Reptiles, Social Norms, Otherness, and Intimacy

01. Geckos and Snakes

I visited a new friend today, who is a professional reptile breeder. I always knew her profession, yet this was the first time I got to visit her in her apartment.

I was welcomed by hundreds of little boxes, holding geckos, spiders, snakes, snails, and the eggs of them, from floor to ceiling. They were placed in her closet and in her living room, along with two cats.

I have never been so excited for a very long time! Never in my life had I had such an experience before. My friend handed me over a snake to snuggle with, whose skin felt like cool water. We saw some new-born baby snakes coming out of their eggs (the snake eggs had an almost rubber-ish touch, how could I never know!), fed some very young snakes with rats, observed a newborn baby leopard gecko stumbling in boxes trying to learn to scramble, and held some very colorful, adult ones.

This was literally the first time in my life getting close to them; and I don’t even dare to share them with most of my friends, in fear of scaring them (I apologize if these pictures scared you, whoever you are!).

Playing with my friend’s snake - she was friendly yet very shy.

My friend shared with me that her mother does not like snakes either; in fact, her mother was very afraid of snakes. When she passed by to visit my friend last time, my friend did not have so many snakes yet, and she hid all her snakes under the bed her mother slept for a whole month on - without even noticing a thing. I was chuckling about this piece of memory with my friend, and yet at the same time, I started to wonder: where does fear come from? Why are we taught/expected to be afraid of something we don’t even know? How fear, prejudice and biases, was constructed?

Also - Why am I not afraid of geckos and snakes? Am I supposed to be afraid of them?

02. The Expected Social Norm

What is an expected social norm from someone, when they see snakes and geckos?

I am trying to balance between clinical-ism and casual-ism, and wanted to write something clinically accurate, but also relaxed and casual. I will not bother into getting into much theoretic analysis, and will just go with the first thing that came to my mind.

My first reaction was pretty similar to my friend - half jokingly, she mentioned, “I am not even going to bother to date, until the guy did not freak out after seeing all my snakes”. If I admitted openly that I was not afraid of snakes and geckos, and instead, I took a lot of interest in them, the first thing I can expect many people to react is feeling ghasted; not mentioning my friend who had boxes that stuffed up from floor to ceiling.

And assume that my friend and I had an accurate evaluation of how people might respond, then, why the social norm is as such? Do reptiles naturally generate people’s fearful reactions, in a biologically manner, when they first see them in real life? I would say, not universally - my friend and I apparently were not biologically built to dislike them.

Then, let’s say there are people who are biologically coded (or due to their traumatic experiences, etc.) to feel floored by reptiles, and there are people who are not (such as myself and my friend), how the commonly accepted social norm (“that one should NOT go too public, like posting pictures or encouraging others to, raise reptiles”) was constructed?

Of course, I do find it necessary to not go too far - I believe there are communities and cultures in which reptiles and taking likings of them were received with warm regards. I find myself talking about two communities I found myself daily engaged in: the young professionals community in the city, as well as the Chineses, so-called Upper-Middle-Class community I originally came from.

I found that I did not trust the former group to react truthfully to me (matter of fact, sadly, I found myself usually dishonest to others in this community, as well); and for the second community, I knew that Chinese government still legally forbids anyone to keep reptiles in their house, and illegal pet-keeping could generate an arrest).

For the Chinese community, it seems pretty self-explanatory to me why “loving reptiles and keeping a lot of them at home” is not a popular choice; for the seemingly-liberal community I daily engage in, it’s a very different story, and I am still struggling to understand this.

One of my wild guessings (can be full of my inaccurate, subjective projection, and it probably is!) is that this situation has a lot of things to do with “implications of social class”. Just like these cocktail party games - asking a guest where do you live, and if you live in UES, that has a very different implication from if you live in Chinatown (which is not totally accurate, some of the most miserably in-debt people I have ever seen resided in UES while some of the wealthiest resided in Chinatown…I will stop here, definition of socioeconomic class is another long story) - asking “what do you like to keep as a pet” also has a socioeconomic class meaning.

More of my wild guessings look like this: An elegant Tibetan Mastiff shows your elegant taste of pets, while a pit bull mix stinks of ghettos. As for reptiles? They are too confusing, sometimes really disgusting for some people. Not a safe choice - at best a very bold one. And pets that can not show your socioeconomic status and can be partially confusing to people are not that worthwhile to pursue.

And most of all - however people interpret the socioeconomic status of the owner, they always show the owner’s otherness, that the owner is “not like me”.

(Although ironically, I learned from my friend, that reptiles are usually extremely expensive to breed, purchase and raise, many times more expensive than dogs.)

And isn’t the expected social norm set to make people feel a sense of confirmation, and a sense of belonging?

03. The Otherness

I fed him a worm, and he literally popped the worm juice!

Things are becoming more interesting now that we are talking about otherness.

In Gestalt theory, we talk a lot about contact boundary - that through your otherness, you create a difference, a clear boundary between yourself, and others, and this clear line is essential for one to be able to connect to other people.

And if the otherness is so essential and important, how come people try very hard to hide it (In Gestalt language, we say, ‘to stay confluential’) ?

One challenge we all face is the quest of showing “the real us” - who we really are, what we really think, to the rest of the world, or at least, to the people that we cared about. For some of us, deep, prolonged trauma leaves them with a lot of guard, and being in control of the distance between themselves and others, being able to hide their “otherness” when they need to, is even more essential to their survival. And when that happens, one would sacrifice the sense of vulnerability (hence the possibility to make real intimate contact) for the sense of security and control.

I have myself been like that. I did not feel safe for a long time - and if I had to choose between my sense of control and opening up to others, and risk for a chance for authentic connections, I stayed with my sense of control. I did have it; however, as the expense, I also felt isolated from the community I was engaging with - things changed a lot over the years, after many positive feedbacks from my own, and other people’s risk-taking decisions.

Come to think of it, my friend today also took a great risk - she has never invited me to her place, and our conversations in the past seldom involved the animals she kept. She risked being judged and being ghasted upon, and she chose to host me, and she gave me the most exciting memories of seeing anyone’s house in my life.

(If I was asked a question of “whose house you want to visit the most - again?” I definitely would have chosen hers!)

I also got to know her on a deeper level - on her very good care to her reptiles, and on her pride and concerns as a reptile lover at the same time. And I deeply appreciate such encounters - I will weight her over many mundane social networking events.

04. On Intimacy

I do believe in the healing power in authentic intimacy - more than any psychoanalysis, or behavioral work. (And that has made me more of a relational thinker than an analytical one.)

I also believe conflicts do not necessarily tear people apart from each other - exactly as power does not CORRUPT, but power SHOWS. Conflict SHOWS. It shows each party’s willingness to reach the other, to love and to understand the other regardless of the disagreement. And that’s true intimacy to me - a warm and authentic regard, regardless of one’s emotions, situations, past experiences, and present concerns.

That has been the thing I have been trying to do with my clients in my work full-time — and I am able to do the same thing to people outside of my work, more and more. Risk-taking and willingness to take actions is my key, and I hope they can be yours as well, whoever you are.