“I don’t feel like I can be honest”
The lament of the…well, of many people, but here, today, in this context, I’ll stick to an old chestnut–the compulsive person–and let the reader extrapolate what they will. What can’t they be honest about? their problem behaviors: drugs, sex, violence. If you have forbidden or just difficult thoughts are you meant to share them? Is there really a gap between thought and behavior? Think quickly, your compulsive self doesn’t think (think?) so. Meanwhile, doesn’t a complaint about honesty imply a willingness to listen to thoughts that acting out behaviors displace?
For those confused by that question, I shall retrace my steps and describe the concept of “acting out” as first explained by Freud (1914). Action replaces thought, feeling, and memory. Compulsive behaviors, for example, are substitutive: they displace energy from one objectionable idea to another, and the latter idea, though objectionable, is actually a lesser idea. That’s right, says the average dissenter, straining to understand this cant yet suspicious of its source…sounds NPR-like, or something. Yes, annihilating another or others in the plural may yield a sting of guilt, but it’s preferable to the sting of victimization, which is belittling, annihilating and, for the sake of posterity…so ultimately shaming. Make me great, as in big, again, not small. The small do not win, H.G. Wells be damned*.
An illustration, perhaps. A person has a complaint about an intimate partner–said partner has become less attractive physically. She’s a women whose hips have expanded. He’s a man sporting a “dad-bod”. Or, either has become difficult in some personal habit and is obstinate in the face of protest. “That’s your problem”, they dismiss, not perceiving the cliff of calamity that can greet such carelessness. The person who “acts out” with porn, drink, an affair, the reckless spending of money, is typically seeking an escape from such impasses. Not so fast, argue those cathected to the narratives of compulsivity. They aver that addicts will do what they do when they want to no matter what stressors or stimulants exist, therefore dog-whistling deflections are contra-indicated, if you please. Sorry, allow me a moment to slap my hand that taps on a keyboard, chastise the mind that thinks what it thinks. See, a question remains, slipping past the modern repressive: do the rules du jour mean that the “obstinate” partner is at fault for the mooted acting out that may or may not follow–ya know, that spending, hoarding, drinking, to infidelity and therefore betrayal hierarchy?
No, and the reader, if you haven’t already opened a new tab and becoming ensconced in a video instead, may notice that I will dodge dichotomies as if they are intellectual potholes. What I am saying is that conflict avoidance is the meta-essence of escapism, and that “acting out” and so-called betrayed partners share a responsibility–that’s right, share–for the relational phenomenon of checking out. Regarding those complaints about your physicality, your lessened drive, your attribution of “this is all you want” to your plaintive other, your wearying politics, or your fixed notions of what constitutes romance and “genuine love”–all the things about which you are politer, more open-minded during the the courting stage of a relationship. So, do you really want to talk about all that stuff, and potentially revise your views. Yes? No? What do you want?
** a reference to The War of the Worlds wherein the tiny, heroic virus does what humanity can’t: defeat the alien
Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 