GRANNON AND VAKNIN TAKE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

It's hard to imagine a more contrasting pair of psych experts than Sam Vaknin and Richard Grannon.  But you don't have to -- they exist and they collaborate.  Last night I watched a shared YouTube essay called "The  Toxicity of Social Media," which was filmed at least partly in some quite grand and historic city I could not identify  The point was to figure out the impact of social media (the "platforms" called Facebook, Twitter, and so on) where it came from, the damage it does, why and how, and what to do next.  The two men agree until the end when personality intervenes.  Vaknin wants authoritarian regulation from within the platforms, like shutting a viewer off after a certain amount of time or at least charging a fee for viewing.  Grannon takes the independent and self-reliance point of view one would expect from an Aussie.

But there's the basic agreement, which comes out of the idea of psych as literature, mirroring and making metaphors out of the culture.  The diagnosis is that we have lost our sense of history and place -- we have a loss of direction.  Social media is not a cause, but a symptom, yet it exacerbates the condition.  These two men are experts focused on narcissism.  Vaknin is describing it as a result of a culture that demands each of us stand out, but because identity emerges from interaction with other people and social media cuts us off from this interaction, we are terrified of being dispersed, annihilated.  So we claim a "part for the whole," such as sexism, racism, and other alliances with groups that supply an identity.

Vaknin refers to the formation of identity as a child and how our identity from that time both protects and reassures us.  But we forget how to handle human interactions if all we do is post quips and arguments. In fact, our self-regulation as bodies comes from being with others, but shuts down in front of a glass screen.  For a while about 2007, he argues, there were studies about this, but they ceased when the biggest donors to Academia were social media.

Grannon, with his base in the martial arts, sees this idea of presentation and belligerance as the old fashioned Darwinian idea of survival of the fittest.  He doesn't mention gladiator competitions in the Coliseum but he means  something similar.  He notes that there are so many people, all demanding to hold the gaze of the crowd, that it's almost a form of cannibalism, because it is a zero sum game and based on the lowest values of the watchers, brutal, abandoning, lonely, never in this moment but always in the past or future.  He says he is frightened.  (His kind of martial arts are Asian, based on restraint and elegance.  Their goal is peace.)

Narcisssism to these guys is therefore a metaphor for our whole society, as all the Identified and defined APA theories of psych disfuncation are, which is why they change all the time.  Vakinin is quite eloquent about narcissism failing and then failed narcissism becoming borderline disorder which is worse.  Grannon feels fascism is another response to an emergency, a state of war, and provable with "human fucking history."

Vaknin recommends narrative and feels the usage method of social media is the problem --not so much the content.  He talks about the "stickiness" of the "like" button and how it is a kind of conditioning that makes you think you're actually communicating.  He notes that the human mind wants stories and makes them even from bits and glimpses, so this is a sign of hope.

Here is a cutting point:  social media was invented by teenagers, who didn't really understand what they were doing bit accidentally stumbled  onto something that made them so much money that they are terrified of reform or any change at all, because the whole thing might collapse.  They have no experience, no broad education.  Their users are also loners, misfits, people lurking alone programming repetitive games.  If challenged, they are fierce, have no restraint.  High school teachers know the type very well.

Grannon identifies them with Cluster B characteristics.  "Cluster B personality disorders are characterized by dramatic, overly emotional or unpredictable thinking or behavior. They include antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder."  ( Mayo Clinic)  He speaks of it as releasing the monsters of the unconscious human mind.

I have two responses to that. One is today's phenomenon of the gun owners demonstration in Virginia in which late middle-aged men with big bellies, red faces, and evidently enough discretionary income to afford a hundred pounds of military equipment including assault rifles, are filling the streets.  The police are nowhere to be seen.  If these bozos really understood, they would realize that if they don't shoot each other by mistake, there are police armored tanks waiting until their water hoses, unbearable sounds, and tear gas are justified.  I saw no gas masks dangling from belts. For every bug there is a bigger bug, until we get to predator drones.

But I have another paradigm to explore.  in the UU congregations there were people who loved to demonstrate to activate their identity and therefore identification with various people.  But there were also alot of people who explored the issue of identity through reading: both fiction (esp among the women) and history.  The two men agreed that there are two potent kinds of identity, one being narcissism or first person stories, and the other -- often demonstrated in social media -- which is the narcissist's victim.  This SM, big/little, oppressive white man/oppressed black man, abusive husband/abused wife, overwhelming patriarch/crippled children is a dependable identity dyad through time.  It prevents reconciliation or even conversation.

Book after book is based on this pattern.  It is a strong precursor for social media and a pattern followed in the stories told there.  What Vaknin and Grannon are beginning to explore is how to get beyond that formula to a new vision. But it's early days.

AN ACTING POINT OF VIEW VS. A LITERARY POINT OF VIEW

Part of the reason I went back to thinking about my old acting classes  (krausenotes.blogspot.com  and thesilvercomb.blogspot.com) is that I’ve been pondering the difference -- subtle as it may be -- between coming to Browning in 1961 from an acting context as compared to a literature context.  Of course, I DID have a literature context, because I read all the time, even books by and about Indians.  “Kutkos,” I’m fond of reporting, was written by my fourth grade teacher, a Chinook Indian, and I read “Tangled Waters” over and over -- written by a white woman married to a trader on the Navajo reservation.  “Two Little Savages,” of course, is about two little wannabe Indian kids, written by that wannabe Indian Ernest Thompson Seton.

But that’s not what I mean.  Being in an acting frame of mind is inhabiting the people you meet, trying to suss what it would be like to be them, to see what they see when they look out of their eyes.  But a literary frame of mind asks for omniscience, maybe judgement from the outside, certainly plot line and structure.  Maybe conflict (agonism).  When I’m in that novelist’s frame of mind, I’m scribbling in the back of my brain, taking notes -- “Oh, notice how he holds that pencil!”  But if I’m in an actor’s frame of mind, I don’t even ask what it would be like to hold the pencil that way -- I’m already vicariously gripping it myself.

This was explained to me as “empathy” years ago when some teacher was trying to distinguish empathy (feeling AS someone) from sympathy (feeling FOR someone).  When empathy is activated, the judgement just isn’t there, unless you’re feeling it from someone else outside both of you.  The boy says,  “My mother is so STUBBORN.”  He’s sincere, but the novelist might say from outside that she was faithful, tenacious, or committed.  The boy might be quoting his dad, identifying with him.  

Of course, sci-fi stories have pointed out the treachery of being too open to other minds.  It may be pretty hard to handle other people’s pain, so you need ways to draw the curtain -- even armor up.  Once I read a story about dolphins, who can read your body through penetrating echolocation right down to what your gut is doing.  They can get upset.  People like to think that dolphins are full of peace and harmony, but what if they sense fear, rage, contempt? 

Trying to understand other people, one way or another, is shared by both writer and actor -- but also psychoanalysts, who sort of walk both sides of the street.  While the writer is noting,  “This person has bitten his nails to the quick, leaving ugly scar tissue,"  the actor is feeling a sudden urge to bite his nails.  The psychoanalyst is noting:  “Bitten nails.  Obsessive syndrome?  Anxiety due to?”  That kind of diagnosis is a dangerous sort of judgement because the next step can be treatment and not necessarily voluntary.

The detective wants to know lots of observable and provable stuff as well, and that could lead to consequences that could be influenced by the opinion of the shrink.  The anthropologist’s reaction depends on the sort of anthro he or she is, but generally the inclination will be to consider a long view: history, the larger patterns of the culture and how they form development.  They might look at the ecology: what is there to eat and what must you do to get it?  What does the climate encourage in the people?  What natural barriers create isolated communities?  What objects and animals are in their lives?  What are their homes like?  And the actor wants to know all this stuff, but -- again -- from the inside.

When I came to Browning to teach, I was still feeling my way into “being” other people, not building evaluations of them -- which might have been more proper.  The kids themselves did not want any intimacy with their teachers.  The more distant and robotic a teacher was, the more they were interpreted as “professional.”  Surgeons are professional.  Missionaries are suspect in their declarations of love and understanding -- unprofessional.  Amateur in the pure sense of “loving.”  (There’s a book I should read:  “I Love You.  You’re Perfect -- Now Change.)

The irony is that the kind of acting I learned (if a script is considered literary which I believe it is) was literature-based,  We weren’t improvising -- we were learning lines and acting out a plot with presenting situation, rising action, climax and resolution. It contained a point of view supplied by the playwright.  Becoming the person was the means to that point of view.  

But for the rez kids, resolution was the last thing they wanted.  Their idea was to prevent change, NOT to grow up, NOT to graduate, NOT to know things about themselves and their families.  They had been well and thoroughly taught never to let nobody know nothing.  They did very well at it.  Their point of view was that they were doomed to an early death anyway. (They saw it all around them.)  Why even try?  Some were pushed hard enough to make them close down: sleeping all the time, drinking, dissociating, drugs.

Except that to an actor, their posture, their voices, what they did with their hands and eyes -- all gave them away.  Most of the school personnel had no intention of “being” them, understanding where they were coming from, because their mission [sic] was to change them.  With good intentions, of course.  The kids could feel it.  The school district was paying them to do it.

Over the years the context of things has changed.  Many more of the teachers and administrators are Blackfeet and local.  The buildings are new.  Students from decades ago have returned from the outside world where they succeeded and are not willing to accept the same old patterns.  There are women on the tribal council.  Agitators complain that the main street is packed with deteriorating old buildings, but in a ring around Browning there are new buildings, including both the hospital and the casino.  Openly gay people work in both places.

Recently a volunteer-built playground was destroyed by the kids it was built for and who had previously enjoyed it.  What do I see when I look out of their eyes?  Frustration.  Now they are awake, they feel the rage, the pain, the grief.  They need action, any action.  Impact.  This planet is packed with people who feel that way.  We should be stubborn about pushing forward until we get past it.  But how?  More plays!  More movies!  More novels!  More, more, more!!  Don't stop now!

EVIDENCE-BASED HELP FOR TRAUMATIC DISTRESS

Every time I find a new “school of thought” about psychology, I think I’ve found the Grail at last and this time the world will be healed.  That lasts a day or so.  Then I begin to research and discover what’s really useful and what is just dreck.  This time around it is “Evidence-Based” treatment, which applies to both medical and psychological cases.  It arises out of several forces, one being the amazing brain function research of the NIneties and the other coming from the “best practices” movement.  

Brain function research is something that can be demonstrated, quantified, replicated in a scientific manner, and researched further.  “Best practices” is measured by results.  Whatever works, regardless of theory schemes.  The motivation for driving towards better goals with better results in counseling comes in large part from the need to address complex traumatic stress disorders arising from war, from poverty, from substance abuse, and from confused families.  Not only do the trauma-causers seem to be increasing, we are much more aware of them than in the past.  PTSD and child abuse seem to be everywhere.

The historical sequence of waves of psych theory --  Freudian forces of sex and death grappling in the darkness; Jungian Celtic figures producing universal narratives; Skinner’s cogs and levers; the Third Force thinkers offering peak experiences, and New Age notions of imports from other cultures -- mixed with a host of people wanting to be healers -- have created a Great Chaos that sometimes has deadly consequences and certainly discredits the whole weaving of moonbeams that psych counseling can seem to be.

What got me excited about “evidence-based” practice in the first place was brain research.  The main thing is the disproving of the idea that brain cells are never renewed and that after age 37, it’s all downhill.  QUITE to the contrary, brains are living, changing, processing complexes of organs that adapt to whatever happens to the whole body.  A person who is blinded re-allocates the brain space to hearing.  A person who takes up golf or piano playing, will “grow” a whole new area of the cortex for storing the new skill.  No one knew this, because it was undetectable with the instruments of the past, though people demonstrated it all the time.

In fact, specialized CELLS -- not just organelles or complexes of connections or processing centers -- but one-by-one specialized brain cells are being found (spindle cells, pyramidal cells, mirror cells), features only found otherwise in elephants, toothed whales, and some apes.  The cells seem to endow empathy, social cooperation, and the like, which the scientists speculate are due to evolution -- not to the benefit of the individual so much as related to the survival of the species which is the real location of evolution.  Not every human has these cells, though there have not been surveys of large numbers of people since it’s so expensive to find individual cells.  It’s not hard to think of people who seem to have no empathy.

Which brings us to the next revelation: that there are certain periods on the time-line of human development that are crucial to the brain.  Most of us by now realize that a baby must have basic physical safety and care to survive, but few have really absorbed “attachment theory.”  Attachment to one human who is dependable, attentive, and responsive is the foundation of everything else in life.  Combined with the genomic potential that it helps to unfold, being able to form an attachment gives the baby the power and motivation to explore the world.

Some reseach suggests and can show on an fMRI, that there are two “modes” in which the young brain operates:  the “learning” mode is when curiosity and exploration are the main motivators.  If the baby is hurt, scared, traumatized, it goes into a second mode: “defensive.”  All energies convert over to watching for danger and taking self-protective measures like fight, flight, freeze, or hide.  The way the person sets these up in his or her brain will govern relationships for the rest of that person’s life.  Even being able to see oneself convert back and forth -- one writer compares this conversion to the sea anemone opening up and closing down -- or learning late in life to be more trusting, will always be in terms of the background of those first early lessons.

There are two more well-described periods of brain growth and elaboration, one at adolescence and one between 17 and maybe 24, the years of college or military service.  What keeps stumping me is why the period they label “adrenarche” -- 6 to 9 -- when long bones grow, adult teeth come in, and sexual organs begin to grow into their functions (though they aren’t operational yet), is not considered a time of brain development.  Freud called it latency.  But those are the years of accumulating identity and reaching the age of reason in terms of legal standing.  I suspect that this is the time of life that the specialized cells are developing rather than more easily perceived organs and connections.

I’m drawing on a book called “Treating Complex Traumatic Stress Disorders: An Evidence-Based Guide.”  Googling brought up a rebellion on the committee that is supposed to be rewriting the DMSO-IV which guides psych people and the insurance industry.  It’s the book that says what is and what is not a psychological problem.  It has to be rewritten all the time because ideas change so much.  You’d be shocked to look at an historic overview.  Anyway, all the European shrinks on the committee felt unheard and disrespected, so they left.  I’m not surprised.  The earlier counseling theory empires are hugely powerful and make a LOT of money, much of it in the US.

This book includes essays by people I would avoid, but Christine Courtois is a person whose thinking I value.  She’s worth searching on YouTube.  I’ve got this book, which she co-edited, on Interlibrary Loan from the Veteran’s Administration Center in Seattle.  The pocket card shows one borrower per year for the last two years.  Maybe counselors can afford to buy their own copies.  It is a compilation of essays by practicing psychologists.

There is nothing about criminality.  The word they use is “forensic,” though traumatic stress disorders are very much entwined with prisons and phenomena like mass murder, to say nothing of domestic abuse.  There is nothing about physical safety when people are after you with bad intentions, though safe houses for abused persons are crucial.  There is nothing about substance abuse, though one writer notes that “self-treatment with drugs and alcohol” can work to the point of being life-saving.  Nothing about sexwork at any age or at any social level from street to penthouse.   Nothing about therapy for those who impose trauma.  One of the most intriguing chapters is that about “vicarious trauma,” which is like second-hand smoke -- trauma to the witnessing healer.  Wasn’t that an HBO series?  “In Treatment”?  I”m just about to the end of “Oz.”  If I survive it, maybe I should try “The Sopranos” to see what that therapist does.