What I realized yesterday is that Developmental Trauma Disorder ALSO has intrusions, but they are unconscious. You are going one way, then suddenly find yourself going another way, and you don’t know why. I don’t know why.
It seems that the social part of us never really shuts down. It keeps trying to reactivate. It hits start, and send, and the ping goes out, and that ping bounces off the protective elements in the nervous system, which immediately prohibit that part from coming on-line. It is too dangerous. It is like the government telling you where you can’t go, when they really have no idea if it is safe or not. They don’t want to chance it, and don’t want you to chance it either.
This blocking is a sort of intrusion, one you can’t see. The memories come up, without coming up, and they have an effect, but you do not realize they have an effect. You just find yourself often numb, often unable to focus, and unable to plan.
And this goes on for a while, then this center hits temporary nervous exhaustion. This is where addiction comes in. This is where the desire to check out becomes overwhelming. This is where you–I–need to hit the reset button, which is what drug and alcohol use does.
And it is interesting to speculate that perhaps in some senses standard, recognized addictions like those to drugs and alcohol might in some respects be healthier than addictions to work and sex and gambling, because there is a cycle of connection, and a cycle of disconnection. An addiction to work is more or less continual shut down. Most boozers have times when they are emotionally available. They just can’t sustain it. Heroin and opium addicts have written great works of music and literature. They are there, and then they are gone, then they come back, and so a lifetime is spent.
And let me add one more addiction to the pantheon: the addiction to moralizing. If judgement is a cognitive reframing of the primal emotion of fear, then it is a logical concomitant of what I am calling unconscious intrusions.
I am usually most productive idea-wise in the morning. This is not just because I can connect to the dreams of the previous night; rather, my fear of the day leads to continual ideas and dissociation.
In a Freudian sense–and I tend not to use Freuds language because he was more than a bit slimy–much of what I write is reaction formation.
And to be clear, the same idea can be presented in the same way, using the same words, but come from many different places emotionally. It is not bad to theorize and ponder, and fight for understanding. I am simply speaking to myself, in a public sphere.
From what does the need to ask forgiveness come from? It comes from social disconnection. A rupture has occurred, and needs to be repaired. Some rule has been violated, some feeling of tenderness or propriety crossed. There was connection, now there is not.
Childhood trauma, of course, will generate the continual sense of shame, of alienation, and the futile asking for, but never receiving, forgiveness. I myself compensate with arrogance. It is a shield of sorts, or has been. It is an interesting thing to contemplate that somewhere in the hardest human beings there is the capacity for tenderness and softness which they have forgotten.
And being me, I started contemplating the dynamics of asking forgiveness from GOD. We cannot see God. Is asking for forgiveness the same as asking for connection?
And being me, I started thinking about T’shuvah, repentance, which at one time consisted in offering animal sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem. What is this dynamic? I will need to feel about this for a while longer.
But the point I wanted to make here is that it is quite possible, and in my view desirable, to treat religion BOTH as a cultural artifact intended to enable social cohesion and the maintenance of meaning, AND as a set of objective claims about the physical universe which can be investigated in a scientific manner. A study can be made as to what works and why culturally, and as to what is true empirically.
As I’ve no doubt mentioned repeatedly, Religion (Religions, if you want to be more politically conformist) was my own academic field of interest, and sacrifice–“acts of the sacred”–my main interest there. But the question “is this true?” was not an important question. I think it should be.
I will often lay in bed in the mornings and just feel. I will interocept–I just made it a verb–and see where I am guided.
I have been lonely all my life. Part of my problem, of course, is that few people can understand me at the level where I like to operate. To a great extent, uniqueness and loneliness go together.
But as I’ve come to know, and as I’ve described here, I seem “have”–I’m not sure what the best word is–Developmental Trauma Disorder.
And I went this morning to a primal place, that of being a small child, looking into my mothers eyes, and feeling the terror and confusion of not seeing her looking back. She could only see herself.
I touched this feeling. It is oceanic, overwhelming. But I have developed enough skill in this sort of thing–in pendulation, in titration–that I was able to work with this high voltage safely. It is painful, of course, but my day will go on.
And I realize that is feeling myself, I am making up for that primitive lack. I am my own mirror. And I feel that to SEE this is narcissism, but to feel it is healing. It matters how one does it. Narcissists only see themselves, but they do not see that they only see themselves. Narcissism is simply how the world is for them. It, too, is the result of a primitive trauma.
And I feel this not being seen is what makes the world go mad. It explains wars and cruelty and obsessions. It is invisible for nearly everyone.
And I was pondering child rearing in this country, especially in light of a question a Democrat asked me in a bar. We were talking politics and I said I was a conservative, and his first question was “what do we do with the old people?” I first asked him “what did we do with old people before?”–to which he really had no response, being a bit drunk–and then I pointed out that in countries with socialized medicine they keep old people alive far less aggressively, and several leaders–such as in Japan–have openly wished for the old to die, as they were “unproductive” members of society. In an allegedly morally superior social order, the old are seen solely in terms of their economic utility. There is a huge push to get people on government run medical plans, then resentment at the cost. The whole thing is ludicrous and contradictory.
But here is the relevant point: in the old days, aging parents lived with their children. Grandmothers were there for their grandbabies. In the old days, numerous women were around in an extended family, such that the babies looked in many eyes, had many opportunities for connection and union. And because this was the norm, the parents themselves would have been more commonly available to their children emotionally. There would have been much less Developmental Trauma Disorder.
And the old days continue in much of the world. It is likely that the average child in an African village feels more love from its mother than the average child in America, even when the mother is playing Mozart and making sure there are lots of colors and shapes for the child to interact with. Her mother is in California Her sister is in Idaho. The fathers mother is in New York. They all come to visit, of course, but are not in and out of the home daily, as happens in more traditional communities with tighter family ties.
Healthy children become healthy adults, and they are not mass produced. There are not techniques for thriving, other than those of connection, and providing a good continuum of both safety and opportunity to explore. They need to feel safe, and they need to be allowed to express their natural curiosity, and to fail sometimes. Failure is not death: it is, on the contrary, the essence of life. Fail better, fail harder, fail forward.
We have a major candidate for President openly talking about the coercive shut down of political opposition. This is categorically anti-American, categorically a blatant example of the sort of authoritarianism our Constitution was explicitly written to prevent.
Who are the lunatics who make this sort of thing possible? Who are the imbeciles and lunatics who support them? Where is the decency in this world? It is surrounding us, I suppose: most people are good, but my God it continues to astonish me how craven, how intellectually corrupt, how STUPID even the graduates of our best colleges and universities are.
Leftist policies cannot be defended. They cannot be defended on moral, practical, or any grounds whatever. They corrupt culture, alienate people from one another, breed poverty and resentment, and place in power psychopaths who eventually generate misery directly. There is nothing good in any of this.
In October I am going to join a Trump phone bank. I would encourage any readers I may have to do likewise. If Hillary wins, our democracy is cooked. We will be fortunate Barack Obama is so lazy, stupid, and cowardly, and that he spent so much time golfing. Hillary will get right down to work ending everything good in this country, and promoting cronies, crooks and thieves.
I actually don’t think this is hyperbole. Propagandistic control of the media, and public gullability, indifference, and out right stupidity, have reached a point where she can commit crimes in the light of day, crimes which cannot be denied, and GET AWAY WITH THEM. If she is President, she will attack journalistic pluralism–the few remaining honest human beings in the profession–immediately, and then we will have NO IDEA what is actually happening.
Jesus Christ people: wake the fuck up.
Here is the thing most people don’t think about: if you can’t feel something, it doesn’t feel NUMB: it doesn’t feel at all. There is no sensation there. The sensation is that there is no sensation, and if you’re not expecting a sensation, there is no way to know it is missing.
And I felt tonight a thousand possibilities, like every pore in me COULD open, could participate in life, but is currently choosing not to. This is a negotiation which will need to happen with my body.
But in the same sense that you cannot see censorship, politically, emotionally you cannot feel what you are not feeling. You cannot know what is missing until it becomes possible, and what happens at that moment is you feel a lack which was not present before; you create a hole–perhaps “pregnable, or “open space” might work better–into which the new might possibly enter.
Ignorance is invisible. This is an important point. It takes LEARNING to see ignorance. You must be searching, and seeing what should be there, but isn’t. This is task undertaken by very few. Those who do, do so out of pain they cannot avoid. That is certainly my own case.
Eventually, I hope that this process will become playful, fun, entertaining, the only worthy game in town.