Observations from Flow: Roots, mattering, compensation strategies ✴️

Here’s a cool way to frame up a recent session Valerie and I facilitated. People were experiencing a bunch of different layers and coping strategies around a fundamental shared human dilemma: 

We’re born and we implicitly have a sense of mattering in a purely denotative sense. “I am”, How could I not be? It’s tautological. We have a basic knowledge of being/existing, at all, inherent in being alive/aware, at all.

Then something happens in our environment that invalidates this. We don’t get fed. Our parents can’t tell why we’re upset. It takes a little longer than we’d like for our diaper to be changed. You can think of this as “original sin”—the seeming separation from total absorption with God in the proverbial Garden of Eden. In today’s modern parlance, reality ‘gaslights’ our sense of mattering. How do we cope with this?

We develop a layer of self-doubt and insecurity about our meaning making.

Then, a bunch of us cope with this by trying to prove how awesome and worth loving we are! Others do the opposite, proving to everyone how unlovable they are. Often we do both: I’m telling myself how much a piece of 💩 I am, while showing off how I reached impossible standards to everyone else.

Fundamental level: I matter (I am) → 

Dilemma: Environment doesn’t reflect this → 

Strategy 1: I must be wrong about mattering → 

Strategy 2: I’ll prove to life how awesome (or imperfect) I am.

Infinite more strategies.
 

Some quick takeaways:

1. This is one of the ways Flow sessions can look very incoherent on the outside, but are actually deeply coherent seen through the right lens; participants manifest radically distinct compensatory layers coming from a shared underlying structure. This way of seeing doesn’t come immediately but it can be invoked. It can also be trained.

2. Seeing the deepest layer doesn’t invalidate the experience of the other layers, but it does invalidate their holistic claim to reality. In seeing them as more superficial, we can learn to be more compassionate with ourselves in those coping mechanisms. Then when we notice they’re no longer serving us, we can divest in them (eventually they won’t work, because they never address the root cause, which doesn’t need addressing since “I am” is still true).

With love, Jordan