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Next post in this series (coming): #3, Mapping Shame
This is the audio, transcript, and commentary for Part 2 of a single, self-contained demo session with Susan, a participant in a small training I conducted in early 2017. Make sure to take a look at Part 1 to give context for this one.
As before, I’ve provided two versions of the transcript. The first is generated by Substack, synced with the audio, and is verbatim. Click the transcript button above and use it to navigate through the session. A lightly edited, more readable version of the transcript is below, along with my comments to give you more info about what’s happening.
Here, we will pick up with the Fearful Fear that revealed itself while we were mapping the No! state. We’ll map that, and as we do, another part will reveal itself.
(NOTE: Susan — not her real name — gave me her full permission to share her session with the public. I am immensely grateful for her offer.)
Let’s go!
Mapping Fearful Fear
J: So let’s go back to the Fearful Fear. If you were to say that the actual, felt experience of this is located somewhere in or around your body, where would you say that seems to be?
S: It actually seems to be, like from my heart, maybe like the upper third of my chest. Like if the steel plate starts in the middle of my chest, this starts in the upper third. And it actually goes all the way up to my jaw. So some of it is protected by the steel plate, and some of it is not.
J: OK. And what's the depth of it? Behind the steel plate, how far back does this Fearful Fear go?
S: Well I'm assuming if my body were sliced vertically, probably about to the middle, wherever the back of my heart is physically located. It goes that deep, like heart deep.
J: Got it. And if you were to say the actual, felt experience of this has qualities of substance, does it seem more like a solid…
S: Like a fog.
J: Like a fog, OK. And this fog, does it seem thick or thin, heavy or light?
S: Thick… and hm… It's like it's patchy, so parts of it are heavy but parts of it seem very light. So kind of like overall it's light, but there are patches of heaviness.
J: OK. And what temperature would you say this fog seems to be?
S: Definitely cold. Not freezing. Maybe like 40s, 40 degrees, like when you walk outside and you say, “Oh! I should have worn a sweater.” But not shivery.
J: Uh huh.
S: But definitely noticeably cold.
J: And what color would you say it seems to be?
S: The heavy parts are dark gray, and the overall color is a light gray.
J: OK.
S: Like it's not white, but it's just kind of a dingy color.
J: OK, so sort of a grayish.
S: Yeah.
J: OK. And is this fog, does it seem to be moving in any way? Any kind of swirl or flow, or pulse or vibration?
S: Not swirling, and not pulse and vibration, but it is kind of moving, like maybe back and forth like this.
J: So sort of a drifting back and forth?
S: Yeah, drifting, that's a great word.
J: OK, back and forth to the right and left, yeah?
S: Yes.
J: And if you listen internally, do you notice any inner sound?
S: It's like a soft crying, not sobbing.
J: More like whimpering?
S: Not whimpering, not moaning. Gosh I don't seem to think of…
J: Well, “a soft, crying sound” is probably close enough.
S: Yeah.
J: OK. Anything else you want to notice about what this feels like?
S: Well, the whole time I've been talking about it, the word “shy” keeps coming up for me. Almost like it wants to hide or not be seen or not be noticed. And almost like a little feeling of shame.
J: Mmmmm. So from this place, what seems true, or real, or important?
S: It seems like it really would like to go.
J: “Go” meaning…?
S: Dissipate.
J: Uh huh.
S: It doesn't really want to be here. It just is.
J: Ah huh. Any sense of why it's here?
S: It seems like it was just a really bad day, like a bad weather day, but just like a bad day and it just came up and then it didn't know how to leave.
J: Ah hah. OK.
S: Kind of like if smog came in and it got trapped in a valley, and short of there being a big wind storm or a really fierce rain or something that would dissipate it, it's just kind of stuck there.
J: All right.
Notice how precise Susan gets in describing her feeling state. She gives a specific temperature, quibbles about the color, is very clear about the patchy density of the fog, and describes with a gesture exactly how it moves. The gesture also indicates how integrated the experience of feeling is with our ever-present experience of embodiment. We experience ourselves, before anything else, as material bodies in a material world, and this pervasive materiality infuses our every moment.
Also notice how Susan mentions a hint of “almost like a little feeling of shame” as she summarizes her experience of the fog. As a facilitator, I am constantly alert for hints like this one which often point to further feeling states connected to the one in focus. Feeling exists as constellations of interrelated states, and fieldwork mapping activates a sensitivity to the nuances of our inner experience, supporting us in bringing the full network of distinct states into tangible awareness.
Identifying Shame
J: So you mentioned something like a little feeling of shame. I wonder if that word points to something else that's connected to this, or if the shame is an attribute of the fog itself.
S: The shame seems to be that it would leave if it knew how but it doesn't. Not a shame that it appeared, but that it was meant to be temporary, and it somehow got trapped. You know? It was really just like a bad weather day. Really, really it was meant that the next morning, you wake up and there's sunshine.
J: Right.
S: But somehow that didn't happen. And then it didn't happen and it didn't happen, and here it is.
J: Yeah. OK. So there's some shame about this existing here, about this being here. It's sort of a…
S: And that it never meant to stay. The shame is, it was like, yeah, it was a real feeling when it occurred, like the fear was real in the moment, maybe even appropriate, but then whatever triggered it, it was over.
J: Right.
S: But it's still here.
J: Right. OK. So does it make sense for us to add the feeling Shame to the list of states that are relevant here?
S: Yeah.
J: OK.
First I ask a clarifying question, inviting Susan to compare her felt experience of the label “shame” to the already mapped fog of Fearful Fear. Her reply expresses a relationship between the shame and the Fearful Fear in which the shame seems to be a reaction to the Fearful Fear’s failure to dissipate. If shame is a response to the Fearful Fear, it is different from it, and so I confirm the name and add it to the list of states we are exploring.
Drawing No!
J: Let's start with the No! So the color of No! is going to be a silvery metallic. Right?
S: Yes.
J: And the thickness of that steel plate is, half an inch, an inch…?
S: No more than a half an inch I would say.
J: Yeah. OK.
S: I mean it's stainless steel, after all. It doesn't take a lot of it.
J: Right, exactly. So I think I'll just use this…
S: So it's actually out in front of the body.
J: OK.
S: So it's barely… yeah, there you go. Like that.
J: OK. Is that about the right size, and is it curved a little bit the way I've made it, or is it…
S: Ah, no, it's straight.
J: OK.
S: Yeah, that's right.
J: All right. And then the front view is going to be…
S: So just start at the collar bone, so you can see where the collar bone is there.
J: Uh huh.
S: And then down to just… up slightly… yeah, right there. And if you were to color it in… yeah.
J: OK. So, that is No!.
For the drawing, I am sharing my screen with Susan and drawing on a tablet with the program ArtRage. I’m starting with a template outline of a human body, and adding the illustration of the feeling state according to Susan’s description and her in-the-moment guidance as we draw it together.
Drawing a feeling state is often a discovery process of its own. When the fieldwork explorer begins to visually see the explicit representation of the state, they will sometimes discover it feels different than what they originally described. If you are facilitating someone and taking notes for them, you’ll want to update your notes with the revised state description after the drawing is complete.
Now I want to call your attention to something unexpected here. Notice that the steel plate of No! lies completely outside Susan’s body. Our common assumptions about “emotion” include the understanding that emotions are strongly somatic, generated by the nervous system in response to threats and opportunities. Our common language about emotions, our science of emotions, our methods of therapy, all orient toward emotion as a phenomenon contained by the body, plus our cognitive engagement with that physiological response.
I don’t want to take you too far into this just yet, but it’s important that I introduce the idea that the feeling we are working with here is not emotion. This map of No! is clear evidence of that. fieldwork maps of states extending beyond the body is actually quite common as we shall see.
Drawing Fearful Fear
J: And then the Fear… I think… I'll leave this here so that we can draw the Fear behind the plate. And we're looking at, this is not metallic, but this has got gray, darker and lighter.
S: And if you were to drop a line from my ear, down through my elbow, that's about how deep it goes. Like from there to the front.
J: Right. OK. But it starts a little higher?
S: Yes. Up, right underneath my chin.
J: And would you say it's a…
S: Yeah, like that. … And then just a little further toward my back, like one more row of color. Yeah.
J: All right. And then, should we add some darker ones?
S: Yeah.
J: Does that seem…?
S: Yep, that seems just right.
J: And how much of this dark color?
S: Just about what you're doing. You're on the right track. Yeah. That's enough.
J: All right. This is the Fearful Fear. Excellent.
Because Susan has a well-developed sense of feeling, her drawings stay true to her original map descriptions. This drawing is simply about visually capturing what she has already discerned in the mapping process.
Drawing a feeling state provides a reinforcement of the detachment of one’s identity from the feeling. When you can see it in front of you, represented on an outline of (your) body, it becomes more difficult to experience yourself AS the feeling. You naturally find yourself inhabiting a perspective that the feeling is something you have, rather than something you are. This in itself is strongly therapeutic in many cases.
Let’s revisit the idea of feeling being different from emotion. In emotion, various external and internal perceptual signals stimulate the emotional systems of the brain and body to produce a physiological state that prepares the body for an appropriate response. The body has one emotional state, possibly generated by more than one emotional circuit but being forced to integrate as one state by the singular nature of the body as a whole.
In mapping No! and Fearful Fear, we see in contrast two distinct and different states. This is further evidence that in working with the actual, felt experience of feeling, we are engaging something very different from the body’s emotional circuitry. Keep that in mind as we proceed. What we currently understand about emotion does not map well to what we discover in our investigations of actual feeling states as we experience them.
Exploring Shame
J: First of all, let me ask, while we were drawing (Fearful Fear), did you discover anything else significant?
S: Noticing the Shame, I don't think I knew that. I think that was a discovery that there was some Shame. And in particular that the Shame was that there was a good reason this all showed up, but then the reason was done with, and it could have gone away but it just didn't know how.
J: Yeah?
S: If I were to describe it, it feels like this little porcupine. But all curled up, where it's just all spikes, you know?
J: Hm.
S: And that actually feels like it's the feeling that's at the heart of it. It's like, if I weren't ashamed, the Fear would go away, which means there wouldn't be the need for the steel plate. And the Shame is almost like, it's like I brought on myself this not being able to receive love. (I don't know, I'm not saying this very well.)
J: What it sounds like is that the Shame is what grounds the interpretation that it's not OK to receive love.
S: Yeah, yeah.
J: You haven't been able to figure out how to let this Fear go…
S: Yeah. And it's almost like I don't deserve to, like if I created all this nonsense, and I don't know how to get rid of it, well…! You know: of course I can't receive love, and why should I be able to, having done all this silly stuff. You know?
J: Yeah. OK.
I had originally been on track with Susan to move the two states No! and Fearful Fear. As this was a demonstration session, I hadn’t intended to go more deeply than these two. But Susan was surprised by her discovery of the Shame and wanted to explore it. As she poked around at it, it become clear that the Shame served to anchor the whole set of feelings in place. The Shame seemed to be holding the Fearful Fear in place, which in turn seemed to be holding the No! in place.
We often find these kinds of chains of control in feeling states. When I am conducting a limited session where my client’s intention is to get the maximum benefit in the shortest time, my goal is to quickly identify what I call the “pivot” state around which the entire pattern set revolves. Releasing the pivot often clears the way for a natural release of the full pattern. In this case, it’s clear that the best results will happen if we include the Shame in our list of states to complete.
What’s Next
In the next post, we’ll dig into mapping Susan’s Shame. As we do, we will discover a fourth state lying hidden inside. What do you anticipate?
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