Therapy

Hi, Mike, how are you?

I'm good, been doing good for most of the last few weeks, but I had a negative experience; or what wasn't completely negative but has nevertheless been interpreted by me as such.

So, what would you like to you talk about?

I always write when I feel bad.

Why is it you only write when you feel bad?

Because I do. It seems the most relevant at those times.

But its horrible, isn't it? Isn't it painful living like that?

It is. It's horrible, it's painful, but it is what it is.

Oh my gosh it can be so f*****g hard listening to that!

I know.

Why!!! Why must I inveterately oscillate between hell and heaven?! I can't f*****g take it. The oppositeness. How the f**k is it that the world works like this?

But thats how it is. You KNOW thats how it is. In your own words, its "loopy". You love that word: paradox. You can't get enough of it because it does something more than the mere absurdity we often attribute to it.

I know, I know. But it's still so painful, it's extreme. The power of the fear and the power of the shame. The one titillates into being the forcefulness of the other. Shame is that extreme terror, the only thing that lives up to the idea of the separateness of death: separation. Shame separates because it is a horrible, horrible emotion to experience and to see experienced by others. We are sensitive to the sight because all of us secretly abhor it. Our minds lift and turn and do maneuvers in remarkably clever ways to get us to avoid feeling shame. If it enters, we quickly project it away and find something, inevitably, to criticize in the other. Or, conversely, if you're like me, you introject it deep, deep within, into a part of you that just doesn't know: but FEARS IT TO THE CORE. You are in the GRIP of it, and the more you experience it, the more unable you become to get away from it. Each reexperience, every moment of relooping, builds ridiculous charges and feedbacks between observer and his observed shame; between the bodily catastrophe of a parasympathetically aroused nervous system, to the felt numbness in the mind of it's own body and emotions. While as thinker and observer, I feel the disconnect: I feel the tension. I feel the fear OF the fear. Its often the second thing, not the first, just as in the structure of our dialectical consciousness, which imposes meaning and creates the loop between subject and object, body and mind. It's the second error which offends.

So what do you do? Whats the only logical way out of such a conundrum?

I know but at times I don't know it. It aligns along a continuum, between fear and safety, where the former brings into being states of feedback between the experience of shame and the cognitive narrative I tell myself: you sound funny, you're sounding tense. There's something wrong with your voice; with your face: you have lots of pimples. You're short. You say 5'7 but you know its just 5'6 1/2, if even. And you cannot help but think about it. It always pops up when another guy - usually a taller guy, stands beside you. You look him up and down, might even stare at him deliberately, as if to say "Yeah, I'm smarter than you, what?"; the feeling is there, really, as the perception and emotional approach, you kind of did feel that way, you just didn't put into the words that makes it explicit and factual. These states are hard; fed by unconscious formulations of the world around you, which makes you feel bad and think, at a basic level: something is so very wrong. And the specific thoughts about height, voice, attractiveness, weight, and even intelligence (in comparison with others), are just elaborations of the general affective theme: I do not f*****g feel good. Sometimes, however, I feel good though, and implied in this state is 'safety'.

That's an important feeling. How do think about the feeling of safety?

It feels like an altogether different dimension of reality. It can sound so paltry to say: "emotion" or "feeling", although we often degrade it by speaking of it as such, the fact is all of reality unfolds in the trajectory of the quality of the emotion that is often accepted as "true" for the individual. And how do we get truth?

Development.

Yes, development. No one can control their f*****g development! It can seem like a game of luck. The wheel spins and you become the person born to so and so, and the woman who bore you felt such and such and thought this and that, and these emotions translated as hormones actually shaped your neurobiology in utero, creating what systems theorists call a "basin of attraction", a steady state guided by biological patterns of protein and genetic expression. When you're finally born, you can either be a big-freaking winner, borne to a woman who is a professional self-regulator, or you can be borne to a woman with "affect regulation difficulties", the anxious, paranoid, depressive, rageful, depressive and or dissociative type. Someone with this type of profile inevitably builds problems in the child which grows about her.

So you feel better to know that your mother shaped you in this way?

Yes. It does. It's important to know this. She wasn't completely horrible either, mind you. I am able to express emotions quite easily, actually. It's just that I can flip from intense joy to intense terror very easily. Clearly, obviously, there's a serotonin type issue but unfortunately artificially adjusting brain-chemistry only works in tandem with the power of suggestion. Trauma is too long-lasting, too united with "self-schemas", to be much affected by pharmacology alone. Fundamentally, you need an idea of psychodynamics as well. Because at this point, in growing up through this trauma your thoughts about yourself are deeply controlling and unwilling without self-persuasion to give up control of the mind and the body.

So you're on a road to increasing self knowledge, super-charging your frontal lobes, as it were?

Yes. What else can I do? How else can I expect to get better? I WANT to get better, it's all I think about it, and of course, I see that as also a big aspect of the problem. Yet, it's a working idea that is implicitly worked with; it has to be: I want change, therefore I have an idea of what I need to change i.e. my intense social phobia.

So this probably has to do with what you were saying before about paradox and how it helps you? Is this right?

Yes. Paradox. How can I even explain how it is that we can function as agents through a mind thoroughly conditioned by dozens of different implicit factors, contextual cues that exist apart from our conscious awareness, and yet control it by simply, it appears, by saying "no". No, do not think. No, do not go. This is what Ian Mcgilchrist argued that the left frontal lobes do. They simply regulate the flow of information picked up by our holistic right hemisphere. The right hemisphere by itself is just novelty detection. It's the left hemisphere which 'sets it straight', gives it something to focus upon in a way that subjectively felt emotion is felt as 'good' and comfortable.

I've noticed that as well. But how does this knowledge help you? What exactly do it give you?

Just knowing that I can say no is everything. I can say no to thinking or feeling a sort of way. But in its replacement, when fear is denied access and the mind is empty to free-associate, you're able to be spontaneous, to act, to feel. The trick is, you need to enter this "clear minded" state in order to feel the freedom to be, to enact spontaneity with an affective fullness that animates voice and body and facilitates communion with the other. It is absolutely impulsive: to be with others in a good way is mediated by an unconscious 'field' where your mind is emotionally 'tuned in' to the others mind. Two contrasting signals leads to a "mismatch" state where minds divert and feeling states for both individuals becomes off, with shame, competitiveness, jealousy or irritation. In this state everything the other does 'perturbs' the subject. The subject is completely beholden to the negative states of the other. Any imagined defense, say, "you're annoying, I hate you", is just that, a clever act of imagination for the subject, but in reality a necessary enactment to restore "good affect" for the organism. But it needn't be like this. There are beautiful states too.

Such as?

When people care for one another, you feel it. I feel it. Feeling as I do, shamed and demoralized and chastened by reality, I have become exquisitely conscious to and sensitive of the states of others. I see a face and in that face everything and anything salient to anything I've ever learned is brought to awareness, one by one, I assess probable realities and find myself 'charged' to be loving and compassionate for them. And yet, I often feel such intense angst for myself. I'm not always good at doing this, but with my mother in particular, especially when I am feeling 'good', my goodness seems to be contingent on being able to consciously attend to the true nature of things. I can't maintain good affect without it. My mind relies on true perception; things that are empirically validated, the fact, for example, that no human being is an island, that every human being has had something fundamental about them biased by the minds and actions of other human beings: mother, father, siblings, the dynamics of a core relationship, friends, school, work, etc. One can draw this out if all the information were ascertained. Perhaps, of course, we'd need to pay attention to the butterfly effect aspect of it. One very salient event could 'switch the course' of the entire system. Having a mother go through a major depression with suicide attempts at a time when I felt particularly vulnerable was such a catalyzing event. Yet, also notice, that "when I felt particularly vulnerable" is just a cliche term for "my whole life prior to my moms depression", where I was forced to tolerate the rage fits of a borderline personality; where my needs were ignored and my needs became all I had. This is why I'm such a hyper and compulsive person: my mom terrorized me just enough to make me anxious and needy; but loving enough to keep me from becoming dissociated from normal human emotion.

So you recognize that shes done a lot to help you?

Yes, she has. This is the whole thing, the 'raw deal', as they say, of being raised by a woman with borderline personality disorder: named such because they are 'borderline' psychotic. Not quite psychotic - they have enough sanity in them to appear quite normal. But inside lies a usually dissociated awareness that can be 'ignited' into being when a certain emotion arises. And when it arises, the person you knew before no longer exists: they scare living s**t out of you. If you had any emotion prior to that, for example, a proclivity to approach her and say what whatever was on your mind, now, you can't help but feel this inner "NO! DONT SPEAK, for the love of the living God, she is dangerous" sensation, that essentially builds up a huge "I can't speak" feeling. But of course, when she cools down and inevitably begins expressing love to you, you come close again: now you're excited, elated! What was denied and which you'd been pining for has been returned: how sensitive you become to goodness when you've tasted so much bad! So there you go, the source of my and perhaps many other "hyper-activity" disorders, which tends to be co-morbid with attention issues. And I had a s**t-load of them when I was a kid. I would have likely been put on ritalin or some other stimulant if that practice was popular in the late 80's and 90's. But, anyways, my point is, look at how predictable this all is: one action has a PREDICTABLE reaction. Baby reacts negatively to negative feedback; particularly an unjustified negative feedback. A crap load of negative feedbacks can shape personality dynamics in ways that "fit" with the personality of significant others, each exerting an effect that comes from some meaningful exchange in their dyadic history. So that explains much.

If your mother were here right now, what would you want to say to her?

I always want to 'say to her'. I live with her, and every time I have ever brought up the subject of development she doesn't want to hear of it: it doesn't mean anything to her. You know plinko? Well, all the rational possibilities are the parts where the plink piece doesn't fall. Her mind isn't built to attend to the world in that way, so that when I bring it up, I tend to encounter difficulties.

Like, in what sense do you mean "difficulties". Give me an example.

If shes feeling good, she'll perhaps attend and at the time, some information will 'seep' in, and at the time - at the time, I want to emphasize this point - she'll understand and listen and appreciate a novel piece of information.

And what about other times?

Other times it's impossible, and that only goes to show me how much more powerful, how much more habituated, how DEEP and still unreflected upon, her past traumas still are. She went through so much s**t herself: an abusive and narcissistic mother who essentially dictated rather than taught: no wonder her 3 children to one extent or another are all narcissists. They cannot tolerate being told what to think. Haha. Wonder the f**k why. And then you have the rape at age 8 by her cousin, which happened a few times, and which her own mother refused to acknowledge. Again, no wonder she gets so panicky and agitated when those 'feelings' come into her again. In her brain, and in her body, it's those times where she was violated and denied being listened to that are enacted. The 'core emotion' that I had to deal with as a baby, as a toddler, as a kid of 6 years old, 13, and upwards, was the abuse her mother and father had unleashed upon her. I am dealing with them via my mother. And oh, I do not know the larger story, so I can't explain why my grandmother was such a narcissistic (same situation, likely?) woman, why my grandfather was a narcissist, bully, and abuser (at times towards my mother). I cannot uncover any ultimate blame. There just doesn't seem to be any. All thats left, all that my human mind can fathom in this situation, is to be willing to accept it. And in that acceptance a weird emotion arises...

Compassion?

And gratitude, and a deep patience and love for the other. You realize the utter 'commonness' of being. Every creature is tied into the other. Every thought we have has an effect on the course of an action; and every action affects the self and others. If the whole 'life review' we hear about near death experiences is true, it's probably based on the scientific fact of intersubjectivity between human minds. Attachment theory has abundantly demonstrated this shouldn't be considered 'unscientific'. Its scientific, primarily, I think, because the body is such a predictable thing. Evolution works by adapting organisms to their environments; and like other organisms, humans, have a basic behavior schema. We don't like feeling bad, therefore we experience 'threat'; we like feeling good, therefore we experience 'attachment'. All the rest is the psychology and philosophy of human history.

Back to your mother. How do you live with her? Do you think being around can be "triggering" for you?

Yeah, and its hard. But I am getting better at it. Its like a game, in a way. I follow the details of my experience while I coach myself to pay attention to how I'm responding, what is happening, not to get 'taken in' by the personal details - the crapola - which ultimately leads to the horrible feelings and obsessions, but to stay open and relaxed. Which is hard.

How do you relax yourself? What do you think about?

I feel a sense of flow. I'm so amazed by this, how reality is ultimately process. We talk about 'things' when there are no things in reality, since all things are in constant motion. Were just not small enough to appreciate that trillions of individual cells are constantly at work within our body's. Hormones are being secreted, food is being digested, waste is being produced. And were aging, we moving closer and closer to the edge, to the moment of our non-existence, to the loss of the subject-object dichotomy we take to be fundamental - because we simply take it for granted in all that we do. I was at the mall, the other day, in fact, and I couldn't help but be drawn in to who each and every person I encountered "was".

And what did you see?

I saw from two perspectives. You need the two of them. You can't be clear minded when you feel emotions while you think; you need to consider both sides as equitably as you can. So I see a person here who is much taller than me - the issue I mentioned earlier, and then I start thinking, ok, he's wearing sandles in late December, in Canada, while it's -6 outside, but of course this is hollisters so he has to dress like a cool Californian dude. And I begin to think what this experience does to them: how are they affected by the images of themselves and each other in this environment? Day in and day out, working in a mall where everyone seems dressed to show themselves off to the other, where your  co-workers religiously do the same, and so do you: why? Because in consumerism world, everyone feels the need to 'fit' in, and to fit in a world which so blatantly favors beauty and things and products over a life of conscious denial: geeze, even saying that I feel like a loser. Who am I to 'complain'? But then I think, well, you've learned a lot Mike, these meta-facts about the mind and relationship, and the whole spiel about affect regulation and how the mind organizes itself does seem to be more important than the personal wish to just be and act without 'reflection' - an eww word that is only shat upon because it necessitates confronting emotions like shame: such as the shame people feel to reflect when others around them give them a weird look or do something at the sub-symbolic level to f**k with their feelings. Anyways, with that guy in the store, I also balanced my critique with the knowledge that he just didn't know any better. How can he be that way unless he found meaning in being that way? With that, I feel a sense of compassion for him, and by doing so take myself out of a similar - although somewhat justified - narcissistic musing about another persons 'inferiority' to me.

Do you feel yourself superior to other people?

In some ways, yes. But in the ways I call 'superior', I only mean that in reference to a feeling and understanding of reality that has been brought into focus because all I've had to suffer. The suffering is the real basis for the awareness. But I also want to reduce it, again, to the facts of a seemingly chance development. My betterness is relative and only in the sense of having a 'true knowledge' that feeling - that trite yet insurmountably fundamental force - is fundamental to the idea of "true knowledge". If you're feeling of the world is off, your thinking is off, your ability to empathize, to think about what you feel and what others feel, is off; you become self-absorbed, you become thing oriented; the fact of your death is dissociated because its uncomfortable and scary. You do this, unrealizing it at the time, that the fact of death is a very democratic fact: both you and that ugly person over there are equals in this department: you're both relative to the now. In 2100, you will both be dead, and, barring reincarnation, will never live to know the effects that your actions contributed to the future you bequeathed. So, I think my knowledge is true because it honor and pays attention to the fundamental cosmic facts, the facts that go beyond my personal existence, which live on as rudiment pings in the shaker of life. But deep superiority makes no sense because I've taken a fancy to each of us being a part of something universal, God, tao, source, whatever your metaphor or way of interpreting it, I see a continuity, mysterious yet everywhere implied, in the way inner and outer are structurally 'tied to one another'.

Ok, Mike, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but that's all for today. I'd really love to hear more about this and I want to take about what we can do next time to get you passed this 'logjam' you feel yourself to be in.

Ok, thanks.