Living with Losing - sink or swim

Swallowing defeat is a shrug-and-move-on experience in the sporting world and even in political circles. You win some, you lose some, you try again. Amongst less competitive types, thrust reluctantly into an argument with right on their side, it’s a bitter, crushing and imprisoning experience. They are trapped facing an awful truth – that their belief in a just world was unfounded. 

   Trust in a benign universe is bred early into the helpless infant, totally dependent on its parent carers. When reality falls short, the essential nugget of faith remains that somewhere out there is an authority who will vindicate their suffering and fix their problem. Then they grow up and discover that governments, the law – the replacement protectors  - are fallible and in some instances actively corrupt. A scary abyss opens up, a gateway into the bleak landscape that Kafka and George Orwell revealed with such chilling precision.

   Leaving the ‘he said/she said’ argument to one side, the Kavanaugh confirmation left a sour taste. The pussy-grabbing president heaped abuse on a brave and dignified woman thrust unwillingly into the spotlight with the sole purpose of achieving his ‘win’ (and defending his own dubious record vis a vis allegations); the boozy, misogynist frat boy culture of the colleges which spawned many of the USA ruling classes was laid bare; and self-serving partisan politics turned every argument on its head to attack the opposition. Deny, attack, reverse. It was an unedifying spectacle.

   But for every action there can be a reaction. It’s known as ‘why things bite back.’ After the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill USA Supreme Court debacle in 1991 over a similar argument failed to further the cause of justice, more women stood for political positions. Not huge numbers but some. This time round, since Trump’s appearance, the USA field is awash with female candidates. For some, defeat sparks a fight-back which would not have happened otherwise.

   For others vindication is a long time coming or never comes at all in their lifetime. Thirty, forty, fifty years later the dirty veritas emerges by which times decades of damage have been done.

   Novels, as ever, have a way of ramming home unpleasant truths which I vaguely knew but never quite digested. Manda Scott’s excellent Treachery of Spies which skilfully pulls together a dual storyline, of French Resistance in World War 11 and present-day, finishes (spoiler alert) with one such.  The author highlights the escape of senior war-criminal Nazis into both the US and UK security services (CIA and MI6) to aid the fight against the Soviets. 50 million died because of the actions of men who were allowed to lead protected lives thereafter because of crass expediency. 

  Henry Porter’s Firefly illuminated another kind of defeat – of refugees fleeing brutality and death risking their lives to reach an exiled freedom. His ending (spoiler alert) for the protagonist is happy-ish, but the reader is left in no doubt that for many, many others there will be no good result. And the resentment left by those experiences amongst oppressed peoples will seep down through generation after generation.

  How do you live with situations that strip away all sense of personal empowerment with no hope that good will triumph over bad? There’s a million inspirational clichés about choosing your attitude when you can’t choose the circumstances. Easier for the super-optimist who always assumes there’s a light at the end of their tunnel; less so for rigorous realists. 

  Nowadays the internet, for all its flaws, has the community-building ability to pull together the likeminded into a critical mass capable of making a dent in the seemingly immoveable. Activism is one route.    Even at a personal level, action can disrupt the lethargy of defeat. If Being with an impossible situation results in depression then Doing can be a lifegiving distraction, even in small ways.

   ‘I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair.’    Alfred Lord Tennyson.

 

   Writers have a privileged remedy in that they can be with the emotional tsunami created by the annihilation of personal choice and do something about it by spreading the word. 

  Edith Eger, a Holocaust survivor, whom I met years ago at Esalen, a wonderfully vibrant personality, wrote her autobiography The Choice, Embrace the Possible. She said “It was very difficult, but I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done, because, you see, the opposite of depression is expression. I was able to put it out there and cry and cry. With every page I lost 2,000lb of emotional weight.”

  And the last word goes to Voltaire. It’s worth pondering.

‘Injustice in the end produces independence.’ 

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Being Believed - not so simple

We’re back on the knotty matter of how we know what we think we know in a week where belief met disbelief head on.  She said, he said with no videotape evidence to blow denials out of the water or shine a light on fantasy or mistaken identity.

  It’s the nightmare of sexual assault where victims are desperate for vindication. Being believed is the key issue according to psychotherapist Brendan McCarthy who worked with child abuse survivors, some of whom had their stories dismissed and were sent back into the arms of their abusers to have their sanity destroyed.

  

 The massed ranks of the disbelievers aren’t all malign. They include middle-of-the-road types who consider themselves moral and decent. Their hostile resistance to acknowledging allegations is rooted in a deep-seated fear. Their comfortable world would be up-ended if they accepted such nastiness occurs, even more so if the accused is a person they consider an upstanding member of the community. For them it’s safer and less tiring to stay in their delusional bubble fending off unpleasant realities with an armoury of excuses – the accusers are mad or bad. They leap with glee onto the instances where claims have been categorically disproved as if that negated every other sad tale.

  Oddly enough belief also plays a considerable role in science, despite the high IQs claim that their conclusions are all based on measureable knowledge. Oliver Sacks in a fascinating chapter in Hidden Histories in Science talks about ‘dirty science’ where the authority in the field crushes any dissent which might undermine their status and reputation. He tells of Ludwig Bolzmann, the supreme theoretical physicist of the 19th century, being driven to suicide by misunderstanding and attack; had he lived only a very little longer, he would have seen worldwide recognition of his methods and ideas.

   In similar vein, the 19th century doctor, who recommended washing hands between patients to stop the spread of disease, was all but destroyed by his peers. They couldn’t stomach the notion they might have been guilty of malpractice. Seems tragically laughable now but fervently held beliefs, especially those which prop up reputations, are defended with destructive vehemence.

   The depressing fact is how universal this phenomenon is across all arenas. Max Planck, physicist admitted "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light but rather because its opponents eventually die, a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."  

  And Pulitzer Prize-winning Ernest Becker identifies the reason behind the hostility which erupts when faced with our own and others’ lies.  “The individual has to protect himself against the world, and he can do this only as any other animal would; by narrowing down the world, shutting off experience, developing an obliviousness to the terrors of the world and to his own anxieties.....* We don't want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about  reality." 

  It’s not that (most) people can’t be persuaded to change their minds but it isn’t the simple linear process which common sense might indicate. There is a period of turmoil when old beliefs disintegrate and along with them the mental stability they brought. The disorientation of glimpsing a new view of reality can be destabilising. Not infrequently people flip back to the old certainties and won’t be budged. 

   If enough don’t, then there is progress – and an almighty conflict between the dinosaurs and the bearers of the new knowledge.  But it does take the equivalent of a meteor-strike to wipe out old mindsets.     

  

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Mind, body, spirit - coming together through trauma

“If there are supernormal powers, it is through the cracked and fragmented self that they enter.” William James.

   Trauma and depression are everywhere – former soldiers struggling to cope in civilian life and often not succeeding, child abuse survivors speaking of their pain, war refugee and torture victims. The damage inflicted can be lifelong, leading to drink and drug addiction to dull the anguish, and suicide when it all gets too much.  Not for nothing is it called the ‘black hole of trauma’ into which the personality, shattered under intolerable pressure, falls.

   What William James and Carl Jung discovered many moons ago, though until recently it was never accepted in the mainstream, was that experiences that threaten to ‘break’ us can also ‘open us’ to another dimension of experience. Light comes through the broken places. 

  Soul is not a word in common currency nowadays outside of churches but is the best way of describing what can emerge from catastrophic damage and is a pathway to healing.  Not necessarily a come-to-Jesus moment, it can be Buddhist, Shamanic, contact with a spirit guide, a mystical connection with nature or animals. Many individual paths to one goal.

   Men, especially in the military, are resistant to talking about feelings but one PTSD specialist found that even the most taciturn soldiers open up when she says: “Tell me about your soul.”

   In our tattered, torn and splintered world, with organized religion having less and less relevance, there is a desperate need to reach out for a deeper meaning and purpose than the nuts ‘n bolt slog of everyday living can offer. Rising suicide rates point to a deep social and existential malaise which begs for profoundly new approach which can offer hope beyond a narrow experience of a miserable life. And as Donald Kalsched points out in Trauma and Soul ‘Ironically trauma survivors are in a unique position to claim this larger vision because they are forced prematurely into “ non-ordinary reality.” 

   Which isn’t to downplay the misery and torment victims suffer and not all make it through. But those who do may become unwitting trailblazers into a more spiritual realm and a wider world that we’ve lost connection with. With the rise and arrogance of science, what is acceptable as ‘known’ is only what can be measured and replicated. Which effectively amputates what lies beyond reality and rational dissection, a region that often carries a greater truth and resonance. 

  Treatments for trauma and PTSD now include bodywork as more becomes known about how memories are imprinted in the biochemical and glandular systems, and alter the brain’s functioning. Standard therapy that tries to alter ways of thinking can’t be effective if the body is grimly hanging on to the experience.  This paradoxically opens up a radically new approach to mind body interaction in a way that modern medicine has lamentably failed to do. 

  Who’d have thought that unbearable horror would lead the way towards a deeper understanding of the links between mind, body and spirit? Three centuries of rationalism have split us asunder, elevating thought above feeling, sensation and intuition, as if a human being was a computerised robot. ‘I think therefore I am’ has outlived its time. The pendulum is starting to swing for the oddest of reasons as trauma therapists, neuroscientists, bodyworkers and spiritual practitioners come together in an extraordinary alliance. 

  Shakespeare’s ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ may be coming back round to its moment.

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