Quote

All sadness is a tantrum

How interesting.

When I was sad and began to weep, my mother, a chronic alcoholic, who feared sadness, her own and others, used to tell me, 'Tears are anger'.

What Mom told me is the kind of thing a child is told in an invalidating environment.

Mom did this in private as an alcoholic parent. She didnt go out to recruit a following.

And I didnt have to pay my mother money in order to receive her misleading information about emotions.

Must mention that after my mother died, I stayed close to my mother's best friend, X who seemed heartily happy and normal.

Very often, when I tried to discuss bad stuff with Mom's friend, X would say, 'Cant you just forgive and forget?'

Eventually I came to understand that I could only get acknowlegement from other people, that even this wonderful friend could not deal with heavy emotion.

(note: acknowledgement/validation do not necessarily mean you totally agree with the other persons' stance. But you can mirror their humanity and their essential take on reality. It is possible to validate someone yet disagree with some of what they assert. Invalidation leaves a person with a ghastly, ungrounded 'lost in space' feeling. You feel that way if you stand in front of a warped mirror in a carnival fun house. Some relationships are the emotional and cognitive equivalent of a warped mirror. This is what the therapist calls an invalidating environment, and can injure a growing child's sense of self)

Years later, after Mom's friend died, I learned from her adult son that for years X been a heavy user of Vicodin,and sometimes mixed it with alcohol.

'When I was a teenager, I peeked in the medicine cabinet. SHe had Vicodin prescriptions in the medicine cabinet that went back for 20 years and more. ' Two years before she died, X entertained her 14 year old grandaughter and the kid reported that at lunch X was swacked when she ordered a martini. That plus the Vicodin would have packed a wallop.

I was never aware that X had any medical condition that mandated decades of Vicodin use.

But it explained why it was so easy for X to tell me to forgive and forget. Forgetting is very, very easy when one numbs emotions using precription drugs.

If you dont tell anyone you're taking this easy route out, you can seem resilient
and others who are not self medicating can seem they're too emotional when with someone who has covertly used pills to, in the words of Pink Floyd's The Wall, make themselves 'comfortably numb'

I have to tell you that I felt invalidated when X pulled that 'forgive and forget' number on me. I used to wonder if she had a secret source of resilience and that I had some sort of weak character and that was why I remembered the bad stuff.

I didnt occur to me that I had full use of my perception and that X was covertly numbing herself.

What I did not know, when X, for all her good intentions, gave me the invaldating information of of 'forgive and forget' was that she'd been using Vicodin for decades, and following a long strategy of lying and dissociating from the emotional suffering of her family, while I was drug free and had made a commitment to learn the truth about myself and my family and to learn to acknowledge, hold and carry the difficult information and emotions the process required.

No wonder it was easy for her to talk about forgiving and forgetting. She was self medicating to support a personal flight path of denial and dissociation.

Forgive and forget is turned out in X's case, to be opiate faciliated psychic numbing.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/11/2009 11:17PM by corboy.

'No wonder it was easy for her to talk about forgiving and forgetting. She was self medicating to support a personal flight path of denial and dissociation.'

In a nutshell, what Byron Katie is advocating as a means of living 'blissfully'. If only it worked.

I had similar problems, emotions were highly dangerous to display in my childhood, and the insistence that I forgive and forget was more about protecting the adult perpetrators view of themselves than any demand for real heartfelt forgiveness on my part. It was to shut me up and I venture that BK uses her technique to shut up the LGAT participants rather than venturing into the hard and painful work of addressing any problems.

Some things are best remembered and unforgiven, we can learn to live with them with equanimity but the brain and body never forgets anyway so the simplistic 'forgive and forget' is just fooling yourself. Forgiveness is anyway in my remit to decide, another person urging premature forgiveness is following their own agenda, not the needs of the forgiver.

That is a really good point that needs repeating.
Perpetrators, like adults who mistreat children, always use psychological manipulation against their victims. And if they ever get caught, the immediately jump to "forgive and forget" often using a religion.
So that is also seen in the Byron Katie program as well, forgive and forget what she did, but with an added wrinkle. Use the Turnaround to BLAME YOURSELF excessively for everything.

Also, the comment about alcoholics and pill-poppers being afraid of experiencing painful emotions is very true. Some of them get very afraid of normal human emotions, sometimes due to trauma they have not dealt with, or other reasons.
But then they become pathologically afraid of normal, healthy, human emotions, like sadness or general anxiety. In their mind, there is no normal sadness, ANY sadness makes them terrified of falling into a black-pit of despair, or into a panic-attack, so they BLOCK OUT any painful emotion with booze or pill-popping. The instant they start to feel some pain, out comes the booze/pills.

Notice how The Work is sold as also getting rid of "all suffering", which of course does not work.

The terrible irony is that to be healthier emotionally, one has to learn how to TOLERATE painful emotion. There is enormous research in that area, and its a fine line. But the pathological fear and avoidance of painful emotions displayed in The Work is very unhealthy and damaging.
The "dream" they have of eliminating all painful emotions, so they can be like Byron Katie, literally is psychological fraud. That is the pill-poppers and alcoholics fantasy, to stop feeling any painful emotion, and it destroys their lives.

Of course, real depression and panic attacks need treatment, but from professionals who know what they are doing, and have training and are licensed.

Quote
Stoic
...emotions were highly dangerous to display in my childhood, and the insistence that I forgive and forget was more about protecting the adult perpetrators view of themselves than any demand for real heartfelt forgiveness on my part. It was to shut me up and I venture that BK uses her technique to shut up the LGAT participants rather than venturing into the hard and painful work of addressing any problems.
...

There is a book and a satirical movie coming out called "Men Who Stare At Goats".

There was an interview with the writer of the book, British journalist Jon Ronson, where he said some special forces in the military experimented with using various New Age techniques in psy-ops, which were taken from various hippy-dippy cults of the 1960's.
Amazingly, he mentioned a technique call the “sparkly eyes technique”, which of course is satirized in the movie and book.

Yes, that is right, the Sparkly Eyes technique, or Sparkling Eyes technique.
Where have we heard that before?

From Stephen Mitchell, and Byron Katie, and their Glittering Eyes marketing stories they have told many times, which relates to making Byron Katie's "glittering eyes" a trigger for various types of light hypnosis and suggestion, and to draw people in with Love-Bombing, and various "eye-staring" techniques that have been used in cults for decades.
Such incredible arrogance, to so brazenly attempt to do these techniques on groups of people.

Are groups of people really so innocent, that when some Guru's husband tells them to "stare into the eyes" of his New Age Guru wife, that they just do it without thinking about what is going on?
When some Guru or their promoters start telling you to stare into the eyes of the Guru, that is when the warning flags start flying.
Its about manufacturing a false intimacy, a one-way intimacy from you to the Guru. Its even more cynical when they try to do it through the media, and using photographs.
But its far more powerful in person in a seminar, when the Guru from time to time picks one person, and STARES at them right in the eyes, after all of the preparation, it can be very powerful.
Its very unfortunate that so many people can fall for such a simple technique.


Stephen Mitchell’s Valentine’s Story, hypno-EYES [forum.culteducation.com]
fabricated Eye-Gazing Love-Bombing PR [forum.culteducation.com]

Also search Google for:

"byron katie" sparkling eyes
"byron katie" glittering eyes

If you type 'sparkly eyes technique' into the ordinary google search bar, look whatcha get:

[www.google.com]

And in a different search, here is an article on eye make up.

Quote

I am a model and I have bright blue eyes that I need to make stand out more in pictures. Any tips on how to do so?

(You can learn almost anything at RR.com if you hang out with us long enough)

[www.make-upusa.com]

The article above is very informative.

This one gives info on how to give 'smoky' emphasis to your eyes.

[www.make-upusa.com]

Readers are invited to do do searches on 'make up' 'cosmetics' and 'glittery eyes' 'emphasize your eyes' 'sparkly eyes'.

All to make ourselves look faabulous, of course.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 09/19/2009 10:22PM by corboy.

Some Readings For Continuing Education

Multiple personas in a high demand group (Adidam) Broken Yogi comments on how a friend in the group could suddenly turn on you and accuse you of being 'a crazy heretic'.

[http://www.adidaarchives.org/fake_belief_irrational.htm

I'm not so sure about the multiple personalities explanation, sounds like a bit of a cop-out to me. George Orwell nailed it, as he did with so much of how totalitarianism works, in his novel '1984'.

It's about pretending to accept the lie. Most totalitarian types do not expect the ordinary person to believe the lie, the ordinary person just has to pretend to believe it--out of fear, a wish to conform, belong, gain approval etc. The pretence at belief then becomes the overriding neccessity to maintain a congruent worldview and to avoid fragmenting as a congruent personality. The lie then has to be maintained to provide stability.

It's why corruscating personal honesty is a fundamental requirement of most traditional spiritual training. That kind of commitment to honest and often painful critical thought is necessary to build up the strength to withstand the very human needs and instincts to go along with the crowd, any crowd.

LGATs such as those run by BK are about reinforcing the lie and encouraging group-think.

Am reading Janja Lalich's 'Take Back Your Life' at the moment, heartily recommended.

I heard from a very reliable and first hand source that Stephen Mitchell is a regular pot smoker, together with one of his friends. This is in fact old news, because there have been similar reports of him smoking pot while being in Europe. Why aren't I surprised?

James Arthur Ray - 2 die at Arizona retreat's sweat lodge [forum.culteducation.com]

Notice the outrageous "waiver" from the James Ray LGAT seminar, and how similar it is to the Byron Katie LGAT seminar disclaimers. They also have a "death clause" for the seminar.
The James Ray waiver explains many aspects of these damaging seminars, and their damaging results, as well as the Landmark waivers.

____________________________________
James Ray International:
[forum.culteducation.com] Waiver of Liability,Assumption of Risk, Indemnity Agreement and
Disclaimer BY SIGNING THIS AGREEMENT YOU ARE WAIVING ALL RIGHTS TO COMPENSATION IN CASE OF INJURY.

Landmark waiver. [forum.culteducation.com] [forum.culteducation.com]

PSI seminars waiver [forum.culteducation.com]

THE SCHOOL FOR THE WORK WITH BYRON KATIE - RELEASE OF LIABILITY [forum.culteducation.com]
________________________



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/11/2009 12:07AM by The Anticult.

Okay, I'm in.

Haven't been on the RR boards in months. Just knew you'd see the parallels with BKI's School For The Work. There were no sweat lodges, but there certainly could have been....everything else was in place, but that. This news pulls me back to that horribly anxious feeling the School gave me.

Time to revisit my experience and try to be of further service.

You've quoted me as arienariadne from last spring.