iouswuoibev

Also, I suspect that a lot of men who attend AA or a similar institution go there to feel vindicated, without any real intention of improving themselves. So I think the first goal of a counsellor is to discover just how serious their target is about improving himself, and take that as the starting point for where to go next. If he isn't serious about it, he's just going to be difficult. You can only tell him to come back later. By the way, I notice you say you're a counsellor. I'm not. The above is what I take to be common sense.

I think you need to remember that a counsellor can only counsel. The ultimate decision is theirs and there's nothing you can do to transplant the right choice into their minds. I think in order for someone to make any major shift in their attitude they need to have objective evaluations of both the vice and at least one alternative. Some men will rationalise their addiction and try to see it as a good thing; some men will go with it because they have no vision of the alternative. In order to leap from one stepping stone to the next you have to see where you're leaping. So, the role of counselling as I see it is to try to massage a new idea into the person's head and then try and have them face the question of whether they then want to make the jump onto that new stepping stone. What their answer is, or whether they answer it at all, is out of your hands; all you can do thereafter is to keep trying what you have already been doing and hope their minds will perform the necessary homework. EDITED: Typo.

I don't own a dog right now but I adore English bull terriers.

Why can't you value objects? The masculine role is that he is the actor. The feminine role is that she is the thing acted upon. You don't hear a man speaking of being taken by a woman. A man's penis, and his whole body, is not a passive instrument. His physiology has a counterpart psychology, and if they don't match, his sex life will be less than perfect, and so will he. A woman is a human being, and a self-confident man will be able to think of her as one (she doesn't have to be just a good f***); but in the dynamics of a relationship, she is an object first. I have a lot more to say on this and will do so at a later date (I realise that a lot of people will disagree with me and will want me to make my position more convincing). For now I'll just leave this example: if a man sees a woman's breasts, and if he is short of being a real man, his attitude and response will be summed up as: "Wow... for ME?". A real man would think: "Those look nice." The former thought is befitting a woman, not a man. Think about it. And so as not to drift off-topic I'll say something about the original post: domination is the wrong word. Domination is destructive, undercutting; a woman surrendered to a man is reaffirming her identity, not undercutting it. She is not a dependant and not a submissive; she will only stay around the man for as long as he is what he is, and will be out of the door when he loses it.

I would reply: "I'm going to see it."

The volition is in the concealment, not the communication. The communication is subconscious. Why put effort into concealing it? Is your motive justifiable? I think any attempt to restrain your subconscious in front of an audience is apologising for who you are, and by doing that you undermine yourself. There is no method. All awkwardness between human beings is in thinking there is a way to communicate. The only way is your way. If you don't know what to say, it's because you don't know what you want to say. Which is because you don't know (or are supressing) what you want. The solution is to stay closer to your ego. You can feel how far from your ego a certain action was. I like to imagine a moon orbiting around a planet, where the planet is my ego and the moon is my will. Ideally they should be together, so I ask myself, how far from the ego do I swing? And then I can measure that against any action I perform. Subverting yourself to others' will draw you out of orbit. You must know your intent. Communication is an approximate science. I say approximate in that in the realm of voice intonation, body language etc. a lot of meaning is just the meaning people grant to these subtleties. Don't make the mistake of substituting what people think something means, for what you actually intended by it. Know what you intend by any given thing and don't forget it - worship it! Then the best (egocentric) communication will follow easily. It's never a sign of aggression (by itself). It reveals a certain state of mind, where you are in control. You are in control because your thought does not break. If you lock eyes on a stranger, what you think determines how long you can hold their gaze. When someone is looking at you, they are measuring you. You can either try to blank that out (which requires that you avert your gaze), or instead focus on measuring them. Eventually this will be automatized and you won't even realise you're doing it. When you look away it says, summed up in an overall feeling: "I don't know what I'm doing - or what is going on - he's looking at me - he looks sure of himself - I'll lower my eyes." You irrationally esteem the other person by doing this. When you don't look away it says: Nothing. You are just yourself. Eye contact is an infallable litmus test for determining confidence, in my opinion. Because you can't fake it. How long you can hold someone's gaze, is just that.

Edit to above post: Of course, you won't know what I'm talking about if you've never experienced a different point of reference/state of mind to distinguish it from.

It's nothing to do with rights. It's to do with submission and how we unconsciously surrender to imagined pressures. For instance, most people can't hold eye contact with a stranger. It is so powerful it feels like some force is pushing their gaze away. If you ask them why they will say they don't know, or might come up with some lame rationalisation, e.g. that it shows that you are aggressive. But I can hold eye contact with anyone indefinitely, and it just means that I'm confident in myself enough to not be self-consciously monitoring myself, and can permit myself to study the other person instead. Of course, you won't know what I'm talking about if you've never experienced it - perhaps you've always had high self-esteem as long as you can remember. I could explain further but I think this is something each person has to explore with his own mind, since everyone has their own unique forms of experiencing the kind of pressure I'm refering to. And I consider it on-topic because it is something most people experience but a psychologically consistent egotistical person certainly does not experience.

I'd call it the psychology of the self-sufficient ego. This might give you something to think about. I wrote this sentence for myself a while back: "An assertive man is one who does not acknowledge/respect other people's boundaries." It never sounded right to me. It gave me no insight as to how I was to avoid acknowledging/respecting people's boundaries, or which boundaries I ought to consider valid and which not. More recently, I reworded the sentence, read it to myself and thought "that's it!". I wrote: "An assertive man is one who does not invent other people's boundaries." I think that a lot of what goes on in social interaction is unreal, except in the sense that God is real (draw a picture of someone's skull and draw a bearded man inside it: that's God). Rand wrote that Roark gives a person nothing in his exchanges with them - in other words, he won't make real what isn't real. He won't think something of you just because of the clothes you are wearing, for instance, or the posture you try to assume in the first given moment. Now that does not mean that none of these things betray anything about you - they might. It means he doesn't try to pre-anticipate what a person is like. If you were to abandon trying to add colour and meaning to everything you see in a person, reminding yourself "It isn't real unless I make it real", it allows you to pay more attention to what is actually, truly, there. This is why Roark, and the other characters like him, were so good at judging people and were able to reach the insights they did.

What is psychological independance? Is this a clearly delimited and objective (edit: and widely accepted) scientific term, or a term you've chosen yourself to refer to what you're thinking of?

I saw two elements, but I don't think them being representations of mind and body is what is essential to them (nor is it necessarily even accurate: what if there are two physical things that don't "go together", like ballet and wrestling?)

When I re-read this sentence of mine it looked rather odd to me, and other people are probably didn't get it either. I think this is a remnant of social metaphysics I had retained from my former self. It is a common idea that when a man and woman communicate (with romantic intentions) there is a contest of wills going on, a vying for dominance, like a second conversation occuring. I think this is only real if you invent it. I'd be interested to know how other readers took this sentence.

Why do you refer to these as examples of integration of mind and body?

And here's something funny... It is always helpful to visualise your success when you want to succeed. You have to visualise in order to actualise. With women and dating, I often mentally invented conversations [EDIT: involving me and another woman] in my head and slowly altered them until I was happy with the resulting conversation. The act of visualising and tweaking scenarios helped to draw out of me a new and better state of mind. Anyway, the ironic thing is, the woman would sometimes verbally lambast me. Remember, this woman was just a creation inside my head - I was dictating her every word. The reality is, I was defeating myself. You create your own success and you create your own failure. Think about it.

Desperation is bad for the man because it leads to him surrendering. What are you talking about?

In regards to the dress scenario: some women would admire a man's honesty here: and if you say it a deadpan tone ("Do I look fat in this?" "Yes you do.") it can sound funny. I had already concluded what I thought about this issue when I started the thread. I sum it up with one sentence "Hold people accountable for their own minds". This goes for every area of life and every single thing a person is capable of thinking or feeling or doing. I had a great deal of difficulty accepting this in the beginning; not because I was mentally incapable of adopting this attitude, but because I'd become one of the people I resented. I didn't (and don't) want to hurt people's feelings - surely a noble intention? But if you avoid triggering certain emotions in people, then you become dependant on them, since what they happen to feel is out of your hands. You end up defining your behaviour by who they are. A lesser error is to say that some emotions are reasonable and some are not, or that emotions are always reasonable in certain contexts. This is lazy over-generalising. You're more likely to be just than the person who simply avoids triggering any negative emotion in people all the time, but doing justice will mostly be a coincidence. The right way to go about it is to only respect a person's thought (which requires that you respect your own thought), since that is what determines their emotional responses. You can't be accountable for anything they've written into their subconscious, no matter how small and innocent, or how big and monstrous. You can only deal with their thought. Your only concern is: is this rational? Is this in accordance with reality or opposed to it? Because that's the only thing that can be answered by your reason. People who are in charge of their own minds don't hold back anything in expressing themselves, and I used to be afraid of them sometimes. Let me tell you something: if you get hurt by anyone mentally, it is your own fault. What about people who betray your trust or lie to you? It's your own fault. Denying fault is tantamount to saying you can't correct it. Saying "it's your fault" does not mean, "I'm responsible for that person's wrongdoing." but, "I am responsible for trusting that person, and that trust was an error, and it is my responsibility to rectify that error." Pronounce judgement on people as absolutely and firmly as you would on any inanimate thing. But, be prepared to revise your decision. On any judgement you make of another person, tag a silent sentence on the end: "In accordance with who I know you to be at the present." Yes, even with murderers and sex offenders (on principle). Doing this puts you in a mind where your mind is open to the fact that people can change, or realise they did wrong. I used to make the error of wanting to put people in a box permenantly. Again, a result of lazy thinking, of not wanting to have to do the necessary work required to stay rational and objective. If I say "I'm never going to speak to you again", I mean "I'm never going to speak to you again - in accordance with who I know you to be at the present." If I say "I love you", I mean "I love you, in accordance with who I know you to be at the present." None of this means that you can't permenantly keep someone in a certain place in your mind - it means that on principle, you accept the reality of volition. Nor should it blunt the absolutism of your judgement. There are some people who can't redeem themselves (e.g. murderers and sex offenders), but it's still not an error to say "In accordance with who I know you to be at the present". Implicitly, when necessary, it will include the whole future as well. Have you ever heard the philosophical statement that the only thing that gives us morality is our emotions or instincts, and we'd be rampant sociopaths if we didn't feel any social pressures? Surely you've heard something along these lines. The greatest ommissions here are volition and reason. It's reason that limits us, always. The "social pressures" we feel are just a shortcut from thinking.

Explain how desperation could be a consequence of one's achievements?

*laughs*

By what standard do you determine whether you're a good conversationalist? It's not a skill, it's a faculty. Where did I say otherwise?

The only ones that stand out in my mind were the one's that were physically violent. Otherwise no. One thing that springs to mind here is that I focused on the fact that I was easily intimidated, and hated myself for that, and that made me all the more easy to intimidate. It was a viscious circle. Anyway, I agree with you.

And about uncomfortable silences: they're not possible if you're 100% selfish 100% of the time. The discomfort comes from thinking that the other person is uncomfortable: that person's discomfort (if it exists) comes from thinking that you are uncomfortable. These expectations feed of each other and become self-fulfilling. If a conversation falls silent, I just sit there, maybe watching the other person, maybe not, without trying to think of anything and without paying mind to what they might be thinking. Because I don't want to talk to them at that particular moment. Often the other person seems to sense that I'm actually not uncomfortable with being silent, and that puts them at ease. They may look silly and I just look at them as if to say "What's the matter?" and they don't feel such a strong pull to say something.

Are your friends going to get up and leave you if you don't keep them entertained? In the end you only have to please yourself, which means: only speak on your behalf, not because you sense that someone expects something from you (that sense will never go away, but you are entirely free to do what you want in how you respond to it; you are probably better off not paying attention to it 99% of the time). If you aren't able to continually produce conversation, then DON'T TRY. Maybe the release of pressure will even allow you to think of more things to talk about (and maybe it won't). The effort of "trying" to produce conversation sounds self-defeating to me. People never talk for no reason (unless they're psychotic), even if the content of their words is reasonless. The reason must come from within you, because it's something you truly, personally want to express, not because of how it will affect someone else. That should never be your primary intent. In any event, you'll be more true to yourself, and if your friends do get up and leave you because you don't talk enough, then that's probably the best thing that could happen because you were only keeping them around you because you were trying to please them. You can then go and find friends that can take you exactly how you are, quiet conversationalist and all. I think you need to regain a sense of wanting to say something solely because you want to say it. If you can't think of anything to say, it's because you have nothing you want to say. It sounds obvious, and you can only overlook that fact if you were conflating other people's (possibly imaginary) demands on your person, and the things you actually want from and for yourself.

No. There certainly are reactions that I would consider appropriate. It's not the reaction but the mental state that causes it that I was thinking of. Hence the "rotting tree". I'm not sure precisely what demarks the differences, but basically, to use the metaphor again, if the tree gets destroyed then a question of blame is involved, but if it is unscathed (and I would say that being mildly irritated by an insult is certainly unscathed) then there is no question of blame involved.

I like the present one.

I disagree. I think the number one rule is "Don't be desperate!".