Survival techniques for oversensitive people

Can philosophers help resolve the real problems that people have in their lives?

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duszek
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Re: Survival techniques for oversensitive people

Post by duszek »

Skip wrote:
duszek wrote:What lies to children strike you as particularly shameful ?

Children are good at lying themselves, from a very early age on.

Lying seems to be part of human nature.
Lying for reward, or to escape harm, is natural. Children would probably invent it independently if they were not taught early enough. But those are not the crazy-making lies.
The crazy-making lies are on the order of:
I'm only hitting you because I love you. It's your fault for making me angry. God so loved the world that he had bad people snuff his innocent son just so he could forgive the good people he was mad at - and you. You must always tell the truth - and I know that's not it. Be yourself - not this self; smarten up. Don't get smart with me, young man! Grandma went to live with the angels. What - you're eight years old and still believe in Santa Claus? Hard work and honesty will always be rewarded. Go on like this, you'll be nothing but a janitor. Money is the root of all evil. Why can't you have a little ambition and become a hedge-fund manager? [Insert name of country] is the best nation on Earth. [Insert name of religion] is the only source of morality. Love thy neighbour. Don't talk to Jorge next door, he's a little hoodlum.

You get the idea.
A child is able to realize whether a parent is speaking in an honest way or in a manipulative way.
A child is able to accept a parent´s opinion and disagree with it because he heard something else elsewhere and is more convinced by the latter.

Kids love to taste the forbidden fruit and they love to check for themselves.

Some kids are even ashamed of their parents (alcoholics etc.).
And they are miserable because of this shame.
Skip
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Re: Survival techniques for oversensitive people

Post by Skip »

The most toxic lies are precisely those that disable critical reason. Then, the instinct to rebellion is immediately countered by self-doubt, guilt and anxiety. The most painful internal dialogues I've had to overhear were between a young person trying to assert his or her authentic self and being slapped down by the internalized voice of a disapproving, belittling, blaming parent.
duszek
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Re: Survival techniques for oversensitive people

Post by duszek »

Yes, this is hard.
But it is a chance for growing up too.
The world is full of confusion and of wrong and contradictory information.
An adult needs to survive in this mess.

There is a chance that such a person will come across a second, third and fourth opinion and will re-examine the options.

These other opinions can come from teachers, class-mates and nowadays also bloggers on the internet, participants on discussion forums.
duszek
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Re: Survival techniques for oversensitive people

Post by duszek »

Even people who had suffered brain-washing from professional brain-washers managed to escape one day.
Skip
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Re: Survival techniques for oversensitive people

Post by Skip »

Some resist, some escape, some recover.
Some become drug-, alcohol- or guru- dependent for life.
Some grow up to believe they're fine, righteous individuals who, in their turn, go around damaging other people.
Walker
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Re: Survival techniques for oversensitive people

Post by Walker »

Sheesh. Without pulling back scabs, smells like poison festering.

Intellectually, one can know that the cup is filled with poison.
However, if the mind wanders
if one forgets
if one grows thirsty
one may drink.

Rest assured the mind will wander
and one will forget
and one will grow thirsty.

How to not drink of the poison?

There are many ways to answer that
but for awhile it’s just fine to realize
what’s going on
when the scabs are a festering.
duszek
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Re: Survival techniques for oversensitive people

Post by duszek »

Yes, there are serious threats, Skip.

I don´t know how old you are, but how about the summer of love in 1967 ?
Or the Woodstock adventure. People did survive the experience. Perhaps some of them are here and can contribute.

Or the Bagwan experience.

Hardships are bad but if we survive them we become immune and thus stronger.
Skip
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Re: Survival techniques for oversensitive people

Post by Skip »

duszek wrote:Yes, there are serious threats, Skip.

I don´t know how old you are, but how about the summer of love in 1967 ?
Or the Woodstock adventure. People did survive the experience. Perhaps some of them are here and can contribute.
What? I recall 1967 as a particularly good year. Got through my internship and made enough money to rent a modest apartment instead of the pokey furnished room I'd lived in a student. Friends, wine, music, elephant pants, street art, Bergman movies.... Didn't go to Woodstock, nor did any of my acquaintance, but some hitchhiked through Europe and many attended anti-war demonstrations. *
How's that relate to being given contradictory information on matters of vital importance, by the people you depend on, when you're too young to have any defense or independent judgment.
Or the Bagwan experience.
I don't know what that is, or how old the baby was.
Hardships are bad but if we survive them we become immune and thus stronger.
This is an unexamined truism. In fact, most people who suffer hardship over long periods are worn down by it, made ill and weak, and their lives are considerably shortened, as compared to people with relatively easy and tranquil lives.
I wasn't talking about hardship. I was talking about lies that program a very young mind to doubt its own sensory and information-processing capability; imposing an authority that judges the child always "in the wrong", guilty and shamed.

*which, of course, is a prime example of brainwashing. Viet Nam. A really crappy colonial regime causing a long, horrible war, sold to a largely trusting and ignorant population who had no part in its origins, tearing apart families on the basis of reason vs patriotism. No, most children don't know when they're being manipulated. Most adults don't know when they're being manipulated. Most adults don't even know when they're manipulative.
duszek
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Re: Survival techniques for oversensitive people

Post by duszek »

Let´s focus on the summer of love then.

They reported on TV that in California people were told back then that one trip (tiggered by hashish or cocaine or was it LSD ?) is like three hours of psychotherapy. And they did it a lot.

I never tried one (hash) or the other (psychotherapy).

Whom shall I listen too ?

Do I miss some vital experience ?
duszek
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Re: Survival techniques for oversensitive people

Post by duszek »

Bagwan preached free love and was chased out of India so he settled in California and had a camp full of followers but he disappointed them too.
duszek
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Re: Survival techniques for oversensitive people

Post by duszek »

You are right about hardships.

I would add this:

You either become streetwise like Oliver Twist or Huckelberry Finn or you brake down and perish.

Or you realize the lying around you and put on a costume of a cockroach and survive that way, feeling disgusted by yourself.
Skip
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Re: Survival techniques for oversensitive people

Post by Skip »

duszek wrote:Let´s focus on the summer of love then.

They reported on TV that in California people were told back then that one trip (tiggered by hashish or cocaine or was it LSD ?) is like three hours of psychotherapy. And they did it a lot.
Nonsense.
We pretty much all smoked a little pot - which, by the way, was much less potent than they have developed since. I even tried growing a few plants in an attic room and failed miserably. Hash was more expensive, so I didn't indulge (Hey, if it's a question of one high or a week's worth of menthol lights...?) but people liked the paraphernalia. Incense still makes me a little nauseous, it was so pervasive and clung so tenaciously to clothing and drapery.
As far as I could see, it made no difference whatever to anyone's mental well-being. A temporary sedative effect, not unlike alcohol, but without the progressive manifestations of inebriation: people on pot don't grow irritable, quarrelsome and pugnacious, and rarely throw up or have hangovers.
I tried LSD a couple of times. Interesting, surreal - not therapeutic.
I never tried one (hash) or the other (psychotherapy).
Quality of care varies. So does compatibility - a mismatch of therapy or therapist and patient can be worse than no help at all.
Whom shall I listen too ?
Everybody. Nobody. If the matter of is some importance to you, collect all the factual data you can find, judge it by source and plausibility, assemble it in a system that makes sense to you. Then make a similar chart of your problems and needs, prioritize: decide what needs addressing most urgently - if, indeed, you require help: it's more likely that you don't. Self-help books are sometimes useful, if only as a starting point to make sense of too much information. Borrow them from the library, rather than buying, since even the ones that turn out to be useful will only have one or two chapters that relate to you. (I find self-help authors tend to have 2-10 ten pages of substance to 200 pages of repetitive filler.)
Most people don't need anything more than a sympathetic friend, or even just enough quiet time to work through their own internal confusion.

You know Oliver Twist and Huck Finn are fictional characters. It's probable that they represent a small fraction of abandoned children who luck out or fight out of their misfortune. The majority are exploited, abused, get sick, get killed, or grow up to be criminals.
In any case, the children I was primarily talking about are privileged, well cared-for, properly clothed, fed and housed and usually cherished. They're lied-to, consistently and with the best of intentions: because the parents and the society don't know any better.
duszek
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Re: Survival techniques for oversensitive people

Post by duszek »

Skip wrote: Most people don't need anything more than a sympathetic friend, or even just enough quiet time to work through their own internal confusion.
I couldn´t agree more and you are probably such a friend to some people you know. They are lucky.

I happen to know some people who lack social skills so much that they put all sympathetic friends off. This is a real tragedy. So such people need to pay someone to endure them.
Some well-minded people take turns in being a nanny to them.
But the mission is depressing and exhausting, I can tell you.

How about friendship becoming a serious subject at school ?
What are the rules and how to deserve a friend and how to keep him or her.
Last edited by duszek on Wed Feb 08, 2017 7:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
duszek
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Re: Survival techniques for oversensitive people

Post by duszek »

:)
Skip
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Re: Survival techniques for oversensitive people

Post by Skip »

duszek wrote: I happen to know some people who lack social skills so much that they put all sympathetic friends off. This is a real tragedy.
I've had to cut a couple of friends loose over the years. The very needy - and especially those who make rotten decisions directly contrary to earnestly solicited advice - and thus cause themselves to be ever-needier, can be too much of a drain on diminishing resources. When you get old and have issues of your own to deal with, you have to conserve energy.

Even professional helpers can be successful only if the client co-operates.
How about friendship becoming a serious subject at school ?
What are the rules and how to deserve a friend and how to keep him or her.
Now, that would be a really good idea. Part of a course on human relations, which would include workplace protocol, family dynamics and general etiquette. It's such a good idea that it cannot possibly be implemented, because
[list 10 bogus reasons here:
1....... ]
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