Tag: object relations

How Object Relations Benefit Us

Soul Space Service

Object relations help us develop the capacity to relate and function in the world. Ego development is necessary for the evolution of the individual consciousness. Ego identity and ego activity are a pain in the butt when a person’s development reaches a point where they know there must be something deeper, more real, more authentic.

Few people trip into the light fantastic without first experiencing a lot of frustration, heartache and expenditure of energy. The ego eventually wears itself out and down.

As wonderful as the mind is, it simply can’t imagine anything beyond its boundaries and limitations. Let’s explore a few ways to increase our potential possibilities for getting blinded by the light.

We started this series of posts using a tangled ball of yarn/string to illustrate a perspective of psychic structure.

Another way of seeing this is like one of these: a mandala.

From the perspective of the soul, not identified with the self, the mess of string/yarn appears as an intricate patterning, a unique expression of the individual consciousness.

As mentioned earlier, the tangled ball of string and knots is permeated by exponentially more space than string. As we all know, at the atomic level, it’s more than 99% space.

So, imagine being able to perceive from the atomic level. From within the ball of string, you can move your attention, your viewpoint anywhere. As the string, your threads of experience, are perceived in all that space, they present various patterns, mandalas.

Same threads/strings, different perspective. Soul and space, how can we invite them into the foreground of our experience.

A tip for recognizing the soul

If you have ever had the experience, knowing something, but the mind could not picture it accurately, have you wondered how you know the image offered up is inaccurate? It’s similar to having a word “on the tip of your tongue.”

This can happen a lot with lucid dreams or meditative states. You’ve experience something vividly, but you can’t get the image of it exactly right in your mind and you “know” that’s not it when the mind offers up various interpretations. How do you know? How are you certain that’s not it?

The first time this happened to me it was with color. I had been in the realm of the nonconceptual where a particular color infused and dominated the experience. In this world, my mind could not recreate that color (our eyes perceive less than a millionth of the electromagnetic spectrum).

It was like my mind was the paint center at Home Depot, trying this combination, and that combination, and that combination… over and over to be met with – that’s not it. That’s not it was certainty, I knew that wasn’t the color.

How? How did I know that? Because the color was still a form in my soul and I could feel it, could sense it and it was obvious that what the mind was trying to create was not it.

If/when you have similar experiences, pay attention to “that’s not it.” Pay attention to the certainty, that you know. Sense into that. Let go of trying to get the picture, it may be impossible because what’s in the soul is beyond this dimension.

In doing this, you will recognize, develop and nurture knowing the soul as the medium of experience it is.

A tip for nurturing awareness of space

Our minds are prone to paying attention to forms, to objects – that person, that car, that tree… We rarely pay attention to or give priority to the space all these objects are held in and surrounded by.

Start doing that, pay attention to space.

I noticed that certain states of perception, like perceiving space, were similar in feel to peripheral vision. This made sense to me as looking directly at space or focusing on it simply turned it into another object. Try this for a month:

Sit in a chair and look straight ahead. With your right arm bent ninety degrees and your palm flat, move your arm to the right, while still looking forward, until your hand disappears. Back it up until you can hold it in your vision without moving your head or eyes. Do the same for the left side.

Now, position both hands in that way. While looking forward, work with your vision until you can stay looking forward and keep both hands in view.

You want the arms lower than the ones in the illustration, the hands at eye level. Arms straight out, bent ninety degrees at elbow.

What you’re working toward is being able to maintain about a 180-degree field of vision without focus on an object and without effort or eye strain or movement. You are simply gazing forward without focus on objects.

As you get more accomplished at this, you want to start shifting some of your attention from the visual field to the felt-sense of the experience – inviting in the perception of inner space. Spend five minutes twice a day doing this and then get back to me with comments.

Allowing Service to Lead the Way

There are many words and books written, as well as videos these days about selflessness, unconditional love, detachment, the true self, self-love, and other “spiritual” concepts.

The self loves to hide in these selfless concepts – in plain sight.

When one gains some experiential understanding of the self and separateness, one usually experiences a subtle shift in orientation to the subject/object world.

It’s not something you can do, nor something you can learn. Shift Happens.

Exploring service and the notion of serving or being of service is of great value in untangling our ball of knots.

Service is the royal-road home and the final job description for the soul. When you arrive home, when the soul is no longer occluded, she finds herself in the company of Friends, the servants of the truth.

September 27
Object Relations: The Power Behind the Throne
What makes object relations so sticky?

In our exploration of object relations, we’ve determined that the “bonding agent” is the key to freeing us from being trapped in the past with these psychodynamic building blocks. On the surface, the bonding agent is experienced as affect which the comparative mind uses to define the object relation and its parts – I’m little, weak, unlovable… The other is big, strong, source of love…

Additionally, the mind uses the affect as its primary label for organizing object relations.

“Peeling” the object relationships off our consciousness can feel like pulling Velcro apart or separating something glued with contact cement. The glue stretches, like taffy. not wanting to release. Let me know if you’ve experienced something like this.

But, there are forces and dynamics at play here much deeper than emotional affect. Understanding these forces will take our work with object relations beyond the self into the realm of Being – the power behind the throne of the self.

Libidinal Energy

Libido is a term used in psychoanalytic theory to describe the energy created by the survival and sexual instincts. According to Sigmund Freud, the libido is part of the id and is the driving force of all behavior.

“Libidinal energy” is that which propels an “object instinct” like sexual desire. To Freud “attachments of affection” are “libidinal ties.

Instincts or drives—innate and biological urge that seeks satisfaction in objects.

Do you see? Objects, objects, objects.

Our biological nature is deeper than our psychological nature. Our capacity for the psychological evolved out of the biological matrix.

The animal we are has objective drives and needs. The psychological self has objective needs and imagined needs.

As part of the survival drive, many species developed a biological imprinting process between mother and offspring. For human beings, this process has evolved psychologically and emotionally into the attachment process.

Imprinting and attachment deepen psychologically through cathexis: an investment of energy into an object or an idea and/or the concentration of mental energy on one particular person, idea, or object.

So, returning to our illustration of an object relation, we have this dynamic:
- Something in the present triggers an object relation – bringing the past into the present via the comparative mind process.
- The object relation has an affect associated with it and an investment of libidinal energy contained in it.
- Reacting to and acting from the object relation loops the affect and invests more libidinal energy into it.
Let’s see if we can provide examples to help you recognize and feel into cathexis and libidinal energy. We’ll provide an example for each drive:

Survival Drive

Imagine you’re famished – “I’m starving.” You’re stuck in traffic and you start imaging that perfect meal that will “hit the spot.” You’re thinking and daydreaming and imagining the experience of eating that food and the satisfaction that will come from it. You’re salivating and your stomach starts growling – because your mind doesn’t know the difference between imagining and reality.

In this moment, as you play around with this, especially the imagining, the anticipation of chewing and relishing the flavors and textures of the food – can you sense the investment of energy taking place? Are you aware of the psychological and biological energies being invested?

Sexual Drive

Anyone who has ever masturbated using fantasy, should be able to recognize libidinal investment right away. Whether you’re just in your mind, looking at a photo or a video, it’s pretty easy to feel the energetic investment into the idea of the other, the interaction and the satisfaction resulting.

Social Drive

Ever been in love? Ever daydream, long for, or imagine all the possibilities with your beloved?

This should be another “no-brainer” for feeling the energy you are investing into an idea of an other and a possibility. The idea is not only the time, place and interaction – your beloved is also an idea in your mind. You can spend hours and hours – no work at all – daydreaming energy into that object relation. For the most part we call this being in a “relationship,” and we are. It’s just deeper and more complex than we realize because it’s based more on ideas, mental images, than a real person.

Life: Real or Imagined?

We usually don’t spend a lot of time thinking about this type of thing. In fact, we consider it as how life is – and it is for 99.9% of the people, but you’re screwed up. You know there is something deeper, something more real than living in the world of imaginings and ideas.

You’re living the curse of those being called home – seeking the real.

It All Comes Down to Identity

What you’re taking yourself to be is an amalgamation, a mosaic of of memories with a familiar feeling tone permeating it all that you string together and refer to as “I,” “me.”

It’s time to bust this whole operatic performance wide-open, revealing exactly how you’ve been investing in the wrong “this is me” plan. It’s time to change brokers.

Object relations theorists and depth-psychologists pretty much agree that the self develops from cathexis to the body, and investing libidinal and psychic energy into objects – ideas of things; concepts, mental representations.

The investment of energy is not only into the object, but also into the idea of you, the idea of the other and the idea of what the relationship between the parts is.

BUT, here’s an important question

What’s the original source of that energy? Libidinal energy comes from the body. Where’s the energy coming from that cathects us to the body?

Well, it’s not energy at all, it’s presence, Being.

With the formation of the body, the soul, the individual consciousness enters into a feedback loop with the body. Awareness and consciousness are extending and expressing themselves into and via the body/mind while the body/mind is sending, so to speak, impressions of experience nanosecond by nanosecond into the matrix of consciousness.

We often hear the phrase – the soul is very sensitive and impressionable – that experience of and from the body/mind, impresses itself upon the soul and the soul takes that shape and then identifies with it. It’s easy to mistake this for some kind of embossing process, but this is not a situation of something outside of the soul impressing itself upon the soul.

No, this is a wholly internal, so to speak, process within the soul, the medium of experience. The body/mind, thoughts, feelings, sensations – everything – are forms arising within the soul. The soul, the forms and the everything are Being, Beingness, “isness,” presence.

The soul is not pumping isness into the forms, the forms are of isness, too. Isness, presence is the nature of it all. The soul, being of isness itself, is, at a very subtle, non-thinking, nonreflective level aware of – all is presence is not the way to describe this because there is nothing other than presence, so there is nothing available to make “all” relevant.

What happens is more like the constant stream of impressions coming from the body/mind (forms within forms), so to speak, start dominating the field of experience. They become foreground, while the more subtle sense of isness fades into the background. It’s the same way body/mind blanks out constant white-noise – the white-noise here being the more subtle sense of presence.

The basic, fundamental ingredient of libidinal energy, emotional energy and everything else is isness, presence. So, we can say that cathexis is the investment (recognition) of isness, presence in the form and that where things go off the rails is within the construct of duality, subject/object experience.

We’ve simply lost presence from the foreground of experience – which is a fairly easy situation to remedy.

Forget about Enlightenment! Let go of Awakening! Stop seeking I AM THAT!

The main barrier, the densest, most subtle veil is “I.” Relating to THAT or enlightenment or awakening, or presence from I, the fly in the ointment, really mucks things up. So, let it go!

Yeah, yeah, yeah – easy for me to say. Actually easy for us all.

Where’s the beef!

Perhaps you remember that Wendy’s commercial from 1984: Where’s the beef?

It’s that simple – where’s the isness? Where’s the isness in present experience? Where’s the isness in body/mind experience right now? Here’s a clue – it doesn’t involve a location as it’s everywhere.

Where’s the isness in any object relation or mental process that’s foreground.? They, too, are isness, presence.

You have to relax looking from the self, from self-referencing – from the body/mind because its job is to interpret all perception in reference to body/mind to navigate this dimension of reality.

Here’s a tip – allow space, spaciousness, openness. Everything is obvious in space and that’s what this site is about – Exploring the Obvious.

Next Up:

How Object Relations Benefit Us
September 20
States & Stations and Optimizing Your Gifts
Objective reality calls forth from the soul what’s needed in the moment

Essence calls to essence. Objective reality calls forth what is needed. If compassion is needed, compassion arises into the situation via the agency of a body/mind according to the clarity and capacity available.

We experience spiritual states when qualities and dimensions of true nature arise in more fullness or purity than our normal day to day experience. These “peak experiences” are thought by some to be mental states, but those familiar with essence recognize them as substantial beyond the realm of mind and body energies.

For some time, our experience with states is often linked with psychodynamic work which “clears” our conduit or, using our ball-of-string example, opens up more space in the psyche.

When our work with our ball of string, our footings and our scaffolding has created more consistent space in our psyche, spiritual states arise more and more often, responding to what’s needed in the moment.

When particular states are available as needed, we refer to that availability as a station. This doesn’t mean you can make this happen. It has nothing to do with you in that way. Relating to it in that manner is an indication that self is claiming spiritual experience and agency.

People usually don’t walk around in particular states all the time. Reality is dynamic, its expression is always manifesting in new and different ways. An open, available consciousness reflects this, kind of like a kaleidoscope.

A station isn’t 24/7 compassion. A station is when compassion is needed, it arises without interference from the past. Orienting toward an open consciousness instead of a static ultimate state embraces the dynamic nature of reality and allows true nature to reveal and optimize our potential in a reality of infinite possibilities.

One of the main guidelines is to know oneself. The moment you know yourself, you always recognize it. Then, if this is not present you can ask what is stopping it. By understanding what is stopping you, you become yourself again. When all the issues and beliefs and images that block this experience are removed by understanding, then it is not just a state you experience, but a station. A station means that a quality of essence is present whenever there is a need. When you are yourself as a station, you are no longer being guided, you have matured. – A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book Two

A station does not mean you are free and clear of reactivity and the world of object relations. You can still get triggered and react with anger or some other emotion, but the reactivity will pass more swiftly, the essential state will emerge a little more fully and there will be less “holding on” to the after-effects of events in time – both good and bad.

A station is not a destination, it’s capacity and availability.

Optimizing Your Gifts and Talents

One definition of humility is: an objective assessment of your strengths and weaknesses.

Take a few minutes for an objective assessment of your experience and relationships with essential qualities.
- - Which essential qualities are most available to you?
    
    Which essential qualities are least available to you?
Assessing this can be subtle and tricky. In the early stages of working with essential qualities, there’s a certain amount of idealization or preference based on ego deficiency or personality “needs.”

The assessment should objectively reflect which qualities seem to arise more easily and readily in day-to-day life. Which qualities seem to be associated with the need for less psychodynamic work?

Each of us have easier access to some qualities, or perhaps, less disconnect. Sometimes we don’t see it, or we may discount it because they don’t take a lot of work or we think it’s normal and everyone has access to this. People may say we have a talent or gift for…

Each essential quality contains all qualities.

You may have a capacity for clarity and not recognize its connection to the essential realm. It’s been there your whole life. It helped you excel in certain subjects at school and plays a big part in your success.

It may have never occurred to you that this is an essential aspect of the soul until you read about it. When this is brought to your attention, and you recognize the validity of it, and you work with it a bit – you can acknowledge and own it, yeah, I seem to have maintained a connection to clarity more than say strength.

Essential strength or essential will may be qualities that are more difficult for you. Perhaps you have spent many years working on these qualities, but they still seem more problematic – anger issues, procrastination, whatever.

Has it ever occurred to you that essential clarity contains essential strength and essential will – and the entire treasure chest of essence? If you spend a little time exploring those qualities you seem most connected to, you will discover access to the qualities you feel least connected to. It’s like having a backdoor into computer code you’ve written.

With clarity you can initiate action because the situation is clear to you. You may find beliefs and history and habits in the way of taking action, but if you recognize the strength in clarity, strength will arise more fully bringing its capacities with it.

Clarity has a steadfastness. It’s not wishy washy, it’s steady – right there in your head center and vision. If you stay with the phenomenology of steadiness, other areas of your body will begin to resonate with it.

Before long, you may experience it in your belly. This steadfastness may not align with your beliefs about will. You may need to spend some time checking it out, see how it influences you.

I always encourage people I work with to be the “lab rat” in their life. When new capacities present themselves, take them out for a test drive. Put the pedal to the metal, see what’s possible.

Sometimes essential qualities arise together and seem to combine in response to certain situations. I remember a situation where compassion arose in response to someone experiencing deep pain, but the black also arose.

It took a moment for me to recognize why the black was arising. Part of the person’s situation was they were lying to themselves and this was adding to their pain and interfering with the action of compassion.

What was needed was “fierce compassion,” the capacity to cut through the lies and the power to be with the truth – all co-emergent with loving kindness. Pointing out the truth was the kindest action I could take in service to the person’s soul.

Up Next

Object Relations: The Power Behind the Throne
September 11
Object Relations: Trauma & Healing
Healing is a deep-rooted longing

Understanding healing is important. When it comes to psychological, emotional, and trauma healing, the self is the barrier to healing.

Fundamental questions are:
- Who is it that needs healing?
- What is healing?
Healing: the process of making or becoming sound or healthy again.

The etymology of heal is literally “to make whole”

Etymology of integrate “make whole,” from integer “whole, complete,” figuratively, “untainted, upright,” literally “untouched”

We tend to think the wounding will be healed, the little one, me, will be healed, but that is impossible because the wounding is part of object relation, part of the identity with the whole unit.

The more intense the affect in an object relation, the more difficult it is to work through. Early trauma is some of the most difficult for this reason because the trauma keeps retraumatizing us, turning the bonding agent into superglue.

When we’ve been abused, traumatized, or wounded deeply, there is a deep longing to be healed. Healing will eventually lead us to the point where we must face the ultimate challenge of healing.

Let’s use this again to help illustrate the situation more clearly:

For the wounding to heal, for the scab to disappear, the whole unit, who you take yourself to be has to disappear. For complete healing, the wounded one has to dissolve. You, as the self, can’t and won’t be around for total healing – it’s not possible, that subjectivity disappears.

As long as you’re there, the identification with the history remains intact which means the existential wounding is still there because the very existence of the object relation cannot be separated from the affect, the wounding.

This can be challenging to understand – yes, we’ve been abused, that history will not change, it happened.

The pain and suffering we carry is body/mind memory being held in dynamic stasis via identification. As long as we hold onto the wounded one, we will not be healed.

What’s in the Way of Healing?
- Identification (the self, the inner child)
- Fear, Pain & Suffering
- Misunderstanding
Inner is Outer

One of the big misunderstandings in healing and spiritual work involves the concept of inner. When we begin to “work on ourselves,” our attention is directed inward – into the body, into the psyche.

This is appropriate, useful and of great value, but, at some point, we become aware that this “inner” is outer, too. It is easy to be aware of the object relations, you/other dynamic, at play in most inner work.

There is an observer, usually with the self inserted in it, observing and exploring the wounding, pain, trauma, suffering, healing process, etc.

What is the inner of the observer? The comparative mind can’t answer this. There is no comparison. We can articulate the effects and affects of awareness and knowing, the “inner of the inner,” but these are not it.

We can’t get there because we are there – we are the thereness, the isness, the inner of the inner. The isness has no head, no eyes to turn around and look at itself. If we attempt to do this, we’ll just twist our head off!

AND, since that isness is everywhere, there is no “where” to turn around to.

BUT, allowing the conundrum of this into awareness produces a very useful affect and a very useful effect.
- Affect = frustration
- Effect = sensitivity
The usefulness of sensitivity is self-evident.

Why is frustration useful?

Because it exposes the futility of ego activity. It challenges one of the main foundation footings of the self. One of the biggest jokes in this whole situation, when seen from the other side is – the self is a masochist. Its whole existence is, literally, self-torture.

I know, where’s the joke? It’s all so serious, really – it is. It is extremely painful – to the self – a nonexistent entity, but all of this still affects the heart/body/mind/soul – a tortured psyche.

Hanging on to pain and suffering is the way the self perpetuates self. All of that pleasure seeking of the self is the suffering! You need to get deep into the weeds with the support of sensitivity and frustration.

It’s possible that you’re frustrated or reactive in just reading this. Halleluja! You’re on your way! Be open, be sensitive to the frustration.

Frustration is nothing more than resisting the rivet-popping process that shakes the whole structure of self apart. Using your sensitivity, it’s easy to experience the resistance, the glue, the rivets, the knots holding it all together. And the futility of not being able to do anything about it.

Why resist
The unraveling
Of the great ruin
Your life
Has made of you?
God has sent His
Wrecking-crew of angels
To renovate
The dog house you call home
Into an exquisite palace
Crystal fountains
Jeweled domes
Diamond spires
Walls of Divine transparency
Why resist?
This Architect’s plan
Always includes
The razing of
Existing structures (jh)

Trauma – For those working with trauma and, for the most part, all of us, this is not something to rush into. First we need to develop resiliency and consciously work to expand our range of energetic tolerance through a titration process.

Resiliency

It’s a little mind-boggling that we first need a strong enough, secure enough ego-self before it can successfully collapse. But, how can it collapse if it’s not first constructed? And, the construction is very much needed for the evolution of the soul.

Some people’s structures simply collapse, and depending on their uniqueness, they may awaken and remain awakened or the experience can be more problematic because a tug-of-war develops between the self and reality.

I want to emphasize this point again:

In my opinion, the notion of a true or real self is an invaluable gift to the ego-self. The ego-self is a camouflage magician when it comes to hiding in plain sight as a real self. The concept of a real self is a gift that keeps on giving right up to the body’s last breath.

Forget about a real self, that motivation is not needed. To the best of my recollection, with very few exceptions, every mention of a real self I’ve heard is coming from an ego-self.

Hanging on to that concept does more harm than good. It contributes more to suffering than to the process of awakening.

This is where working with object relations serves us.

Working with object relations is like having mini-collapses, a little piece of the structure falls apart and the structure readjusts itself to compensate. This process includes experience of not-knowing, space and disorientation.

But, as all of that happens, surprisingly, you don’t die, you don’t lose your mind, at least not permanently, and in the emptiness — awareness (what you really are).

Working with object relations builds resilience in the psyche, experientially educates us as to what we are and what we’re not – all of which leads to more trust and capacity to allow true nature to have its way with us.

UNDERSTANDING THE REALITY OF THE THEORY OF HOLES EVENTUALLY BRINGS US TO THIS RECOGNITION:

What is pain?

Really. Have you ever given this question serious time and attention? I’m talking about a year, maybe two or more. We’re talking about emotional and psychological pain not the sore thumb from being hit with a hammer.

Eventually, working with issues, whether traumatic or not, lead us to recognizing that the inner child and the self cannot be separated from the wounding. The wounding is part and parcel of the identification. It is the dissolution of these structures that is the healing.

Working with the inner child may, at first, feel like an integration – and this is useful, but in the end it is the dissolution of the mental images that frees what’s frozen, returning us to wholeness – untaintedness.

I’m not a trauma expert and I’m not giving advice on how to work with trauma. I’m simply pointing to where work on trauma and all other psychodynamic issues lead us.

Knowing this can help support our unfoldment toward wholeness. It certainly assists with disidentification.

The trauma work I’m familiar with incorporates several elements of essential work:
- Presence – I notice more and more therapeutic approaches emphasize the importance of presence at the outset of working with clients. Some of these processes and techniques lack potency due to a lack of understanding of the essential nature of individual consciousness and presence.
- Space – Space is crucial to the process of disidentification and the detachment needed to support healing and wholeness. Many therapists see space as a result of effective process, but they miss the more complete understanding that space is not only a result, but the dynamism that dissolves inner structures.
- Compassion – All inner work is challenging, sometimes painfully so. Children hold themselves responsible for all the crap that happened to them. Two very, very big challenges for most of us:
  - Returning to innocence
  - Experiencing that others actually care about us
- Love/The Stupa – Love melts boundaries. Love is the essential quality that relaxes the ego for dissolution to happen. Love is what flows into the nervous system thawing the frozenness, melting the tenacity.
More than anything else, self-love is allowing love to have its way with you. Sounds easy. It’s a bitch for many of us! The conviction of our unworthiness and our misplaced accountability are two of the most formidable defenses of the ego. Remember, the superego’s genesis is love, but with time and frustration this turns into self-hatred.

The melting of the lies, the rending of these most-dear beliefs lead to what is referred to as “the ruin of the heart.” Oh, the anguish! The ocean of tears!

The rebirth of ecstasy!

Up Next

Moving from States to Stations
September 10
Beyond Individual Object Relations
Working with Segments and Structures of the Personality

Working on object relations one at a time will never end. Our intent is to work with them enough so we develop our understanding, skills, and capacities to engage ego structures and personality segments which are built with object relations as the main building blocks.

Working in this way addresses many, many blocks at a time.

Three ways of working on personality segments and structures:
1. Work on the footings: Recognize and experience the rejection or frustration as you explore. Each footing contains many, many experiential building-blocks with a common element: frustration, rejection, fulfillment. In keeping with our examples, working with object relations contributes to the degradation of the entire footing. Once this concept is grasped, you can actually recognize the process in your psyche.
  
  Working on the affect, the bonding agent, loosens the foundation where one pylon of the scaffolding of the self rests. As that support is undermined, the scaffolding compensates by redistributing the load-bearing to other pylons. This may lead to a sense of ruts and cycles unless you notice that the entire structure has shifted and what you’re interacting with has changed.
  
  Working with rejection and frustration will bring into consciousness the real state of affairs – the soul is disconnected, so to speak, from its true nature and ego activity will never be able to replace or recreate the real. Landing in the reality of this shakes the whole structure loose.
1. Incorporate knowledge of the theory of holes and essential qualities into object relations work. You notice the balls of string are multicolored. This represents the individual uniqueness of our ball and its relationship to our developmental history with essential qualities.
  
  WHY? Essential qualities are part and parcel of the soul’s experience. Part of the flow of the soul is the continual effulgence of the essential qualities arising to inform and support the moment-to-moment experience of the soul.
  
  In the Diamond Approach, we work with essential qualities and the specific psychodynamics associated with our personal loss of conscious connection to them. This is where we get our first experiences of working consciously with object relations.
  
  Understanding the relationships between object relations and essential qualities helps to optimize work with our psyche.
  
  The scaffolding of the self is an attempt to recreate or imitate the wisdom and function of specific essential aspects of the soul. With time, you’ll be able to recognize and work with large sections of the structure (represented by the red section in the image below), or ball of string by identifying the ego activity attempting to replace the missing aspect.
  
  Working with object relations reveals how easy it is for the psychodynamic work to “lead” to spiritual states which can result in a couple of challenges:
- The dualistic mind will associate this with cause & effect and organize a theory or strategy of how “use” and “do” with this insight.
- One can develop a dependency or need for psychodynamic work that in turn makes experiencing spiritual states dependent on psychodynamic work.
Working on sections involves:
- Recognize the specific ego activity and its function
  - Let’s use getting angry since our ball has so much red in it.
- Allow the whole psychic constellation associated with it to come forward into consciousness. Imagine a crisp, blue sky. You’re feeling fresh, open and alive. You get angry. Familiar thought patterns and tensions associated with being angry arise. Your affective state changes the look and feel of the clear, crisp sky, your orientation to the future, and more. This is the constellation, the whole shebang. Suddenly, it’s like a cloud all around you, infusing you.
  
  If you catch the change quick enough, you can shift back to before the shift and then shift back into the constellation. If you keep playing with this, you’ll discover amazing insights.
1. There’s a concept in psychology that can serve us here. Another way the mind organizes and stores experience is through affective nuclei. Think of this type of organization like a big set of filing cabinets. Every experience involving anger is thrown into the anger drawer and I mean “thrown” in. It’s not neat and tidy, it’s emotions! It’s messy like the ball of string because any particular interaction in our life might produce a stream of cards to be filed: irritation to anger to hurt to sad to…
  
  The concept of affective nuclei helps explain the phenomena of being triggered and dumping a whole drawer of history into the present situation.
With the information shared thus far, we can employ three-pronged awareness in loosening our ball of string. Included in our awareness are:
1. Current object relation in play
2. Which pillar it rests on
3. The affective nuclei
Our goal is not to get rid of the object relation, the footing or the affective nuclei and we certainly can’t change history. What we do is bring the secret ingredients and let them work the magic – presence and space.

We bring the space through open and open-ended inquiry. It’s an orientation, a curiosity about the bug in front of you. The more we’re open, the more awareness of space comes forward in consciousness. Even when we’re addressing incredibly resistant knots, openness does the work, not us. It may feel like we’re working our ass off to remain open, to get through resistance, denial, subterfuge, distraction and the like, but loosening the knot is actually done by the action of space (read The Void, A. H. Almaas) .

The more capacity we have (expansion of our energetic comfort zone), the more interest we have in space rather than what’s in the space, the greater the invitation for the optimizing force.

Affect is more fundamental to how the mind organizes experience than thoughts, concepts and ideas. Affect gives meaning to the phrase: it’s not your experience that’s important, it’s the experience of your experience that’s important.

Affect and sensation dominated our early experience. When you see a frustrated angry toddler, you witness an organism in its entirety displaying frustration and anger – all body/mind systems are flushed, energized and discharging at full capacity. There is no internal mediating force holding the expression in check.

Opening up and following our affect will lead us down the rabbit-hole to the full impact of the experience on our psyche. Trying to stay ahead of the experience intellectually simply adds to the mess or at least impedes the unraveling.

Being is constantly revealing itself via the soul, the individual consciousness. The soul isn’t worried about the unfoldment. It’s not trying to figure out or prepare for what’s next. It’s in the flow, it is the flow. Every moment is infused with knowledge, goodness and awe, not concerns and anxiety.

In the rabbit-hole is where we find the difficult knots, the ones we can’t pry loose. All we can do is bring the space and allow space to work its magic and shake all hell loose.

Up Next..

Orienting the Work in Time
September 7
Optimizing Your Work with Object Relations

What is an Object Relation?

Psychoanalysis definition: a theory describing the relationship felt or the emotional energy directed by the self or ego toward a chosen object.

Simply put, it’s a way the mind perceives, interprets and organizes information – there’s me, there is the other (person, idea, thought, memory, object, etc.) and there is the affective energy that connects me to the other, defining the relationship.

These defined relationships, object relations, begin developing early in life, prior to the capacities for abstract thought and self-reflection. Rudimentary, significant object relations are formed early in our experience and then the mind, interpreting and understanding our stream of experience, for the most part, is simply comparing what’s happening in the moment to something familiar from the past – projecting the past onto the present.

As we develop the capacity for abstract thought and imagining ourselves in events, the mental comparative processes used to ‘understand’ experience begins to usurp experiential exploration as the foundation for the process of understanding. One could see it as a type of mental shorthand to save us time and energy. This is reflected in conversation as well with the ubiquitous use of the word “like” in U. S. culture.

Object relations are the internal building blocks of self-identity.

Let’s talk about the celebrity in this drama – YOU.

The Self

Self – one’s cognitive and affective representation of one’s own identity

Drop the concept of true/false self for a while and simply associate the term self with your historical familiar sense of you.

Though we all have this “sense of self,” it, in fact, does not exist as anything more than a composite of memories, in short it is nothing more than a memory aggregate incorporated into present experience.

We’re going to explore the state of affairs we find ourselves in after normal ego development and a few decades of living. We’ll be looking at this from a view of process and we’ll be using some simple concepts to enhance understanding.

Unraveling

All of us have probably had the experience of untangling string and knots. It takes patience and stick-to-itiveness – perseverance. In addressing this ball of knotted history and identity we are going to need PATIENCE and STICK-to-ITIVENESS!

I don’t know about you, but there were times, in frustration, I said – to hell with it – and got out the scissors, but that won’t work in this situation because psychologically trying to cut the string is really just weaving another thread into the existing mess.

Frustration just pulls on a thread tightening the knots and adding more tension to the entire ball. Most of us have experience with a knot or two that was unmovable – think of that in terms of psychic knots and the amount of resistance and constriction it takes to maintain certain knots.

This is the beauty of understanding object relations – when you understand the process and the simple secret of unwinding the mess, it helps to support perseverance and patience. And, though challenges remain, a sense of joy and aliveness arise in our process.

Here is one of the secrets of engaging this process optimally:

Anyone who has untangled a ball of string knows that as you untangle each section or length of string, no matter how small, more space arises in the mess making progress easier and easier.

Often the first hurdle is finding an end to start with and that’s one of the beauties of object relations, you can start right where you are because the end of the most appropriate string is right here in this moment – in your present experience, even if your present experience is “nothing.”

Here is another powerful secret: as progress is made, give more and more attention to the space than to the mess of string. From experience, you may know that when the tangled mess includes more space, you can almost shake the rest of it free.

The power of space is something we will come back to, but let’s move on to our next illustration.

Constructing the Self

The Linchpin of an Object Relation

Maintaining Structural Integrity

Each of us has a range of energy/tension that helps define us. If it gets dialed-down or amped-up, we go to work consciously or unconsciously to get back into our comfort zone. This comfort zone is a big factor in the inner-child structure which we will discuss later.

But, it’s also a huge biological factor in regards to homeostasis and the charge/discharge regulation of our body.

So, we can’t get around working with affect and energy which can be challenging when our radio station is broadcasting doom and gloom and take shelter 24/7.

Another helpful hint:

In service of patience and perseverance, assume that your involvement with object relations is never going to end. Our normal mind is a comparative mind and affect is part of its filing system. The organizing system is not the problem, identifying with the content, the object relations is the problem.

You can’t stop the mind from doing what it does – interpreting what is perceived and taking action in terms of how it relates to the body (organ of perception) and this dimension of experience.

Up next…

Beyond Single Object Relations: Working with Segments and Structures of the Personality

August 29