Creation Myth or How Our Culture Began
Marshall Rosenberg, PhD, in his book “Nonviolent Communication”, tells us, “Our way of thinking started, as best some people I’ve read believe, started about 8,000 years ago when a myth started over the planet about how the world began. This myth held that a very virtuous male god crushed to smithereens an evil female goddess, and out of this crushing of
the evil force with the good force, that energy created the planet and the people on it. This started a rather tragic image, that human beings are basically created out of nasty energy. Therefore, we need to have some superior people control us. Some theologians and anthropologists, that I have studied, seem to think that this is how this all got started with this idea that we are basically made out of evil energy. Therefore, we need to find those people
who are closest to the gods and these people are our superiors and have a right to control us. This is where we started with the idea of blame and criticism and punishment.” About 5,000 years ago, we started thinking that since human beings are created out of nasty energy, we must be innately evil. We needed a way to deal with blame, criticism and punishment, so penitence became our corrective process. We thought, when people are behaving badly, we must make them hate themselves for what they did. So, for political and theological reasons, we developed a language that cuts us off from the community and makes it quite easy to be violent.
(Wink, Walter, “The Powers That Be, Theology for a New Millennium”,
Galilee Doubleday, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney and Auckland
and others.
“Analyses of others are actually expressions of our own needs and values”
Marshall Rosenberg
The Torah/Old Testament
Now that we have our male superhero and our evil woman implanted solidly in our history, it’s time to look at how the old the Old Testament starts things off. According to the Jewish calendar, the world was created approximately 2200 years after the Creation Myth.
“In the beginning G-d created heaven and earth. The earth was without form and empty, with Darkness on the face of the depth, but G-d’s Spirit moved on the water’s surface. G–d Said, “there shall be light,” and light came into existence. G–d saw that the light was good, and G-d divided between the light in the darkness. G-d named the light “Day,” and the darkness he named “Night.” It was evening and it was morning, one day.”
In graduate school, I learned about the “Presenting Problem”. This is what brings you to a therapist, but which may not be the real problem. This same idea applies here. We focus on the light that G-d created by speaking. But why did he choose to speak? My reaction to this act, was that He was telling us to be incredibly careful about how we use our words, because they are the most powerful tool, we have.
COMMUNICATION
We cannot survive without other people. Albert Mehrabian, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, UCLA), became known best by his publications on the relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages. He studied what happened to people’s perception of and feelings about a person when the three elements in any direct communication: Words, Tone of Voice and Nonverbal Behaviors (Facial Expressions and Body Language) were not consistent” (1). What he found was; The non-verbal elements, tone of voice and nonverbal behaviors, are particularly important for communicating feelings and attitude. And when all three elements of speech are congruent, when they agreed and sent the same message, the person communicating was better liked and what they communicated was better accepted, than when they were not congruent.
“Eli Tannen’s century-spanning Jewish American life is well worth reading about.” —Washington Post
Deborah Tannen, in her book, The Argument Culture, tells us;
“Language invisibly molds our way of thinking about people, actions, and the world around us. Military metaphors train us to think about-and see-everything in terms of fighting, conflict, and war. This perspective then limits our imaginations when we consider what we can do about situations we would like to understand or change.”
The argument culture:
- Urges us to approach the world-and the people in it-in an adversarial frame of mind.
- It rests on the assumption that opposition is the best way to get anything done:
- The best way to discuss an idea is to set up a debate;
- The best way to cover news is to find spokespeople who express the most extreme, polarized views and present them as “both sides”;
- The best way to settle disputes is litigation that pits one party against the other;
- The best way to begin an essay is to attack someone; and
- The best way to show you’re really thinking is to criticize.” (6, p 3-4)
How We Learn
We now know that infants feel their mothers stress while in the uterus, and that we learn from our environment. (Gabor Maté)
Presenting Problem
One of the most significant things I learned in graduate school, was the concept of the “presenting problem”. These are the problems that people explore with a therapist first because they are the easiest to talk about. The ‘presenting problem” surprisingly, is often not the real problem. It is what we think is the problem, but it may be a far less scary alternative to a more embarrassing or painful problem. Or possibly we do not really know what is going on, since we are mostly subconscious creatures, we have a significant blind spot.
Trauma
I was introduced to verbal abuse and antisemitism before I entered Junior High. My real education, however, began more recently. My wife had been verbally victimized and controlled by her ex-husband. At that time, I didn’t really understand Verbal Abuse and Trauma and that words were much more dangerous than I had been taught. I loved her passionately and believed that over time we would work together, and things would be fine. I was wrong.
Technology
Our world is badly broken. Technology has enticed and forced us to communicate differently than we ever have before. It has separated Mehrabian’s three elements and chopped them up into little pieces. This becomes very confusing when used in emails and tweets, etc. Anonymous comments/statements relieve the author of responsibility for what is said and frustrate the reader.
Gabor Maté