#u want mental illness??? i'll give you mental illness !!!!!! don't touch my boy

[butchkaramazov]

*sigh* noone gets dostoevsky like i do.....

[artisan-antibiotics]

A Masochist’s Approach to Positive Psychology 

tw mention of $u!c!de, BD$M/k!nk ramblings.

disclaimer: I have dyslexia so if you find a spelling mistake hold ya fucking breath.

In this discursive I'll be rambling on about pain versus pleasure, what is happiness, and what is wellbeing. These thoughts are an analysis of a paper I used as research for an essay required for a psychology class at my university. To start off I'd like to give some background on what positive psychology is, and why I'm studying. It has a rather unique position in psychology, in that it focuses on the well being of an individual in a way that essentially uses positive emotions, happiness and enrichment of life to alleviate more negative emotions, unlike traditional clinical psychology that fully acknowledges mental illness/presence of symptoms and explores ways to treat those.

The approach to positive psychology that my class is taking is Martin Seligman's PERMA model, the acronym standing for the believed five elements to flourishing as a human being in the modern era: 

Positive emotion

Engagement

Relationships

Meaning

Achievement 

I will be touching on all of these areas but mainly exploring the second element: Engagement and flow. 

Now for the juice. The paper is “Orientations To Happiness and Life Satisfaction: the Full Life versus the Empty Life” published in 2005 and written by Christopher Peterson, nansook park and our positive psychology boi as mentioned above with PERMA, Martin Seligman. I'd like to start of and say how classist the title seems at first glance, “the full life vs the empty one” I believe most of these wellbeing aspects can only be reached by those in places of privilege, those without any severe trauma, strong social connections and relationships, white people, you get the idea. It seems to me like a simple degradation and negative look at those who cannot reach this ideal of a happy life, as described by these elements. Even while looking at journals and accessible websites for “pop-wellbeing” pictures of mostly white, middle to upper-class families such as the one I've included here are used.

I feel like the more I go into studying this emerging field of psychology the more I get filled with this annoyance that psychology is so heavily biased on “W.E.I.R.D” populations. (“W.E.I.R.D” being a term used primarily in social psychology and stands for white, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic, and is used to describe the 80% of people who make up our history of psychological research samples, while that specific demographic only makes up 12% of our global population). MY POINT IS that positive psychology is made for a small population, and if it makes you want to seethe, you have every right to, as it probably wasn't made for you, and verges so close to the toxic positivity line every time. My reason for writing about this subject is because I feel there is much to gain by thinking about some of the themes of what pleasure and happiness even is, using the concepts in positive psychology as a bounce off, and also because I feel like if I don't have somewhere to write my thoughts down I feel I may explode.

So it starts off with the abstract, where we learn that the research is to explore and analyse findings from surveys done by 845 adults through the internet, measuring life satisfaction through three different ways the authors of the paper saw that we can be happy. 

Through pleasure

Through engagement

Through meaning 

Though these have barely no description, and I feel like they have multiple overlapping meanings, I will take them out of consequence with the study and give them meaning because I like to be thorough (unlike most arbitrary nonsense that lots of people write in the name of philosophy and psychology) 

Pleasure is the physical and emotional sensations that fill us with our own unique way we experience bliss. Pleasure can give our lives meaning, and pleasure can be the subject of engagement and flow. I would like to point out that pleasure can be experienced alone, or with others, and can be sexual, but is oftentimes not. Just in the same way that kink and BDSM is experienced in a similar way, and I feel is the perfect representation of sensation, both physical and emotional, in that its balenced in the range of ways that people can experience pleasure, when humans arent forced to adhere to social norms. 

Engagement is to do with the mind and its capacity, flow will be referred to alot and that is when all of the mind is filled with one subject, or activity so that all that our limited-capacitied-brains can comprehend on the conscious level is that activity or subject. Time is blurred. 

Meaning can lead me to multiple trains of thought, and as someone who is still young and dosnt have a strong understanding of their own meaning of life, it's hard to pinpoint. But I will describe it as a sort of drive, a colourfull array of experiences and emotions that are inherently attached to a personal arsenal of values, those labled and unlabeled. 

The paper claims that those with low scores on these three areas of life have a low life satisfaction. And I agree with this much more than the later described PERMA model from 2011, particularly because I think it carries less popular wellbeing bullshit and caters to a much larger variety of human experience. We reach the introduction, where I encounter historical mentions to positive psychology, and the statement “the doctrine of hedonism – maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain – was articulatd thousands of years ago by Aristuppus (435–366 BCE) who championed immediate sensory gratification (Watson, 1895)”. My original thoughts on this were annoyance, because as a complex masochist the notion that pleasure is the ultimate good and pain is the ultimate evil, does not describe my experience. I grew up always in a certain amount of pain either physical or emotional, taught to be by my parents, other family members, chronic illnesses and compounding trauma from every year of my life, I have a different baseline, and many others will agree with me in their own cases. I have recently moved out of home and socially transitioned, been able to build stronger relationships and this has had a profound positive effect on my levels of pain. Yes, a little while ago I attempt suicide but this is because I am still dealing with all of my first 18 years of life’s thought patterns and redundant self-esteem. Pain has become my home, well was always my home, it was what lulled me to sleep. What woke me up in the morning, followed me to parties and the bathroom, overseas and in the wilderness, however, now as I’ve moved out I have more space and time to explore my masochist side, I feel empowered by the fact I can return to that home of pain on my own terms, and slowly replace emotional pain with short term physical pain that I can determine what it feel like, and how long it resides for. 

This possibly introduces a new concept which came to me in a second reading of this paper: true pain and pain for pleasure. I seek out pain so I can heal, feel pleasure, feel vulnerable with another person (which is a very new thing for me) and also, with all background aside, have fun with sensation as pain is another way to stimulate the body and feel, when applied in the right way. It's possible when Aristuppus mentions pain, that he thinks of true pain, ugly pain, uncontroled pain, which for me is life-limiting, rather than enriching. Positive psychology fails to explore this side, and by my own acknolegemnt to this concept I feel I extend the positive assets that positive psychology can have, and its poential to a much larger range of people. 

HEDONISM VS EUDEMONIA 

Hedonism is described as pleasure being the ultimate for wellbeing and happiness, while Aristotle’s Eudemonia- being true to one’s inner demon - is described as the use of one's virtues, to cultivate them and live in accordance with them, but I feel this to be unnecessary as I dont understand why someone would actively want to live in defiance to their own values (I understand maybe many are pushed to or not able to). If I didnt live to what makes me happy I feel like I would tear off my skin, and I see this in the way I rebel to the social and power structures that oppress my values and my happiness, and when I do feel oppressed, I do feel true pain, and I do feel like tearing my skin off. I guess I want to point out that philosophers have some good ideas, and they have some bad ones. It's ok to be in conflict with ideas. Eudemonia was a way to express the desire and need for living according to your own values, and body, how it feels and thinks, how respecting yourself is key, and we can do away with Aristotle’s idea that the meaning of pleasure is too vulgar. Also the statement “the pursuit of a meaningful life is widely endorsed as a way to achieve satisfaction: ‘Be all that you can be, and Make a difference.’’ sounds way too religious and can touch on some religious trauma for some as there are two levels, first being looking at pure values of an individual and supporting them to promote wellbeing, and second using a higher authority to make people believe all their problems will go away if they help other people. I do believe (and it's supported by evidence) that the vast majority of people are happier if they express gratitude and make a difference in this world, but I feel like it's a theme that is not on the same level as the ones core to this discussion. 

Because of this discussion, the thought of hedonism vs eudemonia is irrelevant because the bits I feel that matter that is pleasure and self-fulfilment are interchangeable, overlapping and at core express the same sentiment. 

Waterman’s studies of Eudemonia in 1993 provoked the authors of this paper to state “Flow is not the same as sensual pleasure… flow is nonemotional and arguably nonconscious” which I feel is just so highly untrue. My personal experience with flow is that there is an extreme emotional drive, passion, intense focus driven By emotion, or that flow where emotion is so all consuming and overloading that the subject of flow is emotion. Flow is reached from anger, love, curiosity just a few that come to mind, I would describe these emotions as passionate emotions. And yes, they are all consuming most of the time. I started writing this discursive at 1:30 pm and it is now 5pm. I have not taken a single break, I would describe this as flow, driven by emotion, one that is hard to describe, a carnal need to express my ideas. Anger? A bit, love? A bit… a beautiful explosion of passion. Flow is certainly achieved by sensual pleasure, more often in bdsm scenarios often described by subspace, domspace, but is not limited to these specific experiences and labels. As flow is a state of a subject taking up all capacities of the mind, for a submissive bound by rope this is special by the sensations of rope marking them, and of the vulnerability, engulfing their soul. Or for a service dominant partner, being so Intune to the sub’s feelings, their own feelings, the rope in their hand is all there is in the moment, hours can go by and they are untouched by the outside world. Because of these examples I find that  “People may describe flow as enjoyable, but this is an after-the fact summary judgment; ‘‘joy’’ is not immediately present during the activity itself… At least at any given point in time, flow and pleasure may even be incompatible” as a statement is entirely untrue, at least for me, and many others. 

So there you have it, my rambles for positive psychology. If you didn't understand a single thing, that's ok I have a habit of not making much sense, this isn't going to be graded by a teacher so you can suck my dick. I hope I've left you with things to ponder.

The paper:

(if you don't have a university or other log DM me and ill tell you how you can access it)

Peterson, C., Park, N., and Seligman, M. E. P. (2005). Orientations to happiness and life satisfaction: the full life versus the empty life. J. Happiness Stud. 6, 25–41. doi: 10.1007/s10902-004-1278-z