Leo Bersani wrote that ‘contempt cements the couple’. What seems paradoxical is revealed to be a most powerful form of bonding. Contempt makes somebody or something a strange object of desire. To feel contempt is almost to feast on someone. What a loss it can feel when someone contemptible slips out of sight.
If contempt plays a large part in your life it may have come as an answer to your panicked sense of alienation. A sense of not being part of things, of being disconnected. Feeling kept at a distance, unable to play life’s game you look for a loser who can take the brunt of your despair. More than likely you’ll bond through contempt, too.
Contempt allows politics to find an enemy: left hates right; right hates left. If you’ve ever been politically active you’ll have memories of meetings where someone or something on ‘your own side’ was savaged for not being right or left enough. Politics all too easily becomes a feast of individuals attacking those closest to them.
Bonding through contempt is like keeping a menacing beast. Take your eye off it and it will savage you. Groups who pass time lacerating others will rip into one of their own for the tiniest of reasons – and especially if somebody does something that might threaten them to feel ashamed.
Contempt is a terrible, violent anaesthetic to shame.
Fortunately contempt is easy to get out of your life. To quote Bob Newhart: ‘STOP IT’.
Then you may feel your shame, which will probably feel almost unbearable, until you realise (and this kind of epiphany can change everything) where that shame comes from. Talk to someone who doesn’t welcome contempt. It doesn’t need to be a therapist (the world of psychotherapy is as shot through with contempt as anywhere else).
If you tend to zone out and lose track of time set your phone to buzz, beep or otherwise gently remind you to stay present every ten minutes or so. This is likely to feel irritating, but stick with it for a week and see what life feels like. The uncertain sense of coming and going in life, in and out of the present, is tiring and sometimes shocking. It breaks life up, makes concentration hard and may even get you misdiagnosed as having ADHD. You have been dissociating. It’s time to remain more present in your life. Alienation and hesitation go together with this kind of a problem. But I might also say that dissociation is likely to trouble anybody who’s had the odd shock.
People talk about feeling part of a group. If you feel inclined towards to ALIENATION you will still feel this ‘groupishness’ (a hard to describe combination of unity, solidity, possibility and protection), but probably in relation to a select group of one. Yourself. You may believe that you can do the ‘team player’ thing but I imagine that, on reflection, you might acknowledge that you never properly feel part of a group.
To begin to resolve this, without losing the special, clear sense of yourself that you already have practice stopping interpreting.
Pick any situation and when the part of your mind that starts to suggest to you why someone is doing something, or what they are doing means or symbolises, STOP.
Yes, STOP IT.
Lose yourself in the process of what another person is doing. Recognise how this affects you. If you really have to say anything at all maybe draw that person’s attention to what they are doing. If, for instance, you believe they may not be aware that they are doing something: ‘oh, you’ve got your wellingtons on’ (and it is sunny) … or ‘that was quite loud’ (when someone speaks with more volume than a situation seems to demand, ie in a cinema during a boring bit), or ‘you’ve got your arms folded’ (when a large adult is standing in front of a timid child and looking very defensive). That sort of thing.
You will be surprised how this way of being with someone, bracketing or setting aside your thoughts and allowing theirs to come to light while you somehow keep a beat going (like the rhythm players in a band) do, protecting ‘the beat’ of your time together (a way of thinking about life’s rhythm, perhaps), will allow you to feel connected.
You will be more connected to someone else instead of to your own internal sense of life with all of its suppositions, predictions and ways of forming conclusions.
Look at all of the connections occurring in your life. Maybe think of yourself like an old-fashioned telephone exchange. Here’s a link to a short film about Enfield telephone exchange that will help you understand.
To do this properly you need to find a way of representing your connections: a list, a scribble, a drawing, a model made out of plasticene. It doesn’t matter what as long as you feel like it’s your way of doing this. And don’t try and do this in your thoughts because keeping too much in your thoughts is part of the problem we are trying to deal with.
Look at all of these connections: meetings with friends, paying for something at a shop, answering the telephone, speaking to a colleague at work. Go through them one-by-one and ask yourself ‘how much am I trying to fit in with something when I do this?’ Then ask yourself: ‘is there some small thing I can add to this exchange that might make it more me.
This exercise is about you finding your way of doing something that may involve an element of compliance – but which respects a sense of you. It’s about becoming more properly connected to the world so that if life is like a game it’s as much your game as it can be.
