Open-Secrets

Tag: the self

  • How Object Relations Benefit Us

    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.

    psychic structure

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

    soul 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.

    object relations space

    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.

    meditation exercise on space

    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.

  • Object Relations: The Power Behind the Throne

    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.

    object relation illustratin

    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.
    libido libidinal energy

    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.

    I AM THAT self

    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.

    where's the isness?

    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

  • How Object Relations Control Relating

    How Object Relations Control Relating

    What’s Happening?

    It depends on what you look at obviously
    But even more it depends on the way that you see
    Bruce Cockburn, Child of the Wind

    object relation illustratin

    We have been using this to illustrate and assist us in our discussion of object relations. But, this, like most two-dimensional illustrations, does not accurately reflect the situation. So, let’s delve into this perspective from two different perspectives!

    The Way that You See

    If we adjust the alignment of the three components, we get a better understanding of what’s happening.

    internal object relation

    The “bigger” person in this image is actually the small one (child) in the horizontal representation of an object relation. The “small” one in this image is the big other, but it is perceived through the mental perspective of the child. In the child’s mind, the other is huge.

    The double arrow is actually a looping dynamic where what is perceived causes a reaction which in turn, reinforces the belief about the other and the relationship, which perpetuates the reaction and so on and so on…

    Imagine the figure above is a lens in a pair of glasses. The lens includes the sense of me, the sense of the other and the constellation of affect and energy. We spend most of our lives wearing these lenses, not as glasses, not as the lens in our eyeball, but as a filter in the data stream of mental processing.

    The Way We Relate

    If we look at this from the perspective of any normal interaction in the world we get something like this:

    object relations relationships

    All the arrows are looping dynamics. So, the normal state of affairs (relating) involves two people with “triggered” object relations relating to each other as figments of imagination – mental representations from the past.

    The internal sense of the relationship, then, is like an ice cream cone.

    triple scoop ice cream cone

    The cone represents the container or footing involved (rejecting, frustrating, good), the scoops represent the psychic constellation (thoughts, beliefs, ideas, history…) and the flavor is the affective nuclei. All together, they give your relating in the present, the “full-bodied” experience of the past – the faces have changed, but it’s the same old story.

    The Same Old Story

    The story’s the same
         The story’s the same
              The heart ever hungers
                   while mind hunts the game

    A heart once young as grass in the spring
       dries with the lessons a harsh world can bring
    Childhood’s innocence ran through the fields
       and suffered the trauma that judgment yields
    As you grew up and followed directions
        spontaneity died from others’ inspections

    The story’s the same
         The story’s the same
              The heart ever hungers
                   while mind hunts the game

    Now that you’re molded like a lump of old clay
       your insides turn brittle as you bake day by day
    Your face is chiseled in a permanent frown
       once green pastures have faded to brown
    The body’s a sieve full of old holes
       and life a collection of meaningless roles

    The story’s the same
         The story’s the same
              The heart ever hungers
                   while mind hunts the game

    When life is a cup emptied by grief
       the heart is readied for famine relief
    A single tear falls on parched desert ground
       prompted by childhood’s shocking rebound
    Pain is a flood like rains in the spring
       swelling the heart as new life they bring

    The story’s the same
         The story’s the same
              The heart never hungers
                   while mining its claim          (JH)

    The Fly in the Ointment

    self fly in ointment

    The irritant, the pest in all of this is “the self,” that pesky sense of familiarity that keeps buzzing around in the room of experience – what is happening. Here’s a snapshot of a small segment from the timeline of life:

    timeline self familiarity

    The colors represent different stages in life or streams of experience with specific object relations which are blocking or distorting particular essential qualities. They are the strings in your tangled ball of a psyche.

    Each frame of experience contains that pesky sense of self and because each frame contains the pest, we believe it is part of the picture, but the picture is created in the moment, it’s what is actually happening.

    The fly is inserted so fast it seems like it’s part of what’s arising, but it’s not. What is part of what is arising is the a sense of the phenomenology of the body, the mental processes, the energies and affects. The mental process connects all the historical flies, the memory of that fly in every frame is what creates a sense of self through time.

    You see? It’s created. The mind is taking the sense of familiarity and connecting (comparing it) to the billion trillion frames in your story, adding it to the story of a self as an asserted actual entity.

    Up Next

    Object Relations: Trauma & Healing

  • Orienting the Work in Time

    Orienting the Work in Time

    Time has no moments

    The journey isn’t moving forward in time – dynamic forces at work can be interpreted by the mind as movement – explore these forces

    Prior to me asking this question, where are you?

    There are millions of words written and spoken about being in the NOW. People aspire to be in the moment. The moment is magical according to some.

    Think about it: a point in time is related to as a place because the self is inserting itself into that time, making it a place on the time map.

    When we’re projecting the past into the present or future, we’re doing so in the moment. So, where’s the magic? It’s confusing because you’ve never been anywhere else except in the moment!

    According to some, like Adyashanti, the real trick is that the mind can obscure our perception of reality. As he and others say, It’s not about getting somewhere, it’s about exploring what’s blocking our perception of reality right NOW in this moment.

    One hurdle is pleasure.

    We all know about the ego and its enslavement to the pain/pleasure principle. On one side of the coin the issue is that Being is inherently pleasurable. On the other side, the issue is separation from Being is suffering. 

    So, when Being is obscured, pain and suffering color the consciousness. The ego-self wants to fix it by getting what’s missing, to get there, to get into the moment with that pleasurable, suffering-free experience.

    “Getting” (seeking) is the foundational orientation of the self. It’s future oriented. All of its hopes, dreams and desires are out there in the future, but all of that wishing and dreaming is happening in the moment.

    For a moment let’s entertain the self’s orientation and explore just how confused it is about reality and the journey.

    Here is the timeline of your life:

    To the self, enlightenment is located in time somewhere between where you are and the end of time and it needs to get there, to get it.  But, the enlightened say, “Enlightenment is exactly where you are right now, in this moment.” 

    Here’s a more accurate illustration of the self’s position on the timeline of your life and its relationship to reality.

    prior to self

    The green field is Being or awareness or consciousness. It underlies and permeates your entire existence. In fact, it’s all Being, through and through. It has no extension in time, it has always been and always will be. It’s pure, complete, perfect and timeless.

    The dots after birth represent the period in time where your body existed, but your “self” did not. The sense of you developed. It takes five to seven years after birth. It’s a process.

    Once the self is constructed, it inserts itself into all of your (body/Being) experience claiming that it has always been in your life and has had something to do with everything in your life, your entire history is its claim. It believes it makes choices, thinks, takes action, etc. 

    These things happen, but not from or by the self. It claims ownership in a nano, nano, nano, nano second after the event. It’s so fast, it’s pretty much instantaneous. So fast, the mind can’t register it. Neuroscience is validating this.

    We believe the self is needed to function in the world. It’s not and you’re living proof of that because you (body/Being) did just fine for several years without the self. Our beliefs and convictions on the necessity of the self for functioning are misunderstandings and ignorance of what’s really going on.

    Invest some sincerity and impeccability in this exercise:

    Pull out some old photos of you from 5-years-old back to birth. Spend some time with each and allow memories and stories to come forward. Be with the sense of yourself as you ponder them. Feel the feelings, sensations and energies. Observe the thoughts and felt sense of being in that time.

    What’s your earliest memory? Can you feel the familiar sense of “you” in your past? How far back in your life as you look at the pictures can you get a sense of “you”?  5? 4? 3? 2? 1?

    When you look at those baby pictures, do you get a connected sense of you at that moment that extends forward in time to now?

    Here’s the point – you, the self, didn’t exist back then. The closer you get to five or six, the more you, the self, wafts into and out of existence, but it’s not stable until six or so.

    That two-year-old toddling around, eating, speaking the first words, sleeping, crying, doing all the things we do at two is pretty much doing it all without the self and it’s all happening in a developmentally appropriate way. The self will assert that it’s needed to mature, develop potential and function. This is true to some extent, but it’s a lease situation not a purchase. It’s time to terminate the lease agreement.

    The point is that, if anything, enlightenment in terms of “getting” it from the self’s orientation is not in the future, it’s in the past prior to the self. The self is heading in the wrong direction! Talk about confused!

    Working with object relations and psychodynamics is a regressive process. It peels the onion, removing the layers history, beliefs and identifications. This process can feel like going back in time to a priori, but is really a process that allows what is present, but obscured to emerge into consciousness.

    What psychodynamics allow us to do is study what we’re not. As an orientation or process, this allows us to get off the treadmill to the future and bring our attention and awareness to our immediate experience. Of course, the self will want to coopt the study of what we’re not to “get something out of it” and continue moving toward the future, but we can pull the treadmill out from under the self by exploring that very thing.

    If we hear and understand Adyashanti’s, Tolle’s, Almaas’s, and others’ message, it serves us better to get off the treadmill and explore the moment we’re always in.

    The Power of Object Relations

    This is where working with object relations really rewards us because doing so is one of the most elegant and efficient means of “rending the veils.” We could spend ten, twenty, thirty years or more meditating to pierce what’s in the way or we could avail ourselves of psychodynamic spiritual technology that can do so in days or weeks.

    meditation of self

    This is not to say embodied enlightenment will arise in short order, but one can experience and embody presence and spiritual states as part of a process of working through conditioning, which produces positive effects in our day-to-day life.

    At first, the effects and affect of essence and essential qualities arising in the body/mind are “my” experience, as the claiming is that fast. It takes some time before we recognize experience as happening in the soul and see the body/mind as the agency of perception, extension and expression.

    Again, the string we need to work with is right here, right now because the nature of reality is continuous revelation.

    Here’s the core issue with the self and enlightenment:

    Self cannot get out of self.

    It’s really simple. Every action of self reinforces self. How then, can self get out of self? 

    When you’re meditating, if you’re orienting toward some goal, or preference, or the future – that is the self meditating. This is how meditation begins for everyone.

    Speaking of meditation, what is successful meditation? Being in the NOW? Being full of presence? Some spiritual state? NO, successful meditation is coming back, coming back, coming back… The circuits are being rewired, the smaller pile of sand is growing bigger – more on this later. In thirty minutes of meditation, if you come back once, a hundred times or are gone, gone, gone – that is successful meditation. Putting your butt in the chair is 80%.

    The self can explore self, can get curious about experience. What we really are – awareness – evolves, unfolds, disidentifies without getting anything. It emerges from the background into the foreground via space and curiosity as it is – awareness.

    Self is self-referencing. It lives in a house of one-way mirrors where it only sees itself, everything reflected in self-centeredness. Self cannot see reality, but reality, self-aware awareness, can see self – it is the seeing, not the seer or the seen.

    house of mirrors self

    Here’s an exercise that works better the older you are:

    Have you ever looked in the mirror and had a moment of: geez, I don’t feel that old? This is an experience of timeless awareness, what you really are, being aware of itself. It has nothing to do with memory – check it out!

    Play around with it. Keep your vision loose. Split your attention 20/80 between the mirror and the seeing, not the seer and the seen. See if the sense of timeless awareness moves more forward into consciousness. Relax, grasping at it, shoos it away. 

    Up Next…

    How Object Relations Control Relating

  • Optimizing Your Work with Object Relations

    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

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