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Wrapping Your Head Around the Inexplicable

Keith R Wilson

Nov 24

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Original public domain image from Wikimedia Commons

You don’t get it. Your husband cheated on you when you thought your marriage was fine. Your teenage daughter used to be sweet, but now she says she hates you. You told your wife a hundred times how to load the dishwasher and she still does it wrong. You can’t stop being anxious, even when there’s nothing to be anxious about. You can’t fathom how anyone could vote for that cretin who just got elected. You wonder where we came from, where God went, and what is the meaning of life. These are some of many things you are not likely to comprehend. What do you do with them? How do you wrap your mind around the inexplicable?

This isn’t the first time you felt like this. When you were a baby, you didn’t know what the hell was going on, either. You’d wake up in your crib feeling distressed but didn’t have a word, any word, to describe it. You did the only thing you knew how to do. You cried. Eventually, someone came and figured out what was wrong. You learned what that was, not by their words, for you knew no words, but by their actions. Your caretaker sorted things out for you when you couldn’t.

The Basic System

The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion studied how we think about things we can’t comprehend. He had peculiar terms for this. Raw experience he called beta elements. The process of making sense of them he called alpha function.

The things the baby was experiencing were beta elements, raw sense-impressions and emotional data. When the caretaker heard the baby, she performed alpha function, meaning she reassured the child everything would be OK, determined what was wrong, and took action. It’s like when you eat food. The raw food is beta, the enzymes that digest it are alpha, and the process of digestion is the alpha function. The caretaker is like the stomach. She contains the raw beta.

Your teenage daughter shouted that she hates you, stomped up to her room, and slammed the door. You wondered, who was that? That can’t be my daughter. You felt all sorts of things in your body, ranging from a sick stomach and a heavy heart to rage. That’s your beta elements.

Finding a Container

Not everyone can digest beta. Some people can’t take it. They’ll blame you for bringing raw feelings into their lives and refuse to hear about it. Others offer hasty solutions before they’ve felt what you felt. A good container must do three things: experience the beta themselves, show they feel it, then name it.

Bion was a battlefield tank commander in World War I. His soldiers were subject to all the risks and terrors of that terrible war. That was their beta. He felt the same terror but had the responsibility of command. His duty became his container.

When his soldiers looked to him and saw he was brave, they knew they could be brave, also. He was subject to the same beta as they and pushed onward, anyway. He contained their terror, too. He got decorated for his bravery and the bravery he inspired in others.

The first requirement of a good container is they are subject to the beta but have already contained it. If your wife had been standing right there when your daughter stormed off or had already been on the receiving end of her wrath, she would be just like the battlefield commander. She could be calm if she worked through her beta. If she’s calm, you can be calm.

But if she has never seen this side of your daughter before, you’ll have to describe it. The way she takes in this information is crucial. It’s not enough for your wife just to know what happened, she must feel what happened before she can help you. It’s not enough for her just to feel it, she must show you she feels it. That’s where empathy comes in.

As a therapist, I’m often called upon to be a container. I wasn’t there when the thing happened to my client. I must rely on empathy, which means I must feel some of the beta myself. I can’t pretend. They’ll see right through empty, soothing words.

The process of transferring beta elements from one person to another is called projective identification. We now know about mirror neurons, brain cells that fire the same whether you’re feeling something yourself or observing someone else feel the same thing. When I observe someone in rage, my blood boils a little. That’s how I know I’m dealing with rage. I identify with the projection. When the caretaker of the infant hears the cries coming from the crib, she feels distressed, too. It shows on her face when she picks the child up, soothes it, and says it’ll be all right.

At this point, your wife should imagine how she’d feel if she was you, name that feeling, and say something like, you must be feeling shocked, hurt, angry, sad, or whatever it is. If you agree, she has named it.

Naming it is crucial. Alpha is a box. She’s putting your beta in a box and giving it a label. Here’s the thing, though. The beta must fit in the box. There can’t be any parts spilling out, or you will not accept her alpha.

Listen Without Memory, Desire, or Understanding

Bion had advice for people performing alpha for others, whether they be caretakers of babies, therapists listening to their clients, or wives listening to their husbands. “Listen without memory, desire, or understanding.”

Memory means treat this like your first time hearing it. Desire means don’t steer toward a particular outcome. Understanding means be befuddled by the beta. You’ve never seen this before, don’t know what to do about it, don’t even know what it is. Don’t tell your soldiers to be brave if you’ve never experienced the battlefield.

John Keats called this Negative Capability, “That is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

After she’s done taking in everything and checking if she’s got it right, she can reach into her own memory, desire, and understanding to bring out what helps. She’s looking for a box to put his beta in. She already named his feelings. Now she must name the problem.

Your wife might say it must be your daughter’s hormones, or she’ll refer to pressure she’s getting in school, a boyfriend who just dumped her, or fears about climate change. She might take the side of your daughter against you. Taking sides is generally what people do when they don’t want to accept your beta elements, but if she’s already demonstrated she understands your feelings and still takes the other side, you ought to consider what she has to say.

I name the problem when I give a diagnosis. Sometimes it’s out of the DSM. You can’t get up in the morning because you have depression, you can’t sleep because you just stopped doing drugs, you fly off the handle because of trauma. More often, I have an explanation that’s not the name of a disease. You’re feeling distant from your friend because you haven’t talked to him about how you feel. The client will not believe what I say if I haven’t shown empathy because empathy shows that I understand the problem. In the same way, the caretaker names the problem when she says the baby has a dirty diaper.

Processing Your Own Beta

What do you do if no one’s around to help? You can’t be calling your wife, mother, friends, or therapist all the time. You’ll have to perform your own alpha function. There are three routes to go.

First, try to put what you should do in one of four boxes. Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. You probably already did it anyway, without even thinking about it. It’s all automatic, an instinctual response to something you don’t understand.

You may have already chosen fight and said something like, “Don’t talk to me like that young lady.” Flight seems unnecessary since your daughter already took flight, but you can take flight from your own beta elements by getting a stiff drink. Freeze is what people do when they’re surprised, so shocked they’re immobilized. The fourth box is Fawn. You try to make nice to your daughter and forget she said anything to hurt you.

Fright, flight, freeze, and fawn is a very crude system, but it’s a good emergency protocol. It helps you sort things out a little, at the cost of as many problems as it solves. Take rage, a variety of fight that creates new problems. You wouldn’t know what came over you if you flew into a rage, giving you another inexplicable thing.

The second method is to match whatever happened to some other occurrence that resembles it. She was two years old once, wasn’t she? She must have had the terrible twos. Her temper tantrums then may not match perfectly, but close enough.

This is transference, another useful term. It’s when you transfer expectations of one to another. There are problems with transference because the new experience may not fit perfectly in the old box, but it’s a start. A child’s temper tantrum at fourteen is different from one at two, but remembering it will help you get by.

You were a teenager once and may have told your father you hated him, stomped off, and slammed the door. Remember what was going on for you then, and you might better understand her now. This is also transference but taken further. Think about how your father responded and decide if you want to follow his example. This is the third method. What would your role model do, and what would they say about it?

This is sort of like having that person perform alpha for you, except they’re just in your head. You need a simulation of a role model in your brain for such occasions. Fortunately, when it comes to important people in your life, you already have one. A father’s response now may need to be different from a father’s response when you were young, but it gives you something to build on. You’re finding out what it’s like to be a father whose child says they hate him.

Once you have most of your beta processed into alpha, you should be ready to go talk to your daughter if she’s ready. You’ll probably find her sobbing on her bed, filled with her own beta. Her beta most likely is what prompted her outburst in the first place. When she said she hates you, that was fight, stomping upstairs was flight, and slamming the door a combination of the two. She’ll spend a few minutes at least telling herself how hateful you are.

That’s her trying to pack all her feelings away in a box called, “How mean my father is”. It explains something to her. There will be some beta left over because not everything fits in that box. A few minutes ago, she was sweet, so she must have liked you then. You might be able to help her with alpha to the extent you’re able to take the beta she dishes out.

When It Doesn’t All Fit

Find a box in your brain to put the beta your daughter dishes out. If you can’t do it alone, find someone to help you. But often it doesn’t all fit. In fact, if you really look at it, it never does.

Bion had a name for everything that doesn’t fit in the cognitive boxes we try to stuff it in. He called it O. That’s right, O, the first letter in the word, Oy. It’s his term for the unknowable or ultimate Truth.

You might have come up with a reason your daughter said she hates you. Hormones. That’s a pretty good explanation and you could let it go at that, but if questions remain. Why her, why you, why now, why those words? There are so many other things she could have done with her hormones, why did she pick that one? Will it happen again? Does she really mean it? Will anything be the same? What should you do now? Is she right? Are you really hateful?

The hormone explanation, if you leave it at that, is a cover story. Cover stories cover up the truth. Good cover stories have truth in them. People accept them as the whole truth, but their purpose isn’t to answer all the questions. It’s to keep you from asking. Cover stories are the boxes we put experiences in. The part that doesn’t fit in the box, or escapes, is O.

O can make you crazy. I’ve known people who can’t stop ruminating on things they can’t explain. We call them obsessed. Then there are the people, sometimes the same ones, who keep re-enacting some awful thing that happened to them. We call it PTSD. But I don’t want to make it sound like only the most disturbed are made crazy by O. O makes us all mad. Our minds aren’t happy until everything is in a box. It’s the mind’s job to box things up. When it can’t, it’s hard to make it stop.

You heard of people so driven mad by uncertainty that they do crazy things. They look for closure they believe they’ll receive when they put a lid on their doubts. People have killed themselves for less, and they’ve killed other people. People have killed other people and then killed themselves in the search for closure.

I should be more precise. It’s not O that drives you crazy. You go crazy looking for boxes. Most of your thinking, especially if you have one of those active brains that never shuts up, is you trying to contain O by putting it in whatever boxes you have. You don’t need to be afraid of O, but you are. You’re afraid of O because it’s the Truth. There are many things about your daughter you will never know. You need to know that’s the Truth, but you can’t handle the Truth.

Two of Bion’s other names for O is thoughts without a thinker or wild thoughts. Here’s an example. Before Isaac Newton came along and thought of gravity, gravity was a thought without a thinker, it was a wild thought. Gravity was a fact in the world, but no one ever thought of it before. Thoughts don’t need a thinker. Gravity happily made apples fall from trees forever before Isaac Newton thought of it, and it makes no difference to Gravity if he thought about it or not. Truth doesn’t need us, but we need Truth. Truth is the foundation of sanity.

Your teenage daughter must free herself from you when she grows up. That’s an inexorable truth. There’s another truth that says she needs you. If you can hold both contradictory truths at once, you have capacity for O. Your daughter needs to hold them both, too. She can’t yet, so she opts for the cover story that she hates you.

In Bion’s view, thinking is what you do to cope with thoughts without a thinker, not the other way around. He says a lot of thinking consists of trying to think up and keep track of lies, the cover stories you tell so you don’t have to have any wild thoughts. Thinking is the act of trying to stuff O into boxes. It’s a necessary step but ultimately futile. Thinking is the way you try to run away from thoughts without a thinker. Thinking can make you crazy. It starts off as a way to preserve your sanity, but it ends up being the thing that makes you crazy.

Reverie

What, then, is a long-term solution for staying sane? You can fill up your boxes like you usually do, but when it starts to make you crazy, stop, relax, and cease thinking. Go to a place in your mind without memory, desire, or understanding. Invite a thought without a thinker.

Bion called this reverie, opening yourself to intuition. Your brain has been tied up trying to solve a problem, putting an inexplicable thing into boxes. Untie it, give it a break, and let it play. It’s often helpful to do something else: take a walk, shower, or snooze. An idea will come out of nowhere. Sometimes it appears in dreams. That’s a thought without a thinker. It’s come to pay you a visit. People who do creative work will say this is what they do when they’re stuck. I do it all the time when I’m writing. I only do part of my writing on a keyboard, the rest I do walking the dog.

I also engage in reverie when I’m with a client. It sounds like I’m saying I daydream, but reverie is a form of intently listening. I’m keeping all my memory, desire, and understanding out of my mind in favor of what the client is trying to say. Then I wait for some stray thought to saunter by. It’s a wild thought, not expecting to be captured. Sort of like how birds will come to the feeder when my dog is not out there, barking at them. I grab it and see if it will be a container for some of my client’s problems.

Here’s another example. I often forget people’s names. As long as I’m trying to think of a name, I’ll never think of it. It’ll be on the tip of my tongue. If I thought of the name, I’d be able to put the person’s identity in a box, but that piece of information has escaped. It’s gone wild and lives in O, where all the wild thoughts go. If I stop looking, it’ll come out of hiding and I can catch it again.

You could catch a wild thought if you go talk to your daughter after she’s had a chance to calm down. Start a conversation without memory, desire, or understanding and see what she has to say. Don’t try to force it, so her own thoughts can come out of hiding. You might hear something that makes everything click. Maybe you’ll find out what she was trying to say when she said she hates you.

Once a thought without a thinker pays you a visit, how do you know if it’s the right thought? In other words, is this the idea that can gather up all the wayward bits of O and put them in boxes? Does it introduce order where disorder reigned? If it’s a wild thought, can you domesticate it?

Try it and see. Sometimes it has the ring of truth, and you say, ah hah! Eureka, I’ve got it! You have a thought that’s now in a box. Not everything fits in a box or stays in a box. There’s always plenty of O, but you can move on for now. You’ve domesticated a wild thought, just like when Isaac Newton discovered gravity. Now that you have it, you can use it.

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