Some Very Extreme—But All Too Real—Examples of Altered Perceptions:
For an extreme example of how a person can alter their consciousness to deal with a situation, come watch another Alfred Hitchcock movie with me. Starring Anthony Hopkins. Screenplay by Quentin Tarantino.
A Mafia don owns a private island. Then some drunk college kid date rapes his daughter. The Mafia don finds out who did it, and instead of having the rapist arrested, he sends his boys to abduct the guy and bring him out to his island. Then the Mafia don tells his boys he’s going to be on vacation for a long time. He wants them to drop off supplies for him once a week, but other than that he wants to be left alone with his guest.
The Mafia don has a luxurious mansion on the island. There’s no boat, and the island is too far removed from any other land for the rapist to be able to swim anywhere. When the supply boat docks once a week, it’s guarded by half a dozen Mafia thugs with submachineguns while it’s being unloaded. The rapist has no way off the island.
The Mafia don has three large hunting dogs who stay at his side at all times. He also has a hunting rifle with a scope and plenty of ammunition, all of which he keeps under lock and key. At all times, he keeps a taser, a can of pepper spray, and a pistol on his person. He also keeps all tools, sharp objects, and dangerous chemicals securely locked up. There is nothing the rapist can do that will pose any threat to the Mafia don.
Then the Mafia don gives the rapist free reign of the house and the island. The only condition is that he must join the Mafia don for supper every night before the sun goes down. If he fails to appear, no matter where he goes, the Mafia don and his dogs will find him.
So far, I have stacked the deck so completely in the Mafia don’s favor that there doesn’t seem to be any story left to tell. There’s no amount of heroism that can save the rapist, so this isn’t going to be an action movie, and there’s no amount of subterfuge that can save the rapist, so this isn’t going to be a suspense thriller. It’s going to be a psychological thriller. Watch this:
The Mafia don is an excellent chef. At supper, he serves the rapist a fabulous gourmet meal. Afterwards, they drink coffee, eat desert, and then retire to the den, to sit in easy chairs and smoke cigars and drink cognac by the fireplace.
Then the Mafia don puts his pistol to the rapist’s head and tells him to accompany him to the basement. His three large hunting dogs stand up and growl, just to remind the rapist that he only has one choice.
In the basement is a worktable with a chair in front of it. The Mafia don tells the rapist to sit down in the chair. He then chains the rapist into the chair, and then chains one of his hands to the worktable. Then he picks up a large cleaver and very neatly cuts the rapist’s thumb off at the first joint. Then he cauterizes the wound shut with a blowtorch. All of this is done without anesthetic. Then he sprinkles disinfectant over the wound and very delicately bandages it up.
Apart from these few minutes in the basement, the Mafia don is the perfect host. He treats his guest with the utmost courtesy. But the next night he repeats the process, and cuts the rapist’s thumb off at the second joint. The next night he cuts it off at the final joint. The fourth night he starts on the rapist’s other thumb. Then his toes, one joint at a time. When all his toes are gone, he starts on his fingers, one joint at a time. When all his fingers are gone, he starts on his hands and feet, one piece at a time. When the rapist’s hands and feet are gone, the Mafia don starts cutting off his arms and legs, one inch at a time.
All through this process, the Mafia don is still the perfect host. He serves the rapist three excellent gourmet meals per day and they spend each evening with desert, coffee, cigars, and cognac, and conversation by the fire.
While he isn’t cutting pieces of the rapist’s body off one by one, the Mafia don is the perfect nurse. He keeps the rapist company and entertains him when he can’t move about on his own anymore. He gladly helps the rapist with everything he can’t do for himself anymore. He even smiles with genuine compassion when he wipes the rapist’s ass.
When the rapist’s arms and legs are all gone, the Mafia don starts pulling out his teeth, one at a time. When all the rapists’ teeth are gone, the Mafia don starts in on his ears, his nose, his lips, and his eyes. He leaves the rapists’ tongue intact, so he can listen to what the rapist has to say all the while.
The plot of the movie is a study of the rapist resorting to one psychological defense mechanism after another, and all of them breaking down one by one. I think the only way this movie can end is with the rapist going completely insane and blocking out the entire world. That was a trick people used back in medieval Europe, when monarchs would watch captured enemies be tortured for recreation. If prisoners knew they were going to be tortured to death, sometimes they could talk the torturers into a bribe. If they paid the torturer off, they could convince him to hurt them so badly in the early stages of the torture that by the time the torture moved on to more elaborate, more entertaining stages, they wouldn’t notice anything anymore.
This story of the Mafia don and his daughter’s rapist adds an extra twist, however. The Mafia don knows he has the rapist right where he wants him. He knows he’s going to get to maim the rapist every night, right on schedule, and there’s nothing the rapist can do about it. So he doesn’t need to resort to any emotional aggression whatsoever. On the contrary, he can be the rapist’s best friend the whole time.
When the only other human being the rapist sees for the rest of his life acts like his best friend for all but five minutes out of each day, the rapist is going to cling to the only person he can to feel like he has someone there who cares about him and who’s willing to help him through this—the Mafia don. And making that social/emotional/tribal connection is easy when the Mafia don acts like the rapist’s best friend for virtually the entire time they spend on the island together.
Before the rapist goes completely insane and shuts off his perception of the entire world, I’m willing to bet that his second-to-last defense mechanism would be to accept the Mafia don as his best friend and simply block out those five minutes per day. This entire process would take eight months or more, which would be plenty of time for the rapist to try all kinds of easy defense mechanisms, like begging, pleading, threatening, offering bribes, ignoring the Mafia don, imagining he was somewhere else, and believing that divine powers would exact their revenge on the Mafia don eventually… and give up on all of them one by one. By the end, the rapist’s perception of the world would be that he lives in excruciating pain, but his loyal friend stays by his side for every minute of it.
This is the perfect revenge for the Mafia don, because not only is he cutting the rapist’s body apart, he’s also cutting his mind apart at the same time. To make his revenge complete, he could reduce the rapist to a sniveling groveling lump of flesh that used to be a man and still has a man’s brain inside it somewhere, which pledges his eternal and undying love for the Mafia don, and then shatter that one last illusion that was holding the rapist’s mind together. He could start torturing him physically and continuously, although not hurting him as badly as he has been with the cleaver and the blowtorch. All the while, he would keep talking like the rapist’s best friend, just like he had been the whole time, but now he would be very methodically hurting the rapist. In doing this, the Mafia don would be preventing the rapist from being able to block out being hurt by the Mafia don while accepting the Mafia don as his best friend at the same time. In the process, the Mafia don might even drag the rapist’s memories of being maimed nightly out of his subconscious and force him to remember that his best friend did all that too. (That could happen in real life, but there’s no guarantee—but in a Hollywood movie, you can be sure it would happen.) Then to end it, the Mafia don could stick the rapist’s dick in a blender, and then leave him to bleed to death feeling like he’d been betrayed by his best friend.
Hey, you, reader, come back here! You’re probably altering your emotional perception of the world right now, trying to shut all this out of your mind. Well it’s okay, cuz that story’s over now.
As sick as all this sounds, this is basically how some parents raise their children. (My parents worked for state foster homes for about 20 years, remember?) First these parents trap their kids in a situation they can’t escape (their home lives), then they act like they love them dearly (which is what the kids want to feel), and then sometimes they abuse them—and sometimes even horribly.
When all other defense mechanisms fail, the kid can still warp his perception of the world beyond what most people could even imagine possible. He wants his parents to love him, and he can’t run away from them, so he will subconsciously warp his perception of the world by any amount necessary to believe that he has what he wants. So people start completely shutting out important events of their childhoods that don’t correspond with what they wanted their childhoods to be like.
So then as adults, these people go see psychiatrists to talk about why they feel like something is wrong with their lives. They get to talking about their childhoods, and talk about why their parents got divorced when they always seemed to love each other so much. But then the psychiatrist starts asking questions, and suddenly the patient remembers hearing his parents screaming at each other at night after they’d put him to bed. Now suddenly all the pieces of his childhood don’t fit together the way he thought they did anymore. Or patients start making statements like this one by woman who Dr. Goleman quotes in the introduction to his book:
“I am very close to my family. They were always very demonstrative and loving. When I disagreed with my mother, she always threw whatever was nearest at hand at me. One time it was a knife, and I needed ten stitches in my leg. A few years later my father tried to choke me when I began dating a boy he didn’t like. They really are very concerned about me.”
I’ve known plenty of people who have said similar things about their parents—that their parents treated them like sh*t their whole lives, but they still want to get along with them, “cuz they’re my parents.”
Yeah? So? Out of all the people there are in the world who don’t treat you like sh*t, why do you keep running back to them?
Of course that’s easy for me to ask, because I never had this problem. But when I ask people why they feel that way, they can’t put it into words any more clearly than that. Sometimes they grasp at something like, “Cuz that’s just what I feel like I need to do.”
One friend of mine couldn’t try to get along with her parents. She never knew her father, her mother kept her for a few years but abused her, then put her up for adoption, then two adoptive families didn’t work out, then after a few years she moved back in with her mother, but they still didn’t get along very well, so finally she ran away from home. Over the years they kept in touch from time to time, but my friend had been trying to get in touch with her mother for several years now but hadn’t heard from her, and figured either she was ignoring her or she was dead. So she’d figured out how to put it into words better than anyone else by now, and she said: “I feel like I’ve been robbed.”
And maybe I should add that my friend was probably 36 or 37 last time I saw her, and she had basically nothing to show for her life, except for her two kids who lived with their dad. She was divorced, she had a few friends who treated her like sh*t, she couldn’t keep a job, she’d had to declare bankruptcy, she kept getting evicted from apartments, she’d end up homeless from time to time, or else living at cheap motels for months on end because she couldn’t save up enough money to get into an apartment, and finally she’d gone back to working as a stripper. But she had to stay drunk to do that, and she had Hepatitis C, which is an incurable disease, so her liver was already working overtime… And she’d never accept my with hardly anything. I haven’t seen or heard from her in a couple of years now either. She couldn’t get anywhere in life because she had to build her house on the sand because her parents never gave her any other choice. She felt like she’d been robbed, and she devoted he whole life to trying to stop feeling like she’d been robbed. She couldn’t keep up in the world among people who didn’t feel like they’d been robbed, so she kept ending up with friends and bosses who kept trying to rob her even more. Now a big part of “making herself stop feeling like she’d been robbed,” meant trying to figure out how to keep herself safe from those people. She must be 39 by now, so you can just imagine how much of a future she has left as a stripper…
Dr. Mardi Horowitz compiled a list of different ways people use denial to block out their perceptions. They are:
Avoided associations—the avoidance of anything that seems to be related to a stressful or threatening situation.
Numbness—the sense of not having feelings, or that appropriate emotions are going unfelt.
Flattened response—a reduced or constricted range of emotional reactions.
Dimming of attention—avoidance of focusing clearly on information, thoughts, feelings, or physical sensations.
Daze—actively unfocused attention that clouds alertness and attention.
Memory failure—inability to recall events or their details, or a selective amnesia for telling facts.
Disavowal—saying or thinking that obvious meanings are not so.
Blocking through fantasy—avoiding reality or its implications by fanciful thoughts of what might have been or could be.
When people get trapped in situations they have no way to escape, there are lots of ways they can alter their perceptions of the world to feel like things are working out for them after all. There’s a pretty simple reason for that: Once upon a time, some people who got trapped in hopeless situations they couldn’t escape gave up and committed suicide, and they didn’t pass their genes on to anyone. My friend’s life might be a heap of smoldering wreckage, but she has kids and I don’t. That means in spite of everything that’s gone wrong for her, she has successfully preserved the survival of her DNA anyway.
Some of the ways people warp their perceptions of the world are more obvious than others. Some people realize they’ve done it, while others don’t. The difference between my friend and the hypothetical psychiatry patient or the lady whose mother threw the knife at her was that my friend had figured out what had gone wrong with her life. The hypothetical psychiatry patient not only forgot what went wrong with his life, he’d also forgotten that he’d forgotten. That’s why his hypothetical psychiatrist had to carefully deconstruct his psychological makeup piece by piece until he unearthed that repressed memory. The lady whose mother threw a knife at her not only forgot what had gone wrong with her life, and not only forgot that she’d forgotten, but she had forgotten she’d forgotten so completely that she could still remember the events themselves, but she had completely replaced the way they (presumably) made her feel with what she wanted to feel, and forgotten that too. So ultimately, she had forgotten forgetting so completely that she could remember without remembering.
The mental equipment that made these things possible for these people is evolutionary equipment that we all share. Suppose you find yourself trapped in a hopeless situation with no escape, and lots of other people find themselves trapped in the same situation with no escape. In this case, you live on a planet with a greenhouse effect that’s starting to spiral out of control, and where there are 31,000 nuclear weapons, and lots of people who don’t trust each other, and two giant suicide cults that are trying to kill each other. What are you going to do about it? What is everyone else going to do about it? Try to solve the hopeless problem? Or tranquilize yourself by altering your perception of the world? And what is everyone else going to do? Try solving hopeless problems? Or tranquilize themselves by altering their perceptions of the world? If everybody tranquilizes themselves, who is that going to leave to solve their problems? And if so many people tranquilize themselves that tranquilizing yourself becomes the best way to get along in society because it lets you share a common perspective on the world with the most people, now tranquilizing yourself becomes a social ritual and a cultural value. And then what are people going to do but to help tranquilize each other?
If the mark of insanity is to act upon subjective interpretations of the world that defy objective reality to the point of self-destruction, then the majority of people in the world are insane.
But don’t take my word for it. Remember Dr. Laing and his politics of ice cream? As he put it,
“The range of what we think we do
Is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
That we fail to notice
There is little we can do
To change
Until we notice
How failing to notice
Shapes our thoughts and deeds.”