Beau said:
Reading about Yochelson's intense 'mirror' sessions with Leroy was so fascinating, and instructive. He spared no feelings, and he did that seemingly out of a desire to help his criminal patients to change and get better. The amazing thing to me was that he was able to reach some of his criminals and enact change. If there's any reason to feel positive about doing The Work and changing ourselves, just look at the people who were doing horrible things and who we would classify as psychopaths but who were clearly not because they changed their behavior through intense and serious feedback and changing their thinking.
Yea, super fascinating - and inspiring! That last chapter where he gave his example of Leroy sure did sound like the work on a really intense level. It reminded me of the mirrors you see on the forum. What I think made it successful was that there was a genuine desire by Leroy to push on and continue through it, taking the feedback and consistently applying it. Seeing those things pointed out, as harsh it was, was the shock needed to get him back on track. I do wonder about cases where the treatment didn’t work. I think about how for some people here, no matter how many mirrors they receive, you realize that they ultimately don’t care and there’s nothing you can do, or they are simply incapable of doing it (biological factors). Those that don’t want to change, you will never be able to help. And that’s what’s so interesting - that his program would even work at all with those types seeing how ingrained their patterns are. Yet, there is some part of them that actually comes to value the feedback enough to see its utility and be further motivated to change. Although there was the threat of losing your freedom I think there was still something left in there that made them care even about that. If there's even a shred of being then there's hope!
I also thought that Raine’s and Samenow’s books complement each other. On one hand, Raine outlines the various risk factors from a biological/social angle, while Samenow provides a look into the psychological/behavioral motivations for that type of behavior and basically says that isn't the main issue. I think it lies somewhere in between. On the one extreme there are those with absolutely nothing wrong with their brain or upbringing but still exhibit criminal behaviour and on the other all the biological and environmental risk factors. Most fall somewhere in between the two. What was interesting was that the thought processes described by Samenow were consistent throughout the various types of criminals, despite the biological/social factors or their crimes. What was useful in Raine’s book was that you got a good idea of what can happen when the hardware is faulty and how much more work is needed to counteract that. Though we may not have access to brain scans, the social aspects we can determine for ourselves through examining our upbringing and discovering what those risk factors might be. Where we need to be careful is to not put all the blame on that, which is one thing that he raised up a few times. To what extent do you fault the behaviour on your faulty brain or a bad childhood? It's easy to blame it on external factors, just like in the examples Samenow gives. At the same time, there is a point where the biological/environmental setbacks are so great that there is almost nothing that could be done (like in Donta Page’s case). Still, it's not so cut and dried like in the example of Mr. Oft’s case where he knew what he was doing was wrong but couldn’t "stop" himself despite the strong causal link between his tumour and change in behaviour. However for the majority of cases, what Samenow is putting forward is more applicable – and approachable and therefore more useful for what we're trying to do. Some of the quotes below I think hit the mark in that respect.
Session 9 April 2011
[...]
A: We have more in mind. Take care with interacting with negative energies.
Q: (L) Well that’s kinda like creating your own reality, isn’t it?
A: Not what we mean… Keep your guard up and do not allow negative energies to slip by… such as believing lies… listening to negative music while thinking it is positive…watching negative movies and thinking it is negligible. It is extremely important to not lie to the self. One can listen or watch many things as long as the truth of the orientation is known, acknowledged, and understood. Clear?
Q: (L) So, in other words: awareness. Calling a spade a spade and not allowing something negative to enter you and believing it is positive. You can see it, perceive it and acknowledge it but not allow it to influence you. Because obviously, you cannot shut off your perceptions of the world, but you can control how it affects you. So, don’t let it inside, thinking it’s something that it’s not.
(Belibaste) So, see it as it is. If it is negative, see it as negative.
(L) Yeah, and they’re saying to focus on truth in order for changes to manifest in you that are positive. That is, “positive” can mean acknowledging that something is negative because it is truth.
Q: (Galatea) Choose the seeds you wish to water.
Taking his statement in that context, we need to be extra careful in how we deal with our thoughts and what we let in and allow to be influenced by. Today’s thoughts can fuel tomorrow’s actions, whether it be negative (like crime) or for something positive. Not easy to do and even more so if one stops to consider how much happens at a subconscious level and the various cognitive biases that come with having a big ol' brain! So to emphasize on correct thinking is really important. osit.
[quote author=Samenow]One criminal living in the community happened to mention that en route to the meeting, he had thought of cutting off a driver who abruptly pulled out in front of him. This thinking flashed by, consuming seconds out of a twenty-four-hour day.
Though most people would forget it instantly, this man had been trained to turn a magnifying glass on his thinking. Reporting this seemingly insignificant incident provided substance for a discussion that touched on several themes—the criminal’s expectations of other people, his attempt to control others, his fears, and his anger.
[...]
Finally, Yochelson was
teaching each of the men to take stock of himself, a deterrent process that he emphasized repeatedly. Yochelson had been holding a mirror up to Leroy, rubbing his nose in the slime of the past. Now it was time that Leroy held it up to himself. Alcoholics Anonymous requires its members to conduct a “searching moral inventory.” In the same way,
if a criminal does not make a habit of reflecting on his life, he will not progress because there is little incentive to change.
[/quote]
These snippets stood out for me because it really is something you need to train for. There's no shortcut. It’s so easy to get caught up in day to day life that one doesn’t take the time to examine their thoughts, reflect on their life. Without developing this skill, it becomes very easy to be taken by your thinking errors and essentially become a slave to your passions. In the case of the criminal, that leads to crime but in an ordinary person, it just keeps them where they are, never developing or evolving into a better person. All those little opportunities to improve or correct things are lost unless you stop and take an honest look at yourself. Without doing that, you can never really know what could be. And without knowing that, what's the point? Why change yourself? Things are just fine the way they are thank you! It’s essentially thinking with a hammer - “hammering against one's beliefs and prejudices, creating internal friction by being critical of the thought process itself”.
[quote author=Samenow]One afternoon an attendant offered him a ride from the tennis court to his living quarters. Leroy accepted, only to find that the attendant went by way of the grocery store and purchased beer. Leroy took a few gulps and returned to the ward. No one had missed him, and no one knew about the beer except for the attendant, who wouldn’t tell. When Leroy reported the incident to the group meeting, Yochelson reacted to it as though he had murdered someone.
Leroy saw no big deal because “everyone” wandered off the grounds. For an experienced criminal, it was easy to get past the guards.
Beer didn’t hurt anyone. No one was the wiser.
Wasn’t he entitled to a slip? He wasn’t perfect. In this single incident lay many errors in thinking. First, he had committed two violations of hospital regulations, as well as a violation of the program, by leaving the grounds without permission and drinking. Then there was Leroy’s insistence that he could make exceptions for himself. It was the old story of making what was wrong right because he considered it right for him at the time. It wasn’t the danger of a few gulps of beer that was at issue, but
Leroy’s lifelong practice of making exceptions, with one offense leading to another. Furthermore, Leroy rarely stopped at one beer. Rather, beer was the first link in a chain of Scotch, heroin, women, crime.
His claim that he had slipped and wasn’t perfect only meant that he had not exercised the necessary restraint to eliminate old patterns. Whether everyone went off the grounds and drank was irrelevant, a lame excuse. Everyone was not in the program. Leroy was. The main question was whether a beer was worth the sacrifice of his opportunity to become a responsible member of society.[/quote]
Thinking of all the excuses he made for himself, I was reminded of the many times I’ve done the same. Finding ways to justify my actions, because as I saw it, they were “no big deal”. But the truth is, they are also a big deal in the context of working oneself. When trying to deal with old programs, it takes very real efforts to exercise the restraint needed to eliminate those patterns. Any little excuse, any little lie has the potential to undo all of one’s effort up to that point. A sobering thought because anything else except for full responsibility in all your actions is just a lame excuse. No easy thing either because, well, who likes being wrong?
[quote author=Samenow]In this program he was taught to think not only about future events, but also about what his future thinking might be.
Yochelson stressed the importance of thinking about thinking.[/quote]
Made me think of Collingwood where he calls it “thought of the second degree, thought about thought." ;)
[quote author=Samenow]
Leroy wanted to say the hell with it. Why should he bother? Why should he worry? If this was life, it was not what he bargained for. Patiently, Yochelson did what he had done so many times before. He asked Leroy what alternative he had. Every job had its difficulties. Yochelson was having his own with St. Elizabeths. Life was full of problems. It was only reasonable to expect that before one was solved, another would crop up. Did Leroy want to return to hustling, holdups, and heroin? Did he want to kill himself?
If not, the only other course was to press on and do what had to be done.[/quote]
We may not be in Yochelson’s intensive criminal rehab program, but one could say we are in another intensive program: trying to become receivers/transducers of objective reality, to increase our receivership capacity. It does suck sometimes because the more you see, the more you realize just how f’ed up this planet is and it’s very easy to think similarly: the hell with it all – why bother? Life is short why spend the rest of it "suffering"? But what are the options really? Once you take the red pill there’s no going back. I ask myself if I could leave everything behind and go back to a life of ignorance? Sometimes I want to but I know I can’t. I can’t "unsee" what I’ve seen and to sit there and do absolutely nothing about it would drive me insane. It’s like swimming across a river where you don’t know exactly what lies on the other side. You’re not quite there but you know if you turn back you’ll surely drown. So, what’s left except to keep on?
Another thing with all these cases, aside from the supreme entitlement they portray, is the disconnect of their thought process to everything else around them. It's very much like the same thing that's going on with millennials nowadays; sense of entitlement, narcissism, completely disconnected from reality. Seeing it spelled out that way brings home another point – you don’t have to have a criminal mind to benefit from this. Because that so-called criminal is also YOU. Don't think you can become that person? Earlier Pashalis posted
this video of one of Peterson’s talks (starting around 1:45:04) and which really kind of drove home the point after thinking about it:
[quote author=Jordan Peterson]You should be able to recognize in yourself all the horror of humanity and take responsibility for it because that’s what that means and the thing that’s so interesting about that is
if you can recognize in yourself all the horror of humanity you will instantly have a hell of whole a lot more respect for yourself than you did before you did that. Because there’s some real utility in knowing that you’re a monster. And just because you’re a monster doesn’t mean you have to be a monster but it’s really useful to know that you are one. {and from reading Samenow, thinking errors left unchecked are what will turn you into one}
So one of the things that Jung knew, and this is something that I found so amazing about his writings, something that distinguishes him from Joseph Campbell, who talked about following your bliss, Jung said very clearly that the first step to enlightenment is the encounter with the shadow. And what he meant by that was
everything horrible that human beings have done was done by human beings, and you’re one of them. And so if you don’t understand that, and
to understand that really means to know how it was that you could’ve done it, and that’s a shattering thing. To try and imagine that, to try to imagine yourself as someone who’s engaged in medieval torture, to see how you could in fact do that. You’re never the same after you learn that. But being never the same after learning that is unbelievably useful because when you understand that that’s what you’re like, then you’re a whole different creature. And I don’t think, and this is something I did learn from Jung ,
is that you cannot be a good person until you know how much evil you contain within you. It is not possible. And it’s partly because you just don’t have any potency. Like, if you’re just naïve, if you’re just nice, if you’d never hurt anyone, you’d never hurt a fly, you don’t have the capability for any of that why would anyone ever take your seriously? You’re a domestic animal at best and a rather contemptible one at that. And it’s a very strange thing because you wouldn’t think that the
revelation of the capacity for evil is a pre-condition for the realization of good.
First of all, why would you be serious enough to even attempt to pursue the good unless you had some sense of what the consequence was of not doing it? {ie, to really understand terror of the situation} You have to be serious about these sorts of things. It’s not the game of a child it’s the game of a fully developed adult. I learned this in part when I had little kids. I wrote a chapter for my new book “never let your children do anything that makes you dislike them”. And why was that? I wrote that after I knew I was a monster. And I thought, I’m gonna make sure I like my kids. I’m gonna make sure they behave around me so that I like them because I’m way bigger than them. And I’m way more cruel than they are. And I’ve got tricks up my sleeve they cannot even possibly imagine. And if they irritate me I will absolutely take it out on them.
And if you don’t think that you’re the sort of person that would do that, then you are the sort of person who is doing it.[/quote]
So the terror of the situation is not just only realizing how bad things are, where the world is headed, the chaos. It's also you. It's not only an external thing, but also an internal thing. Peterson also gives a good example when he talks about what happened in
Nazi Germany. Many people who were for all intents and purposes ‘good people’ committed acts of atrocity. Thinking errors on a massive scale. Or on a more personal level, even something as simple as
Milgram's experiments. And that's something I try to keep in mind. Without knowledge input on a continual basis, without feedback, without paying attention to reality 'left' and 'right', without a network to watch your back, I think I would be just as likely as the next guy to do things I couldn't even imagine. Terrible things. Never assume for a second that you won’t given the right circumstances. For me, that’s a terrifying thought and highlights how important it is for someone to get themselves sorted out and keep themselves on track.
Learning is fun, right, but every now and then we need to consider the 'grades' and see if we want to do better or rest on our laurels and watch true existence move beyond our reach.
