FRUSTRATION / CARE
Life becomes a process of gathering momentum out of difficult events (broadly speaking, and unscientifically, entropic ones), the ones that elicit disagreement, distraction, aggravation, loss, unhappiness and disorder as much as those things that seem to maintain the status quo (loosely, homeostatic ones). The more momentum you gather the less likely you are to become stuck.
HELPLESSNESS / RAGE
Remembering a certain song reminded me how when you look at back at something, it can always feel different, always make you think of something else. If it doesn’t then something is stuck. Unchanging recollection is a sign that something is keeping your mind from moving on. Maybe you like it being stuck – but stuck it is. Perhaps you need it to be stuck, a perfect memory of somebody you love or something that happened. Good. Or bad. It’s up to you. An unstuck mind remains open. A stuck one can leave you helpless to the past, angry that you feel the same old stuff.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
DESOLATION / LUST
I’m not sure what I mean. I was thinking, if only Pete Shelley and Beyoncé had done something like Shane MacGowan and Kirsty McColl. I love all that stuff. I suppose I’m getting into the selfishness of love. In the first place it’s totally selfish. When I feel and say, ‘I love you’, who’s feeling the love? Me. And then, sometimes, perhaps, the other person feels some love. Saying ‘I love you’ might confirm something, spark something, fire something up.
If you aren’t aware of all this stuff, especially the bit about love being selfish, read on. This piece is about conditional loving (the kind of thing I was doing thinking I’d have loved Pete Shelley and Beyoncé to have done … I don’t imagine they would have loved it, really.).
It’s like this: if I say ‘I love you’ so that I hear the same thing coming back to me, so that I feel loved, maybe I should have kept my mouth shut. If I say and feel ‘I love you’, I hope I pick my moment so that it may be the right moment for you. Cuff it. What love sounds like, actually, isn’t up to me. It’s a multi-person thing.
The other thing: if I do or say something expecting some gratitude I should possibly never have done it. Not always, but usually, doing something and expecting someone to be pleased won’t end well.
Hoping is another matter.
Someone said to me the best thing ever about love: faith, hope, trust, they said. These are the ways love can happen between two people. Loving involves being open to another person and if you feel desolation in your life, or frustration, I suspect you have spent many hours on your own with your love. That’s devastating. What can you do?
Anticipate the selfishness in love and mediate it. That’s all you can do, really. Look for it in your loving and in what you hear from somebody else, and don’t necessarily recoil when you find it. It will be there: it’s a matter of what is also there. The love +.
Love + might dispossess. It may do something that works against the ‘wanting you to be mine’ thing, like what happens in that stupid children’s game, Buckaroo , where something trips and all the baggage flies off. The possessiveness of love can pull or push other people, the ones you say you love, into carrying you and all of the stuff you find too much.
Filter love as you send it and as you receive it. Imagine love like a postcard rather than a letter. ‘Wishing you were here’ rather something in a sealed envelope. It’s always the sealing off that’s the problem. Sealed off people can’t love or be loved. Sealed off love can’t be felt. Sealed off thoughts can’t be loving.
Anybody can see what’s on a postcard, and of course there are times when you can’t show what you feel (or face the consequences) and only a letter or even something more secret will do. But imagine, just imagine, somebody fair-minded, someone who you’ve never seen show contempt, and trust what you feel they might think of your message.
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,.
FRUSTRATION / CARE
Sometimes it’s hard to see the reasons why you feel anxious or distressed. Think about it: do you feel frustrated? If you feel frustrated it’s likely to be because of your capacity to recognise unfairness. When you recognise it, like a cat with a ball of wool you will not feel able to let it alone. Unfortunately, people whose form of stuck involves FRUSTRATION will never be able to avoid the distress that comes from looking on as terrible things happen in the world. You may do all that you can to right wrongs, to stand up to abuses of power, to campaign or vote or speak out – but that distress will never leave you.
Partly this is because the world provides a steady supply of bad things for you to fight against (and good, we must); and partly this is because your capacity to recognise unfairness will almost certainly relate to personal experiences of unfairness that you were unable to address in your attempts to receive CARE. Your RAGE instinct was not enough to get you what you needed.
There is much I could say about all of this. Psychotherapists tend to dig deep into the effects of resentment and so on. Don’t worry about all of that for now.
Instead search through your life (if possible with a good friend who seems good at caring for themself) and create a list of all the things you haven’t addressed which are addressable. There will be several things, each with a pseudo-reason attached. Maybe you haven’t written to a friend for a while (too busy), or seen the dentist (too scared), or gone for a walk (see ‘written to a friend’, etc). Those pseudo-reasons are excuses not to try and look after your own interests. In the distant past your mind, your body, if not you, consciously, knows that something bad happened when you felt an urge to care about your life and it didn’t go well. Maybe you haven’t signed a contract. Perhaps you haven’t asked for a promotion. Maybe your neighbours make too much noise. Perhaps your pillow is too hard.
Addressing the things that affect you up close and personally is the only way to ease your distress. If you do this then the world’s intractable problems will feel more bearable and you will be able to deal with them more effectively.
On a similar and more complex note you may be interested in reaction formations. People who say they care are sometimes surprisingly cruel. And finally, on the subject of care: