Clinical Notes

Ask questions you can't imagine asking, especially ones that feel pointless. Think about what to ask, now. Get some help from somebody else.

What happens may surprise you, whatever the answer.

This way the future feels different. You might imagine something else.

Curated pops up all over the place. I just found it describing some clothes in a summer sale. Curated seems more and more to mean 'so you don't need to think about it'. That's not good.

Mind and body have been opposed and reunited in countless ways, giving rise to ideas like soul, spirit, self. Neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio, Jaak Panksepp, and Cristina Alberini have spent decades gathering evidence for something Shakespeare imagined:

The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing – of nothing. Hamlet: IV: ii

Something material, a body. Something of nothing, a king who exists only as a projection of the body – an event we might call a story. Instead of mind and body, think of one ongoing event of registration and expression. Think of a dream as a film. It is something like that.

Your mind – a conscious representation of your body in all its fluctuating states, always emotional, never objective – is never detached from what the body carries. The two are not in dialogue. They are one thing, differently expressed.

In some families, perhaps many, every generation someone “disappears.” Not always so you’d notice at the time, but later you look back and they’re gone: no marriage certificate, no place on the family tree, or you mention someone and everything people have to say about them sounds exceptional. They were wonderful or terrible, as if all they had ever been was a rumour.

“Disappearing” is an effect of forgiveness.

We think of forgiveness as resolution: the moment when division ends and people come back together. But forgiveness as it is usually practised is something else. It is a way of managing a feeling, and managing a feeling means protecting the arrangement that produces it, which means making inconvenient things vanish. People, evidence, history. The feeling is preserved. The person is gone.

This is not necessarily a moral failing. It is often biology.

Mind and body have been opposed and reunited so many times that the opposition itself has become hard to see. Soul, spirit, consciousness: these are the names we give to the space we keep reopening between them. But there is no space. There is one ongoing event of registration and expression, and you are it. Your mind is a conscious representation of your body in all its fluctuating states: always emotional, never objective. What you think you know about yourself is always a version of what your body already knows, and your body is often well ahead of you.

The space we imagine between mind and body is not neutral. It is where we put what we cannot bear to know. And what we cannot bear to know, we forgive: meaning we agree, collectively, not to speak of it. Forgiveness is the condition of unconditional love, the price of belonging. Anyone who becomes inconvenient to the story a family, a nation, or an institution tells about itself may have to vanish: discredited, idealised, or simply abandoned. The imagined space between mind and body is the same space in which division is constructed and maintained. It is not a description of how things are. It is a mechanism for keeping things as they are.

Families and groups that operate this way are not rare. The bonding chemistry that makes human connection possible also creates a need for an enemy as much as a friend. Inside the bonds of unconditional love, loyalty can mute you. Anyone outside the group who might otherwise support you can come to seem like a threat if they question it. This is not tribalism as pathology. It is one way belonging works, and it can produce the same results in families, institutions, nations. Someone has to “disappear.”

To change is to inhabit a different state of body, which is how we know it through our state of mind. The nervous system does not respond to argument. It responds to experience, and experience means risk, and risk produces dread. Dread doesn’t always announce itself as dread. More often it subtly structures a life: the staying in bed, the wasted hours, the reaching for something to blur or blunt how you feel. Love is where the biology is oldest and the grip is strongest. Being in love is not a consistent feeling. It is a state that includes feelings that are sometimes painful and hard to tolerate. The problem is the pursuit of the feeling of love: the need for it to be warm, reliable, and pain-free. That pursuit is indistinguishable from dependency. You sacrifice your interests not for the person but for the feeling. A group that needs to be forgiven needs exactly that: not accountability, but the neurological relief that forgiveness briefly provides. Like the relief an addiction promises.

A clinical aside: the concept of codependency has always struck me as a particularly optimistic label. It implies that once you can see the formation clearly, you can decide to leave it. But the whole point is that you can’t. Not through decision. Not through insight. This is a wider problem than codependency. The therapeutic and self-help cultures that dominate how we talk about change are overwhelmingly identification-based: name what you are, find others who are the same, and the recognition itself becomes the cure. Codependent. Narcissist. Avoidant. Anxious. The labels multiply because the hunger for them is genuine — people are in real pain and want to understand why. But identification closes difference down. It gives you a story about yourself that feels like knowledge, and that feeling of knowledge is itself a relief, which means it operates exactly like the dependency it claims to diagnose. You are no longer in an unbearable situation. You are a person with a condition. The situation remains.

This happens in families, institutions, nations. The identification produces the enemy it needs, and the enemy confirms the identification. Seeing yourself in others isn’t a recipe for coexistence; it is the basis of division. The nervous system doesn’t respond to good advice, or to correct labelling. Change of this kind takes years, and it takes the kind of relationship — therapeutic or otherwise — in which something genuinely unexpected can happen to a body that has learned to expect the worst. Naming what you’re in is not the same as getting out of it.

The mind may lose touch with something that has hurt it. A person, a group, a nation may believe it can forgive and forget. But the body knows. It will rebel, flooding you with anxiety when you try to proceed as if things have changed, when nothing has really changed. Repression and dissociation are not failures of memory. They are the body’s way of managing what the mind cannot yet bear to know. Trying to forgive is always, physically, like pressing on a bruise.

Change comes not through insight but through the body’s encounter with something it did not predict: the moment when what it expected turns out not to be there. Not through resolution. Not through the closing down of difference. But through the willingness to stay with what cannot be resolved.

We have to keep becoming. But not by making each other “disappear.”

Why don't people change? Well, they do, but the dread that accompanies doing something differently is almost impossible to withstand, and it doesn't always announce itself as dread. More often it subtly structures your life towards staying in bed, wasting time, or using something to blur or blunt how you feel.

Love is the most difficult diversion. Not because it is an obstacle to change but because it is often the structure that makes change unthinkable. When we love someone, or believe we do, our bodies need that arrangement to hold fast: to stick. To change is to threaten the bond, and threatening the bond can feel more dangerous than whatever the bond is costing you. So you stay stuck.

Being in love is not a consistent feeling. It is a state that includes feelings that are sometimes painful and hard to tolerate, and those feelings are not a sign that something has gone wrong. They are part of what love actually is. The problem is the pursuit of the feeling of love: the need for it to be warm, reliable, and pain-free. That pursuit is indistinguishable from dependency. You are no longer negotiating with another person; you are managing a feeling, and managing it means protecting it, which means protecting the arrangement that produces it, which means never changing anything. You sacrifice your interests not for the person but for the feeling. Sex, substances, busyness work the same way, but love is where the biology is oldest and the grip is strongest. These aren't obstacles to change so much as its silhouette. They show you exactly where the fear is.

To change is to inhabit a different state of body, which is how we know it through our state of mind. Mind and body are not two things but one ongoing event of registration and expression. Your mind, a conscious representation of your body in all its fluctuating states, always emotional and never objective, may lose touch with something that has hurt you. You may believe you can forgive and forget. But your body knows. It will rebel, flooding you with anxiety when you try to proceed as if things have changed, when nothing has really changed. What felt like the only option, or the best one, turns out to have been a response to a danger that no longer exists.

What are you protecting, and what is it costing you?