On Engaging the Unrecognizable
“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
–Winston Churchill
When my patient, Dan, was six years old his father left him and his mother, his mother tried to kill herself, and they moved out of the family’s apartment in Greenwich Village. When Dan was 12 his father and stepmother killed themselves and his mother tried to kill herself, again. When he was 35 his older brother died, the family house was sold, and his mother died of metastatic cancer. Approximately 6 months ago, now in his sixties, Dan got divorced, moved out of his home of 16 years, and COVID struck. In one of our recent sessions after a long pause, Dan sighed and said, “So what should we talk about today, Doc? I feel I should have one of those ‘take-a number’ gizmos for all the shit that seems to happen to me at the same time.”
Six months ago not many of us would have experienced several major life challenges occurring simultaneously. But now we are all facing what Dan has experienced on numerous occasions; the concurrence of multiple traumatic events. Freud wrote that trauma occurs when the person or his environment becomes unrecognizable. There is much that appears unrecognizable these days; the environment, (local, national, global), race relations, public health, dissolution of governmental separation of powers, record unemployment, educational dislocation, just to name the more obvious examples. Re-cognizing is perceiving something that is familiar, something that you have cognized before. Finding the familiar in the unfamiliar is a daunting task, but one that is worth the effort.
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“Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”
–John Lennon
This quote of John Lennon’s seems particularly apt; the recognition that regardless of what we intend the unexpected will happen and likely influence, if not disrupt, our personal agendas. This is difficult to acknowledge in calmer times, and much more so when faced with a deluge of calamities. But it is also true that this acknowledgment can be grounding in that it reminds us that we are not meant to be in control of our destinies.
Human consciousness is an amalgam of our subjective experiences and the impact that external events have on them. In the words of the philosopher Richard Rorty, experience and perception is interpretation, and that our interpretations consist of a commingling of those two divergent realms of experience.
It isn’t the case that the rest of life stops when all hell is breaking loose. The usual persists in spite of the unusual occurring. Using Dan as an example, he had to learn how to keep going-on-being while being, as he knew it, was unrecognizable. Here are some questions that have proven useful for Dan and for a number of my patients to consider when things become unrecognizable.
Am I using external events to impulsively justify my actions, or are external events making me aware of what I didn’t know, or didn’t know I knew, and thereby leading me to more informed and conscious decisions?
How am I talking about what is happening? Am I venting and getting caught up in the group hysteria, or panic, or anger? Or am I trying to understand the facts and draw thoughtful conclusions and possibly do something in service of what I feel needs to be done?
How much of my media consumption is feeding my sense of unease, and making it harder to thoughtfully synthesize what is happening around me, what effect it’s having on me, and what I want to do about it?
This is a trying time on multiple levels, and much is unrecognizable to most of us. By considering how our past impacts our interpretation of the present, we can potentially be more thoughtful and make decisions that will create more stability and better outcomes when these stormy seas subside, as they always do.