entirelysonja

One of the things I like to do in this journal is think about why I think and why I am. Existensial of course, but it's good for this.

Today's thought is about my tendency to castastrophise and where it came from. There is a funny comic about this, guy thinks about why he does what he does and the gist is this:

I tend to think in terms of stuff being 100% good, or 100% bad. It's something you get when you were an abused kid: When things are good they are good, but when things go bad it is a catastrophe of biblical proportions. And you try to bring it back to "good" and "good" just is an absence of "bad" but when you compare the two at like 8 you see good as pure bliss and bad as pure hell.

Nothing in between. Thus you don't learn about taking stuff in context; how can you explain to an 8 year old that your dad is an abusive drunk and you should take the beatings in the context of "this is wrong and not normal"? You just want it to stop and you pull every little lever you have to make it so.

Except you're 8 and those levers really don't do a whole lot. But they do teach you to avoid conflict and conflict=death.

And that's a problem for adult me that I have struggled with for a long time: If I see conflict I immediately throw everything at it to try and bring things back to "good". And when things are "good" I don't improve because well they are 100% good. So I get into this frame which is like the bank robber in the movie "Oh Brother where art thou".

In that movie George is a bank robber and is either happy as hell or massively depressed. He doesn't have a middle, just polar end states. And at the end of the movie when he is being taken away by the police and is happy as hell about it one of the characters observes:

"Oh good, Ole George is back on top!"

Yeah, I tend to be like that.

But I digress. Or maybe I don't. Hm. Point is I don't get to experience incrementalism (gradations of problems) or contextualization (looking at the other items that are happening around the problem) and instead I throw everything I have at FIXING the problem and making it go away.

What I don't have is predictive catastrophization. In other words I don't meet someone, see some tiny flaw that might become a point of conflict in the future, then decide to bail on them without trying because eventually it would come up, it would be a point of conflict, and since conflict=death the relationship or situation would blow up anyway and why should I even try?

Or.... Maybe I do. Sometimes opportunities come up and I analyze them, see the potential for problems, and just toss the thing out with the dishwater because "I have enough problems already". It might result in conflict so why bother?

There is a thing I say to myself: "When I was a kid, I had kid tools to deal with problems, but as an adult I have adult tools to deal with problems".

And adult tools are far more powerful and far more useful/dangerous to use.

I joke to myself when I say "This is a problem can be solved by MONEY!" but it's true: When we got to the hotel in Norway and they didn't have our reservation that night it could have been a disaster and I was just starting to fire up the fight or flight response when that little voice in my head said "Wait, we can solve this with MONEY!" and I just paid for another night. Simple, $200 bucks, would have spent it anyway, not a disaster.

Just throw a small amount of money at the problem instead of going completely insane about it. That's an adult way to deal. Get people together and embrace differences of opinion and come to a consensus instead of throwing everything you have to "fixing" the problem yourself. Have some trust in other people, you're not living in a den of vipers.

Except..... This sort of mental state is probably not unique to me. I'd bet that a lot of people who were pounded as kids by parents who forced right and wrong into their brains have this trigger. And someone like Trump is just the person who knows how to use it.

From the "Daddy's back" bullshit to the stern image of a father about to beat you with a belt (he's an 80+ year old shit) to his attempts at "awesome retribution" towards anyone who tries to resist in any way this trips that "conflict=catastrophe" bit and leads to people either doing anything he wants or going nuts preparing for the "consequences". I'm sure it works on people who see the world as 100% good and 100% bad. Set up a fake conflict and watch people cave or try to bring it back to 100% "good".

There is no 100% good. And 100% bad is possible, but not too likely. Context does matter and yes the world is quite fucked up at the moment. But that's context, you can't magically pull it back to 100% good alone that will take time and dealing with stuff with adult tools. And the 100% "bliss" from complete submission is like the 100% bliss as a kid, a false place of security which you can't control and can go awesomely bad as you're basing good and bad on a drunk dad who is quite honestly random.

Sigh, lot of thoughts this morning. Dreamed I was at college taking notes for an engineering class on "engine efficiency" and the professor was writing tons of formulae on the blackboard and I was trying to write them down but I had a sharpie instead of a pen and the letters just bleed and blur on the paper so I could not read the subscripts. Complete mess.

Ok, it's now 7:15 and I have to get to work. There is a small catastrophe going on and I woke up at 6am so I could go in personally and save things. Except Alex is sick, the dog needs to be walked, and I can't take care of her and the disaster. So I'm not going to go in and instead will fix it remotely and walk the dog/be there for Alex.

It's not going to result in my job going away and even if that happened I have enough $$$ to last for a couple of years.

So it will be ok. No need to freak out and assume it's 100% or 0%. There are gradations, that is life.

More later.

Went to Laurie's PI party last night, it was *fun*! Got to see people, say hi, talk about science stuff, and of course the host had a number of amazing pies to eat and enjoy. The family is veg, but they make such great stuff I was stuffed by the end of the evening.

Good to go out. Her last party was 6 years ago right as COVID rolled in. I think there were five of us total, everyone else cancelled and it was that night we went out to the grocery store to fill three shopping carts full of emergency food to augment the stuff we keep around. I still remember the checkout girl looking at us and saying "is something wrong?"

Um yes. Didn't leave the house for 3 months after that if I recall, glad we had the option and ability to do so.

So last night was fun!