It’s been a few months now, and my perspective isn’t quite as ‘green’ as it was. Of course, there will always be new challenges and surprises, but at least for now I’ve found a comfort zone within the company. I survived my first “sink or swim” moment and managed to tread, though I did get some water up my nose ;) That incident, as well as my conversations with the kids since that time, has really honed my understanding of two concepts that I think hallmark passage into cognitive maturity.
Consciousness and choice.
We all have blind spots to our personality, as Johari’s window taught us all, but have you ever wondered just how ‘blind’ you really are? Kids classically have a huge blind spot when it comes to self-concept and reality, just ask Piaget.
Some clients respond to everything with “I don’t know”. They use learned helplessness as a defense mechanism against being wrong and getting punished. They are not conscious to the reality that their environment has changed, and they are now in a “sink or swim” scenario. From birth they were taught, “If I pretend to be drowning, someone will save me”.
Some of them have distorted ideas of what it means to be in a loving relationship with someone. Scratch that, all of them do. Whether it be a single letter from a long lost relative sending a kid into weeks of hysterics over what to write back, or a kid who just left the program calling us nine days later to tell us they’re engaged to someone they just met. A little bit of attachment is a big attachment to them; they cling desperately to anything they can get their hands on. They are not conscious to the process of relationship development in a world without hurt, abuse, and neglect.
Some of them cannot conceptualize that the wind cannot, in fact, attempt to “intentionally piss [you] off”.
It feels like I am constantly failing in my attempts to bring them into the conscious world. Who wants to break it to a kid that their new “grandparent” might not be a good influence on them? Or that one letter might be all they get?
Balancing the fine line between having faith in humanity and making sure reality is still in sight is a constant struggle. One in which most of us fail, one way or the other, most of the time.
It also makes me question my own consciousness. Who am I trying to be, and how is that different from who I am? Am I aware of this difference? What am I blind to? What can I do to be more aware of exactly the person I am?
If you ever want a total mind trip, take a social psychology class (from a good professor). It will cause you to question every belief you were ever taught, every tradition instilled in you, and everything you thought you knew about the social world. When you start to see where the things you "know" come from, how much more "objectively correct" are they than what these kids know? What my dad taught me, and what his dad taught him may be worlds apart, but they are still concreted into the foundations of our concept of self and knowledge of the world with the exact same solidity and effect on our futures.
Just as with us, it takes a mountain of effort to pull us out of our ways of thinking and to conceptualize in a different light.
Which leads me to topic two: Choice.
To be continued…..Muahaha.
(Also on the docket: the spectrum, how different are bottom feeders from fishermen?)
