distorting reality

Nothing is as suitable to discover one's fears and insecurities than a person who does not show much response to the attempt of interacting with them. Somehow the mind will start to explain away the lacking information (the state of not knowing apparently seems to be unacceptable to the reasoning mechanism), thus producing a rather random image of reality.

It's comparable with a white wall - nothing is there to disturb whatever painting one will draw on it... nothing to give guidance for proportions, nor to put things into a realistic perspective. It's all done free-handedly, based on a potpourri of assumptions and impressions.

And then, compared with paint and brush, how much more powerful is a mind drawing it's conclusions and projecting them unto others in an attempt to explain what is happening? When drawing, painters usually have the reflex to step back and compare the painting with the model - which is not necessarily an instinct when dealing with thoughts?

I can't help wondering where to find the gap between realistic estimation and wild imagination. Any ideas?

modell eines frustfaktors

heute bin ich zufällig wieder einmal über die kommunikationsmodelle von schulz von thun gestolpert. besonders betroffen macht mich wieder einmal das teufelskreismodell, denn man steckt darin so oft selbst fest, ohne es bewusst zu merken oder ohne konkreten einfall wie man den kreis durchbrechen könnte. schnell gehts es meistens ohnehin nicht, genausowenig ohne beträchtliche (oder gerade wegen der notwendigen) persönlichkeitsentwicklung der beteiligten. und ob der willen oder die fähigkeit dazu im entscheidenden moment gegeben ist? ob wirklich die beteiligten selbst alles stemmen können? oder braucht es dazu hilfe von außen, um alternativen zu erkennen und blinde flecken mit inhalt zu füllen?

mirror

I wonder how much the points someone criticises you for tells you about them.

Considering the hypothesis that people might be most annoyed by characteristics they have themselves and consider negative casts a rather different light on the issue.

picture wall

Some of you asked what became of the pictures I collected when I left Bz.. so here you can see them distributed around my room :) the ordering is quite random (probably the order in which i pulled them out of the envelope when fixing them up) so please don't use it to make any inferences on a imaginary friend-ranking :P
If someone feels they are missing on my wall, please feel free to send me a picture and I will happily find some space to put it (in case hard copy is no good for you, mail me the pic and I might eventually get round to print it myself ;).
Generally I have to say that I really like these pictures which make me think of you every day, hoping to see you again soon :)

one or the other or the same?

it never ceases to amaze me that there are people which are very important to me just maybe because of some facet of their character which proves to be the helping hand or the stone to stumble over which gives me the needed direction for my next steps.
quite often these people are probably not aware of their good influence on me and not always i can tell them (either i do not even know them as they might have impressed me by there way of behaving in passing by, or at the time when their behaviour is influencing me it is painful and so i cannot yet show/notice my appreciation for it).

this phenomenon in itself fascinates me a lot already. but even more interesting i find how the roles in this play change depending on the people with whom i interact. maybe it is best to use an approximate example to explain my point. each person biologically has parents, some have siblings, and some later might have a partner and children. let's pick one person which is in this full family network. it is clear to see that this person then has a lot of different roles with respect to nearly all of the others: the one of a child, the one of a sibling, the one of a partner, the one of a parent.. all those being just different facets of the same person, and likely to influence one another.

so with people around it is similar. maybe the roles are not defined that clearly in terms of family concepts only (especially as the definition of friendship is very hard to be put down with precision; again i wonder if it is rather a matter of personal attitude or not..). nevertheless, there seem to be similar patterns: one person takes a certain role when relating to me; possibly a role which i cannot at first understand.

however, what recently has happened is that all of a sudden i find myself exactly in this 'other' role, being unexpectedly confronted with the inside view and challenges, when interacting with somebody else (whilst they might be taking on 'my' own old role...) summing up, the result is rather .. well .. i dont know if more frightening or fascinating. probably both. often it gives interesting clues about what other people might have gone through when having to put up with me.. and at the same time, it makes it a bit easier to understand what the other one in 'my' other skin is going through.

of course these are only hypotheses, and it is likely that i skipped some things which would make my flood even close to consistent. but could it not be that everyone is incorporating (consciously or inconsciously? nearly?) all different roles in their personality? and that discovering one after the other would lead them to finally get an idea about their own identity?

16th December

What a beautiful feeling if someone is showing appreciation towards one. Maybe it is not always an easy thing to do, and people often tend to say 'oh, he/she knows very well how much I appreciate them'.
However, I am not so sure of this, and there is nothing we loose when opening up our hearts and telling someone about the joy they are bringing into our lives just by being there. Maybe it takes some courage to overcome our pride, admitting that our life would be less beautiful without them, but what better gift can you give to a person than telling them that you are grateful to know them?

13th December

It sounds so trivial, but it is so difficult to get it right: to put the appropriate tone in what you say. If you think of it, this is not so surprising - in the end one is trying to firstly squeeze some thoughts or feelings into concrete language, which already can cause so many misunderstandings. secondly, very often one has a more or less conscious opinion about the person one is talking to and conveys a lot of this in one's manner of addressing them. this might not even be wanted, but bears the potential to seriously (and miraculously) upset the other one. So if some totally unexpected behaviour happens in communication, it could be a good indicator for taking a closer look on the issue.

9th December

just as i looked into my mailbox, i saw that there are 2222 emails in it.. probably most of them are not important at all, most of them came to me on some random mailinglist and not from someone in particular who wanted to tell something just to me.

somehow there seems to be a correspondence to oral communication. people so often keep saying things, which might even be entertaining, but not addressed to anyone in particular and not really conveying something substantiable. i am conscious of doing this myself, sometimes just for socialising and (at least trying) to make people feel at ease. but also to avoid to have to discuss something serious and unpleasant. it's even possible to observe people being conscious of such issue but continuously avoiding clearing it up until they kinda can not help it anymore. but then, i guess, it's human.. because addressing these things takes quite some courage, as one - at least for some time - has to put down one's disguise and take a stance on who one really is. in some ways it is quite a risk, but also i think there's a big likelyhood of a bigger gain in the sense of that an addressed problem can never grow into such monster as an ignored one..

and also another thing. truth and honesty might be unpleasant at times. but (maybe especially then) they are a sign of appreciation for one another.

5th December

Quite often in our society one can find the attitude of minding noone's business, paired with the expectation to be left alone and not to be bothered in one's own actions. And often, one could think, this attitude seems quite fine: I go my way, you go yours, as long as we don't get cross we're free to do or not do whatever we please.

However, today I was told a story that shows a drastic counter example to this way of behaviour and highlights that still everyone has a responsibility for the people around them, known or not.

One woman was arriving exhausted and very upset. She told: "There was total chaos on the underground! A young girl had thrown herself in front of the train. When I was arriving at the platform, there was a woman completely shocked and in a mess. What she told me was so terrible; she said, she had observed this girl, standing near the border of the platform, crying desperately. She was thinking of speaking to her, but didn't dare to - and then decided to ignore it! So when the train was entering the station she just saw the girl throwing herself under it.."

I wonder now... how much responsibility does this woman have for the girl's death? And then, I wonder if objectively matters, as she seemed to feel responsible, as her speaking to that desperate girl could have saved her? And... how often could we have helped someone, just by asking how they were feeling, showing that it is not totally uninteresting for the whole world what is happening to them?

There are a lot more thoughts going round in my head, I can't really put them down.. Just one thing really pushes forward; it concerns the way our society is treating younger people.. For a whole huge branch of our economy they are the perfect 'victims' as with all their insecurities they are very easy to seduce and at the same time rather unprotected as they are trying to break free from their parents. So in some sense they are perfect for making money from them, showing them all the nice, glittery, perfect images of fake relationships, friendship, and love, but without EVER telling them about the real impact all these thing will have on them, once they got tangled up in them. And there often seems noone they can turn to, once this whole 'perfect' world comes crashing down on them. So what should become of them? Obviously only few of them take the option of jumping in front of a train. But they still are so often left to themselves to deal with all these pain they have suffered.
I don't think this is fair.. Now don't tell me 'life isn't fair'... it's no use in this place, 'cause there is something everyone can do just by opening up their eyes and looking at the people around.

the importance of team work...

liking sincere people

I realised again how much I appreciate sincere people. Ok, admittedly sincerity might be a bit rough to take at first, but I am by now convinced that it saves you a lot of trouble down the line (basically the same thing as the short feedback cycles in agile programming... quite a human and common sense thing, really).
It's like filling things in a black box, not knowing if they go together well with what is already in.. but how should you possibly know if the owner doesn't tell? You will usually only notice when suddenly and out of the lightest blue there comes an explosion for some completely minuscule thing. And as is probably intuitive, an explosion tends to cause much more damage than some bit of incompatibility information given at the start.
For this reason, it take it to be quite useful to address people directly when a problem occurs, because most of the time they are not deliberately being a nuisance. I just wonder if generally people need more encouragement to dare to state that they do not like something.

turned inside out

sometimes I wonder if it is any use for a person's development to always search for the special, unknown, or pretend to be more clever so people would appreciate one.
actually i guess at this point the focus is exactly the wrong way round, as a person then is so fixated on the opinion of others that it is easy to forget how their inside actually looks like. it is as if they became strangers to themselves, which is likely to be the source of a lot of trouble. because how should they be authentic and rest in themselves, when they have forgotten how they are? this is probably quite difficult, but what is more is the scare they are likely to develop against looking at themselves as they really are. supposedly, one would notice one's faults first, as they probably were the first reason why one initially tried to make up with pretending. this might in fact be very hard to accept, but after delusion some positive surprises are likely to be in store, for example when a problem is mastered better than expected. in some sense it is like sounding one's limits, accepting the deficits as well as the talents.
actually, i do still not understand why often it seems to be so difficult to take on the good things about the own personality.. i wonder if it might have to do with responsibility? it seems as if accepting and promoting one's deficiencies would absolve the person in question of the responsibility of doing or at least attempting things in a specific area, so maybe for tricky things self-depreciation is the more comfortable option. conversely, does accepting a talent not imply the duty to train it (which might be hard work) as well as using it for something good (which might even be harder)?

Who owns the problem?

Very often it can be observed that people start to argue about something. Usually these arguments start off by some very basic remark of person 1, which by some unknown reason is taken very badly by person 2, who reacts unappropriately, and there we go..
If afterwards person2 is asked why they became so upset, they are likely to say something like: 'oh, this p1, he really irritated me with what he said! so outrageous!'
Of course it is possible that p1 said something wrong or in a wrong tone but: there is nothing p2 could do about it. On the other hand though, the feeling irritated by it actually is not p1's problem: it belongs to p2, who has to accept that this happened and then can start to draw constructive conclusions from that point. So to speak, p2 can change their own role from that of a victim ('it's all p1's problem, they were very rude!') to that of a person accepting the responsibility for their problem ('i got really irritated by this and this is my problem which i have to solve').
I find this approach very useful, as often in an argument or a difficult situation people tend to get stuck in mutual blaming but fail to see that there is the possibility that the other one actually did not at all intend things badly, but happened to push some unknown button on ones own 'panic-list'. Consequently, p2 could continue to ask: why does this irritate me so much? and also: do I really, honestly believe that this person wants to deliberately annoy me?
The first question might challenge p2 to face not so nice experiences they have made in their lives so far which have left a considerable mark on how they tend to look at things (which also implies that there is not one 'right' view of the world but rather that they are all right for one person but possibly complete nonsense for another, but that's another issue). We can not really expect another person to know about these things, which then also leads to the second question. If we can not assume another person knowing about our reasons for being annoyed about a certain way of behaviour, it might well be that these poor souls are completely unaware about the how and why they were causing a nuisance to us. Consequently it might well be that it was not the least their intention to get at us, but rather an unhappy series of events. Considering this, quite often quarrels can be condensed down to what lies beneath it. It might be nothing at all, or some corpses in the basement of p2's mind - but it is actually p2, accepting the ownership of their problem, who has the possibility to sort them out and thus break the circle of the argument.