grant

Therapeutic work begins by untangling personal conflicts. These are rooted in biography, with its peculiar disappointments, betrayals, and failures. From the unavoidable traumas of a normal human life, we draw conclusions about ourselves and others. Some of them are useful, but many aren’t. We learn to associate otherwise neutral events with pain, and the world becomes a perfume in which a single whiff returns us to our most searing memories. Much of therapy consists in sorting through the long tail of suffering these events leave in the mind. We smooth out the grooves of old memory, loosen associations that keep us struggling against the past, and draw more helpful paths forward through the sands of the psyche. If you’re lucky in this process of personal restructuring, you begin to notice the vast dunes of sand upon which your private dramas have been etched. As you resolve the painful patterns of your personal history, you begin to notice patterns that more accurately belong to human history. The dunes of your life which you spend your days navigating are shaped by greater forces than your imperfect childhood, ex-lovers, bad bosses, your cracked temperament and crooked personality. Your psychic landscape is also shaped by the sun, by warm and shifting winds, by traces of long-withdrawn oceans. It’s shaped by the trails of travelers who have trudged through the same sands you fear might swallow you forever. And so private suffering leads to something larger. Some grooves in your mind were not etched by parents and exes. Some grooves were etched by millions of years of human evolution. You notice some of your fears, impulses, and lonelinesses speak not to your biography, but to the natural history of the entire earth. This realization changes the texture of suffering. It becomes less isolating and arbitrary. You experience the difficulties of life less as punishment and more as participation. We come to participate in the shifting, hot, horizonless sands of something much stranger and vaster than suffering. The sun sets. The desert resolves into gashes of gold sand and dark purple shadow. Each dune is a knife’s edge cleaving light from dark. A quiet wind drifts past. A grain of sand leaps from the sunlit ridge of a dune into its darker half. Far away, nocturnal creatures begin to stir.

what appears as a regulated nervous system is often the accumulated effect of having been adequately loved, and of regularly exercising one’s ever-growing capacity to love

My hobbies include existing. In my spare time you can definitely find me doing that. I just love it. I do have to warn you however it is a surprisingly expensive hobby

I began reading novels in a kind of heated preparation for all that life in store for me. Somewhere along the way, that impulse deepened, like patina or a bloodstain, into a means of understanding all that has happened. Very much has happened (and crucially) not only to me.

nature loves to hide. what if everything you've ever lost isn't forever gone, but merely temporarily returned to its natural state of concealment? nature hides like a bear in winter, or like love during a brutal argument. absence and loss are two different things

maple syrup is crazy…. i’m sweetening my breakfast with the blood of trees

one of the cruelest parts of attachment conflict is that it doesn’t just estrange you from other people. in repeated stress, your self-concept reorganizes around others’ most uncharitable interpretations of you in their most wounded and wounding moments. attachment disturbance estranges you from yourself. an anxious partner might experience an avoidant’s need for distance as rejecting, cold, and abandoning. “you don’t even care about me!” the anxious person complains. and perhaps the avoidant buys it. over time, they internalize the anxious person’s interpretation: maybe i really don’t care about this relationship. or, worse: maybe deep down i’m not a caring or loving person at all. the avoidant comes to inhabit the anxious person’s worst characterization of them: unloving, selfish, harmful. maybe i’m not cut out for deep relationships after all, they conclude, and begin to avoid and isolate even further. likewise for the anxious person. what begins as a simple need for closeness or reassurance becomes: i’m too much. i drive people away. my needs are problems. in repeated attachment dysregulation, what begins as a basic need (for either closeness or distance) spirals until each person comes to believe they are a bad, impossible person. each becomes colonized by the other’s worst interpretations of them. the result is that each becomes alien not only to the other, but to themselves

something ancient is splitting us into twoness and you’re beginning to look like diverse ecstasies pulsing into life again

many psychological issues begin when we learn neuronal activations corresponding to something like “i made a mistake” can’t fire at the same time as those corresponding to “i am safe.” we learn that mistakes are life-threatening, for example many meditation or therapeutic techniques work by activating both of the previously opposed networks at the same time. we bring up the felt sense of “i’ve made a mistake” at the same time as the felt sense of “i am safe.” this creates the new pattern that mistakes don’t always mean danger; the mistake-sensing networks and the safety-sensing networks become less opposed for example, try holding both felt senses at the same time (your core wounds may vary): - “someone else is upset at me” and “our relationship is stable” - “someone views me negatively” and “i am essentially a good person” - “something went worse than expected” and “my future is livable” you need to get clear on the felt sense of each individual activation, and then toggle between them, until both can be felt as true simultaneously over time, life feels less black-and-white, more fluid, more responsive, and more alive

starting to feel like "independence" doesn't actually exist. there's just natural, unavoidable dependence and embeddedness and how you relate to it: "Psychotherapy does not take dependent people and make them independent; rather, it makes them capable of handling their natural dependency in their best interests. It confronts counterdependent people with their legitimate needs for others. The main differences between attachment in infancy and attachment in adulthood are that, unlike adults, children cannot choose those on whom they depend, cannot ordinarily leave inadequate caretakers, and have insufficient power to influence their objects to change their behavior. Many adults come to therapy feeling like children trapped in destructive relationships and concluding that there is something dangerous about their need for others. Ideally, they figure out during treatment that it is not their basic needs that have been problematic but their handling of them." (Nancy McWilliams, 1999, Psychoanalytic Case Formulation)

the most rewarding thing i know is feeling a new feeling (or an old feeling in a new circumstance) and suddenly a whole slice of previously incomprehensible human behavior and art becomes comprehensible. like, new empathy unlocked. my humanity widens it suddenly makes sense that person (yes, that person) did what they did; why that song slices the way it does; why that social phenomenon erupted the way it did; why in that one fogged-over memory, you erupted the way you did. your sense of yourself expands. your sense of others deepens. the surface area they have to meaningfully interact multiplies. there are more edges where you brush up against the world and other people. there are more surfaces for them to abrade, heal, and mutually transform

Dylan Thomas on words: “There they were, seemingly lifeless, made only of black and white, but out of them, out of their own being, came love and terror and pity and pain and wonder and all the other vague abstractions that make our ephemeral lives dangerous, great, and bearable.”