OUT OF MY MIND

Horcruxes and the Return of Bad Objects.

It has been a while since I wrote about Harry Potter and the particular magic that J.K. Rowling’s stories hold for me, and well, it just would not be my blog if I did not post about her alchemy from time to time. So Potter heads unite, here we go. Today’s post is about Horcruxes and the fact that most of us are them. Aha. We are all Horcruxes, in one way or another.

First, for the uninitiated in the Harry Potter series, a quick definition so that we are on the same page. A Horcrux is created by putting a part of oneself into an object (which can be human, as in Harry’s case). In order to accomplish this the self must be split or divided, which can only happen through a ”supreme act of evil which rips it apart.”  In the magic world of Harry Potter. creating a Horcrux is unnatural and only attempted by evil witches and wizards who divide their souls in order to remain immortal.

What, say you, does this have to do with anything in our muggle/non-wizarding world? Everything, say I.

In my practice I often see people who are tormented by parts of themselves that are experienced as excessive: too bad, too weak, too impulsive, too sad, too frightened- you name it- but the common characteristic is that they are ego dystonic and cannot be embraced as part of the self, so they are experienced as ‘not me’. As such, they remain split off from awareness, and the parts of the self that are acceptable, until (perhaps you have guessed it already), they return unannounced in the context of particular relationships or situations. Often, my patients cannot understand how this comes about, or why they remain in relationships or situations that seem to invite those parts of themselves to come out. Or worse, they find themselves caught in repetitive interaction patterns that bring about such ‘not me’ self states and leave them in despair.

In psychoanalysis, those of us who subscribe to the idea that we seek relationship from the very beginning of our lives, and that it is early interactions with our caretakers that wire our neuro-circuitry and determine many of our relational and intimacy patterns, think of such split off parts of the self as stemming from precisely those relationships-the early ones. When the vissicitudes of early interactions are traumatic, they require the infant to split off (and dissociate) experiences which are overwhelming and threaten his or her survival. The Scottish psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn, believed that such experiences become part of the structure of our personality, and are taken into oneself in order to maintain the connection and bond to our caretaker(s). By splitting off what is bad or overwhelming we manage to keep them loving and good, while the bad experience is taken in and then dissociated. Unfortunately, the fate of those internalized relational experiences is that they return from within and create conflictual states of being.

So perhaps the internalization of a bad object is our unintended way of becoming a Horcrux. We take in a part of another that arises in relationship to us, and we do so in an effort to survive overwhelming emotions arising out of interpersonal dynamics, which demand that the bond to the real other be maintained. Once a Horcrux (or bad object) is created it poses a real threat to our developing personality because of the continued presence of emotions and/or memories which haunt the self from the inside, placing an excessive focus on our internal world and reducing the possibility of new behavior in (relational) situations that mobilize the same emotions.

According to the Harry Potter Wikipedia, to create a Horcrux is to divide one’s soul — the “essence of self” — and it goes against the first Fundamental Law of Magic, which essentially states that tampering with one’s soul inevitably results in grave side effects. Boy is that right. Tampering with a developing sense of self does in fact result in grave consequences. In the Potter books, it is Harry who after witnessing the death of his parents, and surviving his own destruction at the hands of Voldemort’s wand, internalizes a split off part of the dark lords soul, unintentionally making him a Horcrux. Thus, part of Voldermort lives on in Harry, and stirs whenever he experiences frustration and anger, the very emotions that Voldermort thrives on. At those times, Harry withdraws from his friends, thinks evil thoughts, and speaks in parseltongue (Voldermort’s snake language)- all “not me” behaviors which trouble him yet link him to the dark lord. Fairbairn called this situation “the return of the bad objects” and considered it the cornerstone of emotional difficulties.

Furthermore, the parts of a person’s soul/self within a Horcrux can think for themselves and have certain magical abilities, including the ability to influence those in their vicinity. When Harry, Ron, and Hermione carry Slytherin’s locket(a horcrux) around their necks, they became moodier and begin to fight with one another. They are also unable to summon their Patronuses*  (good objects/thoughts) while wearing the locket since the fragment of the bad object inside is darkening their thoughts and exerting its influence. Not unlike what happens in relationships that stir early (troubled) interactional patterns and result in re-creating primal, emotionally traumatic scenarios. Or like the psychic aftermath of trauma, and the particular nature of dissociation:  the lacunae that form around unbearable states of mind -each self-state its own intricate universe. Or like our psychoanalytic ideas of projective identification and the taking in of another persons’ not me self-states,  perhaps as a temporary Horcrux to be used for understanding another and the others it relates to.

Perhaps the world of magic is not make-believe at all: it is our world and the internal theater that each of us responds to.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* For more on Patronuses please click on: https://www.drceccoli.com/2011/08/on-monsters-dementors-and-other-magical-beings/

BEING VIRTUAL: Social Media and the Relational Self.

Is our culture of texting, tweeting, friending, Facebooking, Instagramming, Linked-iness and LOL speak threatening interpersonal connection and communication? You know, the old fashioned kind? Is our techno-connectivity eroding interactive experiences involving face to face contact and conversations, and changing the quality of our relationships with others? Is social media creating a new kind of intimacy?

As a psychoanalyst who believes that human beings are wired to be in relationship, and that it is relationships which advance (or truncate) psychological and physical development, that it is emotional connection which advances growth and maturity through shared intimacy, these are very real and potentially disturbing questions.

Our current culture of virtual inter-connectivity and instant information has already changed the way many people read books (as in the paper kind), as well as our ability to focus on a presentation which is unassisted by media applications. Now that we can get the Technicolor, surround sound, media assisted version of anything, that is what we want- and why not? Email beats snail mail, texts beat phone calls, videos beat photos, etc. For some, this extends to an ongoing stream of information that condenses meaning based on the clicking of a like button. Technology, and in particular social media is shaping the way that we communicate, interact and think of others and very likely ourselves. None of us can deny that the way we communicate and relate to others has been reconfigured and continues to pattern itself according to the technological possibilities offered to us by our various devices and how we use them.

Social media has blurred many boundaries on its way to increased connectivity. The personal and the public have fused themselves in tweets, real friendships and virtual ones have joined through Facebook, and online personae- avatars as they are called- act as symbolic selves for their creators, perhaps merging true and idealized selves. Reciprocal and direct communication has conflated into an ongoing gabfest, and language itself has been abridged to accommodate it. And all of this occurs in the NOW, without pauses and as a constant flow. So that time itself is blurred. Realtime (no gap in between real and time) is nonstop, it streams. According to Nick Carr* (see:  http://www.roughtype.com/?p=1233 )  this also blurs the boundaries of space, dimension and depth: moving us from the three dimensional world to two dimensional screen spaces and “intimate portable worlds that increasingly enclose us”.

Yikes! It may sound like a sci-fi movie but no. It is us now- well maybe not all of us.

For many of today’s generation, an” unstreamed ” life is no life at all*  Sad but true. So perhaps we already have one answer to how all this social media impacts on the fate of the relational self. It seems to be central to how this generation navigates relationships. Each device a remote control to be used as one wishes. It is all in the use of our devices say I. For those that need to be streaming in order to feel connected and be part of a community, in order to establish an identity and have a life, such a life is not real until it is documented and aired, until it is reported and received. With streaming all interpersonal communications are broadcasted ongoingly to an active network of “friends”. Broadcasting may in fact become a way of living for some people. A way of validating their actions and existence, as well as a means of staying connected. Then again, all previous generations have struggled to obtain validation about the same things, and a connection to others has always been instrumental in gaining recognition, even if it was acquired without the help of todays’ technological gadgets. We continue to be relational beings, and as such we need to connect with others to get to know ourselves, to see ourselves through the eyes of another, or in this case, through their streamed commentary! We need other people, individually and collectively. Social media has the ability to connect us instantly, virtually, to the one and to the many, and the current generation has cut its teeth on it.

While it is possible that some mistake streaming and broadcasting for living, it is also possible to think of social media as a potential play space in which to test out one’s identity, a sort of “transitional space” in psychoanalytic parlance, that can afford people the opportunity of experimenting with relationships –  virtual and real. This does not necessarily have to disrupt one’s ability to interact and be, in fact it may provide a chance to begin to be. Think of the now much talked about cable tv show “Girls”– many of those characters would be lost without their gadgets, and in fact, they all stream and experiment with who they are through their devices, yet they retain their relationality, their need for relationship and intimacy, even when they are at a loss as to how to go about relating. They may create virtual dopplegangers for themselves, but their needs are the same as the needs of previous generations expressed anew: for love, for recognition, for connection and community. They are but attempting to navigate through their needs and wants using the technology available to them. Its all in the use of our devices say I.

Perhaps we have arrived at a moment in our history where communication has begun to dictate the terms of how we should communicate. The use of technology and the instant stream of information it allows us has changed our alphabet and shortened our words and sentences, so that we have LOLspeak, and so that some have dropped the “niceties” of inquiring after the weather, thanking one another, beginning emails and texts with Dear, etc. Some people argue that given the amounts of information out there, our tolerance for the communication we receive and choose to have has decreased, and that as a result we risk numbing our facility for tenderness and generosity. Perhaps this is one of the differences inherent with text and pictures on a screen ( the portable intimacy that Carr talks about) instead of sitting in front of a flesh and blood human – but I think it likely that someone who does not use Dear or Thank You or Good Morning in an email or text might have the same  interpersonal difficulties in person. Maybe all of our technology and social media has just made it more difficult to be connected by providing too many ways and options of being connected.  Some might say that it is a matter of filters and implementing the right ones, sifting the information received so that it is more specific, less overwhelming.  Filters. Boundaries. Objects. Object usage. Again, to my mind it is all a matter of how we use our objects (read devices).

So perhaps what I am saying boils down to this:  I think the use of technology and social media re-wires our brains so that we can adapt to environmental demands. The brain structure and neuro-circuitry of one generation is likely different than those of the next because of these evolutionary adaptations. Of course this has an impact on the way we experience and perceive our environment and the people in it, as well as the way we interact. But no, I do not think that we are losing our capacity to relate to each other. Our brains are wired relationally, and while they are evolving in different and varied ways, that need for other(s) remains central to the enterprise of being human and to our survival. How we go about connecting is changing, but our need to connect and relate remains.

GENERATION GAP: Ageism or Darwinian Adaptation?

Recently, in the ongoing supervision group that I have belonged to for almost 20 years, there ensued a discussion about working with younger patients, and whether we were speaking a different language. My colleagues and I all felt a generational gap, and wondered together whether we had finally taken up the language that our parents spoke, and their parents before them, in regard to the differences between one generation and the next. Are we getting old we wondered? Well yes we are, inevitably. But all of us recognized that getting old is only part of the story. This post is about some other possibilities.

In thinking about what constitutes and shapes the worldview of a ‘generation’, I started to think about those things in our culture that shape perception, influencing our thoughts, feelings, preferences, desires, choices, and perhaps the very wiring of our brain.  I am not speaking here about our personal history and experiences (although they too  shape our brain structure and are the shakers and movers of who we are), but rather of the cultural and social context that shapes our worldview:  industrial and economic upswings and downturns, spiritual and religious movements, scientific discoveries and technological advancements, to name a few. Each generation has been influenced by such events, molded into believing certain ideas, consuming specific products, and making particular choices. And this is as it should be. So perhaps what we experience as a generation gap has to do with the particular adaptations that each generation has to make – the individual brain re-wiring itself to absorb and survive the cultural and societal onslaught of information and change. Yes, that is what I am proposing (and I am not alone in this belief): our brains respond and adapt to the shifts and changes in our cultural context by rewiring themselves in order to process and deal with current contexts and situations.*  I am speaking here of the sort of adaptation that is necessary in the Darwinian, survival of the fittest kind of way. An adaptation that happens at the brain level and generates important changes in learning and communication patterns that affect behavior. An adaptation that occurs out of immediate awareness, yet has deep personal and societal implications. A necessary adaptation to the shifting nature of  the world and the way it is perceived, experienced and communicated. Perhaps this is what is behind our experience of the gap between one generati0n or the next : We are wired differently – at the brain level.

Cultural ideology impacts each generation anew and propels an evolution from the previous one, an actual  neuro-biological adaptation to the evolving cultural and social context. We have made enormous progress say, since the generation of my grandparents, who experienced two world wars, relied on newspapers and radio for their news, travelled overseas by boat, and used telephones only occasionally and mostly for emergencies, preferring written letters as a means of communication. That generation was also one that believed in chivalry, assigned gender roles, heterosexuality, and the supremacy of one race or religion or sex over the other. But things changed.

My parents’ generation began to see many industrial, technological and scientific changes. They survived a world war, experienced the birth of the atomic bomb, bought televisions and watched world news on them, and had a new kind of advertising infiltrate their choices. Films became popular means of telling stories and expanding the possibilities of the imagination. Automobiles became a popular form of transportation, and airplanes shortened the distances that could be travelled. Chivalry and gender roles persisted, yet things were changing quickly.

My generation, often referred to as baby boomers, became associated with a redefinition of traditional values questioning many of the cultural and societal dictums of the previous generation (sex differences, gender roles, racial and economic inequality). Widely associated with privilege, mine was a generation that grew up in a time of increasing affluence, where it appeared that anything was possible. As a group, this generation was the wealthiest, most active, and most physically fit.  It oversaw the boom of technology, the introduction of computers, word processing, cable television and the early beginnings of internet technology. This literally changed the way that we thought and conceptualized things, as well as the way that we learned about and transmitted information. Everything seemed to change in my generation.

Then came the so called Generation X, born shortly before and/or during the general introduction of digital technologies like personal computers and operating systems, video games, MTV and the widespread use of the internet. They were the first to grow up with computers in their homes. By interacting with digital technology from an early age Xers not only have a greater understanding of its concepts, they embody them -(think of the genius bar at any Apple store).

One of the most significant developments in the current generation (Generation Y or echo boomers) has been their use of social networking media. They are the first to grow up with this new technology and are highly connected, having had lifelong use of communication and media technology like the world wide web, Skype, text and instant messaging, digital photography and video, mp3 players, cellular phones and a myriad of applications which communicate wirelessly with home computers, automobiles, and yes, people. This generation is always connected to whatever they want to be connected to.

You can see where I am going here. I am not attempting to give an exhaustive list of all of the changes that the 20th and 21st centuries have seen. Rather, I am arguing that as human beings we are continuing to develop, changing and adapting all the time, and that such changes are catalyzed by culture, which amends and revamps the actual structures of our brain. Adaptation requires these physical changes, which in turn bring about psychological ones. Each generation has been impacted by the social, cultural and technological advances of its time, and that impact has very likely shaped and rewired individual brains (collectively) so that they could adapt to the changes in their environs. Each generation the product of Darwinian evolution and adaptation.

In this generation it is technology, the internet, and in particular social media which are changing the way people think, feel and act. And this is inevitable and as it should be. Think of the way information is available today, almost immediately and at our fingertips. If I want to research something I can access many worldwide library sites, giving me access to specific articles, videos, broadcasts and books. I can google anything from recipes to dance performances to references to maps to addresses. Colleagues tell me that it is possible to find out not only where people are, but what they are reading and eating! And that is just the internet. With social media we have instant everything in 20 seconds bites, short segments of information that do not exceed 500 140 characters.  Photographs of events and people tweeted across continents. Social media allows people to share their lives with others (known and unknown) on an ongoing basis. It moves across boundaries, doors and walls at the touch of a send command.

This generation assimilates information quickly and multitasks their way through life. It takes in vast amounts of data in short amounts of time. This is not because they are impatient but because they think differently, and necessarily so: Interacting with multiple screens (and people, places and things) on their computers, or phones or ipads requires a different way of processing information and a different way of relating. It requires a different brain which accommodates to environmental demands and to the technology that creates those demands. A brain that is re-wired on the basis of of what it interacts with. To my mind, this is what the gap between generations is all about – gradual adaptations in brain structure, from one generation to the next, based on cultural, scientific and technological advances. Not ageism at all, but survival through adaptation and integration. Darwin would feel vindicated.

For a peek of what I am talking about, take a look at Jason Silva’s brilliant (2:48m) video below and prepare to be amazed. Here’s to the next generation! You are awesome.

http://vimeo.com/38260970

 

* If you are interested  in the way that technology influences brain structure and want to read more, check out Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we read, think and remember.” Nick  also blogs at :  www.roughtype.com

THE MAKING OF IDENTITY – on fingerprints, bruises and scars.

In my work as a psychoanalyst, I often think that none of us can avoid the fingerprints of our early history, the particulars of who our parent(s) and/or caretakers were and how their distinct elements shaped us, the specific interactions that molded our relational self. We cannot avoid it, nor would we want to. Our parental legacy and its early progression, shapes who we are and who we become. That relational history is ours and ours alone – much like a fingerprint. Such fingerprints make us a particular character; an individual with our own emotional twists and turns. Fingerprints are uniquely ours. They are one of our distinctive, identifying characteristics. They are emblems that capture our individuality, like a birthmark that is singularly ours. Thinking of such physical imprints has helped me consider psychic experience, and particularly the experience of psychic pain in a similar fashion. Psychically, fingerprints consist of multiple, early interactions with significant others, each shaping parts of our identity, creating our particular curves, lines and dents. They cannot be avoided. Bruises and scars are to be avoided, but not fingerprints.

Consider the differences. Bruises are contusions and discolorations that come about as the result of an injury. They may or may not be indicative of the degree of physical trauma on the inside, but they are signs that something has caused harm. They are often sore to the touch and cause us, and others, to take notice. To move with care. They may be minor and disappear quickly, or quite profound and deep.

Then there are scars. Scars come about as the result of a wound. They provide physical evidence that an injury has occurred, a laceration, a gash, an abrasion that leaves a mark on the body. They are the evidence of trauma. Obvious to the eye and painful to the touch, they keep us from engaging freely in our daily lives. While they may diminish over time, they never go away. They fade and are survived but not forgotten.

Fingerprints are part of our identity. Scars and bruises are evidence of trauma. Big difference. While the way that we bruise, and our particular scars, also become part of our identities and who we are, (re)shaping our experience of ourselves, they are evidence of our run-ins with life and its circumstances, of external events and people and their effect on us, of the impact and potential damage that we are capable of inflicting on one another. Take for example, the scars of incest and sexual abuse. Or the way that violence becomes written on the body,  coming to life in the bruises and scars it leaves behind. Our psyche contains bruises and scars that may not be evident to the eye but instead, take hold of our senses and are experienced as painful and destabilizing areas, which like physical lesions, are tender to the touch and reactivate the pain associated with them.

The parallel between psychic suffering and physical suffering is similar in other ways too. Imagine if our psychic wounds were visible to the eye- if our personal lacerations were evident to all, much in the same way that scars and bruises are. Talk about the walking wounded! Perhaps we would take better care, take heed of the others’ pain. Hold a door open, offer up our seats, respond from our own understanding and experience of injury and pain. Respond with compassion. But I digress. The point is that psychic experience is embodied in our physical envelope and vice versa, and this has a powerful influence on how we move in the world, what parts of our bodies are free and which are frozen. What parts of us are open to new experience and what parts of us are closed to it. What parts of us are bruised and scarred. The psyche impacts the nature of our illnesses and ailments. It speaks through our symptoms, giving physicality to our suffering.

It is the nature of pain that it defies words and language and speaks through felt experience. Perhaps that is why when we can see that someone is injured physically we take heed, we hold the door and give up our seat on the bus. But what of the scars and bruises that cannot be seen? When we are able to be present with another, and open ourselves to experiencing them, we become aware of their psychic nevus. We can sense it and feel it. Pain, and particularly psychic pain cries out for such a felt understanding and only then is potentially represented in language- a language co-created in mutual experience. Psychic bruises and scars come about in relationship(s) and require relationship(s) to be processed, understood and perhaps healed. Much of the language of the psyche, as well as that of the soma, is experiential, and thus does not translate so easily to words. Thus the value of relationships and our need for them. Human connection at its best, with all of its multitude of individual fingerprints.

ON TALKING –IN AND OUT OF CONTEXT.

Ever have the experience of hearing something you said but in a different context? Listening to your words yet feeling like something is not quite right? It may be that the actual words are not quite the same, or that they are said in a different tone of voice or affectation, or tweaked so that they take on a different meaning under the different circumstances. Yep, you have been taken out of context- faced with a reality that was not intended in the first articulation of your words yet, here it is: your words coming back to you and they are not the same, not what you intended. Same but different enough to make you wonder if you actually said that. Out of the particular context in which you first spoke them, they become someone else’s words, taking on their meaning and not yours. Context is everything they say. And they (whoever they are) may be right.

I’ve been thinking about how important the context in which something occurs is, what is said and done, particularly in terms of how something is understood. The more I think about it the more complicated it seems to me. How does context establish itself in our lives? How does it affect and influence how we listen, how we hear and process information, and what we do with it? How does it affect what we say and do?

As usual, when I am walking in the maze of my thoughts, musing about the possibilities of something and finding myself at sea, I sit in my psychoanalytic chair. I fold myself into the space where I spend many hours in contemplation with another. The space where it is necessary to be at ease with not knowing yet continue to think and feel. Context made concrete. My office and my chair provide the context for my ruminations about such matters. So I will start there.

In psychotherapy, context is deeply and inexorably rooted in the relationship between doctor and patient. The language of treatment is relationally embedded. The relationship provides the context(s). How things are said and disclosed, how they are interpreted and perceived, and ultimately how useful what is said can be, depends on what is happening interpersonally between two particular people, and what each of them brings to the interaction at any given moment. This is the context of treatment.

While the boundaries of a situation may provide a contextual outline – in the clinical scenario this involves meeting time, fees, the use of the couch or chair, the person of the analyst, the actual office – it is only an outline, the actual context involves meaning as created and articulated by two people sharing and negotiating their worldview(s). People come to treatment because they are in difficulty and they expect that psychotherapy will offer them an opportunity to address and rectify this. That is the contextual outline of therapy, which then becomes richer through the development of the therapeutic relationship. In other situations, the contextual outline may also involve a work or professional setting, or a particular role or situation. While this contextual outline is established initially by the expectations of a particular situation it is then filled in with the colors and qualities of interpersonal transactions, the multitude of conscious and unconscious interactions that make up relationships.

I think of context as a fluid and porous mega-container that shifts and transforms itself on the basis of relational demands and self-other negotiations. Because context is established relationally it makes sense that much of its texture and feel comes from those explicit and implicit communications that lend an affective aura to situations. For example, I may say or point to something in a session that is upsetting to my patient, at that moment both of us are de-stabilized immediately: my patient because they feel misunderstood or caught out with something difficult, myself because I recognize that I have upset them, or worse, that I have touched on something that because of the way that I said it, or the implicit assumption I might have made about it, may have opened a wound for them. The context in this particular situation is emotionally charged, and what is said and done is flooded with those emotions, informing what happens next. While navigating those situations is something that psychoanalysts are usually adept at, my point here is that affect changes the context, shifting it, often to a historical and personal one, a context that operates under different rules of engagement. Transference and countertransference are contextual phenomena.

Because of this, the context of a situation and/or relationship can determine what the possibilities for growth and reparation are. Even within the therapeutic relationship, where the space is designated as potentially providing for both growth and reparation (providing a contextual outline) such context can shift on its head due to relational entanglements which may be so affectively de-stabilizing to both participants that terra firma is elusive and the power of historical context interferes with here and now interpersonal communication.

Couples often get into a similar tangle. Speak to one partner and they will tell you that they feel unheard, speak to the other partner and they will tell you that they can’t get a word in. Context. In this example both partners are at a stalemate. In order to advance a relational negotiation needs to take place to create a new context, one in which they can both talk and hear each other out. Whether this is possible depends on both partners’ ability to review what they are bringing to the situation (personal context) and how it is being triggered by the others’ actions. It depends on their ability to hold on to who they are, to their context, but not too tightly. It depends on the ability to hold on to who you are while being taken out of context.

Ah yes context. Transference. Countertransference. The relational dance. When I sit with a patient and they remind me of something I said, sometimes I remember it exactly- this is a situation in which both of us agreed and created the context. But just as often, a patient may recall something that I said differently, and has used that interpretation in a way that I had not intended. Taken out of context, my words, intentions and meaning(s) do not feel like they are mine. This situation is one in which my patient and I need to re-examine the dissonance between their understanding and mine, and how it came about. Often what we find is other meanings, voices and even self states have been activated by my words or affectation and its emotional impact on my patient.

Our ability to work and move within multiple contexts, known and unknown, implicit and explicit opens up possibility. This is as true of the therapeutic situation as it is of life. Context is relationally determined. And perhaps this is why we are constantly being taken out of context.

ON SEISMIC ACTIVITY – And the Disruption of the Self.

In my work as a psychoanalyst I spend much of my time in areas of experience that tend to be de-stabilizing to our sense of personal integrity and unity. I am speaking here of those times when emotion overwhelms us, disrupting our sense of being oneself and ushering in feeling states that cause a disturbance at the very core of who we are, altering our sense of self and our very reality. Literally breaking apart our ability to think clearly and undermining our sense of stability. Think of them as personal earthquakes, shaking up the structure of who we know ourselves to be and through their reverberations, ushering in parts of ourselves that belong to our personal history and the relationships that make up that history. Seismic activity that resonates with implicit knowledge that continues to reverberate within us and comes to the surface under specific circumstances that trigger it anew.  What is this dark magic?

We are talking here of emotional experience that remains unprocessed yet is known to us in its felt reality and may come about through our interactions with others, often particular others that speak the language of those particular emotions and re-mobilize them in interaction with us. As a psychoanalyst I have many words for such experiences: regression, transference, countertransference, enactments- to name a few. Such words make it simpler to identify those moments in treatment but they do not help in the actual processing of the experience. That has to happen relationally. At those times both my patient and I are surfing in the heart of a massive wave, negotiating it together on our surfboard, or more to the point- on the couch. Today’s post is about the experience of being overwhelmed and flooded by emotional information that remains at the core of who we are yet cannot be processed in its original relationship or interaction- it requires a new relational experience that offers a potential new outcome. In my book, this is what psychotherapy is all about.

The experience of personal de-stabilization is now well documented in the neuropsychological literature. Particular emotions mobilize specific neuro-transmitters in our brain, re-activating psychic solutions that are aimed at optimizing survival and re-stabilizing us. From a neurobiological viewpoint it is all about the return to homeostasis. However, from a psychological point of view emotional stability (and our sense of oneness) requires that we connect the emotions we are feeling to the knowledge that we have accumulated, bridging the divide created by the original emotional upheaval. It requires that we experience a different outcome within a relationship. This is because emotions are encoded relationally and can only be understood, processed and integrated interactively– through an ongoing negotiation with another.

In order for emotions and affect to be contained, understood and processed, mutual emotional regulation is needed- something that begins with our caretakers and continues throughout our lifetime in our relationships to others. To be able to self-regulate we must first have the opportunity to interact with another that helps us to process affective experience and wards off potential overload while engaging with us, or at least helps to mediate such overload. In childhood, what is potentially traumatic involves developmental milestones and their concomitant emotions and how they are negotiated (or not) in the parent/child dyad. Self -regulation is a process that is initiated dyadically and assimilated and internalized as the result of such ongoing dyadic interactions. Where such dyadic mediation has failed, because of parental limitations, absence, neglect, or abuse, affect resides in its raw experiential form and can therefore return with potent aftershocks. And all of this shapes our brain and nervous system, which then impacts our ability to negotiate relationships and intimacy in our life.

The language of affect resides in implicit memory. That part of us that knows, senses, intuits and responds from the inside. The part of us that responds from what is known, but yet to be processed by thought and language. Yet to be integrated into consciousness. But there. Much like the rumblings of an earthquake rearranging the grounding plates and creating seismic activity, that language can be activated by tone of voice, a particular look or movement, a familiar smell, a sound, or a specific interaction or circumstance. All triggers that set off our internal alarm system as we experience the internal quake. It can feel like a personal disaster. Hit 9 on the Richter scale. Yet it also creates the opportunity for change.

And for reparation.

 

ON FACTS, TRUTH AND WHAT IS REAL.

Recently I was interviewed regarding the aftermath of trauma and its impact. I was asked about memory and whether people’s recollection of traumatic events is accurate and factual. This got me thinking about facts and reality, are they the same? Does a fact constitute reality? The word fact comes from the Latin factum originally meant to describe an action, either brave or evil, but in its current use is defined as a truth, a reality, a thing known for certain to have occurred or to be true. A thing that can be verified. So it would appear, at least in terms of current definitions, that facts and reality are one and the same.

But are they?

In speaking to the fact checker, who called me once the journalist I had spoken to had gathered her facts, I was told that as a fact checker his job was to make sure that what I had said happens to trauma survivors really happens to them. He was calling many trauma experts to get the facts straight. Fact checkers spend their time making sure that facts are real and can be verified by others. I would hate that job. As a psychoanalyst I know that ‘facts’ can often not be verified, that reality is subjective and spans many narratives, that there is not one objective truth but many personal, complicated and idiosyncratic truths. That, as T. S. Eliot wrote: All significant truths are private truths. I know that fact checking has nothing to do with psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, which is not to say that truth and reality are not part of my profession and work. While patients often come into therapy with a need to have their lives heard and their “facts” verified and acknowledged, my job is to make room for the exploration of multiple possibilities- each with its own voice, and information, feelings, thoughts and language. Space for multiple narratives of the same event considered and reconsidered anew. Space to question the “facts” and flesh out their personal meanings. The only facts that I deal with as a psychoanalyst are present in the lived experience of my patients and my experience of them. A fact checker would hate my job.

What I have found in the many clinical hours I spend with my patients is that reality always involves a dense and personal theater, populated by our relationships and interactions with others, which shapes the situations and events that we encounter and then becomes the very fabric of our history and experience. Not one truth but many. No single “facts” but rather a myriad of interpretations. Why? Because lived experience is complex and multifaceted. Because no matter how thoughtful and insightful we may be, there are always areas of unexplored possibilities and realities to human experience. Because our lives are made up of many ‘facts’ that begin to shift and change as we put them into varying experiential contexts. Because our humanity cannot be captured in ‘facts’, it requires multiple, ongoing narratives, and even those fail to capture the process of being and becoming oneself let alone the process of living a life.

One of the most useful “facts” about psychotherapy is that it provides the space to think about other possibilities and interpretations of the ‘facts’ of one’s life, and by doing so, begins a personal process of re-evaluating and re-contextualizing lived experience – adding information, weaving emotions and feelings with thoughts and memories, providing new language(s) and words so that ‘facts’ can be known and integrated afresh. So that they become meaningful and ours.

It is true that I often gather informational facts from a patient. I take a history of their lives. I continue to add information to this initial biography, editing, adding, going beyond the “facts” through our relationship and what develops between us – what I come to experience with my patient as their truth. This is what we work with. Together we enter into a collaboration whose aim is to understand lived experience and the impact of personal history on events, all the while knowing that many possibilities abound and any one particular narrative excludes many others. The reality that we work with in treatment is a personal one that over time becomes shared in its experiential meaning.

Facts are, after all, information that is agreed upon by many. People give meaning to facts and in so doing make them real. And it is the human factor in psychotherapy – the relationship between analyst and patient – that creates meaning and expands facts into life stories that reflect the complexity and reality of human experience.

ON CHANGE: And What It Takes To Make It Happen.

It is the end of another year, and the beginning of a new one. After the holidays and celebrations, this is a time when many consider what the past has been about and the possibilities that the future might hold. It is a time when people make resolutions to do something or change something in their lives. The ‘new’ year harbors the potential for  change, the possibility for a new beginning, a promise of hope, of renewal, of reparation and/or  transformation. So this post is about change, what it might mean and how it might happen. Not in the “ten easy steps to…” or “how to…” kind of change, but in the why change is hard kind of way.

Let me start with a tentative definition. Change is a rather difficult word to define. What does it mean exactly? To change, to shift. It implies movement. Does it require a motive? An intention? It certainly requires a conclusion, a particular end. So perhaps change is about the ending of what is. The ending not the movement of what is to what could be. For the philosopher Krishnamuti, only if the ending has a motive, a purpose, if it involves making a decision, does it constitutes a change from this to that. Notice that what moves change from being the ending of what is to something else is the act of deciding, which is an act of will, which is a representation of desire.

Aha. Desire. Yes the movement of change is in desire. As in: I will do this, I won’t do that. When desire is involved in ending something it becomes the cause of its end. Where there is a cause there is a motive and so there is no ending at all. There is movement to something. There is change.

Change. Perhaps it is difficult to achieve because it necessarily involves desire. One of my favorite Buddhist stories about desire comes from Mark Epstein’s retelling of it in his book “Open to Desire”, it goes something like this:

A man sits in the center of a marketplace, crying his eyes out surrounded by a platter of peppers he has been biting into. One after another he tastes them, crying uncontrollably.

Concerned, his friends ask him “What is the matter?” “What are you doing?”

“I am looking for the sweet one” he answers.

Ah, desire. It keeps us doing some very strange things, often eliciting suffering yet persevering in its search for…the sweet one. Epstein sees this as the basic message of both psychoanalysis and Buddhism- the unbridgeable gap between desire and satisfaction and what happens in between. Indeed such a gap houses much of human suffering and struggle, and when it comes to change -the ending of something due to the desire for something else-  suffering is always involved in some way. Change involves an end, a renunciation, a giving up of, as well as an acknowledgement of desire (I want this not that) before something else can take its place, and so it inevitably involves suffering in the process. Many of my clinical hours are spent with people who want to change something in their lives yet remain stuck in the very situations they want to change, often repeating a pattern of suffering that seems to have no end. So change requires not only an act of will, an intention, a decision, a coming to terms with our desire, it involves much more…

Some time ago I wrote a post about the repetition compulsion (to view click here:  https://www.drceccoli.com/2012/03/play-it-again-sam-on-the-compulsion-to-repeat/) in which I addressed some of the ‘more‘ that is required for change to happen. It was a piece about the fact that early relational experiences are hard wired in our brains and actually lay down neuronal pathways that are  based on those interactions.  For example, when someone has suffered early trauma, (either through parental impingement or abandonment) it sets up a yearning for a type of relationship that can never satisfy and continues to reproduce itself in all relationships of import. Even for those who grew up in an environment in which it was possible to negotiate disappointment without losing a connection to the other, the neurobiological equation still holds true: early experiences are embedded in the brain’s physical substrate and influence subsequent emotions, perceptions, behaviors, relationships and experiences. These are reinforced over our lifetime, and when they are triggered by events in the present they color and influence what we feel and do. So change requires not only an act of will, a conscious decision. And a coming to terms with our desire. It also requires the development of new skills, new behaviors and a new language (with which to re-label experience) in order to re-wire brain patterns. Additionally, it requires new relational experience(s) in order to grow and stimulate new brain wiring.

The decision to change something activates many of our past experiences and their concomitant emotions. It activates early desires and disappointments and their relational contexts. So even though the change may be welcomed, it may still elicit fear of the new and unknown, the pain associated with loss and with giving something (known) up, along with specific behaviors and feelings associated to what change might mean to each of us. Take  a deceivingly simple example like food and dieting. Many people begin the new year with the intention of eating better and perhaps losing some weight. Behaviorally this entails making a decision, choosing a diet, making time to exercise and sticking to it. And it is in the sticking to it that many people falter. Why? Because it is sticky territory. It is where we shift from individual behavior to relational configurations of emotion and interpersonal meaning that affect that behavior. For one thing, food has multiple and varied meanings for people (established early on). It potentially  fills that gap between desire and satisfaction (the one we are constantly negotiating). For another, our relationship to how we care for ourselves is an internalized version of how we were cared for. Not as simple as ten easy steps to a thinner and better you. Behavioral solutions are helpful but they do not address the entire story. They do not address how one might go about approaching change and negotiating disappointment.

Yes, this type of change requires time, practice and relationship. Time to reconsider the old within the possibilities of the new. The practice of new skills and behaviors that support the change in question and begin to substantiate its results experientially, so that it is felt from the inside and incorporated into one’s life. And it requires relationships. Since behavior, perception and emotional interaction is all established within early relationships that then shape the very structure of our brain and nervous system, it turns out that relationships are a necessary element to meaningful and lasting change, and this includes our relationship to ourselves as well as to others.

So here is to the process of change. To endings and beginnings and to the space in between, to the gap between desire and satisfaction and to those relationships that help us navigate it successfully and meaningfully.

Cheers.

 

* Watercolor by Roderick Maciver at  Heron Dance Art Studios.

PSYCHIC SURVIVAL – And The Packaging of the Self.

We are, all of us, finely tuned complex beings. Every day in my clinical practice I am reminded of this fact. Individuals and their lives, and life solutions are never simple. Instead, each person carries within them a dense cast of internal characters and experiences which lend their voices and truths to lived experience, often determining outcome and choices. This personal theater of relationships to others and to the world is the very basis of our experience- and often that experience is housed, felt and thought about in different parts of our self, in self-states that have emerged (often out of awareness) to help us get on with the business of living.

Working with people who have suffered various types of traumatic experience, has highlighted for me the fact that there are often many selves, or self states which hold different information about a person: different feelings, thoughts, experiences and memories. The degree of trauma is sometimes equivalent to the degree of psychic fragmentation and dissociation, but this is not always true. The fact is that our psyche is prone to dissociation in the service of maintaining healthy functioning and ongoing homeostasis, (for more on this click here: https://www.drceccoli.com/2010/08/on-being-oneself/ ). All of us dissociate to one degree or another in our daily lives despite our ongoing experience of being one self. And some times we rely more on one part of ourself than on others-because we need to. When trauma has touched one’s life it causes the dissociative properties of our psyche to become entrenched and take over, in order to prevent further destabilization, and this often means that self-experience becomes fragmented and held and managed by varying parts of the self.

This post is about personal marketing, about the packaging of the self and the make up of a personae who can navigate the demands of the world while protecting the truth(s) of the rest of the self, and its psychic unity and survival. This type of “packaging” is known to all survivors of trauma (regardless of the type of trauma) and  usually presents a particular and personally created incarnation that is based on strength, competence and total self-reliance. The trouble is that such packaging usually comes about as the result of environmental impingement on the self. It materializes as a palpable self to help navigate difficulties and prevent further psychic disruption and destabilization while managing life’s demands. Such packaging creates a “false self” that is adept at doing what is needed while maintaining crucial emotional ties and bonds to loved ones and protecting the “true(er) self” that has been injured, trespassed and/or traumatized. Quite a complicated state of affairs.

Since such a self is meant to insure survival, it comes about via the shaping of a self that mirrors what is expected from the adult caretakers that are involved in such survival. What is crucial here is to maintain the emotional connection to others through a mirroring of their perceived needs. Their perceived needs and not the self’s (ergo the developmental impingement). Furthermore, since this packaged self is forged out of a child’s psyche, it is modeled  in the rigid, inflexible, and omnipotent style that children often use in play when they emulate adults. Thus, while it may be very effective in managing ongoing life situations, it precludes the ability to contemplate other behavioral options or to develop the necessary coping skills to deal. And this is out of necessity: in order to develop social and behavioral coping skills one needs to experience the emotions and feelings associated with them so as to be able to think about them experientially. The entire purpose of  the false self or packaged personae is to avoid those feelings and get on with it. What makes such self-states false is that they are borne out of necessity for survival and do not represent the individual’s other needs, instead they act as protective shields with a singular purpose – to avoid further psychic disruption while maintaining a crucial emotional tie.  To call these self-states  ‘false’ is misleading – they are very real indeed and often contain many characteristics of the self which have  rigidified and become ironclad out of necessity. Continued reliance on such “packaging” insures emotional isolation and hopelessness as the rest of the self is likely to feel misunderstood and alone, as well as at a loss as to how to proceed without the help of a much depended on part of itself. This is one of the many reasons why people enter treatment: their (protective) false self has been working overtime, its armor cracking and revealing a much more complex emotional story .

It is often the case that our defenses, whether they exhibit as full on selves, self states or ongoing protective behaviors, come about to help maintain our psychic integrity but at the cost of keeping much of the information and feelings associated with the pain inherent in such experiences, out of our awareness. Thus, our package-like states require that we continue to act within a rigid set of behavioral alternatives (which came about out of necessity) because they are the only ones that such self-states know. Often when other alternatives become an option in treatment, they threaten the self precisely because they require new behavior and skills, which may make previous ways of functioning (and package-like states) not needed. Imagine relying on a part of yourself for most of your life and then finding out that perhaps it has been made redundant!

Psychoanalysts that work with trauma and dissociative states often address the need for integration: a kind of meeting of the self-states so that one can acknowledge the various parts of oneself, why they are needed, how they function, what they speak to, etc. Such integration rarely comes about smoothly. Instead it occurs over time and usually in relationship to an other who comes to know the self in relation to its self-states. Someone who comes to understand why the packaging was and perhaps still is necessary, and who helps bring about a voice and a say -finally initiating a dialogue that makes integration a possibility.

It was when I come to truly know and understand various patient self states, from my experience  of, and interaction with them, that a meeting of minds can take place, and only then is it possible for my patients to consider doing things that until that point had been managed by another part of themselves, packaged to take on that particular task(s). Treatment is not necessarily about banishing these  states, but about understanding their purpose and perhaps initiating a collaboration of sorts- leading to the experience and sense of unity that comes from really knowing oneself.

OUR USE OF OBJECTS – And Their Importance In Our Lives.

Several weeks ago I wrote a post on our internal world and how it is populated (https://www.drceccoli.com/2012/08/our-internal-world-and-how-it-is-populated/). I was drawing attention to the powerhouse that runs our life. In that post I focused on the significant players in our lives and our relationships to them. Today, I would like to speak about the rest of the internal population: the objects and things that become meaningful to us because of the way that we use them and the meaning that we assign to them. In psychological parlance we refer to this as object use.

The objects that populate an individual’s internal world are personal, specific and idiosyncratic in their meaning and use. Take food for example. For some of us, food offers many pleasures in its preparation, tasting and sharing. It immediately connotes  being with loved ones and enjoying it together. For others, food is simply something that must be dealt with, fuel for the body and nothing more. For still others food can be a substance to be abused, used to excess, having more to do with getting a reliable fill, satiating something that is wanting or hungry for something other than food, and/or managing a feeling or an emotion that threatens to be overwhelming. And for yet another group of people, food can become something to do without precisely because it threatens to stir up pleasure and address the hungers within. Food as an object can be used in many ways. And so it is for other objects as well.

Take reading as another example. For some of us reading is a pleasure, a way to gain information, engage in an inner dialogue, experience various feeling states and travel to foreign lands. It can be a playful activity that stimulates our imagination and creativity. It can also become a way of escaping the routine of our lives, our problems and responsibilities, or worse, it can become a way of avoiding our life altogether. Reading, as an object can be used in many different ways.

Our use of objects comes about from our early ability to play and the opportunities afforded to us to do so. I am not speaking here of having many toys, but of having early relationships that encourage exploration, curiosity and play. Relationships that facilitate the exploration of the world, the self, and the self in relation. Such relationships create a facilitating environment that makes it possible to move from relating to an object- as in this is my toy car, it moves this way and that way, to using the object: In my toy car I am a drag racer who is unafraid to bang up my car because it is the conduit to my experience and I can use it any way I want to. The difference between relating to an object and using it involves being able to do with it whatever is needed, to really use it for our own purposes. In essence, it involves being able to use it how we need to and learn from our experience with it. Unless we have had early relationships that have facilitated trusting our “play” and our use of objects to elaborate parts of ourselves and discover our own creative possibilities, objects remain, well, just objects- things with little and/or limited meaning. Object usage requires that we be willing to destroy the actual properties of the thing while being aware of its properties and the possibilities they bring to our lives.

What is of import here is that the more we are able to fully use our objects the better off we are, as they provide potential venues to understand and elaborate our experience. I often see patients who are isolated and withdrawn, full of pain and unable to connect with others. Such patients are often unable to talk about their experience with others because they do not trust that those others will be able to help them with their burdens. They have not developed the ability to use another or an actual object in a way that helps them flesh out their experience. Instead they turn to objects and things, including people, to mitigate their experience, often requiring the objects in their world to be uni-dimensional and rigid, and serve only one particular function- escape, distraction, satiation etc. Unfortunately, this continues a spiral of isolation and a return to the use of objects for their escapist function.

When  you think about how you use the objects in your life, what do you come up with? Utilitarian? Creative? Playful? Elaborative? Restrictive? Compulsive? What objects help expand possibilities and which shut it down? Think about the history of your usage, how long has your relationship to a particular object been around, where did it derive its meaning? What does the way you use it tell you about you? Would it help to review this?

In my work I often focus on how my patients attribute meaning to the things and people in their lives. I know that at least some of those meanings come from their personal, relational history and how it has been internalized .  I then focus on how that plays out  in our interactions. I have come to understand that such (object) usage tells me a great deal about my patients internal world and their experiences in life. It also tells me a great deal about where reparation might be needed. Our relationship is usually forged from the internal players in their world colliding with those in mine, in a space where it is possible to play many different roles and speak in many different tongues opening new possibilities within old interactions and behaviors.