Understand yourself: Who am I? (2)
Edition 12 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
Can you always be yourself? Or do you unconsciously adapt? To what extent do others determine who you are?
In this edition I will discuss the consequences of a disturbed relationship. I want to show that it not only distorts your self-image, but your entire worldview. Anyone who comes from a narcissistic relationship knows this better than anyone. But these patterns also emerge more subtly between each other. Strictly speaking, we are always reflections of others, which go back to the very beginning.
That is why I think that recovery, learning, development, mourning, puberty and evolution are all the same: going back in spacetime to change relationships. Because connections are lost, or relationships change.
This is quite an inclusive view: it means that mental illnesses are not only no different from physical illnesses, but also from life itself. And that makes you think: to what extent can we ask each other to change?
Hologram
In the previous edition I showed how your self-image emerges from the interaction between you and the other. We all share the same origin, of black and white, and from there we look at what happens around us. The holistic universe, as Stephen Hawking described it in his latest theory, is all of us ourselves. But also our brain and body, but also our brain hemispheres, our organs, cells, bacteria and atoms. And all internal cyclic processes.
Everything revolves around everything, and we revolve around each other. I try to describe that process with the YMCK+ model, with which I describe human interaction in terms of energy in spacetime. Last time I described how we try to keep the system in balance with each other. We literally connect the past and future in ourselves with thinking and feeling, to a new here and now. Reality: that is us.
The self is black and white, the colors are created by the experiences we carry with us (see figure 1). A hologram that we create around us, but because we look from the 'here and now', we have forgotten that we have drawn that path ourselves. You only notice that when you are in danger of falling.
Out of balance
We are a sum of our experiences and we are constantly trying to connect them. If a stable foundation was not laid in our early childhood - or in the generations before us - this can have major consequences in the long term.
In the figure below you can see what it means when, for example, someone else has a more dominant role in your life. You see that the other person demands more energy in the relationship, and even suppresses you. This means that the pivot point also lies more with the other person: the point in the here and now (the black dot) is not the center of your self (the white dot). This means that you cannot be completely yourself, cannot put your own wishes central.
Color
Perhaps you now also see why your entire worldview changes. The intersection between brain and other is no longer blue (see figure 1 & 3), but dark purple. And the intersection between your body and other has also shifted from red to pink. So the other influences how you perceive the world, what you think and feel.
The green, between your brain and body, is also darker. It is the result of the shifted center. You can see this clearly in figure 2, the light that radiates upwards from the origin reaches you less. You know less well what you feel yourself. This is also a logical consequence of the influence of the other on your thinking and feeling.
What we see is normal for us. So we don't see when the whole system is distorted, and there is no point in examining your own thoughts or feelings with self-reflection. What does help is using someone else as a mirror.
You can see that the other person has a different perception, and the other person can see that from you. This is where the power of compassion lies: if the other puts himself in your position, and sees that your colors deviate from normal, he can mirror that back.
In the previous edition I described how my psychotherapist did that, and taught me how to recalibrate my inner compass with my loved ones. Below you can see how my path has been: I scored all my 200 poems on the YMCK+ model. You can see how at the end blue, red and green emerged, and I also found the black/white of the self again.
Relationships are rarely symmetrical during our lives, which begin at birth. And no one develops synchronously: some parts of us grow faster than others, sometimes there is a standstill, or an acceleration. We begin our lives in a dependent position, from which we break in puberty, and the mother brings about menopause.
In our lives, relationships change. We lose sight of people, start new relationships or they break up. Or someone else falls away, when someone dies. All of this has an effect on your self-image.
And sometimes our body asks for more attention, when we are sick. Have we followed our head too much, have we made wrong choices for too long. And if you have suppressed your feelings for too long, we call that a burnout. And if someone else has not given your feelings space, we call that transgressive behavior.
In order to recover, grow, learn and develop, we return to space-time again and again. We link new experiences to old experiences, and thus arrive at a new color. Our experiences thereby acquire a new meaning. This is what we do every night, when we let go of the relationships between brain and body in our sleep. We synchronize all parts within ourselves.
But that is not enough. Who we are ourselves is also determined by the other. If the other does not change, you will always encounter the same problems. The relationship must change, so we will have to exchange energy with each other. Not only in the here and now, but where the original experience lies.
To do this, we must collide with each other, break open the other, shift old boundaries. If we change the relationship between each other, we thereby align the colors of the intersections with each other. In this way, the system comes into balance and the tension disappears.
For that we have to collide with each other, to break open the other, to shift old boundaries. If we change the relationship between each other, we thereby align the colors of the intersections with each other. In this way the system comes into balance, and tension disappears.
Inclusivity and morality
Our whole lives we are searching for balance, to reduce the entropy in the whole system that we form together. We are all searching for ways to heal, and we collide on our way there. I think that is our shared meaning: I think we all long for the wholeness of the origin.
And herein lies an interesting paradox: you can only be yourself completely if you perfectly coincide with the other. And that raises questions about what inclusion is exactly.
If there is no distinction between illness, as a disorder, a natural phase, or a character trait, even more so: if this is a consequence of an imbalance in the system, to what extent can you hold others responsible? But at the same time: is a diagnosis, a label, or the umbrella term neurodiversity sufficient reason not to have to change? I think that is not what we mean by accepting each other as we are.
I think YMCK+ makes it clear that we have a shared responsibility: each of us carries the world within us. Morality should not be a dirty word. We can help each other, to improve ourselves. The more people can be themselves, the less tension in the universe. It sounds so logical, even without knowledge of physics.
“If everyone thinks of themselves, everyone is thought of.”
I think taking each other seriously starts with calling everyone to account for their responsibility, without denying your own role. Always being prepared to change, for the sake of the greater whole, that is what I see as inclusion.
Want to hear my whole story? Buy a ticket for Too Mad to be True III now, coming to Ghent or follow it online: Mind in Spacetime, October 30, 16.15
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.