Ask The Analyst



Egoic Mind: What if instead of Gnani … I had a mental dialogue with some famous father’s of modern psychology?

Freud: It would be a sign of dellusional schizophrenia as a result of your dysfunctional relationship with your mother and of course penis envy.

Egoic Mind: Exactly  😉   Let’s roll.  Pulling names from a hat how about a chat with a Somatic Experience Therapist a la Peter Levine field of expertise.  http://www.traumahealing.com/

I find myself trapped in fear as I battle a life limiting chronic illness.  What approach should I do to eliminate my fear?

tiger eyes

SE Therapist: If we look at models in nature we find that by and large predators and prey alike have the ability to move through fear as part of their adaptive coping mechanisms.  But they do so without the burden of a mental story that is fused with old ineffective strategies.  In your case, you would need to work on uncoupling your body responses … which may be a genuine and part of the physical illness … from the mental story of what you believe about what is happening in the moment.

Egoic Mind: The story of ‘I am not enough’ that ‘I can’t handle it’.  But how exactly do you uncouple the fused thoughts from the body sensations?

SE Therapist: The human brain as powerful as it is, can only seem to track a single story at a time. Though it can jump tracks back and forth  between several stories simultaneously, it will track only ONE theme at a given point in time.  So when you notice a physical symptom arise, you make a choice to watch the body sensation and not the mental story.

You notice the quality of what is happening inside the physical form, all of it from the relatively settled places to the highly activated spots.  Name each of them, give them a SUDS value, notice their size texture or shape.

Keep moving around the body; don’t get stuck or pulled into a single trauma.  Notice how things are changing.

By giving your mind something else to focus upon … and beginning to relearn the natural wisdom of how the body is designed to contract and expand around pain … Then you defuse or uncouple the deeply rutted patterns of fear and begin to trust the inherent wisdom of both your mind and body.

Egoic Mind: Wow.  That was cool.  I think there are pieces in that picture that have potential.  Yet I really want to flesh this out from every angle … If I may then thank you very much for your input and move on to the next expert.

Next up from the peanut gallery … an ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) specialist from the work of pioneer Steven Hayes <http://www.contextualpsychology.org/act>.

I’ve practiced the Hayes workbook Get Out Of Your Mind and Back Into Life in full at least twice if not three times over a course of four or five years.  Yet I am unequivocally worse in terms of avoided behaviors and maladaptive strategies than before I started ACT.  What did I do wrong?  Where did I fail?

lily pads

ACT Therapist: Make a commitment.  Break a commitment.  Re-commit.  At some point I would venture a guess you opted to stop your recommitment.

Egoic Mind: No doubt true.  But when the illness came on strong and totally disabled my body and destroyed my career … All of my previous values became challenged and certainly my previous goals were out of reach.

ACT Therapist: Precisely why we do the value and goals exercise as a lifelong practice and not a document that is carved in stone that we forever try and match our circumstances to an old doctrine.

Egoic Mind: What I found impossible during my tenure with ACT was inviting old Aunt Ida into the house … I am forever holding my hand on the door trying to push her out and subsequently missing my own life party going on all around me.

ACT Therapist: Ah yes, the querry of what if poor old Aunt Ida had an uzi machine gun.

Egoic Mind: Exactly.  It is the continued believed thought that if I somehow allow these body sensations to flood over me … That I will die.  I have been ineffective to take that leap despite the wolves biting my backside at the cliff’s edge.  I have not flipped the switch on my willingness dial.  However, I must say my Zen is in excellent form and I can watch a leaf float down a mental river forever.

ACT Therapist: I can imagine that many of the mindfullness practices come easy to you during the moments of relative peace and calm in your body — when the illness is not in breakdown — but when your body becomes highly activated you still turn the keys of the bus over to another monster sitting in the galley.

Egoic Mind: Quite right.  My Zen is out the window when I am in a bio-chemical body sensation.

ACT Therapist: That’s when it is so important to have the other pieces of ACT well established.  You need your road map to remind you where you want to go so that you realize when you have turned around and are no longer driving the bus.

Egoic Mind: Ultimately, I think because my health got so bad and I was so far from where I had hoped to be, that I think my ACT work made me feel like a failure.  Just one more thing that didn’t work.

ACT Therapist: If you expected ACT to inoculate you against illness and the experience of loss and trauma then it does become another failed attempt at ‘cure’.  Yet can you consider that your ability to continue to pick up where you are and move forward despite your hardships and physical circumstance may be in part from the work and experience you had practicing within the framework of acceptance and commitment?

Egoic Mind: I had not looked at my situation from that angle until now.  Deep bow of thanks.  The fluidity of a values exercise seems particularly appealing … If not also frightening at the same time.  There is something here for me to embrace … Or re-embrace  😉  as it were.  Thankyou.

Ahh the next name from the hat is Dr. Skinner.  How might a Skinnerian address the same issue of inflexible fear?

purple stone ratSkinnerian: Despite what you are thinking I wouldn’t recommend locking you inside a box!

Egoic Mind: Good to know.  I get that your behavior model is a bit sterile.  Yet I’ve vetted cognitive models for years without lasting results…. So what would your approach be?

Skinnerian: During the course of an experiment … Oh I’m sorry TREATMENT!  I get the two confused.  The experimenter … Oops Therapist, you see I really haven’t fleshed out my research as an applied science, I’m more at home in the rat lab.  But I’ll try and draw a conclusion from my work in attempt to create a paradigm that is beneficial for you.

First, I would point out the need to fine tune the reward system.  As circumstances change, and the external environment presents new challenges like an illness or loss of career, then your reward system must be geared to new desired goals.  If lever pressing is no longer a desired outcome due to present conditions then look around the cage and see what IS available … Button pushing, bell ringing, maze running … When you find the new set of potential deliverables you need to devise an appropriate positive bio-feedback loop.

I’m guessing you have been focused on the electric shocks of experimental punishment which goes well beyond simple negative reinforcement, to the point your poor Norwegian hooded is completely paralyzed with learned helplessness!

Egoic Mind: I must say that I am surprised, but that does make sense.  I get what you are saying and I do honestly believe the benefit here for a carrot inside the experimental design would be an asset.  Thank you, sir.

I dare not call upon a Freudian given my own past experience and bias, yet a Jungian’s therapeutic approach is probably closest if not elevated to the next level as it embodies a certain compassion and even sense of wholeness if I remember correctly.

So these avoidance behaviors and maladapted strategies of the physical reality of the autonomic nervous system dysfunction .. How would you  interpret this and what would you recommend?

yin-yangJungian: The web of interconnected attributes and circumstances are no doubt vast and while it would be a pop-psych disservice to try and propose a simple explanation or course of treatment, let me see if I can suggest some interesting strands from the overall tapestry that you may want to take time and examine more closely at your own pace.

Each of the current behaviors, adaptations, personality  traits, however you choose to categorize them, are one end of a very long thread that has been woven into your tapestry since birth.  Depending on your experience the thread may have changed color, intertwined with other threads, picked up stitch patterns from other weavers along the way … However it happened, you can with patience trace the thread back to its origin.

With a family of origin of abuse, neglect or predation … It is often the case the child will pick up coping mechanisms to try and fill the void as best she can.  Sometimes you will see amazing examples of transference as a result of repeated assaults on the developing psyche — whereby the physical pain and trauma continued into adulthood even though the original abuse or abuser is long since gone.

Egoic Mind: Even if that was a possibility … How do you then address the dysfunctional transference?

Jungian: Through a gentle reintegration of power back into the locus of control of the individual.  There is a slow process of rebuilding trust relationships, of re-establishing her resources that were not present when she was a child but that she now carries like a diamond in her pocket that she may be completely unaware that she possesses.

Through small steps and approximations she can clear the dust that has covered her solid foundation and begin to build for herself a new home where she feels safe and secure.

Egoic Mind: Any blueprints for how this construction project begins?

Jungian: I’m sorry, our time is up for today.

Egoic Mind: So funny.  And I completely understand, there are no easy answers yet I truly appreciate your time to distill some of the great teachings.

Jungian: In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

Egoic Mind: You sure that was Carl Jung and not Carl Sagan?

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As the universe is so kind to provide me homework to immediately practice my teachings, it should be no small wonder that after tapping out the prose this morning on my little PDA when my eyes were just waking up, that I would go downstairs and after eating a small bit the internal storm would hit.  The rapid gastric emptying, the heat, and an attack of ménière type symptoms to throw my ears and balance off kilt.  All of this on top of the coat hanger pain so familiar in dysautonomia flares.

So what do I do?  Which analyst do I turn to?  Despite my feelings about second amendment activists, I chose the shot gun approach of ALL of them in turn.  I took my belongings outside and sat in meditation as I went through each of the pieces one by one.  Noticing my body, remembering my values and remembering that part of the fear could well be transference from an old body trauma.  Yet despite my best efforts the symptoms raged wildly and I walked slowly upstairs to change my shirt as our weather was being even more unpredictable as my body, and sat crouched on my bed next to my husband who was trying to sleep.

Tears and more tears, thoughts of complete and utter failure.  There was Nothing I could do in the moment to make the situation any better.  I had lost even the perceived control that should come with having a plan and was, as always lost in the throws of a dysfunctional autonomic system.  With each deep breath, I could feel the pain in my body as I tightened and contracted around the expanse.  I knew it would pass, there was no delusion about my situation, but what was there was the knowing that it would certainly come back again.  For me … this is the way my body works.  And it would seem for the moment, this is the way my mind works (perhaps against me) while my body is trying to work out its allostatic systems.

In the moments of seeking the deepest truth, I am always drawn to Advaita.  So as the din of distress died down just a degree, I opened my little PDA and tapped out an inquiry with my inner guru.

§

Egoic Mind: I am brilliant and strong.  I face this shit every damn day … Yet nothing NO THING helps.  What in God’s name am I suppose to do to overcome this?

Gnani: Welcome to the non-dual teachings.  In your experience … Are you as author in control of your circumstances or responses?

pawn and tree shadowEgoic Mind: No.  Damn no.  I seem to be only a pawn.

Gnani: Can the pawn become the queen’s bishop?

Egoic Mind: Not unless it crosses to other side.

Gnani: Which it can only do one step at a time.

Egoic Mind: Yes.  But it looks like I as pawn will never reach the other side of the game board.

Gnani: True.  The game may end before the pawn ever reaches the other side, yet even so it cannot simply stop being pawn and stop playing the game.  However it CAN apperceive that it IS in fact simply playing a game.  Whether it is upon the board or in the cardboard box it does not change the nature of pawn on the level of form.

Egoic Mind: You are trying to tell me that I have nothing to lose.

Gnani: It is true.  But as long as you still believe that you do … That you as chess master should be able to control the game then you will continue to suffer.

Egoic Mind: But the game hurts my body and terrorizes my mind and I feel trapped inside this endless chess tournament of terror.

Gnani: It is NOT that you believe the tournament is endless, it is that you fear it is all coming to an end and YOU as pawn have failed to reach the other side if the board.

Egoic Mind: Checkmate.

Gnani: As long as you believe you are pawn and not in fact a movement of The Game at large you will feel helpless and powerless at all of the bishops, rooks, knights and other royalty around you.

All of your efforts and efforting to try and find new ways for the pawn to move … To strategize in attempt to win the game through better tactical maneuvers … Will fail because the pawn is bound by the rules of The Game.  It cannot move all around as queen or castle.  It cannot jump or capture what is not directly adjacent to its place.  If it tries to be anything other than its form as crafted it will suffer.

tree hugging

Egoic Mind: Pretty bleak picture you paint.

Gnani: Only if the pawn is delusional.  If the pawn in an instant realizes that it has no feet to move upon its own power, that in fact it is only the hand of Grace that decides which piece to put in place and when to play it … Then the pawn is ‘free’ to enjoy the game.  In fact it need not even concern itself with what side is winning or at a loss because it can do nothing on its own to level the playing field.

From this place of resting in the grasp of Grace, the pawn is like a great oak tree in an old growth forest.  It can enjoy the breeze, the birds, the blue sky and the breath of life that enters its form.  For it knows the source of that sacred breath and it knows that it is forever in the perfect place, doing the exact thing it was designed to do.

Egoic Mind: Of all the teachings, it is my experience of Grace that transforms any moment into a miracle.  As pawn how do I practice this teaching so I can remember my true nature during tumultuous times when I seem apt to forget.

Gnani: Hold a pawn in your pocket … Or better yet hug a tree.


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