Minimizing, cutting and exaggeration.

Minimizing, cutting and exaggeration tell us a lot of things about a person.
When someone wants to influence you, then can minimize or exaggerate actions, emotions, attitudes, situations.
Minimize and exaggeration has an important place in current speaking, because people are trying to get into conversation’s oratorical tone, and perhaps theatricality attitude.
What minimization has to do with modesty?
Personal achievements and accomplishments of others are minimized by those who support modesty. People tend to minimize also personal achievements. Minimizing occurrences makes the situation seem less important than reality.

Minimization theory states that allows people to pretend that things are less important than they are, which in turn allows them to deny what they actually believe about themselves or about others.
If someone has the intention of how not to be understood by another person, then will use minimization or will cut the word. Reduction of words that people often use to minimize unethical behavior are: sort of, barely, no big deal, not more than, only a little, all I did was, kind of, once, just, merely.

Let’s see Eric Berne and Alfred Adler‘s clarification.

Eric Berne in Transactional analysis is talking about discounting.
Transactional analysis explored the role played by discounting in maintaining dependency relationships: the discounting of the child by the parent figure, initially by the real parent and later by the child’s internalized parent. When one-person discounts another, he acts as if what he feels is more important than what the other person feels, says or does. What came to be called ‘the “hierarchy of discounts” existence, significance, change possibilities and personal activities were evolved, the highest automatically including those below: a discount of the existence of problems is equivalent to discounting the significance.

In a rather different method, Alfred Adler spoke of his therapeutic technique of ‘minimizing the significance of the symptoms; you must strive to debase the great significance which the neurotic attributes to his symptoms.

Here we can talk about The Pollyanna principle. According to the Pollyanna Principle, the brain processes information that is pleasing and agreeable in a more precise and exact manner as compared to unpleasant information; still for this article is enough.

However, exaggeration, regarding health people tend to hyperbolize a little more. They are trying to get more attention, empathy and affection. Upcoming exaggeration is aggression, suggesting, overvaluing, overacting and other intentions.

People love tragedy, theatricality attitude, and they love to attach more expressionism to actions.
Exaggeration, also is a form of manipulation, like a cognitive distortion when we overestimate a situation, event, natural disaster, emotion.

My questions are:

What is the indented behind minimizing or exaggerating?
What do we aspect when we minimize or exaggerate?
What is the reaction or feedback, we what?

As we age we learn that exaggeration and minimization can be used as rhetorical tools, allowing us to exploit our creative skills to emphasize the mask or what we say.
’’The Book of Tells – Body Talk’’ Peter Collett.

A bit of inspiration taken from Wikipedia, Peter Collet and Daniela Damian.

Related articles

• What Do You Say After You Say Hello, by Eric Berne (thoughtsinfusion.wordpress.com)
• Cognitive Distortions 101 (nataschasantos.com)
• Games People Play (sciencefox5.wordpress.com)

Rationalization of Passion killing

I personally think  that being rational is like wearing an emotion armor. And the belief that this word will simplify understanding of things and making living easier, is not helpful. I believe that those who think they are protecting themselves by rationalizing emotion and behavior, actually they are running for something, and they are defending from …

 This subject of matter is important for most of us, and I decided to take closer view. Current research in this area addresses various questions about reasoning, rationality, intelligence, relationships between emotion and reasoning, and development.

In 1908, Ernest Jones contributed the term “rationalization” to psychoanalysis  – “the inventing of a reason for an attitude or action the motive of which is not recognized.”  

For  Eric Berne, one’s ‘important decisions are already made in early childhood’: thereafter ‘other decisions…are “directed” decisions rationalized on spurious grounds. Once a decision has been made on unconscious grounds, ‘without the individuals being aware of the real forces behind it. He takes upon himself the task of finding justifications for it…”rationalization”‘.

Lacan in his concept of miss recognizing came very close to the same idea: everything that the ego neglects, ignores, exhausts, and binds in the significations that it receives from language. This process called rationalization it splits intellect from feeling and enslaves reason, can falsify judgement. This extermination of real feelings and replacement with the reverse contribute to passion killing. All we must remember is that rationalization is an unconscious defense mechanism, so every time we use this concept in our action, beliefs, relationships or when we are dealing with our emotion, we need to pay more attention. 

Sometimes emotional aspects are acceptable if they are reasonable, if it is so, then we are talking about defensive attitudes and resistances. 

According to the DSM-IV, rationalization occurs “when the individual deals with emotional conflict or internal or external stressors by concealing the true motivations for his or her own thoughts, actions, or feelings through the elaboration of reassuring or self-serving but incorrect explanations.”

It is evident to modern cognitive science and neuroscience, studying the role of emotion in mental function (including topics ranging from flashes of scientific insight to making future plans), that no human has ever satisfied this criterion, except perhaps a person with no affective feelings; such an idealized form of rationality is best exemplified by computers, and not people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationality

Rationality theorist, Jesús Mosterín makes a parallel distinction between theoretical and practical rational. According to him, reason and rationality are different: reason would be a psychological faculty, whereas rationality is an optimizing strategy. Humans are not rational by definition, but they can think and behave rationally or not, depending on whether they apply, explicitly or implicitly, the strategy of theoretical and practical rationality to the thoughts they accept and to the actions, they perform.

Theoretical rationality has a formal component that reduces to logical consistency and a material component that reduces to empirical support, relying on our inborn mechanisms of signal detection and interpretation. Mosterín distinguishes between involuntary and implicit belief, on the one hand, and voluntary and explicit acceptance, on the other. Theoretical rationality can more properly be said to regulate our acceptances than our beliefs.

Rationality is the strategy for living one’s best possible life, achieving your most important goals and your own preferences in as far as possible. Others think that any kind of rationality along the lines of rational choice theory is a useless concept for understanding human behavior. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationality

As my main concern here is about passion, love, relationships and rationalization or rationality between them, let’s take a look on Plato’s theory of love: ”when one dispels these misunderstandings related to the popular notion of Platonic love, one finds a great richness and depth in Plato’s theory of love. In explaining why love is so important to us and yet why it fails us so often, Plato’s view of love seems applicable to our time. It is common knowledge that a very high rate of divorce threatens our marriages. We expect a lot from the sexual passion we call love, but usually end up disappointed when the romance goes away. However, we keep getting married, thinking that we are going to be the ones that will beat the system. If we fail, we change our partner and try again. We end up our love life as we began it, confused, afraid and as disappointed as we were hopeful. The malaise that characterizes our love lives naturally finds its way to the philosophical consulting room. In this paper, I shall attempt to show how Plato’s view of love can be helpful both in dispelling our confusion about love and in proposing some solutions to our suffering. http://www.iep.utm.edu/love/ Philosophy of Love: An Overview 

When someone got’s disappointed in love, can the person say ”next time I will be rational”?

Being rational is not a solution, a solution is to identify the decision that we took long time ago, see Eic Berne at the beginning of this article. The decision we took implies us in the similarly situation, and we go for people who van takes there, being aware of your decision and changing them is a solution. Defending attitude and resistance will put us in the same situation over and over, is like a circle game, like a dance.  If you don’t like the melody, then change it!

Claude Steiner said that ”science was a discipline that encourages detachment and rationality uncluttered by emotion”. Claude Steiner, in his book ”Emotional Literacy”, is talking about how to learn what you feel, how to express your feelings and how to improve every relationship in your life.  http://www.claudesteiner.com/

To be emotionally literate is to be able to handle emotions in a way that improves your personal power and improves the quality of life for you and —equally importantly—the quality of life for the people around you.  You can be emotional literate, if you want to control your feelings, in the same time before control, then you  must be aware  of your feelings, recognize them accept them and understand them.

Rationalizing process it makes us less responsible, we create another world around us, which is uncomfortable, unsecured, unpleasant.
What are we  afraid of? Is  being natural and letting go of feelings?
Quote by Will Smith: ”being realistic is the most commonly traveled road to mediocrity. Why would you be realistic? What is the point of being realistic?”

Sex in Human Loving – Eric Berne

Anyone who is unhappy with the relationships they have, sexual or not, can benefit a LOT from this book. It’s funny, witty, and thought provoking. Not just about sex, but about *you*, and why you don’t have the relationships you want. It tells you why you are after it and how most of the time you have been or got programmed in Life to not get it. One is also better off reading Berne other books before getting this one :  `Games People Play’ and `What do you say after you say hello’.