Some Thoughts on Over-Thinking ...

I had a recent realisation - or perhaps a deeper realising - about the 'hamster wheel' of anxious cogitation. It can feel like a process of hunting for a solution, visiting every possibility, checking again that none of them work ...

The realisation, which can seem cruel, was that when I am in this state I am sometimes working harder at not looking at something than I am at solution-hunting. Often there is a perspective that I am not willing to consider, and it is this unwillingness that is feeding my anxious search. Before I go through the dark door, I must first just check that none of the others lead to anything worthwhile. Maybe there is something behind one of them (something apart from an empty room or a brick wall...) that I didn't see the first time around.

For me, the 'dark door' opens towards the possibility that some solution I need to work may not work. Some fantasy, some aspiration, some self-perception, may not be reliable.

There is a big difference between having a potential solution that you can't put in place (because of opportunity or resources), and having no solution at all. Or between feeling that something would be a solution ('if only ...') and discovering that it might, after all, not be.

The dark door, which looks like despair, may open on a dream relinquished, something that feels like a defeat, a final judgment...

How did it come to feel like this?

There are certainly doors we would not want to go through - bereavements, injuries, betrayals, losses - but not all of these carry censure. They come with pain, but not necessarily shame. There is shame behind the dark door. If I cannot have this, do this, be this, then I am worthless. I have been pretending. I have been deceiving myself and others. I have been vain and stupid. I have failed - not just to meet an objective, but to choose an appropriate objective in the first place.

The rat run of feverish checking, the internal OCD, can feel like security by comparison.

Intelligibility, again ...

There is always something perverse about trying to explain the law of non-contradiction to someone. If they don't minimally observe it - at least performatively, if not explicitly - then they don't know how to speak, and so, arguably, are beyond the reach of any explanation whatsoever ...

The common thread in various types of 'gaslighting' is that it puts people in the position of trying to make sense of maliciously unintelligible behaviour. From colonial exploitation to domestic abuse to playground bullying, coarse power has been expressed through making the powerless go through hell trying to learn the language of the oppressor, however capriciously that oppressor may play hide and seek with the grammar.

The illusion of narcissistic superiority, the ground of psychopathic internal shame-avoidance fantasies, is maintained by keeping people in the dark and manipulating them. Power exercised through deception is, absurdly, valued above the ability to make sense.

Intelligibility Pressures

I've been becoming dimly aware of a pattern that I think I see in some clients' responses to grief, and my own responses to strong negative emotions - 'black hole' emotions ... and perhaps to some other things less obviously malign.

Places that act like points of repulsion - we start to approach them and suddenly find ourselves going somewhere else - ritual, denial, distraction, comfort behaviours. Even 'interpretation' can be a kind of diversion. What is hard, is just to live in them for a while. To experience them as places that a whole human being can find themselves in ...

The black hole is so 'obviously' a horrible place, that avoiding it might hardly seem to require explanation. But as well as the repulsion, there is a puzzle - why are these places there, unless they have some organismic purpose? Why do none of our diversionary tactics quite work?

How can we feel that these locations of the soul, of imagination, of metaphor, might overwhelm us? How can they seem, like monsters of nightmare, both insubstantial and catastrophic? Places that do not exist in our 'physical world', but contemplating whose existence might snuff out our engagement with that world?

A clue might be in the loneliness of our visits to them - we often go there with neither a witness nor a companion. But is there a step beyond loneliness here? We can describe loneliness, we can (a little paradoxically) even share feelings of loneliness. But can the horror of the black hole be beyond even this? Do we feel that it cannot be made intelligible - that nothingness, confusion, ambiguity, the edge of the map is, after all, more terrifying than 'dragons'?

And do we feel we might be abandoned there exactly because we cannot make it intelligible to another?

How did we come to associate intelligibility with emotional contact? How did we learn that we had to explain ourselves or we would be left alone?

How did we learn we had no right to feelings that we could not explain, or justify, or otherwise render potent?

How did we learn to fear these quiet places beyond the world of words?