On The Role of the Body in Speaking Interpersonal Truth and the Possibility of Collective Skill Loss

Speaking truthfully is a physically demanding process. 

 

Ending romantic relationships has often made me gag and vomit. Giving two weeks notice can be an anxiety inducing experience.

 

Anyone who is alive, human, and living, should know what I'm talking about: difficult topics can have arresting affects on our physical body. We shake, sweat, sigh, and suffer under the felt weight of our  situations.

 

This means that speaking truthfully is a process in which our bodies play a significant role.  

 

This claim requires 'truth' to be understood in a specific way. I am not talking about the form of truth appropriate to the physical world. I'm sure its true that Mt. Everest is 29,032 feet tall. But this is not a physically (bodily) demanding truth to learn (except for those that undertook the actual climbing and measuring. My Googling of it was quite easy and didn't generate much of a physical response from me). There are, I confess, truths to learn about ourselves and the world that will not make us shake or sweat or pant or pray. I don't know what my blood type is, and I don't imagine that learning this would mean very much to me. 

It is meaningful truths that strike us in the body, that prompt strange and overwhelming physical responses. Archimedes ran through the streets, allegedly naked, screaming "Eureka!" when he made his discovery about displacement. This was apparently a meaningful truth for him: it prompted him to run naked through the streets exclaiming that he found something!

There are countless videos online of families celebrating acceptances to a college or university. A child tentatively opens a letter, people wait. The news is delivered. And the bodies in the room will become animated in the appropriate ways. Shouting, exclaiming, and dancing and embracing will occur if the news is welcomed. Bodies will deflate, sigh, and soothe one another if the news is bad.

 

This video of a man crying has been memed into oblivion. But it is a powerful example of what I'm talking about. Something clearly powerful is spoken in the context of an intervention or confrontation. In response to hearing this confession, "I still love you...", this man can only wail and cry. Those around him immediately touch him, squeezing his shoulder and rubbing his back.

I think something beautiful and profound is happening in this clip, and I am sad that it has been trivialized by internet culture. Its so real. The way he touches his chin is so real.

I will simply state it as an empirical fact: the truths that arise in human experience are physically arresting and affecting. For some reason different types of truths compel our bodies to adopt certain shapes. Joyful truths curl our lips upward; painful or discouraging truths curl our lips downward. 

Telling the truth is something that we can become more and less capable of, more and less skilled at. It can be difficult to tolerate the bodily sensations that accompany the speaking of a difficult truth. So much of my youth was dominated by the sensation of a tight, burning throat. 

 

To end a relationship or leave a job might make us sick to our stomachs. And it is possible to persist in a job or relationship far longer than we should. If we can't tolerate the shaking, the sweating, the crying, the disorientation, we may never speak difficult truths.

At times I've had to simply sit, shake, and breathe for several minutes before I was able to say the things I knew I had to say. 

 

I am thinking of a practice called Focusing I am very involved in. While practicing Focusing one attends to their body in a present, meditative way, noticing present experience in all of its complexity. 

It is from this place of deep, present, embodied experience that I have been able to speak the greatest truths about myself and my life. But these truths often make me shake before I am able to say them. I feel them in my body, they come to me in sensations and images long before they come to me in words. Again, I suspect that you, my reader, can feel your problems in your body long before you can say them in words. 

But one has to be able to tolerate the jarring appearance of the spirit of the problem if one wants to be able to find the words that will adequately express or honor that spirit. 

The spirit of the truth can be terrifying and overwhelming before we find the words. The words tend to tame.

I know from my own life and therefore can simply assert: There are truths that can be spoken only after one allows oneself the sit, shake, heave, and pant for a while.

What are the kinds of things that can only be said after shaking?

Again, this is a type of truth that I'm pointing to. The solving of a math problem could do this for someone (Eureka!), but often it doesn't. I memorized so many things during my time in public schools, and I didn't feel a thing at all about it all.

In America, it seems to me, we are more inclined to think of 'truth' as something objective, unfeeling, measurable, quantifiable, 'outside of us'. The age of the universe, the height of Mt. Everest, the chemicals in my brain, are these not the 'truest' things because they do not implicate the 'subjectivity' of human beings? 

Put differently, we tend to think of 'truth' as third-personal, as pertaining to the order and arrangement of things without the presence of human beings. This is a type of truth. But I am more interested in first-personal truths, meaningful truths, things that pertain to concrete lives as they occur in concrete relationships and situations.

 

These are the types of truths that arrest the lived body: love, hate, fear, disrespect, shame, hatred, lust, honor.

 

These are the types of words needed to illuminate the types of truths I am talking about.

As a psychotherapist, I specialize in the speaking of first-personal truths. Third-personal truths, no doubt, have their role in psychotherapy. It can be comforting to know, for example, that someone's behavior is well explained by neuroscience or trauma research. And these third-personal insights are true in their own way: someone's nervous system activation is a very important part of explaining their volatility, and this is something all human beings are capable of. It is a generic truth, and there are generic truths.

But there will always be a personal or first-personal dimension missed by these sorts of explanations. "Yes, your nervous system did get overwhelmed and you went into a protective rage response." Yet the question remains: Why was that particular situation so activating to you, what in your unique history conditioned you to respond that way?

Third-personal, abstract forms of truth, unfortunately, can often distract people from those more particular questions. This is something I have experienced often in relation to both of my parents. My mother doesn't want or need to explore her particular depression; she is content with a generic medical explanation about her bad brain. My father doesn't feel the need to look carefully at his own experience; instead he can say "I'm just an anxious person..." 

These generic explanations, derived from psychiatry, have done little to soothe my parents or solve their problems.

 

But they have certainly allowed them to bypass their experience. 

The truths that would cause their bodies to shake have appeared threatening and therefore been deemed irrelevant or illusory.

 

They never developed the skills needed to welcome the types of truths that rack the body. Because, again, this is something that must be learned. We must learn to  pass through the disorienting waves of feeling that precede and accompany the speaking of difficult truths.

And this brings me to the second point I want to explore, that of collective skill loss. I will pose it as a question: If one must learn to tolerate the bodily process of speaking truth, is it possible that a society or culture can be better or worse at this type of education? And wouldn't it be possible for these skills to be gained or lost, to be more and less known at different times in human history?

Or, to render it as a statement: I suspect that European and American cultures have undergone a collective skill loss in which we are less capable of sitting with painful truths, more inclined to seek refuge in empty third-personal truths, frightened and averse to the arresting quality of deep personal,  interpersonal, and spiritual revelations.

Collective skill loss is a documented phenomenon. Sometimes it is called "Brain Drain," by which people mean "the emigration of highly trained or intelligent people from a particular country" (dictionary). I talked to a man who emigrated from China and he explained to me that most of the Chinese people you meet in America have worked incredibly hard to pursue education and opportunities abroad. It is a small and self-selected segment of the population: many of the most intelligent and educated people leave and seek opportunity elsewhere. 

Sometimes Brain Drain isn't about emigration, but about death. I have heard that during WWII large amounts of the Polish educated classes were murdered by the Nazis: doctors, lawyers, politicians, academics, intellectuals, writers, all these people were systematically murdered because they posed a more substantial threat to the Nazi hope of dominating Poland.

Whether its emigration, murder, or other forms of strife, it is possible for skills to be lost, and for a society as a whole to come to lack certain skills, resources, or abilities.

There is much evidence, from many sources, that colonialism abroad, and industrial exploitation domestically, led to the disruption of communities and their local practices and knowledges. 

Collective skill loss seems like something that must have occurred in the last several hundred years, especially in the places my ancestors were: England, Scotland, and the rest of Western Europe. I have recently been learning deeply from Karl Polayni's book The Great Transformation. He documented with great clarity, in then 1940s, the way that the citizens of England were manipulated and coerced into their new existence as a standing body of laborers, subject to the whims of wages, rent, and the whole capitalist apparatus. 

People's livelihood and subsistence was no longer tied to the land, but tied to the market. 

This disconnection from land seems to come along with a disconnection from the body. And, as I have been arguing, it is connectedness to our own bodily experiences that allows us to engage in discussion of difficult truths.

Relationships with land and ancestry were disrupted by industrial and capitalistic processes. The body began to acquire a new, mechanized meaning in this industrial-capitalistic context. How could this type of transformation not affect our capacity for discussion and truth telling? 

This morning, 9/13/24, I finished reading R.G. Collingwood's 1936 essay "Man Goes Mad." Collingwood was observing precisely the processes of collective skill loss I am trying to understand. He lived through, and carefully wrote about, the changes that occurred in the English countryside and the incumbent changes in human relationships and experiences. Collingwood gives special attention to the role of landscape, nature, and agriculture. 

He seems to think that the shift from agricultural to industrial modes of production has radically shifted the emotional patterns of English culture. We no longer feel competent to build in relation to nature, to think of our constructions as 'adornments' of the already beautiful natural world.

I am not yet sure how to develop this idea of 'collective skill loss', but I hope to have indicated some of its contours and some of my sources.

Regardless of how I delineate it, I still believe my immediately and extended family have been suffering under the conditions of this sort of collective skill loss.

 

My great-grandfather left Scotland and came to North America because the industrail revolution had shifted economic conditions so that he could no longer make his living there. Much of his family left, apparently. When he first arrived in America he ended up in Detroit, struggling in the Ford factories. The Ford factories, apparently, were brutal, intolerable. They left and went to Montreal where he worked in coal mines. This was a point of significant shame, it seems.

In his 60s, my grandfather began, but did not finish, a play about his childhood in Montreal. His mother is depicted as a ball of anxiety, grief, and shame. The emigration seems to have hurt her deeply. His father is depicted as initially sweet, then passive in the face of conflict, and then explosive and abusive after a period of frozenness. 

My great-grandfather, at least in my grandfather's description, was not graceful in his ability to speak difficult truths, was not able to sit, breathe, gather, and carefully express himself. He is depicted as overwhelmed. His wife, my great-grandmother Peg, is depicted as overwhelmed. Their bodies shake but they do not understand this as the rumbling of truth; they understand it as the sting of shame, pure and simple, something to be scorned and resisted.

Were my ancestors ever able to have a relationship with the types of truths I'm talking about? I really don't know... But I do have evidence that there has been rage, explosiveness, defensiveness, and fear... There is evidence that certain changes, and the truth of those changes, has been unspoken in the context of the family.

 

My family members were caught up in the tension between one form of truth telling and another... the truth of numbers, clocks, machines... these began to swallow up the truth of the body...

 

For the social changes I am pointing to are impossible without significant changes in the nature of truth. Even in antiquity there is the idea that truth is not about the individual speaking difficult truths (revelation), but rather the impersonal, the quantitative, the 'objective.' In the modern world, this image of truth as third-personal becomes dominant. It is, in fact, the basis of modern science and modern industry.

 

My ancestors were caught up in this avalanche of quantification and rational manipulation. Indeed, this is what made the Ford factories what they were (re: Taylorism, scientific management, and the project of mechanizing the human being). 

 

It must have been so hard to conform to the rhythms of the machine. How could one not forget the rhythms of the body? How could one not lose their sense of place and person?

The truest form of truth is the first-personal revelation of implicit experience. All third-personal forms of truth are derived from this other form of truth. The revelation of first-personal truth is profoundly bodily. We must shake and sweat and pant as a way of blessing and welcoming the words that will honor what wants so how itself in and through us. But this is a skill. And the events of the last several hundred years make it clear to me why this skill is so hard to learn, in such short supply.

Something happened to my ancestors, and I am only now learning to let my body shake as it finds the words to honor the wounds that dominated my family and my life within it.