Verbal Discriminations

 It can be enormously difficult to unlearn ways of viewing things. Once we have verbally rehearsed a situation or symbolised an object through language, it is virtually impossible to “unsee” it again in the future. 

A good metaphor of this is the optical illusion that appears above. If you have not seen it before, it may take a while to see a Dalmatian dog sniffing the ground.  Now try not to see it, it’s impossible. In fact if you’ve seen it before and you’ve seen the dog then you will indeed see it again. It becomes impossible not to see it and if you see this group of dots again in a month, in a year, or within ten years you will not help being able to see the Dalmatian dog. 

In ACT this is known as a making a verbal discrimination and is the basis of inflexible ways of viewing the world. Your “Dalmatian” may be “people aren’t to be trusted”. Like the picture, you can’t unlearn that way of thinking, the verbal discrimination will always be there available to influence upon your behaviour once it has been created. But we can learn to create distance between ourselves and such rigid thought patterns.

 

We can’t stop them from happening any more than you can stop seeing the Dalmatian dog, but through compassion and mindfulness practice we can learn to accept ourselves and understand why we perceive the world as we do. 

The Myth of Healthy Normality

Humans as a species have probably never before been in such a privileged situation in regards to having our basic needs met. We have, at least in the Western world, an abundance of food, shelter and very few of us are attacked by natural predators. It is difficult then to explain why we seem to have continually and systematically more “living problems” than ever. 

Of course we consider normal living as a complete absence of psychological discomfort and this has been reinforced by modern psychology. Western psychology is founded on the assumption of healthy normality: that by their nature, humans are psychologically healthy, and given a healthy environment, lifestyle, and social context (with opportunities for ‘self-actualisation’), humans will naturally be happy and content. From this perspective, psychological suffering is seen as abnormal; a disease or syndrome driven by unusual pathological processes. 

Ambivalent Reflections on "Home"

 I was recently speaking to a friend of mine who was considering going back to the UK. We both considered the pros and cons and what "home" actually meant to us. We've both been away from the UK now for more than 18 years, so any memories that I may have of life in the UK are pretty mixed. Like many who head to the horizon looking for something, I was probably looking for something that was inside me, as in the incredible journey told in “meetings with extraordinary men” by Gurdijev.

This led us to question the motives as to why one goes away and what one is looking for. I found some interesting reflections in Greg Madison’s book The End of Belonging that I would like to share. 

I think about returning home almost every day. Sometimes I am clear that I would never return, sometimes I fantasise about it, yet other times I feel a dull homesickness, a kind of pull to the only place that could have been home but never really was. I think this signifies a desire for a kind of spiritual and psychological reconnection, a healing of the self in some way, a reconciliation where originally there was mutual rejection. 

Return would be a complex process necessitating a melancholic recognition of time: home did not freeze the day I went through the departure gate. Home has changed, though deeply familiar it is also different, and I would return as a stranger in a strangely familiar land. But again, how could I stay and not succumb to the suffocation that led me to leave in the first place? How could I protect my fluid self, elaborated by all my experiences in the world, and withstand the sustained demand to cement into sameness? How can I balance my desire for home with my need for self-direction? Any feeling of being at-home is now forever tinged with feeling not-at-home; the two come inextricably intertwined. Homesickness is a given, not a demand to return home, where the feeling paradoxically continues unabated.

“Is the existential migrant an existential hero or is she or he lost in the dilemma of perpetuating the condition that they are trying to address?” I would say probably a bit of both

Do migrants suffer from a type of cultural schizophrenia? Certainly.