Tag Archives: guilt

Assuage

Assuage: (v) to make an unpleasant feeling less intensedictionary with letter A

Although the circumstances may vary, there are really only two paths of action that we can take in any given situation:

  1.  Am I going to deal with the reality as it exists in a truthful manner?
  2. Am I going to understand the reality and then make up my own rendition, which is more pleasing to my sensibilities?

We do it every day.

Things come up and we have a choice–do I accept my fault and involvement in the present fiasco, or am I desperately looking for ways to assuage my guilt?

It is so much a part of the human experience that other folks who love us will actually help us create a storyline which is more pleasing than the one presently being offered by circumstances.

I will not tell you that I have always pursued the path of truthful disclosure.

I would not be so foolish as to prophesy that going forward I will do so.

The best I can achieve is to admit to myself that both paths exist–and each and every time they come up, I willfully make a decision on my own, to either come clean or dirty up the back story.

Is there a difference?

Candidly, none of us would lie if we had not actually gotten by with it at one time or another. And certainly, the sensation of pulling off the fictitious explanation is so exhilarating that we may continue to do so to get the rush.

None of us are convinced that the truth will make us free. It not only seems unrealistic, it also appears to be downright inhuman.

Yet there is one abiding factor that cannot be escaped:

Confessing our faults is much preferable to denying them. Why? Because later we are cornered by our adversaries, who prove that we are not only transgressors, but liars.

So what will I do going forward, understanding that these two paths are constantly available to me in my dealings with others, and especially my own conscience?

I will try to tell the truth, remembering that the freedom it provides is the giddy spirit that does not need to avoid other people and other situations… in order to escape disclosure.

 

 

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Thank you for enjoying Words from Dic(tionary) —  J.R. Practix

Affair

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter AAffair: (n) (1) an event or sequence of events of a specified kind: e.g. the board admitted responsibility for the affair. (2) a love affair: e.g. his wife is having an affair.

There are three human emotions that collide to form what we shall call pleasure.

  • Excitement
  • Uncertainty
  • And a bit of danger

I will say that people who become involved in affairs are merely attempting to bring that trio of experiences back into their lives, since the humdrum and mundane is suffocating them.

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to counsel people who have come through the ordeal of one or the other of them having an affair, trying to restore the relationship. Most of those conversations revolved around guilt and resentment. Let me tell you–there is nothing that is more of a turn-off to the human spirit than guilt and resentment. So in a voracious attempt to restore normalcy and intimacy, people forget what caused the problem in the first place: lack of excitement, absence of uncertainty and removal of a little danger.

We just expect sex to do too much. After all, it is really only fleshly friction brought about by stimulation in the brain. If the gray matter is excited, uncertain and feels a little danger, it takes care of all the foreplay and places us on an erotic journey.

What eliminates that sensation is guilt and resentment.

So in the process of trying to overcome an affair, the three main questions that are frequently asked end up being counterproductive to solving the dilemma.

  1. Why did you do it?
  2. How could you have done this to me?
  3. 3. How do you expect me to forget this?

If the perpetrator could be honest, he or she would say, “I got excited, I was intrigued by the uncertainty and I was tempted by the danger.”

After that, it was all making arrangements and mechanics.

In many ways I think we put too much emphasis on human sexuality, and in other ways our lack of understanding of what stimulates it renders us silly, if not insipid.

Here’s the truth: if your brain is not being stimulated at four o’clock in the afternoon by intelligent conversation, flirting and admiration of your lover, don’t expect any “skyrockets in flight” at ten o’clock that evening.

And if you happen to work with someone who excites you, generates uncertainty and danger, don’t be shocked if you’re grabbed by the nose hairs and pulled toward unfaithfulness.

The best counsel I ever gave people was to let them know that the affair was not due to an absence in their relationship, but a presence that appeared, bringing excitement, uncertainty and a bit of danger, which had dissipated from their experience.

We are people who need to be excited, feel some uncertainty and tingle with a bit of danger.

Without this, we start trying to schedule our sexual escapades on a calendar … right next to “Buy Groceries.”

Acculturate

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Acculturate: (v.) to assimilate or cause to assimilate to a different culture, typically the dominate one: e.g. an acculturated Cherokee.

What IS a dominate culture?

I guess in this day and age it would be the loudest one–or maybe it’s the one that can get the most votes.

Perhaps the dominate culture would be the one that has the most money to buy commercials on television to promote its cause.

Could the dominate culture be the local color of choice?

Is the dominate culture what we feel in the moment, because we are wracked with guilt, teeming with vengeance or overwhelmed with responsibility?

Perhaps the dominate culture is just the one we learned around the kitchen table with those folks who sprouted the seed which became our lives.

Maybe when we use terms like “dominate culture” we are setting a bit of nastiness in motion which can only be resisted by those who object to such foolish wording. I am not suggesting that “acculturate” should be removed from the dictionary, but truly, the only acculturating we all do is the knowledge that we have arrived on a planet called Earth instead of a three-square-foot  space dubbed “me.”

So I can’t acculturate without recognizing the preferences of my Chinese brothers and sisters. And merely calling some nations our “enemies” does not eliminate them from consideration when we’re trying to find ways to cohabit a planet which is shrinking with each and every new advancement in speed.

This is why I’ve discovered that the only viable principle of acculturation which transfers from one border to another, is the statement: “NoOne is better than anyone else.”

Of course, that particular premise may eliminate the need for a personally devised culture in the first place. Since my ideas and your ideas have equal footing, there is no need to act like your ways are slippery and mine are on solid rock.

Do we really want people from Mexico, Central America, Europe or China to come over here and learn how to speak our language with a mid-western accent so we’ll be comforted by their willingness to be “truly American?”

Would I be willing to go to China, learn the language and imitate the local dialect? Of course not–because I’m American and believe that everybody should acculturate to me. And even though the Chinese outnumber us about four to one, it becomes their duty to be more like us rather than we like them.

It’s not just conceit, it’s just unrealistic.

The more we can find things that are free of taste and preference and are brimming with commonality, the better the chance that we will be able to talk with one another–or at least not blow up each other’s lives

Acculturate–I guess it’s finding the dominate culture by first realizing that it won’t be just ours.

It’s going to be what is earth-friendly.

 

Abreaction

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Abreaction: (n.) a psychological term for the expression and consequent release of a previously repressed emotion, achieved through reliving the experience that caused it (typically through hypnosis or suggestion).

But why do all of our abreactions have to be negative?

In other words, no one ever hypnotizes someone to have them remember all the details of that beautiful day they won the blue ribbon at the county fair. No one sits down in therapy and helps people retrieve the glorious sensations of the first kiss at the door with their date. I don’t think there is any psychologist who puts a shingle out advertising his or her function as helping us retrieve joy, exuberance and victory.

Perhaps there is some value in reliving past memories that are painful or have been pushed deeply into our emotions or soul. I would not question this. But in a negatively charged universe, to further increase the negativity in an attempt to gain positive results, seems to me to be to be both counterproductive and even mean-spirited.

I don’t know what I can do about all the stupid things that happened when I was a kid. I instigated many of them, so to relive them only stimulates my guilt instead of motivating my grit. And those things that were done to me by others might be better drowned in the sea of forgetfulness than excavated as an abreaction in some office of a professional, who believes I will be better off by exposing my terrors.

I am not a professional in this realm. (Gosh, I don’t know whether I’m a professional in any realm, come to think of it…) But what I have discovered in my journey is that the more you can encourage people to find the good in their lives, the easier it is to explain the possibility of a God.

I am sure there is value in exorcising all the demons that may have settled into deep, dark caves in our consciousness, but merely stirring these dark spirits up does not guarantee that they will leave. And once awakened, is there not a danger they will try to gain more prominence than they deserve??

As I say, I’m not sure what I feel about this issue.

But if you want to hypnotize me, I would appreciate it if you would help me remember that one day in my life, when as a middle linebacker, I intercepted that pass that bounced off my facemask, miraculously landing in my hands, and I ran the nine yards in–for my only touchdown.

That would be therapeutic.