Wednesday, May 26, 2021
I had an appointment with Shelly, my therapist/life coach. I was ready to film the final draft of my PowerPoint video on my reading method; I should say the word recognition aspect of my reading method. I always say that I am not comfortable with adoration or excessive admiration. I only enjoy it in people who like me for my whole personality, not just a single aspect. I don't mind admiration from them; I admire things in them. As I think about it, it's not admiration; it's awe. When people admire me without liking me, I experience them as dangerous. People who admired me but didn't like me have attacked me.
My fear of the consequences of becoming well known has inhibited me from sallying forth. I did my two-point healing release. First, I released anything negative about my aversion for admiration, keeping anything good or anything I still needed. Then I did the craving portion, releasing anything negative about craving for admiration, keeping anything good or anything I still needed. What a surprise, not! I had a vision of myself sucking up the admiration a group of people was dishing out, people who didn't know me from Adam.
When I worked on this with Shelly, I sat with the feeling. Lo and behold, I saw myself as a young child, three, four, or five, receiving admiration from adults. That's an appropriate time to get admiration, even awe. It isn't for the individual; it's for the miracle of youth, growth, and life. Young children, children of any age, can evoke awe just for being. What a miracle! I wasn't allowed that admiration. My mother thought of it as bad, at least bad for us- a very German concept in an exaggerated form. When I saw the craving as coming from a very young version of myself, I felt much safer. I no longer had to worry about undermining myself. I will recognize it for what it is and not "believe my own publicity." Ah! That's all very freeing.
Of course, there's the other end of the response that I also fear- contempt and hatred. There's always someone who not only disagrees with your point of view, someone who thinks your point of view is evil because it differs from theirs. Oh, the human condition. I like that I'm at a safe physical distance on YouTube. There's a good chance that my work will slip into the ether unnoticed. I'm okay with that. Maybe there will be one or two people who will be able to use what I've developed. At least it will be out there. I'm less comfortable with gaining a lot of attention. Someone will see it as a threat to their worldview. People have verbally attacked me for what I do.
In the 1990's I was a trailer teacher in Trenton, New Jersey. I had a supervisor who lacked impulse control. She observed me teaching a class with two low-functioning fourth-grade girls. One suffered from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and was significantly delayed. I demonstrated a method I had developed, not the one on the video I was preparing. Both the girls were engaged and doing reasonably well. When the session was over, the supervisor took me to task. She screamed, "That could never work. I've never seen it before." It was devastating. I thought she would be impressed. But the problem was "she had never seen it before." That was the threat. That was the danger. That made me dangerous-even evil. This same supervisor wrote a recommendation for me when I moved. She wrote that I was very effective with low-functioning students. Really? How about all students. No, she couldn't concede that. In short, I anticipate trolls if I do get known.
I brought up another topic with Shelly. I saw a TED talk on entraining. Entraining is the process by which two or more people focus on the same thing, and their brains light up in the same way. Our brains entrain. I was trained to never entrain. I realized that this is a possibility what therapists saw in me that they found so disturbing. I never entrained with them. There are specific reasons for that. First place, most of them weren't on the same page as I was. I'm sure they argued I was wrong and 'just thought I was special." Guess what! Psychology has come around to my way of thinking. These psychologists assumed something was wrong with me because I disagreed with them. Oh, boy!
These same psychologists assumed I could not bond with another person because they couldn't entrain them. What they hadn't realized was I had been trained to never entrain. (I am open to a different point of view, but that requires discussion. These therapists were not open to that.) I do not get pleasure from shared experiences with a large group of people. It frightens me. My father very consciously taught me to always hold on to my point of view. Why? He was a refugee from Nazi Germany. The image of large groups functioning as one was held up for us as some form of evil. We always had to be ready to see clearly and speak up. My father had concluded that any form of group identity was the basis for all evil in man.
You can see why he may have concluded that having gone through WWII and Nazi Germany in Europe. It was nationalism that generated those conflicts. My sister and I weren't even allowed to join the Girl Scouts; it was a group. I once tried to be a Mary Kay representative. I went to one of their meetings. They sang a Mary Kay song. That did it for me. I was out of there.
I had a session with adolescent D. We worked on the 8th-grade material. Because of what I'm learning for Dahaene's book Learning and the Brain, I thought I had to be clearer about what I wanted him to pay attention to. I had been incidentally pointing out phonics patterns: er, ir and ur all make the same sound; when you have a single vowel letter followed by a consonant and nothing else, that vowel is probably a short one. I was more deliberate and less incidental in pointing out phonics patterns. I worked more slowly and deliberately. Before, when I mentioned them, I believe he gave an "oh, yeah" response, but nothing went in. Now, I was being more explicit, more pointed about what he had to pay attention to. I felt it made a huge difference.
I don't know if I could have done this sooner. I had to watch out for adolescent D's ego. It is fragile. I don't think I could have started with eighth-grade material. It's still over his head, but it's within grasp. After all, all you're ever doing is decoding one syllable at a time. He has gotten better at some of his problems, holding on to sounds and blending them. He is beginning to participate in struggling with the difficult things for him differently.
Early on, I used the analogy of the stalled car to describe the phases of his learning process. Because of inertia, getting the car moving takes the most time and energy. You need several people to push the car to sufficient speed for the motor to start. Once the engine starts, the car is still moving slowly, but it moves on its own. It's only then the car can pick up speed. After today's session, I felt there was a chance that his 'motor' was about to click in. Wow! At the end of the session, I had him repeat after me, "I did good work." He did it without objection.
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