The best way to disarm an intolerable reality when it’s about to crush you is. . .
How would you finish the sentence? It’s not a riddle, it’s a way to self-explore.
Romain Gary who came up with this statement said laugh. I find that answer to be horribly trite. What would you answer?
I find it is possible to neutralize one’s intentions and step out of time. People tend to be able to crush other people when they are emotionally aroused, but to still the emotions enables you to step out of the social context and to buy as much time as you need to reflect on whatever matter is likely to crush you. Then, when you are ready and sure, you can step back into time again.
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My first response was “eat.” But now I feel like a primitive life form after your response.
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ah. I learned this level of self-control as it was necessary for me. But stepping out of time is very shamanic. Shamans can bend time.
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We have different levels of consciousness and when we are emotionally aroused by others, socially, we are most prone to being victimised in the present. We may forget that we have other levels of consciousness that can form escape routes for us, at that point. But once one figures out that there are different levels one can disappear to, one can exit a situation that has become unhealthy and re-enter it agan at a later stage.
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My response that would be parallel to your “eat” is “dissociate.” I do things like freeze mentally and emotionally, and withdraw. What I *want* to do is drive or fly to a distant location, out of reach of whatever appears to be about to steamroll me where I am.
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Well I don’t think I’ve ever lived through something truly intolerable but when comforted with sad or anxiety producing situations, I start trying to picture the “end game”– if that makes sense,
So I start by acknowledging to myself that I feel bad in the moment and then I try to predict what the immediate future holds and what the more distant future holds. Usually I start to realize that what I’m stressed or unhappy about is fairly temporary and then I start trying to strategize how I can deal with this more temporary issue.
I don’t know if I’m making sense but basically I try remind myself that I have power over my life and that I get to choose when to feel sad, upset, anxious or bad. There are things over which I don’t have control of course but I always try to remind myself that I am never with no control.
I also try to go for a long walk– preferably by water.
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It depends on how intolerable and how prolonged the situation is.
Short term: eat and watch horror movies (very relaxing when I’m feeling stressed)
Long term: hunker down, focus on minutiae on a day by day basis and let my subconscious find and enact an escape plan (which it’s pretty good at doing).
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“The best way to disarm an intolerable reality when it’s about to crush you is …”
… to re-arm it with the things that matter the least, so that when it makes its inevitable attempt, you’ll laugh at how ridiculous it all seems and make your peace without it.
(aka “Your Intolerable Reality Is My Fictional Play Thing”)
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Yeah I did that too — for instance adding some nonsensical and actually false (because softening) elements to my memoir.
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About to crush: look down on that steamroller from a higher point.
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Everybody is offering very profound approaches while I’m still immersed in my oral issues and searching for “a kind nipple.”
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I am now imagining Fat Bastard from the Austin Powers movies demanding that everyone “COMFORT MAH NURPLE”. [evil grin]
Think of this as aversion therapy for those “oral issues” you’ve mentioned … 🙂
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I do laugh, though I am not sure that I laugh for the same reasons Gary does.
I tend to ruminate on the worse possibilities quite a bit, so when something bad happens, I am not affected, but merely go through the mentally practiced motions. However, sometimes things happen that I did not really expect, and which destroy the plans I might have had. It is at that point that I laugh – whatever else reality is, at least it is still unexpected.
I have it on good authority that this makes it a deeply unsettling experience to be winning against me in competitive games. The laugh turns small victories to small confusions for the opponent, and I guess that’s the hope in the general case, as well – that life will be too confused to want to deal with you and so go on its own way.
It is a way of deriving joy from your own misery, and denying the joy of hurting you from others. I am not sure how well this tactic would slot into your life, but I can at least assure you that the glee of the laugh is quite real, when it happens.
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If I knew how, I would do it. I have no good strategies since I have a lot of “toleration” for bad things.
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I also have a susceptibility to eating when stressed that I don’t want to fall back on.
One thing that’s worked for me is to use my imagination to make a situation less threatening. For example, I was at a dinner where someone was making passive-aggressive comments in the hopes of riling me up, hitting on some vulnerabilities. I didn’t know how to respond, at least not without drawing enough attention to the point where I’d be accused of making a fuss… so what I did was imagine each comment as a piece of mashed potato being flung at me, and mentally I was swatting away each bit of food with a fork and knife; this made me feel calm. At some point, the person making the attack on me dropped it, maybe because I continued to look calm and even amused.
I also have adult relatives with rage issues who will lash out at others. When I’m confronted with them, I’ll look them in the eye, see the confusion in there at the center of the rage, and picture them as their child-selves, angry and confused and unable to handle their powerful emotions or the sense of loss. I’m not saying their anger never upsets me, but they’re less threatening when I see them as their much younger selves.
Currently, I’m also thinking of the idea of a ‘mind palace’ (the image in my own mind is not a palace, but a house in and surrounding a tree) that could be a calm place to retreat to mentally when I need to. I’m developing this now, and I’ll see how it goes.
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Reading some of these responses (musteryou, hkatz, mine) led me to Google dissociation and I found this article on treatment of more severe traumatic reactions than we are talking about. Not sure I agree with the strategy but it may be of some interest. http://www.janinafisher.com/pdfs/dissociation.pdf
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Haven’t yet read the linked article, but dissociation will keep you alive in the front of the intolerable. The price one pays for this is the inability to live a fulfilling life until one deals with the intolerable situation dissociation kept one safe from. Said dealing will often be more difficult than dealing with it immediately would have been because dissociation will hide a lot of information that’s important for actually understanding the situation. It saved my life as a kid completely unable to survive on her own, and the price I’ve paid for this was persuading myself that I was unable to survive on my own, to the point where I’m barely beginning to consider the idea at age 25. Dissociation will keep you alive if there’s any chance that the situation can be survived, but if you’re a legal adult where you live, there are better methods to do so, there are always better methods to do so. I cannot imagine a more hellish situation for an adult to end up in than Soviet gulags, but as Solzhenitsyn describes, people made it through the gulags without relying on dissociation.
This is why I am not convinced by the article: it is talking about using dissociation in your own favor (as opposed to going so far as to integrate).
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By the strategy I do not mean dissociation, I mean the therapeutic strategy for dealing with it described here.
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I’m also dealing with (not intolerable at the moment) stress by bugging out to my beloved Aegean (this time the Hellenic side) for a week or so starting tomorrow. Yay me!
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That sounds like a great plan! Good for you.
I, in the meanwhile, have 4 classes with no breaks tomorrow.
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