tele 4

Sun Apr 26 12:02:26 CDT 2009

Further comments: re your response on April 19, 2009 8:57 PM
   AG   Playing: a pleasure!   Tele and music:  We all resonate with sounds,respond emotionally to sounds, and we can imagine that we human being emanate some inaudible "sounds",vibrations. And just as we all may respond diferrently to the same piece of music,so we may be have diferrent telic responses to diferrent people, events, objects.

The degree of "telic talent", or rather the correctness  of one's perceptions can be measured via sociometric test.

       AB: It would be interesting to assess what the average person reads in an average group; to obtain any norms. My suspicion is that it would be (Just making up a figure) in a middle range---not much higher for most folks.

     AG:   Which brings about a possibility of "teaching tele", as one needs feedback to ensure progress.

         AB: Yes, and has anyone done this?  Written about it? Assessed it?

       I've offered some workshops on basic skills but only for some of those skills that involve:
  (1) getting in touch with how you want to be known or chosen   --- that in itself is hard for many to bring into explicit consciousness

  (2) letting others know without grabbing them by the collar---but more often, folks err in the other direction, being too low-key, too indirect. 
       (I suspect that there's an unconscious infantile fantasy operating that "If you cared you would find out even without my having to say anything.")

       The part about daring to consciously choose, express these preferences clearly and openly---would need some warm-up, because I think it's more threatening than taking off one's clothes. Will they be hurt if I don't choose them first? Will I be hurt if I'm not chosen?  I find such questions absolutely emotionally loaded. So the work to do this kind of assessment would involve a great deal of laying the groundwork and helping people to see this as a matter-of-fact natural distribution of tele that they don't have to take personally. But many folks have been shamed, their self-esteem is fragile, folks are vulnerable, and they are for the most part in strong denial of all this. 

      I hesitate to throw around the term "narcissism," because it immediately implies a degree of pathology, and that is not my thinking. What we're talking about technically is narcissistic wounding, but really as I say, we're talking about normal, reasonably healthy folks with a bit more edginess to their vanity system than they would like to admit; and this, speaking of other topics just sent to grouptalk, also has to do with the overall balance of attachment, of strokes being given. And I think most normal people are half-malnourished this way.

People can live with half-malnourishment with many nutrients. Their body compensates. They get goiters if there's an iodine deficiency, they get other types of anemia if their iron is low, but they generally stay alive.  I think in x hundred years people will look back at the post-industrial revolution (19th - 21st century) and talk about alienation and social malnutrition.

    AG   Reading nonverbal clues is,I think, is part of an  inuitive attunement,,though the intuitive person maybe not be  consciously aware of using such data. 
         AB: I'd go further and say that well-tuned, informed, and self-aware people who can assess their own tendencies to projections, can read nonverbal skills with less than 10% distortion. But such people make up less than 10% of the population. 
     Most people, most intuitive people! also are riddled with neurotic complexes and operate interpersonally through a glass, darkly, as the Bible passage suggests---meaning that they throw out a screen of transferences and projections that if exposed cleanly would be impressive in the thickness and emotional poignancy. And again, I'm talking about otherwise normal people. 
    For people who have accepted or been given any psychiatric label---character disorder, neurotic, whatever---the interpersonal screen of distortions is twice to four times as thick. 

       So while your comments about accurate attunement are good, I question how many people are capable of them.

Also, this is role based. I think that 45% of mothers are able to attain 82% accurate attunement with a non-problematical (temperamental) infant. (These are guesses---the accuracy of the numbers is less important than the idea that I'm not making it all or nothing but attempting to suggest that there are continuums for the variables here.)
         Probably more than 10 but less than 20% can get to a 70% attunement with a more temperamentally difficult child. The difficulty of attunement goes up with the degree of temperamental distortion.

All these variables become far more complex by the time the child is a toddler, because there has been then also the complication of reaction patterns---variations of attachment, since that topic also came up--- piling up in the child's history for the previous two to four years. This involves not only primary caretaker, but also others in nuclear family.   Medical illnesses of the child increase the problems significantly, as do other stressful events. 

         By age eight, there are also overlays of all kinds of secondary relations, such as the sociometric dynamics of early school and playground years; cultural affiliations; and I don't doubt that kids by this age pick up the overall morale of the family and the nation, which again has to do with quality of propaganda, symbols used, the presence or absence of a common enemy, and scores of other variables. 

    All this comes back to the question of whether transferences outweigh accurate tele in the lives of most people, or it's about equal.

                  See how you get me thinking?   Warmly, Adam

anath

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From: ablatner at verizon.net
To: anathga at hotmail.com
CC: list at grouptalkweb.org
Subject: tele 3
Date: Sun, 19 Apr 2009 20:36:06 -0500

  Hi Anath, thanks for playing with me. 

     Response to your point below:  Okay, that brings up another theme:
      1. Sources of tele. For some who are intuitive, your point may be good. But
    2. For those less intuitive, there are many other sources: A flash of eyebrow, a gaze or glance, and how long it is sustained, all sorts of nonverbal communications.
            a. then there are people who are a little clumsy at this, who don't give clear messages, or turn away too soon, or interrupt, etc. A hundred minor interpersonal flaws.
             b. Mix any of these with degrees of sensitivity to rejection. Some folks who are pleasantly accepted or liked will feel hurt, betrayed, rejected by the slightest lack of empathic attunement. They'll react to mildly positive or moderately positive with negative tele because of an oversensitivity.
           c. Some of these people rate their own capacity to attune higher than it is, just like there are many who rate their own competence in a role to be much higher than it is. They think they're sensitive, alert, attuned, and they are quick to use that self-judgment to feel that their "take" or "first impression" is accurate. Such people don't bother to check out such perceptions and in a not-insignificant percentage of the time they're absolutely wrong, or only a tiny bit right and mainly wrong.
            There are lots of folks who believe what they feel, think what they believe, perceive what they believe and vice versa, and I find it useful to consider that all of these sources can be profoundly misleading and need to be checked out, and double-checked out. Alas, I think that many if not most people don't do this.

        Nevertheless, your point is good, because I think most folks respond intuitively. Intuition, though, is frequently contaminated by simple prejudice, stereotype, bias, motivation, and many other sources of distortion. 

        Warmly, Adam
    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: thana ag 
    To: adam blatner 
    Cc: list at grouptalkweb.org 
    Sent: Sunday, April 19, 2009 8:24 PM
    Subject: RE: tele

    Hey Adam,
    yes it  mijht've sounded  as if I were referring to  a positively charged tele,or a positive attunement. I was referring  to the "under current": to my  experiencing of the tele as an  INTUITIVE attunement , attunement done intuitively,without the verbal mediation.which could be charged positively,negatively,be reciprocated etc.
    anath

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    From: ablatner at verizon.net
    To: anathga at hotmail.com
    CC: list at grouptalkweb.org
    Subject: tele
    Date: Sun, 19 Apr 2009 20:15:04 -0500

    So, Anath, you and a number of people react to the word as if it is the same as "very positive tele."  We are faced with several possibilities:
            What about negative tele?  People who instinctively don't like each other?
                          asymmetric tele--- one likes or is neutral, the other is neutral or dislikes?
                                 indifferent tele?
                Do we change the wording here?

                      Is it possible for you to have tele for an admired other, a hero, ancestor, someone who might not even know that you exist? 

                Then about auto-tele: Reciprocity is difficult to imagine. Point is how do you feel about the different roles you play? Like this one, not so much that one?  Or should we not use the word tele for this?

              It is very clear to me that tele is an outgrowth of how we value different things, colors, tastes, feeling, values, interests, etc., as well as people. Perhaps it isn't right to call preferences tele, or maybe it is. But the dynamic expands into the interpersonal field where the other has the potential for reciprocity.

             I want to restate that tele has interesting features in that as it becomes very positive it takes on qualities that are not present when tele is mildly positive. I might even suggest that there are further subdivisions, in which certain kinds of very positive tele overlap with a willingness to get physically close, to hug, cuddle, or become sexually involved. Other types of positive tele still sustain certain kinds of intimacy barriers. These again refer to psychetele. 
         There are further subdivisions with socio-tele, with shared general common interest, shared specific common interest, degrees of enthusiasm, etc.

             What do you think? and others, too?   Warmly, Adam

      ----- Original Message ----- 
      From: thana ag 
      To: sewell.2 at osu.edu ; list at grouptalkweb.org ; adam blatner 
      Sent: Sunday, April 19, 2009 7:59 PM
      Subject: [SPAM] RE: sociometry's potential

      Regina,
      I've always experienced "tele" as intuitively grasped attunement,which probably comes closer to music, harmonics  -  stuff eperienced nonverbally
      anath

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      From: sewell.2 at osu.edu
      To: list at grouptalkweb.org; ablatner at verizon.net
      Date: Sat, 18 Apr 2009 20:11:08 -0400
      Subject: sociometry's potential

      Adam,

      <<The other meaning of tele is just as important, and also more primal: It is the tele with some non-personal object. There are gradients of preference for all manner of things, including not only colors, food, or music, but also values, subject-matter, what is deemed relevant. One can have auto-tele for different roles within oneself, preferring, say, the emergent writer of poetry, becoming inpatient to leave, say, the parenting role.

      I have come to think that tele is as much a part of depth-dynamic psychology as anything described by Freud, Adler, or Jung, or any of their followers. I think tele plays a significant part in how much we feel bonded more to one parent than another, to one or certain sibs over others, and even more for extended family members, friends, and so forth. Variations of preference are not mere temperament, though there may be some overlap, nor are they the product of relationships-I think that's a residue of the idea that young children are "tabula rasa"-empty surfaces-who adapt psycho-emotionally to family and environmental factors, bringing little to that equation.>>

      Here's a different perspective.  My first reaction was, "Of course we have attitudes about objects, color, rhythm, etc."  And some of that may be purely biological or psychological.  But it's also, in part, cultural.  I grew up on the Mexican border.  I still favor hot, spicy food.  As a teenager in the early 80's, I loved heavy metal music, especially ACDC (Back in Black is still a fine album, even though most of the lyrics are appalling) because that was cool and hated disco because it totally was not.   My theory is that a lot of these aspects of our self, our self identity, or Ego if you want to go with Eckhart Tolle - fit in with the idea of what the symbolic interactionists noted to be the self as a social construction.  The same can be said for roles w/in one's self.  My framework, acquired through socialzation from my family, my social class station, my religion and the educational system has led me to value some roles over others and struggle with others still.  I, for example, struggle with the role of musician, I think in part because I remember my father yelling at my mother when I practiced piano - the point being that it was painful and a waste of time.  So I'm drawn to music, love to play guitar, sing and write songs but don't because the inner tape that says, "This is a waste of time.  You should be working or learning something of import.  And besides, you're no good at it anyway."  

      And yet, I would agree that there is something very deep with Tele... with what martial artists called the 6th sense - the ability to "read" the safety of a situation, but my sense is that it is something that relates to energy or harmonics rather than attitudes.  So I would like to see more of your thoughts on tele w/ objects, tele w/ roles.

      Peace,

      regina

      regina sewell, Ph.D.

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