Cleaning the Backyard

                                                (image: youtube.com)

Mag-una gajod ta panilhig sa kauglingon na lagwerta! Do you still remember the story about a woman who constantly commented how her neighbor hangs “dirty” laundry on the clothesline? She often mentioned how her neighbor’s unclean habits may affect the health of the family members. Then one day, her husband cleaned the glass on their window and the woman realized that it was the window which is dirty all the while.

Deflecting is a psychological defense mechanism that people use to take the blame off of them. When they are deflecting, they are trying to make themselves feel less bad for their wrongdoings. This likely happens due to past experiences of being in trouble for things.

Most of the time, they do this so that they will not confront their own realities. They might experience some turmoil and they are seeing that their personal lives are in a mess, they want to deflect the attention to others. In this manner, they are protecting the SELF at the expense of others.

Deflection according to Horn (2020) is one of the many defense mechanisms. When someone deflects, they are trying to feel less guilty, avoid negative consequences, and put the blame on others. It is a learned defense mechanism, typically starting from early childhood. Most people have heard children blame their siblings for something they did. Usually, this behavior is diminished as the child enters other development stages. However, the habit doesn’t always go away when someone enters adulthood. This can be a serious problem and can have a large effect on their relationships.

Since it has become a habit, there are adults who are still trapped on this mechanism to the point that they are not focused on themselves. They probably did some efforts to correct their mistakes but they feel that they were exercises in futility. To cope, they deflect.

Psychological deflection is somewhat similar to blame-shifting and it is a narcissistic abuse tactic that is often used by narcissists but more respectively, Covert narcissists in order to move attention for their bad behaviors away from them, and then redirect it towards other people they may use as their scapegoats. With this tactic, a narcissist is able to control the mind and the emotions of everyone around them (bricefoundation.org).

A Covert narcissist is a type of person who is very manipulative and self-centered, he/she doesn't care about other people's feelings or well-being and doesn't think about how their behavior or actions may affect other people. Other people who are not narcissists have used it also as a form of coping mechanism strategy in order to mask their own impulses (guilt) by denying their mistakes and projecting them on the people around them.

Again, this soliloquy will then be centered on how to confront the SELF first than trying to “correct” others. It has been constantly mentioned that one cannot change others but the person can only change himself. The world, even the micro-communities like a family is in chaos since people like to change others. We can only facilitate the change. It is the person who will do it for his own.

Most defense mechanisms are fairly unconscious – that means most of us don’t realize we’re using them in the moment. Some types of psychotherapy can help a person become aware of what defense mechanisms they are using, how effective they are, and how to use less primitive and more effective mechanisms in the future.

Still, reflections and introspection can be very effective. It has been theorized by progressive thinkers that reflections can become bases of personal change and developmental planning. Academic institutions are now accepting reflections as tangible outputs of training and development. And reflective assessments have been used by big universities and colleges as learning gauges.

So, if we feel that we have already cleaned the front yard, we still have the backyard which others seldom see. We also have store rooms and closets full of cobwebs and probably some skeletons in them. It is always apt to consider General Cleaning during our thinking phases.

You Are Your Thoughts

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Sige man kaw gud naghanap nan sajop nan iban ugsa taghanapan kaw sab nila nan sajop. Simply put, the Law of Attraction is the ability to attract into our lives whatever we are focusing on. It is believed that regardless of age, nationality, or religious belief, we are all susceptible to the laws which govern the Universe, including the Law of Attraction. Whatever you give your energy and attention to will come back to you.

There is this motivational speaker who mentioned that to be able to steer your destiny towards the success you are aiming for, discipline your thoughts into creating positive patterns. She also suggested keeping a journal of Gratefulness. We have to write the small things we feel good for the day to linger on these positivity. People who complain will always receive something worth complaining.

Bestselling author Jack Canfield mentions that the universe, through the Law of Attraction, will respond enthusiastically to both of these vibrations. It doesn’t decide which one is better for you, it just responds to whatever energy you are creating, and it gives you more of the same. You get back exactly what you put out there.

Family orientation greatly affects the mindset of the children which later be developed in adulthood. There are parents who constantly look for the negative actions of the children but fail to affirm the good deeds of the kids. By habit, children will then see the world in a gloomy and negative manner. Worse, the products of such un-nurturing families will soon go out of the society and create more negative ripples to others.

A negative mindset focuses on the nasty side of people, experiences, situations, or judgments. Negative thinking sustains such a mindset. Negative thinking is something we all engage in from time to time, but constant negativity can destroy your mental health, leaving you depressed and anxious.

Rethink Mental Illness mentions: "Negative thinking refers to a pattern of thinking negatively about yourself and your surroundings. While everyone experiences negative thoughts now and again, negative thinking that seriously affects the way you think about yourself and the world and even interferes with work/study and everyday functioning could be a symptom of a mental illness, including depression, anxiety disorders, personality disorders and schizophrenia."

Smith (2019) said that not everyone who engages in negative thinking has a mental illness, just like not everyone with a mental illness has constant negative thoughts. However, negative thinking can be detrimental to your mental health and quality of life, particularly when you can’t stop. Luckily, there are ways to end negative thoughts, but you must first look at what causes them.

So why dwell on such dark and destructive thoughts which muddle your mood? Instead of looking for the bad, why not look for the good? You see, we value our humanity. We adhere to the belief that people could always have both the good and the bad side, so why not nourish the good and eradicate the dark spots by intensifying the white and bright parts?

Looking for someone’s weaknesses is a sign of insecurity. The person is making this crutch with the belief that “he/she is not alone of being imperfect”. Fault finding is a clever device of the ego. It serves a purpose as far as the ego is concerned. The ego does not like to bring attention to itself, and fault finding helps draw attention away.

Seshadri (2020) wrote that fault finding provides a subtle lift to our self-esteem by diminishing the value of someone else. To gain self-confidence, there is an easy way and a hard way. The hard way is to work for it, but finding fault with others is an easier way out. When we find fault with others, there is a silent inference that we are better. But that feeling of being better ultimately makes us feel insecure as it depends on the existence of a fault within another, whether real or not. Fault finding propagates this subtle psychological lift.

Still, we reap what we sow, right? So, prepare yourself for the backlash. We always experience what we allow ourselves to be exposed into.

The sanest thing then is to dwell on the positive side of everything. A more rigorous method to reduce or eliminate fault finding is turning within through the eyes of introspection. For one fault we identify with someone or something, if we resolve to find ten errors within ourselves, we will become so busy digging up dirt within ourselves, that there may not be many opportunities to point fingers at others.

Keep a journal, for a start!

And the winner is...

                                                (photo: youtube.com)

Umay baja gwapa? This is a question which has been asked from time immemorial. The cliché “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” reverberates yet society (or is it culture?) seems to dictate what is beautiful and what is not.

The Philippines is now alive as the Miss Universe pageant intensifies. Social media sites are full of screenshots from the ongoing preliminary rounds and people are so engaged in  the dichotomy of gowns, national costumes and swimwear of the contestants. Which, anthropologists and social scientists might pose these questions: What is it with beauty pageants? What is beautiful? And what is the reason on the obsession for beauty?

The media is a dominant means for transmitting and reinforcing cultural beliefs and values and, while it might not be exclusively responsible for determining the standards for physical attractiveness, it makes escaping frequent exposure to these images and attitudes almost impossible. Advertising, in particular, creates a seductive and toxic mix of messages for men and women (Mahoney, 2018).

It is in media platforms where people see whitening products, makeup, clothes and many other cosmetics which promise a beautiful outcome once patronized. Society then depicts beauty as skinny waistlines, big muscles, tan skin, full lips, large breasts and six-pack abs; dismissing the fact that true beauty originates from the inside.

In Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession With Appearance Hurts Girls and Women, Northwestern University professor Renee Engeln calls this appearance-obsessed culture “beauty sick” — referring to “what happens when women’s emotional energy gets so bound up with what they see in the mirror that it becomes harder for them to see other aspects of their lives,” she writes.

The book indicts social and news media in helping to create beauty sickness by drawing on research and interviews with real-world girls and women. Engeln cites studies that show that women and girls who engage in social media report higher incidences of eating disorders, increased symptoms of depression, and more desire to have plastic surgery.

This is a classic example of allowing others or the media to define what is beautiful and what is not. And, what is the reason why Filipinos are so obsessed with beauty pageants? Is it a shallow, exploitative spectacle in an image-obsessed society?

"In the Philippine setting, pageants are an institution that will not fade away. Every sitio, barrio, barangay, local town and city holds and conducts its own beauty pageant yearly. It is part of our culture," Pawee Ventura, a pageant follower and frequent judge at international pageants, said in 2013.

"Our passion for beauty pageants could probably be traced back [to] the Spanish times. The traditional Santacruzan festival demands that the most beautiful lass in the barrio should be the Reina Elena. That in itself was a form of beauty pageant and that could be the roots of our love affair with beauty pageants," Ric Galvez, founder of leading pageant website Missosology.

But as international beauty contests evolved into redefining beauty, are Filipinos joining the bandwagon? Why was Miss Canada being bashed on social media due to her dark skin? Can they not see that the reigning Miss Universe is dark-skinned from South Africa? Is the colonial mindset brought about by the Spanish become genetically-embedded in our psyche that we limit our definition of beauty to the fair-skinned ones?

Today, marketing skin whiteners is more than just trying to appeal to Filipinos’ standards of beauty. For Filipinos, having a lighter complexion is desirable because it signifies social status, noble ancestry, and most significant, economic status. On television and film, there is also a disproportionate representation of people with whiter skin (Limos, 2019).

Human physical characteristics and their perception by the brain are under pressure by natural selection to optimize reproductive success. Men and women have different strategies to appear attractive and have different interests in identifying beauty in people. Nevertheless (Yarosh, 2019), men and women from all cultures agree on who is and who is not attractive, and throughout the world attractive people show greater acquisition of resources and greater reproductive success than others.

Studies agree that the key elements that go into the judgment are age and health, as well as symmetry, averageness, face and body proportions, facial color and texture. These elements are all Costly Signals of reproductive fitness because they are difficult to fake.

Faking it seems to be the objective of many these days. Besides, science and even Freud suggest that everything is all about reproduction. Probably, the obsession to beauty stems back to being attractive to be able to reproduce. Yet, can’t we all evolve and transcend?

Dark skin vs. Dark minds

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Umay uling! A comment we often hear from people who are so keen in marginalizing others with dark skin tones. They seem to feel some sort of superiority as if skin is the only criterion of becoming a respectable human being.

Miss Universe Canada 2020 Nova Stevens has revealed that she had been getting racist comments online. On May 4, 2021, Nova shared a photo of herself filled with screen shots of negative comments which were in Tagalog. Some of the comments on her photo, which included English translations, were “nognog (‘N words’),” “katakot (scary),” “akala ko engkanto (‘I thought she was a ghost’),” “over well done ang chicken, charge sa grill man (‘burnt chicken’),” and “tostadong tostado na nga nasunog pa (‘she is toasted and burned’),” among other disrespectful remarks (gmanetwork.com).

This caused alarm to some Filipinos especially those who have understood that beauty is not about skin color and that bigotry is a result of IGNORANCE.

Bigotry is the fact of having and expressing strong, unreasonable beliefs and disliking other people who have different beliefs or a different way of life. The Oxford dictionary defines it as an obstinate or unreasonable attachment to a belief, opinion, or faction; in particular, prejudice against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.

Ignorance on the other hand is defined as a lack of knowledge, education or understanding. But with the technological advancements these days and the exposure to the internet, one might wonder why there are some people who choose to IGNORE realities. Of course, there is a genetic factor we can consider since there are biological foundations of intelligence and some theorists believe that “there is no such thing as brain transfer”. But with the advent of development psychology and the nurture theory, we still cannot grasp why there are bigots out there.

Stephanie Fulton (2017) wrote: Do you ever feel like your audience isn’t buying what you are presenting? Or no matter how you present the information, they don’t believe you? Maybe it’s not your presentation that’s the problem, but it’s your audience’s inability to understand your perspective. Your audience members could be experiencing something known as motivated ignorance.

Motivated ignorance can be simply defined as when people don’t want to know the facts. While ignorance is defined as a lack of knowledge, education or understanding; motivated ignorance is when others choose not to educate themselves.

So why such obsession on skin color among the Filipinos? Limos (2019) said that the obsession with fairer skin is related to how the national psyche was shaped by colonial powers who relegated brown-skinned indios to lower class citizens, and elevated the white-skinned insulares, peninsulares, and mestizos to the nobilility. Together, they formed a class of pure- and half-blood Spaniards living in the Philippines.

For 300 years, indios were made to fawn over nobility, to the point of idealizing them and desiring to be like them. Jose Rizal very accurately depicted in his Noli Me Tangere novel this symptom in the character of Doña Victorina de Espadaña – a brown-skinned Filipino woman who pretended to be a Spanish mestiza, who wore heavy white makeup, and spoke very broken Castilian to the point of hilarity.

With this mindset, whitening products became marketing giants in our country. But couldn’t one transcend from his colonized past through the continuum of learning at present?

“With all that has been going on in the world, ‘black lives matter,’ ‘Asians are human,’ you would think this would bring us together. Instead, it looks like some people are still stuck in their ignorant and racist ideologies,” said Nova Stevens in here Instagram account.

Instead of looking into the color of others’ skin, why not focus on questions like: Why am I wearing clothes which can spontaneously combust? Or: what would I say when Rudyard Kipling asks me to narrate a scene out of my favorite story?

But bigots don’t care about dye from endangered trees and products being tested on animals. Worse, they do not even know who Kipling is. They continue to consume products that promise to make their skin fairer and face the consequences of sunburn evident on their scarred facial skin. (This is a tropical country for crying out loud!)