"Applying language" versus "lived experience": more on the internal Narrator/narratives
[Just as an FYI, this is a developing thought process, which means the logic loops are still falling in on themselves in places while I think this one through; it shakes the roots of a fundamental relationship principle I've held dear for a dozen-odd years, and I don't yet have something to replace it, so if the logic appears to cling in places and slip in others, that's why. Seismic shifts introducing instabilities are something of a specialty these days in my life, but that doesn't mean they translate to words and logical sentences so very well right at the point of impact.]
So, I was standing in the shower this morning, initially just enjoying the presence of the hot water streaming over my skin, when I realized I could hear the voice of the Narrator applying language to the experience, and beginning to spin up the narrative process in my conscious mind like a sports commentator getting into the flow of the game he's calling. At that point, I realized I felt like I had lost the immediacy of the lived experience; the narrative, through the filter of the application of language, became a "one-step removed" kind of thing, the enforcing of sensations into descriptors changing the experience like observation changes the state of Schrodinger's cat.
And I felt quite sad, reaching that conclusion; the appreciation of experiential immediacy can be lost so easily, and without most of us ever noticing. I suspect we assume the narrative *is* the experience, at that point, and let the internal Narrator, steeped as it is in our own personal/internal/historic lexicons, *interpret* the experience into something... else. I don't know how many other people are conscious of the difference between "sense memory" or "muscle memory" versus "narrative recall"; I first learned to tell the difference when the spinal issues began the marked downward trend about 20 years ago, because chronic pain drastically changes both sense memory, and how the body reacts to muscle memory ("I *USED* to be able to move this way and the body keeps trying to do that, but now I have to rethink things and move a different way"). But I've never experienced the dissociation between lived experience in the moment and the *creation* of pre-memorized narrative this way ever before. It was a neat process to be present for, in spite of the disappointment of realizing how it moves me out of the authentic sensory moment.
And then I realized the irony of further abstracting sensation into narrative into cognitive observation and processing (further diluting the actual experience with layers of processing), at which point I was running out of hot water and really needed to get out of the shower in a hurry.
I don't know if there's a way to turn off or turn down that Narrative voice so that we can be more present in the moment of a living experience. I imagine there must be, or millions of Buddhists and other open-to-the-universe gurus and yogis would be doing something other than meditating and communing and whatever it is they (we) (I) do (are [am] supposed to do)*. If we live in a mental world that is defined by the Narrator and the narrative, rather than by lived experience, we live at a distance removed from the immediacy of our own sensory input. As I ponder this, I realize that this is a truism; I doubt most living creatures can last long, living full-on in the rawness of sensory and emotional experience as it happens. Babies probably manage it, until they begin to learn that there are other people's values of "what's appropriate, when" for everything from vocal expression to body function (seriously, what's potty-training other than a containment of bodily function to "appropriate time and place so that others don't have to deal with the immediacy of your body function or the stink of poopy diapers"?)
It goes beyond bodily function and physical sensations into the realm of emotional experience, especially as it relates to relationship management. When I thought about it, over coffee between the shower and the pants portions of the morning, I considered the process of emotional content management through this same once-removed filter of applied language, and recognized my own process as looking something like this:
So, by the time we get to something an external relationship partner can see, the narrative has already been built and the Narrator is in control, with the authentic emotional experience being sublimated somewhere into the control process, and what *actually* happens on the outside looks like this:
Partner: How are you doing, right now?
me: I'm fine.
(Of course, I'm not and it probably shows, but I'm listening to the Narrator, not the lived-experience. Some people will actually *be* fine under these conditions. This post really isn't about any of Them :)
The cost of buying into the narrative rather than the authentic experience is dissociation (often manifesting as the inability to recognize the emotional experience for what it is, or not recognizing *which* emotion is actually at the root of what's going on, something that is really common among addicts and trauma survivors who learn early on to sublimate "inappropriate" emotional content under other reactions) and self-denial. We're taught that our own emotional content is inappropriate when it's big, or when it's negative, we deny to ourselves what we're feeling. But the fear is still there, or the anger, and if it's not allowed to be *us*, it must be the partner's fault. Or, if the partner isn't picking up on the fear we can still perceive in ourselves, it must be that the partner doesn't want to see it, ergo it's the PARTNER who is denying and dismissing us.
Trust me when I say that this particular tangle of logic is nowhere near as uncommon as you might think. I've seen variations on this theme in a lot of people, not limited to the clients I work with but also in friends, family, lovers, partners...
This is also where "who has the need, drives the solution" becomes an increasingly-faulty rubrik by which to manage intimate emotional relationships, at least as a sole pillar of organization; if you as a partner see the incongruencies between "I'm fine" and the visible signals of emotional experience and don't call on it, you're now part of the situation whether you know it or not. The tenet of responsibility isn't completely flawed; the person with an identified need is largely the one responsible for driving to have that need addressed in ways that (theoretically) support and enhance the relationship, or at least don't weaken it. But when an individual is trapped in that space between the lived experience and the applied narrative, or trapped in the narrative itself in ways that introduce incongruencies between statement and action, then the partner faces the choice to let things be or untangle the mixed signals.
Something Gloria pointed out to me late in the summer (using different language, obviously) is that when a partner assumes the hands-off stance of "Your need, you have to tell me what the solution is", it assumes that the partner trapped in the narrative *can* identify and articulate needs in the moment, and more often than not, especially in moments of heightened emotional experience, such a person definitely cannot do that, at least not effectively. And it the external partner then says anything to the effect of, "Okay, then this is not my problem, you come find me when you need me," the received message is often going to be a sense of abandonment... which keeps the cycle of the narrative going, right over top of the already-fired emotional state. One of the hard lessons I had to face early on in the summer was the abrupt realization that relying on "Who has the need" puts an unfair (or unrealistic) amount of pressure on the individual to actually be able to discern past all the crap that's being applied by the internal Narrator to even get to the point of being able to *choose* whether or not to share details about the authentic emotional state. And at the risk of splashing hubris all over a lot of you, if *I* couldn't figure out how to manage that (after umpteen years of trying to sift my own emotional shit, years of therapy, and training as a professional therapist for fuck's sake), then truly, how much of a chance do less-trained people have??
"Who has the need" also fails under this realization of the Narrator's omnipresent impact because when the other partner takes a hands-off stance, there ceases to be opportunity for a collaborative solution at this stage. By the time any communicating arrangement reaches this point in an exchange, both (all) parties are probably in the middle of their own individual emotional experience, and odds are good, no-one is sharing. Even if one partner remains objective enough to see that I'm speaking at odds with my behaviours, as soon as the "It's your problem/need, you solve it" stance comes into play, the onus for solving the problem is on me, not us. An opportunity for curiosity and intimacy has been slammed shut because one partner won't step into the hot zone to say, "something seems not on the level here, yo; 'sup with that?"
Partners of any ilk can't be faulted if the other party can't get out of the narrative; there are degrees of involvement that can be encouraged, and there are times when in truth you really can't do anything but back off. The problem remains, though, of *allowing* or *enabling* the narrative/behavioural incongruities to perpetuate. One may not choose this particular hill to die on, and I cannot fault them; I admit I no longer have a pat solution for this specific issue (it used to be, "Who has the need" *WAS* my solution; it holds far less water when riddled full of bullet holes, however).
So the compounded problem is now this: One party has an experience and gets trapped in the narrative overlay to the point of exhibiting clear discontinuities; the other party absolves her/himself of responsibility with the "Who has the need" escape clause ("If you need me to know/do something, you have to tell me what that is", for example) but in doing so perpetuates the incongruity if it is allowed to go unacknowledged/unexplored/unchallenged... and may also be perpetuating part of the internal narrative in other ways unbeknownst to either participant in the exchange. It's very easy to say, "Your emotional distress is not my problem, and if you're not willing to deal with it, neither am I" - which is perhaps one of the more common interpretations of "Who has the need" I encounter (and perhaps the most common one I have employed, personally). But in truth, discrepancies between words and behaviours will often become exactly the kinds of stressors that tear relationships apart, especially once there's an established pattern of backing away from each other in that hands-off, "not my responsibility" stance rather than one of intimate curiosity. In a relationship purported to be intimacy based, that pattern *can* indicate a Big Red Flag of concern.
We all operate from within the context of personal narratives, and most people can't consciously separate the lived experience from the narrative, at least not once there's any distance between the moment of the experience itself, and the point at which recollection occurs (which can be a very short span at times, measured in split seconds between trigger, reaction, and the Narrative process kicking in). If it happens with something as simple as the sensory experience of hot water on skin, imagine how much more complicated it is for someone in the grip of a major emotional flood. I don't mind being abandoned to the delights of a hot shower; the narrative language I'm likely to come up with in the grips of that experience are probably best left for private erotica. But the narrative language that plays out during emotional crisis has a far greater impact on the participants in the scenario, and most people in truth don't *want* to be left alone to deal with it. But we're not trained to stay present with that much authentic emotional content, nor have most of us been allowed to share that raw, naked expression because we've been told pretty much from birth that it's inappropriate or unwelcome.
So while I have no solutions to go with this observation, I do have a suggestion: The next time you engage with someone who seems to be struggling in the flood of a situation, before you adopt that, "Who has the need" rubrik to distance yourself from the other person, consider what you're seeing and wonder at least to yourself if maybe they're feeling trapped between experience and narrative. Even if you don't feel like you can do anything right then to help, even if you then choose to employ the distancer anyway, at least take a moment to acknowledge the struggle, preferably to them aloud, but at least in your own mind. it might go a long way toward disrupting the narrative enough to enable them to work on telling you what they need to say.
And if you're prone to using "Who has the need" as a bootstrap to your own processes, every time you do, pause for a moment and try to listen *past* the narrative to the living experience in the moment. What is the *feeling*, the emotion you are most aware of? Can you tell the sometimes-subtle, sometimes-not differences between the feeling and the words in your head in the moment? Does one feel more authentic than the other? When you consider what you're about to do or trying to do in the light of the identified emotion (assuming you could get there), what can you note about (in)congruencies between the feeling and the actions you would undertake? And can you do all of this *before* actually acting? Is there actually a *need* in play here? Or is there just a feeling looking for a little space to simply *be*?
I'm not saying any of this will solve the world's problems; I'm pretty sure it won't even solve most of mine. But sometimes, if you want to achieve different results in any given context, you have to do something different.
And this observation certainly suggests a lot of room for... difference.
*-I've had a lot of coffee this morning. My grasp on grammar has moved into a whole other sphere of existence. I'd apologise, but it's really pretty out here among the nebulae.
So, I was standing in the shower this morning, initially just enjoying the presence of the hot water streaming over my skin, when I realized I could hear the voice of the Narrator applying language to the experience, and beginning to spin up the narrative process in my conscious mind like a sports commentator getting into the flow of the game he's calling. At that point, I realized I felt like I had lost the immediacy of the lived experience; the narrative, through the filter of the application of language, became a "one-step removed" kind of thing, the enforcing of sensations into descriptors changing the experience like observation changes the state of Schrodinger's cat.
And I felt quite sad, reaching that conclusion; the appreciation of experiential immediacy can be lost so easily, and without most of us ever noticing. I suspect we assume the narrative *is* the experience, at that point, and let the internal Narrator, steeped as it is in our own personal/internal/historic lexicons, *interpret* the experience into something... else. I don't know how many other people are conscious of the difference between "sense memory" or "muscle memory" versus "narrative recall"; I first learned to tell the difference when the spinal issues began the marked downward trend about 20 years ago, because chronic pain drastically changes both sense memory, and how the body reacts to muscle memory ("I *USED* to be able to move this way and the body keeps trying to do that, but now I have to rethink things and move a different way"). But I've never experienced the dissociation between lived experience in the moment and the *creation* of pre-memorized narrative this way ever before. It was a neat process to be present for, in spite of the disappointment of realizing how it moves me out of the authentic sensory moment.
And then I realized the irony of further abstracting sensation into narrative into cognitive observation and processing (further diluting the actual experience with layers of processing), at which point I was running out of hot water and really needed to get out of the shower in a hurry.
I don't know if there's a way to turn off or turn down that Narrative voice so that we can be more present in the moment of a living experience. I imagine there must be, or millions of Buddhists and other open-to-the-universe gurus and yogis would be doing something other than meditating and communing and whatever it is they (we) (I) do (are [am] supposed to do)*. If we live in a mental world that is defined by the Narrator and the narrative, rather than by lived experience, we live at a distance removed from the immediacy of our own sensory input. As I ponder this, I realize that this is a truism; I doubt most living creatures can last long, living full-on in the rawness of sensory and emotional experience as it happens. Babies probably manage it, until they begin to learn that there are other people's values of "what's appropriate, when" for everything from vocal expression to body function (seriously, what's potty-training other than a containment of bodily function to "appropriate time and place so that others don't have to deal with the immediacy of your body function or the stink of poopy diapers"?)
It goes beyond bodily function and physical sensations into the realm of emotional experience, especially as it relates to relationship management. When I thought about it, over coffee between the shower and the pants portions of the morning, I considered the process of emotional content management through this same once-removed filter of applied language, and recognized my own process as looking something like this:
- I feel fear (for example, though it could be any emotion)
- The Narrator steps in immediately and attempts to put processing handles - language - around the experience (this part varies widely depending on the nature of the experience); what is the story that gets built about what's happening in this moment? For fear, sometimes it's the "I'm a victim" story, sometimes it's the "This is just like every other time" story.
- My reaction is based on the narrative, NOT the core emotional experience
- The Narrator continues to build the narrative on the basis of existing building blocks, which include common personal/historical elements such as judgmental components rooted in internalized values, which is where the shame issues kick in, or the internal voices that tell me I'm not doing something right, or that try and diminutize or dismiss the experience and/or the reaction parts of the process; this is all part of the Standard-Issue Narrative being applied as a means of controlling the situation by separating me from the root experience.
So, by the time we get to something an external relationship partner can see, the narrative has already been built and the Narrator is in control, with the authentic emotional experience being sublimated somewhere into the control process, and what *actually* happens on the outside looks like this:
Partner: How are you doing, right now?
me: I'm fine.
(Of course, I'm not and it probably shows, but I'm listening to the Narrator, not the lived-experience. Some people will actually *be* fine under these conditions. This post really isn't about any of Them :)
The cost of buying into the narrative rather than the authentic experience is dissociation (often manifesting as the inability to recognize the emotional experience for what it is, or not recognizing *which* emotion is actually at the root of what's going on, something that is really common among addicts and trauma survivors who learn early on to sublimate "inappropriate" emotional content under other reactions) and self-denial. We're taught that our own emotional content is inappropriate when it's big, or when it's negative, we deny to ourselves what we're feeling. But the fear is still there, or the anger, and if it's not allowed to be *us*, it must be the partner's fault. Or, if the partner isn't picking up on the fear we can still perceive in ourselves, it must be that the partner doesn't want to see it, ergo it's the PARTNER who is denying and dismissing us.
Trust me when I say that this particular tangle of logic is nowhere near as uncommon as you might think. I've seen variations on this theme in a lot of people, not limited to the clients I work with but also in friends, family, lovers, partners...
This is also where "who has the need, drives the solution" becomes an increasingly-faulty rubrik by which to manage intimate emotional relationships, at least as a sole pillar of organization; if you as a partner see the incongruencies between "I'm fine" and the visible signals of emotional experience and don't call on it, you're now part of the situation whether you know it or not. The tenet of responsibility isn't completely flawed; the person with an identified need is largely the one responsible for driving to have that need addressed in ways that (theoretically) support and enhance the relationship, or at least don't weaken it. But when an individual is trapped in that space between the lived experience and the applied narrative, or trapped in the narrative itself in ways that introduce incongruencies between statement and action, then the partner faces the choice to let things be or untangle the mixed signals.
Something Gloria pointed out to me late in the summer (using different language, obviously) is that when a partner assumes the hands-off stance of "Your need, you have to tell me what the solution is", it assumes that the partner trapped in the narrative *can* identify and articulate needs in the moment, and more often than not, especially in moments of heightened emotional experience, such a person definitely cannot do that, at least not effectively. And it the external partner then says anything to the effect of, "Okay, then this is not my problem, you come find me when you need me," the received message is often going to be a sense of abandonment... which keeps the cycle of the narrative going, right over top of the already-fired emotional state. One of the hard lessons I had to face early on in the summer was the abrupt realization that relying on "Who has the need" puts an unfair (or unrealistic) amount of pressure on the individual to actually be able to discern past all the crap that's being applied by the internal Narrator to even get to the point of being able to *choose* whether or not to share details about the authentic emotional state. And at the risk of splashing hubris all over a lot of you, if *I* couldn't figure out how to manage that (after umpteen years of trying to sift my own emotional shit, years of therapy, and training as a professional therapist for fuck's sake), then truly, how much of a chance do less-trained people have??
"Who has the need" also fails under this realization of the Narrator's omnipresent impact because when the other partner takes a hands-off stance, there ceases to be opportunity for a collaborative solution at this stage. By the time any communicating arrangement reaches this point in an exchange, both (all) parties are probably in the middle of their own individual emotional experience, and odds are good, no-one is sharing. Even if one partner remains objective enough to see that I'm speaking at odds with my behaviours, as soon as the "It's your problem/need, you solve it" stance comes into play, the onus for solving the problem is on me, not us. An opportunity for curiosity and intimacy has been slammed shut because one partner won't step into the hot zone to say, "something seems not on the level here, yo; 'sup with that?"
Partners of any ilk can't be faulted if the other party can't get out of the narrative; there are degrees of involvement that can be encouraged, and there are times when in truth you really can't do anything but back off. The problem remains, though, of *allowing* or *enabling* the narrative/behavioural incongruities to perpetuate. One may not choose this particular hill to die on, and I cannot fault them; I admit I no longer have a pat solution for this specific issue (it used to be, "Who has the need" *WAS* my solution; it holds far less water when riddled full of bullet holes, however).
So the compounded problem is now this: One party has an experience and gets trapped in the narrative overlay to the point of exhibiting clear discontinuities; the other party absolves her/himself of responsibility with the "Who has the need" escape clause ("If you need me to know/do something, you have to tell me what that is", for example) but in doing so perpetuates the incongruity if it is allowed to go unacknowledged/unexplored/unchallenged... and may also be perpetuating part of the internal narrative in other ways unbeknownst to either participant in the exchange. It's very easy to say, "Your emotional distress is not my problem, and if you're not willing to deal with it, neither am I" - which is perhaps one of the more common interpretations of "Who has the need" I encounter (and perhaps the most common one I have employed, personally). But in truth, discrepancies between words and behaviours will often become exactly the kinds of stressors that tear relationships apart, especially once there's an established pattern of backing away from each other in that hands-off, "not my responsibility" stance rather than one of intimate curiosity. In a relationship purported to be intimacy based, that pattern *can* indicate a Big Red Flag of concern.
We all operate from within the context of personal narratives, and most people can't consciously separate the lived experience from the narrative, at least not once there's any distance between the moment of the experience itself, and the point at which recollection occurs (which can be a very short span at times, measured in split seconds between trigger, reaction, and the Narrative process kicking in). If it happens with something as simple as the sensory experience of hot water on skin, imagine how much more complicated it is for someone in the grip of a major emotional flood. I don't mind being abandoned to the delights of a hot shower; the narrative language I'm likely to come up with in the grips of that experience are probably best left for private erotica. But the narrative language that plays out during emotional crisis has a far greater impact on the participants in the scenario, and most people in truth don't *want* to be left alone to deal with it. But we're not trained to stay present with that much authentic emotional content, nor have most of us been allowed to share that raw, naked expression because we've been told pretty much from birth that it's inappropriate or unwelcome.
So while I have no solutions to go with this observation, I do have a suggestion: The next time you engage with someone who seems to be struggling in the flood of a situation, before you adopt that, "Who has the need" rubrik to distance yourself from the other person, consider what you're seeing and wonder at least to yourself if maybe they're feeling trapped between experience and narrative. Even if you don't feel like you can do anything right then to help, even if you then choose to employ the distancer anyway, at least take a moment to acknowledge the struggle, preferably to them aloud, but at least in your own mind. it might go a long way toward disrupting the narrative enough to enable them to work on telling you what they need to say.
And if you're prone to using "Who has the need" as a bootstrap to your own processes, every time you do, pause for a moment and try to listen *past* the narrative to the living experience in the moment. What is the *feeling*, the emotion you are most aware of? Can you tell the sometimes-subtle, sometimes-not differences between the feeling and the words in your head in the moment? Does one feel more authentic than the other? When you consider what you're about to do or trying to do in the light of the identified emotion (assuming you could get there), what can you note about (in)congruencies between the feeling and the actions you would undertake? And can you do all of this *before* actually acting? Is there actually a *need* in play here? Or is there just a feeling looking for a little space to simply *be*?
I'm not saying any of this will solve the world's problems; I'm pretty sure it won't even solve most of mine. But sometimes, if you want to achieve different results in any given context, you have to do something different.
And this observation certainly suggests a lot of room for... difference.
*-I've had a lot of coffee this morning. My grasp on grammar has moved into a whole other sphere of existence. I'd apologise, but it's really pretty out here among the nebulae.