Truth, Lies, & Consequences
There are many unintended consequences to not telling the truth. One of the most obvious being the damage that is done to relationships. Once a person has been found out, once it is known that they have a tendency to lie, it becomes difficult to regain trust in them. And it becomes difficult to do the work required to maintain a relationship with them, without the base level of security provided by openness and honesty. Telling the truth is a necessity, not only to love others, but to love yourself.
What does it mean to be in touch with the truth? It simply means seeing things as they really are. Without illusion and without the deception that often stems from preconceived notions. Despite its simple meaning, it is difficult to overcome our biases and preferences for how we think things should be. Oftentimes these biases are reflections of our hopes and wishes, and if we lose them, the only thing waiting for us, we think, is disappointment. Disappointment and pain.
The worst thing about lying is the fact that it renders love an impossibility.
But, uncomfortable as it may be, choosing to tell the truth is still the only way we can fully relate to another human being. Embracing the truth means actually having the freedom to make choices with more honesty and sincerity. It also makes love a legitimate possibility. Love for another and love for oneself. The worst thing about lying is the fact that it renders love an impossibility.
At some point I came to the realization that it is impossible to lie to someone else without first lying to yourself. To present an obvious falsehood as if it were a truth is to actually deal in two kinds of deception. The damage this does to other people is what’s most talked about, but the damage you do to yourself is just as consequential. After relationships end, for one reason or another, you are left only with yourself. You are forced to deal with you, and you have no hope of doing this with compassion or with success, if you are unable to deal in truth.
Anxiety is not a bad thing. It arises when we are on the verge of doing something new and challenging. Telling the truth can be both.
How does an individual know whether or not they are doing well in this regard? One way is to measure and compare your feelings and notice how often you feel anxious as opposed to guilty. Anxiety is not always a bad thing. It arises when we are on the verge of doing something new or challenging. Telling the truth can be both. An honest life is a challenging life because it involves standing up for what you believe in and not always going along with the crowd.
In a way this makes it easy to know when you fall out of line with telling the truth because feelings of anxiety will be replaced by something else. Oftentimes the replacement is guilt, either because of what you have done to someone else through dealing with them dishonestly, or because of what you have done to yourself by doing the same. Guilt, however you experience it, is often a signpost of inauthenticity, another word for lying. When you notice it, pause and examine the way you are dealing with people. You’ll probably recognize shortcomings that need to be corrected.
No one is born knowing how to lie, which means no one is born knowing how to tell the truth.
Even with rigorous self-examination, it is not easy to recognize when we are being dishonest. Sometimes feedback from others is needed in order to gain clarity. The problem is that the type of feedback we seek is usually biased towards whatever it is we really want to do. Seeking this type of feedback is unhelpful, but you can hack your tendency to do so by asking yourself who are the qualified people that you are least likely to talk to about an issue? Those are the people most likely to put you in touch with the truth, and the people whose advice you should be seeking out.
No one is born knowing how to lie, which means no one is born knowing how to tell the truth either. Both are skills one develops. You have to choose which of them you want to invest your time and energy into learning.
How to Communicate with Kids for Better Understanding
There are very few things that one does that consistently offer up in combination so many moments of doubt and uncertainty as parenting does. Children used to be hands, and now their mouths is what they say, and I can say that the calloused hands of my grandmothers and grandfathers testify to this fact; I asked one of them about what it was like growing up and she told me, without a hint of sadness, that she was promoted to the fourth grade, but had to quit school in order to go to work as a dishwasher to help the family. These were simply the choices that one made and all I will ever know about them, and all my children will ever know about them, are the secondhand accounts passed down by people, fewer and fewer of whom have actually been there.
Maybe children are only mouths now, which I would like to believe is a positive development rather than the pejorative it is meant to be, though comfort, ease, and progress rarely fit together nicely. What I do believe is true about children, then and now, is that the wishes that spring forth from their mouths are too quickly and too often silenced.
But I digress. The point I’m trying to make is not specifically about children but an issue with communication in general. It’s just that the inevitable breakdown of communication is most clearly seen in the relationship between adults and children, but really the issue is ubiquitous.
We are fearful of things we do not understand and do not want to know because they threaten our identity.
Language is difficult because it functions by way of impressions and constantly shifting meanings. It is an inexact articulation of one’s feelings that makes great demands of us. It is a system of symbols meant to be reordered and re-used for many purposes from moment to moment. Sometimes this all occurs in the same moment–people have these scripts in their head that co-mingle without coexisting, hence the conflict, which seems to evoke one of two reactions–fear or anger. We are fearful of things we do not understand and do not want to know because they threaten our identity. Very often anger serves as a rallying cry in defense of the identity we so badly want to preserve. We think we are angry when we don’t get what we want, but it’s more than that. Anger is connected to our identity, much of which we can recognize by answering the question, what do we want? It seems like wanting is the most basic element of a person’s identity. You’re born, and you’re given a name, a place to stay, and parents to provide for you, which compromises an identity, or a role maybe, but it’s not your identity, and your feelings aren’t either. Your identity doesn’t come in until you make decisions about what it is you want in life.
The unwillingness to tolerate anger is what clears the way for harm to be done in relationships, not the presence of it.
Therefore, to deny one’s wants is to deny one’s identity, and one of the many things that children seem to know better than adults, is the rage that accompanies this refusal of one’s right to exist. For anyone to be shocked by the anger of a child’s response to this, says a lot about how out of touch we can be with the reality of others. The unwillingness to tolerate anger is what clears the way for harm to be done in relationships, not the presence of it. Which is how you arrive at a place where you offer one-sided ultimatums as solutions, where you secure hollow victories that lead to bitterness and resentment instead of communication and understanding. It is better to extend a hand to embrace than a boot to lick, but people don’t even realize it as they’re doing it.
Yesterday I watched my daughter become more and more angry as she struggled and failed to find a shirt she wanted to wear. Her style is ever-changing and sometimes nothing she chooses can satisfy her current sensibilities. I watched her rummage through her drawers in vain and when I offered to help her she turned to me and screamed “No!”
She was feeling angry, and most importantly, beneath her anger, she was feeling painfully insecure. In her mind, my offer to help must have felt like someone shining a light on her insecurity, so she lashed out in order to protect herself. Why would she let anyone see her in such a vulnerable state?
Okay, I can follow that, and I can understand that she couldn’t find the words to say and how getting into her bed and throwing the blankets over her head seemed like the best thing for her at that moment, but I still had a decision to make for myself. In that moment I had to decide how I would communicate, if I would meet her anger and frustration with my own. If I would demand that she respect me, which has nothing to do with actually being respected and everything to do with being feared. If I would ignore the feelings of my four year old just so I could feel a little more comfortable myself.
I sat quietly next to her and waited for what couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, though discomfort does turn any amount of time into an eternity. But after a few seconds had passed in silence, she poked her head out from underneath the blankets, looked me square in the eyes, and started talking to me. She talked about how she was feeling angry, and how she was learning in school that she should take deep breaths to calm down when she feels angry.
“Have you tried it?” I asked.
“This is my first time trying.” Then she took a deep breath and another after that. Then we took one together, and she was quickly able to calm down.
The rest of the evening was easy. There was laughter and there was bickering over little things, and none of it came at the cost of hurting anyone else’s feelings.
In Search of a Friend
I believe, without discrediting the profession entirely, that some of the benefits derived from psychotherapy could just as well be provided by close friends and family members. Psychotherapy is a relatively young field, but even still, there is evidence that the most important factor in whether or not it actually works is the relationship between the therapist and the client. And if establishing a good relationship is the main way people benefit from psychotherapy, it stands to reason that they could potentially experience some of these same benefits if they established similar kinds of relationships outside of therapy. In fact they should be encouraged to do so by the therapist. What matters most in the final calculation, is the dynamics that are created between two people, not, in totality, who the two people are.
Freud told a story that helps to illustrate this point. He was working with a patient who was suffering from mental distress, loss of sleep, and a lack of appetite. He and the other physicians involved in her care had failed in their attempts to improve her condition which was only worsening. Until one day, a friend of the patient actually came and abducted her from the hospital and brought the patient home with her to care for her there. How she accomplished this is either unknown or unstated, but a year later Freud once again became involved in the care of this patient and was surprised to discover her in a much better condition than the one she was in when he last saw her.
What is more likely is that it was the care she received from her friend that made the crucial difference.
Freud credited himself for the change in her condition, attributing it to the lasting effects of his treatment, but this is unlikely because the little that was said about the treatment, spoke only to how ineffective it had been in helping this woman. What is more likely is that it was the care she received from her friend that made the crucial difference.
And it is safe to assume that this friend of the patient must have cared a great deal about her if she was willing to abduct her from a hospital. To this friend, it must have felt more like a rescue mission, and a serious responsibility to nurse her friend back to health. Her steady presence and consistent care is what allowed this woman to heal and start to become whole again.
Most of us have our stories like this. Stories of being in a low place in life and needing the love and support of someone else to carry us through. Sometimes that someone else is a therapist or a doctor, but as the story illustrates, it does not have to be. We can all provide this type of care for each other, and it is important that we do so because not everyone has access to professionals and even those who do might not have access to them in their time of need. And in those times, what we need, in reality, is a friend who will barge in and save us.
Therapists are skillful and curious learners, which eventually, we hope, will allow us to help someone in need.
The thing that therapists are trained to do well is listen. We listen to what is said and what is not said. We look at the actions of clients and understand that this is a form of communication that must be listened to as well. Through listening we form opinions and make interpretations, and as we get to know our clients better over time, we can make quicker, more accurate judgments about what is happening to them, or at least we should. The necessity of all this listening really implies that therapists are not experts on our clients’ lives, because we have not lived them. Therapists are skillful and curious learners, which eventually, we hope, will allow us to help someone in need.
And yet, it is possible for the friends and family that we keep closest to us to also learn and possess this intense curiosity about others. Friends and family may be even more capable of quickly becoming experts on our client’s lives because they have bore witness to them and have lived in close proximity to them for much longer than we have as therapists. It seems unwise for their testimony to be neglected.
Identity, Control, and Rebellion: Takeaways from They Cloned Tyrone
Tupac is alive, Michael Jackson ain’t dead, and Toni Morrison might just as well be sitting at a coffee shop nodding, I told you to everyone that passes by. Her presence certainly seems to loom large over They Cloned Tyrone, where you very quickly learn that almost no proclamation is unworthy of consideration, if only for an infinitesimal amount of time.
She, Morrison, articulated the searing effect the white gaze has on black life, giving voice to something that for centuries was a constant, but was so potent and lethal that it was unspeakable. Here it is, recaptured in the film’s opening image of an advertisement with a white man grinning obscenely, overlooking a group of black people having this very debate (about Tupac and Michael Jackson). It sets the stage for the inevitable clash between history and perception, ready to play out in the fictional neighborhood called The Glen.
With art, oftentimes one must at least wonder, if not ask who is the audience, or to put it another way, who did the artist have in mind when they made this? It is assumed, pejoratively, that black movies are made for black audiences and that there is no category called white movies. Movies like Oppenheimer are less impressive to me for the technical feats they accomplish than their ability to craft a historical narrative about post World War II America and what follows that is somehow completely devoid of black people. But alas, it is a movie, made for the movie going audience. Black movies must exist for the supplication of some other category of people.
This particular film (Tyrone) offers commentary on the issue of whether or not things naturally are the way they are, or if they were made to be that way, and swallows up the entire category of living with its questioning. It drops you into the lives of its characters and instead of asking you to wonder why they are like this, which is less of an honest question than it is a silent judgement, it forces you to consider who really stands to benefit from these people’s lives being this way?
Some people never recover from the loss of innocence.
Everyone has their own unique response to the question as the answers are revealed. Fontaine (John Boyega), Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), and Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) cycle between moments of doubt, denial, and defiance towards their encroaching reality as they take stock of how complex the machinery of what is happening to them really is.
What it means to have a self, and whether that self is a creation, or the by-product of circumstances is another central theme. Does it even matter, is what the film seems to be asking, because in the end, the self may only be a set of ideas, yours, or mine, made to fit together and promulgated through the body. The trailer and title make it known that clones play a part in the film, in the literal and metaphorical sense. Fontaine discovers he has been cloned, but even before this physical manifestation is shown, the ideas that he embodies appear to be nothing more than the repackaged ideas of someone else, which seems to be true for most of the people surviving in The Glen.
In this way, trauma becomes a common occurrence, and writ large, the private theater of the mind becomes a communal hive. Characters wrestle with what has happened to them and the burden of their nearly forgotten possibilities. Whether one becomes a hero, or a villain seems to hinge on the manner in which they resolve these issues.
Some people never recover from the loss of innocence. One death in particular crystallizes this, but regardless, most characters seem to have had to give birth to an identity much too soon and are thus forced to cling fiercely to it given their vulnerability. Parents are conspicuously absent, and everyone must become their own mother or father much too soon with far too little guidance. Perhaps this is part of the message—parents are, after all, are one step closer to being elders, who function as the collective memory of a community. Memory is a form of safekeeping, without which any group of people is rendered unable to remember the brilliance and tragedy of their history, and thus makes themselves vulnerable to the most wicked ignorance. This is personified by a character whose life is a reminder of what happens when your entire history, past and future, is overshadowed by your worst experience.
The women in the film are the ones who display the courage and intelligence to fight back and injure the cycle that is harming so many, and perhaps break it entirely. They seem to never lose sight of who exactly this is for, and thankfully the film spares them from the fate of being cast as nothing more than accessories to the salvation of men. Yo-Yo dares to dream despite conditions that threaten to suffocate her very existence.
The story is entertaining and even heroic in some moments and fails only if neat and clean resolution is what one seeks, which is certainly forgivable, and fitting given the nature of what it deals with. A quest to discover one’s identity, in this instance, benefits from the inclusion of clones and science fiction but would be no less perplexing without them.
Having an Ethic of Love
Love was, is, and will always be a radical act, and its history one of radicalism, of daring to go further than one has gone before, despite great and violent opposition. This being the case because love requires something which very few people seem willing or able to do. Namely, to let go of the need for power and control.
A need that is so great because it is energized by an intense desire to quell one’s inner anxieties in order to live and exist comfortably, a pursuit, at its most extreme, in which it becomes painfully easy to objectify other people and view them as obstacles to the attainment of one’s goals, rather than as individuals with their own right to exist. Every act of evil committed surely has this quality of loveless objectification attached to it.
An ethic of love is at home within the existential tradition because of this tradition’s belief in the freedom to formulate one’s own values and beliefs in route to living fully. If you are trying to develop your own system of caring instead of staying wedded to the one you inherited, adopting an ethic of love is a good place to start. The values that belay this ethic include honesty, openness, and a commitment to giving your all in the endeavors that you choose. Doing so allows you to re-examine every area of your life and ask yourself if the qualities you seek to embody are present in how you live, in the places and ways that you choose to work, and in the way you relate to other people. Each sphere of your life, from the private to the public, can be considered.
The position that love and freedom are radical ideas maintains its status in large part because of the failure by the majority to realize that freedom has always existed on the other side of safety. And safety is the price that everyone pays for it.
Having integrity is required for practicing an ethic of love and you do this by deciding for yourself what is right and acting in accordance with this decision. This does not automatically negate the impact and value of already established traditions, but it does mean you actively choose to carry on or reject these traditions. Through actively choosing, traditions become your own in a way that they weren’t before. Or you may discover that your faith was misplaced and strike out on your own to discover a new path. Either way, more wisdom, meaning, and freedom await on this path once you find it.
It is unlikely that you will be joined by many on this path, and it is important to have a strong set of values to rely on. You must be willing to stand up for what you believe in, even if no one else agrees with you. It is an act of courageous defiance to stand against the cynicism and absurdity of the world, to accept that to live is to sometimes struggle, and fully embrace life anyway.
The position that love and freedom are radical ideas maintains its status in large part because of the failure by the majority to realize that freedom has always existed on the other side of safety. And safety is the price that everyone pays for it. It is often the case that those who would maintain the status quo for themselves are opposed to freedom for others, and one must work to never find themselves aligned with such forces.
This work, and all the stress and anxiety that it engenders is not to be avoided. Neither is it meant to be overcome. It is the path you perpetually travel as you ascend daily.
The Emotional Toll of Mixed Messages: How Conflicting Parental Signals Affect Mental Health
While walking through the grocery store, I saw something I’ve often seen, that struck me differently this time. A young boy, probably no more than four years of age, was being chauffeured around by the people I presume were his parents, when the man who was likely his father, given his appearance, shoved him as he walked past him further down the aisle. He might have been playing around, but the kid didn’t take it that way. He was upset and to the best of his limited abilities gathered whatever strength he could find and used it to verbally snap back at his father in a small act of dissent. Whatever he said must have registered as a challenge because the father quickly closed the gap between them and dug his hand into the chest of the child, overshadowing his growing frustration. All of this took place in front of me within the span of a few seconds, but it was enough time for an important message to be sent.
This type of messaging creates more problems than it solves. Young children like this boy are constantly learning through their environment, especially through their family. Mostly through what family members do to each other and how they ascribe meaning to those behaviors. Messages that simultaneously communicate it is okay for an adult to hit a child unprovoked, that it is not okay for a child to respond in anger, but it is okay for the adult to retaliate, are mixed up and confusing. Not for the adult who sees no issue with such a self-serving arrangement, but for the child who is forced to make sense of it on their own. An unenviable task for a child, to mentally corral a storm visited upon them by the person tasked with loving them.
Mixed messages can be hidden under the guise of positivity. Some children eventually grow to feel tormented by the message that positive feelings are the only acceptable ones.
Maybe this man is nothing himself but an amalgamation of mixed messages that he received, handed down to him by the adults in his life. It’s impossible to know, but what I suspect will happen over time, from knowledge and intuition, is something like this. The child will eventually internalize these messages if they receive them frequently enough and learn that he must submit to and appease others in order to survive and endure relationships. At least until he is strong enough to imitate them, which will be his form of open rebellion against those who have caused him pain.
Whichever way it plays out, the amount of emotion a child suppresses to handle this situation is immense and this early and persistent lack of expression leads to emotional difficulties. Later, other people will be subjected to these difficulties and will be forced to reckon with them out of their own sense of love and duty. This sets the stage for a sinking pit of reoccurring pain. It gives credence to the generational curses that people speak about, and the idea that trauma is sometimes transmitted through the family, whose rules and behaviors give traumatic experiences their structure and shape. And it is difficult to disentangle, undo, and replace the influence of decades of lessons learned in such harsh ways.
Mixed messages can be hidden under the guise of positivity. Some children eventually grow to feel tormented by the message that positive feelings are the only acceptable ones. They are praised for being sweet, kind, strong, and pretty, or some variation of these things, and taught that this is a standard of behavior they must always reach. Frequently they are punished for falling short of these things, either receiving criticism for being unlike this idealistic image or abandonment by being ignored until they can behave better. They are left to deal with their emotions on their own, like the boy in the grocery store.
The message to them is clear. I love you because you are good. I love you when you are pleasing, which pleases me. I love you for me. A child who associates love with good feelings only is no better equipped for life than a child who associates love with pain. They will seek out the familiarity of this mental programming in their future experiences and find themselves equally frustrated and unsure of what to do.
Losing Control to Be Seen: What are the Unspoken Dynamics of Acting Out in Therapy
A client walked into my office for an appointment. They seemed fine at first, but it quickly became apparent that something was wrong as they sat down on the couch across from me and began to twiddle their thumbs and shuffle their legs uncomfortably. This went on long enough and eventually I asked if they were nervous.
“No” they replied. “Well, maybe a little…I did do cocaine.”
“…When?” I asked, somewhat surprised, mostly because it was only a few minutes past 10 o’clock in the morning.
“Right before I came here.”
I looked at the client, carefully considering what they had said to me, letting it settle in my mind. What did it mean for this person to sit before me, young, impulsive, painfully naïve, and share this information? To opt for truth when they easily could have lied. There was a look of disappointment and expectation on their face as they waited for me to say something.
“Do you want me to be upset with you?” I wasn’t sure if this was the right question, but I knew that any sort of declarative statement would be of no use. Not until I could understand this person more fully, and with my question I started in on that task.
Nothing is done for the sake of nothing, and human agency is goal directed even when the goal is unclear, as is the case in many instances. It is easy to judge someone who shows up to an appointment high on cocaine as being out of control. Maybe they are, but there are also certain benefits to “being out of control” which must be considered. Losing control, by which I mean acting in ways that are risky and potentially harmful to oneself or others is a proven way to elicit care from others.
Imagine a person whose experience teaches them that their wants and needs are not important, or even worse, receives the message that they are not entitled to have any wants or needs because of their status. This message crystallizes around their existence, and it is often the case that the only time an exception is made is when they are ill or in trouble. On these rare occasions, rather than being dismissed, the person is showered with attention, and this attention, no matter how positive or negative, caring or chastising, is still an improvement on being from being the recipient of emotional indifference.
At some point such a person makes a discovery, which is that when they are out of control, people are more likely to take care of them. The person sitting before me, who had been passed over many times in life, was such a person. Branded as a troublemaker already, they explicitly rejected this label, but implicitly accepted it and used it to get attention and care from others. They could have cancelled the appointment or just not shown up at all, but they didn’t, and their confession of drug use doubled as a confession of desire, that there was something they wanted from me. Chiefly, positive attention in the form of caring concern, but I suspect that if I had become angry at their confession this would have been an acceptable substitute. Anything but nothing.
The problems inherent in this strategy are obvious. As previously stated, it is risky, and there is the chance that a person goes too far in their bid for attention and commits a mistake they cannot easily recover from. This strategy of losing control to make people take care of you is also a form of manipulation, and once caught, the person is even less likely to receive the care they initially wanted. At that point either the jig is up, or the person becomes more desperate in their manipulation, resorting to more dangerous versions of losing control to get their needs met.
These regressions may involve harming oneself or others, risky drug use, indiscriminate sexual activity, and episodes of uncontrolled rage. The ways to lose control are numerous.
What other options are available? The person most likely to entertain this strategy struggles with recognizing and acknowledging their wants and needs so they must learn how to begin doing this. They must experience what it is like to be encouraged to share their experience with another and have it validated instead of dismissed. And they must learn that the stakes do not have to be so high for them to feel entitled to receiving care from others.
When they no longer must lose control, they are free to try other things. They can talk about how they feel and what they want and make requests of others. They can learn how to meet their own needs, through exercise, a warm bath, enjoying a favorite meal, and many other things. Or they can give up some of their wants and needs, which may be the greatest sign of an individual’s growth and maturity. When a person consistently gets at least some of their needs met, they are not desperate for limited opportunities to do so.
The client didn’t want me to be upset with them, as it turns out. Truthfully, they didn’t know what they wanted, or why they did what they did. Only that they were struggling and wanted help from somebody. An outcome they would have to learn could be achieved without clumsy concoctions that I would not choose for them, but am thankful that they chose to share with me.
How to go From Autopilot to Authorship: Taking Ownership of Your Journey
To be responsible, as Jean-Paul Sartre defines it, is to be “the uncontested author of an event or thing.” Authorship is a stand-in for the word creator, of which an author is one kind, and for whom the task is to fashion from the materials of their imagination a work that is complete and new. This imagination being the main tool applied, there can be no doubt that the author is the source from which the story originates. It is clear that several people are involved in the making and publishing of a book, from editor’s, proofreaders, cover designers, type setters and more. Each of these serves an important role in the process, but their roles are created in reaction to the author and defined in relation to the author’s original efforts.
Applying his notion of responsibility in a psychotherapeutic setting has benefits and risks. Doing so moves me towards a more internal locus of control when discussing issues and sets up an expectation that the client will shift to a similar orientation. And when more emphasis is placed on what a client can control and change, less time is wasted on issues that can be affected by neither the client or myself.
Of particular interest is the fact that the client is now allowed to approach the issue of suffering differently. To say that someone is responsible for their suffering runs the risk of being insensitive, but to say a client’s suffering is theirs, and that they alone are responsible for what they do with it moves them out of a helpless role and into a more active one. Challenging and often unfair, accepting responsibility for one’s suffering is still the best option for someone who intends to do something about it. A significant amount of suffering self-induced and unwarranted. It is a kind of suffering psychologically born in the aftermath of what has already occurred and added unto one’s burdens through the stories people tell themselves about what their suffering means.
When you focus on your role in events you understand that almost nothing in your life is the way it has always been or the way it must always be. This is true of life generally, and expands your possibilities once you realize it.
Admittedly, an emphasis on responsibility is most comforting to people who highly value individualism, partially because it ignores the reality of interdependence. In societies that are increasingly more complex, where accomplishing most tasks involves help from others, cordoning oneself off might be possible, but it would not be desirable. We need other people to survive and to flourish. We need other people to achieve our full potential. As the African proverb says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
There is the risk of veering too far on the side of responsibility assumption. This attitude becomes unhelpful when you begin to assume responsibility for things that you are not actually responsible for, which allows others to potentially take advantage of this and use you. For example, if a client complains about mistreatment from their family, and I am too quick to focus on the client’s role in the situation, I give the impression that the client’s concerns are illegitimate. It is possible for a client to remain the author of their feelings while also being shown respect and compassion for the difficult conditions under which their feelings arise. Conditions which they of course, are not the uncontested author of. Responsibility should not be heaped on an individual without considering the constant pressure that other people exert on them.
Most clients, at the time we first meet, are limited in their ability to assume responsibility for their lives. As it is in life, so it is in therapy. They must be encouraged to increase this capacity, and a large portion of success in therapy and in life is attributable to ones willingness to do this. One must always come back to their role in events, no matter how large or miniscule, no matter how many times they stray from it, because it is the only perspective from which change takes place.
Blonde as Becoming: Frank Ocean and the Time It Takes to Be
On July 10, 2012 Frank Ocean released what would go on to become his critically acclaimed album Channel Orange, subsequently changing his life with its massive success. Excitement about the release of the album was buffered not only by the content, but by the fact that just days before, Ocean released a letter to the public in which he openly talked about his first love being a man. Both the letter and the album were revelatory, and emblematic of Frank Ocean’s style of art, as well as the way he chose to communicate his art.
Frank Ocean’s current predicament is interesting because it highlights the relationship between the artist and their fans. It is a mutually agreed upon relationship in which the artist consents to make and share their art with fans in exchange for what the artist seeks, whether it be fame, fortune, or something else.
A figure as seemingly unique as Frank Ocean is still not immune to the pressures of fame. Indeed, his uniqueness may very well render him more susceptible to the trappings of fame, as society loves to ensnare rarities of all kinds, and observe them on societies terms before moving on to something else. So it comes as no surprise that three years later, many fans and individuals in the music industry seem ready to do just that—they seem ready to quit Frank Ocean after embracing him initially. Months of delayed promises of a new album, with little indication as to when it will arrive will do that to a fan base.
The relationship between Frank Ocean and his fans resembles other relationships in the sense that the qualities that initially attract us— Ocean’s uniqueness and commitment to doing things his own way—begin to repel us as the love bloom fades. Most if not all of that bloom has worn off after three years of waiting. Clearly Frank Ocean is working on his own time, and this is an absolute necessity for any artist deeply engaged in their craft. Rushing the work would produce unsatisfactory results for both Ocean and his fans. It would be a disappointment for Ocean because he will not have remained true to himself, and what becomes of an artist no longer capable of truth? They are no longer capable of art.
Frank Ocean’s current predicament is interesting because it highlights the relationship between the artist and their fans. It is a mutually agreed upon relationship in which the artist consents to make and share their art with fans in exchange for what the artist seeks, whether it be fame, fortune, or something else. Not every relationship is the same, and as a brief comparison, the singer Adele, under somewhat similar circumstances, has not been subjected to the same sort of questioning and heckling by her fans. Adele’s last album was released in 2011, and until October of 2015 she had not released any new music, apart from a song written and performed for a James Bond film in 2012. She had not performed live in three years. Rather than derision, her choices were respected and when she did release new music, it was treated like a godsend. Why has the same amount of patience and respect for privacy not been afforded to Frank Ocean?
The extent to which Frank Ocean’s reputation has changed for the worse, and whether he even cares what others think of him are all unknown at this point. From his previous actions one can surmise that Ocean is more concerned with his creative process than his fame. This is not to say that he does not care about fame at all, and he may even care a great deal about it. What I am saying is that Frank Ocean’s relationship to his art and the process by which he creates that art seem to be paramount, while his relationship to his fans is peripheral. At best, all we can do is guess about what motivations currently guide Frank Ocean, and not fully understanding the intricacies that underlie Ocean’s art because the most we have access to are his albums as finished products, which are not always equal to the sum of their parts. But we should know about the artist as an identity, one that history tells us exists independently of fans who wait patiently or not. Frank Ocean will release his album when he is ready to, and not a day sooner, regardless of those who complain—perhaps he will be better off for doing so.