Dissing

I feel highly inspired today, with many ideas running through my head for posts. Stress tests. Haircuts (a friend on Twitter wrote, "Happiness is a fresh haircut", and I replied, "Unless you're a Chrysler bondholder."). A story on NPR about Pullman porters, and how the wealthy white passengers called them all "George", as if they were all the progeny of their employer/master, makes me think of how we project an identity onto others. At some point, I will try to return to these ideas and nurture them. Today's post, however, following on yesterday's examination of encouragement, is about two forms of dissing.

To dis someone, in slang, is to insult the person in the sense of dismiss, disapprove, or show distaste or disgust. It has strongly negative connotations. I would like to advance two healthy forms of dissing that serve in a positive way to help us see - and free - our authentic selves.

The first is disambiguation. I work in a company that maintains a database of people, and many of our listees hold numerous positions: executive roles in companies, other corporate or nonprofit board positions, professional memberships, etc. In a database of nearly half a million people, you can imagine that some of them also share the same first and last and even middle name. We use a unique identification number (similar to a social security number but without meaning for the IRS or anyone else) to differentiate one same-named person from another, and we call this process disambiguation. Moving beyond disambiguation as a technical term with roots in library science, think of it in psychological terms as seeing each person for who he or she is, not as someone else (projecting). This could mean, for example, seeing your boss as your boss and not as your father, or vice versa. It also means separating the actions - what someone does - from the person - who someone is. John Smith may be the CEO of company x, a board member of company Y, a member of association Z, as well as a father, a son, a little league coach, a wine enthusiast, whatever. To us, he is 2005182736456. If you feel that someone is holding you back or exerting a negative influence in your life (which means you are allowing this person to do that), there's a strong chance you haven't disambiguated the person in question. You see the role the person is playing and the actions the person is taking as the person. Or perhaps you got in bed with someone who tends to play a familiar, comfortable, yet unhealthy role in your life. Seeing the person as the person, no more, no less, enables you to view the role and the actions more clearly, understand the effect they are having on you, and ultimately, if necessary, disengage - partly or fully - from the relationship. This is particularly appropriate for dysfunctional marriages (where your dis isn't functioning properly). "I hate my husband/wife," can become "I hate what my husband/wife is doing to me," and evolve into "I hate what this person (sans role) is doing to me," then, "I am not happy with what I am allowing this person to do to me," and finally, "I am no longer going to allow this person to do these things to me." I could go on, but I need to leave time for the second form of dissing.

The second form of dissing worth exploring is disintermediation. In business, the term refers to the process of cutting out the middle man, as is happening now in the media itself as journalists become bloggers and self-publishers and news and information become free of the media outlets (newspapers, television networks, book publishing companies) that formerly both filtered the news and information and distributed them to the public. In psychological terms, disintermediation suggests cutting out the voices, the influences, the fears and doubts projected on us by others, the filter - or frame if you wish - through which we receive and perceive our content, and examining the content itself. If someone you love hurts you, but you view the news through the filter, "But this person loves me and didn't mean to," you are not giving the news its due. Or, if Gourmet Magazine and the World Hunger Organization's magazine (if they have one) published the same article, word for word, on starvation, imagine how different the reactions of the readers might be. Disintermediation isn't about eliminating context. Context is important, as any politician will tell you when his or her remarks are taken out of it. But content usually speaks the truth. The best example of messages that come to us disintermediated is our dreams. Our unconscious mind is speaking directly to us, without any filtering.

I have to stop here to finish the post. My advice for today: keep encouraging, and also start dissing.