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I tend not to think very highly of psychology. As a field, Psychology is, it seems to me, hubristically wrong at least as often as it is astonishingly accurate. However, those latter instances unequivocally reveal that, bullshit aside, the study of psychology has borne real observational fruit - that is, it has, in many cases, discovered and described predictable patterns of human behavior and named those patterns.
What psychology purports people do about those behaviors is, perhaps, psychology’s greatest weakness. However, I’m personally of the opinion - borne out by personal experience - that enabling self understanding is more than half the battle when you’re striving to change. When you read a summation of psychological material that uncannily describes you and the way you act - as if some research psychologist has been watching you specifically, like some Truman Show, for 40 years - when it suddenly dawns upon you that what previously seemed an opaque and chaotic way of being is in fact totally transparent and predictable - when it is proven to you, of a sudden, by the weight irrefutable predictive accuracy, that you are not some snowflake in this regard, but rather a “textbook case” well - that’s a pretty fucking weird and powerful feeling.
The nearest corollary is horoscopes. Except, whereas horoscopes leave things purposefully vague and speak in generalities, a matching psychological analysis predicts your behavior with a degree of accuracy that feels almost omniscient. It feels sort of like gazing into a mythical mirror. Or encountering your controlling doppelganger. Where moments earlier you were ostensibly free, now there are strings attached to your arms and legs - to your guts and voice - your brain and your heart - and you can see those strings moving you in spite of yourself - bending you to their strange, essentially autonomic will.
It’s really odd. On the one hand - it immediately evokes feelings of potential liberation. Before, it’s like your eyes were closed and you’re being dragged through the motions of whatever maladaptive behavior you engage in. But now your eyes are open - the sun has dawned - and lo! You are a dummy! You can see the strings all too clearly - and they appear tantalizingly thin and frail - and the first thought is “well, I’m not going to do that anymore!”
But then comes the frustration. Though they look frail, the strings are tough as fishing line - and they pull with force on your body - they make you feel things irrespective of whether you want to feel them - irrespective of whether you know those feelings are unwarranted. The strings cannot be reasoned with. They cannot be cut. They cannot be stopped. They are driven by a vast, automated clockwork in your mind - a Marionette Machine - really a beautiful contraption - an engineering marvel built to a singular purpose - survival. That set of psychological cogs and widgets cannot be reasoned with, it cannot be assuaged, it cannot be destroyed - for to destroy it would be destroy yourself - for it is your own mind.
And so, in the immediate aftermath of discovery, there is both a sudden swelling of hope and a near simultaneous plunge into despair. You can see the mechanism controlling you, but you cannot break free. Yourmuscles have atrophied while the machine moved for you. Your efforts to resist the movement are totally useless - and at first, all you can do is watch, helplessly, as the strings drag your body through the same tired motions. It is frustrating stuff.
The question is - what do you do then? How do you change - or more accurately, how do you build a new you - one that isn’t subject to the whims of the Marionette machine in your own mind?
I’ve been told there are ways - but the starting point is seeing the structures completely. You can’t see the whole of something you’re stuck inside of - you can only see it completely when you’ve exited it - stepped away from it. Reading your psychological profile helps to build that distance. Like a David Lynch fever dream, one second your entwined in those strings and the next, briefly, you’re looking at yourself entwined.
That’s the starting point - building space - being able to observe the way that machine works - how it feels when the strings are pulled - finding agency in relation to those sensations - not sharing an anxious thought - not blurting out a sabotaging remark - not venting your fear into the world.
My marionette machine is an anti-connection machine. It longs for connection while equating connection with disconnection - and equating disconnection with annihilation - and it always assumes that disconnection is inevitable - so much so that when there is no disconnection, it fabricates it - and the more the connection there is, the more it strives to disconnect.
It is, in simple terms, anti-love machine born of hard experience - and sitting in it’s shadow, looking up at it - I see the edifice of my entire life.
I’ll be real - the sense of scale is imposing and the frustrating knowledge that that hulking machinery will forever a part of my internal experience is upsetting - and that’s not even accounting for the impulse to hate everyone whose behaviors necessitated it’s creation - an impulse about as useless and automated as the machine itself.
But, in that despair, there is the cold freedom of fleeting hope. Hope that self-knowledge will allow me, before I die, if I’m determined and lucky, learn how to love and how to be loved - and in so doing, realize the closest thing humanity has to a meaning of life.