Safety Thoughts

[snoringdog]

Hello Beanie,

Not sure where to put this, but Rivergirl was just asking about museums reopening, and I just checked the Metropolitan Museum in NYC.

They're opened, and have a Japanese exhibit on display which is also available online.

https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/l ... y-of-style

I love the screens and woodblock prints.

SD

[Beany Boo]

Sounds great. Thank you

I recently finished memorizing the 46 hiragana (alphabet) characters and I’m onto the katakana ones now. I’m also currently learning about the significance of ‘wa’ as a sentence particle.

[Beany Boo]

Safety thought:

“Toxic positivity”

[rivergirl]

Thank you for sharing, snoringdog. So much beauty. I particularly love this screen: Kōrin’s Irises at Yatsuhashi (Eight Bridges).

There's a kind of enforced positivity that I find to be exhausting and toxic. I'm not sure if that's anything like what you're thinking, Beany. Actually I'm exhausted just reading the word "positivity."

[Beany Boo]

I heard it used on a podcast. It felt like a relief to hear it; like, “enough...”

[Beany Boo]

Safety thought:

Problems are a certain size.

(Not all my thoughts are ready)

[Beany Boo]

Safety thought:

... so that the present might work.

(Not all my thoughts are ready)

[JennaM]

So I have a theory.

When I go to be happy I reach for a full uninterrupted feeling. Unfortunately the only feeling in my repertoire that matches that description is humiliation. My brain receives my prompt, and returns “‘happiness’ does not exist, ‘humiliation’ is this what you’re looking for?”.

This is sort of simplified. My point is I may be constantly trying to access happiness and my brain is constantly trying to furnish me with it based on all previous experience.

Maybe I can start sending a new query, “please cue ‘happiness‘, does not contain ‘humiliation‘“.
Hopefully it doesn’t crash my brain, and just generates a paradoxical object; “‘happiness’, attributes uploading, please stand by”.

My father had this mean spirited habit of shaming me when I was visibly happy. If I had won something or achieved something or made a new friend or was having a wonderful laugh. So I have long been humiliated by happiness. When I experience it, a bout of self-hatred and guilt almost always follow. It's like this: an input leads to joy; joy feels luxuriously physically overwhelming; being overwhelmed is easily confused with not having control; lacking control associated with childhood abuse; children, being innocent, can only know abuse as an indication of inherent unworthiness, which is ipso facto humiliating; therefore one learns to pre-empt happiness with humiliation to achieve control, minimize shock, and get on with it.

Another possible experiment (more for me than you, I think, but related): "please fabricate happiness"?

[Beany Boo]

Hi JennaM,

I like this word, fabrication.

For my happiness-fabrication, I would probably start here, with these component parts;

Arousal (in a general sense) that others can see.

Threat (that my arousal represented, that prompted my father's reactivity to humiliate) which lives in memory, but is now not automatically offered substance in the present.

Time for the arousal to bubble out and overtake the system, without interruption now.

Anticipation of what happens next; what is thought and felt once the arousal of happiness is reflected on the faces of others and they (weirdly) show acceptance and encouragement. They join in, in other words.

Shame, which goes through an overhaul, once it no longer applies in the same way to my body’s display of joy as it affects others’ bodies.

Voice, which becomes relaxed, careless, in both the vocal tone, emotional modulation and words used, since it’s no longer necessary to tightly suppress the ever-present ‘threat’ of happiness it contains.

Here is a start.

[Beany Boo]

In order to preserve my own life, this is the last day I think about trying to be ‘likable.’