In #mediatherapy on Saturday, Dr Song really resonated with a phrase in S01E09 of #Babylon5 referring to "blind comfort". It resulted in a very long, emotional realization about her own life being lived with different levels of blind comfort.
In the episode it was used to describe a kind of ignorance that people suffer from when they don't want to face the dark truths of themselves ... this idea that others are worse than them so they're fine how they are.
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I asked Dr Song to contemplate the opposite of blind comfort ... in essence a MINDFUL DISCOMFORT that most people cannot handle. Basically, blind comfort is preferable to living in TRUTH with the world and themselves.
The truth is brutal and uncomfortable. It is depressive, dark, and scares people, so they turn a blind eye ... they choose comfort or truths only in small, palatable, simplistic pieces or they just choose anger as a shield against everything conflicting with what they prefer.
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The world is full of people who choose anger, ignorance, or fear over truths and who only want to accept easy truths and reject hard ones about themselves or the world they inhabit. Blind comfort is a very necessary state of being for many.
For Dr Song, the phrase "blind comfort" pulled from her an understanding that she was blind to her own need for growth personally and professionally out of fear and a lack of positive self-worth; that she was merely surviving life and not living it.
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I've talked before about how everyone lives in their own realities and speaks their own language -
https://thewebrecluse.com/wordplay/
- and this also means they have their own truths ... about themselves and about the reality that they live in.
How they see the world and what is real to them is specific to the reality they choose to inhabit and changing those truths for them is impossible.
You can't rewrite someone's reality from outside of it nor can you convince them they are incorrect.
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For example, trying to explain to people that the sky isn't actually blue and that we only see it that way because of how our visual system works.
There are people who will accept this truth, there are people who will argue it, there are people who will seek out the science and realign their understanding and for others this will be meaningless information because some people see colors completely differently for medical reasons and others see none at all.
These are different realities.
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The new episode of the #Babylon5 #mediatherapy project that I referred to in this thread will be up in the next couple of days.
Really great and productive session with Dr Song and - for those still struggling with understanding how media therapy works - this session is a good example of the modality working as intended.
I ask my students to try and incorporate some MINDFUL DISCOMFORT into their lives daily ... to slowly ease their way into a better understanding of themselves and other people's realities.
Ask hard questions, listen to the answers. Examine your biases, begin dismantling the framework of your belief system that is mainly a crutch or system of protective denial. It's difficult but worthwhile work.
You will never shatter someone else's reality, but you can become educated on why they live there.