Lately I’ve been writing blog posts in two different formats: the regular style, like this one, and a plural style, where I work things through in conversation between two different sides of myself. This time, as an experiment, I’ve tried writing on the same theme in both formats. You can read the plural conversation version here. Feel free to pick just the format that works best for you. Or, if you like, you can read them both. I’m fascinated by the different potentials opened up by the different formats, and how they compare for readers, so feel free to give me any feedback about that.

One of the big ideas in Pete Walker’s book on cPTSD is the sense of trauma response as a combination of fear and shame. That’s very much how it is for me. When something triggers me I tend to feel somewhere on the spectrum from worry to utter panic, combined with somewhere on the spectrum from self-doubt to self-loathing. In emotional flashback I’m convinced that I’m in huge danger and that I’m a terrible person.

Understanding that this combination of feelings probably underlies most of my stuck patterns in how I relate to myself, others, my work, and the world. I’ve tried to get curious about them and to make it my business to understand the anatomy of my trauma response. Of course my experience and understanding may not resonate for everybody, but I expect these conclusions apply beyond just me.

Fear/shame and other/self

As I’ve mentioned before it’s not always possible – or advisable – to sit in the overwhelm of an emotional flashback. But what I have been doing is to pause when I feel the flicker or flame of fear/shame coming up and to ask myself what might be happening. I’ve also been reflecting after a period of flashback about what might’ve been going on for me.

Where I’ve got to is that nearly always a triggering situation had occurred which I felt required to make a choice between myself and somebody else: either I could choose the other person and hurt myself, or I could choose myself and hurt somebody else. Sometimes it’s more that a memory of a previous such time has come up, or that I’m imagining a future situation which might put me in that predicament.

This self/other dilemma is something I’ve had a sense of for years. The new piece is to map this onto the fear/shame element of trauma. I feel the combination of fear and shame in those moments because choosing the other person over myself equals fear, and choosing myself over the other person equals shame. This makes it feel an unbearable choice.

The fear(others)/shame(self) spectrum

It seems extraordinary how this simple binary – fear(others)/shame(self) – underlies practically everything I struggle with: from something as massive as a break-up to something as tiny as deciding what task to do next today.

Big fear(others)/shame(self) moments

When I’m deciding whether to walk away from a relationship which is hurting me, it generally manifests as a sense of terror at the possibility of remaining in such pain in order to avoid hurting the other person and a sense of debilitating shame at imagining being the person who walks away and hurts the person they love. A similarly huge fear/shame response generally accompanies finding out that something I did in my work hurt somebody.

Small fear(others)/shame(self) moments

When I’m trying to figure out what task to do next today, sometimes the choice of doing something ‘productive’ like writing a blog post or answering emails can be accompanied by an almost imperceptible frisson of fear that I’m falling into my old habit of overriding my self-consent in order to do something for others. The choice of doing something ‘unproductive’ and gentle for myself – like watching TV or going for a walk – can be accompanied by a similarly tiny frisson of shame that this behaviour – and therefore I – am somehow bad, or at least less good than the alternative. A similarly small fear/shame response might flicker up, for example, when deciding which book to read next: one I think I should read or a ‘guilty pleasure’.

I could probably map pretty much every situation I struggle with on a spectrum between these big and small examples.

Where does the fear(others)/shame(self) binary come from?

I think there are many strands which come together to create – and reinforce – this fear(others)/shame(self) binary. 

In one sense it is a human tension, which existential philosophers in particular have written a good deal about. Sartre’s famous quote ‘hell is other people’ is all about his notion that we’re constantly forced to choose between objectifying ourselves for other people, and/or objectifying other people for ourselves. This is something I’ve written about a lot in my work on conflict. I love Terry Pratchett’s Granny Weatherwax quote for this: ‘Sin is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’

In another sense this fear(others)/shame(self) binary is a product of – at least exacerbated by – neoliberal capitalism, because within this system we are trained to experience ourselves as atomised individuals in competition with others. More from me and Justin about how that works here.

Finally the trauma component of the fear(others)/shame(self) binary is important. Pete Walker – and others – locate the starting points of developmental trauma in the lack – or loss – of protection and care. This is another binary that we could see as mapping onto fear(others)/shame(self). When we are protected we are safe enough and have no need to fear others. When we are cared for we know that we are okay in who we are and have no need to feel shame.

Personally I have a memory of a pivotal moment when I became locked into this fear/shame binary way of thinking, feeling, and relating. At nine I moved to a school where it seemed that I was being taught, daily, by my peers that everything about me was unacceptable. My struggles with this were hard for people at home so I felt increasingly unacceptable there too. 

I realised that either I could hide this unacceptable person that I was and shape myself into what others said I should be, in order to belong and be approved of. Or I could ‘be myself’ and continue to feel isolated, unwelcome, and disliked. I chose the former: fear(others) over shame(self). Interestingly I’ve since had conversations with people who felt faced with the same choice and went the other way. At that age it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to find options beyond the binary.

The four Fs and the fear(others)/shame(self) binary

If we see the four F trauma responses – fight, flight, freeze and fawn – as habitual styles of relating to ourselves, others, and the world, then we can also see them as four different ways of trying to avoid those horrible fear/shame feelings. Of course most of us employ a combination of these different strategies.

• In fight we blame others, attack out, and attempt to control others so we don’t risk anyone overriding us (fear) and don’t have to feel at all responsible ourselves (shame).
• In flight we keep busy doing things. This means we don’t have to slow down and feel the fear that we may be prioritising winning other’s approval over our own needs. It means we avoid addressing the shame that means no amount of ‘success’ will ever mean we’re good enough.
• In freeze we distract ourselves constantly from having to face the fear that we might not be protecting ourselves well enough, and the shame that we might not be okay. That may be with social media, TV, food, alcohol, or whatever our mode of avoidance is.
• In fawn we become what we think we need to be in order to please others. We hope this will mean we can avoid the shame of realising we’re not really acceptable. We hope that if we are ‘good enough’ then other people won’t hurt us and we won’t have to feel that fear.

But none of these strategies work. In fact they all fetch us right back in the horrendous fear/shame place that we were trying so hard to avoid.

• Fighters will probably hear more and more from others that we hurt people and are ‘bad’ (shame). The more we defend against hearing this, the louder and more attacking and intrusive those voices are likely to get (fear).
• Fleers are going to have to go faster and faster, overriding ourselves more and more, in an attempt to outrun our feelings. We may well start to feel the underlying fear of what we’re doing to ourselves. We risk overstretching, burnout and the accompanying shame of not being able to do anything any more.
• With freeze, the fear tends to get louder and louder the more we distract ourselves because we’re not listening to what it’s telling us about how we’re failing to protect ourselves. We may also face the shame of realising that we haven’t been there for others.
• Fawn folks are going to keep fetching back up in fear/shame because we can’t sustain turning ourselves into something for others long term. However hard we try to be good, others will hurt us, indeed we may be particularly drawn to relationships in which that’s likely to happen. And however much we try to be something pleasing and good for others it will be unsustainable and they will see what we’ve been trying to hide.

You could also see it that in the forced binary choice between fear(others) and shame(self), flight and fawn choose fear(others) over shame(self), and fight and freeze choose shame(self) over fear(others). Flight and fawn are both more about being-for-others in order to get approval, recognition, love, or belonging. Fight and freeze are both more about being-for-yourself either by blaming, attacking or controlling others, or by disappearing into self distraction or avoidance. 

So perhaps fight and fawn get used to managing the fear which comes when overriding themselves for others. They find the shame which comes with standing up for themselves intolerable. For fight and freeze it’s the other way round. Certainly as I’ve moved towards balancing my go-to strategies of flight with freeze, and fawn with fight, I’ve noticed a tip towards more shame and less fear, rather than the other way around.

So what can we do?

So far so bleak right?! There’s already a lot in my other posts about how we can notice the flicker, flame, and fire of the fear/shame response, work with emotional flashbacks, and shift our stuck patterns. Here I want to focus on two things which I haven’t written so much about yet, but which have been hugely helpful to me recently: welcoming fear/shame with gratitude, and shifting out of fear/shame logic.

Welcoming fear/shame with gratitude

This week it dawned on me that pretty much everything I’d been doing till this point was still with the aim of stopping the fear/shame response. This is pretty understandable given that the feeling feels utterly horrendous to me. When the flicker of fear/shame arises, a previously pleasant day becomes tinged with doom. There is an additional layer of fear that it might get worse, and shame that that could mean I won’t be able do the things I had promised to others. When a full flashback hits I feel small and incapable, terrible about myself, and under huge threat. Who would want to feel like that?

Of course I’m also an advocate of staying with feelings, but the trauma literature has helped me to see that this is not always the best strategy with trauma responses. Staying with intense trauma feelings can be retraumatizing and keep your body and brain locked in trauma responses, making it more – rather than less – likely that it will keep happening.

However, trying to avoid these feelings, freaking out at the first sign of them, and attempting to get rid of them was not working for me either, to say the least! Conversations with my therapist and listening to a new Pema Chödrön audio got me thinking about whether there might be another way. When the feelings were up I decided to try to welcome them warmly as part of the full experience that I was having in that moment. I guess it’s that idea that I’ve written about before of holding everything in an open hand rather than grasping hold of it or hurling it away.

What this looked like for me was pausing the moment I felt the flicker, flame, or fire of fear/shame and sitting – often in my window – trying to be with the whole moment that I was in (the sounds, the sensations, the thoughts, the feelings). This moment included – but wasn’t restricted to – the fear/shame element which often manifested as churning compulsive thoughts, a tight chest, an adrenaline lump in the throat, a sense of contraction, and feelings of anxiety and being a bad person. I tried to welcome those aspects of my experience – while not making them the entirety of my experience. I even said ‘you’re welcome here’ and tried to hold them with warmth.

What surprised me was a sense of gratitude that started to come up. I realised that previously in my life I have managed to cover over this fear/shame feeling with my four F strategies, stuck patterns, etc. Now the feeling is so strong that it’s having none of it! Also it seems to have flipped from a preference for fear(others) over shame(self) to the opposite. The fear I feel every time I risk overriding myself – even in small ways – is so intense that I can’t do it to myself any more. This means that I can’t abandon myself, even if it does mean feeling a lot of shame when I set boundaries or walk away from a situation that is hurting me. 

It feels like this fear/shame feeling is protecting me: warning me when a situation has arisen where I risk hurting myself. Maybe it has always been trying to protect me. I can feel grief for the times I haven’t listened to it in the past, and gratitude for its continued presence and the fact that I am listening to it now.

So now I can – sometimes – sit with fear/shame and say ‘thank-you’ as well as ‘you’re welcome here’. I know that the feeling is probably trying to tell me that I’m risking overriding myself in some way, even if it does feel like an overreaction to a small situation – or even to a memory or an imagined event. Paradoxically, of course, when I listen to fear/shame in this way it doesn’t have to shout quite so loudly.

Shifting out of fear/shame logic

The other thing I’ve been doing is recognising that fear/shame is rooted in binary logic. Some of my favourite thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir and bell hooks have challenged the self/other binary, suggesting that there are ways to engage mutually with others, supporting each others’ projects reciprocally, and valuing ourselves and others equally. It’s not a matter of pendulum swinging from others-over-self (fear) to self-over-others (shame). It’s about how we can hold all lives, bodies, and labour as equally valuable, and understand ourselves as inevitably interdependent and interconnected. 

This is partly why I make such a big project of exploring how we can treat ourselves and others consensually. Fear(other)/shame(self) logic is inevitably non-consensual: either we override our own consent or another’s consent. For me the consent project is all about finding alternative – mutual and ethical – ways of relating to ourselves and others in all aspects of life.

I read an interesting idea in Jessica Fern’s forthcoming book Polysecure from the attachment and trauma literature. This is that for good relationships with ourselves and others we need both protection and connection. Protection requires keeping ourselves safe-enough, having boundaries, not allowing others to hurt us, etc. Connection requires being open, vulnerable, and real with others.

It struck me that being stuck in fear/shame logic doesn’t allow for either of these things. In fear we override ourselves for others and don’t give ourselves protection. In shame we cover over our vulnerability in case others see how ‘bad’ we are, so we don’t allow ourselves real connection. 

Instead of choosing fear(other) or shame(self) it’s about choosing protection and connection. This moves us from an either/or binary to a both/and. Also it neatly maps onto Pete’s sense that we fetch up in fear/shame trauma responses because we lost or lacked protection and/or care, and that finding protection and care within – and from our team of outer relationships – is the way forward.

What shifting out of fear/shame logic looks like – for me – is, again, pausing when I feel the flicker, flame, or fire of fear/shame. I sit with myself and often try to talk from a kind, wise voice to a more vulnerable child voice: the one who is stuck in the fear/shame response. I invite that child side to reflect on how whatever has triggered me is a fear/shame thing. 

Usually it’s fairly easy to see how this situation feels like a choice between others (fear) or myself (shame). Generally naming this, in itself, results in feeling a bit more space or expansiveness around it. I usually try not to rush to any decision right then, but I remind the part of myself who is caught in fear/shame that there are always other options beyond choosing other or self: that this is a false binary, albeit one that is very understandable to fall into.

In exploring how this fear/shame logic works I’ve also realised that it’s understandable to obsess over past memories as I can find myself doing. It’s an attempt to prove to myself that the situation was bad enough to warrant hurting another person, in order to avoid shame. But it’s also retraumatizing to keep going over these memories, putting me back in fear. It similarly makes sense to hypervigilently go over situations where I might have fucked up, or to imagine future scenarios playing out in order to figure out how to avoid fucking up. This is all about trying to prevent shame. But again I can recognise that it’s triggering to do this, which puts me back in fear. 

Generally when I feel any flame or fire of fear/shame I park any decision-making until a time when I’m feeling clear and calm again, perhaps promising myself that I’ll check in about it over morning coffee which is often a good time for me. Once I get to that point I try to expand out to consider all options, and aim at a choice that combines protection and connection. For example, lately the eventual choice has often involved openly explaining my vulnerability to others (connection) and clearly stating my boundaries (protection). If clearness and calmness do not feel possible around this situation yet, I try to commit to going slow and refraining until I feel ready, perhaps explaining that this is what I’m doing to anyone else involved if a response is required.

I’m not saying here that any of this is easy. Believe me the last year or so of my life is living proof that it is not! This approach towards fear/shame goes against the grain of all our habits of avoidance and attempts at eradication. I know it’ll be super easy to slip back into trying to avoid recognising when fear/shame comes up, pretending it’s not really happening, distracting myself, and/or acting quickly to avoid the pain – usually in ways that override myself and give others what I think they want. I’m hoping – as with all of these blog posts – that writing it down will help new ways of being to bed in, as well as hopefully helping others who’re grappling with similar stuff. I see you!

What you can do when fear(others)/shame(self) hits:

• Notice the flicker, flame, or fire feeling (however it manifests for you: familiar bodily sensations, thoughts, feelings, habits, etc.). Name this as a fear/shame trauma response, remember how these work in the body and brain. Everything that is happening makes sense and isn’t your fault. Try to reframe it from something bad that has happened to an opportunity to get curious, understand it better, and practice new – kinder – habits.
• Pause and find somewhere you can be with it safely for some time (if this is impossible, promise yourself that you will do so as soon as you can, and do whatever you need to survive in the meantime). Slow down your breathing and talk to yourself kindly. Give yourself as long as you need. Try to spaciously feel the whole of what you’re experiencing in the moment, including all your senses, not just focusing on the fear/shame. Refrain from going into a fight, flight, freeze or fawn strategy to avoid it or act out of it.
• Welcome the fear/shame feeling with warmth and gratitude, recognising how it has helped you in the past and may well be trying to help you now if you can listen to it gently and curiously instead of grasping it or hurling it away.
• Soothe (if intense): If the feeling is too intense to stay with in this way, thank it and promise to return to it once you’re in a calmer, clearer place. Then go to activities which soothe your nervous system, or wait to address it when you can be supported through it, by a therapist or support group for example.
• Recognise (if possible): If you can stay with it, recognise how the trigger was about fear(others)/shame(self). Remember that it can be a fleeting memory or response to internal sensation as much as an external situation. No worries if you can’t identify the trigger this time. Allow any feelings that come up to be released.
• Explore once you are in a calmer, clearer place. Step out of binary fear(others)/shame(self) logic and consider all the options in relation to the triggering situation, perhaps prioritising those which combine protection and connection. 

I have also found it useful to do this as a preventative activity – just checking in with myself at several points during the day, perhaps whenever one task ends before beginning the next. I ask whether there is any fear/shame feeling around, and apply this process if there is. I keep this list on my phone to remind me of the process during the fear/shame feelings when it can be hard to access.

If you want to read about I do this stuff in real time, check out the plural version of this blog post, here.

Patreon link: If you liked this, feel free to support my Patreon, it will certainly help this self-employed person to maintain some income during these uncertain times.

Plural tag: This post was written by Beastie, with vital input from Jonathan.

The post Fear/Shame and the Anatomy of a Trauma Response appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Reading this play is actually a very accessible introduction to the ideas of the French existentialists, and particularly resonant in these days of reality TV shows which place contestants in a very similar situation to the one in which his characters find themselves.

No Exit

In No Exit, three characters (Garcin, Inez and Estelle) are, one-by-one, escorted into a drawing room and left there together, locked in. We soon discover that all have recently died and that this room is the hell to which they have been condemned for eternity. The characters initially respond in surprise that the room is nothing like the fiery pit of torture and torment which they had always imagined hell to be. However, Inez quickly realises that the idea must be that ‘each of us will act as torturer of the other two’. Whilst Estelle and Garcin try to deny that they would torment the others, and even the validity of them being in hell (perhaps it is all a mistake), Inez is more aware of their fate and resigned to her rightful damnation.

Over the course of the play, we discover that all three characters have done things that they regard as bad and/or cowardly: Inez had an affair with her cousin’s partner and he ended up killing himself, which led to his partner killing both herself and Inez, and she admits that she needs to make others suffer. Estelle became pregnant as a result of an affair and killed her daughter despite her lover begging her not to. Garcin tried to run away rather than being sent to jail as a conscientious objector, and beat and cheated on his wife. They succeed in becoming each others’ tormentors mostly by denying each other what they seek which they believed would alleviate their suffering: Estelle wants Garcin to want and desire her and Garcin wants somebody to see him as a hero and not a coward. Eventually Garcin realises that there will never be any escape from being looked upon by Inez and Estelle, and that they will never see him as he wants to be seen. This is when he delivers the famous line ‘hell is – other people!’.

Reading No Exit

Some people have simply read No Exit at face value: that it is about the kind of hell that might await these particularly (bad) people. However Sartre meant it to be a much wider comment on the human condition: other people are always hell for each other. There is some debate between Garcin, Inez and Estelle over whether they have been chosen as the ideal tormentors for one another, or whether they were simply allocated at random. It seems likely that it was the latter: the point being that any human beings thrown together would inevitably end up being hell for each other in some way.

This idea relates to Sartre’s wider philosophy: the notion that as soon as we are in the (real or even imagined) presence of another person, we begin to see ourselves through their eyes and this is the end of our freedom. In his early work Sartre only sees two ways that we can deal with this situation: either we can try to make ourselves something for the other person, or we can try to turn them into something for us. Thus in No Exit we see Estelle trying to turn herself into a desirable object for Garcin, and Garcin trying to get Inez to rescue him from his fear that he is a coward. The Look of other people has this incredible power. If only Inez (the truth-sayer) could see Garcin as not cowardly then that would mean that he is not.

However, Sartre says that such strategies are doomed to failure. Our freedom will always bubble up and we will resent trying to be what others want us to be, or we will grow weary of another person who has turned themselves into an object for us, because they will no longer have the freedom that we were originally attracted to. It is also possible to bring this existential reading together with a more psychodynamic one in the form of the transactional analysis drama triangle whereby there is always a victim, a perpetrator and a rescuer, but these roles keep switching: We see such switches throughout No Exit as freedom ensures that no role remains static for long.

There are also strong echoes of Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophies in No Exit (unsurprisingly given the close relationship between her and Sartre). There are reverberations of The Second Sex in Inez’s berating of Estelle for thinking that being a desirable object for a man is something to base her life (and even afterlife) around. And it is rather interesting for those of us who have reflected on the gendered treatment of Sartre and de Beauvoir’s work that Inez sees the truth of the situation from the start, whilst Garcin (who was oblivious) is the one who is given the show-stopping line (which just summarises what Inez has been saying all along).

Is hell other people?

This is the big question that the play raises. Are other people necessarily hell for each other? Is there another way? Garcin tries, in the play, to disengage from the others, thinking that if they all just sat there in silence it might be okay. But the futility of this demonstrates what existentialists know – that we are inevitably in-relation with others and can never truly escape their influence (even if we retreat or rebel we are doing it in relation to them).

But might there be another way of being-with-others? I’m reminded of the Jewish parable of the long spoons, where hell is a place with a magnificent feast but everyone has spoons so long that they are unable to feed themselves and they starve. Heaven is exactly the same, but people are using the spoons to feed each other. Might the heaven version of No Exit consist of the exact same three people in the exact same room, but they have found a way to feed each other?

This idea sounds something like the form of mutual, or reciprocal, relating that de Beauvoir proposes in her work (notably her Ethics of Ambiguity), which also echoes in Merleau-Ponty’s theories of intersubjectivity, and which Sartre was perhaps moving towards in his later, more Marxist influenced, writings. De Beauvoir argues that it is in all of our interests to recognise the freedom of others, not only because this is the reality of the situation, but because we need others to be free in order to trust their validations of us and to aid us in our own projects.

It seems like it is necessary for Inez, Estelle and Garcin to recognise, themselves, that their cowardice or cruelty was there, but also that it was not all that they were, and was not fixed and unchangeable. But perhaps they do require the Look of others to affirm that plurality and flexibility in themselves (they cannot use the long spoons to feed themselves). Do we inevitably regard others as objects for ourselves, or can we aspire to seeing others – and therefore ourselves – as unique, complex, changing, human beings? In fleeting moments of connection or mutuality can we experience a flash of heaven?

Find out more:

You can read No Exit here, and there are some fascinating clips and music videos based on the play if you search You Tube for No Exit.

There is a link to the drama triangle here, which comes across quite clearly in this play and represents another more psychodynamic reading.

For more on the flip side of this, I enjoyed rediscovering this old blog post: Only connect.

The post Hell is other people? appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Ruby Sparks

In the film an isolated writer (Calvin Weir-Fields) has writer’s block having published one highly successful book when he was pretty young. His therapist encourages him to write a brief account of a positive encounter with another person. He invents a scenario where he meets his perfect girlfriend in the park. Soon he is writing more and more about her because he enjoys imagining her so much. He describes her to his therapist:

Calvin: Ruby Sparks. Twenty-six years old. Raised in Dayton, Ohio.

Dr. Rosenthal: Why Dayton?

Calvin: Sounds romantic. Ruby’s first crushes were Humphrey Bogart and John Lennon. She cried the day she found out they were already dead. Ruby got kicked out of high school for sleeping with her art teacher… or maybe her Spanish teacher. I haven’t decided yet. Ruby can’t drive. She doesn’t own a computer. She hates her middle name, which is Tiffany. She always, always roots for the underdog. She’s complicated. That’s what I like best about her. Ruby’s not so good at life sometimes. She forgets to open bills or cash checks and… Her last boyfriend was 49. The one before that was an alcoholic. She can feel a change coming. She’s looking for it.

Dr. Rosenthal: Looking for what?

Calvin: Something new.

Spoiler alert: Don’t read on if you want to watch the movie without knowing what happens.

During the time that he is writing about Ruby, Calvin starts to find bits of women’s clothing around his house and things in his bathroom cabinet that don’t belong to him. Then one day he returns home to find that Ruby exists and is living with him. She believes that everything from their first encounter to her moving in with him has actually happened.

After initial confusion Calvin is delighted and throws himself into a real relationship with Ruby. The two enjoy a perfect honeymoon period captured in a movie montage of dancing, beaches and running around town. But things start to sour when Calvin introduces Ruby to his family who she loves whilst he finds them problematic. He begins to become grumpy with the very things that he created Ruby to be.

Calvin’s brother, Harry, has suggested that Calvin should continue writing about Ruby in order to make her into whatever he wants. However, even when she is getting on his nerves Calvin refuses to do this. Then Ruby begins to pull away for some independence: wanting to start a job, hanging out with her friends, and deciding to spend one night a week back at her own flat to give them some space. Calvin panics and returns to his typewriter. He writes that Ruby was sad whenever she wasn’t with Calvin. Ruby then becomes needy and tearful, unable to be parted from Calvin for a moment. Calvin writes that Ruby was effervescently happy all of the time, in order to try to keep her with him but not so demanding. This also backfires because constant happiness is hard to take, and because it is clear that Ruby isn’t choosing to be with Calvin at this point, so he writes her back to normal.

The couple return to bickering and fighting when Ruby doesn’t do what Calvin wants her to do. There is also the sense that the constant changes have taken a toll on Ruby emotionally. At a party she is left alone and flirts with Calvin’s agent. At this point Calvin explodes and tells her what she is, forcing her to do things by typing them out as she stands in front of him. Finally he stops and she runs to her room. He is struck by the horror of what he has become and leaves all of the pages that he has ever written about Ruby outside her room with a final line saying that Ruby is no longer bound by the past and that as she leaves the house she is set free.

The following morning Ruby has disappeared and Calvin is left alone to mourn. Eventually he pulls himself together and buys a computer instead of a typewriter. This was a relief to me because the main problem that I had with the film was understanding how somebody could write a perfect first draft into a typewriter! Calvin writes the story of his time with Ruby, anonymised, and it is a great success.

At the end of the film – which my facebook friends found so problematic – Calvin bumps into Ruby in the park. She is reading his new book but clearly she has forgotten everything that happened due to being set free. They have some banter similar to the first time that they met and it seems that Calvin has been given a second chance at the relationship, but this time having learnt his lessons in love.

There are probably many different readings of this film, and perhaps the way in which you read it affects how you view the ending. Two readings particularly struck me: we could understand the film as an exploration of gender in relationships (and wider society), and/or we could understand it as an examination of how people relate to each other more broadly. We don’t have to discard one reading in order to accept the other as both are possible through the same situations, and indeed the way we relate to each other is generally infused with gender. However, the latter reading perhaps invites a more sympathetic understanding of Calvin: and one in which we might be more likely to wish him the redemption he receives in the final scene.

Deconstructing the manic pixie dream girl

Under a gendered reading we could see Ruby Sparks as an explicit deconstruction of the manic pixie dream girl trope in fiction. In this common romantic plot, a man’s rather empty emotionless life is given meaning when he meets a wacky, quirky woman whose wild and childlike ways help him to learn to love and to free himself from his self-imposed constraints. 

Clearly this trope was on the authors’ minds when they were writing the film. When Calvin first describes the woman that he is writing about to his brother, Harry, Harry replies: ‘quirky, messy women whose problems only make them endearing are not real.’

Not only does the film expose the lack of realism in the manic pixie dream girl trope, it also directly challenges the various specifically problematic aspects of this trope, particularly the way in which it infantilises women and the approach it takes to mental health.

When Calvin tries to justify Ruby to his brother saying ‘she’s a person’, Harry responds ‘you haven’t written a person, okay? You’ve written a girl’. There are echoes here of Beauvoir’s theories that men are regarded as human beings whilst women are seen as being something other than that, and that part of this othering involves infantalising women such that femininity is bound up with being childlike and non-threatening. Interestingly this all relates to freedom. Men are expected to embrace their freedom – and the responsibilities which go with it – in life, whilst women are dissuaded from doing this and encouraged rather to be ‘for-others’, making themselves into the dutiful daughter or the perfect partner, for example, and remaining in a childlike state where they do not embrace their freedom. It is interesting that Ruby explicitly links the freedom and infantilisation towards the end of the film when she responds to Calvin’s attempts to control her saying ‘I’m not your child!’ Calvin’s assumptions in this matter are clear given that he isn’t even willing for Ruby to have a job in a coffee shop or to go out with friends because these things would be for her rather than for him. There is also something particularly sinister in Harry’s argument that Calvin should keep writing Ruby after she appears: ‘for men everywhere, you’ve got to take advantage of this’.

The continued popularity of the manic pixie dream girl trope in indie movies of the last decade such as Garden State or Elizabethtown suggests that the ideal of the woman who is childlike and non-threatening and exists ‘for-others’ is alive and well, and Ruby Sparks does well to reveal it and to criticise it. Calvin’s misogyny is clear in the way in which he describes his previous girlfriend as a ‘heartless slut’. However bad her behaviour may have been, the term ‘slut’ is bound up with the sexual double standard, suggesting that women are a different species to be judged on different terms to men, and ‘heartless’ also suggests that women should properly be emotional and nurturing and that it is problematic for them to move away from such stereotypes.

The manic pixie dream girl trope also echoes wider societal representations of women as ‘mad rather than bad’. Because women cannot be seen as having freedom or responsibility, if they behave in ways which are difficult or different this tends to be regarded as a sign of mental ill-health rather than as morally problematic or criminal. Statistics on the numbers of women and men diagnosed with mental illnesses, and convicted of crimes, support the suggestion that there is still a tendency to view women as mad and men as bad (although there are certainly shifts in this over time, and intersections with race, class and other factors have an influence).

In addition, the manic pixie dream girl has to walk a fine tightrope between being mad enough but not too mad, akin to the tightrope of the sexual double standard where she has to be sexual enough but not a slut. When Ruby becomes properly depressed, and then manic, after Calvin has written her those ways, it is clearly unacceptable and reason enough for him to make further attempts at radical changes. There is an interesting commentary here on women’s mental health in (heterosexual) relationships. From The Yellow Wallpaper, through writing on body image, authors have argued that women’s attempts to make themselves into something ‘for-others’ in general, and ‘for-men’ in particular, can take a huge toll on their well-being. Kitty Stryker has a great post about real life attraction to manic pixie dream girls and why this is problematic for those involved, particularly regarding mental health.

If we read Ruby Sparks as a criticism of the manic pixie dream girl trope in general, and the differential and hierarchical treatment of men and women in wider society in particular, then perhaps we can understand why my facebook friends found the ending so appalling. Why should a man who objectified a woman – trying to shape her into exactly what he wanted her to be, infantalising her, messing with her mental health, denying her freedom, and dictating her sexuality – be offered a second chance?

One way to answer this is to point to the impossibility of stepping outside of culture. I think Ruby Sparks challenges the viewer (of whatever gender) to ask themselves whether they have honestly ever treated a woman in this kind of way. If they can’t answer that they haven’t, then perhaps they need to ask the same sympathy for Calvin as they would want for themselves.

Going further than this, perhaps we can – in some ways – regard Calvin as all of us in all relationships, not just as a man with a woman in this particular relationship.

Treating each other as things

Something that Beauvoir and Sartre agreed upon is our tendency is to treat other people as objects for ourselves in relationships. Terry Pratchett nicely captures this when his character, Granny Weatherwax, says ‘sin, young man, is when you treat people as things, including yourself, that’s what sin is’. It may be sin, but it is a sin that we’re all guilty of pretty much every day of our lives. And it is perhaps particularly prevalent in romantic relationships when we are thrust into close proximity with another person on a regular basis, when we get to know them better than we do other people in our lives, and when we come to be particularly dependent on them for various aspects of our material and emotional well-being (such as our confidence being linked to their approval, or our ability to do things being linked to their income and/or responses to our behaviour).

In a way we could be impressed by quite how long Calvin waits until he starts to try to change Ruby. It is only when he really fears losing her that he returns to his typewriter. It is worth asking ourselves whether we wouldn’t be tempted to use such a mechanism if we had it available to us, and in what ways we do something similar but with less awareness of it. Women’s and men’s magazines and self-help style books are consistent in their attempts to help us to figure out and play the ‘opposite sex’ in order to get them to do what we want them to do, sexually or otherwise. The ‘beauty and the beast’ myth of a woman being able to change a man plays out in relationships all the time, when people attempt to trick, cajole or nag their partner into self-promotion, diets or better domestic habits. It is important to admit to ourselves the temptation to make little tweaks and alterations to a partner, at the same time as holding them back from changing in directions that we are not comfortable with, or feel threatened by. And even if we don’t actually do anything, do we still give a clear message to our partner that we are not really okay with who and how they are with a sigh, a gesture or a hurt expression?

Ruby Sparks nicely captures some of the problems with this way of behaving, beyond the – hopefully obvious – ethical implications. Calvin wants his free-living Calvin-loving manic pixie dream girl, but he doesn’t want her too free, or too manic, or too dependent on him. Altering one aspect of her which he doesn’t like often results in altering other parts of her that he really did like. And the realities of living with another person are that there will inevitably be times when you don’t mesh. It is therefore difficult when Ruby is either dependent or independent, sad or happy, passive or active.

For me one of the most horrific moments in Ruby Sparks is not when Calvin is explicitly re-writing Ruby, but a much more mundane moment. She is singing a lovey-dovey made up song, off-key, in the kitchen. He is lying on the couch. He looks up and snaps something like ‘I’m trying to read’. This attempt, by Calvin, to make Ruby into a thing for himself, is all the more disturbing perhaps because it is impossible for the viewer not to see a mirror of themselves in the scenario.

As Sartre and Weatherwax both point out, there is a temptation to make ourselves into things for others which is just as powerful (and just as much of a sin?) as the temptation to make others into things for ourselves. Perhaps one of the main things that Calvin wants from Ruby is for somebody to love him for the way he is. And perhaps his own dislike of the way he is was responsible for his previous isolation and for his seeking help through therapy.

Again this path is fraught with problems. If we can find (or, in Calvin’s case, create) a partner who loves, respects and is fascinated by, us as we are then we will likely be in constant fear of losing this. Thus we try to mold ourselves into what we think they want us to be and/or the sides of ourselves that we were displaying early in the relationship when they fell for us. This is unsustainable so we end up failing and hating ourselves or resenting our partner for constraining our freedom in this way. Or perhaps, like the rewritten Ruby, our partner continues to see us as marvellous whatever we do and we eventually come to distrust them and to be frustrated with this because we know – ourselves – that it is not true and we are really an imperfect flawed human. As Calvin wearily puts it ‘she wasn’t happy. So I made her happy… and now she’s like this all the time.

It is often harder to see how self-objectification hurts anyone other than ourselves, but it does. Insisting that another person sees us in a certain way is unkind, as is letting them feel responsible for our well-being, guilty for hurting us when we suffer, and therefore constrained in their own freedom.

Why we need a happy ending: Calvin is us

If I’m honest with myself it’s quite probable that they gave Ruby Sparks a happy ending because they originally had a more bleak and realistic ending which didn’t go down well with Hollywood focus groups. If I’m super honest with myself perhaps I’m just a sucker for a happy ending myself and all this attempt to justify it is part of my own desire to believe that there is something possible beyond the Sartrean view that ‘hell is other people’ because we are doomed to keep objectifying each others and ourselves.

Despite having a more nuanced view of relationships than Sartre – recognising the tangle of ways in which gender and other aspects are messed up with our overall human tendency to objectify – Beauvoir was also more optimistic than Sartre about relationships, influencing his own later work which also began to see a way out of objectification.

Beauvoir thought that mutual relationships were possible and that in these people would embrace each other’s freedom, and their own, and support each other in their projects in life.

We could see the end of Ruby Sparks as a move towards this mode of relating. Calvin sees the horror of what he has done to Ruby and he sets her free. Her well-being now means more to him than continuing his relationship with her, which is perhaps the ultimate sign of embracing of another person’s freedom. He is willing to go through grief and pain in order to stop treating somebody in this way. He has seen the suffering that regarding another person as a thing causes.

I wish Calvin a happy ending with Ruby because I think that we are all Calvin. Whoever we are we will have treated other people – probably the other people who we love the most – in similar ways to the ways in which Calvin treats Ruby. And if we look closely we can also see the problems in the ways in which Calvin treats himself: thinking that he is not okay and needing somebody else to prove to him that he is. We’ve probably all done that too.

So saying that Calvin is undeserving of a happy ending is tantamount to saying that we are not either and, whilst this may indeed be true, it also seems rather harsh.

Like Beauvoir I believe that mutual relationships are possible. They are not something we can ever achieve 24/7. We are bound to slip into objectification all the time and need to avoid beating ourselves up for it because expecting constant perfection is another way of treating ourselves as things. But mutual relationships are something to aspire to: an ethics to commit to in our relations with others and with ourselves. We can admit to ourselves, and others, when we have fallen into objectification. We can increase our awareness of the impact of this, and the ways in which our various forms of self- and other- objectification are impacted by power imbalances of gender, race, class, age and so many other aspects. And we can keep committing to doing something different: recognising and valuing the freedom of ourselves – and others – equally, and aiming for relationships of mutual support.

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Here I’ll say a bit more about the author, summarise his argument, and say what I find inspiring about the essay, and where I feel it is limited or problematic.

Victor Frankl

Victor Frankl (1905-1997) was a professor of neurology and psychiatry who founded a type of therapy known as logotherapy. This was the thrid type of therapy to come out of the University of Vienna Medical School (following Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology). However, it was a lot more existential in nature than these more psychodynamic approaches, and has gone on to have a significant influence on the field of existential psychotherapy more broadly.

Frankl spent three years in Auschwitz, Dachau, and other concentration camps during World War II and these experiences had a marked impact on his philosophy and his therapy. They are movingly recounted in his book Man’s Search for Meaning. Following the war, Frankl returned to Vienna where he practised, and wrote and published over thirty books. He was also a visiting professor at Harvard.

Tragic Optimism

The Case for Tragic Optimism basically advocates a certain way of living, that is saying ‘yes’ to life in the face of its tragic elements. Here is a quick summary of the argument:

Frankl states that life involves three inevitable kinds of tragedy, the ‘tragic triad’:

1. Pain and suffering,
2. Guilt, because we are free to make choices in our lives, and are responsible for the impact of those choices, and
3. Death, and knowing that our life is transient.

He says that it is hard to find meaning in the face of such tragedy, but that if we do not, then our sense of meaninglessness lies behind our experiences of:

1. Depression,
2. Aggression, and
3. Addiction.

He also argues that meaninglessness is a particular issue in current western societies (when he was writing in 1984) where the youth see themselves as having ‘no future’ and people ‘have enough to live by but nothing to live for’ (p.142).

Frankl then puts forward three ways in which we can find meaning in our lives:

1. Through our work or deeds,
2. Through experiences or encounters with other people (e.g. love), and
3. Through rising above, and growing from, the inevitable suffering which we will experience.

So Frankl is advocating that we make meaning from all three kinds of tragedy:

1. Pain and suffering – from learning from the experience and finding meaning in it,
2. Guilt – by taking responsibility for our actions, and
3. Death – by living our life as if it was for the second time, knowing how we got it wrong the first time.

Frankl says that it is easy, in the face of inevitable tragedy, to fall in to nihilsm or to chase after things like happiness, success or youth instead of seeking meaning, especially in a culture which seems to encourage such pursuits. However, he is clear that the quest for meaning is the only one which he considers worthwhile. He suggests that seeking happiness is a form of ‘hyperintention’: Like trying to get to sleep, or trying to have an orgasm, it is one of those things that if we try too hard to make it happen we will be even less likely to achieve it. For Frankl the only true way to happiness is through finding meaning.

Discussion of the Essay

There’s much to like in this essay, but I also have some  reservations about some of the arguments.

The Potential of Tragic Optimism

First of all, life does contain a great deal of tragedy, and I think it is useful to acknowledge this rather than denying it. It is interesting that Frankl highlighted suffering and death as inevitable facts of life (in common with Buddhist, and other existential, philosophers), but that he also included guilt, which other writers rarely talk about. Perhaps the experience of surviving the holocaust might have led him to reflect upon guilt more than most.

The pain of meaninglessness also resonates as many of our darkest and most troubling times are located in such experiences. It is hard, or even impossible, to capture the feeling of meaninglessness in words, and  it is an experience which is kept private, and taboo, perhaps more than any other. We may express anger, sadness, joy, and fear, but the expression of meaninglessness is often shunned by other people, as if it were contagious. It is also dealt with quite poorly in mental health systems, perhaps because it requires an intuitive and nurturing response which isn’t what professionals tend to be trained in.

In terms of Frankl’s suggestions for finding meaning, this resonates with my experience of writing and trying to get published this year. First of all I certainly found meaning in the deed of writing the book. When it wasn’t immediately taken up by a publisher, I found that another way to meaning through it was in giving it to a few people to read and sharing an encounter with them through that. Finally, I found that it was useful to move away from a focus on striving for the accomplishment of publishing, to a decision to find meaning through the process of learning about how to get published, and through finding that I could deal with the inevitable pain of rejection that is part of this process. It seemed that perhaps cultivating all three paths to meaning (particularly the last one, as a fall back option) was a good way of ensuring a sense of meaning and fulfilment in life.

Problems with Tragic Optimism

One problem with Frankl’s ideas is with the contradiction between the suggestion that it is good to pursue meaning, but not to pursue other things (e.g. happiness, success, etc.) Why is meaning a special case of something that it is okay to pursue. Perhaps, just like pursuing sleep or happiness too vigorously, seeking meaning too desperately would also inevitably prevent us from finding it.

My own way of dealing with meaninglessness in life, as well as employing many of Frankl’s suggestions, has also been to embrace it as an inevitable part of life which will happen with some regularity. There will be times – perhaps quite frequently – when we feel that our projects are pointless in the grand scheme of things, or when the world feels an overwhelming and cold place to live in, or when disconnections and conflicts with others feel unbearable and we feel utterly broken by life. If we see such times as evidence that we are ‘getting it wrong’ and try desperately to find some meaning quickly, we are – perhaps – likely to spiral even further into hopelessness. When we have such moments, it can be useful to focus on the very basic mundane activities of life (walking the dog, making our breakfast, having a shower), getting on with it until it has passed. And sometimes we just have to be with the horror of the meaninglessness while it is there without trying to change it, and without being able to do anything whilst it is happening.

Frankl also seemed to imply that meaning was ‘out there’ (or ‘in us’) somewhere to be found if we searched for it, and that disagreeing with this was a form of nihilism. Philosophers such as Sartre and de Beauvoir  hold that we create our own meanings but that there is no intrinsic meaning in life. In fact, perhaps facing this fact is also a vital part of finding meaning (recognising that we create our own meanings and could create them differently).

Finally,  Frankl’s philosophy seems to be rather individualistic. The focus appeared to be very much on each person finding their own meaning, rather than any collective meaning-making (although, you could argue, that both guilt and death are very relational experiences as one is all about the impact we have on others, and the other is only something we understand through seeing others die).

Frankl seems to see the ultimate in meaning as being the person who can ‘hold their head high’ in the face of suffering: for example, the people he saw who found meaning even in the hell of the concentration camps, or a person rendered paraplegic who insisted that ‘I broke my neck, it didn’t break me.’ Whilst such examples are incredibly inspiring, they neglect the different circumstances of people’s lives. Surely it is far more easy for some, than others, to find meaning: for example, for those in a position of relative privilege, and who have resources and lots of support, compared to those who are oppressed, marginalised and alienated in various ways. Frankl’s philosophy could lead to a dangerous kind of victim blame where we judge people for not being able to make meaning from their suffering.

Also, Frankl seemed to argue that it was never okay for somebody to choose death over life, and such a choice could be considered meaningful (and who is anybody else to judge this anyway?)

Questions to Consider

• Is life inevitably tragic?
• Are pain, guilt and death the only, and inevitable, tragedies we will experience?
• Do you agree with Frankl that we can’t force ourselves to be optimistic, or happy?
• Do you agree that meaning is the thing we should strive for in life?
• Is meaninglessness the root of all depression, aggression and addiction?
• Is meaningless a particular issue in contemporary society? Do Frankl’s comments on youth, and on having nothing to live for, ring true at the moment?
• Are the three paths to meaning work, encounters and growing through suffering?
• How does the world we live in now encourage, or discourage, the kind of philosophy which Frankl was advocating?
• Is our sense of meaning something that we can find (as Frankl seems to imply) or is it something which we create (in a world where there is no given meaning)?
• In our search for meaning should we be looking for a great purpose or project (the meaning of life) or seek meaning in the more mundane, everydayness of life?

Find Our More

You can read another summary of The Case for Tragic Optimism, here.

You can list to an audio version of the essay here.

The essay is also included at the end of Frankl’s famous book about his experience of the holocaust, Man’s Search for Meaning, which you can find here, and summarised here.

There are several clips of Frankl himself talking on YouTube here.

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