Reverse, Reverse Psychology

Freaknoid wants you to live a healthy, happy life. Freaknoid wants to teach you valuable lessons he has learned that can greatly enhance almost every fact of your otherwise pitiful existence.

One powerful technique that you can learn is reverse / reverse psychology.

Most people are familiar with "reverse psychology". This is a technique to persuade people to your point of view by agreeing with them when they expect you to disagree. Let's look at a couple of examples of reverse psychology in order to make sure we are all "on the same page" and in order to "set the table" for our future discussions.

Example 1

You are in a well-traveled airport and you need to use "the facilities". You enter the rest room and you want to choose a stall that doesn't look like it needs cleaned with a fire hose on high pressure and where your chances of contacting a communicable disease is as low as possible.

You reason that the stall closest to the door is the most convenient and therefore is the one you should use. But you realize that it is convenient to everyone and therefore the stall most likely used by everyone and thus likely to be the dirtiest. Therefore, although you are about to burst because you have delayed this trip in order to avoid the possibility of stinking up the plane you just departed, you pass up the most convenient stall and move to one further down in line that is less convenient and therefore less used and dirty.

By doing something other than the obvious, you have employed reverse psychology.

Example 2

Your 15-year-old daughter comes to you and says she wants to pierce her tongue and starting dating the local gang leader. You remain calm drawing upon inner strength that comes from deep inside you called "a six pack buzz". You reason with yourself that she really doesn't want to date the local rife raft, but instead is calling out for your attention. Perhaps she needs you to reassure her that you love her in spite of discussions she may have overheard regarding questions about you being her real biological father and her striking resemblance to Raul the pool man whose truck is often outside the house in spite of the fact you have no swimming pool.

So instead of allowing a wedge to be driven between you, you agree that she should pierce her tongue, what the heck you say, pierce it all, tongue, belly button, nose, eyebrow, etc. and you suggest that a real biker chick needs plenty of tattoos. You reference tattoos on her 87-year-old grandmother who now lives in Colorado in a "Hells Angels" commune.

This is a use of reverse psychology.

Now let us take a little time to talk about reverse, reverse psychology.

This method allows you to do the unexpected by doing the expected.

Let's return to the previous examples and use them to make our point.

Example 1

Let's pick up the story of where you are in the restroom. If you go into the farthest stalls you will find that a family of Cambodian refugees camped there. They are not disturbed by your sorry ass, but only by rumors of an I.N.S. raid upon the airport custodial staff, which by all appearances has no hope of ever taking place. Although the experience is not a total loss because you learn how Cambodians live with their farm animals and burn the methane that is produced by the rotting of their livestock manure, you would just as soon have avoided the experience and had a clean stall.

Reverse / reverse psychology would have you do the reverse of what reverse psychology would have you do. Reverse / reverse psychology would have you going to the nearest stall, instead of going to a farther, less convenient stall. If you go into the nearest, stall you will find it bright and clean and well lit. It may have never been used since the opening of the airport. The automatic flushing mechanism is so happy to see someone it flushes when you enter, when you sit, when you shift your weight, when you get up and when you leave the stall. (Why do they install these? Don't they think we can flush all by ourselves? And to they really think they are saving water?)

As you can see if you do the unexpected by doing the expected you can often times be much better off by using reverse / reverse psychology.

Example 2

Let's revisit now the scenario wherein your daughter wants to discuss her notion of how to find true love by putting metal in her tongue and sleeping with, future convicts.

As we have said, the obvious path here would be to disagree, by locking her in her room until she is 30. Reverse psychology would have you do the unexpected by agreeing with her and forcing her to take responsibility for her actions and force her into confronting the truth and ultimately decide that living in a trailer court surrounded by junk cars and motorcycles is not what she wants to do.

However reverse psychology won't work because your daughter is expecting you to agree with her, knowing that deep down you really disagree with her.

She therefore is not expecting you to argue with her for a lot of reasons including the stories of her grandmother.

Freaknoid can testify that reverse / reverse psychology works. He tired it for many months on his second wife, clear up till the time she divorced him and moved in with the pool man. As for his daughter, she now has a very close relationship with her grandmother and writes him from Colorado from time to time