Tag: psychology (Page 1 of 2)

The Emperor’s New Romance: An Aroace Writes Normative

June 15, 2022 / Alice Thomsen / 0 Comments

A disclaimer: This post brushes up against some big topics under the umbrella of LGBTQ+ concerns, and I am not going to do anything resembling justice to those topics. Good resources are out there if you’re looking to expand your appreciation for experiences outside the heteronormative; this post is not one of them.

Here are three things you should know about me before we go any further:
1. I love bad puns.
2. I am not a skilled archer.
3. But I am an aroace.

I grapple sometimes with the sense that I am defined less by my shape than by the negative space around me. I’m not a thing; I am an a-thing: an atheist, mildly anarchic, too apathetic to do much about it. And, in this month of Pride, an aromantic asexual.

Like bad puns, bad writing transcends gender, age, religion, political affiliation, race, and every other boundary we use to try to define our unique human shapes. Still, a corner of the internet has evolved to celebrate one overlap in the Venn diagram of poor prose: men writing women. Sometimes humorous, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes calling into question the US educational system, but always betraying some fundamental misunderstanding of the Female Experience.

As fiction writers, we can’t be bound too tightly by a literal interpretation of write what you know. Still, there are considerations for writing what you don’t know, most of which involve remembering what assuming makes of u—and me, when I laugh at your expense. Which I do, shamelessly, even though I sympathize with those male authors whose writing is excerpted for its ridiculous shortcomings. We all have blind spots, those places to us so foreign we don’t realize how unknown they are until we try to capture them and discover (sometimes too late, courtesy of Reddit) how clueless we really are. Some people happen to be men; I happen to be aroace.

Let me say, for the record, that I have tried. In college, I was a few biology courses away from a minor in human sexuality. I’ve read studies and theories and analyses; for years, my go-to diversion in social situations was to discuss the erotic plasticity of female goats. (In short: Take a female baby goat and raise her with sheep, then introduce her to other goats as an adult, and she’ll mate with goats and sheep; take a male baby goat and raise him with sheep, and he’ll only mate with sheep even after being introduced to other goats.) At the risk of being uncouth, I’ll just say that I went well out of my way to make sense of sex—in large part because I wanted to be able to write it competently. Now, I understand it enough that I can fictionalize the drive for it the same way I can write about characters who enjoy recreational runs or big parties. Seems kind of sweaty, awkward, and inefficient to me, but hey—live your life. You do you, or your partner, or yours partners, so long as there’s informed consent all around.

But then there’s romance. Deep down, part of me suspects romance is a myth, likely fabricate by Hallmark/the government/aliens/the Illuminati. I get emotional intimacy, bonding, attachment, and I get physical intimacy, closeness, affection—all that makes sense. But the idea that what we think of as a Normal Couple is anything other than close friends who also have sex—that there’s some mystical other component called “romance”? Seems a bit Emperor’s New Clothes to me.

In writing, I used to fade to black (or, I guess cut to white) whenever it was time for any sort of sexual activity. Now, I’m no master of erotica, but I like to think I can pull off a typical suggestive-but-not-explicit encounter. Romance, though? It all happens off screen. Take some characters; make them friends; make them get physical; yadda yadda the mysterious part … and bam, now they’re doing Romance.

Deeper down than my skepticism, though, is my fear that maybe some hurdles are too significant. Sure, I can conceptualize the mindset of a serial killer who believes they’re taking an ethically-sound approach to righting societal wrongs, but a character experiencing the development of a romantic relationship? No thanks. I don’t have the emotional fortitude to become a meme.

Psychopathology of a Grad Student

June 24, 2014 / Alice Thomsen / 0 Comments

First off, yes, it’s been over six months. I know.

I’m officially halfway through my graduate program at Ball State University. Some things I’ve done over the past year:

-Taught two sections of ENG 104, a research-based course in the first-year writing program.
-Decided teaching was absolutely not for me, because I dreaded getting up in the morning to go to campus.
-Realized that I dreaded getting up in the morning, period; days when I taught just forced me to do it anyway.
-Realized something might be wrong.

Writers are a crazy lot. It’s just something we assume, and research tends to back it up. The mania of creation, the depressive blank page, the sitting in a coffee shop wearing a too-big sweater and watching raindrops slide down the window and contemplating the human condition in all its extremes. And, you know, sometimes the hallucinations and delusions and total breaks from reality.

Similarly, we attribute an inherent neuroticism to graduate students. What sort of obsession, after all, drives somebody into that sort of self-selected servitude? Late nights hoarding books in the library, snapping, “No!” in response to every social invitation, taking naps at a desk between classes and then waking up feeling guilty for not having used that time more productively.

There’s a certain glamour in fitting these stereotypes. What’s more writerly than soul-crushing angst? As Ursula K. Le Guin observes in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” …

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.

And if you’re not in a codependent, self-destructive relationship with graduate school, you may as well not be in grad school at all. Clearly you aren’t taking it seriously enough.

I have a spotty history when it comes to mental health, but I like to think I’ve learned something from it. Most importantly: The time to intervene is before it becomes unbearable. You may think, But I’m still functioning. I’m still getting out of bed, after all. Thing is, you have to take action while you’re still functioning enough to get out of bed. Taking action requires getting out of bed.

Yes, there may be some link that makes writerly types more prone to the crazies, or vice versa; yes, grad school will demand time and energy and commitment. But there’s no glory in misery or self-neglect.

There’s glory in action. Or, at least, there’s the potential for it.

I’m going to hack my brain (but I’m not qualified to instruct you as to how to do the same)

May 2, 2013 / Alice Thomsen / 0 Comments

Not so long ago, I claimed that I would finish out the semester and then give an update on my plans for the future. I still intend to, but for now, a brief digression.

I graduated last Sunday, with a double major in creative writing and psychology. And here’s the thing about undergrad psychology students: we have a tendency to feel more knowledgable than we actually are. This can be handy—if you want something in your life framed in terms of rats in a behavioral psychology lab, for instance, I am your girl—but also dangerous. It’s not so unlike the pre-med student who decides to diagnose friends or go Charlie Bartlett and open up an amateur psychiatry clinic. There’s a sweet spot between total ignorance and sufficient expertise where you know enough to really mess things up, if you’re not careful (even if you try to be).

This is why I say that, when I discuss how I’m going to use psychology on myself in the coming paragraphs, I am not encouraging anyone else to do the same. This is not I earned $50,000 last year working from home, and you can too! (Although really, you should probably be wary of that, too.) This is also why I call it brain hacking. I’m not a qualified life coach or motivational guru, just someone trying to break into somewhere with security about at the level of password1234.

So, with that disclaimer, here’s my plan to hack my brain.

We all know Pavlov and his dogs: ring a bell before you feed the dog and eventually the dog will start to salivate when the bell rings. (Sadly the set-up was not nearly as pleasant for the dogs as one might hope an experiment centered around food would be.) Classical conditioning is all about stimulus pairing.

Something similar to this is useful in setting up routines. Writers talk about their Writing Place, or their Writing Notebook, or their Writing Sweatpants—whatever it is, it’s something that has become linked in their mind to writing, so that the simple act of going there/opening it/putting them on/etc. kicks their brain into writing mode without any conscious effort on their part.

Photo credit: Maria Brundage

This is why I’m very particular about pens, for instance, and having different pens for different situations. I have my general purpose pen, my writing pen, and my revising pen, which is purple rather than the standard red. It’s also why, whenever I embark on a big project, I make a project-specific playlist. Even now, I think of my tenth grade novel whenever I hear A Perfect Circle’s “The Outsider”—but only the version that was on the Resident Evil: Apocalypse soundtrack. If I’d seen the movie first, perhaps that would be different, but as is, that song comes on, and there I am, perched on a window ledge before class, off-brand Discman tucked next to me, working on that old, terrible novel. I can’t claim it makes me drool with desire to return to the project, but there’s still that instant association.

Without applications or final projects tying up my writerly energy, I find myself with time to write on my own terms … and struggling to really commit to it. There’s time to write, sure, but it’s not Writing Time, and I struggle to get “in the groove” in that sense.

The key, I think, is those associations, those triggers. Those things that make you feel, in your gut or salivary glands or whatever, that it’s time to write.

Now that the term and my undergraduate studies are done, I’m wholly responsible for making my schedule. With that and Pavlov in mind, I aim to maximize it. Find all sorts of ways to trigger the “It’s writing o’clock!” impulse. Maybe I’ll even get a bell. Who knows? The future’s full of surprises.

Dissonance, Part II: shocking revelations

May 31, 2012 / Alice Thomsen / 0 Comments

As previously mentioned, I recently read Kurt Vonnegut’s early novel, Mother Night. Protagonist Howard W. Campbell Jr. writes his memoirs for the Haifa Institute, awaiting his trial for war crimes committed while serving as an American spy, producing Nazi propaganda.

The Nazi story is an unsettling one. Howard confesses, when pressed, that if Germany had won the war, he would likely have gone along with it, American spy or no, and this is an unfortunate truth many of us would rather not face. We like to think we are secure in our values and moralities, that we are unaffected by situational factors.

A defense used over and over again was this: “I was just following orders.” How could so many people “just follow orders” to commit such atrocities? One theory, particularly popular with Americans, was the Culture and Personality Theory: essentially, traits inherent to the German culture fostered in the German people an “authoritarian personality,” meaning they were naturally predisposed to “just follow orders.” The appeal of this explanation is, of course, that Americans would never do that, because our culture fosters independence and free thought. A competing theory, Situational Theory, posited that situational factors (e.g., Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War I and the ensuing depression combined with Hitler’s charisma, nationalism, and success) positioned people for that sort of obedience. The implications of this are much less comforting: what happened in Germany could happen anywhere, to anyone, given the right conditions.

In 1961, when the trials of Nazi war criminals were just beginning, Stanley Milgram devised a now-infamous experiment. He recruited subjects for what he called a study on learning. Subjects were taken into a room and told that they were to be the “teacher,” and on the other side of the wall was another subject, the “student”; the teacher would ask the student a question, and when the student answered incorrectly, the teacher was instructed to deliver a shock of increasing severity.

The settings on the device used for shocks were marked, ranging from mild to extremely dangerous, 450V. Inevitably, the students got questions wrong, and the teachers delivered the prescribed shocks. As the voltage got higher, though, students became distraught, eventually begging the teachers to stop, crying, and finally going silent. Whenever the teachers showed signs of hesitation, though, the researcher instructed them to continue. Sixty-five percent of participants administered the maximum shock.

The students were actually actors, and no real shocks were given. Milgram’s results, though, support the Situational Theory over the Culture and Personality Theory. His subjects were normal members of American society, but they “just followed orders” and did things most of us would consider unacceptable.

(There are many criticisms of Milgram’s study, and he is largely responsible for the heightened standards of the Human Subjects Review Committee for ethics, including the addition of an informed consent making subjects explicitly aware that they can stop participating at any time. The results may be imperfect, but they are still troubling.)

So what does this mean for Howard W. Campbell Jr., Nazi propagandist and American agent, known for fraternizing with Eichmann and openly condemning the United States and its Jewish overlords? What does it mean for the other war criminals awaiting trial? What does it mean for me, as a reader, on the opposite side of those pages?

We are not so different as we would like to think.

[to be continued]

Dissonance, Part I: it’s good for you.

May 19, 2012 / Alice Thomsen / 0 Comments

Dissonance does funny things to people.

In 1959, Festinger and Carlsmith set people at a tedious, seemingly pointless task for an hour. After the task was finished, some of the participants were sent on their way; the others were asked to do a favor: go to the waiting room and tell the next “participants” (actors) that the task was interesting. Half these people were offered $20 (~$150 today), and the other half were offered $1 (~$7.50). When asked to rate their own response to the task, participants given $1 tended to call it more interesting than those given $20.

Here’s the explanation posed by Festinger and Carlsmith.

The task was boring. One would be hard-pressed to see it otherwise. But the participants told others that it wasn’t. The ones given $20 could use that money as solid justification, could tell themselves, “I said that because hey—$20!” The others, though, had only a dollar’s excuse. So, they reasoned, since the incentive wasn’t that great, there must’ve been more than that behind their claim that the task was interesting—for instance, maybe the task actually was interesting. If it hadn’t been, after all, why would they have said so for just a dollar?

We want to align things in our minds. When a few dissonant notes are struck, we want them to resolve into a major chord. Sometimes that means changing our circumstances—e.g., if I start reading a book and dislike it, I can stop. Other times, though, that means changing our perspectives.

I recently read Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. The introduction begins …

This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

… and concludes …

There’s another clear moral to this tale, now that I think about it: When you’re dead you’re dead.

And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It’s good for you.

Vonnegut is known for his irreverence and the ubiquitous so it goes, but also—maybe most—for his dark humor. Jessica Hagy expresses it well:

Vonnegut, I would suggest, thrives on dissonance.