In an earlier post, Multiple Coexisting Feeling States, we explored the discovery that feeling states co-occur in groups of several or more. As we practice fieldwork mapping, this discovery nudges us toward asking, “What else are you feeling?” The results can be profoundly sobering, offering a more realistic view of the immense scale of human suffering.
Fieldwork opens up the deep interior of our conscious experience in ways that provide access to entire worlds of inner pain that have previously remained hidden beneath the surface, locked into what has been referred to as “the unconscious mind.” It turns out, much of what lies beneath the surface has been “unconscious” for good reason — because it is just too damned painful to endure.
The pain itself could potentially be tolerable in small doses. But this small pain turns out to be connected in sprawling networks of interrelated states of grief, rage, terror, agony, despair and all the rest. And because we have not developed reliable or effective methods for healing or transforming that pain once it is uncovered, oftentimes when we stumble into such pain it sucks us into excruciating and inescapable vortexes of darkness. So of course we avoid it with all the canny personal and communal tactics we have available to us, and it remains deeply buried, outside of our everyday awareness.
Fieldwork enables us to crack open the basement door and more safely enter these dark chambers with full illumination and agency. First, the mapping practice itself strengthens our natural capacity to hold a witness position to our painful states, holding them as something we have, not as something we are, grounding us firmly in a larger self. We have a place to stand as we shine our light into the darkness.
Second, the powerful moving process — essentially our slider test applied to a swift transformation of the state into one of powerful inner resource — enables us to trust that we have a straightforward path through the pain into liberation. Because this is immediately available to us as we excavate old bones of pain, we can engage with curiosity rather than fear, and we find ourselves entering these dark chambers with a sense of empowerment.
We have not yet fully toured the moving practice in the sequence of articles here, so we do not officially have the tools and skills necessary to safely conduct an investigation like the following. I do not recommend that you attempt such a deep dive on your own at this point. I offer it as a glimpse into what the simple practice of mapping makes possible. All of the following states were excavated and mapped over the course of three days, maybe four hours’ work in total, immediately following which they were cleared through the moving practice.
For now, let us enter this particular dark chamber within my own torment, and take in the view from below.
One Small Chamber of My Own Inner Torment
In what follows, I take you for a journey through one of the chambers in my own netherworld. To give you context, this journey was one of several I made during this period of my life. The chamber I entered after this one was even more intense, having been hidden from my awareness by the first. I’ll give you a peek at what that second one looked like, but we will focus this tour on the process of mapping the first set of states.
I offer these as examples of the kind of complexity and pain that lives in all of us. On the surface, my early life was not one of intense suffering. I grew up in the United States, in relative material and cultural privilege in a white, working class family, with an added benefit of having a knack for academic performance. Under the surface, though, I accumulated the toxicity of that subculture, absorbed directly from my parents and my social surroundings.
Within our respective cultures and subcultures, we are taught norms for how to manage the inner torment. For my father, control and domination were the primary strategies. I rejected the crude form of these he inhabited but took them on nevertheless from an academic angle, pursuing intellectual supremacy. This landed me in the more elite environment of an Ivy League university.
Eventually, though, my unsustainable numbing strategies collapsed, mostly because of my isolation in a subculture with which I could not identify and from which I was unable to draw support. Over time, I found myself needing to devote ever-more intensive efforts to simply remaining alive. Psychotopology is a product of those efforts, and the examples below give you a glimpse into the sheer weight of what I was carrying. I consider this a tiny core sample from the stratified subterranean bedrock of the human experience we all share.
“My Small Life”
On May 13th, 2012, I wrote this as the beginning of my inquiry into an inner pain. I called the focus of my inquiry “My Small Life” to capture the essence of what it was I was feeling.
I ache inside. I ache inside for a place to be held. Held, seen, mirrored, loved. Held in a way that makes it easy to be, me.
At this point, I made the following list of distinct feeling experiences at the heart of and adjoining this ache.
Despair - the damage is done, there's no turning back / going forward
Abandoned/Alone - nobody else sees this, the insanity, the alternative truth
Dangerous Chaos - the world
Lack of Support - no place in which I am nourished
Anger/Rage - I want them to stop, to wake up, and I want to destroy them if they don't
Withdrawal - Pulling away, a buffer or barrier, muffling sound, distance
On May 17th, I captured these additional feeling experiences.
Fear/Anxiety - a sense of being tiny, in my mother's arms, she afraid and I afraid, merged, in a way; my father as the threat/danger.
Wanting to curl up and cry - strong, connected to the fear and wanting to be comforted, held.
On the evening of May 21st, I sat with a friend to do the Being-With practice (taking turns identifying and briefly mapping whatever we’re feeling). I identified and mapped two distinct states that I called Cringe and Hurt.
Cringe
Soft solid, 1/3 of core/trunk, contracting, twisting as if to avoid being hit; bluish gray; body temp or warmer; like putty/clay, porous, not real dense; whimper; a sense of curling into someone's body. Primitive self-protection.
Hurt
Heart, like galaxy stuff, toroid shape, turning in on itself, as if imploding or being sucked into a black hole at the center; giant dimensions but only 6-8 inches external dimensions, spheroid.
An ache, longing. Impulse to cry. Something really important is missing. Loss.
On May 22nd, I wrote the following note about my experience from the previous evening, after mapping Cringe and Hurt:
Plus, there was a moment of physical inability to lie still, my body was climbing out of its skin, very uncomfortable.
I continued to note my state on this day as I began to work through my mapping process:
Now, today, it is as if a more unpleasant state is lurking. As if there is a deafening, body-smashing noise, but there isn't. As if I am being beaten, but I'm not. As if the entire world is being fed into a galactic wood-chipper, but it isn't.
This is the Overwhelm, the sensory overload. This is cacophony, this is strife, this is Bombardment.
I mapped these two states, Bombardment and Overwhelm.
Bombardment
Assault from the outside; Overwhelm, pain of overload. Two parts of this, the external bombardment and the experience of Overwhelm as a result. Need to stop the bombardment first, but the Overwhelm is what's most distressing.
Loud sound, as if sound is massive and dense, surrounding me on all sides, expanding to fill all space, wanting to expand into the space of me and eliminate me from existence. Highly heterogeneous, multi-directional, random, intense bursts of aggressive expansion happening in all directions, like boulders scraping against one another as they expand into one another's space; extremely dangerous, not safe; a synesthesia where sound = substance: sharp, hard, massive, unconscious; neutral temp; dark gray colors with flashes of red where sounds/boulders collide. The sound hurts it's so loud; male voice sounds but they don't fall into meaningful patterns - random, chaotic, meaningless, dangerous.
Overwhelm
Like a protective buffer between the outside and Cringe & Hurt {the two states I mapped the night before}; my whole body, from surface in, leaving space at the center; it is losing the battle, the encroaching Bombardment is too strong, and if it loses, I will be wholly sucked into Hurt and annihilated.
Frenzied, chaotic movement, like an army of ninjas on meth trying to defend against the outside but more often banging into each other; like a churning, seething horde of insects, large, 4 inches long, in constant motion; in some places they are strong and the collective effect is that of a strong body; in others they are weaker and the structure is crumbling, with clumps of critter-things falling away and exposing vulnerabilities; neutral temp; dark gray or brown-red; the panic (Cringe and the not-yet-mapped Core Fear) of being covered or eaten by swarms of giant bugs but needing them for their protection against something even more dangerous (Bombardment); the sound is as if each critter-thing is wailing and the collective rises into a high-pitched shriek of a baby in pain.
This is partly what contributed to the squirrelly, antsy feeling of crawling out of my skin last night; I am in big danger; I must sacrifice everything for the singular goal of preserving my existence. No help is available. I am all Alone. Nothing else is important.
After mapping Bombardment and Overwhelm, I continued by mapping Alone/Abandoned and Cranky/Angry/Rage.
Alone/Abandoned
I want/need an ally, protection from the Bombardment, and there is someone who is supposed to be, or who was, that ally/protection. But she is absent, unavailable, not any protection. In fact, she is just as Overwhelmed by it as I am, and is not present.
Close behind this is Cranky/Angry.
A vacuum where a protective, warm, nurturing body is supposed to be. An empty, vacant space, all around me, about a foot or two. It's just empty. No protection from Bombardment. Cool/chilly temp; color like an insipidly flat, non-blue, non-clouded sky, with a sense of darkness also, or like highly mineralized water in a hot spring; no movement; no sound.
My instant response to this is to expand it, to create a large buffer between myself and Bombardment, and between me and anyone who could potentially abandon me. This is the Alone phase of this, and with it goes judgment of others – they don't see, are unconscious, etc. This feeds into a larger, more generalized Angry. In Alone, I want no enmeshment, no responsibility, no impingement of another's needs on my own.
Cranky/Angry/Rage
Generalized anger/irritability at everyone and everything; probably originally an anger at being Abandoned, in its generalized form, very connected to Alone. Feels like this can also be escalated into Rage.
Starts/rooted low in the belly, rises up through my body; the higher and stronger it rises, the more intense is the anger; comes up to face and emanates out there; can come up through arms and have potential to drive striking out, (higher intensity = focus on sources of Bombardment); younger age = more focused on Abandoned, more Cranky, just a smoldering fire, chaotic, non-directional; older age = more focused on becoming the protector, punishing my father or other unconscious authority; like a larger ember, carbon, ash, and fire, just kind of smoldering in Cranky phase; fire increases and fills body, emanating from face in Angry phase; erupts into volcanic torrent in Rage phase – this only in rare fantasies of retribution against my father; sound is congruent with image/substance.
Cranky: I want my comfort. Angry: Damn you. Damn you all. You all suck. Rage: I hate you.
After mapping Alone/Abandoned and Cranky/Angry/Rage, I took a bit of a break. Whew! In the break, I connected to another part of myself that often stepped in whenever I was at risk of sliding into this morass: Drive to Triumph.
Drive to Triumph
As if I could either a) install a permanent buffer / Alone, or b) conquer Bombardment. The point is to make the pain (Overwhelm and Hurt) stop.
Not sure what this is in early life. Maybe a simple tensing up of my body, "steeling" myself against the onslaught. An attempt to force things forward, sometimes with some effectiveness, but without sustainability.
Physical body, muscles; a tensing up, with forward focus.
Even more, a sense of being a flow forward; it's like I am carried in a flow of very thick, dense liquid, like molten rock, (but room/body temp), yet I am the flow and am directing it; requires some tension/effort to direct/control it; when I am in this, the other stuff, (esp. Bombardment, Overwhelmed, Abandoned), can't affect me. a deep purple/maroon/brown, opaque; flow channel is 8x8 feet; sound is of long, deep breathing, especially the exhale.
I can do this. I am strong. I will keep trying.
This Drive was how I managed the Overwhelm, the Bombardment, the Alone/Abandoned, and the Hurt. It was a force that kept me going, kept me working, kept me striving to pull myself up and out from the mess I perceived humanity to be.
This kind of dynamic is very common — in all of us. We have one or two parts of us that lock into strong positive states in order to prevent being overwhelmed by underlying painful states. In myself, this pattern of some kind of ambition or drive or aspiration has been common. It took shape during my childhood, where my home life was very painful but I could go to school and succeed.
After mapping Drive, however, I turned my attention back toward the pain, found myself slipping into Hopeless, and mapped that.
Hopeless
Belief that it’s too late, there's no way to overcome the Bombardment, and I no longer have the capacity to successfully create a sufficient buffer/barrier. (I wonder if some rich people have put their energy into this, out of a similar place.)
It's too late for me. It's too late for all of us. I'll never be free. I'm too old, too weak, too broke. I'll be dead first. I give up.
Blackness, like an egg surrounding me and through me; it permeates everything inside, blocks everything outside, (only partially – it's more of an overlay, so I can still feel all the painful stuff); a sound-dampening "cone of silence" inside it; substance is like egg white but dry, has viscosity and thickness but not moisture, resists movement; neutral temp; completely opaque, black; no movement; a sense of suffocating, like it would be so easy to just give in and die, now.
Finally, in a natural segue, as a secondary compensation for the pain, I found myself feeling Longing for Comfort, and mapped that.
Longing for Comfort
Food, sweets, numbing, “atavistic."
Super heightened sensitivity, reaching, on all surfaces of my body, including the alimentary canal; moist, red, soft, fleshy solid; surfaces, 1/2-inch thick; small peristaltic micro-movements, heightened around the mouth, satisfied by taste, feel, at which time the movements subside. This may be able to become over-activated and become the jumping-out-of-my-sking feeling / sensation from last night; whiny groaning sound.
I just want comfort. I just want the pain to go away. I want to be distracted. Make it stop.
That was a long session of mapping, and at the end of it, I was sitting with the weight of it all, mulling whether there was anything more to find as part of this pattern within myself.
The next day, May 23rd, I wrote the following before mapping Core Fear.
Suspecting there is a deeper fear. Feeling a total-body, near-paralysis when I go into it. It's not the Overwhelm. Starting to feel sick/nauseous just acknowledging its existence. This is a core fear, inside the Anger, hidden in my belly almost always outside my awareness.
This also resonated with the “fear/anxiety” I named on May 17th, the only one of those named states that did not yet yield something explicitly mapped.
Core Fear
Going into this, I find the Longing for Comfort is stronger, and I am drifting toward feeling practically comatose, moving very slowly, thinking very very slowly, blank expression on my face.
In my belly, hidden inside the ember of Cranky/Anger.
Ice cold; small, maybe two inches diameter, spherical; a dense, concentrated gas, swirling viciously around its center; nearly empty, vacuum-like at the center; has the capacity to expand instantly and stop everything, freeze everything, paralyze everything. {See Numbness below.}
This is the horror of being alive, held as a contrasting juxtaposition with the extreme impersonal nature of the universe; this is the vacuous cold and meaninglessness of the universe held within my own core, as the essential truth of existence.
[Where did this come from?] I don't know. It seems maybe I was born with it.
Having this made the pain and discomfort of my parents’ crap much more difficult to bear, as it removed all hope of something different. No meaning, no comfort possible.
My Drive is a nihilistic raging against the machine, in some ways. I want there to be meaning, I want there to be possibility, and I have taken it upon myself to create that out of my own solitary effort, in the face of the meaninglessness (Core Fear) and insanity (Bombardment). There's no way it can win, but there's no way I can accept anything less than trying. To surrender is too intolerable.
This intensifies Hopeless. Also intensifies, paradoxically, Drive. But Drive is frozen in place, massive but not moving forward. (Ah, perhaps Drive and Hopeless are alternates, same part.)
As you can see from my notes as I delved into this, the experience was intense. The whole group of states seems to revolve around this Core Fear. I call such a state a “pivot” state.
Notice also that I identified Drive and Hopeless as two sides of the same coin. This possibility for states to have a non-coexisting, either/or relationship also shows up in our observations. We will learn much more about this once we start applying the fieldwork moving practice.
This kind of intensity is very difficult to experience. The whole group of these states coexisted simultaneously in my awareness as I wrapped up my mapping investigation of the pattern. To provide some comfort, this Core Fear was able to slide into something I called Numbness — hinted at in the mapping thread — in order to enable me to function.
Numbness
Lifelessness in my entire body, flesh in suspended animation, no thought, no breath; neutral temp; neutral, like silly putty but matte instead of shiny and an off-white color; very very slow morphing movement; sound of things slowed way down beyond comprehension. Highest intensity in my face/head.
I am frozen, I cannot move, I am in stasis, there is nothing I can do.
I didn’t actually draw this one because it was an alternate state of the Core Fear. I could shift them back and forth between the two forms.
All together, these states (with the Hopeless rather than Drive, and Core Fear rather than Numbness) came together in the following composite drawing.
My Small Life
After clearing this My Small Life set on May 26th, I had a few good days. But very quickly, the next set of states raised its ugly head. Within a week, I had mapped these.
The Buried Group: Beserker
This set of states included three I shared in How Virtual Materiality Makes Perfect Sense: Trapped, Trap and No Way Out. The full set also included Hurt (a different form from the one in the set above), Get Away, Hate plus an out-of-control phase of it I called Berserker, Judgment/Analysis, Edgy Hopelessness and Vindictive Retribution.
This set was intense, nasty, and frightening to experience because it seemed capable of great destruction. Thankfully I had successfully kept it buried throughout my life — otherwise, who knows? It felt like this was the kind of inner hell that, for a few, reaches a breaking point and turns into outward violence. This is what the composite drawing looked like:
I was grateful to shift it within a few days. At some point in future posts, I may take you through the full transformation.
At this point, I want to provide some further context as well. These two sets of states I’ve shared are but a very small fraction (about 1/40th) of the extent of hell I was able to find, excavate and transform within myself through persistent work over a period of many years. And to reiterate, I am relatively “normal.” I believe this level of interior, deeply buried pain is common among us all, even among those of us considered “high functioning” or even “happy.”
What This Suggests
Fieldwork gives us the power to more safely enter realms inside of us that were previously off-limits because of sequestered forces too powerful and dangerous for us to dare to approach. Our new tool for high-resolution observation, combined with its capacity for direct and efficient transformation of dangers into resources, empowers us to directly enter these dark inner realms and begin to learn much more about what actually lives there.
Although we have sensed such darkness in the human heart for millennia, the details that reveal themselves through fieldwork bring us far closer to understanding its nature and origins. We still have a long way to go, but simply through the practice of mapping, we have advanced quite a distance. Let’s keep going.
As we prepare to take on the moving practice and to employ our fieldwork tools to their full extent, we will discover much more. One glimpse into our future understanding: we will come to realize that the predominant drives that shape the fabric of modern culture and the systems of our society, along with our personal habits, preferences and personalities, all rest upon a vast ocean of unbearable pain.
This inner pain and the destructive behaviors it fuels are normal in today’s world. But they are not natural. They are not the truth of human nature. As we proceed, you will learn much more about what is true, what is natural, and what is our gift to bring forward. And you will learn what is needed to liberate that gift unto the world.
Reflections
Please let me know how this all lands for you in the comments, or feel free to reach out directly through DM or email (reply if you’re receiving this by email, or use the Frontiers of Psychotopology URL with an @ sign between “frontiers” and “psychotopology”). I’m curious to hear from you. And if you’re not yet subscribed, please consider doing so!
