a train of discontinuous fragments

 

"But I don’t want to go among mad people," 

Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: 

"we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."

"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, 

"or you wouldn’t have come here.”

~ Lewis Carrol

from Alice in Wonderland

In listening to my patients tell me thousands of stories, 

as they try to find some peace in the present, 

I have learned this beyond the shadow of a doubt. 

 Rather than behaving sanely, rather than being in touch with our present realities, 

we human beings - all of us, myself included - 

are too often simply run by losses and hardships long gone by,

 and by our stockpiled fears.  

 

Our collective history, our individual lives, our very minds, 

bear unmistakable testimony.

Instead of receding harmlessly into the past, the darkest,

 most frightening events from our childhood and adolescence gain power 

and authority as we grow older.  The memory of such events 

causes us to depart from ourselves, psychologically speaking,

 or to separate one part of our awareness from the others.  

 

What we conceive of as an unbroken thread of consciousness is, 

instead, quite often a train of discontinuous fragments.  

Our awareness is divided.  

And much more commonly that we know, 

even our personalities are fragmented - 

disorganized team efforts trying to cope with the past -

 rather than the sane, unified wholes 

we anticipate in ourselves and in other people...



~ Martha Stout
from The Myth of Sanity, 

Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

a train of discontinuous fragments

.

In listening to my patients tell me thousands of stories, 

as they try to find some peace in the present, 

I have learned this beyond the shadow of a doubt. 

 Rather than behaving sanely, rather than being in touch with our present realities, 

we human beings - all of us, myself included - 

are too often simply run by losses and hardships long gone by,

 and by our stockpiled fears.  

 

Our collective history, our individual lives, our very minds, 

bear unmistakable testimony.


Instead of receding harmlessly into the past, the darkest,

 most frightening events from our childhood and adolescence gain power 

and authority as we grow older.  The memory of such events 

causes us to depart from ourselves, psychologically speaking,

 or to separate one part of our awareness from the others.  

 

What we conceive of as an unbroken thread of consciousness is, 

instead, quite often a train of discontinuous fragments.  

Our awareness is divided.  

And much more commonly that we know, 

even our personalities are fragmented - 

disorganized team efforts trying to cope with the past -

 rather than the sane, unified wholes 

we anticipate in ourselves and in other people...








~ Martha Stout
from The Myth of Sanity, Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness
art by picasso

discontinuous fragments

We are a thoroughly shell-shocked species.

 Though we have not all suffered abuse as children, 

we have all endured experiences that we perceived as terrifying, 

and that utterly exhausted our tender attempts to comprehend and cope

....as a result of our histories, and of our inborn disposition to become dissociative

 when our minds need protection, moderately dissociative awareness

 is the normal mental status of all adult human beings. 

 What we conceive of as an unbroken thread of consciousness is,

 instead, quite often a train of discontinuous fragments. 

Our awareness is divided.

 And much more commonly than we know, 

even our personalities are fragmented-disorganized

 team efforts trying to cope with past-rather than the sane,

 unified wholes we anticipate in ourselves and in other people.

~ Martha Stout

from The Myth of Sanity

art by picasso