Month: March 2014

The attempt of people suffering from grotesque emotional wounds to maintain psychological stability in an unhealthy and ultimately self destructive way.

Can we call it what it is?  An Anschluss, without the anti-Semitism.  Austria was not what should have precipitated war.  The Rhineland was, particularly when combined with his audacity in stating his objectives openly.

Even I get a bit foggy, but most people have never been any other way.

Our sole national interest in this region is staying the hell away and avoiding a war.  If the Europeans want war, let THEM wage it.  Fucking assholes.  They want us to do their dirty work, but have never paid for any of it.  Our soldiers are too good for this shit.  Let Putin have the Crimea, and if Russia and Ukraine go to war, so be it.  If Putin wants to keep marching, then we can think about it, but from where I am sitting, he is reacting to what he no doubt perceives as a Western sponsored, anti-Russian coup in the Ukraine.

Put another way, we started this.  Why, I don’t know.  We don’t need anything over there.  It likely has something to do with the bankers who rule the world.

It would gratify me to see him put my financial plan into action.  He can do it.  Increasingly, I view the world through a prism of a fundamental conflict between the people of the world and the bankers, and the intermediaries through whom they act.

If someone can name me one strategic interest we have in the Ukraine beyond some amorphous concept like “credibility”, I will take this all back.  Hell: we elected Obama twice.  Why shouldn’t any right-thinking human being view us as a nation of gullible and weak imbeciles?  I do.

It’s a constant source of amazement to me how people will blame evil corporations for all our woes, then in the next breath call for more government of precisely the sort they just claimed the corporations had bought.  The situation is simple: large corporations buy politicians, then use the weapon of government to enrich themselves, not least by damaging competing small businesses.  Does anyone think Obamacare will hurt the Proctor and Gambles or GE’s–both of whom donated heavily to Obama–at all?  Of course not.  It will hurt small restaurants, mom and pop grocery stores, small retail franchises, car parts distributors, roofing companies, and EVERYONE WHO WORKS FOR THEM.  This is the plan, and voting Democrat does nothing but further it.  Yes, voting Republican has more or less amounted to the same thing over the past decade at least, but we are at least trying to change that.

The simplemindedness on display PARTICULARLY among allegedly educated people is breath-taking and jaw-dropping.

Aside from the constant intrusion of unwanted emotions and images, I think a core result of unprocessed trauma is a sensation of watching and not participating in life.  You can mouth the words, and do the things, but you’re not really there.

This is, I think, one of the reasons for self abusive behavior, whether through persistently bad decisions, irresponsibility, or outright self abuse, as through overeating, alcoholism, sexual addiction, drug abuse, or in extreme and literal cases, cutting and suicide attempts that are not serious: all of these, by bringing back pain, bring back a sense of presence.  You are once again a participant in at least  SOMETHING.

The hierarchy of spiritual development I have seen is relaxation, mindfulness, concentration.  But I think anyone who has experienced trauma cannot even achieve the first properly, without preliminary work.  What happens as you relax is the demons start to come out, you sense their advent, and pull back.  You have to deal with them first.

Let us call this stage purification, until I change my mind.  Preparation would also work.  Right-sizing, head straightening, delunaticism, Sanification, blending, mixing (light and dark): I’ll have to smoke on this a bit.  The best time might be the other side, which I think is approaching.

In what ways would the psychological/emotional lives of women be different if they never menstruated?  In what ways does it improve them, in what ways (beyond the obvious) does it lessen them, and what is interesting in this regard to speculate about (de Bono PMI)?

In what ways might human society have evolved differently if many if not most social orders (men) had not feared this process?

If the plane lost cabin pressure, and someone was at the controls–pilot or passenger–would not a rapid descent to lower altitudes be one of the first things they did?  One which was not “radar evading”, but oxygen preserving?  And again, if the electronics were scrambled and they either didn’t know where they were, or how to read the instruments (if the pilots lost consciousness and one or more passengers were trying to fly the thing) you would see both a rapid descent and an erratic trajectory that leads, ultimately, to a crash, either from losing fuel, or from misjudging altitude, all while trying to reach someplace safe.

And what if most but not all passengers were killed in the initial decompression?  Perhaps some remained conscious, but not those whose cell phones were called.  Or what if the survivors panicked and tried to broadcast relentlessly on a broken plane radio and forgot about their cell phones?  I read once about someone who died in a parachute jump because they gave him a left handed parachute, and all he thought to do was paw relentlessly where the pull cord would have been on a right handed parachute.  They could see the marks. 

If the plane was hijacked, it serves no purpose to fail to announce by whom and why.  No terror is achieved.  Even if it was a coordinated attack, and failed due to terrorist pilot error, there would be people who could anonymously announce their “success”.  This is their way of operating.  Nothing is achieved by mystery.

I listened to this interview on Eyes Wide Shut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inLfK535oxs

It occurred to me this morning I should likely find interviews with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, but I tend congenitally to look more for background characters.  I tend to trust janitors more than CEO’s.

Be that as it may, she tried twice to share her view of what the movie was about, but I think the interviewers–as seemingly always happens with her in these interviews, which she warns them of at the outset–were more interested in her as a conduit to get to stories about the Master.

She says that in her view the essential scene is that in which Nicole Kidman admits to spending a pleasant day with Tom–Dr. Bill (and I will say that even I noticed the pervasive symbolism of the wallet, his badge of authenticity and importance, and money)–but still thinking about her Navy officer the whole time.

She was interrupted (it was a poor interview), but here is where I think she was going: we all of us are split in some ways between our social roles, our place, our mask, our persona, and our inner reality.  Kidman, there, was admitting to being simultaneously dutiful wife and what we would call a lustful slut.  She is saying, effectively, that women are just what Tom Cruise accused men of being.  They are no different.  Men have inner fantasy lives, and so too do women.  And these fantasy lives, even if they are not acted on, matter.

What both learned, what opened both of their eyes, is who they really were, how much larger and unconfined, and simultaneously vulnerable and free.  Fucking is what Kidman felt would finally close that circle, and complete some part of the process, put a stamp on it.

Alice starts the trip down the rabbit hole.  She admits to Dr. Bill her lust.  He in turn is startled to see expressed feelings he too has–he was clearly enjoying the attention of those two models, and it was unclear where it was going–but not fully brought into consciousness.  This is what women do better than men: feel consciously.  Cruise did not think about what he was doing at the party, but certainly it was inappropriate for a married man to be both flirting so aggressively, and consenting to receive such more or less open invitations to sex.

So we have the public, pious role, and the shadow licentiousness that rejects all limits–Kidman was willing to lose everything for a man she had never even spoken to (now: this is a fictional story line, and I can’t say how many women might actually feel this way, but the story comes from SOMEWHERE, and I have heard enough crazy stories to believe this may be how it actually works on strange, weird, inexplicable occasions).

Dr. Bill goes liminal.  He does eventually leave the gates of the city, to be received in another set of gates, but before that he meets someone whose ROLE is lust.  That is her point and purpose.  She is not trying to be someone else.  She is not split in any way, at least for the purposes of this analysis (prostitution is no doubt very emotionally demanding, and a profession likely largely populated by survivors of various forms of abuse).  Domino, as I have said, is the only person I like in this movie, other than Nick, who I will get to in a moment.

Domino represents a kind of way point, between role and the reality of lust.  Dr. Bill satisfies his role with her–he gives her money, as an attentive and responsible benefactor–but never fully meets his lust.  He does not integrate them, or even fully admit them.  Since he was quite prepared to spend the night out–based on his subsequent behavior, his primary concern was not with worrying his wife by staying out late–he could have slept with her, and in my opinion that may have been the honest thing to do.

But he doesn’t.  He meets his friend, whose eyes are to be shut by a blindfold, and who mediates the world of the orgy and the world of Dr. Bill’s role.  Nick goes into the party as himself.  He is the only one who does not wear a mask.  But his eyes are wide shut.  He cannot see, literally or figuratively, just what he has gotten himself into.

For his part, Dr. Bill, ironically, puts on a mask–symbolizing a role–where the role is the satisfaction of lust.  And as I have said, making sexual gratification a point and purpose also misses something.  Making it a role misunderstands its arbitrary nature.  Can this fundamental split be FULLY healed even within a carefully constructed ritual context?  I don’t know.  I don’t know.

Coming full circle–and the symbol of the magic circle plainly means something, and likely multiple somethings, in the childrens department store–Dr. Bill and Alice are left living in the liminal zone, processing it, while trying to fulfill the role of parents.  Alice, being more aware, sees that Dr. Bills experience has to be consummated, with her, within the space of both of their roles, and that for the time being everything will be OK.  I suspect they will get divorced later, though, as indeed Kidman and Cruise did.

I am thinking out loud, but there may be something here.  I will add that Davis, when asked if the filming was the first place she met Kubrick, said something like “Oh no.  I had lived in Britain at that point for several years.”  Now, I could live in Britain for decades and never meet anyone famous.  Implicit within that statement was the idea that she–as an attractive model “with great tits”–went to parties where people like Kubrick could be found.  What else that implies, I can’t say.

Here is a video of her singing what in 2007 was her latest single: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB6g66OYoKI

I put off seeing Eyes Wide Shut, because I knew I would react how I am reacting, and at that time, I was unsure how to make creative use of it.  Now I know how.  This is all good for me, even whatever nonsense I am writing.

Here is an interesting fact: the actress in Eyes Wide Shut who played the OD’d hooker, and the corpse in the morgue, was NOT the same actress as that in the mansion, whose name was Abigail something.  The two apparently got in a bit of a cat fight, this being likely the most significant film either will have been involved in in their careers.

Here is my take: what if Kubrick wanted to dangle the illusion of an overarching order–something tangible at the end of the rainbow–but take it away? Davis, in an interview, said she somehow hurt herself in the circle, which is why the other gal took over in those scenes.  But why not suppose the change was demanded by Kubrick himself?

There was no murder.  I am increasingly convinced of it.  Both times the girl warned him, men in masks were easily close enough to overhear her.  Add this to the fact that even though Davis was apparently present in the orgy somewhere, that she was not the girl warning him, and what you have to conclude is that it WAS a charade, and that even though it was NOT the same girl who warned him who died, that Ziegler saw no reason to dissuade Dr. Bill from that possibility, since they wanted all the leverage they could get for him to keep his mouth shut.  And it worked, more or less, since the fear and confusion caused him to break down when he saw the mask, and even if Nicole Kidman has been the one who secretly found it and left it out to see how he would react, she did not say.  She loved him, I think I might say, convulsively, not patiently; reluctantly and perhaps by force of will.

And Kubrick, in the end, was saying there is no order at all.  Good people like Domino get diseases, everyone else is running around chasing sex and things, and there is not even a despotic order ruling the whole thing: just a bunch of prurient and odd rich people with strange tastes they indulge from time to time, out of ennui and perhaps long-standing habit.

It is an odd joke, one he perhaps felt well content to make his last.

There has to be a better word, but I do like that it contains the word reaction, as there is something chemical–alchemical?–at work, an interplay of elements whose aftermath leaves something qualitatively new.

Abreaction is leaning into negative emotions, embracing them, emphasizing them, enlarging them, experiencing them more fully–for the first time, if this is a truly unresolved trauma.

I have been doing a lot of this over the past several weeks.  We hear about positive self talk.  Fuck that.  I’m doing negative self talk, about how I hope I fail, that everyone hates me and wants me to die, that nothing I will ever do will succeed, that I should be ground into the dirt.  .  .etc.

And this is working.  What it is doing is bringing up latent emotions, and what might be termed non-verbal dialogue, which has been in my consciousness substantially all my life, but largely unrecognized, and to the extent it was, fought.  “You say I need to die, but I say I want to live”, back and forth, endlessly.

There is no conclusion to this.  Each “side” achieves momentary victories, but always there is a loss of energy, of enthusiasm, of connection with the inner self, of vitality.

So I decided to give this voice free rein to verbalize literally anything it wants.  What has been happening is that my chronic anger is subsiding, I feel more calm, and I can think more clearly.

What I am realizing is that when I get angry over “nothing”–today, for example, the fact that cancelling a print job on my printer yields roughly 10x as many pages of gibberish as actually printing the document would have–is that the anger–the defensiveness, the sense of being under attack, the sense of needing to justify myself, the need to strike out–was already there.  It was induced by the voice.  I suspect most people with chronic anger issues–and I do want to be clear this is not a major issue for me, but it is an issue–are the same.  They are fighting battles in their heads by proxy, and I think sometimes it is the very concreteness of the proxy–the bad driver, the IRS agent, the thoughtless coworker–that makes them attractive.  At least they know WHAT they are angry at.  The alternative is an emotion without a cause or object, which is very confusing.

Stan Grof talks about traumas of commission and omission.  I believe these are his words.  It is clear enough how to abreact actual abuse, but how neglect?  How lack of love?

Ponder a parent who watches a child in pain, struggling helplessly with something, who watches the child, while the child is watching him or her, begging with their eyes for help, and who walks on without doing anything.  Is the net content of this interaction, in which nothing has apparently been done–no one hurt or helped–neutral?  Of course not.   A clear message has been sent: you don’t matter.  I don’t care whether you live or die.  It might actually be more convenient for me if you died.

This would technically be a trauma of omission–love not given–but I would argue that in important respects all traumas are traumas of commission, in that somewhere, somehow, love that could have been given, understanding and help that could have been granted, was not.  Certainly, there are limits to how much, say, the workers in an orphanage can provide love and comfort to all the children.  But has “society” still not chosen to care, also?  I think this is the way it works.

So a trauma of omission gets abreacted as self loathing, self hate, a feeling of helplessness, violence towards a self which seemingly deserved it–how else to explain these lacks, these gaps?

What I am trying to process, what I have been trying to process all my life, is the fact that not only were my parents incapable of empathetic, nurturing love, but that at many points in my life they more or less rooted for my failure, watched me flail around helplessly, and did nothing.  They just moved on, without emotional involvement or connection.

Now, as I have often said, I don’t feel sorry for myself, and I don’t want this to be a Daily Me.  At the same time, we as a society are so inured in some ways to one another’s inertia and anomie and disconnection, that I think truth telling is warranted and useful at times.  It tells us what is out there. 

And my feelings go through a sort of one way valve, in which I can express myself honestly, but need fear no blowback or emotional aggression.  You  can’t get to me.  I have far, far too much practice surviving emotional assaults, having endured them daily for most of my formative years, and in internal dialogue since.

I think clinical, therapeutic psychology, in the long run, will need to turn to teaching and eliciting deep emotions from people in emotional distress.  It will need to teach them not to hurt less, but to hurt more until they hurt less.  The solution to PTSD is Hell.  But is one large Hell that ends not vastly preferable to daily small ones until the end of a life blunted by a dependence on emotional pain killers or one sort or another?

Stan and Christina Grof’s book “Spiritual  Emergency” was very useful to me in this regard.  It broadened by horizon tremendously as to how much emotional pain someone can take, and my ideas about embracing difficult emotions come from them and Barry McDonagh’s “Panic Away” series;  primarily from them, though.  It is a focus of that book.