Obsession and self-destruction
Created on 06/21/2008
Thank you everybody for your good wishes and comments!
What I have said so far is my attempt to create a space on these pages where we can experience healing in a new collective way, and where we can potentiate the effect of transformation of trauma and extend it to those who don’t have enough resources to do it on their own so we can all move into a healthier and happier space.
I want to warn you though, that I intend to do it as real as it gets and there will be information posted on this blog, at the right time, which will be painful, explicit and very serious and it will be available only for adult readers. The reason for that is that spirits of trauma thrive in secrecy. They have gone a long way in generations of our ancestors, reaching our minds and emotions, well prepared to invade our internal spaces and to build up their dwellings far away from our awareness. Being healed will require an awareness of the pain first. And we will do it in due time, and we will do it safely.
Today I want to talk about addiction. Breaking the walls inside our mind is almost effortless, if we can find a path outside of established mental conventions. It also requires us to get free from addiction in any shape or form and to choose letting go versus clinging onto something rigidly. In other words, we need to choose the intention of breaking the internal walls and of letting go of the whole mechanism of addiction which, in fact, is a building cement for the cells in our minds. And addiction to concepts is one of the most powerful and the least recognized.
Don’t get me wrong; I am aware that our entire communication here is an exchange of concepts, yet there is no contradiction in what I am saying. Concepts are useful tools, nothing more, nothing less, but so are feeling-states, so are experiences of fantasy and imagination, and so are our memories. What I mean is that here and now we exchange not only our ideas about ourselves and the world, but hopefully we get involved in a deeper level of sharing the intention to create a new magical universe where nothing from the past is being lost, but rather is being healed, transformed, and taken to the next level of shared existence.
To illustrate my point, let me speak a little more now about some concrete, non-verbal forms of addiction.
First, I believe the origin of self destruction in any dimension of trauma lies in people’s belief expressed often after trauma as “I will never be the same again”. And I believe it is true, and there is no way back to the same time, space, energy and identity that person had before the trauma happened.
But the trick happens when a traumatized person feels instinctively that the past is cut off and she would never be the same and yet despite this gut feeling, she still tries all she can to become her old self again, as if the tragedy had never happened. It is a subtle but powerful mechanism inside our mind that sets the stage for the grand entrance of denial. And from now on, the true fight would be between denial and the illusions it can create and the healing and a new unknown reality it can uncover.
I want to focus here on self-destructive behaviors related more to the dimension of time in any traumatic experience. All of these behaviors have biological imprinting and by focusing on a dimensional approach I do not attempt to diminish biology but rather choose to limit our focus on what’s relevant to this discussion.
Obsessions and compulsions. They are spontaneous ways to fix one’s time in the present and to minimize the anxiety streaming from the memory of the past or from fears of the future. It’s hard to pay attention to the past when all your attention is preoccupied with doing things in certain ways, over and over again. And it’s impossible to move into the future (I had patients who couldn’t leave their rooms physically for days before they completed their tormenting elaborate compulsive ceremonies). Inside that room there was no space for the past or the future. It was only the now, and that now mercilessly demanded to be repeated again and again.
The internal communication is profoundly altered during obsessive episodes. It’s almost like one’s time machine has been broken and the engine moving us into the future keeps shutting down at the same point of acceleration. So people have to “go back” in their mind to repeat the same mental action they had just performed. Often they have to “go back” physically - to check on the house, to complete the ritual, to wash their hands again, and so forth. You ask people suffering from this, what is the meaning behind these actions? And the painful answer again is “there is none”. Obsessions and compulsions don’t make any sense for people who feel unable to stop doing it and that’s why the feeling of suffering and being trapped associated with obsessive-compulsive experiences is so strong and the helplessness it creates is so overwhelming.
Cutting. Cutting is one of the most powerful ways to affect the flow of time and to fix it artificially in the moment of denial. As a therapist, I find it quite remarkable how similar the experience of cutting is for different cutters.
Mechanically similar, almost identical. The tension builds up first and quickly becomes unbearable. Then the impulse to cut emerges, then some degree of fighting, then the actual experience of taking a knife, a razor, and so on. (I am not going to go into specific details, so any possible triggering stops here and now).
What is common is that there is no pain involved no matter how severe the cut is and the sense of relief is immediate and profound. Very short-lived though, and as with any addiction the price for relief is too high.
How does it relate to time? Again, through altering the process of internal monologue.
The focus of awareness is forced to switch from inner questions, pictures, fragments of memory and the anxiety they bring up into the immediate experience of the bleeding flesh, that finally feels good. You bleed in the here and now, so your mind is tricked to jump out of its imprisonment in the memory of past trauma to take care of what’s going on now. The relief is short-lived though. Because cutting, as visceral and kinesthetic as it is, doesn’t make any sense either. Very few cutters have some ideas about it, most hide it in secret, under long sleeves, deep down, inside the darkness of their shame and frustration. So there is no new meaning for the past that cutting can bring about and the hypnotic pull of traumatic memory is reestablished as soon as the bleeding stops. I believe that cutting is one of the archaic artifacts left for us by our tribal ancestors who didn’t have much healing tools but their bodies and their immediate surroundings. The ancients ritualized self-mutilation, using the physiology of pain as a therapeutic tool.
But in a ritualistic context, self-mutilation had a different meaning - it was just a physical manifestation of a purposeful healing ceremony which by itself was decoding the traumatic memory and encoding the new post-trauma identity for the person healed. And she knew and accepted that she would never be the same again, and she didn’t try to go back, unlike modern cutters who have very little awareness of what is going on inside themselves when they cut.
There you have it. The ultimate difference between meaning and concept, completely lost in our modern understanding of ourselves. Concept - something partial, conditional, replaceable, which often feeds addictions and gives excuses for self-destruction and perpetuation of trauma. Meaning - the essential part of magical transformation that we as human beings go through in life, something we search for so eagerly when we are teenagers and still crave so desperately when we are adults. Because after we find meaning it is uniquely ours, ultimately healing and irreplaceable.
And as soon as we recognize the difference, it is much easier to make a choice between what we are looking for and what we want to leave behind so we can create the true intention and set ourselves free from any addictions.
Hopefully,
Good night.
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