Category Archives: books

I had an exceedingly weird morning. I wish I could remember the exact phrase used, but it was an exceedingly weird morning, so I don’t. But in the course of it a person said something like: from what they could tell of me (or knew of me, or had heard about me), I was a person who was familiar with (or knowledgeable about, or not afraid of) extreme emotional (or psychological) states.

However the last two parts were put, they’re true. But I wasn’t aware that this is an obvious or well known fact. Two years ago the person’s statement would have made me anxious and terrified everyone thought I was crazy. But today I’m just going, “How exceedingly weird. Well, it’s true. Curious.”

A while back I picked up a little book by Arnold Mindell called Working on Yourself Alone because I had become interested in the idea of autopsychotherapy after reading Dabrowski. Because I accumulate books like a squirrel accumulates fleas, I put it on a shelf with the rest of my growing psychology/psychoanalytical collection, expecting it to push itself forward on the shelf at me one day.

Today was the day. In the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about bodywork and emotional release and I’ve run across several random references to Mindell and/or process-oriented psychotherapy. This morning I saw the book from my bed and remembered it has stuff about bodywork and somatic experience, so I sat down with it for breakfast.

A passage I marked:

The way awareness works in us is, I believe, by constantly and patiently chipping away at our lives in order to bring out our original form, visible in our childhood dream, in our personal myth. Jung found out years ago that what we call early childhood dreams and incidents are patterns governing our life-long process. If you dreamed as a child that gangsters were after you, then you may frequently feel like a good person constantly confronted by a gangster-like secondary process. Everything which happens makes you aware of the limitations of your goodness and sweetness and how it keeps out your own gangster-like drives.

Being aware, then, means being aware of not only the short-term situations in our lives, but also our personal myths, childhood dreams and memories, as well as of the observers in us who use our awareness.

Two things about this quote struck me:

1. “the observers in us who use our awareness”
I’ve always been keenly aware of the multiplicity of Is in my interior experience, including observers and commentators.

The chill up my young spine when I first heard the story of the Gerasenes demon, intoned dramatically during a sermon: And he answered, saying, “My name is Legion: for we are many.”

A very different sort of chill upon reading Whitman:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

For most of my life this was terrifying. At worst, I was afraid I was going crazy. Next worst, that I’d slip up and say things that would make others believe I was crazy. At best, this way of being is clearly unacceptable in this culture of ego building and boosting, where you are supposed to know—and clearly display through identity claims and consumer patterns—your Self and what you want, feel, and believe and what the one truth of each matter is, as if these are singular, clear, and well-defined.

In the past 18 months, I’ve finally learned not to be frightened of the way my mind works. Fear of going crazy indicates recognition that what one is internally experiencing does not align with what one would typically experience as the reality of the situation or the expected “normal” response to it. The ability to recognize a disconnect between one’s non-typical experience/perception and the expected, normal experience/perception of reality demonstrates intact reality testing and awareness of one’s mental state. Intact reality testing and awareness of one’s mental state are the opposite of mental illness.

Knowing this makes the difference between overwhelming anxiety and “But I’m not crazy, I’m just laughing at myself.”

Dabrowski, Jung, Mindell, and others see identifying the multiple levels or parts of the self, working with them, and establishing integration as the path to optimal mental health. Insistence upon singularity of self is seen as lack of development and/or the fast lane to neurosis and psychopathology.

It doesn’t take much reading about positive disintegration, spiritual emergencies, shamanism, trauma, peak experience, ego death, and non-ordinary states to understand that, by this culture’s definition, the following would all be crazy and should “talk to their doctors”: saints, mystics, visionaries, indigenous healers, the enlightened, and many highly creative and brilliant creators in the arts and sciences. Not that being “crazy” makes you any of these things… but a reminder that classification and definition is always embedded in something larger with its own priorities.

2. Jung found out years ago that what we call early childhood dreams and incidents are patterns governing our life-long process.

My most vivid recurring childhood dream: I am up in my treehouse. The house part is smaller than the platform it sits on, so I can walk all the way around the exterior of the house. I am doing so, carefully avoiding stepping on any shadows cast by the tree branches. I know that if I step in a shadow, something unthinkable will happen that involves being sucked into the shadow. All I know is that this is to be avoided at all costs. Then the sun starts moving faster across the sky. The shadows start sliding faster across the platform. I have to walk faster to avoid stepping the wrong way. And it all continues to accelerate until the sun is spinning around the sky and I’m running as fast as I can, getting dizzy from watching my feet and everything spinning. And then I wake up terrified.

Vivid childhood incident 1: My parents take me with them to their friends’ house. I am in kindergarten or first grade. I go outside to play with their son who was caught poking me with straight pins when I was younger. For some reason there was a deep hole dug in their back yard. The boy took me over to show it to me. I stepped closer to peer down into it and asked what the hole was for. “It’s where the Devil lives.” Sudden hard push between my shoulder blades and laughter. Tumbling headfirst in, sand in my eyes, sand and blood in my mouth from biting my tongue, breath knocked out, believing I must be dead.

Vivid childhood incident 2: For reasons I don’t recall now, I want my mother’s attention. I have a sense of urgency about something, and I’m holding something in my left hand. I am on the shore of the lake across the street from our house. My brother is still in diapers and toddling if walking at all, so I must be between four and five years old. I don’t know how to swim. My mother is out in the lake with a friend, hanging on a float so it looks like she’s standing up in the water. There are other people around and kids playing. Frustration and starting to walk out into the water, repulsive slimy muck from the floor of the shallows extruding between my toes. A little further and the lake floor feels cleaner. A swirl of cooler water brushes around my legs. A little further and the lake floor is suddenly absent. The image of the dark water scrolling up my field of vision like an upside-down window shade and the sensation of sinking like a stone.

It amuses me to imagine a bringing these to a first session with a Jungian analyst. I haven’t mentioned the burn and the fire, the tornadoes and hurricanes, the snakes and spiders, and all manner of other things that would make my autobiography read like a heavy-handed allegory of archetypes and symbols.

If these sorts of things are patterns governing my life-long process, it’s all about the descent and there is no use fighting it, fearing it, despairing over it, denying it, running from it, or trying to hide it. It’s the Abyss we’re talking about; people don’t usually refer to great happiness, contentment, love, gratitude, etc. as “extreme emotional states.” Yes, last summer I was writing about building a lake house on the shore of the Abyss. Since coming to terms with the fact that I’m never going to have a sunny beach house, I can see it is actually a pretty nice place. I’m just not used to random people having my address or popping round for a visit.