I've been feeling odd since the weather changed. It's entirely bodily, that is, the change is being induced by changes in the season, and not by any experiences I've had in the last 2 weeks.
The temperature has dropped, and for some reason, my body, or nervous system, seems to react with an odd depression feeling. By "depression", I do not my that I am depressed; I am speaking about a body state; a sense of increased sensitivity; a lack of a certain 'feeling' in my body and my ordinary experience that 'sets up' my self-experience: how I think, how I feel and experience myself from moment to moment, and in particular, how I imagine myself with regard to the major changes I've made in my life.
The body formed the 'background', and with that background, I felt a particular "ownership" of my body; a sense that I could steer my ship without finding myself hopelessly disheveled.
This feeling is one of hypoarousal. And with a hypoaroused 'background', I find myself suddenly vulnerable to certain perceptions of self. These ideas of myself - ideas rooted fundamentally in my voice (it's interesting that in the Hebrew language, the word "kol", with a Kaf, which means voice, is phonologically identical to "qol" with a quf, which means 'all', perhaps suggesting that the voice is experienced by human beings as somehow containing the 'essence' of our self experience to the other) - draw me so deeply into fears and anxieties about being 'defective', at not being able to communicate normally, to sound normally, or to feel normally in my related to others; in short, I become utterly entranced by such thoughts because for years I did what all human beings do: I got caught up with my negative feelings, and in desperately trying to 'extricate' myself from those experiences, I was ignorantly "feeding" into a dynamic that my mind-brain-body keeps in motion. The body, brain and mind can be made enervated by such experiences. Consciousness can struggle so strongly against an experience of itself, that, like a dog biting or scratching at an itch, it literally kills itself. By "scratching" at the internal itch, it exhausts itself; one part of the brain, the vagus nerve, responds with a depressive, dissociative, parasympathetic response that challenges the hegemony of the frontal lobes. The frontal lobes, the "house of consciousness", nevertheless seeks to 'scratch' the 'itch', which in my case is my inveterate focus and obsession with the feeling of my voice; the timbre, the pitch, and even the feeling itself in the larynx region. Right now, for instance, I feel a strange tightness there; as well a sense that my ability to 'clear my throat' - another, horrible, long-time obsession bent on "testing" whether my vocal apparatus was working as I wanted it to - feels inhibited. These feelings, I know now have much to do with how I'm breathing while I attempt to clear my throat. The thought "I need to clear my throat", connected as it is with a traumatic state of consciousness, activates processes in my body, in particular diaphragmatic and laryngeal muscles, so that I actually DO feel a tension; but the tension is itself being induced by a hyper-conscious mind, objectifying it's own effort to 'clear its throat', so that as I try, my every attempt becomes more and more subtle, clenching higher and higher muscles, so that the deepest muscles involved in a normal act of clearing the throat - the bottom parts of the diaphragm - are actually too flexed for me to gain any phenomenological 'access' to them. It's as if each successive attempt leaves me a little more 'breathless', and also exhausted, phenomenologically in the quality of my focus, I cannot seem to do anything effective.
I did this for years and year and years and years. It deserves to be laid on a sheet, open before me, with a number as well. My brain-mind is heavily conditioned by this obsession with 'clearing my throat', and it is consolidated by the bodily feeling of a tension in my throat. Between the struggle to speak and communicate, and the struggle to clear my throat, lies a common denominator: how my throat region feels. A strong, percussive vowel-sound, with a strong timbre, is like an oil change for my throat. I repeat such sounds to 'unite' the autonoetic and anoetic parts of my consciousness. The 'autonoetic', or self-related thoughts and feelings, are what we are made of; life only feels as it does and means as it does because we evolved to know other people; which also implied knowing ourselves. The 'anoetic' part, or the part that is largely ignored by conscious while the self is in action, is the bodily experience; the amount of 'energy' passing through the vocal chords from the lungs and body. The anoetic, or physical qualities of speech, actually 'structure' the autonoetic. This means that the quality of your bodily relaxedness, your ability to 'rest' and 'connect' with core feelings and affects, subserves the type of person you experience yourself to be; and even more importantly, influences how other people experience you (this fact makes the experience of tension in the body act a a predictor that others will respond to you in a mirroring way; which, because of the degree of my self-awareness, has a punishing, ironic effect for my self-esteem)
I am too vulnerable at this time to be smoking weed. So why do I do it? Why did I smoke weed and subject my mind to an altered state prone to experience its recent bodily affects as leading to a self-conscious involvement with the voice? I know these things. I know it, but evidently ignore my own wisdom because of the general temptation that the 'want-pleasure' of dopamine arousal creates. The mere presentation of the stimulus - my brother and the oh so transient experience of smoking, and being high - activates neural processes that present themselves again and again to me. I avoided it for the majority of the day, but when it came to 'watching this show', for some reason it always feels so much more attractive, as jon stewarts character in half baked says "on weeeeeed". It's an absurd association that I repeatedly succumb to.
However, I am frightened by these affects and do not want to put myself in any sort of morbid state. My body feels off; but I can control it and HAVE controlled it, by controlling how I respond to the experiences. Do I add to the negative stimulus by adding my own negative evaluation? Thus perpetuating a feedback loop between negative feeling, negative evaluation - in short, the same process that landed me in this current mess? I know too much to allow such a thing to happen. I understand the limits of my free-will and realize that free-will operates 'between the spaces', in the choices I make and the direction I place my attention. I need to resist smoking weed tomorrow and understand that such austerity is necessary, vital even, to my psychological well-being.
Physically, this sense of a 'tension' in my throat will pass. I know it is only a fleeting phenomenon. By itself, it is a feeling; but with me - with my frightened, insistent need to 'control' and "know", in short, to find a feeling and 'be a certain way'; these sorts of thoughts are traps, based on an illusion of a self that is itself transitory, ephemeral, and contingent on the presence and vitality of other human beings. Why care so much about how I'm judged?
I need to care and do care. The self is sensitive and needy, and I need to acknowledge the voice of this sensitive, hurting self within-me. This is the whole wisdom in Philip Brombergs writings on trauma and dissociation. The hurt "me" IS a me, a part of my experience, that I am better off befriending than dreading. What does this mean, in effect? For most of the day, most of the time, I feel good. I wake up, speak, focus on a certain relaxedness in my body, and connect with others in a mostly successful way.
However, negative experiences with mean, rude, or aggressive other people, despite what I may know about the motivation behind their intentionality (and what it supplies for their sense of self), actually do hurt me; I can't help but react to the feeling of being "held" by another mind with a feeling of contempt or dislike. How do I get away from such feelings? Not - as my body has admonished me - by dissociating the feelings I feel. This evidently does not work for the traumatized mind. Compassion seems to be the only antidote; it saves you from hating the other, and more importantly, from distancing your cognitive mind from 'befriending' its affective experience.
Compassion, attachment. The first feelings of life are wondrously, biologically coherent. They give consciousness the 'keys' to its own healing. How else can one but interpret this world, this reality we live in, as an utter miracle? Life is beautiful; good; enmeshed. There is no blame to hand out because we are too embedded to know. But when we do know, when we do know that most important fact - of our vulnerabilities, fears, anxieties, and struggles with shame - the only practicable solution to this trauma and suffering is to 'drop' the selfishness and egotism and immerse yourself in the wonder of existence; and even more so, the astonishing power of love.
Monday, 19 October 2015
Thursday, 15 October 2015
A Diagram Of The Mind
This is probably my best foray into the how human mind functions
At the top, though cut off, is the term "shared intentionality", which I place at the top, beyond the 'sphere', to signify it's transpersonal nature. Shared Intentionality is the state that human nervous systems are genetically programmed to 'drift towards', hence, it is the overarching organizing principle referred to in evolutionary sciences as "group selection".
Within the sphere is the way shared intentionality is operationalized within individual human nervous systems - and the minds they give rise to. The shame-pride continuum is derived from the work of Colwyn Treverathen, as I think it covers the general "flux", or dynamics of our human phenomenology. I don't have any interest in Eckmans, Panksepps or any other theory of "basic emotions" as the only RELEVANT functional terms with regard to the complex social-dynamics of human functioning is shame and pride. All other emotions find their place within this general continuum, and indeed, many are largely derivative from them (happiness, joy, laughter = pride states; depression, anxiety, fear = shame states). Furthermore, the shame-pride continuum speaks to the social processes that maintain "shared-intentionality", and as such, deserve pride of place in any overarching theory of human functioning.
These two poles of self-experience are organized by an unconscious process that does two things at once; it is best to think about this process as occurring within a 3 dimensional space, with a stressor acting upon the organism, leading to a state of cognitive dissonance. When the dissonance is registered, a "turn" happens; the turn is both towards something as well as away from something. The "away" part is dissociation; whereas the "toward" part is idealization. In order to maintain self-coherency (and thus remove cognitive dissonance), unconscious processes deemphasize the content that induces the affect dysregulation (the cognitive dissonance) by "finding" something good to think about and believe. It is important to bear in mind that these actions of the mind are all about maintaining a certain sense of the self as 'powerful', 'strong', and perhaps most saliently, 'invulnerable'. Dissociation and idealization operate to keep the "self" as a functionally useful mechanism that can effectively navigate the complexities of social life.
I place mirror neurons in the center based upon the mainstream belief that the nervous system is fundamentally organized around motor programs. Mirror neurons in the pre-motor areas of the parietal lobe contain information that then 'reverberates; outward to more complex social, relational and cognitive parts of consciousness; the amygdala as well is intimately connected to this process, as intentions picked up in the perceived behaviors of others which "speak" to the personal experiences of the actor, activate defense responses EVEN WHEN there is no phenomenological indication of feeling threatened. Developmental processes are such that when adaptations are made to complex social experiences, what remains 'conscious' is only the idealizations, or thoughts of self and identity, that the actor will more or less describe as being "their personality". What was dissociated at 2, 3 or later on in life, that is, the dysregulating experience which threatened the "self-system" of the organism, only speaks through the idealizations made in the present.
With respect to systems theory, understanding these shame-pride dynamics, and understanding that our species evolved under the pressure of these two ways of being in the world, I cannot think of anything more important than conventionalizing knowledge of dissociative processes in the organization of consciousness. Inasmuch as human beings act upon one another, and thus provoke one another into assuming particular self-states (that is, dissociate negative experience of self, pursue positive "images" of self), and writ-large, a species which forms a "super-system" based upon these individual, dyadic communicative dynamics, our individual dissociations, or lack of awareness of our own 'system-like behavior', ineluctably leads to what we now see in today's world: the destabilization of our planetary atmosphere, as a result of an UNRESTRAINED economic and cultural hunger for more, and more, and more. Materialism, it needs to be noted, is being used as a way too ward off the dissociated feelings of shame, anxiety, enervation and the general day to day vulnerabilities that comes with being a finite, mortal, and energy dependent creature. Our present inability to accept certain realities at the individual level (the abuse of our own "system" - both bodily and psychologically) and our obligations to others (the abuse of the relational system) will inevitably reach (because of our unfettered growth in numbers) a stage where the planet can no longer harbor our existence.
How sad!
At the top, though cut off, is the term "shared intentionality", which I place at the top, beyond the 'sphere', to signify it's transpersonal nature. Shared Intentionality is the state that human nervous systems are genetically programmed to 'drift towards', hence, it is the overarching organizing principle referred to in evolutionary sciences as "group selection".
Within the sphere is the way shared intentionality is operationalized within individual human nervous systems - and the minds they give rise to. The shame-pride continuum is derived from the work of Colwyn Treverathen, as I think it covers the general "flux", or dynamics of our human phenomenology. I don't have any interest in Eckmans, Panksepps or any other theory of "basic emotions" as the only RELEVANT functional terms with regard to the complex social-dynamics of human functioning is shame and pride. All other emotions find their place within this general continuum, and indeed, many are largely derivative from them (happiness, joy, laughter = pride states; depression, anxiety, fear = shame states). Furthermore, the shame-pride continuum speaks to the social processes that maintain "shared-intentionality", and as such, deserve pride of place in any overarching theory of human functioning.
These two poles of self-experience are organized by an unconscious process that does two things at once; it is best to think about this process as occurring within a 3 dimensional space, with a stressor acting upon the organism, leading to a state of cognitive dissonance. When the dissonance is registered, a "turn" happens; the turn is both towards something as well as away from something. The "away" part is dissociation; whereas the "toward" part is idealization. In order to maintain self-coherency (and thus remove cognitive dissonance), unconscious processes deemphasize the content that induces the affect dysregulation (the cognitive dissonance) by "finding" something good to think about and believe. It is important to bear in mind that these actions of the mind are all about maintaining a certain sense of the self as 'powerful', 'strong', and perhaps most saliently, 'invulnerable'. Dissociation and idealization operate to keep the "self" as a functionally useful mechanism that can effectively navigate the complexities of social life.
I place mirror neurons in the center based upon the mainstream belief that the nervous system is fundamentally organized around motor programs. Mirror neurons in the pre-motor areas of the parietal lobe contain information that then 'reverberates; outward to more complex social, relational and cognitive parts of consciousness; the amygdala as well is intimately connected to this process, as intentions picked up in the perceived behaviors of others which "speak" to the personal experiences of the actor, activate defense responses EVEN WHEN there is no phenomenological indication of feeling threatened. Developmental processes are such that when adaptations are made to complex social experiences, what remains 'conscious' is only the idealizations, or thoughts of self and identity, that the actor will more or less describe as being "their personality". What was dissociated at 2, 3 or later on in life, that is, the dysregulating experience which threatened the "self-system" of the organism, only speaks through the idealizations made in the present.
With respect to systems theory, understanding these shame-pride dynamics, and understanding that our species evolved under the pressure of these two ways of being in the world, I cannot think of anything more important than conventionalizing knowledge of dissociative processes in the organization of consciousness. Inasmuch as human beings act upon one another, and thus provoke one another into assuming particular self-states (that is, dissociate negative experience of self, pursue positive "images" of self), and writ-large, a species which forms a "super-system" based upon these individual, dyadic communicative dynamics, our individual dissociations, or lack of awareness of our own 'system-like behavior', ineluctably leads to what we now see in today's world: the destabilization of our planetary atmosphere, as a result of an UNRESTRAINED economic and cultural hunger for more, and more, and more. Materialism, it needs to be noted, is being used as a way too ward off the dissociated feelings of shame, anxiety, enervation and the general day to day vulnerabilities that comes with being a finite, mortal, and energy dependent creature. Our present inability to accept certain realities at the individual level (the abuse of our own "system" - both bodily and psychologically) and our obligations to others (the abuse of the relational system) will inevitably reach (because of our unfettered growth in numbers) a stage where the planet can no longer harbor our existence.
How sad!
Monday, 12 October 2015
Dissociation And Morality
My mother's dissociative disorder can be as frightening as what I saw at my grandmas. And it just so happens that this particular experience is contextualized by my grandmothers visit to the house.
She comes down the stairs, its about 12:30 AM, my brother and myself sitting on the couch watching TV. She comes into the room with her well-known anxiety and moves her way towards the end of the room.."my stomach hurts", she says. I look at her and try to commiserate with the pain and anxiety that this is evidently causing her.
I go into the kitchen, softly - like a mouse - and tell her, "mo, try to breathe". Breathe? Is that antagonistic? Of the possible choices that entered my mind - "don't be anxious", "don't be stressed" or the one she hates the most: "relax", this sounded soft and innocuous. But alas, she reads intentions rather than words. The word game doesn't work with people who experience very intense emotions. The forceful dynamics of a stereotyped behavior - how she acts - runs its course, like a script, until she is finished "resolving" the dilemma currently occurring.
This indeed is an adaptation she learned early on in life; but I can't help but wonder at the extravagance of my mothers dissociativeness than when she says to me "your face makes me irritable". This, apparently, is how I provoke her. My concern that her anxiety, stress, and incessant irritability may be contributing to this "ulcer" like feeling she claimed to be having, amazingly, her enormously defensive nature distorts this into me having the arrogance to talk to her with such impudence. How did impudence come up, you ask? This morning, after approaching me, and offering a deal to me, that if I washed the dog, she would take me to go get a coffee. Ok. Thank you for the offer. I do the washing, took no more than 10 minutes, and then went to her to tell her I was ready. She then snaps at me and tells me she's too hot. Wait. Because she finished off her statement with a softer, milder way of speaking, I responded with a mindful acceptance, saying in a heartfelt, sincere sort of way, "ok" with a playful tint. About 10 minutes later, I go back inside, and this time she snaps at me without the modulating kindness at the end. 5 minutes after that, I have the thought "she's so manipulative! She's going to get dad to drive me", which led to the thought "She knowingly took advantage of my way of responding to her when she speaks that way; and she also knew that she can force my dad to do whatever she asks him to". The thought, in retrospect, took me too far. It became personal. I felt she was a manipulative, controlling, "traumatizing narcissist" who mindlessly externalizes her anxieties. And also, perhaps, the presence of my grandmother "locks her in" (or unconsciously activates neural assemblies associated with this object i.e her mother) into a certain dramatic panache that perhaps wouldn't reach such intensities if she wasn't there. My grandmother too, is astonishingly dissociative.
That is a little Pollyanna sounding to me, because my mother is almost always passing in and out of irritable states, and in those states, she mindlessly and unconsciously believes her own horseshit unconscious constructions that I or my father or my brother or sister am causing her to feel anxiety. She is a woman who, after being conditioned by her own mother to find blame in the world around her (that is, made sense of her anxiety to herself by offloading any responsibility for her feeling states) has built up her own "niche", in a manner very like a beaver, where she can speak to other people and act against other people that helps her support her self-esteem (her sense of pride). The other people are my overly acquiescent father, who, if it weren't for his acquiescence, I wouldn't even exist. Then, her three child, of varying ages, and so, knowing a particularly "different" mother from the others.
My sister and I are sufficiently close enough in age (2 year difference) to have experienced a very similar mother. My brother, born 5 years 7 months later, experienced a more "mature", or affectively regulated mother. It also may have helped that she was told that her pregnancy would 'help normalize her hormones', by her psychic naturopath. The positive expectation did lead to a stability of "self", but unfortunately, there were still others selves, unresolved issues, that allowed her to live very dissociatively.
When she says stuff like "your face makes me sick", how else can I experience this other than a deep unhappiness that my mother can feel this way towards me - and maintain this nonsense. She cannot gvern her mind under distress; how obvious it is to any THINKING person that saying "your face makes me sick" is an emotional self-generated reaction being projected onto another person? And how unfair it is, to be a mind who formed under the auspices of this sort of individual.
She's a victim and an idiot. An "idiot" because she cannot use her mind. Why do I choose that word? Because she hurts me - and has hurt me - and this feeling is a real feeling in me; an anger at her for rebuffing my earnest efforts to help her; my true concern and compassion for her - can go unnoticed.
Her mind is a room with no central organizer. Once certain externalizing "affect regulating" strategies come into play, it feels sort of like being a doctor dealing with a psychiatric patient; the patient defends like a snarling wolf - rebuffing and opposing any effort you put into reasoning with her. Her intense emotional reaction compulsively organizes stereotypical defense reactions; her brain senses "michael is speaking to me in this way," which then triggers this quick defensive response "after what you said to me today (I rudely called her an asshole; for which I profusely apologized for) you have the audacity to talk to me this way?" Her mind dissociates the immediate context - what was just said earlier; information wont 'cohere' into a coherent whole, whereby something said earlier influences whats understood next, and so on. She returns again and again as if to protect against a certain feeling of herself as being worthless, pathetic, "wrong"; in short, shame. Her defense is an effort to feel a certain way vis a vis another person. She returns again and again to the same reaction, desperately maintaining the dissociation of dissonant information - information that will induce anxiety, fear, shame, and a general sense of mental incoherence i.e insanity. This is why she says to me "Your face makes me sick". She treats me as the same type of person who dehumanized her as a child - her mother, father, sibling, cousins. Her harshest relationships were with her parents, and their general, authoritarian ways, built into her a savage defense system against "potential manipulators". I was a potential manipulator, and will likely always be one, whenever she gets anxious like this. Hence, if she can't control her anxiety, she cannot help herself.
I joke from time to time - when she's healthy minded - that I would personally pay for therapy appointments, for instance, for help to "build up her mindfulness function", which I of course pepper with causal language to make it easier for her to accept. But even then she doesn't think she needs therapy; when she's happy, she needs to maintain the illusion of normality; the probability of a turn to a traumatic state of arousal is too likely; hence, when shes happy, she dissociates with still surprisingly high fidelity.
I can feel so debilitated by my anxiety, by a feeling of not being heard. It's a profound sensation that I've always had. My learned anxiety is itself a testament to my organisms desperate need to elicit recognition from the other. From my mother.
My brother can also be difficult to be around, difficult to talk to, because he cannot THINK when he himself experiences anxiety. He dissociates; his attention "spontaneously" moves to something else, his hand, his wallet, but most likely, his phone. And then, hungry for recognition, try to "seek out" his attention. I speak, I look, I speak, I look. I'm hungry for responsiveness; for recognition of my affective experience; indeed, for the very sense of my existence as a self.
This habitual response curbs my enthusiasm. I'm fighting with my self, at some current threshold that seems to be habitually crossed, that 'something is wrong with my voice', and in essence, my self. The voice is the psychological vehicle of self construction. The deepest, most profound feeling of self is associated with these moments of deep arousal, sharing of feelings, and the subtle, usually non-conscious awareness, that I am affecting other people in this way, which makes me feel this way (proud). Pride is the "point" within the human mind which commands our behavior like the sun commands the planets. We naturally 'drift' towards idealizations - this is how we "consciously" help ourselves. Our minds move this way as a compulsive reaction; an inveterate and automatic dissociator of the truth of the reality principle: there is an objective reality, such as, for instance, the necessity of the golden rule: do not treat others in way you wouldn't want to be treated. This rule spurs a type of consciousness we can call "conscience". Conscience pokes its head in when our normal defensive reactions, themselves built from a lifetime of threatening experiences, and understands "I am not thinking clearly here". Yes. It's ok to not always think clearly; there is nothing with discovering this; in fact, it is eminently right to realize the insanity of our human minds: vis a vis our idealized code to be "moral", we are insistently immoral when we deny the way non-conscious, defensive dissociative processes construct our perceptions by biasing our affects, attitudes and attention.
She comes down the stairs, its about 12:30 AM, my brother and myself sitting on the couch watching TV. She comes into the room with her well-known anxiety and moves her way towards the end of the room.."my stomach hurts", she says. I look at her and try to commiserate with the pain and anxiety that this is evidently causing her.
I go into the kitchen, softly - like a mouse - and tell her, "mo, try to breathe". Breathe? Is that antagonistic? Of the possible choices that entered my mind - "don't be anxious", "don't be stressed" or the one she hates the most: "relax", this sounded soft and innocuous. But alas, she reads intentions rather than words. The word game doesn't work with people who experience very intense emotions. The forceful dynamics of a stereotyped behavior - how she acts - runs its course, like a script, until she is finished "resolving" the dilemma currently occurring.
This indeed is an adaptation she learned early on in life; but I can't help but wonder at the extravagance of my mothers dissociativeness than when she says to me "your face makes me irritable". This, apparently, is how I provoke her. My concern that her anxiety, stress, and incessant irritability may be contributing to this "ulcer" like feeling she claimed to be having, amazingly, her enormously defensive nature distorts this into me having the arrogance to talk to her with such impudence. How did impudence come up, you ask? This morning, after approaching me, and offering a deal to me, that if I washed the dog, she would take me to go get a coffee. Ok. Thank you for the offer. I do the washing, took no more than 10 minutes, and then went to her to tell her I was ready. She then snaps at me and tells me she's too hot. Wait. Because she finished off her statement with a softer, milder way of speaking, I responded with a mindful acceptance, saying in a heartfelt, sincere sort of way, "ok" with a playful tint. About 10 minutes later, I go back inside, and this time she snaps at me without the modulating kindness at the end. 5 minutes after that, I have the thought "she's so manipulative! She's going to get dad to drive me", which led to the thought "She knowingly took advantage of my way of responding to her when she speaks that way; and she also knew that she can force my dad to do whatever she asks him to". The thought, in retrospect, took me too far. It became personal. I felt she was a manipulative, controlling, "traumatizing narcissist" who mindlessly externalizes her anxieties. And also, perhaps, the presence of my grandmother "locks her in" (or unconsciously activates neural assemblies associated with this object i.e her mother) into a certain dramatic panache that perhaps wouldn't reach such intensities if she wasn't there. My grandmother too, is astonishingly dissociative.
That is a little Pollyanna sounding to me, because my mother is almost always passing in and out of irritable states, and in those states, she mindlessly and unconsciously believes her own horseshit unconscious constructions that I or my father or my brother or sister am causing her to feel anxiety. She is a woman who, after being conditioned by her own mother to find blame in the world around her (that is, made sense of her anxiety to herself by offloading any responsibility for her feeling states) has built up her own "niche", in a manner very like a beaver, where she can speak to other people and act against other people that helps her support her self-esteem (her sense of pride). The other people are my overly acquiescent father, who, if it weren't for his acquiescence, I wouldn't even exist. Then, her three child, of varying ages, and so, knowing a particularly "different" mother from the others.
My sister and I are sufficiently close enough in age (2 year difference) to have experienced a very similar mother. My brother, born 5 years 7 months later, experienced a more "mature", or affectively regulated mother. It also may have helped that she was told that her pregnancy would 'help normalize her hormones', by her psychic naturopath. The positive expectation did lead to a stability of "self", but unfortunately, there were still others selves, unresolved issues, that allowed her to live very dissociatively.
When she says stuff like "your face makes me sick", how else can I experience this other than a deep unhappiness that my mother can feel this way towards me - and maintain this nonsense. She cannot gvern her mind under distress; how obvious it is to any THINKING person that saying "your face makes me sick" is an emotional self-generated reaction being projected onto another person? And how unfair it is, to be a mind who formed under the auspices of this sort of individual.
She's a victim and an idiot. An "idiot" because she cannot use her mind. Why do I choose that word? Because she hurts me - and has hurt me - and this feeling is a real feeling in me; an anger at her for rebuffing my earnest efforts to help her; my true concern and compassion for her - can go unnoticed.
Her mind is a room with no central organizer. Once certain externalizing "affect regulating" strategies come into play, it feels sort of like being a doctor dealing with a psychiatric patient; the patient defends like a snarling wolf - rebuffing and opposing any effort you put into reasoning with her. Her intense emotional reaction compulsively organizes stereotypical defense reactions; her brain senses "michael is speaking to me in this way," which then triggers this quick defensive response "after what you said to me today (I rudely called her an asshole; for which I profusely apologized for) you have the audacity to talk to me this way?" Her mind dissociates the immediate context - what was just said earlier; information wont 'cohere' into a coherent whole, whereby something said earlier influences whats understood next, and so on. She returns again and again as if to protect against a certain feeling of herself as being worthless, pathetic, "wrong"; in short, shame. Her defense is an effort to feel a certain way vis a vis another person. She returns again and again to the same reaction, desperately maintaining the dissociation of dissonant information - information that will induce anxiety, fear, shame, and a general sense of mental incoherence i.e insanity. This is why she says to me "Your face makes me sick". She treats me as the same type of person who dehumanized her as a child - her mother, father, sibling, cousins. Her harshest relationships were with her parents, and their general, authoritarian ways, built into her a savage defense system against "potential manipulators". I was a potential manipulator, and will likely always be one, whenever she gets anxious like this. Hence, if she can't control her anxiety, she cannot help herself.
I joke from time to time - when she's healthy minded - that I would personally pay for therapy appointments, for instance, for help to "build up her mindfulness function", which I of course pepper with causal language to make it easier for her to accept. But even then she doesn't think she needs therapy; when she's happy, she needs to maintain the illusion of normality; the probability of a turn to a traumatic state of arousal is too likely; hence, when shes happy, she dissociates with still surprisingly high fidelity.
I can feel so debilitated by my anxiety, by a feeling of not being heard. It's a profound sensation that I've always had. My learned anxiety is itself a testament to my organisms desperate need to elicit recognition from the other. From my mother.
My brother can also be difficult to be around, difficult to talk to, because he cannot THINK when he himself experiences anxiety. He dissociates; his attention "spontaneously" moves to something else, his hand, his wallet, but most likely, his phone. And then, hungry for recognition, try to "seek out" his attention. I speak, I look, I speak, I look. I'm hungry for responsiveness; for recognition of my affective experience; indeed, for the very sense of my existence as a self.
This habitual response curbs my enthusiasm. I'm fighting with my self, at some current threshold that seems to be habitually crossed, that 'something is wrong with my voice', and in essence, my self. The voice is the psychological vehicle of self construction. The deepest, most profound feeling of self is associated with these moments of deep arousal, sharing of feelings, and the subtle, usually non-conscious awareness, that I am affecting other people in this way, which makes me feel this way (proud). Pride is the "point" within the human mind which commands our behavior like the sun commands the planets. We naturally 'drift' towards idealizations - this is how we "consciously" help ourselves. Our minds move this way as a compulsive reaction; an inveterate and automatic dissociator of the truth of the reality principle: there is an objective reality, such as, for instance, the necessity of the golden rule: do not treat others in way you wouldn't want to be treated. This rule spurs a type of consciousness we can call "conscience". Conscience pokes its head in when our normal defensive reactions, themselves built from a lifetime of threatening experiences, and understands "I am not thinking clearly here". Yes. It's ok to not always think clearly; there is nothing with discovering this; in fact, it is eminently right to realize the insanity of our human minds: vis a vis our idealized code to be "moral", we are insistently immoral when we deny the way non-conscious, defensive dissociative processes construct our perceptions by biasing our affects, attitudes and attention.
Friday, 9 October 2015
Consciousness and Natural Selection
I am mystified by the way natural selection works. I believe in it, but unlike so many others, I do not see it's activity as dealing only with biology.
The cells which came together to build organisms, according to thinkers like Franscisco Varela, already possess some sort of proto-intentionality; a type of "cognition" that shows itself by "finding" the "right fit" try after try.
Some people are of course prone to interpret this progression as accidental, as opposed to a meaningful emergence set by preexisting physical conditions, of which it bears pointing out, we still do not understand. Before biology there is the malestrom of the developing solar system, and before that, the big bang. To split consciousness and biology from the dualism implicit in the big bang (what came before? Nothing; Something? What caused it?) is not my cup of tea.
In any case, when humans become modern day humans with 1200-1400 cc brains, a change that seemed to occur during the lifetime of homo heidelbergensis, it must have evolved within the social processes that now define our human cognitions.
For me, the most basic motivational properties of homo sapiens is a continuum that moves from shame to pride. In agreement with Colwyn Treverthan, I also believe there is a "horizontal" continuum that moves between a sense of egocentricity, to a sense of intersubjectivity, or said differently, "I'ness" and "we'ness".
Both of these conditions imply a larger construct - a social construct - that "acts upon" the motivational states of the actors; The I, since it belongs to an individual organism, is paradoxically motivationally "bound" to the intentional positions of others; the gaze, voice, facial expressions and gestures of others communicate loudly, not to the conscious mind, which merely "registers" the change, but to an unconscious mind that exists to "pick up" these relational cues.
Our society, so stricken by machismo and a belief in it's own rationalism, is still slow to pick up on the reality of the shame-pride continuum. ALL humans pass through it and are shaped by it's dynamics. Dissociation is the neurological/unconscious process which separates the "wheat from the chaff", that is, experiences which our affectively "affording", and experiences which are affectively "depleting".
Throughout, implied in this pruning is the concept of social-status, something seen so clearly in the other great apes that it is quite surprising that people do not recognize it's centrality in our functioning.
The "self-monitoring" capacity, posited by Tomasello to be present as a "view from nowhere" that nevertheless acts by structuring our motivational states, is really the internalization of the phenomenological reality of human intersubjectivity; the minds we have are "two" - we relate to worlds, to objects, to "things"; present within our mental architecture is a 'witness' function and a event that crosses into our phenomenological awareness. The Buddha (it is said) discovered that mental pathology derives from an 'identification' process whereby the mind (or the witness) unconsciously engages the objects, or experiences, which passes through it; failing to recognize the duality that lies at the core of lived phenomenology, the self habitually engages, and by engaging, augments its suffering. His method for 'curing' the mind of this illness was to continuously 'recall' and 'remember' that you are not that which you perceive; there is a difference, phenomenologically, and psychologically, between awareness and experience, and acting and being acted upon.
Because of this connectivity between action and perception, what we see being acted by others, whether in direct or indirect ways, comes into our consciousness (and brain) through the way we experience it affectively, only to reemerge later on in a similar context as a motivational state. Motivational state's are structured by direct and vicarious experiences with others; those which elicit or display behaviors that indicate shame, are tagged "bad"; the instinctive response appears to be an unconscious dissociation from consciousness of the behavioral patterns associated with the 'eliciting' behavior (a certain way of being that the shamed party displayed).
Two simultaneous things are being "encoded" into the brain here: what to avoid (the shameful behavior) and what to pursue (the dominating behavior). The brain is not inherently programmed to follow this route, inasmuch as society can exert negative (or countervailing) feedback in the form of psychological education; nevertheless, the trend is strong enough because dissociation works not simply by "blocking" out the bad thing, but replacing the bad thing with a suite of assertive behaviors; a small sample of such behaviors are the various things society does today; the military industrial complex, corporations, politicians - the lust for power, money; cynicism, hedonism, self-righteousness. The self doesn't simply dissociate the shame that is the root of all this behavioral excess: it creates something in it's stead: the human mind is fundamentally a story-teller, and the story it is telling, at least in today's politics, is one of liberty, "do what thou wilt" "so long as you don't hurt anyone" (sic) ideologies that are ultimately reactionary - there to "hold back the tide" - of a progress that conflicts with their own developmental conditioning.
Dissociation is a process that deserves to be made explicit by our educational systems in as much as it speaks to the "double sided" nature of our motivations. Take bullying: the bully bullies because in his own lived experience, encoded in his brain, is an experience that is similar in 'form' to the perceived behavior in the kid he wants to bully. This "form" is probably Stern's "forms of vitality" which, like in dance, music, poetry, can shift from modality to modality but still retain some affective and intentional significance.
The bully sees in his target 'weakness' - a weakness that "speaks to his own past"; being that humans are operating from this "view from nowhere" ala Tomasello, the brain performs a subtle acrobatics that only inference can disentangle; anger, or hatred, surreptitiously sneaks in front of the organizing shame of weakness; and since shame implies weakness and vulnerability, it would take something like anger - a dominant, assertive emotion - to flip the switch, and reverse ones social standing: dissociation is there not simply to keep the bad out; but to replace it with a fantasy of the "good".
Acting out our fantasies in ways like these is not surprising, but expected given what we know about the evolution of the human mind. Since the mind evolved to "know" what others think, it should not be surprising, but nay, should be totally expected, that an experience of shame is unconsciously converted by the brain into an experience of hatred, when another party who demonstrates or performs for your own eyes the same weakness and shame you could not tolerate to experience in yourself.
Social pain, as neuroscience has shown, is handled by the same areas of the brain that process physical pain. But unlike physical pain, social actors are constantly trying to buttress their self-esteems; behaviors that might elicit shame, or promote an idea of themselves as weak in the minds of others, are dissociated from perception (that is, they are not aware of this motivation). The behavior they enact is instead culled from the social world they want to be part of; and indeed, their unconsciousness of their own explicit need "to be a part" demonstrates the lack of frontal lobe development in the children, adolescents and teenagers (and unfortunately, adults) that developmental psychologists have highlighted.
The cells which came together to build organisms, according to thinkers like Franscisco Varela, already possess some sort of proto-intentionality; a type of "cognition" that shows itself by "finding" the "right fit" try after try.
Some people are of course prone to interpret this progression as accidental, as opposed to a meaningful emergence set by preexisting physical conditions, of which it bears pointing out, we still do not understand. Before biology there is the malestrom of the developing solar system, and before that, the big bang. To split consciousness and biology from the dualism implicit in the big bang (what came before? Nothing; Something? What caused it?) is not my cup of tea.
In any case, when humans become modern day humans with 1200-1400 cc brains, a change that seemed to occur during the lifetime of homo heidelbergensis, it must have evolved within the social processes that now define our human cognitions.
For me, the most basic motivational properties of homo sapiens is a continuum that moves from shame to pride. In agreement with Colwyn Treverthan, I also believe there is a "horizontal" continuum that moves between a sense of egocentricity, to a sense of intersubjectivity, or said differently, "I'ness" and "we'ness".
Both of these conditions imply a larger construct - a social construct - that "acts upon" the motivational states of the actors; The I, since it belongs to an individual organism, is paradoxically motivationally "bound" to the intentional positions of others; the gaze, voice, facial expressions and gestures of others communicate loudly, not to the conscious mind, which merely "registers" the change, but to an unconscious mind that exists to "pick up" these relational cues.
Our society, so stricken by machismo and a belief in it's own rationalism, is still slow to pick up on the reality of the shame-pride continuum. ALL humans pass through it and are shaped by it's dynamics. Dissociation is the neurological/unconscious process which separates the "wheat from the chaff", that is, experiences which our affectively "affording", and experiences which are affectively "depleting".
Throughout, implied in this pruning is the concept of social-status, something seen so clearly in the other great apes that it is quite surprising that people do not recognize it's centrality in our functioning.
The "self-monitoring" capacity, posited by Tomasello to be present as a "view from nowhere" that nevertheless acts by structuring our motivational states, is really the internalization of the phenomenological reality of human intersubjectivity; the minds we have are "two" - we relate to worlds, to objects, to "things"; present within our mental architecture is a 'witness' function and a event that crosses into our phenomenological awareness. The Buddha (it is said) discovered that mental pathology derives from an 'identification' process whereby the mind (or the witness) unconsciously engages the objects, or experiences, which passes through it; failing to recognize the duality that lies at the core of lived phenomenology, the self habitually engages, and by engaging, augments its suffering. His method for 'curing' the mind of this illness was to continuously 'recall' and 'remember' that you are not that which you perceive; there is a difference, phenomenologically, and psychologically, between awareness and experience, and acting and being acted upon.
Because of this connectivity between action and perception, what we see being acted by others, whether in direct or indirect ways, comes into our consciousness (and brain) through the way we experience it affectively, only to reemerge later on in a similar context as a motivational state. Motivational state's are structured by direct and vicarious experiences with others; those which elicit or display behaviors that indicate shame, are tagged "bad"; the instinctive response appears to be an unconscious dissociation from consciousness of the behavioral patterns associated with the 'eliciting' behavior (a certain way of being that the shamed party displayed).
Two simultaneous things are being "encoded" into the brain here: what to avoid (the shameful behavior) and what to pursue (the dominating behavior). The brain is not inherently programmed to follow this route, inasmuch as society can exert negative (or countervailing) feedback in the form of psychological education; nevertheless, the trend is strong enough because dissociation works not simply by "blocking" out the bad thing, but replacing the bad thing with a suite of assertive behaviors; a small sample of such behaviors are the various things society does today; the military industrial complex, corporations, politicians - the lust for power, money; cynicism, hedonism, self-righteousness. The self doesn't simply dissociate the shame that is the root of all this behavioral excess: it creates something in it's stead: the human mind is fundamentally a story-teller, and the story it is telling, at least in today's politics, is one of liberty, "do what thou wilt" "so long as you don't hurt anyone" (sic) ideologies that are ultimately reactionary - there to "hold back the tide" - of a progress that conflicts with their own developmental conditioning.
Dissociation is a process that deserves to be made explicit by our educational systems in as much as it speaks to the "double sided" nature of our motivations. Take bullying: the bully bullies because in his own lived experience, encoded in his brain, is an experience that is similar in 'form' to the perceived behavior in the kid he wants to bully. This "form" is probably Stern's "forms of vitality" which, like in dance, music, poetry, can shift from modality to modality but still retain some affective and intentional significance.
The bully sees in his target 'weakness' - a weakness that "speaks to his own past"; being that humans are operating from this "view from nowhere" ala Tomasello, the brain performs a subtle acrobatics that only inference can disentangle; anger, or hatred, surreptitiously sneaks in front of the organizing shame of weakness; and since shame implies weakness and vulnerability, it would take something like anger - a dominant, assertive emotion - to flip the switch, and reverse ones social standing: dissociation is there not simply to keep the bad out; but to replace it with a fantasy of the "good".
Acting out our fantasies in ways like these is not surprising, but expected given what we know about the evolution of the human mind. Since the mind evolved to "know" what others think, it should not be surprising, but nay, should be totally expected, that an experience of shame is unconsciously converted by the brain into an experience of hatred, when another party who demonstrates or performs for your own eyes the same weakness and shame you could not tolerate to experience in yourself.
Social pain, as neuroscience has shown, is handled by the same areas of the brain that process physical pain. But unlike physical pain, social actors are constantly trying to buttress their self-esteems; behaviors that might elicit shame, or promote an idea of themselves as weak in the minds of others, are dissociated from perception (that is, they are not aware of this motivation). The behavior they enact is instead culled from the social world they want to be part of; and indeed, their unconsciousness of their own explicit need "to be a part" demonstrates the lack of frontal lobe development in the children, adolescents and teenagers (and unfortunately, adults) that developmental psychologists have highlighted.
Wednesday, 7 October 2015
Analyzing Thoughts
I'm having such wonderful insights into the nature of my morbid thoughts.
The morbid thought I refer to is the thought that obsesses over the sound of my voice.
What I find fascinating is how there appears to be two different parts to this puzzle: there's the bodily, affective arousal; and then there's this cognitive recognition. The recognition is a type of perception that senses into the bodily arousal; knowing it, and sensing that it represents something painful.
I am surviving, or allowing myself to function in the world, because I have been able to get rid of the cognitive recognition aspect, by focusing my mind on the bodily aspect of the total experience of self.
This difference is probably best encapsulated by what the psychologist Alan Fogels terms subjective emotional present and conceptual self awareness. When I am finding myself in a traumatic state of altered perception - that state where I find something 'wrong' in the sound of my own voice; and indeed, become hypnotically entranced by it - I can feel intense shame for sounding off; for failing to connect; and even worse, for perpetuating my experience by unwittingly enacting desperate efforts to string myself free from it. It fails; I fail, and then a 'secondary shame' follows, whereby I experience my "weirdness" in the presence of an interlocutor; amidst this is a a general intense bodily heat;a growing tension in the throat region; and strong sensations of activity within my temples. In all likelihood, the strong sensations of heavy blood flow I feel in my temples is the hypothesized "little seizure" activity that accompanies reliving traumatic experience. Makes a lot of sense to me, as when these types of experiences happen, I do indeed have trouble discriminating sounds in human conversation, as well as an overall sense of diminished ability to hear; also tending to change in proportion to the intensity of the arousal.
Somehow, the mind is able to 'sense into' the dynamic vitality forms of actuated experience. But it is combining different strands and different pieces of knowledge. I am using insights that have come from elsewhere; a sense of strangeness in the world - my own strangeness, or estrangement from others over the years. I discovered something deep in myself, in my suffering self, that was only discovered out of necessity: to survive, my mind needed to 'find' an equilibrium within me, or at least a possibility within a general ontological space. The world felt real not merely as a fact, but as a reality juxtaposed with nothingness: and that, the fear of nothingness, trumps all fears.
I cried and cried - but to whom? To God. To the ontological "other" that is responsible for this sorry fate of mine. To suffer because...of what? Because my mother suffered and dealt with the consequences by externalizing it against her child? But before I was wise enough to appreciate that fact, I had only the feelings of emptiness and fear, and the desperate need for an other to help and save me from the feared doom.
Doom is the overwhelming sense that played a part in building this feeling within me. I could not have come to feel such compassion, to know such awareness, without having been "stunned" into vital alertness to my environment. The evolutionarily ancient "amydgular" system raises consciousness - spurs consciousness, which for humans, supercharges this thing we call "consciousness". Fear builds it; Fear gives us access to possible ways of thinking that would otherwise be hidden in sight. It is not merely a qualitative thing, but something intimately related to a change in quantitative arousal. It is such an odd thing the way quantity and quality relate.
I had a good day; spoke to my teacher. Spoke loudly and assertively. Was relaxed, and most importantly, was relaxed to my relaxedness.
This condition I live within forces me to embed awareness within the thoughts I have. Every thought now needs a thought which can "stabilize" the former. In being with my teacher, I am clearly replaying my relationship with my sister, whom I've developed a particular 'relational function' with, or sense of my self in relation with, that gives me the confidence to proceed.
I do not know what I would do without Ashley. She is so obviously valuable, on a purely unconscious/neurological level; and this is why I need to "build some bridges" towards others, so that this way I feel most relaxed with, based on a person I will perhaps never be as close with (my sister) unless perhaps with a future spouse. In any case, there is a complexity to this situation in that I still have to keep at it, that is, building up an autoregulative faculty that can maintain itself independent of a particular outside other.
I am also clearly sensitive, as we all are, to energy changes. Late at night. Tiring day; a psychologically significant experience - conversation with my teacher, a woman in her late 30's (i'm guessing) and experiencing myself as a positive object for another. I say "object", just to convey that there is a particular pleasure in knowing that you are being experienced by another person in a positive way, and not a negative one. I thought I had this as a child, but obviously I didn't; my mothers BPD undermined my psychological growth, leaving me adapted to a strange environment (the one she created) which in turn spawned worlds of distortion that ultimately culminated in my various traumas (13, 15, 16). Now, in this wonderful conversation with another person, I find myself being a different version of me; some I actually do recognize, as "me", or at least a version of me whom others can know as "mike", when I know all too well there also exists another mike, another part of me, which I naturally fear: could you handle it? Could you still like me if you knew that that part existed?
Such thoughts jump about in my mind because they pertain to the all important issue of being liked. If humans didn't have a genetically ingrained need to be liked, developmental trauma wouldn't exist. But it does; and it does exist, because sociality evolved as a way to maintain "shared intentionality" between conspecifics. Thus, the breakdown in sociality - or the attunement of the caregiver to the infants mind - leads to a series of adaptations, by which I mean, mind-boggling biological complexity at the genetic, organelle, and cytoplasmic level, whereby the world 'out there' becomes internally mapped "in here". Every aspect of the metabolic processing of conscious experience is in the brain, in neurons, represented by something in physical form (proteins, lipids, sugars).
Because of this reality, human infants are at the whim of their caregivers; their future of being the jock everyone likes or the loner who eats lunch in the washroom is perhaps best conceived as a 'phenotype' 'built up' out of a complex medley of opposing meanings, shaping, displacing, and 'designing' the contours of personality.
So this is me? The one who suffers? The one who feels like crying when his mind is so disordered? So lost? So involved in a thought, an obsession, with a feeling of absence.
The loss of self is very much a loss of agency. When I can't hear my self in my voice, I sense that it's due to something more basic: a feeling of effectancy. I do not speak, or hear my self in my voice, because I do not want to speak. I speak, but hear in my own background, a censure, a conviction, that what is there is "wrong" or "unlikable".
At perhaps the deepest level there is something, thank lord, far more banal: inertia. I live it out by feeling so "meh". The dissociative, hypoaroused sense of relatedness to experience yields half-hearted attempts; and it is in these attempts that the 'absence' is heard, and hence, sensed as an ontological 'thing".
There is no thing. Never was. The self gets caught up in these thoughts because it 'thingifies' itself. The self-focus, the turn to conceptual-self awareness, speaks to this reality: when the self is looked at an held as an object, experience becomes performative - a thing to "do" - as opposed to the far more basic reality of "being", whereby I feel my aliveness and connectedness to the world and reality: this, the more natural and true state of human functioning.
That the mind can weave its ongoing experience into a sense of being that is more relaxed, by being more aware of the dynamics of bodily experience, while simultaneously "tuning" ones out breaths with a sense of "peacefulness" and wellbeing. This, I must say, is pretty existentially incredible.
The morbid thought I refer to is the thought that obsesses over the sound of my voice.
What I find fascinating is how there appears to be two different parts to this puzzle: there's the bodily, affective arousal; and then there's this cognitive recognition. The recognition is a type of perception that senses into the bodily arousal; knowing it, and sensing that it represents something painful.
I am surviving, or allowing myself to function in the world, because I have been able to get rid of the cognitive recognition aspect, by focusing my mind on the bodily aspect of the total experience of self.
This difference is probably best encapsulated by what the psychologist Alan Fogels terms subjective emotional present and conceptual self awareness. When I am finding myself in a traumatic state of altered perception - that state where I find something 'wrong' in the sound of my own voice; and indeed, become hypnotically entranced by it - I can feel intense shame for sounding off; for failing to connect; and even worse, for perpetuating my experience by unwittingly enacting desperate efforts to string myself free from it. It fails; I fail, and then a 'secondary shame' follows, whereby I experience my "weirdness" in the presence of an interlocutor; amidst this is a a general intense bodily heat;a growing tension in the throat region; and strong sensations of activity within my temples. In all likelihood, the strong sensations of heavy blood flow I feel in my temples is the hypothesized "little seizure" activity that accompanies reliving traumatic experience. Makes a lot of sense to me, as when these types of experiences happen, I do indeed have trouble discriminating sounds in human conversation, as well as an overall sense of diminished ability to hear; also tending to change in proportion to the intensity of the arousal.
Somehow, the mind is able to 'sense into' the dynamic vitality forms of actuated experience. But it is combining different strands and different pieces of knowledge. I am using insights that have come from elsewhere; a sense of strangeness in the world - my own strangeness, or estrangement from others over the years. I discovered something deep in myself, in my suffering self, that was only discovered out of necessity: to survive, my mind needed to 'find' an equilibrium within me, or at least a possibility within a general ontological space. The world felt real not merely as a fact, but as a reality juxtaposed with nothingness: and that, the fear of nothingness, trumps all fears.
I cried and cried - but to whom? To God. To the ontological "other" that is responsible for this sorry fate of mine. To suffer because...of what? Because my mother suffered and dealt with the consequences by externalizing it against her child? But before I was wise enough to appreciate that fact, I had only the feelings of emptiness and fear, and the desperate need for an other to help and save me from the feared doom.
Doom is the overwhelming sense that played a part in building this feeling within me. I could not have come to feel such compassion, to know such awareness, without having been "stunned" into vital alertness to my environment. The evolutionarily ancient "amydgular" system raises consciousness - spurs consciousness, which for humans, supercharges this thing we call "consciousness". Fear builds it; Fear gives us access to possible ways of thinking that would otherwise be hidden in sight. It is not merely a qualitative thing, but something intimately related to a change in quantitative arousal. It is such an odd thing the way quantity and quality relate.
I had a good day; spoke to my teacher. Spoke loudly and assertively. Was relaxed, and most importantly, was relaxed to my relaxedness.
This condition I live within forces me to embed awareness within the thoughts I have. Every thought now needs a thought which can "stabilize" the former. In being with my teacher, I am clearly replaying my relationship with my sister, whom I've developed a particular 'relational function' with, or sense of my self in relation with, that gives me the confidence to proceed.
I do not know what I would do without Ashley. She is so obviously valuable, on a purely unconscious/neurological level; and this is why I need to "build some bridges" towards others, so that this way I feel most relaxed with, based on a person I will perhaps never be as close with (my sister) unless perhaps with a future spouse. In any case, there is a complexity to this situation in that I still have to keep at it, that is, building up an autoregulative faculty that can maintain itself independent of a particular outside other.
I am also clearly sensitive, as we all are, to energy changes. Late at night. Tiring day; a psychologically significant experience - conversation with my teacher, a woman in her late 30's (i'm guessing) and experiencing myself as a positive object for another. I say "object", just to convey that there is a particular pleasure in knowing that you are being experienced by another person in a positive way, and not a negative one. I thought I had this as a child, but obviously I didn't; my mothers BPD undermined my psychological growth, leaving me adapted to a strange environment (the one she created) which in turn spawned worlds of distortion that ultimately culminated in my various traumas (13, 15, 16). Now, in this wonderful conversation with another person, I find myself being a different version of me; some I actually do recognize, as "me", or at least a version of me whom others can know as "mike", when I know all too well there also exists another mike, another part of me, which I naturally fear: could you handle it? Could you still like me if you knew that that part existed?
Such thoughts jump about in my mind because they pertain to the all important issue of being liked. If humans didn't have a genetically ingrained need to be liked, developmental trauma wouldn't exist. But it does; and it does exist, because sociality evolved as a way to maintain "shared intentionality" between conspecifics. Thus, the breakdown in sociality - or the attunement of the caregiver to the infants mind - leads to a series of adaptations, by which I mean, mind-boggling biological complexity at the genetic, organelle, and cytoplasmic level, whereby the world 'out there' becomes internally mapped "in here". Every aspect of the metabolic processing of conscious experience is in the brain, in neurons, represented by something in physical form (proteins, lipids, sugars).
Because of this reality, human infants are at the whim of their caregivers; their future of being the jock everyone likes or the loner who eats lunch in the washroom is perhaps best conceived as a 'phenotype' 'built up' out of a complex medley of opposing meanings, shaping, displacing, and 'designing' the contours of personality.
So this is me? The one who suffers? The one who feels like crying when his mind is so disordered? So lost? So involved in a thought, an obsession, with a feeling of absence.
The loss of self is very much a loss of agency. When I can't hear my self in my voice, I sense that it's due to something more basic: a feeling of effectancy. I do not speak, or hear my self in my voice, because I do not want to speak. I speak, but hear in my own background, a censure, a conviction, that what is there is "wrong" or "unlikable".
At perhaps the deepest level there is something, thank lord, far more banal: inertia. I live it out by feeling so "meh". The dissociative, hypoaroused sense of relatedness to experience yields half-hearted attempts; and it is in these attempts that the 'absence' is heard, and hence, sensed as an ontological 'thing".
There is no thing. Never was. The self gets caught up in these thoughts because it 'thingifies' itself. The self-focus, the turn to conceptual-self awareness, speaks to this reality: when the self is looked at an held as an object, experience becomes performative - a thing to "do" - as opposed to the far more basic reality of "being", whereby I feel my aliveness and connectedness to the world and reality: this, the more natural and true state of human functioning.
That the mind can weave its ongoing experience into a sense of being that is more relaxed, by being more aware of the dynamics of bodily experience, while simultaneously "tuning" ones out breaths with a sense of "peacefulness" and wellbeing. This, I must say, is pretty existentially incredible.
Tuesday, 6 October 2015
Helping Me See
I feel afraid...again. Why? Why should the next day torment me? I'm just going downtown. Just riding the bus...sharing the bus. And the you get up, walk a bit to another point; wait, get on a bus. Wait...possibly with another person nearby. Get up, off bus, walk, in station, down station, on subway, off subway, walk. Sit.
Just doing this, this exercise, I can feel in me a torrent of feelings. Why? Why are you afraid? Because of the weakness you feel? Because of the fears that arise - fear of more pain? More shame? To feel isolated, alone, and unable to cross the divide?
Those feelings, so real, so ME. It is me. A hurt me. A suffering me. Challenged. So different from other people, so focused in different ways; existentially aware. Constantly living in this zone of empathic awareness and understanding of others. Understanding - or sensing - meanings in actions, because actions, my actions, hold so much meaning for me.
I am me. An astronaut - someone who maintains an 'etheral' sense of relatedness with others. I read this. Explore this. Find in me these stirrings of conviction - of power - and yet side by side is this timid, feckless little boy. Curled up, eyes averted. Shaking with the awareness of watching eyes.
This is me -------> This character <--------, this reality, lived, embodied, known. I feel him because I am him. And yet I am not him, because here I am, talking of myself, holding myself, watching myself, and above all, understanding myself. This blessed capacity to know and suffuse experience with a feeling of lightness, calm, or a removed, silent awareness, piercing the darkness, as it were, its knowing.
The language and evocative imagery of chaos theory has meshed with my perceptual experience of myself. I am that which I want to change: my brain, the "stock" whose inflow/outflow's I must contort.
Repeat a behavior, because behavior is the flows, and the brain, and it's molecular micro-structure, is the stock that needs to be changed. Will 'silences' arousal. Calm. Focused, related. Faces all around, faces just like me, people - knowing as a being in their world - but not knowing the strangeness of it, or more magnificently, the awesomeness.
I am saved by Awe. Awe. It's as if compassion and awe are two sides of the same metaphysical coin, each giving reference to a different vantage point: Awe, reality, knowing you are a knowing knowing; looking around, and experiencing not mere static phenomena, but the dynamic interplay of mutually supporting realities. And compassion - for oneself - for the pangs of others.
I am not as compassionate a person as I like to think. I consistently pull away in interactions; when I pass by a homeless person, I look away; do I not care? Or am I more preoccupied with the social discomfort of talking with someone? I live in myself, away, and apart, a lot of the time. It's still with me, at this point.
But it's moving eastward. It's pulling. I'm growing, My mind is becoming more tolerant of certain realities. The shocks - of awareness - pumping into my mind with incredible force - I need to stay calm and aware of these experiences; experience them, note them, and letting them go - say "bye bye" - a little, loosen your mind, and the fear that cripples a sense of openness.
My brother frequently evokes out of me feelings of insecurity. A pompousness of sorts; not conscious, but embedded, or encoded within his personality, is the types of adaptations he has had to make at his job. The persons he works with - and their arrogance - trickles through in the form of his own attempts to survive in that environment; I see this mess in his mind, but he's mostly blind to it; or even worse, indifferent to it's presence. It is far easier just to "Be in the flow", live, in being, or rather, in the stereotypical narratives he ascribes to his day to day activities.
Because of this he can be removed; blank faced. I speak, and I see not merely a lack of response, but a resistance, or hesitance, directed at me, about me. I've had this underlying feeling that there exists between us feelings of mutual loathing, contained in 'self-states' that are not always present in our relationship, but which can be called into being by either of us, and when it enters, it typically drags the other one with it.
I've resisted these patterns, or at least I am trying to. But I still have to live with this person, with his distance, his tepid sense of intimate relatedness. And a deep, dower sense that my brother is to strongly on the dissociative side to ever really command the type of attentional focus needed to relate at a more compassionate level. There's two mutually enforcing drawbacks; his pride, or the degree of pleasure he gets in eliciting positive feedback for himself, something he's always felt naturally equipped to feel power in (thanks to his timing of birth i.e 6 years after me). And then there's his intense sensitivity to negative emotions; his mind dissociates them with tremendous fidelity; he can move between states with relative 'amnesia' for what he did before. He can persist in a silence, unable to communicate, stricken by alexythemia, I can talk forever, but inside his own mind, he cannot 'get over the upset' created by a powerful emotion. Not being a very compassionate person (or tending to be cynical) he cannot inspire himself to communicate openly. And, again, regardless of whatever health effect that accompanies his behaviors, it seems far too 'immaterial' - in his "mind" - to really strike him as simultaneously exerting a dysregulating force on energetic balance between systems in the brain and body.
Just doing this, this exercise, I can feel in me a torrent of feelings. Why? Why are you afraid? Because of the weakness you feel? Because of the fears that arise - fear of more pain? More shame? To feel isolated, alone, and unable to cross the divide?
Those feelings, so real, so ME. It is me. A hurt me. A suffering me. Challenged. So different from other people, so focused in different ways; existentially aware. Constantly living in this zone of empathic awareness and understanding of others. Understanding - or sensing - meanings in actions, because actions, my actions, hold so much meaning for me.
I am me. An astronaut - someone who maintains an 'etheral' sense of relatedness with others. I read this. Explore this. Find in me these stirrings of conviction - of power - and yet side by side is this timid, feckless little boy. Curled up, eyes averted. Shaking with the awareness of watching eyes.
This is me -------> This character <--------, this reality, lived, embodied, known. I feel him because I am him. And yet I am not him, because here I am, talking of myself, holding myself, watching myself, and above all, understanding myself. This blessed capacity to know and suffuse experience with a feeling of lightness, calm, or a removed, silent awareness, piercing the darkness, as it were, its knowing.
The language and evocative imagery of chaos theory has meshed with my perceptual experience of myself. I am that which I want to change: my brain, the "stock" whose inflow/outflow's I must contort.
Repeat a behavior, because behavior is the flows, and the brain, and it's molecular micro-structure, is the stock that needs to be changed. Will 'silences' arousal. Calm. Focused, related. Faces all around, faces just like me, people - knowing as a being in their world - but not knowing the strangeness of it, or more magnificently, the awesomeness.
I am saved by Awe. Awe. It's as if compassion and awe are two sides of the same metaphysical coin, each giving reference to a different vantage point: Awe, reality, knowing you are a knowing knowing; looking around, and experiencing not mere static phenomena, but the dynamic interplay of mutually supporting realities. And compassion - for oneself - for the pangs of others.
I am not as compassionate a person as I like to think. I consistently pull away in interactions; when I pass by a homeless person, I look away; do I not care? Or am I more preoccupied with the social discomfort of talking with someone? I live in myself, away, and apart, a lot of the time. It's still with me, at this point.
But it's moving eastward. It's pulling. I'm growing, My mind is becoming more tolerant of certain realities. The shocks - of awareness - pumping into my mind with incredible force - I need to stay calm and aware of these experiences; experience them, note them, and letting them go - say "bye bye" - a little, loosen your mind, and the fear that cripples a sense of openness.
My brother frequently evokes out of me feelings of insecurity. A pompousness of sorts; not conscious, but embedded, or encoded within his personality, is the types of adaptations he has had to make at his job. The persons he works with - and their arrogance - trickles through in the form of his own attempts to survive in that environment; I see this mess in his mind, but he's mostly blind to it; or even worse, indifferent to it's presence. It is far easier just to "Be in the flow", live, in being, or rather, in the stereotypical narratives he ascribes to his day to day activities.
Because of this he can be removed; blank faced. I speak, and I see not merely a lack of response, but a resistance, or hesitance, directed at me, about me. I've had this underlying feeling that there exists between us feelings of mutual loathing, contained in 'self-states' that are not always present in our relationship, but which can be called into being by either of us, and when it enters, it typically drags the other one with it.
I've resisted these patterns, or at least I am trying to. But I still have to live with this person, with his distance, his tepid sense of intimate relatedness. And a deep, dower sense that my brother is to strongly on the dissociative side to ever really command the type of attentional focus needed to relate at a more compassionate level. There's two mutually enforcing drawbacks; his pride, or the degree of pleasure he gets in eliciting positive feedback for himself, something he's always felt naturally equipped to feel power in (thanks to his timing of birth i.e 6 years after me). And then there's his intense sensitivity to negative emotions; his mind dissociates them with tremendous fidelity; he can move between states with relative 'amnesia' for what he did before. He can persist in a silence, unable to communicate, stricken by alexythemia, I can talk forever, but inside his own mind, he cannot 'get over the upset' created by a powerful emotion. Not being a very compassionate person (or tending to be cynical) he cannot inspire himself to communicate openly. And, again, regardless of whatever health effect that accompanies his behaviors, it seems far too 'immaterial' - in his "mind" - to really strike him as simultaneously exerting a dysregulating force on energetic balance between systems in the brain and body.
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