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’.
