Understand yourself: Who am I? (1)
Edition 11 The YMCK+ model connects different fields of science - philosophy, psychology and physics - to an integrated view of humanity, offering a different perspective on personal and social issues
I lost myself quite a bit in the past few weeks. Don't worry, I deliberately looked it up. At the end of October I will tell my story at a Philosophy and Psychiatry conference (Too Mad to be True III), and that required a major internal reorganization. After all, I am my story, all my knowledge and feelings lie in it.
And so I also had to deal with what was still there. Something a friend pointed out to me, because I myself was only relatively aware of it. I had to start talking to my family again, about something I had thought I could leave behind. Already said, not understood, never mind. But it was too important.
Once again I had to fight, argue, hope for understanding. Expose everything, risk being traumatized again. This time it went well and I got the recognition I was looking for. I am very grateful for that, it has enabled me to move on.
Also in preparation for my presentation. After all, as the YMCK+ model shows, we ourselves are the information. And there is no distinction between cognitive and social-emotional. It is one process, and that is us. Together.
This brings me to the topic of this edition: who are you? The answer may be quite confusing: you are also the other. The other possesses your blind spots, as I described in the previous edition. Each of us is the entire universe, only we have blind holes. We have to dive into them if we want to find the perspective of the other.
In this edition I describe how techniques from Emotional Focused Therapy (EFT) showed me how this process works, and how it is actually nothing more than tuning your inner compass. Something that I think we should all master, because that is where it so often goes wrong in the world. We continue to stand against each other, instead of helping each other grow. Turn black and white into colours by means of entanglement.
Unconscious motives
How could I not be aware that something was in myself? That question took me back to the time when I had to face the fact that I was carrying a major trauma. Yes, I didn't know. This is a very controversial subject, also among psychiatrists. Bessel van der Kolk, psychiatrist specialized in trauma, got quite a lot of flak. Repressed memories do not exist, the fierce opponents argue, with the slippery slope as the strongest argument.
After all, you could make a client believe anything, and in doing so turn lives upside down. But there are also enormous legal consequences: if someone acts on the basis of something he or she does not know, then you cannot declare him or her guilty. The 'I did not know' would suddenly be a very strong argument.
But it also gives you a very unpleasant feeling. If you can't know your own motives because there are repressed memories, then we give up the control we think we have over ourselves. And that's not a nice feeling: you could be surprised by dark sides in yourself.
Yet I think we can no longer deny that a large part of our behavior is unconscious. That sometimes you cannot know why you do something. In the first edition (Why do I?) I explained that if you want to know why you do something, you have to look at what you do not do. What you do not do, what you do not say. Periods that you have few memories of, or that you never dream about. Sometimes they are subtle signals, slips of the tongue, a hint in your dreams. Where the unconscious speaks, you will find your real motives.
And be honest, how often do you know afterwards why you did something? And do you always know why you do something? For example, can you explain your preferences to yourself? Why do you feel like a banana, and not an apple? I don't think so. There are many physical processes involved, which subtly tell you what your body needs. A potassium deficiency, for example, to name one.
And that is where the answer lies for me. We are not aware of all our bodily processes. Fortunately not, otherwise there would be little room for thought. But these processes all contribute to the meaning of our experiences. Just as a feeling of hunger also determines the meaning of a dining room chair for you (see edition 'What am I (2)).
Our metabolism, blood circulation and heartbeat determine the meaning of the world around us. Just as the sun is a clock that determines our calendar, so too are our internal processes clocks that point to old memories, that let you know where you are in time. And if you order all cyclic processes from small to large, from sun to atom, then we are talking about spacetime (see edition 'What am I (3)). All processes together point us to experiences that lie somewhere in the universe, waiting to be picked up by us. All processes together form our inner compass.
Other one
If these clock-compasses are perfectly aligned, it is not necessary to constantly check whether they are in sync. You also trust your watch, you do not always check it with the world clock. And that is how our subconscious comes into being. After all, it is no longer necessary to consciously control our intestines, our intestines can do that themselves. Our thinking is no longer necessary for that.
In the philosophical movement that sees cognition as embodied (embodied cognition), this is called 'offline cognition': we can use our sensorimotor context without sending the signals. You are able to let your brain perform actions, separate from your body. This imagining allows us to plan, practice and act symbolically.
At the same time, it can make us lose contact with our feelings. Gradually, because we do not take the time to process everything we experience. To synchronize everything within ourselves. We then live partly in the past, and partly in the future. The distance between the experiences, the space-time that we have to bridge ourselves, we experience as tension. Stress = stretch. You are literally torn apart.
But a traumatic event can also cause the body to react acutely, and the brain does not get the chance to connect. Or someone else gives signals that the brain should ignore the body, for whatever reason. And so an enormous asynchronicity can arise.
If one of the clock-compasses falters, lags behind or even stops, then you are pulled apart. The child in us is in conflict with the adult, they want to go in a different direction, and that leads to incongruent behavior.
We then need someone else to restore this connection.
Tuning the inner compass
The YMCK+ model is a combination of my philosophical knowledge of, among other things, embodied cognition, with the methodology of psychotherapist Leslie Gerkema, known as Emotional Focused Therapy (EFT). It shows how the other person can restore the connection between brain and body. The therapist took on the role of the other person, not as a role-playing game, but by letting his own inner compass speak.
After gaining my trust, I let the therapist in. Above you can see how he got to know me (shown with three arrows):
Let's know what you do know. First of all, he wanted to know my life story based on what I told him.
Let's know what you do feel. He also delved into my feelings. Not as a distant outsider, but by feeling it within himself. This goes beyond empathy, this is compassion: really putting yourself in the other person's shoes.
Let's see what you do see. By connecting my story and feeling within himself, he saw the discrepancy. What I told him did not match my feeling.
By plotting the story my body and brain were telling on the energy and time axis, he could analyze where I needed to go. Where was there a lot of feeling, but I spoke about it very lightly? Where was the greatest distance between brain and body? What gave the greatest tension? Where was the difference in charge the greatest?
The therapist then proceeded to reflect his findings back to me.
Let's know what you must see. Here he told me that I did indeed have a trauma. The events I told him about had a different meaning than I had always thought. Of course I knew that what had happened was not good, but I had not seen the impact on my life.
Let's feel what you have to feel. Here the therapist mirrored his feeling back to me. I saw sadness where I didn't feel it myself, or anger that I rationalized away. Where I stayed with my feeling with my adult self, he touched me in my 'little' self. He pulled me back into spacetime.
Let's see what you need to feel. And then came the big shock. The connection between thinking and feeling was re-established. I felt the enormous fear that I had felt as a child, at the event that I had been so rational about.
Reality keeps the score
But who are you now? As you can see, the black area with the white letters in the middle is the 'Self'. This is the center around which everything revolves, the eternal zero point. It is the light that goes up or down. The Self in the middle, can shine or be dark, it is the interaction of everything that revolves around it, that provides the colors.
Now you might understand the name of the YMCK+ model: these are the basic colors (Yellow, Magenta, Cyan and Black Key) with which you can mix all colors. If you want to know how I describe this as quantum entanglement with a gravitational field, read the summary about the perpetual anime (see newsletter When am I (2)).
Thomas Metzinger described in his Being No-one how mental disorders arise when events are wrongly placed in your own self-image. Someone projects his feelings onto you, and you accept them. In this way you feel responsible for causes and effects that are not yours. You carry parts of the other, and that has consequences for your self-image and the relationship with the other. The boundaries between you and others are not well established. And that is what I want to go into more depth next time.
This brings me back to Bessel van der Kolk, MD. He states: "The body keeps the score." I think that is only part of the truth. It is not only the body, it is also the other. Or better said, it is reality that tells what has happened. The whole system that we carry with each other indicates the ‘waarheid’ (Dutch for truthness, literally: where-ness).
That is also why you have to go back, to rewrite history. Not to add new experiences, not to change the order. But to adjust the meaning. After all, only when you know the consequences can you know what the weight of an event is. Things that seemed insignificant turn out to have played a major role in history, and vice versa. It is the load that we have to shift, again and again, between present and past, and between each other. That is not just therapy, that is life.
We live reality. That brings responsibility, but is also incredibly beautiful. It brings us to universal values, and gives the feeling of unification. Entanglement in the here and now, as part of an everlasting process.
The YMCK+ is a dynamic systems model that describes human interaction in terms of energy through spacetime.
The 7 main questions on the way to a better understanding of yourself:
Why do I? What do I say and what not? What do I feel, and what not? What do I see or miss in others?
Where am I? How do I relate what I feel to where I am? How do I connect different places, and thus meanings? What is my position in relation to others?
When am I? Where am I in time, and what are the consequences? How do I go through my memories? Do I speed up, or do I slow down?
What am I? What does what I see or experience symbolize? How is meaning organized in space, and how do I relate to this?
Who am I? Who am I in relation to the other? How are we a projection of each other? Where are boundaries and how can I influence them? What are gender roles?
How much am I? How great are my feelings, and do I mobilize strength to achieve my goal? How are my feelings going?
How am I? How can we understand our interaction based on physics, and what does this mean for our view of our own development, and various disruptions thereof, and syndromes? How can we better tackle social problems?
This model connects different scientific areas and shows how a common language can lead to new insights. In this newsletter I describe how an integral view of humanity provides a different view of personal and social problems: from meaning, climate, healthcare to AI.