NYC Sidewalks are Socialist

The socialist part of New York City appears to be its sidewalks.  All other areas are the trophies of what American championship seems to be.  New York City is like a honey pot for the spoils and booty siphoned from the World's economies.  New York City is one of capitalism's trophy cases.  The only part of New York City that has to be completely shared, are its sidewalks.  And New York City is home for so many.  And it is a rallying point for the ambitious, because it is a launchpad for dreams.  And sidewalks are the path that the modern day Conquistadors, Pilgrims, Rockefellers, and so many other invisibles all take to turn their ideas into experiences.   

I am living in the pinnacle of the economic olympics.  I feel apart of a people who are embarrassed that our lives are not inspiring enough in small towns, to such an extent that some rush off to locations that might help the self worth grow, like a New York City.  We have our aspiring people possibly believing they are the next set of conquistadors, but in this era it's the conquering of the cosmos.  Our countries borders magically keep the riches and opportunities conveniently organized in a way that keeps the American citizen uniquely authorized to play this patriotic pastime of Monopoly, except the 2 dimensional board wasn't ever going to be enough for Rich Uncle Pennybags.  I walked the city this summer and felt the paradox of how marvelous it is while also seeing how saddening the way we have disorganized the shared parts of our communities.  The only part that included everyone was the sidewalk.

I think we leave our home towns out of a fear of facing the existential pause we all have, reminding us of how anonymous we are.  The anonymity that is likely a reminder of what was always gonna be there pointing to a paradoxical yearning for the acceptance of home and yet trying to find it over there, in the big city lights.  New York City provides a metaphor for this.  I now recognize New York City as that city that people hope will erase this existential anonymity.  It is now in my eyes the reminder of what was always gonna point me back to the existential pain of being a tiny moment in a large existence.  Likely a destination that can't erase the human tantrum that happens when we don't arrive at a legendary status.  I am not a celebrity and walking anonymously through New York City was a nice reminder of this.  I don't see New York City as a champion's city, I see it as a pilgrimage for the spirits wounded by not having been seen by those closest to them, especially in their hometowns. 

When walking through the streets of New York City the first thing I hold with tension is how every class of people, at some point, has to share the same grimmey sidewalk.  The wealthy have to share the pungient smells, and walk through the same propagandist advertising.  New York is where the classes are forced to share the narrowest of real estates.  Makes me wonder how long before there are toll booths on Park Ave.  I can't be misled, this caste crossroads does not imply any form of sharing, and no such communal caring, a minor consequence of business, spilled out from profit sharing.  As a metaphor for how much the businessman, person, has any use for the socialist playbook, the sidewalk might fit.  I can picture the New Yorker with the suit and tie tolerating the 12 ft or more of concrete running along the streets. Only the lower castes truly depend on sidewalks.  The moguls only need it for the time it takes them to duck into a chauffeured transport swept away to an elite way of life that probably inspires everyone they've just blew by.  The wake left by these champions are communities and citizens that need more than a sidewalk to grow.  

Are these American champions living a life of civility and prosperity?  The sidewalk metaphor fits for now, I can accept and move more into my financial simplicity because I hope to be one who carves out space where sidewalks become more than a segway.  More like a responsibility.  A reason to look around more than pass through. I don't need assholes in a high-rise penthouses, and I know it is critical to learn about the gravity in the stars pulling these men and women towards the sky.

And like the metaphor of a sidewalk, how does one who has no need for a glamorous high rise make people see there are far better ways to be seen?  How does a small city champion, share the wisdom that comes from having more than a sidewalk to share?  I don't need a sidewalk as much as I need people to see their worth in a life where feet touch the soil, better yet bare feet, and not necessarily on a beach, people who are grounded, without paying $15,000 for a Costa Rican retreat.  Grounded in the natural and simple in a humanistic form.  So here are more thoughts from a Chicano mind in New York City.  I respect the hustle and feel a sadness for the disparity.  It felt a lot like sharing a sidewalk is the only way elite American will tolerate the likes of people like me.  And at the same time I can't see myself in the deep sadness that is shared along the New York City sidewalks, that are the doormats to even more painfilled luxury high rise. I cannot live with the pain I feel when watching homeless people disappearing into the nooks and crannies, desperately hanging onto life, surviving on the concrete real estate they can't be removed from because Sidewalks are socialist.  

Bondability - a synthesis before a condition

  

I feel the categorization by styles found in Attachment Theory is restricting the theory's opportunity to heal.  I am beginning to shape my Bondability perspective because it addresses this duality.  I believe the principles underlying attachment are birthed of the colonial and categorical mindsets that taught us to emphasize the definitive versus paradox.  Paradoxical thinking points to the polar tensions I feel exist between the four styles of attachment.  These polar tensions describe most of nature's important synthesizing processes.  Attachment Theory is used like musicians who see the math in music where as Bondability is the awareness that everyone is a musician.  I am trying to emphasize that seeing the math is important but unnecessary.  How do you tell a musician to ignore the math and tell the child to see the patterns.  Bondability is trying to do this in one sentence.  This is the hope for Bondability. The chemists reached this point when seeing Hardy's paradox.  We have so many counter-intuitive insights and while working with families I found that teaching Attachment as 4 possible styles did an injustice to the dynamicism that neuroscientists were revealing. 

The observation is that all of these styles exist in most people just under different stressors.   I found it hard to teach clients the value of seeing everything in a non-binary way.  I found that parents wanted the sheet music.  I couldn't express how their child was not a song to be learned, but a rhythm, at times a clanging, and yet a sound that was adapting and adjusting to the tempos around them but with a beat that was ingrained in them at conception.  This broke me and still makes me cry.  Some in the industry call it burn out.  I don't I call it awareness for the abusive task of doing a job with the unsharpened tools.  Americans or Spaniards want sheet music when the sounds are in our movements.  Better yet our awareness.  I could not teach this paradox very well working through the model of attachment because the tools it provided me didn't help people accept there isn't an answer, only an encounter.  How do you teach that a behavior is not treatable, the culmination of events and experiences that lead up to the observable event are transcendable. Parents need the steps to change the behavior and I cannot help them understand that the encounter will be the only medicine, so make it a loving one because you don't know how many more loving encounters will be necessary to see a change in the next similar behavior.  The gift of the encounter is how it landed on our history and immediately resolving it to be meaningful in the now is the talent God might have given the Angels.  How do you teach this?  

This is putting paradox to use. The disservice is often times seeing this contradiction as dysfunction, or worse cognitive dissonance.  How can discipline be seen as chaos?  Well that is what love can feel like to an abused child.  Love invites vulnerability and vulnerability is most animals understanding of defenselessness, ultimately becoming the potential for demise.  

I can't overlook the criticality of the science behind the concept of attachment.  Dan Siegle, puts this physiology into a dense yet palatable way.  Neuro scientist are giving us the tid bits of research that teach that the brain isn't compartmental more a well orchestrated nebulous mass distributing energy.  We share our pain in the same fashion we share a smile.  Each being too intense to keep to ourselves.  This is what Bondability tries to highlight.

Bondability Continued

Attachment Theory Misconception Relationship Spectrum

Empire of 22nd Kind

    Sitting at a bar name Lucky Jacks, my mind is on vacation, I am in New York City, the lower eastside to be exact.  This trip is full of emotions around the evolution of my parenting.  I will no longer be parenting children and I will now be parenting adults.  This trip is loaded for me.  I brought my daughter to help her settle in for her first week of a dance program.  The big apple is where this famous dance school brings young adult dancers with bright dreams, cultivating their skills.  In my eyes, they are aspiring spirits believing that New York City is where all the greats go to learn. 

 I wonder how much value this experience will provide for my daughter.  How much it will draw her out of what she understands as home.  The process reminds me of the same hope I had while attending baseball camps.  I can remember how I'd think this camp or coach could provide me the chance I needed to make a statement. Looking back I see that it turned into another thousand dollar contribution to University of Arizona's baseball program.  I appreciate being able to see New York in a practical way.  I no longer see the way my daughter appears to see.  The dogmatic romance around this icon of gangsters of the economic kind.  I lost my aspiration and replaced it with stewardship.  I see she still has an aspiring vision for it and what it can do for her.  I have evolved to worry that New York is what it attracts, hoards of seduced adolescent hearts caching in on free market liberties, with all except a tiny slice depositing more money into their reservoir of capital.

This is New York City, so many young minds gravitating to this icon.  The infrastructure changes slowly and these legal and illegal immigrants stir its economics by contributing their admiration and possibly romance for the big city life.  The interesting part of New York is how so many people bring their newness and vibrancy to add their uniqueness in micro doses, making it not so much what they thought it was going to be, but in many ways contaminating it with what they hoped it would be.  New York isn't a destination or checkbox.  It is a complex participation in a living pinnacle.  It might be the consequence of their wonderment about finding themselves over their, instead of believing their greatness is always at hand.  I don't want to be cliché to call New York a Mecca for arts, but it is surely a vacuum for the existential need to be seen.  There is a paradigm of polarities, driving and fueling the city's economics, culture, and maturation.  There is maturation and I can recognize the tragedy behind the romance.  What makes New York newer might be the economic luster.  What makes New York an empire might be its cultural pollution.

    

Bondability - An evolution of relationship

     I gravitated towards the attachment theory early on in my counseling program.  I grew out of a Rogerian way of thinking.  Rogerian, because it  naturally aligned with my humanistic and Catholic ways of living.  And to be clear, these were ideal identities not so much how I could be seen.  Karen Horney opened up my understanding to the idea of needs and relationships in a profound way.  She elegantly describe this complicated dynamic from a medical perspective.  This sparked my interest in and induction into the bodies role in relationships.  It also became the junction that helped me leave the counseling professional systems.  

A women, in a world of male dominated ideas, had the courage to label neurosis as complex first before disease.  Again this is my perception and not a statement about  the psychoanalytical world.  Dr. Horney saw the movement and transfer of energy between experiences and encounters, and had the fearlessness to make it shared across all of us versus calling it dysfunction.  Her promotion of directions taught me early on how we have a preference for clarity, or maybe exactness, while functioning in a  realism of unknowns and the infinite.

Dr Horney helped me see the complexity that human relationship creates in the context of existential safety.  This is completely out of the colonial concept of safety.  A safety  that might have been birthed from the idea or mentality known as  civilized.  Safety in the moral sense, maybe.  Regardless it was a safety that has continued and possibly expressed best as the idea we now call dignity.  

Centuries after Dr Horney challenged the likes of Freud and Jung, we still arrive at the necessity of healing.  The torch was passed in several directions and this is what a counseling foundations course will describe.  All the different attitudes towards one destination, wellness. The evolution of  healing might best be described in an anthropology of medicine track.  And we all can't enroll in a program to gain the knowledge that informed me of how we are constantly wounding ourselves while also satisfying our survival needs, trying to unrealistically maximize our pleasures.  This cannot be a sustainable understanding of civilized.  

After reading the works of Dr Dan Siegle and Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk I was pulled into needing to know more about how much our physiology impacted our behavior.  I couldn't undo the rational that the behavioral strategies were suffocating the healing process.  I could see the criticality of propagating the message that our physiology and neurology are profound and dealing with their shortcoomings were counterintuitive to addressing the notion of healing.  The counterintuitive will be the basis of this book because I see the counterintuitive as the pathway into the clarity of paradox.  

The trauma work of Dr. Van der Kolk and the mindfulness neuroscience of Dr. Siegle were layers in my maturity as a counselor, giving me concepts that started to overlap.  Like a venn diagram's layers falling into place, overlapping to create areas of opacity.  Lets call, for simplicities sake, these layers as trauma, brain as part of body, and attachment.  The areas that I was now see standing out, bolded.  These insights in retrospective were most effective in my practice. 

 I think this is where I began to graduate out of the ideas that the child attachment research taught me to think of and categorize myself and my clients as being in a condition.  It may be that the four attachment styles were meant to be seen as loose boundaries, and I feel inspired to take it further.  I want to preach the necessity for the chaotic sojourner and teach the essentials of orientation versus condition.  I began to recognize how the counseling profession either wasn't even looking at the attachment perspective or convincing families that our wellness could be found in a simple willful explosion of better cognitive decisions, choices, or worse morality. 

 Without going too much into what attachment is; there are endless literatures on the foundations of attachment theory.  Attachment has been the evolution of several people's life work and can't be  summarized into a well intention blog on how attachment theory is incomplete.  I see it as the biological perspective to describe how our early neurobiology is informing, constructing, and distributing energies from our environment, genetics, and consumption of numerous natural and artificial resources. These variables are just a summary to hint at the vastness of what goes into our psychology.  And keep in mind I cannot speak with truth about this.  

What I share is through observation first. Observations gathered as an inspired broken man working through my own experiences and my finding opportunities for growth.  Secondly through my work as a counselor and the progress of the families I've witnessed.  These variables mentioned are how I see us generating and sharing energy at a quantum level.  I suggest this because I learned that it is often helpful to see it as as small as a molecule and as significant as a hormone, from something as powerful as a hurtful phrase to a car accident.  It could be the amount of vegetables your mother ate during her pregnancy to the trauma your grandmother experienced in her childhood.  These variables are also well written about and, most importantly, still being written about. 

 Bondability Continued

Bondability - I don't attach, I bond

 This post will be my first attempt at writing about what made me an effective counselor and how my mindset is ineffective in the counseling world.  First it is extremely important to read the following posts with a paradoxical mindset.  If you don't know what a paradoxical mindset is, then step away from this literature and set yourself on a learning path for paradoxical thinking (Hameiri et al., 2014).  Much of my mind over the last several months, possibly last couple of years, has been in the cloud of doubt around our (humanity's) ability to put a dent in the disparity between the civil dysfunction and grow social harmony.   So I've been wrestling with how to put that chaos into words.  

How do I write without authority in a field full of passionate, good intentioned, charlatanistic, wounded, talented, experts, who function out the same legalistic, profit driven, insurance tethered, evangelistic, conservative systems that damaged the people they are wanting to rescue.  This isn't going to be easy.  So I am going to chip away at it. I am no longer a counselor because I was becoming a counselor.

I found my platform.  I found my model of treatment.  I found a diagram that will invite people to orientate versus locate themselves.  I have had to step away from the great teachings of Ainsworth, Bowlby, Harlow, and Siegle. When I say step away it is in a modest non American sense of the phrase.  I say it like a young child might step away from their first 2,000 piece puzzle to take those 2,000 pieces and have the curiosity to draw a new picture from that puzzles box cover image.  I don't have the medical knowledge to fully understand the brain, nervous system, hormone balancing, dietetics, or pharmacology and yet I experience each of these while applying these fore parent's expertise on modern mental healing.  For me it is lifestyle health more than mental health.  As if I found a new way of looking at nature versus nurture; Mindset versus Lifestyle!

I don't attach....I bond.  And my aptitude for building relationships with others is what I call my Bondability...it isn't a collection of patterns it is an inborn instinct, that must develop into a skill, taught through culture and environment, and exercised through lifestyle.   

Bondability Continued

Climbing out or pulled into who's bucket?

 There is fable out there that most less fortunate communities use to describe "making it out".  I am describing this story we teach each other in the streets, the story reinforcing the analogy seen with crabs in a bucket.  I get to write my own version. Who taught you that you are in a bucket?

When I look at who my grandparents were, and for a few remaining, are, I realize the analogy should reflect how who they are coming out of their 1930's-ish New Mexican and South Texas cultures is respectable. I can picture how the bucket came to us.  The industrial revolution, came radioactively.  The bucket arrived infected with Tuberculosis.  The crabs came from the American East bringing this mentality of caste.  I think the crabs that escaped their mediocrity bucket, felt a strong need replicate their bucket mentality here.  

Now we are being labeled as subversive because many of still aren't fully on board with this form of capitalistic or individualistic mindset.  They often call us communist because it is a lazy way of dismissing how important our faith requires us to be communal.  The bucket is so much more like a container we were seduced to see ourselves in.  It makes me think, one consequence of the great American expansion was to persuade our modest ways of sustenance to be undesirable, and how it ought to transition into a more ambitious competition for prosperity.  Did we get pulled into a bucket?

The atomic weapon brought America to New Mexico.  And New Mexico's high desert air seduced the Tuberculosis refugee.  The same Spanish individualism thought that this part of world now know as New Mexico was gold garden.  I am learning and seeing through a different lens that informs me of how fortunate I am to be nestled in this liminal place where we are boring enough to not be desirable, perceived to be inadequate enough to be overlooked, and yet still not subservient enough to be accepted.  As a consequence to this fable we rebel by sabotaging ourselves with delinquencies.
  

We can't be racist

 I learned in my late 20's that race was a construct and not a biological marker.  This expanded my perplexed attitude towards my perception of dominant cultures and my own identifications.  I have to admit that it created a disappointment in me that inspired many life changing principles.  A hatred for my own contributions to the systematic bigotries.  The changes were disorienting.  I had new information that highlighted how I didn't belong to a race, how I have privilege despite having embraced a victim's mentality for so long, and how I learned how tainted my origin story is.  

I was socially indoctrinated to function believing that somehow I was socially ordered into an ethnic layer tied to the color of my skin.  And I had around 3 unspoken layers beneath me, a few complex layers around me and one championship layer above me.  And this system of layers was more about human capital than it was ever about superiority. I now find it impossible to participate in life the same way knowing these layers are dysfunctional.  

Today it seems like the world is coming to these same realization or maybe resistance to seeing it change.  Seems like these layers are being stirred by the complexities of our nations shortcuts, abuses, rule breaking, rule bending, and for sure rule escaping.  The Black Lives Matter movement, the Boogaloo movement, the Federalist Society, ANTIFA, Blue Lives Matter and the QAnon folks are all adjusting to the lower layers being informed and the new voices demanding participation where their views historically could be ignored when rule making.  We may not have equality but that is not suppressing assertion. 

I am as aware as ever of the emotions I still have when thinking about where I land in the eyes of my fellow citizens.  I find it challenging and hard to know that I have this information and the systems or eco-systems I live in are still functioning on the legacy caste like mentalities.  I find the pain that creates anger in me isn't as overwhelming.  I can still feel the injustice while also celebrating the change.  I still feel discriminated and I smile when I can't recognize if it is bigotry or because of me .  

At times I think some dominant cultures conceal their bigotry far easier now that we have a more ambiguous linguistics for prejudice.  I see the opportunities where I might have written off barriers to entry as racist, where earlier in my life I would have felt it wasn't my shortcomings but theirs.  I now take more responsibility for making it harder for the systems to exclude me, sometimes by assertion, more often by trusting the process, and when I fall short I let it motivate me to find a different route.  The system is going to make space, but not until I let it know I want it to make room. 

I am not as surprised or devastated when the Anglo world sees me through fear oriented lenses.  I accept the sadness that my culture has such delinquent parts.  I still get frustrated with how it seems at times I am catching up to all the other layers of people, whether it be in knowledge, lifestyle, or effectiveness.  I am grieving the ways I am not sufficient and can't close the gaps.  I seem to be between layers.  And I am grateful for the anger and tension because it might mean I am not the only one who has to begin the process of revisiting this looming concept called Race and how it has antagonized the darkest parts of our character.

I am proud of my Chicano heritage, my Spanish origins, Mexican adaptation, and New Mexican simplicity.  I am a complicated member of a brave experiment that at times didn't want to include me, found a way to, and is now providing a way to contribute that is safer than other peoples around the world can.  I will slowly eliminate my regard for race or speak to the invalidity of Race as a human trait. I will continue to let it draw out emotions working to orient them in way that helps me be more Christ-like and a spreader of dignity

.  All of this while hoping that I might create safety that rarely creates danger for the other layers.