RLS Journal

Insanity is believing everyone else is Insane. It is easy for this condition to exist when a person is born into an insane family environment even though the larger environment outside it may be generally sane. The double irony of this condition is that a person born into insanity becomes part of the problem... but they also have the exact thing necessary to solve it... experience. The challenge of this condition is the struggle against one's own instincts... against one's own identity... against the self. This is a problem because it goes against the natural instinct to survive and defend ourselves against threats... but because the threat is ourselves, it results in guilt, depression and suicidal thinking. In religion, this kind of problem is known as Ancestral Sin  ( the idea that individuals inherit the judgement for the sin of their ancestors ) and has connections to the concept of  Original Sin  ( the idea that humans, through birth, inherit a tainted nature ). Anot...

= In her year and a half living as Ned, Ms. Vincent put him in a number of stereotypical, hypermasculine situations. He joined a blue-collar bowling league, though he was a terrible bowler. (His teammates were kind and cheered him on; they thought he was gay, Ms. Vincent learned later, because they thought he bowled like a girl.) He spent weeks in a monastery with cloistered monks. He went to strip clubs and dated women, though he was rebuffed more often than not in singles bars. He worked in sales, hustling coupon books and other low-margin products door-to-door with fellow salesmen who, with their cartoon bravado, seemed drawn from the 1983 David Mamet play “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Finally, at an Iron John retreat, a therapeutic masculinity workshop — think drum circles and hero archetypes — modeled on the work of the men’s movement author Robert Bly, Ned began to lose it. Being Ned had worn Ms. Vincent down; she felt alienated and disassociated, and after the retreat she checked herse...