The subject of healing has once again become a profitable, popular one.
Four years ago on July 6th, I found myself drunkenly perusing the contents of CityLights Books in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. Having finished up my day at Neuroscape conducting basic-level neuroscience research for the development of the now widely-used Headspace app, I was three pints deep in a three-piece Italian-cut suit with a man on vacation from the Canary Islands I’d just met in Vesuvio, the iconic former beatnik haven and bar next-door.
I remember that it was July 6th because the Spaniard I spent the afternoon occupied with would, later that evening, invite the man who’s couch he was staying on to Vesuvio, and that man would two years later become, for approximately five drunken minutes in the grand scheme of life, my fiancé—a centering eye of an undoing storm.
Overlooking Columbus Avenue on the bookstore’s second floor, I happened upon a collection of poetry with a title that nothing has since surpassed in truthiness: The Performance of Becoming Human. I chuckled at the fleeting salience of God calling me out like that, and bought it.
In our hyper-awareness of our presentation in the world, our interactions, on a screen, behold, my following; the people, they really love me, it would seem we have become equally perceptive to the performing world in own heads as well. At some necessary juncture, the nature of the charade-ing becomes explicit to us.
Thusly, this is a note on healing.
The felt finality in brokenness is often rooted in the possession of very simple, original wounds. Though some of us deeper than others, we all have them. Inevitably, these original wounds are intended healthy attachments severed through death, or emotional unavailability, the absence of a validating model of attunement.
On this, a deeply embodied child, in a codependent family system, will often learn it is in their best interest to ignore their body to survive; scarcity of recognition, of self-regulation, becomes familiar.
The devastation here lies in the wholeness of what the body is for.
The body, in its constant alertness promulgated by the central nervous system, allows us to receive informational cues from the environment, designed to then motivate actioned response. Sadly, to ignore the body (with or without conscious awareness) is to irrevocably dissociate from the feeling of a foundational self.
We are elegantly social creatures, designed to internalize and replicate all we perceive around us and turn it into schemas, or scripts, for what safety and survival should look like. We do this primarily, among other things, through working memory: the absorption, consideration, and internalization of the behavior modeled around us—as well as explicit and implicit echos of the culture, sensations of permanence—in compounding simultaneousness.
Of course, the process never quite does look that smooth on the inside of an actual life.
The ego, in its largely successful purpose to maintain an outward-facing confluence of self-concept, seeks to contain the incongruence of dissociation, created by a willful self-protective ignorance. We learn to mask suffering as chosen pleasure; adding yet another new layer of familiarity to codependence.
In pursuit of this maintenance, the ego begins to fragment. A once-grounded Pangea of selfhood begins to splinter, new islands cropping up in the topography of personality and dysphoric self-perception. The mirror that we have had begins to lie, warping what Brené Brown has put so well; the story we tell ourselves.
Our feelings, our feeling-states, are not meant to be convergent or coherent, but rather informational. In this way, we follow the ancient lines of humans immemorial, toward sharing our incredibly distinct, strange realities with one another.
Intimacy in language is the most foundational form of community—regardless of epoch.
I’m not referring to a sexualized, reductive intimacy we see uplifted in today’s culture, spun by a paternalistic puritanical ideology. Fantasies of carefree wealth, an unknowable world without obligation, abound.
“Happy couples,” as they are known and worshipped, with matching spray tans and inexplicable wealth with no trace of a grounded reality somewhere in Bali, blissfully and eternally captured for the cultural capital of social media, leaving all to wonder about, and then feel threatened by.
How did they know? Will I ever have something like that? This has got to be a scam, or at least photoshopped. Right? They don’t love me like that, am I just not enough? Is there just something wrong with me? Why is it so easy for some?
These feigning notions of intimacy lead us astray, deeper into manipulation and insufficiency and victimhood, because the game is rigged in precisely the ways bell hooks said it was.
The rigging is such that our inability to return, to a measure of intimacy as community in language, comes, I believe, in the arbitration from our deeply intuitive capacity for giving and receiving to one another.
The cult of personality, the religion of you or I so relentlessly uplifted by the culture, still further entrenches us in a delusion of emotional immaturity and abject poverty of spirit. I do it all the time.
We have—in a culture of screaming into the void and inaccessible over-abundance and first world problems and instant gratification; in between I am a very important person and yet never good enough—lost ourselves, in the once sacred act of giving and receiving fully.