August 2, 2003

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  Entitlement…
   among other things….

  
  

  On the days when I don’t go into town to be with Greyfox, and between his Monday-Tuesday “weekend” trips up the valley, the morning phone calls are our times “together” for talking about what’s on our minds.  We often talk about our dreams.  Last week we were both a little surprised to learn that we’d had similarly themed dreams the previous night.  Details differed, but we both had public nudity dreams–and both of them indicated that our unconscious feelings about self-disclosure have evolved.

  
  

  That same night we also had drug dreams.  Drug dreams are common for addicts in recovery.  We often hear them recounted and discussed at NA meetings.  What was unusual about these drug dreams was the drug involved.  We weren’t dreaming about crack or crank or booze, but about sugar.  In context, it makes sense.  Sugar, for both of us, was our first addiction.  It has been the hardest of all for me to kick, too, but that’s probably only because I never got addicted to nicotine.  In Greyfox’s dream, he resisted the sugar; in mine, I indulged.  I was so relieved to wake up and find that it had been a dream!

  
  

  This morning when he called, Greyfox was telling me about his latest session with his other “therapist”.  I’m helping him with his work on the personality disorders and addictions, the intertwined “double trouble” that seems to occur together for many people.  He also gets help in nightly shamanic journeys, from Raven, one of his spirit helpers.  A few times Greyfox has expressed the feeling that it’s a bit weird getting therapy from a bird in his mind, but “whatever works” is what I say.  This has been working, working out well for all of us.  That bird knows his beans.

  
  

  During the conversation, he brought up the issue of being “special”, which had come out in his latest blog.  We both got plenty of the “special” treatment in our youth, being exceptionally bright as well as having “special” challenges, such as illness and pathological clumsiness and incoordination on my part, and being short and legally blind on his part. 

  
  

  Until recently, I hadn’t a clue how he had come to translate that “special” quality into greater entitlement, extra privileges he granted himself, and a lower status for everyone else’s desires and needs compared to his own.  Where I came from, being sick and clumsy meant I had to try harder to pull my own weight in society, and being smarter than average meant greater than average responsibility.  I placed greater expectations on myself than on other people.  That difference in perspective between us has caused many misunderstandings.  Being “special” was never all that great for me.  While I was yearning for normality, he was exulting in his special status.

  
  

  Today, as we were talking about it, I had a flash.  What if… what if the reason I interpreted my “special” status so differently from the way he did, was because I’m a woman and he’s a man?  We all know, don’t we, that women apply both brain hemispheres to processing sensory input, while men listen with only half a brain?  Okay, I’m not assuming that this is the only factor involved in this vast difference between the ways we interpreted what it meant to be “different” from the norm, but I think it could be a factor, along with the neglect he suffered, the lack of “mirroring” during the critical period of his infancy.  The fact remains that we took very similar premises and reached virtually opposite conclusions.

  
  

  I definitely “think like a woman”. <<That link will take you to a test where you can determine the gender of your own brain.  Women tend to use both logic and intuition, and probably some more subtle senses that men don’t even acknowledge the existence of and most women fear their ever finding out about.  The fact that we can bleed five days out of every month without dying, and that we swell up occasionally and produce new people, is enough cause for superstitious fear… think what it would be like if they understood how our minds work.  Then we might really see a war between the sexes.

  
  

  

  • 10:03 pm
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