Trauma, Defense
Putting this in philosophy of mind because not sure what else to put it.
I recently had a difficult (though ultimately positive) LSD trip. Afterwards, I talked about it with my therapist, who told me much of it reminded him of a Jungian psychologist named Donald Kalsched who had done a lot of work on trauma and archetypal self-defense systems. I've only read a few pages of his book The Inner World of Trauma , but I'm already blown away. Immediate recognition. And a sense of relief that it's not just me. Wondering if anyone else is familiar with this kind of thing? Here are a few screencaps from the intro.
I recently had a difficult (though ultimately positive) LSD trip. Afterwards, I talked about it with my therapist, who told me much of it reminded him of a Jungian psychologist named Donald Kalsched who had done a lot of work on trauma and archetypal self-defense systems. I've only read a few pages of his book The Inner World of Trauma , but I'm already blown away. Immediate recognition. And a sense of relief that it's not just me. Wondering if anyone else is familiar with this kind of thing? Here are a few screencaps from the intro.
Comments (76)
It's interesting to note that the author describes this as a "schizoid" personality. One of which I nourish one these very forums.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/233444
Get out of yer head. The secret, and truth is of course, is that due to all of the day dreaming, body is all bound together and twisted, and if only you could stay present long enough, you might start to notice all of the arches and pains you ignore and shut out, like you do with all pain.
You strike me as being capable of a lot, I hope that you don't ruin it with drugs. The best stuff is subtle, and difficult to perceive, but there for everyone. It isn't grand extremely stimulating experiences.
I think I'm about to devour his books. From what I understand, the one this is taken from, The Inner World of Trauma, is essentially an attempt to create a portrait of these types of defense systems, as well as to sketch how they are born and develop. He has a later book, Trauma & the Soul which I believe deals much more with growing out of them. Though part of me is also reluctant to read too much - because this is so spot on , and part of my 'daimon' is intellectualizing - and so rendering neutral - things that could help me.
That's interesting. I take an approach towards treating trauma tantamount to the appearance of psychosis, though from an external and not internal event. Psychosis is, in essence, a trauma of the mind. But, to return to the topic... I think that trauma is a severe event in one's life that leads to the retardation of the development of one's psyche. The mind cannot cope with trauma and is, so to speak, stuck in the event. Defence mechanisms then manifest and are treated with significance wrt. to that very trauma.
When you say:
'The secret, and truth is of course, is that due to all of the day dreaming, body is all bound together and twisted, and if only you could stay present long enough, you might start to notice all of the arches and pains you ignore and shut out, like you do with all pain.'
I agree, wholeheartedly. But there's a middle step missing - how to stay present.
Thank you, I appreciate that. I also think, though, that psychedelics are useful in reasonable doses, in safe environments. Opening the valves a bit, if they've been closed up too tight - but not too much, which could overwhelm.
I think that's spot on. Kalsched's take is that the type of defence he's talking about is a double-trauma. First there is the external event. The creation of the archetypes happens as a defence against external trauma, and does so by creating a kind of internal trauma, a secondary trauma so to speak.
I wonder though, to entertain a more positivistic aspect of the issue. What is required to "emerge" from this "stuck in reverse or neutral" aspect of trauma? As you've tried, LSD can bring about change in terms of addressing the issue through circumventing the hardwired defence mechanism that is stuck in neutral or reverse. I can't take LSD, and as a person suffering from psychosis in terms of schizophrenia or psychotic disorder, and contradicted too...
I've tried many therapies; but, am unsure what could possibly work for the issue. It's a difficult issue.
Kudos for the breakthrough experience though.
To post more philosophically. I think rationality is a useful tool here. One can "listen" to what reason has to say and grow out of it, so to speak. The mind obviously always doesn't listen to rationality though.
I sometimes think that a big part of recovery is just becoming comfortable with the reality of one's experience and situation, and the limits and possibilities that situation entails. That takes a lot of courage, I think. Sometimes the need for an 'escape' is part of the problem itself.
I agree about rationality. It's a useful grounding tool.
I think, that trust is an issue for any person who has experienced trauma. Even (or especially) a schizophrenic experiences trust issues. Trust is such an important feature of humanity.
Quoting csalisbury
Yeah, my previous therapist put the onus on me to get better. He basically told me that I have to want to get better to get better. Difficult shit.
Quoting csalisbury
Certainly. I think, the problem with recovery is developing the idea, that there's something fundamentally wrong with you that needs changing. It ain't easy admitting to yourself that something is wrong. We all wish we were infallible and competent beings.
Quoting csalisbury
What else do you think about that? I think rationality is severely underappreciated.
I dunno, you're right, may not be helpful, and I don't have like ideas to offer, more than allusions, and practices. See, we understand others by mirroring them with the motor cortex, and that doesn't work so well when you aren't open and flexible (and the darkness is frightening). The ideas, or characteristic narrative that you inherit will just play in the mind in the back ground as a consequence of attaining the human form.
When people hurt you, you of course close off to people... I dunno man, I just got saved... by the most ridiculously convenient coincidence ever. To somehow distrust and hate everyone enough to be within a millimeter away from absolute certainty of their nonsense wrongness, and then I submitted to the essence of what all of the representations point to, without realizing that for the majority of the time that I was doing it.
Agreed. My biggest obstacle in life has been my inability to trust, as well as to feel myself trustworthy. Trust is the bedrock of community, and I think community is the bedrock of human wellbeing. It makes sense, having been traumatized, not to give out trust to whomever comes along. But eventually that also becomes isolating. Whenever I see someone new to the boards posting, despondently, about solipsism my gut-reaction is that this is someone who has been deprived of someone to trust and is looking less for philosophical engagement, than reassurance that there is no outside world (as well, probably, for some savior figure to help them reestablish that outside world.)
Quoting Wallows
That's a tough one. For a long time I've been preoccupied by the paradox of grace. The idea is that grace is always there if you can open yourself up to it. But if the state of being devoid of grace is the inability to open oneself to grace - then how can grace get in?
In less theological terms : if you need help, but what you need help for is not being able to receive help, how do you get help?
That's the sticky part when the mind starts whirring about this stuff - but in practical terms:
It sounds like your therapist was getting frustrated not with you but with your defense mechanisms. That's a human reaction, and understandable, but a therapist, in his professional capacity, should never place the blame on the person coming for help. If there's a roadblock, its not because the person doesn't want to get better, but because their defenses are keeping them safe. That's why I find Kalsched's approach so refreshing. He identifies this problem, and sees the complexity behind it - rather than reducing it simply to some form of obstinance.
Imagine a child therapist, trying to help a child who has been abused, a child who keeps growing shy and silent, or playing games to keep the therapist at bay. And imagine that therapist accusing that child of not wanting to get better. In these terms, there's obviously something amiss. But when a traumatized adult goes to therapy, the part looking for help is quite childlike. And its just as confused to accuse that person of denying help.
Quoting Wallows
I think rationality is underappreciated in certain quarters, overappreciated in some. I like the image in the Inferno where Virgil (the embodiment of rationality) is necessary for getting Dante through hell, yet can't cross the boundary into purgatory. I think there's a moment in spiritual and mental growth where rationality has to take a background role. But I think, before that, its an incredibly powerful tool for remaining grounded in the midst of personal suffering.
Yes, it does sound very religious. To want to get help entails that one admits that one needs help. That seems like the biggest obstacle to overcome in terms of therapy.
Quoting csalisbury
Perhaps, rationalizations and intellectualization is the biggest obstacle here. One can fantasize away about what kind of help one needs or doesn't need away.
Quoting csalisbury
My therapist did that. He placed the onus on me to get better, which is understandable; but, leads to nothing but despair and hopelessness.
Quoting csalisbury
Said like a prophet.
Quoting csalisbury
Two-edged sword here. Who knows what is the issue? The patient only in some regards. There's only so much a therapist can do.
Quoting csalisbury
Quoting csalisbury
Please expand!
I see this was added. What's your take on solipsism. Surely, one cannot become a solipsist with regards to their own mother. Maybe had you been adopted, that might have been a comforting belief to profess.
That's true. I take some comfort in the fact that Kalsched's book is based only partially on his studies, but equally (if not more so) on his own therapeutic experiences, listening to his patients. He's trying to describe a similar feature he's seen in many of his patients. If you like, he's working inductively, rather than deductively. But i agree that, in the end, it always boils down to the particular therapeutic relationship. But in Kalsched's defense, the only way of imparting knowledge gained from the world is to generalize. And he himself is very cognizant of how one has to move from generalities to the particular case.
I'm not sure if I can here. I think there is an extent to which rationality - in terms of spiritual and mental growth - is a sort of mediating container. And I think that's a fine thing! But i think that ultimately it's a ladder that ---shouldn't be kicked away, exactly, but should be seen as a ladder.
My take on solipsism is that its less a philosophical issue than an emotional one (there are no canonical philosophers who were solipsists, as far as I know.) But an emotional one susceptible to philosophical rationalization. I think you're on to something with adoption. My sense is that its something someone with any sort of attachment issue is susceptible to, and those who were adopted are particuarly vulnerable. But I think it can develop for anyone with any sort of attachment difficulty, including people who were raised by their biological parents.
That's awesome - I'm very much a believer in the reality of grace, and that it can visit itself upon people in many different ways. I don't want to project too much of my own beliefs onto your experience, but it sounds like one of those awakenings which fascinate me and which I am sometimes envious of.
I agree that its a matter of being opening and flexible - I guess that, for whatever reason, there are different paths different people have to take to get there.
What I particularly like is the way he does not speak from on high; he excludes neither himself nor 'the professionals' from the traumatised.
Quoting All sight
This is the great difficulty, that the world one wants to reach is the world one fled from. To live is to be vulnerable, and having been hurt, one recoils from vulnerability even as one feels the hurt of isolation.
So I am seeking an end to isolation, but I have 'trust issues', because I have been hurt before. People who should have cared for me did not, and so, before I trust my friend, my lover, my therapist with the infinite depth of my vulnerability, I want to be certain of their love. But the tragedy is that love is like a rope, the only way to test its breaking point is to break it. Don't do it! Every relationship has a breaking point, and every time I find it, it confirms that no one can be trusted. Hold on, indeed, to all the broken ropes, add whatever thread you can, and thus I'll get by with a little help from my friends.
I had a similar experience on salvia, in which this inner demon was revealed as a pontificating coward and a scared parasite. The obsessive self mockery, abuse and violent intrusive thoughts that characterise my 'second thoughts' were revealed as a coping mechanism to put the world at a distance, due to fear of dependency developed from growing up in an abusive household with traumatised adults (polygamous cult of personality made out of mostly mentally ill people). I self distanced to the extent that I used to feel incredibly exposed whenever someone intuited anything about my mental state or preferences, even if it was just that I was having a good day, or a bad one. Constant stoicism as an affectation to cover the vulnerabilities of a mind warped around unstable attachments.
Eventually this distancing somatized and I developed dissociative disorder; giving me absence seizures, but more recently I've been sufficiently connected to myself (as a result of two talented therapists) to fully develop the intrusive thoughts and trigger scenarios of PTSD, so finally I'm getting effective treatment rather than addressing symptomatic comorbidities (depression, anxiety, dissociative disorder and hallucinations).
I had a therapist red face yelling at me over the summer, and display an almost disgust at my level of vulnerability. People don't pity me when I walk in the room either, particularly not mediocre frumpy men. He's lucky he was through a tv sceen. I just had a big manic break down, and needed a doctors note for work for a little time off. He wanted to medicate me, even though I was not at that time manic, and I pretty much told him that I didn't think that he knew how to help me, but I needed the diagnosis, so he told me that if I didn't agree to do what he told me, then I didn't have bi-polar, or a medical issue, even though he just got down telling me that I did. So I told him that he was being unfair and unreasonable, as not agreeing to his treatment doesn't mean I no longer have it, obviously. Then he got all super pissed off, so I told him he was an arrogant prick and left basically.
Exactly. This has been what has most hamstrung me in both therapeutic and romantic relationships. There's something to if of that thing Sartre says about vertigo - about how the fear isn't of the heights but of ones freedom to throw oneself of the edge. So the distrust of the other person is equally the distrust of myself.
Edgar Allen Poe wrote about the 'imp of the perverse.'
"Induction, a posteriori, would have brought phrenology to admit, as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term[...] Through its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable, but, in fact, there is none more strong. "
The language, admittedly, has the distinctive ring of the pseudo-scientific charlatan, but.... he gives an interesting example, one that is almost a commentary on his style itself:
"There lives no man who at some period has not been tormented, for example, by an earnest desire to tantalize a listener by circumlocution. The speaker is aware that he displeases; he has every intention to please, he is usually curt, precise, and clear, the most laconic and luminous language is struggling for utterance upon his tongue, it is only with difficulty that he restrains himself from giving it flow; he dreads and deprecates the anger of him whom he addresses; yet, the thought strikes him, that by certain involutions and parentheses this anger may be engendered. That single thought is enough. The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, and the longing (to the deep regret and mortification of the speaker, and in defiance of all consequences) is indulged."
That's one of the thorny aspects of the 'repetition compulsion' that stems from trauma - how conscious attempts to circumvent it often up being the very thing repeating it.
I feel like somehow it all comes down to the inability to remain with silence. Especially in the presence of another.
i had a weird lsd experience last night. very fluid sense of space, room shifting around a lot. whenever i would go to the bathroom, it would shift around and become a different, realer bathroom. there was a malevolent presence behind me. the door became ajar, with white light.
i was very young.
what kept happening was a struggle to be older. it was like the malevolent presence needed me to be young. i would feel myself becoming older and taller, and more present to the room. it was like i could leave through the door by doing nothing but simply standing self-assertively in the room as if to disregard the presence.
i wasnt scared of the presence, and i remember feeling like i knew this scenario and room, and had been scared in the past. however i wasnt able to fully go through with the whole scene because dan was tripping too and i felt weird about being in the bathroom too long. that was kind of frustrating.
i feel like the malevolent presence is somehow tied to philosophy and intellectualizing.
i remember the feeling was close to a master/slave thing. there was something to it of being a kid in time out and angry, and like my anger was externalized and it was a faustian deal almost like : if you are quiet and dont mess with me, ill take control and protect you.
the thing is we put on a record after and played music and there was some relinquishing of control and it felt like the music was working on me and unthawing me, in a way thats difficult to explain. in some ways like a spiritual and emptional massaging out of knots. Memories would pop up as if released. and these feelings that were bodily and emptional at the same time. it only went so far, and i drifted out of it as i came down. i feel like thats the closest ive come to confronting the core of my self-defense, but im also disappointed the confrontration feels incomplete and interrupted.
I can relate to a lot of what you describe, especially the parasitic aspect. I was particuarly bothered, as a kid, by certain representations of parasitism (in cartoons, in the game parasite eve etc). The reasons for that feeling are starting to make more sense now.
I've also had the experience, especially at work, of being very uncomfortable with the idea that people around me can tell something about what I'm feeling, also to the point where I sometimes dissociate. I work as a dispatcher, and I've had times where I've dispatched calls while being entirely unaware of what I'm doing, and suddenly snapping back. One of the weird things for me has been that, on the phone, I often rely on an automatic 'persona' which is laid-back and friendly, and I've had drivers develop a warmness toward me which has at times been really confusing.
Kudos on finding effective treatment - I feel like I'm getting closer myself (in terms of finding the core issue, rather than (mis)treating the symptoms) but its still early for me.
Yeah, I think scrupulosity stems from a similar place. Have you read much about Luther?
It sounds like a difficult experience, but I do want to challenge the way you've framed it.
You say first that his response stemmed from a disgust at your vulnerability.
But then you say this:
That sounds less like disgust with vulnerability and more like frustration with the invulnerability that accompanies willful self-assertion. I've also noticed that those in the psychiatric field respond strongly to any pushback from their clients, so I'm not taking his side. Willfull self-assertion is often necessary and its important to advocate for oneself. Nevertheless, there are two different accounts in your post of what sparked his response.
Erik Erickson's book. Did he have it?
I don't know much about Erikson. From what little I know, I think the conversation in this thread corresponds most to his shame/autonomy stage. Did Erikson talk about Luther?
Erickson wrote a book about him: Young Man Luther. It's pretty good.
I like this interpretation. It helps me make sense of what is going on. Maybe I've misread some of these threads as a kind of game of concepts driven by the imp of the perverse. 'Prove to me that you are there.' 'Prove to me that I exist.' Then the perverse solipsist can neutralize all of the usual retorts with a kind of stubborn cleverness. In some ways it's trollish. It pokes the bear. In other ways it's the parade of vigilance. Belief is vulnerability is sin.
I would add recognition to the reassurance sought. The denial of the outside world asks the outside world to admire and confirm it. For me this relates to what is questionable about the alienated and isolated 'I.' It is always already directed outward toward the world of the we. It speaks the language of the world and the we in the possession of/as its utmost and ownmost secret 'self.'
But I should also be fair to the experience of isolation. One can wrestle with the most terrible thoughts and feelings while others are smiling and playing outside the window.
This makes sense to me. I can't look at the other as a machine to be fixed, even if that is part of the situation. There is a religious aspect of friendship that I have in mind connected to forgiveness of sin. I think I would find it off-putting if a therapist presented a kind of above-it-all invulnerability. On the other hand, that may be exactly what a client wants him or her to project.
But I can imagine highly intelligent and critically minded clients seeing only confirmation of their general sense of the world as a stage of fakers in such a pose. To be above it and invulnerable is to longer be humanly present. Theories might be great, but maybe a certain kind of client wants exactly some kind of genuine connection, even if this connection is muddied by commerce. Perhaps a good therapist isn't really doing it for the money (while still needing to make a living.)
Neither was actually what I figured set him off, it was because I am of the poor and casually swear a lot, and I said that he was being "effing unreasonable", and he interpreted the swearing as aggression, and responded by getting red faced and yelling.
I had spoken twice to him, that was the second time, the first time for like a hour, and the second for maybe ten minutes. It was the first discussion, in which I went over my experiences, including gender issues and stuff where his disgust was apparent to me. I could also, and still be wrong about that interpretation, but you read more into what I said than what was available.
Yeah, this was me my first couple years of therapy. I imagine I was very frustrating to work with. I had a theory of what was ailing me. I think the idea I had was that the point of therapy was to 'say' what the problem was. Once it was said, brought to light, the therapist would be able to produce an instantaneous cure. I would rigidly control the process because I thought the therapist would be liable to go down the wrong path, and so take us away from the moment where all would be revealed and the cure would descend.
I think what was really happening is that what I saw as 'dead ends' or inessential avenues were in fact questions about stuff that I wasnt able to fit into my neat theory. In other words they were threatening. They threatened the idea that I could get better without confrontation.
That was the first phase. In the second phase (which I'm not totally free of) I was aware that this was the problem. Instead of dismissal of difficult questions I would 'dissociate.' My mind would literally go blank - or, not quite. All I would be aware of was the other persons presence as somehow requiring something of me that I could not give. It was like being spiritually hunched over in front of another. It was protective and entirely isolating. I would also find that if I tried to talk, I would be talking in the 'fake' voice from the first phase. In other words, I'd be trying to manage the process from a distance - not lying exactly - I tried to explain it as 'lying by telling the truth.' It was - and still sometimes is - a double bind. Either remain hunched and silent or try to talk and tell 'lies'. The feeling was frustration and anger. and despair. I felt like this was a prison I was trapped in that couldnt be conveyed. I tried to describe it as being like the astronaut in 2001 with HAL making sure i couldnt escape. part of what I like about the Kalsched quote from the OP is feeling like someone beyond me understands. It deprives 'hal' of his pretensions to invisibility and omnipotence.
I still fall back into both phases sometime. I'm not sure whats changed so that sometimes I move past these defenses. Which is probably good. Im not sure I want to 'know'
Quoting sign
is at the heart of it, what lets you move beyond. I remember at one point while i was deep in 'phase ii' geting drunk and scribbling down 'god cant forgive what he doesnt understand'
What i think i was missing is the hubris in thinking that 'god' wouldnt understand my suffering and 'sin'. It was really me saying - 'i can still hide what i need to' camoflauged as an anger at being failed by others
If you put yourself in his position, he was being asked to furnish an official diagnosis to others, while also being asked to disregard the steps he was supposed to take in his official capacity when giving this diagnosis. Whatever you believe about the merits of psychiatric medicine, he was being put in a position where he was effectively being asked to do something not-allowed for which he could be held responsible. If he provided the note, freeing you of work-obligations, he himself was obligated to provide the officially mandated treatment.
Now that might be a structural issue with institutional psychiatry. it may be - and i think i agree that it is - an artificial problem which shouldnt exist in the first place. But just as you were in a difficult, frustrating position and responded with anger, so did he. Thats human.
But what do you make of the situation? again like un said, the more we seek confirmation of the untrustwothiness of others the more we'll find it. You talk about how he was disgusted with your vulnerability - but were you respectful of his?
Well a shrink whose breaking point is anything said by a client needs to get another job; they are a menace. I don't want to make a judgement at this distance, and based on one side of the story, because sometimes an emotional response is what is required. But on the face of it, it doesn't sound very therapeutic.
Quoting csalisbury
That's an unfair question to put to the client. Client - therapist is not an equal relationship, and whatever the failings of the client may be, they do not excuse the failings of the therapist. I would say, in general, that disgust and anger are defences against vulnerability. The therapist needs to be vulnerable, but also able to maintain himself in his vulnerability, and not defend by projecting.
The first time I was hopsitalized I was 19. I was working at an island resort in Maine. It was an island on a pond, accessible only by a 'ferry' which was basically just a raft with a dinky motor. Rich non-mainers owned houses on the island. They would all contribute to a island fund. They would summer for a few weeks, and we would make the food, wait on them, upkeep the island etc. while living there in a cabin (two cabins, to be exact - one for boys, one for girls.) The first week of work was the week before everyone arrived. It was cleaning-up and getting everything ready. I had just finished my first year of college and was severely depressed. I had taken the job because it had been offered to me, and because it was conveyed to me that this was a good opportunity (a lot of local 'kids' before me had made 'connections' doing this job. That was kind of part of it. It was part of the culture of it. But more than that, I felt responsible to my mom - that I needed to prove I could do a job, that other parents kids were doing - that I could do a job like anyone else.
But I was severely depressed. The first week I could barely keep it together. At the end of every week, we could go home for a couple days. I did, and wrestled with the idea of suicide. I made a noose out of wire, which was less a real possibility of escape than something I used to contemplate suicide as something real and external, and my mom found it. Maybe I wanted her to? I don't remember that, but it would make sense.
Anyway - she found it, I was hospitalized. I was pissed. Because I knew I was going to miss work - and even though maybe that was the point, I still was mad. The head of the psych-unit was an authoritative presence. He was big and confident and used to having things done as he said they ought to be done. i hated him. He had a star trek ring tone on his cellphone that I hated. One time, in a meeting with me and my parents, it rang - and you could see him waiting for the effect to register, as though he wanted people to see that he had a quirky or nerdy side. At least I remember it that way.
I hated him a lot. Patients would talk about him in glowing, thankful terms - about how he'd convinced them to get shock therapy and they had resisted, but then acquiesced, and were now thankful. I thought of him as being an aggressive alpha personality with a stable of passive broken people over whom he could exert his will. He talked to my parents once, in one of our meetings, about a big celebration he was going to. I remember thinking that this was a guy who had two sides - the lovable, nerdy, star-trek ring-toned'd guy in public, and how he was able to maintain this by his shadow-life where he was discharge his desire for dominance over patients.
I denied everything. I was not depressed, I was not suicidal. I didn't say it, but I certainly tried to convey that I was smarter and more willful than him. I made little comics with names like ' dr mountebank and the nostrums' which were about him and his medicine.
He told my parents, with me there, that if I didn't change my behavior, that I was an idiot. He has an aide there too who explained, in less aggressive terms, that there exists a kind of mental-forest that some sick people go into. That, without medicine and adherence to the process, I would keep going into the forest. And that each time, I would come back more sick.
This was also my awakening to the overlap of psychiatry and poverty. I realized that most of the people there were simply living live in pure chaos, and that there responses, their breakdowns, were - if not 'rational' then at least understandable in terms of something other than deficient brain chemistry. This was a hard thing that stuck with me - because it seemed to me that there was no safety net ultimately - that if you lost control, you had no guarantee that you wouldn't wind up simply in the grasps of someone for whom control was more important than healing. And that maybe this was basically the ultimate structure of things.
So I fought him every step of the way. I never conceded.
And then eventually, I got to go.
I actually have no moral to this story. I thought one might come up as I wrote it out, but I got nothing.
Beautiful. What comes to my mind is something like authenticity as being in touch with always being still a sinner and a fool to some degree. God has to be a sinner and a fool to understand. Only a sinner and a fool can understand a sinner and a fool from the inside. A friend as true friend is an unfinished sinner-fool or only half-wise listening. Love-trust-hope builds a bridge from the undecided to the undecided. I feel that you know what I'm getting at, but I will add for others that I don't understand all this 'love' talk in terms of determinate metaphysical entities arranged in some quasi-geometric proof. The 'opened-ness' I have in mind is 'behind' or 'beneath' the signs, near the place of their genesis and reception (which I nevertheless can only point to with signs.)
That's a pretty great description of Hell. I've been there. In some ways not being able to say it is the very heart of its darkness. The flow outward is damned up. One understands oneself as a disease that should not be spread in the worst phase. But one believes in this darkness, that one has seen the truth. So one protects others from this terrible truth. Or (maybe at the heart of the heart of the darkness) one thinks of oneself as purely crazy, afflicted not by the truth but the fantasy of a dark truth. I'm almost afraid to summon it to memory. Let's just say that it's amazing how disgusting and obscene existence can seem or be for certain states of mind. One maybe ever experiences a wonder along with it, that it could all be so disgusting and perverse. 'Implosion' and black holes come to mind. The world becomes a hollowed-out stupid skit, oblivious to its own nullity. Of course death appears as a sweet release. Suicide beckons to such a state of mind as the only heroic and/or rational act available.
To me one of the strange things is that a person can be mostly happy and yet still unexpectedly dragged into this darkness, surviving it and returning to be happier than most even. This helps me make sense of the some of the great musicians who committed suicide. Good music comes from ecstasy, from being happier than most. But probably sensitivity is two-edged. Heights and depths come together perhaps.
Donald Kalsched interview.
So the psychological response to trauma is a defensive splitting, and the divided selves are mutually antagonistic. As long as this condition is bearable and functional, why indeed upset it? But when it comes to fashioning nooses, or what-have-you, it is clearly not bearable and functional any more. To care is to be vulnerable, whether one cares about oneself or another; to be upset is to care, and this is the beginning of life. It is the business of a therapist to upset, to overturn a psyche that has become self-destructive, to force the antagonists together.
Quoting unenlightened
This approach has perpetuated the vicious circle - suffering
has been propped up and amplified by some psychological authorities, theories, and practices.
On top of thay, I probably should have trigger warning'd this thread. I'm in a volatile place as I have been for quite a while now, and this is volatile subject matter, especially for people who have experienced something similar. I'm working through these ideas, emotions, fears myself, and, while I'm trying to do so responsibly here, I'm also riding my own waves. The long story about my hospitalization was a sudden impulse, I typed it out very quickly (unlike me, i usually edit as i write) and I'm not sure quite why I typed it out - it wasnt a move in a game, or at least it wasn't intended as one.
Yes exactly. The 'hiding' of 'sin' creates this weird symmetrical structure. The more I hide my indiscretions from myself and others, the more I suspect others of harboring equally unforgivable abuses. And If I act shallowly and falsely, maintaining an aura of innocence - then, at the same time, I'm soliciting the other person to play along. And when they play along, its easy to see them as shallow and false. If I can see them as equal to me in their capacity for losing the path, or plot - that's the only time I can actually breathe.
But more than anything, I like this:
I like this, because what many of us see as unforgivable is often, for our friends, a tenth as important as we ourselves have made it out to be. And flipped - I've had friends open up to me about dark stuff - and it's like - dude, you're killing yourself over that? It's not always clear to me, as listener, that we've entered the 'serious' atmosphere of self-recrimination - the atmosphere I feel is obvious and palpable when I'm the one confessing. There's often a delayed effect, when I only realize the significance partway through.
And then even when friends open up about the stuff that is a little darker. I don't know. It's still dark, but it usually doesn't diminish my affection and sympathy - especially when I can see the other person is truly torn up about it.
This is verrry cheesy. BUT one of my most cherished memories is at a xmas party, with a group of friends - linked arms, heads bowed down, eyes closed, gently swaying, singing 'bridge over troubled water' together in unison. That was probably the closest I've been to a shared religious experience. Or at least a certain type of shared religious experience. The experience of it welled up and overcame the sappiness I would've been put-off by were the critical observer part of me more in control.
yeah, this is it. I can especially relate to the feeling of having to 'protect others' from yourself and your ideas.
To keep the Dante theme going, I think he got this feeling exactly:
"Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear."
Seems melodramatic until you know what he's talking about. Which, yet another poet said better
"even a proverb is no proverb to you until your life has illustrated it."
This goes to the heart of worldliness for me. Let's say that a person has come to terms in a certain way with human nature. They know their own evil (give it free play) in their imaginations. Yes, they wince at sins that they actually committed in the past, but perhaps they are behaving pretty well these days because they give their evil a life in their imagination. 'Wise as a serpent, gentle as a dove.'
I have the sense of many would reject this idea and instead feel that they must have clean minds. Sanity as sanitation. But if most people insist on having and projecting clean minds, then this kind of self-knowledge has to hide itself. People are trapped inside themselves, everyone afraid to confess that their interiors don't match exterior images of impossible/perfect purity.
I think this is where friendship as a kind of sacred sharing of secrets comes in. Profound friends stand in some secret place outside all the lying and faking. This structure is expanded in subcultures that really do violate norms.
I relate. There's something so naked about singing and dancing together. The soul as a vulnerable ecstatic and gentle thing comes out. And anyone with a trouble childhood is probably going to feel afraid and tempted to repeat (as in my case) the mockery of my father of all such softness ad enthusiasm. (Now I maybe have turned that mockery on itself, weaponized that contempt against the contempt for all things gentle. )
Yes. And I've more or less always identified with being some kind of writer. I find myself or present myself in words first and foremost. Father knows best. 'He thinks he's an old soul.' So the experience of being damned up, of only having poison for truth, was the anti-dream. Naturally my mind would present to me an ice-cold logic of suicide. Dostoevskian grins and grimaces. Looking back on it, I can enjoy in some sense my passage through that darkness. I can theoretically listen from a darker place, having endured the cruel laughter of the gods. All of this somewhat candifies the experience. If I am ever thrown back into that state, I will want to vomit at the idea that something could be made of it.
Great quote. It's as hard as describing being in love to a kid. The heights and depths can only be words from the outside. Quoting csalisbury
This is a great theme. Many is the time when I 'understood' something that I had read. My mind had absorbed the words, but then those words would take on a living meaning, sometimes years later. 'That's what he was talking about!'
I've been thinking a lot about this. This kind of goes back to the stuff about repetition compulsion, and the same psychological or affective impulse renewing itself, camoflauged, in new forms.
On the one hand, I think that's sure progress. Like - being contemptuous of contempt for all things gentle is a better way of navigating the world than being contemptuous of all things gentle.
But, at the same time, that same contempt-muscle is being flexed and strengthened.
It seems somehow related to this:
Which I also get. And I like the clear-eyed appreciation of how that state works. I've succumbed, in the past, to the feeling that I'd overcome once and for all that state, and that I'd never think in that way again.
What I want to say is that the depressive state has to be met on its own terms. That doesn't say much of anything but. I've been using a moodtracker for half a year now. It helps to 'objectify' both positive and negative states. I can say, for sure, that its helped me through negative times. Not because it shows the negative as a 'delusion' but because it just kind of...naturalizes the process? Like It makes it easier to see it as an affective wave, a natural and normal process. and that, in turn, makes it easier to do things like: clean the apartment, make food - little stuff that draws me slowly out. Which is harder to do, if it seems smothering and absolute.
idk, moodtracking helps tap into the part of you that remains constant throughout all those states. A kind of neutral anchor. I'm not the type to dismiss ecstatic states, but I have been trying to figure out how to integrate them into my life.
You make an interesting point. I must confess that I feel repulsed by men who aren't 'gentleman' (in the grocery store for instance.) I remember painfully being less of a 'gentleman' myself. The non-gentleman over-projects suspicion and the willingness to make war (a cat with its tail puffed out.) And the non-gentleman is the drunk person who exaggerates the interest that strangers might have their interruption. I guess in some ways I am just my own asshole father (who's much gentler these days anyway) responding to different sins. Because I can see the vulnerability behind the aggressiveness, and I do feel superior to it and embarrassed by it (along with some sense of danger), even as or because I remember expressing myself more in that way. I've convinced myself that I am one of the beautiful people (ignoring bad moods), and there's a cruelty in that. I can face up to it and pay myself on the back for a beautiful facing up to it, etc. I am wise because I'm a sinner and fool and a sinner and a fool for believing myself wise and beautiful. Messy stuff.
Same here. I've escaped for years at a time to be sucked back in to the whirlpool. It's been almost a year since the last bout. I had a variety of pills on hand to self-medicate. I did some very real and very gloomy writing. I still have it but haven't bothered to re-read it. I was cleaning out a dead woman's house, dealing with ashes of family (in-laws) literally and figuratively. And I was also temporarily unsure of who I wanted to be in the world. And there was (as there often is in such cases) a dream of purity (monk-like simplicity) that plays a role. Even marriage seemed like too much entanglement, even a good one. The will to purity is akin to the will to death, in my experience. Only the silence of the grave is pure.
Anyway, I worked through this last bout in just a few weeks thankfully. I remember worse cases lasting for maybe 2 months. I'd wake up thinking about suicide. Yet I'd keep my job and relationship intact. It was all or nothing. And I've always been too proud or stupid or cynical in such modes to seek any professional help. I insisted on interpreting my agony in terms of the universal human condition which I was heroically facing. And I was seemingly willing to die to maintain this fiction (?).
I don't know how good the legal drugs work these days, but my unprofessional hunch would be that drugs are maybe necessary. At least for me the mood was just so thick and physical that it was all going on below ideology, even if an icy logic of suicide was a symptom. Indeed, I'd often get a little risky with substances in such states. While this isn't ideal, it often helped. One good party could wake up the will to the live. I guess I needed the others to connect to just as much, though. It's just that I needed the drugs to open me up again to what I already had in the others perhaps. I still haven't tried ecstasy, but I believe that was developed for therapy. To me that makes sense: jumpstart the will to live.
I generally agree, though the last time I was stricken I didn't stop believing in the good states. I knew that I was irrationally afflicted. I was self-consciously trying to reactivate my lust for life. It's all about the darkness of the future, perhaps. Is that darkness made of pure threat? Or is there enough promise in that darkness to embrace the threat? One falls out of love with life. Or that's how it is for me.
Yeah, this is tricky. I'm not good at living in the middle. I'm not at all claiming that I live in a state of ecstasy. I mean I usually really approve of myself or I am really disgusted with myself. While there is a healthy or unhealthy-but-enjoyable narcissism involved, there is also a genuine lust/curiosity that directs me beyond myself when I am happy. (I assume this is pretty common: happiness as being on the hopeful chase.)
It was precisely that, yes. It is somewhat inflammatory to disagree with the interpretations of events or things people said in someone else's experience that you weren't even there for... that is a high level of causal distrust and dismissal. Unless someone is quite a dubious character, that attacks one's competence and integrity.
It's also important to point out that I never had any special experiences, I dedicated a lot of time and effort into cultivating something. Many years.
Schizoaffective disorder is somewhat manageable on high doses of medication, but the negative symptoms are still very much present. I find it much easier and I feel much more open with people who have been broken as well. However, I am very lucky to be married to someone with a master’s degree in counseling who understands trauma and mental illness. I would be lost without her.
I don’t have any advice, but I hope you see from the responses in this thread that you are not alone. I think reading all of your stories has been therapeutic for me and hope it has been for you, too.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-42431430
On school of rock Gene Simmons upset all the little children by picking the kid with the most passion to be the lead singer, rather than the kid with the most pleasing, and refined sound.
I also like how when kids disagreed with him he pulled authority and was all like "I sold millions of records, did this, or that, and know what I'm talking about, and you don't", and the kid was like "so, I don't care!" and he felt like he'd lost that exchange, like he was the establishment against the rebel, and immediately wanted to change places.
Funny guy.
Excellent read.
The part that haunts me the most is this :
"The irony of trauma is that even though it happens so deeply inside a single person, so quietly and close to the bone, it is never personal. It is shared, and it is collective. You cannot keep it to yourself. It is handed from one person to the next like a strain of herpes or, if you like, a fruit cake gifted and regifted every year during the holidays. My father’s trauma becomes my mother’s trauma. My mother’s trauma becomes mine. Whose will mine become?"
That rings true to me. And it's scary. I read a book by a retired psychoanalyst who told the stories of various patients in a way that was a little bit like a collection of Chekhov stories (I have some mild ethical qualms about this, even with the secure identity-protection, but that's another topic.) One thing he talked about is how, when someone is unable to tell their story, they will (usually unconsciously) behave in ways that make other people relive it.
I'm as disturbed by this idea as I am convinced of its truth. The story will be told, despite one's best laid plans and good intentions. The two outlets I see are art and community (of conscious fellow-sufferers). Or both, as with the choir.
The tough thing is, as always : The fear of not really being able to do either ---the fear that the 'false self' will take the reins. And that I'll be the bloodied woman in a 1970s slasher flick running down the road, escaped, desperately flagging down a truck --- only to recognize, with horror, the driver.
I always get hung up on this last image or metaphor. It's been with me for a long time.
I've had many dreams like this. The one I remember most from childhood involves shadowy figures in a kind of police interrogation room forcing me to sit and watch a movie. In the movie, a person is being beaten, with chains. At the moment the person dies, the shadowy figure tells that me that his ghost is in the room watching me watch him die. I can feel the ghost come up behind me as I watch a video of his body dying. I must've been 9 or 10, but I can still remember this dream vividly. There's something to it of making me complicit in the murder.
So: very much in the vein of the other dreams Kalsched mentions. I wish I could remember what was going on in my life at the time.
Buut anyway, recently, I had another variant of this 'genre' of dream. And the way in which it varied gives me hope.
In the dream, I was talking to my therapist. I got really excited about some video I wanted to show him. We went over to his computer and both sat there as I pulled it up. I remember looking over at him, and seeing him brooding and thinking. Then, with a sort of clumsy deliberation, he reached over and grabbed me. He held me firmly and aggressively. And then he groped me. There was something comic about the groping. It was almost phoned in. A reach over and one quick squeeze. I was less scared than bewildered. The dream-therapist looked at me and said something like 'how are you ever going to trust me anymore?'
It was almost like that technique in parody where you sketch a scene that draws on a grand 'tradition' but you do it so literally and so free of nuance that it becomes absurd. Almost like the dream-figure was someone poorly cast in a role going : "ok, I know I'm supposed to do something like this, umm, was that good enough?"
My dreamself responded with a kind of shrug.
First as tragedy, then as farce?
I'm happy to hear you're finding a way to make it work, and that you've had the good fortune to find someone understanding. That gives me some hope.
So much to say. I resonate with almost all of what you've said, including:
Though for me it was - and occasionally still is - alcohol. And sometimes adderall. But it was very much about doing whatever was necessary to get to a state where I could try to connect with others, at whatever cost. It does sometimes work, is the thing. I'm of two minds here.
Quoting sign
As I've mentioned, I've been cautiously approaching St John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul. In a very different mode than how I used to approach it (which was: I'm having a Dark Night. St. John talked about a dark night, and then talked about a higher joy. Therefore I'm close to that higher joy.) I also tend to oscillate between self-propelling self-joy and self-disgust. It's only becoming clear to me now that the real gem of the book is how it deals with the art(?) of integrating ecstatic and nonecstatic states. Of balancing being-close and being-far-away. He provides, in the very first chapters, an astounding typology of the vices that arrest spiritual progression. (Not the vices that prevent people from seeking the path of spirituality. The vices that attend those who have already decided to take that path.)
One of my favorite quotes so far in my rereading
I've been toying with another idea that the point of nonecstatic interludes is to fashion a soul or self that is able to retain the insights of the ecstatic moments without being disintegrated
Keats, again:
"The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is ‘a vale of
tears’ from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitary interposition of God and taken to
Heaven – What a little circumscribe[d] straightened notion! Call the world if you Please ‘”The
vale of Soul-making” Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the
highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for
the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it) I say ‘Soul making’ Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence – There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions – but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.
I[n]telligences are atoms of perception – they know and they see and they are pure, in short they
are God – how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have
identity given them – so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each ones individual existence?
How, but by the medium of a world like this?"
Indeed. It's tricky. Because I know a few people who have been just eaten up by substance abuse. I'm probably lucky in that I don't like alcohol that much without stimulants. And I am very slow to go scrounging for such stimulants (my nicotine gum and coffee vice is bad enough.) If I had just two weeks to live and could have whatever I wanted as a comfort, I might just include a pile of cocaine. I see drugs as heaven and hell, intensities of good and/or evil, re-humanizing and de-humanizing.
Quoting csalisbury
'Art' seems like the perfect word.
Quoting csalisbury
I like this. It makes perfect sense to me.
Quoting Keats via csalisbury
I love both quotes. Keats is offering a pretty good theodicy. It reminds me of early more spiritual Feuerbach. The 'species-essence' ('Christ') develops in billions of different ways. Its richness can only be manifest as a plurality of personalities if it is to be infinite. To me it's like finding the infinite in the finite.
What is a good party? I am there as me in my strangeness. Others are just as distinct, just as quirky. And yet we all love and value one another not only despite but mostly because of these differences which can surprise and delight us.
[quote =SEP]
In the introduction to Thoughts Feuerbach assumes the role of diagnostician of a spiritual malady by which he claims that modern moral subjects are afflicted. This malady, to which he does not give a name, but which he might have called either individualism or egoism, he takes to be the defining feature of the modern age insofar as this age conceives of “the single human individual for himself in his individuality […] as divine and infinite” (GTU 189/10). The principal symptom of this malady is the loss of “the perception [Anschauung] of the true totality, of oneness and life in one unity” (GTU 264/66).
...
Feuerbach urged his readers to acknowledge and accept the irreversibility of their individual mortality so that in doing so they might come to an awareness of the immortality of their species-essence, and thus to knowledge of their true self, which is not the individual person with whom they were accustomed to identify themselves. They would then be in a position to recognize that, while “the shell of death is hard, its kernel is sweet” (GTU 205/20), and that the true belief in immortality is
a belief in the infinity of Spirit and in the everlasting youth of humanity, in the inexhaustible love and creative power of Spirit, in its eternally unfolding itself into new individuals out of the womb of its plenitude and granting new beings for the glorification, enjoyment, and contemplation of itself. (GTU 357/137)
[/quote]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/
Forgiving the 'species essence' language, which is dated, I enjoy that as something like the core of a spirituality of this world that doesn't hide itself away. It's not anti-flesh. It's not anti-sex. Indeed, the sex-death is central. Of course I think it would be terrible to interpret this as a kind of cheap anti-egoism that basically hates the human being. I believe that there is a healthy self-love that makes the love of others possible and sincere. To love the self in the right way is to love others in the right way and the reverse. Or that's what my guts tell me. I hope this isn't too much of a digression from the Keats quote.