flannel no more

I have been watching the growing dissatisfaction with the flannel nest as the mad kitten has been making this odd circuit throughout the day, trying out different sleeping areas.

It got to be like a game yesterday, I would go out and come back in and try to find where she was napping. In the middle of the night I woke up with her tucked under the covers with me and patting my face.

Who knows what type of logic dictates all of this?

Oh, and also, suddenly she has lost that "how could you look" and is treating me like something a little bit more than a paycheck.

Yesterday night turned out to be one of those slow, building beauties. You know the kind? Where you are working towards something but really, have no idea how it is going to go and when it goes, what it starts to become is far more then you dared hope for. Then I came home and crawled back into the books, I have three major exams for some certifications I am doing coming up and I am both trying to keep up with everything and trying to make sure I don't lose the fleeting things that come up for later pursuit.

And I was shocked, in mid-chapter of a book that has been proving to be quite revealing and sensical to me, to see who the author started quoting. 12 chapters in, there have been few quotes, which is odd since it is a book on a type of psychoanalytic theory and then WHAM! Once he felt you had the basics down he started to fill out the theory and began quoting peopled - and quoting all the damn people I have been reading and studying for years on my own - Fromm, Frankl, Jung, Frued, Branden and on and on. It was one of those, "oh" moments and it made sense why the book made sense to me.

Most interesting to me, however, is in this presentation of this treatment theory, he presents (like Fromm) that the most disturbed among us are not necessarily those who are in treatment or insitutionalized, but the average person on the street. And then...this was the interesting part, he took the theory and alongside the traditional clinical work with it, took it into homeless shelters, workplaces and schools  - and he took it to all age ranges and documented what then happened.

Now, I am not going to tell you who this guy is or what book I am reading. It was very popular for a brief time before falling out of style. The author addresses that phase in the edition I have and says "just because you can learn to recognize where the problem lies and how what you are doing may be contributing to it does not mean you are capable or willing to do anything about it." He discussed how the introduction to the theory became a popular cocktail party game. "They missed the importance of the fact that health lies not in what you can recognize another person doing and avoiding it, but in recognizing what you are doing and changing it. But change, without an understanding of why the habit was developed in the first place and what illusions are still being actively pursued and created to support it, isn't change, but a new suit of clothes for the same thing."

And the proof of change lies in concrete evidence, although, the evidence may not be "positive," it can also be "negative." But too often we rely on a belief that we have changed based upon a feeling, when the facts around us do not support it at all.

All this theory, the killer thing about all of these certifications is that after you get done mastering the booky stuff, then you engage in a series of writings and videotapes that apply the analysis to yourself, submit and wait for critique. And worse, since part of these courses are geared towards a kind of "counseling" interaction, then you have to video yourself in relation to others and that gets critiqued, plus you have to do both positive and negative assessments of how you handle interactions on a weekly basis. No small wonder I feel like I being dragged along bumpy rail, but if there is one thing I do appreciate, I think anyone in any kind of care field should have practical and evaluative training, to much is left to lecture and then you get thrown into reality and left to report on how you think you did or with someone only dropping in every so often.

ehhhh....coffee...a little nap and then back to the Bette Midler poem

c.2010 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved,