Hunch or Prejudice?

What is the difference between an intuitive hunch and a prejudice? This is one of my virtual questions that I enjoy asking.

It's curious to me how each and every perceptual attitude that someone can adopt seems to have alternate ways of describing it. These descriptions, definitions and interpretations seem to color how the subject and person is defined to express another bias or prejudice. Some can get quite...colorful, with pointed accusations.

For instance, students often stop themselves from asking a question of a teacher out of respect for that teacher. But from the teacher's point of view,, "why don't my students ask ANY question?" In my culture, you can have rapport or you can have respect, but not both.

Another instance, it's obvious from my posting here that I enjoy to take the time to offer the benefit of my observations to other people. I've taken the time to learn to write to do this, which has been an effort for me because my talking style isn't easily translated into the forms of writing.  But now others are coming to recognize my investment of being able to write. Whenever there is recognition of "talent" or ability, people inevitably wonder why you do such a thing. They assign a motive to your actions - sometimes these motives are not what you would answer if they had asked you. In some cases, they react as if the person who has invested value in an opinion must be a proselytizer or a salesperson.

But sometimes, people complaint that I am being "too" helpful. They seem to not appreciate my motives or my open-mindedness because I don't communicate that very well.

If I come up with creative thinking ideas on their behalf without warning them or getting their permission to do so, they react strangely. They're slightly intimidated. They don't know why I can do it or why I would do such a thing for them. Perhaps they assign nefarious motives to what I'm doing or why I'm doing it. I've been accused of "co-dependence," but I just don't have the vested interests and addictions to go along with the profile. Demonstrating my ability to think has also often gotten me defined me as "analytical," as if I am an inflexible one-trick pony.  Am of the opinion that everyone has multiple talents, often undeveloped.

I've learned to actively refuse to defend myself and instead invite participation. But sometimes it just doesn't work. People misread my communicating as being upset. They don't dare to confront or engage, fearing they might offend.

Would love to open a conversation to suggestions on how to better this state of affairs, because I think this same issue affects many, many interactions with many people. Perhaps I just need to joke about it more often.

Anyone have any suggestions or explorations...stories? Probably not. Somehow, the way that I write doesn't invite comments. Not sure what to do about that.

Sculptural

In honor of deva spirits and witches everywhere, I made a witchy nymph. 

What you don't see in this picture is how I had to splint and graft two pieces of the stick into one to get the witchy nymph to have arms as well as legs. 

While I was doing so, I was thinking about how many of us wounded healers there are, partially broken... How many there are who have had to go from being broken to making themselves whole again. This journey seems to be necessary to make compassionate teachers with some real answers for those who find themselves in dire straights.

Haywired

It is a fact that no matter how much "better" your sensory judgment gets,  you are always going to be using your senses in a 'relative' way.  'Absolute fact' doesn't exist. It's not how people are wired. We're made so that we get used to being whatever we have learned, so what is new can get our attention. So whenever a significant change is made, it will always feel "strange" and "abnormal."  

After recovering from over-doing and needing to adapt to terrible or extraordinary circumstances of life that nearly everyone encounters, it is pretty amazing how it's still possible to uncover your original subtle sensitivity. Eventually with the right sort of attention, you can get your bearings and learn to do things easier as you used to be able to do it when you were innocently younger. As this is happening, the changes that register as "significant" get more subtle, but they are still changes with those same "weird" sensations of newness. 

I believe that sensory appreciation is far and away more important priority as a principle than most Alexander teachers give it. Most give it lesser billing as a sort of "special effects" in relation to the other "more important" principles - but I think motor sensory amnesia has center stage as the one of the three most important concepts of Alexander Technique. Sensory appreciation is the principle that needs to be introduced first. 

It's important because students need to know from the beginning how to recognize that something new has happened. most people disregard happenings that are "unclassified flukes" because they don't fit preconceptions - they're not anywhere near the radar of expectations. If students don't understand what a discovery looks like, how are they going to know they are making one when it happens?

As far as humor goes - more teachers should use it!

Seven Minute Drawing

The illusion of depth works best if you can blur your view, simulating the ability to stand back from the image.

      

Sploosh!

Fifteen years ago my then-significant other named Pearl and I had loaded the back of the pickup truck camper for an extended trip to Baja California. We were located along Highway One an hour north of San Francisco along a tightly winding road. After situating everything we could possibly need in a primitive desert environment such as Baja by the means of car-camping in the back of the pickup truck, we set out at a leisurely pace for a ten hour drive to San Diego to my brother's house.

It wasn't slow enough. Or perhaps we hadn't tied in the water container well enough. Or perhaps we were too excited about who else we were about to visit on the way there. At any rate, as the driver I swung a little wide on one of the turns and over-corrected a little too fast...and the 5 gallon water container dumped it's contents on our bed.

My significant other pointed to a steep driveway to pull off the road. With the nose of the car pointing up, most of the water went out the back of the tailgate so didn't spend more than thirty seconds soaking the back of the truck. We got out of the car and re-tied the water container after mostly emptying it.

Back in the car and driving down the road, we admonished ourselves for filling up the water dispenser before we left, and not tying it down properly so it fell over.

"Hey," I looked at my significant other and said, "SPLOOSH!" and I started laughing.
"Sploosh? What is Sploosh?" he ranted. "How can it be so funny that our bed and stuff in the back is soaked!"
"Sploosh!" I explained. "We're driving for the next ten hours in the desert with the windows open, blowing hot air on our bed for hours."

Later, we found ourselves halfway down Baja to "Bahia de Los Angeles" on the Sea of Cortez side of Baja. I had become more than a little worried because somehow, despite having a really cool calculator-calendar, Pearl had mis-calculated the amount of gas required to get home. (He had an excuse, which was he had just quit smoking and wasn't in his right mind.) We talked about calling my brother for a rescue when we got closer to the Tiajuana border, or leave our truck and getting just ourselves back to San Diego and going back for the truck...or something. In the meantime we figured it wasn't any different if we continued our camping trip; only the change of heading home the most direct route.

A little closer to the border, I was cleaning out the car near Bahia Conception to repack after camping for our last week, intending to get the dust out of the car. Hidden under the driver's seat footwell mats by the previous owner, I found three stained old travelers checks that totaled three hundred dollars.

"Hey, check this out! As I brandished the checks. "Apparently, a fateful redemption."

"Oh yeah," Pearl quipped. "Sploosh!"

Scapegoats

Blame is an interesting activity that is worthy of study. When there is something wrong, it's very curious why people first have the urge to go looking for someone else who can be the reason for their problems.

Have to admit, this same thought of being a victim often happens when I must look for something that I have misplaced. What really happened was that I found a "secure" spot for it in a remotely "safe" location. In an attempt to foil possible theft, I hid the item from myself! Nobody stole it from me. But this is what I begin to fear as I frantically look for it.

No wonder people look for scapegoats. Someone to blame is so convenient to have around.

Sophie Lhoste Are polite relationships draining your energy?

Read: http://bit.ly/co9kuH

Reading this article leaves me to wonder how those energy vampires feel about people who label them.

Beyond the judgmental conclusions of name-calling, what do loving people constructively do about this situation? Couldn't people who complain and label just learn more gracefully and tactfully to ask for what they need or want as a questionable point continues to happen routinely? Why do we need to resort to name-calling to demonize others for allowing some room to adjust to each others evolving needs?

I'm asking these questions because I really want answers. A mark of true friendship is to be able to hear other points of view without imagining it is an attack. I don't intend to deliver my opinions veiled as questions. I want to let the spin cycle come to a close before we open the oven to see if the souffle fell. Divorce seems to be a rite of passage, rather than a last resort. People are too quick to come to a conclusion that writes off others. They could look for new ideas about how to deal with a new situation that is unfamiliar.

Let's think for a moment from the point of view of these people you want to blame for taking your energy. 
What would they say they are doing to deal with how you are acting?
The first platitude that makes sense is "live and let live." 
Can it be OK to say: "if you can't say something constructive, don't say anything"...?  
What about the tolerance and compassion of, "OK, whatever floats your boat"! 
Isn't it supportive to indicate," I'm gonna leave it up to you to call me when your available again."

Is it a requirement that those closest to us should ALWAYS read our minds so they can provide exactly the support we need in the moments they determine that we must have it? 

Isn't that a bit self-involved to expect from the mere humans who happen to have already been loving us?

Why should every moment, every support, every activity be so much drama that we must come to a resolved conclusion about What It Is and arbitrarily determined we should cut off the relationships that we have decided must be "draining us"?

It's the empty spaces that get left up to us to provide content.  Leave some dead air for a change and have it all be OK. Assume love. Those people who used to love you might want you to be happy, but are they could be innocently clueless about what you want them to do because you're not being all that articulate. Get a little more proactive and indicate what is appropriate and constructive.  Just...take a nap or go for a walk; play with the pet or the kids. Nobody is sucking you dry, just stop expecting there is a trade or tacit agreement of exchange as you give.

Animal Portraits!

Do you have a favorite kitty or canine? Send me a picture and I'll apply my artistry... It's not expensive - Only $100. per drawing, unframed. You'll have a lasting keepsake of your charming, loyal or playful animal companion.

Language for Perception

How do you perceive? Well, you just do it. That's an inadequate answer, so I decided to do some thinking about this.

Perhaps the way I teach people to observe themselves would be relevant to making up a language for perception. It's my business to be teaching people to perceive what they take for granted by teaching Alexander Technique. I use the often ignored kinesthetic sense as a medium, rather than the visual or auditory...but maybe we can cross-pollinate with it. Maybe we can use the same process and apply it to perception in general - say, the visual sense.

In Alexander Technique classes, students walk across the room and try to describe how they are walking. They can't, usually. So I introduce them to categories to form some questions for themselves. These categories function like thinking tools to organize and focus their point of view.

The categories are:

• timing
• sequence
• quality
• direction
• relationship

Once they have these categories, their ability to describe what they're experiencing for themselves gets unleashed. Their new ability to observe and describe what is happening works so well they can later design, on the fly, inventive ways for getting past some pretty serious self-imposed limitations.

So perhaps we could do this with perception in general. We could make general categories to help people ask themselves specific questions. Answering these questions would give us new perceptual information out of what we usually take for granted.

We're talking about the raw perception, not the content. So - how we direct attention to say, the visual sense with these categories? If I were to apply the same categories I just mentioned, I'd get something like:

• Quality: attention can be focused, like a searchlight, or diffuse like an overhead light.
  

• Timing: depending on when you pay attention, different things will be happening. A frozen image will show you stuff that you would miss in a movie, for instance. Bits and pieces do not have the same effect as the whole. Timing will influence the figure-ground relationship of what you can see. If you're moving fast while traveling, you'll have a whole different experience compared to moving slowly.
  

• Sequence: chains of paying attention to one thing after another bring different results; and mixing up sequences actually has an associative emotional effect. It's easy to mistake sequence for cause and effect.
  

• Direction: Where we are oriented contributes to Point Of View. POV and motive about what you want others to do, react and agree with you will color how you describe what you see.

Anyone else want to try one or more of these four categories about perception that I made up and apply them to help generate a new language for perception?

This is using your Thinking Skill bag of tricks!

Love and Respect - Mixed

Respect can be so often offered as a deal or a trade - but I guess that can also be true about love. Many people attempt to negotiate tacitly while professing to be offering "love."

Marriage, for many people, just allows everything about the relationship be implied rather than specified. Have always regarded marriage as a lazy person's way to say, "Hey, rather than negotiate and really make agreements specifically that we're going to keep with each other, let's get married and that umbrella will take care of the whole conversation about our agreements." Once the situation of defining what, exactly, the agreements really are, things can fall apart...because people who didn't know how to talk to each other tried to use marriage for the substitute of not having a clue how to make agreements.

In a sense, many marriages are all about expectations about how the husband or wife role is "supposed" to go, as if it's a slot or a job. If the couple's cultural assumptions match, then all is well. Most often in this era, these cultural assumptions do not match. In addition, cultural assumptions about love often do not match people's own needs because the times have changed.

Professing love, many people are really only making a deal without knowing what they are actually getting or giving. Of course, people can get disappointed if the deal is not suitable - but I'm not sure if it's actually love that they're getting or giving. There's really nothing wrong with making a deal. In a sense, a deal is an agreement.

It seems to me that respect contains quite a bit more sanity than the passions of love. so many people destroy their relationship by allowing the small indulgences to determine the course of how they "please" each other. Rather than showing the petty, dark and small side and allowing it to "run" the relationship, respect allows the positive, constructive side to be the driver.

Passion - looking at the root of that word is really interesting in the origin and history of the word "passion." Rather than an intense striving sort of meaning the word has come to mean in today's culture, it turns out that "passion" is related more to "pass." It is a surrendered state, an allowing sort of action. The word passion comes from meaning of "passive."

So it's not just that there is love or not love, but what sort of love there is, what sort of respect there is. Quality is everything in love - and in respect!

Respect can be had out of fear as well as love. Of course, there is a twisted sort of love that is also mixed in with fear or power to wound which would be a variation of "respect" in parent/child love when control or authority is an issue.

Many emotions may be mixed in with each other. As long as it is partly "love," does that mean all of it still Love? I think not.

For instance, love mixed with blame or a sense of cause and effect or consequence gives an impression that the other person is causing love to occur. One of the interesting characteristics of love is that it is something like a fountain of one's own.

It is common to be notoriously inarticulate when it comes to misunderstanding or mis-naming one's own emotions. Many people use the more general term "love" when a better word for what they are doing might be "care," "admiration," "compassion," "desire," "attraction," "infatuation," "absorption," "attention," "adulation," etc.

This is true for other emotions as well. Pride without fear is a desire for excellence. - (a quote from a friend of mine named Chuck Lewis, author of "You're Gonna Love It!" - a book on selling for artists.) Pride mixed with fear -  it is one of the seven deadly sins of self-involved arrogance. A big difference exists between the two.

If that's true, why is anything with a little love mixed into it called the real thing?

Does this idea that emotions can be mixtures make you curious the next time you think you think that you know what emotion you're feeling?
Tell me about it...

Back-firing, Suggestions?

I have many talents, but many of them seem to be back-firing on me at once. My headlights went ON when I discovered creative thinking as a teen. Since then I've been experiencing what I've read is quite common that many inventors run into head-on as they attempt to present their new ideas to others.

Proselytizers are icky - that's how many creative people interpret and respond to my enthusiasm when I bother to show it. They don't understand why I have suggestions for them. (Only Barbara Sher's Idea Party crowd really gets it.) My magic power is a high-idea talent generator that keeps the ideas coming when everyone else is spent.

Evidently, there is a cost to doing what is new. People can't imagine what motivates, so they assign the motive they can imagine. Most people are not very imaginative. Most commonly they become quite concerned with self-preservation while they freak out.

Of course, you're different. You're imaginative! You love to think!

Here are three situations where my brilliant creative thinking is causing chaos rather than solutions. Please offer your suggestions and bright ideas!

1. My ideas and experience of Alexander Technique are random acts of senseless beauty here:

In the situation of being able to come up with many ideas for their benefit, people mistakenly assume that I have some sort of investment in controlling them by telling them how and what else it is possible. This doesn't happen on the internet, because I don't know who they are, where they are or if they take my ideas for a ride or not and I've put a great deal of thought behind making it simple.  This is great deal why I put so much of my energy into writing about creative thinking and writing about Alexander Technique. This takes up a great deal of my time without me getting much personal benefit back from it. But it's fulfilling on many levels because at least my intent is clear to others. So I spend 'way too much time doing it online - how can that be more productive time?

My way of teaching Alexander Technique in private lessons doesn't happen with the right timing for people. When I show someone how to get free of restrictions, (and what else is possible once you get free,) it's sometimes too effective hands-on. But teaching that way it takes too long and makes students dependent. So I make it more simple and  "hands-off" so students can do it themselves from the very beginning. Then it's too simple and repetitive so they trivialize the usefulness of the information. (Obviously, there's a fine line between simply accessible and a topic being so conceptual that it becomes watered down and useless.) What would you prefer?  Hands off or hands on? Or what else? Could you suggest a way to solve both these issues at once?

2. Relationships

If I know the person intimately, I'm a great observer with a long memory who can compensate for time of arrival. So I can describe for them what patterns of behavior I see them doing over this long period of time, (patterns that they have determined are in their way from before they met me.) So when I give them a way out, they tell me I have an investment in changing them and fight me because I handed them this observation and gave them keys to significant improvement. So, I let them fly on their own and they fall down, because someone who was "trying to change them" for their own selfish convenience wouldn't allow that freedom. Them identifying my care-taking as "twisted co-dependence" meant I could not express my care for them at all! Perhaps because I predicted their fall after seeing the pattern, they get rid of me because I "caused" them to fall, (the "kill the messenger" approach.) I regard this as being part of a pattern that is bound to re-occur because it's inherent in the caretaker/care taking role. This issue is surely to evolve if I hook up with a partner who will eventually need care - or I will eventually need help.

3. Social Change

Other people who don't know me very well imagine I'm really weird to broadcast my bright and wild ideas that shows them what else they can do (to be more imaginative about relationships, for instance.) If I show the benefit of my own inner understanding of myself, (my lack of jealousy, for instance,) they react by being afraid of me. The feedback I've heard about that is I am flaunting my maturity and insight... toward various negative effects only limited by their lack of imagination. In one case, my motive, (according to one person,) was supposedly to make a splash and incite controversy as if discussing the idea was going to result in me doing the idea personally. (Not my intent. But I can see how most people personally identify with their ideas. So at least I can understand where this assumption originates.)


OK - any ideas on one or all of these three? You can blog a long-winded answer, leave a comment, give a tweet on #ideaparty or call me up on the phone and talk to me... if you have my number. I'll add them to future posts...

Any Questions?

 A kid and a Jehovah Witness came to my door last week. Before they started in with their religious invitations, I engaged the youngster in learning to juggle. He was a kid of around ten years old. Because I'd given him something of value in learning juggling, the kid wanted to give me a booklet that was a digest of their bible. I took it and read some of it.

In this condensed Bible there was an admonition where followers were urged to burn the books of "evil" false prophets such as Tarot card readers, psychics, astrologers, etc. It got me thinking how threatening it is to religions to have competition to their cornering the market on interpreting answers to spiritual questions. Probably nowadays, anyone who dispenses advice and wisdom based on their personal experience is going to be threatening to a church. Made me wonder what definition of "evil" this threat would actually include. Pretty much whenever you decide certain people are "evil," it's only a matter of time before many more people end up in that same category.

I thought of all the people in social networking who are urged to "brand themselves" and be the number one special version of the dispenser of value gained by their followers. In a flash of inspiration, I saw every social networker on Twitter as having their own religion...and respective followers...  How would threatened religions and churches burn e-books...?

In the time of Christ there must have been quite a few people out preaching "Truth." Probably there were lots of swindlers who were looking for followers who would pay them money to support their efforts, just as there seem to be now. In that era to perform the miracle of raising the dead, all you had to do is have the skill of recognizing someone in a coma who is might wake up eventually.

That Bible held up as the "word of God" was written by "psychics" who probably did not have much means to advertise - but they could write. Just getting materials to write something down must have been challenging. Probably being someone who knew how to read and write was something you had to keep secret, because people in that era were threatened by it. Creativity was probably low on the list of those cultures deliberately designed to control huge classes of people. Urban myths about anyone, translated numerous times and painstakingly hand-written and copied by those who could READ - it must have been such a privileged, rare gift to be literate in that era. Maybe all those stories in the Bible were about many people, and they all got lumped together into being about one person. (Bait and switch was a common historical tactic of religions.)


Now anyone can have their blog printed on demand. Anyone can dispense "wisdom" and write their own Bible. No wonder religions are being threatened.

Some people believe words have a firm, factual reality in themselves. They think words "mean what they mean." But this is not true. Words shift and flicker depending on context and expression, just as symbols do. This is what makes poetry and the symbols of religion and belief interesting.

Many people have an ability to think, but their ability to express their thinking may not reach the listener or reader for many mutual reasons. The topic or context may be incomplete or indistinct. Or the communicator's natural style of thinking may be so different from our own that it is difficult to figure out the communicator's intent. What is their associative pathway from point to point and how can I follow? It may be tricky to follow thinking paths - especially if thinking is original thinking.

In this way creative thinking is similar to religion - in that really original ideas must be carefully interpreted for the listener.

So often religious bureaucracy seems to want to control how people think because they invest in being the interpreter for the public of their respective "holy scripture." Religious leaders want to be the ONLY interpreter for the believers, claiming "all others are wrong or evil."

Each time they read or listen, each person is reconstructing meaning from reading what someone else has written or said. Someone who has written is pointing at...something about what they intend to say. Their skill and familiarity with their language use is a factor, in addition to their ability to think - but also their ability to articulate and guess at the assumptions of their listener. They try to answer the virtual question: "What would the listener want to know?"

It is up the person listening or reading to fill in the blanks, follow the traces or indicators while the listener reconstructs the thinking pathways of the communicator. In this way, listening is almost a spiritual practice. It is a spiritual question when a person seeks a way to express that which cannot be directly expressed. Spiritual, intuitive, or virtual questions often beg for symbols and indirect ways to express their messages and intent.

Of course, the way you frame a question structures and points to the answer. Have any questions now? Hope so.

Outside Language

People seem to have a really hard time thinking for themselves. They're not practiced at thinking on demand at all, especially when asked to think about what is missing. You really can't demand that others "think stuff outside of the box" and then not come up with at least one example right on the spot of what that is all about.

The most interesting idea is to use language to point out how it's possible to think beyond language.

The easiest example is to get out the video camera and film people walking. Then ask them to describe what they actually did as they walked. Or ask people to demonstrate a skill and teach it to someone else in a way other than how they learned it. Some more examples... point out why art exists - because people can't describe the making of art in words. Or ask music fans to describe, in words, what musicians do that allows them to improvise with each other. Ask movie fans how come a series of movie scenes makes people get startled or what really happened in the movie scenes before the whole movie theater just sucked in their breath simultaneously, or offered some other group reaction. ...They can't do it! Only those who work in those fields are conscious of these "nuts and bolts." Even these professionals who do these things don't know HOW they do them well enough to articulate how it works in words.



Many people are able to demonstrate something successfully, but they can't describe what they are doing without sounding trite, inane and fumbling. As a collective culture, we're just not used to observing for ourselves and using our own words to describe what we are experiencing.



Why isn't self-observation taught as a foundation skill?



The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis - that language structures thought ability - is not merely limited to mere specific word definition. It's also related to how words are put together. It points out the perceptual assumptions within the sentence structure of language also traps us.



For instance, important to English sentence structure is the direct object. This has the whole culture being quite concerned with who is doing what to whom. We are constantly thinking about how much someone is lying, (not whether they are lying or not!) Everyone is constantly having to ask themselves, "What percentage of what so and so says should be believed?" Since the direct object is so important in our language, Westerners so often focus on what we can do to something outside of ourselves. It's all about who does what to whom, who gets whose way and who has to wait and for how long they wait - and does the one who waits EVER get what they might want or need?



This why people are so concerned with status in our Indo-European culture. It's impossible to open your mouth or write without adding to the cultural trance of defining the nature of reality. People are constantly in the position of attempting to determine how much another person is lying, teasing or joking and what their motives are.



Really, how does someone understand what another person MEANS to say? People are confronted by descriptions about what the world "is" constantly - every advertisement, every newscast, every piece of gossip, every narration of the nature of the world, every description, every lesson, every comment - any utterance that involves the possibility of word choice.



All of these constructs of words involve a unique point of view. As a listener, we must reconstruct a workable meaning out of what we hear. Nothing IS what it IS. Everything is "open to interpretation! We all must do this in spite of having little or no knowledge, appreciation, sympathy, empathy or compassion for that other person's point of view and/or experiences. We must guess at all of these or communicate directly.



For instance, although there are many lip-serviced references to an inter-woven body-mind connection, we still combine two words to discuss the feature - and the word is a noun, rather than a verb. In English at least, we are still cramming the concept of psycho-physical into our old mold of the two being separate - even though it it common that our culture now acknowledges that bodies and minds are inseparable in one person.






OK, I'll stop ranting now. Tell me what you think.

Thinking While Angry

I have taught myself to creatively problem solve while angry. It was a very strange skill to learn, not a skill which I'd recommend to others. Better to not to get to this level in your ability to have to manage anger in the first place!

Twenty years ago, I had a relationship going with a person who was quite skilled in being manipulative. When I entered into the relationship, I observed that he also possessed ethics on when and where to apply his considerable skills in argumentation and debate. Ten years into the relationship, he eventually used his superior memory recall and debate skills to fight with me - something which I did not anticipate would ever happen. I had to firmly establish my boundaries and keep them in place as he decided that all things we had established and agreed upon previously were renegotiable. It was a trying time, but I managed it.

He came to expect me to do so. Had I not groomed the ability to creatively problem solve possible options of what to do next in spite of being angry, our relationship would have ended immediately. As it became clear later that staying in the relationship had become a toss-up whether it was good or bad for me personally, I was relieved when the relationship fell apart for practical reasons. I'm sure that the demands for training the skill to be able to problem solve while angry mitigated unpleasant reactions and effects; but perhaps it also prolonged the inevitable conflicts that later ended the relationship.

A more common situation where this skill would be useful to model would be during the parenting of teens - who again, would come to believe that everything should be renegotiated.

There were some prerequisite skills to make this ability possible. These were the ability to stop, pause or interrupt one's own habitual reaction. This can be best practiced when one is not in the throes of an intense emotion. It requires quite a bit of practice concerning the ability to surrender one's goal. There is a short window of time, (a quarter-second,) available to veto an action. You are already preparing to act as soon as you think of doing so, long before you realize you "want" to do something. It's quite telling when people around you believe you have first gotten angry - usually this is quite a bit further back before you realize it yourself.

Because of this lack of awareness, it's very difficult to veto a reaction that has already begun. This skill implies sophisticated exploration of expectations. Also useful during the learning process are pointedly specific observations of how a specific person's anger routinely works.

I learned this skill through the study of Alexander Technique. I'm not sure there is any other forum to learn such a thing, but I imagine anger management class would have these elements. Most commonly, this skill is usually described negatively as "poor impulse control." As far as I know, there is not any place suggested where "good impulse control" is taught - other than very early in life by parental guidance.

There is recently a field of study that seems to teach this skill specifically, but it's tailored toward adults. It's in the negotiation field, ( "Appreciative Inquiry,") the field of mediation or arbitration. Also, at www.newconversations.net there are free e-books on communication tools that seem quite useful. Some interesting books on this are classics in negotiation by Ury and Fisher. It's a series that started with "Getting to Yes." "Getting Past No, dealing with difficult people" More recently Fisher wrote a book with a guy named Shapiro dealing with how to manage emotions during negotiation called "Beyond Reason, using emotions as you negotiate."

Most of these contain stories and philosophy, but some of them provide practice suggestions. It's those offerings of practice that are most effective.

In an ongoing relationship, it is a good thing to make the general agreement that only one person in an argument is allowed to be "out of control." Obviously, it's best for the longevity of the relationship if safe expression of anger can happen as this role is rotated. It has been documented that women in particular suffer quite a bit in their health more than men if they do not speak up and make their "not very nice" concerns known.

I did hear about a study where four year olds were told that if they waited to eat something yummy, they could have twice as much of it when the grownups returned. Or they could eat the smaller portion that was in front of them now. The study afterwards followed the kids as they grew up who managed to wait compared to those who did not. It was found the ability to wait possibly resulted in a significant difference in general achievement.

My own mother was also a great model for how to deal with anger. She and my sister used to fight when I was a kid. By the time I became a teen, she had learned a few things about anger. She told me that people do not bother to get angry if they are not concerned about the relationship. She also modeled "cleaner" ways to fight. She never brought up "the kitchen sink" i.e: unrelated issues. She never tried to wound intentionally, retaliate or say things she might regret later. She would never accused me of being stupid and managed to resist telling me to do what she did not want me to do. But she would yell when she was upset, "I thought you're smart enough to think ahead about how your actions affect others."  Her words were quite carefully selected. This instead of the classic name-calling angry routine of: "You thoughtless, selfish, cruel complainer. Why should what you want come first?"

She also made it quite clear to me that people who are out of control while angry say things they don't mean. She said this is mostly because people get scared - fear is a big component of anger. She gave me ways to calm myself down when I got angry and left me the time and place to do so. Then she modeled the ability to talk out the concerns that made us want to get angry with each other, once we were calmed down enough to figure out what we really thought and wanted.

So it was this fortunate, firm foundation, along with learning Alexander Technique, that led me to be able to manage to learn later to creatively problem solve and actually think while angry. I believe it's a rare thing. It should be more common.

Favorite Pet?

Do you have a favorite pet? 

Here's an example of a photo I was shown to be able to draw a likeness of this kitty named "Josie." You can see the drawing I made. What do you think?

Lucky

This is a drawing I made of a very lucky tabby kitty cat named Grover. He was rescued out of the engine of a car after he got tangled up when the car started. His people were nice enough to put Grover back together. Now they have a kitty who winks at them a lot.