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This tweet about somatic safety and behavioral patterns made me think of a friend from high school, who had Celiac disease and couldn't eat gluten, but would still be constantly craving it and cheating all the time. In fact, he would often use group hangs as opportunities or excuses to cheat--"Let's just order pizza guys, it's the most convenient thing..." and we'd be like okay Ryan we all see what's happening here but sure, fine we'll order pizza.
And this would make him sick every time and then he would sort of wallow the rest of the evening or maybe the next day too and be like "yeah I shouldn't have done that." But also *Goofy meme voice*: I'll fuckin' do it again.
Alcohol had a similar effect on him, and we were in an era of our lives where there was lots of partying, lots of drinking, and lots of day-after “yeah I shouldn’t have done that”s.
And so this was a cycle for him of prioritizing short-term pleasure/desires over long-term health and well-being, but what's remarkable is that there was a moment or perhaps an era where he grew out of it and it basically completely transformed his life. He took his work very seriously, studied hard for the CPA, became a licensed accountant, married his college sweetheart, and they built an extremely stable and good life together. When that cycle was transcended (by bringing his desires into alignment with his longer-term, deeper well-being), he basically fell into an upward spiral and unlocked all these great things.
I’d have to ask him to get his honest perspective on it, but if it was anything like the positive transformations that sobriety unlocked in my own life, it really was “easier” than it looked, too. Like when you stop engaging in somatic self-harm and building trust and alignment in yourself, everything about your mind-body-spirit will respond to this AND you will see the external universe responding with positivity to the positive changes in you too. It’s a mutually reinforcing, internal and external, upward spiral. It’s almost totalizing how it captures and transforms you, in the best way possible.
Now opportunities for somatic self-harm cycles are ALL around us in the modern world. My own relationship with alcohol (aka alcoholism) was basically that: drink until you got to that sweet spot of floaty weightlessness, which lasted for maybe 30-90 minutes, and pay it for with an entire subsequent day of wallowing. Short-term pleasure + long-term harm.
Just off the top of my head, common and culturally accepted opportunities for somatic self-harm: drug use, pornography / masturbation, some types of video games, gambling, binge eating or eating unhealthy food (exacerbated by the frictionless convenience of food delivery services), binge watching television (escapism, self-abandonment), and having relationships that meet *some* needs while infringing or compromising on others (thinking of the stereotypical situationship which is sexually but not emotionally gratifying, or where you’re investing your sexual energy in someone you know is not a suitable match for your long-term desires or goals).
All of these dynamics are about misalignment between the short-term and the long-term, somatic betrayals that create little grooves in your psyche trying to reinforce and assert themselves as THE pattern of your life. One framing you could use is, “Somatic betrayals are training you to betray yourself somatically.” They create doubt and uncertainty in your body about listening to your desires and whether you can trust them, whether you can trust yourself. But we must remember the cure: every day is an opportunity to begin telling a new story about your life, to begin creating new patterns. It feels really good to take care of yourself and cultivate trust in your own body and desires. You might be much less misaligned than you think (or feel 😉) when you take somatic safety seriously and work towards cultivating and nourishing it within yourself.
I see these patterns a lot in politics and culture: politicians are constantly looking for short-term solutions that incur long-term drawbacks (see: the environmentalist push against nuclear energy that made a bunch of people feel morally superior in the short term while drastically reducing our long-term capacity for low-carbon emission energy. Whoops!).
Or the current cultural push to normalize gambling and sportsbetting: oh, what lucrative short-term profits there are to be had! But they come at the expense of 1) many individual lives being destroyed and 2) now every major sports league is just one major gambling scandal away from irrevocably losing audience trust in their integrity. It really is a question of when, not if, a high-profile player or referee gives into the short-term temptation of fixing an important game and gets caught. I watch an NBA game and the commentators are constantly bringing up prop bets and referral codes and it honestly just makes me feel so uninspired about the product I am watching. I can’t care about a sport that endorses this, I wish people understood that reputation and trust are hard won and easily lost.
I think we live in a culture of normalized somatic self-harm. This is tragic on so many levels: people are likely to mimic and imitate each others, so if the cultural models we see most often are “person self-inflicting somatic harm” that is what people will emulate and become. It’s unpleasant to be around people with low somatic safety in themselves because you become part of their coping mechanism. I think if you thought about what a society would look like where lots of people have low somatic safety and self-trust, you would expect to see: more isolation, more anti-social behavior, less communal trust.
My personal belief is this culture and its set of beliefs and value hierarchies begins early in our lives through the education system and advertising, and is reinforced as we age. In order to find the right role models and ideas to live my own life by, I had to venture beyond the culturally accepted world of secular liberal-progressivism and explore conservative thought, spiritual thought, and deep religious inquiry. IMO, American default culture is, in a fundamental way, not aligned with reality and the kinds of somatic well-being that lead to people truly flourishing. (and I think the outcomes kind of speak for themselves here)
Two last thoughts: attention and how we use it is a key building block in building somatic trust. Social media scrolling a bad or unhealthy feed is an act of somatic betrayal. Tons of people obsessively follow politics, which they have effectively no control and no influence over, but they allow it to regularly and habitually enrage them and use that anger to dehumanize others. This cannot possibly be good for them and it makes their life, and by extension the world, much worse.
Finally—this last thought is tangential, but that’s what stream of consciousness is all about baby–I’m wondering if even the mere concept of somatic (as in relating to the body rather than the mind or spirit) implies a sort of compartmentalized, disintegrated conceptualization of self? You might say it's a word that is symptomatic of an overly intellectual and analytical cultural frame.
Because everything really is tied together, it's all integrated in meaningful and inextricable ways, right? When I go for a run, when I cook, when I eat, when I [redacted], these things touch on my wholeness of being and perception. So somatic safety is also a spiritual and mental thing, an intellectual and emotional thing, a product of moving towards alignment with everything you have. There are so many different ways to create and cultivate somatic safety inside of oneself, but when done successfully it looks like balance, like serenity. A person with high somatic safety is in a state of resilient equilibrium, hard to decenter, characterized by a high-degree of self-respect and willingness to enforce boundaries through actions, not words or thoughts.
(I had promised to stream of consciousness on this topic a while back and I can now declare that promise: FULFILLED. 😁)
・❥・@lapislagoons
there’s so many interesting ties between how we create somatic safety within ourselves, for example what you eat: there are people who shit their brains out every time they eat dairy or gluten, if that’s happens for you and you decide to do it anyway you create a lack of somatic trust between your body and mind, you are essentially telling your body: I don’t care what happens to us, I am overriding what is good for us for the sake of desire or pleasure the same thing happens with media consumption, if a certain kind of media makes your skin boil and you continue to decide to lean in to the consumption of that media instead of leaning out and choosing somatic safety for yourself, you build a lack of trust between mind and body where else do you see this happening?
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