by Tom Tomaszewski | Mar 27, 2024 | Be Somebody Else, HELPLESSNESS, MONOTONY
HELPLESSNESS / RAGE
Does your mind turn angrily to things you wish you could forget? It’s as if someone’s turned the heat up too high; a kind of friction with the past. These things seem to hang around waiting for an opportunity to get noticed. Maybe a small thing occurs and suddenly you’re back with them, all over again.
Resentful thoughts involve events in which you believe you were unable to represent yourself properly. For one reason or another the truth of the situation remains unrecognised. If you want to have fewer angry, resentful thoughts you need to feel recognised. Doing this can be like adjusting the thermostat of a heating system.
Everyday things say everything
Think about everyday things in your life and see if you can rate them in terms of how angry they make you feel now. Not when they happened, but right now. Hopefully, with them being everyday things, the majority will score a zero. But if they score twos or threes you may have a problem. All of those twos and threes can add up to a storm that feels more like a seven plus three.
Zero feels like a two
What can you do if a zero feels like a two? The ‘whole memory thing’ is liable to keep you thinking about the past, but you need to do something about the future, and you’d better get started.
Are your ‘everyday things’ actually things that are crucial to you but ones that the people around you ignore? Is there a theme underlying everything you feel angry about? Perhaps this theme rather than a lot of different events explains why you are feeling two or three, or maybe even more.
It’s very likely you are angry about something in general rather than the effects of specific things in isolation. Those ‘everyday things’ will involve a particular sense of injustice that you need to give meaning to. Maybe it’s something you can feel much more than describe. That’s okay, go with the feeling and some thoughts will arrive.
The justice emotion
Anger is the justice emotion. It should rise up when you experience what you regard as injustice, motivating you to stop or start something. If you experience a lot of injustice you’ll be seeing it in all kinds of things, small as well as large. The size of the ‘thing’ itself doesn’t matter: injustice is most likely to lurk in the small things people do that they think about least. At the same time they show themselves most.
If I find myself getting treated poorly because of something intrinsic to me (I get looked at in a certain way, for example, as I enter a building and am met with silence), and maybe I then see someone else being treated differently because of how they intrinsically are (they get smiled at and greeted respectfully) … my day is going to take a hit of anger. Moments of injustice like these will feel like links on a chain.
Search for openness
Look for people who are open to you as you are. Search for that openness in as many places as you can: you’ll feel it right away. Maybe you have stopped looking. You’re ability to SEEK has gone to sleep. Wake it up by finding the feeling of openness.
The feeling you get when you connect in that openness is the feeling of understanding, and understanding is the best signpost to justice. Trying to find justice on your own is the worst. Looking for it with other people, even if you find those other people in something like a book or a film, is better.
This is how you can start to turn the thermostat down.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Mar 6, 2024 | ALIENATION, DESOLATION, FRUSTRATION, HELPLESSNESS, HESITATION, INEXPERIENCE, MONOTONY
Insight and information can help you avoid repeating past ways of feeling, thinking and acting. You need to protect your capacity to think with that information, rather than to remember it. Your capacity to think freely is what will keep you safe and doing life the way you want.
Here are three things that you can do three times each day which will help prevent your body from becoming overloaded by negative intensity… worries, resentments and so on … the kinds of thing that will leave you stuck. causes a loss, sometimes a radical loss, of momentum. These three things promote positive intensity: the joy of being able to feel relaxed and thoughtful, the pleasure of being in harmony with your life, and the ability to start and stop things when you need to.
Box Breathing
Experiment with different amounts of time for the in-breath, pause and out-breath to see what suits you most for a situation. Box breathing is something you can always turn to discreetly
Don’t get taken for a ride
Stop being taken for a ride. Go and see films specifically to explore whether staying watching them or leaving is the best option. After you leave you need to be able to tell someone why you left. How long can you stay before you’re confident the film is not going to deliver what you need? You can experiment like this with any kind of experience, really. Always hold a place for your right to leave, work out how to do this in ways that feel right for you and others (ie storming out might not be the best option – quietly departing might be instead. Do you really want to make a point? What will the effect of that be on?
Instant sound bath
Buy a tuning fork or two and sound these close to your ear for an instant experience of being present in the world, connected to something outside of you that leaves you feel grounded in yourself.
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 | 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 | 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’.
