by Dawn Garisch
The best healers combine both approaches and pay close attention to all aspects of the process. They listen carefully to what the afflicted is saying. Right now, I don't want to be dissected or diagnosed or processed. My body is probably littered with exciting clues, but at present, I just want to be accepted, held and nurtured. That is healing enough.
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9. On the Fear of Failure
i have one eye full of dreams and hintentions the other Is full of broken mirrors & cracked churchbells
i have one eye full of rivers and welcomes the other is full of flickers and fades
Seitlhamo Motsapi40
I am faced with failure, of not being good enough.
I did not get the writer's grant, which would allow me time off to complete this manuscript. At the Cape Town Book Fair, I met up with the director of the association that administers the grant. He told me that it had been a close thing. Most of the judges on the panel liked my writing and the subject matter. The objection, he said, was that some judges were doubtful that the project qualified as non-fiction. He encouraged me to reapply, which is what I will do, only this time I will bump up the science and autobiography for the purposes of the application.
The irony is fabulous: the judges have decided that my investigation into the methods artists and scientists use to evaluate truth – which includes the imagination – is not non-fiction! Non-fiction, according to my dictionary, refers to ‘writing that deals with facts and events rather than imaginative narration’.
What a conundrum. Maybe I should give up right now, and stick to the boundaries. Go back to fiction. Boundaries are good. They let everyone know where they are.
Or I should be encouraged by E. L. Doctorow, who said several decades ago that there is no such thing as fiction and non-fiction, there is only narrative. Or the poet, John Keats: ‘I am certain of nothing but the truth of imagination and the holiness of the heart's affections. ’ Or Einstein, who felt that imagination was more important than knowledge.
Nevertheless, when I did not get the grant, I went into a minor slump, as well as wanting to burst out laughing. My notion of ‘angels stampeding to help me’, which arrived on the opening pages in full writing flight, I decided to keep and not edit out, as I found the image hilarious and hopeful, despite an attendant squeamishness at the quaint narcissism. Now it is just embarrassing. Am I deluded about the potential help provided by Psyche, available to anyone on taking a determined step in the direction of desire?
Yet the call for applications for a grant set this huge project in motion. That I do not regret. That is just what I needed. So, on I go. But how? Increasingly I feel the need to take uninterrupted time off my demanding day job to complete this book.
My son, who has believed in this project from the outset, suggests that I should be my own benefactor. I should award myself a grant out of my access bond. I might well have to do that. Writing non-fiction turns out to have different demands from fiction. I have completed a first draft of nine chapters, with a hundred pages of scrambled notes, and there are ten books teetering next to my bed on relevant topics. I am currently reading about the neuroscience of consciousness and about product branding, also the poetry of the body. The track I am following has changed, chapters I had planned have been deleted, new ones have taken their place. Writing this book needs focus, time, a vibrant energy. Some mornings I wake up with a whole chapter in my head, and then have to go to work. I jot reminders down, and hope it will be enough to jog my memory when I eventually get back to that thought, perhaps only in several months' time.
I need a patron of the arts, no strings attached. But that gift is rare. Grants fulfil that function, but most contemporary patrons of the arts are essentially no different from those of days gone by. They want their pound of flesh. Previously in the western world, the artist received assistance from the church or from the wealthy and, in return, was required to paint or compose subject matter in honour of the patron.
In modern times, many a young person with an artistic bent who wants to earn a living from art is absorbed into the advertising and media world, where he is in service to the product, and thereby in service to the pocket of the owner of the brand. Graphic designers, film makers, copywriters, musicians, art directors, composers, actors, are employed to apply their considerable talents to manipulate the public into wanting to buy things that they don't need, or don't even want.
Scientists as artists, using their imagination and knowledge and skill in order to invent – what Changeux41 calls tinkering in the neuronal workspace – are often in this position too. Private companies, state institutions and universities are the patrons who can afford to finance research projects. University laboratories are subsidised by the government, but they are often assisted with private money too. Private investors want financial reward for doing so. Scientific research ceases to be open-minded and open-ended – it has a specific goal: a product that will make the financiers even wealthier.
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Many people I meet say they would love to write. Or they tell me they used to dance, paint or sing. They once had a guitar, a piano, or a kiln. They would love to take it up again, but …
While running workshops on creativity, I have observed how afraid people are to express themselves artistically. The desire is often there, but something comes up to stop them.
What if I begin and make an ‘inept’ movement, or ‘ugly’ mark or sing out of tune? What if the ‘wrong’ words emerge, or if I do not have the skill to execute my exact intention? What if I make a fool of myself, and everyone is watching?
It can be very challenging to step into our creative lives. It is an unfortunate human tendency to take imagination, a cornerstone in the creative act, and to subvert it, using it as a weapon to cripple ourselves instead. We imagine our humiliating failure even before we have put pastel to paper, or else we imagine fame and fortune while writing a novel, then, when it does not even get published, we use that as a reason to retire to the sofa in front of the TV.
Employing a professional to tell us what to do and how to do it can ease the terror. Technical skills are very helpful, and role models can encourage us by demonstrating that it is possible to achieve one's goals, but no-one can teach us how to find out who we are and what we have to say in our own unique way.
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Back at my desk, I have decided: I will face the terrors of the creative void, financial insecurity, imperfection, disapproval, failure and success. I will find a locum to take my place at work for two months in order to finish this book.
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10. Rhyme or Reason – Fear's Role in the Brain/body
I have stood in the kitchen giving up on it, betraying it, betraying you, giving it to the wind, to the field in front of us, to the fallow ground;
saying: nothing compels me, it Is too much for me, too far out and beyond me – .…
What do I have to do to get through to myself what do I have to do?
Joan Metelerkamp42
We need to know more about fear, and how it operates in the brain/body, so that we might begin to take steps to decrease its negative impact.
Just as there are distinct facial expressions for the emotions, there are different physiological profiles in the organs that accompany the emotion. We call these physiological profiles feelings. The smile, scowl, or grimace evident on your face is reflected in your organs as a change in chemistry. Anyone able to wield a gastroscope, or fibre-optic tube, can observe how the lining of the stomach blanches with stress. Knowing how emotions affect our organs, the expressions ‘gut feeling’, and ‘have a heart’, take on a whole new meaning. It also explains how emotions affect our physical health.
The following conditions are related to anxiety and stress: migraine, tension headaches, gastritis, peptic ulcer disease, hypertension, eczema, rosacea, irritable bowel syndrome, muscle tension and insomnia. The strategies we put in place to deal with anxiety – smoking, over- and undereating, overwork, alc
ohol abuse, prescription and recreational drugs -lead to further physical ailments such as heart attacks, strokes, emphysema, kidney damage, addiction and alcoholism, which result in yet more anxiety. These conditions, in turn, can lead to other difficulties. Being obese makes one susceptible to arthritis and diabetes, with its many complications like blindness, kidney failure and amputation of the legs. Obese people and smokers are far more likely to develop complications should they need an operation.
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A forty-three-year-old man arrived at the clinic complaining of chest pain that had come on while driving. Although the characteristics of the pain were not typical of heart disease and the ECG was normal, I was concerned. He was hypertensive and a smoker, his cholesterol was high, and he told me that, when he was a boy, his father had died of a heart attack. The pain had only started half an hour previously, so it was too early to do a spot blood check for raised cardiac enzymes. I explained that I wanted to refer him by ambulance to the local hospital, so that a cardiologist could monitor him further in the ICU.
The man sat up and pulled off the oxygen mask. He exclaimed: ‘I am not having a heart attack! I have a four-year-old son at home!' Despite my every attempt to dissuade him, he insisted that we take down his drip, and he left.
His fear was so overwhelming it rendered him incapable of reason. His response to his predicament was to insist that it was not happening, and to remove himself from any available help. To understand this, we need to check in with recent discoveries in neuroscience concerning how and why fear operates in the body.
Largely unbeknown to us, we are constantly monitoring our bodies to assess whether all is well, and what needs to be adjusted if there is something amiss. Am I too hot? Too cold? Am I hungry? Am I aroused? If the incoming signals generate a feeling of discomfort, the brainstem issues outgoing signals to the parts of the brain designated to respond to these basic needs by initiating appropriate movement. Take the jacket off, or put it on. Move to a more comfortable spot. Find food, or sex.
We are also continuously surveying our environment. If I see a snake while walking on the mountain, I instinctively freeze. My viscera respond to this sight as well, in preparation to protect myself from possible danger – my heart rate goes up, my breathing gets shallower, and blood shunts from my stomach to my muscles in preparation for flight. Many of these neurological pathways are hard-wired, reflexive, not requiring conscious reflection. When you need to respond to a threat, it would be counter-productive to have to think about it first.
Attaching emotions to experiences is invaluable, as they provide us with a guide to action. Yet emotions, precisely because of instances like those described above, are frequently seen as problematic, unreliable and subjective. Until recently, they were not studied by any self-respecting neuroscientist.
The invention of real-time imaging has allowed scientists better access to subjective experience. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, in The Feeling of What Happens, says that emotion and reason are no longer presumed to be in opposition. His research shows that our emotions are integral to our decision-making processes, and that the superstructure of reason cannot operate properly without a firm emotional base.43
Fear has an essential function that is far more subtle than the crude fight, flight or freeze. Fear can be protective in reminding us of similar situations we have encountered.
Damasio describes a woman who, as a result of a rare disorder, developed deposits of calcium in her amygdale, the seat of the fear response in the brain. This woman was a friendly, compassionate, generous person, and it was easy to like her. Yet she was repeatedly abused in relationships, and was unable to stop repeating her error in trusting untrustworthy people, purely because she was incapable of feeling fear. Her alarm bell – her warning system – was encrusted with calcium.
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The essence of consciousness is a relationship: I feel like this in relationship to that. This connection reflects the fact that our needs can only be satisfied by things that exist beyond ourselves.
Damasio describes consciousness as the spontaneous ability of an organism to step back metaphorically and observe life, including him/herself, and to make associations about the observations, stringing them into a non-verbal and repeatable story about what the organism is living through.44
Consciousness gives us the ability to sense both the external and the inner worlds in the present, and to correlate the current experience with our past perceptions. For example, when I see and hear and touch and smell an object which I have learnt to recognise as Brother, at the same time, instantaneously, I reconstruct all my feeling associations with this person that were set up long ago.
This is not a simple matter, as there will always be a range of associated feelings. If my experience of Brother has been unhappy, the range evoked might include fear, longing (shown bio-chemically to be associated with loss and panic) and anger. Seeing Brother in real-time, or even being on the receiving end of any behaviour from another person that reminds me of Brother, will evoke these old visceral responses we call emotion. Emotion motivates action; the word itself – e-motion – embodies movement. Unhappy to see Brother, I might scowl, go silent, smile unconvincingly, leave the room, or become belligerent: Freeze, flight or fight.
The symptom of chest pain in my patient triggered the unbearable visceral memory of his father's death when he was a boy and the fear that he might inflict that same fate on his own child. He had a knee-jerk response to my assessment and to his fears for his son's wellbeing, decided that my concern was misplaced and walked away.
It is possible that his chest pain was not brought on by poor perfusion of his heart muscle. But it is preferable to assess the situation fully before deciding on a course of action. Secondary consciousness comes in here. In humans it is more developed than in most other animals due to the filtering function of the frontal lobes. This brain structure allows for a more differentiated response to a situation, as opposed to a reflexive reaction. We have recognised this for some time – people who have severely damaged frontal lobes have limited capacity for reflection, and can exhibit unmediated, disinhibited and antisocial behaviour.
My patient had never injured his frontal lobes, but in these circumstances, he was not able to employ them effectively. The job of this area of the brain is to insert directed thinking and attention between perception of an event and action. The pause generated allows us to run through possible responses to a situation as well as the probable consequences, and to choose the most appropriate one. In other words, the pause allows us to think. Thinking is imagining.
This ability to review options for action, through the frontal lobe functions of impulse control, assessment, judgement, motivation and modification, is one that needs to be exercised. It can take a lifetime to recognise patterns of reaction that are generated entirely out of our own self-referential story, and not to foist them on others as though they were the truth.
The neuropsychologist Mark Solms45 points out the irony that the frontal lobes are the seat of free will precisely because of their effect of inhibition on human behaviour. Through impulse control, human beings are freed from stereotypical reactions.
Impulse control is a factor that allows for loving, considerate behaviour. If I am hungry, I can refrain from gobbling all the food so as to share it with others who are also hungry. If I am sexually aroused, I can restrain myself from imposing myself inappropriately on another person. If I am beside myself with anger, I can stop myself from inflicting harm on others.
However, inhibition is not only a helpful attribute. It can also result in repression of aspects of one's core humanity. For example, parental injunctions, based on the social practices of the times, like boys don't cry, or a decent woman wouldn't walk like that, or art is a waste of time, can become word restrictions embedded within neural circuits, playing havoc later with emotional, sexual and creative life.
As we know, emotions too are not always good guides. Sometimes we
misread the situation completely, and feel terrible about something that had absolutely nothing to do with us. Someone doesn't greet us in the street, and we take it as a personal affront; meanwhile she hasn't got her contact lenses in. Or the emotion we attached to an event when we were dependent and vulnerable children, might have engendered an action plan appropriate only for that situation. The fear and rage a boy might feel at being bullied at boarding school, where there was no-one to protect him, could result in him dissociating from those feelings as a self-protective strategy. Later, as an independent adult in the workplace and in a marriage, when situations inevitably arise that make him feel threatened, he dissociates, even though the strategy is no longer helpful.
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Anxiety in infants is mediated by the caregiver. A baby is a totally vulnerable creature, who can complain loudly to draw attention to discomfort and distress, but cannot satisfy any need by herself.
The child psychologist, John Bowlby, states that it is essential for the developing infant to have a secure relationship with adult caregivers for normal social and emotional development to occur. We have evidence through real-time imaging of the brain that the primary caregiver's attitude to life shapes the development of part of the child's brain called the orbito-frontal cortex (OFC), and thereby the way she will experience the world.46
The child develops patterns of attachment which lead to what Bowlby calls an internal working model. This guides the individual's feelings, thoughts, and expectations in later relationships. An internal working model might include feeling that you are unwanted, or that people cannot be trusted, that you must always look after number one, or that you are the golden child. These powerful beliefs are handed down from parents to their offspring, even before they learn to speak.