From: dy@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Dr. Yes)
Newsgroups: soc.singles
Subject: Re: Various Ramblings
Date: 15 Aug 92 16:22:01 GMT

I started following your discussion a couple of weeks ago, and
since you had apparently decided to be completely open I was about
to ask a couple of question when you went ahead and answered them
in your post entitled "Various ramblings."

I was going to ask if you had been picked on or been a victim of
peer abuse by other boys.  You suggest that you were when you say
the kids are all mean in junior high.

From you description of your reading and coordination difficulties
I would guess that you suffered from a what is known as a "mixed
development disorder."  For reasons that are not completely clear,
such children are usually rejected by their peers -- the "being
different" thing apparently.  Kids that suffer from such a
disorder -- some girls have it, too -- are rejected by ordinary
peers as well as becoming targets for bullies.

The other principal feature of your personality, the apparent need
to keep cognitive processes conscious and explicit, the lack of
trust in "intuitive" or "unconscious" processes (also seen in
persons with autistic tendencies), is also a common accompaniment
of what is sometimes called "people phobia" -- this one isn't in
the DSM-III-R -- namely an inability to get close to other people.

Whether it is the _rejection_ (deprivation) or the more active
victimization (abuse and trauma) which leads to people phobia
isn't clear.  Kids without the development disorder you describe
are sometimes rejected for various other reasons -- frequent moves
and frequent "new kid" status in school after school, these are
the Army and IBM brats -- or just relative muscular weakness
(without coordination difficulties, just being at the periphery of
the distribution of muscular strength) in an environment in which
there happens to be a would-be bully looking for a victim,
although the pervasive rejection by all peers isn't usually
present.  Sometimes just being dropped once into an inappropriate
community, where there is no extended family or other birthright
network, such as a church, is enough.

I've also been reading the advice, which essentially boils down to
two propositions: 1.) keep trying, and 2.) keep busy at social
activities but don't overtly try.  These propositions are not
really contradictory -- indeed, 1 could be thought of as a
subheading of 2, but since it got stated so many times it might as
well be given independent status.

This advice is certainly good generic advice.  Undoubtedly it
works for a lot of people whose main problem is that they lack
what for want of a better term we might call "social skills."  But
whether it can work for you is quite another matter.  You say you
can't trust people, which is not surprising if they have never
been reinforcing in the past.  Perhaps being in a position where
you would be forced to trust someone would revivify all the
traumatic memories which are now merely unpleasant -- or the
unconscious material between age 5 and 10, which is most likely
actively repressed (you say you have no conscious memories of
those years).  Perhaps your best move is to consult a sex
therapist. They are no longer allowed to employ surrogates, like
the one being discussed in this Newsgroup, but they have had
experience with cases like yours.  I don't know what the solution
is.  It's the etiology I find interesting.  (That's why it took
so long for me to get to this one paragraph on the advice offered
and to drop my own advice in at the end of it.)

I think that knowing the etiology of you condition could have a
benign, even therapeutic-like effect.  If the condition is the
result of deprivation or trauma (even though we don't precisely
understand the mechanism involved) then a least it cuts out the
nagging feeling of personal responsibility.  And the feeling that
the solution is just a reach away.  Women are packaged like
commodities on the shelf.  They look so good in their high style
clothes, almost as if you could just reach out and pick them up
like items on the shelf at a department store.  But poor people
have to learn that they at least cannot pick up the items and walk
out the door because they don't have the cash to pay for them.  I
think they're happier when they realize that the goodies aren't
there for them.

Of course following that advice everyone is giving just might
work.  (You don't know how serious your lack of trust is, how
pervasive.)  But wouldn't it also be a kind of relief to come to
the conclusion that you will never have a relationship?  I suspect
that many of the philosophers, particularly the ones who, like
Aristotle, Descartes and Leibniz, took an especial interest in
making intuitive processes explicit and formal -- I guess we could
probably also include most people who find themselves drawn to AI
-- suffered from the same kind of people phobia.

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