River Kenna Profile picture
Aug 7, 2022 20 tweets 3 min read Read on X
What if Healing isn’t a coherent concept?
“Healing” requires something to return to.

What if you never had it, so you can’t return?
“Healing” requires an ideal form to move towards

How is that form chosen?

For things like “I sprained my ankle” the obvious answer is to move towards the form of your able-bodied self, v familiar
For things like “i have a disorganized soul and disregulated inner drives”

The form you choose to move towards can be much more arbitrary
“No mark of health to be well adjusted to a sick society” and all that

Do you move towards a form that can function socially? Or a form that can meditate on a mountaintop? What are you aiming for? How did you choose the bullseye?
This isn’t academic,

A lot of people take time away from their previous life “to heal”

And end up becoming something unrecognizable, strange, and let’s just be perfectly honest: it’s very often unclear if there’s much upside to the “healed” version of them
“I undid all the conditioning society wounded and scarred me with. That’s why I now live under this tarp in the woods, drinking rain water and covering my head in sap to protect my thoughts from faerie sprites”
“I spent my whole life under the thumb of authoritarian control freaks—my mother, my principal, my boss. Then I left and took time to heal; now I live how *I* want, scamming money off of older divorcees and travelling the world”
“Healing” as a concept in spiritual/self-help/therapeutic circles is often colored with a lot of “awayness” and very little “towardness”

Intention is vague if present at all.
Very often, the idea is “the important thing is following technique X—from there you’ll transform, and you can trust that transformation”

But that’s not enough. It’s clearly, obviously not enough.
And the closer we get to an intention that makes real sense and has real telos,

The less sense it makes to refer to it as “healing”
You want to infuse your soul with divine connection? Excellent, I love it. Why does the word “healing” apply to that?

You want to feel calm and comfortable and connected as a baseline state? Sounds great. Why is that “healed”?
The answer seems fairly obvious,

If you can confidently assert that your preferred direction/intention is “healing”

That comes w a whole narrative-world that gives *your* intention precedence and primacy.
It muddies the water, disguising how arbitrary your particular intention is.

If it’s “healing”, then it’s not uncertain and arbitrary—it’s a return to proper function. To original function. It’s what you (and everyone else) we’re always *supposed* to be like
“Healing” provides a narrative that lets you brush off the need for narrative.

You don’t have to answer any questions about why you’re choosing the intention that you are—no more than someone w a broke arm needs to answer questions about why they want their bone to mend
There’s a lot of sloppiness here.

When it’s normal to have zero need to even think about why you’re going in the direction you are, there’s a lot of ways to lie to yourself
There are many things in my life that I’ve chosen for shitty reasons.

Emotional stuntedness, trauma, heartbreak, peer pressure, limited imagination, inertia,,,

But I was able to follow some of them longer than I should have, by not feeling any need to inquire into them
“Healing” is a non-answer, in most cases. It doesn’t make sense, outside of a few v limited contexts, as more than a rhetorical device for credibility-laundering.
If you can’t explain to yourself why the things you’re doing are “healing” rather than “exploring” or “floundering” or sth else, maybe don’t use the word or frame. It invites incoherence
@capacitieshq save #unsorted

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More from @the_wilderless

May 27
Iain McGilchrist writes on the ways Left & Right Hemispheres of the brain see the world, and his work is often misunderstood, mischaracterized, & 'um-akshully'-ed

At the beginning of The Matter with Things, he lists 20 robust, well-recognized differences between LH & RH... Image
In this section, he more or less says "these differences are well-studied and well-understood, they aren't controversial.

But when we look at them as a whole, instead of as unrelated pieces -- connecting the dots gets controversial for some reason"

I'm just going to list the 20 differences he lays out, and you can look for yourself -- does it seem like there are dots to connect? do the left and right hemispheres seem to have different, recognizable modes of attending to the world?

(note: this isn't "the right hemisphere likes art, the left likes math" pablum or anything -- both hemispheres do everything; but the WAY they do them, the WAY they approach life, that's what we're looking at)
"1. The LH is principally concerned with the manipulation of the world; the RH with understanding the world as a whole and how to relate to it."
Read 23 tweets
Aug 21, 2023
I’ve noticed that my work with Somatic Resonance and mythopoetics / dreaming

are my attempt to shore up the aspects of wholeness that go missing again and again and again in this cultural moment
Archetypes like the Generative Nurturing Adult and the Sage/Innocent… I’m not so worried about those

there are plentiful examples, a lot of people putting out a lot of different versions of the positive qualities there: heartfelt thinking, equanimity, perspective, etc…
but the “south” qualities of embodiment, resonance, passion and energy, authenticity, belonging-to-the-world-ness — those are harder to come by
Read 7 tweets
Aug 21, 2023
basically: tpot is missing Dark Muse Soul Guide energy, and it leads to an overgrowth of escapist spiritual materialism and its cousins

So BRING ON THE FUCKING VISIONARY DEEP IMAGINATION AND DEEP DIVES INTO DEATH AND GRIEF AND THE INESCAPABLE WHOLENESS OF BEING
i actually know a few people around here *have* this energy pretty strongly

they just don’t post much or put themselves into this community a lot

which seems unfortunate, but a structural element of the (inward-facing, very not-extroverted or proselytize-y) soul guide archetype
(i’m just kidding about the ‘bring it on’ btw

tpot has no room for it and pretty actively pushes away dark stuff from this territory)
Read 5 tweets
Aug 21, 2023
in my “oh, so Plotkin’s framework explains a lot of tpot dynamics” arc
@JoshAFairhead Example: the inner wounded child needs the presence of the Nurturing Generative Adult to hold space for it so it can heal. —healing the shadow requires a strong sense of one’s Innocent/Sage so there’s enough perspective and equanimity to not get mired in shadow material. Etc […]
@JoshAFairhead The one that caught my eye is the relationship between “escapists and addicts” and the “muse/inner beloved/soul guide”
Read 7 tweets
Aug 15, 2023
There’s nothing you can’t use as a tool to obstruct, harm, defeat, and belittle yourself, from meditation to crying to hiking,

and there’s basically nothing that can’t open you up, bring about healing, sink you into Life more deeply,

it depends entirely on your approach/stance
eg- if your implicit, background subconscious stance is in the neighborhood of

“I need to Do This Correctly. Am I messing up? If I can just *focus* and *work* enough and *get better* at it,

I can get my experience to match up with how other people’s good experiences sound…
If I can just Do The Correct Things in this framework, I’ll Achieve The Goal of having my life Feel How It Should”

—that whole region of mindset (basically the sociocultural default) can turn anything into a tool you use to trap and hurt yourself.
Read 11 tweets
Aug 7, 2023
Plotkin’s map of the soul might clarify what I mean about it being a continuation of IFS, or a movement past it or something

The inner layer is sub-personalities, the outer layer is aspects of Self

[…] Image
Most of what goes around for IFS tends towards dealing with the inner layer, the sub-personalities.

These are parts of us that are generally not fully matured, that are using old childhood strategies to manage our lives,,

And often keep us stuck by relying on those strategies
This is generally what parts work centers on, is finding parts of yourself that are maladaptive or using strategies that aren’t working,

and finding ways to variously heal, love, dissolve, develop them, etc
Read 7 tweets

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