The Monk In My Brain - 1 -

Trying to find answers for the things that went wrong. Life. It just happens to you. Until you wake up to it.

It is surreal to me that just by thinking of something, something else is also happening; at the physiological level, tiny little things called proteins are being assembled, building complexes that somehow correspond to what I’m thinking and feeling. How is it both things are happening? I know that I think, I know that I feel; I know they happen together, the thinking occurring “up in my head”, and the feeling somewhere in my body, usually the chest region. And yet with it is this bizarre fact: it’s also fleshy things, neurochemicals, tiny, ultimately involved in a chorus of submolecular processes.

This is a phenomenal fact to a mind which has “woken up”. And in terms of todays most popular metaphor: my thinking has produced neuronal changes between parts in my brain, particularly the frontal lobe areas; dorsolateral and ventromedial areas to be more specific. It’s in here, by exercising “self awareness”, my own thinking and feeling about my own internal condition feels to be transforming into something quite ethereal. My mind is existing “up here”, substantially “above” the thoughts, feelings and other events monitored by this “observing self”. But what the hell is that? That’s the question. If you’re metaphysically inclined, the ontological status of this experience beckons your attention.

So not only is a simple process occurring - I’m thinking more in certain “detached” ways - but it’s also yielding a very different experiential “feel”, in that the way I relate with “others” is different. A different attitude. But what strikes me as amazing every time is the fact that it can even be done. How can thought become so detached from it all? From the thoughts and emotions which happen? There is clearly, if we pay attention to the subjective - and valid - evidence, we can see an aspect of cognition that is actually removed, highly cerebral, in it’s relationship to the contents of it’s “body”; as even the emotions and the self states which form from them have a very bodily oriented existence.

I’ve come to think of this part within me as a “monk”. I heard the phrase “monk in the mind”, can’t remember from whom, but I distinctly felt an attraction to this idea. The phrase in particular. I felt that way, as a monk, guiding my own attention. Shaping reality from a place “without”, yet feeling ever so interested and relaxed in finding emotion - interests - within my body.

The “brain” part of the phrase struck instantly as important. The monk, ultimately, is an emergent property of my brain; or is at least correlated with it. Knowing that a hit to the head in any particular region can lead to a specific loss in consciousness enunciates this vulnerable situation. I am my body. I have a brain. And yet, I am not a brain or a body. I have this strange detached observing awareness that can actually bias attention this way or that way. And whats even odder, for me anyways, is that inhibition plays such a vital role in it all. If you have a particular negative way of being, you’re inhibiting that part of yourself whenever you loosen your identifications with that particular state. When you can say to yourself, suggest to yourself, your mind takes on a new orientation. The next phase of thought will be the one assumed in the self-suggestion. And all of a sudden " to any outsider " you appear to be a different person, relating from a different place. Speaking with greater energy, fluidity, in body and voice, in facial expression and rhythm. You’re completely different. To them. To yourself.

So who am I? I am both. The weakened and vulnerable person who suffered a developmental trauma. Born to a mother with borderline personal disorder. Whose early life was rattled by on again and of again maternal aggression. At one moment, kindness, love, generosity of spirit; a true joy, I imagine, for my baby self. But then at other moments there was brashness, disconnectedness; an anger, frustration and anxiety. A face upset and annoyed; always annoyed. I can almost remember my infant self seeing it, and feeling it; feeling it impossible to be any other way than the way she is projecting into me; which I succumb to in weakness, absorb and take on as if my own. I am a mind obsessed with getting her attention, getting her to be calm, to be consistent, to be dependable. And so I would think about what she was feeling; paying great attention to her subjectivity and forsaking my own. By making me “her object”, she became my object. I merely mirrored, albeit, in a traumatic way, what was occurring within her.

 

My mother was born in the Azores in 1956. Yes, the Azores. I am a person with a mother born on probably one of the most secluded Island chains in the world. I wonder if there was any relationship between how she was raised and the isolation of those islands.

Her father was from a lowly family whose own father was a shoe maker. From the stories I’ve been told of him, he was vicious and abusive towards his son; beating him for making the slightest mistakes and overall feeling a hatred towards; feeling a need to constantly put him down. To beat him lower; his own son. I can’t even hear this story without then thinking “and what must have happened to him for him to treat his son this way?” The chain of causation goes back to time immemorial. Our parents shape us. Their parents shaped them. This isn’t a mere trope, just think about it: every human subjective reality is being shaped by another human subjective reality; and the external events produce an objects relation condition similar to the abuser.

Someone can of course say that I’m exaggerating this; in a sense I can understand. Nature is harsh. All creatures, to an extent, have relational traumas. A deer freezes if it sees a human: that is a “shock” response similar to our concept of trauma. But after it they shake it off. Even though this response will become invariably triggered by the sight of another human.

Yet, for us humans, we have this amazing capacity to see things as if from “without” " as that ‘impartial’, detached observing awareness. This alone punts us above all other known creatures. We can stand as “creators” " as it were " of the world around us.  As well as within us.

My mothers mother, my grandmother and godmother (she took ownership of me, alright) came from a wealthier family who owned land. Her father apparently disapproved of the marriage but relented when my grandmother made known her intention to marry him. She was a confident, quasi-narcissistic woman who expected a certain responsiveness from the people she related with. In the case of my grandfather, it meant giving in to her whenever she spoke. And he did it. My grandfather needed, it seemed, the love - and idolization - of a woman besides his mother.

I don’t know what my mom went through early in life, but knowing my grandmother and understanding some of her - now mostly outgrown, and dissociated - ways, I see someone who is intensely controlling; sometimes responsive, other times petulant. Forcing on my mother from the get go “how to think”; unwittingly training her daughter to export her thinking to other people; to mom and dad, to the catholic church and its official interpreter, her mother.

My mother had two other siblings as well as a younger sibling that died in infancy. My grandmother, who was surprisingly charitable, decided to forgo taking legal action against the malpractice of the doctor who gave her son the wrong medication.

My grandmother has two very defined selves " both of them unwilling to communicate with the other.

One part of her is amazingly kind; even if there is a narcissistic quality to it - which there probably is - there’s also an undeniable tenderness, emanating from a heart that feels, I believe, true love for the other. But there is another part of her that is amazingly manipulative, amazingly narcissistic and bent on controlling other subjectivities. It is loud, it is aggressive; it is animated; her face even expands, ape-like, when she gets riled up.

I remember spending 6 months at her house with my family as we waited to move into our new house. The first few months, probably 3 or 4, were good. Peaceful. Relaxed. And then all of a sudden my grandmother slipped, felt and bruised and even dislocated a few ribs. My god. It was like, night and day.

From then on out, she was bitter everyday, constantly complaining, constantly invoking “Jesus”, “ay maria”, all of it in Portuguese as she got up from her spot and paced her house back and forth. Christ, I couldn’t take it, I had to go upstairs. But even there there was only refuge from her during the day, because at night, she got up from bed and turned on the hallway light, and began muttering about Jesus and Mother Mary and how she was going to die. I was seriously concerned at this point - mostly, as I saw it, for what was happening in her mind.

My grandmother, 81 at the time, was intensely focused on death. Her imminent death. Because this collapse and the way she was feeling meant to her, in some subtle way, that this would be the end. In her religious lexicon, it seemed to me that she was absolutely possessed by a demon - a past self state had taken hold of her mind and got her focused on destruction. My mother told me that “she always does this”. “What” I asked, wanting clarification. “She pretends to be hurt. She did this to your uncle when he lived here years ago”. Really, I thought to myself. Without even knowing this story, I was already aware of my grandmothers obsessiveness. Now I knew that it was pathological: its happened before. And the crazy thing is, she doesn’t even KNOW IT!

This is a perfect example of a dissociative disorder. Contextual factors change, some stresser occurs - the fall - and she slowly melts into this other self-state. And you can try to reason with her - as I tried - but the communication gap - I don’t know Portuguese and she can hardly handle an abstract conversation in English - made it extremely difficult.

When we left, I was genuinely concerned about her health. The anxiety, bloatedness from gas, weight loss, all let me know that this wasn’t merely “her pretending” as my mom would say in her more angry moments. She was genuinely stuck in this pathological awareness.

Sure enough, about a month after our departure, my grandmother started sleeping more. Two months after that, her ribs had healed, gained her weight back and was back to her normal self. Our presence, “imposing” on the sanctity of her inner space - her own mind and her house - led to a state of traumatic dissociation. Her discomfort with our presence was so strong - so emotionally powerful - and yet at complete odds with the part of her, the narcissistic part of her that consciously refused to not help her children: how would other people see her? Thus, two opposed self-states, a minor and treatable injury later, and shes manifesting this internal opposition within her as anxiety, digestive problems, paranoid thoughts about her impending death, and an ever aching chest.

The power of the unconscious mind is truly astonishing to watch in action.

 

My dad was born in 1959 to parents from Madeira, another island chain, near the Canary Islands, just off the coast of Morocco. He was born in Toronto. Was raised in Thornhill Ontario, a suburb - at that point - just north of it. He had 7 siblings. 2 older sisters, 4 older brothers and one younger brother. At 13, something traumatizing happened to him. I can only imagine.

One day you have a dad, and the next day, he leaves. He doesn’t come back. Your mother and your siblings are all talking about it and the idea floating around is that dad left. He won’t come back. Still, my dad waits and hopes for him to come back. He’s his dad. My dad is 13, hitting a point in life where connection to your father is highly important: the move into adolescence, a move into a mature state, and at a time when “being manly” means a lot.

He goes to bed every night with the same hope, the same thoughts and feelings. He wants dad to come home. He cries to himself, he feels an absence within him, as he thinks and reflects on this primal concept, the father, the one who is supposed to show you how to be in “the real world”.

2 years earlier, his older brother was killed in a car accident. It was just before his dad left. I can only imagine the stresses that were felt in that house. My dad’s father yelling at his wife, complaining about finances; he doesn’t have enough, he’s had enough. She’s still not over the death of her son. The dynamics in the family have changed. It wasn’t like the years before, when Orlando was alive. Everything was negative and contentious. That thing called “harmony” was gone. The older brothers did their own thing while my dad navigated his future, through high school, with the support of his older sisters.

Thus, as can be inferred from the story above, my father’s psychology was emasculated. As a way to balance himself, he took up an interest in building. Construction, architecture, electrical engineering. These were manly pursuits, and so my dad pursued them.

When my mother and my dad married, my dad sent a letter to his father who was then living in Brazil. He waited for a reply. He didn’t get one. On his wedding day, despite all that was going on around him, he was depressed that his dad hadn't come. Even after everything my father’s dad had done to him, he still wanted him; he had not disowned him as many other people would have done. He kept himself open to the return of his father.

 

When I was born, my mother made it difficult for me and herself. She was too anxious, as the pregnancy went on for 10 hours, then 20, and then 30. The affair of pushing and noise all around her, no doubt being registered by my primal infant mind; I don’t remember anything from then, of course, but since it was “me”, I imagine that it was just very messy; very stressful. Traumatic even. Registered still someplace deep in my neurobiology.

Besides the fact that she had taken massive epidurals, my birth was better than many others. I was cleaned up of my evolutionarily useful wax, and brought back to my mother spick and span 15 or so minutes later. Nothing like being taken away from the source of comfort and calm on a walk around a scary and foreign place to a room with glass walls and weird sounds. So much for Harlowes monkey's.

About a year after my birth, I developed that common condition of insufficient lung development, aka Asthma. Knowing just a bit about the research into immune function, stress and lung development in early life, asthma could very well be triggered by an angry and stressful environment. The body’s metabolic resources can only do so much; we have a limited supply, so if the mind needs “more attention” to external stressors, that translates as more metabolic energy for brain processes and less for growth processes. In this case, the lungs are sacrificed for the brain.

The asthma was far from mild. It was chronic, and it got bad enough that my mom was apparently told by the hospital doctor that I had “2 weeks to live”. Knowing my mother’s proclivity for confabulation, this may be embellishment, but still, I was very sick and she was very anxious and paranoid about my health.

She stayed with me for those 2 weeks that I was there. She slept at the hospital, sat by my little bed, probably sang songs; probably prayed a lot. Probably spent a lot of time anxiously brooding about my death; and struggling against those thoughts.

In mercy, life answered my mother’s prayers. I got better. At 4 years old, she brought me to a naturopath who “changed” my diet, to stop eating bananas, drinking orange juice, and other things, and eventually all these things seemed to work. I no longer needed a puffer by age 7. Although I was cantankerously insecure about my diminutiveness, which nowadays my mother tells me was because of the steroids in the puffers. Could be true.

In talking about my mother and me, I am omitting another important other - my sister, playmate and best friend for the first few years of my life. A person I was always with, who I learned from in too many ways to discover.

Unlike me, my sister’s pregnancy was unintended, and was probably not wanted by my mother when she discovered that she was pregnant. My sister too went through a long birth and also had a strange first few years of life. By the time I came 2 years later, my mom spent more time with me; probably grew closer with me because of the Asthma scare at 1 years old. I wonder to myself, how did my sister experience this? Mommy isn’t home. Where did mommy go? I don’t see mommy anymore; and when she is home, she spends more time with the baby than with me.

This sort of dynamic established itself and was strangely enforced by my mother, probably unconsciously, by paying more attention to me and less attention to her; giving me toys and not giving her toys. Encouraging me to play sports whilst discouraging her. In analyzing this - it just astonishes me the ridiculous enactments occurring: she treats her oldest daughter just as her mother treated her. She doesn’t know this; but she feels related to her daughter in a way similar to how her mother treated her. A sense of ownership and a sense of authoritarianism: if she couldn’t play sports, NEITHER COULD YOU! Although my mother played sports her whole life, she nevertheless denied the opportunity for her daughter. Why? Perhaps, I think, there was a dissociated shame; an awareness that she wasn’t supposed to be that - just as her mother always told her; she was “too tomboyish”. In treating my sister as she did, my mother gave voice to her mothers voice. Speaking just as she did, yet paradoxically, doing the exact opposite when she was a kid.

 

So, my mom, unbeknownst to her, had set my sister in opposition to me. Predictably, I became an object of envy and hatred for my sister. I was that spoiled little brat who got everything he wanted. Those things she wanted which I got! So, she was going to dominate me - and she did, in a way that began as physical but eventually became very emotional and cognitive; I had become disposed towards her at different times as a sort of “idol”; someone I emulate and seek approval from. But who is never allowed equal ground; perhaps, at times, we were true equals; but when it became important to assert her authority, my subjectivity was obliterated; it was done largely through her way of relating - which for her was total habit; and likewise on my end, my way of relating had become habit. She was oriented to me as “controller”, and I was oriented towards her, sycophant like, perfectly happy to get her attention.

By the time my brother was born, I was 5 years and 7 months old, and my sister, born 3 days before me two years earlier, was 2 years and 7 months old. We liked to tell ourselves this.

I remember the day my brother was born. I was at my grandmothers house. I faintly remember being grumpy the whole day; I was actually annoyed; in retrospect it’s hilarious to think about, but for that 5 and a half year old me, I was truly bothered by my brothers presence. I was intensely jealous towards him; mom was MINE! And I was HERS! We were a ONE " and I wasn’t going to have this newcomer displace me!

From the get go, I had been trouble for Jordan. In his little crib, I would come closer to see him. At times, I was genuinely loving. I was developing a self state of seeing him as delicate, fragile, needing to be treated with gently and kindly. My parents told me this and I began to “pick up” their approach style. Ashley too was being very sisterly; much more happy and interested than I was. I also resented, not only my moms relationship with Jordan, but I also felt threatened by this new-found attraction Ashley had towards the baby.

I actually felt angry and soon enough I was creeping near his crib, poking at him. And then I would take his arm into my hand, and begin to pull at it; harder as I searched the babies face for a reaction - a sign of pain, so that I could feel good about hurting him.

My mom and my sister caught me a few times doing this and I was chastised very hard for it. Deservingly, of course. My response was not only pathologically mean, but dangerous. I could have hurt him.

The problem got worse. When my brother came home, I was in a new house decorated in baby blue; a sign on our front lawn - my dads doing - and all this happy anticipation for the baby. I didn’t like it and was intent on making his homecoming a drama.

Of course, I knew none of this; in acting as I did I was playing out patterns that for my still very young mind were very relevant; my attachment with my mother and sister and the threat my brother created to my own sense of “ownership”, as it were, as the most important person. I was just being it; and unfortunately, my parents didn't know it  - probably intuited I imagine - but didn’t have the sensibility to talk to me in a way that would have made me more receptive to a new baby.

Of course, I must say that in saying this I am not condemning my parents. They were like everyone else, victims of dynamics. And knowing and understanding these dynamics - something that hadn’t been thought of as very important in those days - meant unconsciously enacting them: in my dads relationship with my mother; in his relationship with me; in my mothers relationship to my dad and her relationship to me; and so forth, all of them built by the particular contexts and demands of their basic biology - for feeling good. For avoiding bad feelings.

Imagine a world where people don’t ignore the inner dynamics that sabotage what they pay attention to - which means how they relate with people, how they treat others. So much information here - yet no one, back in the 1990s, gave much thought about this.

Just as my sister treated me, so too did I subject my younger brother to my will.

 

Author's Note

First chapter of the book I'm writing.

Reviews

[Jeannette Lunete]

Very profound and intriguing read. Your writing style is quite captivating. Well done.

[AprilRN1210]

wow... this is deep, detailed, and enlightening.. I love the way you write, I have told you this several times, but you have this way of thinking, of wording things, of analyzing things that intrigues me, that stimulates my mind, and that makes me want to keep reading, to hear more.. to figure it out.. to go back and read again.. can't wait for the next chapter..

[Mike Defreitas]

Thankyou! Again!

It's so funny how in your mind - after you finish writing - you have this habit of finding problems with how you wrote.

I'm glad that someone else picked up the emotion that I wrote this piece with.

[AprilRN1210]

we are our own worst critics.. you are more than welcome.