Do I really believe that?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original posting: Sat, 27 Dec 1997 00:37:13 EST

Okay... here's today's game.

First, pick one of the following statements (down there a ways, you can't miss them, there are 35 of them.)

The easy way? Pick a number from one to seven. subtract one, and multiply by five. (this should give you one of these: 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 ). Next, pick a number from one to five. add it to the previous number. poof! there's your statement.

(the slightly harder way? read through the list and pick one that you know seems obvious to you, but other people seem to ignore or not understand often.)

Next do a little exploration. Write down your statement in the form that you would ordinarily think of it in (i.e., make it YOUR statement). Then underneath, write these two questions: "If that weren't true, why would it upset me? What would it mean to me?" Think about that, and sum up the automatic response that you would make to that challenge. Write down that new statement, and ask yourself again: "If that weren't true, why would it upset me? What would it mean to me?" Keep going for three to five steps, or more if you want to.

Then look at the assumptions that are contained in your chain of statements. Look for all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralizations, mental filters that only show you one part, disqualification of the positive, jumps to conclusions based on mindreading and predictions of disasters, magnifications or minimizations, emotional reasoning, should's and shouldn't and musty musts, labeling and mislabeling, and personalizations that may be threaded into your statements.

Ask yourself three questions: (from p. 289)

1. Is it to my advantage to maintain this particular belief?
2. Is this belief really true and valid?
3. What specific steps can I take that will allow me to rid myself of attitudes that are self-defeating and unrealistic, and substitute others that are more objective and more self-enhancing?

Consider the various possible stances towards this belief that are possible, and why different people may have different views of the issues...

And then "play out" the story. Whether in a poem, story, or other format, show us the possibilities. Maybe your heroine believes that her value depends on how others think about her, and someone on the football team is spreading nasty rumors about her?

Or perhaps you want to re-create the tale of Sisyphus, building on the struggle to make everyone happy all the time, and being crushed time after time by that stone? A rhyming we will go, a rhythm taps our toe, hi-ho-the merry o, a poem for to blow? (okay, I'll stop there, but you don't have to...)

[that was probably too fast. First, pick a statement and explore your own thinking about it. Second, take that thinking and package it as a story, poem, essay, or something else. I.e., take the general statement and show us one or more scenes with someone trying to apply that abstraction, to make it concrete and real in their life. The conflict(s) can come from alternate positions, or just from the normal difficulties of trying to apply such a general statement...]

From Feeling Good by David D. Burns, M.D., ISBN 0-380-71803-0

(p. 272 ff)

1. Criticism will obviously upset the person who receives the criticism.
2. It is best to give up my own interests in order to please other people.
3. I need other people's approval in order to be happy.
4. If someone important to me expects me to do something, than I really should do it.
5. My value as a person depends greatly on what others think of me.

6. I cannot find happiness without being loved by another person.
7. If others dislike you, you are bound to be less happy.
8. If people whom I care about reject me, it means there is something wrong with me.
9. If a person I love does not love me, it means I am unloveable.
10. Being isolated from others is bound to lead to unhappiness.

11. If I am to be a worthwhile person, I must be truly outstanding in at least one major respect.
12. I must be a useful, productive, creative person or life has no purpose.
13. People who have good ideas are more worthy than those who do not.
14. If I do not do as well as other people, it means I am inferior.
15. If I fail at my work, then I am a failure as a person.

16. If you cannot do something well, there is little point in doing it at all.
17. It is shameful for a person to display his weaknesses.
18. A person should try to be the best at everything he undertakes.
19. I should be upset if I make a mistake.
20. If I don't set the highest standards for myself, I am likely to end up a second-rate person.

21. If I strongly believe I deserve something, I have reason to expect that I should get it.
22. It is necessary to become frustrated if you find obstacles to getting what you want.
23. If I put other people's needs before my own, they should help me when I need something from them.
24. If I am a good husband (or wife), then my spouse is bound to love me.
25. If I do nice things for someone, I can anticipate that they will respect me and treat me just as well as I treat them.

26. I should assume responsibility for how people feel and behave if they are close to me.
27. If I criticize the way someone does something and they become angry or depressed, this means I have upset them.
28. To be a good, worthwhile, moral person, I must try to help everyone who needs it.
29. If a child is having emotional or behavioral difficulties, this shows that the child's parents have failed in some important respect.
30. I should be able to please everybody.

31. I cannot expect to control how I feel when something bad happens.
32. There is no point in trying to change upsetting emotions because they are a valid and inevitable part of daily living.
33. My moods are primarily created by factors that are largely beyond my control, such as the past, or body chemistry, or hormone cycles, or biorhythms, or chance, or fate.
34. My happiness is largely dependent on what happens to me.
35. People who have the marks of success (good looks, social status, wealth, or fame) are bound to be happier than those who do not.

These are the clusters:

1. Approval (1-5) do you measure your self-esteem based on how people react to you and what they think of you?

2. Love (6-10) do you base your worth on whether or not you are loved?

3. Achievement (11-15) do you base your worth and satisfation on your external productivity or your internal creativity?

4. Perfectionism (16-20) do you demand perfection or simply meaningful, flexible standards?

5. Entitlement (21-25) do you feel entitled to things or do you negotiate for them?

6. Omnipotence (26-30) do you see yourself as the center of your universe and hold yourself responsible for much of what happens?

7. Autonomy (31-35) do you believe that your potential for joy and self-esteem comes from outside or do you know that you are the creator of your own thoughts, attitudes, and feelings?

Note that (p. 269) "...there is no 'right' or 'wrong' answer to any statement. To decide whether a given attitude is typical of your own philosophy, recall how you look at things _most of the time_."

(In the book, he suggests rating yourself somewhere in Agree Strongly, Agree Slightly, Neutral, Disagree Slightly, and Disagree Very Much. Then use -2 for Agree Strongly to +2 for Disagree Very Much and add up the totals for each cluster. (p. 284) "...a positive score represents an area where you are psychologically _strong_. A negative score represents an area where you're emotionally _vulnerable_." And there is a section on interpreting the scores...)

and today's burning question--when you play mental games, where do you bounce the ball?

On Your Tropes and Schemes!

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original posting: Fri, 5 Dec 1997 23:59:37 EST

[my elusive tropes and schemes...]

A list of tropes:

1. metaphor
2. simile
3. personification
4. irony
5. hyperbole
6. understatement
7. metonymy
8. synecdoche

A list of schemes:

1. allegory,
2. parallelism
3. antithesis
4. congeries
5. apostrophe
6. enthymeme
7. interrogatio
8. gradatio

Okay. The first part of the exercise is to make sure you know what each of these means! You may consult your dictionaries, your rhetorical grammars, or whatever sources you like (even knocking out the old brain cells is permitted!).

The second part of the exercise is work. Next time you are trying to write about something, take one of these lists (the tropes or the schemes) and walk down through all eight flavorings, trying them out. Talking about love? Think about a gooey metaphor, a fine simile, a ribald personification, a phrase with irony, some hyperbole, perhaps an understatement, a dash of metonymy, or even the odd synecdoche!

Or, if you're all troped out, try dressing it up in a scheme! Think of the fine allegories of love lurking in your swamp, or maybe the parallelism of two bodies? don't you hate that antithesis, though? or you could do a congeries line! (not to mention the apostrophe most insincere) what about enthymememe (sorry, the opera singer got stuck)? do you think you might employ interrogatio? or if not, how about gradatio?

[psst? no idea what most of those flaky words mean? try making it multiple choice...here's most--but not all!--of the meanings... match them up, then figure out which ones I left out, and add those meanings:

a. overstatement or exaggeration

b. substituting one word for another which it suggests or to which it is in some way related

c. combining opposites into one statement--"To be or not to be, that is the question"

d. a turning from one's immediate audience to address another, who may be present only in the imagination

e. a progressive advance from one statement to another until a climax is achieved

f. an accumulation of statements or phrases that say essentially the same thing

g. a discrepancy between a speaker's literal statement and his attitude or intent

h. a comparison announced by "like" or "as"

i. constructing sentences or phrases that resemble one another syntactically

j. attributing human qualities to a nonhuman being or object

k. a loosely syllogistic form of reasoning in which the speaker assumes that any missing premises will be supplied by the audience

l. substituting part for whole,

m. the "rhetorical" question, which is posed for argumentative effect and requires no answer

Five (or more?) Senses to Play With...

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original posting: Fri, 21 Nov 1997 09:34:11 EST

This could probably be considered a warm-up for writing, especially sensual or romantic or otherwise sensational pieces.

First, pick a number from one to six:

1. Morning
2. Work
3. Art
4. Belief
5. Play
6. Evening

Okay! You have a somewhat abstract little term there. Now, the next step is to take your term and make a list. Here are the categories--do them in order. Try to come up with at least five items for each one.

1. Taste:
2. Smell:
3. Touch:
4. Hearing:
5. Sight:
6. Motion/muscle:

So, for example, you might stop and think what morning tastes like. Is it the slimy film on your teeth before you brush? Or is it the gritty freshness of your mouth after you brush? What about the crunchiness of an English muffin, with the greasiness of melted butter? What does morning taste like to you?

Last, for the end game that makes you stretch, take a number from one to six:

1. Hate
2. Fear
3. Guilt
4. Pride
5. Anticipation
6. Love

And there we have an emotion. Step back and think about how a character might have such an emotion--perhaps guilt over where they spent last night?

Then write one paragraph using several (probably not all) of the sensory involvements you thought of earlier, in which the focal character is experiencing this emotional loading (the focal character may be the POV character or not, at your discretion--I'd suggest third person to avoid those "I"s). Oh, and don't tell us what your first abstraction was, or what the emotional wind is that is blowing--just show it to us, through the sensations and pin-pricks.

So, for example, give us a lyrical picture of the character, chomping through the cornflakes, slicing bananas and strawberries into a bowl (with a nick or two on the forefinger?) and inhaling that aroma, listening to the tiny white "pop" of creamy bubbles in the milk, swirling a spoon in a figure-eight until the coffee slops over the edge of the mug...give us that scene, replete with sensory detail, and make us feel your abstract theme, flavored with the emotional twist.

[yes, of course, the poetically inclined may write a verse, rather terse, instead of a paragraph full of laugh...]

(short start? how about:

I could feel my fingers wiggling in it.

and what did it feel like? smell like? go on...tell us all about it!]