Old Blog New Blog

I've been writing a blog for years, in the form of "Notes to my Students" sent out to my "StudentListServ." I didn't realize it was a blog until David Seah, Merlin Mann and recently Matt Cornell caught my attention, and I now admit in public, my heart. David Seah began to put a structure around my so-called "work day" which often starts late, like at noon, and runs late, like 5 AM give or take a few hours. You all thought I was really working from 9 until 5 AM, when in fact I was sleeping until noon. I'm trying to change that, getting up at 5:30 AM so I have more writing time before I'm tired from a day of interacting.

I've been writing notes to my student listserv for years. The student listserv has grown exponentially over the years, and is now running to about 250 psychologists (first you are in-training, then you graduate, have your doctoral degrees, are working at agencies, in private practice, and a few of you, like me, are doing research, teaching, as well as privite practice, and you are my first blog-readers). Turning this list into a blog might make it easier to respond, for those of you who have been wanting to respond to my notes to you over the years. Go ahead, I think you were held back by the nature of the listserv, but this is a blog, and many (most?) of you are no longer students. So you can respond freely, with no inhibitions. Maybe that is the theme of this blog, fight inhibitions, fight survivor guilt (those of you who don't know me will find out about this in good time), and start writing to support or --yes, even dispute-- my latest mind wanderings, findings, or as David Seah has put a frame to it, my endless pursuit of discovering patterns in anything and everything. David, there's my second thank you for the morning. Thank you. Its far easier for me, as a sociologist, to find and organize those patterns, than it is for me as a psychologist, easier yet to admit to always searching out the patterns when someone else has admitted the same.

Psychologists are masters at personal obfuscation (making easy things indecipherable), and this is also true of me because I'm a psychologist. I know that when you (or I) see patterns a psychologist doesn't see, or doesn't want you to see or when you don't agree with them (us), the response is generally some kind of psychobabble, the psychologists' weapon. "You're projecting" or "You're in denial." Of course how could we know we were in deinal, if we are in denial. And how do psychologists think they know you're in denial, where do they get their evidence, since, after all, you can't tell them, because you're ostensibly in denial. This is unclear thinking, or to make it sound softer, a profound inability to use logic. Along with accusing people of projecting or being "in denial," psychologists also, when speaking about YOU, suggest: "You're repressing your hatred, (or your rage, or anything else negative you care to consider). That's another piece of verbal trickery; how can psychologists possibly know that someone else has information that is repressed, when if there really were such a thing as repression (thus far unsupported by science), how could it be known by psychologists, or by you. Its a contradiction.

Of course I make interpretations all the time, make up stories to explain things, as you will come to see. For example if you told me that you threw a horrible temper last night, threatened to throw a chair against the wall, and otherwise scared your spouse, I wouldn't tell you that you were projecting, or denying. I'd probably tell you that your behavior was a nonconscious effort to be loyal to your father who was famous for his tempers. See, we are a conundrum of poor logic, unclear thinking, and made up stories. The only difference between me and many other psychologists is that I would be interpreting up, not down. Point of this comment, is that I plan to defend the patterns I see and I am as convoluted as any other psychologist. But I wish there weren't so many jokes about us, and I wish people would stop believing psychologists can read their minds.

Welcome to you all, and welcome to me. Thank you David Seah, for making this possible. I'm running off right now to attend the morning session of a great conference I'm attending, "Learning and the Brain," aimed at bringing real live teachers together with real live neuroscientists, and happens to be one of the greatest meetings I've been to in years.

More later...