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so i happily welcome back rather be at his other presentations we found very rewarding and we asked if you could spell that out of it he's coming to order to do that silver cloud it can be here for the whole wheat and i don't think we have to go on and on about his many qualifications and
and he's going right out there i think of the spiral of the left their competence and much but if some of you would listen very carefully when he talks about counterproductive behavior
but we're glad to have you back so we'll be taking the first part as he's speaking at a certain point you turn it off and then we can have three questions comments discussion that will be on the t with them off the record off the record and this money to pride in your deck
bomber glad to have a chance be back here again them to spend some time talking about this and also just to spend some time up here and so very beautiful place
the title is self and others in community life and i want to use that polarity of self and others as the starting point and refer back to that throughout my week long presentations and because i think that this is the the ground from which we operate
eight at least a psychological human beings ways in which we're trying to find and solidify hands a sense of who we are as a person and also simultaneously maintaining and developing and enhancing our relationships with other people and this is a complicated and difficult process
ss that begins really at birth and doesn't finish until death
we are always moving back and forth between issues around separateness and oneness about a desire for independence versus and need and wish to be dependent on others between a desire for solitude and a need for community
hermann hesse saying is a nice quote and his book the glass bead game says that the human condition is always a continuous struggle for position and the search for love and i think that we're always going back and forth between those today i want to give you a little bit of background i'll talk about psychological die
development and adult developmental theory and spend a little time but with some notions of self and identity to provide some groundwork for where we'll go from here and the remaining sessions tomorrow i'm going to be talking about
defenses defense mechanisms and pd has graciously let me use him and all of his personal experiences as an example for so thank you very hard to get nothing will also be discussing the role of sexuality and a celibate monastic community then we'll look at
friendship and the role in our ongoing development role of friendships a community and fraternity and finally spend some time on friday and monastic friendships and on the role of compassion and the development and maintenance of authentic community life so those are the topics for today
we have multiple births in our lives of course there's the physical birth but the one that i want to spend a little time talking with you as to do with her psychological birth and there are some stages in that process we aren't born a full psychological human being and in fact we need
the assistance and help of others if we're going to develop to be our own self it's almost a paradox and without others in our lives we cannot have and maintain a self
the end result of this process should be the capacity to say i and mean it that's what we're working toward with the whole process of psychological development the first stage is when the infidels and kind of a sense of a psychological shell and the info
needs others people at that time just to exist all aspects of life sustenance are required from another person during this stage the next stage is the beginnings of an awareness that there is something beyond oneself even though there isn't a self to begin with there's a
growing awareness and hear other people are needed in order to help
inculcated within the person sense of order and predictability so the young child needs the parents to be very responsive to his or her needs when this works well the mother determines just what the cry means for the baby does that mean hunger
a or change or just need to be held when that's done often enough correctly enough not perfectly but good enough child learns to develop a sense of relationship and
he knows that some needs can be met by other people and is able to contain himself and that's an important element that we need later on in our line or ability to contain ourselves but at that stage there's a fluid unity between the mother and child
finally in the longest stage that begins next as this whole process of separation and individuation this is where we rely on other people to help us validate and support sense of who we are
and there's an ongoing separation that takes place you see it and the initial stages as the young infant when the infant learns to crawl and eventually to walk away they engage and practicing behaviours if you are
think of some nieces and nephews that you might have when they're in the two and three year stage you see them around their parents especially around their mother you'll notice a stage where they want to be held all the time and then they move from that to where they want to call up in the mom's lap and as soon as mom has kids settled what does the kid do
runs away and it gets all the laugh again but will repeat that quite often and then instead of just having to get and mom's lap and getting mom's face just as to clap when kind of touch mop and rubber leg hold on for two seconds and run away again and finally can move to the point where just to kind of see mom is enough so the kid by the
playing in the corner i just realized that he isn't looking at mom and then looks at her sees her senses of connection and go back to play and finally reaches a stage where mom and other people are internalized that one can think about mom and all of the good aspects that are
associated with her come to mind a sense of being reassured
that's when things go well and that's how it goes for most of us that we do tend to have a little difficulty with it at some time or another in our lives and i want to highlight how some of these things might go wrong especially in terms of relationships remember we're thinking of the notion of being and loving
and these are both important to us but there can be extreme reactions to that some people who are so desirous of maintaining their sense of self and so fearful of losing it at what their extreme is to reject all relationships with other people and so in order to preserve
serve the self they exist alone and an isolation these this is not authentic solitude which i'll talk more about towards the end of the week but this is a real splitting off cutting off of one's self and the opportunity for further growth to hold onto that little piece of self they have the other extreme
is when people look so needy for connectedness that they sacrifice anything about themselves to maintain a relationship
if you can imagine this leads to some difficult this and let me talk about a few of those
the first example of this is the belief that i need you to convince me that i exist so other people in my life here serve the purpose of mirroring my existence
a person for example at work who always makes it a point to wave and say hi to everybody
back from someone or someone here might be walking down one of the paths and might not and smiled someone and for whatever reason doesn't get a response people who have concerns at this stage this isn't just a minor irritation for them this is a major blow and it stirs up all sorts of strong feelings because they're very so
sense of self is shaken by the fact that that one person didn't kind of way back to them it speaks to how certain other people are in their lives to help remind them that they exist so they tend to get very angry and often hold a sense of smoldering anger around this now from our perspire
active you know if we were parents it would be our responsibility to organize and confirm a child's existence but when we get a little although we don't expect to have to do that and when we're called upon to do that we get a little upset with that ourselves so that leads to a lot of struggles and the individual who needs others this way tends to nurse a great deal of and
nder
the second stage in or a second level here would be the need for others i need you to tell me who i am not so much that i exist but to tell me who i am
and these folks tend to be involved pretty much in assuming and maintaining a fixed role not having the capacity for assuming multiple roles which is part of human life but holding onto a fixed role now i'm i work with a clergy and religious what i tend to see where this goes wrong most is when people get up
about in identifying solely in their role as minister or a being involved in ministry
there is something very secure and predictable about having one and only one rule however it is a way of squelching and preventing a real genuine life existence from my perspective when we have one and only one role than everyone else has to be certain characters in the play in which were living so if i
i'm a helping person and that's the only way in which i can operate than everyone else that i have a relationship with has to what has to need help so not only my patients need help but everybody that i interact with my family my friends my dog i am always helping everybody and the times when
people need help that works well but imagine what happens in relationships when you're the other person and you're tired of being helped all the time or you don't need help are you wanting something else that's going to upset the balance of the relationship you're likely to want to change or or want out and that will lead to go
great deal of discomfort and anxiety in me if that's what my a key need is we need other people to be there for us in that role
the third one is i need you to keep me from feeling lost so here it's a sense that i know who i exist to i'm supposed to do but if i don't have some anchor points i'm gonna feel lost i'm not gonna i'm going to have a general sense of anxiety malays about me we all need some anchor point
it's and we all normally experience some anxiety when those anchor points disappear major shifts for example leaving home entering religious community moving from one community to another we should all expect to feel some normal anxiety around that
but usually we have enough internal resources so that we can whether that and understand it and get over it and build new anchor points where we are for those folks who don't have those inner resources those inner reserves and have a great need to really depend on others and the have them around to maintain
gain the sense of
organization there's a lot of anxiety in their lives they have a hard time ending relationships when they need to be ended and they'll cling to old relationships and rather than try and form new ones are new kinds of relationships that reflect growth they hadn't stand to read form the same
old ones all over again you're a cotton a rigid pam
the next one is i need you to make me perfect
this is a struggle that we have when we haven't reached the ability to accept the strengths and weaknesses within us that we are caught only believe in that were really really good so therefore i've i'm going to be really good i need to have other people around to hate to hold off the badness for me and that's what their role
that other people play for these folks i'm good because everyone else is bad or everyone else is troubled and this then if i see the trouble elsewhere i know it's not me and then i have to be okay and then i get some relief from that troubled relationships obviously associated with that
the next one is a i need you to make me feel good about being me so i need you in order to increase and bolster my own sense of self esteem
people who get caught in this trap are usually good at sinking other people out so they think they they will tell you young very good at reading what other folks want and getting a tomb or what let they're really very good as reading and other people but they want so they have a limited repertoire that are not accurate readers
necessarily of others but instead they put into every relationship and they see what they want in the relationship and then they go after getting that they have extreme concerns about pleasing other people because of others are upset with them meant that decreases their own sense of self esteem
one of the things that i've noticed with people who tend to be caught it at this level is that they have not thought through and owned a set of values for themselves the either are kind of at sea with that or have taken on a whole cloth values of their parents or some institution or religious
group without even thinking about it without having internalized it and owned it
the last one is the sense of i need you to measure me against
this is associated with power issues one up and one down i know i'm okay if i'm in the one opposition and everyone else's in the one down position these relationships are characterized by a great deal of hostility and competitiveness so everything task to be done better in i'm better
at this sort of thing than this person and i can pray longer i can meditate more deeply i can do more weddings i have a funeral homily ease doesn't matter what it is there's always a way of kind of measuring against and so people are needed in order to do that
now you might say well this must get awfully troubling while of fact it does but fighting is one way to maintain a sense of connectedness with other people while at the same time maintaining a sense of independence and that's why if you look at all if we look at our lives will see that we all engage to some degree another and some of these at some
times because we're not all saints yet
so we have to see which of these tend to be more a troublesome patterns for us are there certain ones that we tend to fall into and work towards understanding those more carefully in these patterns i'm describing i'm not talking about real loving here i'm talking about needing people and needing is not the same thing as loving people when you need some
one it's because you're using them to fulfil and a part of yourself that as yet incomplete so you can't accept them as whole human beings themselves they have to be what you need them to be that is limiting and that thwarts their ability to be and it eventually sports our ability to be
as well when we continue to act on these patterns as i've described and and we all have the potential to do that
it will usually lead to the death of relationships and even an annihilation of our sense of ourselves
we have to recognize and value both ourselves and with our strengths and weaknesses and other people with their strengths and weaknesses that then allows for mature loving and then the capacity to be so then we have the experience of being and loving so that's really the task that we're about
and that's a psychological process that continues and we're we're always struggling with issues around being and loving and our life
let's look briefly at adult development
very professional want to move kind of quickly
how it used to be that folks thought development was a linear process usually went pretty well
that is you want to school you started off in a career you've got a job you made money like went well you're retired you were happy and then you died and was very predictable unexpected will
well it ever was that and i'm not sure that it was it certainly isn't that way anymore rather than thinking of life as a linear process i think it makes more sense to look at it as a something cyclical and that means that we have to move or shift or view of thinking from making progress towards some very specific achieve
movable goal toward being involved in a process of living
that we have to move away from thinking that we can acquire or own a sense of happiness whatever that may mean that to find in many different ways for people towards understanding and being at peace with the process of change in our lives
helps us move away from a sense of looking at old age as a sensor for kind of over the hill and then kind of going down to nothingness to a greater sense of positive valuing of elder hood of the older and aged people in our lives and ourselves to
now

there are normal expected bull adult developmental sequences that we can all go through and most of us will
daniel levinson has written about that specifically from a men's perspective in his book seasons of a man's life there's a book by gould called transformations that all lines those same processes gail sheehy i'm blocking in the title of her both now and passages does the same thing
though gould says that she basically kind of stole his thunder that he had the researched actually done but she got to press sooner than he did and his book hasn't gotten as much press and that's actually true but and his book is a good book if you can ever find it and it's it's worth reading
i'm not going to review those except to say that they're often like decades where people are working on different tasks now why dwell on a highlight that well if you look around the room here you're going to see people in different decades of their life and so the tasks that they're facing are gonna be different ah
depending on where they are in their life course now that seems self evident but since we all tend to be a little bit narcissistic we don't stop and think that other people i be a less attuned to our needs and were often less attuned to their needs so step one is to be aware of the people are going to be a different places i'm a developed
mental process and that if we look at life as more of a secular cyclical process that people are gonna be involved in various processes of change no matter where they are as well so you're gonna have a developmental sequence and you're gonna be involved in this process of change do
currently and i just want to highlight those for change processes and you can see how that's affected you and your life the first is a sense of kind of feeling in alignment you've made a decision you're are some place and things seem to be going pretty well for yourself pretty happy for a moment you think wife's on track stable going well
then you won't start noticing a sense of being out of sync that's the second stage some things are not quite as comfortable as they used to but you're starting to know some ships the plans and you're set for yourself the goals maybe you're going to need some readjustment
that calls them for the third stage which is a sense of disengagement this usually requires some pulling back some reassessment and this can either be a minor fix up by going in for a tune-up taking your car for a tuna oil change getting a spark plugs fixed and then getting back on track or in some cases in your life
i've it's gonna be a major overhaul they're going to have to bore on the whenever they bore out and engines and to a lot of
cylinder fence around your neck you and do some major replacement work maybe the transmissions gone are the brakes are shot major work has to be done anyway
some disengagement as a process where that takes place and that's then followed by a sense of reintegration where things come together and you begin the process again and your it again at the state of alignment this happens over and over and over again in our lives if we're sensitive to it
men tend to be less aware of rhythmic cycles in their lives i'm going to try and comment throughout my talks about kind of men's issues in particular
some has cent of men suffer from chronic a eurythmics city we just are not so aware of cycles in our bodies and in our lives and we would be better off to be paying more attention to them and i think that's an important point that i wanted to commenter
now
how does that all come together it comes together in these kansas tornadoes i have over here on the board
i have a developmental spiral here on the left
when we make good decisions more often than not not always but more often than not and that leads to positive behavior both that we recognize and that others recognize as positive it increases our sense of self competence and our sense of self esteem
and then we keep on moving upward made him continuing good decisions got a broadening our
exposure our interactions with others and feeling quite good that's a positive developmental spiral
when things go wrong here when people make a sidetrack it's pretty easy for them either with either on their owner with the help of a friend or colleague or maybe a therapist for a short while to get back on track again not too much difficult we all get off track we all get back on track again i'll ever when people have real difference
maltese then they start entering a whole different area called the pathological spiral and this is as downward course here you're making time and time again bad decisions decisions that work against them and this leads to counterproductive behavior the
a i don't help them
there are often unable to see what's happening here or they might change it if they could they're blind to it for some reason this leads to a sense of increased and competence and lowered self-esteem and then who cares what kind of students then they start feeling more and more worthless about themselves and they continue down
onward spiral

this has actually indicative of more kind of severe difficulties when people are caught in this they usually need assistance from someone outside of them to help interrupt that psycho and get them moving they are often usually blind to some key elements in their life and it's usually related to some
of
kind of major disruption in their sense of themselves and their ability to relate to others so some kind of major disturbance and being and loving his work is going to contribute to this
oh
in the last thing that i wanted to touch on this morning in terms of some basic elements here with this notion of self and identity
if you've already gotten the idea that it's a complex process this kind of forming and maintaining and growing and our self identity you're right and we are always caught between two opposing forces within ourselves that is sense of wanting to move forward and grow and tackle new challenge
edges on one side and the other side is is hey this is fine let's keep things as same as comfortable here trying to maintain the status quo were caught in that sort of of of a battle between ourselves is there a way in which we can make ourselves better but that's that's a involves greater risk and
and so what let's not take that risk things are okay the where they are now we really could have life a little bit better now that we might be able to but think of the risk and doing them these are the struggles that are within us at all times
we generally speaking deal with the anxiety associated with leaving the comfortable things behind us if we are more involved in this developmental spiral because we've learned that we can take some chances take some risk experienced anxiety for a while and that we will get some good results from
that
now the last thing i one of come in and and i think as a particular importance to understanding
human beings and their relationships with each other is some relatively new work by an analyst on kind of an anthropologist as well named alan roland and he did some studies of culture in india and japan and i think some of his findings and he alludes to this in a footnote and
this book have some special significance for us as religious
he points out that in the western tradition we are very much focused on the individual self and individuation and in fact one of those psychological birth stages as called the process of separation and individuation that's what is works toward an
and he says that this kind of a model of life works very well for itself works very well for mobile individualistic autonomous folks and these people are granted if not forced into increasing senses of autonomy now he contrast this with what
he calls the familial self
and this is a self organization that allows for a better functioning within stable long term groups read religious communities i think he doesn't go this far with it but this is this is how i would apply and it provides away
a of understanding developing and maintaining important intimate group relationships and places a value on that versus the more egalitarian on contractual relationships that tend to be more consistent with an individualized sense or a western sense of self
the familiar scent familial sense of self has a we so the person thinks more often than not about we the group the family and that is contrasted with the sense of i i notice in the endeavor
usual self
rather than the separation and individuation the kind of becoming more and more apart in the familiar self it's a it's a continued process of developing reciprocity with other people it's always a very clear emphasis on self in
relationship with other not that they wouldn't be so true for the individual self but is paramount to self definition we are who we are because we are in certain kinds of relationships with other people and that's at the foremost of there are thinking about themselves
they have people who have this kind of more familial self tend to have a more blurred sense of self and others so if you would look at their writings as i did
they'll use the word we more often when i asked religious groups to talk about people from religious communities to write about themselves rather than using i so much they tended to use we a lot more
now i think this is particularly important has a real value to understanding religious communities because i think in the past psychology has altogether too much overvalued independence
and when we would look at studies of people who are joining religious communities in the past we'd find out that on psychological measures these folks tended to be immature and why would they mature they were immature because they had greater dependency needs and in western culture there's not too much
ah it there's not much worse if you're a man and particular than to have too much dependency needs this is kind of built into us from the getgo were taught to be alone were taught to be heroes were taught to be involved in solitary quests in our live
and so the need other people is somehow anathema i'm saying that the sense of familial self which has its eastern roots is still evident and the judeo christian tradition and is still held i believe to a stronger degree in
monastic communities and and those who hold a value orientations that are or a different separate and connected with their past than current religious communities more active orders for example
now another element that he brought forth was the notion of a spiritual self now unless you're real involved with psychoanalysis you know he's you won't know that this guy's taking a real risk freud didn't have much to say about religion except that it was a universal neurosis and reflected some unresolved early symbiotic
relationships with the mother fuck with the mother figure
you know we can always analyze freud and say well were his issues and there have been books written on that as a matter of fact there's one out called freud's christian unconscious goes a little far but it's an interesting read if you if you wanted to hear more about that
anyway he makes the point that in these eastern traditions the sense of spiritual self is much more prevalent in the day to day experiences of these folks there is an assumption that most people make that there is a process of self transformation that they could be involved in if they
they wanted to even if they choose not to
many choose to be involved in it but even if they don't they acknowledge the existence of that
and he's a contrast that with not seeing that very much in western culture and again i would say that's true except for those who make that's part of their life goal and that that here again would not just only be members oak from religious communities or what i call religious prefer
nationals but others who are involved in the the seeking process and you have to notice that in the western culture this is a soon to be a natural part of folks lives here in the western culture it's not characterize them way too much there's as people look askance at that you know new age
rocks and stones and or strange meditative to the techniques the western culture tends to view that and think that there's something wrong with it that makes for a little bit of uncomfortable this for those of us who have are more in touch with this sense of ourselves
why do i bring all of this up and particular here because i think it helps us understand put a different twist on what our psychological development needs to be it doesn't i think need to be a movement towards continuous separation from other people to build a more of an emphasis on a single person says
secret from other people but with some connection to him which might be an ideal western view but i would argue for more solid community life will be fostered when there is the implicit and perhaps perhaps explicit understanding of this kind of notion of familial and
and spiritual selves active and involved within us that is bringing us ports of ways of being a healthy interdependence and connectedness with each other rather than a sense of separateness that is more common with the or adult
developmental thinking
he provides an interesting musical analogy he says in the western culture the individual self tends to be the dominant note and you'll find a few background chords of familial self and only the tiniest muted notes
of the spiritual self but he says there are exceptions he says there are loud echoes in some groups and he mentions monastic groups and particular as being one example of them so i'm saying let's put the emphasis not just on having a few echoes here and there but kind of making a turning the tables a little bit and making the familial self in the spiritual
self and the ways in which we can help each other develop those more fully at the forefront of the music
okay thou kind of summarize the initial presentation we can take some questions from him

i talked yesterday about the development and general highlighting the process of psychological birth and then outlining a general sequence of events for adult development and how we as human beings struggled back and forth between issues of
of being and loving and i suspect that all of you
saw yourself and at least one of the examples i was giving
really wouldn't be surprising for each of us to find that some time or another in our lives we'd do some of the things i talked about our have those sorts of feelings it's part of the human condition actually that it becomes a real problem only when people get locked in are stuck in a particular
a way of being or attempting to love that works against them and causes trouble in relationships that
some additional help would be needed i wanted to talk today more specifically about sexual development in men and highlight that a little bit it's an area that often that is a large part of our lives but frequently is not
disgust or talked much about when i discuss these sorts of things in classes when i would teach undergraduates with
men and women
we we would talk about this the little bit and there are some a real gender differences that are seen in classes of men in general and women in general and that is women are much more comfortable and sharing
all sorts of things with each other than men are neither good nor bad just the way that it is
and in particular women talk quite a bit with their close intimate female friends about their own sexual feelings and if they're married about their sexual relationship with their husbands how it goes well our doesn't go well and in fact most men would be shy
shocked to know that the wives of their spouses or lovers know just a tremendous amount about their sexual activities and that makes when men here that when i make that comment in class the men start getting very anxious about them
so it reflects a lack of
opportunity i suspect and some cultural pressures against discussing sexuality i'm want to use a model developed by a man named john money
sexologist
quite old now
i don't think he dead yet but wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't die soon has been around a very long time currently or last working at johns hopkins university and he has a number of books out and but the concept that i want to use to and a described as whole process is to look at his notion of love maps
because it provides want not only but one way of looking at how one's sexual orientation develops and also it provides a way of explaining how
love maps can become a vandalized to use his word and ways in which sexual
problem behaviors are technically called pair of failures develop so i will just talk a little bit about that
but first humming just go through some definitions here and return so that we can have those down because often these words are misused and misunderstood first a core gender identity
that is a sense of where whether one is a male or female
this comes from three sources
our biological forces that determine this the assigned label that were given boy or girl at birth and body image and anatomy now for most of us that's going to be fairly straightforward it becomes more complicated with individuals who have
some congenital deformation due to genetic destruction most often where it's always not so clear where someone's male or female and where doctors sometimes after almost flip a coin and say well we're going to call this child mail or going to call this child female but that's not an issue for most people
so since being male or female as the core gender identity secondly gender role this is the social sex role that one adopts or develops over time and that's a sense of being masculine or feminine different from being male or a
email because what passes for masculine and feminine behavior changes over time as cultural and social definition or quality to it
sexual orientation
is the person's erotic response tendency that noted not only an overt sexual behavior but also in sexual dreams and sexual fantasies so an individual could have a heterosexual orientation but never had genital sex persons
to be considered heterosexual or person could again have never engaged in general sex but have a homosexual fantasies or dreams and would be then considered a homosexual the word here is purposely used orientation rather than preference
it's
because simply put none of us shows are sexual orientation
it wasn't something that when you turn thirteen
you sit down with your family and school guidance counselor and and okay here are your choices homosexual bisexual heterosexual what what's it gonna be no it doesn't work that way so you don't use the word preference in order to highlight the fact that it is not a choice
preferred sexual partner is the
sex of the person with whom if you were to have sex you would like to have sex with and then finders the south labeled sexual identity
again that's to being
gay straight in between and that may differ from one sexual orientation depending on how comfortable one is in expressing one sir
sexual identity
okay we'll keep those in mind let's talk about love maps this is an interesting concept and i like it a lot for its explanatory value
it is from john money standpoint very much like a map and that there are many ways to get to different places and for us the place that we're getting to is a developed pattern of sexual arousal for us so there are complex roots that people go
through throughout life and the early life in particular and there are multiple intersections where people can take different roads always there are some options but these all these roads are all leading to different places there is no one single turn in one's life that will
will determine one's final love map outcome you can't go back and say a it was this one experience when i was four months old that your recalling as you're lying on your analyst's couch that that did the trick know it's not like that much too complicated
but as you start making turns and choices that automatically starts excluding some pathways on the love mac and finally by early adolescence the love map itself is a fairly well defined so what's the end result the end result is a particular
pattern of requirements for one your sexual arousal
your preferred partner
and the modes of expressing genital contact with your preferred partner
this tends to be extremely specific for people when they talk about what i like people with blonde hair or i like a tall women to learn from the mmp i wish they use to use all the time they don't anymore so you may remember them
or i like a short stocky man
doesn't matter these things develop over time and we don't know exactly why or how it works this way so that's one of the reasons i liked this model that makes an attempt to say that something's happening but it also points out that we don't know exactly why it happens the way that it happens is they're likely a
genetic and prenatal biological influence to this whole process yes is there likely to be a environmental early socialization process something that happens within the first few years of life remember that psychological birth takes place that and that's an important part the answer is yes
yes is either one of those alone enough to explain the development of one sexual orientation and love map know do we have the final answer on this know
people still doing research and trying to understand this more carefully yes but it's really gonna be a long time coming there is a recent article
a thing in the new england journal of medicine i have a copy of it somewhere here that reviewed example reviewed the whole area homosexuality did a nice job of kind of bringing together all the research so far and a few pages that have summarized to quite well worthy empirical evidence stands for
them
okay so that's how love maps work
john money says that love map can include either a hetero phillip or a homeowner villec direction either sexual attraction towards the opposite sex or sexual attraction towards the same sex
he makes the point that there's nothing inherently deformed about a homeowner feel like attraction
he does not categorize that under a vandalized love map
he said to be loaded issues for people of for a number of reasons one of which is
because out for him
a sense so
homophobia that is current in most societies and in many individuals and it's important to note that the homophobia is pros not only in heterosexuals but also on homosexuals it's not at all uncommon to find some component of lack of acceptance or home
i'm a phobia and individuals who are homosexual
part of they're coming to terms with their sexual identity means needing to look and see if fannie and how much of that as president and working through that that's just the nature of how it needs to be is or cultural problems and they affect men's relationship with each other because there is a confusion between
queen a warm and tender feelings that men may have for each other and erotic feelings that men may have for each other then it's also confused with thinking that feminine characteristics in a man are equal to a homosexual orientation
it's not could be i mean that you could have someone who as more of a heterosexual as a heterosexual and the feminine
feminine characteristics but still heterosexual you can have homosexual with very masculine or feminine traits but men in general tend to get afraid of that and of that is because of men's limited repertoire of emotional feeling states men have basically
two emotions off and on
again a generally speaking
not true for all men but it makes for a good starting point men often either feel aroused or they don't feel aroused and arousal for men she often include some sexual component mean so many more things than sexual interest or attraction men get
aroused sexually one their sad when they're angry when they're excited when they're lonely and the list goes on so it has something to do with sexual attraction sometimes and often has very little to do with sexual attraction and other times
when we talk more about friendships in tomorrow we will spend a little bit more time on that as well
just some comments about homosexuals
it used to be believed that to be homosexual was a psychiatric disorder the american psychiatric association used to have category for homosexuality and then ego dystonic homosexuality the current big book the dsm for the lists all the things that can go wrong with people
doesn't have a listing for that and that's been gone for a number of years there is some research to support the fact that there are no there's no clear empirical evidence that heterosexuals have a greater incidence of any sort of psychopathology than do homeless homeless x
what do not have any greater incidence of psychopathology than do heterosexuals are homosexuals are capable of maintaining a committed relationships homosexuals are able to engage in a solvent lifestyle and lead that are fully
the point i want to make it the this notion of sexual orientation is not really just one or the other
many individuals talk about a kind of range where people can place themselves kinsey who is the noted sexual researcher came up with the seven point scale where there's a individuals who are exclusively heterosexual and individuals who are exclusively homosexual and then there's a range and between
most researchers are accept that fact that is the case but in general there don't seem to be a preponderance people are going to be feeling or to find themselves more as one than the other
i suspect we're i'm actually i don't think i don't think there is such a thing is just a kind of a pure bisexual that's right at the you know half the time i'm attracted to men half the time attracted to him and i don't think so i think that there is more of a preponderance one way or the other
but the flew there are people in that middle range
now just briefly this notion of vandalized love maps this is when things go rather terribly wrong and it's always not clear why that happened though
early extraordinarily repressive sexual experiences as children seems to have some connection with this
children who are very severely punished for the ordinarily natural sex play that is a part of the growth of a young child also seem to be more likely to have
a vandalized love map and also individuals who end up because of the early experiences having to split off and separate love an erotic feelings it's the what's sometimes called the madonna whore syndrome so they can only have this guy
of pure love for a man or woman that has nothing to do with any sexual feelings or they can engage in you know kind of dirty terrible sex and they do that with people that they don't think much about so they really kind of split off their life and those in those areas
pedophiles are a classic example of that
pedophilia is not the same thing as homosexuality had appeal he his attraction to prepubescent children heterosexuals as well as homosexuals can have vandalized love maps and be attracted to that that's the one of course they get the biggest press these days in the catholic church and another denominations as well
oh the press you to doesn't pick it up as much but our experience at the menninger clinic is that it's not limited to just catholic instance it's not a catholic priest disorder it's much broader than that seen in the other religious denominations scene and other professional groups as well in fact some recent research i'm in red indicated
that there's not really not a higher proponents of it the catholic church as compared to other on professional groups like lawyers dentists and doctors answered
okay nevertheless the whole area of sexual it does tend to stir up strong feelings and people and attends to be the one that gets a repressed or mishandle in many ways so let's look over here at my artwork can give you one exam
apple of
a way of thinking about some of freud's ideas and then some adaptation i'm gonna make on that
this has to do it to the represent he never thought of it this way but it's a way of thinking about
kind of an ego and superego if you have at the bottom of the steam boiler here and of a layer of red hot it calls now these are the ceiling sexual and aggressive impulses that freud posits are are within us and our kind of boiling away and then that manifests itself as sexual he
heat k and that leads to steam being produced and then in a well functioning boiler the steam gets produced and spends around and then gets
put out a pipe somewhere and this would be the appropriate sublimated energy so the sexual energy is transformed sublimated into creative activities energy life vitality that kind of motivates us and keeps us going
our most of us don't really have a brand new boiler and we often have you know kind of a little weak holes in the boil looks a little thing has teamed up can slip out every once in while not all of the energy gets sublimated are channeled and there's all sorts of ways in which displaced
sexual energy can come out and hysterical symptoms are clearly and dreams sexual dreams feelings of depression psychosomatic symptoms physical illnesses that don't really have a physical cause
self-defeating behaviors that's the way in which we punish ourselves unconsciously perhaps for having sexual feelings this has done outside of awareness
obsessive compulsive symptoms but some of those are good since i can have allowed myself and advantage if you're going to have some that's an okay over here inappropriate behaviors things that slip out of things that should do that you or others would say she that's not really like you
you are you taking out wonder why did that that's something slipped out there little slips of the tongue or care practices
accidents
for i usually believe that the most accidents really warrant accidents and so the people who have a lifelong pattern of having accidents are really that's an example of self-defeating behavior so they're trying to get at themselves
so that's one way of understanding it it really gives i think altogether too much power to this notion of the eared and that here in this case the steam boiler would be considered the eagle kind of week and and not very adaptable so this would
be interesting but incomplete model excuse me i think
looking at defenses as an adaptation to life is a better way of understanding it and there are a couple of ways for ways in which we have a needs to adapt the eagle
is the one that has to handle pressures from for load stones each of which can contribute to a conflict in our areas the first one would be desire and this might be considered the ed when our emotions and are drives and our wishes become very strong
the eagle has to do something to work with that the second one is the conscience conscience or the superego as
therapist talk about it though it's really more that the superego is more than just that don't do that things that your parents taught you that you developed and and colocated within you around the age of five it really has to do also with this other neglected part which is called our eagle ideal this is the image
the way that we want to be some people have been
very good ego ideal and know they work towards that that's an image that they keep doing others have something it's too far beyond them and they
find themselves always feeling like they can never measure up
then there are people let's not forget people people can live with them you can't live with them and you can't live without em right
we have a lot of conflicts around people and the important thing here is that it says that some of our adapting to life doesn't have to do only just with issues within us but with our relationship with others which includes issues with us but also issues with them and finally reality
life sucks sometimes left those terrible things to people through no fault of anyone except that that's very hard for people to understand and explain
there was an interesting study done with mothers of children who developed leukemia
you know there's no there's no one to blame for that there's nothing that the mother did that she could have done differently that would have prevented that from happening it's nothing the doctor could have done differently that would have prevented that from happening it's very difficult for mothers to deal with that they can't accept that there's too much of a loss of control associate
that so they distort reality they use defensive functioning to adapt because the the belief that something can be that terrible and so much out of one's control is too much to handle so the reason why we his defense mechanisms as to help us adapt until we're ready and able to deal both with the ideas as
and the feelings associated with the problem
i'm gonna just run down a real quick list of an example of how people use defense mechanisms
let's say
in a hypothetical situation there is a young man who has a father as bot so who he liked a great deal had a great deal of respect for and finds out that his father has been embezzling and now the company is just about bankrupt and the sun is love trying to pick up the pieces here
if the sun is in touch with both his ideas and feelings about it not needing to use any defenses he can say think and feel i hate my father for what he's done to me by this okay so there's no defenses if an individual users to kind of the most
primitive form of defense's then you will have a psychotic break and we'll tell his doctor i don't have a father i was born without one psychotic denial that the father even exists that's one way of handling them
or you can use less mature defenses you can project the anger that you feel so it's not so much that i hate my father but my father hates me my father's out to get me so let's taken the feeling that we have and putting it in someone else in the father of this time or the
can be passive aggression where a person might attempt suicide so the anger is directed toward the self
or that could simply be acting out the person could go to a police station and just start punching police officers this is acting out with authority figures like the father and displaced in the it's not even displacement is acting out the aggression that he'd like to give to the father to the
to the police officers or can engage in fantasy dreaming and fantasizing of killing giants it's another kind of slight displacement of the anger towards the father
oh nora kind of neurotic ways of handling it would be telling jokes to your father sharp edged jokes little giants that to get to your father or you really could displace it and kick your father's dog of paid your father's die
you can have isolation this is a very common defense mechanism that we see and that is people who say i really don't approve that my father did they can hold the idea in their head but you can tell by the way they're talking that they're not at all and in touch with the anger and in fact if you're working with someone or
visiting with someone they might be sitting like this and say i just really don't like that my phone did and then you said you'd notice how your hands are crunched so hard that his blood coming out of your palms oh no i wonder what that's about so they're aware of the fact that the feeling is there and they've kind of isolated aspect from feeling both of us who tend to use them
says a compulsive defenses have a tendency in that area were very good and therapy because once we get treatment and get released from that that were in touch with our murderous rage and were much happier
i'm not quite as any anyhow with mile ledger
he fits it
it doesn't it expands that it expands that this is a limit of new level and then some are just the channel for this be this year really only says that problems come because of desire for its earliest model i'm saying problems come from all of these areas and we develop a mingle handling it but we're thinking mostly of does
i er because we're talking about what sexual development and the conflicted feelings we have a dealing and accepting our sexual cells that's that's the point of okay
then another way to react is to just totally repressive just be anxious g doctor i'm just very anxious and think thing lot on your life yeah well our businesses gone to crap why while my father did this oh published i'm just anxious i don't want so no i'm
ability to have the ideas or feelings their reaction formation is to deny the anger completely in love father
and finally the more mature defenses one that we'd like to think that we all use and we can
and do sometimes we can use suppression we can acknowledge that were cross at our father and but we're not gonna tell okay so we acknowledge both the idea in some of the feeling but not all of it we sublimated by beating our father repeatedly at racquetball or tennis or golf or anything
and feeling better or we can turn it around and and respond altruistically and start a support group for father haters
so those are those are the ways in which we can respond to this now i'd like to tell you that we have some choice in this matter but actually the notion of a defense mechanism is that it's an unconscious process and we kind of do what we do and these can be shifted over time either through therapy or through
the normal process of growing up in developing and especially helpful when you're involved in a good peer relationships and can develop strong identifications with other people that helps us grow and mature in the
in this process here of developing ourselves more fully and using more advanced or are mature defenses we can choose sometimes to use suppression you know we could have taught us or i'm just you know i'm not going to think about this now i'm not going to deal with this now i'm going to do something else but the fact is that there are some time
when we should do that we find that we don't we repress so it's not as though we can always use it but every once in a while we can we have to depend on our friends to help point out to us when we're using some of that more or less effective defenses when we tend to be repressing
the the reason i do like to think of the steam boiler method is because in if there's too much repression going on that's like putting some sort of about here
and then turning it off because of fear but we're talking about here sexual eat you shut everything down and individuals who tend to be repressed in one area of their life tend to have that repression manifested in many areas of their life
there's a mistaken assumption and you can see this is kind of old movies of going my way said jim kelly was kind of all a big crosby all those kind of
old priest movies what how high priests have tended to be portrayed are these kind of gaunt of aesthetic sometimes silly minded but usually a sexual people and what they're more likely doing it is
demonstrated you know kind of a cut off from one's feelings and that's given us them as a model in not spiritual detachment when in fact it's likely to be just cut off of one are
national with one's desire itself
and the task is to remove these repressive barriers to open the age up here and to let the feelings come out and to help remove the distortion and being able to accept both ideas and feelings about all aspects of ourselves
including our our understanding of our sexual selves and our desires
because of the visit by one santa it'll start part one and i'm going to stop for questions
in order to have authentic still a bit living one as to be very much in touch with one's desires in all areas with one's kind of year our sexual heat are broad range of desires not cut off from that but in touch with
that since that really is our sexual some part of us if we need to grow and develop and understand that area too
so let me stop here and see what kind of questions or comments that you have or think you like me to comment or yet and any good eric i'm not very good like the worker by sexual attitudes and from the weather observation use extra checking on the summer can anything good come
that yes i think it can because for example i think
one of the difficulties that some marital couples have is the difficulty in establishing of a genital intimacy and a understanding and respect for each other's bodies and men have a very hard time with some men have very hard time with that so to be able to talk to another man of
about some of those same kinds of issues can allow him to get some feedback about that and hopefully increases loving mutual relationship with his wife
which surveyed are you talking about that came up with summer or the optimal that was shown in both island
i don't recall the name that was posted on the was to come up with this a masters and johnson's
there was a jam study that came up with your particular question we had about that this year and i think that
what's useful about that is that it's trying to get some empirical evidence for what of people talk about or brag about or lie about its
i'm in favor of having clear information about this myself people are wanting to know well people are we're always interested in kind of trying to measure up and see where we fit other hours some you know psychological issues around whether we need to do that or not but most of us kind of wonder where are we within this range and
certainly is helpful to have some sense of that for those people who tend to work with individuals who are experiencing some sexual difficulties one of the things i would say as that might apply to religious life for example my own experience in working with religious works from sexual concerns is that
so often they don't talk to anybody they don't think anyone else is having any trouble at all except them that some other so terribly alone in this and no one else has ever thought like this are done these sorts of things and it helps them feel less alone and it gives them some strength for being able to work on these issues so
i see some benefit for them
the business about a whole very helpful it is for the summer like to know one's desires whose history is psychologist whose underlying net incidents one point john the cross was asked was most valued he read the same article i am that's from the carefully that magazine that they are
yeah have here which most valuable thing you learned from asceticism appearances to know my desire to said because you might be parts that we don't like to acknowledge or with your miniscule the though as roman catholics so but just to know that they're there to knowledge to start to work with that extremely helpful but
in sweden we spiritualized ourselves into a period when we hide things from ourselves when we hide things from others they can exert great power over us so the ability to own our own desires and acknowledge them
and ideally to have some and with whom you can talk to about these sorts of things really tends to reduce the power and control that these feelings can have the more that they're kept in secret that more difficult that is that's especially true for those folks with vandalized love maps
it'll go that there's a small minority what's this organization called man boy love that they're trying to the they have these folks have very severe cognitive distortions you know they operate under the principle that sunday society will acknowledge that this really is okay and that people can do that but when these things for most people
when that comes out of the closet when they start am to talk about that that reduces the the power that these impulses have over them
so knowing one's desires acknowledging and being able to talk about them in a healthy relationship with someone else is a way of integrating that is good important
i have a seven costumes okay i'm ready for him
is there's not a thing
but first of all the difference between repression and so fresh
repression is
an unconscious process where things are kept from even coming into consciousness so with this person is that and that example i gave you a person has never even aware that they were angry with their father that they wanted to you know chapter their father up or whatever
suppression is more of a conscious act that works towards inhibiting or redirecting the impulses
and in order to have some to be able to use suppression you have to have some capacity to delay gratification
suppression works in many different ways when you're studying for an exam and also you get hungry for pizza
part of suppression is think i'm not going to think about my hunger and i'm going to get through his chapter and than ever
okay then is there such thing as a health as an unhealthy suppression and the that eventually become a reproach
now that's only thing i want to answer that i can people can misuse suppression if the neither feeling he has pushed out question i just do better because regret right that can have you and the other part of that actually a glass private not just keep writing word
or anything but an can that oh traction
ah also
be something that leads to our obsession i'm thinking that repressions oppression and aggression any of those things eventually leads and person to to obsession which then triggers up
yes but cannot help i'm saying like for example is going out who can talk about their sexual feelings now eventually they become repressive to the point where they are upstairs and then they turn into some kind of sexual monster because there were
name in touch yes you can think of
our ability to handle our sexuality has been working on a bell shaped curve and and most of us are you know the middle one plus to minus one standard deviation are doing pretty good some of us tend to avoid some of us have some problems with acting on it and i'm finally at the far end
here are the people who are either like anorexic or a sexual and deny and so completely are those who are seriously addicted
notion are having a sexual addiction the different ways of understanding them but people are so engaged and acting out sexual behavior that's beyond their control is are just two opposite sides of the same coin and the notion of oppression and the role of that plays in one sexual development has to do with this lodestar here
that's a very important one people who don't grow up and who grow up and and sexually oppressive society or family or environment even if it was meant for the best of reasons that's going to cause grave difficulties and it's like a rubber ball what happens the harder you throw it down
the higher boxes so he has all these things can lead to
eruptions actually what it can lead to is that the whole here and so there's becoming a little becomes a big hole is a huge blow up and you can have really inappropriate acting out you can have in these individuals who have kind of for
to repress this huge eruptions of unbelievably strong sexual feelings because i've not been in touch with their desires for so long can be just overwhelming which hadn't been transit to do
trauma violence or numbness or something that would appear sexual realm but it can you can you can find someone who's considers himself that and lead kind of a very virtuous life and then all of a sudden it just erupts and and their blindsided by it and that's that's very hard to handle for them
yeah think to be this is they're such a reverse our culture than so sex crazed in the sixties and seventies
in on any kind of talking about in there mean now made it was standing and so the old oppression the repression led to this oxygen and had an urge or and the thing is that the same pound kids growing up were on the sectionals can have that
they yeah it's hard though they become so old crash that at some point they become obsessed and then burst value completely inappropriate
society is simultaneously obsessed and repressed about sexuality simultaneously the same people who were arguing for you know kind of work for free sex and free love of their own deeply repressed issues around them so it's a simultaneous process you bring up the notion of a young gay man it's a very
difficult time for them they suffer from you know many different many additional burdens that they have to work through that heterosexual young men don't including listen oh yeah yeah and women as well the difficulties of avenue experience
because of the culture so homophobia which they have already internalized to think that there's something kind of wrong with them something abnormal
just complicates their life the there was a studied at the period of time between or a young man became clear of what a sexual orientation was in the first time he told someone bought an average and at least four years so there wasn't a long time before they could bring themselves to talk about them and he had yeah i
like to ask of eco sense to use a lot of the language against evil such women's version okay well and then psychology
pupils of i think sometimes we might even be enough to be one of your probably because
describe when i used the term ego from a psychological standpoint i'm talking about that psychological construct whose main purposes to mediate here all these four areas that a hinge upon our experience of ourselves in the world the task of the ego is to balance pressures from does
ayer chine people in reality it's the part of us that
i was as described sometimes like the executive who has to kind of balance all of these areas here
i think in some spiritual writers when they talk about the need to reduce ego they're talking about and correct me if you have different understanding of them more of a self centeredness and narcissism and inflated ego a sense of putting oneself a high above
while other people about god idolatry of one's cell and that's not really what we're talking about here again psychology in their use of no not really mean that a healthy ego allows for a balanced realistic understanding and acceptance of one's self and others around us
and i think spirit arise which said that's a good thing too so when they're talking about lessening the ego it's it's reducing this overweening self love that we develop some time as it as a defensive maneuver actually to protect ourselves from feeling and experiencing our own really
fragile brittle empty nest inside
kind of balance for after that time you know the one that it's an adaptation for you read right for the satellite
retarded i left to them
right it's it's provided with angular yeah right yeah it might be doing that but that would be just one never be one defensive maneuver of the ego not the whole colleague itself is not something you want to produce you know you want to get a balance with them
you have to recognize and respect defenses are are adaptations people use them for reasons it's because they couldn't handle the truth so you don't want to be too quick to kind of knock these things down because we used to fences for reason and sometimes for a while when we can let go of them and those shoes
the title of self in the over i'm sorting what's the relation between self and ego
okay
i don't think that they're the same thing but i'm not quite sure what i think or how to other teas that out
i think the self is more than just the eagle the minimum input that when i think it's a larger over arching concept that includes
r e it includes conscience
it includes our perceptions of other people and our understanding of reality
so i see it as it as as a broader issue
kind of i'm in a broader construct
it's our you're seeing that year
here was our desire
the passions of a good way of doing it and you can be too careful
obsession or hours repression