Whole Sight

Article: Movie Madness

Published in Hudson Valley Magazine, March 2007

Last summer, I read an article in a local paper that described how, in March 2005, filmmakers had descended on a series of locales in Orange and Ulster counties and used them as stand-ins for rural Wisconsin. These locations included the Sky Top Motel in Kingston, the Reservoir Dairy Deli in Shokan, and the Phoenicia Diner. This seemed both magical and bizarre to me. How, I wondered, could an ordinary diner, whose pancakes and sausages I was intimately familiar with, be transplanted to a Midwestern state I’ve never even visited? And why had the filmmakers picked the Valley for their sleight of hand? This demanded investigation.

To read more, download the PDF.

Add comment February 29th, 2008

Invalidation versus presence

Invalidation is what happens to us as kids when we’re told to control our emotions, especially negative ones—anxiety, fear, anger, and the like. This happens more in some families than in others. If it happens to you a lot, and if you’re emotionally vulnerable, you may well grow up and become self-invalidating, prone to constantly and aggressively denying the validity of your own inner experience. In a sense, you are denying your very right to feel anything at all—even to exist as you do.

The opposite of invalidation is presence. Presence is accepting yourself as you are, with your entire range of thoughts and feelings, in whatever role you find yourself. You affirm your experience as valid, for no other reason than it happened to you. In doing this simple thing, you affirm your right to exist.

Self-invalidation is social in nature. This is because what most of us have been taught to call our “self” is also social in nature—a portrait constructed out of words, a description assembled for the purpose of deciding who we are, how much we are worth, how we fit in, and so on. This verbal portrait originates in large measure to serve other people’s purposes—starting out with the needs of our parents and other adult caregivers around us as we grow up. Here is where the problem begins, if there is going to be one. When the English poet Philip Larkin famously wrote, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do,” he was talking about the generational and cultural passing on of emotional repression and thus invalidation. A somewhat more technical explanation than Larkin’s can be found in the 1999 book Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Experiential Approach to Change:

Children are told, regularly and often, that they can and ought to control negative affective states. Even babies are often evaluated according to how little they experience negative affective states (e.g. “She’s such a good baby, she never cries.”) Punishment and reinforcement are frequently doled according to the ability to control and suppress at least the outward signs of aversive emotional states (“Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.”) Siblings and schoolmates support the ongoing purposeful control of thoughts, memories, or emotions. Statements such as “Don’t be a baby” or “Just forget about X” will be backed up by a variety of socially mediated consequences (e.g., getting beat up, being shamed, etc.). What is going on here is that seeing negative emotions in others is aversive, so pliance is used to reduce the frequency with which children express negative emotions.

A person who grew up in such an environment, and who many years later finds himself or herself suffering the after-effects in the form of anxiety, depression, or some other mental illness, may discover that at least some of their self-critical behaviors are part of an extensive pattern of invalidation. In my own case, one such pattern consists of what one of my therapists aptly called “rejection sensitivity.” It’s quite simple: my mind, acting on what it believes to be my behalf, constantly scans the environment and other people’s behavior for signs they don’t like me or are angry at me. Everyone is included. I can convince myself in a heartbeat that the clerk at the supermarket has taken a dislike to me because of my failure to smile at them at just the right moment; if a friend takes too long to return a phone call or email, I am capable of deciding they’re doing it on purpose and working myself up into fits of alternating depression and rage. When I’m at my worst, no one is immune from my suspicion, and I walk around angry and upset. The toll on my personal and professional life has of course been significant.

I see other people invalidating themselves as well, usually without realizing it. This includes many who consider themselves high-functioning and in no need of therapy; from time to time it may include you. How often, when you’re unhappy, anxious, or sad, have you told yourself to get a grip on your feelings; that you have “no reason” to feel as you do; that you have to “grow up” and stop making a fuss; that you’ll be okay if you can just get rid of your distress by replacing it with a “positive mental attitude”? Or that your misery is selfish and wrong because somewhere in some third-world country, “someone is starving right now,” meaning, apparently, that suffering has only to do with material wealth? By the same token, how often have you attacked in this innocent manner a friend, a partner, a child? Every time we do this, no matter who the target, we are practicing invalidation. What we imagine to be moral authority is merely the internalized voice of a parent or other adult from our childhood; and what that voice is expressing is merely its own fear of emotion—nothing more.

The balm for invalidation is nonjudgemental mindfulness. You can learn the practice of mindfulness from one of the new, “third wave” talk therapies, such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or Dialectical Behavior Therapy; or you can learn it via a more traditional route such as one of the many forms of Buddhism now popular in this country: Zen, Vipassanā, Tibetan, etc. The basic ideas are the same.

In my own case, becoming aware of the true extent of my “rejection sensitivity” has been a long time coming. It has been a process of gradually noticing the sameness in many of my angry thoughts—not arguing with these thoughts, but awarding them respect as valid, listening to them without necessarily buying what they have to say. This then gives me a little more room to see the pattern; and to delay my reactions and wait for more definitive signals pro or con from the people around me. Often, just waiting a little bit reveals that my initial thoughts were off-base. It’s okay that they were off-base. My purpose is not to judge myself right or wrong, but to become more skillful as a human being. My suspicious, rejection-sensitive thoughts may not go away any time soon, but their meaning is gradually changing, loosening up. Like a fist my mind still clenches, but it is becoming easier to unclench it.

This brings me to presence. I’ve borrowed this word from other contexts—it shows up a lot in speaking about acting or performing; in speaking about the vitality a person conveys to us. It means we are really here, not somewhere else. Presence is naturally cultivated by the practice of mindfulness: we learn to feel our body sensations rather than ignore them; to spend more time in the now rather than dwell solely in what our mind tells us was the past or will be the future. But there is an additional aspect of presence that comes up when we talk about invalidation, and it is this second aspect, which I’ve only lately discovered, that especially interests me.

It is simply this: in being here as we are, we must inhabit many roles: parent, child, friend, lover, insider, outsider, boss, worker, and so on. In fact our roles can be much more subtle than we are aware of. There is rarely if ever a time when we are not inhabiting some sort of role, even if all we are doing is reading or eating or walking down the street.

If we take the metaphor a bit further, then each role is a performance, and we are on a stage with an audience. What does this mean for presence? It means that to fully inhabit a role, we must take on the trappings of that role—including the natural authority of performing it. How many of us, practicing self-invalidation, do our best to shrink inside our clothing or turn ourselves invisible? Shame does that. Yet if our role of the moment is to be an adult child, talking to our elderly parent, then we possess the natural authority of that role—to give advice, to listen, to take what responsibility we may. If we are a writer, writing for publication and speaking to imaginary readers, we possess the natural authority of someone speaking up, offering their point of view. A worker digging a trench for a sewer line has the authority of his role as expert digger. A prisoner of war waiting to be executed has the authority of that role—there is no one else who can fill it. Someone in charge shouldn’t shy away from being the boss—the role is there, waiting.

Here is the thing. If we become aware of our invalidating habits, we can begin to see the occasions of our suffering as occasions also for practicing presence. Even as we hear the familiar harsh voice in our heads, telling us we have no reason or right to be angry, depressed, sad—or for that matter, no right to be excited, engaged, glad—we can validate our experience, up to and including the harsh voice and beyond. We can fear a role and perform it anyway: tell our parent what we think and why; respond thoughtfully despite our irritation to a reader’s criticism of something we have written. We can walk down
the street feeling happy or feeling sad and allow ourselves to be in the moment. Being is not boasting.

John Daido Loori, the abbot of the Zen Mountain Monastery in Woodstock, New York, has written The Heart of Being, a book of commentaries on various koans; one chapter is titled “Cause and Effect: Pai-chang and the Fox.” In it Daido Roshi has this to say about how invalidation gets hold of us and poses as our “self”:

An ego trip is an ego trip. “Big-deal self” is an ego trip. “The insignificant self” is an ego trip. “I can’t do it” is an even bigger ego trip. “I’m no good. Everyone is better than I am” is the biggest ego trip of all. It’s all got to do with self-preservation. There is no self to protect. What are you holding on to? What are you protecting?

The next time you think you’re selfish for having a particular thought or feeling or point of view, ask yourself: who is it I’m supposed to be, if not myself? Why shouldn’t my life center around myself—who else would it center around? Who is here at the center of my experience, if not me? Consider the fox in the koan “Pai-chang and the Fox”: would a fox, would any animal, waste its time asking whether it has the right to feel what it feels? Can there be any invalidity in a fox? Can there be any in you? Strangely, the more you ask such seemingly self-centered questions, the more you will find you have in common with everyone around you.

Add comment February 9th, 2008

Book review: At Hell’s Gate

At Hell’s Gate: A Soldier’s Journey from War to Peace, by Claude Anshin Thomas (Shambala, paperback edition 2006, 184 pages, $12.95)

My favorite book about the Vietnam War—if it makes sense to have a favorite book about something so horrible—is Chickenhawk, by Robert Mason, a former Army helicopter pilot. Mason’s candid memoir centers on both the joy of learning to fly, something he’d wanted to do since childhood, and the terror and horror of participating in an utterly pointless conflict. It’s a great read, especially since Mason is without any self-pity whatsoever, even as he makes clear that the war damaged his psyche in ways he can’t fully explain to himself, let alone to us: years after the war has ended, he is arrested and convicted seemingly out of the blue for drug smuggling. “No one is more shocked than I,” writes Mason in the book’s stunning last line.

“At Hell’s Gate” is not nearly as brilliantly written, but its message is more useful. Like Mason, Claude Anshin Thomas fought in Vietnam and suffered greatly as a result—but unlike Mason (at least, Mason the author), Thomas has gone a step further in finding a solution to his suffering that he believes can benefit us all.

It won’t surprise readers of this blog to learn that Thomas is now an ordained Buddhist monk, and that the solution he proposes is mindfulness meditation. What makes “At Hell’s Gate” compelling, however, is Thomas’s ability to relate his suffering to our own, whatever form it takes; as he reminds us, “Everyone has their Vietnam.” It might be a friend killed by a drunk driver, stories told by someone we love of being abused as a child, or some other personal torment; beyond that, and on a more public level, it surely includes the violent messages we are showered with daily, not only on television and in the movies, but in news accounts of Iraq, Israel, Palestine, and so on. Living in Manhattan as I am at the moment, I am confronted with my own complicity in this violence every time I ride on the subway and hear the broadcast announcement that my belongings are “subject to random search by police.” Government propaganda to the contrary, I am living not in a state of security, but of constant fear engendered by various unjust wars; moreover, like most people I know, I am doing next to nothing about it.

Thomas may wear the robes of a Buddhist monk now, and so seem strange to us—personally I find the plump bare arms of a man wearing such a robe obscurely repulsive, even when it’s the Dalai Lama—yet his origins are both familiar and mundane in their Americanness. Born and raised in a small farm town in Pennsylvania, he learned violence first-hand from both his mother and his father. In keeping with what their own families and culture had taught them, they practiced repression of unpleasant memories and emotions, believed children needed to be violently disciplined in order to learn the harsh ways of the world, and in general taught their son to fear and hate anyone even remotely different from him—great preparation, as it turned out, for joining the Army as a volunteer and learning as an infantryman that anger is good, and that the proper response to anger is to kill someone.

Thomas’s tour of duty in Vietnam lasted only a year, but it might as well have been a lifetime. Among other things, he was one of only 20 soldiers out of 135 to survive a nighttime breaching of the perimeter around a helicopter bivouac, spending hours in the dark shooting to death people he couldn’t see, then killing many more in intimate hand-to-hand combat. Later he learned that the soldiers entrusted with guarding the perimeter had literally fallen asleep. It is here that we come across a sentence that could not be more clear or simple, yet should stop any reader cold: “After physically surviving this experience, I made the decision that I would not sleep at night because the night wasn’t safe.”

Thomas isn’t exaggerating. He literally made that decision, and he literally did his best for the rest of the war not to sleep at night. As a consequence, even decades after the original incident, he still gets anxious as night approaches; he is supposed to sleep, he writes, but he can’t; the war echoes too loudly in his ears. Early on after his return he tried drugs to quell the memories, but they brought him only the further suffering of addiction. Eventually he hooked up with the Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh—himself a Vietnamese native, as well as an ardent pacifist who opposed the U.S. presence in Vietnam—and learned to follow his breath in sitting meditation.

Through the practice of mindfulness, then, Thomas finally found relief. What is both striking and instructive is the form this relief takes, very different from what we might have expected:

One of the mistakes people often make when they take up the practice of mindfulness is that they form a false image of it. They think that being mindful means not being afraid, that it means being calm and at peace at all times. This is not living in mindfulness. Mindfulness and mental calm are related, but they are not the same. For me living in mindfulness means that I can live peacefully in nonpeace, that I can accept the reality of noncalm. In all our lives, there are moments of calm and moments of noncalm. If I live in mindfulness, I can accept that these moments come and go like a gentle tropical rain or a hurricane, but they do come and go. In mindfulness I see their beauty when they are here, I can celebrate what they offer me, knowing that they will pass and also knowing that they may return. If I am living in mindfulness, if I can look deeply into the nature of myself and touch my suffering, I can learn to live with my fear, my doubts, my insecurity, my confusion, my anger.

And, Thomas adds, it is in this willingness to feel our suffering, to acknowledge and stay with it rather than attempt to forget or suppress, that we find our commonality with others.

His own personal story goes on to encompass the talks he now gives about mindfulness and pacifism—his way of atoning for the lives he took as a soldier. And what about us? We can take up the practice of mindfulness, but can we, should we, do more in terms of public policy? Thomas doesn’t harangue, only suggest in the manner of other Buddhists that by healing ourselves, and by speaking openly and honestly about our condition, we can at least make a beginning.

Add comment February 3rd, 2008