by Tom Tomaszewski | Jan 17, 2024 | INEXPERIENCE
INEXPERIENCE / FEAR
All of the ‘whats’ you invest in can help you understand who you are. The pronouns you choose, the titles you accept, anything and everything you take or have to take as a measure of yourself can show you what you might otherwise never see. You. All you need is a way of noticing who becomes clear, in the way you feel, in the way you think, in your behaviour, when you are circumscribed like this.
Rules provoke a reaction
Rules provoke a reaction from who you really are. Find another person who can reflect back to you who they see in you without spoiling that reflection with too much of themself. It isn’t so much a case of who you are is what you do, as who you are is how you do things.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Jan 12, 2024 | HELPLESSNESS
INEXPERIENCE / FEAR
All of us have to deal with a frustratingly unimaginative inner soothsayer. Dreaming up the future often seems somehow beyond them. Like new episodes of most TV shows their visions seem like re-arrangements of past successes, or even past failures that didn’t end up in the show being cancelled.
To meet life’s challenges
We move forward in life drawing on predictable ways of doing things in order to meet life’s challenges. Often this works but inevitably a point arrives when running away from shadows, for example, because they look like monsters, needs to be addressed. A helpful adult showing a very suspicious child that there are no monsters as the end of the bed usually results in the banishing of thoughts of monsters … but what if there is no adult like this to hand? What if a person keeps going avoiding things, not only shadows, because of how they predict things will go?
In-built failure
Doing things differently is regularly necessary if you are to adapt to life as it happens, rather than remain faithful to it as it has happened. When you don’t adapt, things fail: relationships, investments, gardens, entertainment, they all stand still and begin to perish. Entropy does its job when no new energy arrives.
Unfortunately, turning your back on your inner seer can feel much like displeasing the gods (even if you don’t believe in them). The more difficult your life has been the more pronounced this feeling may be. Alternatively, if life’s been very hard, you may have evolved a way of doing it that’s almost the opposite of this. You might be the kind of person who throws caution to the winds, and in your profound self-sufficiency meet other forms of disaster.
Be open to invention
Keep looking for opportunities to lighten up your inner soothsayer. Ground what you do in learning, thinking, and conversations with people who have a variety of points of view. The more narrow your points of reference are, the more closed off to invention you will become.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Jan 10, 2024 | HESITATION
HESITATION / PANIC
As an adult don’t look to your parents to take responsibility for you. Take responsibility for your own life or your life will never feel yours. Until you take responsibility for your life speaking out in any way against someone in your family will feel disloyal. You may hesitate before recognising that something unfair or worse has been done. There will be family secrets. There will be whitewashes.
Where else do so many crimes go unpunished than as among members of the same family? Family often assumes jurisdiction over everywhere and everything.
The only person who can do something about this is you. Practice talking openly about your family and notice when you hesitate to speak.
If you take responsibility for your life your family may not thank you. What they continue to see from within their bunker will no doubt be different from you.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Jan 10, 2024 | FRUSTRATION
FRUSTRATION / CARE
Without realising it we do things on behalf of other people as much as we do for ourselves. People operate collectively whether or not they like it, even when they believe they are acting on their own. Much of what I write about on these pages is about how our ways of living have been shaped by others organising life around us in our earliest years.
What’s hard to think about might be that those ‘others’ include people who were not physically present. They may have been on the other side of the world and unknown to you; they could have been long dead. This is a strange thought to have unless you already think this way.
No such thing as a single relationship
Let’s begin with a bold thought. There is no such thing as a single relationship, although sometimes we talk about one for the sake of simplicity. Each thing we call a relationship carries the effects of countless others, some so fleeting but so potent; their force like the glancing blow of a meteor now knowable only as we might trace some rock traveling through the outer limits of our universe.
Relationships involve the lingering presence of people who are long dead or events that occurred deep in the past. What we think about as being between two people, you and me for instance, is actually always a bigger adventure, a group activity.
Anger as a group activity
Let’s see what anger, which has a lot to do with CARE might look like as a group activity. My thoughts owe something to Foulkes’ rather hazy ideas about location and a lot to Nicolas Abraham’s and Maria Torok’s extraordinary ones about the dynamism of intersubjective functioning.
Imagine that people tend to get angry with you. Maybe you had an angry parent. You tend not to get angry easily (you feel it, you sometimes do it when that seems absolutely necessary, but something doesn’t feel free about your relationship with anger). You do some things with great force. Maybe you kick a ball, dance, sing or throw things with a kind of power that other people come to recognise. Maybe you even make a career out of it. At the same time you find people getting angry with you in ways that aren’t clear. You rarely get into a fight. Perhaps you experience others being envious of you. Things are more blurred than a straightforward fight.
Blurred anger
This blurred experience of others’ anger comes from you dealing with your parent’s anger when you were a child, but also from all kinds of other places. It may not be blurred: perhaps it has some other distinct form. See if you can find a way of describing it. As your defence, a way of adapting to something that threatened you, it operated along these lines. If someone is going to get angry with me (unavoidable) I will experience, when they start to do so, a kind of a tension that builds up to some kind of a release. That way I let go of the tension and I feel okay.
Being a lightning conductor
This is like being a lightning conductor. A catalyst for some immense force, taking it out of one place (your parent) and into the ground. Unfortunately ou don’t escape unscathed. Over time all of this catalytic work will affect your body. Entropy is inescapable and more profound when the same thing happens again and again.
Overall, though, you will seem okay with anger. By not responding angrily to someone who is angry with you you run less risk of immediate injury or insult.
How people feel safe
Perhaps you can see how your way of coping with anger can be a cornerstone of a group’s way of coping with anger. You are very likely to feel safe to other people, unless they are living some kind of a lie. You can become a go-to when people reliably want to vent their frustration. They know you will in some way stand up to them, even if they can’t quite see how, and they can see you are doing okay. The way you receive and release anger can keep a group stable.
Frustration
Groups need people like you. But you really need to make sure you care for yourself. What toll is all of this taking on you? Being a lightning conductor has benefits but predictable ways of dealing with difficulties inevitably become outdated. Nobody can live life as if they are trying to deal with a long-gone meteor.
You will feel so frustrated if you try to care about things you can do nothing about. Many of the things that might affect your response to situations are no longer happening. Their invisibility might leave you feeling what you care about is only straight in front of you, whereas you could be angry for all the cares in the world. Your world, that is, and whatever that may be is impossible to ever entrirely know.
Have a go though. Try to understand indirection. Always, we need to update.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Dec 21, 2023 | MONOTONY
MONOTONY / SEEKING
If things seem unending, unchanging, do something differently. This doesn’t have to be the polar opposite (stop instead of start, for instance). Ideally you are looking for a supplement. But failing that, all you are looking for is something legal, which isn’t abusive that makes you feel a little more powerful whether or not anyone else present agrees. If you’re in any doubt ask your three judges.
When you feel powerful some kind of a struggle has taken place. You have overcome something. Power is never possessed, it’s felt in moments and it always plays out like this.
