iPacifier

Everyone reaches for something, a phone, a bottle, themselves. We are compelled to experience something familiar, the same, in order to fend off the overwhelm of newness.

It's the way of the world. We can't avoid doing this, we fall in with familiarity like a long-time lover, its curvature we know well, and it's taste of the same, kindly sweetness. This reminds me, however, of a friend saying to me that music is created in (owing to) the silences - there is only rhythm if a pause occurs in between the beats. I believe the same can be said for familiarity, in the sense that in order to enjoy familiarity, find favour with it, it must be contrasted with the experiences of the new, the shock of unpredictability. To be sure, there are adrenaline junkies who thrive off novelty and letting all hell break loose, but my disposition tends towards an overreliance on the familiar - and this serves as the driving force behind the current post.

What is the appropriate amount of leaning on familiarity? When can one feel out when it is being overused, or when it is in service of running away from something (as a fixation, a crutch) versus when it is used as a temporary respite from a 'hard day's work'? Each person clings to something differently, and there are myriad factors (internal and external) culminating in a person having their unique 'fix' (fixation?). The uniqueness of one's fix is not the point of my investigation, however, so we must leave it aside for now. The current issue regards why someone is 'fixed' at all, and one's relationship to their 'fixedness' as either well-being breaktime or nefarious stranglehold on psychic development.

The reason why someone is fixed is simple: with an external reality dominated by constant change and chaos, we seek to construct our immediate world around us to be more amenable to our homeostatic set points. By this, I am touching on the fact that there is only so much frustration or difficulty one can handle at a given moment. We know this to be true owing to the expression that one reaches their 'breaking point' - we all feel this point within ourselves. It is uncertain what will happen if someone actually reaches their breaking point - maybe it is accompanied with a scream, a cry, a laugh, or even a psychotic break (episode). There is something finite about one's ability to work on something, in thought and in working memory, 5% so I'm told of our brain's capacity, yet if the world makes demands upon us (which inextricably touch on our internal drive demands) we may be so 'overwhelmed' that we cannot cope - the ship cannot hold in such raucous waves. So some action must be done to expel this energy, whatever energy insists most upon its primacy in our minds and bodies - so the action that is taken at the breaking point reveals the most demanding drive which has sought expression yet had hitherto not been allowed out, had been prohibited of gaining form, for some reason. Again, there are numerous reasons for one's inhibition of their drives, and we shall revisit this in our discussion on PANIC/GRIEF and the importance of social approval/connectedness.

So, we understand, at least in an elementary manner, what one's breaking point entails. It is the final overflow, a long awaited outpouring of previously suppressed emotional response (and I would say, emotional need). We, of course, are inclined to think of issues pertaining to the external world because that is how our emotional needs are known to us - our external representatives of our drives are the only way we know how to articulate/understand ourselves and our wishes. One may think of the boss demanding you submit that file at 5pm today, one may think of the husband demanding (albeit in a roundabout fashion) you cook the food with a bit more flavour next time, one may think of the idiot driver demanding that you swerve your car out of the way to avoid utter catastrophe, one may think of the children, your children, who don't know the dangers of the world demanding that you consistently 'mind' and care for them, no matter the weather, etc. etc. etc. You experience these objects (persons) in your world as 'demanding', 'forcing' you to act, but that is actually not the case. They are, in fact, the external representatives of our drive demands, nothing more, nothing less. From these objects, you experience them 'making' you feel a certain way, but it would be more apt to say that, you are feeling a certain way in these scenarios and you attribute these feelings to those objects in your world. In actuality, you have these feelings. These feelings are a part of, always inside of, you. The boss is not cause of the feeling of FEAR - you feel FEAR owing to experiences where you are threatened, and your boss is just one mere instantiation/representative of your innate FEAR (its feeling and associated actions). I could articulate more and more instances (the ones mentioned above) but I feel I would be belabouring the point. We only know external things, persons, phenomena, as representatives of our drive demands, of our emotional demands, of our emotional needs, of our survival needs. The feelings themselves (SEEKING, LUST, FEAR, RAGE, PANIC/GRIEF, CARE, & PLAY) are, in truth, inside of you, and the external world is given form only through these (your) elicited affects; an object's boundaries/borders are defined owing to the sufficient enough difference in the emotional feeling which is elicited in one perceptual context versus another. It is only with this insight can we truly understand our relationship to the external world, how we 'know' our world to be. It is much more appropriate to say we do not know our world to be any sort of way, we must, instead, say, we only 'feel' our world to be a certain way.

Okay... Jeez. A bit of a tangent there. Apologies.

Okay, so 'fixedness' - reaching for a phone or a bottle. Right. With what I've said about how we only have a certain capacity for conscious mental work (working memory), and also we have these innate needs that emerge within us when we are in certain contexts (and owing to our biological survival needs) - well, with all that, we have to balance all these drive/emotional/survival demands with limited capacity to do so. Sometimes multiple affects (and therefore needs) arise in a single scenario, and with these competing drive demands, we must 'choose' (I don't think consciously, but the most 'pressing', or 'precise' thing we consciously feel), the most important need, we feel the thing, and then that motivates either thought or action about the emotional need. I know I'm not being super precise in my language here, but I'm in a little bit of a flow state - if you'll forgive me. Right, OK, so the most important thing is felt. There are specific things that bring about a satisfaction of these feelings (e.g. if you feel RAGE, the associated action is to kill, harm, stand your ground/state your case), and so not just any action can bring about a diminution of the feeling. I should also say here, that the feeling motivates you to act, so that the feeling is 'gotten rid of', and in that getting rid of feeling, you experience pleasure/satiation/ an 'Aahh' relaxation. More on that in another blog post. So: many emotional needs simultaneously, limited psychic capacity to feel/act upon emotional needs so only 1 is felt and emerges as dominant, and only specific actions can bring about the dominant need's dissolution. What if the specific action/solution to the most pressing need contradicts with another one? Fuck. Yeah, this is the great challenge of life. All these internal demands - oh, an by the way, you have to discover the appropriate solutions through experience in the external world - THIS external world that we find ourselves in - so you're also limited there too. You cannot dream up/conjure/hallucinate a solution because, well, that won't do anything for you besides potentially delay your frustrations a little bit longer. How does that hallucinated steak and lobster taste? Good? Well your stomach is still grumbling...

Ok, I don't think I'm going to build to a grand point about 'fixedness' so here's my best approximation: we rely on our crutches because 1) they themselves satisfy an internal/emotional need (pick your poison, really, depending on what is the drive that presses on your mind the most, and you haven't found another action/solution for) and 2) we seek to tune out further scenarios which may elicit further drive demands as we feel already at our brink. We feel we cannot take on any more newness, any more internal drives elicited whilst in unpredictable events, and so we turn to something utterly familiar, totally known, 100% tried and true. However, and as we will discuss in future blog posts, with any 'fixedness' there is an issue: circumstance changes, different intensities/blends of your drive demands will emerge at any time, and that's why coming back to the same behaviours may, one day, conflict with other demands. If all you know if how to drink a bottle of vodka when you've had too much, it might be fine if you have no spouse or kids, you'll get your social interaction elsewhere and at other times - so drink up after work when you're at home. But if you elect to welcome a spouse and children into your life, at home, and if these people matter to you, if they form into the representatives of your PANIC/GRIEF system - your drinking, which may have been adaptive (and to a degree still is because it satisfies some drive demand (maybe LUST/RAGE/SEEKING/PLAY, you're a bit less inhibited here when you're drunk), has now become a representative of suffering for you (you feel bad owing to a negligence of other drive demands). And, again, if all you know is how to drink, if you've never found any other expression for certain emotional needs, your fixed behaviours are likely to conflict with other needs you have. Life is an everchanging process and so should your actions/solutions be for your emotional needs.

And, on the topic of finding respite from the 'go go go' of life, you can find that - there are innumerable ways of doing so. But the issue, or the pathological factor which lay inside fixed patterns of behaviour is that they satisfy a drive demand, an emotional/survival need, that likely has not found freer expression elsewhere. It has been banished, for some reason, which we will eventually discuss in later blog posts, and has found itself forced into the action/solution of 'fixedness'. Psychotherapy may help - and God let's hope it does.