Banking on a Psychoanalytic Insight!

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.