Tony White

Social engineering

2008-07-20T12:25:16+08:00

I always find this a very interesting topic. The ways and means people will use to get others in a society to behave a certain way. It can be as simple as the speed limit for driving a car, you get them to behave by taking their money away. I recall in Singapore many years ago they had a law where if a university educated man married and had a child to a university educated female then he got taxation benefits that non-university educated parents did not.

Haven’t governments tried that throughout history - apartheid and the aryan race just to name two - and fortunately it has never been successful. Imagine what we would be like now if governments could actually be successful in engineering who mated with who in a society.

I heard a most interesting talk on the radio the other day about China’s one child policy. The man stated that it is now estimated that there are 50 million children in China who are a second child. Yes, there are 50 million people in China who have no birth certificate, who can never get a passport and who officially do not exist. Imagine the impact of that. Firstly they will be ripe for exploitation - unless you do what I want then I will dob you in - and they are going to have to have a massive black economy to support them all as someone who does not exist can’t pay taxation. It seems that governments cannot engineer the human sex drive but I suppose that wont stop them trying.

Anyway closer to home they are bringing in a new law in the state where I live. They want to reduce teenage truancy which is closely related to crime in the community. Another piece of social engineering who’s goals are most meritorious in my view. How they plan to do it is by withholding welfare payments from parents who’s teenagers do not attend school. Well fancy that!

Now there is some good engineering!!

Firstly, its discriminatory in that it only effects poor parents and not the ones who have a job. And I can tell you that there are plenty of rich kids who are truants. I see them regularly in my work. A mother will bring her 14 year old highly rebellious daughter to see me, to get her repaired. This child’s sole goal in life is to defy authority and of course that includes not going to school. Indeed just getting the child inside the door of my office is a major logistical exercise as in the teenager’s eyes I am authority even before we have ever met. Often I ask the mother how she managed it and sometimes you get an answer like she paid her daughter $20 to get her to come to counselling!! Yes that is right. The parent pays the counsellor to counsel the child and pays the child to be a client!!

I tell you what, you earn your money when you counsel such very rebellious teenagers. They are not easy clients. It truly tests the counsellors skills. If you can just somehow manage to weave your way through all the rebellion and get underneath it and make some real contact with the child then you have made it and some good changes can occur. Sometimes you get there and sometimes you don’t.

Unfortunately this welfare withholding piece of social engineering is based on a faulty assumption. This is no better articulated than in the editorial of the “West Australian” newspaper where in discussing this program the editor states, “The aim is surely unobjectionable: to get children from such families to attend school regularly. Education is the means by which such children are given the opportunity to break the pattern of welfare dependency”

And the faulty assumption is? School = education. You can make a child go to school but you can’t make it learn. You can make a child sit in a classroom but you can’t make it get educated. Oh well!!

He looks rebellious. Apparently if he is made to go to school that means he will learn. According to the Australian government one causes the other to happen.

Furthermore who would want to be a teacher now! They are going to watch their classrooms start to fill up with children who don’t want to be there, who don’t want to learn and who angry about it all. You don’t need three guesses to work out who is going to take the brunt of that anger.

Then there are the other children in the classroom who do want to learn and they are going to be adversely effected because the teacher is spending all the time coping with the welfare driven disruptive student.

And finally there is one other point. People are usually attracted to those things which they are good at. They will naturally seek them out like skills in art, or music or sport and yes academic ability as well. The vast majority of truants aren’t good at it. They are academically challenged or they are dumb as they have been called numerous times before and as they call themselves. Putting such children back in the classroom will only further reinforce their “dumbness” to themselves and their self image is further crushed into the ground. And that is one common feature in many social experiments. The people effected, end up worse off than before the social engineering was implemented in the first place.

He is good at taking baths so he will naturally do it of his own volition.

I am all in favour of getting truants to do some structured activity. A very good idea for sure. Putting them back in the classroom is a very bad idea.

Graffiti

Sign, sign everywhere a sign

2008-07-19T17:02:40+08:00

By now you all know how I am often banging on about graffiti and what it represents in youth and so forth. Well guess what?

Last nite my front wall got graffitied and here it is

So what do you do with it? I suppose when you first see it is is a bit of a shock. It is very bright and and probably covers a square meter. I guess when it happens to people’s homes they go straight into their racket. Some get angry, some get sad or frustrated I suppose.

I took a minute to look at it and it certainly is on the artistic end of the graffiti continuum. Actually I think it looks quite good. So I think I will keep it there for a few weeks/months and then get the council to paint over it and wait for the next one.

“Sign, sign everywhere a sign”

Graffiti

Self disclosure

2008-07-19T12:14:12+08:00

Roses states:
“I think it's funny how you don't disclose a lot. Actually, i'm the same.”

Graffiti responds:
My level of self disclosure Roses?
In the past have been told that I am a bit of a closed book. So I do agree with that as there are some areas that I am very private about.

But

In other ways I am not at all. I have stated openly on this blog about my life script and how I am like Eeyore and Popov the clown. Indeed in some areas I would say that I am quite exhibitionistic. Hey, I am a bit narcissistic so I have to be!

At a week long workshop recently there were some people there who were my clients, trainees and colleagues. I got up and did a piece of personal work (as the client) in front of them. I spoke in depth about my early relationship with my mother, her personal demons and how that impacted on me as a child and so forth. So I have no problem with that and that is very disclosing of self.

I always find it entertaining when therapists and trainers say they would never do a piece of their own personal work in front of their clients or trainees as it would damage them and traumatize them. When that is not the real reason at all. They just feel insecure about showing self like that in front of the client. Their perfect persona may come crashing down. Which is OK for them not to self disclose in such a way if they do not want to, but it is just funny how they give a fake reason for doing so.

Since that workshop I have asked my clients and trainees what was their reaction to seeing me do that. All of them (so far at least) have said that they admired me for doing so and indeed it has helped them therapeutically and they see me as more real now. Certainly no one has been traumatized by it.

Keeping up appearances

Graffiti

Signs

2008-07-17T08:13:10+08:00

There were two good articles in the “West Australian’ newspaper today by Paul Murray and Zoltan Kovacs. Discussing how we live in a nanny state and how paternalistic governments can be and so forth.

One comment made was “We’re largely over-governed because we want to be”. A most refreshing comment and one that I fully agree with. Why are we living in a nanny state? Because we want to be. Well I don’t, but most Australians do. So it is the electorate who is responsible for the nanny state not the government.

One always hears people banging on about how politicians lie to us and put spin on this and that. Most politicians are OK people who don’t want to lie, so why do they? Because they know that if they tell it as it is on certain topics then we, the electorate will rapidly ‘un-elect’ them. So it is us, the voters, who say to the politicians tell us the truth but if you do then we will kick you out of office. So it is the voters who are responsible for political spin on this and that. We elect people who we know are going to lie to us, so that is our responsibility. In the final analysis a politician is merely a reflection of the attitudes of the electorate.

And to the nanny state. I went to the beach the other day and as you walk to it from your car you are confronted with all these signs about shallow water here so don’t dive, rocks over there so be cautious, beware of rips, jellyfish and so forth. Fuck! I thought. All they need is one sign which says, “Remember to assess the environment for potential dangers” then the rest is up to me. I don’t need the government to do it for me!

Here is a picture of me when I was a long haired freaky person

With all those signs I was reminded of a great song that was around when I was a long haired freaky person. We used to love this song and sing it at parties when it was played. It is by Telsa and titled “Signs”

And the sign says "Long-haired freaky people need not apply"
So I put my hair up under my hat and I went in to ask him why
He said you look like a fine outstanding young man, I think you'll do
So I took off my hat, I said "Imagine that, huh, me working for you"

[Chorus:]
Signs, signs, everywhere there's signs
Fuckin' up the scenery, breakin' my mind
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign

And the sign says "Anybody caught trespassing will be shot on sight"
So I jumped the fence and I yelled at the house
Hey! What gives you the right!
To put up a fence and keep me out, or to keep Mother Nature in
If God was here, he'd tell it to your face, man, you're some kind of sinner

[Chorus]

Oh, say now mister, can't you read
You got to have a shirt and tie to get a seat
You can't watch, no you can't eat, you ain't supposed to be here

And the sign says "You got to have a membership card to get inside" - uh!

[Solo]

And the sign says "Everybody welcome, come in, kneel down and pray"
But then they passed around a plate at the end of it all
And I didn't have a penny to pay
So I got me a pen and a paper and I made up my own fuckin' sign
I said, "Thank you Lord for thinking 'bout me, I'm alive and doing fine", oh

[Chorus 2x]

--------------

One thing that does concern me is how much the youth in particular just accept what the government tells them and it is like they want the government to tell them what to do. When I was young (I always promised never to say that) the government was the enemy. What they told you to do you didn’t do and you certainly didn’t ask them what to do!!

However there is one thing that the youth of today do do which shows they have spirit and gives assurance that they have a mind of their own - graffiti. The government constantly tells them not to do it and they keep doing it. They are making up their own signs!

Graffiti

Objectophiles

2008-07-11T20:00:28+08:00

Freud came up with some very good ones, none better than the concept of Polymorphous Perversity. What a great sounding term isn’t it? But what does it mean?

Well according to Freud all of us were born polymorphously perverse. Did you know that you were once perverse? Every newborn infant is born with this sexual orientation as we can call it and slowly it reduces over time until the child is about 5 years of age. That is in normal human development.

Each newborn has no sexual orientation. That is their erotic focus is not fixated on any one “thing”. As a result they find many different things erotic and sexually arousing. Hence they can quite readily have incestuous sexual feelings and are fully bisexual in their orientation. Of course as they have not yet developed any conscience these erotic attractions go on guilt free in the young child’s mind.

As the child develops slowly but surely the variety gets smaller and smaller until eventually they have an erotic focus or sexual orientation that is quite specific. For the average heterosexual that means they are sexually attracted to a member of the opposite sex of approximately the same age.

For some people this does not happen and they don’t develop a quite specific focus. For instance the bisexual could be seen as such a person. The true bisexual in the psychological sense has a sexual orientation to members of both sexes. So they remain more polymorphously perverse. Interestingly enough Freud would argue that these people are less neurotic than your average heterosexual or homosexual.

The human psyche. A strange thing it is at times.

The way the child gets its sexual focus more specific is by the defence mechanism of repression. The child simply represses each sexual focus that its Parent ego state deems as inappropriate. So this person is more neurotic and highly defended than the person who remains polymorphously perverse. They remain more in their Free Child ego state and less neurotic.

Then we have the problem of what becomes the person’s sexual focus and orientation. Our society says it should be heterosexual to a person of approximately the same age. Indeed it is becoming more acceptable or ‘normal’ to have a homosexual orientation to a person of approximately the same age. Of course sometimes neither of these happen and then we get people like the “Objectophile”. The person who develops a sexual focus towards and inanimate object. Like a wall or a bike or a painting. These people will develop the same form of attachment and feelings towards the object as others develop towards a human partner. They fall in love with it in just the same way.

Indeed this is the psychological mechanism behind many of the fetishes. The man who develops a foot fetish ot breast fetish in one way is an objectophile. Although he usually wont admit it to his wife, he is not actually in love with her but in love with that particular part of her anatomy. The rest of her is just happens to be attached to the foot or the breasts.

This person is not polymorphously perverse as they have developed normally in that they have a specific sexual focus. But their sexual focus or orientation is deemed by their society to be odd, neurotic and maybe even illegal.

Graffiti

Psychological damage of the law

2008-07-12T23:23:24+08:00

I attended a workshop a few weeks ago which in essence was a presentation of the latest research on child sexual abuse. One of the things stated was that if an incident of abuse becomes a police matter then it is quite likely that the child will be psychologically worse off at the end of it. The process inevitably retraumatizes the child no matter how careful one is. I find it hard to think of a larger clash between an individual’s needs and society’s needs. It is psychologically better for the child not to get involved in the legal process and of course society (others) may suffer if they do not.

However I think one can expand this to all people and the psychology of the legal process. I saw it again on TV last night. A man had been murdered and the murderer had been found guilty. The press interviewed the victim’s mother and sister outside the court. They were venomous. The hatred and anger that was coming out of them was disarming and you could see the depth of it in their faces. The legal process is usually psychologically damaging to those who get involved in it such as these two women.

You don't want to end up with anger like this, or its "you loose".

When an event happens to you and you have a feeling the goal is to express the feeling as much as is needed and then drop the feeling. Feelings like anything else can become habitual. The more a person does, thinks or feels something the more habitual it will become. This is one way in which the legal process makes people worse of psychologically. The man had been murdered 2 years ago and those two women were still furiously angry. This means that the anger was very habitual to them now. It was by this time deeply ingrained in their personality and thus it would take considerable effort and time for them to drop the anger. Of course the longer they have the anger the more psychological deterioration they will experience.

My counsel would be to distance yourself psychologically from the legal process as it is a retraumatizing process. Those two women on TV are now worse off than before the trial. Their anger is now stimulated yet again and even more ingrained into the personality.

The other thing which is imperative is to not link your emotional state to the outcome of a trial. One has no control over the outcome of a trial and thus one does not want their psychological well being linked to it. Again it seems a distancing process would be most wise. To make the outcome of the trail as psychologically unimportant as one can.

Taking on the legal process.

Why attend the trial? You hear some people say they did it for their son. Well that is not true as the son is dead and knows nothing about it. If you were murdered would you want your loved ones to attend the trial knowing that it is likely that they would be retraumatized by it. I would not want mine to. Some say they attend the trial for final closure. That is not true either as one can do that in the counselling room. Why wait often years for the final closure and thus it becomes more and more ingrained in the personality and one is worse and worse off.

Weather it be a small thing like being cut off in the traffic or a big thing like attending the trial of your son’s murderer the psychological processes are the same. The more you hang onto the feelings the more psychological damage you do to your self. Trials are usually retraumatizing as the entire legal process can be. The more you get involved with it the more likely you will be worse off. Indeed with children there is strong scientific evidence to support this view.

If you have been traumatized once, why stick this in front of your face again when you don't have to?

Vengeance is a normal human emotion and is by and large an angry process. To use the legal process as a means to get your sense of revenge seems most unwise. That can readily be done in the counselling room where the likelihood of dropping the vengeful anger eventually is far greater. That is the best psychological outcome for any emotion one experiences - drop it.

Graffiti

Beliefs about feelings

2008-07-07T20:28:15+08:00

One. Some people believe that feelings have to be logical. Often they are not. To feel angry on a Monday morning, to feel grief when you sell your car, to feel scared in crowds, to feel despairing when you have a good job, family and life all may seem somewhat illogical.

More often than not feelings are illogical. We would all like them to be appropriate and reasonable in reaction to our environment. Unfortunately there is a powerful illogical part of ourselves. Freud called it the id and in Transactional Analysis it is called the Child ego state.

There are even some therapeutic approaches that rest on this false belief. They try and take control of these ‘irrational’ parts of the personality and make it rational or at least dominate it with rationality. Rational Emotive Therapy(RET) and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy(CBT) are two prime examples. I suggest that such a task of dominating the Child with rationality is doomed to failure if not in the short term then in the long term.

The approach I would suggest is that you accept that we are irrational beings to some extent at least. Do not try and fight it but work to live with it.

Two. Some people believe that feelings must have a goal or be a means to an end. We hear statements such as:
“What is the use of being angry, it doesn’t change anything”
“If someone dies why cry about it, it wont bring them back”

80% of the time feelings do not change reality. So in this way feelings are not a successful means to an end, yet I would suggest that they are an end in them self. They do not have to lead to something, indeed they are that something.

Consider this metaphor. When one drinks water the bladder expands and then there is a tension. The tension is expressed by releasing the bladder and taking a leak. Feelings are the same. Something happens and the body goes into a state of tension (feeling is felt). One can then act and expresses the feeling and the tension reduces. This is a biological fact I am afraid so you might as well get used to it.

Three. Feelings and issues often get mixed up and then the feeling becomes the issue. Hubby wants to go out at night and the missus wants to spend the night at home. They begin to negotiate the issue of going out or staying in. During the negotiating they start to feel angry at each other. Now there are two problems:
1. Going out vs staying in - the issue
2. The anger - the feeling

Some do not make this distinction between the issue and the feeling and they will then start to use the issue as a means to express the feeling. At this point the issue becomes irrelevant but often people believe they are addressing the issue and cannot understand why the other person is not understanding them. Both stop listening to each other because it is no longer about the issue and it is about expressing the feeling instead. This can make the issue drag on for long periods of time. If they do make the distinction then first set about expressing the feeling and forget about the issue. Once that is done then get back to the issue and usually it is resolved in record time.

Graffiti

The non-drug addict

2008-07-05T11:24:40+08:00

Well they are at it again!

Ben Cousins has signed to play footy again and the press is having a field day. Ben Cousins is the Australian Rules Football version of David Beckham. Very high public profile and with a much publicised drug problem. He was delisted and now he has just “re-listed” to play again.

There is one question that I have always wanted to ask and no one seems to have asked it. Here is a man who is repeated called a drug addict although one must say that all he has publicly stated is that he has a “drug problem”. That term could mean a wide variety of things but he has admitted to this.

I worked in drug rehab for a number of years and worked with many addicts who were on parole. Part of their parole was often court ordered drug tests usually once or twice a week. They would test for about 10 different substances such as cannabis, amphetamines, heroin, cocaine and so forth. It always surprised me at how often they would present with a positive test. Sometimes they would come back with all ten substances indicated in their urine!

Busted!

They would have known that this would be the case and I used to think why bother having the test in the first place. They should have just refused the test or made up some excuse like “I missed the bus” or my “Grandmother had a stroke”. I must admit some of the excuses they came up with were pretty creative.

But that is the nature of drug addiction. They know taking the drug will lead to bad consequences and yet they find it really, really, really hard not to. That is what a drug addict is.

Now over a period of a couple of years Ben Cousins was subjected to pre-planned and random urine tests as were all footballers in the league. But they were onto him so he would have also been target tested. He would have been ‘piss’ tested (as they impolitely call it) on numerous occasions over an extended period. Guess what, in all those tests he never returned one positive urine test. Yes every single one of his urine tests was clean.

Hello? Hello? Is there anyone out there? Did I miss something?

How can a man who is apparently a drug addict be tested on numerous occasions over an extended period of time and not return one positive urine test?

I would like someone to answer that question for me?

This question is just sort of ignored and no one seems to ask it and everyone just carries on like nothing has happened.

Is this for real.

To my mind there are 3 possible answers

He isn’t a drug addict and his drug use is minor
or
The league’s drug testing regime has more holes in it than swiss cheese
or
He has an effective masking agent

This seems a fairly important question to ask because if a ‘drug addict’ can repeatedly give clean urine tests then any other footballer could easily use drugs recreationally and give clean test results.

However in the words of the great man himself - Benny Cousins - Such is life!

The great man with his 'Such is life" tatt.

Graffiti

Google me

2008-07-04T15:28:42+08:00

OK I admit to it I can be a bit narcissistic at times, so every now and then I google my name with

"Tony White"

Well as the results show up the first item is my website

http://www.ynot1.com.au/

the second is my biography

www.ynot1.com.au/magazines/WPATA%20bio.cwk%20(WP).pdf

the ninth is my ausweblogs blog

http://www.ausweblogs.com/users/ynot1/?p=74

At first I thought this is a bit odd and I would more likely be on the 10th page. As the search shows there are thousands and thousands of "me". I thought perhaps this is happening because I am searching from my computer. So I asked a friend to do a search and it came up the same for hers. She said that the order is based on the number of hits you get. Is that right?

If so I even got more than Tony Joe White!

Remember Polk Salad Annie

Yours truly

Graffiti

3 solutions to feelings

2008-07-03T18:38:06+08:00

There are three solutions that one can have to a feeling. That is, an event happens which you have some feeling reaction to. You then have a problem because you have this thing called a feeling and you have to do something with it. The three things you can do with it are:

1. Have a thinking or cognitive solution to it. You think about the feeling and this is primarily the CBT approach

2. The inhibition solution. You suppress or repress the feeling to make it go away. If the feeling isn’t too big or is a one off then you can get away with this solution and suffer no long lasting problems. But if the feeling is significant and in particular repetitive then this solution just creates more problems for the person in the future. The feelings come back to haunt the repressor in some way.

3. Express the feeling. This is the catharsis approach and the opposite to the inhibition approach. It rests on the assumption that if you have a feeling and express it then it is out and gone. The problem is solved and you wont have later difficulties due to this feeling. I will talk more about this now.

So how do you express a feeling? There has to be a some point some form of physical expression. For instance the healthy expression of anger includes active bodily movement or motion. Pillow fights are excellent for children, as are punching bags or some other hitting of a soft inanimate object. Verbal expressions are also useful, however they tend to be more appropriate for adults. With a raised voice, statements such as "I'm angry at you", "You piss me off!" are all good. These all supply good brief outlets for mild levels of anger. For more intense anger, verbal expressions must be accompanied by the bodily expressions that were mentioned above.

The happy, joyous, delighted kind of feelings are the same, there needs to be some kind of physical movement whether that be running and jumping to smiling and laughing. All these are the physical release of this emotion. So with feelings like anger and happiness we have this means of their expression. These are the simple solutions because with other feelings it is more complicated.

Consider these equations
Anger = Movement (expression)
Happy = Movement (expression)
Sad = Movement (expression) + Satiation (V+T=R)
Scare = Movement (expression) + Satiation (V+T=R)

We see that for feelings like sadness and scare there is a bit added on and it is called satiation. They are require movement (expression) but with sadness and scare there is a second part to the solution to the feeling.

I mentioned in the previous post some women have learnt that if they turn on the waterworks then they can get some men to behave in a certain way. Why does this happen?

If someone close to you dies then you are sad and one physically expresses that by crying or wailing and so forth. This is the movement (expression) part being completed. But there is another bit. When someone cries often people will respond to them in a nurturing, comforting way and hence we get the woman using the waterworks. She knows that if she cries then people tend to become caring, giving and comforting of her.

For the sad feeling to be dealt with one does the physical expression AND gets the comforting. At this point I usually get asked can one do the comforting them self with their own Nurturing Parent. The answer to that is yes as long as it is only a small sadness. If it is a big one then it has to come from the outside using someone else's Nurturing Parent.

The diagram shows how one can nurture self from their own NP to deal with their sadness. This is a good thing to do and it is a great asset to have in one’s personality. If the sadness is a big one then that is not enough and you have to get some from another person on the outside. And this is the hard part where many people stumble in the process due to the equation.

There are actually two equations
V (Vulnerability) + T (Trust) = R (Relief)
V (Vulnerability) - T (Trust) = A (Anxiety)

If one expresses their sadness with another person then they are placing self in a vulnerable position and they have to trust the other person, (and as we know some find that most difficult to do). If they risk trusting the other and the other is caring towards them then they have the sad feeling satiated and they sense relief. If they don’t trust the other then they never get the satiation and that most commonly results in the feeling of anxiety. “I can’t trust anyone to care for me in my hour of need so I am alone”. Someone who thinks like this usually ends up with anxiety.

Can we trust those nurses?

The same applies for scare as well. It is great to nurture self but it is not enough if it is a big scare. You need to seek the nurturing from someone else and then one gets satiated, the feeling is dealt with and will not cause more problems later on. If it is not satiated the person will be left with a sense of anxiety and the undealt with feeling will manifest in some other problem later on.

Graffiti