Any seriously disorganized system or subsystem will improve if sufficient stimulus is applied to it. This does not mean that the stimulus is good, true or sane, just that the disorganized system responds positively in some regard to almost anything.
This is why and how bad, corrupt and untrue things can appear to help certain people, who then bond to those things the same way a baby duck bonds to the first face it sees when it hatches.
To the baby duck, there is no ability to discern between correct and incorrect bonding. There is just bonding to the organizing force, in this case, a mammalian face, as the first step towards orienting inside of its chaotic, disorganized state. It entrains, hopefully, to a more organizing force.
But this force could be corrupt. This force could be stupid and also disorganized, but just have slightly more physical power.
Do you see what I’m getting at? Do you see why we are drowning in a sea of insane systems, methods, so-called therapies and interventions? Why people are bonding to conspiracy theories, why you can seem to be helped by cults and cult leaders up to a point? The help has little to do with the person, the system, the ideological nonsense baked into the stimulus.
It is merely because your system is so regressed and infantilized that any organizing force improves some of its chaotic symptoms.
Yes, cults and conspiracy theories are organizing systems. Somatic domination and moral hypnosis are organizing stimuli.
If you are lucky enough to survive this initial re-parenting attachment delusion, it’s likely that many of your original symptoms will return in different ways, meaning you will backslide. You backslide because your system has acclimated to the initial buzz of the stimulus and the methods of the system are untrue, wrong, abusive, not actually helpful for your underlying conditions, etc.
The caffeine-like dopamine high of the initial bonding is wearing off, but the lust for feeling connected and feeling taken care of, feeling certain about the worldview remains, making you feel bad for pulling away from your addictive bond.
But you must pull away because your body is devolving again, and the symptoms are trying to tell you how stupid you are behaving; how stupid your bonds are.
This is why in more advanced stages of life and practice, real help becomes rarer and more specific. Because if you can learn some maturity and become more internally organized, you hopefully will not fall for things like a baby duck anymore, so you won’t get the dopamine rush of any-port-in-a-storm bonding to a stimulus.
Most of what constitutes as help, support and progress in the west is just a sufficiently organized scheme that propagates a mythology of salvation and connection, with flimsy techniques and methods that dazzle a disorganized system into temporary dopaminergic bliss.
author’s notes:
(special thanks to leah petroski for the name of this phenomena)
I’m writing some new material because I want to begin to host small group cohorts/incubators/artist labs that are centered around what i have been calling deathclown method, a style of performance arts that works with “taboo” or intense feelings, impulses and ideas in ways that metabolize and integrate without addicting or (re)traumatizing the performer.
But this method requires mature actors. When I say actor or performer, I mean player, enactor, agent… any person who is willfully learning the craft. And it is a craft, not a salvational system of “healing”. I can say it is therapeutic, but definitely NOT therapy.
People fail to realize is that I was a trained clown before I was a trained counselor. The inherent spiritual and artistic therapeutics inside clown training are a way that anyone can reclaim themselves from the chaos entrainment and learned helplessness of the modern western culture. Clown is a practice of the commons, of the people, long before it became a highly stylized performance aesthetic.
However, there is a massive pink cloud effect in the initial stages of the deathclown work, of the craft, that must be named transparently. Many people have never been in a container like this before, and the buzz of the techniques and worldview of deathclown have psychedelic potential which can be a destabilizing force.
Learning to use this destabilizing force and all that it reveals in us (apocalypse = revelation) as MATERIAL for the strange craft of artmaking, soulmaking and culturemaking ON PURPOSE is the long, crooked trail of clues to the center of our fateful labyrinth and the door to the otherside that we find there — already unlocked, slightly ajar, gently creaking back and forth from some unknown wind. Something, someone, has already broken through.
if my work has helped you, please donate to my medical fund at www.paypal.me/daresohei
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[Feature Photo by Mo Eid via Pexels.]