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at the first bio-emotive retreat i was paired up to facilitate bio-emotive for this woman. we started with "there's this friend who owes me money and i haven't been on her case about it" got to "why do i always let people walk all over me" then: raped when she was 14
the point of this story is not about me but i'll mention that i noticed something funny about her while we were talking at the beginning of the session: anytime she answered a question, regardless of her answer, she shook her head like she was saying "no"
this seemed significant to me so on an impulse i asked her to try repeating the word "no" over and over again she said "no" maybe a hundred times, gradually getting louder and louder and more and more agonized each time until at the end she was fully screaming
her friends brought her cushions and held them in the air for her to kick against so she could experience in her body what it was like to fight back against the rape. she did a lot of kicking and screaming and wailing and sobbing. at the end there were like 3 of her friends there
when she was coherent enough to talk about it, to describe what had hurt about the experience, almost none of it was about the rape itself. i wish i could remember what she said but the gist of it was she said everyone close to her withdrew from her afterwards
her parents didn't know what to do, nobody knew what to do. i might be misremembering this bit but they fired her nanny or something out of some misunderstanding but the nanny was actually the person she'd been closest to. she was inconsolable about how much it hurt to lose them
the essential feature of her pain was: that in her hour of most desperate need, when she was the most lost and most confused and most in need of support, the people closest to her withdrew further away instead of coming closer
she cried and screamed and sobbed and wailed like i'd never seen a person do before, like an animal, like a child. it went on for maybe an hour or two, idk, i completely lost track of time while it was happening. all i could do was witness it
this was maybe the first time i'd ever seen someone *finish* crying. there's a reason i kept talking about this. she *completely finished* crying and afterwards her energy was completely transformed. before we started she looked kind of shy and mousy https://t.co/DV8kNrSjxm
crying is a process adults rarely let themselves *complete*; the complete process feels like too much to ask for, it is loud, it makes you look insane or like a child or both, other people get scared and don't know how to handle it. but it is totally normal and immensely healing
after she finished crying she - i have no other words for this - looked angelic. like an angel. beatific. i'd never seen a person's face look the way hers looked in that moment. she was beautiful in a way i hadn't known a person could be beautiful before
it was like an angel or a bodhisattva or something had descended upon us. she smiled at us and started blessing all of us for being there. this is not a word i use lightly but there's really no other way to say it. we were literally being blessed by her
this was one of the most beautiful and sacred and humbling moments of my life and it was significant to me that it had happened with no assistance from psychedelics, but instead from creating conditions under which screaming and crying had become, temporarily, 100% normalized
this was happening at the monastic academy in vermont. it's an absolutely gorgeous location in an absolutely gorgeous state, way out in the middle of nowhere, beautiful nature all around, can't hear any cars and we had been filling it for days with the sound of crying
you might expect it to feel stressful but at least for me there was something unbelievably insanely relaxing about hearing literally a dozen different people in a big echoey room sobbing like they were being beaten. like finally the external world was matching my internal world
that did something literally magical to the atmosphere i'm not sure i've seen anywhere else to this day. we had temporarily just made it completely *socially* normal to be in unbelievably agonizing amounts of emotional pain. this was so exactly what i needed i can't express it
my time among the rationalists and my experiences with circling had convinced me that unbelievably agonizing amounts of emotional pain were underneath a lot of the other stuff that people seemed to get up to - i used the term "vast underground rivers of pain" to describe it
that's where stuff like this came from. at the bio-emotive retreat it felt like i was finally seeing the pain directly, mine and everyone else's, and it was such a relief just to know that that's what was actually happening and we didn't have to pretend https://t.co/cpWFrLgyEr
I firmly believe that many people carry much stronger emotions than they show to almost anyone, including themselves, and it's super fucked up how much emotional suppression we need to engage in in order to appear normal, calm, sane, and happy to ourselves and others.
this was an incredibly formative experience for me and i built sort of a religion out of it for myself. the thing i had decided to worship was crying, because it seemed like crying was the thing that was saving me when nothing else had
this is where #sobsquad came from. some of you showed up here after the period on twitter when i was really on about this but for awhile i was really on about normalizing crying. again, in retrospect, this was simply what *i* needed https://t.co/mmCp45qtM7
i've never felt comfortable sharing this story (about the woman who was raped) b/c it's not my story and it didn't seem like my place to share it. but it was deeply meaningful to me, and it occurs to me it might be meaningful for someone else to hear a man share a story like this
it was deeply meaningful to me to see someone actively wrestling with what seemed to me to be literally the maximum level of emotional pain, literally the most in pain it was possible for a person to be, and come out the other end smiling
it was also deeply meaningful to see someone specifically process a rape. i don't know if i can really convey this in a way that feels adequately respectful but i had been socialized to believe this was the worst thing a person could do to another person, like the #1 sin
i actually have a draft about this that i'll probably never finish about how i had made feminism into a childhood religion, and in that religion rape was like the primordial sin, the essential way in which Man had wronged Woman and would always wrong Woman
in my childhood religion rape victims were holy. i have no idea if this will sound insulting or what but it's what happened. in my childhood religion all women were holy but rape victims especially so, because of how badly they had been wronged by Society (Men)
in my childhood religion the essential task of manhood was rectifying wrongs perpetrated by men against women, but there was no concrete guidance available about how to, like, do that. so it hit me in a weird way i've never properly expressed before to see someone process a rape
it was like in my childhood religion there'd been a lot of talk about hell but not much talk about heaven and i was finally getting a glimpse into what heaven could be like. what it was like when you made right the things that are wrong
there was also this aspect to the experience that was like... again it is hard to talk about this in a way i'm confident is adequately respectful. but i had grown up relating to rape as this very abstract thing, very divorced from my experience, rarefied, set apart
i was fortunate to have been good enough at listening to girls as a teenager that i grew up hearing stories like this from female friends. i knew rape was a real thing that really happened to people i knew (not all men know this btw). but it was still an abstraction to me
so to watch someone process a rape... it wasn't abstract anymore. i saw very clearly the effects it had had on her psyche, on her soul, as she was screaming and crying all this stuff out. the ways it had stiffened her, frozen her, made her less trusting, less confident
i saw - again, i hope this is received with the respect i intend it - that the pain a person feels from being raped isn't a fundamentally different kind of pain from the other kinds. it's sort of all made of the same stuff. and specifically stuff i, personally, had experienced
she made it very, very clear what it had felt like to have been in all this pain and to have been holding it all in for what must've been a decade or so by that point. and it could've just stayed in there forever if the right context hadn't been created for it to be expressed
what did it feel like for her? being small. not knowing who to trust. being afraid. having to constantly expend energy to hold it together. her pain was made out of ingredients i had experienced so i could experience it with her
it's funny to revisit this - i had previously filed this story in my head as demonstrating the power of *crying*. and it is undoubtedly about that, but now i am looking over all these events again and looking at the significance of what the people did who were there
it is significant that when she was crying out in pain 3 of her friends came over to be with her in it. that's what is supposed to happen, you see. when you cry out in pain other people are supposed to hear it and try to help you
""""technique"""" https://t.co/n6HeHrIaHv
the rationalists used "techniquifying" to refer to trying to turn people's weird little self-improvement things they did into repeatable techniques that could be taught to other people and i've mostly decided it's bad actually. very easy to drain the life out of things this way
there was a brief period where i was writing up the details of all of my specific crying sessions. that was fun but then i uh. went too viral https://t.co/OtOWJiJy7d
a few days ago i took a medium dose of acid and wrote for several hours straight and admitted some things to myself, mostly about money let's start here: last august my mom gave me $100,000 for my birthday. i resented her for this and also suppressed the resentment
@QiaochuYuan big same, as well - this is what I like about the Asheville grief community. ime pain is actually Not That Bad if there is a real honest place for it where it can be fully met. like, it's still pain - sometimes excruciating dismemberment - but un-held or disowned it's worse
@QiaochuYuan yes! this is 300% the thing that I love grief rituals for. having seen it - how people obviously, legibly feel better, after plunging to those depths in a space strong enough to hold them - I wonder wtf mainstream psych is doing, if not aiming for this
@QiaochuYuan My guess is like 30-40mins for the really loud part, based on my memory of overhearing the sounds from the next room over. But makes sense it would have seemed longer from up close, and I'm not certain it wasn't.
@QiaochuYuan Powerful thread, thanks for writing it. So interesting to feel the resonance, notice how you point to parts of my experience that I have trouble making sense of, partly because I always felt one or two steps removed.