Redemption Narrative VS Contamination Narrative
Packet #4 writing/Notes for this packet is on the lighter side, in favor of developing images/design ideas. Writing continues to run along 2 tracks, the first focuses on a personal narrative that drives image/project making, and the second focuses on synthesizing ideas around working with the subconscious mind and creating an Imago Deisign teaching/learning resource.
TO DO
Image Making
Cake
Prayer Hands
(winter/spring 24)
Family Photo Wall
Image #4?
Journals
On Marriage
On Self
(winter/spring 24)
On Motherhood
On My Body
Packet #4 design/Art thinking and making focuses on developing the ideas uncovered in subconscious places into fully realized illustrations/ photos.
These images will be used as covers for printed zines/journals that contain writings from packets 1-5 that inspired the images.
Stop Making Sense
Cover
Front Matter
Add exercises 3 & 4
A-Z
Galley #1
A, B, C, D, E, F
J, L, P, S, X
Change Your Story, Change Your Life
Hidden Brain podcast
We all tell stories about ourselves, often without realizing we’re doing so. How we frame those stories can profoundly shape our lives. In the kickoff episode to our monthlong series on healing, psychologist Jonathan Adler shares how to tell our stories in ways that enhance our wellbeing.
Jonathan Adler spent much of his young adulthood, feeling unsatisfied and yearning for more. He says he was gay, but didn’t feel comfortable coming out. He spent a semester in Australia to break free of the constraints of his college life in Maine, but found that he was just as lonely on another continent. Sometime after he returned to the United States, however, Jonathan came by the work of a pioneering scientist in a field known as narrative psychology. Dan McAdams at Northwestern University argued that the stories we tell about our lives have profound effects on our webby. Jon moved to Northwestern, became Dan PhD student, and later, his scientific collaborator in time Jonathan came to see his own life through the lens of his research. He realized that he had been telling the story of his life in a way that was self-defeating, and he came to see that by telling that story differently, it could make a profound difference.
Jonathan to explain to me the basic idea behind narrative psychology.
You can’t totally control the things that happen to you in your life, you have some more say about how you make sense of it and it’s important to remember we’re talking about stories here so we know from research on memory that we’re not very good at recording the objective facts of our experience for a long time that frustrated cognitive scientist, but in more recent years is become clear that our memory works like this for a good reason. If you think about why we have memory in the first place, it’s not so we can hold onto every single thing that’s happened to us in some vertical way, we have memories so that we can make sense of what’s happening to us right now, and anticipate what might happen next. So if you walk by a cave and a bear jumps out you don’t necessarily need to remember that cave and that bear, you need to remember that dangerous things might hide in dark places so the slippery reconstructive nature of memory is a feature of the system, not a bug and stories are an amazing tool for holding onto the meaning of our past experiences. The objective facts of our lives are what they are, but the stories are about where we draw connections between things where we park the chapter breaks of our lives. Those are narrative acts, not historical acts, and the way we do that can have big implications for our well-being, and McCadams found one of the most crucial choices we make is how we tell our stories.
It’s important to underscore that most of us make these choices unconsciously. What we find in the research is that where we draw connections between the negative and the positive matters a lot so stories that we narrate as starting bad and ending good we call that a redemption sequence and stories that start good and end bad we call that a contamination sequence. The redemption sequence is “something bad happened to you but you rise from the ashes.” A contamination sequence is “things are “going pretty well but then something bad happens to you and then everything is downhill from there.” One story has an upward trajectory, the other one has a downward trajectory. This is how we narrate the experience.
Wooing the unconscious mind
Free Association
Ink Blots
Dreams
Tarot
Meditation / Mindfulness exercises
Art Therapy
Using the non-dominant hand - it is associated with the non-verbal hemisphere (right)
Sentence completion exercises
Divination
Packets
Compile into printables
Print
Dream journaling/interpretation
Bibliomancy
from Reddit’s “Explain it to me like I’m five”
What is ADHD?
At the most fundamental level, the simplest way to think about ADHD is that the front part of your brain is supposed to control the rest of your brain but it has trouble doing that. So, people with ADHD can have trouble directing their thoughts, controlling their attention, remembering things (or recalling the memory when they want it, their memory is fine, it’s just their control over the memory center is wonky), emotional regulation, sitting still or fidgeting (poor control of the motor center), and so on. But the thing is different people can have some of these more affected than others. So, one person can have a terrible memory and another can have more trouble with emotional regulation but they aren’t that forgetful. Which can make adhd look very different person to person.
But that’s not really the full story. Imagine you have asthma, but you live in a world where running is the most important thing in life. You’re taught from the time you’re a little kid that to be a successful adult you need to be a good runner. As such, school is nothing but gym class all day. You come home and have exercise homework. All your chores are exercise chores (maybe you have to run on a treadmill to power the dishwasher or something, just go with it lol). But you have undiagnosed and untreated asthma.
How would you feel about yourself and your performance in this world? Would you feel accomplished and sure of yourself? Or would you feel like you’re never good enough, that you’re always failing at tasks you’re asked to do, and that everything kind of always seems to suck for you?
Probably the latter. And this is really at the heart of what it’s like living with ADHD. Because in our world we’re not asked to “run”, but we’re expected to use all of the executive function skills affected by ADHD at a high level, constantly day in and day out. We’re expected to sit still, not fidget, pay attention, remember large volumes of complicated information and details, remember basic information like the name of the new person you just met, to control and regulate our emotions and our actions, and so on. And because we have adhd, we struggle with these things so, invariably, regardless of which particular adhd things we struggle with, we all feel like we’re constantly failing or messing up at, well, life.
If I could only ask my patients one question to determine if they had ADHD or not, it’d be that one: do you feel like you mess up or fail a lot, and how long have you felt that way? In the end, the only question that truly matters. It doesn’t matter what specific things they mess up at. It only matters how doing these adhd things makes them feel, and the answer, invariably, is that it makes them feel terrible.
Embodiment
Neuroscience now recognizes that the brain and the body are so intertwined that they cannot be thought of separately. Cognitive science, which as recently as 30 years ago was a field intent on understanding cognition as a closed system, has begun—based on a broad swath of interdisciplinary research—to embrace the theory that cognition is embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive (the 4E cognition model). These ideas are no longer a fringe movement. Even psychotherapy is embracing more embodied techniques to treat trauma and to supplement talk therapy.
What would it mean to live in a world in which we understand that the body has knowledge and subjectivity? Or rather that part of our “thinking” process happens in the body. Embodiment is not an idea. It is not a theory. It is a state of being in which you feel connected and attuned to your body and senses. It is a state in which the mind listens to the body. Ultimately, it is a state of being in which the division between mind and body dissolves.
You feel embodiment when you drop down from your thinking mind into the feeling body.
Life cataloging
On the Self
A soul living in a body. Writing about spiritual relationships, with GOD, ancestors, nature, and the subconscious self.
On My Marriage
Writing on the forming of a relationship, the trauma that happens within, and I’ve responded/grown through it
On My Mama
Writing on parenting, parent relationships, The things done right, the intentions, and Generational Trauma
On My Body
body/mind connection. Writing on my relationship with my physical self, includes the mind, reflects on sexuality, eating disorders, intimacy,