Steve_Bamlett_blog

What personality trait in people raises a red flag with you?

Image from : https://www.carp.ca/2014/03/07/ask-expert-red-flags-investing/

People don’t walk around with ‘red flags’, even to announce anymore the danger posed by a motor car, yet we are asked to see them everywhere – to look for the ‘red flag’ warnings that situation is not as safe as it may appear or not without costs that are not apparent, at least to you, as they may be, and even appear to others. When I trained in mental health social work in the 1990s, we were given a lecture by a retired psychiatrist on the ‘red flags’ for detecting dangerous (to ‘self and others’ as always in the context of The Mental Health Act 1983) traits in people we do not know. I think this particular psychiatrist may have been extreme (his lecture raised widespread concern not only in me but other colleagues attempting to learn) but among his list was: not making eye contact, and having more-than-three-tattoos-on-the body.

In some cultures, avoidance of eye contact is a norm of the display rules for politeness, especially to people thought to be social superiors. It is anyway, a well-known expressive trait of feelings of relative powerlessness. Skin art is a cultural variant of even more wide differences, that are clearly socio-cultural rather than symptoms of pathological psychology. But I would guess that these ‘traits’ are still considered by some to be expressions of a damaged self, and one that might, in some way or other, pose a danger.

We have subtler versions of them in relation to entering into relationships – whether in business, friendship, sex or romance. Is the person showing signs of over-confidence or under-confidence, egoism or extreme other-centredness, gregariousness or shyness? The binaries here emphasise the bias towards ‘moderation’ or the ‘middle way’ in the display rules that children learn with regard to the performance of ‘personality’ from a mix of experience and parental or societal wisdom. The plea for moderation was a big thing in Aristotle, for instance, and Theophrastus in the later stages of Classical Greece. A whole discipline of analysing ‘character’ in these terms flowed from it.

However, the case becomes more severe when risk analysis is applied to character in terms of judging the potential of failure of a partnership of any kind, and this is almost certainly a spin off from the way in which relationships of all kinds have to become increasingly contractual in nature through the process of historical capitalism – and increasingly in a formal way that is enshrined in civil law. The marriage contract is often indistinguishable from a business contract in some circumstances, especially with regard to the protection of personal wealth, assets and all kinds of things that are considered ‘investments’, even of emotion.

Freud’s term Besetzung, which literally means ‘occupation’ in English when that word describes the take over of territory by an alien military force, was used by him to describe how the charge of emotion takes over spaces in a love-object and makes them its own. James Strachey, a pacifist of the Bloomsbury types and Freud’s best known English translator preferred to eradicate the helpful interpretative imagery of Freud’s language and used the term for this phenomenon of cathexis (κάθεξις) from the Greek, but French translators preferred investissement, literally investment – a placing of one’s own assets inside a resource to increase its value. In fact both the German and the French are useful physical metaphors of how to describe ‘falling in loving’.

The French and German terms also make the physical symbol of the ‘red flag’ more understandable: for as a sign it says – keep away from me because I am more dangerous (as it means when seen on a sea coast) and costly to you than you might think and I may offer you therefore poorer returns than you expected. The red flag might even betoken the fact that one’s most visible return in the future will be a loss, or LOSS more generally.

But the vigilance that looks for red flags around new experience or uncommon traits in the other also has its cost. For instance, if we predominantly fear the eventual loss of a loved one, do we fail to make use and find pleasure in the time we might legitimately find mutual gain from each other, and sacrifice that short term magnificence for long-term indifference to otherness. Moreover, the warning may not be about the other but about one’s own lack of plasticity to the new, one’s own deficit of adaptability. Of course, no-one embraces change as fully as they say or think. We all hold on to the old Adam lest the new one be too flighty, or liable to sinking into a bog of himself.

However, after all, the dangers (and risks) of change are the reflex of its thrill. After all, even in our genetically engineered machinery equivalent to ‘red flag searching’ the fight or flight response is as near as might be to the processes which make sexual excitation, and the need to diminish neuronal inhibitions, possible and accomplishable. In all those situations we marshal extra resources and diminish those forces that nay-say us or doubt our competence in our own endurance. But that applies only to the short-term excitation of course. In the long-term, there will be a new for either strategy (‘things will have to change if we want them to stay as they are’, is the wisdom of Lampedusa’s The Leopard) or reevaluations of self that make change integral and accept eventualities we cannot control – such as that in a pairing of things once independent of each other, change occurring in the systemics of one of the paired ‘things’ must bring about change in the other or otherwise fracture the pairing, and perhaps one or both of its components.

Hyper-vigilance is often a symptom of panic responses.

We look so deeply into things, reading depth activity from surface signs, that we induce panic (aggressive or fearful) where it serves no purpose to us and may cause damage. Hence the belief once that one should ‘relax into the flow’ of things that are of nature or otherwise not in our control: Csikszentmihalyi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi) even theorised this as flow theory, but it could be deduced from humanist psychotherapy such as that of Carl Rogers. People in Roger’s encounter groups used to challenge each other to drop their protective social masks and grow as people instead.

Reading that book (On Encounter Groups by Rogers -https://psicopico.com/en/los-grupos-de-encuentro-de-carl-rogers-expresando-sentimientos/) sometimes makes you see however that this was sometimes a most cruel process. But, this is perhaps because it is more difficult to persuade a person that they live surrounded by unhelpful defence mechanisms (like looking always for ‘a red flag’) than it is to shatter them, and sometime too, everything that makes this person the person they are.

Defence is necessary against aggression (even micro-aggressions) that are so heinous they create disability environmentally – stigma is such a process in mental health. But if defence becomes a matter of open negotiation, it can also change its nature from ambivalently harmful as well as intended to be helpful to a kind of mutual and co-operative form of ‘caring’ for and ‘supporting’ each other, even when we must part.

For parting is as inevitable as meeting, as the great poet of it, Robert Browning, showed continually – and parting can be harmful or creepy as in Andrea del Sarto and Evelyn Hope or it can be consensual and, well, beautiful, and thence, Pippa Passes in gladness and all’s ‘right with the world’ (Pippa Passes is a most grossly underestimated early work of Browning’s).

In Browning’s early poem – the verse is nowhere so mature as that of his prime nor as psychologically rich, but its meaning is clear – we share good intent to everyone in the world (radically so) or nothing. Here he imagines Luigi speaking to his mother on the morning of the day he plans to assassinate an oppressive agent of Austrian rule over Italy. He is a Risorgimento terrorist – the context reminds me of Kamila Shamshie’s work:

You may assure yourself I say and say
Ever to myself! At times—nay, even as now
We sit—I think my mind is touched, suspect
All is not sound: but is not knowing that,
What constitutes one sane or otherwise?
I know I am thus—so, all is right again.
I laugh at myself as through the town I walk,
And see men merry as if no Italy
Were suffering; then I ponder—“I am rich,
Young, healthy; why should this fact trouble me,
More than it troubles these?” But it does trouble.
No, trouble ’s a bad word: for as I walk
There ’s springing and melody and giddiness,
And old quaint turns and passages of my youth,
Dreams long forgotten, little in themselves,
Return to me—whatever may amuse me:
And earth seems in a truce with me, and heaven
Accords with me, all things suspend their strife,
The very cicala laughs “There goes he, and there!
Feast him, the time is short; he is on his way
For the world’s sake: feast him this once, our friend!”
And in return for all this, I can trip
Cheerfully up the scaffold-steps. I go
This evening, mother!

‘Pippa Passes’, Part III, available at: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Pippa_Passes/III

Sometimes we must venture all. Or so, I think, Browning thought. Don’t red flag me. Maybe what I am afraid of in your personality is that you might CHANGE me. Can I be sure I do not NEED CHANGING.

With great love to one who changed me recently but greater to those who stayed to test the results, especially my Geoff,

From Geoff’s Steve