What is comfort and what's so wrong with it?

A few months ago I decided to start telling friends more about what I think about the world. Even though a part of me is frightened of losing friends and alienating people as as result, in my heart of hearts I know that for me to keep growing I have to get more real, get more fully aligned with my true self and actually live, instead of pretending to live!

Its a tough mission but I wonder what the point is otherwise?

The date of the book group meeting arrived and I decided that my book group friends, (who are all trained therapists!) would make a good and thoughtful place to start. I began that evening, before the others joined us the following day, by talking about comfort with my host and her husband. To my surprise they weren't immediately dismissive and got the point of what I was saying (though I'm sure they felt as though I was going a bit far!) they were kind and respectful and listened till late at night. They asked pertinent questions that helped me clarify my ideas as did the rest of the group the next day. Apart from sharing my ideas with my closest friends, people who already know and have discovered this stuff for themselves I realised that I hadn't shared much with the other people in my life and I knew that as I do want to communicate this stuff and of course fear was at the bottom of this avoidance, as ever!


Thinking about the search for comfort as a major organising principle upon which so much of human activity is based seems strange at first. After all, we all want to be comfortable, what's so awful about that? Its easy to see though, how our drive to attain comfort, at least at the superficial level, is a negative propellant by thinking of it as being on a continuum....


People use a variety of means to manage their feelings of discomfort, distress, upset and emotional pain. Ever used heroin to numb the terror and pain of being physically and sexually abused by your family throughout your childhood? Hmm, probably not eh? Had a glass of wine or a beer to conquer your nerves at a party? Seem a bit more familiar? Its basically the same thing. In all the significant ways our culture (in other words the families we grew up in) encourages us to manage distress by avoiding it and we have been endlessly creative in developing innumerable ways to do just that. Don't drink,smoke or do drugs? Ever do a bit too much of something? Running, watching telly, shopping, eating, working? Ever wondered why or what you were avoiding by doing those things to excess? In a way its not the thing itself that's the problem its why we are doing it, what our unconscious motivations are and what the implications of these reasons are for ourselves, children, the planet might be if we were able to stop! More on this later...As an aside here; whether people use socially acceptable means to dissociate or not is not the problem, the 'war on drugs' is futile not just because of the hypocrisy involved but because it doesn't so much as touch on the reasons people actually use drugs. This is what I mean when I say the compulsive, ceaseless drive to attain comfort is a negative but exceedingly powerful force in the world, however, resistance is not futile!

In the example I gave above, at one end of the spectrum is somebody regarded as a social outcast, someone who is, temporarily at least, unable to function in 'normal' (!) society. At the other end we see many average, high functioning, high achieving persons. Despite the differences they were basically motivated by the same thing- the flight from discomfort, pain, agony. How much of human activity is just that? When I stop to really consider this question my mind frankly boggles! The drive to acquire more property and possessions, more worldly goods to demonstrate your success- a home, a spouse, even children; all of these are ways in which we declare to the world that we are 'doing well' that we are successful ‘adults’. To a crack addict, 'doing well' is not running out of drugs, not getting sick, not getting caught by the police and successfully numbing all traces of the terrifying traumas within. To someone who is a high flying,’succesful’ professional, the same things apply; unless their work, or health or possessions (including that wine collection!) with which they comfort and numb themselves from their traumatic histories are threatened or taken away they feel fine- not that different from the junkie at all.


We have constructed a culture which is all about not feeling, we are all, as I said in my first post... brought up not to feel- to seek comfort at the merest hint of feelings breaking through our defences. Often people come to therapy because they no longer feel comfortable, or they're in a crisis that, in some way, has brought them in touch with their inner pain. Often this is due to a loss of something that was preventing them from feeling pain and in its absence their pain wells up, overflows and threatens their equilibrium- their ability to feel comfortable. Many people decide to stop using drugs or alcohol, enter recovery and realise they had reasons for wanting to numb out for all that time or they have a child who develops a mental health problem or they discover infidelity in their partner or they lose their job or get cancer or they meet any other major life challenge and the painful truth starts leaking out. And it hurts, I've been there and it really does hurt! Most people want help simply to stop the pain, make it go away so they can continue as normal. Such a goal might be addressed by a short course of CBT available through the UK government's new Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies' programme!

Some of us realise that simply stopping the pain won't bring about profound change and what we need is profound change- a radical rethink of who we are and what made us this way. In exploring that we unearth a journey that takes us deep within ourselves and our histories, it has miles of grief and inevitably demands having to explore pitch dark, scary alleys. At times the journey toward our truth, the truth of who we are and what we have experienced; to discover what lies beneath all our defences is so isolating that we'll need to stop and grieve that too. This journey to regain a full, heart, soul and mind connection with ourselves, the connection we're all conceived, if not born with, is ultimately the only way we can enable ourselves to live and feel as spontaneously as we are capable of. In fact to survive and evolve as a species this is exactly what we need to do! If we gave up comfort seeking and avoiding the truth that the casues of our pain hold for us, both about what has been done to us and what we have done to others, we would be fully aligned with our true selves and free.

Your Sacred Self

"As we search deeper, under our traumas, we also encounter our sacred self. We see how our traumatic history has entombed our magnificence. With this awareness, now unlocked from the unconscious, we begin the process of our enlightenment"

From Your Sacred Self, (www.yoursacredself.com) my dear friend's website.

I love this quote! Learning to see how our traumatic histories have entombed our magnificence is a wonderful,poetic, rallying slogan! Its also a life mission for me and all of us who want to become fully aligned with our greatest humanity and its a beautiful line of poetry too!

So whats to be done....

My friend's feedback on my last post got me thinking! She felt the anger coming through in what I'd written and I agree with her, I am angry! If you're not angry about the ways in which children are abused, whether overtly OR far more insidiously and subtly I can only ask you why not!? If you're not angry about the implications for our future and the future of the environment of all this abuse why not?! What she also did was inspire me to post about what we can do to arrest this apparently downward spiral, so huge thanks to her and hence the title of this post.

Healing our own pain and trauma is the way out of the loop of self, other and environmental destruction, of course ALL our destructiveness has its roots in our ability to not feel, to dissociate. As a species we are endlessly creative in developing dissociative aids, from drugs and alcohol to television; from shopping to..... well, you name it we can use it to avoid our emotions! Even essential or positive things like food, exercise, work or helping others can all be used to avoid, deny or numb our feelings and I've tried them all! (Well maybe not exercise YET). The only way to change our globally destructive trends is for individuals to stop dissociating and start healing the pain that their dissociation is helping them to avoid! How to go about this work? More on this later but in the meantime take a look at:
www.iraresoul.com
Thanks for reading!

Ecological Disaster and The Unloved Child

When I look around at the ecological disaster we humans seem so intent on creating I can't help but wonder what is motivating this destructiveness. Why is it we are continuing to behave in ways that are destroying the resources we completely depend upon for our survival? Why is it that we ignore the evidence that tells us loud and clear that our current rate of population growth as well as our way of life is not sustainable. One doesn't have to be an expert or even particularly well informed to see that there is something very destructive going on and we are all responsible to varying degrees. Its apparent that the planet isn't actually being destroyed, in all likelihood it'll continue to exist, in some form or another long after we have rendered it unable to support our species, so maybe what we're actually doing is eradicating ourselves in an act of a mass species suicide. As a therapist of course suicideality is something I come across not infrequently, I've had my own brushes with suicidal feelings in the distant past, and have known people who have killed themselves as well as survivors of bereavement by suicide. There is a lot written elsewhere on the warning signs of suicide and the meaning of the act but there are certain risk factors all therapists are aware of when working with someone who contemplates suicide. A past history of attempts, having a family member or close friend who has committed suicide, a history of attempts using extreme or violent methods (hanging, stabbing, traffic or rail etc) all increase the risk, as does the presence of a sense of hopelessness about ones future, a generally depressed mindset (though I've also heard it said that its just as someone is slightly feeling a bit better than the severe depression which incapacitates a person entirely that the greatest risk of suicide occurs). So how do all these thoughts about suicide relate to our destruction of our precious resources? Are we suffering from a kind of ecological sociopathy and if so what is its aetiology? What about the idea of anger turned against the self, anger that rightly belongs at the feet of the people who created us, failed to love us adequately and brought us up not to feel the pain of their failures?

Suicide can be seen as the desperate act of the unloved child who, as a result of being unloved believes they are unlovable and knows that life without love is not only intolerable but simply impossible since unless a baby's parents love it it will die. Without their protection, care and nurturance basic physical survival is impossible. We all experienced parents who did not love us fully, did not cherish our deepest, truest selves but whether
consciously or not sought to mold us to fulfill their needs. The first word most babies hear when they arrive in the world after birth is 'Shhhh' after all! An attempt at soothing on one level but also basically an instruction to stop expressing their emotional response to a fairly extreme experience by any definition! In the absence of active encouragement to feel and express our emotional realities we are trained to deny what they are, that they exist and the significance of them from the get go. To cut off from our feelings and therefore our selves (for where does selfdom exist if not in what we feel ourselves to be?) may seem an inevitable part of being a human but we must ask ourselves at what cost do we habitually dissociate in this way? Not just the cost to ourselves as individuals which is obviously massive but looking around us, the cost to our planet and all its flora and fauna. Perhaps if we were able to feel all our feelings, heal the pain of being cut off from them at our parents behest and begin to exist as feeling beings we wouldn't feel so comfortable ignoring the cries of our planet and abusing its resources. Perhaps if we could evolve in this way we'd be able and willing to stop the inexorable rise in population, put an end to our wastefulness and our overwhelming addiction to consuming 'stuff' in order to blot out the painful void of emptiness that not being able to feel and be who we are inevitably leaves us with.

Welcome!

Welcome to The Ratatøsk Blog!

Well this is my first ever attempt at Blogging and I owe a huge thanks for the inspiration to the Chocolate Albatross (we'll have a real menagerie if this keeps up)!

The point of this blog is to disseminate ideas and encourage deeper thought about who we are, why we're here and how we can become fully aligned with our true selves, if this sound ambitious then good!

There are lots of remarkably freindly squirrels in New York City but sadly no red ones, there aren't many reds left in the UK either but they're not quite extinct yet. The reds continue to survive in a couple of places and its because of their rarity and endangered status (and my lifelong love of Squirrels) that I decided to name this blog after the mythical Norse messenger Ratatøsk who ferries messages from the unnamed eagle in the upper branches of the Ash Tree to the Nithogg who lives in the roots!

Well thats my first welcome message, thanks for reading .... more to follow!