OUT OF MY MIND

PLAY IT AGAIN SAM: On the compulsion to repeat.

There is a Buddhist belief that people come into our life so that we may learn something and/or work through something that we need to resolve before we can move on.  Thus everyone in our lives is a potential teacher, involving us in a relationship with the very thing that we have to work out. I like this idea. I wonder what Freud would have done with this, whether he would have reworked it or used it to inform his concept of the repetition compulsion. Perhaps he did. What he did not know, because it was impossible to know this at the time, is that neuroscience would prove him right, at least regarding the physiology of the repetition compulsion.

The concept of the repetition compulsion has undergone a number of revisions since its initial description by Freud as related to the death instinct-a move toward self-destructive behavior that he postulated was part of our psychology. According to his initial formulation, behavior patterns acquired in childhood relationships are forgotten (residing in the unconscious) and are instead acted out and repeated later in life. Such behaviors are thus reproduced not as memories but as actions, which continue to repeat themselves in our lives.

The compulsion to repeat a particularly self destructive behavior, often within a relationship, was later seen as arising from early (traumatic) experiences which were unconsciously recreated in adult relationships in an effort to repair and master them. The idea behind this was that the individual had learned to behave in a particular interpersonal way in intimacy, and unconsciously sought out people who felt familiar, effectively recreating the emotional environs of childhood and the need to behave in a particular way. We finally have a body of neuro-scientific research that validates this idea, essentially telling us that since our brain develops in relation to our caretakers and their caregiving, both brain tissue and brain chemistry are built and driven by such early experiences. The brain structures borne within the early relational matrix filter and shape subsequent psychological development including learning, perception, and behavior.

Because of the major brain growth spurts that occur in infancy, during critical periods of development, early experiences have a particularly powerful influence over the formation of neurological structures. Not only are the elements of implicit and emotional memories laid down, but  the actual placement of neuronal synapses, as well as the calibration of neuro-transmitters. Researchers now believe that our initial experiences are embedded in the brain’s physical substrate and therefore influence subsequent experiences, feelings and perceptions as well as behavior. Early experience reverberates anew through its echo in our current life. The repetition compulsion is but one of those instances.

This explains why compulsive behavior is so difficult to shift. Why the repetitions continue. The repetition is not only an effort to master it and to get it right, to repair it. It is also a circuitous loop  that is hard wired in our brain and central nervous system. It is literally mapped out in our brain structures as a unique and personal highway of affect, relational memories and adaptive (yes, adaptive!) behavior aimed at psychic survival and homeostatic regulation at all costs- even if it means playing it again, over and over. You can think of it as a loop that has been reinforced over many years (early on), which now resonates in the present and requires the development of new skills, new behaviors and  new language in order to re-wire itself into a different brain pattern. It requires new relational experience(s) in order to grow and stimulate new brain wiring.

Whew! This is why it requires time. And practice. And a relationship that makes possible new experience out of the old. This is why all behavior change requires time and practice and a relational exchange. This is why psychotherapy requires time, commitment and hard work.

The Buddhist tale I began with is more poetic than science. More descriptive of the experiential power of being open to learning something new out of something familiar and old. It too is supported by research, for in the interaction and relationship with our “teachers”  (those others that help us to play it again) we arrive at  and experience what we must learn in order to usher in change. And this too requires the hard work of practice and  the gift of time.

 

THE HEART OF THE MATTER: On Love.

OK, here comes the last in a series of holidays that tortures many people – Valentine’s Day. A completely made up holiday to celebrate love and those we love in our lives. Great if you have love, horrible if you do not. That being said, I am going to take it as an opportunity to think about love and relationships, and the meanings that they take on for all of us. So here goes.

Sometimes it may seem as if love is better left to poets and books, who manage to access our feelings and emotions through their words. Or more unfortunately, to Hollywood and the images it flood us with –  of romance, marriage and the fruits of relationships. What makes poetry and movies so powerful is that they evoke deeply held memories, fantasies and wishes, some of which may have never been fully articulated.  I am going to try to speak about love from a psychological perspective, which, while it may not sound or be romantic or sexy, does, to my mind, help explain why all of us want and need to be loved. And perhaps why love can seem so elusive to some. Valentine’s day mourners take heed.

The need for love, along with the need for security and the need for food, is a basic one for all of us. And interestingly, love can be a means of providing emotional security and nutrition for the soul. Love is something that starts in our family of origin, at our mothers’ lap, in our father’s arms, and actually, even earlier, in the womb. At such early stages it has to do with creating an environment that supports life – what British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott  termed ‘good enough’ in referring to a mothers’ ability to care for her infant in life promoting ways. (See, not so romantic but definitely the seed of love forever more).

Within the mother-child couple, love takes on many meanings that will set the pattern for adult interactions and expectations in love relationships. These early interactions actually set down the neurological wiring that supports our thoughts, feelings, expectations and behavior, as well as our ability to engage others and experience ourselves as engageable. As children, our early experiences with the adults that care for us literally shape (neurologically and behaviorally) what we come to term ‘love’- what we believe it is, our expectations of it and how we understand and approach it. Few, if any of us can claim to enter adult life having received enough love, but many of us are fortunate to have had a‘good enough’ loving environment that provided what was needed. No wonder Hollywood and literature have managed to make a huge industry out of love, there is so much room for fantasy and longing to plug into! Hollywood does not settle for ‘good enough’, they go for the full monty and beyond. And they take us along.

Psychologically speaking, the receiving and giving of love is one of the ways in which meaning is created  and established in our lives. It happens relationally. Through our experience of being cared for, attended to, and recognized in relationship, we come to experience the other and ourselves in ongoing interaction. This interaction mediates many of our emotions and feelings about ourselves and others. It operates intra-personally (telling me about myself and who I am) as well as inter-personally (me in relation to another). Just as it was within the maternal dyad, love in adult relationships can co-create the space to support (or shut down) life. In this case intimate life. Who amongst us does not want to be known, recognized and acknowledged for who we really feel we are and be loved for it or despite it? Unconditional love. The stuff that Hollywood thrives on.

Enter romance and the notion of romantic love. And with romance, enter Eros and sexuality. This is the stuff that makes us feel robust and energized, the stuff that vitalizes us. The stuff of potential magic. Love, and our experience of it, along with its incarnation in romance, and its activation of our senses, has something to do with the feeling that life is worth living and meaningful. And this has something to do with why people seek romance to give their lives meaning- a slippery slope, and one that is likely to disappoint. Our ability to love another, and to experience ourselves as lovable is directly related to our early relational history. As such it has its own particular kind of chemistry, a specific combination of relationally driven elements that pre-determine our selection of partners, making some appealing and others not so much.  Such is the (neurological) imprint of early relationships and our experience of it later in life.

This is why the search for romance is likely to disappoint- it is not the other that repairs our early history, but our ability to engage and interact with the other openly, to survive the potential dangers of intimacy and our  personal vulnerability to those dangers, and to get to know the many ways in which we have closed ourselves to love, that holds the most promise for meaningful experiences of the loving kind- but you will not find that on a greeting card.

Some time ago I posted a quote from Rumi that seems appropriate here:

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it”.

Emotional barriers come about as protective envelopes that help us to negotiate early intimacy but keep us from engaging in depth later on. They too are borne within the early maternal matrix  and were intended to help us maintain an emotional connection – but at a cost. In adult relationships such barriers may continue to thicken in an attempt to protect us from the same kinds of vulnerability. This business of being human is complex and emotionally fraught, and yet, if we are to remain vital, engaged and present in our lives, Rumi was right, our task is to seek and find our barriers, creating a space that supports life.

 

*For more on relationships, love and commitment please click on:  https://www.drceccoli.com/2011/02/i-do-i-do-on-relationships-and-commitment/

THE BONDS THAT HOLD US: ON BLOOD AND LOVE.

This blog is collaboration. While I am writing it, it is based on something that was shared with me regarding a meaningful personal experience in psychotherapy. It was spawned from a posting on authenticity (https://www.drceccoli.com/2011/07/on-being-authentic/) in which I described the potential curative power of relationships that rely on the sharing of felt experience. This got my collaborator thinking about her experiences in treatment, and in particular, how her first treatment with a male therapist had changed her life because of his willingness to be real and to make himself known in this way. She has given me permission to share part of her story. So here it is.

Her fathers’ love provided a powerful resource that helped her to survive the trauma and pain in her early life, despite his untimely death during her adolescence. As an adult, she began treatment with a male analyst, who through his authenticity, echoed and rekindled the memory of protection and trust that she had experienced with her father. This made it possible for her to address and work on many of the difficulties in her life. Her therapist’s recognition and real attunement made her feel safe and protected. After reading my blog on authenticity, and as a Potterhead (my affectionate name for those of us that are fans of the Harry Potter books), she talked to me about this experience. She told me that she felt that her analyst had sealed the “bond of love” that her father had begun, through an authentic relationship, which provided a human context in which it was possible to revisit dark places because she felt cared for, recognized, understood and protected. She further told me that she had come to understand this through her reading of Harry Potter.

So now some explanations regarding the bond of love, which in the Potter series, is a bond that is exchanged between Lily (Harry’s mom) and Harry, when she protects him from the dark wizard (Voldermort) by standing between Harry and the powerful death spell cast by Voldermort. The spell hits Lily and kills her, and leaves a thunderbolt shaped scar on Harry’s forehead. Here is how it is described in the Harry Potter Lexicon:

The bond of blood is formed when a person sacrifices himself or herself for a family member, out of love. The sacrifice creates a lingering protection in the blood of the person who was saved. It is not activated, however, until a charm is actually cast, and it is not sealed and functioning until another member of the family accepts the saved person as his or her own.

In Harry Potter, the charm is cast when the wise wizard (Dumbledore) sends Harry to live with his aunt, and gets her to agree to care for him until he can attend the school of magic. By accepting this, it is his aunt who seals the charm, and as a result Harry is protected. The nature of this magic is that it requires two people – it requires a relationship to be activated.

It is called the bond of blood, because although Harry’s aunt has no affection for him at all, she is his family, his blood. The love part comes from Harry’s mother. The one interacts with the other. Now what does this have to do with therapy? say you. Everything. Please read on.

All of us have our family blood, both literally and figuratively. It carries not only our DNA, we could say that it also contains our history at the cellular level. Our bloodline carries on through generations, as do many of the behaviors and emotions that are learned and experienced in our early family relationships. Consciously and unconsciously. Such early interactions with our caretakers literally shape our experience of our self and our self in relationship. We now know that early relationships and interactions shape the way our brains develop and function, and that this in turn affects the way that we experience and conduct our relationships. Love, and our (early) experience of it may in fact ‘protect’ us by helping us form meaningful connections and relationships to others. By paving the way to relationality.

In psychotherapy we bring our history, and our blood bonds with us, and we share them with another through our relationship with them. If that other is attuned to the emotional communication that we bring with us, and if that other is prepared to relate to us in an authentic way, that echoes our emotional history because it provides a human context in which to articulate our experience, then magic happens: the experience of feeling known and recognized by someone who can help us repair parts of our experience because they help us to re-experience it in a new way. The therapeutic relationship has the potential to activate a protective “bond of love” through its authenticity. I share this story because it captures this most important factor of the therapeutic action. And it also captures what bonds us together – our humanity.

 

THE NUTCRACKER – On Being A Soldier Through Life.

During the recent holiday season, on my daily commute to the office, I walked by a poster of New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker, smiling at the familiar image of rosey-cheeked wooden soldiers and the memories that it elicited of my childhood. Until one morning as I walked by, it elicited something else, the image of a rigid soldier attempting to fight off potential danger. Hmm. Then I remembered that in my work I have often used the metaphor of being a soldier for the experience of having to be strong and take charge too early – for a response to the experience of developmental trauma and the need to survive it at all costs.

Truth be told, Nutcracker soldiers are sweet but a bit scary. The color in their cheeks a tad too red, their expression hard and their body posture downright rigid. The Nutcracker ballet itself is not all sugar plum fairies, it is full of frightening battles, even when they are danced. Interesting that all of this came to mind suddenly, as I looked, really looked at the images of nutcrackers on the poster. Soldiers indeed, although dressed and colored as toys to be played with. In the ballet, the Nutcracker is given as a gift to Clara, the little girl, but is swiftly taken from her by her brother and his friends who manage to break him in their rough play. Clara’s godfather, the toymaker who made the nutcracker for her, bandages the wooden soldier and provides a bed for him to rest on under the christmas tree. Clara stays with him and is awakened by a battle between the toy soldiers and an army of mice, led by their king, which her nutcracker wins (with Clara’s help) despite his injury. In the end, the nutcracker turns into a prince. I love fairy tales, and I love this ballet, but it was not until one December morning that I realized why I still love it so.

A soldier is someone who has to be armed and prepared for anything – fighting for survival in an attempt to insure that no more damage will be done. A soldier is called into duty when there is a threat to safety. How like the experience of developmental trauma and the response to it. A soldier has to be skilled in weaponry, and wear armor to protect him or her from potential danger. A soldier has to carry on in the midst of ongoing, potentially traumatic events. Soldiering through insures survival. And survival is what it is all about when it comes to trauma. Particularly developmental trauma – the kind that happens when we are young, the kind that happens within the family and at the hands of those we love. We are wired to survive and so we do, and some do by soldiering on – even when there is no longer a war to be fought. In such cases being a soldier becomes part of our character structure, part of who we experience ourselves to be. This can take many forms. We may experience ourselves as strong, capable, logical within our soldier self, and fear being weak, vulnerable and needy. Yet we are likely all of the above. The soldier-self protecting what may be most princely about us – our humanity.

I have written a number of blog posts regarding the experience of trauma (see/click   https://www.drceccoli.com/2010/08/trauma-and-dissociation/  and  https://www.drceccoli.com/2010/09/dissociation-part-one-and-three-quarters/ ), what I am attempting to describe here is a state of mind, a way of being in the world that seeks to protect a wound that continues to resonate  (often unconsciously) into adulthood and threaten the individual. A soldier self-state is necessarily brittle and rigid, much like my description of the nutcracker – a bit too much. It does not allow for the experience of vulnerability, or real connection with another, or the experiencing of deep emotions because to do so brings on potential threat to the unity of the self, and survival trumps all. The traumatized psyche exercises an eternal hyper-vigilance on itself, destroying the ability to live creatively and spontaneously because it has lost the ability to move fluidly within itself. Thus, a psychic army of one is called forth to manage threats and restore safety. A personal nutcracker if you will, complete with costume and make up.

So I return to the story of the Nutcracker, where it is Clara’s intervention, when she throws her slipper at the Mouse King as he is overtaking her wounded nutcracker, which saves the day. It allows the nutcracker to  win the battle and turn into a prince, to become human. It is through our shared humanity, and our ability to connect and rely on others, to use our relationships fully that healing takes place. In psychotherapy this constitutes the bedrock of the patient-analyst relationship.


 

HE SAID, SHE DID: A return to gender stereotypes or the recipe for gender fluidity?

He leads, she follows. This is the simple truth of tango. Because of this, many have the misconception that tango is a man’s dance. But this is not true. Tango is a dance of equals – different and equal. Read on, you’ll see.

Tango, the music and the dance, was borne with the European immigration wave to Argentina in the 1880’s. The immigrants were mostly men who came from Italy, Germany and Greece, and settled in the orillas or outskirts of Buenos Aires. Thus many of the songs are melancholy – they speak of lost love and loneliness, desperation and unfulfilled passion. The dance itself started between men and then moved to brothels, where the women would dance to attract customers. But this is not a history lesson, I am simply trying to trace some of the roots of Tango to highlight the fact that it too, was stereotyped by the cultural norms of the time. However, when you dance it , if you want to dance it well, you immediately understand that it is a dance that requires both masculine and feminine energy, in more or less equal parts that have to be negotiated constantly and in partnership. It is perhaps, the only dance that requires the equal participation of the dancers in order to be fluid, so I find it useful to use Tango to think about gender roles and stereotypes and about what happens when the embodiment of masculine and feminine energy (in all of their conventional and clichéd formulas) actually flows.

Yes it is true that in Tango the man leads and the woman follows. This is true even when two women or two men dance together: the masculine energy leads, the feminine follows. Hmmm. What does that actually mean? In actuality what it means is that the leader has to initiate the dance, choreograph his steps, stay alert in the line of dance so as to not run into anyone else, and most importantly, through his embrace, communicate and invite the woman to move with him. Huh! And it looks so smooth. The leader has to know what the step looks like backwards, so that he can make room for his partner to move. Being a good leader is very difficult – he is always a little ahead of the beat so that he can move his partner onto her feet with the beat, and then follow her movement into the next step.  A good leader has a light touch but a strong presence. And so it is for the follower. Now since the man initiates the movement, the woman (the follower) has to be receptive to his invitation. She moves only when he moves, and does not set her foot down in a step until the man has moved her there. This requires physical awareness and sensitivity. It is the subtle exchange of mutual understanding through the embrace that literally moves the center of balance from two separate individuals to one – the couple. This requires trust, as both partners are constantly counter balancing each other and sharing the other’s weight. This connection creates security and confidence in the partnership. In Tango the center of weight is between the dancers so that they may become one.

If you are still with me, and not wanting to immediately jump up and dance, then you probably have caught on to where I am going with this. The leader leads and follows. The follower follows and leads. Moving as one requires two people who are present and negotiate their energy constantly. Masculine and feminine energies. Fluidity of movement requires negotiation not just between leader and follower but between the masculine and feminine  energies of both partners. Individually and together. When the movement is powered by two equally involved and present energies the gender of each participant matters not. It literally creates a fluid, interactive loop. Such is the dance of Tango. Such is the interplay of sexuality and gender in life – a subtle negotiation between the masculine, the feminine and the possibilities in between.

He says: Make me wait for you. She moves into him and adjusts the pressure of her embrace. The center of gravity shifts. They dance as one, both balancing in each others’ embrace. Uh huh. A magical moment. A communion with the fluidity of our being, in sexed reality and gendered energy.

 

Between The Word And The Deed/Entre Lo Dicho y Lo Hecho – A poem/Un poema

Poetry seems to access emotions through words. Poetry moves language beyond its daily use, shifting it beyond itself to the language of emotion. Much like music and art, poetry speaks to us in a direct and most personal way. I originally wrote this poem in Spanish, years ago. Here it is below, in both English and Spanish…

They say the unsaid

embeds itself in the heart

and rots it from within

The word unheard

turns against itself

strangling the speaker.

They say that the not done

embeds itself in memory

destroying all possibility

The act that is not risked

becomes the torture of each moment

And little by little

erodes time

24/7

They say that breathing

does not constitute living

Life is made

Of what is said and done

Only thus can the heart beat.

                                                                                                                  ****

   Dicen que lo no dicho

se embede en el corazón

y lo pudre desde adentro

La palabra no escuchada

se vuelve contra si misma

estrangulando al autor

Dicen que lo no hecho

se embede en la memoria

destrozando toda posibilidad

El acto no arriesgado

se vuelve la tortura de cada momento

Y poco a poco

erosiona el tiempo

24 horas sobre 24

Dicen que el respiro

no constituye vivir

La vida esta hecha

de lo dicho y hecho

Solo así puede latir el corazón

*

THE LIGHT AND DARK OF HOLIDAYS – the winter of our discontent?

Twas’ the night before Christmas and all through New York, all the people were smiling and nodding and caroling about. OK not really, but people do seem to be taken by the holiday spirit, many gather by the tree in Rockefeller center looking up at it and taking photographs. Others seem busy buying presents for those they love. There are singing Santa’s for the Salvation Army- some of them rocking out and moon dancing. The city is lit up with stars and decorated trees. New York is beautiful any time of the year, but during the Christmas holidays it is spectacular, even magical.

New Yorkers are a tough breed. We have learned to look through people on the street, smile only at those we know, and interact minimally with strangers. These are the unspoken rules of city living, and when you break one of them, you do so at your own risk! But, somehow at Christmas the rules relax, people look you in the eye, talk to you at the counter, even give up their seat for you on the subway. During the holiday season all of us seem to remember that we are linked, connected to each other through our humanity.

Inside my office the mood is a little dimmer. Our human bond brings other associations. Holidays appear to take their toll on many, as they often highlight all the peculiarities and difficulties in relationships and family connections. They also highlight loneliness. Those that are in relationships may be unhappy with them and those that do not have them come into intense contact with their longing. Holidays can do this and more.

This is because holidays are days that are meant to celebrate connection, when such a connection is painful or non-existent, holidays become days of mourning. Reminders of what has been lost, or what has not become a reality. Much like birthdays (a sort of personal holiday), which often spawn reflections on what one has accomplished and done with one’s life, holidays make us think of those around us and our connection to them. They elicit memories of previous holidays as well as wishes and fantasies full of personal desires.

The dark and the light, the inside and the outside, the other side of the coin, the yin and the yang – holidays are not exempt from this dichotomy. This is important because it means that we can alternate in our feelings about holidays and what they mean to us. We may flip back and forth between the light and the dark of it, and travel through the territory in between. I encourage people to pay attention to what causes those shifts in them, what triggers particular feelings and what makes it possible to understand them, to live through them, to reach the other side. I am also particularly interested in the area in between the light and dark, as I think it is capable of much more emotional range and behavioral action. I think the area in between the light and dark is where our life is possible, where movement can happen, where change takes hold. While the dark side is often the area that is explored in therapy, it is the area in between the light and dark, the area that is generated and created in relationship to my patients where change and new possibilities reside.

So whether holidays touch upon the dark, or the light, I encourage you to search the in between.

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

― Rumi

ON BREAKING BREAD – and the meaning of food.

Yes this post is about food. Tis’ the time for merry making and this often involves food, and also potential excess. It got me thinking about food and what it means to us. It got me thinking that the way we use and consume food says a great deal about us. It got me thinking that food is a daily source of potential projection that holds and contains more than its nutritive value. Along with the imagined qualities that we may assign to food, our use of it literally carries ingested parts of our history, our relationships and our physical and emotional development. The holiday season just makes it more obvious because  festivities usually involve the breaking of bread together.

Think of the words ‘comfort food’ and its’ associated meanings. Some food is literally comforting to us, and this has less to do with what it does for our stomach than what it does for our sense of ourselves. Some food just makes us feel good because it reminds us of something or someone that made us feel, well comforted. The particular kind of food varies with the individual according to what that something or that someone was.

Think of the sensual characteristics of food. There is of course its taste and the multiple flavors and spices which get our digestive and creative juices flowing. There is the aroma of food calling forth the smells and perfumes of childhood. There is the color of food and its presentation, which appeals to our visually oriented self and invites us to the table. And then there is the actual taste of food, its texture and feel. Food invites all of our senses to be present, and as such, it accesses our most personal bodily and psychological experiences because it speaks in a sensual language. Food is a shortcut to implicit memory and experience. A shortcut to what we know deep inside but perhaps never articulate and instead it comes alive when we eat. Although this post is not about eating disorders, you can see how they might be forms of speaking the unspeakable – of restricting because of having had too much of something or of binging and overeating as an antidote for not having had enough of it.

In a wonderful novel that speaks to this most primal element of food – Like Water for Chocolate– the author, Laura Esquivel develops the notion that food, and its preparation and ingestion carries emotional meaning and significance. Tita, the protagonist, is a young woman who has survived a life full of trauma- not knowing her father, a sadistic mother, the loss of her lover to her older sister – and has poured herself into cooking. Her dishes involve her intimately with her emotions and the food that she prepares communicates them to those that eat it. Thus when she prepares something with love, her dinner guests literally are overcome with love and passion, when she is sad and cries into the wedding cake she is baking, her guests become tearful and depressed. And when she prepares something while upset and angry her dinner guests become ill. You get the idea. Beyond its nutrient value, food speaks directly to our emotions because it accesses them in a primal way.

But it is more complicated than that. Because food is involved in all manner of interpersonal relations we  invest meaning to it accordingly. Elaborate preparation of food often carries the spirit and generosity of the chef preparing it. In this instance food becomes a way of sharing oneself and caring for others, of celebrating connection through home made culinary delights. In my experience it is always the people who love to cook who make the best chefs, and that is because their experience and love of food is communicated to others through their preparations. The overabundance or under-abundance of food, its excess and waste or restriction, speak to a particular use of it based on emotional experiences which wrap themselves up in food. This is how food becomes a way of providing for whatever we lack, or a way of “self-discipline” which wipes out any traces of hunger or need. As a direct link to our implicit self, food is marinated in emotions that determine how and what we eat, as well as the joy (or lack of it) that it might bring us.

While food is something that we need to live, like water and sleep and exercise, its emotional range resonates through generations. It echoes of the love in my grandma’s gnocchi and my mother’s tagliatelle, and resonates deeply every time I am at the stove and make a meal for those that I love. There is a communion of more than our bodies when we eat  and break bread together. To my mind, it is a communion that activates our lived experience directly and emotionally and connects us to each other  from the inside.

The great M.F.K. Fisher says it best:

“Like most humans, I am hungry…our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it…”

― M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me

 

 

ON SPACE AND ITS USES.

We all need space. Not just the concrete kind, but the personal kind, the kind of space that frees us to be ourselves and play with the possibilities of who we are and who we want to be. The kind of space where we can surprise ourselves, the kind of space that feels limitless and lets us play –spontaneously engaging various parts of who we are. The kind of space that Virginia Wolff wrote about in A Room of One’s Own – the kind that offers opportunities for creation. Self creation.

In therapy, space is something that is created within the analytic relationship. Many psychoanalysts have addressed space, and its use for the elaboration of the self. In this scenario, space is always shifting: sometimes expanding to make room for previously unknown experience, and sometimes constricting and closing off possibilities, replaying situations in which we feel constrained to be or act in a particular way. The shifting of space in clinical situations has everything to do with the relationship between patient and analyst and the particular relational configurations that come to life within that context.

In therapy, as in our lives, the people that we share our space with become active players in the elaboration and use of it, sometimes helping to open it up and at other times closing it off. While having open space helps us to discover the new, often situations that constrict our space by replaying emotionally difficult themes also potentially help us work out new ways of being. Such situations offer us the opportunity to negotiate space with another, and while that negotiation may take some time, maybe even a great deal of time, it is full of possibilities as long as both people are willing to negotiate, and negotiations can be tricky, particularly since they are often driven by our personal history.

So at first it may seem that space is best utilized on our own, no negotiation with another needed, just with our selves. Often this is the case with creative endeavors which require space to play with ideas, images, thoughts. This is true when our alone (internal) space is full of play and possibilities, which have been accumulated through self-exploration in the presence of another (see my post on this subject  https://www.drceccoli.com/2011/08/is-anybody-out-there/ ). Our internal world and our ability to access its many spaces is made up of what we have taken in, through our interactions with early significant others who have made such space safe enough to allow exploration on one’s own. Without this interactive space negotiation, where an other has been present and available, alone space may not feel full of creative possibility. So it turns out that space, and its potential use, involves a relational negotiation, an interpersonal negotiation of boundaries to both make the space secure enough to connect and negotiate with another.

Such a negotiation is tangible in the dance of Tango*, where two dancers need to read each other and respond to each other in order for the dance to take place. Furthermore, the dancers need each other and rely on each other for their balance, constantly negotiating it through their embrace. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Tango is such a difficult dance to learn – our negotiating skills are immediately tested! Perhaps because this occurs on a physical plane first, it is quite obvious to the dancer. Push one way and you lose your balance, move the other way and a turn happens, etc. But there is also a mental component to all of this: many more subtle shifts between our self states that may or may not be adept at negotiation. In fact, it is often these mental states that interfere with the physical negotiation needed in Tango. Much like it is the mental and emotional states that come alive in our internal world that can ultimately interfere with our use of space for self creation.

For some, external space (open vistas, the ocean, a meadow) can make internal space appear, for others it may be art or music that accesses the ability to move freely, for others dance, or silence. It is likely different for everyone, and requires a combination of elements that speaks only to us and the traces of our first negotiated relationship.

 

* For more on Tango as involving negotiation and possibility please see W. Bucci’s article: The Interplay of Subsymbolic and Symbolic Processes in Psychoanalytic Treatment: It Takes Two to Tango—But Who Knows the Steps, Who’s The Leader? The Choreography of the Psychoanalytic Interchange.

Click on:  http://stage.pep.gvpi.net/document.php?id=pd.021.0045a

THE LANGUAGE OF AFFECT: feelings and emotions.

I have been thinking about emotions and feelings lately, and about how differently people respond to them. There are those people who treat their emotions and feelings as valuable sources of information, considering them like their third eye or ear, a personal route to felt, implicit knowledge. Such people approach their feelings with a sense of wonderment and curiosity, which allows them to consider what the meaning of their affective experience may be. In psychotherapy this kind of exploration of ones’ feelings is not only encouraged, it is considered a potential source of play, which enriches the possibilities of self experience.

Other people have great difficulty feeling their emotions and considering them a source of information. To them, emotions and feelings are the harbingers of trouble and difficulty, like an unwanted and uncalled for alert to a situation that is best avoided. In a similar vein, feelings and emotions can be experienced as coming out of nowhere, in which case they can frighten us. Either way, when feelings are experienced as alien, as unwanted, as difficult or troublesome, as overwhelming, there is no ability to explore them and wonder what they are about, to ‘play’ with the possibilities, there is only the need not to feel and this requires shutting down. It requires a rigid adherence to whatever is going to help the person not think about it and not feel too much, if at all.

This is often the case when trauma has touched someone’s life. The experience of trauma assaults the individual with non-compatible, unexpected and incomprehensible information (thoughts, sensations, feelings) that overwhelms the ability to think and to make sense of the occurrence, making emotions and feelings intensely de-stabilizing. Thus, better to shut down and be on the alert for emotions that may bring pain and trouble, than to explore the pain and trouble. Often this is not a conscious choice. Or said differently: In the case of traumatic experience survival trumps everything else, so certain feelings and thoughts, as well as their links to personal sources of information will be disrupted and/or altogether aborted. They will be dissociated in order to insure psychic survival.

( for more on this, please see my series of posts on dissociation): https://www.drceccoli.com/category/trauma/

This post is not about dissociation, instead it means to address how we experience our feelings, and what role feelings and emotions play in our lives.

I have often found it helpful to think about emotion and feelings as one way to read the world around us and our response to it. This came from my belief and later, my understanding that affect, feeling and emotion are our first language, and that this language is the one with which we develop an understanding of our environs and a relationship with the caretakers in it. Our feelings alert us to how we respond to the outside world, and how it responds to us. At first this happens in a very personal way (as in pangs in stomach = hunger), and as we establish a relationship to our caretakers in an ever evolving more refined way (as in hunger pangs=she comes and feeds me=no more pangs in stomach=I feel good=she is good=we are good=I am happy) that begins to highlight the relationship between us and our caretaker as the source of contentment or pain. The source of a feeling. At least initially.

What I mean to highlight here is that feelings are part of an interior language that tells us what is going on within us in relation to the outside. As we grow up and begin to acquire a relational language (between mommy and me) that includes thoughts and feelings, we begin to experience more complex emotions. So emotions end up being feelings that have a cognitive and relational component, because a feeling has been identified as having to do with a particular relationship and its effect or impact on us. Again, emotions help us to read our response to people and our relationship with them. They locate who we are and how we feel  in relation to (another).

Feelings and emotions are affective channels for understanding the world and our relationship to it. they have their own, internal logic. Just like our senses, our ability to see and hear, to speak and touch help us to navigate the world, emotions and feelings provide the sonar equipment for this. Thought and cognition, as well as speech and its semantic register come about later and are informed by the language of affect.

So rather than privilege thought and cognition, which may make us feel safe within its language and provide an explanation that appeals to us because it captures something in words, I say, work with your emotions and feelings too. Add this information to your thoughts. Follow your heart and why it is beating. Listen to your gut, pay attention to your irritation, be with your tears. They are a language that is entirely yours and means to get your attention. It wants to lead you somewhere that may need re-visiting.

Here is how Rumi thinks of the same thing, but it sounds so much better when he writes about it:

 

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.