I’m kind of starting to think that my feelings don’t matter. At least not as much as I’ve been led to believe.
Increasingly, I’ve been having conversations with friends about people who turned down plans because they didn’t feel like going out, then later complained of feeling lonely. Others talk of people who moved out to the country during the pandemic, then found that it was kinda boring out there in the woods with no friends. On the opposite side of the spectrum, other friends complain that they are no longer able to handle others’ chaos and shut out that which “doesn’t align” or whatever therapy-speak we’re using these days.
You know how if you stare at yourself in the mirror for ten minutes you start to hallucinate? I think we’ve been doing that but with our internal experience. Under quarantine, there was nothing but our own minds to gaze into like reflecting pools. And now, somehow, we’re shocked when we look at the outside world, not realizing that our sight has been distorted from our previous staring.
Like, even just personally…I left my umbrella at home and, more quickly than I care to admit, understood it as some sign that the day—if not the week, if not my life—was screwed. I knew that in a day, if not an hour, that feeling would go away. I had learned the deep breathing exercises. Completed the emotional intelligence trainings. And yet, no matter how I self-regulated, I couldn’t seem to stop this overwhelming sense of me from bubbling up.
I’ve allowed a grandiosity to my interiority that I’d find tedious in another person. Years of Instagram Therapists telling me that my emotions are valid or whatever has led me to consider each and every whim as some sort of case to crack. I’m convinced that a feeling is something to manage, acknowledge, or respond to. And once I “solve” the emotion, I guess, I’ll feel comfortable again. (?)
When I say “comfort,” I don’t mean hygge or heated blankets or warm showers, but an emotional sort. The kind of reaction we’ve come to know as “protecting your inner peace.”
“Comfort separates you from reality in a very direct way…comfort can lull you into a dangerous tranquility.”
Somewhere in the last few years, it seems swarths of us became convinced that not only is emotional comfort (here’s to feeling good all the time) possible, it is our right — achievable by self-care, by therapy, by “boundaries,” by if you can’t love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love somebody else?
As we embark on this mission, there’s some slight recognition that our interiorities are, to other people, somebody else’s interiority. And I guess that’s why we’ve been going around honoring other people’s emotions (their right to peace): so that, in turn, they’ll acknowledge our own. My friends parent their kid with the mantra: I can see that you’re really upset right now. I text friends: take all the time you need!!!!!!!
And I’m not saying that feelings don’t matter at all. I’m not taking some kind of conservative “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” stance towards mental health here. Obviously, there is real psychic pain in the world. Obviously, I don’t believe that opening a window and going for a walk is the cure for depression. But I am doubtful that consistently prioritizing emotion makes us any happier.
When emotion becomes both marker and judge of experience (“why do it if it doesn’t feel good?”), we become trapped by feeling. Anxiety becomes a boundary, as opposed to a signal. We’ll never have that tough conversation or make that move or crash children’s karaoke and half-rap Cake’s “The Distance” into a microphone. (Just a theoretical example, of course, that last one.) “Self-care” is now just a roundabout way of saying “self-soothing.”
The thing that intrigues me most about “self-care” (and its ever-elusive destination, inner peace) is that it came into contemporary discourse around the same time as trauma-speak. Last month, New York published a profile of Bessel van Kolk (author of “The Body Keeps the Score”), which aimed to explain how trauma became “the dominant way we make sense of our lives.”
In her explanation of van Kolk’s work (which I’m assuming you know and therefore won’t delve into — but if you don’t, click here), author Danielle Carr wrote:
Widening trauma to include both acute and developmental stressors transformed it from a “you have it or you don’t” binary into a spectrum. The result is if everyone’s body is keeping the score, what that score actually adds up to starts to get less clear.
Basically, “trauma” has become so broad a concept as to become practically meaningless. In the words of one of my all-time-favorite tweets: peeing is a trauma response to drinking too much water.
As Carr explores why the acknowledgment of psychic pain has proliferated throughout culture, she comes to the conclusion that:
For a liberal politics of inclusion founded on claims of injury, what could be more useful than a way to turn that injury into biological trauma, something objective, observable, and measurable in the brain?
Van Kolk’s work, she asserts, was successful because it gave people validation of their pain — empirical evidence that could prove, indeed, Their Experiences Had Changed Them. But evidence of these changes didn’t make them go away.
In her reporting, Carr spoke with an assistant at a van Kolk retreat who explained how this understanding of trauma (“trapped in the body as a reflexive wince stuck in time — manifesting as a shoulder spasm, for example, when someone hears a word that reminds them of the traumatic event”) could change the world. The assistant claimed that if we release ourselves from the cycles of “war, violence, and poverty” that induce trauma, “someday soon [...] finally, we will all become clean.”
The twinning ideas of “someday soon” and “cleanliness” haunt me. As I read the New York piece, I was reminded of an essay by Will Self, published in Harper’s in 2021, with a similar subtitle (“How everything became trauma.”)
In his swim around the traumasphere, Self writes that:
part of what gives modern trauma theory its appeal is precisely its covert importation of Judeo-Christian redemptive eschatology: a grand narrative of human moral progress in which suffering is an essential motivation for all the principal actors.
And, uh, yeah, I second that.
Not only is suffering essential in Christianity (cue: Jesus, cue: cross), redemption is just out of reach. Salvation is a thing that is coming, rarely something possible right this second. The Rapture can only be (*will always be*) a thing in the future. If it didn’t come when we predicted, we mispredicted. If the lord doesn’t answer your prayers in this life, you’ll be rewarded in the afterlife. This “Judeo-Christian redemptive eschatology” is a narrative, which means that it’s action unfolding over time. But, unlike other narratives, the end never quite arrives.
In his book “God is Red,” Sioux Tribe thinker Vine DeLoria juxtaposes Christianity with native religion, calling the former a “temporal” religion, one more concerned with its history (the belief system’s existence through time) than the land on which it happens. According to DeLoria, “it has been the Christian contention that the experiences of humankind could be recorded in a linear fashion,” and that this timeline leads humanity directly from Creation to Judgment (or Rapture, depending on your level of doomsday fanaticism.)
“If a religion is tied to a sense of time, then everything forming a part of it must have some validity because it occurs within the temporal scheme,” DeLoria wrote. The parts of history irrelevant to the great Western (Christian) timeline simply fall away — and so history and the belief system’s validity become mutually self-supporting.
In one way, DeLoria is calling for a reckoning with complexity, perhaps similar to decolonization efforts in academia: recognition that there is much more story than the dominant one.1
Looping back to Self’s essay on trauma, we read:
in our confusion, we try to reinterpret the experience so as to assimilate it into the ever-evolving narrative of our conscious lives, to make it something that has happened to a self-aware and thinking I, rather than to an inchoate and amorphous swirl of semiconsciousnesses.
Pinning this understanding of Self’s (bit of a pun there for you!) to DeLoria’s thinking on Christianity, I’d argue that when we inherit a Christian understanding of history, we inherit a Christian understanding of self. Like Christian history reinforces Christianity, our personal timelines affirm our sense of self. In other words: our stories support what we believe ourselves to be. And logic flows the other way: we believe that we are what we have experienced.
So perhaps it is our insistence that there is a timeline that can be followed, some clear and continuing sense of personage from Birth to Death, that makes traumatic events so … traumatic. When trauma (in its contemporary definition of *gestures broadly at everything*) inevitably interrupts that timeline, we cannot continue the story that once unshakeably informed who we were.
Linearity becomes interrupted by an “inchoate and amorphous” haunting. You’re riding the subway and everything is fine—-until you remember what he did to you and then, mentally, you’re back there. That’s the vibe. It’s so common that we take it as a feature of life. “Time isn’t linear,” I drawl to friends, and they all nod along like yeah yeah, we already know. But talk of flashbacks is still relatively novel, in the grand scheme of things. And flashbacks that live in the body (as van Kolk’s spasms or winces) is an even newer conversation.
Trauma theory emerged, as most things do, in reaction to what came before. Its rise is not because we’re all just quivering victim complexes looking for a quick ego boost. Somatic therapy and trauma theory are a rally against hard-line rationalism and the long-standing supremacy of Cartesian dualism (the assertion that the mind is quite separate from the body). Trauma theory has done excellent work in making us reimagine ourselves as an entire organism in which all parts — mind, body, spirit — work together. By asserting that the body has a memory, we begin treating “the whole person,” as some medics say.
And, sure, this is good, I reckon. I suppose we’re making progress when we ask why our bodies keep the score. But I can’t shake the feeling that perhaps the more interesting question is: what keeps us from erasing the scoreboard?
In his TED Talk “Is There A Real You?” British philosopher Julian Baggini seems to align with Self’s writing on the self, arguing in favor of this “swirl of semiconsciousness,” or at least the idea of a complex self, one that runs deeper than the dominant story.
Echoing many a Buddhist, he considers the self to be what arises from the meeting of different processes: memories, desires, beliefs, external sensations or stimuli. In Baggini’s understanding, there is no central point that connects all these projects. No small man in your brain or heart that could be understood as a soul or some form of permanent fixture that defines you. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that the self doesn’t exist. Refuting some thinkers who insist that the self is nothing but an illusion because it cannot be located neurologically, Baggini says “the fact that we are a very complex collection of things does not mean we are not real” and insists that this complexity is, in fact, something to be celebrated.
“If you think that you have this fixed, permanent essence which is always the same throughout your life no matter what, in a sense, you’re kind of trapped,” he says. “But if you think of yourself as being not a thing, but a kind of process, something that is changing, then I think that that’s quite liberating.”
I want to believe in this liberation. And I do think it’s possible. But in order to be free of our fixed understanding of self, it seems we first have to free ourselves from the project of understanding. In short: we have to admit that trauma-based narratives are not our whole story.
Whenever I’m in a particularly self-indulgent mood, I think of one of my best friends, who constantly mutters, “The sooner you realize that everything in the world is covered in shit, the happier you’ll be.” He means this literally and he means also this as a sort of twisted Zen practice. Everything is covered in shit. Like, literally. And yet…we’re also covered in microbes, you know? It’s complex. There’s a lot out there that we don’t perceive.
I’m trying to approach my feelings (my self) the same way.
Perhaps we can begin to view trauma not as an interruption of our personal stories, but an invitation to step into something more complex. The “cure” might not be some distant day when, finally, we all become clean. It could be today. Whenever we realize that though our personal narratives may be covered in shit, we are not the stories we tell ourselves we are.
And that stories, when repeated, can either affirm power or deny it.
Aaah and now you quote one of my favourite lines from one of my favourite films "Comfort separates you from reality in a very direct way…comfort can lull you into a dangerous tranquility" I lie, I could never remember the line but I've told that story about the perils of sleeping with an electric blanket cutting you off from the reality of the cold and thus of homeless people to so many people.
And Will Self - a good thinker but too many fancy words to be a favourite. And in his BBC Radio 4 Point of View about living with dogs he didn't mention the most important thing which is what we as humans can learn about our own ageing and death from living with an old and dying dog.
Apologies if the over exuberance is embarrassing but reading your posts is like meeting someone who ought to have been my friend years ago.