I've mentioned society guidelines, the teachings of the church, and organizational pressures ...all three have had a major effect upon how we've changed as a nation.

Change ...it's a great campaign slogan, as people are too often dissatisfied and discontent.  Too eager to cry foul, or jump on the bandwagon of any injustice that surfaces ...also too quickly emotions peak without looking any deeper than the surface.

Society's guidelines are driven by impulses & the legal controls, or lack of them ...place upon everyone.

Societies attempt to place value judgments upon what is acceptable and what is not ...and often society is not.

Society is made up of people and what they share ...but it is not foremost that they share things, but how they view things.  We view things in ways that we often cannot decide whether something should be guided by Sigmund Freud-type of reasoning ...where we are not to suffer the guilt of blame, because we can charge all responsibility to past flaws in our upbringing.

I did not mean to solo out Sigmund Freud, I was just recalling attempting to compliment someone one time at work ...only to be told I was passive-aggressive.  She was a new therapist that I had just begun to work with ...she was not my personal therapist.  There's been only one personal therapist in my life ...my wife.  Anyway, back to the story ...I laughed, and asked where she got that idea.  She said it was my jokes ...and my bit of sarcasm intertwined.  The rest of the conversation went something like this:

Therapist: "You and your other co-worker are passive-aggressive."

Me: "Where do you get that?"

Therapist: "I learned it at college."

Me: "Okay, but who taught you that?"

Therapist: "My professor at college."

Me: "Okay, but where did he get it?"

Therapist: "Sigmund Freud."

Me: "But, he was a sick man."

Therapist (defensively): "He was a very intelligent man!"

Me: "Yes, he was very intelligent, but he was sick too ...and that's a dangerous combination."

Silence.

Me: "I'm sorry, when my friend and I joke, it's because we like someone ...we don't try to be disrespectful. If I don't like someone, I don't talk to them at all ...I'm not passive-aggressive, as you say."

I guess I was trying to backtrack there after I realized that I was perhaps unintentionally insinuating at that point that all her years of study were in studying a sick man.  I had not intended to say that ...we had both tried to compliment her, and if anything her comment back to us was a bit ...not deemed 'aggressive' to me, but challenging.  I had also graduated from college and had heard of Freud's theories, and how he viewed behaviors as a result of each of us being victims of our past ...and behaviors were labeled more for technical prowess of dreaming up ideas of their origin than gaining understanding towards the benefit of solutions.  And while he was dreaming up these Oedipal theories ...the thing that disturbed me most was that in saying we are victims of our past, he was ignoring the true victims such as the child abuse cases that he dismissed as fantasies of abuse that were conjured up to repress self-induced or society-induced guilt for what he called healthy natural behaviors.