Brave New Kitty

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.-Andre Gide (1869 – 1951)

Have you heard the old parable about the blind men and the elephant? Each man feels a different part of the elephant and gets a different impression of the animal. The man who takes hold of the trunk thinks it’s a snake. Another who feels its side thinks it’s a wall. Another feels its ear and thinks it’s a fan. Yet another feels its leg and thinks it’s a tree. None of them are completely wrong, but none of them are right, either. Each has gotten an incomplete impression of the animal and formed an opinion based on that.

We are all like the blind men—we fail to see the whole picture. This is not an indictment of the human race; it’s a simple truth that the nature of learning is infinite. It’s impossible to see the whole picture, and the more you know about something, the more you know there is to learn about it.

Nowhere is this truer than with our selves. Self-awareness is like an iceberg poking out of a murky ocean of disowned feelings, repressed thoughts and desires, oblique opinions, and an entire personal history that affects everything we see, think, hear, feel, and do. If the brain had to consciously process all of that every time it took in new information, Homo sapiens would not have survived. Instead, most sensory information gets dealt with on some level below what we’re aware of, going through several filters before it reaches consciousness. It happens in a split second, but it happens. And everything we’re aware of has undergone this filtering before it becomes a thought: In “Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception,” Daniel Goleman states, “…the contents of awareness come to us picked over, sorted through, and pre-packaged. The whole process takes a fraction of a second…This is much to our benefit…consciousness would be far too cluttered were it not reached by a vastly reduced information flow.” (Goleman, 1998, p. 65)

This filtering applies to self-awareness, as well (this is the premise of Goleman’s book). No matter how much I work at self-awareness, I know I’ll never be all the way there. There’s no shame in this, and no reason to feel hopeless about it, either. The subconscious seems designed to provide a bottomless repository for that which we aren’t, or don’t want to be, fully aware of. We seem to require this capacity for repression to deal with the world; any adult struggling to make sense of a painful childhood can tell you this.

And yet, knowing that the human capacity to process information is limited creates a bind. Senses are how we survive in the world. Without awareness, we’d perish, we’d have long ago become extinct. And yet I’m supposed to believe those senses are fallible? How can I do that and have any confidence about my ability to deal with life?

This is, I think, one of the core existential anxieties of being human. It is perhaps the most ubiquitous mistake on the planet to think we know more than we actually do, that everything we see, feel, and think is completely accurate. People find an answer that works for them and think that answer should work for everybody else. When attempts to make others believe the same way turn coercive, myriad forms of human suffering ensue.

Much of this could be avoided by making friends with that vast unconscious repository, that shadow atop which all consciousness perches. But if doing so means admitting limitations in thought and judgment, which it does, then the difficulty involved becomes understandable, and the widespread dogmatism in the world begins to make sense.

People find an answer that works for them and think that answer should work for everybody else. Why is this the case? Why do so many people think it their right, even their life’s mission, to make others believe as they do? I think the elephant analogy explains it, at least somewhat. On some level, we all know we’re the blind men, and what we see is an incomplete picture. But it’s easier to tell ourselves that what we see is the whole truth and our search is over. Like getting fat is easier than getting fit, accepting partial truths is easier than seeking more complete answers. Again, this is not an indictment of the human race; like lions who only hunt when they’re hungry, humans are biologically programmed to take the path of least resistance. And it’s only in the realm of higher consciousness that such an attitude causes problems: physical laziness can be troublesome, but intellectual laziness is likely responsible for most, if not all, of the pain and suffering in the world.

When I say it’s easier to believe partial truths, I mostly mean that it creates the least amount of anxiety, far less than admitting ignorance. And we are biologically programmed to keep anxiety to a minimum. So moving towards intellectual honesty and acceptance of our own limitations is difficult, to say the least. An uphill battle to break free of biological bonds, to transcend evolutionary programming. This is ironic, as intellectual honesty—understanding our own limitations—is how to broaden horizons, gain insight, increase tolerance, make friends with the shadow. It’s an existential bind that has no easy solution.

I have no answers. In fact, I would submit that thus far in human history this has been a largely unsolvable problem. But two things stick out for me: the necessity of tolerance, and the relentless seeking of truth. Just as none of the blind men is completely wrong, neither am I, and neither is anybody else. Each partial picture contains something of value. But equally important is the necessity to acknowledge the incompleteness of all views; doing so is what keeps my eyes open and my head out of the sand, moving in the right direction.

Due to the complexity of human consciousness—my own prejudices, beliefs, blind spots, and insecurities—I will never adhere to this path perfectly. But it’s far better to make the effort than to not make the effort. Alleviating anxiety may be how we survive, but intellectual honesty is how we thrive. Without it, we’re destined to a lifetime of missing the bigger picture, of touching an elephant and thinking it’s a rope, then arguing with those who think it’s a tree, wall, or snake.

Yikes.

Why is crying healing?

The short answer is because it’s visceral—it’s a physical act.

But why is that healing? What is it about a physical act that makes it healing?

Only everything. Crying is the body’s natural process of acknowledging and expressing pain, just as laughing is the body’s natural process of expressing joy and happiness. If this process is interrupted, emotions get stuck, and they can wreak all sorts of havoc if they remain unresolved.

Even if your parents thought they were doing you a favor by teaching you not to cry when you were hurt, they did you a disservice. And if you grew up in an invalidating environment where you were shamed or punished for showing “negative” emotion, then you definitely have some stuck feelings that are likely to be causing problems.

The truth is, we all have some amount of stuck feelings; parents aren’t perfect and life is full of trauma and grief. For some, that amount is manageable. But for others, it really does cause a lot of problems.

Here’s a good rule of thumb: The amount of stuckness is directly proportional to how invalidated we were when showing our feelings as children. This is not always easy to determine. Those of us who grew up in invalidating environments tend to be out of touch with our feelings because that’s how we learned to cope with them as powerless children. And being out of touch with our feelings often means it takes a long time just to identify the problem, much less figure out what to do about it.

This was certainly my experience. When I first started exploring my depression as a young adult, I’d go numb when asked about my childhood. I seemed to have a weird amnesia about it, too: I remembered certain traumatic things, but even so, I couldn’t talk about them in detail or put them in any context that made sense, much less evoked any feelings. I actually told some stories as humorous anecdotes and didn’t understand why I’d be met with dropped jaws or quizzical frowns; that’s how dissociated I was from my feelings.

It took several years to work past the numbness,  to start “having my feelings.” Getting to that point wasn’t a conscious process by any means; I had no idea what I needed or how to get it. I just knew that as I searched for ways to feel better, a support base of safe people helped, so I put myself more and more in that path (therapy, 12 Step groups, meditation groups, for example). Once I established a sense of trust with a few of them—which took a long time, as trust is one of the first casualties of an invalidating childhood—the feelings started coming. From beneath the numbness, which had been my predominant “emotion” all my life, pain, sadness, anger, and fear began to bubble through, and the tears began.

Once I started to cry, I felt like I would never stop. I spent many a night curled up on my floor listening to sad music and crying for hours and hours and hours; I actually planned my crying sessions after I noticed that they seemed to result in some relief. I didn’t know why that was so, but at some point I stopped trying to figure it out and just surrendered to the process, which felt like a dam trying to break through inside of me.

The thoughts and emotions I experienced while going through this were very primitive, and terrifying almost to the point of feeling life-threatening. One night I realized that this was what I’d have felt as a child if I’d been able. They weren’t like the feelings I’d repressed as a child, they were the feelings I’d repressed as a child, and they were finally getting the audience they’d been demanding all my life.

I began to understand what I’d been pursuing intuitively. I began to understand that the crying was…necessary.

What I didn’t know was how long the process would last. Once that dam broke, the tears came and came and came. I stayed in this spot for about five years. Oh, life went on. I made it to work, had a social life, appeared normal from the outside. I just went home and cried a number of nights a week. I even looked forward to it. I was reconnecting with very old feelings, and as bad as that felt, it also felt good: I was dealing honestly with some hard stuff, and I was healing.

Then, one day, it eased up. The urge to cry abated, and I had the sense of having come out the other side of something. The pain was still there, as it will always be, but it didn’t have the power it once had. Giving it physical release through crying put it into a normal perspective and made it simply another part, neither good nor bad, of who I was.

Childhood trauma plus years of repression equals, I think more than anything, grief. There is no real way to resolve this grief, in lieu of parental acknowledgement. As very few of us are fortunate enough to experience this, we have to find a way to deal with it on our own. Crying, in a safe environment, is one of the best ways to do that. It completes a process halted decades ago, brings back the parts of ourselves we had to abandon in the name of survival. The simple honesty of it, and the quiet acceptance of the way things really are, is transformative, and necessary for healing and wholeness.

Oh, they cut you in half with a knife, and they give you a band-aid. – Adam and the Ants

In the emotional realm, the hard way is the only way.

To get past pain, you have to own it. There are no shortcuts, there is no way to avoid painful feelings, no way to hyperwarp past grief without disastrous consequences.

What are the disastrous consequences?

Well, Alice Miller wrote a fascinating essay called Adolf Hitler: How Could a Monster Succeed in Blinding a Nation? In it, she makes the case that Hitler’s aggression was the result of being an abused child, that he was “mercilessly and constantly driven to destructive acts by his latent feelings of hatred and revenge.” Of course he was unaware of this. Miller explains: “In order not to die, all mistreated children must totally repress the mistreatment, deprivation, and bewilderment they have undergone because otherwise the child’s organism wouldn’t be able to cope with the magnitude of the pain suffered. Only as adults do they have other possibilities for dealing with their feelings.”

Those repressed feelings are what, as an adult, you have to get at if you want a shot at a satisfactory life.

Yes, of course Adolf Hitler is an extreme example of how abuse affects children. Most of us just limp along through our own lives feeling more like observers than participants. But Miller’s point is that repressed childhood trauma is responsible for much of the pain and sadness in the world. I wholeheartedly agree with her. Many of us carry around this repressed pain like a cast iron weight around our necks, not knowing it’s there, not even questioning its existence, having some vague idea that something’s wrong, but not getting much farther than that with it. At least not until the pain, which keeps trying to get our attention with any means available—addiction, depression, neediness, impulsivity, self-destructive tendencies, eating disorders, physical symptoms, feelings of helplessness, rage, powerlessness and inadequacy, numbness, unsatisfying relationships, and generally feeling like a stranger in our own lives—gets so bad, we have to do something about it. And even then, most of us try like hell to find another way—any other way—than digging into our painful pasts: a new addiction, a new unsatisfying relationship, a new antidepressant. Ad infinitum, until, if we’re lucky, the crack up is so bad, there is no longer any way to ignore the truth.

And what is that truth?

In simplest terms, that our parents didn’t love us.

This reality is so awful, so painful, so devastating, so grief-inspiring, so crippling, so wrong, that we work very, very hard to not face it. As a child, that truth meant death. We had to deny it to survive. Only in adulthood do we have the power to deal with it. But it makes perfect sense that we would rather not, if we can possibly avoid doing so.

But we can not avoid doing so, not if we are ever to heal, to have a shot at wholeness. The only choice we have is to control it or be controlled by it. And the only way to control it is to face it.

And the only way to face it is to feel it.

How do we feel it?

Very painfully.

I don’t mean to make light of this. There’s nothing light about it. But if you’ve gotten as far as facing the awful truth, then the rest is kind of up to you. Everybody has their own process.

Here are a few guidelines that may help:

• You have to be vigilant about your symptoms because what they’re telling you is important; furthermore, ignoring them is the height of disrespect for yourself.
• You have to be courageous, as this pain is deep and scary (thus the lifelong vehement avoidance).
• You have to persevere, as the process can take a long time (and truthfully, is never quite complete).
• You have to have faith in your own resiliency, to trust that there is a new dawn waiting on the other side (there is).
• You have to tap into some sense of your own power (which we all have, whether we are in touch with it or not), and use it for all it’s worth.
• Maybe most of all, you have to want to get through it, to beat it, to win (you can!).

If you don’t deal with your disowned childhood pain, you probably won’t become a Hitler, but you will remain controlled by it. Every thought, every decision, every feeling, is tainted by it, reactionary to it. If you’ve ever wondered why you feel stuck, numb, depressed, anxious, scared, and out of control, look here first. It’s the most positive pain you’ll ever feel. Because once you’re on the other side of it, the sky’s truly the limit.

Lately, I’ve been writing a lot about feeling disconnected from yourself, but I haven’t actually defined what I mean by “disconnected.” I’d been assuming—and we all know what that does—that the symptoms I list such as depression, resentment, addiction, numbness, etc. are definition enough. But one of the primary symptoms of being disconnected from yourself is lacking the self-awareness to recognize the symptoms. So I’m going to back up a step here and talk about disconnectedness itself.

Although “disconnectedness” is my term, I am far from the first person to recognize it. In The Disowned Self, a classic exploration of this issue first published in 1971, Dr. Nathaniel Branden describes “the process whereby individuals become disconnected from their inner experience.” He defines it as “…the problem of self-alienation—a condition in which the individual is out of contact with his own needs, feelings, emotions, frustrations and longings, so that he is largely oblivious to his actual self and his life is the reflection of an unreal self, of a role he has adopted.” This was one of the first self-help books I read many years ago, and I found it extremely, well, helpful in my quest for self-awareness.

Dr. Branden was also far from the first person to explore the disowned self. Sigmund Freud himself observed several “defense mechanisms” people employed to deal with their anxiety, two of the more commonly known ones being repression and denial. And in one of my favorite books related to this topic, Escape From Freedom, Erich Fromm states, “The way to become truly free in an individual sense is to become spontaneous in our self-expression and behavior and respond truthfully to our genuine feelings.” Although the book is not directly about disconnectedness, it treats it as a given, an underlying symptom of an overly conforming culture in which totalitarianism is possible. It’s an amazing book, and I recommend it highly.

In philosophy, alienation is a common theme as well, particularly in industrialized society. In The Lonely Crowd, Reiser, Glazer and Denney talk about the “outer-directed” personality, largely a result of material abundance and consumerism, that bases self-worth on comparison to how others live. They state that “… since the other-directed could only identify themselves through references to others in their communities (and what they earned, owned, consumed, believed in) they inherently were restricted in their ability to know themselves.” The Lonely Crowd also argues that “society dominated by the other-directed faces has profound deficiencies in leadership, individual self-knowledge, and human potential.”

I have long been fascinated with disconnectedness. I am vigilant for it in myself, fully realizing the impossibility of ever completely conquering it. I am also a student of cultural disconnectedness—alienation—a problem compounded, I think, by the advent of the Internet, e-mail, and text messaging. While none of these are responsible for cultural disonnectedness (technology itself being a neutral entity), all have certainly exacerbated the tenuous sense of connection between people. (Note: In many cases, technology has also strengthened human connection, or certainly made that a possibility where it had not existed before. But this is another topic.)

In any case, disconnectedness is a riveting topic, and one important to understand in the quest for healing and wholeness. It’s disturbingly easy to be dishonest with ourselves, and incredibly difficult to be honest. Which is understandable, as our existential pain can be terrifying to confront. But confront it we must, as self-delusion solves nothing and indeed, only compounds the problem. If ever the phrase “knowledge is power” was applicable, it’s here, in the realm of self-awareness.

Confucious say, man who fly upside down have crack-up.

Everyone is always trying to “hold it together.” Our culture values emotional endurance to the point of stoicism. That can be a good thing in many circumstances: when we have to be strong for a child; to make it to work when all we want to do is crawl back under the covers; to stand up to adversity and speak our truth.

But I’d like to make a case for cracking up. Not the variety that causes a total break with reality—and I mean no disrespect to those struggling with this, but only use this crude terminology as an indication of our culture’s negative views of emotional trauma—rather, the kind that forces us into a corner, makes us confront our denial, and demands that we take a good, long, hard look at how we’re living our lives.

Cracking under pressure can be a good thing. A wonderful thing! Like touching a hot stove makes you pull away, painful emotions indicate that something is wrong. Something needs attention. And it will keep demanding attention until it gets it. Cracking up is much dreaded, but it is usually a wake up call, an opportunity to reconnect with long buried, deeply rooted emotional pain, pain that affects every thought, every reaction, every decision, every feeling, every day of our lives.

People often distance from their emotional trauma, particularly if it happened in childhood, when they were powerless to deal with it any other way. By the time these children reach adulthood, such distance feels normal. It becomes easy to say “I’m fine” and believe it, if their hair isn’t on fire. But if a person who believes he’s fine has chronic or recurring symptoms such as outbursts of temper, long-lingering resentments, depression, hopelessness, numbness, addictive tendencies, eating disorders, headaches, stomach problems, neck or shoulder pain, and an overall sense of disconnectedness from himself or from his life, then he isn’t fine at all. In lieu of more obvious trauma—loss or other major stress—all of these are symptoms of old pain that’s trying desperately to get its owner’s attention.

If you’re thinking, “But everyone has that stuff to some degree,” it’s true. We do. But that isn’t because it’s something we need to buck up and live with. It’s because we all have some degree of long buried, deeply rooted emotional pain. It’s part of the human condition. Or, as the First Noble Truth of Buddhism declares, everyone is suffering.

This is not to say everyone needs to crack up to deal with their pain. Many people have manageable levels or are just naturally better than others at finding outlets (no judgment here, just a statement of fact). But it seems that those of us with the most pain tend to be the most stoic about it, the most “in denial,” the most unwilling to admit there’s anything wrong. This is partly because the natural way to deal with childhood trauma is to disregard it; the more intense the trauma, the harder we work at disregarding it. So we tend not to notice it as adults until our hair is, indeed, on fire. It’s also partly because we know, on some level, also very old, that it’s big, scary stuff, and facing it can feel like facing death itself. It’s also because of the emotional stoicism of our culture and a desire to “hold it all together” because what will people think if we don’t?

Yes, there are many factors colluding to keep us from facing our pain. Which is why the crack up can sometimes be the only way to get at it. Sometimes, it’s the only way to reconnect with those parts that are so vehemently demanding attention. And this is why the crack up can be a good thing.

The simplest example of a good crack up I can think of is an addict getting sober. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, “nobody walks into an AA meeting because they’re having a good day.” Much as I disagree with the prevalent attitudes toward addiction, I believe this is a valid statement. For an addict to try sobriety, he generally has to hit an emotional bottom. The chemicals have, for whatever reason, quit working. Once sober, the addict’s buried pain throbs to the surface like a fresh wound. He’s painted himself into a corner with only two escape routes: deal with the underlying causes, or return to the addiction.

Another example of healthy cracking up is the mid-life crisis. One day, a person wakes up and realizes he hasn’t done anything he wanted to do with his life, so he makes some drastic changes. These changes can look crazy from the outside, and sometimes they are, but the motivation is sound: to salvage the time he’s got left. If the changes are merely superficial (as they sadly often are), they don’t accomplish much. But if the changes address  the reasons the person was stuck and unhappy, then they can be very positive.

Anyway, the point is that cracking up often isn’t cracking up at all. If a person who’s felt disconnected from her self and her life finally tries to figure out why and what to do about it, that’s a profoundly good thing, even if it appears from the outside like she’s having a breakdown. For feeling disconnected is the very essence of missing out on the one and only thing that really matters: being present in your own life. If the alternative is soldiering on without that, then those that crack up are the lucky ones.

Have you ever worked really hard at healing, reading and studying and analyzing your emotional pain tirelessly, yet felt like nothing was budging? You may just need more time, but it could also be that you’re addressing only half the problem: the intellectual half.

The 18-inch journey refers to the journey from head to heart, and it is an extremely important journey to take.

Children in invalidating environments disown and repress undesirable emotions. When a child is taught that certain feelings anger or disturb a parent, she learns not to show those feelings; this is how she survives her environment. But if the child has no outlet for those “bad” feelings, if they stay repressed, she also learns not to feel the feelings. This can cause problems later in life.

Say a child watches her father get drunk and rageful. This frightens her, but she can’t go to either parent—the father for obvious reasons, nor the mother, as she is too caught up in her own drama to be emotionally available—and has no other resources. She also has no way to escape the situation. She is a captive audience for this scene that happens a few times a week throughout her childhood. How can she deal with that?

She might tell herself it isn’t that bad, that she’s “overreacting” or “oversensitive” for being angry or afraid. She might tell herself that she’s not angry, not afraid, and that her parents’ behavior is normal, or at least normal enough. She might tell herself she’s selfish for wanting more from them. Or, she might just ignore it as best she can, finding escape routes like books or school or friends, until she can find more effective ones (like addiction, relationships, or running away).

These are all examples of intellectualizing. Instead of having the scary feelings, the child learns to think about the feelings in a way that doesn’t threaten her situation. She also spares herself from having to risk expressing the feelings, as there is “nothing” to express. In adulthood, this emotional repression sets people up for all sorts of bad situations, as they never learned to trust themselves, or how it feels to be treated respectfully.

But feelings are not something people, especially children, have control over. You can’t say, “I don’t want to have that feeling, so I won’t.” But that’s what the intellectualizing process would have us believe. (This is not to say we don’t have control over how we express feelings, because we absolutely do, but that is another topic.)

I certainly believed this. I came to recovery thinking I had a lot of self-awareness. I knew I was chemically dependent, I knew I lacked self-confidence, I knew I was fearful and depressed. I knew I wasn’t good at interpersonal relationships. I knew the family I grew up in was the underlying reason for it all. I knew I wanted to figure out a way to stop feeling bad. I knew, I knew, I knew. What I didn’t know was that all this knowing was an obstacle to feeling better, and not, as I thought, the way to fix it. I didn’t need more knowing; I needed more feeling. I needed to gather up all those disowned, intellectualized feelings and allow them into my awareness. But since I believed those feelings were the whole problem, I avoided them vehemently. Little did I know the avoidance was the real problem, and not until I made that eighteen-inch journey from head to heart did things start to change for me.

I can’t remember how this first happened. I think because owning feelings is a messy, non-rational process, it’s hard to pinpoint and even harder to describe. But I can say that it was a gradual process, starting with a supportive environment of people who encouraged “emotional exploration.” Slowly, as I proved capable, to my own amazement, of surviving snatches of feelings that I had believed on some level were unsurvivable, I took on more and more, until I had finally exhausted much (but not all, as this is a lifelong adventure) of what had once felt like a bottomless pit. It’s taken several years and has involved lots of crying and lots of full-body, gut-level acceptance.

For the 18-inch journey is, more than anything, a physical process. Intellectualized, disowned, or repressed feelings are accompanied by a sense of numbness or disconnectedness from yourself; owned feelings are not. Owned feelings are visceral feelings. This is why crying is healing: it brings the disowned feelings into the physical realm, where they can be fully experienced. There is a sense of centeredness, of rightness, of clarity. Sometimes, there is also a desire to avoid a feeling (as it’s scary or painful), but if the other aspects are present, it’s important to stay present and give the feeling the attention it deserves.

The thing is, if we don’t undertake this journey, we stay stuck. It is not possible to avoid disowned feelings. They’re in there, and they’re going to come out one way or another. The only options are to address them directly, or experience their consequences indirectly in the form of depression, addiction, disconnectedness, unsatisfying relationships, power struggles, and the like. If you don’t own your feelings, they own you. This is the simple truth.

Finally, I think it’s important to be clear that I’m not making an anti-intellectual argument here. I’m not saying that understanding in and of itself is an obstacle to healing. Intellectual understanding is as important as owning feelings. The two go hand in hand, equal partners in healing. Both are necessary. Yet you can have all the knowledge in the world, and without emotional ownership, nothing ever changes. That is the eighteen-inch journey, and if we don’t take it, healing will remain forever out of reach.