OUT OF MY MIND

LOST (AND FOUND) IN TRANSLATION.

I have always been interested in language, and how the ability to speak many of them, to think and dream in them, impacts who and how we are. When, and how we learn a second or third or fourth language influences not only how we communicate with others, it also shapes the particular content and material that we select as well as our experience of ourselves. Language and the particular symbols it assigns to things (thoughts, objects, feelings, etc.) lends specific meaning to our experiences. Or at the very least, it tries to capture our experience in words so that we may find its meaning and share it with others.

The readers of my posts know that I do not believe that language and the spoken word can capture the complexities of human experience. So perhaps it will not come as a surprise that I think that multilingual people have access to more ways to express and communicate their experience, as well as to hide from it. This can be tricky, as each language will likely capture some but not all of the nuances of human experience, some will necessarily be lost. Or remain hidden. With language(s) we are likely to be lost in the translation. And perhaps found, anew, in a different way.

Language always involves an element of translation: from our felt experience to our perceptions, to our thoughts, to the words and what we say, or from the thoughts to the action and what we do. The particular language that we use, whether it be English or Italian or Spanish or sign language or the language of art in all its expressive forms (poetry, music, dance, painting, sculpture) contextualizes our experience, translating it and its meaning in a particular way. Our very own translation. Thus, parts of our selves are lost in the process of translation, while others come to life.

As a psychoanalyst I think that different languages (spoken and otherwise) access different self-states and their concomitant experience. Some self-states may be language bound. This has been most evident to me in the area of affect and emotion. Think of it, how many different ways do you experience and express emotion? The language of art is often useful here, perhaps because it reaches beyond words, it seems to access felt experience easily for all of us.

In my clinical work with patients who speak more than one language, I have found that often their emotions and early history reside within their ‘mother tongue’ and lose something of its impact when translated into another language. When it is spoken (or drawn, or hummed, or enacted) in the language in which it initially occurred and was registered in, it accesses more of its emotional meaning and resonance. Even if I do not speak or know the particular language that my patient’s experience is registered in, I always ask him or her to say it (or do it) as it comes to them anyway, in its original language. I manage to “get it” that way . Much the same way that telling you about a dance performance or a piece of music cannot possibly do it justice only as a verbal representation. You have to experience it. Artists have always intuited and known that their particular art form is a language of its own, one that evokes meaning through its aesthetic. As the observers and audience of the artists’ language we respond to the movement of their particular aesthetic and what it touches in us.

Language, as the symbolic container of meaning and experience, shifts (our) experience according to its structural limitations and the kind of experience it is attempting to define and communicate. It loses and gains elements of the original in the translation. Whether you speak more than one language, it turns out, we are all involved in the process of translation.

CAN I GET A WITNESS? Relationality and consciousness.

I used to think that we needed language in order to experience consciousness. I could even make an intelligent argument for it. The conscious mind, I thought, coded experience with words, which assigned meaning to it. Since thoughts are language based, so consciousness must be. Now that seems all wrong. Simplistic really. I have changed my mind. Done a 180 . Finally included information that ‘felt’ right to me but I could not categorize into what I had learned. So I had a category of my own for it because it just felt right. While I still think that language is important for our experience of consciousness and the preferred way of accessing much of our history and information, the language of the body and the senses, which is the carrier of emotion and feelings, encompasses consciousness as well, spoken language can only capture some of it. If we re-think our definition of language, and expand it to include a sensorial and somatic register that is not about signs and symbols but about experience that is felt – what is now called implicit knowing- then it is true that we need language to experience consciousness. On the other hand, maybe we should expand our definition of consciousness so that it includes relational memories that are inscribed in the body and in the senses rather than in spoken language. Hmm.

Several weeks ago, in my post on intuition I wrote about implicit knowledge. How is it that we just know some things? In our gut, or in our bones, or just have a feeling? For many years the answer to such questions were left to religion, spirituality, extra sensory perception and coincidence. Not exactly scientific categories, but then, their not- science stature gives them room to think outside the box and consider such experiential phenomena as real, and more importantly, responsible for many of our decisions about life. Implicit knowing accounts for much of who we are and what we do.

In the world of psychoanalysis such things were not talked about, and when they were, they were usually grouped into the vast category of unconscious phenomena- there, somewhere and waiting to be found and explained –with few and notable exceptions (relational analysts have been at this for a long time). There is a vast body of neuro-biological research that supports the idea that we read and assess environmental information sensorially and that it becomes filtered through our first relationships to our caretakers. By the time we acquire language to label information and begin to think in language bits, we have a world of implicit knowledge stored in relational memories that helps to inform what we put into language, how we think and what we do. The meaning of the thing arrived at in interaction with another.

So today’s blog is about consciousness, and the notion that our experience of consciousness is created relationally and non-verbally! Before we can have words that assign meaning to our experience we need another to experience it with. We need someone to act as witness and sometime translator. Consciousness is an interactive creation that later becomes internalized and, along with language, results in what we call thought or the experience of being conscious in our mind. But we are conscious all along and we are left with bits of implicit knowledge that bubble up and get our attention in nano seconds, bursting into ‘consciousness’ with split second accuracy and determination.

We need a witness to see, feel and experience our experience so that it’s meaning can be arrived at relationally. We need another set of eyes and ears, another head to think, another heart to feel, another voice to speak, another body to experience what we experience and what we may leave out, particularly in situations that have been traumatic. We need a witness– this is why so many people come to therapy and benefit from it: it offers the opportunity to have a witness who bears the weight of lived experience and helps to understand it, label it and re-structure it through an ongoing relational exchange.

Witnesses are always involved. Participant observers.The very presence of a witness changes the nature of the experience. Someone else knows. We are no longer alone with our experience; someone else has shared in it, his or her participation as witnesses adding to the meaning of the thing.

Ultimately we all need a witness to validate and recognize who we are, where we have been, and what we are capable of doing. We need a witness to witness our life and its imprint on the planet.

ON THE IMPORT OF HISTORY: 9/11-Ten years after.

History has always fascinated me. In school, it was one of my favorite subjects because it provided a context for how the world evolved, how it got to be what I know it as. Perhaps my interest in history was one of the things that led me to the study of psychology and  later to psychoanalysis – two fields that focus on personal history and its reverberations through life. Today’s post is about history and its importance in our lives, and in particular, about a slice of history that I experienced that forever changed who I am and how I think.

This time last year I wrote a blog about my experience during the 9/11 attacks in New York City. It was a heartfelt visitation to a memory that was sparked off when I looked outside my window at the white beams of light emanating from the World Trade Center site. I love those two beams of light, reaching toward the heavens and paying homage to what used to be. Marking the spot like two tall spirits of light every September 11. Today, it is ten years since 9/11, almost to the minute as I write this post. The day is not quite as beautiful and clear as it was then, but the sky is blue and the air full with the promise of fall and the change of seasons.

Much is being made of this ten year anniversary. Somehow ten years has a special ring to it. A decade. Special enough to spawn multiple ceremonies, newspaper articles,  tv shows, and street closings. Special enough to alert the authorities here and in Washington of a potential threat of another attack.  I think that this is one of those days that  is difficult to commemorate for everyone regardless of the timing. Such a mixture of feelings, grief, despair and hope. It is like this every year at this time of year, this is just the tenth year. Today is also a day to remember our human bond, to remember and grieve together, to remember and renew our resolution to never forget, to remain connected without ceremony and without the need for tragedy to bring us together.

Ten years ago the American landscape was forever changed. I don’t just mean concretely, I mean our psychic landscape was altered. The definition of trauma is of an event or situation that happens too unexpectedly to be understood. It interrupts our minds ability to think clearly and put together what has happened, and demands that we deal with conflicting and incompatible ideas, thoughts, perceptions, emotions and sensations. Trauma forever changes who you are. The events of 9/11/01 did just that.

This week I viewed an exhibition of life-size photographs called: Faces at Ground Zero, 10 years later. It is installed in the Columbus Circle shopping mall. The photographs capture many of the heroic people that worked at the 9/11 site, ten years after the fact. It was incredibly moving despite the fact that it was curated in a shopping mall. The incongruity of people and tourists shopping and walking through life size pictures of firemen, police, and distraught family members was not lost on me. How curious I thought, somehow not right, and in many ways, reminding us that life goes on. That it must.

What remains? History. Our history. A history that some of us have lived, and others are seeing in pictures and reading about in magazines and books. History makes a witness of all of us, calling our attention not only to recorded facts and memories, to autobiographical accounts,  but to interconnected actions and reactions, to a web of human possibilities and interactions which, when experienced through the lens of history connect us to our very nature, to who we are and who we too could be. Or as Niccola Machiavelli puts it:

“Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.”

History is important, not just so that we may foresee the future, but so that we can understand our present and learn from what has happened in the past. No matter how it is told or remembered, history links us to one another with lived and remembered experience. Attention to history gives us the possibility of hope.

Cultural and personal trauma highlight history in blood red ink, as is the case today, ten years after. A reminder that once we have experienced trauma, we are all survivors. By the time the memorial at the World Trade Center site is finished, there will be four hundred white oak trees (symbols of strength and hope), yet now, in the center of the plaza stands a single Callery pear tree, a survivor of the attacks ten years ago. As M. Kalman writes for The New Yorker, ‘Where there is life there is hope”. It was nursed back to health from a burned stump and now flourishes again.

Callery Pear Tree Then and Now                      


ON MEMORY AND THE RE-LIVING OF IT.

 

Memory is one of those concepts that has been studied for centuries and has spawned multiple theories about what it is and how it operates. In psychology we think about memory functionally: in terms of how it operates and what it does. Hence, there are various types of memory whose name describe its function. I will be outlining these below for the purpose of elucidating the theme of today’s blog – the re-living and sharing of memories in order to arrive at a shared understanding of their impact and begin a process of integration.

As a psychoanalyst, I often accompany patients down their personal memory lane, stopping along the way to re-consider something, gather more information, or simply because we are stumped and we need to stop and be still. I am talking mostly of autobiographical memory here, a subset of explicit/declarative/semantic memory (see what I mean? many concepts all based on function). Autobiographical  memory is based on our personal, experience-based narratives. Autobiographical memory is what most of us revert to when we speak about our lived experience. It contains snapshots of our lives, our history and our past-  happy events, stories that were told to us, family myths, even traumatic situations if they are available to us. Autobiographical memory relies on language, on words that we have put together into a story, our story. Then there is implicit memory (also known as procedural memory), which speaks to us from the unconscious, as in the memories that we just know even though we do not know how we know. Implicit memory has to do with sensori-motor based information, information that is not language based but operates instead in the language of our senses, (body memories are part of this). Implicit memory resides outside our immediate awareness yet it is capable of directing many of our activities and thoughts. Think for example about riding a bike, where previous experience helps you perform the task. Or of one of those situations when you recognize something, a facial expression, a movement, or sense something that is meaningful to you, that informs your opinion or action even though you do not know why. Implicit memory is part of autobiographical memory, out of awareness but there and making its appearance and presence known nonetheless. In psychotherapy we work with both. In fact, the clinical hour often involves and ongoing interweaving of the implicitly known with the explicitly stated for both patient and analyst. The re-living of our remembered history with another person (the therapist) gives us the opportunity to put words to what has been implicitly registered and known so that it can fill in the narrative that we have constructed over time.

A more ingenious and whimsical way of describing memory and its functional use, is to my mind, J.K. Rowling’s pensieve, as introduced in the Harry Potter books. Here is the official definition as per Potter/Wiki:

“The penseive is a bowl filled with a silvery white gaseous liquid (or viscous gas). The user extracts a memory from himself or someone else with a wand, then drops it in the pensieve for examination.

Dumbledore explains that it helps keep his mind from becoming too crowded with old memories, and to experience a particular memory again when needed. Memories are stored in vials and poured into the pernsieve for Harry or whoever to experience.

The name is ingenious too. Clearly a wordplay on pensive, and in the spirit with which J.K. Rowling creates a lot of her names, the pensieve also includes the word sieve, a device often resembling a screen that can be used to sift through something. The pensieve seems to be a way to prevent people’s often sieve-like memories from losing important information.

Interestingly, the penseive not only lets its user see a memory from a third-person perspective, but it also seems to add information the user could not have known. But Rowling has explained, in an interview, that the memories in a pensieve include what the person did not notice or remark upon originally.”

So, the memories in a pensieve include autobiographical and implicit memory. As such they are complete. Think of it, a pensieve as an instrument to hold and sift through our memories, add important information that has not previously been addressed despite the fact that it was known and registered, and  something that gives us the ability to not only store intact memories for later recall and use, but also allow us to share them as they happened (i.e. experientially) with another so that their meaning(s) can be understood, recognized and integrated intra-psychically (between one’s own states of being) and interpersonally (within a relationship). Boy do I wish I had one of those.

People are often haunted by memories, particularly if they are traumatic in nature.  We revisit these memories in an effort to understand them, solve them, repair them, get over them. Often such memories are also shrouded in shame, making them even more potentially traumatic to our sense of being, so that they can alter our sense of ourselves and shut us down. Shame can often keep important information from us, serving instead as a cloud of confusion so as to numb the feelings or actions involved in the memory or to highlight a particular feeling (shame) that allows nothing else. Shame immediately triggers a feeling of what psychoanalysts call “not me”. Shame makes us want to diss-associate ourselves from the part of ourselves which was emotionally involved. Thus, shame complicates remembering and re-living memories because it calls forth extremely painful affect, the kind that fractures our experience of self and self-unity, the kind that makes us not want to be.

For me, much of the magic in J.K. Rowling’s writing is the way that she addresses how trauma impacts us as people and what we do to survive it and work through it. Look at how she treats memory: she includes what happens when we are ashamed of something, or afraid, or traumatized. Those memories are not so clear, even in a penseive. They are clouded with a blackness which makes it difficult to see, hear or experience them fully. A clouding of the senses that happens as the result of  emotional pain. She was definitely onto the experience of trauma and how it impacts remembered experience and lived experience thereafter. She also knew that alongside the clouded memory lies the clarity of the lived event, with all its feelings and emotions, just like as psychoanalysts we know to look beyond confusion, and beyond what appears obvious, we know to believe the trail that we travel with our patients, and believe that often it has to be travelled many times, over and over, before things begin to make sense – before we can sense things and then put words to them. In doing so we co-create a language, through the patient-analyst relationship, which includes what has been implicitly known and needing a relationship to be re-experienced and formulated, to be told as part of our narrative history.

Or as Dumbledore, the wise wizard, says to Harry: “Magic, particularly dark magic, leaves traces”. Psychoanalysts and their patients travel precisely through those traces that have etched themselves painfully in memory, and remain shrouded with emotion and no language to describe it. Even in the Potter books, the penseive is but an instrument for memory. Meaning, understanding and a grounded sense of who one is (including the not me’s) is achieved through relationship and connection, and the opportunity to share who we are, how we got to be this way, and who we want to be.

 

 

IS ANYBODY OUT THERE?

This might seem a strange question coming from a dweller of NYC, where millions of people are constantly out there – on the street, in the trains, stores, cafes, restaurants. Yet, it is a question that many of my patients ask, in relation to their loneliness. And so, this blog is about the experience of loneliness and how we deal with it, and with being alone.

From a developmental perspective, the ability to be alone comes about slowly, and within the safety of our relationship to our caretakers. As children, we begin to experience our separateness from our mothers over time: initially we need her presence much of the time for our survival, then as we grow into toddlers, and we are able to move and discover our surroundings, we begin to play with our environment in small increments, to explore the world in little bits and pieces under her watchful eye.

Have you ever seen a child playing on its own but turning to search for mom from time to time? Children seek the maternal presence for reassurance: if she is still there, watching and available, all is well, even though she is not interacting in the play. The capacity to be alone develops gradually, over time, and through repetitive interactions with caretakers that establish first, the ability to be alone in the presence of another, and later, through many inter-actively mediated experiences with the world, the ability to be alone with oneself. As such, the capacity to be alone is a developmental milestone that requires the gradual ability to mediate and regulate our experience and feeling of aloneness. To feel safe while alone. First mom does this for us, then we begin to do this together with her, and finally, we are able to do this on our own. It is our ability to learn to regulate our emotional experience (while alone) that helps us to manage our time alone, and experience it as safe and reconstitutive. Much in the same way that we did when we played on our own as children.

People often confuse the experience of aloneness with loneliness. While they are related, they are not the same thing. Both involve our experience of our-self. Aloneness involves our ability to auto-regulate, to play on our own without the need for another. Not so with loneliness.  Loneliness is a relational phenomena – it can only be felt and experienced in relation to others, even when they are absent. Loneliness is about the self in need of another.

Loneliness involves the experience of the self in isolation, and the fear of not being known, recognized and elaborated in relationship to another. Loneliness involves a feeling state that is about the self as dis-connected from others, and/or the self as searching for connection. In fact, loneliness is about a specific kind of connection or relationship, one that is based on the authentic recognition of our self. This is why many people are capable of being alone yet despair at their feelings of loneliness and their search for connection.

We are relational beings. We grow , develop and elaborate our selves in relationship to and with others. It is relational connections from our early beginnings that support and shape our psyche’s and soma’s, our total experience of our  selves in our lives. So it is no wonder that many people are on a quest to find a soul mate, the one person with whom to connect, the “solution” to loneliness. As most of you know, this is not really a solution. I often hear about the experience of loneliness and despair from patients’ that are in relationships, who have mates, friends, loved ones. They experience their loneliness within relationships because they feel not known and unrecognized in them. Someone is there and yet there is no connection.

Loneliness is indeed a relational phenomena. It involves the experience of the self as unable to connect and communicate with others, not just love mates, but others in general. At heart, what loneliness is about is fear- the fear of lost possibilities and dreams, the fear of not being able to move intimately with another, and of not having a witness for the elaboration of our most intimate self.

ON MONSTERS, DEMENTORS AND OTHER MAGICAL BEINGS.

This blog is about Dementors, those magical creatures in the Harry Potter books, that suck all happiness away with a deadly kiss, leaving one empty of life and with nothing to look forward to. A fate, some would say, worse than death. If you are not familiar with the Potter books, no worries, read on, as I am writing about the experience of depression and its life threatening reality.

Those of you who know me, know of my strong attachment to Harry Potter and his world of magic. You also know that I often use magical creatures as metaphors for what ails us. I have been known to talk about depression as the monster that must be walked, first thing, everyday. This came to me a long time ago, when I remembered an interview with Ingmar Bergman, in which he was talking about his life long struggle with depression, and the fact that it had not stopped him from being a prolific film maker because, after much therapeutic intervention he had learned to “walk his monster every morning”. This, he stated, needed to be done everyday or else he might not find his way out of bed. I often share this story with my patients because it speaks to the necessity of knowing one’s monsters intimately, and of finding our own way to take them on, daily if needed.

So first, the defintion of Dementor, as per the Harry Potter Wikipedia (yes there is such a thing!):

A Dementor is a dark creature, considered one of the foulest to inhabit the world. Dementors feed off human happiness, and thus cause depression and despair to anyone near them. They can also consume a person’s soul, leaving their victims in a permanent vegetative state, and thus are often referred to as “soul-sucking fiends” and are known to leave a person as an “empty-shell.” They cannot be destroyed, though their numbers can be limited if the conditions in which they multiply are reduced, implying that they do die off eventually.

Or as Professor Lupin explains to Harry:

“Dementors drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them… Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself…soulless and evil. You will be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life.”

So here we have the magical equivalent to depression. A state that comes upon a person and begins to suck out every happy memory or feeling, until all that is left is dark, negative and deadly. In the Potter stories, Dementors appear suddenly but their presence can be felt long before they are in full view. Their approach feels cold and dark, its iciness takes your breath away and freezes you on the spot. Then a Dementor will appear in full force and begin to literally suck your life away.

Thinking about depression in this way moves us away from diagnostic categories and into the felt experience of the thing. Depression comes about slowly, its presence felt and pervasive. It slows people down, makes them feel vulnerable, negative, pessimistic and lost. It creates a negative feedback loop, which traps the person in ongoing despair and connects them to the worst, traumatic experiences in their lives, repeating and resonating them affectively. In such a state it is difficult to remember anything that is good in life. There is literally no light at the end of the tunnel because depression has extinguished it.

When doctors diagnose depression they look at vegetative states – as in changes in sleep, appetite, activity, interests, relationships. People who are depressed may continue to function, but always in a reduced capacity, as it requires enormous effort to undertake even the simplest of actions. Depression impairs the ability to think clearly, make decisions, interact with others and gain any enjoyment out of life. It reduces people to “empty shells” moving in a time warp through their lives and routines, with no attachment to anything, except the depression itself.

In psychotherapy, working with depression involves taking on the Dementors a deux, within the relationship that is forged between therapist and patient. It means that the patients’ demons and monsters are invited into the room so that they can be known and understood. So that the experiences which have called them forth can be articulated and addressed. So that the monsters will not continue to feed on and destroy what is good. So that the affective states that the demons live within can be known, experienced and worked through within a relationship that offers new possibilities and choices.

Similarly, in the magic world, Dementors can be fought off by learning to concentrate and think about joyful experiences which then bring about a protective shield, called a Patronus. Of course, learning how to do this depends on a relationship of trust with another. This is how Professor Lupin describes it to Harry:

“A Patronus is a kind of positive force, and for the wizard who can conjure one, it works something like a shield, with the Dementor feeding on it, rather than him. In order for it to work, you need to think of a memory. Not just any memory, a very happy memory, a very powerful memory… Allow it to fill you up… lose yourself in it… then speak the incantation “Expecto Patronum”.

Lest this sound too simple and childlike to you, take heed: J.K. Rowling was on to something when she came up with Dementors and Patronuses- she recognized the feelings that depression engenders and the feelings that it takes away. She also recognized that we need joy in our lives and that this usually involves our connection to real others. And while treating depression is not a simple matter, neither is producing a Patronus! Both require trust, effort, concentration, practice, and most of all courage. The courage to look deep inside, to review and share our history and trauma, to face the wounds and the pain, and to reconnect with what is good about us and our lives. This is a process, which begins to build our very own protective shield against states of mind that are disruptive, disorganizing and life threatening. It is a process that is contingent on the psychotherapeutic relationship and its ability to engage all types of monsters and demons.

In Harry Potter, a Patronus takes on the shape of an animal which goes forth emanating its positive force and dispelling the Dementors (Harry’s is a Stag).

I like to think that in psychotherapy, it is the space that is created between two people, through a relationship of recognition and understanding, real enough to take on and work within the intimate language of affect and emotion, that creates a protective shield, a magic circle of sorts. Within this circle I sometimes ask patients, particularly those that are familiar with Harry, to think about what their Patronus is like. Often the image of it is faint and distant (just like it was for Harry when he first attempted to produce one), and so we continue our work, until what has been faint grows stronger.

So now a question for you: You probably have an idea of what your Dementors look like, but do you know what your Patronus looks like?

ON INTUITION.

You know that feeling you have when you realize something? You notice it, perceive it, sense it, immediately, you feel it on the inside? You have a hunch, you feel it in your bones, you have an inkling, a sneaking suspicion, a sense, a gut feeling, a presentiment. You just know something without knowing how you know it. Intuition. Your sixth sense. Felt and known. That is intuition. A communication from the right hemisphere of your brain. The one responsible for sub-symbolic communication and for the processing and regulating of emotion. The place where the unconscious lives.

Many people follow their intuition, others have a difficult time trusting it, because they cannot pinpoint the source of their knowledge, of how they know, so they may dismiss it. Some would say that the former are right brain people and the latter left brain people (for more on this check out this link- http://www.iainmcgilchrist.com/). That is to say, each of our brain hemispheres has its own window for affect tolerance. The right hemisphere in our brain deals with deeper, more intense and extreme emotions and their regulation. Those emotions that are encoded in relational memories and are felt but not necessarily translated into  language. The left hemisphere of our brain deals with moderate levels of arousal and behavior that is under our voluntary control, behavior that is known to us and can be talked about and known because it has been mediated by thought and action. But I get ahead of myself.

In the past ten years, more and more books and authors have begun talking and writing about intuition as a sixth sense, and the fact that our first impressions and choices are usually right. Usually, but not always. Why is this so? The short answer is: because information is filtered by a number of areas in the brain, all of which have developed and been impacted by our experience, particularly our early relational experience. This may help us or lead us astray. Current neuro-biological research confirms that our early relationship to our caretakers is the catalyst for brain development and lays the foundation for how our brain will grow and perform. More to the point, it accounts for how we will experience our feelings and manage our emotional states.

Back to intuition. In order to attend to our sense and feeling of something we need our bodies. We cannot recognize a feeling unless we have an embodied experience of it. Think about it, where do you feel your anxiety? Your fear? Your sadness? Butterflies in your stomach? Lungs closing in on you? Limbs tensing up? A heavy heart? It takes a specific change in our body, a felt experience in order to connect to our internal self. We need a body to experience feelings. The ability to link our felt experience to our thoughts allows for some recognition and integration of sensations, feelings and cognitive states which in turn allows us to regulate and manage our emotions. In order to attend to our intuition we need to be able to listen to our bodily sensations, to feel them and experience them. Only after we feel it can we follow through on it, or not. Feelings translate our ongoing life-state (including our dream states) so that it can be understood in the language of our mind. So what happens if you can’t feel it?

Often in illness, particularly chronic illness, there exists a state of ongoing emotional dysregulation because illness may make it difficult to hold onto bodily sensations (and to experience one’s body in an organized way), further disrupting one’s experience of one’s own body and wrecking havoc with the person’s ability to identify feelings as well as regulate them. In other words, the ability to recognize feeling states is in itself regulating of them.

Psychoanalysis has long viewed affects as the raw material of internal life. Rage, panic, anxiety are all examples of disruptive affects which interfere with our ability to modulate our emotional states. Such affective states activate our right hemisphere, whose window for intense affect tolerance is greater than the left hemisphere. Feelings differ from affects in that they represent a form of unconscious perception that is based on the original template of our emotional life. A feeling is a separate sense. As such, it comes about internally, speaking through the body. It is ours alone, although it develops within our early relational context and history, and gains its relevance and meaning there. From a neuro-scientific point of view, feelings are a set of homeostatic, regulatory reactions, which unfold within us and represent our body involved in a reactive process. Think of them as body-maps speaking to the brain. Feelings speak a language that is not based on words, but instead, on internal sensations which are interactive and relationally determined. Feelings differ from emotions in that emotions link affects with thought, ideas and memories, and as such, are more complex and a step ahead of feeling or sensing something.

Intuition may very well be what connects the “life of the limbs” – a metaphor from developmental psychology which speaks to the sensori-motor organization of our bodies- to the life of the mind. The one cannot exist without the other. And perhaps intuition offers a bridge between the two. Intuition. A presentiment. I like this word because it captures what I am trying to write about here. Pre- as in before, sentiment– from the French for feeling, emotion, sense. So before we can actually put something into words and think about it, we have to rely precisely on our feeling, our sense of it. Before we can speak or think about something we know it because we can feel it and sense it. There you have it. Perhaps we could say that this is our very own extra-sensory-perception. Our sixth sense. That is, if we can manage to tune in.

 

ON BEING AUTHENTIC.

When it comes to authenticity, be careful what you wish for. I say this, because being authentic is a lot more trouble than not being so. But it is also more rewarding, nurturing, freeing, and full of possibilities for emotional growth. Ultimately, authenticity is the key to life and our experience of it.

As of late, authenticity has become one of the hip words in the field of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. It is rightfully thought to be one of the major movers of the therapeutic action, based on the belief that all of us are looking for an authentic other who can respond to us and get to know us in that way. Someone who can tell us what we are like on the basis of his or her relationship to us. This is a huge departure from the original idea of being a blank slate for our patients, and of interpreting the various meanings of their personal history on the basis of what we have come to understand. Authenticity involves not only using our experience of another to understand much of their experience, it also involves translating the personal into the professional: relating our experience in an honest and real way. So that it can be known to the other person – as an experiential pivot into their relational history. Such a communication involves speaking from what we feel on the inside while in relation to another, and doing so without stripping it of emotion. In therapy it also involves what my colleague Philip Bromberg has aptly termed “stumbling along and hanging in” particularly when what we experience is not so clear and cannot be put into words, but we know that something important is going on, and it is going on in the moment and within the relationship. As analysts we are no longer relying on the blankness of our canvas but instead working deeply within its texture, feel and make up. Human to human. No longer privileging a cognitive interpretation of what might be, on the basis of history, but instead, of what is in the mutual experience of the moment. Thus the recent interest in the person of the therapist. Working in this way means that the therapist is a translator of sorts: working beyond words with intuition and emotion, and within the moment-to-moment sensorial register of the relationship.

Ultimately, being authentic requires being familiar with our own canvas and being relatively comfortable sharing this with others, or at the very least, finding a way to communicate through it, in spite of whatever discomfort this may bring us. The rub is, that while attempting to be authentic there is always some part of us that resists. Oy! The good news is, that people, particularly people that have needed to negotiate relationships by becoming sensitive readers of what is not said, can always recognize the inauthentic. They just know. This applies to both therapists and patients. And this makes a huge difference as far as what happens next. Despite the discomfort that it may cause us to be known in this way, it is our attempt to be authentic that provides an opportunity to shift old patterns and bring about change.

These ideas deeply affect the way that a psychotherapy is conducted, as well as the way that we think about symptoms and psychopathology. It embeds our response to trauma and adversity into a deeply humane experience and takes it out of the medicalization of mental health. We are living at a time when many of the theories underlying psychological functioning are being mapped out neuro-biologically by science as lived realities. Freud would be ecstatic about that, despite the fact that it monumentally alters many of his original ideas about how psychoanalysis needs to be conducted. I think he was just way ahead of his time. But I digress. The fact that neuro-scientists are now able to see what happens to our nervous system and brain when they are impacted by trauma has shifted the focus of analytic treatment to the regulation of affect within the relational matrix.

It turns out, that through our initial relationship with our caretakers we develop certain parts of our brain and nervous system, which can only be activated and turned on within a relationship. Within that interactive context we begin to experience ourselves as engaged and engageable with another. We begin to read, respond and interact with others and this relational interaction accounts for much of the structural development of our nervous system and brain. It accounts for the way that we will experience and process emotions with others. So the quality of the relationship matters. You can see the implications of this. If, our initial experiences have failed us or traumatized us in some way, this will affect not only how we feel but also how adept we become at regulating our emotional responses to others and to situations in our life. In fact, it probably accounts for how we view life. Much of this is laid down within the first year or two of life. Scientists who study brain structure and function are now able to explain and study what psychotherapists have worked with all along, and give us clues as to what is helpful and what is not. Thus authenticity – it is all about what happens in relationships and personal interactions. About how meaningful relational exchanges can help us alter and redefine our behavior and experience, and through these exchanges with an authentic other, change the workings of our brain and nervous system. A shift at the cellular level!

Lest you think this is some new age incantation, check out the reading list (Neuroscience) on this site for the scientific sources, and it is definitely not exhaustive. This is real, exciting, and it impacts all of us. Expect to hear more on this topic!

So what is the password for authenticity?

ME as experienced by YOU.

YOU as experienced by  ME.

Password: relationship. For it is only in the context of a relationship that we encounter the opportunity to be authentic. Margaret Williams said it best in her wonderful story The Velveteen Rabbit:

“What is REAL?” the Rabbit asked the Skin Horse one day. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, you become Real. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and you get very shabby.”

“I suppose you are Real?” said the Rabbit.

“The boy’s uncle made me Real many years ago,” said the Skin Horse. “Once you are Real, it lasts for always.“

SPEAKING IN TONGUES.

It has occurred to me that all of us speak in many tongues. There is our everyday language, how we speak to others in the course of our day. There is our professional language, for me, the language of psychoanalysis that I share with colleagues and patients. There is the language of emotions, dense with feeling and affect. The language of the body and the senses. The language of art, or music. The language of science. Or the language of spirituality. And for those of us that are multilingual, there are different languages that come to represent our experience and what we want to say in various ways, bathed in many tones and expressions, each with a particular and individual history which manifests differently in each language.

In thinking about the many and various ways in which we communicate, I have begun to think about how, despite the particular language we use, the meaning or purpose is often the same. Take for example the language of psychotherapy and the language of spirituality. In my work I have found that I speak differently to different patients. Some of this has to do with their use of language and what particular words or ways of thinking make sense to them. But some of it has to do with the fact that when it comes to helping someone who is suffering, there are many different schools of thought, and therefore many languages that address the issue and try to arrive at the same goal: to alleviate the suffering and offer alternatives.

The first time that this became clear to me was when I read Mark Epstein’s Thoughts Without a Thinker. In this book he compares and contrasts psychotherapy with Buddhism, highlighting their common goals despite the fact that they are arrived at through  different languages. It got me thinking about how important it is to hear things in a way that we can understand, a way that touches us deeply and bathes words with individual meaning and significance.

Take for example the idea of pausing before responding, something Pema Chodron has written about. Pausing gives us an opportunity to connect to where we are in the moment, to stop before we respond, and in that pause consider what it is that we really want to say or do. In the language of psychotherapy, this means being conscious, being in the moment and able to consider our actions, thoughts and feelings. Or the Buddhist idea of non-attachment, which would translate into psychotherapy language as the concept of secondary gain: “what purpose is this serving for you? Why is it so important to hang onto? What is it getting you”? We could also take the language of Alcoholics Anonymous and their twelve step program, each step of the program consists of variations on the theme of consciousness, surrender, taking inventory and making amends. Coming to know and understand who one is and what one can do if one remains present and takes authentic action. All of these coincide with the goals of good treatment. There may be many languages that speak to one’s experience: spiritual ones, philosophical ones, physical ones, group modalities and so on. Some of these, like meditation, address ways of arriving at awareness and self-regulation on one’s own, while others, like psychotherapy involve an ongoing experiential exchange with another. As a psychotherapist, being able to move between and betwixt languages and ways of thinking and experiencing, offers the flexibility to contact different people and different areas of functioning in different ways. Somewhat akin to being able to move across and within different cultures. Think about it. What makes sense to you?

Many of the concepts that I have come to regard as important in my clinical practice have come around again and touched me deeply through the physical practice of yoga or through my reading of Eastern philosophy or neuro-biological research, or through my experience of a particular piece of music, or through ongoing conversations and exchanges with patients, colleagues and loved ones.  Each of these languages carrying something known and re-discovered through their evocation of what they happen to touch in me. I think it is so for my patients as well. And perhaps for you. The language may be different, the path may vary but the outcome is the same. We feel as if we have discovered something, or arrived at something, and from that something possibilities abound. What is important is that we find the language(s) that makes sense to us and that helps us to elaborate who we are and who we want to be. In this sense, we are all multilingual and full of possibility.

 

HOME.

The dictionary defines home as the place where one lives. This definition refers to the concrete place that one lives in, but it applies, just as well, to our internal home, and to the feeling all of us have of being home. I am referring to the experience of home, which can occur when we encounter something that speaks to us intimately, like a work of art or music, or a person with whom we feel recognized and known, at home with ourselves while in relation to them. What is this feeling of home that we all have? What is it made up of?

Home is about the familiar. Yes, from the Latin familia. It is related to our family of origin, to what has become known to us in a most intimate way. Our experience of home holds the beginnings of our experience of intimacy- the original blueprint. Home is about something one knows and responds to instinctively, from the inside, often a felt something that needs no words to be noted, felt, and understood. The feeling of home speaks in a personal language, the language of our senses. An intimate language that begins before we can use words, and in relationship to a primary other. So if home is about what is familiar to us, because of our early experiences with our family, and it is a feeling that speaks through our senses, then home must also encompass memories of lived, relational experiences. Home is about experiences that make us feel known from the inside precisely because they access our internal experience.

Let me count the ways:

1)    There is the smell of home. Ever notice how a particular aroma catapults you back into a particular place or situation? Or a particular craving?

2)   There is the feel of home. Clean, organized, messy, shiny, dingy, scary, safe, warm, cold, etc.

3)   There is the sound of home. It might be silence, or noisy streets, or music of a particular kind. Or the sound of fighting and screaming. Sounds that take you back to a lived feeling.

4)   And then there are the visuals of home. Sight is tricky because we rely on it and privilege it over other senses. Many of our memories are organized around it. So the visuals may pertain to the way someone moved, walked, stood. Or they may pertain to environmental things, like trees, colors, rooms, houses, etc.

So there it is. The language of home. Strung together in our own, idiosyncratic way, and made up of numerous moments of interaction with intimate others, stored in memory, and distilled into our feeling of home.

I am making it sound pretty idyllic, but it is not always so. In fact, the feeling of home often involves what was good as well as what was not so good. And our senses will alert us to all of it. Home, for better or for worse.

The feeling of home often continues to play a part and even dictate what we do in our adult lives. Perhaps not consciously, but as an important part of our lived experience and who we are. Home, and the way it speaks to us internally, is involved in many of our choices: who our lovers and partners are, who our friends and confidants are, what we do, how we live, where we live, etc. This is because home is about our early history.

Think about it. What happens to us early on influences our ability to live in the world. Who do we trust? How do we make decisions? Do we want to come home or get away from it? As a psychoanalyst, who is in the business of helping people revisit home, in order to understand the why’s of their present lives, I think the feeling of home is often responsible for the repetition of certain experiences and behaviors in our lives. Because it is familiar and known. Because even when we are aware of this, we might continue to revisit home in the hopes of doing it differently this time around.

Ah! There is always a rub it seems. In this case, it involves separation. Leaving home so as to do something new. Understanding home so as to make your own home. So that each visitation into the feeling of home explains another piece of our intimate make up, and perhaps releases its hold. “I’ve got a feeling we are not in Kansas anymore,” said Dorothy to Toto, while looking around at Oz, and indeed, separation and leaving home can feel like being a stranger in a strange land. On the other hand, Dorothy also said, “There’s no place like home”. I could not agree with her more. There is no place like home because it is ours in its entirety. Ours and ours alone, and it holds much of the magic of who we are and who we can become.