The Girl Ain't Right

Well, it's been a while, and I haven't had FGC or anything like that for an excuse. Not sure what I am going to write about tonight. I've had a number of possible posts floating around but haven't felt led to write until this spectacularly un-programmed evening.

It has been an intense little while here in Somerville, with both the literal and emotional climate raging back and forth from cold and stormy to steamy and stifling. Stepping out of a training session this morning, wherein I was oriented within an inch of my life, I walked into a wall of heat and breathed in the thick mixture of mud and honey that was passing for air. The torpor of the atmosphere this weekend has been mirrored, not entirely negatively, in my spiritual life. I feel an enforced stillness, as if I've been swaddled tightly in cotton wool. As I said, this isn’t all bad.

My first week in MA, I was paralyzed in a very different, and much more painful way. The transition of the move and new job hit me unexpectedly, exposing weak spots I’d effectively camouflaged with the tons of concrete and company available to me in NYC. Catastrophic depression and anxiety, which had marked my life pre-New York, returned for the first time in two years. I had come to the conclusion that this pain was all situational, entirely caused and sustained by destructive relationships and unhealthy emotional environments. It was deeply disturbing to move into what promised to be the healthiest, most stable, and comfortable position of my life to date, only to be ambushed by old enemies I’d left for dead months and months before. Even while battling the old bad feelings, I was overwhelmed by a sense of betrayal. How dare this happen to me now? Did this mean I would never be safe?

It brought up an old and miserable worry about the difference or connection between one’s soul and one’s psyche. Since Job, it’s been instinctual to connect suffering and sin. Though we’ve been slowly and surely moving away from equating physical suffering and privation with moral depravity, it’s much more difficult once you move into psychological waters. Even to the sufferer, it is easy to “see” that an emotional disturbance must be caused by an imbalance on the spiritual plane. I’m not sure anybody has ever resolved this – I certainly haven’t. Far from being a patient martyr, when my mental health wavers, my faith shudders and stumbles. I’d like to think if I broke a leg or came down with a serious illness I could find a way to use my pain to bring me closer to God. (I almost met Him once while raving with a Chicken Pox fever). But when dealing with psychological pain, and worst of all, the corresponding sense of being out of control of my own emotional responses, it’s a lot harder. How can you be virtuous if you feel as though your free will is gone? When you fight and fight against impulses towards thoughts and actions that must be unholy by their self-destructiveness, but lose, despite your most valiant willpower? Very often I won’t be good, but paradoxically, I’ve never felt more damned than I do in those times where I really, honestly, and truly can’t “be good”.

I’d hope that this frightening loss of control would teach me something about surrender, but in these cases it’s hard to think of it as a matter of trust. It is not God that has control of me at these times, but something that once upon a time we might have cast into a bunch of pigs. You don’t need to believe in a sentient devil-being to have experience of demons. I can't imagine that you are supposed to just lie still and give yourself over to them - they can and will and do destroy people all the time. That doesn’t seem like trust or holy submission. But at the same time, you can't seem to fight them off. What do you do? How are you supposed to react? What is happening?

My literary wanderings often shoot me off into strange inter-disciplinary alleys (that’s how I ended up stumbling into God again, for one thing) Once, peeking into psychology, I came upon the “Theory of Positive Disintegration, by the Polish Psychologist Kazimierz Debrowski. When I first ran into it, I’d been following a quote from Aeschylus, which continues to find me, over and over again:

"He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God"

It’s hard to find an overview of this theory that doesn’t dissolve into hopeless jargon, but the basic idea is that the person moves through different levels in the development of their personality, from the base, which is determined largely through hereditary and social factors, through the second, where they first begin to realize that “life can be higher”, that there is a disconnect (both in the world and in themselves) between “what is” and what “could be”, and construct an idealized self, and finally to a third, “actualized” stage, where the personality is autonomous, no longer controlled by outside forces, operating in harmony with the "self-aware, self-chosen, self-affirmed, and self-determined unity of essential individual psychic qualities". (Think: in the world, but not of it) Transition through the second level into the third is marked by a crisis involving the breakdown of the former, lower, personality. The disconnect between the newly developed "idealized self" and the reality of the present self causes deep psychic pain, which spurs the individual to change and creates the necessary conditions for the transformation. Dabrowski argued that breakdown, depression and psychoneurosis were not illnesses to be treated, but rather, crucial doors through which the individual must pass in order to develop both psychologically and morally. In the good doctor’s own words:

" "The propensity for changing one's internal environment and the ability to influence positively the external environment indicate the capacity of the individual to develop. Almost as a rule, these factors are related to increased mental excitability, depressions, dissatisfaction with oneself, feelings of inferiority and guilt, states of anxiety, inhibitions, and ambivalences - all symptoms which the psychiatrist tends to label psychoneurotic. Given a definition of mental health as the development of the personality, we can say that all individuals who present active development in the direction of a higher level of personality (including most psychoneurotic patients) are mentally healthy" (Dabrowski, 1964, p. 112).

"Intense psychoneurotic processes are especially characteristic of accelerated development in its course towards the formation of personality. According to our theory accelerated psychic development is actually impossible without transition through processes of nervousness and psychoneuroses, without external and internal conflicts, without maladjustment to actual conditions in order to achieve adjustment to a higher level of values (to what 'ought to be'), and without conflicts with lower level realities as a result of spontaneous or deliberate choice to strengthen the bond with reality of higher level" (Dabrowski, 1972, p. 220).

"...This is a process in which the individual himself becomes an active agent in his disintegration, and even breakdown. Thus the person finds a 'cure' for himself, not in the sense of a rehabilitation but rather in the sense of reaching a higher level than the one at which he was prior to disintegration. This occurs through a process of an education of oneself and of an inner psychic transformation. One of the main mechanisms of this process is a continual sense of looking into oneself as if from outside, followed by a conscious affirmation or negation of conditions and values in both the internal and external environments. Through the constant creation of himself, though the development of the inner psychic milieu and development of discriminating power with respect to both the inner and outer milieus - an individual goes through ever higher levels of 'neuroses' and at the same time through ever higher levels of universal development of his personality" (Dabrowski, 1972, p. 4).

Honestly, this is the most hopeful thing I’ve ever read in relation to “mental illness”. In a way it is a secularization of the old “Dark Night of the Soul”. Honestly, when you feel really, really bad, a clinical description of your suffering can be more reassuring than a mystical promise. And is that wrong? Many of us are scarred by the fetishizing of suffering as an end in itself by misapplications and mischaracterizations of the crucifixion, and it’s hard to understand suffering as redemptive outside of this context. Removing it from the trappings of Western religion and the associated concepts of punishment, payment, and penance, maybe we can come to an understanding of redemptive suffering (or at least, a realization that maybe suffering is not senseless)that is deeply healing, cleansing, and constructive.

In this last painful period, I certainly wasn’t “good” or “holy” or “patient”. I was not behaving myself emotionally or spiritually. I didn’t feel like I was developing emotionally or spiritually. I can’t claim any virtue in this past week. The only thing I can say is that a few times, when I was feeling blackest, I made a weak application of those parts of my soul I could locate, to God, who at that moment I didn’t really believe in at all. What helped most was the love, acceptance and comfort of my dearest friend, even when I had a hard time believing in him, too.

Right now, I certainly don’t feel “good”, but I do feel stilled. Centering came this past First Day with more sureness and ease than ever before, and though prayer did not follow in any recognizable way, I did feel the Presence.

”Master, I have brought unto thee my son, which hath a dumb spirit; And wheresoever he taketh him, he teareth him: and he foameth, and gnasheth with his teeth, and pineth away: and I spake to thy disciples that they should cast him out; and they could not.
He answerth him, and saith, O faithless generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him unto me. And they brought him unto him: and when he saw him, straightway the spirit tare him: and he fell on the ground, and wallowed foaming.
And he asked his father, How long is it ago since this came unto him? And he said, Of a child. And ofttimes it hath cast him into the fire; and into the waters, to destroy him: but if thou canst do any thing, have compassion on us, and help us.
Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth. And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.
When Jesus saw that the people came running together, he rebuked the foul spirit, saying unto him, Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him. And the spirit cried, and rent him sore, and came out of him: and he was as one dead; insomuch that many said, He is dead.
But Jesus took him by the hand, and lifted him up; and he arose.
Mark 9:17 - 27