All Life doesn’t happen easily. Maybe it seems sensible not to complicate it even further. Lead a simple life, you might think. It’s best.
But simplicity does not arrive like a birthday. Often, we cut ourselves off from complications. We might try to keep things simple by not saying disruptive things. We may only let the world know little versions of ourselves.
This piece is about the disruptive energy that we all possess. When we let it out in the right way it allows us to be bigger in the world. We feel less anxious. We stand the best chance of getting the life we need in order to be happy. If we trap it life becomes one long bum rap. A kind of a death. We drown in resentment and horrible complications. That energy is called anger.
Distance
Angry energy creates distance. If you are being messed with you need to feel you can show you don’t like it. You can say or do something and connect the angry feeling in you to the world outside you. This is angry energy going the right way: out of you, putting some distance between you and what you don’t want.
But if you feel angry and can’t connect that feeling in you to the world it will leave you feeling alone. You will avoid situations where something might happen that you don’t like. Your energy will go nowhere. You end up squashed in with it, silently enveloped by rage.
In a Rage
If your anger isn’t going anywhere you go a strange kind of still. You freeze in a rage.
How can you not get stuck like that? Budge. You need to keep moving. One of the things that can keep you moving is music. There are books, paintings and films, but music’s a good way to get going. Something tight, something in time.
What you don’t want is something spaced out. Something that’s gone so far it’s broken off. You want music to go just far enough to still be rude, shocking, brilliant in the way it opens the world up. Bach, Banshees, Last Poets.
Budgie Cage
You don’t want to be tranquilised by stupid music, silly novels or memes. Anger going nowhere does enough of that already. You yawn. You feel very sleepy. You feel bored because boredom is like a budgerigar cloth, the thing you hang over a cage. A budgie stops singing in a cage just like an angry person wiped out by their own irritation. So don’t stay still. That kind of still is like the dead calm before a storm. We talk about something being dead boring. Find some music, or anything that moves you. Something outside you that brings you to life. Don’t let your anger make you dead. Harness your anger like a rocket from the crypt.
Say Something
When you disagree, or when you feel hurt, or when you feel frustrated (which can be like a fraying rope that ties something in place) you need to know you can say something. If you can’t, you are mute.
You might decide to say nothing. But if you have no choice about being heard you will feel defeated, maybe hopeless. Life will feel really unsafe.
Disagreement is Our Edges
Friendship needs some disagreement, if you and your friends don’t want to end up being one big blob.
Disagreement is our edges, and our height, and our depth. Up there, over here, down there — that’s not you. It can helpfully interrupt love, like someone you love might interrupt you if you were eating like a pig. Disagreement reminds love to stop eating or it will just get fat to the point of an explosion.
A Big Scene
What’s it all about? What does it all mean? These questions are a waste of time. They make you think, and think, and think.
You need to be inside, not thinking about. What’s in it all? What’s happening? With these questions something can happen apart from frustration. Look, I could say something about what’s in it all? right away. The plant on the table in front of me, whose flowers look different every day.
What’s it all about? What does it all mean? You might put up with these two like party bores, and you know where that ends.
Problem Numero Uno
All the worst examples of anger are to do with men. Men who don’t get what they want — maybe they are ugly, stupid or boring, for instance. Rather than make the best of a bad job, to wise up or stop talking rubbish, these men think the people they are scaring, stupefying, or boring need to shape up.
This is what happens. The world’s a place where men can do that. Do you know many women who do that? I don’t think so. Where can the energy come from to change this? This is problem numerouno because there’s something about Rome in all of it: Caesar, Catholics, etc.
A Lot of Pretending
If you fear putting your toe in the water, sometimes in your mind’s eye you might pretend to freeze, get eaten by a crocodile, drown and so on. A lot of the time a lot of pretending goes on.
Pretending is when something gets put off. Something’s still happening when you put things off. Angry energy is a step forward into the water which is for real.
A Little Scene
You might miss what you want from him, but you won’t miss him. That’s a disagreement.
Laugh
If life feels unsafe it feels unjust. Cancel culture is because people feel unsafe. The kind of people you’d want to cancel, don’t bother. Laugh at them instead. Try it. Point at someone awful and laugh. It’s better than cancelling them. Comedy is the most amusing form of anger. Kafka laughed so loud when he read out The Trial that he had to stop. Thomas Bernhard exterminates stupidity with the force of his wit.
Avoid satire and sarcasm which are like vomiting into the wind.
Life is Written
Anger allows justice. Justice allows respect. Without respect nothing is safe. Without anger there will only be injustice.
Everything has to be contested, always and for ever. You might believe that there is a magic law written into to life saying: this is right. No, justice is something that you fight for. All that is written into life is what you write into it. You must be able to make a case for what you believe, or nobody will believe anything at all. They will simply insist that something is right. Or wrong, and try to cancel it. Or cancel you.
Hope
A lovely person who listens won’t tell you what to do. They will give you a weapon for the future: something to believe in. There may be justice in the future if you have friends who you can trust, and that keeps your angry energy out in the world, like a ship on high seas.
A Great Bomb
To stop resentment killing you, you need kind, thoughtful people who will not forget what has happened to you and who agree deeply, all the way through, that it is wrong. They say they will not forget. When you know people like this it feels good. They catch your angry energy, holding it in the world, and help make it a great loving bomb.
It becomes the wrong kind of bomb, liable to explode in your face, when you talk about it with a bitter fanatic who tells you what to do. They throw your energy back at you. Catch: here’s some hate.
Close Enough
Things change in a moment. I hope you’re not the kind of person who says change takes a long time. If you are, go back to the beginning and you might see what’s changed. Saying change takes a long time is pretending it hasn’t happened. It’s trying to put it off, which as I’ve said is not a way to stop something happening.
So where can you find the energy to make a difficult change? To change the world? That’s what this piece wants to know. It’s all about desire, which is a lot about love, and a lot about anger. Love brings things together. Anger says: that’s close enough.
It’s such a drag when you wake up after seven or eight hours’ sleep, apparently good sleep, feeling as if nobody’s turned yesterday off. How can you cope with today when you’re still buzzing from the previous 24 hours? It’s as though your past, every bad thing, has risen up and decided to come after you. You feel incapable, frightened, angry and confused.
A conversation I had several years ago with Dr Marco Pagani, Research Director at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies in Rome, pointed me towards an important reason why this might happen. One of the phases of sleep that we need to go through each night if we’re to consolidate our memories and feel able to adjust to future challenges involves slow wave sleep (SWS). In an article from 2017 he lists the many converging effects of poor sleep.¹ He describes how cycles of SWS, which happen early on in the sleep process, and of rapid eye movement (REM), which occur towards the later stages of a night’s sleep, shape our capacity to remember and to learn:
SWS … facilitates information transfer from hippocampus to neocortex and the reorganization of distant functional networks. The “dialog” between hippocampus and neo-cortex favours memory encoding. During Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep a decreased activity from hippocampus to neo-cortex occurs, suggesting a more intense memory consolidation.
If you want a good night’s sleep that tucks away the effects of the previous day, which files some of them as memories, earmarks them as ‘done’, consigns them to what feels like the past so that it takes an effort to remember them, you need to fall asleep in a way most likely to promote SWS. Then you need to wake after you’ve had substantial periods of SWS and REM.
Of course there are also many other important things that happen while you’re asleep that we could address in relation to SWS and REM. Autonomic systems activity, for example, to do with the release of hormones like growth hormone, cortisol, prolactin, and aldosterone. All I want to suggest here are some ways you might be able to go to bed with a lot of hope that your next day won’t feel like your last.
And I’m not going to say much here about REM. That’s pretty well-covered elsewhere on the web. I’d like to, if I may, share some thoughts about how a little neuroscientific understanding can be practically applied through some very simple means and without any professional experience.
Let’s think about lullabies. Or anything someone might find lulls their child off to sleep (sometimes them, too). The drone and gentle vibration of a car engine; rocking; some forms of music. If you want SWS you need to invest in lulling and these are the kinds of thing people have turned to when they’ve wanted to lull their child, whose experience of getting to sleep is necessarily passive, who seems to need some help getting off to sleep. No drugs. No counting sheep (although once you learn to count that can be a good one).
If we find ourselves as adults noticing things that gently lull us we may feel drowsy, dreamy: the sound of the wind blowing outside through the trees. The noise of the sea washing on the shore. They begin to entrance us. I have written about trance states before (2020), suggesting that they are present in most forms of therapy and seem closely linked to therapeutic change. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (1993) has some important things to say about the subject, and I imagine myself returning to it again in the near future; but for now, let’s just think about what a trance might offer us for our sleep.
Besedovsky, Cordi, Wißlicen, Martínez-Albert , Born and Rasch’s recent work connects hypnotic trance states with optimal slow wave sleep (2022). It describes what happens if the beginning of a night’s sleep is deliberately ‘blurred’ by hypnosis. Sleep needs to involve a gradual transition from wakefulness to sleep rather than simply … lights out. As Dr Pagani pointed out, when we spoke in 2018, going from wakefulness to deep sleep without a gradual transition takes SWS off the menu.
Most good sleep advice will tell you to find ways of relaxing before you go to sleep. What it may not tell you is that really deep relaxation, the kind Dave Elman, widely regarded as one of the best sources for information about hypnosis, describes (1964) might help you fall asleep, stay asleep and get the best kind of sleep you can. Try Paul McKenna’s sleep trance recordings, available for free on YouTube. I use them myself, preceded by Stanley Rosenberg’s basic exercises for vagus nerve regulating function (Access the healing power of the vagus nerve, 2017, North Atlantic books).
What you don’t want to do is simply hit the sack.
1. His comments are about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) sufferers, but you don’t need PTSD to find your SWS disrupted enough for you to be profoundly affected by the aftermath (although PTSD sufferers, anyone going through their menopause and anyone recovering from an illness might find what I have to say here particularly helpful).
References
Besedovsky, L., Cordi, M., Wißlicen, L., Martínez-Albert, E., Born, J., and Rasch, B. (2022) ‘Hypnotic enhancement of slow-wave sleep increases sleep-associated hormone secretion and reduces sympathetic predominance in healthy humans’ in Communications Biology, vol 5:747.
Borch-Jacobsen, M. (1993) ‘From Psychoanalysis to Hypnosis’ in The Emotional Tie. 1993. Stanford University Press.
Elman, D. (1964) Hypnotherapy. Westwood Publishing.
Pagani, M and Carletto, S. (2017) ‘A hypothetical mechanism of action of EMDR: The Role of Slow Wave Sleep’ in Clinical Neuropsychiatry, vol 14, 5)
Tomaszewski, T. (2020) ‘Noticing the Effects of Narcissism: Working with Clients Ending Abusive Relationships’ in EMDR Therapy Quarterly, 2020, Vol 2)
I was speaking the other day with someone about their experience of being asked to reflect. It became apparent that, as is often the case, someone who was being asked to reflect on their life was in fact being asked to reflect back to another person something that that person wanted to see.
I remember, in my own experience, being told by a teacher to reflect on something I had done and realising as I attempted to do so that no amount of my reflecting was going to change the fact that I didn’t like what he was about or that what I had done seemed necessary. I had turned a cross-country run into a protest at being told to run (which I actually enjoyed doing), and that this made a certain teacher very cross indeed.
Unfortunately that teacher wasn’t able to understand there was very little personal, towards him, in my refusal, but that what he was experiencing was a reflection of my life growing up with a certain kind of a father. My being able to refuse was to survive. Context was hardly an issue. What appeared to be an unfair command certainly was.
Fortunately another teacher, one of two men to whom I think I may owe my life, saw what was happening, took me to one side, asked if I was all right and drove me home from the school.
On reflection these kinds of minor miracle happen more frequently than one might imagine. At the time I was astonished.
On reflection I see how a certain kind of reflection, of the form that kind teacher offered to me (and genuine kindness is often a sign of emotional and intellectual depth) might dream up a very old relationship between mirrors and miracles. The words are related in their pre-European roots relating to astonishment and happiness.
Reflecting, reflective practice, like loving, is always narcissistic. Whether or not that reflection is able to offer happiness to more than oneself is what clinicians find themselves reflecting on when they begin considering categories such as ‘pathalogical’. And here I feel as if I am entering a hall of mirrors.
I was speaking the other day with someone about their experience of being asked to reflect. It became apparent that, as is often the case, someone who was being asked to reflect on their life was in fact being asked to reflect back to another person something that that person wanted to see.
I remember, in my own experience, being told by a teacher to reflect on something I had done and realising as I attempted to do so that no amount of my reflecting was going to change the fact that I didn’t like what he was about or that what I had done seemed necessary. I had turned a cross-country run into a protest at being told to run (which I actually enjoyed doing), and that this made a certain teacher very cross indeed.
Unfortunately that teacher wasn’t able to understand there was very little personal, towards him, in my refusal, but that what he was experiencing was a reflection of my life growing up with a certain kind of a father. My being able to refuse was to survive. Context was hardly an issue. What appeared to be an unfair command certainly was.
Fortunately another teacher, one of two men to whom I think I may owe my life, saw what was happening, took me to one side, asked if I was all right and drove me home from the school.
On reflection these kinds of minor miracle happen more frequently than one might imagine. At the time I was astonished.
On reflection I see how a certain kind of reflection, of the form that kind teacher offered to me (and genuine kindness is often a sign of emotional and intellectual depth) might dream up a very old relationship between mirrors and miracles. The words are related in their pre-European roots relating to astonishment and happiness.
Reflecting, reflective practice, like loving, is always narcissistic. Whether or not that reflection is able to offer happiness to more than oneself is what clinicians find themselves reflecting on when they begin considering categories such as ‘pathalogical’. And here I feel as if I am entering a hall of mirrors.
Think about what it’s like being looked at by somebody searching for something they want to see. To be regarded so intently without the possibility of difference. It’s so easy not to notice differences, and to find oneself unnoticed, for life to repeat. Thinking like this might be the beginning of something else.
So much gets lost talking about privilege, though I understand why you might want to.
Are we encouraged to live life as if it were less of a physical thing? I wonder, if we are, whose sense of life we are living?
If a happy child looks to a parent (if someone looks to anybody) and, rather than finding something of their own sense of joy reflected back, . How can they recognise happiness after encounters such as this? How can they not be dissatisfied or uncertain or become lost in the future? In the world’s people? Who are more prepared to use them than recognise recognise them
