My knee is all fucked up. I think it's a small tear in the meniscus, which should heal eventually. It might not though, and the torn piece can get stuck in the joint causing more problems. It's probably temporary, but given the nature of 45 year old knees, who the hell knows.
Kickboxing and grappling keep me sane. It's not just about the exercise. It's about doing something I enjoy, that I'm good at, that keeps me engaged with people and involved in something. It provides something psychologically critical that I can't function without. I can't just do something else, but I haven't been able to train in months. I've been feeling worse and worse.
Life has been complicated and confusing lately. It's been an easy semester, but I'm not doing all that well, because I've been a mess. Then my dad gets his biopsy results. 5cm malignant mass on pancreas, multiple lymph node metastasis.
I'm heading down to Pittsfield this Thursday. Guess I'll be getting there as often as I can.
Last week, another group was doing a class presentation on friendship. This week, my group had to do our presentation on family. The presentation itself was awkward, but I got through it. People construct families in all these different ways, place emphasis in different ways, on the roles, responsibilities, and relevance of those in the group, and even the group over all.
Collectivists, we learn, value the group itself, while individualists predominantly value the group only in so far as what it does for them. Individualists value independence, while treating familial connections as more temporary, circumstantial, disposable. Collectivists can go to the other extreme, of treating an individual as disposable, should their disposal benefit the group.
We ask why people go through all this; what is the purpose of family? These are complex fluid in-group / out-group dynamics. On one level, the practicality of it seems to be fundamental across cultures. People figure out ways of banding together, establishing these protocols to facilitate it.
On another level, we need to create all these distinctions between us and them, because it's how human biology works. We bond over the notion that we're us, and they're terrible.
Family is a vital part of being human, regardless of how we define it. What it does for people is important. We're not evolved to go through life alone.
We covered friendship today, in Intercultural Communication class. What it means across cultures, what's expected, and how it's expressed. To start, everyone in the class has to say what friendship means to us personally, what more close friendship means, and what we give (and expect) from the relationship. All the answers we gave were then listed on the board.
"Trust" was written all over the place, along with numerous related terms like reliability and honesty. At one point, the class got into discussing honesty vs hurt feelings. How honest does honest have to be? Should we insult our friends, make them feel worse, because we're just being honest? For the most part, no, of course not. We tell a friend the hard truths when it stands to help, not just because we feel like it.
In talking about honesty and the need to be brutal about it, there seemed to be another underlying truth. There was a lot of sentiment along the lines of friends being honest, but not judgmental. People are more trusting of those who value us, who make us feel worth something. Too much brutal truth destroys trust as sure as anything.
This sort of trust apparently goes right out the window, when we think someone is too antagonistic. It seems unrelated, but makes sense in a way. Trust has a lot to do with motives. No matter how good and honest a person is, if they value different things, if they don't value us, their goals are far more likely to be in opposition to our own.
So many behaviors people engage in are developed to facilitate trust. All these cultural rituals show that we're the same. We both know how to shake hands, make eye contact, small talk, or whatever else. When we don't show affinity, trust falls apart.
Gabor Maté says this all the time. It was the title of the paper I wrote on addiction ..and yet, there's this assumption: of course we're mostly talking about drugs. That I'm still talking about people like Jenny. As I explain in that paper, I'm talking about almost everyone I know. I'm talking about the human condition more broadly.
I don't like these distinctions society makes. There are degrees of severity, in a condition we're all prone to. There are co-existing traits that can compound the risks, such as impulsivity. We then say it's only real addiction if the person lacks impulse control. That combination can lead to the most destructive behaviors, but lumping them together as a "disorder" completely misconstrues the nature of the problem. Like, how these two separate issues that on their own are just normal human traits.
At about 39:30, he says that there's this depressing general rule, that we always marry people who are at the same level of trauma that we're at. One thing that bothers me about Maté, is that he too often speaks in absolutes, but that aside.. is there any truth to that? That people tend to pair off more successfully with someone of similar levels of trauma?
I found it interesting, because it makes intuitive sense to me. I've always doubted the notion that depressed people shouldn't be together, for example. It's highly unrealistic. People need to be able to relate to each other. See somewhat eye to eye.
It's important to understand his definition of trauma though. He's referring to the psychological wound. Not the event or experience that created it, but the psychological scarring and damage that remains - something that varies massively depending on how well the damage healed.
A broken leg that's never set can become permanently crippling. While someone else breaks their leg and can say they're just fine, because they got medical attention. One of them healed properly a long time ago, so calling them the same for the original break would make no sense. Trauma, as Maté defines it, means whatever damage currently exists due to those harmful experiences, for whatever reasons.
Trauma then is a product of our lives, the tangle of vicious cycles, compounding factors, abuse, illnesses and accidents, poverty and neglect, in a psychopathic civilization that does everything to keep us down.
My knee is all fucked up. I think it's a small tear in the meniscus, which should heal eventually. It might not though, and the torn piece can get stuck in the joint causing more problems. It's probably temporary, but given the nature of 45 year old knees, who the hell knows.
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