Tumbler Trans People vs. Psychology

                We live in an age where people like to toss words around like so many Afghan rocks, some have serious power psychologically/socially/legally such as “nigger,” “peado,” or “rapists.” Others have been (or risk being) so overused as to no longer have any serious meaning despite being very serious indeed, such as “triggered,” “rape,” and “terrorist.” The power or lack thereof of these words is the subject for another post, but for now let’s look at why words are so important, and why you should be afraid of somebody who tells you what you can and cannot say.

                There was a fellow in the early 1900’s called Whorf, back before psychology really existed as a serious discipline, he was an individual who made a career out of studying linguistics. Whorf proposed eventually a theory called linguistic determinism, which is essentially the notion that the words you have access to shape your thinking.  I’ll give you an example, let’s say I took an egg and covered it in mud; how would you describe that egg? Filthy? Dirty? Unhygienic? Tainted? Edible/Inedible? Disgusting? Gross? Each word carries subtle meaning and stipulations to us about the state of my egg, especially if we are describing the egg to another person who has not seen it. A disgusting egg sounds very different from an egg that is described as “still edible”. Thus our command of language and the words we employ in our internal narrative shapes our thoughts and our ability to comprehend and interpret the world around us. It wasn’t until 1948 that George Orwell would create the idea of “Newspeak” establishing linguistic determinism into a literary work. Orwell highlighted that without a broad command of language our ability to think, and therefore create independent opinions and express our motivations is heavily restricted, for example with newspeak all the words I listed for our egg would be disregarded, as only one was needed “Bad” (or even “Un-good)”. “Bad” would be used to describe everything from your child being murdered and your feelings about it through to you missing the train that morning, and as such your own flexibility of thought would be stifled and directed by the restrictions placed on what you were, and were not, allowed to say.

                So why is this worthy of my attention? Well with the current climate seeing these very aggressive and powerful words being tossed around like bullets at a school shooting, individuals, political groups and campaigners are taking action to restrict words that people are allowed to say. “Ban Boss” springs to mind, where prominent influential women were campaigning to make it amoral/illegal to call a little girl (and only a little girl) “bossy”. While the lesser known “#sorrynotsorry” campaign attempted to remove the word “sorry” from the vocabulary of women (and again, only women).

But what really hammered this home were the recent issues with Dr John Peterson refusing to comply with the demand by the University of Toronto who employ him that he use pronouns that students have invented when addressing them. I’d encourage you to look into it, but suffice to say it’s an exercise in watching people abuse some very powerful words like “white-supremacist” and “Nazi” oblivious to irony of them fighting to control the speech of others by using such terms.

                So why do I (as a headshrinker myself) think Dr Peterson refused? Well…. Because it’s psychologically harmful to indulge such things. The average humans mind does not develop fully until they are in their mid-twenties, despite what most university students may think, they still have several formative years ahead of them, and a big part of that is establishing “who they are”. When a child decided because they like coco-pops that is all they will eat from now on, you still persuade them to try other foods and encourage them to experience new things, so when a teenager wishes to declare they are trans and force a person to refer to them as bun, bun, and bunself, it’s not psychologically heathy to stop their development of an identity there, rather it is better to let them try on a few new things and perspectives until they finish developing. Most heathy trans people are content to be addressed with whatever pronoun they are currently presenting as, and undoubtedly cringe when some idiot millennial decides to scream hysterically at somebody because they refuse to use jee/jem/jeir/jemself when addressing them. I doubt Mr. Patterson is trying to malign trans people, but what I suspect he is doing is recognising that by enforcing laws and codes on how others chose to speak you are attempting to exercise authoritarian control, a control that is very popular among those seeking to establish dominance over the hearts, minds, rights and thoughts of everyone else.  Y’know, like the Nazi’s did.

The importance of diverse learning.

                DISCLAIMER: For those of you outside the UK, an A-level is a course you take before you go to university, it’s the equivalent learning to your first year and a half of your undergraduate course and to be accepted to most universities you need three of them with some fairly good results (usually A – C). They’re fairly intense, can be very demanding, and provide usually a very broad and detailed understanding of whatever field they happen to be in.

Imagine for a moment I employ my god-like omnipotent powers and teleport you to the middle of Baghdad or Tokyo (whichever would be more alien to you). You’re alone, you have whatever you happen to be wearing right now on you and you’re surrounded by people talking in a language you have no comprehension of, doing things you have only limited understanding of. You have no clue as to the social taboo’s or the communicative norms of this society. How long before you get terrified? How long (assuming you find somebody willing to talk to you, and not take advantage of you) until you get frustrated at your plight and inability to be understood? How long before that frustration boils over and you start making poor decisions?

Now imagine you have met somebody who has never seen an elephant, I want you to try and describe an elephant to them, but only use shapes and no similes.

                I’m not suggesting that everyone be taught mandatory world-politic/sociology/language or abstract geometry classes as a response to all the A-levels being cut, which would be silly. I’m outlining the feeling you get when you are unable to make yourself understood, when you can’t access that part of yourself that can process what you’re feeling, your intentions and your desires and make them known to people around you. I’m talking about having a cognitive toolkit that is broad and detailed enough to allow you to not only “think outside the box” but think about the box itself, and why is the box there, what purpose does it serve?

                While people may scoff at “soft” A-levels such as art, music, and creative writing when compared to STEM, but they do serve a valuable psychological purpose, one that could actually be lost now that many of them are being discontinued. We don’t come out the womb knowing “how to think”, we have to train ourselves, we have to practice and develop our mental flexibility and cognitive processing. It’s all well and good memorising the layout and dimensions as well at the theory behind a thermonuclear reactor, but without the flexibility of thought to apply those designs elsewhere it’s only so much information, waiting to be spat out onto an exam form. Matt Taylor didn’t land a satellite on a comet by copying somebodies design, he had the insight and imagination to apply his understanding in new and creative ways. He also wears excellent shirts.

                The crux of the matter is; every day I work with children who become violent, distressed and frustrated at their inability to make themselves understood. By removing this vast source of mental wealth and emotional contexts we limit all children’s abilities to express themselves, to interpret the world around them as they grow older, and to employ that mental flexibility and contextual processing by removing this source of information they could have drawn upon. We prepare them to become drones, to sit in a cubical, or lift heavy things in the right order, or operate machinery for eight hours a day. We prepare them to ignore their own thought and feelings, and focus on repeating the works of others who have come before them. We aren’t creating and nurturing potential, we’re stifling it. This is not creating a generation of great men and women, it’s creating cogs that can slot into the machine of society.

                And not to be a “doomsayer” about things, but if this trend continues, I expect in the next few years we’ll see more and more kids in SEN schools, as they simply can’t handle having their lives crushed and the thoughts they treasure maligned into obscurity. Kids grow up and the world is a magical place full of small miracles and amazing adventures, a good school will explain those miracles and inspire them to make some of their own. A bad school will teach them that they need to sit down, shut up, and focus hard on STEM subjects otherwise they will be punished.

This obviously won’t work with all kids… but we have tranquilizers to medicate them with…. Right?

Self-diagnosis: The real diagnosis is stupidity.

                So we live in an age where you can walk into a GP surgery (Or your countries equivalent doctors/ER/Shaman tent and the unofficial motto is “don’t confuse your google search with my medical degree.” Yet the sad reality is I’m seeing more and more people assume because they read the whole Wikipedia page on a mental illness they have the ability to diagnose themselves with something.

                The reality is; simply by reading something you become susceptible to the idea it applies to you, it’s something used very commonly in “Psychics” and other charlatans that through cold calling and careful use of this phenomenon are able to convince you that they can read your mind/future/dead grannies will. One of the reasons some people get their proverbial knickers in a twist over the lack of representation of [dynamic] in [media] is because the need to identify with the things you interact with is a strong compulsion of our brains as it is one of the ways we learn about the world around us emotionally through empathy with others we see, obviously that empathy is easier to see in people like us (if you have the emotional maturity of a 10 year old). We don’t just enter the world able to interpret and manage our emotional state. Part of our development as we grow up, from an infant all the way to our mid-twenties is learning not only how our own emotions fit into our life, but how we react to them and how we view them in others. Autistics have a hard time with this because they often can’t understand why others don’t share their emotions, and cannot understand that others emotions are different from their own.

                So why do people self-diagnose?

                A lot of reasons, the easiest one to observe is the need to form a unique identity, a drive very common in teenagers and early twenty-somethings. It’s a very intense formative stage of a person’s individual personality development, and it’s not uncommon to see people trying different collectivist groups and ideologies on for size, sometimes it’s a clique (Goth, Jock etc..) other times it can be a political ideology (Anarchism, Communism, Feminism etc..) and of course the proverbial “sexual experiments in college” people have as they explore the dynamics of sexuality that they feel best represents their own internal identity.  Now that mental health is being talked about more, it’s only natural that an individual look within themselves and wonder “Am I normal, is this me?” and then try on a few mental illnesses for size. While I understand, and occasionally sympathise with this little voyage of self-discovery, it can be teeth grindingly frustrating to watch some middle-class university student acting like a total fucking shit-melon and then compounding this behaviour by screaming abuse at people reacting to them because they aren’t recognising they are autistic, and can’t help it.

                Pro tip: 99% of autistic people once they reach their late teens have very good self-control, because they’ve spent a lifetime learning to cope with the world as it is for them, only autistic children generally have meltdowns in public, and only those on the SEVERE end of the autism spectrum (Ie: non-verbal, semi-catatonic etc..) would be so heedless of social norms as to start screaming at people in the middle of a college campus. Also, they wouldn’t have the self-control required to make it to university. Just because an autistic has difficulty recognising social norms and emotions in others, doesn’t mean they don’t understand the consequences of acting like a hooting turd-sprinkler in public, and so adjust their behaviour accordingly.

                The more sympathetic reason people self-diagnose is when they have severe anxiety about medical professionals, or just the outside in general. These people tend to be older, it’s no longer really about an identity, it’s more about finding a label for their suffering. While I have more sympathy for these people I generally still get frustrated by this as the well-known “first step” is recognising you have a problem, but: there are other steps people! The indulging of an urge to sit in their respective lairs and bemoan society/god/fate/genetics/vaccines/Donald Trump for their plight is a strong one, after all, if it’s somebody else’s fault, it’s not your responsibility to fix it, right?
                Pro Tip: The only way to fix your brain is working hard yourself to want to fix your brain, no amount of meds or therapy will help you if you don’t make the effort, yeah it sucks, and yeah it’s unfair, but I don’t recall you signing anything after leaving your mother’s birth canal/c-section/test tube saying “Your life will always be fair.” By all means accept help from others, that’s always great! But don’t forget it’s a team effort and you have to be part of that team.

                Of course this is a pretty broad topic, and I’ve only scratched the proverbial surface of this very huge and very crusty turd. People using mental illness as an excuse to act like a tool, or to be “trendy”, or to accessorise their personality is something that makes me implement a radical form of therapy called “Ram sharp things into your face until you stop being a narcissistic little butt-weasel therapy.” (It’s still in the development stage). Because it trivialises very real, very damaging, and very brutal afflictions that destroy lives, the sort of lives I see every day.

Multi-tasking: Why it makes you a terrible human being (or not).

                I’m going to annoy a lot of people and avoid the whole topic of sex and multi-tasking, suffice to say everyone is capable of doing it to greater and lesser degrees and there is evidence to suggest that it’s influenced by your genetics (like almost everything in human behaviour).

                Our ability to do stuff is determined by what psychologist call your “cognitive load” essentially you only have a certain amount of cognitive function and you don’t want to blow your load all on one thing, you can split your attention between two or more tasks to varying degrees of success. The level of success depends on the familiarity you have with your tasks, for example people who type often can do so with very little cognitive load, as their unconscious mind and muscle memory handle a lot of the heavy lifting, leaving the conscious mind under less of a load.

                So what effect does a high cognitive load have? Well, most people become more irritable, easily distracted, and tend to make mistakes in what they are doing more often.  “Patting the head and rubbing the tummy” demonstrates the problem of relying on unconscious habits while at the same time employing the conscious mind to alter then. However for people who spend a lot of time around kids and do it a lot, they will have developed that “skill” to such a point where it’s unthinking, so they can pat their heads, rub their tummy’s and deliver a short presentation on the film career of Nick Cage at the same time while suffering very few side effects.

                Does it affect your ability to reason? Yes, it does. Being under a high cognitive load means you’re more dependent on your unconscious mind and long term memories for a lot of your executive level thinking. You’ll be quicker to jump to conclusions, more reliant on stereotypes and generally more inclined to take the “short route” cognitively speaking rather than stop and consider a problem or situation at length. You'll also be quicker to anger and frustration then you otherwise would be. Interestingly (but unrelatedly) this effect has been demonstrated to be compounded by hunger.

                As for productivity, it can arguably be very productive, especially if it’s tasks that the individual is very familiar with, people who do long repetitive jobs may often switch between them with very little obvious signs of fatigue or increase in cognitive load, simply because most of the tasks are done without serious conscious thought. That explains that “I am dead inside” look you often get form people in the public service industry, they’re on autopilot, seemingly doing a complex multitude of tasks without engaging more brainpower then it takes to consider what sandwich they will have after work. The flipside to this is when people accept too much of a cognitive load, which I have referred to earlier, the results being VERY unproductive.

                So essentially? Multi-tasking, and its effects are very much dependant on what you’re doing as to the effects it will have on you. It’s not a “skill” in the sense you can develop it, rather it’s an ability you can employ to varying degrees of success based on your level of ability with the tasks at hand.

Dreams II: The re-dreamaning.

                Another quick disclaimer before I get into the meat of this, to horrify/upset/rage-bait my fellow psychologists I actually rate dream analysis to be as valid a technique as astrology and tarot reading. You can really only tell something about a person by asking them how they feel about their dreams, attempting to interpret them as an outsider is like trying to convince somebody that they don’t like a type of food because they are “tasting it wrong”.

                Regardless! It’s something that crops up a lot in psychology, the idea of you sitting on a couch and telling me about that dream you had where the money propositioned you but you couldn’t accept because you’re already engaged to a formula one car. Then I take a drag on my pipe, adjust my little circle-glasses and tweed suit and then while making a few notes on some paper you can’t see tell you that this comes from a deep seated urge to do the dirty with your mother/father.

                I’m sad to say there is a tiny bit of truth in this, like all stereotypes it’s based on something that happens so I’ll break it down for you. I’m sure you’ve all heard of Freud, who had some very interesting ideas about the penis and your relationship with your parents. Modern psychologists consider his work about as relevant as aerospace engineer would refer to the Wright brother’s planes. The guy was a pioneer of his time, but his ideas now are… well “dated” is the nice way of describing them. But before you blow him off remember that before this point, nobody had considered the notion that a traumatic childhood could affect you into adulthood, or that emotional wellbeing was as important as physical wellbeing, so penises and parent-banging aside, the guy had some pretty interesting stuff to say.

                One of his biggest ideas was the notion of an “unconscious mind” the part of your brain that makes all the decisions for you, and then tosses them up to your pre-frontal cortex for your conscious mind to mull over. It’s also part of the brain that has a big impact on your dreams, and as such Freud referred to your dreams as “The royal road into the unconscious mind” and set a lot of stock on analysing them to discover what your “Inner self” was really worried about. To an extent this is true, things that your unconscious mind fixates on will tend to crop up in your dreams, many people still re-live events from their schooldays in their dreams, or are confronted with people who broke their hearts, it’s not all balderdash, but it also can’t be said to conclusively demonstrate a mental illness either.

                So how much stock should you put in your dreams? Well the answer is “as much as you want to.” It’s not “Your mind trying to tell you something” any more then flipping through your “most viewed channels” and finding a lot of naked people is telling you that maybe you gotta ease back on all the porn. Your unconscious mind doesn’t have a “will” par sé, it’s more like an adaptive learning computer that tries to make sense of the world for you and then hands you the important bits on a platter for you to do something with. Dreams are its way of passing that information back and forth between its various evolved bits and when it leaks through you get to see the result, it’s not what your unconscious it thinking, it’s more like fragments of what you may potentially be thinking if you decided to poke your unconscious the right way, it’s a graveyard of “thoughts that may have been”  and your dreams are the ghost of those thoughts, coming back to haunt you.