I’d prefer to see it stay in the Temple. What an excellent topic.
I apologise in advance if I offend anyone with this post, as I’m attempting to delineate a distinction that’s quite slippery but has emerged from my personal experience, that in many ways bears similarities to Money $hot’s (but in other ways definitely doesn’t). Now it’s possible that the distinction is actually non-existent and for that I’ll rely on my own after-the-fact thinking plus your thoughts to correct myself. If I fumble the ball here please err on the side of forgiving, as some of this is pretty personal.
Enough embarrassing safety net building…
For several years through my late teenage years and early twenties (but probably having its roots much earlier) I had recurring dreams in which figured sexual relationships with females of Asian ethnicity, specifically Chinese (although later in this account I’ll fudge even that specificity by giving an example that blurs over into a culture I know practically nothing about). Already I’m on shaky ground and in what Mordant might describe as Asian Babes territory, the “white fetishisation of nonwhite women.” This tended to crop up time and time again, and if I’m to be honest I chose to reinforce it in waking life with choices of porn and Chinese movies. More problematic still were the ways in which I was representing this to myself in my journals, which were pretty similar again to the ways in which Money $hot describes his experiences only without the potentially saving grace of describing a love Goddess. In waking life I’d have extreme reactions around women who I perceived as being *of this type* (the type being essentially of my own making, which was a predominantly unconscious process). And if I were to track all this potential misogyny back to a particular starting point then I reckon it probably began when I was dumped back in my teenage years by a girl who – to me – exemplified these characteristics, after which I rebelled into religious chastity as an escape from the pain (funny, as my early teenage growing pains surrounding my first sexual experiences were a rebellion away from my religious upbringing… I guess I wanted safe, non-sexual territory). These reactions to people I knew in the flesh were frequently very physical, shaking and getting tongue tied, etc. And once my limited brainpower had cottoned on to the fact that there was a pattern in all this, when I attempted to describe every instance of women who fit the pattern I would use words like “exotic” and “sensual.” Being honest about my journaling, there would also be accounts of them being “creative,” “forces of nature,” “tempestuous,” “highly emotional” and even “promiscuous.”
Reading that back, it’s classic Barbelith male growing up stuff: getting ditched and freaking out whenever you see someone who reminds you of the person, with all the attendant terror of women hidden beneath the surface. Hopefully this has the benefit of being honest, and possibly even good for a laugh.
Now the first step in dealing with all of this stuff was to take responsibility for it, to realise that it was all about me, really. Now here comes the crucial distinction that I mentioned in my first paragraph, the distinction that I suspect actually exists but am open to being proved wrong about: as is quite common in young blokes, a lot of these sexualised representations were accompanied by a lot of fear, shame, guilt and a basic denial of parts of myself. Essentially, I came to the realisation that the sheer number of times these women were cropping up in my dreams was my unconscious giving me a very pointed message concerning parts of myself that had become somehow dislocated, qualities in myself that my unconscious had labelled “female” in order to better put the message across. In short, it was a pretty classic example of what Jung would call *anima,* a term that I’m not necessarily sure I wholly believe in but use here because it fits my experience nicely.
The distinction is this: I knew there was something wrong here, something wrong about me. But if I’d have acted in a manner that denied these phenomena because their manifestation was extremely problematic it would have had the secondary effect of pushing that complex that my unconscious was trying to flag up further out of reach, in that telling myself it was wrong to feel this way I would have reinforced the fear, guilt and shame. If I had dismissed this message as Seth having an icky, pervy sexual predilection for Asian Babes sites it would have buried some important self realisation, and I’d have run further from Self-Awaria, not closer to it.
The first step was accepting that I felt that way and allowing myself to feel it. Then came the process of owning it all, of realising that I was that of which I dreamed. I was the one who was creative, sensual, flirtatious, promiscuous, tempestuous, exotic and highly emotional (not that you’d necessarily think “sensual” if you were to look at a chubby, bald-headed and extremely hairy bloke nearing his thirties). These are all qualities of Seth that I couldn’t recognise about myself because I’d chosen to do a complete about-face from my painful teenage rebellious years into a kind of utterly unreal religious sexual purity, denying my sex drive, being a committed Christian and entering into a sexless marriage with a – surprise surprise – Chinese girl (I’d like to add that this isn’t a commentary on my marriage in its entirety. I had a seven year relationship with a woman I loved very much, and any mention of her here will not do justice to her in the slightest, or the complexities of our relationship). I’d effectively ignored particular parts of myself and they were clamouring to be heard, choosing their own form until I was wise enough to capable enough to deal.
When I was doing my NLP course I deliberately used these internal representations in order to restore these qualities back into myself using an exercise called Change Personal History. This is extremely important, not only because as a result of the exercise I’ve never had those recurring problems again, but also because of the principle it demonstrates: in changework, utilise ANYTHING. It was always only the stuff of me, and as such it is my right to use it effectively in healing myself. To not allow it to come good in this way would have been to disrespect myself. If I had dismissed the messages I’d been flagging to myself as the product of vile wrong-thinking I could never have seen that it was a part of myself that I had othered, and never have utilised the principle that the cure is often contained within the symptom. Now I can allow myself to create, to be emotional, to fuck when I want to (should the opportunity present itself) and flirt when I want to (if the other person is up for it). I see those characteristics as a part of me, not belonging to someone or something else. Crucially the integration happened because I accepted my thoughts and feelings at an earlier, more unpalatable stage and didn’t judge too quickly or too harshly.
As a brief aside on technique, the exercise involved a trans-derivational search to find the earliest instance of a recurring problem, and then to introduce resources back into those memories and experience how your conceptions of your own life and your pain changes as a result. At the time I was working at the bank with someone onto whom I was projecting all of this, my unconscious had seemingly flagged her as the exemplar of everything about Seth that Seth couldn’t deal with at that time. I hope to God she wasn’t aware of any of this, it’s really embarrassing. To add fuel to the fire of all of this being totally theoretically unsound and potentially lying in areas questionable and icky, she was Vietnamese. The extent of my knowledge of Vietnam is from movies and what she chose to tell me, in effect all of my projections seemed utterly independent of who she was at any level. I’m not proud of any of this, and I’m not trying to make out that it’s all OK because it had a happy ending, but at least I can roll my eyes at myself. When I was doing the exercise and trying to decide what resource to bring to the problem, I felt her name instantly bubble up within myself, and I knew enough to trust the instinct. Sure enough it proved bang on the money and all of this stuff is historical past now. I don’t have those reactions any more. I integrated it all. It’s all a part of me again, and while I can’t explain it all I know I was responsible for my own healing as well as the life choices that led to the fragmentation in the first place.
Now that’s a gross over-simplification of everything, as usual. Every event has infinite causes and there’s far too much going on to adequately do it justice. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m taking total responsibility for this, for what goes on in my unconscious, even if I recognise that a lot more goes on in there than I’m capable of categorising or controlling. It’s my unconscious. It’s part of me, it’s one of the most important parts of me. It’s mine and I own it and I love it. I didn’t choose the gender and race representations that my unconscious flagged up to me, but I set the life circumstances – the parameters – that led to their creation, by fleeing from my healing process into a kind of religious emotional and sexual hiatus. And I don’t even regret that, as a lot of the best learning I ever did was at that stage of my life. But crucially, while I take responsibility for my life and my actions I also think that it took me years to unpick the tangle of pain and hurt and that I can’t judge myself too harshly for how I thought and felt.
So what exactly is the distinction here? I’m struggling to put it into words. I firmly believe that, as Trouser has been so eloquently writing upthread, these considerations should be taken into account. That they should be challenged. But this has to be balanced against an understanding of the type of changework that we’re engaged in when we claim to do magic or therapy or whatever you want to call it. How and when should a person be challenged? Are we always necessarily the one fit to challenge them? Many of us have a series of extremely well-rehearsed reactions that we go into when we feel we are being judged, and to couple that with deeply personal situations that are experienced in visionary or dream states that have a sexual element should be sufficient to flag to anyone getting involved that you have to tread extremely carefully and with an extraordinary amount of wisdom. This is not an easy area to deal with in the slightest, and it may concern relating to people at their most intimate levels, at the very basis of who they are.
I have no idea how anyone might respond to any of the above. I think it’s all safely past experience for me now, done and dealt with and healed up. I see it as a major success story in my life. Whether you see it that way is entirely up to you, and I’ll happily answer questions on it to the best of my ability. Again, sorry if that’s too much information, or if I’ve offended anyone. |
