The non-verbals

Why do some of us need to become writers? What is it that drives us? Why the almost obsessive behaviour? Here are some answers, or at least some carefully couched questions, from my own observations and experience.

I sometimes wonder if some people become writers because they need to take ownership of what’s said.

More clearly put, they have grown up in an environment where ownership was not only never taken by those more powerful in the pyramid of actions but, actually, was proactively denied.

Whether consciously or subconsciously, the result is always the same.

And people who become writers need, in some way, to repeat — or relive — the processes of childhood so denied to them, in order that they finally become patent, manifest and visible.

By using verbal communication — ie words and the pictures they physically, apparently, obviously, clearly, permanently, publicly generate — a writer who’s lived a life of denied reality can finally, ultimately, lay to rest the ownership once wrenched so violently from them.

So how might this ownership be wrenched?

The other day I witnessed a conversation which appeared coherent, not at all rambling; it appeared to be well connected and seamless; it seemed, to me, to know where it was going.

To another member of my party, however, it was disjointed, fragmented, frankly boring.

Boredom either sets in when the people or situations we have before us are in fact boring — or, alternatively, when we don’t understand what’s going on, and have no inkling we don’t understand.

Without such an inkling, we have no incentive to pursue the line of thought developing before us; to struggle with its comprehension; to want to make the necessary emotional investment.

Without such an inkling, we are in the presence of an unknown unknown.

I suggest, am stumbling to propose, am wondering with difficulty, slowly, gently and carefully, whether in some families non-verbal communication is used to keep potentially recalcitrant members in tow.

What would I count as non-verbal communication, in such cases? Again, I’m struggling to understand exactly what right now, but might — on the back of Laing/Esterson’s work and, indeed, my own very occasional and incompletely formed observations — suggest some or all of the following could be included:

• nods, winks and complicit glances amongst those of the family group who were “in” — being body language always deniable as having any purpose but that of a quite superficial nature — in order to marshal the behaviour of the one who might be judged “out”
• the use of allegory, metaphor, figurative turns of speech and memories shared/reconstructed by some, and at the expense of other witnesses of the communications in question, to tie together conversations which otherwise would objectively be disjointed
• the usage, placing and re-placing of what we might term “significant” real-world objects, to inform, advise or even warn others of behaviours not to be contemplated — and as before, always being objects deniable as having any such alternative purpose
• other non-verbal communication systems we might still need to investigate and explore

Now of course, if any of the above is correct and exists in some families, the power such non-verbals may have over certain members is directly related to their inability to simply ignore them.

On the other hand, if you’ve been brought up from childhood with such systems as part of your surroundings, it can be very difficult to separate yourself from their “reality”, and therefore their power over you. If, for example, you’ve never used anything but a touchscreen (ie you’re, say, five years old), of course you’ll call it a screen, not a touchscreen, and wonder if a normal screen isn’t broken. And if you’re a pre-Internet soul, you’ll miss your TV before your wifi.

Such assumptions of what this “reality” must contain form an often invisible backdrop to our ways of seeing and doing, a backdrop which we can only shrug off and liberate ourselves from (if we wish to; that is to say, if its presence is causing us continuing dysfunctionality) when we begin to modulate from the unknown unknown to the known unknown.

The journey will still not be finished, even then.

Greater clarity will still be needed if real liberty from such non-verbals is to be achieved, but once the issue is recognised as such, real progress can then be properly contemplated; broached; and, ultimately, I am sure, achieved.

Originally published at lifeworklab.uk on December 27, 2015.