Honoring The Wound

“We are born all life long.” -Michael Eigen

If I can just get the bad thing out of me and onto you I can think less of the monster-parts that make up any human life as something that I must work with, and through, and instead see it as something bad-you possesses and good-me does not. We alleviate our deepest anxieties by projecting what we fear most about our own impulses and flaws onto someone else. Politicians become easy targets, or voters who we don’t agree with, because they are seen as possessing the bad object of which we surely have never handled ourselves. There is something childish in this tendency, and I don’t mean childish as a way of demeaning the tendency but rather as a way of honoring it for what it is; a complex attempt to survive ourselves and those who sometimes fail to give us what we deeply need.

Can we work with our destructive impulses? A lot depends on whether or not we can first admit to having them. Melanie Klein’s work tracks this process by which all early and lasting relationships and experiences of the other are bound, the realms of love and hate.

“the infant sees objects around it either as good or bad, according to his/her experiences with them. They are felt to be loving and good when the infant’s wishes are gratified and happy feelings prevail. On the other hand, objects are seen as bad when the infant’s wishes are not met adequately and frustration prevails. In the child’s world there is not yet a distinction between fantasy and reality; loving and hating experiences towards the good and bad objects are believed to have an actual impact on the surrounding objects. Therefore, the infant must keep these loving and hating emotions as distinct as possible, because of the paranoid anxiety that the destructive force of the bad object will destroy the loving object from which the infant gains refuge against the bad objects. The mother must be either good or bad and the feeling experienced is either love or hate.” -Wikipedia

In some ways this tendency is at play in the denial of our own destructive capacity. We see those who act out their own monstrosity in a blatant way as being purely “bad”, rather than the more integrated view of co-existing states, bad, but also good. The place of refuge from which we must hole up in against the forces of badness is indeed the self. And if the self is also sometimes bad how could we seek safety there? How could anything about ourselves or the world be trusted? If the bad thing is not just in you but is in me too, how can any of us survive?

The irony is we have much less a chance of survival in a place where we constantly deny ourselves the sobering acceptance of our own mixed state of being. Scapegoating may be what we do best, but it isn’t what we do most beautifully. It takes courage to admit when we are wrong about something, and when the thing we are most wrong about is ourselves, it takes an immense amount of struggle to get to the kind of place where we can begin to view our side of the street as being mixed with the same kind of pavement as everyone else’s.

Klein further notes that “as the infant develops the potential to tolerate ambivalent feelings, he or she also starts forming a perception of the objects around it as both good and bad, thus tolerating the coexistence of these two opposite feelings for the same object where experience had previously been either idealized or dismissed as bad, the good object can be accepted as frustrating without losing its acceptable status.” -ibid

It seems likely that the acceptable status is the state of being human, and of honoring what Michael Eigen has called its wound. Eigen has a keen appreciation for the inner bomb depths of our being. Refusing to either idealize or demoralize our nature, he instead pays close attention to the mixed capacities we all bring to the table. To prepare a good meal we have to know all of the right ingredients, but since there are no transcendentally “good” humans we learn that some ingredients are better suited to certain moments and meals than others. Sometimes what is right isn’t necessarily useful to us. If proving that I am right at the expense of working with complicated and messy feelings and states that need my attention, and in getting my attention, might also benefit the one I see as wrong, then the old adage, “would you rather be right or would you rather be happy” might also be said as “would you rather be right or would you rather honor the wound of simply being human?”

Perhaps honoring the wound can become an invitation, not just to the other, but most importantly to ourselves, to delve deeper below the surface of what we think we know to be true about who and how we are. None of us are one thing alone. Good, bad, holy, evil, beautiful, ugly, right, wrong. These are binaries that simplify but also shrink our understanding of the world.

In “The Challenge of Being Human”, Eigen writes:

“We are misled by the media world we live in, a world of hype and pictures, news frenzies, hysterical feeds. We see the rich and famous and hear about their amazing wealth. It obscures the fact that life is much more difficult and always has been, and, as human beings are subject to themselves, always will be. Fantasy life obliterates real life and appreciation for real daily existence as it is. For many, Trump is a cartoon, an underside of Disney world… Yet, I am afraid to say he is a mild version of a “Trump-spirit” in the world, infectious affective attitudes and forces he weakly represents and expresses. The world has outlasted, and will outlast, all of us. It is still going after atom bomb blasts that should not have happened. There have been worse times in history, yet I am not sure I have ever lived through a crazier moment of abrasive fragility. Tension between self-hate and self-love increases… We are more than compliant-defiant beings. Can we, little by little, discover ways to offset self-hate with deeper love? Not the self-love of egomania, which tramples others and damages oneself as well. There is another love, deeper love, that helps, or tries to. We have a deep need – but I cannot quite say what it is. Faith is part of it, but it is much more.”

Why can Eigen not quite say what it is, this thing that we deeply need? Because the ingredients of our lives, of our wounded and often wounding humanity, vary. Dizzingly so. To begin to contemplate our makeup is like trying to reach the bottom of an endless ocean. It seems the further down we go, the darker it gets. And yet, as Matthew Goulish writes; “the brightest thing in the world is not a leaf in sunlight. It is a ctenophore, a ribbed or combed jellyfish… a deep sea creature that invents its own light within the darkest place in the world. It does not reflect the light of the sun but generates light immanently from within its black universe, its midnight zone“. Supposing such a creature is equally made of an inner darkness as well, would it be so odd to say that this dual capacity, among countless others, makes it impossible to ever say that we are one thing alone.

“Our minds grew up as survival minds. Hiding, tricking, aggression helped us live in dangerous environments. At some point, we developed concern not just for physical but psychical survival, who and what kind of being we are. Capacities to work with ourselves are still embryonic… We have a mind that has grown up to win, to survive, to stay alive any way it can, dealing with issues of personal integrity and expression, a work very much in progress. Where will we go together? How does each of us navigate our mixed nature, contribute to growth of possibility, honor the wound of being human?” -Michael Eigen
​
How do we honor such a wound? It is all to easy to pretend that the bad thing is in someone else and not also in me. But the hard and beautiful work of co-habitating and building a livable world, both physically and psychically, demand a much deeper dive. For even in midnight zones we are also capable of generating our own light. And vice a versa. We are not one thing alone. We are many.