THE MONKEY MIND

Gurus and teachers of meditation somewhat disrespectfully call our wandering attention the ‘Monkey Mind. In trying to focus on breathing, for example, I am distracted by thoughts and fantasies. The Monkey Mind heads off on its own trip with rehearsals of the future or fantasies of the past, quite ignoring what I’m supposed to be concentrating on. Past and future is not what meditation is about; they are distractions from being able to live in the here and now. Monkey Mind is a well known Buddhist term meaning that part of the mind which is unsettled, restless, and uncontrollable.

The Monkey Mind’s non-stop chatter is about unimportant trifles. Even when not meditating I think silently most of the time, sometimes bordering on talking to myself, like an internal dialogue – much of it trivial chatter. Yet such trivia became the very tools of psychoanalysis. Rather than trying to ignore or overcome the Monkey Mind, Sigmund Freud decided to pay close attention to it. Of course, Freud didn’t use that term, but we’re talking about the same thing: the stream of consciousness.

The analyst would sit in a chair behind the patient who reclined on a sofa. Not even the sight of the analyst must distract the patient from reporting his ‘trivia’. The patient’s instructions were to say whatever came to mind without censoring or omitting anything. Capturing one’s passing thoughts, actually being aware of them, is no easy task because this stream of images, thoughts and wishes are almost unconscious; almost, but not quite. Moreover, it is subjected to varying degrees of self-censorship and self-disapproval.

Freud called speaking out this stream of consciousness ‘free association’.  It is, he said, the “fundamental technical rule of analysis... We instruct the patient to put himself into a state of quiet, unreflecting self-observation.” The patient is to report any passing thought or idea, taking care, he said, not to "exclude any of them, whether on the ground that it is too disagreeable or too indiscreet to say, or that it is too unimportant or irrelevant, or that it is nonsensical and need not be said".

What’s interesting is that the Monkey Mind does not just wander aimlessly as it appears to do. Free association is not free at all. It is anchored and hovers around and returns to certain underlying issues that are anything but trivial: they are connected to painful memories or unpleasant urges and impulses – all the disagreeable things that have been neglected or stuffed into the unconscious. The so-called trivia are disguised symbols representing deeper things. They are watered down ciphers, disguised by their apparent unimportance. The Monkey Mind does a good balancing act of reminding without remembering. The trivia doesn’t worry us, but it doesn’t let us forget either.

Sometimes though, the Monkey Mind only partially hides a hidden anguish, as when a present-time problem becomes such a symbol. The present-time worry represents, without revealing, something repressed and forgotten. The pressure from the unconscious leaks through, attaching itself to a present-time issue, making this appear bigger than it actually is. The Monkey Mind deceives us that the present-time issue is the real problem. Again the Monkey Mind provides a defense from and compensation for the pain of the real thing.

The analyst is supposed to work all this out by listening to the patient with a third ear, matching it up with his Freudian theory and divulging his conclusions at the end of the session. Sometimes he gets it right, but more often than not his conclusions are off key, too bogged down with theory.

Freud looked upon free association as a tool, but Ferenczi, one of Freud’s early colleagues, thought differently. He said, ‘the patient is not cured by free-associating, he is cured when he can free-associate'.  The implication of this would seem to suggest that the act of free associating is what benefits the patient, not the analyst’s interpretation of it. In hindsight we can see how very true this was. Firstly, being aware of what is going on almost out of sight and then revealing it to another person whom one trusts – that’s what does the trick !

There is no need for the analyst’s interpretation. It is irrelevant, even counterproductive. What is needed is simply for the therapist to listen with a non-judgmental attitude and allow the client to explore his own reality. Later, this is exactly what Carl Rogers, the founder of counselling and person-centred therapy, recommended; and 90% of the time it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

For a stubborn and unyielding difficulty a little more suggestive intervention is required, based on the hard-won knowledge that a persistent or recurring problem in present-time derives its intractability from an early trauma or conflict. Such events may even be within the person’s range of memory, but cut off from any feeling of what it was like. Still, the Monkey Mind will hover around its present-time incarnation, giving us plenty of clues of what it was like. The emotions and anxiety that the present-time problem evokes can almost be guaranteed to be exactly those of the original trauma. The task of the therapist is to point the person in the direction of the original situation, not just to recognise it cognitively, but to begin to feel the connection.

Why the past is so important. Well, really it isn’t. It is the repression of it that does the damage. Even if the person can cognitively remember, the emotion of the incident is repressed and it is this that leaks through in the worry about the present-time problem. A lot of nervous energy is spent keeping the emotion of original at bay. One does this by concentrating on the present-time problem; but because the present-time problem isn’t the problem, it cannot be solved in its own terms. Thus the same type of present-time problem occurs again and again. Each recurrence is an incarnation of the original repression.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST

Freud’s discovery of the unconscious changed everything. Copernicus had shown us that our planet was not the centre of the universe, Darwin demonstrated that we were just another animal species, and then Freud came along to give us another shock: the ego was not the center of the person: we have an unconscious mind, he said, that exercises an enormous power and influence over our lives. Freud's work and theories helped shape our views of childhood, personality, memory, sexuality and therapy. Just how influential he was can be judge by W.H.Auden’s poem written at the time of Freud’s death,

if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,
to us he is no more a person
now but a whole climate of opinion.

The years since then have seen a gradual change in that climate. Freud is no longer fashionable. Indeed, the present received wisdom among scientifically minded psychologist is that Freud is passé. Only in the humanities is Freud still a subject for study. Patricia Cohen said that psychoanalysis is taught at all the top universities, but not in the Psychology Departments. In therapy we now concentrate on the various versions of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. Forget the past; what matters is The Now and how to enhance it.

Folk wisdom from pop psychology to meditation, all stress the importance of living in The Now – the great Ekhart Tolle fever. But the present moment isn’t as simple as we make out. The past is an aspect of the present moment of which we are unconscious. What we call the present moment encapsulates the past. The present moment contains, yet hides the past. The past is always present. What we regard as ‘the present’ in common sense is actually an abstraction. Freud never said this, but it’s what I take from his remark that there is nothing in the id corresponding to the idea of time; there is no recognition of the passage of time.

The past is that aspect of the present the influence of which we are unaware, oblivious of how it is woven into our perceptions and behaviour. We can, of course, cognitively discern the past as something quite distinct from the present, but this is an abstraction from the actual presence of the past. 

If the ‘present moment’ were denuded of the past, our experience would be relatively formless; in fact, what we call the present moment would disappear if it wasn’t informed by the past. In its place would be a world of pure being – impossible to describe, a mystic state of consciousness that people often find after a long retreat in meditation. Because this state is relatively detached from the past, the environment seems completely new and is hardly recognisable. It is a state of bliss that usually last for only a few days. After a while ordinary consciousness returns where the present moment carries the past as it’s hidden but active component. It’s back to business as usual.

The past is an essential ingredient of the present, seamlessly interwoven with the body and influencing our day to day life in the most profound way. When we experience life in a detached way we are relatively cut off from the body and its feelings and memories. We are then unconscious of the body and its store of memories, and can pretend we have put the past behind us. We then live in the head and our bodily memory becomes that aspect of the present which is invisible. We can then be victims of strange emotions and reactions for which there seems to be no reason.

Under these circumstances the unconscious gets to a point where it screams to be heard. But it can only express itself in a hidden way and it does so with strange pains and physical dysfunctions of all kinds. This is the reason for the placebo effect: I contact my therapist or doctor and she gives me attention and treats me seriously. My unconscious gets that it is being heard. It can then drop the symptoms which were the effort to be heard. Sometimes just ringing for an appointment is enough for the symptoms to disappear. 

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

THE GREAT DIVIDE.

Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung became fast friends the moment they first met way back in 1907 and Freud viewed Jung as protégé and heir to psychoanalysis. Over the years they began to drift apart. Jung was drawn séances and spiritualism, whereas Freud wanted to keep his psychoanalysis within the fold of scientific respectability. Freud famously warned Jung, ‘beware of the black tide of the occult’. This is the same paranoid fear that today’s militant atheists have of admitting any validity to parapsychology. They insist that it would open the door to all kinds of crack-pot and dangerous beliefs.

For Freud and Jung it was a difference that ran too deep for any kind of resolution. It wasn’t just a disagreement between two intelligent individuals; rather it was a gulf that had its origins in the age old fight between the church and the rationalist, the belief in the supernatural and the growth of science and scepticism in the 17^th century. It was a struggle that gouged a rift that divided these two men and still divides us today. Having banished all the ghosts, ghouls, devils, demons, werewolves, and spirits, the guardians of science are still scared of them coming back to haunt us – deep down they still believe that the unfettered psyche could throw us back into superstition and savagery.

The gulf is now deeper than ever. On one side of the great divide is science which is objective and impersonal. This enables a physicist in Beijing to understand exactly what a physicist in Boston or Reykjavik is talking about; a common language, and unified view of the natural world. Standing behind this tradition are all the technical achievements of the modern world.

On the other side of the divide there are only subjective opinions and all our individual slants, preference, prejudices, idiosyncrasies, dreams and moods, styles and fashions, as well as the huge range of alternative medicines and spiritual beliefs, as well as the many crazy religions, cults and self-opinioned gurus I can believe in. There’s huge choice of fantastic promises out there in the wild.

Amid all that chaos, science does give us some certainty. Throughout history there has been wave after wave of smallpox epidemics, decimating millions. Following aggressive vaccination campaigns during the 19^th and 20^th centuries the World Heath Organization certified the eradication of smallpox in December 1979. To this day, smallpox is the only human infectious disease to have been completely eradicated. The virus is now totally extinct. The story of polio is shaping up to go the same way.

With triumphs like this it is no wonder that we have faith in the scientific method. Nonetheless, the growth of alternative medicines shows that we have growing doubts. Something remains unsatisfied. Maybe our uncertainties about science are due to its inability to deal with human subjectivity – viruses are objective things, human minds are not. Consciousness itself is still a mystery. In many medical treatments the placebo effect is so strong we don’t know quite what we are dealing with. Where does science end and the power of belief begin?

Personal subjectivity is admittedly messy and certainly no one can say what is normal. Still, when dealing with personal subjectivity we have to take everything into account and treat what we find seriously and respectfully, even if we don’t understand it. We cannot tidy the mind up without losing what makes us human. To fully grant being to something we don’t understand is a brave step; and in our personal encounters this is exactly what is demanded of us.

Clinical and medical psychology tries to categorise human nature. The trouble is that despite all its wonderful achievements, when science turns it attention on human psyche it objectifies and depersonalises it. The very project of science from the beginning was to discount ‘qualia’ and ‘feelings’ and stick to what is objectively measureable. The individual human then becomes an object to be categorised instead of a subject to be felt.

The world of science is a world of objects, not subjects. And so clinical psychologists are apt to deal with people more as though they were dysfunctional machines. The wild and volatile realms of human subjectivity do not fit well with psychological systems; we nervously hide behind them when confronting the stormy oceans of the soul.

“I think I am, therefore, I am... I think.” 
                                                                 ― George Carlin

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IS STEALING PEOPLE WRONG

   

When I was a teenager I was a great orchestral conductor. I gave many concerts of all the notable Russian composers: Tchaikovsky, Rimsky Korsakov, Stravinsky; but my favourite was Prokofiev, particularly his lively and cheeky Classical Symphony, a wonderful parody on Joseph Hayden. I knew the score inside out; or at least I knew how to wave my arms about and exactly where to bring in the woodwinds and the cellos. I had conducted this work many times in the lounge room when my parents were out, accompanied by three large 78 records going full tit. The applause was overwhelming. I took many bows, not forgetting to acknowledge the members of the orchestra.

In my later years I have gone off most classical music – except for some old favourites. I’ve definitely given up the baton, perhaps because I now have more of my own identity; I don’t have to steal one as I did back then when I was less than nobody. It was so much better to be someone else.

Is it a question of growing up, of absorbing role models? Do we target someone who we will later emulate? No, I think one steals celebrity, of being someone who is the centre of adulation. Its about being adored. We ardently imagine what it must be like to be that loved. The actor, singer or star knows this and pretends to live up to our image, wearing fabulous clothes and sporting a fabulous partner. The more adulation they get, the more they get.

We don’t envy them simply because we identify with them. Every little girl at the roadside of the Royal Tour is Princess Kate with her Prince William – and not less the ecstatic ladies who wait with her, trembling with excitement.

We underestimate the power of the imagination, how it can transform who we are. Naturally, no one walks around declaring that they are Princess Kate. Stealing someone is much more subtle than that. It’s secret. It’s stored away in the hidden places of the heart, but it can transform the feeling of the day.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

HUMORESQE

          Don Quixote del la Mancha – the archetypal absurd hero

   

HUMORESQUE 

My bad mood transforms into humour when it becomes aware of itself.* When my mood becomes conscious of itself I can’t help seeing the funny side of it. I am a little bit absurd. A sense of humour dissolves my serious self-regard. As the ancient meaning suggests, humour is moist. A sense of humour softens my rigidity with amusement – I laugh at myself. The self importance, the posturing and domination of my mood becomes ludicrous.

Googling ‘laughing at funerals’ produces about 8 million hits. Apparently it’s a distressingly common experience. There are many theories about it: relief of tension, hysteria, denial of the loss etc. My theory is that perhaps it serves the same function that all humour does – it blows a hole in seriousness. Funerals become ridiculous.

 I did Classics at university and I remember a special tutorial where we spent a whole afternoon reading aloud, in turns, from Homer’s epic poem The Iliad. The Greek heroes of the story have monstrously overblown egos; and, in the battle scenes, the gods take sides and urge the heroes on. Great deeds and displays of courage are graphically rendered with bodies sliced and chopped in combat, urged on by the gods of Olympus. Real blood and guts with cosmically momentous consequences. Towards the end of these tutorial readings I remember one student got the giggles. Very soon the whole class went to pieces. Overblown heroic egos are idiotically funny. Not quite what the great classic of western literature was meant to inspire.

When, like don Quixote, I take my heroic suffering seriously, I’m already in deep trouble.  So the whole question is how to change a serious mood into a humour. I wont do it by trying to understand it. I have no real rationale for my mood. I should never try to explain it. To do so would be to reveal my absurdity without it being funny. Explanations are a bottomless pit. You can never reach the end. Oh yes, I was certainly angry as a child because things weren’t right. But there must be a reason why I have held on to this feeling for so long. Why would that be? Understanding always needs something else to explain the last term explained. In getting a hold of myself, ‘understanding’ is the wrong tool.  The closest I get to myself is getting what my mood is like.

Seems strange to suggest that I can be ignorant of what my mood is like. I mean ‘like’ not in the analogical, comparative, form of the expression, (i.e. similar to), but the experiential form, as in “no one knows what it is like to be me”. In this latter sense it can be true that I do not know what my mood is like. I have never really experience it. I have been it, but I have never experienced it.

To change a mood into a humour is to grasp what the mood is like; and the most useful way of doing this is what we know in person-centred therapy as ‘reflection’. If I can reflect another’s mood, if I can imaginatively enter into it, if I can show the other person I know what his mood must be like, what it must feel like, what its implications are – then, when he sees his reflection, he can begin to grasp what it is like himself. In the earlier days of counselling ‘reflection’ was done verbally and this is still the most useful. But I have learned many times over the years that it can be enough to imaginatively grasp what it must be like for the other person. Nothing is said, yet somehow telepathically they get it. So often I have been a silent reflector and it has worked.  Or perhaps it’s that if I really get what their mood is like, whatever comes out of my mouth is an accurate reflection.

That’s in therapy, but how do you turn your own mood into a humour on your own? Very tricky! How do you get what your own mood is like? Obviously by self-reflection. When you ask yourself, ‘what’s the matter with me’, you can get it for a flash – grasping your mood by the tail, actually experiencing it, before it slithers away. There I am … swishhhh. I get what its like before the recognition slips through the floorboards. I have to be real quick.

What do you do when you’ve got it?

Well, nothing. Getting what its like is all you need.

The recognition is instantaneous – then gone.

Do that a couple of times and you’ll be in a better humour.

  

*     I realise I am redefining ‘humour’, coming from

       from medieval physiology: i.e. the four humours

or body fluids. But I am also using the other meaning

of ‘humour’,  i.e. a funny or amusing quality

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

PREHENSION: the sixth sense

When someone is trying to understand you there is already a disjunction. If there were empathy between you there would be no need to try to understand. The empathy would be enough; they would immediately grasp how you are and what you mean.

When someone says ‘I feel understood’ the emphasis is on the feeling of empathy. When someone says, ‘My doctor understands my case’ the emphasis is on his diagnostic discernment – any feelings of empathy are irrelevant.

Someone trying to understand you is on the wrong track. To understand you is to place you in a set, you are this or that. You are a characterised, diagnosed. All the terms that could be used to describe you are alien. Descriptions always feel foreign. They have nothing to do with how you are for yourself. Someone who ‘understands’ you in this sense has no idea who you are.

This is because understanding is an action of the mind that thinks, the intellect. Personal relations require something more than this. We somehow have to grasp a person’s being. You don’t have to understand, you have to grasp their state, to directly perceive their state of being.

Having made this distinction, we have to give this ability a special name. We could call it ‘intuition’, but I am going to call it prehension. “Prehension is the basic, extrasensory awareness, or grasping, … One might call it the super intuition on which all conventionally recognized extrasensory perception and sensory perceptions are built.” ¹

To grasp a person’s state of being is, first of all, to grant that it exists. This is not a cognitive comprehension, but a prehension which is grasping the being of a person. You can understand a person without prehending them: in diagnosing me, my doctor understands me (or rather my case), but he does not grasp me. An understanding of me is not me, it’s a category. Granted, you may say it’s about me, like my medical diagnosis, but it’s not me as I am for myself. There is me myself – that’s one thing. Then there is the category you put me in – that’s another thing entirely.

Understanding my desire for chocolate is not my desire for chocolate itself. Understanding why I desire chocolate is one thing; the actual desire for chocolate is something else. It is essential to recognise this distinction. Understanding alters nothing. The desire for chocolate is still what it is – whether understood or not.  

To reduce prehension to understanding relates all perception to rational cognition and denies the possibility of non-rational perception; but we know from personal experience there are many things I don’t understand that definitely exist.  I feel things I don’t understand, but I still feel them.

If I ask myself, ‘do I want to go to the movies with John?’ I find myself saying ‘no’. I can invent all the reasons why not, any one of which is understandable. But what I find in myself is simply ‘no’. That ‘no’ is more authentic than any of the reasons. Plausible reasons are invented afterwards. I don’t want to give John reasons or explain. Discussions, one way or the other, won’t make any difference. It’s still ‘no’.

Self-assertion is not about being able to clearly explain one’s position. One can do that, of course. But explanations are sensible sounding excuses for one’s illogical state of being.

One’s state of being is always unlikely, like a mood, it’s always outside the square; it doesn’t leave a calling card or an address – irrational because my mood doesn’t arise from the mind or intellect or conscious decision.  One finds oneself in it. Self-assertion is the affirmation of one’s mood.

Like a mood, a state of being is what it is, like a stone or the weather. The weather asserts itself by simply being the weather. It does not explain itself.

As a person, you actually cannot help being assertive because there is no way you can not be what you are. You are always exactly what you are in any given moment. You always assert yourself whether you know it or not. The only question is whether someone else can pick up what you are being. This is what prehension is: it is simply picking up at depth what a person is being.

*

Most of the time person-centred counselling relies on a person prehending themselves. This is what we call focusing. It is extremely workable 90% of the time. But the longer I have been in practice the more I realised that much can depend on my being able to tune into what my client is being. It’s like a sixth sense. Only then can I ask the right questions.

When you are relating intimately with someone there are dozens of questions you could ask and be curious about. How is their health, their work, how is their boat project coming along, how are they getting along now with their mother-in-law? But to ask the right question may be none of these obvious issues. The right question would be one that engages immediately with the other’s present state of being. A prehension, a hunch, might make you ask something out of the blue that engages them at a deeper level and is more true to where they are at.

Incidentally, those of you the read my last blog on Sense and Sensibility might realise that it’s about prehending the environment. You can prehend a tree and tune into its being; you can prehend your dog – and this is probably what he does to you too.²

1       http://websyte.com/alan/prehen.htm  on ‘Prehension’ in Alfred        North                      .         Whitehead’s Process and Reality: An Essay in   Cosmology, 1929

²    Rupert Sheldrake: Dogs the Know When When Their Owners are Coming Home
     

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264.

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

  Can you remember an occasion when you were totally relaxed, perhaps lounging in the garden on a fine day, doing absolutely nothing – you put the book down for a moment and just looked at the garden.

You were doing something very good for you. But because of our lifestyle, doing nothing is suspect. You put the book down; but maybe you could allow ‘just looking’ only for a brief moment.

Here’s a little meditation exercise I call Sensing. It’s a way of getting more in touch.  It’s a great little pick-me-up if you are feeling a bit caved in or if there seems to be nothing else but work.

All you do is take a few minutes off and just sense the environment like an animal. Just stay with the environment for a short while….. look at it…. Don’t think, LOOK. Look around and see things. Feel the solidness of things. Actually feel their THERENESS  – their REALNESS… their weight and solidity, colour and shape – the walls, the floor, the table, the bookshelf, the windows and so on. Look at each thing in turn and get its realness.

Then, try getting the reality of, not just parts of the room, but the whole room at once – walls, floor, ceiling, everything. Have the lot in one go.

Sensing is easier to do while going for a walk, away from home. This is because everything in the home tends to send you a message: fix me, attend to me, clean me. It’s as though every household item issues a requirement, an order.

 There is no doubt that there are abusive houses that treat their owners abominably and keep them in a condition of semi-slavery, overworked and unappreciated !

Jesting aside, the truth is that we have lost our animal sense of connection with the environment. The planet and our bodies suffer from this neglect. Animals do not function well unless they are connected with the natural world; and the natural world suffers if we are not in touch with it.

Sensing is a way of recovering our animal senses. You can do it for a few minutes in your room. Get the walls, floors and furniture as real, solid, eminently THERE in their form and colour. Consider it time out for a few minutes meditating. Particularly get things as physically solid. Get the movement of the trees outside the window, anything that moves as well the solidity of the furniture. Move your Sensing around the objects in the room and through the windows. Have what you see. Keep it up for 5, 10 or 15 minutes

As I say, Sensing is easiest to do when outside walking. The constant change of perspective alters everything as you stroll and helps keep your attention engaged. Stay with what you sense each second. Have everything you see. Keep looking around at things. Don’t’ think – look. Keep it up, no matter the temptation to drift away into thinking. As you walk notice how perspectives change. Each moment yields a completely new aspect. Keep your looking fresh. The earth, the sky, the grass, each tree. Each moment look at things freshly – the first time you look you get the THERENESS of things. Make every look the first time.

I’ve done this at times in my life when I’ve been stressed out; and believe me, it starts to make difference in a few minutes. Your surrounding take on a new body, fuller, clearer and more colourful; the grass is greener and the sky bluer, like someone cleaned the windows – it will give you energy and the pressure of stress will lift.

If going for a walk normally makes you feel better, you are probably doing sensing anyway; maybe it’s what you do naturally when you go for a walk; and why you do it. But if you are a bit stressed, or too much in your head, it may help to do sensing intentionally.

This is why holidays are so vitally important. It’s not just the change of air, but the change of scene. You do more looking. And it’s why when coming home after a holiday the house feels kind of strange. You are experiencing your home minus the ‘do-me’ signals. For a while the house seems familiar, yet unfamiliar. Everything stands there just as it is, without the command signals.

Sensing People: here’s another good exercise. Sit in a public place, a park, a square, or a mall and just sense people as they go by. (Not somewhere too crowded or where people are in a rush). Take them in one at a time – have each person.

You will have seen people doing this naturally in the park and other places. It’s what they do with their spare time. It’s good not just for loners or losers. It does something for the psyche. Whenever I have done this I have had a night of dreams with lots of people in them. It must nourish the psyche’s populousness. It’s definitely not a waste of time.

For those of you who have had some experience with focusing, try sensing the environment while at the same time getting your inner bodily felt-sense. It’s quite a novel experience.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

RESTIMULATION

RESTIMULATION

One day I will write a little piece about my early encounter with Dianetics, the forerunner of Scientology, that super psycho-religious, money-making con-game that has since grown into a monster. But for now, I just want to tell you about an idea I learned in those early days when it was just new-hit psychotherapy. It was buttressed by a clumsy, over-simplistic theory, but one of its ideas I have since refined to suit my own observations. It is the simple notion of ‘restimulation’.

It occurs when a present-time event triggers a past moment of trauma so that the person reacts physically and emotionally as they did in the original incident. The memory of the past trauma can be fused and identified with present-time in such a way that there is little awareness that the emotion and physical reaction is coming from the past.

It can happen on a quite small scale. Let’s say some years ago you were going through a bad time – say a marriage breakup. There was an awful moment when it hit you just how bad it was. You were waiting at a cross-walk of a busy intersection in town – that’s when utter disaster of the loss struck you. Suddenly you felt a deadly fear. Years later, without really knowing it, every time you approach that same cross-walk in town, a bad mood overtakes you or a pessimistic dread drifts in – without knowing why. That exact geographical place is the trigger.

Another example would be how I always put off going to bed. It is eleven-o-clock and I feel tired, but I lie on the couch watching television until I drop off. At three-o-clock I’m still on the couch, reluctant to go to bed. If I ask myself, ‘what is it I am avoiding’. I remember as a little boy. I don’t want to go to bed. I’m afraid of the dark bedroom and the shadows in which I can see faces; or I might have my repeated nightmare of being buried alive in a coffin. I have learned since that this nightmare itself was the restimulation of an earlier incident: the terror of being trapped in the no-exit just before birth.

You can see from this that restimulations can occur in chains. In this last example, birth is the first no-exit, trapped situation. But throughout life there are many other instances of a similar nature. Some have only a remote similarity, but just enough to act as a trigger. Crowded buses, lifts, the compacted crowds at Concerts in the Park make me slightly uncomfortably closed in. But it’s really surprising how worked up I get when I’m trapped in a social situation and I can’t get out of it. I hate it.

There is one interesting device that that psyche uses to avoid restimulation. It’s a strange one. It is a maneuver I only cottoned onto recently. It has to do with comfort zones.  It’s about going back before an original trauma. That’s where it was most comfortable – before it happened. To move forward in time is to move into the trauma. So it is that one can get stuck at a level of mental and emotional development.

Let us say that the biggest trauma in this person’s life was the separation from mother at an early age because of the mother’s illness after the birth. For some reason the child never really recovered from this blow and grows up shy and withdrawn. Her only comfort zone is the warmth and protection before the mother’s illness. The child grows up but doesn’t develop. She stays at home, is never really present at school and avoids engagement with the world. Later, she has the most god-awful conflict between launching into life and staying at home, remaining in the comfort zone prior to the first trauma; but launching into life equals launching into what comes next. She knows what come next. After the comfort zone is the shock of losing your mother. After her warmth, loss and isolation comes next. The idea of moving forward is too much. The result is a breakdown. Her libido, her life force, is pressuring her to risk it and it precipitates her forward into the trauma that is waiting. The breakdown is her way forward.

 It is very easy to tell people that they should move out of their comfort zone, but if they are ensconced in a place prior to a trauma, only they know what comes next if they start to move forward. When they even think of leaving home or leaving a marriage, all they get is a subliminal terror they try not to notice.

Life is a minefield and comfort zones are scarce. So, hey, when you do find a safe and comfy patch – what’s the hurry !

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264