DemonKia
Posts: 5521
Joined: 10/13/2007
From: Chico, Nor-Cali
Status: offline
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FR, after read thru
lol . . . Great thread, Jeptha, what an excellent discussion to start . . . . . . Good job, 50 points, & a silver star for you, lol . . . . . .
In addition to the other excellent contributions I'll add some of my particulars . ... . & for me 'criticism' unpacks into a lot of related issues . .. . . . . & wow did this turn into one hell of a long-ass post . . . . . . I've separated the distinct points by colors . . . . ..
I think of myself as being 'very sensitive', & mostly that's something I cultivate while knowing it comes with a price tag. A chunk of what that costs me is that I have a hard time with criticism. On the other hand I can testify that it is possible to get better about these things . . . . . . .
It's only in the last decade or so that I've started figuring out the childhood connections for much of my stuff. In the case of criticism, the most pertinent thing is that my mother was enormously judgemental & critical, & her mother too. & those were the women who raised me, so I've had to deal with being hypercritical & being too quick to perceive others as hypercritical . . . . . I also tend to think that I attract the critical to my life . . . . . . My parents & extended family also suffer from the 'disease' of perfectionism, & I do think there's a connection between ideas of 'attainable perfection' & how one perceives & copes with criticism . . . . . .
But I balance the stuff in the previous paragraph with noticing that human culture at large has both a great deal of hypercriticism & perfectionism going on with it . . . ..
I'm gonna really stick my neck out & say that I think a chunk of the 'problem of critique' is the innate human propensity to fall into either/or thinking, especially those good/bad channels of association. There are thousands of words & terms that carry all kinds of 'hot meaning', capable of conveying ideas about goodness/badness in addition to those words' more utilitarian uses. ('Criticism' itself being one of those 'hot words'.) Skepticism, peer review, & critique are all useful tools, tho' they can be as painful as a scalpel without anesthesia . . ... .
For me, a very important part about being able to 'listen accurately' (to criticism, or anything else) is learning / remembering to turn off the 'judgemental' portion of thinking & to hear the descriptives . . .. . . My feeling is that a really significant part of 'problem communication' is getting stuck in the judgemental space on the giving & / or receiving end . . . . . .
From that stance my general policy, increasingly, is to be very stingy about attaching good/bad, right/wrong labels to descriptive terminology (mostly an inside the head function), where possible, & where not-so-possible to 'notice' the process going on, in myself & others, of attaching those meanings . . . . . Keeping this in mind, for instance, dear reader, try not to attach a 'bad' or 'wrong' label to the notion of 'self-centeredness' in the following paragraph:
In my idealistic youth I had all kinds of unexamined notions, one of which was that others were very interested in me & my goings on . . .. . Somewhere between my mid-20s & my mid-30s I realized & 'got' that most all of us humans are so intensely self-centered that any given individual, on average, barely notices anyone else in their whole-hearted & enthusiastic focus on their own stuff . . . . . . (Please note, lol, that my very belief that everyone else was watching, noticing, & remembering me was in itself a product of my own self-centered nature . . . . . ) This really helped me not take stuff as personally, figuring out that most people are too self-involved to actually be paying that much attention to anyone else . . . . & from that came the realization that most of the time when people are ostensibly talking about others they're talking about themselves as much or more . . . . . . . . This framework was a very helpful epiphany to get . . . . ..
I've since then had the experience of being criticized by someone about something that left me wondering 'WTF?', but over time I could see that their criticism had as much or more to do with that person's issues than with mine . . . . . .
I've always tended towards being strongly inner-directed, despite how some of the above might sound like being outwardly-directed . . . . lol . . . . It's more the case that my rather relentless pursuit of my own goals, my own way, has tended to ruffle the feathers of others. Thus, above & beyond the hyper-critical parent figures, I've quite a bit of experience with both being criticized & of feeling criticized, & of being concerned about how I'm perceived by others. & being so inner-directed has really helped me to learn to shed undue criticism like water off a duck's back, because ultimately it's up to me to figure out what my issues are, & it's me that ultimately knows who & what I am . .. .. . & there's that even people who know me quite intimately in real life only know so much about me, much less some rather more distant acquaintances' perceptions of who I am . . .. .
A certain amount of less-succesful criticism aimed my way I perceive as being about the criticizers attempt to fit me whole into a label / box, mostly for their own comfort & simplicity of thought. There are darn few boxes or labels into which I fit neatly & tidily. & I think that's probably pretty common, that looseness of fit of most labels . . . . . .
'Power & control issues'. A certain amount of what goes on with criticism, in my mind, has to do with attempts to control & / or to feel powerful & like an effective agent of change, on the part of the criticizer . . . .. . Again, not in a good or a bad sense, merely in a 'detached observational' sense . . . .. .
There's this process that I've termed 'projective displacement' which has a large interplay with the concept & practice of criticism. Projective displacement is the mental process (generally unconscious) of transferring 'bad' feelings out into the world. Also referred to as 'toilet object behavior', as in, dumping one's emotional shit onto deserving or undeserving targets. It's one thing to vent anger, for instance, at that which has provoked the anger, but it's projective displacement when the anger is aimed at anything or anyone but the provoking agent. & not that projective displacement is good or bad, it just is. In my experience it most comes into play with repressed & suppressed 'bad' feelings . .. . .
Feelings happen, they are the chemical squirts reacting to stimuli coming in or being replayed, imagined, & etc . . . . . 'Normal' humans should be having the full range of biochemical reactions to stimuli that are possible, on a pretty regular basis. But if there is belief that a particular emotion is 'bad' & attempts are made to suppress, repress, deny, ignore, or what have you the expression of that emotion as it occurs, it has to go somewhere. Emotions are actual physical entities (biochemicals, neurotransmitters, neurons, & so on & so forth) engaging in actual physical events, however invisible all that might be, or be desired to be . . . . . . .
& projective displacement is my little term for when that repressed stuff comes out, especially when it's inappropriately vented. Disguised as rationality quite a bit of the time, hidden under obfuscating layers of words, safely distancing the feeling from the feeler in as plausibly deniable a way as possible . . . . . . .
Ummm, wow, yet another long-ass post, lol. Ah, poor dear reader . .. . . A reward. A powerful tool for being perceived (by self & others) as less critical & more helpful is to stay in a positive linguistic space, to phrase things only in positive terms, to eliminate the negations. Actually I've found it to be just an all-around powerful tool for changing my headspace, my relationship with the world around me, & etc . . .. . . . But I started practicing at it specifically to reduce my criticalness . . .. . .
Another powerful tool is to work to eliminate the use of imperative command structures & absolute terminology from ones language. 'You should', 'you ought', 'you need to', 'you must' & so on, of the former, & 'always', 'every', & similar, of the latter, are like casual gasoline tossed around conversations, turning 'innocent communication' into volatile explodium . . . . . .
A significant tool I have for dealing with all kinds of criticism is a sense of humor. I tend to be over-serious, so developing my sense of humor has been 'job 1' here for a while now, & especially humor as a way of turning life's lemons into aid, lol . . . . . . That 'laugh rather than cry' thing . ... . . Wherever possible . . . . So, to digest painful 'constructive criticism' I turn to self-deprecation & being willing & able to laugh at myself, & to process 'destructive criticism' I turn to satire, parody, sarcasm, & that sorta thing . . . . . .
Ah, & finally. I do a lot of both constructive & destructive self-critique. On purpose, accidentally, etc . .. . . I like it anymore; it's tough to ruffle my feathers over something I've already observed & am working on in myself . . . . . . I kinda view it as a form of innoculation . . . .. . .
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Snarko ergo sum.
The Verbossinator
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RE: Handling criticism... - 
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