MARK WOLYNN'S MESSAGE

Actually, I watched this vid because it linked into the margin of the interview with Tez, so that it was really putting ideas together from both that took me to where I got to.  Both men were interviewed on the same program by the same man.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vuo0QRvV7Lk  

It might be a shorter way to get to the same content by going to the website:  markwolynn.com  but the interview in this above linked vid is much more accessible.  Some slick person did the website and lost a lot of context.

Wolynn has put together an approach to something obvious that combines some cutting edge ideas.  One is neuroplasticity, the idea that we can think new thoughts because our neurons are always making new connections.  Another is epigenomes, which are the ability of the genes to be adjusted by experience so that new knowledge and processes can persist for generations, inherited, become part of one’s continuing new being.  (He calls them “ghost genes.”)  A third is that there an enormous repository of knowledge in the brain that is not conscious — back in the more basic and more evolutionarily old part of the tissue (limbic) — but that can be brought to the attention (the conscious and sorting) pre-frontal lobe above the eyes, the newest and possibly “most human” part.

When I was interim in the Northlake UU Church in Kirkland, WA, we had a “tea time” afternoon group that centered on genealogy.  We used a big roll of wrapping paper to draw diagrams of our previous generations and looked for patterns: twins, early deaths, lost babies, bad marriages, and traumas, which are what Wolynn is confronting.  In fact, they are almost exactly the same things that nice people (bourgeois) deny, hide, and obsess over.  We had a very funny session over our first bridal nights (these were all old ladies) and how goofy they were.  You're not supposed to talk about it.

What I never did talk about was “playing doctor,” which is almost as universal an incident.  In my family it was treated as a ghastly transgression, though the position of my father had always been that nothing should be secluded.  (He slept naked and crossed the hall to the bathroom that way until my mother “reformed” him.  Neither would she let him attend my birth.)  I was the “doctor” and was nearly destroyed by the guilt the uproar triggered.  

But I did score a room of my own, which was also an idea my father resisted.  He only expected to own one small house in his lifetime and this one was it.  My mother then pursued the idea of building on a bedroom, but he wouldn’t go for that either.  So she bought a folding hide-a-bed and my parents slept in the front room until I went to college.  My father was only home on weekends anyway.  The situation only made me more unpopular, accused of selfishness and damaging the family, guilty as hell.  

Wolynn said he was impressed that so many people carried a story that said:  “I’ll do something dreadful that makes me deserve to die.”  Both the dreadfulness and death sentence were made real in my divorce.  I left Browning, which had been my married home, and went back to my childhood home.  My father had died so my mother was there alone.  That’s when I was an animal control officer and collected scores of dead animals off the streets every day, bringing them back to the shelter where we killed even more.

Coming back was a different version of the prodigal child, and to my mother it meant a “little marriage” in which I would be her younger sister, which was her growing-up pattern.  As a young woman she bullied her younger sisters until they married men who stood her off.  She never solved the problem of her sisters-in-law, who ran away.  But I had another story, one which is alive now.

There are two stories summed up in the phrase, “I alone escaped to tell you.”  One is in the Biblical Job and goes on to recount the unsatisfactory diagnoses of Job’s counselors.  The other is in the Greek play Medea and is vivid to me because of a college acting class assignment to play the part of the messenger who reports the effect of a poisonous garment Medea sends as a gift to her rival Princess.  The woman dies a hideous death, witnessed by the messenger and relished by Medea.  The messenger says, “I alone escaped to tell you.”  

So now the story in my gut went:  “I have done something dreadful and would die as punishment unless I escape to tell you.”  Hard to think up a tale more salient for a writer.  “Salience,” the word, means obvious and important.  The promise Wolynn gives is that recounting such deep and indelible ideas will open a person for many new qualities like intensity, surprise, and power.  He gets people to tell the stories to him, with good results, and encourages people to dialogue with the parties to the dilemma.

Some therapists use a “hot seat” like the Smash Street red chair, to make this sort of thing real and emplaced.  It’s a permission giver as well as an escape preventer.  In a sense, talking to imagined problem people or even problem ideas can haul them out of the subconscious limbic mind where they lurk and gnaw, and force them to come to the front for digestion.  For many years I’ve talked about “metabolizing” pain and difficulty, meaning analyzing them.  People talk about chewing things over.  We don’t need Lakoff to get it.

But there’s another side.  My dead brother, the one who was the “patient,” fell, suffered a concussion. and lived off my mother for a decade.  His pre-frontal cortex didn’t work.  After her death he stayed with relatives for a while, then was asked to leave.  Wolynn speaks of “walking off to some new warm and welcoming place.”  My brother cut himself a “thumb staff,” the kind that is tall and has a Y at the top where your thumb rests, and walked away.  He died on the streets of Eugene.

I was a thousand miles away with a very limited income, staying alive by “telling.”  I didn’t go get him.  Have I done something so terrible that I deserve to die for it?  I’m telling you.