Category: psychology

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Murmuration

This morning in bed I listened to a radio play, ‘Murmuration’, which I’d downloaded without reading the description, so I didn’t know what to expect. It was about a man who lived alone in a flat and heard voices in his head – various characters with different personalities – aggressive, childlike, and one a bombastic circus ringmaster – who told him who he was and what he should do. At one point he is taken to hospital and given drugs which silence the voices but also make him feel numb all the time, taking away the pain, sadness and anger but also positive emotions like joy, enthusiasm and hope, which reminded me of my experience with Amitryptyline.

This is not quite what I mean when I say I hear words in my head, or have arguments with myself. Despite all the stuff about Belinda, Melinda, Cassandra and Cat-By-Herself, or about gremlins, I know all that is metaphorical, and at all times I am just me, myself. Admittedly, at different times my thoughts – and the words in my head – manifest in different kinds of behaviour, and I don’t have any control over that, I can’t choose who I am going to be at any particular time. I wish I could. I think about the times when I thought I could ‘reinvent’ myself, focus on one of those aspects (usually Melinda) and let her have her head – when I was doing my PhD, or after I left my husband, or went travelling, or moved here – my ‘running away’ times, in other words. In many ways they were when I was at my ‘happiest’, because even though I still had bad patches within that, I had hope that somehow I was moving towards a sunlit plateau where the world was full of joy and light.

Yeah, I know, embarrassingly unrealistic.

The play was described as ‘darkly comic and heart-warming’ (I read the description afterwards) and had a sweet, hopeful ending, as the man makes friends with a neighbour who draws him out of himself and out of his flat into the world outside.

The writer had worked with MIND and with people who hear voices in this way while developing the play, and also played the pivotal role of the neighbour. The description says:

‘A diagnosis of voice hearing has long been stigmatised in western culture, but in recent years there’s been a new approach that helps hearers to understand who their voices are and where they come from.’

It made me think about how strange the workings of the human mind are, how little we really know about what goes on in others’ minds, or our own, come to that. How much of what we experience is down to underlying conditions like dyspraxia and autism, how much is triggered by early childhood experiences and trauma, how do these interact and continue to interact and develop through our experiences of relating to other people as we pass through life? Who among us is ‘normal’, after all?

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Stream of Consciousness

I got a bit distracted yesterday – or maybe I didn’t. Maybe you were enthralled by my ramblings about: what was that actor’s name, and should I try knitting jumpers based on William Morris designs, or would they look like shit, and would that matter anyway, as long as I had fun doing it? (I missed out the bit about looking up stroke symptoms on Google).

I can’t really work out whether the fact that my mind works like that is unusual or not, given that I can’t get inside anyone else’s head to find out how they think. Up until a few years ago, I assumed that’s the way everyone thinks, that constantly rolling narrative, the barrage of words running through the head, and when I discovered that some people actually think in pictures  (allegedly most people, though I find that hard to believe) it – well – blew my mind. I mean, maybe partially – I can ‘visualise’ some things, but I have to make a conscious effort to do – but as a main way of thinking? How do you visualise abstract concepts? I had this conversation with a friend a while back, and he said that he sees the words as he thinks them. To me that sounds bizarre.

But I started this train of thought by thinking about whether I can control my thoughts. The theme of those pep talks I used to listen to over a full English was that it is possible to control your thinking and by doing so change your life, but my mind seems to have a mind of its own. The actors’ names and knitting designs kind of thoughts don’t bother me at all – except when they interfere with my ability to do more important stuff (which is quite often). I don’t even particularly mind the might I have a stroke and will the cancer come back thoughts too much – they’re awful at the time, of course, but tend not to come very often or last very long.

The ones that really get to me are the regular, unavoidable ones that come in the early hours, or occasionally in the day time, the: I hate myself and wish I was dead, why has everything I’ve ever tried to do with my life come to nothing, why do I always give up on everything, why can’t I write anything apart from this drivel? Those are the ones I’d really like to be able to control. Daylight and doing things can sometimes blow them away – knitting, crochet, reading etc are usually pretty reliable; walking by the sea can be too, but it requires effort to get myself out of the house (not always easy, even when there isn’t a lockdown). Being with other people can be, but it’s risky, it can also have the opposite effect, so in general being by myself is safer.

Writing these daily essays – I think that helps too. I usually feel better afterwards, anyway, even if I don’t have anything to say.

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Mind Full of…

The question I posed was: ‘Do I control my thoughts or do my thoughts control me?’ and the answer is fairly obvious – my thoughts define me, determine my experiences and control my life: I am my own story. How could it be otherwise? I think, therefore I am – how could I know I was alive if I didn’t think it? Although, of course, I only think that was the question – I may have misremembered it. I could go back and check, but I’m choosing to trust my memory on this occasion.

The ‘I’ who is typing this and the ‘me’ I’m describing are the same person, that goes without saying, indicated by use of the first person singular pronouns. Why did I say that? I have no idea. My thoughts are the outcome of genetic predispositions, my life experiences and external conditions, and they feed back on themselves and go round and round and make me who I am.

But can I control them? To some extent, I suppose I do – I can decide to concentrate on one particular subject or activity – like cooking a meal, for example, which involves performing a set of tasks. But even as I’m performing them, my thoughts don’t necessarily stay in one place –while I’m chopping an onion or stirring a pan, my thoughts can be anywhere – possibly planning the next task, but in my case, more likely thinking of something completely different.

Consider what my thoughts have been doing since I started writing this – reading the titles of a pile of DVDs which I found in the study yesterday and put on my desk; considering watching Gosford Park because I haven’t seen it in years and can’t remember anything about it except that I enjoyed it and it has an exceptional cast; trying to remember the surname of the actor named Tim who was in The Shawshank Redemption, knowing it’s not Burton (he’s a director) although I always get confused between them, wondering whether they’ve ever worked together, reading on the back of the box that it’s Tim Robbins and thinking ‘oh yes, of course!’, noticing how young he looks in the picture, and also how young Morgan Freeman looks, and wondering what Tim Robbins has done since. Then picking up a book of Victorian needlepoint patterns based on William Morris designs, and thinking how lovely they are, wondering if I could somehow incorporate them into my knitting, or if I should take up needlepoint again, and whether I should try to visit William Morris’s house at Kelmscott when things open up again, because I’ve never been there…

A gull flies right to left across a grey patch of cloud outside my window and catches my eye, leading it towards a plane crossing the other way, much higher, across the distant blue.

There’s a much misused and misunderstood concept called ‘mindfulness’, which derives from Zen Buddhism, and means focussing completely in the present moment. I’ve been trying to learn it for sixteen years.

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Je Ne Regrette Rien

This morning I got up and walked to the beach. I was there in time for the sunrise, but the cloud cover was solid, and there was nothing to see. I sat on my usual bench, but the wind seemed to be blowing directly at me, and I didn’t feel comfortable enough to drink my coffee, so I walked down to the tideline and tried to photograph the waves, which were pretty fearsome. They were licking at the remains of a sandcastle, which seemed bizarre – who had been there building a sandcastle at this time of year?

I left the beach to cross the esplanade and drink my coffee in the Rose Garden, which is more sheltered, and as I turned to look back, I saw the clouds moving and parting, and a brief burst of light came from the gap and shone momentarily on the sea.

I think I finished yesterday saying something about regret, and Geoff Dyer saying that whatever you do, or don’t, there are always regrets. But I part company with him there – I think I’m quite good at avoiding regrets, over the big things, anyway. Of all the major changes I’ve made over the last twelve years, I don’t think there are any which I would undo, were such a thing possible, even the ones whose consequences were painful at the time. Not that that spares me from agonies when I have to make a choice, but that’s another matter. The torments I went through before I decided to move here – which seem ludicrous looking back from this perspective – were only finally settled when I realised that if I didn’t at least try it, I would always wonder what would have happened if I had. And now I know.

I read somewhere – a few years ago now – that it is part of human psychology to see major life choices – marriage, house purchase, choice of job, divorce – in a positive light once they’ve been made and committed to. It’s the ‘it was meant to be…’ syndrome: ‘I was meant to meet you, move here, do that – because look what happened!’ I was saying this a couple of weeks ago, I think, when I talked about fate and fatalism. We know the consequences of those decisions, and can’t really imagine what the alternatives might have been like. Of course, this isn’t universal, and I can’t remember the research and references off the top of my head, but I can see how it has worked out in my life.

In the time before I left my husband, I bought a greeting card with the legend: ‘The only things I’ll regret are the things I don’t do’, and stuck it to the wall behind my computer. It also became the tagline for the new blog I started when I moved out. I’ve still got that card, in fact if I look over my left shoulder, I can see it on a shelf. I think it’s a pretty good motto.

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Brain Freeze

Back in front of my PC after my weekly trip to the shop. Oddly calm in the morning the last couple of days. I think it’s because I’m slipping back into the lockdown peace, no stress, nowhere to go, nobody to see, just my own peaceful life. Won’t last, of course it won’t, it can’t, at some point the world will wake up and I’ll be forced to deal with it again, but not now. Can’t believe it’s only a week since I took the van out, it feels like ages ago.

The sun is shining at present. I didn’t mow the grass when I said I would – maybe I will today, if it stays sunny, though it must still be wet underfoot.

I’ve not been remembering my dreams recently. When I wake up, I know that I’ve been dreaming and now I’m awake, but the content of the dream is completely gone from my awareness. It’s like watching something on the telly, and you know you haven’t been asleep, but you haven’t got a clue what just happened, or what was said, and you have to rewind the last few minutes to find out. Of course, that also happens when I’m listening to the radio, or reading, or even in the middle of a conversation (though in that case there’s no rewind button), and as I now know, that’s all part and parcel of dyspraxia. But I’m sure I used to remember my dreams.

Incidentally, although for me the lack of short term memory had always seemed to be the key aspect of dyspraxia, from which all else follows, it’s only recently that I’ve started to think it might be the other way round. Starting from the premise that it’s due to faulty message processing in the brain, and that that makes it hard to focus on more than one thing at a time, this leads to the phenomenon of ‘absent-mindedness’, whereby I have no recollection of where I put my glasses, because when I put them down no part of my brain was processing the information : ‘I am putting my glasses on the bookshelf/back of the toilet/behind the fruit basket/they just fell on the floor’ and so doesn’t leave an imprint on my memory.  

Sounds like a good theory – it definitely reflects my personal experience, anyway. I expect somebody somewhere has thought of that before, but as I mentioned yesterday (I think), my PhD supervisor pointed out years ago that I struggle to accept things unless I can understand them from first principles. What I don’t think he understood at the time was that it wasn’t due to bloody-mindedness so much as that my brain couldn’t hold and process that information if I didn’t have the right pegs to hang it onto. Which sounds quite paradoxical, because although I can have enough flashes of insight to have achieved a PhD, there are times when my brain freezes and I’m incapable of absorbing what I’m being told.  

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Running With Wolves

The deeper I get into the book I’ve been reading, ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, and the more I relate it to my life, the more I can see how broken and bent my life has been. I know how melodramatic this sounds, I can hear the voices telling me all that stuff: how lucky I am to have had such a (materially) comfortable life; that I should stop whining and practise gratitude; that I should stop reading books that make me unhappy; that I should stop thinking so much and simply be.

I was never cut out to be a nice, good, well behaved girl, but I tried, I really did. Some of my struggles in that regard were clearly related to my dyspraxia, interpreted as clumsiness, untidiness, laziness, carelessness, not listening, not paying attention, all those traits of the ‘difficult’ child. I wasn’t deliberately ‘naughty’, in fact I tried very hard to avoid it, which still holds to this day – needing to know the ‘rules’ so I can stay on the right side of them always, never causing trouble, never making waves – except that doesn’t always work, isn’t always possible, there were/are/will always be times when through carelessness etc I overstep the mark, or get trapped in a situation where to please someone upsets someone else and so I keep falling over my own feet (metaphorically as well as literally) and bringing down judgement on myself, which is why, as you must know by now, it’s easier for everyone if I just keep away from other people as much as I can.

The book, written about thirty years ago, is a Jungian analysis, illustrated by myths and fairy tales from all cultures, about how girls and women are socialised into conforming to culturally required feminine norms and roles. The author’s main thesis is that by trying to live up to those norms and roles, many women suppress their creative spirit, or ‘wild nature’. I gave up on it the first time I tried to read it, two years ago, because her writing style irritated me and it seemed related to New Age ‘Goddess’ cults, which feel a bit whacky to me. Now I’ve persevered I’m more impressed by the psychology behind it, and anyway, it was recommended by my therapist, and I have great respect for her academic credentials.

And, as you can probably guess from that description, the idea of the ‘wild nature’, the alternative female archetype and alter ego of the creative spirit, whose suppression can cause great harm and distress in women’s lives, struck a mighty chord for me. Hence the posts over the last few days about the Wild Thing who lives caged inside of me: self-destructive, resentful and raging as any caged beast has the right to be, but only ‘evil’ if seen from a specific, limited perspective.

I sat down to write almost in tears because I didn’t think I could find the words to express this. But it happened anyway.

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Not Writing About the New Forest

I said yesterday that today I’d write about going to the New Forest, but when I try to start there are so many other things I’m thinking about, like I got up at 6.00 because that’s what I decided I should do, although that’s still not ‘first thing’ because I’ve been awake since 4.00, reading and listening to the radio. And at 6.00 it’s still dark, so that’s how it’s going to be from now, probably till March or maybe April, I’m not sure.  

I thought I’d come straight to the computer and start writing, but I fed the cat and let her out, then wondered whether to make coffee, because usually I do my exercise first, and then should I use my espresso pot or the Tassimo, which is quicker but only makes a small cup? And thinking about how I should start, where I should start, about moving here and what it is about the south coast for me, and when did I first go to the New Forest, what is the attraction? And issues around the van, because it’s brought me so much stress and expense down the years, but I have to not think about that, and that’s a split infinitive, but apart from the fact that it’s quite passé to care about split infinitives, it’s important because what I was trying to say there is subtly different from how else it could be said: ‘can’t think’ or ‘mustn’t think’ is different from a choice to ‘not think’ about something, so arguably that two word phrase is a verb in itself, and ‘to not think’ is the infinitive form of that compound verb.

Speaking about ‘choice’, the choice about coffee is a decision in itself, with the factors of speed, flavour and quantity of coffee all having to be taken into account and balanced, and the outcome of that decision (to prioritise speed and use the Tassimo) is that the coffee has already gone and I haven’t finished writing.

Which reminded me of a conversation I had yesterday with the garage man about keeping UHT milk in the van (his suggestion), but once it’s been opened, it only keeps as well as normal milk, so I might as well just take a small bottle of fresh milk with me each time, which is what I do.

This is how my mind works all the time – bouncing from one apparently trivial and meaningless thought to another. I used to assume that it was the same for everybody, but that other people were better than me at cutting through the crap and dealing with it. Now I’m beginning to understand that it goes deeper than that. That’s why the idea of ‘thinking visually’ blew my mind, though I’m now coming to think that that’s probably not as prevalent as I’ve been led to believe – I honestly don’t see how it could be. Thinking is thinking and it’s made up of words and depends on words, and that’s that.

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Decisions…

I listened to that TED programme about decision making again yesterday. It takes me several goes before I take in what I’m hearing – same with reading, watching telly etc. This has always been the case, but I’ve always taken it for granted. Interesting to learn that it is typical of dyspraxia, and not just because I’m slow and stupid and don’t pay attention, which is what I’ve always believed. Or rather, maybe I am all those things, but there’s an underlying reason for it.

The format of the programme is that they interview people who have made TED talks about whatever the theme is that they’re talking about. One of the contributors yesterday was talking about how ‘hard’ choices are not always ‘big’ choices, and ‘small’ choices are not always ‘easy’. Their definition of a hard choice is where there isn’t a clear distinction between whether one option is better or worse than the other(s) – it may be that they’re all better on some criteria, but not on others. I recognise this problem very well – every day so much of my emotional and mental energy gets sapped by chewing over trivial decisions, because I can’t stop myself going round in circles trying to make comparisons between different factors. When I was a student in the 1970s, the focus was on ‘rational’ decision making, assigning probabilities and utilities to various outcomes and devising models, like cost-benefit analysis, to establish optimal courses of action. I’m glad to see that the field has moved on since then.

Another speaker talked about the importance of ‘committing’ to your choices. If I understand correctly, this is about coming up with a satisfactory explanation for why you made that choice rather than another – satisfactory to yourself, that is. This sounds like post hoc rationalisation, but evidently it makes a real difference to the subjects’ later attitude to the choices that they’ve made.

Just writing that now makes me think that there could be huge ramifications from this, in the ways individuals’ beliefs are formed and solidified. For example, what might it say about people who voted for Trump, or Brexit, and then find themselves having to live with the consequences? It also says something to me about the importance of narrative, or story – the stories we tell ourselves. And what about uncertainty? And unintended consequences? Because of course we can’t always predict the outcomes of our choices, or the likelihood of ‘success’ (however that is defined). And never forget the old cliché about ‘for want of a nail…’, or the more modern version, ‘the butterfly effect’ – what did I say a few weeks ago about banal events that turn out to be surprisingly significant, and momentous events that turn out to be surprisingly banal?

Well, this post started out feeling quite trivial, maybe even flippant, but in the writing it has triggered something in my thoughts, both about how my mind works – how I can never settle on a conclusion – and how the world works generally.

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Along the Way

Back again.

This does feel like a chore. I seem to have slipped back into that demotivated state where I really don’t want to do anything. Maybe it’s the heat – doesn’t help, that’s for sure. That’s quite an odd phrase for me to use: ‘for sure’. Slipping back thirty-odd years into Dallas-speak – maybe it’s the heat – though it’s nowhere near as hot as it was there, but then nobody went outdoors at this time of year, they stayed inside and froze in the air-conditioning.

This morning, doing my exercises in the spare room with the window open, I felt stifled. Usually I have a high tolerance for heat, but this is getting even me down.

Taoism – must’ve been in a pretentious mood the day I mentioned it. How about Existentialism? Let’s throw that into the mix.

My yoga teacher said (a while ago now, must be, because we were in the Community Centre at the time, not the park), that the difference between fate and destiny is that Destiny is the true purpose of your life, what you should be doing if you allow everything to happen as intended (by whom? The Universe, or God, or whoever). But Fate is what happens to you anyway if you’re not following your Destiny. I liked that, I thought it was a nice distinction, even though I don’t believe there is such a thing as a ‘True Purpose’ to the Universe that underlies everything that happens. Why should that be? I suppose, to my ‘left brain’ (if we want to go back to that cliché) it’s quite clever, because it allows an ‘out’, as positive-thinking based philosophies often do: ‘Oh well, things didn’t turn out the way you wanted or expected, but that’s because you didn’t want it deeply enough, or you didn’t believe in it enough, or because the Universe has a different plan for you, which you can’t see right now, but one day you’ll see why it happened this way.’

Looking back over life, or history, it’s easy to see the Way that brought us here, the turning points, the (sometimes) tiny events that can trigger enormous consequences. We look back, and we construct a pattern (because that’s what humans do), and we can see that, well, that had to happen for this to be the way things are now. But we can’t know what would have happened if that point hadn’t turned, or had turned in a different direction – we can speculate, perhaps, but we can never know.

The example that just popped into my head wasn’t ‘tiny’ at the time – in fact, I’ve always thought of it as a tragedy, until just recently: the fact that my grandmother was widowed with five children at the age of forty – but if she hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have moved from Manchester to Cleethorpes, and my parents would never have met – pretty fundamental, from my point of view (and my children’s and grandchildren’s).

More along this thought path another day, perhaps.

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More Musings

Another morning, another empty white screen.

Still reading that book. It’s moved on from left brain thinking to ways of developing the right brain: yoga, tai chi, meditation etc. The irony is that my PhD thesis was all about managing a world where causes are reductive and impacts are holistic. Trying to find left brain categories for right brain phenomena when language itself is suspect because it immediately binds thought into its own limitations. I used to get so excited about all that stuff, until I realised that this is in itself the problem, that the two can never be reconciled, and that’s why the world is in such a mess, and probably why my head is in such a mess too. I didn’t use the language of left-and-right-brains twenty five years ago, but the ideas are directly comparable.

How can I express myself more clearly? Reading back that last paragraph, I thought: it’s about control. We try to understand causes and control them, but the problems with this are legion: how do we identify the fundamental causes? How do we find ways of controlling them? How do we implement the controls and sanctions? How long does it take before we come up against the unintended consequences of those controls and sanctions? And what has happened in the meantime to the overall impacts we were trying to control in the first place? I could go on, but I’ve probably confused you more than enough already (if there is a ‘you’ still reading this).

And how, if at all, does this relate to my dyspraxia? The author of that book would probably say that my right brain is currently working out something that my left brain is preventing me from recognising.

Yesterday was Skype-therapy day, I read out to the therapist the list of ‘wisdom’ bullet points that I posted earlier in the week, and I thought I was being quite tongue-in-cheek about it, but part way down the list I started to get tearful. Because all those contradictions and over-simplifications are what makes up who I am, and can’t be wished away by well-intended platitudes, or by trying to make me laugh at myself when all I want to do is cry. Maybe, in the context of what I was saying, they’re a set of left-brain ‘solutions’ to the holistic right-brain question of who I am and how I get by in this world without shattering into a million fragments.

I’m not saying dyspraxia explains all of that. Of course, it’s a left-brain category and hence by its nature draws arbitrary lines in the sand – this side and that side, inside and outside. But the more I look into it, the more I unravel the strands of how I became this self-contradictory person, the more I can see how well it fits.

Yesterday I joined a Facebook group for dyspraxic adults. I have a sense of ‘coming out’ and being – not exactly proud (I don’t do ‘pride’) but maybe ‘honest’.