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therepublicofletters · 4 years

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This is embarrassing but I never learned anything about the 15th century so literally any single fact would be a learning experience. What about a short list of world events from the 15th century that were all happening at the same time? Politics, art, breakthroughs, anything! Hopefully this question makes sense. I find it interesting how different cultures were making their own strides independently but concurrently especially when people didn��t have such easy access to each other.

There’s no shame in not having learned about it! That’s why I love academics and studying, because there’s always something more to learn. In any case, to answer your question, I don’t think I’m the right person to give a broad overview of what happened worldwide in the 15th century because I study Italy – and of course Italy has its relationships with the rest of Europe and northern Africa and parts of Asia through trade but I know not nearly as much about it as I should. My advisor actually works on East-West relations in the 15th century, specially Italian perception of the Ottoman Empire, which is fascinating. I personally am looking to do some work on finance and trade between Italy and England when I’m abroad at Oxford in the Spring. However, wikipedia has a really cool timeline about all the important events in the 15th century! This is probably not the exciting and curated list you wanted from me, but I know that I cannot accurately describe world events when I am only comfortable really talking about Florence and Rome and maybe Milan between say 1390 and 1520. Just looking at that timeline on Wikipedia I’m really struck by the wealth of things that happened over these 100 years. While in Italy states were fighting over power and artists were reviving classical traditions that had been rather dormant in Italy since the classical period, the Forbidden City was completed in Beijing, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake, the Inca Empire was founded and Machu Picchu was built, Constantinople was captured by the Ottoman Turks, Benin became a great power in northern Africa, and countless other things. Quite honestly, I didn’t know that a lot of these were happening at the same time as the things in my little world over in Italy – which is what I study because it’s what’s dear to my heart, and I’m the sort of person who goes for depth rather than breadth (hence why I know nothing about the popes of the 14th or 16th centuries, or the Medici after say 1520). History is so rich of things that no one can possibly know everything, even about a relatively short stretch of time such as the 15th century (which is, I suppose, why scholars have such specific topics). But all these things are equally important, and I truly hope that someone out there is as passionate about, say, the foundation of the Kingdom of Benin or the construction of Machu Picchu or the Forbidden City as I am about the Pazzi Conspiracy. Similarly, I hope someone (for example, yourself, anon?) who is interested in the global issues rather than the specific local ones, and can make broader connections between, say, artistic advancements in Asia and Europe – because there was such an outpouring of art during this period, as here has been during all periods! Anyway, this has been really long and went on a tangent that certainly didn’t answer your question, but I hope that you get something out of it? Because I certainly have.

#this was so long i'm sorry #personal correspondence #also never be embarrassed if you don't know something because we all have things to learn #like i said... i know very little about global history outside of 15th century italy i barely even know what was going on in england #but global history IS really cool

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therapy101 · 5 years

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What can therapy do in the face of climate change & fascism?

I’ve received several requests to comment on how worry about existential and sociocultural threats impact therapy and therapeutic approach. A couple of people have linked me this post as an example.

The question is: what can therapy do about real, objective threats to the individual therapy client and the world? For example, the linked post mentions climate change and the rise of fascism. Can therapy do anything? Is therapy only for minor problems, or issues that the client is ‘blowing out of proportion,’ so to speak?

I have a few points to make, so this may be a long post.

First, I want to acknowledge clearly that the earliest conceptions of psychotherapy- yes, like Freud –were built for rich people, and mostly those without acute or chronic threats to their wellbeing (I say “mostly,” because Freud and his colleagues saw a lot of women, who were still rich, but often lacked power due to their social status). Because of the target population for therapy in those days, therapy was not necessarily made to recognize or help with tangible, sociocultural threats that negatively impact mental health, like poverty or bigotry. That might be partially why psychodynamic psychotherapy is largely not evidence-based: it doesn’t target tangible outcomes, like symptom severity or functioning. So we would not expect those types of therapies to be helpful for people facing these sociocultural threats to their wellbeing.

I think the post linked, though, is mostly hinting at a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) approach (“are you sure that’s rational?”), so let’s talk about CBT and tangible sociocultural threats. It’s important to remember that a thing can be real, AND a person’s thoughts/beliefs about that thing can be distorted. Examining thoughts, and how they connect to feelings and behavior, can be helpful in many situations, not just when a person is completely misinterpreting/misunderstanding a situation. So for example, in that example post, there are two beliefs that are worthy of examining in a CBT context: 1) the belief that if you might not live to be 60, your life is pointless; and 2) the belief that there is nothing you can do to prevent the threats that might limit your lifespan.

That first belief (if you might not live to be 60, your life is pointless) really caught my eye because it’s so clearly in need of some Socratic questioning. Like: which lives are worthwhile? Is lifespan the main determining factor? How long do you need to live for your life to have a point? If you die the day after your 60th birthday, was your life worth more than if you die the day before your 60th birthday? If dying before age 60 renders your life pointless, was MLK’s life pointless? Joan of Arc? Jesus? (Insert your own examples of historical figures who died before age 60 here). If you knew you were going to die the night before your 60th birthday, would you just give up now because the years you do have left are pointless?

Or: if you knew you would die before age 60, how would you want to use the time you do have? How could you use it in the most meaningful, most worthwhile way?

That second belief is all about powerlessness, a common theme in CBT. For many people, one of their core beliefs is about lack of power or lack of worth. Core beliefs impact the decisions people make throughout their lives, the emotions they feel on a day to day basis, and their ongoing thoughts. Beliefs about powerlessness are also called defeatist attitudes, because when people believe “I am powerless,” or “There is nothing I can do to help myself/the world,” they act that way. They don’t try to change things or to help. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy- if I believe I can’t make an impact, I don’t try to make an impact, and therefore I don’t make an impact, proving to myself that I am in fact powerless.

Look: there are real, tangible threats in the world today, including climate change and fascism. That being true does not mean that all associated beliefs a person might have about the world or the future is also true. Steven Pinker, an experimental psychologist at Harvard, would say that overall, the world is better today than in the past. He would mention that lifespan is increasing, female education and literacy rates are increasing, and crime is decreasing worldwide. He would mention that the hole in the ozone layer has mostly mended. With more fact gathering, I think we would find more evidence that is more optimistic than that post- for example, the record number of women elected to the House of Representatives last year, or the (small) reduction in CO2 use in the US. I’m not saying that existential and sociocultural threats aren’t real, or that being worried and anxious and sad about them is wrong. I’m saying that any black and white belief about the world is almost always wrong (I say “almost” because if I didn’t, I’d be engaging in black and while thinking!). And that when we engage in black and white thinking, it often leads to us ignoring other, more nuanced information that might help us make better or more helpful decisions. If someone thinks, “things are terrible and there is nothing I can do,” they won’t do anything. But if someone thinks, “things are terrible, but I can vote/donate/volunteer/run for office/protest/etc,” they might do something that makes a difference (and might feel more hopeful and have a sense of purpose, both of which can really help with mental health). So considering whether your beliefs are fact-based, and then, whether they are helpful, is a really important therapeutic strategy.

But let’s also think beyond CBT. Sometimes people’s beliefs are totally rationale and there is no need to examine evidence. (Alternatively, sometimes people’s beliefs are not rationale but it won’t be helpful to examine the evidence.) Grief and loss is often a good example of this. Trauma can also often fit into this (although not always, which is why nearly all evidence-based trauma therapies include examining thoughts).

When that’s the case, other approaches, like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), can be really helpful. I think sometimes people think of evidence-based therapies or manualized therapies as being totally divorced from existential or meaning-focused questioning. CBT can actually do a great job of integrating those sorts of things too- like above, you can totally use CBT to delve into a question like, ‘what makes a life worth living?’ But ACT is developed with a specific orientation towards value-based living. The question the ACT might help someone answer is, ‘what are my values and how can I live my life in accordance with those values?’ The idea is that people experience less distress and feel more fulfilled when their actions are congruent with their values. That approach might lead the client from that post into a direction like: how can I use my values to integrate more meaning into my life, so that I don’t feel like my life is pointless?

Another thing that ACT does that can be hugely beneficial is to help people accept thoughts and create distance from them, instead of feeling so attached to thoughts. The central (VERY simplified) concept in ACT is that we as humans tend to see thoughts are core aspects of ourselves- innately meaningful and emblematic of our identities and truths, but that this is not actually true, and over-attachment to thoughts can be distressing and ultimately harmful. So creating that distance, and seeing a thought as just a thought, can help people feel less trapped in those thoughts and more able to take value-based action. In this case that might be having thoughts about life being pointless, or the rise of fascism being unstoppable and personally or universally fatal, and continuing to move forward and engage in meaningful action. So while in CBT, we often want to change unhelpful thoughts, in ACT we want to leave them as they are, but be less attached to them and less motivated to action by them.

There are other approaches that I haven’t touched on, but I’m realizing how hugely long this post is.

So my point is: therapy is not just for minor issues or irrational thinking. Therapy can help a person tackle existential questions, tangible sociocultural threats, and other big, real issues. Is it perfect at this? No. Is therapy able to stop climate change or turn the political tide? No. Can therapy always fix individual level experiences of sociocultural threats, like poverty or bigotry? No.

But: can therapy help people navigate overwhelming, difficult, tragic, traumatizing experiences? Yes. Can therapy help people feel more empowered to take the actions that are available to them within that sociocultural context? Yes. Can therapy help people feel less distressed and more able to pursue the life they want? Yes. Can therapy sometimes even help people change or fix those individual experiences of sociocultural threats? Yes, particularly when we’re talking about things like getting housing, disability payments, and other community supports and access.

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victoriagloverstuff · 6 years

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Like Most Americans, I Was Raised to Be A White Man

Like most Americans, I was raised to be a white man: I read William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. I read F. Scott Fitzgerald and Charles Bukowski. I came to identify with the emotionally disengaged characters, the staccato sentences, the irreverent dirty old man voice. The books I read asked me to imagine the power I might have. I got women pregnant and then worried that they wouldn’t get an abortion, tying me down forever when all I wanted to do was continue experiencing my freedom. I wrote poems about the absurdity of writing poems, enjoying the decadence of imagining my readers drinking in my disregard for them. Being likeable, explaining oneself to others, were not prerequisites of protagonism. I watched women move—their hips in dresses, their lips on glasses, their breasts heaving. All of it offered up to me, to enjoy, to consume. The fact that I was a brown woman was not something that seemed immediately relevant when I was younger.

I moved through the world with this sense that I would have access to the same kind of power as the protagonists of the books I read and movies I watched. Of course we all identify with white protagonists—they’re almost always the heroes, the ones with the power to change things, to affect things rather than simply be affected.

As James Baldwin put it,

You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realize all of these things are really metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish.

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And whether it be because you are female, brown, queer, or in any other way visibly other from white, able-bodied, cisgender, heterosexual men, it feels like a kind of violence when you suddenly have to reckon with the differences of the body you’re in. Not because of some innate qualities embedded in those differences, but because of all the assumptions made about the body you’re in that you have to confront.

Coming of age in particular constitutes a jarring emergence of double-consciousness—of being forced to see yourself through the eyes of others even as you’re still trying to form a sense of self.

During a summer trip to Florida to visit relatives, my aunt, poolside, remarked upon my 14-year-old form in a bathing suit: When did you get breasts? How big are those things? I felt ashamed—and not just because my body was suddenly a spectacle. I already knew it was. How big are those things was precisely how I felt about the strange lumps of flesh that had sprouted from my body. They were separate from me.

While I was deeply embarrassed by my aunt’s commentary, there was an element of identification, of relating to her perspective. It seemed more of a farce to me that people could look at me and assume that this newly hatched female form was somehow me instead of something that had happened to me.

And yet, that is the presumption: that the general shape you come to take imbues you with certain “female” traits—to be accommodating, empathetic, emotional, sexual (but not too sexual!). Our bodies become shorthand for a grab-bag of assumptions, some of which we grow into, some of which we bristle against.

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My femaleness has always been something that seemed to fit me poorly—at turns an oversized garment I could not fill, or some skimpy rag out of which I spilled.

I’ve already made a mistake by calling the femaleness “mine.” It’s never felt like a thing I owned so much as a general shape I grew into that seemed to offer me up for public consumption.

“I moved through the world with this sense that I would have access to the same kind of power as the protagonists of the books I read and movies I watched.“

The phrase “gender is a construct” might strike some as academic claptrap, but ask any woman how they were treated before and after puberty, and you’re well on your way to understanding not just the truth, but how fucked up that truth is—the extent to which the entire world, and the way you must navigate it, is irrevocably changed.

Also at 14, I remember walking down the street with K. and H., my closest friends, in the North Carolina college town where I grew up. We flinched when three men started catcalling us. Yeah, baby. Look at that ass. I remember feeling bewildered and disarmed. Having a reputation as being the outspoken one, I felt vaguely responsible for doing something about it. But I did nothing.

One of the most humiliating aspects of that moment was that in doing nothing, it felt like I had allowed them to do something to us. This is one of the most nefarious aspects of predatory behavior: it makes the target of the behavior feel complicit. You might be going about your business, and then someone who has more power than you demands engagement—the kind in which even your refusal does not always free you, forcing you to play a part in a scene you had no interest in even auditioning for.

A couple hours after the encounter with those men, my friends and I piled back into the car and started our drive home. That’s when I spotted the men, still roving the sidewalk not far from where we’d encountered them. Wait! I told H., who was driving. Slow down. I rolled down the window, started shouting at them the very same things they had lobbed at us: Yeah, baby. Look at that ass. It was a humbling and educational moment because, of course, they loved it. I was startled in my naïveté: I had turned the tables, but the tables had not turned.

I didn’t have the language for it then, but this was one of the first times I experienced how my words would always be shaped by my appearance—how they would be heard differently. How they would often weigh less. How the expectations of my femaleness would become a thing I would repeatedly have to explain, justify, respond to, contradict.

The same was true of my brownness. Growing up in the South, I quickly learned how to translate the questions “What are you?” and “Where are you from?” Obviously, “human” and “North Carolina by way of Connecticut and California” didn’t cut it. What they wanted was for me to explain the parts of me that weren’t white. I came to accept the question, and as I got older, played around with responses. Sometimes I’d say I was “half white” (and in response to “What’s the other half?” I’d add “half non-white”). Sometimes I’d say I was “mostly human.” I played dumb, and answered as literally as possible in an attempt to force people to examine what they were saying, what they actually wanted to know, and whether it was a reasonable thing to ask of a virtual stranger.

This was hardly unique to my experience of growing up in the South. When I was in my twenties, I spoke to a literary agent in New York about a collection of short stories I had written. She was excited by my writing, but concerned that there wasn’t enough of an “overarching emotional arc or theme” to connect the stories. “For instance,” she wrote,

Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories have something larger to say about first generation Indian-Americans—about marriage, family dynamics, adjusting to a new country, etc., and I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to say here . . . I’d like to see more of your background woven into the stories.

Better yet, one of the stories in the collection I had shared with her included a protagonist who was an Indian writer in conversation with her agent:

“Nobody biting yet,” the agent writes, suggesting that I start something new—something that “takes advantage of your heritage. . . . How about a novel with an Indian-in-America theme? Sort of Jhumpa Lahiri-ish?”

It was darkly comical that the real-life agent was echoing the fictional situation I had written. At the time, I took her feedback to heart. Yet I found myself wondering about what she meant by my “background.” My primary identity is not as a first-generation Indian-American. I identify more as an ambiguously brown American—one who decided to learn Spanish in part because so many people assume I’m Latina, that I figured I should be able to at least say, “No soy Latina. Mi padre es de India y mi madre es blanca—de Estados Unidos.” The unifying theme in the stories I gave the agent was precisely this: my characters were shape-shifters whose appearances were often in tension with their self-identification.

I abandoned those stories, and it wasn’t until almost a decade after my conversation with that agent that I thought: Would she ever have said “I’d like to see more of your background woven into the stories” to a white male writer?

“I didn’t have the language for it then, but this was one of the first times I experienced how my words would always be shaped by my appearance—how they would be heard differently.”

When you ask what terrain a white male fiction writer might explore, the sky is generally the limit. (In fact, it’s rare to even see that question posed.) But if you’re queer, brown, female, differently abled, etc., it’s expected that you’ll discuss that. More than discuss it, you’re often tasked with explaining it—what happened, why you look the way you do, why you identify the way you do in contrast to the expectations projected on you based on your appearance. The conversation you’re supposed to have is the conversation white folks would like to have based on what they see. They’re the kinds of questions we almost never think to ask white folks themselves—particularly white men.

As an “other,” the complex human you are ends up being reduced to a handful of visible traits. It’s a kind of censorship: the world’s questions shape how you define yourself, how you explain yourself. Even individuals and organizations with good intentions end up reinforcing this heavily policed line: there are a number of scholarship and funding initiatives for marginalized individuals, but to be eligible or to have a real chance of being selected, you usually have to prove that this identity is core to who you are and the work you do.

To move beyond the perceived notions of your identity can be destabilizing for other people. As a teenager, I recall a drunken frat boy who, after seeing me teaching a friend basic dance steps, ambled over to ask what kind of dancing we were doing. I told him it was salsa. His brow furrowed. Then he asked, “What are you?” I translated his question, replied that I was half Indian. I watched his face travel a journey of utter bewilderment. There were about eight long seconds of silence before he came out with: “Then . . . shouldn’t you be Indian dancing?” Despite the offensiveness of the question, I laugh when I think about it. In the moment, I recall telling him that I knew he had had a lot to drink, but that I wanted him to try to remember the conversation when he woke up the next morning, and to think about what he’d assumed and why it was problematic. He nodded, a little confused, the effort of earnestly trying to follow my instructions written on his face.

I sometimes get nostalgic about the transparent way that boy responded to me. I knew exactly where he stood. He felt like less of a threat than so many of the folks who count themselves as allies while their bigotry goes unexamined, closeted behind a veneer of progressive cred or good intentions. This outright confusion or even straightforward bigotry and sexism can be easier to navigate than the more veiled way so many Americans—particularly those on the Left—deal with their confusion about, and fear of, otherness.

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