful, and had returned the favour. None existed. This struck me as very odd, especially as I had met this person through mutual friends, and those mutual friends were people I considered to be very sweet souls. I mentioned this to this person. This fact was met with a sad face, a slow shake of the head, and then a quiet conspiratorial whisper informed me that our mutual friends were not as sweet as they appeared to be, but this person could not tell me more about what had happened, to reveal the truth about our mutual friends because this person was a nice, good, and kind person who did not speak badly of others. I knew that if I pushed for information I would have been given every little detail of the story, but I didn’t want to hear it.

      

 

still from The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)

What Is The First Thing You Think Of When You Wake In The Morning?

 

The dream I had just before I woke up.

Sometimes the dream will wake me up. There’s this one I have every now and then which plays the sound of a doorbell – I’ve finally learned to stop leaping out of bed and rushing to the door. Yesterday I was woken up by my partner asking: Are you awake? only my partner was fast asleep. This morning my first thought was… something which I have now forgotten but I do recall that it was a funny alliteration. My next thought was: Why am I awake so early? and it wasn’t because of my cat waking me up to snuggle under the covers, she did that after she heard me stir awake.

“Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life…

If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature…

Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.”

― C.G. Jung, The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition

I’m a vivid dreamer, although not all of my dreams are vivid. Sometimes my dreams clearly map out a problem with which I am struggling, and may show me the solution, or a way to find the solution.

On one occasion (when I was a teen) I fell asleep pondering what I was going to do now that the local garage where I bought petrol for my moped had closed down. Not all gas stations provided petrol for mopeds. My dream showed me exactly where to go to get that particular petrol locally – and when I checked the place out while awake, I found what I was looking for.

Sometimes I share my dreams in my posts.

This is one of my favourite dream posts (I was fairly certain that I had this dream after my operation rather than before, and that it wasn’t what spurred me to not allow myself to die, but the me who wrote this thought it was the other way around): Graven – A Hypnagogic Nightmare

Here’s an excerpt (oh, I just remembered that I recounted this dream to the Toxic Niceness person, and they thought I’d actually been possessed by a real demon, and I’m fairly certain they thought I might be a satanist. Pfft!):

I awoke in the dream to find an old woman sitting beside my bed. Resting on her lap was a large, ancient book, through which she was searching eagerly with her small hands. She eventually found what she was looking for, and began chanting words out loud. All I could understand was the word ‘Garven’. I don’t know how or why, but I knew that she had got the word wrong. It was a name. She kept repeating it, and her insistence on using the wrong word made me so angry that I cried out:

“Graven! Graven! Graven!”

As soon as those words left my lips, I realised that I had made a terrible mistake. The old woman looked at me with beady eyes glowing with cunning, as a twisted smile disfigured her mouth. She had tricked me. She had deliberately used the wrong word. She had been casting a spell, and, for it to work, she needed me to speak the right word three times.

From within my body came a rumbling like thunder. Intense fear gripped me. I could not move. My arms, which were crossed over my chest, felt heavy, their weight slowly bearing down on my ribcage.

A low growl emanated from within and around me. I knew immediately that this was a demon summoned by my words. I cried out to God to help me, but this made the demon laugh. He told me that God could not help me, since I had brought all of this on myself. I had summoned a demon willingly.

   

 

The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli

 

Would You Rather Be Able To Talk With The Animals Or Speak All Foreign Languages?

I speak three languages fairly fluently, and can muddle through a few others thanks to the ones I know fairly fluently. I don’t solely rely on words to communicate, to speak and listen – body language is very useful to know.

Most animals understand human language, especially body language, and the vibes you’re giving off (you can’t lie to animals), so I’d go with speak all foreign languages.

“We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.”

― Carl Jung

My experiences of living in a foreign land (which at times, to me, has been the entire planet… I went through a period of suspecting that I might be an alien lifeform even though I knew that was a stupid thing to think, it felt that way, it made more sense, it explained some of how I felt about what didn’t make sense) have a) made me weirder for others to understand b) made others less weird to me and easier to understand.

One of my favourite posts is this one (it’s not so much the post itself which I like, but the thought journey expressed in it): The Places We Live…

Here is an excerpt (warning: if you decide to read more than the excerpt, the post contains astrology – my version of astrology):

I was talking with a friend about the places we live and how they affect our perception of ourselves. Each country, city, town, village, etc, has a specific psychological outlook, as well as a cultural tradition. Our very mood, and thoughts about who we are, and what the meaning of our life is, can be altered by the collective consciousness of the place in which we find ourselves physically. Home decoration is always something we consider in this respect, which is why one of the first things we do when we move into a new home is to make it our own. Add our own touches. Introduce our favourite things and colours. Add or remove furnishings. We know this affects how we feel, but how often do we consider that how we feel is affected by the thoughts and feelings of all the people around us, not our friends, but the strangers who live in the same geographical location as us. And how often do we consider the psychological impact upon us of the country, city, town, etc, in which we choose, or are forced by circumstances, to live.

This idea greatly intrigues me. I even looked up the asteroids for the cities in which I have lived in to see where they are in my astrological chart, hoping to shed some light on the issue for me. I have lived in quite a few places around the world. Some for short spells, others for longer periods. I did not feel particularly connected to any of them. I was just there because that’s where the winds of fate had blown me. One of those places I truly hated. I desperately wanted to escape it, but I couldn’t for many reasons and excuses, depending on how you look at life and the control you have over it. I told myself at the time that I had to live there until I had absorbed the energy of the place, and learned the lesson it had to teach me. Because each place has a certain something which it imparts to those who live there. So I thought that once I had learned the lesson I was supposed to understand and integrate into myself, the place would release me from an invisible contract I had with it and I could move on. Surprisingly, this did indeed seem to occur, repeatedly. So, whether it is real or a fantasy, it kind of proved itself to be true for me. Whatever gets you through life…

  

  

The Eiffel Tower and the Champ de Mars photo by Wladyslaw (you can see the flat I used to live in from here)

  

What small thing happened today (or in the past few days) that you were grateful for?   

Someone didn’t treat me like I was crazy or weird and it was a negative thing which they needed to get rid of because it was messing with their mojo – that’s always a pleasant surprise!

Am I grateful about it, for it, for them? Yes. I know it’s hard to accept me as I am, it’s taken me most of my almost 50 years to do that myself, to accept myself as I am and not add a but… a condition, a clause, a criticism, etc.

“I don’t aspire to be a good man. I aspire to be a whole man.”

― Carl Jung

  

If there’s one thing which I have learned over the years, it’s that it is the small gestures which make the biggest difference, the largest impact.

The small gestures are the ones which give people away, they’re like those expression tells which human lie detectors use to spot a liar – micro expressions.

The small gestures can show you that the scary looking person over there, who others have labeled as belonging to the tribe of Negative People, isn’t negative at all (okay, they’re a little bit pissed off at those others who keep trying to cheer him/her up because they’ve decided him/her is blue and should be yellow or pink, and him/her was just having a peaceful think to themselves – that’s their enjoying my thoughts to myself expression, not the please come and positive smells of roses fart all over me look!). They’re thoughtful say their hands as they caress the pages of the book they were reading until rudely interrupted.

I was once sitting alone on a bench in a London park just staring at the view, contemplating… and BAM! A trio of elderly ladies (who reminded me of the witches in MacBeth) decided that I needed saving from eternal damnation. Sometimes I wish I had resting bitchface instead of resting please bother me face (my resting face is a tad melancholic, that doesn’t mean I am melancholic and if I am it doesn’t mean I need to be told to smile – what if I’m enjoying my melancholia and you’ve just ruined my enjoyment with your interference?)

The small gestures are more valuable to me than the big ones (big ones can be lovely, but only when they’re genuine, an inspired impulse, and not motivated by someone wanting something from me or because they took the advice of some list of rules on how to win friends, etc.).

The small gestures have sometimes saved my life, my mind, my heart…

“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”

― Carl Gustav Jung

Animals in particular are very adept at offering small gestures which soothe a human soul at just the right time, in the right moment, and the right way. There’s so much humans could learn from animals if we’d just listen to them with more than our ears.

The final favourite post is: Attitude Problem For Sale By Owner

 Here’s an excerpt:

There comes a time in life, when life asks you to do the opposite of what you normally do. That time has arrived for me. Life has challenged me. It said, so you’ve seen it all and you are bored, then create your own drama, write, direct, and perform it, centre stage, lights blazing. Your time to step up has come. Sure you’ve had some walk on parts, but you were often replaced by a stand-in because you refused to do the part exactly as instructed. Now you’re in charge, do something about it. Stop mumbling, start emoting.

The drama I am writing, directing, and performing at this time is not original… but it is mine. And I’ll be damned if anyone is going to push me off stage as they have in the past because their drama is more important than mine and they need to perform it now, on my stage… Get your own stage!

This is all new to me, and I am having to confront stage fright, many of my fears, the self doubt which always comes when you face fears, and… battle with the big bad boss of attitude problems which keeps trying to undermine my newly found self belief and smidgeon of self importance. I don’t think that I am more important than anyone else, I don’t want to think that way, I’m happy with equality in the matter of importance, I just need to stop seeing myself as less important than anyone else.

  

   

This scarf is just about done, and then I’ll have to figure out who to give it to….

or maybe I’ll keep it all to myself, sew a bunch together and make a cosy security blanket as you never know when the need for self-comforting might arise… isn’t that right, Miss Muffet?