by Tom Tomaszewski | Oct 20, 2023 | HELPLESSNESS
HELPLESSNESS / RAGE
Noticing something can happen in many different ways. It can be a moment in which something comes to your attention. It can involve an experience of something inescapable: a thought, a sensation, a sound. A certain kind of helplessness might accompany either experience. ‘I couldn’t help but notice …’ or ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about …’. These experiences have something in common. In either case what you might regard as your ongoing feelings and thoughts, the ones that you might want to hold onto, are interrupted. How easy do you find it to return to them?
Notice how often you find yourself being unexpectedly interrupted and unable to return to where you were, emotionally and intellectually, before the interruption. The more often it happens, the more vigilant it is likely that you are being. In some way, maybe even if you don’t recognise it at first, you will be living your life feeling ‘on edge’.
There are many ways you can begin to deal with this kind of precariousness. One of the most effective ways involves trying to notice how ‘present’ you are in situations. Do you, for example, find yourself sitting among supposed friends and believe that they are talking about things which seem strangely, indirectly critical of you? Are you able to say anything directly about what you believe is going on?
If you’re not then in a way that surely isn’t hard to imagine … you’re not really there with them. And that will put you on edge. It may put them on edge; it may relax them knowing that you are unlikely to respond. They may believe they are helping you by telling you a ‘truth’ gently. Or you may be projecting something onto the situation. The only way that you will find out what is happening, and to stop feeling so on edge, is to discover a way of articulating your point of view.
Don’t just jump in and say something. That can be destructive and painful. What’s at stake here? Trust. Think about and find someone to speak with (when I say this I usually mean a psychotherapist, if you can find one who’s any good) about how you might be able to do this.
Asserting yourself safely is a good response to your RAGE instinct.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Oct 18, 2023 | HELPLESSNESS
HELPLESSNESS / RAGE
If someone has abused or exploited you it’s likely you’ll have been left with a terrible feeling that you did something wrong. Maybe you think you didn’t listen to something inside yourself, an instinct, a feeling, a thought, that told you what was going on was wrong. Perhaps a friend said something and you ignored it. Maybe up to a point you wanted something.
You didn’t want what happened.
Whoever did this awful thing to you will, from the moment they became aware of you, have done all that they could to tune into any signs that you could have wanted to feel loved, thought special or beautiful.
Who doesn’t? A person, however, who hasn’t been loved enough, securely enough, or who feels there is something wrong with them, will set aside their doubts more easily than someone who rarely doubts how people feel about them.
Abusers bank on this playing a large part in their victims going along with them. More than that, abusers rely on people they abuse being frightened of reporting what has happened to them in case they, themself, are blamed … because that abused person already blames themself. They feel ashamed. It’s a horrendous bind.
Draw your anger out like a sword and cut through it. Search for somebody you can trust, discover how to trust them, and tell that person what has happened. A psychotherapist may be the best person for this.
When you do so you will begin to realise all of the things you have never said out of a fear that people will think badly of you. You will see what your anger can do for you.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Oct 18, 2023 | HESITATION
HESITATION / PANIC
Next time you notice you are holding something, whether it’s someone’s hand, a steering wheel, a tennis racket, a musical instrument or a pen, try to see how much more loosely you can grip it without feeling out of touch with it (or whoever’s connected to it). The chances are you will begin to feel more in touch as soon as you start to hold on more loosely. Practice this often. Do life with the loosest possible grip.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Oct 18, 2023 | HELPLESSNESS
HELPLESSNESS / RAGE
I often work with people who have had to end a relationship with a person after they have been treated very badly. Sometimes that person will leave them … but in either case a strange situation seems to develop. The relationship in some horrible way seems to go on as before, with the person who has left or been left continuing to look on while their former partner carries on as they did before, and continues to be a part of their life.
This is largely a RAGE problem, of someone not being able to communicate how angry they feel in a way that makes a difference.
If this is you try thinking of your ongoing experiences of your ex as like watching a film. A film does not have feelings or intelligence, it inspires them and your emotional experience is what keeps the film being shown, just like a film in a cinema will keep being screened as long as there’s a good audience for it.
Your ex is in fact like a producer. The person who gets the film made in order to profit from it … and as long as you keep ‘watching the film’ your ex will be getting something from you doing so.
Look away. In every situation try to take your attention away from your ex. Use your angry energy to stop looking, to fire you off in another direction like a rocket to the moon. If you are, for example, talking to one of your children and your ex surfaces in a conversation (as they inevitably will) step away as though you have just seen a land mine lurking where you were about to tread.
And turn off Instagram, Twitter, your WhatsApp ‘family chat’ and whatever else keeps you stuck to them. Anger can serve like a magnet when it finds the wrong form. As Leo Bersani wrote: ‘contempt cements the couple’.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Oct 15, 2023 | INEXPERIENCE
INEXPERIENCE / FEAR
If your instincts for safety have been compromised you’re likely to end up forever hanging out in the mainstream, eating what most people do, listening to what most people listen to, believing in things that most people think are reasonable … or eyeing the mainstream as a place where lies get told, where the truth is being buried and in which your interests are never being served. The mainstream, in other words, preserves you perfectly or seeks to destroy you unmitigatedly depending on where you swing to in your struggle to accommodate FEAR.
The secret to complacency or paranoia is the same. Go wide and deep, not narrow and shallow. If you’re standing in what gets called the mainstream or consider yourself outside of it … be kind. Look to be open when you can. Embrace complexity.
Spend as much time as you can working out how you can safely do these things and you’ll discover something your life never easily granted you: how to cope with feeling frightened.
