X-posing the Fallen Individual

Inner Enactment of Avoidance

 

Flickering Triggers

 

The way passion glows sometimes in its exquisite

sculptured lamp glass over the stair-well,

lights up but flickers. or it’s stuck on,

or is unresponsive or it’s all of this at once,

to the point of cognitive dissonance, until the oldest

part of me sees my travels into an intimate

dark as dangerous, stumbling into blame

cursing at an unintended pain, tripped up,

or lying unconscious in the shame.

But now in your embrace I can better navigate

(in love and playfulness) this unfathomable

wiring and a faulty switch.

 

 The Burdened  

Erratic, Fragmented, Avoidant

 

“We all need to feel safe in the arms of another appropriate mammal.” Steven Porges

 

Automatons are sophisticated machines but know little about being “present” and so lack the capacity to Attune. Wiring that allows for deep, non-verbal bonds of communication and connection—if it has been installed at all—is so thinned down that they can only mimic comforting words and twist their faces into something they think looks like a heart-felt response but—for mammalian Hearts—feels predatory and frightening.

This is not necessarily a deception. And Heart-drama is never about blaming parents. On their plane of physical existence, some may be quite impressive and even have a PhD in frozen and one-dimensional things.  But since they can see only ice, they are unmoved by waters cascading down the moonlit mountains. How can we expect them to know a child’s deepest subjective, ever moving internal seas of longings, fears, and hopes, dreams and imaginings? When they can’t see what is emotionally messy and wet, how can we blame them for blindness to what the Child’s Heart desires? It’s not in their purview.

However, the wounds are real.

When there is no Heart-felt awareness, there can be no intention of really getting to know their children. This creates a Burden, as you might imagine. Bottom-line: Automaton parents produce Burdened adults or little robots. Of course, they do.

Why this painting?

It is uncomfortable to say aloud that our family traumatized us. Especially if we were not obviously abused or beaten, it can be hard to believe, even to consider that emotional neglect and unresponsive parenting wounded us. The family did its best, so how can I fault them? What is wrong with me that I want to blame them? Suck it up. Grow up. These may seem like “rational” self-criticisms, but it all misses the point. We have been injured. And we need to know that we have been wounded before we can heal. This painting wonders if you are carrying such an old wound?

Martin Heidegger described our need for “un-concealment.” He criticized the technological age for reducing our reality and our authenticity to a “standing conserve,” where everything becomes raw material for manipulation, where all is objectified, and so is available for utility and control. In such a world, we yearn to be unconcealed, to be understood as more than a mere correspondence to what is already known or to what our ego thinks (or thinks it knows). We all need be more than an accurate account, or a tally of our accomplishments or list of our possessions.

What seems certain and knowable is a Fallen world delusion, a way to conceal, to restrain our spontaneity and creativity, to concretize, and to replace our fullness and freedom with a cultural interpretation.

Loving-playfulness is the primary way of uncovering the Heart, letting all the innate capacities in us and all our messiness rise to the surface. But if we are Children of the Automata Family, concealment, even dissociation seems “normal. But it is not natural. It fragments us. At some deep level, when we are not seen in the Inside-out or the Upside-down, we remain frightened animals who have no safe place to shelter and regulate.

Inside out:

Some humanoid families are icy, never dramatic. Others windmill around in loud and painful ways. Either way, as children we are Burdened by the inability to self-regulate, because it wasn’t shown to us. We are forced to either dismiss our own emotional needs, to tamp down our sadness and our panic, or to flail in uncontrollable currents.

Playing at Love.

Playing. We can become amazingly complicated in our obsessions and fixations, in our attempts to hold on to someone. We can be wildly relentless and expressive in a moment of desperation. Or, going to the opposite extreme, with a stony coldness we can lack expression. Or we may go both ways, on and off, driven to excess followed by shut-down and self-erasure.

At its essence, Playing at Love is drinking the drug of an energized fantasy of connection, a driven seeking or “playing at” relationships without real intimacy. It’s superficial, without authenticity or empathic tenderness. Though the performance may seem to be about an object of desire, about love, it’s not, in truth, about anyone else; it’s about us and our past. We “play” (game) at love, driven by the pain. We “play” hard and become exhausted. We perform until we become played out.

Upside-down

Automatons operate according to predictable algorithms that they pass along from generation to generation. For example, if you are the Golden Child raised with ample surplus resources available to an upper income family, parents may excel at supporting what you do, what you have, and what others think of you. Showering you with all the commodities the Name Brand society can provide (designer clothes, youth activities, themed birthday parties), they may celebrate your moments of perfection, as they define it. Perfect grade scores, perfect successes, playing perfect roles.

No wonder Goldens sometimes seem happy to avoid and cut off from anything that might interfere with the accolades.

If we are not Golden, or if family is icy and chaotic, the Burden can be much more obvious. Either way, we can’t have the fullness of being-in-the-world.  We are top down or bottom up. We are outside or trapped in an inner hell. We are erratic, or we are rigid. We are one but not another. Or both in wild swings.

Many of us are Burdened, living life without mindfulness. Unable to stop thoughts from looping and obsessions from intruding day and night, we cannot shift emotional states; thus, when we do feel states of sadness, panic, and anguish it will feel permanent. When we don’t feel (numbed), there are constant tensions in the body, and flesh can grow hardened like metal.

Many people with such saddled Hearts look “normal” on the surface because they have perfected the disguise. Yet they are in and out of a hyper-aroused and/or hypo-aroused state. They may work diligently at staying blind to what is occurring, and demand the same of others, but that is unsustainable. Because beneath the appearance, unconscious patterns run amok, throwing them into fights or flight or resentful submission or addictions and distractions.