Onward and upward: Beyond our self and the world

A person can be born in trauma (soaked in mother’s depressive chemistry, ripped out by caesarian, shut away in an incubator); have no bonding; grow up out of sync with his age, with his peers, with life; repress and lose his feeling core and real self in his childhood; live an anxious dissociated then manufactured persona; grow a warped ideational field that covers just about everything; live an ambition or a momentum that is entirely non-real – not based in a core organic person who never existed.

And we will find him a normal, standard-issue person, like you or me. He may feel something wrong, but it won’t stop him from moving about in some mundane direction, and he won’t know it’s this wrong which is getting in his way. Or he may be bizarre or berserk or personality disordered or a comedian. But still, we’ll think this is just a person with flaws, a guy with some challenges.

He could be a malignant demon, and be Mr. Rogers.

What keeps us unreally stable is our mind, which lies on a bed of repression. Picture this simple fact: Assuming we are troubled anywhere close to the person described: If we lived only our feelings, were lost and mutantly made as can possibly be, we would be a ball of acid on fire, rolling like the apex of torture crazily through a hellish life. It is thinking and ideas and mental attachment that create the anesthetizing, counterbalancing stability for us. Pain and loss become “understood.” A completely absent sense of self (and self-esteem) is replaced by belief or hope or narcissism, or by perceiving – our cognitive eyes – the outer world not the inner one. A sense of never having been fully human (Modrow’s* idea about the disintegration leading to schizophrenia) is saved by delusional ideas. Serial or seamless tortures in childhood are Band-aided by inspirational sayings or crusades or by having the identity of PTSD.

The mind of thought and word comes in to give us a false stage, a dream that seems real. And a bonus value: Thought makes us feel mastery, feel powerful. We’re now in a place different from our pain, from our roots, from the rolling ball. The thought occurs that this deception is related to the phenomeno­log­ical problem: our adherence to a universe of surfaces, of appearance, with no capacity to know the essence. But it’s only a parallel, that we live an illusion of ourselves and see and think only an illusion of the world. There is little choice about the first, none about the second.

Psychotherapy, on this plane, helps us find some happiness or peace by mixing our need for the self-medication of thought with our need for organic feeling in a way that “works” for each person. It doesn’t know how it accomplishes this (and probably most often doesn’t know that it accomplishes this). Our work is noble and blind.

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* One of my favorite books, John Modrow’s How To Become a Schizophrenic, quoted elsewhere in this blog.