It’s just one of those days where you don’t want to wake up
Break stuff – Limp Bizkit
Everything is fucked, everybody sucks
When I’m clutched by a bad mood, a simple question like should I go for a swim? becomes increasingly difficult to answer. My brain goes in circles. Hours before I was looking forward to it, but now I feel different, negative and not like myself.
But with a good habit in place, I can drag myself to the pool even when I don’t feel like it. Predictably, by the second lap, I can barely remember my previous state of mind. Happily deluded thoughts dance in my head (see, it always works out, what was that fuss about?) and like a hangover washing off in the shower, I’m close to forgetting my stern pledge to never drink again. I’d be happy to forget it too, if it wasn’t for the fact that this same, uncomfortable routine has played out thousands of times before.
Isn’t this strange? Shouldn’t the mental havoc caused a bad mood warrant a deeper investigation, or dare I say it, a solution?
Five years ago, I took a stand against a bad mood. I had wasted a weekend feeling listless and loathing for no apparent reason. I then proceeded to waste more time dismantling my brain to figure out where I had taken a wrong turn. Once I felt a bit better, I concluded in a blog post that I had been stuck in a comfort zone and needed to be more aggressive and take more risks. Not a bad course of action, but really just more neurotic chatter. I had thought my way into some internally approved solution and moved on with my life.
You contain multitudes
It only takes a little concentration while you wash the dishes to notice that we are constantly thinking. Marie-Louise von Franz, a disciple of Carl Jung explains how your mood and thoughts interrelate: “You’re in a friendly mood. Then you think of something negative and then you muse about revenge. We constantly switch moods.”1
Our personality changes too. It’s not hard to reflect on all the different people we can be. You might be monk, a benevolent businessman and a hedonistic playboy all depending on context. A bad fight might bring out a different, previously unknown side to our partners. Office Christmas parties are known to feature some hapless employee showing their true (or worst) self. Not only do our thoughts and moods constantly change, but our selves do too. Yet we tend not to notice.
In extreme cases, we might call this shift a possession. In primitive cultures, rituals are conducted where mediums are put in a trance and “certain gods, female or male enter them, and they speak in a changed voice. The god speaks through them. Then they are possessed. They become the horse and the god becomes the rider.” 2Emerging from the trance, they often have no memory of what happened moments ago.
It sounds extreme, but perhaps this is a helpful analogy for the effect of shifting moods. Psychology seems to think so.
Archetypes, Parts & Circuits
Over the past 100 years, psychology has given us some useful tools for peering into the black box of a black mood.
- Internal family systems is a therapeutic model developed in the 80’s that breaks our mind down into various parts or subpersonalities. These parts can take on roles and characteristics that may be adaptive or protective in response to past experiences or current challenges. For example, “firefighter” parts that deal with intense emotions can be seen as responsible for binge eating or addictive behaviors. Author Jenna Riemersma explains that “when our parts… have taken over, we feel like we are the part. When our Angry part is up front, we feel angry, act angry, and speak angrily. We often think we are an angry person. The same goes for Sadness, Anxiety, Control, or any other part. When the part is in control, we have to speak from it. We speak as though we are it.“3
- Jung defined the Anima as man’s internal ‘other’, a “feminine image which guides and shapes the way you relate to women and the world at large.”4 When a man is involuntarily possessed by his Anima, he becomes “spineless, moody, sulky, passive yet overreactive to small slights, indecisive and lost in fantasy, stuck in a fate that his repetitive patterns have chosen for him.”
- Harvard trained Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor was used to dividing the brain physically, until she had a critical left brain stroke and had to re-learn different parts of her brain from the inside out. She describes the left/emotional brain as a character. “If I get upset and can’t resist calling you nasty names, my Character 2 has possessed my brain and is out of control.”5
When a strong mood suddenly enters us, we become that mood. We believe those negative thoughts are our own thoughts. We’re involuntarily possessed, taken over, deluded, submerged, flooded, immersed, engrossed or like Bolte Taylor dramatically describes as “engulfed by a blinding fog of desperate emotion.” No exaggeration needed.
While these different schools of psychology might have different words for these parts (and endless metaphors for how they behave), both Jungian scholars and brain scientists choose to be curious in the face of debilitating moods.
Bolte Taylor tries to notice her own physiological reactions, “a recognizable furrow in my brow” or a “stiff body posture”. “If I choose to become fascinated when I start feeling prickly, curious about the charge, that is often all I need to deactivate the circuit from running”.6 For Von Franz, her animus can change her mouth and hunch her shoulders up and forward. Weirdly specific, but useful it keeps you in charge. “If you know (something has grabbed you), you can steer it, kick them out or play them and put them aside again.”7
Curiosity huh? Worth a try. But although I can remember where I wrote that blog entry in my Brooklyn apartment, and roughly how I was feeling, it’s impossible for me to get in that same headspace. Perhaps because it wasn’t really me. And maybe tomorrow, for a few hours, I won’t be me again.
- https://youtu.be/v13PUb9sC9s?t=5131 ↩︎
- https://youtu.be/v13PUb9sC9s?t=5066 ↩︎
- Riemersma, Jenna. Altogether You (p. 187) ↩︎
- https://appliedjung.com/anima-possession/ ↩︎
- Bolte Taylor, Jill. Whole Brain Living (p. 92) ↩︎
- Bolte Taylor, Jill. Whole Brain Living (p. 266) ↩︎
- https://youtu.be/v13PUb9sC9s?t=5206 ↩︎
Buddha Bike 