by Tom Tomaszewski | Nov 30, 2023 | HESITATION
HESITATION / PANIC
People whose lives feel saturated with moments of hesitation are often people who find in thoughtfulness like a second nature. Their difficulty in caring, because to care might invite PANIC, drives them away from straightforward kindness and tenderness even though they seem capable of it. If this feels like you, don’t PANIC. You do care, but it’s terrifying. Think of your emotional life like a series of ski-runs (I don’t ski but I did watch something called Ski Sunday on television a lot when I was a child: it was like dreaming.)
Thoughtfulness might look deadly to some people but not to you. You’ll have thoughts about most things. The hardest slope for you, the kind of thing that seems to end up in a cloud of snow and disaster is the one leading to genuine tenderness: kindness and gentleness together. When you hold someone or something tenderly you are as vulnerable as they, all of your attention with them. For you, however, there will always be a lot of thoughtfulness going on at the same time … a bit like an engine starting to smoke as it gets overloaded.
The difficulty about a connection grounded in extreme thoughtfulness is that you can relatively easily change your mind. Do you ever ask: why do I keep changing my mind? Those connections will be much easier to move on from than ones where you have truly let the other in. All the way in. And people who you say you love will notice this. A certain self-centredness will become clear to them over time, however much you don’t want that to be the case. They may be in your thoughts, or they may not be. You’ll feel guilty when they are not and maybe hate yourself for what you blame on your thoughtlessness. It’s anything but that.
There is a solution. In fact there are many. Make up your own ones once you see the idea. Get some EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) to get you moving if you feel double-stuck. EMDR jump starts your psychological power of self-healing.
Try this exercise as often as you can.
Practice being connected to the world from your heart not your head. It’s called a head to heart movement. Try it.
HEAD TO HEART
If you move between regarding the world out of somewhere near your forehead, maybe between your eyes, and then slowly drop your attention down to feeling something like a ray of light between your heart and whatever you are regarding you’ll find yourself starting to feel something. I’ve chosen a tree in these amateurish scribbles because they tend not to move and are in fact lovely things we can’t do without. Try it. If you don’t feel anything, try it again. This is not about anything mystical, but something extraordinary: you imagining something differently … from a place where you might imagine you feel love (trust those songs) rather than the sentinel who is your cortex.
And then try with another tree, or a flower, and build your way up to a person. Can you see why you hesitate?
by Tom Tomaszewski | Nov 22, 2023 | MONOTONY
MONOTONY / SEEKING
How can you go searching? Caution is not uncertainty. Enthusiasm is not over-confidence. Being yourself in your life involves working out these kinds of differences, Whether or not you like books and regardless of whether you like Charles Dickens his books are one of the greatest sources of awareness I can think of. When it comes to understanding how to go about living. Dickens doesn’t simply write about things, he writes them, from the heart, from the middle of things, not as if he was an unconcerned onlooker, and usually with the welfare of children in mind. If you really want to give that child in you who could never feel secure a sense of something solid to believe in try Dickens. He knew how to go looking. He cared about children.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Nov 5, 2023 | HESITATION
HESITATION / PANIC
Anxiety is always related to a sense of constriction imposed by others.
Thought about like this there are many things you can look to adjust, including how able you might be to say yes or no to what others suggest, the kind of people you hang around with, how able you feel to hang around with who you like, and what you do with your spare time. Remember, you need to think of a ‘sense’ of constriction: your sense. It may be inaccurate.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Nov 4, 2023 | FRUSTRATION
FRUSTRATION / CARE
The word ‘esteem’ comes to us from an old word meaning ‘estimate’. Many problems to do with FRUSTRATION involve something to do with a sense of estimation fostered in childhood that mediates our sense of self-esteem.
Do you come from a family that under- or overestimated things? Did you have too little or too much to eat? Did the world feel too unsafe, or too safe? If you cast your mind across these kinds of questions you may see a correlation: too safe, too much to eat, and too comfortable (a world of fluffy cushions and horrendous sentimentality) might correspond to a certain kind of self-centredness or self-importance. I say ‘a certain kind’ because there are many! A tendency to underestimate other people’s things can follow from this: their problems, their generosity, their kindness … those kinds of thing.
If you believe you look after yourself well here’s a simple way to test that sense of estimation. Focus on one of your meals. Prepare it in exactly the way you might normally do and then check with a nutritionist whether the portion size and amounts of various food groups you have prepared are in line with what you had imagined were necessary.
Your sense of time is also something you can assess. Estimate a journey time and see how accurate that is. Do you tend to arrive too late or too early? You may have an estimation problem.
Similarly, how accurately do you report what you think was said in a conversation? Record some (don’t forget to ask anyone else involved first). Tell someone else what was said in the conversation and then play back the recording. Were you accurate? Did you add stuff or edit out stuff? They ways in which you might distort an experience when you report it to someone else is often related to your sense of estimation – your self-esteem.
Learn to measure things so that what you see, feel or experience is held together with a reliable gauge (a clock, some scales, a dictionary,.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Nov 4, 2023 | HESITATION
I’m not a big believer in what get called attachment styles. It’s like buying clothes from a mass-market store, on-line, without trying them on first, and without any real sense of what S, M, L, XL, or XXL might relate to. However, thinking about attachment through the lens of Panksepp’s PANIC system allows for a little more imagination. It’s more like trying something on and then being able to make adjustments before you take your clothes home.
Thinking about PANIC and the ways in which we might find life plagued by HESITATION (or maybe you can think of your own label based on your experience?) allows you to examine the effects of mediation. The pull towards addressing PANIC can leave you and the people around you (all with their own sense of PANIC to try and deal with. Attachment understood like this has to be seen as a ‘group’ phenomenon; a process of interdependence that Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok called the ‘Dynamics of Intersubjective Functioning)’ experiencing life with different degrees of mutual mediation.
Mediation Styles
Above are some drawings of the kind I do for my clients in sessions. The four I have shown are among the ones I most commonly find myself drawing.
In number one there’s a sense of the carer being comfortably ‘in the world’ and able to pass this sense of realism and lack of anxiety across to their child. The child receives the world mediated by someone who has a good idea of how the world operates and who manages to balance feeling getting what they need with what others need, and so on.
Number two shows a carer crushed by the world. Their child receives a sense of the world as alarming, threatening and overwhelming. ‘stick close to me at all times’, might be a message the carer implicitly passes on. Or you will PANIC. Another kind of message might be ‘Head for the hills, everybody for themself’. I come up with messages appropriate to each client. What would your message have been, do you think, and how are you still living it? How can you rewrite the script you were given?
Number three shows a child taking in confusion. Their carer can’t make sense of the world.
Number four shows a child standing between their carer and the world. That’s no fun at all. That child has to stand up to the world like an adult while their carer shelters. Sometimes the carer really needs to get their act together. Sometimes the carer needs help from a doctor or someone like that … and their child needs help from other adults so they can go on being a child while their body, their brain, their mind develop less acutely.
There are dozens of drawings like these to be made. They help show how all of the drives might be adapted to.
