OUT OF MY MIND

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

*

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.

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 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?