Wednesday, September 12, 2018

(Picture from Youtube body painting artist Johannes Stoetter)

“Do not explain your philosophy. Embody it.” –Epictetus

I name.

I name objects.

Names construct objects.

The corpus arises from an infinity of sensory, and sensational material.

Body.  One of my names.  One of the names for you.

My body:  With two words I create and own this object.

My language, my naming construes and constructs ‘my’ and ‘body.’

As object: I claim ownership of this body self, and that separates this body from

‘me.’

As object, my body may be subject to commoditization, to consumption by

others.

As object my body may acquire multiple social labels and cultural bar codes.

My body may be packaged, handled, used, returned, and delivered in multiple

ways.

My body may become damaged or diseased or discarded or denigrated or

disrespected.

My body may die alone, and with its death, the death of my other, given names.

This body will never resurrect; will deconstruct into the nameless infinitude

with  yours.

Namer and name—this duality—narrates many stories:  of my ‘body’ and ‘me,’ of me and you, of me versus you; of those afterlife kingdoms of godly real estate owned by Jesus, Yahweh, Allah, Bahؘa, Krishna, Elohim.

Delivered, cleaved, swaddled, handed to our mothers, we also rock in the cradle of that capricious embrace of mother country and culture—those who cut our cords and read our palms.  Symbiotic, nascent, wordless–we emerge howling our first vowels into a blanket of language. Named, we will live our lives separate even from those whom we love most.  We can have no relationship to anyone or anything that is not separated by its own name; and yet by names we call—by, to, and for each other, which makes us familiars.  And the richness of the world in which we will eat and think and meander and work and dream depends on words.  Underprivileged children hear thirty million fewer words than privileged children.  Language is the most important currency of the human world.  And we are word-woven into story, our story within a family’s story, within larger nested stories of neighborhoods, states, nations, and the planet.

The exquisiteness with which language articulates and specifies a body’s experiences of the world is matched by an equally powerful dullness with which one can perceive the body’s living interior with its pumps and bellows, with its pharmaceutical manufacturing plants, with its harvesting and waste removal systems, with the moving of limbs in complex choreographies, with the neuronal tick-tick-booms of thinking.

We do not know our indwelling microbiome colonies, their winds and weathers, the degree to which the leg must bend, and with what force to heft us from the bed at morning’s behest or the inconvenient dictate of the bladder.  We experience our inner world of organ systems as foreign as any lands or peoples we have never met, and with whom we do not share a common language.  I preside blind, deaf, and with limited tactility over a mysterious body-world I call mine.

Perception is the province of poets; introspection the bailiwick of psychologists, philosophers, memoirists, and navel gazers.  But the details of interoception lie behind closed doors, barred by a brain who reserves its energetic hustling, with more, or less sensitive equipment, to the business of thinking and feeling and doing and belonging to its village.

The notion of dualism derives from my ability to name, and from my inability to feel my cogitation so as to explicitly describe my interoceptions:  my emotions, the processes of my organs, including the incredibly sophisticated workings of my brain.

Because I am separated from the details of my inner workings—this filtering necessary so that I can pay attention to what most needs my attention—I experience the inner self, including what I call ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ or ‘mind’ as differentiated from my body.  My body seems material, and the unknowable inner world seems, by inference, immaterial.

If I experience my spirit or soul or mind as immaterial, then the illusion of a heaven or afterlife seamlessly and logically unfolds.  As do the mysterious narratives of eternity.

In our lives we occupy multiple roles as expressions of our multiplicity of selves.  At least two prominent selves, as John Haidt analogizes, in his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, constitute both the large bodied “elephant” of feelings, desires, and the complex and involuntary running of our biological systems, as well as the much smaller “rider” on that elephant, who sometimes justifies, sometimes tries to persuade, and sometimes succeeds in disciplining the behavior of the elephant.  Haidt suggests that we often suffer from an illusion of rational decision making when we really create stories to justify what our “elephant” wants.

In a more pedestrian than mystical sense we straddle the worlds of knowledge and experience every day.  We know that the quality of ‘delicious’ belongs to a chocolate ice cream sundae, or to great sex, or to loving deeply, but we would rather experience ice cream, sex, and love, than to merely know about them abstractly.

“Those who know do not say; those who say do not know.”

When the Master entered, they asked him exactly what the words meant.

Said the Master, “Which of you knows the fragrance of a rose?”

All of them knew.

Then he said, “Put it into words.”

All of them were silent. (Taoist Story)

We accumulate all kinds of knowledge, including some knowledge about experience:  What it is like to have a baby, to parachute from a plane, to go off to college, or to interview for a job.  Mindfulness meditation experts call our constant cogitation ‘monkey chatter.’  The refreshment of being in the moment, of full presence, relies on opening our eyes, our ears, our noses, and our sense of touch, to the incoming colors, sounds, fragrances and breezes in the surround.  Without naming.  Without objectifying. As much as possible for us human language junkies.

But we love poetry too, for it circles, titillates, and tantalizes us by producing its own kind of experience, one that stirs those impressions our senses and our emotions offer up of the world, while incorporating ideas to compel our attention, shift our perspective, or advance our appreciation.

Ahs and Ahas.

When we engage our senses fully, we vitalize our world, with openness and curiosity.  When someone gently presses our faces into the roses, says ‘rose,’ says, ‘mmm,’ asks, ‘can you smell that?  Breathe in deeply,’ then thought marries feeling.  Naming unites and separates.

If naming gives us duality, and duality the separateness of self from all others, then our human differentiations by hue of skin, by shape of feature, by gender, by culture or ethnic background are vulnerable to the potential meanings assigned to them, and to the parameters of our relationships with others.  In our world mere differentiation, by one characteristic or another, apparently suffices—with doses of adult ‘stranger danger,’ or economic greed, or power mongering–to justify the application of different statuses; to justify differences in rights and privileges; to sanction exploitation, subjugation, even violence.  The powerful assign status differences which apply to bodies, human bodies; our human bodies.

Those who name the recipients of privilege hold power.  Those who lay claim to applying meanings associated with differences hold power and extend this power to ownership over the bodies of others—where those bodies can travel, how they may be treated, whether they may be dominated, subjugated, negatively objectified, or denied opportunity.

We can even justify poor treatment of animals by claiming that we are more intelligent, have a superior language, that because we appear to be built with greater complexity, we are kings of the planet.  We have better bodies.  We have talking bodies.

The social, professional, and cultural contexts for how we treat each other’s bodies hold the structures, policies, traditions, and etiquette for that which we deem appropriate or inappropriate, as defined by a boundary or crossing a boundary, as violating or servicing.

Clothing, hats, scarves, habits or robes, decorations of the body or hair growth, certain movements or expressions are all at one remove from the body itself. These are the immediate expressions—the shells, the fur, the feathers and the variations in ambulation with eye gaze up or down or retracted or piercing—that clue others to this body and its interior rooms and social affinities.

 

When my mother-in-law lay dying, the hospice nurses came and repositioned her, massaging cream into her hands and feet.  She had not spoken in sentences for years, the most prominent decline her loss of words, and then of the meaningful use of her hands for holding her books, hugging her friends and relatives, and eating on her own.

Still, we spoke with her, caught her up on all the details of family laments and successes, talking her into that final silence.  Even when she could not name herself.

All cultures with which I have any familiarity utilize rituals to prepare the bodies of their dead.  It would be unthinkable to throw a human body out like trash; and we feel horrified by the appearance of mass graves in a genocidal or maniacal war.

Ritual accompanies the treatment of human bodies, dying or dead.  We dress or wrap or shroud bodies accordingly and this preparation brings reassurance and comfort to those most closely linked by family, by shared experiences, by love.

What the bodies of our beloveds have worn or touched or lit lamps to read, have meaning beyond their lives as heirlooms, mementos, legacy pieces, reminders, holders of memory. In some sense, and however briefly in the ascent of generations, we poetically immortalize the bodies of our dead.

 

“We ought to think that we are one of the leaves of a tree,

and the tree is all humanity.

We cannot live without the others, without the tree.”

Pablo Casals (1876 – 1973) Spanish cellist and composer

 

Bodies of the living connect as do leaves on a tree, each a unique expression of the sunlit climbing, branching, and rooting of the whole.  When we construct thoughts or beliefs about status differences, we separate ourselves too much, we cease to feel our connectedness; we die a little bit.  But when we sense each other’s radiance along energetic pathways that circulate and intersect, we can lift and be lifted by others.

“If you’re standing at the bottom of a hill with friends, it will appear less steep and easier to climb than if you are alone,” writes research psychologist Lisa Feldman Barret, in her book How Emotions Are Made (pg. 71). “If you grow up in poverty, a situation that leads to chronic body-budget imbalance and an overactive immune system, these body-budgeting problems are reduced if you have a supportive person in your life.  In contrast, when you lose a close, loving relationship and feel physically ill about it, part of the reason is that your loved one is no longer helping to regulate your (body) budget.  You feel like you’ve lost a part of yourself because, in a sense, you have.”

 

Words have power to obscure truth as well as to illuminate; to blur and to distinguish.  Try the word, ‘race.’ Since the rise of slavery in this country, this word, race, has regrettably differentiated our bodies, not only by skin color, but by associated meanings glued to this epidermal variation.  It has blurred our connectedness intellectually.  It has barred our connectedness by the application of differences in opportunity and treatment. We have treated our collective as composed of different races, with powerfully different implications for social equity, while academics–anthropologists, sociologists, and biologists–know we are one human race:

“. . . More recently, molecular techniques have developed to examine genetic differences between individuals and populations, including karyotypes providing chromosomal number and patterns, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) hybridization, protein sequences, and nuclear and mitochondrial base sequences from ancient and modern DNA. From all this evidence, it is clear that populational, but not racial, differences do exist within the human species. Race should not be equated with ethnicity, which has a sociological meaning. Ethnicity is a self-described category that has three components—ancestry, language, and culture—that all have affinities to certain ancestral groups.” (Read more: http://www.biologyreference.com/Ar-Bi/Biology-of-Race.html#ixzz4xkJ7f99b)

In their book, In the Company of Crows and Ravens, John Marzluff and Tony Angell write, “The ability to transmit culture through social learning equips social species like humans with a dual inheritance system.  We obtain many physical traits, actions, and behaviors from the arrangement of nucleic acids on our chromosomes—that is, through inheritance of genes from our parents.  But we also inherit a vast array of cultural traits from our society through social learning.  Some researchers call the social units we learn memes. . .At any point in time, human culture is composed of memes that reflect genetic, individually learned, and socially transmitted information.” (pg. 15)

Our micro-absorption into consciousness of genetic and socially transmitted information surfaces for reflection through individual learning, and it is here that we can all utilize our capacities for positive influence.  As mentors, teachers, friends, parents, sponsors, doctors, and so forth, we can all shine the beam of our attention on someone who will benefit by such encouragement and expansion through relationship.

We can talk to others about injustice, inequality, inequity.  We can validate complaints of abuse, exploitation or discrimination.  We can stand together awakened. We can take our awakening to the streets, to our extended families, friends, neighborhoods, workplaces, as well as to publications and polls.

We can bear witness.  We can be willing to hold sorrow, rage, frustration, and determination in the face of obstacles, whether they are current and societal or their residual introjects that emerge as self-limiting narratives.

As a therapist, also trained in Ericsonian hypnosis, I am informed by the power of word repetition to hypnotize and to suggest.  Like a chant, every time we discuss the “race” issue, we instill within our minds the fiction that we live in a world of different races, and assigned meanings associated with that fiction get strengthened.  Repeatedly, discussing the injustices done to those whose bodies have darker skin or whose features, including gender, do not look like the bodies of those in power, as a “racial” problem, strengthens the unintended consequence of embedding the misconstrued idea that people are differentiated by race.

This false notion that plural human races exist has fueled discriminatory differentiation; has been used to substantiate prejudicial treatment of some humans by others based upon trumped-up proof, based on nefarious research that there are superior/inferior races. Those characteristics which visually differentiate us, do not in fact differentiate us into races.  We must address inequality and inequity.  We must close the thirty-million-word gap, and all other opportunity gaps.

But our language will need to e-race ‘race’ in the process.  This is not color blindness, not a refusal to listen, nor to trivialize the sufferings caused by prejudice and hate.  As long as we continue to talk about ‘race’ relations, we embed ever more strongly, a set of negative associations threaded through the prevailing power-majority of the light skinned, that have historically ascribed lesser statuses—in intelligence, talents, contributions, appearance, and so on—to persons whose skin is dark or whose features bear resemblance to peoples from a number of other continents.

Lack of social, educational, and/or economic equity and equality, within the country, state, town and neighborhood where one grew up has a profound impact on the degree of ease or difficulty with which any human being enters doors of opportunity in the present, and/or psychologically has the resilience and confidence to knock.  Ancestral genes have no direct bearing.  As Ta Nehisi Coates so eloquently writes, “Racism is the parent of race,” as an issue, not the other way around.

In an article picked up by Flipboard, an online digest of articles on many topics, a piece from wired.com by Nitasha Tiku, demonstrates how intelligence and education can coexist with ignorant bias.  She quotes from a blog run by a Google employee: “Blacks are not equal to whites. Therefore the ‘inequality’ between these races is expected and makes perfect sense.” WIRED was not able to confirm the identity of the employee.”

At the core of discrimination, subjugation, inequality and inequity lies an inherited belief among the powerful and the ignorant that some kinds of bodies are better than others and are therefore entitled to take more of the resources, more of the available opportunities, and to deny others in the process.  Of course, way beyond the scope of this essay, many factors foment greater or lesser degrees of these outrages.  Fears of war, competition for scarce resources, fears of losses—land, income, a way of life, the freedom to pursue one’s religion or traditions–and pure greed, are examples.

A body I have never met, different than my body, puts me on alert.  My curiosity may hold hands with wonder, or clutch fear in a death grip.  When we encounter a person’s differences, often visually at first, those differences link immediately and unconsciously to anticipatory anxiety about what other differences might disadvantage us.  We fear experiencing incompatibility, or competition for dominance—in tradition, language, belief, values, and behavior.

Affiliations by ethnicity or religion or national origin have meaning for us.  Parts of our personal identities get constituted by what is familiar, customary, and includes beliefs, affects and behaviors associated with the reinforcement of those potent identities.  The performing of specific rituals, the eating of preferred foods, the use of turns of phrase and associated idiosyncratic language or references, as well as music, fashion and other art forms, all contribute to a sense of belonging.

The construction of identities, by virtue of our embeddedness and embodiment within communities that look like us, speak like us, dress like we dress, believe and behave like us, proves problematic in larger conglomerate cultures where the prevailing psychology, belief system and behavior treat some bodies, and some communities, as less worthy than others.

The epitome of hostility toward some bodies, makes them invisible—untouchable, inaudible, ignorable entirely.  This is the societal analog of homicide.  To kill off another human being’s presence; to make them virtually nonexistent in one’s own world. Those with marginalized bodies either recede into the shadows, deliberately hide, or rebel.

There’s a powerful episode on an Australian Netflix show called, ’Wentworth,’ about the governing and inmate populations in a woman’s prison.  The former governor of the prison, Joan, now a murderess inmate, is temporarily shunned by all the women.  Isolated, she has no power and no one to influence.  An isolate is in a dangerously disconnected position, without associates for protection, collective bargaining or reciprocally beneficial arrangements.

Preferred identities, while important to our sense of who we are, can become aggressively dominant and eschew participation in the larger arms of a broader and more complex community comprised of many subgroups.  There is currently a counter tension between the desirability and comfort of belonging that comes with the affiliation afforded by preferred identities (such as African American, or Asian American or European American, etc.) and the thrust toward globality with its deemphasis on identities that describe limited common denominators, even when those denominators.  When a common denominator like skin color has no more association with discriminatory practices and lack of access to positive social networks from birth, perhaps the tension will resolve.

When no negative associations are brought to a meeting of people whose bodies have prominently different distinctions, what can happen?  A woman I know, Rosie Russell, in her mid-fifties and light skinned, traveled to visit a relative in a small city in Sierra Leone, one of the poorest African countries.  She brought soccer balls to poor villages outside the city. All the children ran gleefully toward her, calling her “opoto” and touching her light skin.  Within about five minutes they were all playing ball and joking and laughing.  She told me that most of these children had rarely, if never seen a light skinned person.  The main mode of transportation outside of walking, were a few bicycles and the occasional bus.  In spite of looking intriguingly different, Rosie neither scared nor disgusted the children.  They had no preconceived notions about her and some joyful bonding happened quickly.  The children allowed themselves to be informed about Rosie by experiencing their interactions with her, and she them.

In a context of curiosity, engagement, and wonderment there is only the miracle of particularity; the strangely different as attracting, and interesting.  In this context, free from fear, from greed, from negative objectification, we can find appreciation and connection possible.

Bodies are fancy, miraculous, surprising, with ‘mini brains’ learning and training everywhere in satellite stations of the gut, the muscles; and memories residing like citizens of this complex body-country even to the most outlying regions of fingertip or hair follicle, telling their stories of delight or trauma, of strength or overuse, of triumph or breakdown.

When my body meets your body, I want to figure out how to orient myself to you.  I may already have a prescribed role—as your potential therapist, your colleague, your social acquaintance, or your fellow rider on the bus—so whatever concepts allow me to place you within or outside my realm of experience help me scribe my place beside you.  I want to discover who you are, at least a little bit, so I can discover who we are to each other, at least a little bit.

On page 233 of his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt writes, “All human beings today are the products of a co-evolution of a set of genes (which is almost identical across cultures) and a set of cultural elements (which is diverse across cultures, but still constrained by the capacities and predispositions of the human mind). . . We are out for our own personal gain but tempered by our impetus to promote the group with which we identify.“ Haidt says, we are “not mere apes. . .we are also part bee.”

As eloquent human beings, with neuronal and imaginative plasticity, we must find, beyond apes or bees, that capability–sometimes found in animals living in the wild as well as in domestic households– of loving beyond shell or fur or hoof or paw.

 

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
Mother Teresa (1910 – 1997), Ethnic Albanian Roman Catholic nun

 

Bodies develop over time. Some bodies are genetically and anatomically male or female, and some bodies express genetic variation; but beyond the organic assignments of pregnancies and nursing to women, and mostly the greater size and strength to males on average, it is the gradual sculpting of prerogatives, privileges, realms of knowledge and congregation that generate, not only limitations, but cruel differences in social status, in access to ownership of goods, services, voice, vote, turf, and occupation, not to forget health.  It is the meta-level umbrella of discriminatory, disrespectful, and corrupt meanings, values and practices that attach to and pervert our different strengths.

Our personal pronouns in the English language hypnotically emphasize a binary view of genders. The meaning of gender results from a co-construction of language and culture.  Until recently, aside from the term ‘gender queer,’ we had no mainstream language for a third or alternate gender identity.  The term ‘non-binary’ (female non-binary, male non-binary) had not entered our vocabulary, yet for the Juchitán village of Oaxaca, Mexico, Muxes, a third gender, hold a social role of importance.

In an interview with NOWNESS.com, Ivan Olita, a Los Angeles based Italian director says, “Though Juchitán is not the paradise of tolerance it might seem, and there are still episodes of discrimination, the Muxes are absolutely part of the city’s cultural landscape. They are cherished by the people of the village and most families see having a Muxe as a blessing, especially since they rarely marry and will most likely take care of their elders. . .

Juchitán Muxes do not need to be dressed as women to be considered such. It is simply a person that is born male but displays certain female characteristics, or some of each, and fills a certain role between men and women, a third gender. The whole dressing thing is not really relevant, it is more about the social role they play.”

In his documentary, Olita makes the point that in the ancient language of Zapotec, “la-ave” refers to another person without the bifurcation of “him” or “her.”  This changed after the Spanish conquistadors.

Muxes do not wish to change their bodies as do many transgendered individuals in the United States.  Muxes have an integrated sense of their (anatomically male) bodies housing characteristics defined as typically belonging to females.  In contrast, the transgendered experience generally includes an experience of disintegration between embodiment and internal sensibility.  To fix the problem and create a sense of personal integration some people choose to alter embodiment hormonally and surgically.  In a sense, many transgendered persons still experience life in a context of male/female bifurcation and want to have their gender identity consistent with their embodiment.

From an article in Zeit Magazin Nr. 1/2018 29. Januar 2018 by Von Annett Heide, we read: “Last November, Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled that official documents must add a third gender choice, such as ‘other’ or ‘various,’ arguing that the lack of such a choice is discriminatory. It was a revolutionary ruling. . .’Societal acceptance cannot be mandated by a court ruling, but it is a step in the right direction,’ said Vanja, the plaintiff in the case, who was supported by the campaign Dritte Option, or ‘Third Option.’”

The article discusses the case of a person whose sexual indeterminacy at birth results in a series of sex assignment surgeries which one can only see as butchery now; as the result of the idea that a human being is required to be either male or female, and perhaps the associated notion that psychological adjustment to an atypical presentation of embodiment would be impossible.

As tempting as it is to assign blame to those doctors, they were operating within societal directives and beliefs about characteristics a body must have to thrive and to fit in. New ideas and ways of thinking, just like new developments in technology, in energy resources and life sciences, in literature and art, thrive within historical periods where opportunity, imagination, and fomentation co-occur and disseminate through media and other sources of accessible information.  To sensitize ourselves to others who feel, because of maltreatment, disenfranchised, insulted, or devalued, we must first try on new lenses which only make sense when operating within a new or meta-perspective.

Intentionality must count for something.

Ignorance and innocence have something in common, until they part company at the crossroads of available sources of enlightenment, where the defiantly ignorant continue unwilling to consider new, non-traditional ideas, and the innocent move bravely and openly into the light.  Newer ideas are, of course, not always better, but are generally more expansive and powerful because they better explain social and scientific phenomena that have previously been less well understood.

Intentionality and sensitivity come into play with a great deal of nuance in a recent situation at the NYU dining hall.  According to some online editorials, there was a menu in celebration of Black History Month that included southern “soul” cuisine—ribs, collard greens, mac and cheese, as well as red Kool Aid and watermelon flavored water. Apparently, some vocal students and faculty found this culturally insensitive, highlighting negative associations, as well as excluding food from other places within the black diaspora.

Apparently, African American employees suggested the menu items and Aramark, the company subcontracted to supply the dining hall, made it available.  Aramark later apologized for the offense, and according to what I read, an employee or two may have been fired or reassigned to a new location.

It seems most plausible that the employees who suggested the menu items had good intentions.  But they were castigated and shamed by highly educated, perhaps more sophisticated persons at the university.  Skin color may most obviously mark a divide in privilege in this country, but by no means constitutes the only divide.  Bodies of the same skin color are not equally educated or sophisticated.  If an ignorant person intends something meant to honor a holiday, then is not insensitive to call that person insensitive when there is an equal lack of understanding by both parties—the more and the less educated?

Perhaps we must generalize about insensitivities to push the agenda of greater social equity and equality at large.  But within the larger groups of embodiment identifiers such as skin color or sex, there are a greater number of subsets of persons whose experience and awareness differ greatly.  Conversation, not castigation, must bridge those gaps.

 

In our digitized world of bytes, we will no longer need to meet in the flesh.  And perhaps our words and our worlds will come together differently, more abstractly, and with fewer hurdles than how we relate body to body.  A client of mine, Sadie, imagined a presidential debate in which the candidates were hidden in booths and only their answers on debate questions were read out loud by the same third party, while a teleprompter transcribed their answers.  Minus bodies, what kinds of ideas would garner the most votes?

Today, our images and words—instagrammed, snapchatted, texted, Facebooked, Linked, emailed, web-paged—suggest but flatten who we are.  And 3D glasses, however the brilliance of their virtual technology, do not even begin to offer the energetic connections we can only experience embodied, hot and personal, in the skin. The beauty of in-the-moment virtual connectedness also distances. . .and at the extreme we can ‘ghost’ one another, kill off our connection by our sudden absence on a screen.  And we adapt.  We get used to nullifying others by never communicating with them again.  And we get used to being annihilated as well.  I worry about this desensitization; a diminishment in our ability to make hellos and goodbyes mean something.

Words of the flesh, embodied words, wear color and texture and punch.  We can feel them, try them on, even imbibe them, and therefore experience empathic responses to them.  Concrete language, as writers of fiction and poetry know, show rather than tell us.  Abstract words like racism and sexism are conceptual, academic, head-in-the-clouds words.  It is, in our real lives, more important than “are you or are you not racist,” to query how and in what ways you embody the stories and beliefs that have oppressive feet on the ground, and in what language you tell them; cast spells with them.

In my experience, people who hate, keep those they hate at a distance.  Face to face proximity gives everyone a human face, breath, and a heartbeat.  It becomes more difficult to keep hate alive when we gaze, face to face, into each other’s eyes and share our stories.

Religious and political affiliations prove very powerful aspects of identity and, unlike more loosely constructed friendship, school, sports or neighborhood groups, religions and political groups have more explicit beliefs which often get reiterated by speech, sermon and slogan.  More emphasis on insider and outsider statuses apply including, at an extreme, shunning—an intragroup shaming and extruding of a former member to an unwelcome outsider status.  It is hard to avoid the notion that for one to be right in one’s beliefs, others have to be wrong.  When others are wrong they require saving, or slaying—figuratively or literally.

I may not be able to live in your skin, but I can live for some moments in your story.

The limits to all human understanding go back to abstract knowledge versus experience.  Empathy is the bridge.  We are amply supplied with mirror neurons and good listening skills.  We can watch movies and read novels and suspend our disbelief so that we may enter a story and feel enveloped in the fabric of its crimes and triumphs.

Even in the publishing world today, it’s a no-no for writers to draw protagonists whose bodies are different than their bodies.  But the world of science fiction and fantasy, in which characters have very different, imagined bodies, lies open to interpretation by anyone. We are equally free to explore the unknown apparently, but not allowed to claim ownership of any relevant ability to understand, let alone describe, the experiences of fictional bodies different than our own.

Objectification—the ownership of bodies of experience–both real and imagined, continues to separate and denigrate our humanity.  We move further from what Martin Buber, a twentieth century philosopher explored in his book, I and Thou, translated from German into English in 1937.  Relationships between people occur in a realm of “I and thou,” as opposed to “I and it.”  And real relationships invite, not only our skins or our parts to talk to each other across differences but also our hearts.  Relationships live, organismically, both beyond and encompassing of each component self.

Neural plasticity allows for simulating future possibilities.  According to Lisa Feldman Barret, in How Emotions are Made, “simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world. . .Your brain uses past experiences to construct a hypothesis—the simulation—and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses.” (pg. 27)

From there we go on to make predictions, sometimes in error, and make course corrections along the way.  Simulation underlies play as well as social engagement.  My three- year-old granddaughter Lili hands me a stuffed dog.  She wants me to make it talk so she can have a conversation with it.  In my best ventriloquist’s canine-speak I begin a conversation, during which she tells me to be patient, gives me a kiss, and asks if I want to have a small piece of her toast.  Of course, I do!  We move on to the next activity without a further concern about this stuffed animal who, but a moment ago, moved and gestured and spoke animatedly. Our inter-mentality allowed for the co-creation of a mutually understood and felt imaginary experience.

The porosity of our beings offers us synergistic communication and understanding, insofar as it is possible for one human being to get inside the skin of another human being.

I do not accept that I cannot understand you.  And it’s not the merit of having worked as a therapist for over thirty years.  No, not at all.  We achieve understanding because you allow me into your world, because I check in with you and ask, ‘So, is this how it is for you?’ And I ask you how things were done and what was expected and accepted in your family, your community, your religion, your culture, your nation, your time in history.  And we work on the filigree of your experience until we have co-created a narrative that means something to you, at least in the present, in this room, in this conversation that we have produced together, inter-mentally. We are in each other’s minds and hearts through the pores in our skin and the portals of our eyes and ears.

When you speak of your life, your story is now happening through me, like a fish swims through water.  The medium of me, of the river, are part of your story, the journey of the fish.  And when we go to the movies together we suspend our disbelief and cry as if the unfolding of events in this story-world are happening to me and my beloveds, to you and your beloveds, and to our relationship because, in this moment, we are one sea, and in this one sea the story rises and falls.

That I cannot learn you or you cannot learn me is just an idea, like any other idea, and sometimes an intransigent belief that holds us back. Your body has lived experiences different from my own, and yet I feel sensations in my body that resonate with your story, as if, right now, as you tell me, it happens inside me, like a cellular infusion; homologous.

 

My mother is gone.  My mother-in-law is gone.  I think often these days that all ownership, even of my body’s address, yields to the surround wittingly, willingly, or anyway.  I can but borrow and share what I have. We all dress in the dust of have nots for most of eternity.

 

Are we not all influencers and illuminators?  Grassroots movements that resulted in the women’s marches, though the events happen on a singular day, illustrate the potency of word of mouth influence.  There is someone whose opportunities—to realize their personal strengths and aptitudes and interests, as well as to accessing education, career, and other concrete paths—will benefit from a relationship with us.   Reach out.  Develop a friendship, a mentorship, a connection of some kind with someone who can benefit from whatever you have to offer.  Help close the opportunity gap.  Not only does bias damage our relationships with others, but also to ourselves.  How easy we find it to hate our own bodies when they differ from cultural ideals:  we are too dark skinned or too light, too fat, too short, too old, too disabled, our noses or lips or ears are too large, our heads are too small, our hair too curly or too straight. And from these self-limiting narratives we derive others:  No one will love me, I will never succeed, I can’t, I can’t. . .

As poet ee cummings, wrote, “yes is a world.”  Each body is a world.  Every body is a ‘yes.’

Sunday, November 5, 2017

Affirmations, a subspecies of thought, have the power to attract and to constellate our affects, bodily sensations, postural alignment, how we move, availability of energy, and sensory utilization as well as neural circuitry.  The entirety of our bodyminds responds to affirmations, just as they do to denigrating thoughts about ourselves, other persons or situations.   We can learn to harness the potential of affirmations to program ourselves to operate or run in a desired way.

If we borrow the vocabulary given us by software programming, we might think of the use of affirmations as essentially downloading bytes of code into our wetware.  Self-affirmations are thoughts, and specifically the kind of thoughts we call beliefs. When encoding beliefs works best, these beliefs must dovetail well with the programming that already runs.  This explains why potent affirmations must underscore narratives about ourselves with which we can agree, at least for the most part. When we grow up in households, and communities, we imbibe the predominant beliefs on a daily basis—about ourselves and our communities and those outside our immediate neighborhoods, towns, states, and even countries. As children our minds are open and curious.  Our permeable cells and senses saturate with the thoughts around us—happy, encouraging, worried, condemning, complaining, illuminating, or dismissive?  Particularly, when we hear over and over again, thought patterns, or belief subscriptions, we often incorporate those rigorously reinforced bytes of code as unquestionable.

Yet, we retain the capacity to construct and utilize affirmations purposefully: to increase our courage in tough situations, for comfort when we have suffered insult, rejection, or when we have disappointed ourselves or others, and to bolster new behavior, thought patterns and their consequently more uplifting affects.  Affirmations, when practiced diligently, can shift our perspectives, bolster our endurance, and prime us to gather our wits or our energy in order to behave or make progress on our goals in a desired way. Due to their newness in our thought-repertoire, affirmations must be repeated often enough to achieve the reiterative familiarity of second nature, and to dominate the multiple narratives that we maintain within ourselves.

Robert Sopolsky writes, in his fascinating book, Behavior, about the concept of automaticity, an alternate word to describe what happens when someone studying a piece of piano music, for example, now gets through the complicated trill “without thinking.”  In terms of the brain science, the neural activity moves from prefrontal cortex to a reflexive part of the brain.  With mastery in sports, in music, in a second language, in all types of activities, this geographical migration within the complex landscape of the brain takes place over time with practice, practice, practice.

Louise Hay reiterates that every piece of inner monologue is an affirmation or endorsement of beliefs, whether useful or unproductive.  She says that the deliberate use of self-constructed affirmations serves to eliminate unproductive thoughts or to create new ones which can offer us help in changing.

When we construct self-affirmations in a specific use of language that speaks to us and sounds like us, and hones our awareness of exceptional stories from our lives to lend support, then these affirmations help to shape our supportive behavior around them.  As an example, when fearful of learning something new, if I affirm that I can learn most things by studying them enough, then constructing time and effort to study the materials I have collected for the purpose, both buttresses and benefits from my affirmation.  The term, “exceptional stories,” taken from Narrative Therapy theory, refer to the moments in our lives when, even if shy, we have spoken up and voiced our concerns; or when, even if we feel prone to procrastination and avoidance, we just up and do something without over-thinking it.  It is much easier to affirm behaviors or thoughts that we have actually experienced, even if more rarely than our commonly held thoughts and typically produced behaviors, than to affirm foreign thoughts and behaviors that do not ring true.

From an online article in Psychology Today by Ray Williams, (May 5, 2013), called, ‘Do Self-Affirmations Work? A Revisit,’ we read: “There are other researchers who question the validity and utility of self-affirmations. Canadian researcher, Dr. Joanne Wood at the University of Waterloo and her colleagues at the University of New Brunswick who have recently published their research in the Journal of Psychological Science, concluded “repeating positive self-statements may benefit certain people, such as individuals with high self-esteem, but backfire for the very people who need them the most.”

The researchers asked people with and low self-esteem to say “I am a lovable person.” They then measured the participants’ moods and their feelings about themselves. The low-esteem group felt worse afterwards compared with others who did not. However, people with high self-esteem felt better after repeating the positive affirmation–but only slightly.”

This research is helpful in our understanding that wholesale affirmations, a one-size-fits- all concept, does not work as well as affirmations that support our main or exceptional narratives about ourselves.  For our affirmations to work, they must fit criteria of authenticity, and customization in our own use of language.  They must be consistent with our deeply held beliefs.

Williams goes on to write, “These findings were supported by previous research published in 1994 in the Journal of Social Psychology, showing that when people get feedback that they believe is overly positive, they actually feel worse, not better.”

And it makes sense.  We feel like frauds when people compliment us for something we do not think we deserve.  But when we feel truly seen for what we do, and noticed for that, and when the acknowledgements are “right-sized,” a phrase used in 12-step programs, then we can accept and feel boosted by such social recognition and support.

Sometimes self-affirmations actually amount to a rewriting (and neural rewiring) of old stories about ourselves with which we have been inculcated to our detriment.  In the excavation-level explorations that sometimes occur in psychotherapy or self-reflection, we can uncover these artifacts and recognize who planted them there.  All of these narratives may form part of our multifaceted identities, and we can exercise the right to revoke, reverse, or debate these no longer warranted narratives.

As an example, Joseph felt depressed a lot of the time and tended to sleep a lot now that he had some good recovery time from drinking accomplished.  He had moments of happiness when his kids visited, when he took long walks in the woods, or prepared a meal for friends.  But he expressed to me his exhaustion at not being able to “fix” himself.  Joseph said, “I know I’m all screwed up, and I just don’t know how to fix myself.”

“How do you know you’re all screwed up?” I asked him one afternoon.

“Well, my mother never stopped telling me how I’d ruined her life and that of my sister, the goodie-two-shoes.”

As we continued to talk, I proposed that Joe contemplate the possibility that, if by some miracle the thought that he was “all screwed up” disappeared, would there be anything to fix?  Would there be any exhaustion around such a project?

“I guess I’ve carried that belief around for a long time“, Joe considered. “Maybe way too long.”

How relieving to become aware of self-negating beliefs as just beliefs; and not ultimate truths.  As Joe worked through the notion that he might think otherwise about himself, he came to the conclusion that he could revoke all-screwed-up-ness from his list of identifiers.

In a University of Pennsylvania article, published November 20, 2015, called ‘The Neural Mechanics of Self-Affirmation,’ “led by Doctoral Candidate Christopher Cascio and Associate Professor Emily Falk and published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience,” (incorporating research out of both UCLA and the Michigan Center for Excellence in Cancer Communication Research), the team “used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to find that self-affirmation activates well-known reward centers in the brain. These areas — the ventral striatum (VS) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) — are the same reward centers that respond to other pleasurable experiences, such as eating your favorite meal or winning a prize.”

This research underscores the notion that for affirmations to feel good, then they must sync with our motivational/seeking and reward/redemption emotions and behaviors.  If I want to run a really good half marathon, am both motivated, and self-affirmative (“I know I give this and all races my best”), then I will feel rewarded by both the affirmation as well as by the solid completion of the race.

If I had never run a half marathon then such a self-affirmation would not do much good.  But if I had to get 13 miles down the road, I might successfully utilize the energizing potential of an affirmation like this:  “There is some pace by which I can keep going; even if it is a slow walk, I can keep going.”

One client, Jim, said that for him, trying to be perfectly on a diet doomed him to frequent failures.  In contrast, the willingness to eat modestly well on a holiday, for example, felt freeing.  Within freedom one encounters all possibilities—not only poor choices, but great choices.  Whereas, perfection has as its painful bedfellow, only failure.

Affirming ourselves can help us stay afloat during tough times.  Sometimes affirmations are actually rationalizations. Rationalizing is a psychological defense mechanism that protects us from feeling weaker, smaller, less competent, less than. . .And sometimes it is helpful, in order to keep on truckin’, to indulge in affirmative self-talk:  ‘So she didn’t go to the dance with me;  she’s probably stuck up and wouldn’t want to be seen with me anyway.  It’s better to go with my neighbor.  We’re friends and will have a good time.’  Or, ‘So I didn’t get that promotion.  It would have made for a lot more work without a lot more pay. I’m glad I dodged that bullet.’

In summary, positive self-affirmations work when they meet these criteria:  authenticity, believability, align with some other beliefs about the self, reflect exceptional stories in our own lives, are well practiced, sound like our own language, are specific and not inflated.  And most importantly, learning how to accept the genuine acknowledgement and recognition of others—learning to absorb that on a cellular level—helps us rework our narratives, rewire our brains, and open doors to greater freedom and new possibilities.

Writing Prompt:

What are some your self-limiting beliefs?  Do these sound like people you know?  Or derive from painful experiences you can remember?  What would you like to believe about yourself that will lift you up?  When have you experienced yourself as that (belief) courageous, assertive, open, persistent, etc?

Unthinged

Friday, July 7, 2017

Christine sorts through Mari’s things for the 11^th time since I started seeing her 17 years ago.  We have known each other longer than her daughter, Mari, lived, dying at age 15.  Christy has moved twice since Mari lapsed from consciousness.  Each subsequent house has felt temporary, and each had a bedroom in which Mari should have gone to sleep and awakened every morning. The final retirement home will have no empty bedroom for Mari’s ghost.

Most of us worship at the shrine of a unified self. We remember, and by inviting memories—sharp or vague, garnished with fear, humiliation or gladness–build a chronology, a through line for ourselves.  See, here we are at the beach, Mari and me.  And at every Halloween she wore a different witch hat; and there I sat, typing up my poems on an IBM Selectric word processor.

We develop into multiplicities; layered versions of our mythological, monolithic notions of me.  Our various selves, in different moments, or linked to different people or places or passions or defeats form a crowd that sometimes coheres and sometimes conflicts; occasionally a self sits alone, isolated from the rest. The crystalline Christine has lost a main facet.  For years she has obscured that lopsidedness by shoring up Mari’s things, even as they, too, desiccate, shred, fade, attenuate, turn transparent as a dying butterfly’s wings.

After 17 years and 11 times sorting through Mari’s belongings, Christy has yet to find a satisfying sense of completion.  The new retirement house, the empty nest and the one floor maintenance-free manifestation of success in living long enough to slough off unnecessary accoutrements helps though.  This weeding has got to be the last.

An archaeologist, fingering relics of infinite sorrow, Christy has done the work of grievers:  Lit candles at the shrine on Mari’s birthday and the day she died; sat in groups for parents whose children have died, read the library of self-help books, journaled, written commemorative stories, scanned pictures into Shutterfly books, testified and won the malpractice suit, and talked with me.  She as she is, Christy refused the settlement offer in favor of telling her daughter’s story, and perhaps, year after year, she comes back to sit with me every three or four weeks, to tell her daughter’s story again.  This is what she has left of motherhood.

That Christy cannot “move on,” a capstone phrase of our culture, might presuppose a narrative of failure, in life, and perhaps in therapy.  As I talk with Christy, I brush away some cobwebs of occupational failure myself; that she still comes, still needs me.  How my helping has never arrived at an outcome we imaginable as complete, or successful.

I have offered her an ‘out’ on occasion, a kind of graduation from therapy, but she wants to come back.  Perhaps, like an omnipresent and patient dog, no matter for how long, I am simply willing to hear again her story, Mari’s story.  To tear up each time she tears up.  Most people “don’t want to hear,” she tells me.  Her mother, her sister and brother, her friends, even her husband who shares a parent’s loss.

So, my willingness, and my diligent witnessing, surpass any analytical intelligence or interventional strategy I might employ to pull her from the abyss of inconsolable, and as the literature has it, “complicated grief.”  I honor Christy who has an unparalleled capacity to bend and gaze and breathe and remember, and replay and ruminate and touch her daughter’s decomposing things and tell, again and again, her story.  Together we reconstruct this dinosaur of grief from bone fragments and shards of information, with slight but significant differences.  But there is no return to Christy of her own person, and certainly not of Mari.

The thing is, Mari died because of a confluence of medical negligence.  And not because of any lapse on Christy’s part. But as a mother, she needs to hold on to an alternate reality in which, if she discovers the necessary details of omniscience and omnipotence, she could have, and would have, saved her daughter.  This seeking and puzzle solving keeps Christy alive.  And who am I, in the service of mental health, to disabuse her of this problem?  The one that knots her up but also tethers her to the planet.  Byron Katie notwithstanding (Who would you be without your story?), Christy would be dead without her story. Even for a woman of faith, the Catholic story of heavenly reunion has not sufficed, because love is a flavor of mortal connection.  This is how things, like Velveteen rabbits, start twitching their noses, and cell phones become homes away from home. So, we are working on saying goodbye to Mari’s things, sorting out rabbits from vegetation.

Our things define and describe the spaces in which we live and work as places.  Things are also place holders and prompters.  Like pearls on a strand, things help to chronologize our days, our months, even our family legacies.  I move from the pantry where coffee sits, to coffee maker and faucet, to cabinet for a mug to the fridge for half and half, to the table where the computer awaits the tap dance of my hands and the phone sits a bit removed, just out of the circle of temptation. And I’ve opened the sliders so I can feel the air move as it fans the branches of the hundred-year-old White Pine, against which my kayak leans, reminding me of the benefits, for the external obliques, of circulating the torso in a figure eight pattern.  And as the washer rinses towels and spins for the last time, sadness rinses and spins me too, as this signals my aloneness.  My dear guests have recently left and, though I looked forward to my solo time, I miss them already, those who have taken their sandals and bathing suits and beach toys and books which had marked their presence these last few days.  Dr. Christian Jarrett, in an article from The British Psychological Society, entitled, ‘The Psychology of Stuff and Things,’ quotes Karen Lollar, whose house burned down: “’My house is not “just a thing,”’ wrote Karen Lollar in 2010. ‘The house is not merely a possession or a structure of unfeeling walls. It is an extension of my physical body and my sense of self that reflects who I was, am, and want to be.’”

While the ‘thinghood,’ of my things is an extension of myself, it is also, necessarily, a distinguisher of otherness.  I cannot, after all, acquire or consume myself.  A toddler will think it funny if you ask, “Where’s Tommy’s nose?” as you look around under couch pillows, because by shear development he knows his nose is inherent to his being. The building blocks of myself exist in the world as influences, whether nutritional, intellectual, affectional, physical or moral.  Objects in the world, living and inorganic, magnetize me like a compass, or repel me.

Some psychologists say we grow more attached to the things we anthropomorphize.  But this imbuing of human characteristics to inorganic objects is the same process by which we relate to other persons who, in an important sense, are also objects in our world.  The more we humanize other humans, the more curiosity, empathy, compassion, identification and gratitude can lubricate the stubborn viscosity that has prevented us from fully embracing our own tenuous humanity and ability to relate.  On the other hand, the more we objectify other human beings, the easier it is to use, abuse and discard them.

As my mother lay dying in her bedroom, light through the blinds dappled the bed, the bookshelves, her dresser, catching occasionally on one of the delicate gold chains that spilled from a ceramic cup in which she kept them next to perfumes, all sitting on a hammered copper plate from Lithuania.  It reminded me of Mico Kaufman, a sculptor in Tewksbury, who said to me, as he showed me his studio and work, “I love to see the presence of the hand.”

Hammers extend the hand’s power to attach materials, to build, to impress design.  Phones extend our power to communicate plans, feelings, ideas.  Planes give wings to the imagination’s delight in travel.  Grandma’s samovar extends the memory of a family’s story across a continent and languages and through the ravages of war.  Russell Belk, mentioned in many articles for his work on the meaning of things, says things are “extensions of the self.”  But within and outside our own kinespheres, our extensions-of-self serve the purpose of anchoring us, as do bridges, across divides between our panoply of selves, and between ourselves and salient others.

Above the dermal layers of being, few objects seemed important to my mother but for the cheap digital clock which she demanded to see, that she might orient herself, in clock time, during these last few days without meals or errands or defined periods of sleeping and waking.  Behind the blinds silhouettes of leaves trilled, and beyond the fading room our voices, mine and my sisters, and those of our mother’s few remaining friends rose and whispered and coughed and sighed and sobbed and quieted, as do voices among the living.

My mother pared down her belongings years before she died.  Still, she had more than my sisters and I could use or treasure or shepherd into the future.  My sister Lynne took on stewardship of the Grand Dame, the Mason & Hamlin baby grand piano my mother played her entire adult life, but inherited from my father’s mother, Fannie, who won it during the seventh annual student competition at the New England Conservatory of Music, on Saturday, May 13, 1916, at 2:30 PM in Jordan Hall. The program was Beethoven’s 1^st movement of Sonata in C major, opus 53, Chopin’s Nocturne in F major, opus 15, no. 1, and Debussy’s ‘L’isle Joyeuse.’ According to the Boston based Mason & Hamlin website, they went from making organs to pianos in 1881. “With Mason & Hamlin’s innovations, use of only the finest materials and expert craftsmanship, its pianos were the world’s costliest to produce and widely accepted as the world’s finest.”

Julie Beck, in an Atlantic Monthly article from 12/10/14 quotes, “’Things embody goals, make skills manifest, and shape the identities of their users,’ write Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton in their 1981 book The Meaning of Things. ‘Man is not only homo sapiens … he is also homo faber, the maker and user of objects, his self to a large extent a reflection of things with which he interacts.’”

So what does it mean to do justice to an object so meticulously honed, and so momentously won for the artistry and craftsmanship of its musician, which has now survived all relevant owners in a family?  To honor the piano, it must be played, lovingly and by someone whose connoisseurship recommends them.  The piano must feel the presence of a devotee’s hands.

Like pimps, the piano resellers trivialized the worth of our older and less than furniture quality, but well-tended instrument.  However, they would take it off our hands.  My sister would not give up so easily, and the long tentacles of Craig’s List brought a sale close, and even closer, as successively, potential buyers tendered, not only their checkbooks but their stories.  And the most closely aligned story won!  Though there were several in the running:  The woman who, widowed young, made it on her own with three daughters, one of which with musical inclination.  We are four sisters whose mother was widowed at 42.  There was the young man studying at the New England Conservatory for a Certificate in Composition and his parents would house the Grand Dame at their Cape Cod house, just down the street from my sister’s house.  Synchronicity there.  And then there was the Frenchman, a concert pianist who needed such a piano on which to prepare for his summer concert series. And betwixt and between, the Grand Dame’s piano tuner’s client, a semi-retired lawyer, who like our mother, played all the time.  He had already driven fifty miles several times to play it, and, like our mother, had his own bucket list of compositions he wanted to accomplish before he died.  He was selling his Steinway to have this Mason & Hamlin, and our mother’s piano tuner of 40 years would continue his service to the Grand Dame.  Driven by divine discontent, he reminded me of my mother who, ever curious, ever ludic, would place her diminutive arthritic fingers on the keyboard and start a new piece, or play from ear some jazz, some ragtime, and a rock song or two.

I went to the home of a client in trouble for hoarding, and thus endangering her child.  The abundance I saw held, somewhat obscured at first, both order as well as overwhelming love.  Books, toys, clothing, art supplies, and every paper with a hand drawn doodle piled up, a growing hedge against forgetting even a single kiss.  Every day is a keeper.

I keep the word ‘omphaloskepsis’ written on a piece of paper from a receipt in my main glasses case, housing the fourth iteration lenses for my deteriorating eyesight.  It appeared ten years ago in a Balderdash game and I married it, Las Vegas style, love at first sight.

In a world of mass manufactured things, I recommend Gerard Bertrand’s Cote des Roses wine, in a bottle topped with a glass stopper and standing on an irregularly whorled rose petal bottom.  However reiterative, perfume and flavor and color and design coalesce in perfect harmony.  I sit here with my pale coral wine in a warm air that gently condenses the glass, a momentary lebenskünstler watching the water chuff at the shoreline while the wind chime dances its pentatonic dance and the kayak collects pine needles.  These are vacation things.  And next week work things will welcome me back, the plants thirsty, my dear clients ready to story and re-story.

Guest Saddle:  What are your favorite things?  What things are metaphors for who you are?  What things connect you to others in your favorite circles?  What things are you willing to do without?  Without which things would you feel sad to live without?

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Boundary Puzzle

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

 

We require a behavioral and verbal repertoire to define boundaries because we came from oceanic enmeshment. We humans start our lives as symbiotes and remain pack animals, who crave connection as badly as do our furry friends who, in the absence of their own species (read cats and dogs), will curl up to us for warmth, soothing touch, play and loving affection. Remember Ashley Montagu’s 1971 book, Touching? Our skins, our persons, fail to thrive without bodily connection.

The psychological and self-help literature on boundaries often treats personal and psychological boundaries as analogs for territorial ones, lines in the sand.  But boundaries have vastly more vagueness and movement, and are frequently negotiable.  They do not have exact placements because of the ways in which social, psychological, professional and even global contexts define, and redefine them.  The interpersonal and larger social contexts in which we speak of intrusion, inclusion, extrusion, or codependency and isolation, selects the meanings that calibrate, with great nuance, the boundary crossings that construct or deconstruct us.

Body boundaries:  A woman’s body has housed us. For the invited or intruding indweller, her startup body had all the equipment necessary to provide shelter and sustenance, but quickly scaled up to a highly sophisticated industrial complex, whirring and whizzing, exponentially massing up and sloughing, weaponizing us for combat and cooperation in many arenas of survival: development, individuation, choice making, emotional connection, and social embeddedness.  The walls of this body-house expanded, the supporting beams flexing at their joints, an ocean lapping at its shores, while outside in the neighborhood birds sang, traffic hummed, a relative yelled, televisions dulled their watchers or interrupted their dreams with reiterative sensory blitzes.

And then the first goodbye: a cry, a slap of air opening our lungs, the blood-cord severed.  This first move–the expulsion from indweller to out-dweller–already a shift in worlds, would otherwise destroy us but for the porches, swings, branches and floors of our mother’s body, our second home.  No wonder those of us who grew up in the country loved tree houses so much, the model of our mother’s exterior home for us—the one we climbed, rode, sucked, and upon whose pillows and bones we slept our deepest sleep.

From blood to milk, from cord to mouth, attachment shifts.  Still, a baby’s cry sounds the mother’s alarm; the bald-headed baby’s sleep a maternal sedative, a baby‘s suckling, some relief for her mother.

Men and women, whatever our hue—peach, tan, almond, olive, or mahogany—all swam in a woman’s interior sea, surrounded by the continent of her body, and fed by her bread and wine.  Her blood traveled through our tiny tributaries, her music became the dance of our bones, her hopes and dreams and touch our eyes and skin. But our very essence, an explosion of DNA from two tribes, from two stranger camps, caused each of us, as crisis, to proliferate, cell by cell, synergizing our parents’ differences until they could function as one.  We have it in the very core of our nature to make a family of strangers.  In fact, the idea of purity—of race or ethnicity or family lineage—never works out well.  Inbreeding makes progeny fragile, prone to illness and oddity; even the single trait overbreeding of animals, such as dogs, can cause serious health problems.  Our sturdiness, our very survival, concerns the story of our making family out of strangers.  We are all mutts, and over time will become less distinguishable by feature and hue. Boundaries between strangers in language, ethnicity, and nationality will look more like zippers or ebbing and flowing tide lines than straight ones.

Women’s bodies house babies, as do jungles their wild beings or apartment buildings in East Boston their renters, and all reiterate the fundamental question of ownership between landlord and tenant.  The frequent misalignment, regarding ownership of house and home, and their analogs shows up everywhere, every day: between parents who own the house and their adolescents who claim ownership of their bedrooms and rights to messiness; between landlords who own the apartments and tenants the psychological space, between women and fetuses, between nations and residents, between our planet and the nations that, though squatters, we mythologize as subdividing it.  Even slavery, the owning of one human by another, though legally disallowed in our country, rears its head ubiquitously in the fuzzy ownership rights within marriages and parenting (and step parenting) relationships, as well as between employers and workers regarding human energy and time.

Our experiences of boundary trespasses also presuppose the existence of clear, separate domains of ownership.  With some exceptions, these domains have so many exceptions as to create frequent misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and sometimes felicitous surprises. A kiss, an investigative probe into our past histories in areas of money, taxes, employment, medical and mental health, and the law, may seem invasions of privacy in many instances, but we make exceptions, or exceptions are made by powers greater than our own, for these boundary crossings.  Sometimes these invasions will benefit us, and sometimes cause detrimental actions.

Boundary nuances are more psychological than physical.  When human beings are very young, parents take care of toileting, feeding and cleaning.  And when mom was dying, my sisters and I took care of her toileting and intimate personal care, with love and respect.  Our roles with regard to each other, and the understanding that defines those are far more powerful at creating comfort than whether someone’s hands are on our bodies.  We do not consider pap smears, colonoscopies, or cardiac surgery to be intrusions or abuse because the expertise and role of physicians, and the location of these practices, defines these intimate contacts as helpful and healthy.

Perhaps, paradoxically then, the need for vagueness, even infringement of boundaries enhances survival:  Susan Brown, a new mother, eloquently articulated her view of the way in which women get cultivated into an essential caretaking role with regard to other people’s lives, starting in utero and reinforced continuously after birth.  Like a surgical mesh, the conjunction of a mother’s life with that of her newborn sees the two growing into one another, their fibers of being overlapping and interweaving in a way both inextricable and impossible to articulate.  Susan said about her husband, “He is still who he is with the addition of a baby.  He has a quiet ride to work and can stop for a coffee or get breakfast.  He can get up from his desk and take a break whenever he wants to, can pee when the urge arrives, get a drink, get food, chat with colleagues. My old life is totally gone.  I often have to choose which one of those—eating, drinking or peeing—I will be able to manage after I put the baby in her crib for a minute.  I’ve lost my old freedom entirely.  He’s still living his life, but I’m living her (the baby’s) life.”

Sharon stayed married to Roy—whose body and brain fell apart from his alcoholism—for 30 years.  A “codependent,” she took care of everything—his and her finances, what he ate, when he ate, made his doctor’s appointments, woke him for his part time jobs, when he had them, organized their social calendar, communicated with his extended family, washed his clothes, set them out for him, took their dog to the vet, took him to get his excise tax paid. She was living Roy’s life as well as her own, as if he were still symbiotically attached.  Even after their separation, at long last, she still takes care of some things, fills in some gaps in his limited capacities. She even found him an apartment, still pays his more separate bills online. The leash has lengthened to the extent her guilt will allow.

Mark’s story, an alcoholic–in recovery too late for his wife to endure– reveals the importance of connection, within which our sense of self thrives.  Connections and boundary separators coexist in all relationships, even between warring troops talking across trenches during a truce.  Spouses, parents and children, friends and coworkers interact within a complex, pulsating, expanding and contracting microcosm of intentions, desires, directives, etiquettes and power differentials that formulate and reformulate the minute to minute shapeshifting of boundaries.  We dance with each other.  Come close.  Step apart. Gaze.  Shut our lids. Mark and his wife sold their house.  She took their son to live with her.  “I just want to go home,” he cried, “but there is no home.”  A man without a home, a family; a man freefalling into an undefined, borderless space, utterly disoriented, stared at me across the coffee table, hoping that I might point the way out of the Town of Temporary and the State of Despair.  Completely severed from our connections we are strangers in our own lives.  Strange, estranged, unbound.

Within our own persons we might describe degrees to which we experience connection and boundary divides.  That we play multiple roles in life, that we express different aspects or facets, does not surprise.  Some theorists speak of persons as having parts.  As Philip Bloomberg write, “the mind (is) a configuration of shifting, nonlinear, discontinuous states of consciousness in an ongoing dialectic with the healthy illusion of unitary selfhood.”  When our selves experience conflict—I am on a diet so can’t have dessert; but I want that chocolate cake—we negotiate with ourselves.  If a self occupies an intolerable status within our collective of selves, then that self might get cut off from consciousness, banished to a borderland internment camp where its voice gets silenced most of the time.

Sometimes we drift in and out of each other’s thoughts and dreams and creative foment.  Our inter-mentality gets mobilized when we brain storm or empathize, our mirror neurons firing up their engines.  Together we put pieces of puzzles together, retrace steps, find things, discover or invent new processes, mobilize and coordinate skill sets. The creative fuzziness of our intellectual and creative boundaries—this imperfect but glorious mind-reading and attunement—works often to our benefit.  In the kitchen with my sisters, and with my mother when she was alive, all of us would seamlessly move around and, without any words exchanged, manage to cook a large family meal and bring it to the table, hot and enticing, with exact timing.  And all of the cooking pots and pans cleaned up along the way.

Intentions, even ignorance, often hold sway over the sanctity of boundaries, and this can sometimes make you laugh.  Remember?  While your toddler, utterly enthralled, reads her board books on the kitchen floor, you sneak into the bathroom, silently close the door, and sit on the only throne you’ll ever know.  And then, as if the world has suddenly gone dark, the door barges open.  There’s your two-year old with that beaming face of discovery, relief, and adoration. “I’m here mama!”  Grabbing the toilet paper she pulls at least six feet of it off and hands it to you.  And what does a polite adult say in that situation, but thank you?

And if at the theater with the short intermission, you rush into your stall in the women’s restroom, with the unfortunately broken lock, and another woman pushes the door into your head, while saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ you easily forgive, underpants down at your calves, in mid squat over the dewy toilet rim—previously sprinkled on by the former temporary owner of the two foot square space where the relevance of your noggin seems to be in question.

In a hostage taking situation, a negotiator comes in peace, hands raised to signal no weaponry.  An exception might get made for talking which, yes, offers more nuances than gunfire.

And speaking of talking, of words, those brash culprits, poets, dash across the boundary of the everyday numinous: claw, pry, slip through the wall of dumbness our very existence applies. Words, even piles and piles of them, can but refer to the unutterable coldness of a vernal pool, stepped into as snow still melts, the heart racing dare of it, the uncertainty of its nascent, translucent eggs. Poets plunge head first through thickets of tangled unknowing with flashlights, illuminating the unsaid—the impossible to say—so that our marvelous mirror neurons can fire us up, embroider our surfaces with pleasure, and distract us from the breach.  Words in all of their intriguing combinations, live in neighborhoods on the other side of the tracks from our bodies—breathing and hungry and laughing or dysphoric in an orchestral wonder of grunts, grabs and expulsions of gas.

For us, boundaries protect, confine, clarify, mystify.  We decide when to negotiate them or we flail at the mercy of their violation.  But in other than the human world, migratory birds don’t give a fig through whose air space they fly.  And stars throw indiscriminate fistfuls of light.

Camel Saddle:  What boundaries do you need to feel safe?  How do you tend to react when others breach those boundaries?  Do other people ever complain to you that you’re stepping over a line with them?  What boundaries were clear or vague in your family of origin and do you subscribe to those now? How do you believe we as a nation would do well to treat our borders?