EXISTENTIAL OBSERVER

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Video: EXISTENTIAL OBSERVER

Video: EXISTENTIAL OBSERVER
Video: ПЛОХОЕ БУДУЩЕЕ ► Observer 2024, March
EXISTENTIAL OBSERVER
EXISTENTIAL OBSERVER
Anonim

Recently I have been thinking about the process, without which it is impossible, in my opinion, no change in personality, no serious changes in life. It often unfolds in the office of psychologists / psychotherapists, because without it, any psychotherapy of any direction will not give any lasting effect (and often - even any tangible one). This process I call "existential shift", during which a person finds a new position in relation to his own life

From birth, we know one, basic for all living beings, position: this is merging with our experiences and experiences. A baby is a continuous experience, there is not even a drop of reflection, reflection on what, how and why he is doing. Stimulus - and immediate response, no pause, no choice. Everything is automatic, which has provided us with billions of years of evolution. That is, the first position is emotionally reactive, based on experience, specific and individual. This is a kind of emotionally experiencing I. Over time, the emotionally experiencing Self is supplemented by the attitudes of other people, which dictate to our body and consciousness in particular how the world works and how to react to it if something happens. The main question from this point is: "How do I feel?"

The second position in relation to life is found much later, and not in all people. This is a rational position, that is, the ability to act not on the basis of momentary impulses or habitual patterns, but on the basis of analyzing data and extracting new information. The attitude to life here is not reactive, but analytical. Based on this position, a person builds himself a rational picture of his behavior, explains to himself and to others the cause-and-effect relationships of the events taking place. There was no "it is not clear what rolled over me!" The main question is "what do I think?"

As a matter of fact, these two positions are enough, and people often move between the two, from one to the other. "You have to try everything in life!" - says a person from an emotionally worried position in relation to life, fearing that something very important or interesting will pass him by. "Yeah, there, some heroin tried out of curiosity - and what happened?" - says the rational "I". In general, we are all familiar with the complex relationship of mind and feelings.

However, there comes a time when these positions - emotional and rational attitude to the world - do not cope. When emotions only make it difficult to contact people, and rational constructions turn out to be powerless to connect one with the other and calm a person down. As a result of a failure, someone kisses the bottle, someone crushes emotions in themselves (considering them to be the cause of troubles) - in general, the actions take place within the framework of the usual positions. Somehow to plug the holes in your perception of reality: here to cover up with hysteria or pour vodka, here to strengthen with rational constructions - if only the familiar building of reality would hold, even if it looses more and more every time. And then a person, when he already clearly hears in his soul the crackle of the breaking familiar world, can come to a psychologist. Or a priest. Or someone else. With the question: what is wrong with the world or with me?

Finding the third position is often described as “awakening”. If it happens, change is often inevitable. It turns out that there is more to emotional response or stressful brainstorming. The third position, which is hard to find in the process of psychotherapy, is the position of detachment from both the emotional and the rational pole, and observing how our emotions unfold, as well as how we think. This is the position of a thoughtful observer-researcher who does not set the task of immediately doing something (as the emotionally reactive position requires) or explaining (as “rationalists” are used to doing). It turns out that life can not only be experienced and analyzed. Life - including your own - can be watched. And the main question from this point is: "How do I think and feel?"

Does it sound corny? Maybe. But this shift is often impossible for many people. Often, as a psychologist, I did not manage to establish productive work, because all a person needed was to understand what to do, immediately drown out some difficult experience, or find an explanation. To an existential shift, to a transition to the question “how my world is arranged”, “how I myself am arranged”, “how I organize interaction between myself and the world” - there was either no strength or desire. But it is precisely these questions that contain the answers to many tasks: what to do, why and why.

The position of the observer I call the existential I, this is a kind of inner center, the basis of reflection, the "assemblage point" of our personality. Only by moving away from emotional and rational storms, having risen above them, you can see how these very storms are organized, how they work. At the same time, it is important to distinguish between estrangement and alienation. With alienation, we lose contact with the personality, we stop seeing it in whole or its separate parts, we stop worrying or thinking. And for observation - true observation - contact with the observed is simply necessary. The existential I is not an impassive observer, but an included, experiencing - but still not caught up in a turbid stream.

The position of the existential observer-researcher is characterized by several important realizations that give special sharpness to the observed picture.

Awareness of the experimental nature of our I. Our psyche is a great experimenter. She constantly puts forward hypotheses about how the world works, another person or ourselves, conducts experiments to test these hypotheses and interprets the data obtained. Being at the “assemblage point”, in our existential I, we can observe HOW this inner experimenter works, how correctly he conducts research. Why is this so important? Because so many people start from the stage of hypotheses (assumptions about other people, etc.) and immediately proceed to interpret these hypotheses as if they have already been proven. That is, the stage of the experiment - direct contact with the world in order to check the correctness / incorrectness of assumptions - is ignored. This is how inner worlds are formed, fixated on themselves, and it is they who create self-fulfilling prophecies (psychotherapists would add "projective identification", in which a person unconsciously tries to get from another such behavior, which, in the opinion of this person, this other should adhere). And someone conducts experiments, but makes very strange interpretations. My favorite example: a young man complains that he just can't get to know a “normal” girl. The question sounds: HOW does he manage to get acquainted only with the "abnormal" (whatever stands behind this word, this is a separate story). The young man is sure in advance that the nice / "normal" girl will reject him. She does not do this, accepts the invitation to come on a date, and then this young man comes to the conclusion that the girl is not so good (that is, "normal"), since she agreed. And everything does not come. A vicious circle, obvious to the Observing Self, but hidden from the view of the direct participant.

Perception of the complex context of events. The ability to see the world as a combination of various, often contradictory, phenomena and processes. From the existential I it is impossible to look only in one direction, rising OVER the fight, you see HOW often the opposite forces reveal an amazing similarity. Religious and atheistic fanatics, radical feminists and the "men's movement", "quilted jackets" and "vyshevatniki" - all these poles are united by an amazing similarity in what and how they say. It is only necessary to carry out technical work - to replace the terms with the opposite, and that's all - because their hate speech is the same. Dialectics - you can't get away from this struggle and unity of opposites. If, in response to an irritant (someone's statement or post), you explode with fireworks of emotions, your hands reach for the keyboard in order to smear the villain on the computer screen, you are clearly one with the one you are opposing in something. For example, in your hatred for everything that does not fit into your picture of the world. An existential observer in us can come to life at this moment and say: “Wait a minute… How did it happen that you already feel such hatred for a person you don't know? What do you not accept so much in him? Isn't it in you yourself? What are your own ideas about how the world and other people should be arranged, now pushing you to enter the path of virtual war? " The world is rarely - very rarely - monochromatic. Consciousness, fixated on itself and aimed at simplifying the picture of the world, is unable to detect its blind spots. It takes the boundaries of its outlook as the boundaries of the world … This is most clearly seen in political disputes, when both sides become blind and deaf and accuse each other of blindness and deafness ("zombie").

The ability to look in different directions does not mean equidistance: nothing prevents me from taking this or that point of view, realizing its weaknesses and shortcomings. An attempt to find an impeccable position inevitably takes you to the extreme ends of the spectrum and entails ignoring the context, any inconvenient facts. And honest recognition of the shortcomings of one's own position inevitably leads to a departure from radicalization - only psychopaths are capable of such powerful hypocrisy (awareness of shortcomings while maintaining radicalism).

Here we come to another important aspect of being in the existential self: humility as an awareness of the limitations of your ability to influence the world and other people. Moreover, we cannot directly observe someone's inner life. Therefore, the observing self concentrates on its own, and not others', feelings, thoughts and deeds. If you want to "clarify the relationship" - clearly indicate your position, and do not demand clarity from the other. Or, for starters, figure out what it is, your position.

The existential shift, the discovery of not only the emotional and rational, but also the observing part, makes change possible, but for this you must first get to your own "assemblage point". To feel that our habitual ways of thinking and feeling are not yet us. To realize that the endless hurdy-gurdy “you are nobody, you are nobody, you are nobody” is just a melody that is played without any connection with reality. For example, a girl whose head was continuously playing a devaluing song “if you couldn't do it the first time, you’re insignificant, and if you could, then this is too easy a problem that an idiot could handle”, at some point she was able to simply observe this incessant obsessive song, instead of either fighting it with the mind, or emotionally joining it. I just watched, from situation to situation, that this melody does not change, and that it will never leave her the slightest chance to change anything. I watched - and the habitual automatism of the barrel organ began to malfunction, because the internal organ grinder does not like persistent observers very much.

In general, watch yourself. Behind your thoughts and emotions. It can be no less interesting than spying on neighbors:))). But it is important to remember that good observation leads to discoveries, and discoveries - to new feelings and knowledge that turn into experience. It is impossible to be ABOVE the fight all the time, everything has its time, and there is time for feelings and for reasoning. It's just that when you feel that you are clearly being carried somewhere in the wrong place, it is good to have a piece of yourself somewhere that you can turn to with the question: “hey, get up, come on. Do you need help. Please observe what I am doing and how I participate in what is happening. You sit high, you look far away ….

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