Eureka! I feel like Archimedes.
I think I've found a seed - a word - from which to understand an aspect of my problem.
When the trauma erupts, how do I respond? I become hyper-vigilant, I retract like a turtle into its shell, peering out, slightly, but tentatively.
My words - my voice - never sounds right to me. I search inside me - unconsciously engage in past mental strategies that aim at "fixing" the problem: but I never get it right, or never GOT it right, so today I still sometimes, unconsciously, enact the same approaches to a problem I have never had a deep enough understanding of.
I can use language like 'vertices' - with my attending mind 'watching' myself, feeling uninvolved, struggling, really, with the depressing sound coming out of my mouth; and then I intend: the evil, menacing instinct to correct, consciously. To be consciously aware: vigilant! before a threat that exists only in my past, shrouded in the logic of my actions. But nowhere known.
The problem, ultimately, is what it has always been: FEAR. Fear - in the form of a profoundly powerful sympathetic response; and dissociation, in the form of a profoundly powerful parasympathetic response. Two systems: co-activated, one attending, watching, the other pulling back, retracting. Or is it retracting? The anxiety and the dissociation sort of meld together, leading to an anxious, though tremendously vacuous - empty, disheartened - attempt at speech.
It's so hard to notice the problem so I simply enact a response; and what response? A response to what, exactly? To the impression that something is 'wrong' with my voice. The corrective action - or rather, the perverse attempt at fixing - aims at 'fixing' the voice. A physiological focus, a connection in my mind on the 'wrongness' on the way my voice sounds. Doing this, my mind becomes more acutely aware of my throat, causing an almost subtle 'throbbing' - for years I felt this throbbing, only getting worse with every attempt at speech; so I seldom spoke, lest I feel the despair of not hearing myself in my voice. Enter dissociation.
The process - and experience - can seem laughable - distant, even - when I'm feeling good about myself and 'not noticing' anything being wrong. But this is wrong, and crude, as this possibility always exists within me waiting - lying in dormancy - for a physiological trigger.
The word is: OWNERSHIP! For those who deny the self, I suggest you traumatize yourself to see what life is like from the other side. And from there, contemplate - or, try to figure out how to get back to 'normalcy'. Obviously, this isn't possible. Only some of us are blessed - and cursed - with the experience of self-dissociation.
Reading Jessica Benjamin, Philip Bromberg, Lewis Aron and other theorists of the social mind, the concept of owning ones experiences often comes up; but it has always felt abstract - understood, in concept, but it felt difficult, or abstruse, in it's relation to my experienced reality.
No longer! Sometimes the stars line up just right - and an insight emerges - and everything seems clearer, and you can say, with Archimedes, Eureka! Truly, something deserving of so vaunted an expression. Ownership. The problem - the missing element of my linguistic understanding - the power of a word - in line with the theorizing of Donnel Stern, can help enunciate the fabric of a humans experience.
Ownership. The problem is, in feeling so scared - shameful - I never entirely allow myself to enter my body, fully, and non-consciously, without getting bogged down in the weeds of self-obsession.
Smoking weed no doubt adds an element of dissociation - and this I can not really defend. Smoking weed - especially on the 2nd straight night - condemns me to the experience of 'unreflected experience'. My interlocutor - always my brother - himself dissociated, fails to reciprocate, enjoy, and join me in my experiences. It hurts, and it inevitably throws me into obsessive 'self-correction'.
But beside weed, beside all that, is the failure to RECOGNIZE MYSELF: being dissociated for so long, I have come to enjoin experience to my thinking mind, and not my feeling mind. The difference is ultimate: night and day, the difference to ACTING, and BEING ACTED THROUGH. Embodied being, what the psychologist Alan Fogel terms "subjective emotional present ' is a way of being that feels entirely unbidden, undirected, sort of tacitly directed by 'me' from within, with an actor ACTING, owning, and BEING in some deeper way than the mechanical feeling 'mind above' acting on an inert body.
Owning, completely, the feelings one feels, without reference - or care - to the possibility of disconfirmation from without - is the KEY TO PARADISE, if paradise be defined as accepting who you are.
Owning, the fears you have, but mostly, owning, and expressing, the things you feel, the things you think, and letting the body provide 'the goods' - without attempting to procure its treasure through conscious investigation. It is a thoroughly existential act: a pressing DEEEP into your being, into your stomach, the pit of your gut, where butterflies unfurl their wings, and you feel, like them, the sensation of flight.
Saturday, 11 April 2015
Wednesday, 8 April 2015
Reflections
Why am I starting yet another blog? I love to write. I love to write because I need to express - and I also need to know, and learn about what there is to be known.
About myself. This mysterious thing which some skeptics doubt exist. Yet I feel it. I am certain of it's substantiality because there is a frame of reference - and a way of experiencing reality - which is painfully different, excruciatingly morbid, obsessive and compulsive - and in this slew of experiences and witnessing yourself as being this way, it can feel like an embarrassment to be you.
It is not anything to me but the proper expression of the potential that exists in every healthy body. A "self" is the essence, the core and unique dynamic that enables a sense of oneself as competent and able. Sufficient, strong, and healthy. An ability to present oneself - before other eyes - and maintain, unconsciously, an autocentric way of experience.
To be liked is to be embodied. When we live in our body's, the energy of it's eruption - calm, yet forceful - stable and resilient - we experience ourselves as alive to ourselves. The body is the Self. We only experience our selves when we experience bodily emotion. From the affective core to the form of expression, emotion suffuses cognition, and the subject experiences himself as 'in a flow'.
To even be with other people, in a comfortable and relaxed way entails an unconscious embeddedness in a relational dynamic that operates, through us, in the form of expressed actions. The Self is therefore, paradoxically, not entirely ones own: it finds its most coherent expression in relation with other selves. Together, two selves, mutually sensing one anothers experience, enact their similar desires, in finding a topic and enjoying themselves together 'in it'.
I love these times. I cherish, and I am absolutely wedded to the beauty of embodied experience, experiences with others, and the overall, breathtakingly challenging - yet exciting - process that is human existence. But I also suffer, greatly, and painfully. I lose myself, it shatters and falls apart in ways I feel I cannot control. My heart falls into my chest. I feel weak in my body and the way I'm holding myself: I'm self conscious, horridly, as a shameful, repulsive force that others minds expressive instinctive distaste for.
Those moments when I feel this way, where I turn inwards in myself, unconsciously identify with some part - another me - I unknowingly throw my system into disarray. The whole thing happens so quickly. I can be in an automatic, embodied state of consciousness, and something will happen, either in conversation or the local setting, or even the emergence of a random feeling with no specific contextual trigger, and my mind changes to a different state. I identified with a weak, submissive part of me. Who fears other people - and has good right to. Good fucking right indeed. This person holds himself vigilantly and tentatively. He ruminates about what other people are thinking of him - constantly and non-stop. He contemplates his closeness to other people and what they might think. These are impressions he has - not as fully articulated 'thoughts' but as feelings that guide and structure his self-reflective experience.
Just the other day - or today, actually - I sat in the magazine section in the library next to my house. I do this everyday. Today, as I walk in, later in the day, I see an attractive woman, probably late 30's early 40's, just reading a magazine. My first impression upon seeing her was "oooh, she's hot". Yet in that thought, in the background, or as a central element of my weak-submissive 'parts' experience, there is a tendency to experience fear at random and unpredictable moments.
Coming in, I turn back and then turn around again because I am drawn to sit near attractive people (who isn't!?). I know. I'm a dirtbag - or maybe as a virgin 29 year old with developmental trauma - I can be excused for innocent experiences of proximity to another - attractive - human being.
I decide to sit across from her, on the opposite chair from hers - as the farthest possible area. I recall this being an element of my consideration. I sit down, take off my napsack, put it to the side of my chair, and take off my jacket. I'm conscious of how I'm looking the whole time. Initially, I come in confidently and relaxed and experience myself as giving off a good impression. She has a smile on her face and seems relaxingly involved in her magazine, which tells me "you're having a good effect, Mike". I know this because after a few thousand times, you get an almost psychic sense of how other people experience you. If I came in involved in a traumatic thought - and giving off, quite noxiously, signs through my facial expression, eyes, and overall body language what I was feeling, the other persons unconscious 'picks' it up and passes it off to attention. The person becomes aware, assimilates a meaning, and enacts in their own, probably unconscious way a response to my presence.
But this time it went fine. I sat down, opened my book, and from time to time couldn't resist not getting a peaking glance at her. I'm thinking about how odd it is. She's pretty, beautiful even, but older. And she's wearing loose pants and a shirt that don't do much in accentuating her body - so she's a parent with a different set of priorities and concerns in life. Going to the library is less about showing off her body for others than it is for bringing her daughter to a big sister get-together.
But before I figured all that out (through observation) I looked at her and felt within me the first burblings of shame. Unpredictable, ineluctably 'sticky' - shame. When I experience it, I try not to push it away violently through enactment - that is, showing through my actions what I'm feeling. I've gotten very good at regulating my breath and feeling into my body, and calming myself, quietly and peacefully, to assure myself that nothing is wrong, all is okay. But there are times where I feel absolutely defeated and thoroughly overwhelmed. It feels like its in my stomach, deep, impressing into my nervous system a deeply disturbed take on reality, and this, despite the knowledge that what I'm feeling is nothing else but a reenactment of my grade school traumas.
I don't think I did very well holding it down. The nervous system - and human cognition - has surprising flexibility. Sometimes the difference between 'confident' and 'unconfident' can seem like night and day. Other times, they can shade into each other, and for some reason, for me, the appearance of unconfidence in an attempt at confidence can strike you with a shame that obliterates your frontal lobes.
She started looking across from me towards the windows. Why? I'm not sure, and then she gets up, picks up her jacket and purse on the other chair, puts her shoes back on, and walks over to the chairs towards the corner of the magazine area.
Did I have that affect? Or rather, did my thinking - and my specific, repetitive worry of myself as being so close to a woman so attractive, and feeling vulnerable to being approached and spoken to by her - leak through into my actions, despite my conscious belief that I was carrying myself relaxingly, and subtly impress on her mind that she would rather sit some place else?
Or, what about, why do I care so much? Ah, the double bind! I feel locked between my narcissistic claim to knowledge - which seems so plausible - and the uncomfortable, insistent worry that other people don't like me, don't want to be around me, or aren't stimulated by my presence.
The psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin quite rightly emphasizes the importance of recognition in establishing the 'shield' that becomes somebody's avowed self-confidence. The assumption throughout history, and as ignorantly touted by business junkies, is the 'self-made man'. The idea that someone accomplishes something great as a result of his inherent talent, and not, as the evidence shows, as a consequence of contextual factors determining individual forms of expression.
The science is pretty clear. Most fields are moving towards a 'field' view of reality. Molecular biology has 'epigenetics' - the study of the processes which intervene between genes and the environment. Psychology is moving towards affect - the way emotion influences and catalyzes cognitive processes; relationships in psychoanaysis as relational theory. Enactive cognitive science is coming to replace computational theories of neuropsychological processing. Environmental science shows the earth - and, consequently, all of us - as tied into a wider biosphere, involving chemical interactions, us giving off carbon, plants giving us oxygen, trees growing, species developing, and all of this is delicately maintained at a particular atmospheric and biochemical balance.
Well, I'm sleepy, and my computer is at 9%, and my chord is downstairs. Too tired to get it.
I'm sure I will have more to write in the future to come.
About myself. This mysterious thing which some skeptics doubt exist. Yet I feel it. I am certain of it's substantiality because there is a frame of reference - and a way of experiencing reality - which is painfully different, excruciatingly morbid, obsessive and compulsive - and in this slew of experiences and witnessing yourself as being this way, it can feel like an embarrassment to be you.
It is not anything to me but the proper expression of the potential that exists in every healthy body. A "self" is the essence, the core and unique dynamic that enables a sense of oneself as competent and able. Sufficient, strong, and healthy. An ability to present oneself - before other eyes - and maintain, unconsciously, an autocentric way of experience.
To be liked is to be embodied. When we live in our body's, the energy of it's eruption - calm, yet forceful - stable and resilient - we experience ourselves as alive to ourselves. The body is the Self. We only experience our selves when we experience bodily emotion. From the affective core to the form of expression, emotion suffuses cognition, and the subject experiences himself as 'in a flow'.
To even be with other people, in a comfortable and relaxed way entails an unconscious embeddedness in a relational dynamic that operates, through us, in the form of expressed actions. The Self is therefore, paradoxically, not entirely ones own: it finds its most coherent expression in relation with other selves. Together, two selves, mutually sensing one anothers experience, enact their similar desires, in finding a topic and enjoying themselves together 'in it'.
I love these times. I cherish, and I am absolutely wedded to the beauty of embodied experience, experiences with others, and the overall, breathtakingly challenging - yet exciting - process that is human existence. But I also suffer, greatly, and painfully. I lose myself, it shatters and falls apart in ways I feel I cannot control. My heart falls into my chest. I feel weak in my body and the way I'm holding myself: I'm self conscious, horridly, as a shameful, repulsive force that others minds expressive instinctive distaste for.
Those moments when I feel this way, where I turn inwards in myself, unconsciously identify with some part - another me - I unknowingly throw my system into disarray. The whole thing happens so quickly. I can be in an automatic, embodied state of consciousness, and something will happen, either in conversation or the local setting, or even the emergence of a random feeling with no specific contextual trigger, and my mind changes to a different state. I identified with a weak, submissive part of me. Who fears other people - and has good right to. Good fucking right indeed. This person holds himself vigilantly and tentatively. He ruminates about what other people are thinking of him - constantly and non-stop. He contemplates his closeness to other people and what they might think. These are impressions he has - not as fully articulated 'thoughts' but as feelings that guide and structure his self-reflective experience.
Just the other day - or today, actually - I sat in the magazine section in the library next to my house. I do this everyday. Today, as I walk in, later in the day, I see an attractive woman, probably late 30's early 40's, just reading a magazine. My first impression upon seeing her was "oooh, she's hot". Yet in that thought, in the background, or as a central element of my weak-submissive 'parts' experience, there is a tendency to experience fear at random and unpredictable moments.
Coming in, I turn back and then turn around again because I am drawn to sit near attractive people (who isn't!?). I know. I'm a dirtbag - or maybe as a virgin 29 year old with developmental trauma - I can be excused for innocent experiences of proximity to another - attractive - human being.
I decide to sit across from her, on the opposite chair from hers - as the farthest possible area. I recall this being an element of my consideration. I sit down, take off my napsack, put it to the side of my chair, and take off my jacket. I'm conscious of how I'm looking the whole time. Initially, I come in confidently and relaxed and experience myself as giving off a good impression. She has a smile on her face and seems relaxingly involved in her magazine, which tells me "you're having a good effect, Mike". I know this because after a few thousand times, you get an almost psychic sense of how other people experience you. If I came in involved in a traumatic thought - and giving off, quite noxiously, signs through my facial expression, eyes, and overall body language what I was feeling, the other persons unconscious 'picks' it up and passes it off to attention. The person becomes aware, assimilates a meaning, and enacts in their own, probably unconscious way a response to my presence.
But this time it went fine. I sat down, opened my book, and from time to time couldn't resist not getting a peaking glance at her. I'm thinking about how odd it is. She's pretty, beautiful even, but older. And she's wearing loose pants and a shirt that don't do much in accentuating her body - so she's a parent with a different set of priorities and concerns in life. Going to the library is less about showing off her body for others than it is for bringing her daughter to a big sister get-together.
But before I figured all that out (through observation) I looked at her and felt within me the first burblings of shame. Unpredictable, ineluctably 'sticky' - shame. When I experience it, I try not to push it away violently through enactment - that is, showing through my actions what I'm feeling. I've gotten very good at regulating my breath and feeling into my body, and calming myself, quietly and peacefully, to assure myself that nothing is wrong, all is okay. But there are times where I feel absolutely defeated and thoroughly overwhelmed. It feels like its in my stomach, deep, impressing into my nervous system a deeply disturbed take on reality, and this, despite the knowledge that what I'm feeling is nothing else but a reenactment of my grade school traumas.
I don't think I did very well holding it down. The nervous system - and human cognition - has surprising flexibility. Sometimes the difference between 'confident' and 'unconfident' can seem like night and day. Other times, they can shade into each other, and for some reason, for me, the appearance of unconfidence in an attempt at confidence can strike you with a shame that obliterates your frontal lobes.
She started looking across from me towards the windows. Why? I'm not sure, and then she gets up, picks up her jacket and purse on the other chair, puts her shoes back on, and walks over to the chairs towards the corner of the magazine area.
Did I have that affect? Or rather, did my thinking - and my specific, repetitive worry of myself as being so close to a woman so attractive, and feeling vulnerable to being approached and spoken to by her - leak through into my actions, despite my conscious belief that I was carrying myself relaxingly, and subtly impress on her mind that she would rather sit some place else?
Or, what about, why do I care so much? Ah, the double bind! I feel locked between my narcissistic claim to knowledge - which seems so plausible - and the uncomfortable, insistent worry that other people don't like me, don't want to be around me, or aren't stimulated by my presence.
The psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin quite rightly emphasizes the importance of recognition in establishing the 'shield' that becomes somebody's avowed self-confidence. The assumption throughout history, and as ignorantly touted by business junkies, is the 'self-made man'. The idea that someone accomplishes something great as a result of his inherent talent, and not, as the evidence shows, as a consequence of contextual factors determining individual forms of expression.
The science is pretty clear. Most fields are moving towards a 'field' view of reality. Molecular biology has 'epigenetics' - the study of the processes which intervene between genes and the environment. Psychology is moving towards affect - the way emotion influences and catalyzes cognitive processes; relationships in psychoanaysis as relational theory. Enactive cognitive science is coming to replace computational theories of neuropsychological processing. Environmental science shows the earth - and, consequently, all of us - as tied into a wider biosphere, involving chemical interactions, us giving off carbon, plants giving us oxygen, trees growing, species developing, and all of this is delicately maintained at a particular atmospheric and biochemical balance.
Well, I'm sleepy, and my computer is at 9%, and my chord is downstairs. Too tired to get it.
I'm sure I will have more to write in the future to come.
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