Touchy-Feely

[penfield]

"Our feelings are time travelers. We keep re-experiencing that feeling until we go to the root. And then when we go to the root, we can begin to heal."
- M. Gary Neuman (psychotherapist & rabbi)

The above quotation is borrowed from a recent "quote of the day" on a contemporary's LiveJournal. My understanding is that she actually lifted it from the Oprah Winfrey show. The repurposing of Neuman's thought in this space brings us a full two degrees of separation from Oprah, which should be enough to offset her intense psyche-gravitational pull.

First, I should note my willingness to accept Neuman's notion as Truth. Cosmic imagery and mixed metaphors aside, his argument is sound: our deeply held feelings extend all the way to the surface, stick with us, and inform our thoughts and actions every day.

For example, my relationships in the present are no doubt inflected by my relationships from the past. Loss has made me appreciative; Betrayal has made me guarded; co-dependence has made me self-sufficient.

But there's still something that bothers me about Neuman's observation. It's in the second sentence: "And then when we go to the root, we can begin to heal." It includes a clear presumption that those feelings are negative feelings -- that "feelings" are equivalent to "pain." We know this isn't true. For another example, the deep love and respect I inherited from my parents is a more powerful influence in my relationships today than is the hurt from my miscellaneous traumas combined.

Now, maybe I'm simply taking Neuman's quotation out of context. I'm only reading it second-hand, and I'm certainly engaging in some subjective reductionism, which in this case is kind of like fighting fire with fire. But here's why the distinction is important:

Neuman is advocating a regressive kind of therapy where you go back to the source of your anxiety, spray it with Weed-B-Gon®, and go back to your life. But human experiences are more complex than that; feelings are often intertwined, hurt often wrapped in a double-helix with euphoria. Anyone who's seen Back to the Future Part II knows that when you go back in time to set things right, you inadvertently set other things wrong. Kill the weeds and you could spoil the fruit.

Pain is important, because it lets us know when we care about something. I'm all for healing the sick, but we have to draw the line somewhere around the moderately bummed-out.

Of course, Neuman has probably forgotten more about counseling than I ever knew. Psychologists and psychiatrists have been thinking about this stuff for centuries; I've been thinking about it for ten minutes. I'm sure my aforementioned LiveJournal contemporary is right now grinding her teeth and dismissing me as the narcissistic, masochistic, self-righteous self-determinist macho barstool philosopher I am.

All I can say to back all of this up is that I used to be a pretty melancholy guy. If feelings are time-travelers, I was fricking Quantum Leap. And I spent most of my time mulling my feelings and rooting around in the past. It wasn't until I left the old garden and started planting new trees that I stopped being such a drag.

Which brings me to this parting quotation, by a guy who knows something about bad feelings:

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."
- Soren Kierkegaard

Comments

[mearth.livejournal.com]

1. You can bet I'll never lift from Oprah again, unless I own the book she or her guest is quoting from. I wouldn't want to invalidate the psychological clout with popular context.

2. I'm not grinding my teeth, actually. By getting to MY root, I've started to heal my defensiveness and attachment to being right. So there.

3. The word "Regressive" in this context can be misleading... I wouldn't want anyone to return themselves to a time of pain or trauma just to reexperience it and be retraumatized. That is a methodology, but one I don't believe to be necessary. It can be useful to recall a time when we felt the same way in order to recognize that the feeling pattern was learned, and can therefore be unlearned. But what we really want to do is become aware of our feelings in a current situation, and question them:
     - Are they useful?
     - What information are they giving me about the situation?
     - What thought is generating the feeling?
     - Do I even believe that thought, or is it a negative prediction that can't be proven, or a "mind read" about someone else's thoughts (which are not my business)?

4. You're right, the ways in which our past has shaped our current behavior is both positive and negative. Your examples are spot on. That is, when we are talking about conscious behavior.

5. Unconscious behavior: when we take our beliefs and experiences and fears and default reactions as Truth, unaware that we are acting self-preservationally rather than intelligently.

6. You are fortunate that you have inherited deep love an respect. That your parents saw you for who you really were. That they were present with you, as opposed to superior to you. That your feelings - positive or negative, no matter how intense - were never dismissed. That they recognized your innate goodness even when you lost your way. If all this is accurate of your experience, you have received a rare gift. The quote is for everyone else.

7. 2 "normal" causes of Relationship Pain in an otherwise healthy relationship: 1) Hurtful actions, 2) Failing to do loving actions. You are right when you said that the active love (showing it, not just saying it) you received has more of an influence than trauma on current relationships.     But imagine someone else with a relatively minor trauma history, no more than their fair share of useful disappointments and pain from which to learn and grow. And imagine this person has none of your experiences of being loved and supported, no experience of being "enough" just as they are - every failure and disappointment is amplified, overwhelming. And this lack of a coping mechanism is arguably more damaging than any transient painful situation or external trauma. Using your example, killing the weeds of development in a person with a healthy sense of self will indeed spoil the fruit - the person would literally be spoiled and superficial without the experience of suffering. But what of suffering that bears no fruit, only more weeds, growing ever more intertwined, choking off the fruit before it gets the chance to ripen? This is where a replanting and some yanking of the secondary weeds needs to take place.

[enchanted-pants.livejournal.com]

Thank you for authoring such a thoughtful response. Looking back on my original entry, I realize that I come off as a self-congratulatory blowhard, and I do hope you didn't perceive it as any kind of attack against which you needed to defend. And I will try not to make insolent and silly jokes that have nothing to do with the point of your reply, even though I can think of some pretty funny things to say with regard to the "Failure to do loving actions."

Obviously I failed to consider the perspective of the greater counseling community, of which you are a part, and the fact that this community is frequently dealing with some seriously damaged and disaffected individuals who require renovations from the foundation-up. In these instances, it makes perfect sense (At the risk of mixing my metaphors) to treat the roots rather than trim the branches.

The only point of yours of which I am still dubious is your distinction between acting self-preservationally and acting intelligently. As you said in a more recent comment on your site, "the reality of one's inner world is just as, if not more, valid (i.e. "real") than the material world and its physical events." My view is that our beliefs and experiences and fears and default reactions really are Truth -- as true as human beings get -- and if this encourages self-preservation, then it's working correctly. Self-preservation isn't more important than acting intelligently, I think self-preservation is intelligent behavior.

Now, if I understand you correctly, you are saying that Neuman's brand of retroactive (I won't use the word "regressive," since it is so methodologically loaded) therapy is designed to influence those instinctual reactions so that they're not ultimately harmful to themselves or other people. That seems to me like a noble and worthy effort.

[mearth.livejournal.com]

Insolent jokes are fine :)

Sometimes I forget that the differences in terminology I use are in my head only, and need to be explained... You said, "Self-preservation isn't more important than acting intelligently, I think self-preservation is intelligent behavior."

The kind of self-preservation I'm talking about is dysfunctional behavior as a reaction to a perceived, not actual, threat. The behavior was learned when the danger was real, but in the present only serves to push people away and sabotage the things the person wants. "Intelligent" behavior is based on an awareness of the basis for one's automatic reactions, and takes into account other perspectives - which can be extremely difficult, even when the person knows intellectually that what they are doing isn't helping them, they're so wrapped up in years of "weeds" who have a self-preservation mechanism all their own.

[mearth.livejournal.com]

"Instinctual reactions" is a good phrase... you do understand me correctly. My other reply just elaborates that it is not that the primitive instincts we are all born with are harmful, but when and how we learn to act on them can be.