Malcolm Ocean's roamblog

Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings

created 2019-12-28 · edited 2020-02-22 · open in Roam
  • Now a blog post here: malcolmocean.com/2021/06/dream-mashups/
  • And a twitter thread here: twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1410155043760730114
  • Old draft:
    • In a December 2019 emotional processing retreat I did with a close friend holding space for me, I came up with a new model for talking about what’s happening when the old schemas meet the new reality, which I expressed in this tweet (which is now one of my all-time most popular tweets)
    • Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation and whatever old emotional meanings are getting activated by the current situation. Like dreaming you're at your high school but it's also on an airplane somehow.
    • What makes this metaphor really powerful is that, as in dreams, somehow the weirdness of this mashup goes unnoticed until you wake up (and only then if you think about it). And then even though you’ve noticed while awake how weird dreams are, you’re just as fooled by the next dream, until you wake up.
    • This helps explain the vivid reality of peoples’ experiences. The emotional brain is experiencing something totally real—just as your high school is real. The part of you that’s taking in reality is experiencing something totally real—just as airplanes are real. But there is no real “my high school, except on an airplane”.
    • So people experience these mashups in relationships as well, emotionally experiencing their friends & partners as if they’re a parent, teacher, sibling, or bully from childhood, or an earlier friend or partner.
    • (this is the part at which my old model starts going into a not-NNTD-informed frame)
    • When people experience this and it’s accompanied by major discomfort, they try to have the entirety of their experience validated by the person they’re experiencing it with, or someone else. However, because half of what’s happening—and possibly more than half of the meaning experienced by the dreamer—isn’t actually part of the scene as experienced by the other person, it’s hard for them to really validate it, especially when this involves taking responsibility for something they don’t experience any response-ability in relation to.
    • Others will therefore tend to—at best—respond with something like “I can see that your experience of this is really rough” which sometimes lands & connects but other times the person feels like the reality of their experience is being denied, and feeling that they would have to negate their own self-trust in their own experience in order to connect with the other person. This results in an increasingly desperate attempt to get the other person to enter the dream mashup. With sufficient persuasive ability, conviction, & determination, people are sometimes able to pull others into their dreams in this way.
    • However, this simply perpetuates the nightmare. The mashup was never fully real to begin with, so liberation comes not from any move within it but by successfully differentiating “my emotional flashback” from “the present live situation” and responding creatively. One useful move here can be meta-communication: “Oh man I’m projecting right now, something like... that I’m back in school and you’re my teacher about to punish me for not having done my homework”, or if you’re not sure what the actual content of the flashback is, simply, “I’m feeling activated and I don’t know why”.
    • Not knowing why is the default case, to be clear, and this is part of the role of techniques like NEDERA, Coherence Therapy, etc. They help surface the context. For more on what’s going on with emotional flashbacks, check out this excellent article by Pete Walker, which says:
      • “Because most emotional flashbacks do not have a visual or memory component to them, the triggered individual rarely realizes that she is re-experiencing a traumatic time from childhood.”
      • “Eventually the child grows up, but she is so dominated by feelings of danger, shame and abandonment, that she is unaware that adulthood now offers many new resources for achieving internal and external safety. She is stuck seeing the present as rife with danger as the past.”
      • “Over the course of therapy, I often reframe flashbacks as messages from the wounded inner child about the denied or minimized traumas of childhood. In this vein I paint flashbacks as the inner child righteously clamoring for validation of past parental abuse and neglect.”
    • This third quote connects very powerfully with one lens on the Bio-Emotive Framework, which is that when people get triggered, it’s like the emotional brain’s version of that feeling when you think of something you haven’t had the chance to say and you want to say it before you forget it. Except instead of a joke, story, or fun fact, it’s something more like “I’m in a lot of pain because of <event>. I want to cry.” Yet because of other schemas that say it’s not okay to cry, the emotional brain never gets to say its bit, and it just sits on it forever—even if some of the content does get expressed, it doesn’t get validated with compassion, which would allow it to rest & dissolve, having achieved its purpose.
    • Pete outlines over a dozen creative responses to the flashbacks, most of which are transformative and a few are counteractive. In the context of the overall very transformative approach he presents, the counteractive moves likely function to produce experiences of short-term empowerment for people, by consciously thinking different thoughts or avoiding triggering situations. This empowerment then fuels further transformation.
    • He describes an utterly transformed relationship with the flashbacks:
      • “As clients begin to derive benefit from responding more functionally to being triggered, there are more opportunities to work with their active flashbacks in session. In fact, it often seems that their unconscious desire for mastery 'schedules' their flashbacks to occur just prior to or during sessions.”
    • In other words, having a functional and non-ashamed response to flashbacks transforms them into an opportunity! This is very similar to something that happened at the June 2019 Bio-Emotive retreat. As described in Malcolm’s 2019 yearly review:
      • The Bio-Emotive retreat created a really powerful experience for people of realizing that when they become emotionally activated it’s usually less about the person or situation or incident that sparked the activation, and more about whatever historical emotional meaning was getting activated. So where in a typical conversation someone might say “I’m irritated by that sound you’re making!” with a kind of pushing away quality… instead at the retreat people would tend to say something more like “huh, I’m finding that sound surprisingly irritating… not sure what that is but I guess that’s something for me to NEDER about!”
    • While Pete Walker is talking about Complex PTSD (which sounds extreme & rare) the principles apply to less extreme situations. Also schools are prisons so basically everybody is actually traumatized quite a lot. Mainstream society is founded on a certain baseline level of trauma as being the norm, and fails to realize that there could be a completely different way of human-ing that doesn't involve everyone constantly rehashing these old nightmares at each other.
    • Re responsibility & updates post-NNTD, see this section:
        • Wanted to jot down something I noticed about how this relates to the dream mashups thing / Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings
          • I used to think that it was kind of the person having the nightmare's job to recognize that and pull themselves out.
          • And I'm now seeing ways in which structurally it works a lot better if the people triggering the nightmare are able to orient to it like
            • okay, this person currently can't trust that I won't behave in some way that hurt them in the past
            • and I want to respect that reality
              • and explore how I might communicate that I won't, inasmuch as that is what's so
              • as well as explore how it might also be so that I will behave in such a way
                • noting that that doesn't mean that behaving in such a way is wrong
                • and it might also be the case that many other people wouldn't be hurt by such behavior, or that I might think it makes sense for me to continue doing that behavior and find another level of abstraction to get samesided with this person on
                  • which might involve them doing emotional reconsolidation on their response to the behavior
                  • or might involve us acknowledging together that
                    • I don't have another move I feel makes sense for me to make
                    • that their experience of distrust/activation/whatever in response to my behavior is ok
                      • and doesn't mean either of us is wrong
                  • etc etc
              • it also might be the case that I would not in any of my other relationships behave in such a way, but in the context of trying to relate with this person who expects people to behave this way, that I'll somehow end up behaving this way
          • Previously I sort of had a thought that if someone was like "Get me out of this nightmare" (but not in so many words) that the thing that needed to happen was for them to be prompted to wake up.
            • But I'm seeing more clearly now that such a response ("wake up") can reinforce the sense of nightmare, and that it thus deepens the distrust and creates more tangles.
              • The "wake up", for me at least, often comes from a perspective of
                • "we can't do anything useful while you're stuck in this"
              • And the whole stance has a kind of "this nightmare isn't real" kind of vibe. I've even done that to myself at times. And it's tempting to do, because there's a sense in which it is almost always a smaller reality than one's usual reality, so if you're just comparing size then it seems less real or not real. But it is still real and it contains information that the reality one is otherwise present to does not, and that's why it's happening and it won't fundamentally integrate until that information & reality is integrated.
                • Sarah: Oof, this lands -- "it it almost always a smaller reality than one's usual reality [...] but it is still real and it contains information"
            • Whereas a response that says "oh, I see you can't seem to wake up and be present right now. what are you needing, as you understand it?" may in many cases break the image of the nightmare because it disconfirms the nightmare's sense of "this person doesn't care about me"
              • you may not be able to u bbbbbbbnderstand or give them what they need, given whatever constraints, but you can have an orientation that continually says "you matter and your experience is real"
              • (this is not a complete answer—it's just another way to point at the generator of the NNTD, which is a fully human-complete puzzle-solving challenge)
              • Part of the point here is to completely upend the idea of "we can't do anything useful while you're stuck in this", because you can actually do something very useful, which is create a different kind of response to the stuckness and nightmare
            • In both cases here the quoted phrases are not necessarily literal utterances, but more like the basic stance of the response
    • Scraps
      • < quote Bly re bag? >
      • (Magic parenthesis: I'm having trouble writing this section because I want to somehow tie it back to the dream mashup thing but I don't feel like I have a tight way to do that, and I'm also grappling with metaphor stuff around like, lucid dreaming, waking up, etc. What's the high school, and what's the airplane? What are the different kinds of counteractive modes? What #unfinished )
      • a section to follow bit on counteractive vs transformational
        • A counteractive approach to working with
        • Within the dream mashup metaphor, transformational change is where you actually understand why your brain was producing the strange mashup.
        • Within the dream mashup metaphor, there's an obvious question of "how can I go about noticing the weirdness of the mashup?"
        • Spiritual practices (particularly those based on buddhism) often talk about "waking up"
      • shame
        • —would you be embarrassed to realize that part of you still thinks you're a little kid in school? Would you be embarrassed to realize you've been emotionally thinking your partner is your sibling or parent?
      • another scrap
        • <!-- wp:paragraph -->
<p>While Pete Walker is talking about Complex PTSD (which sounds extreme &amp; rare) the principles apply to less extreme situations. Also schools are prisons (kids are not allowed to leave, and in some cases not allowed to go to the bathroom on their body's own schedule) so basically everybody is actually traumatized quite a lot. Mainstream society is <em>founded on</em> a certain baseline level of trauma as being the norm, and fails to realize that there could be a completely different way of human-ing that doesn't involve everyone constantly rehashing these old nightmares at each other.</p>
<!-- /wp:paragraph -->

<!-- wp:quote -->
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>“mutual triggering is the bedrock of interaction”</p><cite>— <a href="https://twitter.com/RomeoStevens76/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://twitter.com/RomeoStevens76/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Romeo Stevens</a>, in a chat message to me, March 12, 2019</cite></blockquote>
<!-- /wp:quote -->
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  • Wanted to jot down something I noticed about how this relates to the dream mashups thing / Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings
    • I used to think that it was kind of the person having the nightmare's job to recognize that and pull themselves out.
    • And I'm now seeing ways in which structurally it works a lot better if the people triggering the nightmare are able to orient to it like
      • okay, this person currently can't trust that I won't behave in some way that hurt them in the past
      • and I want to respect that reality
        • and explore how I might communicate that I won't, inasmuch as that is what's so
        • as well as explore how it might also be so that I will behave in such a way
          • noting that that doesn't mean that behaving in such a way is wrong
          • and it might also be the case that many other people wouldn't be hurt by such behavior, or that I might think it makes sense for me to continue doing that behavior and find another level of abstraction to get samesided with this person on
            • which might involve them doing emotional reconsolidation on their response to the behavior
            • or might involve us acknowledging together that
              • I don't have another move I feel makes sense for me to make
              • that their experience of distrust/activation/whatever in response to my behavior is ok
                • and doesn't mean either of us is wrong
            • etc etc
        • it also might be the case that I would not in any of my other relationships behave in such a way, but in the context of trying to relate with this person who expects people to behave this way, that I'll somehow end up behaving this way
    • Previously I sort of had a thought that if someone was like "Get me out of this nightmare" (but not in so many words) that the thing that needed to happen was for them to be prompted to wake up.
      • But I'm seeing more clearly now that such a response ("wake up") can reinforce the sense of nightmare, and that it thus deepens the distrust and creates more tangles.
        • The "wake up", for me at least, often comes from a perspective of
          • "we can't do anything useful while you're stuck in this"
        • And the whole stance has a kind of "this nightmare isn't real" kind of vibe. I've even done that to myself at times. And it's tempting to do, because there's a sense in which it is almost always a smaller reality than one's usual reality, so if you're just comparing size then it seems less real or not real. But it is still real and it contains information that the reality one is otherwise present to does not, and that's why it's happening and it won't fundamentally integrate until that information & reality is integrated.
          • Sarah: Oof, this lands -- "it it almost always a smaller reality than one's usual reality [...] but it is still real and it contains information"
      • Whereas a response that says "oh, I see you can't seem to wake up and be present right now. what are you needing, as you understand it?" may in many cases break the image of the nightmare because it disconfirms the nightmare's sense of "this person doesn't care about me"
        • you may not be able to u bbbbbbbnderstand or give them what they need, given whatever constraints, but you can have an orientation that continually says "you matter and your experience is real"
        • (this is not a complete answer—it's just another way to point at the generator of the NNTD, which is a fully human-complete puzzle-solving challenge)
        • Part of the point here is to completely upend the idea of "we can't do anything useful while you're stuck in this", because you can actually do something very useful, which is create a different kind of response to the stuckness and nightmare
      • In both cases here the quoted phrases are not necessarily literal utterances, but more like the basic stance of the response

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