When your life feels stuck you need to improvise. It’s the best way of adapting to an uncompromising world in which we all have to get enough of what we need. Being stuck is to lose your sense of equilibrium. Life feels as if it’s going nowhere; as though it’s repetitive and depleting. Getting things unstuck can feel impossible, as if you’ll have to start again from scratch. However, improvisation doesn’t mean starting again. It requires momentum: it’s keeping going by doing something else; something unexpectedly connected to what’s already there. You thrive by following and embracing new ways of doing things that take you beyond ‘okay’, which have the potential for you to be somebody else, another you, your best one yet.

What can drive you to live like this? Feeling. If you’re stuck, you’re feeling stuck. There isn’t a label that drops out of the sky and sticks to your forehead saying STUCK. We need to get you feeling full of energy again. A biologist or neuroscientist would call this kind of a process ‘homeostatic regulation’. Something, in this case feeling, guides you to retain or gain energy and maintain an equilibrium in order to escape the forces of entropy. That’s life.

I want to help you get unstuck. When I’m being a psychotherapist I dip into combinations of different therapeutic practices, including psychoanalytic psychotherapy and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing). I try to get involved in people changing the ways they feel and think about themselves.  If this works out they begin improvising; they get moving

I’m not being a psychotherapist here. This blog gathers my thoughts from all over the place to try and shed some light on how you and I, how we, might do life differently. It isn’t an ‘instead of’ kind of a thing, it’s a something else that might get into the way you do things, because the way you do things is everything.

If you’re doing psychotherapy, you may get something from doing these thoughts as well. I’m suggesting you do things rather than have them, because you can only have so much, and a lot of what I get to by the end of this piece is about having things, and be open to doing some psychotherapy, too. Being somebody else means being open, whatever you are doing.

Feeling good, being open

Feeling good, what Paul Federn wrote about as good ego feeling, is supposed to mean your homeostatic regulation is going well. Your life feels something of whatever Frank O’Hara was thinking when he wrote:

I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world

(Having a Coke With You, Love Poems, 1965)

That’s Frank being open. It isn’t waking up and thinking ‘Oh God, I don’t feel myself today’. Feeling like that feels closed. It stops you. It ruins your momentum.

When you feel good your life is in motion, on track, in flow, open to maintaining a certain sense of you. Whatever you are doing, and there’s no secret recipe, it leaves you resilient, connected and looking ahead, or even up, gathering momentum.

Unfortunately pursuing what feels good does not always mean your life is going well. There’s a scene at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove which sums this up nicely. Feeling good can leave you stuck. Former British prime minister Liz Truss seemed very pleased with herself when she announced certain financial measures that left many people, especially her colleagues, reeling. Her divisive premiership lasted just fifty days. We’ll get back to this later: the divisive ways in which people seem to leave others feeling bad while they feel good. It’s quite a subject and always something to think about. Your sense of contentment is liable to be imminently rocked if the only people sharing it are a few chosen cronies. It’s a kind of unstable improvising where nobody really knows what they are doing and everybody starts to feel separate. You always need to know as far as possible what you are doing and, as I say later, you need to feel together: together in yourself and together with others.

Consistency needs difference

Unstable improvisation prompts you to unwittingly repeat yourself in a very ‘you’, individualised, way which includes an approach to life that once worked but which really isn’t necessary any more. This way of yours commanded attention helpfully in the past. It seemed to make life work for you but repeating it now causes disharmony and chaos.

As Hans Magnus Enzensburger wrote, anything you do with complete consistency will likely have disastrous results. A degree of unpredictability, of difference, of extending yourself into the unknown, maybe just a toe at a time, towards being that ‘somebody else’, a you supplemented by invention, is essential. You need to become a you responding to the world as it is, not how it was for you.

Freud’s thoughts about what he called Übertragung, transference, are the crème de la crème of ways of thinking about all of this.

Crème de la crème, the sweetest spot

Why might you not respond to what’s happening now if it’s so important for your survival? If it can feel so good? Your idea of feeling good, your idea of life’s sweetest spot, is complicated by the particularities of the world you arrived in. A world of a womb, a family, a society and all that happens to people beyond their control will have shaped what you want and how you go about getting it.

Other people in that world will have also had to get what they felt they needed and, depending on what they felt strongly about, your early instinctual experiments may have been compromised. Experiments, for example, with what to do if your fear or anger seem to make life worse. Not getting angry might be a better option faced with an aggressive parent. Not showing you are frightened might seem essential if you have to prematurely care for your siblings – or even your parents. Looking brave in the face of fear. Caring like crazy instead of being annoyed.

Experiment becomes experience

If you begin acting like this you will probably keep doing it. Nervous system responses develop experientially, while you physically mature, out of your experiments in how to avoid trouble and find what you need. These ways of most comfortably staying alive become benchmarks for how your brain predicts your life should occur.

You are likely to recreate your ‘home’ situation without realising it because this was how life came to work for you. Your nervous system goes on demanding it, reaching out, as Sarah Wood says, to other nervous systems accordingly (one body to another, where a body is also a ‘mind’, rather than one ‘mind’ to another, as an idea of ‘intersubjective’ space implies).  Outside the context of your early life such interpersonal misguidedness, the kind Harry Stack-Sullivan wrote about, causes havoc. Times change.

People who got stuck

Getting angry can helpfully stop or start things. Showing fear might lead to you being shown how to generally feel safe. But what happens if, when you are a child, your father likes you to get angry at your mother, to not trust her so that he feels good when he sows discontent every time you speak to him? Or if as a child your existence is disrupted every day by fighting between another sibling and your parents who appease that sibling by letting them do what they want? You can’t sleep, your toys get taken, your clothes get borrowed and damaged and your school-work suffers. Or if every time you show signs of doing something exceptional one of your parents leans more heavily on you for support in their difficult life, hoping you will be their saviour?

The effects of these kinds of situations are what I try to help my clients with. Each of the situations I have described here is real and produced people whose lives became stuck at crucial points. In the first case someone became dependent on a woman who seemed very safe because she saw all the danger in the world and then revealed herself to be possessive and controlling. My client realised he had never felt safe in his life. His fear might, when he was a child, have lead him to find ways of understanding how to be safe in all kinds of situations. Instead, it had guided him to look for protective figures who held onto him like a weapon or sometimes a shield.

In the second case somebody decided to live in isolation, terribly lonely but able to look after herself and her possessions. Her instinct for how to care for herself worked up to a point; but loving other people seemed impossible. Eventually she gave up her seclusion and married somebody gentle and caring. She came to me fearing the relationship might fail because she couldn’t stop interfering in her husband’s life. If she didn’t she felt out of control, and her husband seemed incapable of naming the problem directly. Instead, he spent more and more time on his own, staying late at work and making excuses that limited their time together. Anger never seemed to appear in their relationship although both people seemed to feel angry and sad. My client had to reinvent herself as more assertive, rediscovering her anger as a good way to say exactly what she wanted.

With the third person a crisis occurred at the worst possible time, when she was about to leave home to study. She felt so guilty she decided to live at home and attend a local university rather than one of the best in the country, to which she had earned a scholarship. Her sense of how to care for herself had been lost to an overwhelming need to care for others. Eventually she married a difficult, narcissistic man who demanded she give up her successful job as a scientist and look after their children (which she had secretly, painfully, never wanted to have).

These are how lives repeat, depleting everyone involved and denying the possibility of improvising. This is what I see and this is what Freud saw, or anybody else who hangs around people long enough and carefully enough to examine what they do with themselves.

Scientific explanation

Mark Solms’ theories of consciousness are grounded in feeling and affect, incorporating concepts like Karl Friston’s descriptions of self-organising, self-evidencing systems (let’s say, loosely, what happens in your nervous system). These systems perceive life’s events, predict how to stay organised in response, and balance these predictions with incoming sensory information. They potentially offer a compelling scientific explanation for the patterns of behaviour I am describing.

However, science never tells you what to do with what it reveals. Let’s not forget that Freud was a neurologist who said clearly that his theories were provisional. He knew that if he were to try and work with the existing conventions of science rather than trust his clinical experience and improvise a metapsychology which is (strangely) figurative he would get stuck.

Empirical science takes things literally and often without acknowledging that even the most sophisticated ways of performing it, brain-imaging for instance, involve interpreting figurative representations of functioning bodily organs. Freud believed that the forms of representing the brain’s workings which were available to him were too crude. Maybe now, as Mark Solms believes, it’s different. Maybe. A psychoanalyst like Solms who studies a brain scan may be open to its inevitable uncertainties and willing to include in his reading intuitions drawn from his clinical practice. Science done like this, we could say, will be better read.

Repetition, compulsion and reading life better

Freud described how Übertragung, transference, produces ‘new editions’ of the impulses and thoughts cultivated in our early lives. We read the world and experience it as it happened, not as it is happening. Getting unstuck from ‘repetition compulsion’ means reading life as an ongoing text and responding intelligently.

In a horrible way this is simply how life happens for us animals who think as people do, as people like Freud, Friston and Solms try to understand. When you start perceiving things, a thinking activity, you are, if we follow Friston and Solms, (which leads us back to valuing Freud and psychoanalysis), guided by feeling. Searching for what to embrace and what to resist happens because of affective intensity.

A thought ‘feels’ attractive and maybe it once was. Something that feels intensely attractive might, like a certain kind of eye-catching fungi, always be safer with a written warning. Our attention is unavoidably drawn to things that excite us.

What draws your attention

Your attention to anything is drawn by your curiosity; and curiosity is the feeling of what Jaak Panksepp called your SEEKING instinct. Like the other six instincts he identified, he capitalised the word to make it distinct from an ordinary, dictionary definition. Panksepp’s ‘instincts’ are emotional-intellectual-behavioural systems that should inspire you to get what you need in life through regulating what you do. In all they are SEEKING, PANIC, PLAY, RAGE, LUST, CARE and FEAR. Knowing about them and understanding how they might become confused, is key to getting unstuck.

Tremendous Horses

Your thoughts are always at the disposal of your feelings. They ride on currents of feeling like riders on tremendous horses. If you believe you can improvise by thinking alone then you would be a good person to have at a racecourse. It looks like you can talk to horses.

Imagine if you could say to a good horse ‘just keep running like the clappers for another fifty yards and you can have as many apples as you like.’  Life is not like this. Your mind gets distracted by what’s coming up from behind it: all that’s previously happened to you; what you’ve done to SEEK out your best hits of good self-feeling.

We generally know what we should be doing but then sometimes, often in fact, we feel scared or bored, turned on, jealous, ashamed, stupid, take your pick or add something else – and anarchy reigns. Different plans creep in: you do the equivalent of bolting over a fence or stopping to eat some lovely grass like a horse who’s spied what’s happening alongside it or behind it and can’t overlook how good or bad it felt the last time that thing happened. What’s in front gets taken in but we judge the potential benefits of the future in terms of what’s gone on in the past.

Not to be somebody else

There are, I mentioned earlier, some truly unfortunate ways of trying to be somebody else, of improvising like an army bugler who plays the call to charge when they should be playing a retreat. We should spend some time with these.

Freud wrote about reaction formations, ways of being yourself as if you are not who you are. A person essentially prone to make emotionally charged, unfair decisions, might behave in the world with exaggerated equanimity. This won’t be much of an act, either, but a troubling division of their personality, a defensive improvisation, that invents a destructive ‘dark side’.

People meeting someone divided like this may find themselves, not without some reason, but somehow not with enough reason, being told about their faults. They will very likely feel harshly judged by someone claiming to be ‘fair’ or ‘straightforward’. Aggressive socialists, benevolent fascists, controlling psychotherapists and violent nurses all come to mind.

Our society offers very little to people who don’t comply with its demands. Reaction formations are usually the result of compliance: and compliance isn’t always what it looks like. Remember, people will comply according to what they feel.

Right now there’s a lot of this going on: people trying to improvise their way towards feeling powerful, knowledgeable and right, and they are doing it unstably. George Monbiot writes about it:

‘In her excellent book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein explains how today’s conspiracy fictions are a distorted response to the impunities of power. We know we’re being lied to, we know justice is not done, we see the beneficiaries flaunting their immense wealth and undemocratic power. Conspiracy fantasists may get the facts wrong, “but often get the feelings right”

(The Guardian, 4.5.24)

Apparent non-compliance such as conspiracy theorising seems to emerge out of fear, anger, and an understandable desire for a way out of a terrifying situation (various incarnations of doomsday).

Unfortunately, the principle of always getting something for yourself rather than sometimes sacrificing something for others seems to be instilled in many people’s minds as a benchmark of the best way to live. If you believe this, please think again. Collectivity might offer an adaptive solution to the end of the world but most of us grow up being taught to individuate, to make ourselves distinct from other people through what we earn, wear, live in, drive or do with our children.

Principles of individualism determine processes of neurology and neurology goes on to determine individualism – an ideology. Louis Althusser wrote that ideology has no history, that there’s no ‘outside’ of it. Abandoning things which give you a good self-feeling goes against your brain’s predictions. It feels stupid and embarrassing.

Most of us are a little like this, unaccountably complying with what seems to offer us the best feeling and the least pain. But whatever emotional pain you refuse or fail to tolerate will inevitably get inflicted on somebody else.

Individualism demands feeling good in a self-centred, rather than selfish (which I don’t think is always a bad thing at all) way. Self-centred living means that your needs, or your group’s will always come first, at the expense of others’. This is the most unstable from of improvisation of all. It’s like the musician in a band who thinks they’re more important than the other band members. Look at what happened to Oasis.

We are all, whether or not we are in a band, interdependent. My success depends, in some ‘spooky action at a distance’ way, as Einstein called the bizarrely indirect ways in which he saw life connected (quantum entanglement), on yours.

Think of all the groups that included stand-out people, ‘stars’ who were boring and against all expectations failed. Football teams, film casts, political cabinets, university departments, shop floors, cooperatives, charity shops – anything that involves people. These groups couldn’t get a good feeling going. Their projects never gained momentum. They couldn’t improvise. They unfailingly failed to sparkle and alienated their fans. They gained bad reviews because their films felt meaningless. They were voted out of office after ruining a nation with divisive policies that pandered to secret interests. They were sacked because they never understood that their division was something they should never have come to tolerate. They never found support because they felt inward-looking and out of reach.

We wish they had never happened as we force ourselves to engage with them, to try and cheer them on. They are boring. Boredom: the angry feeling of somehow being trapped, unappreciated. These groups never understood that if they were to thrive they had to cheer us on. They had to be social.

Being all together

Getting unstuck means being somebody else. Getting properly unstuck involves doing so and becoming better-connected, more equally so, to other people; of living all together.

No more ‘Je pense, donc je suis’ (I think, therefore I am).  Always remember those tremendous horses. René Descartes famously drew his conclusions in a warm, secluded room. Some say an oven. What he overlooked in his appreciation of his being was his instinctual capacity not to end up stuck outside on a doorstep on a freezing November night. How might he have thought about himself, then? Imagine all of the things he may have felt and thought he was not.

Our feelings are unmanageable. The thoughts I offer in this blog are an attempt to suggest helpful ways of thinking not so much about them, those tremendous horses, as with them; and we do this best with other people. You can be with feeling like a rider can be with horses. I don’t know how to ride a horse but I can see you don’t ride about it. Improvisation is doing things with.

Writing this I have found myself trying to think with scientists and clinicians like Antonio Damasio, Cristina Alberini, Francine Shapiro, Jaak Panksepp, Karl Friston, Laura Jacobs, Marian Diamond, Mark Solms, Paul Federn, Sanja Oakley, Miranda Wood, Sarah Wood, Sigmund Freud, Suzy Matthiessen, Thomas Ogden and Wilfred Bion. There are others, unconcerned with psychotherapy, from famous people like David Bowie, Frank O’Hara, Fred Moten, Jacques Derrida, Jeremy Deller, Louis Althusser, Roy DeCarava, Shane Warne and The Slits to less well-known people like Andaiye, Catherine Robinson, Forbes Morlock, Freddie Tomaszewski and Lorena Cingi, Jason Kennedy, Poppy and Laurence Hall, Rebecca and Phil Front, and Sam Mills, whose lives involve a lot of what I am trying to describe here.

These people all seem to understand that we never arrive and that whoever we think we are we are multitudes, always plural, always among others and involved with them in ways we often barely realise or simply don’t know. Polyphonic complexity, imagination, fluidity, subtlety and openness signal the best ways to live. Individualism is mistaken, a desperate thing, and you never feel good when you get stuck into it. In 12-Step they say that you keep what you’ve got by giving it away.

Frank O’Hara seems to know how to get hold of a good feeling without trying to bleed it dry:

… what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank

or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

(Having a Coke With You, Love Poems, 1965)

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