Suffering Through Brain Retraining
Finding Meaning and Value in Inadequacy
At some point you’ll likely meet someone who’s dealing with chronic illness or you yourself will experience it. It’s difficult to understand if you haven’t been in it. This essay is a glimpse inside. Inspired by an 8 week Brain Retraining Program starting next week for people with chronic illness. Here’s your pre-program pulse with some archetypal imagery and a fairy-tale woven in.
Stay-tuned for more on the topic of healing straight from the horse’s mouth.
On Healing Systems, Nervous and More
There’s a thing that happens when a system gets sick enough for long enough. The world begins to collapse and it starts to become personal. The air in a room lands as a judgment of inadequacy square on your neck. A smell triggers that old animal part of you, something dense and heavy descends on your shoulders. The fire alarm in the limbic system shouts threat full-time and quits distinguishing between danger out there and threats in here.
Everything becomes signal. Everything becomes danger. It’s exhausting, and it makes you insufferable to be around, and you know it, which makes it worse because want to be close and you’re paralyzed to move. It’s socially disastrous. In time, it shows up as a blasé causal romp that becomes you… system collapsed.
You have to experience it to get it. When systems shift drastically; nervous, cardiovascular, immune- from the outside, to those who don’t understand, it looks crazy. Because it is. It’s totally crazy. And just like when they said Dave Chappelle was crazy for going to Africa at the height of his career, everything that happens after the label’s assigned is dismissed as just crazy. Maybe he was crazy. Maybe he wasn’t. What’s for sure is that the projections shift. Dave’s now crazy. That’s all it is. Case closed.
During the drama triangle of chronic illness, at some point the inner critic narrates a feature film produced by the inner protector in which the Red Knight of your internal world trots out with all his armor and lance to fight symptoms. Your internal dangerously insta-famous Karen arrives pushing her cell phone into the face of your immune cells as legal enforcement ordered by the H.O.A. to run all the “bad guys” out of the neighborhood. Defenses are up. Cell Danger sets in. The system is panicked.
It’s much better now, but I’ve been in something like this for a while. Not the Africa part, but the systems part. 2 years in a vehicle. Van life has been a necessity not a nicety. Mold does something specific to the system as a whole; once the limbic loop gets stuck, even clean-ish air can feel like poison because the brain has updated its priors. It’s not lying. It’s doing exactly what brains do: predicting based on available evidence, what will kill you. At its peak, it’s like that- life or death. You’re in it and it’s got you, full fucking bear hug. Getting anything done is a miracle.
The nervous system hyper-vigilantly finds the subtle and double clicks and double clicks and double clicks til the wee hours of the morning opening tab after tab draining the battery til it’s dead. The tragedy is that the available evidence is corrupted. Or better yet, the detective has confirmation bias. The instrument is reading its own damage report as external existential threat. It’s futuristic memory on repeat. Stress becomes the feature rather than a generative transitional space.
This is infrastructure for projection.
I don’t mean projection in the pop psychology sense - blaming others for your moods, seeing your flaws in strangers, placing your unowned inner world onto a politician or celeb. I mean the deeper thing, the one that’s actually running most of the show: the way we inhabit a map of reality we mistake for the territory. We believe we are in a relationship that isn’t actually the one we’re in.
With a person, an institution, political party, with our own body, even your own past. The betrayal, and there are always betrayals once you start looking, isn’t that someone did something terrible. It’s that the gap suddenly becomes visible. The moment the unknown context surfaces and you realize you’ve been narrating a story with characters who don’t share your script. “How could she do this to me? She’s definitely evil,” you say.
This is true of betrayal internally the same as it is externally.
The projection becomes evident. We were in different stories.
What to do next is a matter of agency.
You Will Never be Good Enough
Mold makes this unavoidable. 80% of buildings are water damaged and when the nervous system is compromised, you can watch the projections in almost real-time. The room isn’t safe. The conversation isn’t safe. The thought isn’t safe. You can viscerally observe the machinery of threat-detection doing its work on inputs that, to anyone else, would register as neutral. And if you’re paying enough attention, if you’re willing to be completely embarrassed by what you see, you start to notice that this machinery was running long before the illness arrived. The illness just cranked the volume to eleven. There it is, in technicolor, what was always already there enters stage left »>Trauma.
The body, the world we thought we inhabited wasn’t that at all. It wasn’t even our own.
You never get rid of mold. You don’t necessarily heal your trauma. You learn to live with it over time. You build new relationships with yourselves. You expand what you can include. What you can metabolize. You update.
For the nerds, trauma healing is just a synonym for nervous system flexibility. So, in a sense you do heal your trauma.
😉
Gurdjieff said that in order to escape prison, one must first understand they are in prison. The update is that one must be willing to find the prison completely humiliating, not heroic. The arrogance of victimhood is exactly this - the secret satisfaction of the cell. The existential kink of humiliation if we want to take it to its disgustingly red and bloody end.
No agency.
The safety of suffering can take a few shapes; the suffering in suffering is one. At least in here you know the familiarity of the thing. At least in here the story makes sense. In here, the victimhood manifests as arrogance so you can stay righteous like the White Knight. But what’s true? And also: so what. There’s no question they loved you, Red Knight, Karen, the H.O.A.. Even if you couldn’t feel it. The parts, the people, Life. The explanation is not the exit. It’s just another story.
Second shape is malleable, it’s letting the suffering shape you. From the White Knight to the Red Knight, eventually to the Black Knight. From dissociation//freeze, to sympathetic activation, to social engagement; climbing the ladder rung by rung to gather a clearer view. Getting banged up enough to be initiated into something beyond a cure.
The Prince as Witness
‘The Little Prince’ visits six planets before he gets to Earth. Each one holds a different version of the same trap: the king who needs subjects, the businessman who counts stars he thinks he owns, the lamplighter following orders that no longer serve any purpose. Each planet is a closed system. Each inhabitant running a looper on repeat. What the Prince keeps noticing, with the open bewilderment of the not-yet-initiated, is that nobody seems to be in relationship with anything outside their own unconscious projections. They are each alone inside a story that requires no one else to pump the looper.
He only breaks out when the fox teaches him something about attention. Not about inherent worth. Not about being loved because of what you are. About being loved because of what is given; time, return, the specific vulnerability of showing up again. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. Roses, nervous systems, Knights, Karens.
Which is to say: the antidote to projection is not perception. It’s relationship. Specific, costly, repeated relationship with something that is part of you, other than you and is you all at once. It’s the transactionality that stems from a love beyond one’s self. It’s Self-care.
Noticing Practice and Mutation
Traveling across the country looking for a room my body can tolerate. Five trips driving coast to coast in the last four months. Sorry for not writing more. The exhaustion is real. But underneath the exhaustion there’s something here that wants to be peeled back because it stinks like a wet van carpet: the way any systemic illness; the virus, mold, or like rupture, like grief, like any experience that is genuinely too much for the current container can strip the projections down to something you can actually examine. Not because suffering is noble. It isn’t, especially. But because when the system is overwhelmed, the usual management fails. The stories stop holding. And in the gap, briefly, you can sometimes see the machinery itself.
Even if it costs a wince, always be game to look. Even if it costs righteousness, be game. Even if it costs humiliation, look.
Breakdown arrives prior to breakthrough. The shadow of Chaos precedes the gift of Innovation, inevitably and ultimately, we land in the siddhi of Innocence. This is Mutation.
When breach is systemic, enforcement-first reflexes are the inner Red Knight’s only move. He’s one dimensional that way. And effective. Armor up, defend, clamp down. This works inside a stable system. Inside a compromised system it becomes violence to the Self, violence to the entire system. The White Knight wants to float above and meditate it all away. They’re bad. I’m good. But any focused mediation on symptoms amplifies what he doesn’t want, and in degraded territory amplification only leads to more degradation.
Response to internal breakdown doesn’t require either of these approaches; Red violence or White passivity. Archetypally, it’s calling for Black care which is not soft, but it initiates in the absence of Self-care to avoid the social wreckage between systems associated with chronic illness.
When it looks like a cardiovascular issue, but in reality it’s coordination error at a nervous system level, we need to know this because a cardiologist might help, but a nervous system practitioner is going to be more effective. It’s never about the failure of the system itself, it’s about working to create a system that can handle being broken by illness without compounding it. It’s about reviving flexibility, not increasing rigidity. It’s about regeneration and resilience. Whatever it’s about, it’s about moving forward and not staying stuck.
It’s not that everything is included, it’s not. Don’t exile your parts. And don’t try to eat ice cream if you can’t get out of bed.
Healing > Curing
Brain retraining; the real kind, not symptom reduction, not a return to a previous state, is learning to update the instrument without destroying it. To recognize that the readings are being shaped by prior damage without concluding that all readings are now false. Dave might not be crazy after all. Or maybe he is. It doesn’t much matter anymore. The body keeps updating. So does the self. Every input trains the brain. The first question is whether you’re training it consciously or not. The second is, are you working at the correct level to mitigate and or triage the system.
It’s not about “curing,” it’s about healing. Healing is messy. It’s not pretty.
Embodying the self-compassion of innocent intent becomes the fertile ground to move from. The field of loving kindness toward yourself is where you choose to dwell. It may seem groundless, but here you are, can you love it?
In high-level relational practice, you’re trusting in positive intent. In chronic illness you must bring the same level of unconditional positive regard and love to yourselves because paradoxically, fighting illness creates more illness. Karen and the White and Red Knights need love too. They are showing it in their unique way because it’s all love and innocent intent all the way down. Even the devils and evils of illness have their roots in love. Even the blood-thirsty inner persecutor. It doesn’t mean you let him persecute. You stop him, but you do it with love.
Still in it. Still in flux, still looking for a place to land, still catching the victimhood loop mid-rotation and having to decide, again, whether to get off the merry-go-round or go for another spin. Still failing at compassion on the days you’re under-resourced. Still finding it embarrassing how much of what you call perception is just old wounds. Be humbled by where life has taken you. This can be a journey of soul initiation. Praise mystery. Praise god. Praise Jesus. Praise Buddha. Find faith wherever you can.
To that unknown place, you send love.
And there’s something you find yourself coming back to: you have been in a prison whose walls were built from a story about being trapped. This story needs unspooling. All these stories need unspooling.
That’s the thing about seeing. It doesn’t fix anything. But it does mean you’re no longer just inside it. Still in it, but no longer enveloped.
It’s enough to keep going. Not like a King on a throne that’s beyond doubt, but a like battered and bruised Knight holding a coin with two sides; one dark, one light- flawed, and refusing to bypass your inadequacy or fight against it with either arrogance and or victimization. In that, you choose to step off the drama triangle, apologize to yourself, and forgive yourself. Faith will prevail.
There’s meaning in the struggle. Truth in your inadequacy. And value in brain retraining. It’s a simple ABC’s practice: awareness, breath, and choice. You get to choose your own story. Or unspool and drop them all.
That’s agency.
This is the manifestation of the highest principles in everyday and practical affairs. This is the possibility of the highest principles in all relationships resulting in a leadership role in your own life.
Let’s go.
More on the practice of ABC and more on nervous system flexibility soon.
Thanks for reading,
Patrick