Eyes Wide Open, Together
Addressing the Inner Challenges of Modern Life
Welcome to the complexity within. This post builds upon my earlier A Word of Caution piece to describe in a little more depth just how much complexity awaits us as we delve into the realm of feeling. And I want to make the cause for mindful care if you choose to begin using psychotopology fieldwork for your own journey or to assist others.
With psychotopology, we get to turn the light on in the dark basement of our own inner selves. Very often, what we discover there can be uncomfortable, to say the least. There’s a lot in there, a lot that’s been buried for a long time. And there are good reasons for that.
Although the experience of feeling is the foundation of conscious experience, modern society has become relentless in its suppression of feeling by privileging thought and behavior, applying rules and expectations, setting up dynamics like competition for status, hijacking our brains for the shallow stimulation of screens, and much more. These forces impact every one of us starting even before birth, in the womb of a mother living through the onslaught.
I’m going to give you a brief overview of the consequences of this separation from feeling as I see them. My perspective comes not only from the structural discoveries of psychotopology but from the highly detailed expositions of people’s experience of unpacking these consequences in the course of doing in-depth fieldwork. When we dive in with fieldwork and shine the light into the previously-hidden basement, we get to examine in depth just what are the short- and long-term impacts of our society’s turn away from feeling into the hegemony of thought.
First, a Bit of Context
What I share below reaches into the broad expanse of psychotopology’s discoveries, much of which I have not yet explicitly covered. I’ve decided to share this post anyway because of wanting to offer a bit of context for our current collective struggle moment. We’re all in this, all together, and we have a lot of work to do in getting through to the other side. What I’ve written here provides a glimpse of how our collective struggle lives deep within every one of us.
Our Inner Honeycomb
Our inner world of feeling carries a highly complex structure. Chamber upon chamber nestles one against the other in a rich, wide architecture of many-faceted being. Each of these chambers houses an inner self, and each of these inner selves functions to embody a specific life capacity unique to that self.
These capacities range from the most basic abilities such as managing the movement of our body or sustaining its vitality, through enacting the manifestation of our desires and giving and receiving in relationship, all the way to those such as fulfilling our life purpose or making a contribution to our community. Optimally, as we grow up, life presents opportunities to develop one capacity after another, and each self grows into its full functionality. Our natural, healthy adulthood contains the potential for a wide repertoire of modes of being, wonderfully adaptable to changing contexts and conditions.
Feeling as Essential Guide
Crucial to the development of these capacities is the smooth, integrated functionality of feeling. Each capacity comes with needs and gifts, and feeling guides us to meet the needs and deliver the gifts. Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, modern life undermines this functionality.
As a result, many of our natural capacities never fully develop. What develops instead are thought and behavior compensations for needs being unable to be met and gifts being unable to be delivered. The inner selves hosting these compensations experience life as distressing, often with very intense and intolerable states locked into place to retain a functional response to a distorted world.
Locking Chambers Away
Take the capacity for intimacy with others, for example. When we learn that the need for being seen and held is not available, and that the asset of being able to offer such seeing and holding has no place to be received, we may take on a position of self-reliance in order to mask the intense pain of that unmet need and unreceived gift, and keep us from getting close to anyone who might trigger it back into our awareness. Once this compensation is in place, we bypass the compromised capacity for intimacy by only engaging in relationships that clearly do not offer it.
In this way, over time, we systematically shut the door to one capacity chamber after another, one inner self after another. We find a few capacities that are better supported in our particular wing of society, and we shoehorn all of our life experience into those few selves. One example of such a privileged capacity in modern society is that for productivity. Many people become obsessive achievers as a result. The other selves get stored in the basement.
Many Selves in Storage
I will have a lot more to share about this over time. For now, what I want to emphasize is that fieldwork is powerful. When you work on undoing the compensations of a surface self or two, that liberation opens up a space for more deeply buried selves to come to the surface. Our natural state is one of many selves, hosting many capacities, seamlessly shifting from one self/capacity to the next as life’s context changes. So when we restore those selves at the surface, rather than remaining locked in place regardless of what capacities are naturally called for, they step aside to make space for the appropriate capacity to come to the foreground. But that relevant self/capacity may have been long buried and deeply compromised. Bringing it to the foreground can be painful and disruptive.
Fieldwork enables us to meet such emergent compensations with a next round of work — excavating the states, mapping and moving, restoring the parts’ access to their ideal states. But once they have been restored, that capacity still needs to learn how to function well. It needs to go through its original developmental process again, hopefully this time with more access to needs being met, stronger inner resources, and better receptivity for its gifts to support a healthy maturation.
What all this means is that fieldwork opens the door to an epic scope of personal (re)development. We folks in modern times all have chambers upon chambers of compromised selves locked away in the basement. And when we gain access, it can be overwhelming to realize just how much work there is to do. There is no easy path to complete inner thriving. At this point in history, for every one of us, given the compensations of our society and their impact on our individual development, we each have a massive amount of work to do.
Moving Forward Wisely
All this is to say, it can be easy to dive into psychotopology fieldwork with a little too much zeal and wind up in over your head. When you discover this amazing method that lets you efficiently clear your inner baggage, of course you want to start applying it to every limitation that comes to mind. Be more now!
But what I am telling you, and what I want you to hear, is that under the surface are far more dark shadows than you are aware of at the moment. Our society has supported and encouraged you for many years to sideline pain, to bury it deeply, and to shunt all your conscious energy into those small spaces in which you are able to shine according to the standards by which your particular collective measures you.
That society and its standards still surrounds you. You still inhabit the world it has built. In order to fully heal, you absolutely must start small, go slowly, and begin to recraft your personal world to support your thriving. This may require a redesign of some aspects of your life, from the patterns of your activity to the dynamics of your relationships to the food you eat and the work you do with your body.
You cannot fully heal from deeply buried pain without excavating and exposing the pain, restoring those parts’ access to their gifts and wisdom, and integrating the restoration into the shape of your embodied and interconnected life. This will take time, and you cannot do it alone.
Taking One Measured Step at a Time
As you begin your journey with psychotopology fieldwork, it will be enough to simply map and move two or three states at a time. In doing so, you will train your capacity for focused attention to bring feeling into awareness, and you will develop a stronger witness position from which to do the work. Strengthening your inner witness will also serve you in other contexts, making it much easier to avoid getting swallowed up by reactive states and make choices about how to respond, when triggered, from a much healthier place.
As you restore these parts of you to their natural functioning, a few at a time, other parts related to them will surface, and it may take some effort to maintain your gains. That’s OK. Focus on cultivating the shift you have experienced, and invite the other states to support the integration. If needed, enroll those new states into the fieldwork process to strengthen the shift.
Over time, and as you access more detailed training, you will learn to identify and work with full sets of nine parts, surfacing the structure of a full self. Restoring the nine-part set of a full self will initiate a more profound experience of dissolving old patterns and opening the door to new ways of being. As you begin to work with full sets like this, give yourself time to approach slowly as you observe the self in action, make sure you have the space to enter and steadily conduct the fieldwork to take you through the shift, and give yourself plenty of time for integration when you have completed.
The Long-Term Journey of Restoration
As you become more familiar with working with sets, you will learn to identify and work with full constellations comprised of three sets. These excursions will be more epic in scope. At the end of working a full constellation, you may experience a period of significant disorientation as your old ways of being fall away. You will need significant time to become familiar with the new capacities that come forward and to learn how to activate and embody these capacities in the context of your life. Give yourself that time, we’re talking a few months at least for each constellation you undertake.
To give you a little context for the whole journey, we have within us 27 such constellations. In the context of the modern world, at this time in history, you can be fairly certain that many — if not most — of these have been compromised. Not only that, but the older you are, the more decades of life have been devoted to practicing and deepening the compensations for these compromises, and the more fully the outer shape of your life mirrors and supports these compensations. Healing the whole self will require immense effort and prolonged devotion.
In my own experience, I came upon the central structure of constellations in 2015. Until that time I had worked one-off on nine-part sets starting when I discovered that structure in 2007 or so. Before then my inner work was more haphazard, working with a few states at a time but not able to clearly discern the structures they formed.
Starting in 2015, I spent the next eight years systematically working through all 27 constellations. But while I released the old patterns and restored my access to their natural functioning, my resources and access to community were very limited, and so for many of the restored capacities I did not have much opportunity to complete their integration. I’m still working on that.
What Lies Within, Among, and Around Us All
At the heart of the universal topology underlying all conscious experience is a three-component structure that should inform everything we do. I will be unpacking this in great detail, in ways that make it easy for you to access what I am describing directly in your own experience, in coming months. For now, let me offer this summary of the three-component structure of the self. Each component is itself comprised of three parts, or modules of conscious experience.
Inside: What is within us, available to be offered outward into the world. The inside parts are anchored by what I call the inside source, a supply of limitless energy located somewhere along the midline core of our body.
Outside: What is outside of us, available to be received into our being. The outside parts are anchored by what I call the outside source, located outside our body, from which a limitless supply of energy which flows into and through us.
Context: What holds the inside and outside, making possible the relationship between them. The context parts are anchored by what I call the context source, a supply of limitless energy located everywhere inside and around us, extending infinitely in all directions.
The key takeaway here for our current discussion is this. Two thirds of the structure of our being is devoted to what lies outside of us. In order to thrive, we must be fully engaged with others around us, and with the broader context which informs and supports (or constrains) our relationships. In other words, very simply, none of us can fully heal until all of us approach healing.
Establishing Community to Support Our Journeys
One of the biggest challenges of this work is its divergence from dominant cultural norms carried by religion and spirituality, neuroscience and medicine, psychotherapy and healing, and even many of the ascendant modalities such as psychedelic journeying, somatic processing and more. These divergences include:
Psychotopology flips the relationship between concepts and our raw experience of being, placing concepts in service to being rather than fitting being into concepts.
Psychotopology shifts our raw conscious experience of feeling into the foreground as our primary guidance for navigating the experience of our lives, with sensory, somatic, and cognitive experience shifted to the background.
Psychotopology fully trusts and supports the drive toward wholeness inherent in all being, and devotes itself to supporting that natural drive.
Psychotopology supports the wholeness and wisdom inherent within us all, embracing the unique genius and beauty of every individual and supporting an emergent thriving, individually and collectively, as our natural state of being.
Because of these and other divergences from generally-assumed and mostly-unexamined norms, it can be difficult to inhabit the universe of experience opened up by psychotopology when we are surrounded by other people who have not experienced these openings. As I mentioned, fully two-thirds of our being is devoted to hosting and navigating our experiences of others and of the contexts that hold our relationships. When those others and those contexts inhabit the old reality, it can indeed be difficult to hold our new position and honor the aliveness within ourselves. It’s a perplexing conundrum with no easy solution.
For this reason, I believe that bringing these new ways of being, these new frameworks and experiences, into the world for ourselves and others requires us to do so in community. And I believe we can get things started right here.
As we become familiar with this new awareness of our inner topology, and as we gain skills in navigating it by ourselves and with others, we can join together in making meaning of our experiences. As we craft new stories and practices that support our new ways of being, these stories and practices can serve as wider containers that can nourish an expanding network of communities supporting thriving all around the world.
We won’t know what that looks like until it takes shape, and it will not take shape until we embody its possibility. I invite you to join with others here in the Engage community to start crafting a new, more promising future with one another. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to join us there.
Reflections
Here’s your chance to influence how I move forward by adding your reflections in the comments below.
How does this post land for you?
What in you feels like it is being spoken to in this post?
What questions are you left with? What are you most curious about?
What feedback would you like to offer me, in service to my being able to share this new work with you and the world?
What feedback could you offer toward improving my writing of this post?
Comments are open to all, and I do hope you will consider also subscribing so we can stay in the loop with one another as this evolves.
Thank you.
Thank you for being here, thank you for reading, and thank you for sharing your thoughts in the comments below. I look forward to meeting you soon.
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