By Stanley
A gut-reaction is literally felt in the solar plexus. It’s something you can’t easily ignore. Often unpleasant, like my reaction to the wet kisses Old Auntie Doris use to give me when I was a boy; or later in life, like the tedious committee meeting that goes on and on until I am overwhelmed with frantic boredom: ‘I can’t’ stand this a minute longer’; some gut-reactions are pleasant like falling in love; some, like a gambler’s hunch, can turn out to be either inspired or horribly wrong. Gut-reactions like chronic anxiety can seem to have no present cause at all.
Why do I call these holistic responses? [1] Well, they are all sort of global reactions of the body, impossible to analyse. When questioned one is likely to fall back lamely on: ‘I just got this feeling’ . This difficulty is the hallmark of holistic responses of all kinds. Reasonable explanations are inadequate because what its about isn’t singular or simple.
If we question a gut-reaction we want to know what it’s about. And there’s the difficulty: I have a hunch about this person, but is it about me or about them; are they really mean or am I projecting my own meanness? Is my fear of authority about my Oedipus Complex or my Inferiority Complex; are the quarrels with my partner because I am too critical or because she is too sensitive, or both.
A holistic response is too illusive, too slippery to answer black and white questions like these. Whatever story you tell only rings partly true. You can never quite settle the matter because a gut-reaction is holistic. It is never about only one thing; and it is potentially mobile. The rational mind wants a simple story; but any holistic response is potentially a wider story. A holistic response wants to mutate. It has the impulse to expand and evolve.
If you go to the whole feeling of a gut-reaction – not going over this or that about it in your head, but to the whole feeling of it in your gut – if you stay with the whole physical sensation itself, focusing on the non-verbal feeling of it, interesting changes start to happen. Other connection will pop up; it starts to mutate, to widen, to develop sub-plots. You could easily say: ‘I change my mind when I think about it’. And yes, you can do this by thinking about it. But what I’m suggesting is precisely that you don’t think about it. If you give-over to the gut-reaction itself, always going back to the whole sense of it, a surprising and unexpected widening of the story begins to emerge. This process seems not to be directed by the thinking ego. So what does direct it? It can only be something in the gut-reaction itself. It seems to have a larger story to tell. It wants to evolve. This is astonishing! Why should stories want to evolve? But they do – and in a certain kind of way.
The Cognitive Behaviorists and Narrative Therapists are right about one thing: so much of our emotional life is tied up with the stories we tell about ourselves – optimistic stories or stories of failure and doom, stories of inadequacy and blame, reasons why we feel guilty or wrong, fantasies about who we are or want to be, stories about what others think of us. Some would advise us to simply change our stories, but we can’t just invent positive stories at will. We can try, but they don’t warm you at a gut level. If there is to be a different story the belly has to believe it !
Sometimes personal stories seem to change, yet really all have an identical theme. These are stuck stories. If you have ever been a worrier you will know how each different worry is really the same story in a different setting. If it isn’t one thing to worry about its another. Each new worrying story holds one in its spell until the next day – next day, new episode.
Some people have what are called ‘problem-saturated’ stories. Such stories can define a person’s identity, leading them to claim that they have always been nervous or self- conscious. Stuck stories tell only a single tale and will even limit a person’s memory to events that confirm their story.
What we call our moods each have a entirely different story to tell about what the day means, indeed, what life itself means. Each moods can seem like a different but parallel universe having little in common with yesterdays mood – that is, if you can remember what that mood was like. Moods have a way of vanishing when another has taken its place. Sometimes I think am like a travelling drama company with a repertoire plays. Depending on the audience, I know what drama to turn on. It’s second nature. As a kid they said I should have been an actor.
Stories are biological. They arise from our history as an organism, going way back beyond the origins of myth; and our personal stories arise out of own history – you could call them personal myths. There are plots within plots, plays within plays. We watch them dramatised as we grow up living in a family within a network of other families and friends. We watch how happy-go-lucky Dad is at a party and how angry he is at home; how bonhomie he is to mates and how mean he is to his kids. We watch Mum smiling at Mrs X and how she frowns about her to someone else. I can find remnants of all these dramatis personae in my own character.
Plots are donated to us largely through the family that brought us into the world, and we make the best of them we can. Some dramas we get drawn into whether we want to or not and we act them out unconsciously taking one role or another.
Most people who want to be better than they are do manage to filter out much the bad stuff. But much we get stuck with. And try as we will it is difficult to change. Complete ‘biblical’ conversion is usually fake and changing the major plot is never entirely possible. The idea that we have freedom of choice is greatly exaggerated……But
And it is a real ‘but’… as I said, stories do want to evolve. A holistic response is about a bigger picture than the tale we tell of it. The best way is to take your gut-reaction to a nursery, give it healthy soil, tend it, water it and give it room to grow – then, just see what kind of hybrid it turns into. You might be surprised.
[1] The adjective ‘holistic’ has been sequestered by the Green Movement and New Age. I have invented the term ‘holistic response’ to designate a subjectively felt biological reaction. It could be called the ‘whole body response’; or, more colloquially, a ‘gut-reaction’.
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