News Notebook 2.23.21
Early beta post revisited
Here is an early beta version of a February news notebook that I’ll be revisiting and re-posting in some forms as part of upcoming Shrink-Wraps doing a close reading of President Joe Biden’s life-story with particular attention to this much-initiated man’s most recent “crucible” with the death of his son Beau in 2015. Among the biographies and memoirs I’m tapping for this process, I find myself lingering and pondering most on his memoir about this grief ordeal that led him to drop out of the 2016 presidential race — the pinnacle achievement on his career-long “resume virtue” goals — and effectively removed him from public life until his 2019 announced run for the 2020 race. More soon, as focus on the President will lead-off the newShrink focus on public figure series.
Greetings, this winter Tuesday.
My winner for Quote of the Day is something I’ve heard Joe Biden say in some form dozens of times the past year, not some show-stopper. This morning I only overhear it as a snippet in the next room from my home office, awhile before the Senate hearings are to start, and suddenly I’m choking-up.
“There will come a time when the love you have lost will bring a smile to your face before it brings a tear to your eye.”
[In studying Biden, especially given the content of this comment and my spontaneous emotional response, I’ve been even more than usually watching his emotional and body expressiveness. I’ll tune in to TV news to watch with the volume down, listen for what his voice is doing, etc. And what I keep finding, and was likely the case the morning I was moved to tears, is that Biden routinely smiles and laughs with a quick tear in his voice… and he weeps without shame just short of the belly-laugh of a punchline. It’s integrated, like the smiles and the tears come from the same place. The quote above is a neat sound-bite, but too neat, I think. This is a guy who knows and has something to teach about death, redemption and wholeness.]
The quote is vintage Joe, who I’m pretty sure has never chatted-up my friend, former professor and author Veronica Goodchild. But I think he would get the wisdom her work holds for these turbulent times when she argues that the opposite of chaos is not order or rigidity, as is commonly assumed. The opposite, in constant tension with chaos, is love.
In the depth and imaginal psychologies of Jung and Hillman, my specialty, we have one of those when-in-doubt rules of thumb, kind of like journalists and lawyers who know to “follow the money.” For psychologists it’s “follow the affect” — emotion, and how it’s showing up in the room with things like body language, voices, things like sweat and tears, in both self and other. Affect is a wonky-sounding word that’s kind of the sweet-spot and the tell in soul-focused psychological work.
Old Joe seems to have clenched the shrink-vote in our house by breakfast this morning. (And I’m good and primed for following that affect in the news!)
Before shifting gears from the corny, today’s cartoon…
Topping the news I’m most aware and focused about today:
yesterday’s U.S. Senate Committee Cabinet-confirmation hearing for attorney general-nominee Merrick Garland
the somber tributes and rituals marking the devastating milestone of more than 500,000 Americans who have died in the coronavirus pandemic
the continuing Texas weather, power-grid, and human-suffering disaster… alongside the many public faces of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) these recent days and weeks
and, what I’ve zeroed in on most directly in real time, the live coverage on Capitol Hill of the bipartisan U.S. Senate hearings investigating the violent January 6 Capitol. (This hearing is where most of my psychologist-lens and ear are aimed today.)
Some attribution: In the meatier subject-section of Notebook entries I’m shamelessly stealing a numbered-list-riff kind of format I like a lot, from Justin Perry of Charlotte, who writes and posts eloquently and deeply on lots of social-justice issues that include and transcend race. Justin has become for me a favorite and motivating thinker, social-justice activist, writer, fellow psychotherapist, apparently wise and loving human… Oh, and I’ve actually never met him IRL; he’s a Facebook friend-of-friends. Do look Justin up and meet him either way, if the opportunity presents.
Along with that theme of always tracking the affect and “emotional temperature” here’s a shrink’s-eye view from a couple of hours earlier in the day with the live broadcast of U.S. Senate hearing on the investigation of the January 6 Capitol riots.
Most overarching, this is massive, multi-dimensional, enormously complex trauma, both acute and long unresolved. And as with all trauma, both its debilitating effects and the only paths to relief and restoration to wholeness… are manifestly physical.
Watching and listening, I’m overwhelmingly aware that we are not only witnessing, but in a real sense experiencing in our own bodies through our senses, both the embodied memories and the imaginal images that come up for us as viewers and voters… all of which triggers our own automatic, reactive, most “reptile-brain” responses…
As for millions of others, my viewer experience is filtered through Zoom and cameras and TV, across time and distance in contrast to those in the room, in real time.
What I’m intensely noticing in the room — and with the added layer of complexity with some Senators out on Zoom.
A big part of this is following the affect, reading the emotional “heat” and levels of reactivity in everyone.
Even with the fact-free digressions and contradictory stories there’s no screaming, spitting or ranted accusations, and the participants seem sober and concerned, not shut-down or denying.
I’m encouraged by this apparently lowered general level of reactivity and hyper-arousal compared with so many such hearings in recent years.
As we know from both brain science and the cognitive-behavioral side of psychotherapy, the moment our individual or our collective nervous system, body and brain are aroused into a fight-flight-freeze response, our whole capacity for thinking, strategy, impulse-overriding shuts down.
Noticing a lot of screaming, interrupting and hyper-arousal like spitting and sweating in anybody, particularly leaders, crowds or people with power who can harm us, can be a real good time to hit a pause button, get quiet and be curious about why, what all that noise is serving or accomplishing, and what responses are coming up in me and the people around.
It’s important to keep in mind that these people, ALL of them, both “our side” and the “other sides” and all the “crazy who knows what side” are exhibiting symptoms of BOTH acute trauma (Capitol riots, Texas, coronavirus) and PTSD from deeply unresolved past (systemic racism).
People who are traumatized lie, behave badly and wreak chaos. We all do. Because our brains are not working properly. In fact when these symptoms start showing up it’s a pretty good signal that we are in a red zone dealing with trauma and acting as though all is normal and fine is not going to cut it.
All of the traumas (riots, Texas, coronavirus, elections) are overlapping, interrelated, multiple, geographically diverse and brought to a center point/ground zero inside a single space and building.
This brings to mind the whole idea of appropriate containment and containers to hold our essential psychological processes like healing trauma and grief.
That’s a whole big topic I’ll be getting into more. For now, psychologically the idea of being contained means safely held, supported, protected from harm and interference while vulnerable during the processes necessary for healing. (It doesn’t mean stifled, shut-down, restricted or denying.)
As with cooking, healing and creation can’t happen without the right containers and temperature! (And there’s sort of a Goldilocks not too hot, not too cold thing)
More to come also on this whole sense of our witnessing and participating in mass therapy… and how in self-governing democracy that seems to mean in a sense we have to be the therapists for each other and ourselves.
I’ll close for now with a nod to the late Fred Rogers, who in times like these would gently remind us to look for the helpers. Now, I think he might say, we’re also going to have to BE the helpers!
Talk to you again soon 🦋
News sources and organizations followed today include: (historian) Heather Cox Richardson, (lawyer/Democratic activist) Robert Hubbell , The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Charlotte Observer, NPR/All Things Considered, NBC/MSNBC News live.
Veronica Goodchild’s 2001 book is Eros and Chaos, from Nicolas-Hays publishing of Lake Worth, FL, and Red Wheel/Weiser of Newburyport, MA.
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