Habits, kicking & cultivation

No wonder I wear a hat so frequently.

Habits. I've often thought about habits. About that which is habitual, reflex-like, automatic, etc. What we do with but a bare minimum of thought. Depending on what field of repeated action we're thinking of habits are always found, I can be quite negative or positive about them. 

With regard to matters poetic, I've tended to be quite suspicious and rarely positive, but that requires some qualification. I've no aversion to a daily writing regime or anything like that. I have a file always open on my laptop where I collect lines for a long-term project that I am working on, if this is a habit. The habit of writing or improvising poetry seems neutral to me in and of itself. Billy Collins, and perhaps even moreso Richard Kostelanetz, have a bad habit, and I wish they'd get help, but that's me and at root I don't much care if they do or don't. But when habits become slurs (my terminological adoption and possibly, if purposively, a misconstrual of what Harry Mathews referred to as "systems of low-level regularity", this being the phrase he used to describe the system of any given author's "inspired" practice of writing), I get increasingly negative in my baseline response. This, again, is me; my bias, and I own it without qualm. It just seems to me more worthwhile to break language habits and reflexes if one intends to surprise oneself, or simply avoid writing the same poem again and again. 

During the time when I was in analysis, I developed a habit that now and then got me into a bit of trouble, that of hearing the things people didn't intend. When one's analyst is incessantly echoing one's slips of the tongue, after a time they start to become almost glaring. I noticed them in my own speech a great deal, and used that to poetic effect when improvising. But when you repeat the slips of others to them, a funny thing happens. Not denial, that's predictable. The funny thing is that sometimes they get really pissed off. Ha ha. After awhile I learned not to repeat them, though I still tended to think about them and what they might suggest which differed from what the person was trying to convey. But analysis is, sadly, some years behind me now and that habit has diminished with time. Recently though I was spending a bit of time with someone and noticed that she, on a number of occasions noticed my own slips of the tongue or caught the implication which I was trying to, if not conceal, then at least not to blurt out. I told her she should become an analyst, which to my mind is high praise. Admittedly though, it didn't work very well as a technique of seduction. 

I've also been at times persuaded by C. S. Peirce's position regarding habits. Basically, that they are necessary things, and that we'd be better off to choose them than to be chosen by them. I do some poetry most every week, whether it be writing, assembling, improvising. But, I doubt that I would in most instances describe my poetic activities as habits as they are usually quite volitional. I tend rather to use the word for activities like smoking, staying up too late, nose-picking, chewing at the corner of one's mustache and the like, and thus, as I wrote above, as things that we do, repeatedly, but with such a minimum of thought that it borders upon no thought at all. 

I have been reading a book called,The Mind & The Brain; Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force by Schwartz and Begley. The subject matter of this text might surprise some of those who know my interests and stated biases, as the author is both a neuroscientist and a cognitive-behavioral therapist. But if you are one of my small elective family you might have heard me saying a number of things in the last year about wishing to learn more about neuroscience. My reasons for that interest are several, but the dominant one initially was undoubtedly that, as a psychoanalytic partisan prone to making arguments from that framework, the toughest counter-arguments it seems are coming from that neuroscience terrain. My intention was to read Damasio this year and I still hope to get to his work, but I ended up with Schwartz &Begley. 

I'm glad that I bought this book. The authors do make a couple of ill-informed references to Freud (ones that they are apparently so confident of that they felt no need to cite him to substantiate), but that is so commonplace in contemporary writing that I'm beginning not to notice, much. Ok, I do notice and it irks me, but I sense that I might have a better chance of dissuading Homeland Security agents from frisking anyone they think "looks muslim" than countering this trend, so I wish I didn't care (sort of). 

That pet peeve aside (& this book is nowhere near as dumb-headed than many others I could name), this is a very interesting book that combines the neuroscience with CBT and adds in some buddhist meditational material (mindfulness stuff essentially), all of which are coordinated in the treatment of OCD in Schwartz's practice. But a larger, more philosophically juicy aspect of this text's argument is that, contrary to prevailing wisdom (or at least, prevailing until recently) from the neuro camp, "mind" and even "will" are emerging as both therapeutically and empirically valid concepts. Oh yeah, there is also quantum theory on offer here and integral to the broader claims of the text. Schwartz is bucking the trend in neuroscience of refusing all discussion of "mind" in favor of "brain," and is insisting, with a great deal of citational support, that those suffering from OCD can learn to "rewire" their brains by force of will. My terms are sloppy, but they get at the claim made here, and I find that I am positively disposed toward it even as many aspects of the CBT framework still strike me as exceedingly problematic (I'll come back to that below). 

Everything hinges on neuroplasticity. Though there has been contrary evidence for some decades now, the general view in neuroscience was that, while the infant's brain exhibited great neuroplasticity, that in short order it became fixed and quite static, with this batch of neurons "hardwired" to perform these and only these tasks. But that conviction has been undermined by research which shows not only that there is a second period in adolescence when the brain, to borrow some of the metaphors that the author's use, does a great deal of "rezoning". That is to say, that parts of the brain which may have heretofore been engaged in specific actions begin to be involved with quite other actions. There are a great many studies described and explained here, as well as therapies, all of which demonstrate this. I was most impressed by the details of the work of a man named Taub and the therapeutic practice (CI Therapy) that he developed for stroke victims. Without going into the details, this type of therapy, though obviously very difficult, has been successful in allowing stroke victims who may have lost the use of an arm, to regain use of that limb by reassigning the work that the part of the brain which has gone dark since the stroke, to another area of the brain. The success rates of this approach are pretty impressive, with, in some cases, people who had not been able to use their affected limb for 15 or more years, regaining near total use of it. 

Schwartz's primary work is with people who suffer from OCD. He noted that, though those who suffer greatly from this malady, and who are compelled again and again to wash their hands such that they stay chapped and bleeding also know at the same time that their hands are not filthy and covered in dangerous germs. That is, while potent and difficult to deny compulsions are screaming an alarm about the germs and freighting that alarm with great emotional weight (described as dread, among other terms) which the sufferers often cannot resist giving in to, they also know very well that their hands are clean and that the washing is both unnecessary and harmful. It was this 'split consciousness' (referred to as 'ego-dystonic') which drew Schwartz's attention. Again, glossing a great deal of material into a few sentences here, his innovation was to recognize how this is not unlike the situation that a meditator faces when trying not to get caught up in thinking his own thoughts rather than just watching them arise and dissipate. There is no reference has made to the classic line by some venerable buddhist so and so (who I have forgotten), of the moon and the clouds in the pool, but I will as I've always like that image. If one imagines looking at the reflection of the moon on the surface of a pool as the analog of meditative awareness, then stray thoughts would be like the clouds which now and then cover the moon. The 'trick' of meditation then would be not to follow the clouds but simply to attend to them as they pass by and then return one's attention to the moon. Schwartz, through a four step method, teaches his OCD patients to listen to the voice inside them which knows that these are compulsions, that they are just their brains sending dark clouds out to cover over that awareness and distract them from their awareness that these compulsions are expression of their illness and not what they in fact know to be the case. There is of course more to the therapy that this, but that is how it starts. Subsequently they learn to substitute other actions for those which the compulsion had driven them to previously, actions which they have the chance to choose and which are not self-damaging. 

It's a very interesting book and I'd like to post a bit more about it in the future. But getting back to habits…

Some months ago my dear sister Rah read a book about stopping smoking, she'd been given it by a lifelong friend and fellow smoking buddy, L, who read it and quit. Then Rah read it and quit. Then Tony read it and didn't, though I must admit I haven't seen him smoking much at all. I'm reading it now. I had intended to wipe the book out this passed Sunday but I didn't. In part it may be because of the "threat" to my habit. & in part it may be my annoyance with the text's repetitive nature. But whatever the author advisers his readers to smoke while reading it, so I've bought a couple of packs since then. I also have some difficulties with one of the basic claims the author makes, that what keeps the smoker smoking is fear. Actually, many of his claims about what "all smokers" think and feel about smoking strike me as questionable. But whatever. I found while reading it and have noticed afterward that parts of analysis seem to be, for me at least, accurate. I'm thinking of the feelings leading up to the moment when one lights the next one. & thinking of how it is the nicotine addiction itself which produces this unease which leads to lighting up sort of pisses me off, in a similar fashion to, if less pissed off, when I notice while listening back to a series of my improvised poems that I've found a slur, a repeated word or series of sound choices. I nonetheless intend to read some of the book today and try to finish it tomorrow. Stay tuned for details. 

Amusingly, an image search for "CBT" also brings up images of
& devices for "cock and ball torture" 

Now, to return to the uneasiness that I have with CBT as a therapy. When I hear about how it is pursued I cannot help but think of The Power of Positive Thinking, a text which I think gets much too much positive regard. Look around for fuck's sake, the world has serious problems from the macro to the micro level. Deciding to just 'stay positive' feels like an ostrich strategy. I also can't help but to recall an argument I got into with a High School history teacher who was incensed that I was reading Mao's Little Red Book and was interested in Marx. I was in High School remember, and not quite the argument monster that I can be these days in classroom settings, but I tried to account for what I found convincing in Marx, the alienation of labor, exploitation of workers, etc. This teacher did something quite similar in structure to the CBT response to a patient's self-understanding of their suffering. He re-labelled and refocused and so forth. Thus it is not exploitation of labor but a free system where your work was rewarded depending on how hard you worked. It was not alienation at all, but part of the process of cultural development, etc. Capitalism was not an economic system that only emerged fully in the last few centuries which is dependent upon somebody somewhere getting exploited and which cannot exist otherwise, it was the natural outcomes of rational choices and the best way that we can have to satisfy basic human needs and wants. Here that business about how in Texas no student in public school will ever learn of any economic system other than Capitalism from birth to end of High School and whether this isn't depending upon the very strategy in play here, though applied in advance of any deviation.

Now one could obviously just reverse the process here and relabel again, so perhaps this isn't the fault of strategies like CBT. But I have to wonder as well. There are moment's in Schwartz & Begley's book when I question from who's perspective this or that behavior is deemed better. & this would lead to the larger question of whether in the situation of this or that person, feeling miserable and hopeless might not be an entirely rational assessment of the situation. But let us assume for a moment at least that there are ways in which we are, as social subjects, quite thoroughly fucked, as in disempowered. I cannot believe that re-labelling this situation in such a way as to naturalize it, or make it entirely up to the individual rather than a systemic issue, or any such thing is adequate. How many guards at the concentration camps had qualms which they quashed in this fashion? 

Google>Images "Habit" - tho obviously I chose it for looking like the Borromean Knot