FILLFULMENT

an after-dinner conversation.

Coffee ?

Thanks. But what on earth do you mean by ‘Fillfullment’

Oh, I just like playing with words – you start to think what words really say. Said rightly ‘fulfillment’ is supposed to mean the consummation of one’s desires and hopes, not just feeling full. But sorry, you were being serious before I started talking nonsense.

Yes, well, fulfillment is certainly something I haven’t got.

Why’s that?

 I’ve just ended a relationship and I am a bit worried about it – I mean, whether I’ve done the right thing. For so long I felt I was being used. I went along with it for ever, but I just reached a point where I couldn’t stand it any longer.

 So, what’s worrying you, I said? 

Well, the way I did it. So drastic. She wanted to discuss the problem. I wrote a letter saying that I didn’t want to discuss it. I knew that if we got into a discussion I would wind up agreeing with her – I always do – and we would be right back where we were.

So you cut the relationship. Just like that? 

Yes. And I keep going over and over it – whether I’ve done the right thing. 

How do you do your worrying, I asked.

 Like a knot of fear in my stomach. This decision is important, but I worry about silly things too. Like weekends before I get up I worry about whether I should do this job or that job. Then, when I’m doing, it I worry whether I should be doing something else. That’s what I’m like.

So, I suppose you’d class yourself as a worrier, then?

Yes. Not all the time. I have bouts of it.

I said, I’d just like to try something with you – try out an idea experiment. See whether it means anything to you. When you are in one of those states of worry is the feeling always similar ? 

Well, I don’t always worry about the same thing, he said.

No, I don’t mean what you worry about – I mean is the feeling similar whatever you worry about.

I don’t quite follow you.

Well, there are two things: on the one hand there is the worry and then there is what you worry about. Sometimes, if you look closely, you can see that whatever you worry about, the feeling of the worry is always the same. The subject of the worry differs, but the worry is always the same, it has the same tone, the same quality.  The last time you worried it was about something completely different – but that’s forgotten. But in fact, it was exactly the same feeling – the same state, the same kind of anxiousness.

I think I see what you mean, he said. Like the worry shifts from one thing to another. Like its floating around waiting to fix on the next thing to worry about. I’ve often thought that.

That’s right. It’s like being stuck in the present. You don’t see the whole picture. Everyone is so crazy about ‘living in the now’ it blinds them to what they are living in. The pure ‘now’ is an abstraction. Life isn’t like that. Emotional issues are seldom about the present only. It’s confusing for people. What we call ‘the now’ is really whatever is actually going on; and what is going on is also the past. The past lives in the present like a hidden ghost. The past is vital to the living, breathing present. The present always carries the past with it. The present cleansed of the past would be cold stone dead. If you were totally marooned in the now you wouldn’t recognise anything, not even your own mother.  

So, what you’re saying is: when I worry about something in the present my past is there too.

Sure it is, I said. And the presence of the past is marked by the same feeling-sensation it gives you. But instead of paying attention to the feeling, you fixate on the present object of worry. Most people do that. It’s like present time gets all the blame for the past. The concentration is too much. The whole weight of your past experience is focused on the now. The present moment can’t take it. People looking at you can see that you are over the top, that you are giving too much weight to the present difficulty. 

He said, that’s right. What people always seem to be saying is, ‘what’s he worrying about. It isn’t that bad. Why doesn’t he relax about it. Worrying isn’t going to help’. And I can see they’re right. But that doesn’t take the nagging away.

No, I replied, because that kind of advise doesn’t cut the mustard. You can’t ignore how strong it feels and how it absorbs you. But you can differentiate between the worry and what you are worrying about. You can, Just for a moment, separate the feeling of worry from its present object. Or rather, you use what you are worried about, to capture the feeling of the worry, the sensation of it, the specific taste of it. That’s the secret. Then it will open out into all the times in the past when you were in that precise state. They’re all present. They’re all ‘now’.

OK, so you see the difference between the worry and what you are worrying about, but how does that solve it, he said ?

It’s not a question of solving it, but of spreading the load. The real agony is the concentration of your whole past onto a pinpoint in the present. it’s like an acetylene torch burning a hole in your soul. Getting a reality on the whole time sense of it spreads the load. Once the load is spread the heat is off and you are being more real, more truthful. It’s easier then to accept just how your life has been and how it is. You realise that the feeling you suffer isn’t all about your immediate circumstances.

I guess this idea goes for more that just the problem of worry, he said. 

Yes indeed, just take the experience of loneliness. However strongly it is felt to be one’s present circumstance, loneliness is never just occurring in the now. Sure there had to be a first time you experienced loneliness. But I will bet there was a time when being alone was really serious, perhaps overwhelming. And it will have fired up over and over in many episodes throughout life; and every time it fired up it seemed as though it was only due to your present circumstances. 

Well, I can remember times in the past when I was lonely or worried or whatever. That’s fairly easy, but I can’t see how just remembering will make any difference. 

Quite right, it doesn’t. You can remember a time past, a time that was quite upsetting, but in just remembering it as something that happened isn’t enough. It’s distant. You know it happened. It’s a fact, but that’s all. It’s long past now. “Oh yes, one says, I used to get upset, but I got over it. I can actually recall it now and it has lost its power.”

I might feel I’ve dealt with it; but I suppose it can still affect me ?

 ‘You suppose’. You only suppose it still affects you.  That means it’s just data, memory stripped of feeling. In reality you haven’t remembered it all. If you really remembered it you wouldn’t suppose that it affects you. You would see that the whole feeling is here in the living situation again, exactly the same as was – and you’d get the real taste of how it was, if only for a second.

Remembering something as data and saying that you’ve dealt with it is a cop out, I said. Sure, you know it happened. The memory of it – as data – is quite clear. You’ve talked about it with your therapist over and over. You dealt with it. It happened. OK! You think it has lost it’s bite now. But the truth is, the experience of it – as a felt-sense – the real depth of it has been cut off. And so you have never related it to the whole string of times when it hit you again and again. In that way, your memories are disconnected and unreal. And it is the underlying feeling that breaks through and attaches itself to the trigger in present time – the way it always has done. The feeling attaches itself to the present rather than its roots in the past.

 Sounds like you’re saying that the solution to everything is in the past.

Oh no!  Living in the now is a good guideline so long as you mean to include all that is going on in it. 

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

  

ONCE WERE CHILDREN

For males in many indigenous societies what is known as the ‘a rite of passage’ into manhood has the effect of cutting a youth off from his younger self, dissociating him from his childhood – it is a ceremony that is painful and traumatic and felt to be necessary for the boy to become a  man. Among the Luiseño Indians, a boy has to ‘undergo severe ordeals such as laying on red ant mounds and not crying out from pain as they are repeatedly bitten over long periods of time.  Among some Australian Aborigine societies, a boy being initiated was expected to repeatedly hit his penis with a heavy rock until it was bruised and bloody.  He also had several of his incisor teeth knocked out with a sharp rock by the adult men who were instructing him in the duties and obligations of manhood and the secrets of their religion.’  1

As I said, purpose of these barbaric rituals is to dissociate the boy from childhood. In some aboriginal societies this is accomplished with such effectiveness that a boy will walk past his mother and ignore her. He is now a man, not a boy. She simply doesn’t exist any longer as his mother.

In western society a man’s break with childhood isn’t as complete as this. Over the decades things have slowly changed.  ‘Macho’ is now a derogatory label; but there lingers the powerful ghost of the old primitive image of what it is to be ‘a man’: a tough, fearless warrior, indifferent to pain and physical injury.

In our country the aggressive ‘rugby culture’, energised by our Maori people, has an enormous grip on the male psyche. Its Anglo-Saxon roots can be traced back to the bullying practices of the English Public Schools where men were trained in sports and the cool ruthlessness necessary to run the British Empire.  There are still the remnants of this traditional mindset even in the gentlest of nappy-changing New Age fathers. Powerful emotions can be switched on in front of TV sports programs, triggering a rush of war-like adrenaline. The primitive warrior loiters in the unconscious at the ready, like an archetypal savage. It has allied itself with the warrior nostalgia of the Maori with which the New Zealand sense of national identity has become conflated.

But the repressed child does not go away and for many men it unconsciously reemerges in the family situation, where the man, now a father, is emotionally tethered to the wife as his mother, without his in the least realising it – a situation he would vehemently deny and only becomes openly manifest when there is the threat that he may lose her.

It is strange, isn’t it, that the very emphasis on manhood produces men who are psychologically fixated in childhood. The internal child is repressed and with it the vital connection with the original self. Masculine bravado tries to compensate for this loss, sometimes going to enormous lengths to prove his mastery. Such men show all the outward signs of strength and competence, and indeed do posses these qualities in war, sport and the creative struggle for survival – but the price is an unconscious regressive streak that is weak and immature. The plus side, the pay-off, is the sense of power and the freedom from the pull of the feminine.

Women are not subject to requirements that so severely cut them off from childhood and, because of this, and for other reasons too, women retain a more wholesome connection with their original self and are thus, on the whole, more psychologically skillful and mature.

The history of western society has been that of the ‘dominator style’, a man’s world – deeply cut off from nature. We are beginning to see the devastating consequences of this mindset.  We have bullied and raped the natural world and are now beginning to pay for it; and the life of a single man will also eventually reap the desolation of being detached, discovering that power and self-mastery are ultimately self-defeating.

To accomplish the rite of passage into ‘manhood’ the past has to be rewritten to fit the myth. A man’s fictional history becomes that of the warrior, ten feet tall, strong as an ox and who, like Heracles, Theseus and Odysseus can defy even the gods. The self made man. To make the fiction true a man has to accomplish masterful deeds. Our violent history has been littered with madmen like Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Hitler, the results of whose great deeds we know all too well.

If we look at our small New Zealand society we can see that this myth of manhood is not distributed evenly across the boards. It is culturally determined, but variations run in families. The hyper-masculine mindset, its particular style and strength, is handed down from one generation to the next. A style can persist in the family atmosphere across the generations without ever being explicitly stated – unconsciously endemic in the family ethos. And because it is never even thought about its hold on the soul is tenacious.

As a psychotherapist I have seen how much difficulty some men have with this affliction: the instinctive terror of weakness, uncertainty or vacillation: and there is a sort of pall of guilt hanging over it all, where any admission of childlike feelings is absolutely inadmissible. It is a terrible burden to carry. They struggle with what they are supposed to be.

We must understand that the macho archetype, if we can call it that, is not simply genetic, but rather epigenetic. This means that the genes involved can be switched on or off by environmental and cultural factors. Nobody chooses the kind of culture they are born into. But it is culture that greatly determines what we become. Cultures change slowly. Not as slowly as biological evolution, but change it does.

The way we each struggle with our culture is how we help create the future. It’s the difference between what we have been dealt with and what kind of deal we hand on.

1 http://anthro.palomar.edu/social/soc_4.htm

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264