Healing together or breaking apart
The choice is (y)ours
Yesterday, I chatted to Simon van der Els, Transition guide, Gaianthropocene wanderer and (Micro)biologist PhD. This kindred spirited interaction inspired today’s brief post.
As is often the case, this is a brief summary of some thinking intended to encourage dialogue. I’m running off very little sleep and am currently full-time parenting during school holidays. This is therefore being written quickly while a very wonderful small human is in bed. I’ll do my best to effectively service the topic, within said enabling constraints.
The TL;DR is essentially this: If we take something like a Gaian view of earth as super organism, and really express our thinking through biologically inspired analogies, we can think of ‘ourselves’ as cells of the superorganism. The super organism is sick (this can be expressed in many different ways). This has resulted from the way cells have combined, organised etc. in relation to a specific teleology / purpose / goal orientation (let’s just suggest this is the narrowness of capitalism that values capital accumulation above all else, self justifies / reinforces and makes possible the privatisation of narrow value and the socialisation of broad / deep losses). This cannot continue. Something’s gotta give (we basically kill the habitability of the ‘host’ i.e. runaway effects of transgressing planetary boundaries, which makes complex civilisation and possibly even complex life incredibly difficult. Or we find ways to transition the goal orientation and better coordinate cellular activity in favour of activities that are self sustaining within biophysical limits. The result is a healthy superorganism). In order to do this, however, we, the cells, have to be healthy. If we are maladapted we cannot contribute to transformation. Therefore, we must work to heal ourselves, in a deeply relational sense, if the whole (gaia / the superorganism) is to heal (recognising, of course, that this ‘self healing’ cannot actually be separated from the whole. Think of this as agent-arena relation).
If you’re interested in a tad more detail, let’s begin.
Healing self
In an episode of Voices with Vervaeke, I shared a little of my ‘healing journey’ (that stuff starts in the second half of the convo).
The summary is essentially:
I had a number of difficult experiences and circumstances in earlier life (the first 16 years for the sake of simplicity)
For a number of reasons, my ‘adaptive response’ was to become ‘hyper-logical’ and shut off ‘negative’ emotions
This enabled me to ‘survive’ said experiences and circumstances (I use the word survive loosely for now)
On many different occasions, I ended up with quite 'serious’, yet unexplained physiological symptoms (extreme stomach pain, IBS, insomnia, chronic neck and back pain, chronic fatigue, post exertional malaise etc.). Some came and went. Others lasted for years
This culminated in 2022 with a ‘Long Covid’ diagnosis, something I battled for almost a year. The symptoms rendered me unable to perform basic daily functions
After close to a year in a post covid hospital program, having every test you could possibly imagine again and again (resulting in no identifiable bio-medical pathology. In fact, quite the opposite. Everything was ‘optimal’), I began exploring different explanations for what might be ‘wrong’
I came across an article from Paul Garner (Professor of Infectious Disease at the University of Liverpool) in the BMJ explaining the fact that, for some people, these symptoms likely result from neuroplastcicity, a mindbody syndrome or a psychophysiolical disorder (a slightly more recent take from Paul here). For those interested, I’m happy to massively expand on how this might be playing out in the populations diagnosed with PASC or LC
This didn’t gel with my at the time understanding of our physiology. It confronted me and many deeply held beliefs
But, I was motivated to find ways forward, so I explored in far more depth
I ended up reviewing a lot of the chronic pain literature that demonstrated what you can think of as full symptom resolution from mindbody approaches (including, of course, the various attempts to explain what, in fact, was going on). This started in the west with folks like Dr. Sarno, and has since been evolved, adapted and continued by many other clinicians and researchers
A few weeks into this I connected with researchers from Harvard Medical School. They’d published a study with impressive results
We connected and chatted. I then started their protocol (they’ve continued to kindly and generously support me since)
Three weeks later I had experienced full symptom resolution. This resulted from deeply expressing, accepting and overcoming emotions that I’d buried so deep I didn’t even know they were there. I generated incredible insights, I saw myself and the world differently (my beliefs changed if you will), and, in a slightly more formal sense, my metaphysics were confronted in ways I couldn’t ignore. This really ‘opened me up’ philosophically. This whole process (this is a nice explanation of Pain Reprocessing Therapy, which is a bit of an updated take on Sarno, Schubiner and other work in this space. I used this specifically to achieve full symptom resolution of crippling neck pain) effectively re-wired my brain, CNS etc. resulting in a massive reduction in fear (fear is typically thought of as the fuel for the sensitisation and the way that safe signals from the body are misinterpreted, which effectively triggers the symptoms)
Although I’ve had some challenges here and there (symptoms that come and go, always connected to fear and following the same patterns observed with such mindbody phenomena), I continue this work. I can feel more authentically again, sometimes allowing the emotions to rise and fall, other times deliberately expressing them. But the result, for the most part, is that I no longer allow them to fester, ‘harden’ and contribute negatively to my overall health
*A quick note: Many folks that working with ‘energy’ use different language and approaches. I have come to believe that their modality is ontologically resonant. By this I mean, it’s working with the same reality, just in a different way (through a different language system etc.). I no longer look at ‘medical’ approaches as being inherently superior. It depends on the specific circumstances, the complexity of the causality etc. I’m happy to expand on the nuances of these brief points, but will leave this here for now.
If you’ve never explored this type of causality / explanation of chronic pain, this video will be useful.
This is a terribly oversimplified explanation, with very limited technical or esoteric language (this is deliberate as a true deep dive is not within my current time-bound constraints).
After my chat with Simon, I now think of this process as bringing me, the cell, back into a healthy balance (or rather, ‘balancing’, because this is an active and ongoing process). I’m adaptive. The result is that I am very likely better able to contribute ‘beyond myself’, which I now think of as necessary for the broader and deeper healing that’s required for real transformation at the level of the global human civilisation (at least halving overall material throughput / energy, while more equitably distributing the benefits and costs of that entire living process).
Healing the whole
This could be approached in so many ways. But today I’ll keep it brief.
One of many challenges we seem to face is that we cannot really see each other. By not really seeing each other we cannot understand each other. By not understanding each other we cannot empathise with one another. As a result, we have unproductive and unhealthy tension all over the place.
What we need is productive, healthy tension. We need to work with difference through macro, meso and micro opponent processing. Through this we can and will find better ways forward.
In summary, we need to heal ourselves so that we (as individuals) are open, curious, caring and better able to know and act in meaningful relation to what truly matters. If we keep living as a maladapted expression of our trauma (effectively the way the human organism has responded to difficult events and circumstances, which was likely adaptive for a time, then became a maladaptive), we will be unable to truly come together and productively work with difference that leads to betterment.
God I’d love to dive deeper into all of this with you. There’s so much here. There’s so much to feel, be with and be moved by. I hope we have that opportunity.
With love as always.
…
*The School of Life recently did a good job of articulating this in the context of parenting. For some of you this may deeply resonate, even if you don’t fully agree with every word.
“For almost a century now, societies have been very concerned with trying to give children better childhoods. And the way this mission has primarily been interpreted has been through a focus on the need for parents to be kinder to their children than they were back in the olden days; they should try never to smack them or lock them up in a cellar, beat them up when they scream or scold them violently if they break a household object.
As a result, two things have happened. There has been a huge improvement in the quality of parenting. And, as we may slowly be starting to realise, it’s not been enough.
This is extremely puzzling. How is it possible that children are still emerging from childhood substantially damaged - even though they may have been shown immense goodwill, dad has read them stories before bed every night and mum has carefully organised a succession of playdates?
However, we should cease to expect that the riddle to good childhoods is going to be any less easy to crack than quantum physics or cancer. There appears to be another even stricter requirement for being a good parent than kindness: a parent must get on top of their own issues before the child comes on the scene: in particular, they must minimise the number of things that they are unduly frightened of or threatened or traumatised by in other people - on account of difficult events in their pasts. The parent needs to have dealt with their unfinished business so that their child will not have to live their life through the narrow window of their parent’s projected neuroses and terrors.
Imagine a parent who, though immensely kind, also happens to be in the background (on account childhood pains):
- afraid of men
- repulsed by women
- awkward about their potency
- scared of the success of others
- terrified of failure
- anxious around emotional vulnerability
- gnawingly jealous
- unsure of their intelligence
- worried about being found ‘dirty’
- struggling to accept their own sexuality
So long as they have a gentle manner and take their child to the park a lot, it might look like this would be any of the child's business.
But a golden rule of intergenerational psychology dictates that a child grows up immensely sensitive to the parent’s needs; it has an acute feeling for whatever the parent wants it to be. It is wired to try very hard to avoid upsetting its parent, and out of an innate loyalty, will try to become whomever the parent needs it to become in order not to lose their psychic equilibrium.
The more easily the parent is rattled, the more they cannot tolerate certain possibilities in themselves and in others, the more the child will therefore need to be careful not to grow in particular directions - often at severe cost to their own authentic potential. The unexamined parent will unconsciously raise a child who is silently commanded not to frighten or undermine them. Their care will contain a coded command: ‘don’t remind me of my terror of incompetence’. Or: ‘don’t evoke my problems around success’. Or, ‘we cannot go anywhere near my fear of failure or masculinity or femininity….’ And as a result of this oversensitive legacy, the child will end up feeling - without knowing where the feeling has come from: ‘I am not allowed to be too powerful.’ Or, ‘I can’t be too pretty without causing some sort of upset.’ Or: ‘there’s something not quite right here about being a boy - or a girl.’ Or: ‘I’m not allowed to have success in sex.’ Or: ‘It doesn’t feel nice to make money.’ Or: ‘It’s simply not an option for me not to make a lot of money…’
The child won’t be able to see that the imperatives in their own minds derive from the mind of someone else. They will end up beset by a host of requirements that they cannot trace back anywhere beyond themselves. They will just fail every single exam (despite being by nature very intelligent); or feel guilty if ever they look nice, or grow acutely concerned about being sexual, or work every minute of the day or fail to take pleasure in any physical activity or never stop crying or think of themselves as chronically fragile.
Classes for parents tend to focus overwhelmingly on the practical requirements for the first few months of a new life. In a better organised world, we would take new parents aside and put them through a much more arduous set of examinations about themselves. We’d say to them in effect: What threatens you most? And why? What is your unfinished business with your early life? What frightens you in yourself and in others on account of traumatic feelings that you’ve been in flight from in a childhood that you may not have understood as well as you should? There is nowhere to hide in the crucible of the parent-child relationship; no jagged edge in one generation will fail to make a cut in the next. We can strive to be the sweetest parent in the world, and bake the loveliest biscuits, but unless we have had the courage to understand our fears, we will be almost certain to bring up our children inside an invisible cage defined by all that we have failed to make sense of and overcome in ourselves.”