What Do Blue Cheese, Dogs, and Men All Have in Common?

The Nature of Generalizations

What do blue cheese, dogs, and men all have in common?

A. They all stink!

B. They have nothing in common.

C. Both A and B.

I feel the content I have provided to you lately has been on the heavy side. Given the month we’re in and how much stress this season seems to put on everyone, I would like to maybe lighten the mood by talking about blue cheese, dogs, and men.

Blue cheese is nasty stuff! I won’t go near it. I go on full alert at the mention of blue cheese. I had trouble looking at images of blue cheese for this post!

Twenty-five years ago, I went to a pub for lunch with my boss. This was my Christmas bonus. I had chicken wings with blue cheese. I’d never had blue cheese before but I love trying new foods. We both ordered the same meal and at the time I didn’t mind it. But that evening, I was extremely ill. I threw up so much that I couldn’t report to work the next day. Given that the only thing I had eaten that was unfamiliar to me was the blue cheese, I blamed it all on the blue cheese even though my boss didn’t get sick.

With that single experience, I made the life-saving (tongue in cheek) generalization that blue cheese is better to be avoided right to my death bed.

Who hasn’t done the same thing after a single bad experience?

My Ex-father-in-law had a scary encounter with a German Shepherd in his youth so he was adamant that dogs were forbidden in his house.

Unfortunately for him, all his children grew up and had their own homes so he could no longer enforce his rule. Three out of four of his children had dogs. My husband and I had a pack of dogs. All large working breeds.

With time and exposure to our dogs, he learned he could trust dogs and eventually welcomed a little blue and white Merle Shetland into his home and heart.

You get the idea about how we can generalize a single experience which then creates a belief around it.

For me, all blue cheese is a threat to my health. I’m content to go the rest of my life never eating that stuff again and my belief doesn’t impact anyone significantly. My apologies to all the blue cheese makers.

My Ex-father-in-law’s fear-based belief impacted his children’s childhood for they were deprived of the experience of having a family pet and all that could have taught them.

Please, I mean him no disrespect. This doesn’t make him a bad man; it makes him human. He was a devoted husband and father. Bless his soul.

Now, where do you stand on the subject of men? Are all men assholes? Are all men sexual predators? Are all men untrustworthy?

I could as easily ask, are all women bitches? Are all women bad drivers? Are all women control freaks?

In my personal history, my biological father rejected me before I was even born.

My stepfather abandoned me twice. He’d taken me into his home when I was three months old and gave me his name and taught me to call him, Dad. When my parents divorced, he took responsibility for my brothers but not me. I wasn’t seven years old yet.

Years later, when I was a teenager, we reconnected. It was a fragile alliance. Then he abandoned me again on my wedding day refusing to be by my side as father-of-the-bride because he didn’t want to share the same space (not the same title, just the same space) as my biological father.

I married my first boyfriend, ten years after we’d met. We were married for 17 years. Our marriage came to an abrupt end one night while lying in bed, he told me he was in love with another woman.

Oh, yes, and let’s not forget to mention that I was raped as a toddler by a trusted male family member.

Any one of these experiences had the potential to create some very limiting beliefs about men as being poor fathers, or as being untrustworthy, or as being sexual predators, or simply as assholes.

From a young age, I proclaimed I would never have children of my own. Of course, I was laughed at and treated like I was naïve. I was told I was too young to understand the powerful biological drive to reproduce.

Given what I just shared with you, you may have concluded, I was too fearful of my options when it came to men. You may have thought that I didn’t believe I would find a good man I could trust to be a good father for my children.

That wasn’t the case either. I had had examples of good men in my life. My grandfather. Many of my teachers. My father-in-law to mention a few.

No, in my case, I didn’t want to be anything like my mother (I only had one example to base my experience on) and for me to avoid that possibility, the only solution was to avoid the whole motherhood experience. That’s how deeply traumatizing it was for me to have my needs dismissed by my mother when I went to her bedside looking to be comforted after being violated.

It’s one giant generalization that would direct my life for a very long time. For example, when I was romantically interested in someone, I wouldn’t get involved with them if they wanted children.

My point is, the younger you are when you have a powerful experience that creates a generalized belief the more irrational that generalization will be and the deeper it will be from your awareness yet it will dictate the direction of your life.

It’s a learned behavior. Conditioning hides who you really are and your true potential.

So, how do you expose a generalization as a worthy truth or as a falsehood?

Well, it has to prove to be valid for EVERYONE all the time. That’s what a generalization is, something that is applied to a group as a whole. All blue cheese is revolting. All dogs are bad. All men are assholes. All women are bitches. A generalization doesn’t make something true unless it’s adequately tested.

Let’s say your mother was cooking and you were running around the kitchen island chasing your brother. In the scuffle, one of you burns their hand on the hot stove. Both of you could come out of that experience learning that stoves get hot and are dangerous even if only one of you got burned. That’s a healthy fear and could apply to anyone. If tested, anyone who touches a hot stove will get burned. The generalization, that if you play around or with fire, you could get burned, is accurate.

But say, in the same scenario, the brother doesn’t get burned and his sister does. Maybe he learns that fire is dangerous in a healthy way but is marked by the experience because he blames himself for his sister getting burned. Later in life, he chooses to become a firefighter. Maybe his sister takes on the fear of stoves to the point that she never learns how to cook. To survive as an adult, she seeks out a partner who does all the cooking.

Who would they have become if they hadn’t had that one experience?

It’s mind-boggling to think about all the experiences that transformed who you are.

Without questioning how you have been conditioned, you are living in an illusion. You cannot be living your life authentically; you only think you are.

So much for being a light-hearted article.

I will give one more example that I feel everyone needs to wake up to; the hypocrisy of health sciences on aging. This is the real joke and it’s on us!

I’d bet you EXPECT to have health problems as you age.

• Diminished eyesight

• Diminished hearing

• Heart disease

• Bone disease like arthritis

• Weight problems (overweight or weight loss)

• Hair loss

You may expect to check off any number of these points and these are only a few examples but how TRUE is this? Does EVERYONE age in the same way?

Does EVERYONE experience diminished eyesight or hearing? No.

Does EVERYONE develop heart disease or arthritis? No.

Does EVERYONE spontaneously get fat or lose their hair at a certain age? No.

There is a real danger in blindly accepting generalized statistics as fact. You are setting yourself up neurologically to have these things be part of your roadmap to aging. What’s important is to recognize how you are conditioning yourself to these things but you don’t have to be!

I learned about this in my early 20s and one of the examples that was given was menopause. Menopause has a bad reputation in North America but it doesn't have the same reputation worldwide. Women of other cultures don’t experience the same biological changes, like hot flashes, in relation to the cessation of their menstruation cycle.

I decided I wouldn’t buy into the horror stories I had heard from women about their menopause, including what I had witnessed of my mothers’. And you know what? My menopause was a welcomed change. It may as well have been a footnote compared with my other life experiences.

So, no, not everyone has poor vision as they get older. Not everyone has poor hearing as they get older. Not everyone develops arthritis or heart disease, etc... These are not necessarily the natural path to your aging.

The one true natural path to aging, which is universal, although not necessarily at the same rate, is that our telomeres become shorter. They are the grains of sand of our hourglass. “Telomeres act as the aging clock in every cell.” [T.A. Sciences] Everyone has a finite amount of time here on earth. That is the one thing that is universal when it comes to the aging process.

One last nugget. While I have predominately used life experiences as examples of how generalizations are created, keep in mind you may have learned them from your parents or your culture.

Discrimination and racism are taught and are the nastiest kinds of generalizations.

By now, you should be able to recognize that my last statement is also a generalization.

The next time you catch yourself making some kind of generalization, I hope you will stop and check its validity. If you discover that it isn’t true, then you can start by telling yourself a new story - an NLP technique called “reframing”. This is one way of “unlearning”, of shedding the layers of conditioning to step into becoming whole and living your true potential.

I hope this article gave you some insight into yourself. I invite you to share your story in the comments. You never know when you may inspire someone else.

Thank you for your continued support and engagement.

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