Internal Referents: the value of Trauma

It's basically a truism that people tend to formulate their relations to the world in terms of what they feel they need in the moment i.e. in terms of short-term gains.

For instance, to want to say something that might offend someone, versus not saying it, puts someone in a situation of a) gaining by acting (or as it is perceived in the moment of acting) by both asserting something that will bolster the persons self-esteem (because every positive assertion presents oneself as a 'knower' even if its only with oneself) and b) resisting a corresponding urge to desist from acting - or not saying - that which the person also feels, usually subsequent to the urge to speak.

A typical and common - or perhaps, the de facto mode of interpreting Self-experience in a capitalistic/competition valorizing culture is to see the "don't say it" self-state as emerging from a fear of what other people think. If you aren't bold ala in the model of a Mussolini, and are afraid of the consequences, you are interpreted in the Nietzschean 'strong-man' mental dictionary as a "weakling".

Interpreting Emotions

Emotions are difficult to interpret, particularly if you are existing in an epistemological vacuum where the theory of evolution and the evolutiona of organisms (and their nervous systems) isn't there to serve as an internal referent that allows you to recognize the essential polarity of the organism - that which is generative and symmetrical, and that which is dissipative and symmetry breaking. These terms come from the physics of thermodynamics, and the study of the physics of organisms, where symmetry (generative) dynamics exist side by side with dissipative (disequilibrated) dynamics, generally termed 'metabolism'. In a certain sense, the gene-protein macro-molecular edifice that builds us into a real-physical structure can be considered the 'symmetry' within us, whereas its tendency towards dissolution' (heat loss) puts it into constant interaction with small metabolites, co-factors and the environment to keep itself alive.

The biologist and philosopher Jesper Hoffmeyer sees a 'dual code' here, with a "digital" code (symmetry) acting against an analogic code (dissipative/dynamic), with the former needing to 'attune' to the latter if it wants to maintain its coherent structure, as well as stay alive.

With the evolution of Human beings, language./thought and feeling/body have come to recapitulate the dynamics of the cell, this time at the level of mentality. The mind uses its digital and sequential representative capacities to better understand itself and the world. A correct approach mirrors the analogic -> digital directionality with the former pre-existing the latter, forcing the latter to 'learn' the language of the former if it wants to maximize its coherence, symmetry, and ultimately, sense of well being.

Therefore, understanding your feelings is not a sleight matter, since we cannot help but apply some narrative deriving from our developmental canalization, a person who holds the wrong narrative - who represents the world through the digitizing prowess of language in the wrong way, scaffolds a mental structure that carries feelings - and interpretations of those feelings - in very subpar ways.

Trauma

Trauma is in itself a psychological set of experiences that push the brain-mind system sufficiently out-of-kilter - or comfort - so as to present a way of knowing and being that is, from the perspective of the knower, terrifying.

Indeed, terror is itself an inchoate presence, pushing from 'behind' the mind, indicating a tremendously negative and confused sets of lived images - yelling voices, crying faces, histrionic sounds, or, conversely, ones own relationship to such images - the habitual ways of interpreting to 'feel stronger' than the affects which arise and terrify. But what happens - or what occurs, when the mind finds itself overwhelmed? What does it even mean, in the first place, to be overwhelmed?

Informationally speaking, when primordial emotional images (incoherent, though infused with powerful numinous potential) enter a persons mind, the cognitive part of the Self has a response to the feeling. It is here, in the response, where the "potential for trauma" arises. Usually, the Human relies upon dissociation to 'push away' trauma, and indeed, dissociation can eventually become so extreme as to bring about a state of 'cataonia' - or a permanent feeling of derealisation, depersonalization, and therefore, the absence of a 'forebrain' that is interested in exploring its affective life - or stated differently, to live means to relate, and the traumatized mind can sometimes go the way of the mute: never talking or seeking to be again.

Another response, besides the dissociative one, is the anxiety one. Many people here probably no the power-of-anxiety on the Human body-mind, and its persuasive power, yet few have explored the two ways anxiety tends to be handled. Besides those people who become channeled towards complete depersonalization - an end state naturally associated with the "avoidant" attachment category, people with anxious, or ambivalent early-life attachments can either a) learn from the anxiety, and recognize it as an assault from the world (or reality) on ones way of being, or, rather, you can choose the Nietchean "strong man" route - which to me is just pure weakness masquerading as strength: kill yourself.

Suicide is always a function of egotism, that is to say, a complete self-absorption where the person cannot seem to conceive another way of living, knowing, or being, that isn't about what the perceiver names and describes (to himself and others) as the 'problems' with reality. Such confusion abounds in minds who fail to take seriously the dynamical nature of being: instead of recognizing their depression/fear/anxiety as a dysfunction of their relational life, the problem becomes generalized and ontologized as "the way things are". Life and living becomes directed towards bitching about life and living. As egotism wears the mind-away, the mind seeks to totalize the dysfunction: "its everything!" reality is horrible, it thinks, as opposed to "it can be horrible if its structure isn't respected".

But for those who realize that the response of fear to an inchoate perception - and the rambunctious anxiety that results - is a call to recognize ones vulnerability, and therefore, a beckoning of the Other that the Self recognize its fundamental "halfness" vis-à-vis the other's around him - reality, love, and other Humans.

Trauma can teach and help "reset" a person's dysfunction. But it takes humility - indeed, that is it's only purpose, just as a feeling of burn forces the body to retract from the cause of the burn, an immoral way of being SHOULD inasmuch as it indicates a lack-of-love for others, provoke a "withdrawal" of ones 'moral hand', and admit ones mistakes - to oneself, or others, or to the universe.

a reply to: Astrocyte

"Inchoate", not once but twice. Gorgeous word.

Interesting read, thanks.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Trauma is in itself a psychological set of experiences that push the brain-mind system sufficiently out-of-kilter - or comfort

I wonder if that is why people who survive traumatic experiences report that they felt very 'alive'. Some of the survivors even state that the feeling of being alive was a very good experience in the end, once they came out the other end still being intact.

The loop of everyday life can be a killer for some.

"But... for one minute... or one second... or maybe one hour- i don't know- i saw something that... made every memory i ever had a lie. Because when i was a kid, it was an ugly, sad, unbearable nightmare. And i saw it. I know what it was. I remember it now.

I don't know what happened to you, either, Horace, but i think we're all like that. We remember what was good, and we black out what was bad, maybe because we couldn't live if we didn't."

"No media project succeeds based on "good news only" because good news doesn't trigger our alert system. Anything good indicates the safe space, the quiet background against which events can play out. The encultured mind is cued to respond to the negative as a point of focus, which largely screens out or ignores a quiet stable base, and, because it sharpens and maintains our alert awareness, we actually begin to look for the negative."

"So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level. And you begin to realize that, and you begin to be aware too, that the discords of your life and the discords of people's lives, which are a discord at one level, at a higher level of the universe are healthy and harmonious. And you suddenly realize that everything you are and do is at that level as magnificent and as free of any blemish as the patterns in waves. The markings in marble. The way a cat moves. And that this world is really OK. Can't be anything else, because otherwise it couldn't exist."

a reply to: Astrocyte

Really admire the way you are able to convey the knowledge,
it is very clear and leaves little room for misinterpretation.

The only question that arose to me is about the word ''cataonia'' i cannot seem to find a explanation about this on the NET.
After reading up and remembering the Dutch version maybe think you meant 'catatonia'.

Do wonder how you come to know this knowledge, are studying the subject matter or are you just very knowledgeable about this true experience?

These types of articles are rare here so really get excited when finding one again.

originally posted by: Astrocyte
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The biologist and philosopher Jesper Hoffmeyer sees a 'dual code' here, with a "digital" code (symmetry) acting against an analogic code (dissipative/dynamic), with the former needing to 'attune' to the latter if it wants to maintain its coherent structure, as well as stay alive.

With the evolution of Human beings, language./thought and feeling/body have come to recapitulate the dynamics of the cell, this time at the level of mentality. The mind uses its digital and sequential representative capacities to better understand itself and the world. A correct approach mirrors the analogic -> digital directionality with the former pre-existing the latter, forcing the latter to 'learn' the language of the former if it wants to maximize its coherence, symmetry, and ultimately, sense of well being.

Therefore, understanding your feelings is not a sleight matter, since we cannot help but apply some narrative deriving from our developmental canalization, a person who holds the wrong narrative - who represents the world through the digitizing prowess of language in the wrong way, scaffolds a mental structure that carries feelings - and interpretations of those feelings - in very subpar ways.

Those who accentuate the vitreous, as civilization dictates.

When you learn to distinguish these halves, that the digital is an inverted limited static perception of the dynamic analogue,


Every time these cryptic philosophers mention a mirror, remember what it's like to read a book backwards. Everything is twisted on that perceived side of reflected light.