Meaning

Meaning arises when I say something congruent, and feel a congruent response from an interlocutor. When this happens, I think (if I reflect on it at all) something like: "We both know how to talk about this."

We cannot give an 'external' account of this - there is no behavioural, syntactical, or 'physical' story we can tell about meaning that will capture it correctly. It's actually quite easy to demonstrate this formally (I've discussed this, and related issues, in another blog: 'A True Account'), but the formal account only sheds a very indirect light on the subjective experience - the feeling of meaningfulness.

Here's the formal difficulty:

Any account of meaning has to be given in words that, well, mean something. If the account of meaning determines how these words should be interpreted, then it becomes immediately ambiguous - we don't know what the account means without knowing what the words mean, and we can't pin down the meanings of the words without knowing what the account means.

At the same time, we must be able to know what words mean. Otherwise, we wouldn't even know what the question "Do we know what words mean?" meant.

You can see why this neat paradox is frustrating to anyone who wants to get to grips with the big question.

The thing is: we do know how to talk. If we didn't we couldn't ask whether we did. And if we know how to talk, then we know - to some minimal extent - what the words and sentences we use mean. That knowledge has a certain feeling associated with it - a feeling of getting it right. The exact feeling, I think, that I described in the first paragraph of this post.

And if the feeling isn't there, the meaning isn't there either. It cannot be imposed from outside by literal instruction.

Mood Swings - 'Bipolar Disorder'

Conversations with some clients and with my partner, along with reflections on my own condition three decades ago, led me to some new thoughts (for me) on severe mood swings. I'd also been watching one of Gabor Mate's videos, so was thinking about attachment, reward pathways, and addiction.

I'll start by summarising what I remember about my own mood swings, about the experience of 'highs and lows' which my doctor described as a sort of sub-clinical bi-polar condition. Not that that particular description helped me much. It certainly didn't lead to either an effective coping strategy or any optimism about a real solution ...

Anyhow:

When I was low, the despair felt incurable. I always felt that I knew what it was about - certain aspects of my current circumstances and their relationship with some acute childhood miseries just left me grief-stricken and feeling worthless & helpless. Also, I knew that any experiments with authenticity would probably cause a lot of pain to people I cared about, that taking steps towards things I needed in my life would hurt them more than I could bear.

When I was high, I could also think about these things, but when I did, the problems seemed possible to address, and I couldn't put myself back in the place of seeing them as insoluble. In fact, I was full of plans about how they could be addressed - detailed, long-term, 'optimistic' plans ...

Towards the end of a 'high' period, I would have one or two slightly 'glassy' episodes, in which these plans would begin to look transparent and uncertain - minor flaws would look like portents of failure, imperfections like disasters. I would know that I was about to crash - usually within the following twenty-four hours.

I still have these cycles occasionally. The swings are not so extreme, and I have a more self-conscious awareness of what is going on. The Covid lockdown has triggered one or two - being cut off from some activities and places that are important to me, plus a lot of opportunities for daydreaming, have led me down familiar pathways. One recent one, coinciding with a conversation with a client (no surprise ...) led me to wonder if there was a parallel that I had missed:

The optimistic plan-fantasies were comforting. Being absorbed in them made me feel happy. Even if there was nothing very practical I could do in the moment, the 'plan-world' was a peaceful place to escape to.

At the time when I was most in crisis, I knew, consciously, that there was something 'pathological' about this - that my need for this escape, and the nature of the escape, were evidence of something having gone badly wrong for me. I could see no way forward from it, though, and felt I would be crushed if I didn't have the 'plan-world' to visit. It was a holding strategy, but I didn't know how to unlock myself from it.

What occurred to me recently is how much this is like an addiction. A comforting habit that offers short-term relief from pain, but is ultimately destructive. The cycle of highs and lows mirrors an addict's dopaminergic slavery - from the 'hit' of the high, to the glassy strung-out period as it unwinds, to the despair of the low and the open-wound need that is expressed in desperate attempts to get high again, to return to the plan-world.

Just as with addiction, it is unhelpful to focus on the behaviour without addressing the problem that the behaviour allows us to manage. Also, the plan-world or 'fantasising' activity can be a place where we explore real possibilities. A client drew my attention to this quotation: 

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden: Illustrated (Evergreen Classics) (p. 205). Kindle Edition. 

In a conversation with another client, a musician, I was reminded that the 'highs' are often associated with bravery and creation; that works of the imagination require imaginative effort ...

Building foundations and valuing outputs are ways of bringing the 'fantasy world' into contact with reality. Both were essential parts of my own development.

But I could also have retreated into fantasy. Just as someone who needs pain relief can progress to drug addiction, I might have given up on reality for the comfort of the dreams.

The parallel with addiction struck me very forcibly during my lockdown musings. Perhaps because I could not put my hand on some of the realities I had connected with, and because I was cut off from some of the interactions that might have directly rewarded creative enterprise.

And perhaps because an old part of me recognised a deep pattern, and wondered at its power and presence, faded as it was.

And so I offer it here. Not as an instruction to follow dreams or count blessings, but as a possible route to reflection. I do not know how valid or persistent my present track is. Maybe I wouldn't be writing this if I had taken another course - history may not always be written by the winners, but it is certainly only written by those who have the opportunity and motivation to write it down.

If I do return to the darkness, though, it will not be with my eyes closed.

Beating Children

Someone who beats a child has probably been brought up in what we call an 'abusive' environment themselves. This fact can seem disturbing - as though it excuses their behaviour in some way. Or as though, by 'explaining' it, it invalidates the experience of their victims - that this should not happen in any decent world.

This discomfort can make it hard to reflect on some important aspects of this kind of structure.

This morning, in a discussion with another counsellor, I said that my father's violence had something to do with his growing up in a culture of violence towards children. This was reflected in everything from a self-righteous punitive Protestantism to the 'Oor Wullie' cartoons in the Sunday Post - where PC Murdoch and Pa conspired to form Wullie's character through frequent and 'amusing' beatings.

My friend said 'But that doesn't explain their reaction to what they must have seen in front of them - a child made miserable by their behaviour. How could that not count against their childhood conditioning?'

I remember an occasion when my parents and some very religious friends were discussing a child who was never beaten - even when he did something monstrously unforgivable. On one occasion, at the age of three or four, this child had locked his parents out of the house in a fit of rage. They negotiated with him through the screen door until he let them back in and then carried on as normal. As though there had been no terrible breach in the divine order...

I remember being outraged at this - I think I was about eight or nine at the time. I knew that I would have been belted until weals appeared on my legs for such a transgression, and couldn't understand why he would have been allowed to get off with it. The idea that an adult might negotiate with a child was a profound threat to the authoritarian structures upon which the possibility of an intelligible universe depended. It was as though God had just apologised to Adam and Eve for getting a bit over-wrought about an apple.

The situation was obviously novel, puzzling, and alien to my parents and their friends. They were discussing it in quite a matter-of-fact way, as though examining a peculiar plant they had found growing up beside the porch. They didn't seem to be as outraged as I was. They even acknowledged that the child seemed happy and well-adjusted, as though this just increased the mystery.

Cultural conditioning doesn't just teach a parent to be abusively violent. It teaches them to enjoy it. They beat their children because they have been promised that it will work - maybe not so much to correct the child as to salve the wounds that their own shame has hidden from them. Self-righteous rage, proved potent by another's pain, is a kind of healing ecstasy.

This is dopaminergic. Their behaviour is like an addiction - it is entirely resistant to facts, whether they are to do with the child's immediate miserable experience or to do with the value of humiliating violence as an educational tool. 

Once we have sacrificed our children to our parents and to the addictions they have induced us into it becomes very hard to walk back to a humanistic perspective. By this stage new shames, about our adult behaviour, have been added to the childhood hoard. It becomes too hard to persuade the dragon that there is any other food.

I could tell a long story about the route I have had to take from my childhood outrage to where I am now. Neither forgiveness nor acceptance seems to have been particularly useful either as guides or comforts. Both focus too much on the parent's predicament.

We have to focus on protecting and validating the children first.