"Dust of snow from a hemlock tree". 14th March 2022.
I brought the fairy lights. Slender copper wire, and tiny, delicate white stars. He laughs, as I drape them gently over his bookcase...
And then I'm giving him a card and his money in the card, and talking about how I feel I should offer him a white scarf in return for his teachings..
There is a poem, written in the card. It is the poem that I quote on the first page of my research project:
Dust of Snow
BY ROBERT FROST.
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
He asks me why? - Why offer a scarf?
I say - "Because that's how you do it, you offer a scarf to the teacher, and the money is in an envelope"
I am purposefully missing out the obvious, that I'm treating him as a lama.
We are talking about crows, I say "I remember being sat, on Glastonbury Tor, watching a crow. And there were onion rings - not the battered rings - crispy, like crisps! And this crow had collected...it had found some, and it was picking them up and arranging them. Then having trouble with them. Just playing with these rings"
And then we are talking about Bran the Blessed, or is it Brian Blessed - and The Tower of London.
Until I say - "Ah yes, my research - which was a joy to begin writing after the confinement of the assignment! So, I remember asking you questions at the beginning, And I looked at those questions again this morning to work out what you had said and what I thought"
He asks me to remind him about the topic of my research - and is he right in thinking that the research subjects are people on my course?
Again mistrust - a question aimed to find out if I'm being 'ethical'.
Me - "Yes. I wanted people who had undergone a transformative experience; so they had been in a horrible place, and then something had happened and it changed it 'the way the crow - shook down on me...'. So, there is no reason why a crow shaking down a dust of snow would change anybody's mood - and yet...it does. And it did, I think what Robert Frost is alluding to, is true, those sorts of things happen. Random and weird events can transform. But me being me, I want to understand and know more...So I asked you about trauma. My view was a. and your view was..."
He doesn't understand. And we are heading into his set of definitions again this will be a repetition of the same glitch that occurred when we talked about this before. My argument is based on the observation that a traumatized person may experience random, non-traumatic events as hyper-significant and transformative.
Am I in error when I go with what he has said, rather than try to explain that my work is about 'altered states'?
Well, I don't need him to understand, and he seems very sure of his point of view. He seems to believe that the only remedy is the reparative relationship. I don't disagree, a reparative relationship may be the key for some people, but I also know that other remedies are available; my observation is that prolonged stress and trauma cause an altered state of mind, which leads a person to an alteration in perception and understanding - and - that this weird way of seeing can be part of healing. Let's call it the flip side of psychosis. As with EMDR, it isn't just thinking and experiencing, there is a definite way to think about the experience that causes transformation.
That stress alters perception is undeniable.
Links:
- Trauma related altered states of conciousness. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4440663/
- The Neuropsychiatry of Paranormal Experiences - https://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/doi/epdf/10.1176/jnp.13.4.515
The concept of using hyper-significant experiences as part of healing, begins I think with Jung who assiduously would unpack and imbue people's hallucinations and bizarre experiences - including his own of course - with respect and meaning. I follow on in his footsteps to the best of my ability. But for the sake of this conversation, I don't explain my point of view. I don't feel that there is any room for it here.
Kit's assertions that people who are traumatised use games to lock the past into the present, and other notions, casts them as a victim of their past - I hear people who tried to manage an impossible situation say of themselves 'I was a doormat, I let him/her treat me like a doormat' and I say 'Perhaps you could not see any other way to make things better, you didn't want to make things worse for yourself - or worse for others; especially your children?
And then we are in a Ballardian world talking about the different levels of stress a pregnant woman might feel compared to a stunt driver, should they both be involved in an accident!
Kit doesn't agree that perhaps, when the children are grown, this incident would lead the woman to become a stunt driver too!
He says, we would have to go meet her and ask her!
Ah, another 'we' moment or is it a Kohut manoeuvre to create the appearance of relationship? Is it an indication that he feels a unity with me enough to use we? For a fragment of time, less than a moment; like elemental particles that exist only during the most extreme of times, there is an us and we can do...then immediately I feel it flickering back into the void.
I label it as an artefact of energies and collisions, nothing more.
Whilst wanting to believe...
Clearly I take against the concept that 'it's all developmental' and reparative relationship. As Huberman said 'stress makes children of us all' . Once the things in life that create 'us' are stripped away, we panic and fall apart as children do. For children this happens every day! Adults, we just have more security blankets, and have learnt how to use fantasy to delude ourselves.
And we are back to trauma - the word the people in my focus group used - that isn't trauma (according to his understanding of the word!) I'm saying - but I don't know what the word is if it isn't trauma? The people in my research project were in horrible situations - what was happening in their lives was too much - and by that I mean that humans naturally love and care for their families, for their partners, and when someone close is in danger, or is threatening them, and this stressor is ongoing - for months (obviously this has also been my own experience too!) a normal person reacts to the threat with anxiety.
I have a deep seated belief that reactions such as ghosting, or other forms of denying communication, and reconciliation, are dissociation - literally. And therefore indicative of a worse mental state than anxiety. I watched this happen to my husband as he shifted from anxiety induced by seeing our son's descent into madness, then rage - as fear took hold - into cold dissociation and leaving us...I entered 'cold dissociation' in moments of terror and then I came out again. I stayed with my feelings, I allowed the fear to wash through me and relaxed - because I had a good grasp on how trauma works and its remedy...compassion for self is the key.
The adrenaline led response, is anxiety. And one possible anxiety response is to keep believing that people are worth fighting for. If nothing is working the next stage may well be the need to run away, as the feeling of powerlessness threatens to become overwhelming. And finally there is avoidance, dissociation - at worst an opioid 'dorsal vagal' shut down. Which might feel safe, as it kills hope, kills relationship, kills repair. And it leads to discarding, throwing away...moving on (leaving broken people in your wake?). This place is hard to get out of...Opioids are addictive.
Broken begins with fighting for, becomes fighting against and finally slumps into can't care..
I'm saying - "Anyone in their situation would feel absolutely broken.." I'm not OK is a pure source of pain, and pain is a pure source of endorphins. So developmental, or addiction? And if it is actually closer to an addiction, the real question is now how to get out of the need to feel pain? 'Developmental' works here because blaming the parents creates 'righteous' anger, and that's a powerful drug.
"Therapy should generate dynamics of interaction in which people recover something in themselves (self-respect, love, legitimacy) as well as in others" (I can't remember who said this!)
But I don't seek to find developmental faults. Though scape-goating may not be anyone's intention, it happens; 'how could my mom/dad do that to me'?! How or why they did it, can't provide a cure, clients who use it - an it is a really powerful cocktail of rage, pain, sadness and indignation - are at a way station. Their destination, as long as they access all their feelings and move beyond the righteous ones, will be empowerment. That's what I've seen, and it is my personal experience. The only cure for a broken system is to negotiate a system that works, that may involve never seeing someone again, but I'm not sure. I say this as someone who has cut three people out of my life...albeit for very good reasons, but I absolutely see it as the worst solution. I'm not happy with it at all.
Me - "In the situations my research subjects were in, they felt 'shame' and 'guilt' but they were in a situation that was telling them - through the behaviours and words of others - that they should feel shame and guilt. So they felt - in their own words - shame and guilt...there just isn't any way for them to make shame actionable. They would have to agree that they were shameful. What they are really experiencing is exile. They are being turned into something/other/objectified and erased".
But I can see that the subject of power within a relationship is missing from this discussion.
Western culture values a single-minded, perhaps obsessive focus on an individual's truth. Integrity is often defined as maintaining one's truth, one's values and beliefs and acting in accord with them no matter what!
Power, the ability to grant or deny the thing another person needs - a person with power controls what can or cannot be said because a person with power holds more resources than the person without power, end of. If a person in power defines you as X and you refuse the label, you better have an alternative source of whatever that person has the power to give you...or you will need something else to trade that gives you some power over them. End of.
'Sod the lot of them, I'm walking away' is the movie version, in this society when you take that stance you have a good chance of ending up homeless and without any qualifications.
Over to you, Maynard.
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