I find myself pained by the darkness currently settling over the PNW. I left work at 4:30 yesterday and there was a shred of light still in the air. I left work at 5:00 today and it was essentially night... dark dark dark. It is December 3rd as I begin this writing. I have been reminding those around me that the shortest day of the year is about 17 days away. December 20th. After that we begin gaining light again, something like 3 minutes a day.
I have learned to track this movement in and out of the dark. Every year I forget what the depths of winter and heights of summer are like. Every year I lose something of myself, die a little, as winter comes along. "Now is the time that everything not necessary for surviving is dying away," a friend recently said to me. There are depths to this statement. I am also reminded of a lyric from one of my favorite songs by Moonface: "Quickfire, I tried to not go crazy, but the winter got inside me anyway." It happens every year and I don't know what to do other than to be sad, to cook food, to try and see others and care for myself.
Recently I attended a friendsgiving that I have been attending for many years. There were many people that I love and am happy to see. I had several conversations that revealed to me pain that others are in. The pain that I saw from my friends and acquaintances was different from the pain of winter: it was the pain of political turmoil and instability; the pain of people trying to look at a world that more obviously offers misery and misanthropy than anything else.
I have a complex relationship with words like optimism and pessimism, cynicism and realism, hope and dread. They are complex experiences.
I want to relay several of these conversations, as I think they are reasonable starting points for reflecting on the meaning of friendship in relationship to political instability, and can help me perhaps unpack some of what I have been learning about contemporary trauma and physiology research.
A strange new direction in my thought is to put together much of my reading of classical political philosophy with what is going on in contemporary trauma research. Plato and polyvagal theory actually compliment one another quite well.
I spoke with a person that I have met only recently at this friendsgiving. He told me at some point that he was moving away from thinking about justice and morality. This naturally piqued my interest. I inquired. He told me that 'these things were primarily just human constructs,' and that 'human beings are just blips in terms of cosmic or geological time'. When we are gone these ideas will no longer have a life in the universe. These arguments were used principally in the name of self-soothing: it is painful to look at the world and to consider it rife with immoral and unjust suffering. I asked 'Do you think this is a good attitude for engaging responsibly in the present situation?' 'Of course not...' he said, or something similar. Again, these are arguments of self-soothing, of comforting oneself in the face of what might be useless suffering.
I spoke with another person, a friend, about her anxiety watching the country move towards the 2020 election cycle. It will, indeed, be a fucked up year full of liars lying in order to do more fucked up things. She was somewhat adamant that Trump will most likely be reelected, 'when has America not been on the edge of a precipice and not just gone right over it?' I was and am sympathetic to her general political outlook, but found this statement immoderate and mostly just not true. I brought up the passing of the New Deal, the founding of the American social safety net, and the election of Obama and the passing of the Affordable Care Act. She assented that these were steps in the right direction. We both agreed, however, that they were far from enough. America has no real viable political left, and we are left largely with centrist policies that call themselves 'liberal'. David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism recently clarified some of these issues for me.
What I was most struck by in this conversation was the anxiety that seized my friend as soon as we began this topic, and the accompanying extreme views about American politics. I share her pain, just like I share the pain of the previously mentioned acquaintance. But I want so badly to retain my peace of mind in the face of observing horrible things. This may be foolish or naive. I can't tell yet. But the anxiety seized my friend, pained her. I could see it in her face and in her body; I could feel it in my body. My reaction was to try and soothe her. I think I put a hand on her shoulder and told her as much. I think of John Gray's basic argument in The Soul of the Marionette: when political instability becomes endemic it is vital to work to retain some kind of inner peace, as it may be the only freedom left available to us. I said this to my friend with an immediate caveat: this type of peace or equanimity is largely a function of privilege. We are both white, and I am a white man. I am afforded peace because I am free from the more violent and overt forms of coercion that others in America experience. The police have never fucked with me, and I've never been seriously threatened by poverty, illness, or other woes that destroy others' lives.
Yet if we want to be politically engaged, if we want to understand what responsible action or thinking is, we cannot allow our bodies to be ravaged by the stress and horror that comes from observing the horrors around us. These things will ruin our bodies: panic attacks, intrusive thoughts and memories, elevated nervous systems... trauma is a crucial engine of the police state, and this includes vicarious traumatization of the sympathetic and concerned observer. I once heard Alton Brown speak openly of his hunch that America would be interested in food television as a way to escape the horrors of political spectacle.
I spoke with another friend that was in pain in regards to his professional decisions. This friend is a very good writer who for a brief time made a living teaching composition after his MFA. He now works in coding, computers, programming. His plan was to work in that world until he could manage do it for 20 hours or so a week, spending the rest of his time making, writing, working on things that really mattered. He said something like 'I really only feel good or my best when I am creating, writing, working on stuff like that.' I sympathized and empathized with what he was saying. I, too, am making a sacrifice in terms of how I make money. I, too, would like to spend a life writing, reading, and attempting to care for others. Becoming a therapist, or a community mental health 'clinician' is a compromise or sacrifice I am making because it gets me closest to the kind of life that I want to be living. This friend, and I, were experiencing the low-grade forms of coercion that afflict almost everyone in America. We all have to make money in order to not starve. Rent never stops being demanded. The labor must be sold, and only after can we turn to our work.
We are the lucky ones. I am currently working very intimately with the unlucky ones. The institutionally sanctioned role for helping, however, feels like a mask for larger unaddressed political problems. Poverty has indeed been pathologized, and I have become one of the 'experts' doling out 'treatment plans' to individuals whose needs are simultaneously so much simpler and so much more complex than my faux-sophisticated position pretends.
Yet I am finding that some of my learning in this new world is deepening my reflections on political things. In particular, what I have been learning of trauma, bodies, and nervous systems has given me new ways to reflect on the political problems that I have been thinking about for a while. In particular, I want to reflect more on a claim that Aristotle makes in the Nicomachean Ethics: That friendship is the foundation of any strong political community. I will be reading De Anima in the next few weeks, and Keir and I intend to read the Politics within the next six months or so. I will not be returning to the Ethics right now because I am not in the mood to deal with that kind of text right now.
These reflections will proceed from an idea stated above: that in order to be responsibly and politically engaged individuals it is necessary to retain a certain peace of mind that keeps us from being too physically and psychologically taxed by the terrible things we are exposing ourselves to. I want to frame this dilemma in terms of trauma and perhaps the notion of 'trauma stewardship' (which I am insufficiently learned on at this point).
The essence of what I want to say is this: If we are to stay relatively healthy while engaging in taxing or traumatizing work we need to have a well regulated nervous system. The best way to regulate our nervous system is through relationship. This means both relationship with ourselves and our own minds and bodies, and relationships with others. The model of relationship that is most conducive to this task is friendship. Friendship is thus vital to any healthy political community because politics necessarily involves the traumatization of the many at the hands of the machinations of the few and of the community as a whole. Friendship is the private form of healing that makes possible engagement with the necessarily traumatizing space of the public or political. For even the most basic facts of being a political animal means that we will be traumatized: filling roles, occupying space, and interacting with other animals. All of these things act on us, shape our bodies, and the intelligent nervous system is the primary way that we fit ourselves to these public situations.
This is going to be rough, as I don't have a handle on this stuff yet.
I have been reading some in contemporary research on trauma, physiology, and biophysics. I am out of my depth. Yet I find the work of Bessel van der Kolk, Stephen Porges, and Peter Levine to be compelling stuff. Polyvagal theory is also something I have had exposure to professionally, as I wade my way into the strange and painful world of community mental health.
The thing that I find most promising about these various trauma researchers is the way they offer resources for understanding the body as a highly complex and intelligent organism that is constantly preoccupied with the question 'Am I safe?' The body, the nervous system, are constantly engaged with the environment, taking in information from all of our various senses, and making determinations about how safe we are in our current environment. It would be easy to say that the body is 'unconsciously' keeping track of these words. But I find this term insufficient for a few reasons. First, the unconscious is conceptualized as a mental phenomena as opposed to an embodied one. Second, these bodily processes are far more accessible to conscious awareness than a term like the 'unconscious' implies. The body is not a black box, and the workings of our organismic intelligence do not need to be opaque to us. We just need to learn to pay attention to our bodies in new ways.
It is not necessary to learn about biology in order to develop this type of bodily awareness. Gendlin's work on 'focusing' and implicit intricacy accomplish a similar result. But the biological research adds a layer to our understanding.
Polyvagal theory adds an interesting evolutionary element to this account of organismic intelligence. The vagus nerve is a core nervous system structure that is found in all vertebrates. It is the main source of control of the autonomic nervous system. There is an identifiable phylogenetic history to its development that corresponds to different survival strategies. In reptiles, the vagus nerve principally controls freezing mechanisms. Lizards and reptiles play dead as their principal defense. With mammals and other vertebrates the fight-flight mechanisms are introduced, as well as 'flopping' and other responses. With human beings and other mammals the vagus nerve is responsible for our ability to engage socially: it controls language, facial interpretation, head tilting, and all the subtle cues that go into our being social creatures.
We are composite beings, monsters, that possess all of these elements of our phylogenetic history within us. When we are traumatized, or even when we feel unsafe, the higher elements of the vagus nerve structures go offline. Trauma is 'unspeakable' because the language centers of the brain literally shut down when we feel unsafe. Additionally, if we feel unsafe, or have been repeatedly traumatized, we are more likely to interpret faces and voice tones as more hostile, we are less trusting of others. Trauma literally forces us to occupy older, more primitive places in our nervous systems, and it takes our consciousness there with it.
I have shared my interest in these questions with friends and they have told me it raises the specter of bio-physical determinism, that it threatens their sense of freedom, responsibility, or the 'autonomy of human affairs'. I have no such fear. I strongly suspect that there is a way for these insights into the nature of our nervous system to be completely compatible with a reasonable account of human 'freedom', or at least of responsible activity. I am displeased with how I'm formulating this right now. But somehow I feel that these insights about the body and its evolutionary history only serve to deepen my understanding of what it means to think about human life, about politics, about responsibility. Truthfully, I think of what Ta-Nehisi Coates says in Between the World and Me: Racial violence, violence of all kinds, happens to bodies. It is broken teeth and fractured bones, punctured skin and bruised organs. Violence is a nervous system that no longer knows how to engage with other beings; a nervous system, a poor body, that can no longer feel itself safe, but remains afraid, remains alert and aroused.
I am going to begin reading Aristotle's De Anima this weekend, and I hope that it will give me resources for conceptualizing these questions about bodies, minds, and souls in new ways.
Polyvagal theory also adds a deeper layer to attachment theory. The notion of weak, strong, insecure attachment circulates fairly widely. I never perceived the depth of attachment theory, however, until I read an article that claimed that it is really a theory of relational nervous system regulation. That is to say, the essence of attachment between children and parents, or between friends and lovers, is a matter of how our bodies and nervous systems relate to one another. When we are around another person our bodies organically understand and mirror how they are breathing, how their faces are expressing, how their bodies tell us about how they are feeling (See Iacoboni and Goldman on mirror neurons and simulation theory). When we notice that a partner or friend is uncomfortable, we see it in their breathing, and we feel it in our own breathing and our own heart rate.
Fortunately, we can develop strategies for regulating our bodies and nervous systems. Indeed, breathing and touch are the only direct connection we have to the autonomic nervous system, the vagus nerve. Everything else is fully automatic: hormones, heart rate, digestion, so on. All of these things are beyond us; yet our body is responding and adapting at every moment.
As a therapist, it is crucial that I pay attention to my body, and that I regulate it while I am with a client. I am attending to their body; I see them become dysregulated; I see them begin to breath; begin to rock back and forth; begin to look away. I feel it in my body. I feel my ability to listen carefully slipping away; my body is telling me to get out, that we are unsafe. I recognize this. I take a deep breath; I let it out slowly. I feel into my body, I bring it back to the moment. I return to the moment, and try to engage. Crucially, I keep myself regulated so as to provide them a point of relational regulation. I have to keep my nervous system, my body, in check, to give them the opportunity to regulate themselves in relation to me.
This is the connection I want to make between friendship, bodies, and political life. Modern political institutions have become exceedingly good at wielding trauma as a means of social control. Trauma is something that makes real changes to bodies and literally affects the way we are able to engage in the world. Friendship, as a process of regulating and caring for our bodies and nervous systems in relation to others, has to be a vital part of engaging responsibly with the public domain. Without the private nourishment of friendship we are left bare to the wicked winds of the public sphere.
Certain forms of public traumatization are obvious: the police state and its constant afflicting of communities of color; poverty and the ongoing fear and uncertainty of food, shelter, and safety. These are easy to see. What I also want myself and others to be aware of are the minor traumas that accompany the occupation of any social role. Because trauma is not an isolated event, but rather an extreme version of what everyone experiences every day: our intelligent bodies fit ourselves to situations; our intelligent bodies shape themselves into whatever shapes they need to be in order to survive. Psychosis, as a response to trauma, is deeply intelligent: the body finds a way to continue living when the world is intolerable; it finds another place. Neuroses, so-called mental illness, these things are also tremendously intelligent responses to painful and intolerable situations.
The public sphere will always shape us. Taking shape, filling roles is the stuff of political life. Political order makes itself by ordering bodies, to be here, to do this, to say that. These things show up in the nervous system. Every time I start a new job I have bizarre and stressful dreams. Last night I dreamt that I was crushing the skulls of kittens. I had been riding on a train with a former classmate, and somehow I knew these kittens were evil. I stomped on their heads. Then I was in the water, in the middle of the night, with a new coworker, trying desperately to avoid a menacing, violent presence in the water. I was terrified.
This is the necessary stress of my body responding to a new shape that is being imposed on me. I am one of the lucky ones in that I have options. I chose to take a job in forensic community mental health. I wanted to. Yet I am choosing among a limited number of options. There is an element of coercion and violence to all social life. Society demands that we acquire shape; it hurts to acquire shape; and our poor bodies are responsible for acquiring this shape. What does it mean to be flexible? What does it mean to find grace in the occupation of a social role? What does it mean to assent, willingly, to acquiring shape, to filling a role?
The poor, those struggling, the people I'm working with on a daily basis, do not have options. They are being shaped in explicitly and extremely violent ways. The violence or coercion I am afflicted with is more subtle.
The violence of capitalism is subtle. It claims it assures freedom. Nonsense. To be a political animal is to not to be free, but to be bound.
Friendship is, hopefully, a private space in which the violence of conforming to social roles can be mitigated. 'Friend' is also a kind of role. But it is a role that is closest to not being a role than perhaps any role. Friendship, in this way, is transpolitical: it stands outside the normal coercive pressures endemic to life as a political animal. I have ideas about therapy as a kind of friendship, the therapeutic space as a kind of transpolitical space. I wrote my graduate school integration paper about this question.
At that Friendsgiving I was watching my friends grapple with the sacrifices necessary to fitting into a world in which we are condemned to relation, to being political by nature. We can try to sacrifice the notions of justice and morality, trying to buy ourselves a peace of mind. We can sacrifice our own bodies, our sense of hope, and be racked by the anxiety of the ongoing political spectacle. We can sacrifice our time and our deepest desires to make our livelihood. None shall be free of sacrifice.
But hopefully we can all find places in which we find not only sacrifices, but duties, or sacrifices that we are happy to make. Friendship is perhaps such a place. Friendship can perhaps be a space in which we can nurture and nourish one another, care for eachother's s bodies, regulate each other's nervous systems, love one another.
Love shows itself in the way the nervous system works. Unless we feel fundamentally safe, i.e. loved, the higher portions of the brain go offline. Philosophy is impossible without friendship. Genuine engagement with the fundamentally unsafe world of politics is impossible without pain, trauma. We need to find ways to feed those portions of the soul as we wade out into public life in full awareness that they will be wounded and threatened.
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