#when once again it's precluded by the power dynamics of characters who get to do whatever they want no consequence ever

[unproduciblesmackdown]

another billions analysis thing is like so yeah while it's like "hmm let's think about power" but then doesn't really do that, what's there to offset that is "but let's think about what these people with billions(tm) are doing because of their like personal feelings & lives & whatever" and the personal feelings are the thrilling journey of s1 men following the compass of their ego & the way their personal lives matter at all beyond this is about their Relationships. except the relationships are also actually about the power billions isn't really thinking about because the ones billions focuses on involve this Fealty where one person does whatever and the other is just stuck with it. sure they might air some unhappiness sometimes, but if it's not punished or ignored from the start anyway, it'll still end up so inconsequential that it's as though it never happened. and what's left to offset the way that can't mean anything if you again take it for granted that of course people are just locked into such relationships & best they can do is fix it from the inside or embrace it as is? is "do you think this character is a winner among losers & you want to see them pwn everyone & do whatever they want forever" & if you like all the media the creators do like

[iamnmbr3]

Hi. I've been reading threw a number of your posts related to Loki 2021 and the general impression your post give is that you don't like how Loki 2021 has been written and present (which I understand because while Loki is not a favourite character of mine, I want to see his character done justices). And I guess I was just wondering how you would have tackled Loki 2021, using the plot elements that have been established in the show, but with your own spin. Thank you :)

That's a great question! I think the premise actually had a ton of potential. @nikkoliferous and I often talk about all the really cool things that could've been done and why it's so particularly tragic that they wasted all that good story setup. I think there are 3 main types of directions the story could've gone in with this premise (and then a lot of variations within each type).

Direction 1 - A buddy comedy with a heart

So I think this is what they were trying to go for with Loki and Mobius's dynamic based on the narrative framing and how all the interviews have presented Mobius in a positive light. (Though that's not what they actually wrote at all).

The way to do this would be to set Mobius up in a more sympathetic way and put him and Loki on more even footing. They could've had Mobius be almost as much a prisoner as Loki. They could have started out with him being pretty indoctrinated into the TVA worldview, but also being considered expendable. We could've seen his superiors threaten him with deletion if he can't make things work with the Loki Variant. Maybe he even feels some compassion for Loki and convinces his superiors that Loki can be useful and shouldn't be deleted since he's powerless to do anything else and he figures being enslaved is probably better than dying. Loki could actually be in-character and question Mobius's world view etc. And Mobius could to the best of his ability treat him decently instead of smugly mocking and tormenting him.

We could have Loki escape early on and end up bringing Mobius along with him, either by accident or because he realizes Mobius will be killed for losing him and he feels bad about it. Then we have them thrown together by circumstances and they could slowly grow to trust each other over the course of the show. The series could dig into the parallels between them. Loki could point out to Mobius that he repeats the propaganda he's been taught but he's hardly less of a prisoner than Loki and his masters are hypocritical. This could also lead to Loki realizing that while maybe he wanted to tell himself that he was an ally of Thanos's the truth was anything but.

While they're on the run both could start to realize they're experiencing freedom from the first time. Mobius could learn to question the TVA and Loki could realize that maybe he can be himself and doesn't have to be a tool of Odin or Thanos. Loki could could grapple with how much control he had while attacking NYC (thus allowing Disney to leave that a bit open to interpretation without totally sweeping the torture and mind control under the rug) and Mobius could grapple with how complicit he has been in the TVA's horrific actions.

Rather than Loki "learning to be trustworthy" (smh) Loki could learn to trust someone else and that not everyone will betray him. Mobius could also be a stand-in for more casual viewers and slowly realize that Loki isn't just the uncomplicated villain he at first took him for. There could be a nice mix of substantive character drama and entertaining hijinks. And of course in the end they could burn the TVA to the ground and liberate all realities. There's so many variations on this and @nikkoliferous and I often chat about them. Because the show could've been so good! And yet. </3

Direction 2 - The TVA & Mobius are acknowledged as the great villains they are

This is kind of what they're making by accident without acknowledging it which leads to a lot of emotional dissonance in the narrative. In canon the TVA is a horrific organization and Mobius seems happily complicit. He doesn't seem to have any compunctions about supporting their agenda of using murder, genocide, forced labor, enslavement, torture, police brutality, sham trials without due process, and privacy violation to eliminate free will. He happily forced Loki to toil under threat of death, mocks and humiliates him, manipulates him, and participates in acts of torture. He is INCREDIBLY creepy and a great embodiment of the "banality of evil" concept. The TVA is also absolutely terrifying.

If the show actually leaned into that it would create a great sense of narrative tension. Loki has escaped Thanos only to once again fall into the hands of a horrifically evil and powerful enemy. And it's up to him to figure out a way out of this situation and a way to liberate all of reality from their grip. In this scenario it might be useful to introduce some other prisoner characters so that he has some friendlyish faces to interact with...and potentially an army to lead against the TVA after he's won them over and figured out a plan.

Mobius's parallels to Odin and Thanos would work really well here because having Loki eventually defeat him and tell him he doesn't get to tell Loki who he is or make him into a tool of evil would be hugely cathartic. We'd get to see Loki stand up to and defeat someone who parallels the two individuals who have most hurt and manipulated him and decide to make his own way from now on rather than trying to be what others make of him. It would be awesome.

Direction 3 - TVA are twist villains

Some people think this might be the direction the show is going. The problem is that if that's true it'll just fall flat because the TVA is already clearly villainous so there's no twist. In the first episode already we see them commit acts of murder, genocide (wiping out a whole timeline because they believe the beings in that timeline belong to a class - variants - that are unworthy of life), police brutality, trial without due process, privacy violation, torture, and illegitimate imposition of rule (they are not elected in any sense and yet they have appointed themselves the arbiters of reality) all in the service of eliminating free will. That is...not what heroes do.

However they COULD have been good twist villains with just a few tweaks. Maybe they approach Loki and play on his deep yearning to be viewed as good and worthy as well as his self-hatred and poor self image to convince him that an "evil" version of him is wreaking havoc and they need his help. Maybe they also sweeten the deal by offering him protection from Thanos and the Black Order since he has no idea they are dead in this timeline. (If you wanted to keep audiences more in the dark you could have them just talk about the Black Order so that audiences at first assume they are still hunting Loki even tho Thanos is dead and don't realize the TVA is manipulating Loki).

At first they don't do anything overtly evil. The authoritarian aesthetic would seem like a humorous parody of office culture. It would then take on a new, much more sinister meaning when the TVA get's revealed as evil later and we learn that they obliterate entire timelines, murder people for the slightest infractions, don't view variants as people, and want to eliminate free will. Mobius could either appear first as a friend and then get revealed as a villain or have a redemption arc where he ends up siding with Loki.

Also for all of these scenarios the script and characterization should be good. I should see Loki, not Larry his dumb lookalike cousin. The script should have Loki doing and saying things that are in-character. (Which certainly doesn't preclude humor since Loki's wit is one of his most iconic features!)

[kingmakings]

my brains not working (like I just finished rewatching the show though i did end up skipping most of it- probably nearly all the examples of how unhealthy merthur could be tbh): when is Merlin and Arthur's relationship toxic/unhealthy

Wow, anon, I��m not sure what brought this ask on, but I guess we’re going there again nearly six years after the fact. Before I begin, @jasontodding and I have discussed our constant love of, but also our frustrations with, Merlin time and again, so May, if I leave anything out, let me know. 

Okay so first off, let me just say that this was the central relationship of the show, and they did share some powerful, character-defining moments together, obviously. And people are entitled to enjoy whatever dynamics they like, especially a dynamic so central to a television show, so long as they’re not being racist and gross to other characters whom they view as “getting in the way.” Now that we’ve covered that, let me start by saying that the fundamental problem with Merlin and Arthur’s relationship is that it’s built on distrust: Merlin cannot trust Arthur to tell him his secret, until the confession is quite literally forced out of him when Arthur is dying. Thus, the writing becomes infuriating.

Despite being the central relationship of the show, both Merlin and Arthur’s individual, positive character development often hinged on the relationships they shared with other characters, rather than the one they shared with each other. Proof that Arthur’s character development was left on the cutting room floor is a deleted scene between Arthur and Guinevere, where Arthur considers that perhaps Uther’s horrific attitude towards magic and magic-users was ill-conceived, and Gwen agrees, which gives him the confidence to really question Camelot’s inhumane ban on magic. Contrast this with Merlin literally shutting Arthur down in the fifth season, when he once again reconsiders the magic ban, because Merlin’s tunnel-vision when it comes to Mordred having been prophesied to kill Arthur precludes him from providing sound advice. Merlin consistently throws magic-users under the bus, while simultaneously preventing Arthur’s growth. I understand the extremely difficult positions Merlin is often placed in, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that the way this dynamic is constructed does not do either character any favors when it comes to consistent, positive character growth. Similarly, unlike with Arthur, Merlin is able to open up to Lancelot about his magic, and thus Lancelot becomes his closest confidante, and the person whom he can trust in any battle to cover his back when he has to save the day with his magic. And even though Gwaine doesn’t know about Merlin’s powers, Gwaine uplifts and commends Merlin for his heroism constantly. Furthermore, due to Arthur and Uther’s attitudes towards magic, Merlin is not only forced to hide who he is, but is additionally forced into horrible positions, such as where he has to lie to Arthur about Morgause in order to prevent Arthur from killing his father. The writers never wrote this relationship in a way that is healthy, as both characters cannot seem to provide one another with effective advice, nor can they really trust one another. 

There’s also the fact that Arthur constantly belittles Merlin and literally… throws objects at him. There are moments of maturity in Arthur and Merlin’s dynamic, but it’s few and far between. I don’t even hate Arthur and Merlin’s dynamic; rather, I just find it really frustrating, because it was only written the way it was, so that the writers could rush into Camlann. Their whole shared destiny of a United Albion was never realized because of all the lies between them; in fact Arthur remained completely unaware of this so-called destiny. The Golden Age of Camelot did not come about because of either of them; that Golden Age was truly only realized during Guinevere’s rule. 

[walteinsamkeit]

When the owl calls

This is a oneshot fanfic I’ve been working on for what must have been at least half a year (despite how short it is). A lot of things happened in my life during the period I worked on and off about this, but here we are. The story was originally born out of the realization there is a severe lack of Paladins fanfiction out there, so I decided that if I wanted more content, I would have to make it myself. Strix and Jenos are easily two of my favorite champions and with how different they are their dynamic fascinated me. I was however quite pleased to find that, in a way, the two do have some things in common. I hope that whoever reads this enjoys it as much as I enjoyed writing it! Thank you in advance.

Summary: An old sniper meets a young god, and the two keep each other company through the night. Around the campfire, new insights are born and old memories resurface. Despite their differences, it seems as though the two might have more in common than they initially thought.

Word count: 987 Characters: Strix, Jenos, implied Kinessa Rating: All ages Warnings: None “So, you’re a god...” “Yes. I am indeed.” He shifted in place, poking the fire with a long stick. The silver-haired creature watched on in quiet fascination, seated opposite of him, unmoving. The woods were dark and silent at this hour. They were separated only by the flames of the campfire that, with its fiery fingers, reached up towards the verdure of the branches overhead. From here they could not even see the night sky through the lush foliage. They were alone, but together. “I don’t really believe in gods,” the man broke the silence after a while. “But I am sitting right before you.” The god cocked his head to the side in bewilderment, visibly taking offense to the confession. “What more does your kind need to believe? Are you truly so arrogant as to deny the existence of a god, when one is seated right before you?” “I can see you just fine, but that’s not what I meant. Believing would suggest I put my faith in you, but I don’t.” For a while then the young god was silent, lost in contemplation. “Then, if not in us, what do you put your faith in?” “Myself,” he said, looking up to meet his eyes shortly. “I’ve only ever had myself to rely on. No god comes when you call.” Once more, the god was silent. “As much as I hate to admit it, I suppose you are right,” he then stated. “You are a wise man...” “Not wise,” he replied, fixing his dark stare on the campfire once more. The flames set the rich brandy of his eyes aglow, reflecting the embers that floated up into the darkness like distant memories. He raised his cup to his lips, taking a thoughtful swig. “Bitter, and tired of fighting...” “You must have fought many battles.” “Countless. Some of them against myself.” “What, exactly, do you mean?” “That some of the toughest wars,” and he pointed his finger towards his temple, “are only fought here.” The god gazed down into his own cup that sat untouched in his hands, overthinking these words for a while, until he nodded. “I believe I understand. And yet, I cannot help but condemn the acts of violence you have committed.” “Well, kid-”, he let out a joyless chuckle, “get in line.” The faintest curve of a weary smile came to his lips. “All that your kind knows is conflict. Why do you seek to destroy that which you do not understand? Ever since the dawn of mankind you have been at war with each other, trying to take what does not belong to you and laying waste to everything that lies in your path. You are a cruel species that fights, solely because you desire power and wealth. I have seen it myself, many times.” “I beg to differ. Some people fight to protect what they love.” “What they love? Such as what?” He scoffed, his chest puffing out with the kind of cockiness only young gods inherently possess. “Other people.” This gave the deity pause, his expression falling into one of perplexity. “Sometimes, good people do bad things. It doesn’t make them bad people. It makes them human.” A moment passed, and the god looked up again. “Who was it?” The sniper lowered his gaze, consciously. “Who was what?” “The one you fought for.” For a long time, neither of them said anything. There was only the crackling of the fire, and the ghostly call of an owl somewhere in the quiet woodland. “She was like a daughter to me…” He then finally answered, his voice barely above a hoarse whisper. He downed the rest of his cup. “What happened to her?” The deity asked, his childlike curiosity piqued by the glimpse of raw emotion. “I don’t want to talk about it.” “My apologies.” For a moment he stared thoughtfully into the fire, a grave and solemn expression on his face. “The thing you call wisdom... It’s really just character. Years of struggle and disappointment. It’s bound to make you tough. Owls are wise birds. They’re careful and patient. But wisdom inherently precludes boldness. That is why owls make poor heroes.” “You said you fought to protect someone you loved. Is that not the very definition of a hero?” “I’m not a hero. Not anymore. I’m just a man who realized the responsibility that comes with freedom, and heeded the call when that freedom was threatened to be compromised...” “You can be both a man and a hero. Bravery does not demand for one to be extraordinary, the same way one does not need to be faultless to be good. I can know this. I myself was just a man once.” The sniper looked up, the same inscrutable expression on his face, not speaking a word as he stared into the glowing eyes of the god across from him. For a moment, they only sat and gazed at one another. Radical opposites - one, young and radiant like the ethereal silver moon, kissed by stardust and crowned with midnight; the other, weathered by the passing of the seasons like the dark earth below, the fine lines in his face like the annual rings of trees, stripped of their bark, yet rendered all the more beautiful with age. A few seconds passed before the god let out a chuckle, lifting his gaze up towards the slivers of moonlight that fell through the canopy of leaves. “Perhaps, if there are more people out there like you, there might be hope for this world yet…” “Maybe, yes,” added the sniper, following the other’s almost wistful stare with a pensive look in his eyes. “That’s the thing about hope...” “What is?” He glanced back over at him, locking gazes through the smoke of the fire. The soldier mustered the faintest of smiles before slowly shaking his head. “For as long as we exist, it springs eternal.”

[duhragonball]

DBS Episodes #94-96

94: I wasn’t happy about the idea of bringing Frieza back for this tournament, but now that I’ve watched the episodes in question, I’m beginning to appreciate his presence in the story. 

To be sure, adding Frieza to the Universe 7 team is a stupid idea.  Frieza can’t be trusted, and there’s more cooperative warriors in the afterlife who could have filled out the roster.  If friggin’ Master Roshi can make the cut, then there’s no reason to leave Yamcha behind, especially since he’s fought alongside most of the team for decades. 

Nevertheless, Frieza’s presence adds some much-needed tension to the story.  Everyone else on the team hates his guts, and they’re starting to rethink their relationship with Goku based on this recruitment. 

Mostly, though, I find Frieza to be a breath of fresh air for this arc, because he seems to be acting more in-character than everyone else.  Vegeta’s been a non-factor for the past dozen episodes, and Gohan seems to flip from scholar to warrior depending on what the script calls for.  For some reason, Goku keeps lying to get people on board for this tournament, which is dumb because the truth is far more persuasive.  I don’t understand this fetish Toei has lately for making Goku into a well-intentioned trickster. 

Frieza, at least, is picking up right where he left off.  In the past, I’ve complained that this was his worst aspect.  No matter what happens to Frieza, he remains completely unchanged by the experience.  Here, it’s a good thing, because he feels a lot more real than a lot of the other characters. 

95: Stupidly, the gods of Universe 9 plot to assassinate Frieza before he can get to the tournament.  At first, I thought the plot itself was dumb, since Frieza’s already dead, and if he could be defeated so easily, why not do it at the tournament itself?  But they actually handled those issues very neatly, with the lead assassin being given a sample of God of Destruction power to erase Frieza permanently. 

No, what’s dumb is the motive behind the plot.  Much of the last few episodes is built on the idea that if any team enters the tournament without a full roster, they’ll be disqualified on the spot, and their universe summarily erased.   So U9 thinks that killing Frieza will eliminate U7 in a single stroke, but so what?  You still have six other universes to worry about.  Also, why target Frieza specifically?  They could have assassinated Tien and achieved the same result with a lot less trouble.

True to form, Frieza uses the assassins to contact the gods of Universe 9 and offers to jump ship to their team in exchange for a guaranteed resurrection.  Then Beerus shows up and he has to abandon that idea before he’s caught. 

I’m starting to think that the entire Tournament of Power was conceived with this dynamic in mind.  To the audience, it feels like Frieza is a last-minute switch, because they’ve been promoting this thing all year with Buu on the team.  But it seems like Frieza’s the only character in the story with any real agency.   Everyone else is desperate to preserve their native universe, and they only have one way to do that, so their course is obvious for the forseeable future.   But Frieza’s dead and he has no ties to Universe 7, so he literally has nothing to lose.  He could betray his teammates, switch sides, or sabotage the entire tournament and still come out ahead. 

It’s that same ruthlessness that’s precluded the idea of Frieza ever turning good like Piccolo or Vegeta.  The only way to get him on the same team as the heroes is to have a scenario like this one, where the entire universe will be erased unless they join forces.  Otherwise, it just isn’t worth the hassle of giving Frieza a chance to cause trouble again.  So I get the feeling that this was the starting point the writers began with, and the Tournament of Power evolved from there. 

96: Everybody meets up at the giant roulette wheel where the Tournament of Power will take place.  Goku meets Caulifla and Kale, and Caulifla smacks his hand away when he offers a handshake. 

I seem to remember this incident rustling some jimmies on the internet when the episode first aired.  Some things to keep in mind:

1) Everyone in this tournament hates Goku, because this whole stupid thing was his idea, and it’s going to get most of them killed.  Why should Caulifla feel any differently?

2) Saiyans dislike Goku on general principle, because he’s so saccharine and care-free.  Cabba and Tarble are notable exceptions, but they’re also giant nerds who like homework and scrapbooking.  All the cool Saiyans look at Goku and feel a mixture of pity and disgust.

3) Vegeta smacked Gohan’s hand away once in DBZ, and he’s been dissing Goku since 1989.  This is how it’s supposed to be.   What did people expect Caulifla to do?  Give Goku a big sloppy kiss?  

4) Granted, it’s a big deal for U7 characters to meet female Saiyans, but Caulifla sees male Saiyan all the damn time.  This moment is far less interesting to her than it is to Goku. 

On a related note, I recall some dissatisfaction that Vegeta had no reaction to Caulifla and Kale at all, because they’re the first Saiyan women he’s seen in like thirty or forty years.  What was he supposed to do?  Dry hump them on the spot?  Make that giggity-giggity noise like Quagmire from Family Guy?  Hey, maybe he should have shook their hand.  That went super-well for Goku, right?

No, Vegeta knows better, which is why he crossed his arms stoically and did nothing.  It’s almost like he’s the Prince of all Saiyans, and is beneath such irreverent displays of sentiment.

In summary, as grateful as I am to Goku for arranging this tournament to eliminate all the loser universes, I’m really rooting for Caulifla and/or Kale to punch him in his stupid face a bunch of times.  Shake your own damn hand, you orange turd. 

[spidersanctuary]

A disordered venting about RP problems:

My experience RPing with Tumblr RPing is not very extensive - goes back about five years, I think. Before that, I RPd a bit, much earlier, but for the most part the only RPing I've done is on Tumblr (and Skype, but as an extension of Tumblr RPing).

I don't like bouncing around. I tend to stick with a place that looks legit, get attached to the characters (mine and others') and stick it out, even sometimes unreasonably so. I've been in... basically three group RPs. Two of them were larger (let's say, defined as "more than around ten active players at any given time", and the third was smaller and purely reactionary, a-la "we don't like the way things are here so we'll make our own". Though not without problems (and I can't say I didn't have my part in them), it was the most drama-free as a whole. It also looks like the fourth, soon to come, might follow along the same pattern.

Despite my sample size of one, I'm confident in saying small groups have a different dynamic. Especially if they're founded by people who already know each other. Bigger groups are trickier, in many ways, and I was struck by the realisation that the different problems I encountered in both my bigger groups were representative of two ends of a spectrum.  Similar things going wrong in opposite ways, so to speak.

One of them was defined by lack of forethought and planning. Indeed the whole RP just kind of happened organically, something more serious growing out of something very silly and casual. While it had its fun sides - and it was wildly fun, at times, for as long as the fun lasted - it's also obvious in retrospect how that could be a huge problem. Different players. No standardised rules or guidelines until way, waaay later in the game (after much drama had already happened). Lots of different people with different RPing backgrounds and personalities and playstyles, none of them fully on the same page. While many of the problems had to do with one or two difficult personalities in the group, that's not really the isuse. There is always a risk of... unpleasant people, no RP group is safe from them and no RP guidelines will truly protect you from someone who WANTS to start shit or manipulate things to their benefit and is cunning enough to do that. But even aside from that... the lack of regulation about who could grab what characters and how many (some players ending up with 20+ blogs), or any kind of spoken agreement about activity guidelines and replying etiquette. Lack of agreement about how "canon" certain plots were, in the RPing continuity. Lack of agreement about the continuity, period. A clash between people who wanted to develop a certain pre-planned (and rather exclusive) storyline and those who were more in it for spontaneity. It was a recipe for disaster. It didn't need to get as bad as it did, but starting off like that, it was bound to get unpleasant eventually anyway.

Now, the other group... oh, the other group. After the colourful experience of the first group, the things it offered seemed like a reassuring breath of fresh air. Planning! An almost DnD-esque level of detail to the established universe, rulebook, bestiary and lore! Basically an entire little sandbox lovingly crafted for you to play in. Transparent activity guidelines and rules! An actual mod team working to be approachable while still holding authority! New plots for everyone to participate in to be released basically by the clock, so nobody would feel left out! So lovely! Unfortunately, things are rarely as sunny as they appear. A certain type of literate, application RPs is infamous for their snobbishness and elitism, and despite the initially welcoming tone, that was exactly what this unravelled to be. On the flip side, many of the appeals of the group amounted to little more than elaborate publicity acts. Always, always must the group remain attractive and desirable to newcomers (perhaps unsurprisingly given the apparently abysmal player retention rates, both short and long-term). The tone turned out very different from what was advertised, the sandbox-like universe revealing itself to be more of a literal sandbox, with complex topics turned into gimmicks, and supernatural characters (prosecuted and feared for their in-humanity) easily and casually sharing information about their powers with near-strangers like kids on a playground comparing their toys. The "plots" thrown one's way are not only usually poorly (if at all) developed but intrusive, so that they are impossible to avoid completely even if one is not interested in them. Worse yet, the RP insists on doling out serious consequences and high-stakes crises like death, destruction, invasions of murderous monsters or malignant town-wide spells, but is curiously reluctant to allow any room for serious RPing or sense of consequences.

In fact, it's impossible to talk about consequences when even a sense of any basic continuity is thrown out the window, precluded by the occasional hiatus and re-launch and the various measures taken to make sure that new players enter onto a relatively blank slate. Yes, even if long-time residents of the area and the populace in general SHOULD remember and be affected by that politically motivated massacre half a year back, or that time monstrous vegetables SLAUGHTERED half a school of elementary schoolchildren. Thus, even though the RP is long-running (turning two years old soon), it is impossible for the setting to develop any sense of history, and instead it seems to turn more and more comically nonsensical the more tragedies befall the town and are promptly forgotten a few weeks later. Rather than a serious and in-depth setting, one begins to feel instead as if all the characters are living in a Lotus Eater-like state of vague oblivion, briefly reacting to various events but never quite letting them reach collective memory.

Now, all this might be bearable (and even fun! There's an appeal in a certain kind of wacky no-strings-attached horror-comedy-gore, no denying that), IF a couple things weren't true. a) If the RP (and specifically the mod team) didn't make such a huge deal about what a serious and respectable and serious RP it is. No OCs allowed. "We allow shipping but we don't put an emphasis on it! Please don't think this is one of those silly ship-obsessed RPs". No more than two characters allowed. Replies MUST happen every x days, and even though replies of various kinds are accepted (all prose, just different formats and individual reply lengths), only CERTAIN kinds count towards the activity requirement (???!), and a long-term failure to keep it up will end up in you getting the boot. Even if you ARE active and involved with other people and interact a lot. (Don't even get me started on that. I and about three or four other people, most of whom LEFT shortly after, ended up having our plots disrupted SIGNIFICANTLY because the mods booted - or in this case harangued into throwing in the towel and leaving in a huff - a player who was active with all of us, but wasn't active enough in "the RIGHT way" i.e. the right format. This was part of a bigger package of them caring more about keeping up certain pretenses and ticking off certain boxes to be more outwardly desirable to new applicants than the fun of the users who were already there.) b) The nit-picking. Oh god the nitpicking and micromanagement. Some of the shit I've personally seen, some of it I've heard about. It's one thing to crit a player for not being IC with a mod pre-made character. It's another thing to do that after they've been in play for A YEAR, and if you do that then, you're being blatantly disrespectful of all the development the player's put into them. And it's yet another thing to do that to someone's OC (before the 'no OCs' rule was instated). I've had mods dictate to me that my character shouldn't be reacting to x event like this or that, by listing a bunch of factors that, while possibly convincing, were only ONE possible way to interpret the big picture. For real. Psychology is complicated but for some reason all that goes out the window the moment the mod team decides they know how your character should be played (and I'm not talking about blatant realism or accuracy issues like "that's not how PTSD works" but actual decisions/ways of thinking, things that there should, in theory, be no "wrong" option with because once again, people are complicated).

Which brings me to: C) The omnipresent feeling of entitlement by the mod team aka the Powers That Be, as if they believe that theirs is such a supremely privileged, special and elite group, that they merely DEIGN to let you be a part of it. All of it manifesting in a complete lack of basic courtesy when approaching players. Or rather, any player who's been there longer than a month and who they're not actively trying to be Welcoming(TM) to. I should have seen it pretty early when I had a beef with another player who, to wit, disliked that an RP scene we had depicted her character as a "bad guy" (who was previously ESTABLISHED in canon as a psychopathic murderer!!! and the RP scene basically showed him doing more of the same!!!). She ended up badmouthing me to other players she was interacting with closely, and then they as a group complained about me to the mods, in which she twisted a certain conversation we'd had over Skype into something that reflected very badly on me, along the lines of me forcing her to RP a scene she would be triggered by. Now. This was resolved when I provided the mods with copied Skype messages (direct Skype quotes, a format that, in theory, can't be doctored) that showed she was fabricating that conversation - that she had outright told me she WOULD be okay with doing that scene. She eventually got booted for that (and other stuff). And all would have been well if it weren't for the way I had been initially addressed by the mods, and the condescending, denigrating, making you feel like shit TONE of it. Going from zero, utter peace, to "you have an attitude problem and you need to stop now or we'll kick you out". They also tacked on about half a dozen minor "offenses" I had done, like rambling too much about how the reasons I liked a school subject someone else disliked in the ooc chat, or trying TOO hard to get involved in plots, or other bullshit things that the people involved hadn't even complained to them about. I later realised that this, too, was a Pattern. Whenever they went to you with any sort of grievance, whether from their own side or from another player, they would tack on about half a dozen other "transgressions" you had made, sometimes making them up entirely out of thin air. (Other examples include: Me trying to "enforce a headcanon" by having my character react x way. I then pointed out that the "headcanon" I was allegedly """"enforcing"""" was the information stated on THEIR blog about how characters are large are reacting to a previous major town-wide event. (To wit: the information stated that the Event, a violent and deadly clash between two groups of people, exacerbated tensions between them and led to more mistrust between them. My character, who belongs to ONE group, was being mistrustful of the OTHER group. And somehow, this was not okay. Yes. That's it. That is literally how asinine it got. But then again, it's not surprising - as I explain later, it wasn't baout the offenses making sense. It was about getting to make me feel shitty for something) Or: I was being "inconsiderate" by having my character "out" the supernatural status of another character whose player was no longer in the group, and who they were not in contact with. Said player and I HAD in fact discussed this at the time, and they'd WANTED to have it happen, but the mods didn't know one way OR the other. They simply ASSUMED so they could try to pin it on me!) A long line of instances of them taking "offenses" that they didn't know for sure were offenses, that the player DIRECTLY affected HAD NOT come to them about, to paint a bigger picture of you being some kind of Problem Child who was daring to be naughty in THEIR classroom.

Now, I don't know if this was deliberate, but I can see why they did it. It makes you, as the player, feel like crap, puts you on the defensive, makes you question yourself. "Holy crap, were people really bothered by that time I went on a jokingly-serious rant about how awesome botany is when someone said they hated that topic in biology class?" (Hint: No they weren't. They thought NOTHING of it. But the mods saw it and filed it away for when they needed to make you feel like crap.) It puts the mods in a position of power and strengthened their authority. It forces you into a no-win scenario where you either deny the nonsensical accusations, and thus weaken your position and look less credible because it looks like you can't accept responsibility when you're wrong, OR accept the accusations and thereby agree with them that you're the naughty child and bad at following the rules. So it's a shitty, shitty manipulation technique. All of it coming from a place of entitlement and elitism.

I wish I could say I come from all this wiser, but it does feel like entitlement and elitism are the common denominator here. Part of the problem of the first RP was certain people needing to feel like they were superior and hating it when other people got in the way of that. Part of the problem of the second was stuck-up, self-important mods. Ultimately, it comes down to people who enjoy, just a little too much, to feel power and authority over people. To say that "it's THIS way, because I say it is" and have that listened to without question. Who enforce the rules not because it benefits the community, but because it makes them look good. Who view discussion, in and of itself, as disobedience, as an attack on their authority, an attack on them. I can't say I know for sure how to recognise the warning signs of a group like that BEFORE applying. But maybe big RP groups just aren't worth it, period.

[theconservativebrief]

The only way out is through.

By the time the curtain falls on the first season of HBO’s Succession, that adage has quite literally drawn blood. Though the series, which follows the power struggle within a family-owned media conglomerate, has been called a satire and in some cases a comedy, any laughter during the show’s final hour will likely be out of horror rather than amusement. With each successive episode, the series has shed layer after layer, revealing itself to be something much grimmer than just a wry indictment of the über-rich.

The finale, “Nobody is Ever Missing,” lands like a bomb, fundamentally shifting the dynamics of the show thus far. That it works is largely thanks to the stunning performances of Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy, the heir to the family company throne, and Brian Cox as Logan, his ruthless father, as their characters emerge as the keystones of the entire show.

Kendall and Logan’s story neatly vaults Succession into the realm of the classical texts that inform it, a point that was driven home when I spoke to Strong and Cox to examine the season’s final episode and its last two parts, which shake the very foundations upon which the series is built. Strong calls it an example of the archetypal monomyth, while Cox describes the show as “ludicrous.”

“It’s the ludicrousness of life,” Cox explains, citing how the classical works that Succession calls to mind — King Lear and Titus Andronicus among them — veer between comedy and tragedy. “You’re not locked into any sense of absolutism about the characters,” he adds, laughing, “You think, ‘Oh, they’re such horrible people,’ but then, if you really strip it down, they’re no more horrible than most people.”

Strong’s verdict is similar: “I hear from a lot of people how unlikeable these characters are, and I find that so interesting, as if a character is either likable or unlikable.”

It’s that refusal to fall into a strictly black-and-white matrix that ultimately makes the Succession finale so affecting, and so difficult to watch. The balance between comedy and tragedy finally tips, crashing into the latter category, and it’s a testament to the series that it all comes together.

Warning: spoilers for “Nobody is Ever Missing” lie ahead.

With the crash, the series reaches a point of no return. Colin Hutton/HBO

At the beginning of “Nobody Is Ever Missing,” Kendall delivers a letter to his father informing him of a hostile takeover of the company. For a moment, it seems like Kendall may finally triumph over Logan after the countless humiliations and setbacks he’s suffered over the course of the season, but there’s no savoring the victory. Kendall can’t get through the confrontation without stammering, and his siblings now hate him for putting their inheritances and social status in jeopardy, and on the day of his sister’s wedding, no less.

The brewing sense of unease only worsens as, at the episode’s halfway point, Kendall goes hunting for drugs to try to take the edge off, coaxing one of the serving staff to take him to get some cocaine. As they drive, they joke about kidnapping; “You should kidnap me,” Kendall says, boasting about his fortune as the boy notes that he knows a house where he could keep him. Though the characters laugh, the scene is very clearly teetering on the edge of an abyss — of some event that it’ll be impossible to come back from.

In an instant, the balance breaks. A deer appears in the middle of the road, and the car goes careening into a nearby lake. Though Kendall manages to swim out of the car, the boy is knocked out cold by the crash. Kendall dives once, twice, to try to get him out of the sinking car, but it’s no use. By the time he manages to swim to shore, the spot where the car sunk isn’t even distinguishable anymore, and the young man is dead.

The next 10 minutes focus on Kendall, and Kendall alone. As the ramifications of what’s just happened sink in, he stumbles back to the wedding festivities. The sequence almost plays like a horror movie: Kendall is soaked through to the bone, and darts behind trees to hide from cars on the road, knowing that he can’t afford to be placed anywhere near the accident. His posture is rigid, as if he doesn’t know how to function anymore, and his expression is slack, going from abject despair to grim determination and back again.

“It was really hard to shoot,” Strong says of the scene. “It was hard emotionally, it was hard physically. But in a way, those are the given circumstances, so you kind of lean into that. You lean into the fact that the water is freezing, you lean into the fact that it’s raining and freezing and it’s 4 in the morning and you’re covered in mud.”

On top of that, to try to sustain a certain ��energy field” around the sequence, Strong asked the episode’s director, Mark Mylod, to keep as much of the post-crash shooting together as possible. “As you can imagine, a 10-minute sequence takes much longer to film, and you have to sustain the life and death stakes of that, or I believe you do, for the entirety of it,” he explains, adding that he’d also requested not to rehearse a few specific scenes (including Kendall’s delivering the letter to Logan) to keep a sense of tension to them.

After breaking back into his own suite (having lost his room key somewhere along the way), Kendall cleans himself off and returns to the wedding. Though he does his best to act as though nothing’s happened, dancing with his children as Whitney Houston plays, he can’t quite keep his facade from slipping.

It’s a showcase for Strong, who, despite the presence of more outwardly colorful characters like Tom Wamsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) and Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun), emerges as the series MVP with how heartbreakingly he pulls off the episode’s final act.

“I remember just being really kind of destroyed by them,” Strong recalls of reading the final scripts, which were written by series creator Jesse Armstrong. “You read something like that, you sort of know you’re going to have to go through this, you can’t avoid it. But I think a part of me certainly wished it on someone else.”

This near-Gothic tragedy is a far cry from most initial impressions of the series, which Strong is quick to acknowledge. “Even though the show starts out with some low-hanging fruit, I think the real kind of bedrock of it, the plate tectonics of the structure that [Armstrong] starts to create, that build to this sort of tragedy, is really — when I read the script, I was blown away, and quite daunted by what I had to go through in order to serve it,” he says.

He tells me he hasn’t revisited those nights since they were over. “They were harrowing to go through. You want it to be real, is the thing. It’s not enjoyable. I think there’s always joy in the creative process, on some level, but actually, what is the character’s experience, and what is the character’s struggle — I don’t think you can really spare yourself from that if you want to embody it.”

Given just how far and how drastically Kendall falls, there’s a certain bittersweetness to knowing that the show’s writers had such a plummet in mind all along. One day, during a break in the writer’s room, Strong sneaked in to take a look around. On the wall were notecards, one of which read, “Kendall wins, but loses.”

“This could be the defining moment of your life, and indeed everything.” Colin Hutton/HBO

It doesn’t take long for the other shoe to drop. The next morning, Logan calls Kendall to discuss a matter brought to him by the police. The car and the body have been found, along with Kendall’s room key. Calmly, Logan explains to Kendall that it must have been an accident following an attempted robbery, and tells Kendall to report any missing items. Kendall, shellshocked, simply nods along.

As soon as the room empties, Logan instructs Kendall to inform his co-conspirators that the takeover is no more. Kendall begins to cry, trying to protest his innocence, but it’s of no use. “This could be the defining moment of your life, and indeed everything,” Logan says. “A rich kid kills a boy. You’d never be anything else. Or you know what it could be, what it should be? Nothing at all. A sad, little detail at a lovely wedding, where father and son are reconciled.”

There’s something awful about the episode’s final moment, as Kendall, in tears, stumbles into Logan’s arms. It’s the first glimpse of tenderness we’ve seen Logan offer his son — “You’re my number one boy,” he says in consolation — but it’s undercut by the tragedy that’s prompted it, as well as by Logan quickly calling in one of the house staff to take Kendall off his hands.

“I remember talking to Jesse about if [Logan] really loves his children,” Cox recalls, when I ask about Logan’s capacity for genuine warmth. ”Jesse said, ‘Absolutely. He absolutely loves his children.’ And I think that’s the tragedy of the piece, that’s what gives it its stature. It’s not just — it is a morality tale, certainly, but the thing about Logan is his children mean a lot to him. They’re all fuck-ups, and he sees that, and that sort of fills him with great sadness, that they have to have their hands held.”

But that doesn’t preclude a certain ruthlessness. “He really had Kendall,” Cox says of the final scene. “He was able to reconstruct Kendall, in a way. … It goes back right to the first episode, where I say to him, ‘You’re too soft.’”

It’s a sentiment that’s echoed in the finale before the crash, as Logan dresses down Kendall yet again, telling him that he’s not made for the harsher, harder world in which his father runs.

Their final conversation drives that point home, as Logan’s willingness to sacrifice a life in order to bring his son back into the fold is contrasted with the way that Kendall breaks, exhibiting a vulnerability that had seemed lost as the season progressed. They’re fundamentally different — Logan is a “man of blood,” as Strong puts it, where Kendall is not. The crash shakes Kendall to his core, but as Cox explains, “Logan will not dwell on that. He wants it sorted, done. He moves on.”

In other words, Logan’s language is the “language of strength,” a description that Strong cites from Michael Wolff’s book The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch, and which Cox ascribes to Logan’s childhood brutalization, as suggested by the scars visible on Logan’s back when he goes swimming in “Austerlitz.” Obviously, it’s not a vocabulary that Kendall possesses, and as Strong notes, it’s his attempts to use it that lead him to suffer.

It’s clearest in Kendall’s breakdown, which, incredibly, Strong tells me wasn’t scripted. “That’s honestly just what happened in the room that day; I had no idea how it would come out of me,” he explains. “That was just what I experienced. I think you load yourself up with everything that’s happened to the character until that moment, and then you walk through the door and see what happens. It’s a very important way of working, for me, because if anything is prescribed — to be honest, if it had been in the writing, I’m not sure it would have happened.”

On the characters of Succession: “These are real people.” Colin Hutton/HBO

“It’s not Arrested Development,” Cox says, as we discuss the series’ influences, from the Chappaquiddick incident to Greek tragedy. “There’s a classical element to it, with language, and I think that’s its strength, in a way.”

His meaning becomes clearer as he notes the way that plays like King Lear will get laughs despite being regarded as tragedies, just as Succession has excelled at balancing humor with an increasingly tragic narrative.

“I’ve always regarded myself as a comic actor,” Cox says, adding, “I play a lot of heavies, but I think I always play them in a slightly sort of comic— certainly wicked, that kind of comic way. […] I think Logan is also very funny, because he’s got this authentic quality. He doesn’t seem to be quite there. He’s not quite there because he’s damaged in some way, but he’s not quite there, I think, because he doesn’t want to be quite there. He likes to be inscrutable. And you get that very clearly in the first episode, when one son brings the goo, the sourdough, and then Tom brings a Patek Philippe watch. He’s more curious about the sourdough than he is about the Patek Philippe watch.”

Though Kendall certainly isn’t quite as opaque, he’s still unquestionably complex, and draws from the same sorts of archetypal molds. “Chekhov said, ‘Tell me what a character wants, and I’ll tell you who they are,’” Strong tells me. “What [Kendall] wants is so clear, and he goes after it with such a vengeance that that becomes his undoing. And that is such an archetypal story. I’ll be struck down by a bolt of lightning, but if you look at The Godfather, Michael Corleone goes from being this guileless student to being a cold-blooded, ruthless killer. Obviously, Jesse finds his way into that terrain in a kind of sideways way.”

To that end, Succession is an organically growing creature, and its creators clearly have larger ambitions. Cox initially expected his role on the series to be a one-season part, but Armstrong and Adam McKay dispelled that notion as soon as they began negotiating to bring him onto the show.

Cox also points to the growth of Kieran Culkin’s character, Roman, as evidence of the show’s shift toward “a more considered element.” “He’s such a roister-goister, he’s so glib and talky,” Cox says, “but he suddenly emerges. I watched [episode] eight the other day, and I thought Kieran was so good in that because he sort of ends up holding it all together.”

Again, it all comes down to a sense of humanity. “These are real people,” Strong says, stressing the quality of the show’s writing. “I think Mike Nichols said that, in the first act of a play, you invite the audience to the party. So I feel like the show invites everyone to the party, and then hopefully it kicks them in the stomach. Or something forceful.”

That forceful effect is certainly felt in the series finale, which is more than just a brutal reset, as the crash and its resulting fallout wipe out a season’s worth (arguably a lifetime’s worth) of Kendall’s attempts to get out from under Logan’s shadow. It’s wrenching to watch, and all the more remarkable for having been born out of genuine emotion.

“I think that really great work is a product of putting yourself in danger, which is sort of what I mean about not knowing what would happen in that last scene,” Strong explains. “Without risk, you’re just making something safe. Or if you know in advance what you’re making, it’s not art, certainly. I think that’s, at the end of the day, what you’re trying to make, whether you fall short of it or not — not just television.”

Original Source -> How HBO’s Succession pulled off its brutal finale

via The Conservative Brief

[lukeburnside521-blog]

The Treatment of Sex Pot - An Analytic Approach

It Is well-known among people in the 12-step sex applications that of all the dependence, sex is the most difficult to master. Far from the idea that sex addiction is that the "fun" one, the anguish of managing this affliction is tremendous. The compulsion is so compelling it's typical for members of their sex recovering classes to be not able to maintain any continuous time of sexual salvation, giving way to grief and hopelessness. Before therapy, sexual enactment is the addict's only source of security, enjoyment, soothing and acceptance. It vitalizes and joins. Sex addition was known as the athlete's foot of the mind: it's an itch always waiting to be scraped. The scratching, nevertheless, causes wounds and never alleviates the itch. Moreover, the percent of individuals Who go to therapy or a 12-step program is rather small. The majority of sexual compulsives live in isolation full of feelings of shame. That can be a condition that slowly Bleeds away what the person holds dear. The life of a sex addict gradually becomes very small. The liberty of self is impaired. Energies are all consumed. The rapacious demand for a specific sort of sexual experience drives the enthusiast to devote untold hours on the planet of his dependence. Inexorably, the compulsion starts to exact higher and higher prices. Whether it be on the internet indulging in sexual fantasies with fantasy folks, being on the telephone into the gender hot-lines, or searching the internet and the S&M nightclubs for someone who will act out a special, ritualized fetish dream, or even cruising the bars searching for your "one" who will have sex in a public toilet, or visiting dungeons to be whipped, flogged and humiliated, sexual addiction is a devastating illness that takes a massive toll. Friends slip away. Then there is endless fear of vulnerability. Relationships with partners are ruined, since the allure of intimate sex with a partner pales in comparison to the intense "high" of indulging in the darkened and devious world of sexual compulsion. What's a sex addict? Gender dependency, of course, has Nothing to do with sex. Any sexual activity or apparent "perversion" has no meaning outside of its psychological, unconscious context. A very simple definition of sex addiction is not dissimilar to definitions of other addictions. But a very simple definition of the complex and intractable condition doesn't detract. What sets sex dependence besides other addictions and which makes it persistent is the field of sex touches on our innermost subconscious fantasies and fears, our sense of self, our individuality. Current treatment might include participation in a 12-step program, going to an inpatient clinic, working with the Patrick Carnes material, aversion therapy, or the use of drugs to stave off hypersexuality. Most treatment is cognitive-behavioral, made to help the individual to control or repress the urge for a period of time, usually from a desire to comply with the group norms of the 12-step assembly or a need to please the therapist. While I understand the efficacy that the 12-step programs to provide structure and support, in my estimation, the reason that relapse is so prevalent is the treatment modalities don't effect long-term structural character change that eliminates the compulsion in its roots. Current treatment doesn't aim to transform psychic energies so that the fact sector of their mind dominates the character so that the urge to behave can be understood and controlled. While the definition of sex addiction Is the same as that of other addictions (perennial failure to control the behaviour and continuation of the behavior despite increasingly harmful effects), sexual compulsion is set apart from other dependence in that gender involves our innermost unconscious wishes, anxieties and conflicts. It involves a individual's derailed developmental process that occurred as a result of inadequate parenting. Hence, permanent growth and change are likely to happen in the arena of contemporary psychoanalysis, which seeks understanding and repair of these unconscious dysfunctional relational patterns along with the evolution of a more unified and structured sense of self. This new character restructuring can better self-regulate feeling countries without the use of a destructive defense such as sexualization and can find significance, joy, closeness, meaningful goal setting and achievement from attainable and appropriate sources in life. The remainder of this Paper provides a brief overview of the historical psychoanalytic perspectives about sexual deviance, and will then articulate the present analytical understanding about the dynamics and treatment of sexual compulsions. Any Freud formulated that sexual deviance occurs due to an incomplete resolution of the Oedipus complex, with its concomitant castration anxiety. Unconscious castration anxiety happens in the individual's present-day consciousness in the kind of fear of confrontation, retaliation, or rebuke, a feeling of inadequacy, and doubts about gender identity. Gender addiction, according to Freud, is a defensive way to deal with a tenuous sense of masculinity together with unrelenting anxiety about gender, women, closeness, aggression, as well as competition. Sexual compulsions derive from an insatiable need for acceptance, prestige, power, bolstering of self-esteem, security and love which are experienced as being mandatory for survival. Characteristic of Any enthusiast is a very long history of a distressed mother-child relationship. An unempathic, narcissistic, depressed or alcoholic mum has low tolerance for the child's stress and frustrations. Nor is she able to provide the compassion, attention, nurturing and support that foster healthy development. This anxiety sends the sexual enthusiast running to his eroticized, dream cocoon where he encounters security, security, a diminution of stress in addition to the quelling of a subconscious wish to set up and maintain the overlooking, yet crucial tie to mother. Average of this individual is the hope he can find an idealized "other" who can embody, actualize and make tangible the longed for endlessly nurturing parent. This approach is doomed to failure. Inevitably, the other person's needs start to impinge on the fantasy. The result is frustration, disappointment and isolation. On the other hand, a mom could be too Intrusive and careful. She may be seductive, possibly using the child as a replacement for an emotionally husband. Later in life, the addict is hypersexual and has difficulty setting boundaries. Real intimacy is experienced as an engulfing burden. The disillusionment of not having appropriate parental boundaries is acted out later in life by the enthusiast's unconscious belief that the rules do not apply to him with regards to gender, although he may be regulated and compliant in different parts of his lifetime. A major theme for all dependence is that they Have experienced deep and chronic need deprivation throughout childhood. Addicts generally sustain emotional injury within the realm of this mother-infant interaction in addition to with different relationships. Intense interpersonal anxiety is the result of the early-life psychological need deprivation. In later life, the person experiences anxiety in all intimate relationships. Since the sex addict has anxiety about being unable to get what he needs from real people and since his desperate search for the fulfillment of unmet childhood needs inevitably end in disillusionment, he inevitably returns to his reliance on sexual dreams and enactments to alleviate anxiety about relationship and closeness and as a way to accomplish a sense of self-affirmation. Sex, For the enthusiast, starts to be his principal value and a confirmation of his awareness of self. Feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and worthlessness magically vanish while sexually preoccupied , through acting through or out spending untold hours online. On the other hand, using gender to meet self-centered needs for approval or validation precludes with it to meet the intimacy demands of a cherished other. Characteristic of this type of narcissism is the screening of other human beings less complete people who have their own emotions, desires and desires, but instead because deliverers of desperately desired satisfaction that beaches up a fragile sense of self. This sets up a cycle in which his narcissism prevents him from deriving satisfaction from mutual, reciprocal connections in real life. Sexualizing, once again, is returned as a magical elixir wherein his demands are met without needing to negotiate the exact real vicissitudes of romantic relationships. A After spending years of living a poisonous youth household, he went to his own world of fantasizing and bliss as a way to soothe and shield himself. "When I was a kid, I was obsessed with beautiful women in the magazines. When I was able to date, I went through one girl after another. In maturity, I knew there was anger and despair I didn't need to confront. I went to peep shows and that I visited prostitutes. Many a night I'd spend hours in my car circling the block looking for just the correct street-walker to give me oral sex in my vehicle. 1 night I had sex with a transvestite. I cried all the way home" He met a woman whom he designated as "perfect - my He became engaged but soon lost interest from the gender, which he described as "boring". While engaged, he started picking up hookers for oral sex in the car and began compulsively using phone sex. His current relationship is breaking up since he The remainder of the story is predictable. They moved in together along with the beautiful, youthful, sexy female started become actual and having needs of her own. He admits he never felt warmth or love for her; she was only a supplier of his narcissistic needs. As the relationship deteriorates, he struggles the instincts to come back to sex with strangers that do not make demand on him. Another client of mine, a 38-year-old married man, has a compulsion to see prostitutes. Three years into the therapy, he was finally able to discuss his anger towards his mother for depriving him through neglect and also for never touching or caressing him. He could now make a link between visits to the prostitutes and his hostility against mom for depriving him of sensual pleasure. He has lost in the mire of his parents' constant feuding. "When I was really young I'd put a blanket My genitals as a sort of soothing that I was not getting from my parents. The rest of my life was a struggle to find other methods to soothe myself. When I discovered prostitutes, I believed I was in heaven. I am able to get sex and be in complete control. I can have it instantly, any way I need it, whenever I want it. I don't have to bother myself with the girl, so long as I pay her. I do not have to concern myself with vulnerability and rejection. This is my restricted joy world. This is the ultimate antithesis of the deprivation of my youth." The Usage of sexualization as a defense is a frequent theme that runs through the psychoanalytic literature. A shield is a mechanism that the young child devises to emotionally survive a poisonous family environment. While this manner of shielding himself works nicely for a time period, the continuous use of it as an adult is destructive to the person's continuing functioning and sense of wellbeing. By losing himself sexual Fantasies and constantly watching others as potential sex partners, or from sensual net enactments, the sex addict can significantly reduce and control a wide array of threatening and uncomfortable psychological conditions. Most addicts restrain or bind potentially overwhelming anxiety via the dependence process. Diminution of depression, anxiety and rage are some of the pay-offs that operate to facilitate and maintain life in the sensual cocoon. I quote another patient that Illustrates a case of narcissistic personality along with the usage of sexualization as a defense. He's a 52-year old attractive, successful single man. She desired sex. I Did not. It's predictable. I don't believe I could even maintain an erection . While a spend untold hours compulsively websurfing to live in my erotic dreams, when it will become actual, when you find somebody who seems to be the embodiment of your sensual pre-occupation, interest soon wanes as her wants and needs come into the film. From time to time, I

[marshallreece28-blog]

The Treatment of Sex Addiction - An Analytic Approach

It Is well known among people in the 12-step sex applications that of all the addictions, sex is the toughest to master. Far from the notion that sex addiction is the "fun" one, the anguish of dealing with this affliction is enormous. The compulsion is so compelling that it's typical for members of the sex recovering classes to be unable to maintain any constant time of sexual sobriety, giving way to despair and hopelessness. Before treatment, sexual enactment is the enthusiast's only supply of security, pleasure, soothing and approval. It vitalizes and connects. Sex addition was called the athlete's foot of the brain: it's an itch always waiting to be scratched. The scratching, nevertheless, causes wounds and never alleviates the itch. Furthermore, the percent of people Who go to therapy or a 12-step program is quite tiny. The majority of sexual compulsives reside in isolation filled with feelings of shame. Nearly 100 percent of the men and women who visit me for an initial consultation, if it be for compulsive use of prostitutes, phone sex, a fetish, cross dressing, or masochistic experiences with dominatrixes, relay which under the shame they feel in telling me their story, they also experience a feeling of freedom that comes from finally being able to share with another human being the hidden, shameful, and sexually compulsive actions which imprison them. This is a condition that gradually Bleeds away everything the individual holds dear. The lifetime of a sexual addict gradually becomes very little. The freedom of self is diminished. Energies are consumed. The rapacious need for a particular kind of sexual experience compels the enthusiast to spend countless hours on the planet of his addiction. Inexorably, the compulsion begins to exact higher and higher costs. Whether it be online indulging in sensual fantasies with fantasy folks, being on the telephone to the gender hot-lines, or searching the internet and the S&M nightclubs for someone who will act out a particular, ritualized fetish fantasy, or cruising the bars searching for the "one" who will have sex at a public bathroom, or going to dungeons to be whipped, flogged and humiliated, sexual addiction is a devastating illness that requires an enormous toll. Friends slide away. Hobbies and activities once enjoyed are dropped. Then there is endless fear of vulnerability. Relationships with partners are ruined, as the appeal of romantic sex with a spouse pales in comparison to the intense "high" of indulging into the darkened and devious world of sexual compulsion. What is a sex addict? Nothing to do with sex. Any sexual act or clear "perversion" has no significance outside of its emotional, subconscious circumstance. A simple definition of sexual addiction is not dissimilar to definitions of different addictions. But a very simple definition of the complex and intractable condition does not suffice. What sets sex dependence besides other addictions and which makes it persistent is that the subject of sex rolls on our innermost unconscious wishes and fears, our sense of self, our individuality. Present treatment might include participation in a 12-step program, going to an outpatient clinic, working together with the Patrick Carnes material, aversion therapy, or using medications to stave off hypersexuality. Most therapy is cognitive-behavioral, designed to help the individual to control or repress the instinct for a time period, usually out of a desire to abide by the group standards of the 12-step assembly or a necessity to please the therapist. While I recognize the efficacy the 12-step programs to give structure and support, in my estimation, the rationale that alcoholism is indeed widespread is the treatment modalities don't effect long-term structural character change that eliminates the compulsion in its origins. Current treatment doesn't aim to transform psychic energies so that the fact sector of the mind dominates the personality so the urge to act out can be understood and controlled. Even though the definition of sex addiction Is the same as that of other addictions (recurrent failure to restrain the behavior and disposition of the behavior despite increasingly harmful consequences), sexual compulsion is put apart from other dependence because gender involves our innermost subconscious fantasies, anxieties and conflicts. Sex addiction is a symbolic enactment of deeply entrenched unconscious dysfunctional relational patterns with others and self. It involves a individual's derailed developmental process that occurred as a result of inadequate parenting. Therefore, permanent growth and change are most likely to occur in the arena of contemporary psychoanalysis, which reproduces understanding and repair of those unconscious dysfunctional relational patterns together with the development of a more unified and organized awareness of self. This new personality restructuring may better self-regulate feeling states without using a damaging defense like sexualization and will find meaning, enjoyment, intimacy, purposeful goal setting and accomplishment from attainable and appropriate sources in life. The remainder of this Paper will give a brief overview of the historical psychoanalytic perspectives regarding sexual deviance, and will then articulate the current analytic understanding about the dynamics and therapy of sexual compulsions. Any Discussion of historic psychoanalysis must, ipso facto, start with Sigmund Freud. Unconscious castration anxiety occurs from the person's present-day awareness in the form of fear of confrontation, retaliation, or rebuke, a feeling of inadequacy, and doubts regarding gender identity. Gender addiction, according to Freud, is a defensive way to cope with a tenuous sense of masculinity combined with unrelenting fear of gender, women, intimacy, aggression, as well as rivalry. Critics that followed Freud held varying perspectives. Sexual compulsions derive from an insatiable need for acceptance, prestige, power, strengthening of self-esteem, love and security which are experienced as being necessary for survival. Characteristic of Any addict is a very long history of a distressed mother-child relationship. An unempathic, narcissistic, depressed or alcoholic mother has reduced tolerance to the child's anxiety and frustrations. Nor is unable to supply the empathy, attention, support and nurturing that foster healthy growth. The effect in after life is separation anxiety, fear of abandonment and a sense of impending self-fragmentation. This stress sends the sex enthusiast running to his eroticized, dream cocoon where he experiences safety, security, a diminution of stress in addition to the quelling of a subconscious wish to set up and keep the overlooking, yet essential tie to mother. Typical of the person is the hope that he can come across an idealized "other" who can embody, actualize and make concrete the longed for endlessly nurturing parent. This approach is doomed to collapse. Inevitably, the other person's needs start to impinge on the dream. The end result is frustration, disappointment and isolation. On the other hand, a mother could be overly Intrusive and attentive. She could be unconsciously seductive, perhaps using the child for a replacement for an emotionally husband. Later in life, the addict is hypersexual and has trouble setting boundaries. Real intimacy is experienced as an engulfing burden. The disillusionment of not having appropriate parental boundaries is acted out later in life by the enthusiast's unconscious belief that the rules don't apply to him with respect to gender, although he may be regulated and compliant in other parts of his life. A major theme for many addictions is that they Addicts generally sustain psychological injury within the world of the mother-infant interaction in addition to with different associations. Intense social anxiety is the result of the early-life psychological need deprivation. In later life, the person experiences anxiety in all intimate relationships. Because the sex addict has fear of being unable to get what he desires from actual people and because his desperate hunt for the fulfillment of unmet childhood needs inevitably end in disillusionment, he inevitably returns to his own dependence on sexual fantasies and enactments to relieve anxiety about relationship and intimacy and as a means to accomplish a feeling of self-affirmation. Sex, For the enthusiast, begins to be his primary price along with also a confirmation of his sense of self. Feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and worthlessness magically disappear while sexually preoccupied through acting out or through spending countless hours on the internet. However, the use of gender to meet self-centered needs for approval or validation precludes with it to meet the intimacy demands of a cherished other. Characteristic of this kind of narcissism is the screening of other human beings less complete people who have their own emotions, wants and desires, but instead because deliverers of desperately desired satisfaction that shores up a fragile sense of self. This sets up a cycle in which his narcissism prevents him from deriving gratification from mutual, mutual relationships in real-life. Sexualizing, once again, is returned as a magical elixir wherein his demands are met without having to negotiate the exact real vicissitudes of romantic relationships. A Customer of mine, a 48-year-old attractive single man, is in the process of this dividing of yet another connection. After spending years of living a poisonous youth household, he went into his own world of fantasizing and masturbation as a means to soothe and protect himself. "When I was a child, I was obsessed with beautiful women in the publications. When I was able so far, I moved through a single woman after another. In maturity, I knew there was anger and despair I didn't want to face. To evade them, I had a constant flow of women who worshipped me, soothed me, paid attention to my requirements. I went to peep shows and that I visited prostitutes. Many a night I'd spend hours in my car circling the block searching for just the correct street-walker to give me oral sex in my vehicle. I cried all the way home." He met a woman whom he designated as "perfect - my He became engaged but soon lost interest from the gender, and that he described as "boring". While engaged, he began picking up hookers for oral sex in the vehicle and began compulsively using phone sex. His current relationship is breaking up since he Picked a woman for her youth and beauty (which represented well on his narcissistic self). They moved in together and the gorgeous, young, sexy female started become actual and having needs of her very own. He admits he never felt heat or love for her; she had been merely a supplier of his real life needs. Since the connection deteriorates, he fights the impulses to return to sex with strangers that don't make demand. 38-year-old married man, has a compulsion to visit prostitutes. Three years into the treatment, he was eventually able to discuss his anger towards his mother for depriving him emotionally through negligence and for never touching or caressing him. "When I was really young I would put a blanket My dad as a sort of soothing which I wasn't getting out of my parents. The remainder of my life was a struggle to find other ways to soothe myself. As soon as I found prostitutes, I thought I was in heaven. I can get sex and be in total control. I could have it instantly, any way I want it, whenever I want it. I do not need to concern myself with the woman, as long as I cover her. I don't need to concern myself with rejection and vulnerability. This is my restricted pleasure world. This is the ultimate antithesis of the deprivation of my childhood." The Use of sexualization as a defense is a common theme that runs throughout the psychoanalytic literature. A defense is a mechanism the young child devises to emotionally survive a noxious family atmosphere. Although this way of shielding himself functions nicely for a period of time, the constant use of it as a grownup is harmful to the person's ongoing functioning and sense of well being. By losing himself sexual Fantasies and always watching others as potential sex partners, or from sensual net enactments, the sex addict can significantly reduce and control a huge variety of threatening and uncomfortable emotional states. Most addicts control or bind potentially overwhelming pressure through the dependence process. Diminution of melancholy, anxiety and rage are a number of the pay-offs that function to facilitate and maintain life in the erotic cocoon. I estimate another individual which Illustrates a case of narcissistic personality together with the usage of sexualization as a defense. He's a 52-year old attractive, effective single guy. "I went to date the other night. She wanted sex. I Did not. It is predictable. I don't believe I could also maintain an erection anymore. While a spend untold hours compulsively websurfing to live within my erotic dreams, as it will become actual, when you find someone who seems to be the embodiment of your sexual pre-occupation, interest shortly wanes as her desires and needs come into the picture. Sometimes, I

[loganneilson7-blog]

The Treatment of Sex Pot - An Analytic Approach

It Is well-known among people in the 12-step sex programs that of the addictions, sex is the toughest to master. Far from the idea that sex addiction is the "fun" one, the anguish of dealing with this affliction is tremendous. The compulsion is so persuasive it is common for members of the sex recovering classes to be not able to maintain any constant time of sexual salvation, giving way to despair and hopelessness. Before therapy, sexual enactment is the addict's only source of security, pleasure, soothing and approval. It vitalizes and connects. Sex addition has been called the athlete's foot of the brain: it's an itch always waiting to be scraped. The scratching, nevertheless, causes wounds rather than alleviates the itching. Moreover, the percent of people Who go to therapy or a 12-step program is rather tiny. The majority of sexual compulsives live in isolation filled with feelings of pity. That can be a condition that slowly Bleeds away everything the person holds dear. The life of a sexual addict gradually becomes quite small. The freedom of self is diminished. Energies are all consumed. The rapacious demand for a particular kind of sexual encounter compels the enthusiast to devote untold hours on the planet of his dependence. Inexorably, the compulsion begins to exact higher and greater costs. Whether it be online indulging in sexual fantasies with fantasy folks, being on the phone to the gender hot-lines, or searching the internet and the S&M nightclubs for someone who will act out a special, ritualized fetish dream, or even cruising the bars looking for your "one" who'll have sex in a public toilet, or visiting dungeons to be whipped, flogged and humiliated, and sex addiction is a catastrophic illness that takes an enormous toll. Friends slip away. Financial security crumbles as sums as high as $40,000 or $50,000 annually are spent on gender. Then there's perpetual fear of exposure. Relationships with partners are ruined, since the appeal of intimate sex with a spouse pales in comparison to the intense "high" of indulging into the darkened and devious world of sexual compulsion. What's a sex addict? Nothing related to sex. Any sexual act or clear "perversion" has no meaning outside its emotional, subconscious circumstance. A simple definition of sex addiction is not dissimilar to definitions of other addictions. But a simple definition of this complex and intractable condition does not detract. What sets sex dependence apart from other addictions and makes it persistent is the subject of sex touches on our innermost unconscious wishes and fears, our sense of self, our very identity. Current treatment might include participation in a 12-step program, going to an inpatient clinic, working with the Patrick Carnes material, aversion therapy, or the use of drugs to stave off hypersexuality. Most treatment is cognitive-behavioral, made to help the patient to control or repress the instinct for a time period, usually out of a desire to abide by the group standards of the 12-step meeting or a need to please the therapist. While I understand the effectiveness the 12-step programs to provide support and structure, in my opinion, the rationale that relapse is so prevalent is the treatment modalities do not effect long-term structural character change that eliminates the compulsion in its origins. Current treatment does not aim to change psychic energies so that the reality sector of their mind dominates the personality so that the impulse to behave can be understood and controlled. Is the same as that of other addictions (perennial failure to restrain the behavior and disposition of the behavior despite increasingly harmful consequences), sexual compulsion is set apart from other addictions because gender involves our innermost subconscious fantasies, anxieties and conflicts. It involves a individual's derailed developmental process that happened as a consequence of inadequate parenting. Therefore, permanent growth and change are likely to happen in the arena of modern psychoanalysis, which seeks repair and understanding of these unconscious dysfunctional relational patterns along with the evolution of a more unified and organized awareness of self. This new personality restructuring can better self-regulate feeling countries without the use of a damaging defense like sexualization and can find meaning, enjoyment, closeness, meaningful goal setting and accomplishment from attainable and appropriate sources in existence. The remainder of the Paper provides a brief summary of the historical psychoanalytic perspectives about sexual deviance, and will then articulate the current analytic understanding about the dynamics and therapy of sexual compulsions. Any Unconscious castration anxiety happens from the person's present-day consciousness in the form of fear of confrontation, retaliation, or rebuke, a feeling of inadequacy, and perhaps doubts regarding gender identity. Sex addiction, according to Freud, is a defensive method to deal with a tenuous sense of masculinity combined with unrelenting anxiety about sex, women, intimacy, aggression, as well as competition. Sexual compulsions derive from an insatiable need for approval, prestige, power, strengthening of self-esteem, security and love that are experienced as being necessary for survival. Characteristic of Any addict is a very long history of a disturbed mother-child relationship. An unempathic, narcissistic, depressed or alcoholic mother has low tolerance to the child's anxiety and frustrations. Nor is she able to supply the empathy, attention, support and nurturing that foster healthy growth. This stress sends the sexual addict running to his eroticized, dream cocoon where he encounters security, safety, a diminution of stress as well as the quelling of a subconscious desire to set up and keep the overlooking, yet crucial tie to mother. Typical of this person is the hope that he can find an idealized "other" who can embody, actualize and make concrete the longed for endlessly nurturing parent. This approach is doomed to failure. Inevitably, another individual's needs start to impinge on the dream. The result is frustration, loneliness and disappointment. On the other hand, a mom can be overly Intrusive and careful. She may be unconsciously seductive, possibly using the child as a substitute for an emotionally unavailable spouse. The child perceives the mother's inability to set appropriate boundaries as seductive and as a huge disillusionment. Later in life, the enthusiast is hypersexual and has difficulty setting boundaries. Real intimacy is experienced as a engulfing burden. The disillusionment of not experiencing proper parental boundaries is acted out later in life by the addict's unconscious belief that the rules don't apply to him with respect to sex, although he can be regulated and compliant in different parts of his life. A major theme for all addictions is that they Addicts generally sustain emotional injury within the realm of this mother-infant interaction in addition to with different relationships. Intense interpersonal anxiety is the consequence of the early-life emotional need deprivation. In later life, the individual experiences anxiety in most intimate relationships. Because the sex addict has fear of being not able to get what he needs from actual people and because his desperate search for the fulfillment of unmet childhood needs inevitably end in disillusionment, he inevitably contributes to his dependence on sexual dreams and enactments to alleviate anxiety about connection and intimacy and as a way to accomplish a feeling of self-affirmation. Sex, For the addict, begins to be his primary price along with a confirmation of his sense of self. Feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and worthlessness magically vanish while sexually preoccupied through acting out or through spending untold hours online. However, the use of sex to meet self-centered needs for approval or validation precludes using it to meet with the intimacy demands of a precious other. Characteristic of this type of narcissism is the screening of other human beings less whole people who have their own feelings, desires and desires, but instead as deliverers of desperately needed satisfaction that shores up a fragile sense of self. This sets up a cycle wherein his narcissism prevents him from deriving gratification from mutual, reciprocal connections in real-life. Sexualizing, once again, is returned as a magical elixir wherein his needs are met without needing to negotiate the exact real vicissitudes of intimate relationships. A Client of mine, a 48-year-old attractive single person, is in the process of the dividing of yet another relationship. After spending years of living a noxious childhood family, he went to his own world of fantasizing and masturbation as a way to soothe and protect himself. "When I was a child, I was obsessed with beautiful women in the magazines. When I was able so far, I moved through one girl after another. In adulthood, I knew there was anger and despair I didn't need to confront. I went to peep shows and I visited prostitutes. Many a night I would spend hours in my car circling the block searching for just the correct street-walker to give me oral sex in my car. He met a woman whom he designated as "ideal - my He became engaged but soon lost interest from the gender, which he described as "boring". While still engaged, he started picking up hookers for oral sex in the vehicle and began compulsively using telephone sex. His present relationship is breaking up because he Picked a girl for the youth and beauty (which reflected well on his narcissistic self). The remainder of the story is predictable. They moved in together along with the gorgeous, youthful, sexy female began become actual and having needs of her own. He admits that he never felt warmth or love for her; she was merely a supplier of his real life needs. As the relationship deteriorates, he fights the impulses to return to sex with strangers that don't make demand. Another customer of mine, a 38-year-old married guy, has a compulsion to see prostitutes. Three years to the therapy, he was finally able to discuss his anger towards his mother for depriving him through neglect and also for never touching or caressing him. "When I was very young I would put a blanket My dad as a kind of soothing that I wasn't getting from my parents. The remainder of my life was a battle to discover other methods to soothe myself. When I discovered prostitutes, I thought I was in heaven. I am able to get sex and be in complete control. I could have it instantly, any way I need it, whenever I need it. I don't need to concern myself with the girl, so long as I pay her. I don't have to concern myself with vulnerability and rejection. This is my controlled pleasure world. Here is the ultimate antithesis of this deprivation of my youth." The Usage of sexualization as a defense is a common theme that runs through the psychoanalytic literature. A shield is a mechanism the child devises to emotionally survive a noxious family atmosphere. While this manner of protecting himself works well for a period of time, the continuous use of it as a grownup is harmful to the individual's continuing functioning and feeling of wellbeing. By losing himself sexual Fantasies and always seeing others as potential sex partners, or from erotic internet enactments, the sex addict can significantly reduce and control a huge array of threatening and uncomfortable emotional states. Most addicts restrain or bind potentially overwhelming anxiety via the dependence process. Diminution of melancholy, anxiety and rage are a number of the pay-offs that operate to facilitate and preserve life in the erotic cocoon. I estimate another patient that Illustrates a case of narcissistic personality along with the usage of sexualization as a defense. He's a 52-year old attractive, successful single guy. She desired sex. I Did not. It is predictable. I really don't believe I can also maintain an erection anymore. While a spend untold hours compulsively websurfing to reside in my erotic fantasies, as it becomes real, when you find somebody who seems to be the embodiment of your sexual pre-occupation, interest soon wanes as her wants and desires come into the film. Sometimes, I

[onlinereputationmanagementpackag]

The Treatment of Sex Addiction - An Analytic Approach

It Is well-known among people in the 12-step sex applications that of all the dependence, sex is the most difficult to master. Far from the notion that sex addiction is the "fun" one, the suffering of managing this affliction is enormous. The compulsion is so persuasive it's typical for members of their sex recovering groups to be not able to maintain any constant time of sexual salvation, giving way to despair and hopelessness. Before treatment, sexual enactment is the addict's only supply of security, pleasure, soothing and acceptance. It vitalizes and connects. It relieves loneliness, emptiness and depression. Sex addition was known as the athlete's foot of the mind: it is an itch constantly waiting to be scratched. The scratching, however, causes wounds rather than alleviates the itching. Furthermore, the percent of individuals Who go to treatment or a 12-step app is rather tiny. Nearly all sexual compulsives live in isolation full of feelings of shame. Nearly 100 percent of the men and women who visit me to get an initial consultation, if it be for compulsive use of prostitutes, phone sex, a fetish, cross dressing, or even masochistic experiences with dominatrixes, relay that beneath the shame they believe in telling me their story, they also experience a feeling of freedom that comes from finally being able to share with another human being the concealed, shameful, sexually compulsive actions which imprison them. That is a condition that slowly Bleeds away what the individual holds dear. The life of a sex addict gradually becomes quite small. The freedom of self is impaired. Energies are all consumed. The rapacious demand for a particular kind of sexual experience compels the enthusiast to devote countless hours in the world of his addiction. Inexorably, the compulsion starts to exact higher and higher costs. Whether it be on the internet indulging in sensual fantasies with dream folks, being on the telephone into the gender hot-lines, or searching the internet and the S&M nightclubs for someone who will act out a special, ritualized fetish dream, or cruising the bars searching for the "one" who will have sex in a public bathroom, or going to dungeons to be whipped, flogged and humiliated, sex addiction is a devastating illness that requires a massive toll. Friends slide away. Hobbies and activities once enjoyed are dropped. Then there's endless fear of vulnerability. Relationships with partners are ruined, as the appeal of intimate sex with a spouse pales compared to the intense "high" of indulging in the darkened and devious planet of sexual compulsion. Gender addiction, of course, has Nothing to do with sex. Any sexual act or apparent "perversion" has no meaning outside its psychological, unconscious context. A very simple definition of sex addiction is not dissimilar to definitions of different addictions. But a simple definition of the complex and intractable condition does not detract. What sets sex addiction besides other addictions and makes it so persistent is the subject of sex touches on our innermost unconscious wishes and fears, our sense of self, our very identity. Present treatment may include participation in a 12-step program, going to an inpatient clinic, working with the Patrick Carnes substance, aversion therapy, or using medications to stave off hypersexuality. Most therapy is cognitive-behavioral, designed to help the patient to control or repress the urge for a time period, usually from a desire to abide by the group standards of their 12-step meeting or a need to please the therapist. While I understand the efficacy the 12-step programs to provide support and structure, in my estimation, the reason that alcoholism is indeed widespread is that these treatment modalities don't affect long-term structural character change that eliminates the compulsion in its roots. Current treatment does not aim to change psychic energies so that the fact sector of their mind dominates the character so that the urge to behave can be controlled and understood. Is the same as that of other addictions (perennial failure to restrain the behavior and continuation of the behavior despite progressively harmful consequences), sexual compulsion is put apart from other dependence because gender involves our innermost subconscious fantasies, fears and conflicts. Sex addiction is a symbolic enactment of deeply entrenched unconscious dysfunctional relational patterns with others and self. It involves a individual's derailed developmental process that occurred as a result of inadequate parenting. Therefore, permanent growth and change are likely to happen in the arena of contemporary psychoanalysis, which reproduces understanding and repair of those unconscious dysfunctional relational patterns along with the development of a more unified and structured awareness of self. This new personality restructuring can better self-regulate feeling countries without the use of a damaging defense such as sexualization and can find meaning, enjoyment, intimacy, purposeful goal setting and achievement from attainable and proper sources in life. The remainder of the Paper will give a concise overview of the historical psychoanalytic perspectives regarding sexual deviance, and will then articulate the present analytical understanding about the dynamics and treatment for sexual compulsions. Any Freud formulated that sexual deviance occurs due to an incomplete resolution of the Oedipus complex, with its concomitant castration anxiety. Unconscious castration anxiety occurs in the individual's present-day awareness in the kind of fear of confrontation, retaliation, or rebuke, a feeling of inadequacy, and perhaps doubts about gender identity. Gender addiction, according to Freud, is a defensive method to cope with a tenuous sense of masculinity together with unrelenting anxiety about sex, women, closeness, aggression, as well as competition. Critics that followed Freud held varying perspectives. Sexual compulsions derive from an insatiable need for acceptance, prestige, power, bolstering of self-esteem, love and security that are experienced as being mandatory for survival. Characteristic of Any addict is a very long history of a distressed mother-child relationship. An unempathic, narcissistic, blue or alcoholic mum has low tolerance to the child's anxiety and frustrations. Nor is she able to provide the empathy, attention, support and nurturing that foster healthy growth. This anxiety sends the sexual addict running to his eroticized, dream cocoon where he experiences security, safety, a diminution of anxiety as well as the quelling of an unconscious desire to establish and maintain the overlooking, yet essential tie to mother. Typical of this individual is the hope he can find an idealized "other" who will embody, actualize and make tangible the longed for endlessly nurturing parent. This method is doomed to collapse. Inevitably, the other individual's needs start to impinge on the dream. The result is frustration, disappointment and isolation. On the other hand, a mother could be overly Intrusive and attentive. She could be seductive, perhaps using the child for a substitute for an emotionally husband. The child perceives the mother's inability to set appropriate boundaries as enchanting and as a huge disillusionment. Later in life, the enthusiast is hypersexual and has trouble setting boundaries. Real intimacy is experienced as an engulfing burden. The disillusionment of not having appropriate parental boundaries is acted out later in life by the enthusiast's unconscious belief that the principles don't apply to him with regards to sex, although he can be compliant and regulated in different parts of his lifetime. A major theme for all addictions is that they Have experienced deep and chronic need deprivation throughout childhood. Addicts in general sustain psychological injury within the world of this mother-infant interaction in addition to with different associations. Intense interpersonal anxiety is the consequence of this early-life psychological need deprivation. In later life, the individual experiences anxiety in all intimate relationships. Because the sexual addict has anxiety about being not able to get what he desires from actual people and because his desperate hunt for the satisfaction of unmet childhood needs inevitably lead to disillusionment, he inevitably returns to his reliance on sexual fantasies and enactments to relieve anxiety about connection and closeness and as a way to achieve a feeling of self-affirmation. Sex, For the addict, starts to be his primary price and a confirmation of his sense of self. Feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and worthlessness magically disappear while sexually preoccupied through acting out or through spending untold hours online. On the other hand, the use of sex to meet self-centered needs for approval or validation precludes using it to fulfill the intimacy needs of a cherished other. Characteristic of this type of narcissism is the viewing of additional human beings less whole people who have their own emotions, desires and needs, but instead because deliverers of desperately desired satisfaction that shores up a fragile sense of self. This sets up a cycle in which his narcissism prevents him from deriving satisfaction from mutual, mutual relationships in real-life. Sexualizing, once again, is returned as a magical elixir wherein his demands are magically met without needing to negotiate the very real vicissitudes of romantic relationships. A Client of mine, a 48-year-old attractive single person, is in the process of this dividing of yet another relationship. After spending years of living a noxious childhood household, he went into his own world of fantasizing and bliss as a way to soothe and protect himself. "When I was a child, I was obsessed with beautiful girls in the magazines. When I managed so far, I went through a single girl after another. In maturity, I knew there was sadness and anger I did not need to face. I went into peep shows and I visited prostitutes. One night I had sex with a transvestite. He met a woman whom he designated as "perfect - my He became engaged but soon lost interest in the sex, which he described as "boring". While still engaged, he started picking up hookers for oral sex in the vehicle and started compulsively using telephone sex. His current relationship is breaking up because he They moved in together along with the beautiful, young, sexy female started become actual and having needs of her own. He admits he never felt warmth or love for her; she had been merely a provider of his real life needs. Since the relationship deteriorates, he fights the impulses to come back to sex with strangers that don't make demand. Another customer of mine, a 38-year-old married man, has a compulsion to see prostitutes. Three years into the treatment, he was eventually able to discuss his anger towards his mother for depriving him emotionally through neglect and also for never touching or caressing him. "When I was very young I would put a blanket on My dad as a kind of soothing that I wasn't getting from my parents. The remainder of my life was a struggle to find other methods to soothe myself. As soon as I discovered prostitutes, I believed I was in heaven. I am able to get sex now and be in total control. I could have it immediately, any way I want it, whenever I want it. I don't need to bother myself with the woman, so long as I pay her. I don't need to concern myself with vulnerability and rejection. This is my controlled joy world. This really is the ultimate antithesis of the deprivation of my childhood." The Usage of sexualization as a defense is a common theme that runs throughout the psychoanalytic literature. A shield is a mechanism that the young child devises to psychologically survive a poisonous family atmosphere. While this way of shielding himself functions well for a period of time, the constant use of it as an adult is harmful to the individual's ongoing functioning and feeling of wellbeing. By losing himself sexual Fantasies and always seeing others as potential sex partners, or by sensual net enactments, the sex addict is able to significantly reduce and control a wide array of threatening and uncomfortable psychological conditions. Most addicts control or bind potentially overwhelming anxiety via the addiction procedure. Diminution of depression, anxiety and anger are some of the pay-offs that function to facilitate and preserve life in the erotic cocoon. I estimate another patient which Illustrates a case of narcissistic personality along with the use of sexualization for a defense. He is a 52-year old handsome, effective single guy. She desired sex. I Did not. It is predictable. I don't believe I could also maintain an erection anymore. While a spend untold hours compulsively websurfing to live in my erotic dreams, as it will become real, when you find someone who seems to be the embodiment of your sexual pre-occupation, interest soon wanes as her wants and desires come into the picture. From time to time, I

[russellyoder124-blog]

The Treatment of Sex Pot - An Analytic Approach

It Is well known among people in the 12-step sex applications that of all the dependence, sex is the toughest to master. Far from the idea that sex addiction is that the "fun" one, the anguish of managing this affliction is tremendous. The compulsion is so compelling that it is typical for members of the sex recovering classes to be unable to maintain any constant time of sexual salvation, giving way to grief and despair. Before therapy, sexual enactment is the enthusiast's only supply of security, enjoyment, soothing and approval. It vitalizes and joins. Sex addition has been called the athlete's foot of the mind: it is an itch constantly waiting to be scraped. The scratching, nevertheless, causes wounds rather than alleviates the itching. Furthermore, the percentage of individuals Who go to treatment or a 12-step app is quite tiny. The majority of sexual compulsives reside in isolation full of feelings of shame. Almost 100% of the people who visit me to get an initial appointment, if it be for compulsive use of prostitutes, phone sex, a fetish, cross dressing, or masochistic experiences with dominatrixes, relay which under the shame they believe in telling me their story, they also experience a sense of freedom that comes from finally being able to share with another human being the concealed, shameful, and sexually compulsive actions that imprison them. That can be a condition that slowly Bleeds away what the person holds dear. The lifetime of a sex addict gradually becomes very small. The liberty of self is diminished. Energies are all consumed. The rapacious demand for a particular kind of sexual encounter compels the enthusiast to devote untold hours in the world of his addiction. Inexorably, the compulsion begins to exact higher and higher costs. Whether it be on the internet indulging in sexual fantasies with fantasy people, being on the phone into the gender hot-lines, or searching the net and the S&M clubs for somebody who will act out a special, ritualized fetish fantasy, or even cruising the bars searching for the "one" who will have sex in a public bathroom, or going to dungeons to be whipped, flogged and humiliated, sex addiction is a devastating illness that takes a massive toll. Friends slide away. Hobbies and activities once enjoyed are dropped. Financial security crumbles as sums as large as $40,000 or $50,000 annually are spent on sex. Then there's endless fear of exposure. Relationships with partners are destroyed, as the allure of romantic sex with a spouse pales in comparison to the intense "high" of indulging into the dark and devious planet of sexual compulsion. What is a sex addict? Nothing to do with sex. Any sexual act or apparent "perversion" has no meaning outside of its emotional, subconscious circumstance. A simple definition of sexual addiction is not dissimilar to definitions of different addictions. But a very simple definition of this complex and intractable condition doesn't suffice. What sets sex dependence besides other addictions and makes it persistent is the field of sex rolls on our innermost unconscious wishes and fears, our sense of self, our individuality. Present treatment might include participation in a 12-step program, going to an inpatient clinic, working with the Patrick Carnes material, aversion therapy, or the use of drugs to stave off hypersexuality. Most therapy is cognitive-behavioral, made to help the individual to control or repress the instinct for a period of time, usually from a desire to abide by the group norms of the 12-step assembly or a need to please the therapist. While I understand the effectiveness the 12-step programs to provide structure and support, in my estimation, the rationale that alcoholism is indeed widespread is the treatment modalities don't affect long-term structural personality change that eliminates the compulsion at its origins. Current treatment doesn't aim to transform psychic energies so that the reality sector of their brain dominates the character so the impulse to behave can be understood and controlled. Is just like that of other addictions (perennial failure to control the behaviour and continuation of the behavior despite progressively harmful consequences), sexual compulsion is put apart from other addictions because sex involves our innermost unconscious wishes, anxieties and conflicts. Sex addiction is a symbolic enactment of deeply entrenched unconscious dysfunctional relational patterns with others and self. It involves a person's derailed developmental process that occurred as a consequence of inadequate parenting. Therefore, permanent growth and change are likely to occur in the arena of contemporary psychoanalysis, which seeks repair and understanding of those unconscious dysfunctional relational patterns along with the development of a more unified and organized sense of self. This new personality restructuring can better self-regulate feeling states without using a damaging defense like sexualization and will find meaning, enjoyment, intimacy, purposeful goal setting and accomplishment from attainable and proper sources in existence. The remainder of this Paper will give a brief summary of the historical psychoanalytic perspectives regarding sexual deviance, and will then articulate the current analytic understanding about the dynamics and therapy of sexual compulsions. Any Discussion of historic psychoanalysis must, ipso facto, start with Sigmund Freud. Unconscious castration anxiety happens in the person's present-day awareness in the form of fear of confrontation, retaliation, or rebuke, a sense of inadequacy, and doubts about gender identity. Gender addiction, according to Freud, is a defensive method to cope with a tenuous sense of masculinity together with unrelenting anxiety about sex, women, closeness, aggression, as well as competition. Analysts that followed Freud held varying views. Sexual compulsions derive from an insatiable need for approval, prestige, power, bolstering of self-esteem, security and love which are experienced as being mandatory for survival. Characteristic of Any enthusiast is a long history of a distressed mother-child relationship. An unempathic, narcissistic, blue or alcoholic mother has low tolerance for the child's anxiety and frustrations. Nor is unable to supply the empathy, attention, nurturing and support that foster healthy development. This stress sends the sex enthusiast running to his eroticized, fantasy cocoon where he encounters safety, security, a diminution of stress in addition to the quelling of an unconscious desire to set up and maintain the missing, yet essential tie to mother. Average of the individual is the hope that he can come across an idealized "other" who can embody, actualize and make concrete the longed for endlessly nurturing parent. This method is doomed to collapse. Inevitably, another individual's needs start to impinge on the fantasy. The result is frustration, loneliness and disappointment. Intrusive and attentive. She may be seductive, possibly using the child as a replacement for an emotionally unavailable spouse. The child perceives the mother's inability to set appropriate boundaries as seductive and as a massive disillusionment. Later in life, the enthusiast is hypersexual and has trouble setting boundaries. Real intimacy is advocated as an engulfing burden. The disillusionment of not having appropriate parental boundaries is performed later in life by the addict's unconscious belief that the principles do not apply to him with respect to sex, although he may be compliant and regulated in other elements of his lifetime. A Significant theme for many dependence is that they Addicts in general sustain psychological injury within the realm of this mother-infant interaction in addition to with other relationships. Intense social anxiety is the result of this early-life emotional need deprivation. In later life, the person experiences anxiety in all intimate relationships. Since the sex addict has anxiety about being unable to get what he needs from real people and because his desperate hunt for the fulfillment of unmet childhood needs necessarily lead to disillusionment, he inevitably contributes to his own reliance on sexual dreams and enactments to alleviate anxiety about relationship and closeness and as a means to achieve a feeling of self-affirmation. Sex, For the enthusiast, begins to be his principal value and also a confirmation of his sense of self. Feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and worthlessness magically disappear while sexually preoccupied , through acting out or through spending countless hours online. On the other hand, the use of sex to satisfy self-centered needs for acceptance or validation precludes with it to fulfill with the intimacy needs of a cherished other. Characteristic of this kind of narcissism is that the screening of additional human beings less complete people who have their own feelings, wants and desires, but rather because deliverers of desperately desired satisfaction that beaches up a delicate sense of self. This sets up a cycle wherein his narcissism prevents him from deriving gratification from mutual, mutual relationships in real life. Sexualizing, once again, is returned to as a magical elixir wherein his demands are met without needing to negotiate the very real vicissitudes of romantic relationships. A Client of mine, a 48-year-old attractive only person, is in the process of this breaking up of yet another connection. After spending years of living a poisonous youth household, he went to his own world of fantasizing and masturbation as a means to soothe and shield himself. "When I was a child, I was obsessed with beautiful women in the magazines. When I was able to date, I moved through one woman after another. In adulthood, I knew there was anger and despair I didn't want to face. I went to peep shows and I visited prostitutes. One night I had sex with a transvestite. He met a woman whom he designated as "ideal - my Redemption, my salvation." While still engaged, he started picking up hookers for oral sex in the car and started compulsively using phone sex. His current relationship is breaking up since he Chose a girl for the youth and beauty (which represented well on his narcissistic self). The remainder of the story is predictable. They moved in together and the gorgeous, young, sexy female started become actual and having demands of her very own. He admits that he never felt heat or love for her; she was merely a provider of his narcissistic needs. As the relationship deteriorates, he fights the impulses to come back to sex with strangers that do not make demand on him. Another customer of mine, a 38-year-old married man, has a compulsion to visit prostitutes. Three years to the therapy, he was eventually able to talk about his anger towards his mother for depriving him through negligence and also for never touching or caressing him. He can now make a connection between visits to the prostitutes and his hostility against mom for depriving him of sensual pleasure. He has lost in the mire of his parents' constant feuding. "When I was very young I'd put a blanket My genitals as a sort of soothing that I wasn't getting out of my parents. The rest of my life was a struggle to discover different ways to soothe myself. When I found prostitutes, I thought I was in paradise. I am able to get sex now and be in complete control. I can have it instantly, any way I need it, whenever I need it. I do not have to bother myself with the girl, so long as I cover her. I don't need to concern myself with rejection and vulnerability. This is my restricted joy world. This is the ultimate antithesis of this deprivation of my youth." The Usage of sexualization for a defense is a common theme that runs throughout the psychoanalytic literature. A shield is a mechanism the young child devises to emotionally survive a noxious family environment. Although this way of shielding himself works well for a time period, the continuous use of it as a grownup is harmful to the individual's ongoing functioning and feeling of wellbeing. By losing himself in sexual Fantasies and always seeing others as potential sex partners, or from sensual net enactments, the sex addict is able to significantly reduce and control a wide variety of threatening and uncomfortable psychological conditions. Most addicts restrain or bind potentially overwhelming pressure through the addiction procedure. Diminution of depression, anxiety and rage are a number of the pay-offs that operate to facilitate and preserve life in the sensual cocoon. I quote another individual which Illustrates a case of narcissistic personality along with the use of sexualization as a defense. He's a 52-year old handsome, effective single man. "I went on a date the other night. She wanted sex. I Didn't. It's predictable. I really don't believe I could even maintain an erection anymore. While a spend untold hours compulsively websurfing to live within my erotic dreams, as it becomes real, when you find someone who appears like the embodiment of your sensual pre-occupation, interest shortly wanes as her desires and needs come into the picture. From time to time, I

[blackburnianmorning]

Meekness Isn't Weakness

On to the third beatitude:  “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” For those who are not yet convinced the Sermon on the Mount is for the living of these tumultuous days….pay attention! The third beatitude is understudied and undervalued among the beatitudes.  We’re not quite sure who “the meek” are and we can’t quite find ourselves in there.  We’re missing something, and surely our current batch of leaders are missing something too.

If you were to write a job description for the ideal CEO, would include “meek” in the description? Imagine if the presidential candidates ran with the slogan: "Vote for me, I'm meek!" There’s something about meekness that doesn’t square with our notion of ideal character. We don't want a meek person to be our leader; we want someone who is dynamic and powerful. Once again, as beatitudes are apt to do, this one messes with our understanding of how things ought to be.  The problem is due to a simple misunderstanding. We hear the word "meek" and we think "weak." We couldn't be more wrong. Meekness isn’t weakness.  Meekness requires strength.

A better word might be gentle (it’s the same word in Greek). Even better might be: "strength under control."  I used to know a beautiful and powerful horse named Regent.  He was big and strong and full of life, and when I was on his back he could have taken me for a wild ride.  He could have dumped me in a heartbeat. But he didn’t; instead, he carefully followed my clumsy instructions and took me where I wanted to go.  Regent was a gentle giant.  He was as mindful of the little girl on his back as we are with newborn infants. That’s “strength under control.”    

Meekness requires strength. In fact, to be meek in the sense this beatitude intends requires supernatural strength—a quality that is produced by God in a person's life. This same word, "meekness" or "gentleness" is listed as one of the fruits of the Spirit: “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” (Galatians 5:22-23)  Meekness flows from the Spirit of God.

The stereotype of meekness is a person who has no will of his own -- someone pathetically passive who lets others take advantage of him. But that’s not what is portrayed in the biblical concept of meekness.  Proverbs  says, "Better a patient man than a warrior, a man who controls his temper than one who takes a city." Meekness isn't weakness. A patient man is stronger than a warrior because it takes more strength to control his temper than it does to storm a city. Meekness isn't passivity either. The meek person is intentional and in control.

So what does meekness look like in terms of behavior? Humility is characteristic of meekness. Let’s be clear, humility is not self-deprecation, it is not low self-esteem, it is not self-loathing.  Humility is a trait that is marked by wholeness and well-being. There is something compelling and appealing about true humility. Someone once said, “Humility captures by retreat the very stronghold that pride attempts to take by storm.”

Pride, of course, is the opposite of humility. Like the fun-house mirror at the carnival, pride distorts.  Pride takes some achievement or aspect of character and blows it out of proportion. Pride gives us a false view of ourselves. It inflates the few virtues we possess and makes us think we have others that we don't. Pride blinds us so that we fail to see our glaring faults which are obvious to everyone else. It minimizes the few weaknesses we are willing to admit. Worse yet, pride often prompts us to put on the mask of humility in an attempt to disguise what is really self-absorption. Humility doesn't come from looking in the mirror. It doesn't come from examining ourselves for signs that we are humble. Instead, look for the pride and expect to find it.

If you’re seeing pride, you’re not seeing Jesus. If you’re seeing pompous, ego-centric, attention-getting behavior, you’re not seeing Jesus.  

"Blessed are the meek," Jesus said, "for they will inherit the earth." Those who first heard this sermon lived with daily reminders that the land God promised them was in the hands of someone else. These were people for whom meekness was a daily challenge. They knew of the wonderful potential of the Kingdom of God, but had no power to bring it to pass. In other words, they were just like us.

Meekness does not preclude coming together in solidarity for a common cause. A great nation of meek people is a great nation indeed. Cooperation among many takes a measure of meekness by all.  Meekness is a posture that allows us to hear the other especially when they too, are humble, gentle and under control.  When a bully enters the room with pride and arrogance, the temptation is to allow his bad behavior to be headline news. Bullies make waves. But ultimately their vitriol, anger and hatred will come back to haunt them. Watch for the headlines about strength under control.  In the end, gentleness will win the day. 

Don’t despair.  The day of blessing is coming.  Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.