May I validate your feelings?

A few years ago now I volunteered to visit people who are sick and shut in. In order to be able to do it I had to take (and pay for) a course. I did it without enthusiasm but did it seriously. The course taught us to validate people's feelings. No one in the course told us why this was required. We all meet people every day and manage to get along pretty well so why is it necessary to validate the feelings of people who are shut in?

When I made my first visit I discovered hat the answer to the question is that people who are very sick are often bitter about their experience. They can't do many of the things they used to and no one visits them. They respond to this with anger and sense of entitlement. They put up psychological barriers making it difficult to approach them and this makes their very real problems even worse. They make it impossible for you to reach them. Not every seriously ill person does this but enough do that if you were to sign up to do what I did it would be a virtual certainty that you'd encounter someone like that. People who respond to life's problems with patience, hope and love are a joy to visit so their friends and family tend to visit them. The people who need visits from volunteers aren't like that. Thus the course.

I tolerated the lectures and role-playing activities. As skeptical as I tried to be, though, I could see that this was a technique that would work in some cases. That turned out to be an understatement. It worked incredibly well. I found myself unconsciously slipping into validation mode any time I had to deal with a difficult person. The only time it doesn't "work" is when you're dealing with a difficult person who is in a position equal to your own. I mean, it works in the sense that it calms them down and reassures them but you can't go anywhere after that.

Let me explain what I mean by that. If you're sitting with someone who is bitter and angry about life because they're sick and they feel like no one cares you can diffuse a lot of their anger by saying that  you fully understand that they are angry. When they calm down you can ask them to talk about their life. Ninety percent of the time, simply doing that will lead them to find something good and meaningful about their lives and that will improve their outlook on life. In a very small number of cases you will have to help this process along with with a few gently leading questions. In a tiny number on instances this won't work and you'll have to go to the head of the program and they will assign a qualified therapist to see this person.

The technique "works" because the person in the bed needs human contact. At some level they are trying to earn your company. The bitterness and entitlement and counter-productive in the way that many human responses are counter-productive. When someone like me validates their feelings I give them away to get around this barrier and most people, not surprisingly, jump at that second chance. Most of us would do exactly the same thing in their position. And we'd do it because we'd be in a position of weakness. If this person visiting us doesn't come back we'll be stuck in this damn bed all alone again. Validating feelings is all about power.

And that started to trouble me.

I am my gut

I know, that's asking for it. The nasty putdowns write themselves.

Actually, it was a cheap putdown that inspired me to write this. I saw this in Facebook the other day: "Don't trust your gut; it's literally full of shit." Ha ha. And then, not wanting to be humiliated by any more such wit, we abandon our views out of fear.

And, you may think, my gut instincts are often wrong. That's true but they are also often right. So, what do you do?

I'd suggest not thinking about the issue in terms of right and wrong. Think instead that you are your gut.

Good Cartesian dualists that we are, we tend to think of thought as something that happens in the brain. Many of our ancestors imagined thought happened in their bowels or in their chests. The Psalms were all written by people who imagined thought happened in the heart. (As a consequence, we misread them: when we read that we should keep the LORD in our hearts, we imagine that to call for an emotional commitment when it actually calls for an intellectual one.)

Let me give you a sports metaphor. A good male athlete can throw a feint with his shoulders or his hips. He can't throw a fake with is gut. Wherever his gut goes he has to go too. Our gut feelings are like that. They are the accumulation of a lifetime of emotional and mental development. That gut feeling you get tells you that a proposed action either is or is not in your comfort zone. If you feel a vague uneasiness about something, that is telling you that this isn't something you feel comfortable about. When people say, "Trust your gut," they mean that your instincts are a good indicator of what you should and shouldn't do.

I'll go out on a limb and say, without having any evidence, that even if it feels that your gut is often wrong that you would find, if you chose to keep a tally, you'd find your gut is right far more often than it's wrong.

And I'd go further and say, trust your gut because it's you. It's your moral centre of gravity.

Let's ask a different question. How do you get a better gut? Or, to put it another way, how do I get better moral instincts? And here, having put it the way we have, the answer becomes obvious: by developing a better character. Push yourself to improve in small ways that you can clearly see and your gut will get better.

We could turn that around: if it feel like your moral instincts are bad—which is how I felt fifteen years ago when I started this quest—the solution is not to stop trusting your moral instincts. They are, good or bad, the foundation of your moral life. What you need to do is to change what you do. You will become what you do.

Is narcissism really THE problem?

Up until a week ago, I would have said it was.

I've tended to buy into the claim that narcissism is the major problem in our culture but I've always had problems spelling it out. A while back, Amy asked me to spell out what I understood to be narcissism and why it was a social problem. Not for the first time, I found that what seemed clear when I didn't have to explain it, suddenly became murky when I did.

And then I saw a reworking of Waterhouse's painting of Echo and Narcissus. If you don't feel like going to the link, instead of staring down into the water, Narcissus is staring down into a smartphone whose screen is labelled "Instagram".  I saw it on Facebook and it struck me as shallow and stupid.

And then I had to figure out why I felt that way.

The painting has two figures: Echo and Narcissus. Who are we in this interaction? I'm sure we all agree that we're not Narcissus. So we're Echo then? What's she like?

I keep seeing these babe pictures on Facebook. Some woman desperate for attention posts a picture of herself in a bathing suit. We all see through the tricks she has used to make herself look better than she really does and yet all her friends click on "like". A few even write comments. And we privately call her a narcissist.

It strikes me as more like Echo and her problem is echoism, to coin a term. The person who does this desperately needs others to validate her worth. (In mythology, Echo distracted Hera with her lively chatter until Zeus and the nymphs he had been philandering with got away. Hera punished her by rendering her only capable of answering back the concluding words of what others had said to her. Those are the two poles of echoism: chattering to distract others so they don't figure out what we really are up to and feeding back what others give us.)

The true narcissist is the one who comments on her post, "Looking good".

Did you catch it? If you say, "Looking good", the flip side of that is an implication that she doesn't always look this good. The echoist reading that comment will feel happy then empty and will have to go back to the narcissist for more. When she does, the narcissist will make her earn it. The narcissist would be relatively harmless if we didn't have these weaknesses.

I think we have more to fear from the echoism than narcissism for the echoist enables the narcissist.

I had to deal with a narcissist for years. By herself, she was pathetic but her power and reach came from the forces she could draw on. She could draw on echoists, some of whom were in her own family, by simply threatening to withdraw her love, and they'd be her stormtroopers.

Today, the Prime Minister of Canada is a narcissist—a painfully shallow boy. The same was true of Obama. Neither is particularly intelligent in the normal sense of the term. What they have going for them is that they are geniuses at exploiting the weakness and insecurity of others. "Because it's 2015!" is a stupid and empty thing to say but Justin Trudeau could count on a whole lot of people cheering him for doing so because it made them feel like insiders. He knows that people will check their brains at the door for the chance to feel they are on the ride side of the joke.

There is no obvious cure for this problem. On one level it seems obvious: we need to be strong and stand up for ourselves but try spelling out what you mean by that and you run into trouble. Shouldn't you be standing up for others? Do you really want to find the meaning to your life inside yourself? Whatever that means.

In the story Ovid tells and Waterhouse painted (image above courtesy of Wikipedia), there are only two people. If Echo does not seek to fulfill her desperate need for love from Narcissus, the only person she has left to go to is herself. That isn't as crazy as it might seem. A well-regulated self love is essential to a virtuous life. But what regulates it? If the only measure of what is well-regulated is our own feedback, then we cease being Echo only to become Narcissus.

Social science only gets us so far. We need to be able to reference moral realities and not just psychological states or interpersonal relationships to get out of this trap.

A scout's virtues: thrift

A scout is thrifty. He does not wantonly destroy property. He works faithfully, wastes nothing, and makes the best use of his opportunities. He saves his money so that he may pay his own way, be generous to those in need, and helpful to worthy objects. 

He may work for pay but must not receive tips for courtesies or good turns.

That is a manly virtue. You might miss that because thrift, as it used to be described when I was a boy, can be pretty girly. I say "when I was a boy" because nobody talks about thrift anymore.  Probably because it became such a girly virtue.

It became girly because thrift came to mean crap like saving wrapping paper, finding new uses for elastic bands and being the sort of busybody who makes everybody wait while they get out a pen and paper or a calculator out to work everyone's exact share when it's time to pay the bill at a restaurant.

But look at that text and see this: "He saves his money so that he may pay his own way, be generous to those in need, and helpful to worthy objects." That's old-fashioned manliness.

All of that "thrift" is about spending or giving away money! This may see contradictory if you're used to girly thrift, but manly thrift is a big, generous, overflowing virtue.

I'll continue this by going somewhere that might seem weird. A while ago we had a crazed, wanna-be terrorist shoot one of the soldiers standing guard at the national war memorial. Here's how an article in the latest issue of Anglican Journal starts:

As Canadians grappled with how to respond to the unprecedented violence that rocked Ottawa and the rest of Canada Oct. 22, the Anglican Journal asked leadership within the Anglican Church of Canada to reflect on the role of the church in troubled times.

I have a crazy suggestion. How about we respond by doing nothing at all?

Nothing happened to us! A good man, who'd dedicated his career to serving his country was killed. His family are devastated. But we suffered nothing. We should do nothing.

That is very unthrifty and very umanly writing. It's full of empty words. For starters, what was "unprecedented" about this violence? And was Ottawa, indeed the whole country, "rocked" by a senseless killing? Yeah, I wish that these things didn't happen but do you know what, they do happen. They happen all the time. If you were rocked by it, you're worthless bit of jello masquerading as  a man. Get over yourself. This wasn't about you.

We think of thrift as an economic concept but it's an emotional thing at base. An impulse buy is an emotional response. On strictly economic grounds, we already know it's a bad idea to make the impulse buy. We do it anyway because we haven't learned to manage our emotions.

Manage doesn't mean to suppress. It means to have the right kind of emotions, at the right time, in the right way.

Think about big gestures. What's the difference between a big gesture that comes of as manly, magnanimous or meaningful and one that comes off as trying to prove something, defensive or empty?

Thrift.

He works faithfully, wastes nothing, and makes the best use of his opportunities.

Being a man

The video I linked the other day got a telling response on Facebook from someone who calls himself "Star Man Aquarius"

The bottom message of this video isn't entirely clear. Men around the world exist in various ways. There are archetypical masculine men, and there are archetypical feminine men. But all of them are MEN, and every man in this planet behaves differently from the other. 

The problem I notice in the content of this discourse is that authentic behavior (with its weak and strong sides) is dismissed in front of mythical and archetypical behavior.
If my grandfather was abusive against men and women, and this is my family's core belief, I certainly would be avoiding evolution by just imitating my grandfather until I get to act just as he did, rejecting and approving the same ideas and ways of living like he did; never questioning or simply evolving such ideas, or habits, etc. 

Mmm... I'm sorry but this is just not entirely convincing. (To find the original, log onto face book and find the Art of Manliness page. and scroll down until you find the video.)

I don't post this to mock. Amongst other things, English is obviously not SMA's first language. It also takes a certain amount of intestinal fortitude to call yourself "Star Man Aquarius" and I admire that, although I'd never use a handle like that myself. That said, the most stunning thing about this argument is it's weakness. Not a logical weakness. There is little logic there because there doesn't need to be. SMA sets a very low bar for himself. The argument he advances is really an excuse for remaining weak.

In the first paragraph he says that there are archetypal masculine and archetypal effeminate role models but that all men are men. Well, yes, if your standard for being a man is having an X chromosome and a Y chromosome. If you think men should actually be good at being men, however, SMA has nothing to offer you.

Now, consider the word archetypal. If you you check the video, Brett MacKay doesn't talk about archetypes. He talks about becoming the sort of man you want to be. The man you want to be! There is no archetype in that. Now what I suspect SMA sees that Mackay clearly has a particular model of manhood in mind and SMA is not big on machismo. Elsewhere he writes:

You can see this nice moustached guy talking to us about manliness in a very elegant way, and you can see him carrying an axe, too. He talks about «the circle of men», personal heroes, politicians, philosophers and also modern psychologists. All these very «successful» men -in the public eye.- 

But he isn't talking about the «other ones». The little ones. The uncourageous ones. The ones that aren't heroes, that are sensitive, sentimental, etc. And we haven't got yet to the homoparental stuff (these are men too!), gay issues, etc, etc.

Again, English is obviously not SMA's first language and we see that he clearly misses the playful irony implied by the axe. But he is also pushing weakness; he is the sort of man that Nietzsche deplored.

I mean, if you really want to be like Liberace, then go ahead and be like Liberace. SMA's problem is that he wants society to help him become what he already is. He thinks society should love the little ones (I think he means "weak" when he says "little"), the uncourageous ones, the non-heroic ones, the sensitive ones and the sentimental ones. And society doesn't. It just doesn't and no one is going to make SMA king of the world any time soon. And why should it make him anything given that he is so little interested in making anything of himself.

And don't get fooled by the gay issues red herring here. Gay men are perfectly capable of being strong, courageous, unemotional and laconic as heterosexual men are. SMA is pushing gay stereotypes while pretending to be sensitive to gay issues.

But I relate because I would have agreed with him when I was younger. I was everything that he was and I had learned how to be helpless. It took me the entire 1980s to turn it around.

Notice these lines from the third paragraph:

If my grandfather was abusive against men and women, and this is my family's core belief, I certainly would be avoiding evolution by just imitating my grandfather until I get to act just as he did, rejecting and approving the same ideas and ways of living like he did; never questioning or simply evolving such ideas, or habits, etc.

That's a wacky argument because nowhere does MacKay say to blindly imitate the values that predominate in your family. He advises finding men who typify the man you want to be and imitating them. If your grandfather was an asshole, pick someone else!

Now that is obvious which suggests to me that SMA's problem is not that he can't figure out a way out of his trap but that he won't. There are thousands of male role models to follow, what SMA lacks is the courage to pick a type and follow it.

Now, you may be thinking (and SMA himself might say, if he were here) that MacKay's ideal man is pretty typical in the set of virtues he embodies. Well, the first thing I'd say is that you're just wrong if you think that. How many men like that are there? Not many. On the other hand, if the question is, "How many pasty-faced, physically weak, metrosexuals are there out there who think of themselves as individuals even though there are a dime a dozen? Well, there are a lot of them.

And I think the question you'd want to ask yourself if you are one of these men is, Do you really like and admire men who are just like you? Maybe you do but do yourself the favour of asking yourself honestly. There is solid evidence out here that effeminate men rate other effeminate men as lacking something. If that is your problem, there are two ways to solve it. 1) You can stop being effeminate yourself or 2) you can start evaluating other effeminate men more positively. What you can't do is keep on doing what you are. You need to pick a lane and drive in it.

For some good advice on the topic, go here.

Worth sharing

I'm not going to comment on this there is nothing there that I would say differently. I remember figuring this out for myself around the time I turned thirty. The idea had been gelling for a few years before that—I could see that as I looked back and saw how I'd begun to change my life in a better direction—but it took me an awful long time. I wish there had been something like this around when I was a young man.