A ghost story from France (#13)
When the idea of this post came up to my mind, I smiled and said to myself that it may look strange to some that this story shows up after two posts on spirituality! But apart from the fact that my fears have been permanent residents of my pinball machine (see post #12 for the inside story), as far as I know the timing of this story is sheer coincidence.
Around mid-June I was scheduled to give a workshop in Nîmes, France. This was my third visit in this fascinating city from southern France. My good friend Philippe organized the workshop with the help of his warm and efficient assistant Michèle.
There were three days between my arrival and the workshop; so, Philippe invited me to his recent acquisition, a charming hamlet in “les Cévennes”, about an hour drive northwest of Nîmes. The hamlet is located +600 meters over sea level; it has four houses, and lodges between the last house of the village and the mountaintop (a protected area). The view over southern France is simply gorgeous; with a clear sky, it is possible to see the sea from the terrace.
Philippe who is a psychiatrist has a very exciting project for this beautiful hamlet; he wants to create a center where people suffering from burnout could recuperate and plant healthy habits, meditation being one of those.
While Philippe was guiding me through his property, he pointed to one of the houses and said: “Pierre, it will be your house during our stay here… And look at the windowsills, they are at least 400 years’ old!”
I haven’t written yet about language, but there is a concept used to describe it, “derived relations”. My first derived relation to “at least 400 years’ old” was it means there are many persons who died in that house! And I instantaneously recognized my well-known unpleasant sensation coming up from my deep body, FEAR. According to Panksepp[1], fear is one of the seven basic emotional or affective systems located in our ancient subcortical regions of the brain. Experiencing fear in such a situation was not a personal choice (if asked, I would have chosen another response), it was an automatic reaction – my pinball machine analogy.
When I was a young child, being alone in darkness terrified me; going to the bathroom in the middle of the night was as adventurous as Ulysses’ odyssey. My symbolic universe was full of devils, ghosts, vengeful dead persons… all kinds of supernatural entities with malicious intents (an interesting question: why weren’t they with good intents?). The worst of all were dead people; for some reason I expected them to be revengeful. Every time my family would go to a funeral home, I was very careful to assure I wouldn’t be forgotten there – I was convinced that the morning after I would be dead or gone crazy. Fortunately my parents never forgot me in a funeral home!
This fear of darkness dampened with years and was probably gone before I was 10 (very approximate memory though). Thereafter, I have never been very intrepid in darkness, but at least I could go to bathroom at night without the feeling of an adventurous journey!
Some contexts have occasionally reactivated that child’s fear (in Schema Therapy, we call this self-state the Vulnerable Child) in me. The excellent television series “Five Feet Under” has been one of them; one night after many hours of viewing, my basement was for a few seconds full of dead persons. It didn’t last like it used to do in my childhood, but for those few seconds I had the emotional conviction of their existence. In my life experience I never met any of them, cognitively it doesn’t make sense to me, and when my FEAR system doesn’t submerge me, my most fundamental belief is that ghosts don’t exist.
This is an example of a split (non-integrated) between our cortical and subcortical regions of the brain.
The context (at least 400 years’ old house – many persons should have died there – I’ll be by myself in this house that has two storeys) triggers an emotional memory. The intensity of the emotional memory associated with Fear makes believe that the danger is real: it is a coherence principle going somewhat like this, if I feel such intense fear there has to be something or someone dangerous.
At one point, the intensity of the fear was so excruciating that I seriously considered imploring Philippe to let me sleep in the corner of the living room of his house; I was close to PANIC.
But I slept alone in the house for the two nights we were there. Mindfulness was the means I used to do it; I stayed mindfully with the somatic sensations of my terror and fell into sleep after 10 to 15 minutes. It took a little bit of courage to go to the bathroom in the middle of each night (nothing is simple, it was situated on the second floor and I had to use a very queer staircase to get there), but I did it. I referred myself to Susan Jeffer’s philosophy: “Feel the fear… and do it anyway”[2].
My ghost story is an example of Bruce Ecker’s concept of “emotional truth”[3], the basic ingredient being that it feels true. But, in the case of this ghost story, it feels true in some contexts, but not in other. It is thus easier to understand that it has more to do with a self-state triggered in certain contexts than with an objective truth (meaning a truth shared by most members of my community, my culture – my two nights belief in ghosts wasn’t shared by people around me; they found it kindly amusing).
But many emotional truths feel true most of the time, which make them feel even truer. For example, some persons perceive themselves as impostors; this is frequently called the “impostor syndrome”. The person has a profound conviction that he is unworthy or she is incompetent. Even if he gets frequent testimony of friendship and love, or she accumulates professional achievements, they remain convinced of their unworthiness or incompetence – some external factors explain their personal bonds (people don’t really know who they are, they haven’t seen yet how bad they are, etc.) or professional successes (sheer luck – their intense work has duped their colleagues, etc.). In Schema Therapy, the first situation illustrates the Defectiveness Schema, the second one the Failure to Achieve Schema. They result from experiences and interpretations accumulated from the person’s life history (the story that was told by significant others and the story that was constructed by the person). And this resulted in a self-representation, I am defective or I am incompetent. For me, there is no fundamental difference between those emotional truths and my ghost story: they are self-representations (I feel vulnerable, I am threatened – I feel defective – I feel incompetent). And as was the case with my ghost story, other people could perceive those self-representations as being without any objective foundations. But whatever the protestation from others, most of us believes a lot of this stuff!
It means that a large part of our life is under the control of our self-representations, another instance of the pinball machine analogy; I have always to act kindly so that people won’t think that I am a bad person (compliance – surrendering) – I have to know everything that has been written about that subject, so that I never look incompetent (compensation).
Some would say that we identify with our self-representations, others that there is a fusion with those images of ourselves, some would argue that this shows that Ego doesn’t really exist, some others that the essential experience is a presence to those different constructions of our mind, etc. I let you pick your interpretation… But I like to leave for reflection the observation that much of our mental activities have to do with ghosts, or echoes of our mental apparatus!
pcousineau
[1] Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012) The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
[2] Jeffers, Susann. (2007) Feel the fear… and do it anyway. Jeffers Press.
[3] Ecker, B., Ticic, R., & Hulley, L. (2012) Unlocking the Emotional Brain. New York: Routledge.
pcousineau 