Time Goes On

Stephanie

February 4

Daily writing prompt

How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?

This morning's prompt is made wildly widely general by the present tense "do" rather than "did", so I wonder whether to answer the question it takes lifetimes to answer, or to answer philosophically. Anyway answering these questions is like sticking a ladle into soup: a little spills out and lots keeps bubbling for later.

So, on one level, we know that our cells are continually generating, so parts of us are new every few months or years. Still, we're not defined by a cell within the network, more by the network in its entirety. The idea that we have an entirely new body every seven years is based on good science, extrapolated too far. Otherwise a lot of our medical treatments would consist of waiting things out! Physiologically there's continuity, but one cell run amuck can take over much of the enterprise.

This is true psychologically as well, with trauma understood as wound of imagination that must be addressed in some way if the whole is network is to flow flourish.

One of van der Kolk's most insightful characterizations of acute forms trauma is that it is a "failure of the imagination." When people are compulsively and constantly pulled back into the past, to the last time they felt intense involvement and deep emotions, they suffer from a failure of imagination, a loss of the [sic] mental flexibility.
Without imagination, there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future. Without imagination, we lose hope and creativity."

Psychology Today

So even without traumatic events in my history, I would glean insight from the idea that imagination must be fed a nourishing diet of wide-ranging ideas, stories and cultural contexts if one doesn't wish to let stuck places define one's life. It isn't an easy balance, not straight-forward "just get over it" work, although there's some of that in there. Not talking about or managing memories or feelings that come up is also giving a lot of importance to them rather than making them grist for the mill, so to speak.

Everything has to process through in life; it all has to keep moving. It's fascinating if one can back up a bit and more impersonally see the process. "Oh, there's the character of my life moving toward the door, but here comes that memory making her doubt it's the right door. What can I do to mark that door as the one she wants to go through? How can I make it easier?

One very interesting observation in the Psychology Today I article I quoted before is that those stuck in trauma tend toward literalization, which is one of those powerful observations that may help one keep compassion for the most sinister or difficult characters in their life. They can't back up and take perspective, or see that there are different contexts for viewing something, rather a story becomes immovably true. They are literally putting themselves or their loved ones in danger if they deviate from belief or let down their guard.

I say they, but am well-aware I have Miss Havisham in Great Expectations places.

Although I don't wake in tears or looping arguments like I used to anymore (thank you therapy), I still do often wake with general thoughts about my mother and/or sister, neither of whom are in my story anymore. I'm still moving toward a certain door, unsure if I can get there. The stuck-ness is compounded by this trauma coming up because I chose to address an earlier one, inception indeed.

Many aspects of a traumatic response are encompassed symbolically, in Dickens's Gothic scenario. Above all, we see someone stuck in the traumatic moment: Miss Havisham cannot make her experience into something that happened in the past. Miss Havisham literalizes the psychic immobility of traumatic experience by stopping her life at the moment she received the news of her abandonment. We later learn that all the clocks in the house are set at that moment as well: twenty minutes to nine. Like many who suffer from trauma, everything remains as it was, but of course it doesn't. Time might stop psychologically in that Miss Havisham ceases to participate in life at that moment, but the condition of her body and environment (there's a particularly disgusting wedding cake moldering in another room) shows that time goes on.

Same Psychology Today article

Keep Moving