How do we know
what we are feeling, and what conclusions the feeling should make about
ourselves? While I work to help clients read their “felt sense” – Gendlin’s
term for our body’s emotional-and-meaning content – the fact is the body’s
ocean history is often too complicated to grasp solidly, delicately. Not always,
though. I’ve written about a man who’d “known” from childhood on that he wanted
to be a computer programmer, yet inexplicably, when the time came, he couldn’t
motivate to study. In his chest, not his insight, was the revelation: I don’t give
a damn about computers. I want my dad, who was a programmer, to approve of me,
love me. That was the truth felt sense that he had misconceived, for more than
twenty years, as passion for a kind of work.
But mostly our
stuff is too fuzzy, myriad, countless old layers, hodgepodge of recent, fused.
Right now my stupid mind says I should be pretty sanguine: I’m going to a
better job, my wife is working again and we will finally be sturdy, in our
sixties we are healthy, she’s made a beautiful apartment, we love each other in
strong but recondite ways, I write some bright pieces that posterity two years
after my death will appreciate.
Then again, we
have no savings – are terribly immature in that way; will be free to live more
interestingly only when my mother-in-law passes, which we don’t want; my wife
and I are part-distant, uncommunicative; my inner child was
injured and never grew; I can feel my organic passivity, possibly related to a birth-stage thyroid
problem or weeks in an incubator; I am too detached from the world, too much in
my head; my adult fuses bitterness, need, love and hate.
The usual.
With such a
mess of facts and their emotional chemistry, which we all are, we obviously have to make decisions about ourselves, for
ourselves, that take into account only a part of the depth. That is a continuum whose bleakest end is decisions that have nothing to do with one's heart, one's self. So we will feel dissociated or confused or uncertain, or dead in the water, or like impostors. We will necessarily have disenfranchised most feeling and replaced it with conviction, deciding, ideology,
following. I find this terrible: Human nature in the universe is a necessary
accident of living by disembodied thought. Our identity is a high school essay.
Let’s make the
most of it.
Just shooting off some thoughts. I know they have been said before, but maybe with different words or different emphasis. You are one of the very few who align therapy to the child within, most just see the dysfunction in the adult before them. Yes, it’s getting better, but so slowly. Hopefully one day they will teach how to be a [ human..... being ] in schools, especially just before adolescence, when earlier disjunctions re-emerge:
ReplyDeleteFor some children, over varying time spans depending on the family situational affectations they are in, loss of mother is equivalent to annihilation (i.e. death-like) and so traumatic loss of the internalised image of the mother-saviour. i.e. I am empty, an empty tin can. [No SELF]. It seems to me that depression, even in adulthood, is because some thought, or some feeling, has taken us back to one or more of these childhood incidents, and we re-experience those feelings of loss of the mother, emptiness, hopelessness, fear, dejection. Yes, we all carry the child we were and all its experiences deep within, or in implicit memory, barely conscious, but still operational.
But in good times, when mother IS there (physically AND mentally), and she is happy, and so I am in euphoria, and the world is a safe place, (and I might over-idealise at this point because life is so good!) (Anything opposite to that anxiety-raising feeling of annihilation must feel like I’m in heaven!!) No wonder the infant has mood swings as child and so - later as an adult!
As an adult, some academic “expert” might label the person as Bipolar, mood swings and all that. They analyse the “patient” as (say) Bipolar, and then the patient analyses him/herself as (say) Bipolar and then the whole team “process” the patient according to the labels the experts have put on them. Welcome to modern life!! ;)
We all survive, for good and for bad, with the wounded child within (though disconnected from). No, time does not alleviate the damaged core, because it has been scarred over by protective layers of repression (mental defences to annihilation), access is denied (without good therapy, or perhaps, self-regression).
I think academics should be treating the child within, not seeing a set of “symptoms” in the adult and labelling them with some kind of disorder. I think we all have that child within, it’s just that some were given reliable, consistent caregiving, and some were not. Between these two, lay the severity of the dysfunction.