Lost Touch

I wonder sometimes how people can have views so out of touch with reality; and I don't mean this in the political sense at all. Believing what one sees on television is one matter, believing what you see with your own eyes is another entirely. I see people, myself included, draw conclusions from their own observations that don't align with reality at all.

For example, I told a fellow, "You ought to measure this," so that the thing we were laying out might by measured properly. He took the measuring tape and laid it across the span to be measured, but didn't actually apply one end of the tape to one end and look at the markings at the other end to get an accurate measurement. On the misunderstanding end myself, I had someone tell me quite plainly that on a list of names I had assembled, three were wrong. It took me ten minutes and several more times asking to wrap my head around that small fact.

I haven't brought this observation up to bemoan its existence, but to ponder its origin. How is it that one becomes disconnected from reality such that one's own senses become untrustworthy, not in sensing but in interpretation?

This question can be potentially answered with another, rhetorical question: Who has the more turbulent emotional life: the recluse or the social butterfly? The natural answer would seem to be the butterfly, as they would tend to put themselves in more variegated and dramatic situations, but reality is emphatically opposite. The butterfly may have more radical adventures, but their external and internal experiences line up. When they're angry they fight, sad they cry, bitter they pout, happy they laugh and dance. The reclusive is not so effusive. Instead, this being his titular characteristic, he secludes himself. Alone, one can express or not express anything without external consequence, and the recluse tends towards the latter. This is the source of the disconnect from reality: when an individual, unchecked by their peers, suffers some experience and does not acknowledge it to themselves, whether for pride, fear, or naiveté.

(It bears allusion that Tom Hanks, when confronted with true seclusion on his island, conjured himself a companion to avoid this very problem. External observation, it then seems implied, is required for the maintenance of sanity. This, I theorize, is also why the homeless become such shells of themselves, and why talking to them is like visiting another planet. Totally alone and uncared for, in a much more real way than the terminally online, they rocket down this path I'm about to describe.)

That is the source, and if continually unchecked it snowballs into greater disconnect. What happens is the non-self-acknowledgement creates a lie. A person feels, for instance, "I do not feel sad," when in reality they have some great cause to be. The body does not forget though, as the adage goes: The body keeps the score. The lie can cause a protracted tension that wears a person down, causing them to become inattentive by interior exhaustion. Or it may cause them to become deaf to others' feelings of the same sort, in this case sadness. (These feelings can be context-specific too.) This happens because when the occasion arises to feel that emotion again, for example to empathize with another's emotion of the same sort, the body, prepares to unleash not only a normal response, but also the original emotion that was stored away back when it was first unacknowledged and unexpressed. The mind, sensing that the oncoming emotional response exceeds the appropriate level for the situation, shuts everything down. Now one unaddressed experience has turned into two, and the snowball is begun. One's interior state drifts from reality, causing further faulty experiences, until they can said to be out of touch with reality.

These out-of-touch emotional experiences begin to color even the facts of situations, as reality bends within the mind to enable acceptable interpretations. What gets really complicated is when these out-of-touch beliefs cause a person to interpret situations, on a factual level, incorrectly. Not only are they having corrupted emotional experiences, but the "normal" emotional experience, as in the one they would have if they were healthy, is a fiction. Based on their corrupted worldview, a third answer, corresponding neither to their displayed emotional response nor the "normal" response, is what they should experience. In order to process the emotion, that third answer must be learned, which is a difficult introspective task for the person and an impossibility for anyone trying to help them. This is how a person gets so spun around that they say, "I don't know what to feel anymore." They lost the thread of their own life, and it's become so snarled they can't untangle it.

A tangled knot analogy is actually a helpful way to deliver some hope, to close this on a positive note. Anyone who's untangled a bird-nested fishing line knows that a seemingly hopeless situation can be resolved with patience. You don't have to figure it all out at once, you simply find a piece of thread and work from there. By this analogy, to a person who feels lost and disconnected, I say first reconnect. Don't try to figure out any of your problems right away, but first find a safe space, I recommend the Lord, and a community to help regulate you. Seek out simple, ordinary experiences, and don't seek to have any certain reaction to them but pay attention to what you feel. Most likely it'll be weak and passing, but that's okay. This is just the first bit of thread. Stick with the same pattern of seeking positive experiences and releasing them from expectation, and you'll begin to build an expectation for how you'll react. This is a thread, you've found the thread again. Once you have it, you can build momentum from there, simultaneously forging ahead and untangling the past. Maybe you'll get lucky and have a big moment that cuts out the tangle, maybe it'll take years of untangling. I can say it's been the latter for me.

Lastly, that thread analogy is the exact on used by Our Lady Undoer of Knots. Sometimes, threads are too difficult for us to untangle ourselves. The experiences that first disconnected us from reality are too remote to recreate, because they happened far away, at a different maturity level, or in a way that we never realized it even happened. But the Divine Mother, with access to the omnipotence of God, knows what's needed to untangle those knots. By her intercession it becomes possible.