In the social media age words become more than their meaning. Triggered is one of these words.
It seems to mean one someone else doing or saying something setting off a chain of emotions inside us.
Depending on the user this gets expanded into either the responsibility of the trigger or the triggered.
At worst we can feel victimised by our triggers. But if the study of ourselves is an art then our triggers are an opportunity & guide to see ourselves through painting with depth & colour. The shape and colour of ourselves is constantly changing. Shape shifting. Some triggers become better known with repetition. Some noticed, familiar but not thought about. Others remain unknown.
In our minds we can create crime scenes from triggers. We will never prove or know what happened. But we can imagine scenarios leading upto the crime scene. We can update or alter these scenarios through resonating, familiarity, coolness or warmth. Like a jigsaw puzzle piece – turning it playfully to see where it might fit.
Triggers expose our traumas in the trigger light. Trauma is what shapes us: creating our uniqueness: quirkes, complexities. Never to be known by ourselves or others. To celebrate what is not provable or known takes skill and courage. Our fear would thwart us in this task.
Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2024
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Watching Labi Siffre on Top of the Pops was a particular experience. He seemed out of time and place.
Himself, raw and vulnerable. It was almost too much in contrast to the other acts and the medium of television.
Black Gay Atheist Introvert Depressive – this all came across in his playing and voice.
He was brought up in a middle class household, privately educated. A family dominated by his overbearing Father. His mother invisible. Whom he chose to protect.
He lives in remote parts solitary composing with an urge to return to playing live. He claims that his home life is most important to him – that and his music. The only two things he felt he was good at. He retired from music to look after his partner through illness.
He imbibes a kind of calm strong protest. From a life of dealing with his Father, and an unenlightened unsympathetic time.
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He turned to me and said, ‘I haven’t written a song in three years.’ ‘Why? ’I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ He made a vague circling gesture with his hand taking in both of us, the swimming pool, the high hedge, the manor house, the apple orchard, the walled garden, the mare and foal, the swallows in the eves, our beautiful arboured wives, and the pure, blue sky itself and said, ‘There is nothing to write about.’ Then he pushed off into the water.
Like the Great Gatsby a glimpse into lives of wealth, priviledge wrought in emptiness, & meaningless. How to connect to what is sold to us as success? To believe that wealth is not the answer is not convincing in this time of consumption. We are all corrupted by the idea of wealth with many still to be convinced that money is not the answer.
Human nature has always been gripped by the idea of money: a metaphor for safety. We are dominated by wanting to feel safe: but if our version of safety is unsafe we are doomed to repeat. Make more and more money to satisfy trying to feel safe.
Money is comforting & comfortable, but takes the edge of the rough surfaces of ourselves. The broken pieces, flaws, grooves and scars which make us. No Song Bryan
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Steve Albini was an uncompomising individual. He screwed the outside world, impinging himself on the social.
He worked as a music producer with the Pixies, Breeders, PJ Harvey, Nirvana. He was proper punk. He wasn’t interested in money or fame. He worked on an hourly rate like a plumber. No percentage cuts of albums etc
Ironically he was also a good poker player. A poker face. Perhaps it was all a pretence. Bands working with him were surprised at his support and his commitment to them, and what they were trying to create.
He was rude and obnoxious, but anyone could call up to work with him. He didn’t care. He would work with anyone. Later on he apologised for his mysogyny and ignorance. But his reputation remained intact: uncompromising, blue collar, punk.
Steve Albini 1962-2024
Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2024
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Like many professions when you witness a group together they take on powerful characteristics.
Therapists are similar – perhaps like artists, musicians, authors the world is seen as fluid, full of colour, shapes, impressions. Led by the irrational, feelings, & connections. A celebration of the unknown remaining unknown. Humans dwarfed by the natural, metaphysical, space, infinity.
In the digital world of 2024 no space no time. Everything on the quick click. Scroll, short cut. Easy balm. Everything has to be evidenced and known. Calibrated for efficiency and consumption. Led by the rational, facts, & outcomes. We all benefit from this world: but pros and cons.
With therapists the pleasure of speaking to another about the essence of the self. Defenses recognised identitfied unresolved: but sometimes able to navigate around. To speak freely to others about ourselves is a rare priviledge. But more or less possible with colleagues and strangers?
The real world is not like this. How do you relate to the world with a sensibility that doesn’t fit? The human dilemma of how to relate the personal to the social. Do you stick to your version of the world and bear the clash? Do you relate to the world strictly through your own vision? Authentic Integrity. Strange weird?
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Billionaire Art? Can Art change the world? Can Art improve the world?
Art is personal. We know music, art paintings, objects. They are present and from the past. Childhood shapes.
Gallery visits. First time listening to pieces of music remain. Where when and with who.
Yet a large part of art is an industry fuelled by wealth. The wealthy buy art for love and investment. Mainly investment? It is a sleight of hand for the wealthy to say that artists are crucial to the world. They become benefactors of artists to offset their wealth. Like a carbon footprint.
To use their resources to benefit others is not wealth: it’s a loss of wealth.
Humans bolster their world to the idea they want to have of themselves. Art makes billionaires acceptable, cuddly, interesting. The way they want to be seen.
Did Andy Warhol or the Beatles change the world? Post war emanicipation? Music functioned as an open secret of ownership. We had music that only belonged to us. Not to our parents. It was radical, shocking, avante garde. It separated as into a new generation. Music formed us. Other things will separate newer generations. While music now has become mainstream which generations share.
Each generation has similar anxieties. Who are we? What makes us different? How we do what we want with what’s left? Do our values align with those presented to us? Art for Art’s Sake
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This article describes a life of shame from a daily dread of anxiety and fear. Not happy reading.
Commonly many come to therapy to be changed, fixed, resolved. The idea to wrestle with is that we are created, have experiences and are landed with ourselves. The attrition of relating to others is to be resisted. We defend to protect ourselves, our perceived weaknesses, and vulnerabilities.
Our families shape us. We are motivated by what we are not aware of. Finding ourselves through the labyrinth of our minds is resisted at every step.
Into the therapy the clients go through a transition of depression. The hopelessness around being unable to change hits. We arrive at adulthood and are presented with a contract for life which we see we have signed with our signature. We know we didn’t sign it, didn’t agree to it: but there it is. We didn’t ask to be born.
Market economies give us demographic ages to sell us products and services. The reality is that we are a person in our teens & twenties who lives added years of experience. We don’t significantly change. We don’t become wiser. If we are clever – and we generally aren’t – we learn to manage ourselves and give up to the personalities that we are given.
Something of a success might be that we can use our talents to give us a life, while accepting and accomodating our less than parts of ourselves. A learning that the person we are given is good enough.
Surrounded by others who are aiming to change.
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The English Patient opens and closes with the shot of the desert from a plane looking like the surface of the brain. The English Patient (Count Almasy) has forgotten his name and identity aka Sam.
The English Patient tells the story from the hot desert of a romance with his friend’s wife Katharine. On their first meeting she mocks the English Patient for his writing with no adjectives. With this comment she sees something familiar: a withdrawn cold man: a template of control, self discipline, and using himself as a tool of production. And a man looking for some sort of salvation, fixing, completeness by a woman. The empty space that aches to be filled. Katharine appeals to his writing, drawing, singing. They dance.
The English Patient’s unconscious trying to protect him from his fear of Katharine goes into a flght flight response. He fights with her husband trying to expel Katharine from the desert. He refuses her offer of putting her sketches in his notebook. Obligation belies dependence. They flew in by plane with no flight/escape out. He is stuck in the desert with his fear of her. But it is not his fear of Katharine that propels him. But the familiar fear of his own (aka Sam) early trauma attachment with his mother nursed by nannies. A familiar babyhood fear in his preverbal life.
Once the defence is breached in a sandstorm: the fever is in. She is angry with him: for pushing her to this. Women can relate to men as friends more? For the English Patient she is the space filler: the trauma soother: the wound balm. The Supersternal Notch. Katharine declares a love of her husband. The English Patient declares a hatred of ownership: telling her she should forget him – trying to wrestle back cold control after being rebuffed.
Then comes the threat of the love withdrawal. The English Patient becomes desperate, longing for a Katharine the English Patient cannot have: the English Patient becomes unboundaried, angry, vengeful, rude & insulting. Out of character & control such is his fear of returning to the original trauma version of himself.
“I have to teach myself not to read too much into everything. It comes of too long having to read so much into hardly anything at all …..” The English Patient 2:06:30
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On the morning Amr Abdallah was killed, he woke before dawn to say his Ramadan prayers with his father, mother, two younger brothers and aunt, in an open field in southern Gaza.
“It is You we worship and You we ask for help,” they prayed. “Guide us to the straight path — the path of those upon whom You have bestowed favor, not of those who have evoked Your anger or of those who are astray.”
It was dark. They made their way back to their tents. Their old life was gone — their village, Al-Qarara, their house — built with the money Amr’s father saved during the 30 years he worked in the Persian Gulf — their orchards, their school, the local mosque and the town’s cultural museum with artifacts dating from 4,000 B.C.
Amr, who was 17, would have graduated from high school this year. The schools were closed in November. He would have gone to college, perhaps to be an engineer like his father, who was a prominent community leader. Amr was a gifted student. Now he lived in a tent in a designated “safe area” that, as he and his family already knew, was not safe. It was shelled sporadically by the Israelis.
It was cold and rainy. The family huddled together to keep warm. Hunger wrapped itself around them like a coil.
“When you say ‘Amr’ it’s like you’re talking about the moon,” his uncle, Abdulbaset Abdallah, who lives in New Jersey, tells me. “He was the special one, handsome, brilliant, and kind.”
Amr in Gaza
The Israeli attacks began in northern Gaza. Then they spread south. On the morning of Friday, Dec. 1, Israeli drones dropped leaflets over Amr’s village.
“To the inhabitants of al-Qarara, Khirbet al-Khuza’a, Absan and Bani Soheila,” the leaflets read. “You must evacuate immediately and go to shelters in the Rafah area. The city of Khan Yunis is a dangerous combat zone. You have been warned. Signed by the Israeli Defense Army.”
One of the leaflets dropped over Amr’s village.
Families in Gaza live together. Whole generations. This is why dozens of family members are killed in a single air strike. Amr grew up surrounded by uncles, aunts and cousins.
The villagers panicked. Some began to pack. Some refused to leave.
One of Amr’s uncles was adamant. He would stay behind while the family would go to the “safe area.” His son was a physician at Nasser Hospital. Amr’s cousin left the hospital to plead with his father to leave. Moments after he and his father fled, their street was bombed.
Amr and his family moved in with relatives in Khan Yunis. A few days later more leaflets were dropped. Everyone was told to go to Rafah.
Amr’s family, now joined by relatives from Khan Yunis, fled to Rafah.
Rafah was a nightmare. Desperate Palestinians were living in the open air and on streets. There was little food or water. The family slept in their car. It was cold and rainy. They did not have blankets. They looked desperately for a tent. There were no tents. They found an old sheet of plastic, which they attached to the back of the car to make a protected area. There were no bathrooms. People relieved themselves on the side of the road. The stench was overpowering.
They had been displaced twice in the span of a week.
Amr’s father, who has diabetes and high blood pressure, fell sick. The family took him to the European Hospital near Khan Yunis. The doctor told him he was ill because he was not eating enough.
“We can’t handle your case,” the doctor told him. “There are more critical cases.”
“He had a beautiful house,” Abdallah says of his older brother. “Now he is homeless. He knew everyone in his hometown. Now he lives on the street with crowds of strangers. No one has enough to eat. There is no clean water. There are no proper facilities or bathrooms.”
The family decided to move again to al-Mawasi, designated a “humanitarian area” by Israel. They would at least be in open land, some of which belonged to their family. The coastal area, filled with dunes, now holds some 380,000 displaced Palestinians. The Israelis promised the delivery of international humanitarian aid to al-Mawasi, little of which arrived. Water has to be trucked in. There is no electricity.
Israeli warplanes hit a residential compound in al-Mawasi in January where medical teams and their families from the International Rescue Committee and Medical Aid for Palestinians were housed. Several were injured. An Israeli tank fired on a house in al-Mawasi where staff from Médecins Sans Frontières and their families were sheltering in February, killing two and injuring six.
Amr’s family set up two makeshift tents with palm tree leaves and sheets of plastic. Israeli drones circled overhead night and day.
On the day before he was killed, Amr managed to get a phone connection — telecommunications are often cut — to speak to his sister in Canada.
“Please get us out of here,” he pleaded.
The Egyptian firm Hala, which means “Welcome” in Arabic, provided travel permits for Gazans to enter Egypt for $350, before the Israeli assault. Since the genocide began, the firm has raised the price to $5,000 for an adult and $2,500 for a child. It has sometimes charged as much as $10,000 for a travel permit.
Hala has offices in Cairo and Rafah. Once the money is paid — Hala only accepts U.S. dollars — the name of the applicant is submitted to Egyptian authorities. It can take weeks to get a permit. It would cost around $25,000 to get Amr’s family out of Gaza, double that if they included his widowed aunt and three cousins. This was not a sum Amr’s relatives abroad could raise quickly. They set up a GoFundMe page here. They are still trying to collect enough money.
Once Palestinians get to Egypt, the permits expire within a month. Most of the Palestinian refugees in Egypt survive on money sent to them from abroad.
Amr awoke in the dark. It was the first Friday of Ramadan. He joined his family in the morning prayer. The Fajr. It was 5 a.m.
Muslims fast in the day during the month of Ramadan. They eat and drink once the sun goes down and shortly before dawn. But food was now in very short supply. A little olive oil. The spice za’atar. It was not much.
They went back to their tents after prayers. Amr was in the tent with his aunt and three cousins. A shell exploded near the tent. Shrapnel tore apart his aunt’s leg and critically injured his cousins. Amr frantically tried to help them. A second shell exploded. Shrapnel ripped through Amr’s stomach and exited from his back.
Amr stood up. He walked out of the tent. He collapsed. Older cousins ran towards him. They had enough gas in their car — fuel is in very short supply — to drive Amr to Nasser Hospital, three miles away.
“Amr, are you okay?” his cousins asked.
“Yes,” he moaned.
“Amr, are you awake?” they asked after a few minutes
“Yes,” he whispered.
They lifted him from the car. They carried him into the overcrowded corridors of the hospital. They set him down.
He was dead.
Amr in death.
They carried Amr’s body back to the car. They drove to the family’s encampment.
Amr’s uncle shows me a video of Amr’s mother keening over his corpse.
“My son, my son, my beloved son,” she laments in the video, her left hand tenderly stroking his face. “I don’t know what I will do without you.”
They buried Amr in a makeshift grave.
Amr’s Burial
Later that night the Israelis shelled again. Several Palestinians were wounded and killed.
The empty tent, occupied the day before by Amr’s family, was obliterated.
LIzzo quits and then doesn’t.
To this day we still see people of difference – race creed colour body shape attacked on social media.
We appear to find other intolerable. We have to attack to the point where it goes away.
To compulsively repeat we are hard wired genetically to seek out the familiar. We are drawn to others who we feel safe and comfortable with. Anything else is deemed a threat.
We are taught that we shouid be inclusive, welcome the other, tolerate difference. Ultimately in the modern world we feel different. As our hard wired brain outside our village of origin treats everything as a danger.
To challenge this as teenagers we can feel different to our families, and rebel against them. Could this be the confines of nuclear families? Would we feel different in our villages of origin. Where there would be many versions of familiar safe and not so safe depending on our preverbal experience. But in the village we might not have to be brought up by parents after the initial months.
To be aware of our hard wired brains we might have more impact on our intolerances and prejudices. Back to LIzzo ….
Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2024
All rights reserved Disclaimer:
This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique
Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2023
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This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique
