Random thoughts of the day
I've been thinking recently about emotional pain; not that I haven't felt it too, I've just spent some time the last few days thinking about it from outside of the pain itself.
Families, while not having the monopoly on emotional pain, seem to be especially cruel when it comes to inflicting such pain. My therapist told me recently that my family history is one of the worst/craziest she has ever dealt with. That doesn't surprise me much, as I have spent 36 years feeling the pain of such craziness and trying to figure out when I'm the crazy one and when someone else is. Sometimes we are all crazy. But that is beside the point.
The point is about emotional pain. I am an extremely sensitive person in many, many ways. I can't stand to talk or think about bodily gore and pain; I can't watch horror movies; I am extremely moved by movies, and books, and art; I have spent most of my life feeling deeply both my own pain and that of others in the world. Maybe I'm not different from other people, all people feel these things -- I hope. But C says that what most people feel, I feel 100 times more powerfully. So, while you might be moved by a book, I'll spend days or even weeks crying and thinking about it. While you don't want to hear the bloody details, my knees are buckling underneath me at the first mention of the accident. I could go on and on. The point is, when someone makes comments or does things that hurt me, I have a lot of pain to deal in the aftermath. And it takes me a while.
Sometimes, I get stuck with a particular pain for years. There are some incidents from my childhood that I still haven't been able to settle. But that is not always true. Many times I move right along. What I've been thinking about this week is the difference between the two. Why do some emotional scars never heal? Why do some things heal immediately? What are the keys to understanding which pains will become which kind of scars?
I haven't found answers. There must be components of genetics, experiences, and commitments that play into why some pains dig deeper than others, but I don't know how to predict anything as of yet. Here's what I know: family has deep power because they have been there from the beginning, because our basic trust issues were built on and by those people, and because they know precisely where to push to make it hurt the worst. I know, because I know just how to inflict pain. I'm not always (or even usually) the victim.
But if all life is suffering, or if we suffer because we are human (struggling between the dark and light parts of our selves), do I just accept pain as life? Even the Buddhists seem to be teaching ways to transcend pain: if you don't want, you don't hurt. But how do we tell an infant not to want food? Love? Isn't all emotional pain the result of the lack of love? What is love in this human life which is suffering? A miracle?
I don't really expect your answers to such a question, but your insights would be appreciated.
Families, while not having the monopoly on emotional pain, seem to be especially cruel when it comes to inflicting such pain. My therapist told me recently that my family history is one of the worst/craziest she has ever dealt with. That doesn't surprise me much, as I have spent 36 years feeling the pain of such craziness and trying to figure out when I'm the crazy one and when someone else is. Sometimes we are all crazy. But that is beside the point.
The point is about emotional pain. I am an extremely sensitive person in many, many ways. I can't stand to talk or think about bodily gore and pain; I can't watch horror movies; I am extremely moved by movies, and books, and art; I have spent most of my life feeling deeply both my own pain and that of others in the world. Maybe I'm not different from other people, all people feel these things -- I hope. But C says that what most people feel, I feel 100 times more powerfully. So, while you might be moved by a book, I'll spend days or even weeks crying and thinking about it. While you don't want to hear the bloody details, my knees are buckling underneath me at the first mention of the accident. I could go on and on. The point is, when someone makes comments or does things that hurt me, I have a lot of pain to deal in the aftermath. And it takes me a while.
Sometimes, I get stuck with a particular pain for years. There are some incidents from my childhood that I still haven't been able to settle. But that is not always true. Many times I move right along. What I've been thinking about this week is the difference between the two. Why do some emotional scars never heal? Why do some things heal immediately? What are the keys to understanding which pains will become which kind of scars?
I haven't found answers. There must be components of genetics, experiences, and commitments that play into why some pains dig deeper than others, but I don't know how to predict anything as of yet. Here's what I know: family has deep power because they have been there from the beginning, because our basic trust issues were built on and by those people, and because they know precisely where to push to make it hurt the worst. I know, because I know just how to inflict pain. I'm not always (or even usually) the victim.
But if all life is suffering, or if we suffer because we are human (struggling between the dark and light parts of our selves), do I just accept pain as life? Even the Buddhists seem to be teaching ways to transcend pain: if you don't want, you don't hurt. But how do we tell an infant not to want food? Love? Isn't all emotional pain the result of the lack of love? What is love in this human life which is suffering? A miracle?
I don't really expect your answers to such a question, but your insights would be appreciated.
posted by perrykat at
12:42 PM
2 Comments:
One of the things that is tough about blogs is that some topics are just so so so much easier to think about table tennis style. At least, if you want to get to a really useful understanding/realization about something.
(Side branch number one: in the spirit of, "do other people think this way, or is it just me?", I've got a couple of those that seem to come up at least once a week, and just how long and hard and deep and detailed one is supposed to think about something for it to be considered worthwhile is one of them)
So gritting my teeth, biting down on a towel and tying my hands behind my back, here's what I think without thinking about it:
My guess is that it is primarily a matter of brain wiring, but brain wiring is something that I consider to be nurture rather than nature. That's a gross oversimplification and I don't mean it how it probably sounds, but when you think your thoughts are rainwater carving out the river beds of your personality. Your brain shapes itself to the habit of your thought in the same way that your body shapes itself to the habit of your movement.
To further abuse the analogy, if you settle a certain part of your personality, if you fine tune your thoughts to put a 5 Lane Hwy between you and certain aspects of the world we live in, then when a big storm hits the floodwaters don't sink silently into the wild soil, they are channeled through the same expressway to your mind, and they crash into what you've built there.
Another analogy: we build the Internet, we can get information much easier and much faster. It makes sense that we do this. It makes our lives better. But the same technology that makes it easy for us to do good things, also makes it that much easier for bad things to happen to us. Identity theft. Hackers.
Nuclear power can provide the energy for mankind to have a more productive life, have light, transportation, industrial production, electrical power for the homes, etc. It can do this without contributing significantly to global warming. But a dirty coal plant can't melt down and kill everyone in a massive radius.
And so on. One more that may add something useful: when we allow our economies and politics to interact, the economic and cultural benefits are significant. Our material standard and quality of living improves. But that interdependence also brings risk. The same paradigm that allows us to drive Japanese cars with Saudi oil across France also risks war in Iraq or North Korea.
People who feel little are those whose minds do not have the deeply carved stream beds connecting their daily thoughts to the powerful emotions that exists in the world around us and occasionally in their own lives. Even people who seem quite stoic, who are quite stoic, can experience gut-busting emotional pain and bliss. That's what I believe anyway.
There's a piece I'm missing here. Let's assume for arguments sake that the peaks and valleys were the same for all people. Is it then the case that some people, most people, spend their time in the middle with a very rare deviations, while others roller coaster more? I tend to think so. But I also think that, like the Lorenz attractor, those extremes can be self reinforcing, and the more time spent there the more that habits of thought carve the river deeper. The upshot being that while you might could think of it as a pendulum where you swing back and forth between extremes, I think the extremes can be more stable than a pendulum or roller coaster analogy implies.
That kind of leads to the how to heal/Buddhist/want line of thought. If the emotional extremes are relatively stable emotional states, this could be so because there is so much more to the world then we can think of at one time.
(Side thought number two: this is the tip of quite a big iceberg my mind has been chipping away at for a long time, and quite a lot recently. I'll fight the urge to wander off, but that will require me leaving some perhaps weird statements unexplained.)
Our brains are infinitely smaller than the universe. Our ability to grasp the world is from a practical standpoint limited by the RAM of how much universe modeling we can hold in our heads at one time. Language, especially increasingly complex language, is the tool for compressing more of the world into the fixed amount of RAM that the Homo sapiens brain has available. So we are faced with where we develop our language, what part of reality we will gain a more sophisticated and thus more compressed understanding of, what part of reality we will be able to most efficiently hold into the limited space that we can think about.
We make progress through the accumulated knowledge of our species, the hard disks of our libraries etc.. Our rational minds work off of hard disk. Our emotions though are visceral, and respond to the senses. Imagination serves as a sense, but it works off RAM.
So when we think about something, really think about it, we develop a more sophisticated understanding, we developed more compact language packing complex thoughts into fewer words, allowing our minds to have visceral emotional reactions to more abstract thoughts.
An implication of this is that if you never think about anything, you'll never be able to feel anything with particular depth unless it is happening immediately to you. And if you spend all your time thinking about something, your mind will more quickly race to it, and you will have a more complete set of emotional crayons to draw pictures with.
Consider this: if I were to draw comparisons to Vietnam and Orwellian government and quote some Ani DiFranco and talk about Catch-22's, you'd know what I was talking about, and the thoughts would have emotional punch. If you didn't read Orwell or Heller, had never heard of DiFranco, and didn't know anyone who had been in Vietnam, you could be exactly the same person genetically, but the different wiring of your brain based on experience would make you much less emotionally sensitive to any of it.
So I suppose one implication is that you should be careful what you think about. Do you remember us talking about 10 years ago about Maya Angelou, and the idea that everybody wants to be wise (at least in theory) but few people want to go through what it takes to become wise. I hear about the war in Sudan and it sounds horrific, but if I were to see it up close I'm sure I'd have trouble sleeping at night.
So I think a lot of people, again the majority of people, choose (however consciously) to ignore things that feel unpleasant. They ignore racism, sexism, you name it. They don't see the homeless. They don't care that people trying to come into the country may struggle to feed their families. They don't want to hear about wars. They want to be happy. They leave that wilderness undisturbed. If it comes down to being wise or happy, they want to be happy.
So one thing I would ask if I were in your shoes is, to what extent is your experience of feeling emotionally sensitive related to things about the world that you feel you should/everyone should/it is impossible not to think about?
There is also perhaps some correlation (ah, but causation?) between sensitivity and development of the imagination. Reading, literature, poetry, perhaps especially poetry and the writing thereof, these require the exercise of a mental muscle that takes words and creates pictures in the mind. If you hear about an accident, I suspect that your mind is more automatic at creating pictures for your imagination to see, to create that visceral emotional reaction. I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't as automatic and subconscious as shifting the gears on a car that you drive every day. Someone who does landscaping or construction or mail delivery or nursing or computer programming might have to make a conscious effort to imagine such details, and not wanting to do so (if it is distressing) might experience little emotional reaction.
(Aside - one counterexample: there are some things that come out of the blue consistently and get me very emotional. Like a news story will come up about little kids whose parents are in Iraq or whatever, and I'll get a tremendous wave of sadness and compassion and tears will be in my eyes, all in about 1 second, and I can be playing a videogame at the time, and it's not anything that I spend time thinking about. Since that is topical, I think that argues for some component of personal experience rather than a general biological or personality explanation.)
Anyway, moving on. Buddhism, healing. I asked Jeanne one time a similar question, I think I worded it "how do you stop wanting" and her response was along the lines "it's not about stopping wanting, it's about wanting the right things". As usual, that seemed a little pat, but I think it's right. The idea of Buddhism has long seemed fashionable to me, and I don't claim to understand it well enough to know how well it matches my beliefs. But I do think it is overly pessimistic in the sense that if you want nothing then you feel no pain... true enough, but you may also feel no joy, and in the long run you're dead anyway. Point being, all life isn't suffering. I believe there is always suffering but there is always joy.
There's another idea I haven't introduced but it's needed. Someone said, "you cannot break the law, you can only break yourself against the law." The context for statements like that is often religious, but I think it is a key insight. How does that relate? Let's take love.
I was reading the Washington Post earlier, that column about relationships that I find so well written. Two people in a new relationship, one of them asks the other something to the effect of, promise me you'll never hurt me.
Great example to work with.
The law, the law of the world, the way things are, is that everyone gets hurt. People hurt each other without meaning to. And nobody wants to get hurt. A Buddhist might say, to choose to love someone is to set yourself up for suffering. So is the art of life learning to not want to love anyone? I don't think so. I think the art of life is learning the law, the way things are, understanding that everyone gets hurt, that people hurt each other without meaning to. Knowing this doesn't make such pain go away, but in my experience it creates tremendous empathy, it unites people, it's what we all share in common. It allows me to forgive those who hurt me, and helps me to avoid hurting others, makes me more able to recognize when I do so, etc..
I don't really know where to go with that thought solo, except the implications in my life. I believe happiness is possible, but there will always be some suffering. I mean in the day-to-day experience of a person's life. What I try to do, what I'd hope to teach a child, is how to understand what the law is, to understand what actions we take and what expectations we have that lead to suffering (ours or others). That our desire to be happy and our experiences of pain and joy are what ties us all together. I could go into other particular thoughts and beliefs that I have, but the big picture is to use suffering as a tool to teach you how to be a better person and how to make the world a better place. Know that you will hurt people accidentally, and that this will cause you pain in turn. Know that you will be hurt, and that the hurt you feel does not mean that someone else intended it. When you feel suffering, ask why. Know that because there will always be suffering, you have a duty to create joy to give strength to yourself and others.
I think the two books that most help shape this line of thinking are The Road Less Traveled and Passionate Marriage. The idea they have in common is that life is a process of perfecting oneself, and that the pain we experience is the inevitable collision of our imperfections with the people and the world around us. Because we'll never be perfect, that pain will always be there, but every suffering is an opportunity to learn something that makes you a better person. If you don't learn, life will repeat the lesson until you do. Perfection, then, is learning how to live life the right way. So going back to Jeanne's answer, you could say it's not about not wanting, it's learning to want the right things. And the reward is being able to cause less harm to others, to protect yourself and thus those who care about you, and hopefully being able to pass what you've learned of "the law" to others.
That's kind of what I think about that.
As I take a bit of time to digest all of this, I'll make three brief comments.
1) I think the nature/nurture debate needs some revision -- or at least the way I understand it needs some work. I agree that much of our "brain wiring" is nurture. Yet, if I can take a little bit of salt in a pill and that pill will (and does) change the wiring of my brain and the way I see the world and the way I react to the world, there is more to nature than you seem to suggest here. It seems to me that the interactions between nature and nurture are more complicated and more intertwined than we had originally thought.
2) A Buddhist would say (I think) that both my comment above and your response are products of Western thinking. As parts of Western worlds, we see suffering and joy as two linked and necessary parts of life. As I try to stand on the edge of my universe (Western thinking) and wonder what is outside of it, I admit that I have no way to really comprehend the idea that there can be joy without suffering. Yet it is interesting to me. And if my sources are correct, there is something outside of my way of thinking: such joy should exist. I just don't know how to see it.
3) Something particular happened to make me write the original post, and it cannot be posted here. I agree that table tennis is needed.
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