Coup and contrecoup, such
lovely words, I thought when I learned them, sounding softer than the
usual Latin-based words we were taught in medical school, but what they
describe is far from gentle.
They are used in the context of brain injury, when the head is struck by something or itself strikes something or strikes nothing but the body is jarred and the head snaps forward or back on the small stalk of the neck (like, say, getting hit by a car while riding your bike, your body twisting through the air beyond anything you've ever accomplished in a yoga class, until gravity abruptly halts your momentum; yes, I am still processing that). With such sudden force, the brain slams against one side of the inner skull (coup), then bounces off and slams against the opposite side of the skull (contrecoup).
The impact on the brain may range from minimal to mildly bruised to severely damaged, with neurons shorn and connections broken. The injury may be immediately obvious or may manifest slowly over hours or even days. A person may develop a headache or simply get sleepy; the Sudoku may seem harder, words might be trickier to string together.
If one has an attentive other, the change may be detected early, which is important because such brain injuries, and, more precisely, the consequent swelling, can cause death. If one is alone, one must first, be aware of the possibility and second, hope one's perceptions and judgments remain sufficiently intact to make the crucial determination of impairment.
This is not unlike what we must do with our biased patterns of thinking. Immersed as we our in our culture, it is necessary that we constantly interrogate ourselves as to our beliefs and actions. Our vigilance must be persistent and redoubled when we think we know what we think, when we are coasting.
An easy example is transgenderism. I believe most non-transgenders go along with it because, in short-hand, it is politically correct, it seems 'like enough' a previously-fought issue, like sexual orientation, that the decision to accept ought to be the same. The lack here is a critical, objective evaluation of one's assumptions.
For those who are transgenderist, the lack is deeper, wider, broader: it is a lack of attentive others to intercede in the bruised thinking.
Being transgendered is to be deluded, to believe as true what is false: being born in the wrong body. This can, not uncommonly, be as alarmingly insane as the case of Kosilek described by GallusMag in GenderTrender and reprinted in Female Erasure, but it is more commonly of the milder version as described by Jackie Mearns, who wrote in Female Erasure of her husband coming out as transgender and the subsequent emergence of his pathology, though who can predict the full trajectory of anyone's delusional thinking.
Then one wonders about the transgender interventionalists: are they aiding and abetting out of a similar delusion, or because it is easier not to question?
We were taught in psychiatry never to collude with a delusion. It is not helpful to a patient to agree he is Jesus and that Pontius Pilate is hot on his trail, although every mental health care worker knows the temptation to go along with the delusion to stop the endless disagreement and coerce Jesus to take the damn pill so you can just move on.
Our culture is nodding in coercion with the transgenderists, hoping they will just be quiet and let us carry on with our own lives, but this is not how it will go. As Jackie Mearns says, with transgenderists, it is 'give an inch, take a mile.'
Transgenderism is not confined to transgenderism, and to get this, or how any issue in our society is connected to everything else (and for an elegantly-drawn explication of this, read Lierre Keith's Girls in the Grasses), we must return to our own thinking and perpetually challenge ourselves to deconstruct our assumptions and check the magnet in our moral compass. Even what seems inconsequential. Especially what seems inconsequential, for that is where the small things sneak by and coalesce to become big things that led us to act counter to our presumed good sense.
It is not enough to recycle our newspapers and collect our food waste into compost; we must stop driving any distance that we could walk or bike or bus and overcome our laziness.
It is not enough to demand affordable housing; we must refuse to rent our own space on AirBnB and overcome our greed.
It is not enough to fight patriarchy by disdaining its objectification of women; we must honour our women friends and overcome our own base prejudices and desires.
We must be true - not to ourselves or our hearts or our heads or even an idealized other. All of us our fallible and fickle, not necessarily out of malice; more often out of sloppiness, laziness, ignorance. Of course, use these sources to inform yourself, to form your principles, and then be true to these. Be true to your principles. Use your principles to set the magnet of your moral compass, and then check yourself against your compass often.
You will likely find yourself making compromises. To live an uncompromised life is its own compromise, if it is even possible. However, at least known compromises can be acknowledged and the harms (coups) perhaps - perhaps! - ameliorated. The harms of unrecognized compromises are blinkered and compounded (contrecoups).
Being honourable is grand; it is also sometimes inconvenient and requires dreary personal discipline. However, it is what we must do, if we are not to capitulate to and conspire with the forces that are working to erase women.
They are used in the context of brain injury, when the head is struck by something or itself strikes something or strikes nothing but the body is jarred and the head snaps forward or back on the small stalk of the neck (like, say, getting hit by a car while riding your bike, your body twisting through the air beyond anything you've ever accomplished in a yoga class, until gravity abruptly halts your momentum; yes, I am still processing that). With such sudden force, the brain slams against one side of the inner skull (coup), then bounces off and slams against the opposite side of the skull (contrecoup).
The impact on the brain may range from minimal to mildly bruised to severely damaged, with neurons shorn and connections broken. The injury may be immediately obvious or may manifest slowly over hours or even days. A person may develop a headache or simply get sleepy; the Sudoku may seem harder, words might be trickier to string together.
If one has an attentive other, the change may be detected early, which is important because such brain injuries, and, more precisely, the consequent swelling, can cause death. If one is alone, one must first, be aware of the possibility and second, hope one's perceptions and judgments remain sufficiently intact to make the crucial determination of impairment.
This is not unlike what we must do with our biased patterns of thinking. Immersed as we our in our culture, it is necessary that we constantly interrogate ourselves as to our beliefs and actions. Our vigilance must be persistent and redoubled when we think we know what we think, when we are coasting.
An easy example is transgenderism. I believe most non-transgenders go along with it because, in short-hand, it is politically correct, it seems 'like enough' a previously-fought issue, like sexual orientation, that the decision to accept ought to be the same. The lack here is a critical, objective evaluation of one's assumptions.
For those who are transgenderist, the lack is deeper, wider, broader: it is a lack of attentive others to intercede in the bruised thinking.
Being transgendered is to be deluded, to believe as true what is false: being born in the wrong body. This can, not uncommonly, be as alarmingly insane as the case of Kosilek described by GallusMag in GenderTrender and reprinted in Female Erasure, but it is more commonly of the milder version as described by Jackie Mearns, who wrote in Female Erasure of her husband coming out as transgender and the subsequent emergence of his pathology, though who can predict the full trajectory of anyone's delusional thinking.
Then one wonders about the transgender interventionalists: are they aiding and abetting out of a similar delusion, or because it is easier not to question?
We were taught in psychiatry never to collude with a delusion. It is not helpful to a patient to agree he is Jesus and that Pontius Pilate is hot on his trail, although every mental health care worker knows the temptation to go along with the delusion to stop the endless disagreement and coerce Jesus to take the damn pill so you can just move on.
Our culture is nodding in coercion with the transgenderists, hoping they will just be quiet and let us carry on with our own lives, but this is not how it will go. As Jackie Mearns says, with transgenderists, it is 'give an inch, take a mile.'
Transgenderism is not confined to transgenderism, and to get this, or how any issue in our society is connected to everything else (and for an elegantly-drawn explication of this, read Lierre Keith's Girls in the Grasses), we must return to our own thinking and perpetually challenge ourselves to deconstruct our assumptions and check the magnet in our moral compass. Even what seems inconsequential. Especially what seems inconsequential, for that is where the small things sneak by and coalesce to become big things that led us to act counter to our presumed good sense.
It is not enough to recycle our newspapers and collect our food waste into compost; we must stop driving any distance that we could walk or bike or bus and overcome our laziness.
It is not enough to demand affordable housing; we must refuse to rent our own space on AirBnB and overcome our greed.
It is not enough to fight patriarchy by disdaining its objectification of women; we must honour our women friends and overcome our own base prejudices and desires.
We must be true - not to ourselves or our hearts or our heads or even an idealized other. All of us our fallible and fickle, not necessarily out of malice; more often out of sloppiness, laziness, ignorance. Of course, use these sources to inform yourself, to form your principles, and then be true to these. Be true to your principles. Use your principles to set the magnet of your moral compass, and then check yourself against your compass often.
You will likely find yourself making compromises. To live an uncompromised life is its own compromise, if it is even possible. However, at least known compromises can be acknowledged and the harms (coups) perhaps - perhaps! - ameliorated. The harms of unrecognized compromises are blinkered and compounded (contrecoups).
Being honourable is grand; it is also sometimes inconvenient and requires dreary personal discipline. However, it is what we must do, if we are not to capitulate to and conspire with the forces that are working to erase women.
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