by Tom Tomaszewski | Apr 19, 2024 | ALIENATION
HELPLESSNESS / RAGE
I’m used to hearing people say: ‘the common denominator is me’. It’s often a relief to hear someone accept that they may be the source of a problem, that they realise they may be doing something a lot of the time which makes life hard for them — and for other people. But we don’t only exist like that.
We feel we exist individually and the reality is very different.
If I wake up and think ‘I don’t feel myself today’ I know what I mean. I feel ‘off’, somehow. If I don’t think this kind of thing I’m usually feeling … okay. Good, even. Here’s a thought: we feel ourselves. A scientist might tell you that we feel our way through life before we think about it.
This thing that goes on, this good–self-feeling thing, leaves you feeling you; but it doesn’t tell you how interconnected you are with everything around you. Paul Federn wrote about this way back and anybody who’s ever been into improvisation or poetry, factories for vibes that mean we can all meet up, truly plural vibes, will know exactly what I mean.
When somebody tells me ‘the common denominator is me’ I wonder: do they mean that they are going about instigating some kind of a problem which makes life harder than it has to be? Are they doing things that on reflection they wish they had not done because something else would have been the right thing? Something which wouldn’t hurt them or other people like that?
Or are this person saying ‘the common denominator is me’ hurting differently: refusing to tolerate some of the things that might follow them around from one group of people to the next in a weird kind of a way? I mean things like friendship or family, notions that people inhabit, generally without thinking about it, which dictate how a life needs to be lead. These vibes, these ways of doing life, are alive with people: they come from and through people. If you disagree, life gets tricky.
If you don’t think blood is thicker than water, as they say, or that family always comes first, as I heard someone else say, where does that leave you in situations when your experience of family is bad? Or you don’t think loyalty to your friends should over-ride other people’s peace of mind? Or for that matter when you think anything that seems to clash with the status quo? When you find somebody overlooking you because of the colour of your skin or other ways your body is, or has become, what next?
The common denominator is not only you. You are never alone.
The common denominator is you plus the force and effect of whatever you disagree with, felt in you, messing you up, as administered by other people. Our lives are full of these things. Family and friendship, and you could also think about misogyny, racism, sexuality, cowardice, resilience, or productivity. All of these things interconnect. Nicolas Abraham and probably Maria Torok thought about the dynamics of intersubjective functioning. I’m not into ‘intersubjectivity’ but let’s go with that. Fred Moten thinks about everything, so let’s go with him. These words, these things are bodies of signifiers. They do as much as anything that lives. They are group totals of who we are — the more than me as an individual which can only be felt through its effects.
Why is this important? Because often, if you conclude that you are the common denominator in situations that get fiery, or frightening, or depressing, you can find yourself believing that you must change. People around you might agree with that. Even your family and friends.
There’s a line in life that we can all come to. It marks a division between what you feel is right and true, and what others do. Do you cross it? Maybe if you cross it there’s a vibe that says you’re wrong or crazy, deluded.
Or perhaps you’re in touch with injustice and there’s no arguing with that.
Hold hands with somebody else when you cross that line. Justice may be impossible to achieve, but it’s always there to be found if you look for it together. Thinking like an individual makes you think about yours, which is always going to be a kind of profiteering, which is never just in any sense. Justice never gets started. Thinking together, which can only be felt, which might have good vibes, might find a beginning like this.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Apr 10, 2024 | Be Somebody Else
INEXPERIENCE / FEAR
Imagine all the worries you can think of as like wild horses running off into the future. Get on the back of one of those and you’ll be in trouble. These wild horses are a big reason that people get stuck in life. They can’t decide what to do, or they become so scared of the future with all of its impending trouble that they miss life’s true opportunities.
Lucky you
If you’re lucky enough to grow up among people who tell you things about what you fear which make sense and make you feel better you are unlikely to be plagued by these horses. A major tragedy, some kind of awful traumatic event, might let them loose but rather you’re more likely to have the odd stray cat than a field full of wild horses.
These wild horses are your projections about how life might be. People who ‘catastrophise’ have a herd of them ready to go at the drop of a hat (or the thought of a worry).
Where conspiracy theories come from
Think about it like this. If I am six years old and I think there’s a monster under my bed, and nobody is around to convince me that there isn’t one, I will still be finding the equivalents of monsters under my bed when I am sixty-six. Conspiracy theories, paranoias, mistrust, and all those kinds of thing come about when people get on a wild horse and ride off into the sunset like some kind of crazy cowboy.
Glamour, lies and necessary invention
There’s a certain glamour to the idea of riding a wild horse. People who get lost in projections can become so attached to them they convince others around them of the most peculiar things. Beware of gurus. They are very good at this. On the other hand, someone who is able to summon up the power of projection temporarily and harness it for a specific reason can be very helpful. Great leaders can do this in seemingly impossible situations.
Wild horses get in the way of people being able to make good decisions. Life is nearly always lived a long way outside of the moment. Important new information, differences, are likely to be overlooked. Different conclusions will be very hard to draw (conspiracy theories always seem to be about proving some kind of fear rather than resolving it).
What to do
Sit and listen to all the sounds around you. Notice the furthest away sound and slowly move your way to the closest sound … but WITHOUT trying to understand what each sound is. Notice the sounds as things you are making contact with. Think of them in terms of their intensity, their volume, their texture, their resonance or their pitch. Knowing them like this, as things in the present, will tell you a lot more than you think. You’re not allowing yourself to get lost, as I so often did as a child growing up under one of the main flight paths radiating out of London, in the adventures of someone on a jet flying off on an adventure.
Let the sounds present themselves like this rather than represent something you can only know less certainly based on what you already know.
There’s an indispensable place in your experience for deduction, but what you infer from a sound will be all the more useful if you grow accustomed to hearing every sound, as far as you can, as it is. Projections overtake careful listening. They will transform a sound into a general symbol: a ‘jet’ rather than a particular kind of aeroplane traveling in a certain direction at a specific height. And so on. Work with projections.
Mindfulness works like this, but mindfulness can all-too-easily become a way of making your/self a symbol.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Mar 27, 2024 | Be Somebody Else, HELPLESSNESS, MONOTONY
HELPLESSNESS / RAGE
Does your mind turn angrily to things you wish you could forget? It’s as if someone’s turned the heat up too high; a kind of friction with the past. These things seem to hang around waiting for an opportunity to get noticed. Maybe a small thing occurs and suddenly you’re back with them, all over again.
Resentful thoughts involve events in which you believe you were unable to represent yourself properly. For one reason or another the truth of the situation remains unrecognised. If you want to have fewer angry, resentful thoughts you need to feel recognised. Doing this can be like adjusting the thermostat of a heating system.
Everyday things say everything
Think about everyday things in your life and see if you can rate them in terms of how angry they make you feel now. Not when they happened, but right now. Hopefully, with them being everyday things, the majority will score a zero. But if they score twos or threes you may have a problem. All of those twos and threes can add up to a storm that feels more like a seven plus three.
Zero feels like a two
What can you do if a zero feels like a two? The ‘whole memory thing’ is liable to keep you thinking about the past, but you need to do something about the future, and you’d better get started.
Are your ‘everyday things’ actually things that are crucial to you but ones that the people around you ignore? Is there a theme underlying everything you feel angry about? Perhaps this theme rather than a lot of different events explains why you are feeling two or three, or maybe even more.
It’s very likely you are angry about something in general rather than the effects of specific things in isolation. Those ‘everyday things’ will involve a particular sense of injustice that you need to give meaning to. Maybe it’s something you can feel much more than describe. That’s okay, go with the feeling and some thoughts will arrive.
The justice emotion
Anger is the justice emotion. It should rise up when you experience what you regard as injustice, motivating you to stop or start something. If you experience a lot of injustice you’ll be seeing it in all kinds of things, small as well as large. The size of the ‘thing’ itself doesn’t matter: injustice is most likely to lurk in the small things people do that they think about least. At the same time they show themselves most.
If I find myself getting treated poorly because of something intrinsic to me (I get looked at in a certain way, for example, as I enter a building and am met with silence), and maybe I then see someone else being treated differently because of how they intrinsically are (they get smiled at and greeted respectfully) … my day is going to take a hit of anger. Moments of injustice like these will feel like links on a chain.
Search for openness
Look for people who are open to you as you are. Search for that openness in as many places as you can: you’ll feel it right away. Maybe you have stopped looking. You’re ability to SEEK has gone to sleep. Wake it up by finding the feeling of openness.
The feeling you get when you connect in that openness is the feeling of understanding, and understanding is the best signpost to justice. Trying to find justice on your own is the worst. Looking for it with other people, even if you find those other people in something like a book or a film, is better.
This is how you can start to turn the thermostat down.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Mar 20, 2024 | Be Somebody Else, FRUSTRATION
FRUSTRATION / CARE
I’ve written about being at the centre of your own solar system somewhere else, but a talk I listened to at the weekend made me think about it again.
Think about the relationships in your life and how intensely you’d cling on to whatever they contain. That clinging involves the stuff of Panksepp’s emotional instincts. Life, it seems, depends on how we respond affectively, our emotions guiding our thoughts towards ‘what supports out survival and detracts from our survival’.
Struggles with intensity
That’s what this blog is about. I could have called it ‘struggles with intensity’, those struggles meaning whether or not you get stuck. As an EMDR therapist I spend every working day experiencing the extraordinarily different ways in which people react to intense or diminished feeling. Sometimes they might call this an emotion, the subjective way of categorising feeling that we assume everybody is broadly aligned to. Other times they might only be able to draw attention to some kind of sensation in their body that feels out of place. EMDR, according to Francine Shapiro’s AIP (advanced information processing) model, is an excellent way of getting unstuck.
Going back to those relationships in your life, ask yourself: what do you do to cling on to them? Pathological clinging, as the Buddha pointed out, is not a blast.
Your own solar system
Draw yourself a map of your own ‘solar system’ like the one below and see what it looks like when you rate your relationships in terms of uncomfortable intensity. It’ll give you a good idea of how stuck you are and maybe where the main sticking points are. You’ll be looking at symptoms, of course, but go with that. Look into those relationships and see what causes conflicts.
In this example there are a number of what feel like stable relationships. As life goes on, day to day, there may be good and bad moments but the relationship feels consistent (it has a predictable orbit). Whatever’s included feels at a similar level of intensity. The volatile relationships, however, veer between being very close up and very distant. Think about what that looks like as an orbit and imagine the havoc that would cause in any solar system.
Havoc in your life
A scenario like this will be causing havoc in your life. What kinds of compromise might lead to work feeling suffocating or barely there? Is this person unable to press for a promotion because they cannot assert themselves? Maybe they perform their duties extremely well in the hope they might ‘care’ their way there. A conflict like this, in which CARE supersedes RAGE (well, the lowest levels of it!) is very common. It might be the result of having an angry or a passive parent. Is this you? Are you known to CARE really hard? Do you often feel unrewarded, abandoned, and frustrated?
Study your own map and look for what doesn’t feel real. Or are there relationships where important things don’t get said? That’s unreal. Life will be being lived without attention to the whole story. Sometimes this is essential but often it’s not. It’s a big part of why someone like you gets stuck.
Homeostasis
At the bottom right corner of the illustration the are the words ‘HOMEOSTASIS’ and ‘ENTROPY’. Don’t worry too much for now about these: they refer to a clinical way of approaching life. Imagine, though, that your emotions are there to help you achieve a state of homeostasis where you aren’t running down your battery all of the time. Living an unreal life is one of the most depleting things you can do. Conflicts never get dealt with because they are not acknowledged.
Look to be as real as possible and you will resource yourself. You will be far less likely to get stuck.
Satellite of Love
What’s all this got to do with Satellites of Love? All love is narcissistic. Satellite of Love is a beautiful, soulful Lou Reed song that says something about the strangeness of this and everything I’ve tried to include here. It’s a song that spills over into things that feel impossible to get hold of or understand. David Bowie produced it with Mick Ronson (who also plays guitar on the song) but Mick Ronson never received any credit.
All of this: all the stuff of relationships and a reason for me to (narcissistically) include this (thanks to my babysitter, a very good relationship, it’s among my earliest memories). Better have this, too.
When it’s not part of a living nightmare narcissism can be the gift that keeps giving.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Mar 6, 2024 | ALIENATION, DESOLATION, FRUSTRATION, HELPLESSNESS, HESITATION, INEXPERIENCE, MONOTONY
Insight and information can help you avoid repeating past ways of feeling, thinking and acting. You need to protect your capacity to think with that information, rather than to remember it. Your capacity to think freely is what will keep you safe and doing life the way you want.
Here are three things that you can do three times each day which will help prevent your body from becoming overloaded by negative intensity… worries, resentments and so on … the kinds of thing that will leave you stuck. causes a loss, sometimes a radical loss, of momentum. These three things promote positive intensity: the joy of being able to feel relaxed and thoughtful, the pleasure of being in harmony with your life, and the ability to start and stop things when you need to.
Box Breathing
Experiment with different amounts of time for the in-breath, pause and out-breath to see what suits you most for a situation. Box breathing is something you can always turn to discreetly
Don’t get taken for a ride
Stop being taken for a ride. Go and see films specifically to explore whether staying watching them or leaving is the best option. After you leave you need to be able to tell someone why you left. How long can you stay before you’re confident the film is not going to deliver what you need? You can experiment like this with any kind of experience, really. Always hold a place for your right to leave, work out how to do this in ways that feel right for you and others (ie storming out might not be the best option – quietly departing might be instead. Do you really want to make a point? What will the effect of that be on?
Instant sound bath
Buy a tuning fork or two and sound these close to your ear for an instant experience of being present in the world, connected to something outside of you that leaves you feel grounded in yourself.
