by Tom Tomaszewski | Dec 19, 2023 | HESITATION
HESITATION / PANIC
Control what you can control, which isn’t much, really. Even if you feel you have something under control you’ll soon see how that might go wrong. Staying in control needs a certain way of thinking: you can’t, but up to a point you need to be able to try … and even if you find yourself able to ‘let it go’, as they say, you need to be able to think and do the ‘letting go’ thing without getting stuck in the process.
Feeling in control is being in control. And feeling in control comes from being able to do decide ‘I will do this’ without delay. Not actually doing it, but being able to do it.
What makes life really difficult are those hesitations, confusions and potential changes of mind that stop you from picking up on something quickly enough to act on it. These moments shape your life: ones happening now; those chances of something different emerging.
What can you do? Forget about the past for a moment and look at what affects you in the here and now, which jams the machine, if you like. Which leaves you uncomfortably hovering. Anyone can do this. All you need is a reliable other person who can tell you what they see and feel stops you in your tracks.
If you’re to feel in control you need to be able to act without hesitation. Staying in control is feeling in control.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Dec 12, 2023 | ALIENATION, HESITATION
ALIENATION / PLAY
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).
by Tom Tomaszewski | Dec 11, 2023 | ALIENATION, HESITATION
HESITATION / PANIC
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.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Nov 30, 2023 | HESITATION
HESITATION / PANIC
People whose lives feel saturated with moments of hesitation are often people who find in thoughtfulness like a second nature. Their difficulty in caring, because to care might invite PANIC, drives them away from straightforward kindness and tenderness even though they seem capable of it. If this feels like you, don’t PANIC. You do care, but it’s terrifying. Think of your emotional life like a series of ski-runs (I don’t ski but I did watch something called Ski Sunday on television a lot when I was a child: it was like dreaming.)
Thoughtfulness might look deadly to some people but not to you. You’ll have thoughts about most things. The hardest slope for you, the kind of thing that seems to end up in a cloud of snow and disaster is the one leading to genuine tenderness: kindness and gentleness together. When you hold someone or something tenderly you are as vulnerable as they, all of your attention with them. For you, however, there will always be a lot of thoughtfulness going on at the same time … a bit like an engine starting to smoke as it gets overloaded.
The difficulty about a connection grounded in extreme thoughtfulness is that you can relatively easily change your mind. Do you ever ask: why do I keep changing my mind? Those connections will be much easier to move on from than ones where you have truly let the other in. All the way in. And people who you say you love will notice this. A certain self-centredness will become clear to them over time, however much you don’t want that to be the case. They may be in your thoughts, or they may not be. You’ll feel guilty when they are not and maybe hate yourself for what you blame on your thoughtlessness. It’s anything but that.
There is a solution. In fact there are many. Make up your own ones once you see the idea. Get some EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) to get you moving if you feel double-stuck. EMDR jump starts your psychological power of self-healing.
Try this exercise as often as you can.
Practice being connected to the world from your heart not your head. It’s called a head to heart movement. Try it.
HEAD TO HEART
If you move between regarding the world out of somewhere near your forehead, maybe between your eyes, and then slowly drop your attention down to feeling something like a ray of light between your heart and whatever you are regarding you’ll find yourself starting to feel something. I’ve chosen a tree in these amateurish scribbles because they tend not to move and are in fact lovely things we can’t do without. Try it. If you don’t feel anything, try it again. This is not about anything mystical, but something extraordinary: you imagining something differently … from a place where you might imagine you feel love (trust those songs) rather than the sentinel who is your cortex.
And then try with another tree, or a flower, and build your way up to a person. Can you see why you hesitate?
by Tom Tomaszewski | Nov 5, 2023 | HESITATION
HESITATION / PANIC
Anxiety is always related to a sense of constriction imposed by others.
Thought about like this there are many things you can look to adjust, including how able you might be to say yes or no to what others suggest, the kind of people you hang around with, how able you feel to hang around with who you like, and what you do with your spare time. Remember, you need to think of a ‘sense’ of constriction: your sense. It may be inaccurate.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Nov 4, 2023 | HESITATION
I’m not a big believer in what get called attachment styles. It’s like buying clothes from a mass-market store, on-line, without trying them on first, and without any real sense of what S, M, L, XL, or XXL might relate to. However, thinking about attachment through the lens of Panksepp’s PANIC system allows for a little more imagination. It’s more like trying something on and then being able to make adjustments before you take your clothes home.
Thinking about PANIC and the ways in which we might find life plagued by HESITATION (or maybe you can think of your own label based on your experience?) allows you to examine the effects of mediation. The pull towards addressing PANIC can leave you and the people around you (all with their own sense of PANIC to try and deal with. Attachment understood like this has to be seen as a ‘group’ phenomenon; a process of interdependence that Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok called the ‘Dynamics of Intersubjective Functioning)’ experiencing life with different degrees of mutual mediation.
Mediation Styles
Above are some drawings of the kind I do for my clients in sessions. The four I have shown are among the ones I most commonly find myself drawing.
In number one there’s a sense of the carer being comfortably ‘in the world’ and able to pass this sense of realism and lack of anxiety across to their child. The child receives the world mediated by someone who has a good idea of how the world operates and who manages to balance feeling getting what they need with what others need, and so on.
Number two shows a carer crushed by the world. Their child receives a sense of the world as alarming, threatening and overwhelming. ‘stick close to me at all times’, might be a message the carer implicitly passes on. Or you will PANIC. Another kind of message might be ‘Head for the hills, everybody for themself’. I come up with messages appropriate to each client. What would your message have been, do you think, and how are you still living it? How can you rewrite the script you were given?
Number three shows a child taking in confusion. Their carer can’t make sense of the world.
Number four shows a child standing between their carer and the world. That’s no fun at all. That child has to stand up to the world like an adult while their carer shelters. Sometimes the carer really needs to get their act together. Sometimes the carer needs help from a doctor or someone like that … and their child needs help from other adults so they can go on being a child while their body, their brain, their mind develop less acutely.
There are dozens of drawings like these to be made. They help show how all of the drives might be adapted to.
