Regrets, Only?

How does one find a way to put regrets into a balanced perspective? I see my past life as one that was filled with the kind of possibilities that open doors to a life of “wonderfulness.” As I look back, it seems to me that although those possibilities were never spelled out in specific ways, it was about achieving a reasonable facsimile of “fame and fortune,” or, to put it simply, living life above the masses of humanity in comfort and entitlement.

Okay. There it is! The error in my thinking! We are all part of the masses of humanity. So how did I get to a place I thought I should be above? Of course, daydreaming always comes to the rescue when we need to avoid something that feels endangering, especially when we are bewilderingly alone with our feelings. The answer goes beyond daydreaming and the power of dissociation. As starters, I came out of the womb with a depth of emotionality that did not fit into a cultural background that censored the show of feelings. As the child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who quickly assimilated to the New England culture within which we lived, my emotionality was constantly demonized. I learned, only too well, to quell my feelings in harmony with what I intuited was expected of me.

The blame does not lie with my parents, who were kind and loving. I’m sure they, too, were struggling with their own feelings to fit into a world that, on many levels, may have felt foreign and frightening. But I digress from the subject of regrets as they concern the failure to meet fantasied expectations. In polite society, responses to invitations are by “regrets only.” Conversely, an invitation to a life lived goes beyond “regrets only” because it includes a wide array of feelings, not the least of which are regrets. The caveat here is finding a way to put regrets into a context of understanding rather than failure, a state that is injurious to self-esteem.

American philosopher, Martha Nussbaum describes emotions as appraisals that we ascribe to things and persons. They are also a significant source of ones’ flourishing. For me, appraisals were outside my control. I had no language to connect my endemic feelings with how I thought about my world. This lack of understanding ones’ emotional world is a critical dilemma for far too many people.

Despite the disconnect from what I felt, the depth of my emotionality led me to a lifelong pursuit to make sense of unexpressed feelings and translate them into a discursive form of emotional knowing. It’s not surprising that I became a contemporary psychoanalyst writing and working with what I refer to as “extralinguistic affectivity,” feelings that exist outside the range of words. My approach includes a way to understand emotional experience, hopefully, without judgment. The optimal word here is experience. Experience simply exists. As a phenomenon, subjective experience transcends arbitration, and, as such, judgment.

So how do I reconcile an erroneous mode of thinking with emotional authenticity? It is a struggle that needs to be constantly acknowledged, especially during moments when regrets occupy “top of mind.” What helps me during challenging times is realizing what human experience is about. We are all battling the struggles of life together. I have had important help along the way so I can usually identify when I’m losing a perspective of what it means to be human.

Yet, there are still those difficult times and transitions when we all tend to revert back to old ways of thinking. No matter who we are, where we are in life and how young or old we may be, we may need the validating response of a nonjudgmental, understanding other. It is our continuing struggle as human beings to remember what we tried to forget during certain times in our lives. Though clichéd, truth can set us free. For me, truth begins with realizing that struggle is an inevitable part of the human passage to which I, among many others, belong.

The Scarlet Label (Borderline Personality Disorder)

Important addition to understanding the cultural silencing of grief

Beyond Meds: Alternatives to Psychiatry

By Brent Potter PhD

The diagnosis Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) strikes fear and loathing in the hearts of most mental health providers. It is unquestionably one of the most stigmatizing and overused diagnoses in existence. Often diagnosing someone with this label is a clinical punch in the gut to the client and also a means of communicating warning to other clinicians. It is the 21st century version of the scarlet letter.

In Borderline Personality Disorder: New Perspectives on a Stigmatizing and Overused Diagnosis, Jacqueline Simon Gunn and I outline the history of attitudes about the (perceived) feminine gone awry. We show that current diagnostic conceptions do not bespeak a psychiatric disease of chemically imbalanced brain organs, but are the logical outcome of long-standing attitudes about women through history. We do not deny that there are patterns of experience typical of emotional chaos and we demonstrate that men too suffer…

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Malek Bendjelloul: Suicide and the Silencing of Despair

It’s striking that seemingly no one picked up that a sense of despair had begun to close in within months before Malik’s suicide death.  How is that possible?                                                                                                                                                             

There are two remarkable stories that book end the premature death of the award-winning film director, Malik Bendjelloul on May 13. One is about Malik, who, at 36 years old, shocked the film world with his horrific suicide and the other is about the Detroit singer-songwriter, Sixto Rodriquez, the subject of Malik’a Oscar-winning film “Searching for Sugar Man.” In the early 1970’s, Rodriquez’ two albums failed to take hold in the States, where he remained unknown. Without the artist’s knowledge, his albums were bootlegged and distributed in apartheid South Africa, igniting the imagination of young Afrikaners living in political oppression. Rodriquez became a superstar on another continent simply on the merits of these two albums that contained no information about him. In 1998, after an exhausting search, a group of Afrikaner musicians found him in Detroit and invited him to perform in Cape Town to great acclaim.

The two stories of these two different men mirror each other in contradictory ways. One story is about life and hope, and the other is about death and despair. The stretch of life, the time between birth and death, when weighed in balance with hope, overpowers feelings of despair that inevitably emerge in life. Although Rodriquez’ music career did not develop during his prime years, he remained grounded in hope and took life as it came. Malik’s story is quite different. One wonders if the multi-talented film director, perhaps to escape from an encroaching sense of despair, was unknowingly searching for his own “sugar man” in seeking out and making this film. His creative genius transformed a “great story,” told with exquisite film editing, his own animation, writing his own original music and much more into a “great film.” In a January14 interview, Malik was asked what was next for him, and his last words during that interview were prophetic …”maybe I’ll be a Hollywood casualty.” It’s striking that seemingly no one picked up that a sense of despair had begun to close in within months before his suicide.

Rodriquez, having always possessed a bawdy kind of emotional truth, lived life among the working poor and close to his family. When his 1970’s recordings failed to sell, he viewed his situation as one in which “reality reigns,” meaning he had to go back to his day job as a laborer. Known as someone who might come to work at a demolition site in a tuxedo, he was able to keep a sense of fun through the drudgery of daily life. His music, true to who he is, expresses his soulfulness and emotional authenticity. www.last.fm/music/Rodriguez/_/Sugar+Man.

During the several years it took to make this remarkable film, Malik’s creative juices kept him going. With little to no funding, he ingeniously found inexpensive, simple solutions to what might have been high production costs. When the hoopla of the award season waned, and the “sugar” that fueled his creative genius ended, one might wonder if Malik’s own demons, perhaps a long-held sense of despair, which often comes with creative genius, took over. For someone like Malik, it may have been traumatizing to be separated from family, friends and his highly prized creative project. Catapulted onto a celebrity circuit awash with expectation most likely left him feeling alienated and isolated from others. Those surrounding him, more than likely, were unable to understand what was happening to the young director. When the wellsprings of creativity run dry, it yields to despair, disconnecting the artist from himself and others.

I find these two stories remarkable because they establish the importance of embodied emotion. Rodriquez’ story demonstrates that the “body never lies”—for bodily emotion inhabits our truth. Malik’s story, and I take poetic license here in my delineation, is about being alone with despair without understanding how human it is to feel deeply. Despair is an inevitable part of life—but what is primary is the context within which such feelings emerge, that needs to be fleshed out and understood. When one dissociates from emotional pain, it often becomes concretized in other forms such as physical pain. When one flees to a disembodied mind, obsessive thinking and perfectionism enslave daily existence.

Suicide is a complex and complicated subject. I don’t assume to know why an artist such as Malik Bendjelloul commits suicide, or, for that matter, why anyone of us might end life in suicide. For some individuals, the overwhelming danger of connecting with one’s emotional truth trumps the will to live. As preposterous as it sounds, death becomes less endangering than bearing the pain when you’re hopelessly alone trying to make sense of it. It takes a welcoming environment, a “relational home” with others who are willing and able to resonate the meanings of such despair to be able to bear it.

There is no such thing as a right or wrong feeling. And there is no such thing as an island unto oneself. We all need others who can resonate what is often above or below the level of worded meanings. The paradox is that Searching for Sugar Man goes far beyond a real-life Cinderella tale. The story is universal as all good stories are because it depicts what it means to be human. We can all identify with the sadness of being unknown and the hope of being found. Malik was almost there … he serendipitously found a very human story, intuitively stoked it to life, only to have his own cut short by misfortune and unbearable despair.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/searching-sugarman-director-dead-thr-710882

 

 

 

Suicide and the Silence of Despair by Lorraine Cates PhD

It’s striking that seemingly no one picked up that a sense of despair had begun to close in within months before Malik’s suicide death.

There are two remarkable stories that book end the premature death of the award-winning film director, Malik Bendjelloul on May 13. One is about Malik, who, at 36 years old, shocked the film world with his horrific suicide and the other is about the Detroit singer-songwriter, Sixto Rodriquez, the subject of Malik’a Oscar-winning film “Searching for Sugar Man.” In the early 1970’s, Rodriquez’ two albums failed to take hold in the States, where he remained unknown. Without the artist’s knowledge, his albums were bootlegged and distributed in apartheid South Africa, igniting the imagination of young Afrikaners living in political oppression. Rodriquez became a superstar on another continent simply on the merits of these two albums that contained no information about him. In 1998, after an exhausting search, a group of Afrikaner musicians found him in Detroit and invited him to perform in Cape Town to great acclaim.

The two stories of these two different men mirror each other in contradictory ways. One story is about life and hope, and the other is about death and despair. The stretch of life, the time between birth and death, when weighed in balance with hope, overpowers feelings of despair that inevitably emerge in life. Although Rodriquez’ music career did not develop during his prime years, he remained grounded in hope and took life as it came. Malik’s story is quite different. One wonders if the multi-talented film director, perhaps to escape from an encroaching sense of despair, was unknowingly searching for his own “sugar man” in seeking out and making this film. His creative genius transformed a “great story,” told with exquisite film editing, his own animation, writing his own original music and much more into a “great film.” In a January14 interview, Malik was asked what was next for him, and his last words during that interview were prophetic …”maybe I’ll be a Hollywood casualty.” It’s striking that seemingly no one picked up that a sense of despair had begun to close in within months before his suicide.

Rodriquez, having always possessed a bawdy kind of emotional truth, lived life among the working poor and close to his family. When his 1970’s recordings failed to sell, he viewed his situation as one in which “reality reigns,” meaning he had to go back to his day job as a laborer. Known as someone who might come to work at a demolition site in a tuxedo, he was able to keep a sense of fun through the drudgery of daily life. His music, true to who he is, expresses his soulfulness and emotional authenticity. www.last.fm/music/Rodriguez/_/Sugar+Man.

During the several years it took to make this remarkable film, Malik’s creative juices kept him going. With little to no funding, he ingeniously found inexpensive, simple solutions to what might have been high production costs. When the hoopla of the award season waned, and the “sugar” that fueled his creative genius ended, one might wonder if Malik’s own demons, perhaps a long-held sense of despair, which often comes with creative genius, took over. For someone like Malik, it may have been traumatizing to be separated from family, friends and his highly prized creative project. Catapulted onto a celebrity circuit awash with expectation most likely left him feeling alienated and isolated from others. Those surrounding him, more than likely, were unable to understand what was happening to the young director. When the wellsprings of creativity run dry, it yields to despair, disconnecting the artist from himself and other

I find these two stories remarkable because they establish the importance of embodied emotion. Rodriquez’ story demonstrates that the “body never lies”—for bodily emotion inhabits our truth. Malik’s story, and I take poetic license here in my delineation, is about being alone with despair without understanding how human it is to feel deeply. Despair is an inevitable part of life—but what is primary is the context within which such feelings emerge, that needs to be fleshed out and understood. When one dissociates from emotional pain, it often becomes concretized in other forms such as physical pain. When one flees to a disembodied mind, obsessive thinking and perfectionism enslave daily existence.

Suicide is a complex and complicated subject. I don’t assume to know why an artist such as Malik Bendjelloul commits suicide, or, for that matter, why anyone of us might end life in suicide. For some individuals, the overwhelming danger of connecting with one’s emotional truth trumps the will to live. As preposterous as it sounds, death becomes less endangering than bearing the pain when you’re hopelessly alone trying to make sense of it. It takes a welcoming environment, a “relational home” with others who are willing and able to resonate the meanings of such despair to be able to bear it.

There is no such thing as a right or wrong feeling. And there is no such thing as an island unto oneself. We all need others who can resonate what is often above or below the level of worded meanings. The paradox is that Searching for Sugar Man goes far beyond a real-life Cinderella tale. The story is universal as all good stories are because it depicts what it means to be human. We can all identify with the sadness of being unknown and the hope of being found. Malik was almost there … he serendipitously found a very human story, intuitively stoked it to life, only to have his own cut short by misfortune and unbearable despair.