Well shit. the one thing that I did pay attention at Benchmark was that anger did not exist.. Anger was a secondary emotion caused by pain or fear. If you feel angry, it must be for one of those two reasons. I have not been able to disprove it, and it sort of makes sense (and that was about the only thing).
hmm... interstingly.. googling "anger secondary emotion"
produces this link: eqi.org sounds est-ish... what with the emotional intelligence(you're in your head)... A lot of the music they reference is from propheets / workshops (Lennon for example)
Jayne commented a few months ago in a phone interview that psychologists were too "in their heads"...
I asked her why she used sleep deprivation in the workshops... she said it was to help kids be a "little more real"
the shit spreads like a cancer. Shit. I'm constantly finding pieces of it i absorbed when I was at Benchmark... It's like pulling out pieces of glass... and there's nothing there to patch it up... and you wonder what was there before, and you can't remember.
the god damn rabbit hole just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
Well, they have been known to co-opt some otherwise useful thinking, terms, and techniques and bastardize them. Just like Hillary Clinton did with "It Takes A Village".
They (nor est) coined the thinking that anger is a secondary emotion. Conduct a different search, like, research + anger secondary emotion. You'll find plenty of clinical research.
Oh. That I found. However, only one of those links considered anger as
only being a primary emotion. I remember googling the same thing just after I got out of benchmark and I stumbled along the same link.
Most of The clinical research and websites listed anger as both a primary and a secondary emotion, if not chiefly a primary emotion (something, that i actually argued originally in program)
see hereAmong other things, I argued that seeing others being wronged made me angry. Injustice. It was early on in the program, which explains why I actually remember it. I sited "righteous anger" in defense of those who cannot defend themselves... Idealistic I was even then. But I underestimated their capability to influence me, even without my full knowledge. But at some point, I stopped caring. I was willing to give in, to give myself in, if it would make life a little more normal.
Most "personal growth" (alternating days all morning) revolved around the re-interpretation of various concepts, from love, to friendship.. etc. I doubt everything now. Love? Love was forbidden until level 2... good luck getting there without redefining Friendship. Friendship? "A friend is your needs answered"... without the rest of the poem. "The harsher the truth to tell, the truer the friend"... ratting.. ratting was helping another to follow the program. It was helping. It was helping. It was honorable to report when you saw something wrong happening, like breaking bans, or a kiss, or a love note passed... It was a threat to the program you see... They needed to protect us from ourselves because we were sick and didn't know what we wanted, or what was good for us. That's why we were there. We needed to be shown the way.
Group. Group was an all out friendship fest. Morning group before personal growth at 8am til 9. That's when you fill out your hitlists (i mean "rap sheets")
From 1 to 4 pm... Noon group... longer and more intense. Sometimes it would break up into smaller groups. This is when the staff would let you express your friendship to your friends on your rap sheet.
Cooking class. Aah. I loved cooking class. I got to cook and cook... I couldn't cook the way I used to though. No spontinaity. creativity was highly discouraged. But the food was still a rare treat. and when you graduated, you could invite one friend... but you had to be careful lest you isolate, or get too close to another... especially one of the opposite sex. no... That was not friendship...
Soon after I arrived in program, I baked an apple pie (dont' ask how i scraped together the materials... let's just say one of the anorexic chicks had a thing for apples and we came to an arrangement). Bargaining for the simplest of things was like one would do in prison.. but in prison, such thigs are expected, tolerated, and never was anybody ratted out. So i Baked this pie, and I delivered it to the neighboring apartment... It happened to be a girls apartment. So the next day I got in trouble for it.... and was confronted in group for it. (yes you guessed it, staff confiscated the contraband pie)... It sounds so absurd, but such an attempt at the slightest bit of normalcy, of kindness, was viewed as a threat.
I was cheerful. I was extroverted. I loved people, i loved crowds. I made friends with random people, i trusted everybody... I was innocent. I was sheltered, I was undamaged... and I learned. I learned to be shrewd. I learned to calculate the consequences of social cause and effect.. push a button here to get an effect here. I learned how to devastate. I learned how to destroy a person emotionally, verbally. I learned pressure points, and i pushed them... and i felt drunk on the power of it. But as much as I fucked over others... the same was done to me. Karma is like that and illustrated no better than in program. Towards then end, before they exiled me, i realized what they were doing and I stopped. I realized that if I was becoming the "real me"... i didn't want to be the "real me"... I realized they were mindfucking me, and i flat out confronted a counselor in group about it. He asked me "what about your realization that you were just wearing masks..." I told him that "everybody gets mindfucked once in a while"... I attempted to start a protest... It suceeded, but i would never find that out as I was exiled before the fruits of my labor could blossom. A host of students lost their levels becuase I convinced them that if they did not comply with the system, it could not function, and since they could not kick us all out, they would be forced to comply. They walked off property in protest. I was honored. I was surprised. But that action they took still gives me hope. My current plan for Benchmark relies on it.
Common sense bares this out as well. Would you ever get angry if you never felt physically or emotionally threatened in some way or violated, or any number of other things that fall under the heading of disrepect?
It is possible to arrive at a place where you can recognize and address the disrespect immediately, when first noticed, therefore eliminating the anger response. It's a matter of recognizing when the fight/flight response is necessary and when it's not. Most people who have achieved this are either saints or con artists.
Do you know what it is to feel completely numb? To be confused as to what is, and what isn't a feeling. Emotion is a choice remember. I choose to feel __________. Despite my initial attempts to argue the contrary... Something shut off at some point. Everything shut off at some point. There is danger in it, i know that. But there is also control... Whether or not it is an illusion... Am i supressing something, or am I truly dead inside. The more I research, the more I fight this, the closer i feel to who I was before, the more alive I feel again. I feel great now. I helped others, expecting nothing in return, and somehow something happened. Empathy, altruism, love, compassion, not hatred.
Like I said. Hatred fueled me initially several years ago. I thought it would be enough, but it burnt out, and it gave me no hope. Now i just want others to feel the same, to have the same chances i have had. Somehow doing this is reconnecting me to the humanity I once had. When Anne from Minessota goes on about Fornits and the negativity... How narrowminded.
Spend some time with an esty. No matter how much they swear they are anger-free, you can find a button if you push long enough.
People have tried. My boss commented that I was impossable to piss off, that he was surprised at everything I could take (work was very much a boys locker room, complete with practical jokes of the lowest kind... and humor to match)...
One time my idiot boss was yelling at me, and i turned around. I didn't feel like taking bothering with his crap. He was losing his memory and blaming everybody around him for the chaos he caused by doing things such as asking to re-verify the same stack of boxes every single day. he was upset nothign was getting done. It was comical were it not so sad to see (eventually he resigned).. So when I turned around (apparantly that's a big insult in the military) he became enraged, grabbed my arm, and twisted me around. Most people would react, fight back, punch him, flinch... anything. Nothing happened. His boss was coming down the hall (attracted by the yelling) so i put my arm on his shoulder and pretended we were talking quietly. He was grateful... but probably forgot the whole thing minutes later. In any case. I think he was more jarred by the incident than anything else. His idea of resolving disagreements was (literally) to go outside, fight, and go have a friendly beer afterwards. It sounds fucked up... but I suppose it worked where he came from. He wasn't used to dealing with civilians (still stuck in 'nam).
And that's one really fucked up thing about programs. They bait kids with heavy daily doses of disrespect, enough to anger a saint, and then punish them for their reaction.
And eventually you shut down to survive.
Disrespect in the form of inane rules, austere punishments, guilty until proven innocent, and basically insulting their intelligence. It's like being spanked and not allowed to cry. What happens to your self respect when you're not allowed to defend yourself, or question, or debate, or even have your feelings? All that anger gets pushed inside. I know one young man who post program broke his hand on two different ocassions by hitting a wall when all that suppressed rage surfaced.
Relinquishing control huh? I have no clue how. Prozac (especially such high doses i was on at Benchmark), when used in conjunction with Behavior modification, as far as my mother explains it, results in permanent changes in the brain. She says it's not set in stone until the mid 20s.
So, not everything the program says is unique to it or est or synanon, they co-opt and bastardize a lot of otherwise good information. And totally misuse or use in hurtful ways. It could take a while to sort out the confusion. I think the effort is worth the trouble.
What they sourced their information from... I know for a fact: est, lifespring, synanon(indirectly through CEDU) and various trinkets of eastern mysticism. Wherever it came from.. They used the tools they were given.
Maybe I'm ranting but I'm in Alpha mode right now (sleep disturbances) and i feel like I need to talk about this. I'm going to be doing a senior final project next semester (animation) and am preparing the script, storyboards, etc. It's based on program... not loosely at all. Ginger has heard the synopsis. Since I can't smoke weed in my house, this is the only method I know of to access that mode of thought. It's very useful for art, writing, and other creative stuff.
