Category: Musings

These blogs are just me thinking aloud.

Research to save the human race

I had the privilege of being invited to attend a day on research at UWC. I was kindly invited by Anita Maurtin-Cairncross from the UWC Human Resources Department to join a workshop which was aimed at developing research capacity. The Rector and Vice-Chancellor Professor Brian O’ Connell started the day by talking about the importance of research. He used the analogy of the Mayan people to emphasise that we as human beings are at risk if we continue unthinkingly along our path, and just like the Mayans, we may be facing extinction unless we can improve the sustainability of our situation. We are 7 billion people (and more every minute) on this planet.

I recently saw a film that showed a picture of our planet from outer space and I was struck by how fragile it looked from out there – this green and blue ball shrouded in strips of cloud just  hanging there in space. And I have been wondering about how long the planet can sustain 7 billion people and more. The earth is an ecosystem, and so surely it requires a certain amount of balance in order to continue sustaining life. Last year, I drove past Hartebeespoortdam. It is a luminous green and it is poisonous to humans. How long before we have made an environment that cannot sustain us anymore? Of course, the environmentalists tell us that we do not have long. What I find so astonishing is that so many of us, myself included (at least some of the time), live as if that is not true. We live as if we can continue consuming resources and producing waste as we are doing at the moment.

We can’t. We need research that tell us why human beings live in denial of glaring truths and we need research that tells us how to help ourselves wake up. I was impressed by the speakers at the UWC day. I think they are genuinely developing research capacity and I learnt a lot from them. I am pursuing my own research with renewed vigour. But I was left with a lingering discomfort because the time for research may be over.

Anger and repair

Anger is such a terrifying emotion.  Every now and then I become aware of feeling furious about something. It may be triggered by a seemingly inconsequential event such as an interaction with a rude customer service person, or more seriously by a random act of cruelty. Those reactive flashes of engagement with the world are still manageable, although unpleasant.

Sometimes, however, the thing that happens resonates at the core level of myself, reminding of a violation that occurred before I could fend for myself. And then, with the surge of a volcanic eruption, I become subsumed by the primitive ferocity of a threatened wild animal, and I pity those who stand in my way.  It is only later that I understand the dislocation in time and space, but by then the damage is done.

Training Dragons

I liked the symbolism in the film “How to train you dragon”. The basic story line is as follows: The Vikings regard dragons as enemies, because the dragons steal their sheep. A chief’s son injures a dragon without the knowledge of the village, but over time gradually heals and befriends the creature, coming to understand that the dragons are not evil, but are simply also trying to survive. In the process, the boy becomes disabled, but survives and wins the approval of his father and the village, resulting in a transformed relationship between Vikings and dragons.

I watched this film a while ago, but I often think about its story. As I mentioned previously, I have just published a book called Beneath – Exploring the Unconscious in Individuals which describes the arduous, painstaking and epic journey of integrating our unconsciously stored experiences into our conscious minds on an ongoing basis. I am continually asked what the simple message in my book is – in other words – what enlightening but easy-to-implement wisdom will transform people’s lives if they read my book? The answer is none. There are few easy answers to life’s problems and I do not include any in my book.

In a way, my book describes how to train our dragons. Training dragons is as difficult as it sounds and it may even mean learning to live with some disability of our own. Despite that, the process of training our inner dragons is transformative and likely to be deeply fulfilling. But it does require courage, stamina and perseverance.

I think many of us live lives of quiet desperation amidst a plethora of quick fix homilies and abundant, yet simplistic self help advice which does not work for us. I think we should be allowed to appreciate exactly how hard it is to break the destructive patterns handed to us by the generations before us (and magnificently refined through our own efforts in our own lives) and then be compassionately helped to keep going even when it’s tough.

The process of creative work

I have finally completed a book called Beneath – Exploring the unconscious in individuals that I have been working on for five years. It has gone to the printers and will be back in 4 weeks time, ready to be sold. For five years I thought about the book, spent hours and hours working on it, researching the subject matter, writing and rewriting words and sentences. During the process, I often imagined the joy I would feel when I finally finished. I was impatient to see the complete work and anticipated a feeling of great satisfaction. The anticipation kept me going when the work was tedious, which was thankfully not often. Most of the time, I was extremely motivated. I felt that I had something to say and that it was worth saying. I worked with an extremely talented designer, Pluto Panoussis, who ensured that the book was beautiful to look at and I was delighted as I watched the final product unfold. And then we sent it to the printers.

It has been very strange since then. I unexpectedly felt completely empty. I needed to start thinking about marketing the book and telling people about it, but the more I imagined what I would say, the less I could think of anything to say. I felt as if I have nothing more to offer. That is fortunately no longer the case, I am starting to reconnect with the wellspring of ideas inside me. But, the expected euphoria of completing a creative process did not manifest as I imagined. It was more as if I was compelled to allow the flow of the work through me, and then was exhausted and depleted by the process. To me it seems as if creativity is bigger than the human being who delivers it to the world, and that in the end we are merely vehicles for the life force. In retrospect, the biggest joy was the sense of being meaningfully occupied in the creative process itself, the joy of being an instrument that is being played.

Blogs

Blogs are are hard to do regularly. Sometimes I have plenty to say, but I am better off not saying it in public. Sometimes I have nothing to say that feels like it would benefit or interest anyone else. A blog implies that that you are either doing something interesting that others would like to know about, or that you have wisdom to share, or that you are funny and interesting. Many of the things that I do are mundane; often I doubt myself and seem unable to behave wisely myself and so there is not much point in sharing that, and often, when remarkable things happen, I am too busy to write about it. However, here is a summary of some noteworthy things that have affected me or that I have observed in the last few months:

  • A dear friend died in a fire. All I could do was mourn the loss of his life and his phenomenal creativity.
  • A boy that I care about a great deal was diagnosed with cancer. He is being treated and I feel for his suffering – both because of the invasive treatment and the enormous changes to his life and the lives of his family.
  • Two young men that I mentor both landed up in prison and although they are both doing well under the circumstances, all I could do was remain supportive and accept the complexity of their struggles.
  • I have moved house, finally sacrificing the empty promise of rural greenery for the complex joy of living at close quarters with a community who knows your name and occasionally invades your privacy, but also importantly witnesses and supports your life.
  • I am learning how to overcome extreme childhood wounds in order to risk sustaining an intimate relationship with a significant other, while some days holding the fear in my throat rather than re-enacting old defense mechanisms.
  • I have continued to teach the things I believe in day after day, and hopefully I am adapting my teaching to reflect my learning, and finding an optimum balance between fear,  realism  and hope in doing so.
  • And finally, by chance, I found an arum lily frog (surprisingly) in an arum lily. I had never seen one before.

Neurosis and creativity

Someone was talking to me yesterday about creative inspiration and how it can be blocked and this person paid me an important compliment. She said that the one thing she has noticed about me is that I never seem to struggle with blocked creativity. I had never noticed this about myself, but when I thought about it, I was delighted to realise that she was right. Of course, not everything that flows from my mouth or my keyboard (as a teacher and writer my creativity spills forth through those channels) has value for others, but it nevertheless seems to keep coming in an endless stream. For that I am extremely grateful.

However, I have been thinking about why that is. Why am I so fortunate? And some of the following thoughts came to mind. I have recently stumbled in my research across the work of a man named Otto Rank. He was a close associate of Freud until he developed a ground breaking theory that challenged Freud’s thought leadership. He suggested that the trauma of birth is as (if not more) important than the Oedipal complex. I am not enough of an expert to pursue the detail of that here, but I would like to focus on one of Otto Rank’s other ideas. He proposed that neurosis (or mental dis-ease) is caused by creativity that cannot be expressed.

Now, as most of my friends know, I have some profound neurotic tendencies. I suffer from massive anxiety about many things. I will spare you the details, but these days it is a source of much humour for my family. But, I have been privileged (and stubborn enough) to spend 15 years in therapy trying to figure out why I became so anxious. This process has meant that I have more answers than I started with and my anxiety is far more manageable than it used to be and that has been very useful. However, in some ways, a much more important consequence of all those years of self-analysis is that it resulted in the lifting of the flood gates of my creativity.  

I often have as many as five epic dreams a night, and new thoughts spill forth continuously. I cannot consciously make it happen, it just happens. And I think it is because the years of therapy allowed me to build the most important friendship of my life – the friendship with the part of me that houses and drives my unconscious mind. So, when that part speaks (as it does continuously through body symptoms, dreams, wayward thoughts, slips of the tongue, strange urges and impulses) all I have to do is listen.

The evolution of childrearing

I am doing research for my book on the unconscious and in considering the work of John Bowlby on attachment theory, I stumbled across a perspective that has horrified me.

The research about Bowlby indicated what a breakthrough his thinking provided. He emphasised the idea that children form an important bond or attachment to their mother or primary caregiver and that a disruption of this bond, in terms of sudden and/or prolonged separation, is detrimental to the child. He also talked about the idea that the effects of disruption in this important relationship transmit themselves over generations. These are ideas that I now take for granted. One of the personal facts about Bowlby is that he grew up in an upper class British home, where he only saw his mother for an hour a day. It was apparently felt that any more time with the mother could spoil the child. So Bowlby’s history explains his work. But, somehow it woke me up to the idea that my current perceptions and assumptions about children and childrearing are very different to those which have prevailed over the ages in many cultures.

The idea that children are precious and should be protected and nurtured is a fairly new one in many cultures. In many instances, what is now seen as child abuse was standard and accepted practice. I left Bowlby behind temporarily to investigate the history of childrearing. Google it. The information is terrifying. I will spare you the details. Suffice to say that it disturbed me greatly. But also, when seen in context, extremely hopeful.

Yes, we still neglect and abuse our fellow humans, particularly our children, in a multitude of ways all over the world today. However, gradually, over the ages, parents have tried to do less harm than their own parents, and have in many instances, succeeded. Many parents who suffered abuse and neglect at the hands of their own parents, have, like Bowlby, tried to and have done better, and even more, tried to teach the world about the destructive effects of the beliefs that prevailed at the time. As a result of Bowlby’s work, hospitals reconsidered their policies regarding the access of parents to their sick children. And as a result of all the other work done by parents and practitioners over the ages, my children and I live in a far more humane society than my ancestors did.  

The cobbler has a hole in her soul

I am good at helping other people solve their interpersonal problems. I am even quite good at solving my own problems as long as they are not in the realm of significant intimacy. I have spent years teaching others (and myself in the process) how to be more assertive, spend time more wisely, manage emotions, make presentations, facilitate, mentor, coach, counsel, manage teams and groups and do inner work, which means getting to know the contents of the unconscious part of the psyche. I think that along the way I have made a difference to some people and I am pleased about that.

Many of the people who have allowed me to work with them have asked me why I do this kind of work. Over the years my answer has become more honest, or rather more accurate, as I have become more conscious about the truth. In trying to help and heal others, there is of course a part of me that I am trying to heal, and my way of doing that has involved (amongst many other strategies) an intense and relentless research project aimed at understanding the psyche and its functioning. Somewhere inside me, driving me mercilessly, is a childlike belief that if I could just understand how the whole thing works, then maybe, just maybe, I can rewrite my personal history, and so prevent the unthinkable from having happened. Except of course it did happen, and even though to this day I am still not really sure what happened, I have all the symptoms of a survivor of the unthinkable and unbearable. I have painstakingly reconstructed most of my history out of many fragments discovered over the years, but a crucial hole remains, and so do the essential symptoms. Real intimacy remains a continual struggle. And so the research continues. I will keep us posted.