To date, I do not know that there are more adequate readings of mourning, nor of the forms of separation mourning that hesitate, with alarming frequency, in legal wars, in stalking, and even worse in uxoricide, murder, femicide, without forgetting suicide at all.

Common wisdom remains anchored to the similarity of the impairment, to the obviousness of the retaliation and revenge directed against those who caused the impairment, to the senselessness of taking one's own life to obtain the cessation of unbearable pain.

 

Again the common wisdom indicates in the gentleman time the main remedy, and other accessories, for example moving away temporarily, ensuring a discreet and affectionate company, perhaps a trip, a cruise, distraction in short, sports and the like.

A little less in common wisdom, more “specialists" like, various forms of support to the so-called "mourning processing", more or less of a psychotherapeutic mold and flavor, and, certainly, drugs, meds for the "regulation of mood".

For some time I wanted to offer systemic help to those who found themselves having to face the so-called mourning, not enough being the evidence that I had collected, so to speak, first-hand, resorting to this knowledge to deal with the separations I had encountered.

With Elizabeth I began, confidently, a new journey, as a helper,  maintaining a stable summit of observation considerably different from that suggested by common knowledge, the one that has been delivered to us, directly or indirectly, in the course of our lives.

With the commitment to give much more meaning and different contents to the "loss", to the pain that accompanies it, and, above all, to identify in practice what really helps to cushion the real and unquestionable suffering and to continue with satisfaction the journey of one's existence.

Starting from the first and most conspicuous sensitive evidence: there is no impairment, not only that, there is no significant threat to the survival of Elizabeth, who is in conditions of good safety and in excellent health.

Yet, equally evident, we encounter evidence of the existence of at least one, or perhaps more than one, serious threat to Elizabeth's life, incontrovertibly signaled by the intense pain she has been experiencing for several weeks.

Elizabeth has tried to help herself with a mild psychotherapeutic support, to no avail, Elizabeth opposes an unshakable refusal to resort to meds, and, after some meetings that we have agreed to be necessary for both of us to be able to dissolve their respective reservations, she agrees to continue the journey with me.

Path that consists of meetings, the duration and frequency of which we will decide together, from time to time.

Let's start with seven

Today's session was very hard, for Elizabeth and for me: deep cry, on several occasions, she tells me let’s postpone, today I can't do it, I'm very tired, last night I also tried to go out, good friends, of the real ones, but it's not good for me, it's not good for me ...

What happens, what has ever happened so tragic as to lead a lady not even fifty years old to burst into tears, to declare with intensely desperate tones that she can't make it, to ask to postpone a session ... a cultured lady, who has traveled the world, who has worked in prestigious multinational companies, in roles of good prestige and importance, definitely still beautiful and attractive, two beautiful children, a husband a few years younger than her, beautiful, strong, capable, already today in positions of high management, and constantly growing ...

Ah yes, the husband... the almost ex-husband.

In a few weeks at the hearing will be signed an agreement of marital separation freely, so to speak, concerted by and between the two spouses, with the assistance of a valid lawyer, no contention, the husband (almost ex) has accepted without batting an eyelid all Elizabeth's requests, economic and not economic, custody of the children, visits, everything, in short.

After 15 years, due to the absence of affectio coniugalis, it is necessary to separate... and today is the birthday of the eldest son, whom Elizabeth sees, while we are in session, portrayed in a snapshot of a decade ago, the same celebration, the whole family, dad, mom, son and little brother ...

And the cry bursts out, copious and violent, altering her beautiful features, taking her breath away, and preventing her from continuing to utter a word... listen to me, you don't get used to it, I've never succeeded... I admit, I just don't want to succeed.

It is the seventh session, still exploratory, others will follow, until we can dissolve the reservations, decide, both she and I, that it makes sense to continue, that I can be of help to her and that she can be, and feel, helped.

To do what?

For now the answer is very general, at the end of the first meeting I was able to promise her good chances of obtaining a better governability of the suffering that she has been experiencing, intensely, for months, a recovery of energy that can be used, she is often exhausted, exhausted, crying crises exhaust her, and she struggles a lot to follow as she would like, and according to her she should,  the children, to take care of the other matters that only she can and must take care of.

We will have to be able to identify more precise objectives, which at the moment does not seem possible, we will have to wait, while we cross, while we take these first steps together.

Switches from what to what?

It is not that it is very clear even to me, although I am supposed to  have the clearer ideas ... a first laborious conquest was allowed by accepting a evidence only apparently plain and obvious: if you feel pain, and there is no possible doubt about this condition, then something threatens your survival.

And we need to be able to pinpoint with sufficient precision what is so badly threatened and how what threatens you can do irreparable harm, before we can even try to find an antidote, something that reduces or eliminates the threat you are exposed to.

Our emotional system, the evolutionary fruit of the nociceptive system and the proficeptive system, never lies: the pain experienced is sufficient, and not questionable, proof of the occurring, in the environments with which we are dealing, of a threat to our survival.

We could consider it as a simple alarm system, couldn’t we?

No, better not... the human emotional system, one of the constitutive systems of every human being, is not limited to signaling a threat, or an opportunity... of course, it also does that, in this case, for the moment, of opportunities we do not see many, so we can not find this variant of its possible intervention.

The pain is very intense, to the point of "obliging" Elizabeth to cry (crying is an archaic device aimed at allowing immediate, even if slight and not decisive, relief), screams, in a certain sense, so "strong" as to make it sometimes impossible for Elizabeth the usually agile and fruitful use of thought ... yes, pain screams loudly, very loudly, what does it say, do we know?

Yes, we know, it is the oldest command of all, the command that even the amoeba obeys when it encounters an acidic solution that can end its rudimentary life, we all know it, it says get-away-from-here-immediately, get-away-from-here-immediately, since here death is coming.

At the time, when this saving command was conquered by our species, plausibly, nothing could have curbed the compulsive motion of distancing, as powerful as an unconditioned and unconditioable reflex, it took millions of years to be able to modify, in part, the degree of cogency.

Have you ever tried to think when the common toothache hits you hard? If not, well, I hope you never try it so intensely, if you already know what it implies: we cannot ask ourselves to think in those conditions, as long as he is there, the thought cannot be there, except in the form of every possible prefiguration of how to escape his relentless bite.

Elizabeth does not have a toothache, on the contrary, she has a dental cloister still magnificent, however what she is feeling, credibly, comes to great intensity, if not the maximum, just below the maximum.

And it is not possible for her to obey the ancient command out-of-here-now."

A non-systemic observer, at this point, on this point, would shake his head, probably, incredulous, if not confused: and from where should he go away? She is located in a beautiful house, bright, spacious, tidy and clean, a magnificent bookcase full of books and pretty objects behind her, she is very well dressed, styled, she is neither overweight nor underweight... of course, and I would also add that she is certainly not at risk of suffering hunger and deprivation, neither she nor her children, a shrewd patrimonial administration has kept them safe for several years.

So what does it mean, what does it have to do with it, what is the meaning of this hypothetical command out-from-here-immediately? No death is near, and therefore the emotional system has made a fuss, it has clicked empty, maybe it is defective ...

Our non-systemic friend has very good reasons and very good arguments: it is quite true that, in the real environment, no threat is present at this moment, not such as to solicit the innervation of the command way-of-here-immediately.

She probably neglects, or is not aware, of our, human, distinctive systemic characteristic, which we could call double life: each of us lives simultaneously, has to do, simultaneously with at least two environments, the real environment, in which for Elizabeth, at least for now, there are no serious threats to her survival, and the virtual environment, which is as real as the real one,  but which is, so to speak, inside the skull of all of us, even in Elizabeth's.

Our friend perhaps neglects, or perhaps does not know, that in more than one sense most of our life we experience, live it (and do many other significant and important things) governing our interaction with our respective virtual environments, where everything that can happen happens, and which we use to govern our interaction with the real environment,  where only what can happen happens.

Sounds good, doesn't it? Yes, I like it too, and it seems to me that it is not a pun at all.

It was a tough conquest for Elizabeth, paralyzed in front of the incontrovertible evidence, for her, over and over again expressed, that everything was and went down the drain, but don’t’mess, it is tough for us too.

For a non-systemic the question is soon resolved: all right, she was dumped by her husband, okay, with two children still to finish growing up, okay, the romantic dream of the happy family white mill style has been shattered, and, finally, okay, the husband has probably found a young woman attracted by his rank and who will try to take advantage,  or maybe he found a victim to whom to make the usual proposal, not very moral, but it happens all the time.

She is in good health, she takes care of her business well, she has no money problems, her children will grow up, she will get over it.

These are stories told for thousands of years, always the same, often worse and much more unfortunate, it would be better to deal with more serious and relevant things, with all due respect to the legitimate pain of an exemplary mother and faithful wife betrayed and abandoned by her husband.

And here we greet urbanly, without particular warmth, our non-systemic friend, grateful for his incisive contribution, of which we will take good account, politely takes off his feet, well, let's continue our journey.

For us systemic things are neither really, nor only so, perhaps with a hint of envy we accept that Elizabeth does not have economic difficulties at the moment, and that it is unlikely that she will have them in the future, blessed her, we are pleased that she is in good health and that, yes, perhaps this deserves a deepening, crying crisis aside, she  is in good, if not very good, shape.

And we remain loyal and true to what we know, if the pain is real, and it is, then the threat is real, and it concerns something vital about Elizabeth.

What?

 

 

Stuck

For several weeks we have been at a standstill, during the last meeting Elizabeth was adamant, that's enough, let's stop, I can't, it's not mine, it's not mine...

For a few weeks I have been working frequently on this, what stopped Elizabeth?

No, this is not the question, Elizabeth has not stopped, how could she, life continues to flow through every cell of her body, the boys go to school every day, and then they come back, every day there is to take care of their hygiene, dress, supervise that the operations of restoring the order of the house are properly carried out, keep an eye on the accounts,  carrying out administrative tasks, seeing if today a long walk is better, or going to the shooting range, or to the golf club, checking what are the commitments with the Sailing Club of which she is vice president, the calls of "friends", taking a look at job opportunities, what moves on the net, what the ex-husband is up to, sending him messages,  memo, email, scold him for one of his usual bullshit, he skips the visit to the children and goes around with his slut, see what a kind of father, buys them things that they agreed should not be granted, does not make them do their homework, does not care, does not prevent Frederick from swallowing crap,  we are already beyond the limit of the obese, and he is only 11 year old, he does not help Ethan with physics tasks, oh well what does it have to do if he is 15 years old, you know that Ethan with these things has always struggled, don’t you? you do not care for children and this is not acceptable, and then keep an eye on how children go to school, okay, according to them everything is always fine, no problem, just a deadly boredom,  and then you find out that Ethan does not deliver the homeworks, warnings come from the school management that denounce serious behavior of Frederick, bullying, or they caught him playing with the tablet during the lesson, or that he put false signatures on the weekly report on school performance ... flows during the day and flows at night, and yes, they are not nights when she can sleep, forget it, kids do not want to disconnect from those damn video games, making them go to bed at a decent hour means arguing loudly, often screaming, and then Frederick continues to want to sleep with his mother, he can't sleep in his bed,  and it has been so for years, since that bastard accepted the first extracontinental assignment, how many years are, let’s see, eight, there are eight, and then Ethan at 2 in the morning slips into the bed with mom and his little brother, and they quarrel and do not let me sleep, okay,  not bad after all, I am awake,  the first thought is always for that animal, that bastard who took everything away from me, and while the children fall asleep I go to see what other bullshit he is up to, what else he has published, ah!, busted, you see,  what a jerk, with his slut and also with a ring on his finger, ah no, not mine,  I want mine back, he promised me, he says he will keep it for himself, but I want him back, it is my ring, it would be better if he died, ah yes, much better, gosh, if he had died everything would be easier, I would collect the insurance money and I would never see him again, I would like to see his slut dead too, the one who took him away from me,  I kill her, I want to see her suffer like a dog, and I will do it, I swear on the heads of my children, it will take time, and it will be difficult, but I will do it ...

No, she just hasn't stopped, she continues to walk the same paths every day, to feed the same thoughts, to feel the same anger, the same pain, sometimes almost sedated, sometimes acute, as when she puts her hands on her husband, on her cheating ex-husband, heee, we are sure that the pain meter, scale 1 to 10, records 8,  also 9

And dozens and dozens of other thoughts, of other beliefs, repeated again and again, from: ha! the children, I send them to the father, he shall think about it, it has nothing to do with it, yes, they are totally entrusted to me, I  change, go with him, I put the backpack on my shoulder and I leave, or I kill myself, so I finish suffering,  I am useless, they are just a burden, even for me, especially for me, enough, let's finish it ... to: I get rid of everyone, enough, I have had enough, mom, brother, old friends, pains in the ass, go away, fuck you all, to: the time is gentleman, everything will pass, to: whom? Children? fuck, who cares, they will make it, they will not make it, they will make do, as I did, or: haa, no! that bastard must do his part, for children we have always chosen the best schools, so that they have the best possible education and then they can have the best possible life, of course it costs a bang,  who cares, he is rich, he has to get thew money out, they are his children, he can't give them up, heeee no, he can't do it, so pompous, I Me Mine and I and I again, fucking selfish, always and only him, the others fuck everyone ...

For a while she would have taken him back, his Arthur, only that he had moved a finger in that direction, but nothing, he did not move ... and then more, in the granitic certainty that not only Arthur never again, but everyone never again, everyone, this is out of the question, we do not even talk about it ... what that has to do, yes, but it is only to widen the circle of acquaintances, I also tried tinder, but here there is nothing for me, yes I go out, sometimes, a coffee, a walk, but I have nothing to do with them, and they have nothing to do with me, no one will ever be able, never again.

If we needed to refresh our memory of what hell can be on earth, well, I think this sample has achieved its purpose... a hellish carousel, ajumble, repeated beyond the limit of exhaustion, a danse macabre that every day and every night is staged with her blind and voluntary participation.

Visible to a few, since Elizabeth is always impeccable, well dressed, well combed, yes a bit of dark circles, sometimes even more than a bit, a few well-chosen jewelry, exhibiting urban ways, displaying an absolutely conventional conversation and more than socially acceptable, respectful and composed.

We have seen this show together a few dozen times, each time for me it has meant twisting of bowels, I can only imagine her painful and torturing twisting ... it was a precious pain, of this I was and I am convinced, that is the powerful engine that allows us to achieve what may seem impossible.

And slowly, piece by piece, together we dismantled hell ...

Elizabeth has not stopped at all, it is that, a few weeks ago, after having managed to have the proof that it was in her power to get out of hell, after having managed to get out, for short stretches, from hell, with my enormous joy, it is enough to succeed once, since even once is the beginning of a possible turning point, Elizabeth has come across a tremendous obstacle ...

We had noticed it, we had, to a large extent, identified and described it, usefully translated into systemic, the language we use to identify, describe, understand and try to modify our neural codes, but I fear that we have missed some pieces.

And all the pieces are important, each and every,  the work can not be completed even if only one is missing, I am still looking for that tiny damn missing piece, I think I have found it, I am not far from completing ...

 

 

Which way to hell?

Once he addressed me jokingly calling me Virgil, not all our meetings were devastating, some were very satisfying, the similarity of Dante's journey in part was appropriate, trying never to forget that Elizabeth was simultaneously Dante and Hell: it is not really a walk, it is not an orderly procedure, while Virgil knows perfectly the structure and organization of hell,  well, I'm not in that condition at all, although I can quickly recognize some of the most dangerous beasts, some of the deadliest poisons... beasts that have a noble origin, all have served the survival of our species for millions of years, lethal poisons and formidable utility, knowing how to dose them ...

No one can know what the hell of the other is like, often not even how his own is, not before having been there virtually, having virtually crossed it, and having virtually come out of it: among my points of commitment there is that of limiting as much as possible the recourse to similarity, metaphor, as if ... and to say, to try to describe what is, accepting similitude and metaphor only as an intermediate step, if and to the extent that this helps to obtain a satisfactory description and understanding of what really is.

Hell is where and when you suffer without being able to see the end, where suffering, pain are a condition from which you do not know, you can not see, understand how and when it will cease.

Let us abandon the similarity, and try to approach what is happening.

Elizabeth feels intense pain, and for her it is directly connected to the loss of Arthur, the abandonment of Arthur, his absence and the way in which the abandonment took place: this is neither metaphor nor similarity, it is the best description of what it is, of what it was when we began to deal with it together.

The question that we have been formulating for some time, and that we keep as one of our most valuable guides for our search for knowledge and practical solutions, is always there: pain undoubtedly indicates threat, what threatens and what is threatened?

For us systemics it is difficult to renounce the investigation on the two horns of the question, it is good, it leads to answers and solutions, to investigate about the configuration of what is qualified as threatening, without ever neglecting the other horn, to investigate the configuration of what is threatened, avoiding with every care to take for plain and obvious any aspect.

Let's start with Arthur, from Arthur's current absence, qualified as very painful: was the pain there even before? When Arthur was still a husband, although not very present?

The first answer is "naturally" no, leaving aside the physiological pains of any marriage, the difference in intensity, magnitude between this and those is indisputable.

So far everything seems normal, doesn't it? Arthur, husband, justified absent, absent even for long periods, weeks, but present through the daily long phone calls, the exchanges of messages on the chats, Arthur is not classified as a threat, the alarm system does not "read" this absence as a threat, that pain does not overwhelm Elizabeth.

Arthur, ex-husband, in more than one sense absent justified, and still partially present in the poisonous exchange sometimes via telephone and more often via chat, is classified as a threat, a source of danger, the alarm system is never silent, sometimes it screams, sometimes it is more smoothed, but you can not silence it, the pain touches or pierces Elizabeth.

Yet he is the same Arthur as before, he is not another living subject, how is it possible, how do we manage to account for this transformation?

On the eminently practical, concrete level, and we really like concreteness and practicality, we have already clarified that Elizabeth is not in any danger, let's see chapter by chapter.

With the children, compared to the care work that the children still require, well, setting aside the phone calls and chat messages, things are exactly as before, before Elizabeth took care of it, and now Elizabeth takes care of it.

The house: Elizabeth and the children live in a villa, with swimming pool and service staff, exactly as before, paid by the ex-husband, it is true, and the fear that the ex-husband will maneuver so as to be able to escape, and succeeds in the intent, makes sense: but, as we have seen several times together, it would be a small annoyance, undoubtedly temporary.

Elizabeth not only knows how to do it, despite coming from a family that has become relatively wealthy over time, she has lived for over a decade or two without the comforts of the current location , but has, materially and practically, sufficient resources to get by, with a more than decent standard of living, although certainly less prestigious than the current one, for about twenty years.

Even if he does not find other sources of supply for twenty years, he would do it with what he has now: Arthur's absence, and perhaps even his possible further turning point, would have really worrying effects in twenty years, and human alarm systems have the characteristic of being activated in the face of a current threat, of what is now qualified as a threat,  which is present now, right now, at this moment.

So, given that on a concrete and practical level, now, at this moment, there are no serious dangers for the survival of Elizabeth and her two children, that the coverage reaches two decades, the third horn of the matter, work, employment, the exercise of a profession, do not constitute themselves as an element capable of triggering the pain that Elizabeth intensely feels.

Indeed, Elizabeth finds herself in the enviable prospect of being able to devote herself to what she likes, to what she is passionate about, what interests her, just anything, and being able to try what is the privilege of a few, and that is to find or build a job, a job, an occupation that concerns what she is passionate about, what interests her.

On this we meet an unexpected obstacle, we will try to deal with it later, but the feedback is that Elizabeth says several times that she has never really felt passionate about something, she has never found anything deeply and intensely interesting, since the beginning of her life, as far as she can now remember ... this condition is more frequent than is commonly believed, at least on the basis of my direct feedback, well, we will see.

Children, home and work, again from the exquisitely practical and concrete point of view, are more than safe, the presence or absence of Arthur affects to an extent not so significant as to account for such an intense pain, an assessment fully shared by Elizabeth herself on more than one occasion.

We are not children, we do not ignore that in the conjugal relationship there are, or at least there should be, other aspects, sources of energy and satisfaction: being without the partner exposes us to the condition of not being able to satisfy specific needs and desires, and therefore we go to look for if that could be the reason for so much pain.

Arthur has always conducted himself in a generally affectionate way, except when he went out of the gangs because things did not go according to his wishes, but this is normal, no?... here, from that point of view it was quite a long time that he no longer sought her.

How long? Well, so, more or less, going by memory, a few years... always taken by work, when he managed to go home, once a month, sometimes more often, sometimes less, he was always very tired, go out, see friends, he didn't really want to ... and yes, she fulfilled the conjugal duties, they say so no?, but it was she who sought, and he, well, behold, fulfilled ... What? Enthusiasm? Well, he was always so tired, poor man, sometimes it was better to let him rest... huh? And I? I what... ah, well yes, long weeks, even more, but no, abstinence has never been a problem, you can stand it, right? huh? ah no no, never, of course they came forward, stopped well before the border, I dress and behave so as not to leave any doubt to anyone, the sign "stay away" is very clear and there is always.

Nothing even here, for years the "contacts" were rarefied, very rarefied, the recent change of state, from wife to ex-wife, from this point of view has changed little ... little, but it is not a little little, before she had hope, now that is no longer there ... and I don't want to know anymore, for me the game ends here.

Yes, even from this point of view there are no significant changes, not on the practical level, there are, certainly, on other levels, for example on the level of hope (name of a very complex emotion, we will see if it will be good to resume the specific theme later), but the plane of hope is not out there, it is not in the things that happen out there,  in the opportunities and threats that arise out there, in the real environment.

Hell is inside Elizabeth.

 

 

 

 

Who is who

To delve into the other chapters of Elizabeth's life, I think it is good to resume an aspect of the way elizabeth comes into action: Elizabeth agrees and agrees on the assessment of relative economic security of the condition in which she finds herself after separation, a condition that she struggled to obtain in the months preceding the signing of the legal act,  on more than one occasion, it is she herself who formulates it, diligently putting the elements in a row, I can also say with more than a hint of pride.

On many other occasions the picture is completely overturned, the existence of a well-guarded and well-administered little treasure is denied, anguish and despair accompany the story of how things could be put if Arthur, in the practically certain (before it was possible, yes, but not very likely, not very convenient for him, above all) cause of divorce that, he obviously assisted by the best divorce lawyers in the world,  it would have ended up in court, if it were able to obtain a substantial modification of the agreements consensually formulated and properly documented at the time of separation.

And things would get very bad, she and her children on the streets, no way out: we depend on him, on the fact that he pays on time, that he honors every month the commitments made, the house, the service staff, the alimony, for me and for the children, school fees, medical expenses, misc stuff.

On those occasions it turned out to be completely useless to try to put back into play the evidence of the robust protections of which he had full control, if I dared to insist he went on all the furies threateningly enjoining me to stop it, with ways and tones that admitted nothing but prone obedience.

I was sincerely frightened, even if I was not abandoned by the certainty of being safe, given that the meetings took place by video call and that we were thousands of kilometers away, I did not run any serious immediate danger, in short... I knew, as I know even now, where my fright came from, especially where it didn't come from.

I believe that we have all encountered phenomena of this kind, commonly we talk about the different faces that the same person can have in different situations, about the different aspects that from time to time emerge in the ways of interacting, bringing them back to the character, personality, variegations and facets of personality and character.

What normally escapes the common observation is that these facets, these variegations, these different aspects are brought back to a unity, constituted precisely by the character, each has his own, one, unique and distinctive, by the personality, one, unique and distinctive of this or that person: one is the person, one is the personality, one is the character.

I believe that many have happened to have to deal with people who exhibit, at times, sometimes short, sometimes hours or days, aspects so far away and different that they feel in difficulty in recognizing the unique identity of that person, transformations often so sudden and intense as to push us to doubt that we are dealing with the same person as a moment before,  to the point of wondering if those in front of us are not possessed by some infernal demon, so great is the difference.

Difference that very often is also reflected in the somatic aspect, the face is transformed, the voice is unrecognizable, the speed of movement, the gestures, the words, the tones, the thoughts that are reported, so different and distant from just before that we could serenely conclude that we are dealing with another person, who has taken the place of the previous one before our eyes without us noticing,  a kind of magic, maybe a sleight of hand, maybe a cinematic trick.

In those cases, the difficulty of bringing back what we are witnesses to the unity, uniqueness, "sameness" of the person with whom we are interacting increases a lot, even in the story that we sometimes make of these events we often catch expressions such as, it was no longer her, or it was no longer him, or he seemed like another, until he seemed crazy,  she went crazy, more or less temporarily.

We are struck by these "transformations", even if not necessarily the outcomes for us are unpleasant, sometimes they present themselves as very pleasant and funny, the intractable muzzle turns into a formidable entertainer and the party comes alive, sometimes, as in the case I was talking about before, but no, thank goodness that I was thousands of kilometers away:  in both cases it strikes us, it is disquieting.

And since restlessness is nothing more than one of the many forms of that primary emotion known as fear, since that emotion is nothing more than a complex element, evolved form of the even older painful signal, a painful signal that in turn is a sensitive effect generated by our nociceptive system,  system that oversees the task of intercepting threats to our survival, it would not hurt to be able to explain, even in this case, of what, of which is the nature of the threat and what is threatened, which we will try to do: for the moment let's limit ourselves to recording the fact, Arthur,  at times and occasions, it is not a substantial threat to Elizabeth's life, in others he is a serious threat.

Elizabeth's tears, tones, statements leave no doubt about the truth of the pain, the pain she is feeling, and therefore the reality of the existence of a serious threat that she brings back to Arthur.

How can Arthur not be a threat and then become one, if the conditions found in the real environment remain the same?

On occasions when Arthur is recognized as relatively harmless, Elizabeth presents herself toned, serene, self-confident, lively, exhibits a polite sense of humor, none of the distinctive signs and clues of suffering and pain, further proof that Elizabeth registers Artur as an element existing in her perimeter but not as a threat.

In common reading, phenomena like these are often described as mood swings, little or not at all controllable, if not resorting to drugs, hopefully under medical supervision.

In systemic reading things are in another way, and to account for what is commonly seen as a quirk, an alteration of normal conduct, it is necessary to deal more deeply with who, or what, Arthur is, and who, or what, has to do with Arthur.

Who, or what Arthur is, is soon said: we don't know, and no one can know.

Although comforted by an enormous amount of observations, by the genius of our most illustrious researchers and scientists, we still do not know, and perhaps we will never know, what exactly matter is, what the simplest and most banal piece of matter is, let alone if we know more about such complex things as living beings.

On the other hand, we have a lot of theories, interpretative models, many of enormous utility for us ... yes, in fact, for us, useful for us: our vaunted knowledge, until today, and perhaps forever, is "only" the set of models and theories that we use to find useful answers for us, for our species, for every single subject of our species.

Useful in what sense? Needless to turn around, useful means always and only what sustains our survival, as a species and as individual subjects.

We do not have a more effective way, as scientists, as non-mystics, to build, identify connections and give meaning to what we are and what surrounds us, than to welcome the survival of the species and the individual as a constitutive property of all living systems... the Latins left us their "primum vivere", two hundred years ago Darwin left us the masterpiece known as "The evolution of the species".

Models and theories that are, only and always, models and theories of action: as for all living things, "reality", regardless of whether its nature is known or not known, is constituted as the set of actions that each living person can deploy to have to do with it, in view of his own survival and, by the way,  of the survival of the species to which it belongs.

For this reason, legitimately, for us Arthur is a businessman in his forties, quite successful in the Western world, married for fifteen years to a beautiful woman and father of two children, recently legally separated from his wife, wife who has obtained total custody of the children, currently enjoys the company of another woman and continues to do the work he did before,  obtaining considerable amounts of money, plausibly satisfactions, good results and awards.

For Elizabeth, Arthur is also this, and so far he recognizes it as an element to some extent present in his vital perimeter, devoid of really threatening connotations: it could make her life more complicated than it is, if he did not pay alimony and did not cover the expenses of the family (Elizabeth and the two children are, in their own right,  legal and in fact, a family), but not to the point of ruining it and forcing it to accept a miserable quality of life, no, none of this, it would be a life a little less comfortable, guaranteed for a very long time.

For Elizabeth, Arthur is also this, but, with sufficient evidence, it is not only this: Arthur-forty-year-old-businessman-around-the-world was not and is not a threat, the other Arthur, with no less evidence, is, very much.

So let's try to see who, or what it is, for Elizabeth, this other Arthur, and maybe even for which Elizabeth.

 

 

 

Author Characters

Moving from the "thing", from the "who" to the actions that constitute them is not at all easy, not even for those who, like me, are quite trained, I always need a certain commitment to "switch" from the obvious (and pragmatically useful) confirmation of the existence of the "thing" in the real or virtual environment, to the identification of at least some of the (for me) life-saving actions that constitute the thing.

And of course it's not easy at all for Elizabeth, no matter how bright and lively her mind is: the first attempt seems like a total failure.

The suggestion that I felt like proposing to Elizabeth had been, more or less: Arthur, what you carry with you, in your mind, in your memory, is also made of "pieces" that you already had, we can try to identify someone, to start ...

This shudder had worked well in other cases, from there recoveries of "pieces" of value had arisen, and I counted that it would also happen with Elizabeth: nothing.

Elizabeth, perplexed, tells me that she has tried, but that Arthur has nothing, no element, no detail, no characteristic that is connected to anything that she can recognize as "familiar", as already seen, already hers, prior to her meeting with Arthur: in short, Arthur is totally new and different.

To tell the truth, some hints had already emerged in our sessions, hints that had led me to look forward to the possibility that Elizabeth would return from the hunt empty-handed ... and I wondered, in that case, what we could do. It seemed to me that perhaps I could try to proceed by asking her what, in her opinion, had pushed her, motivated, supported her in accepting the courtship of the young aspirant, and then the engagement and then the marriage ...

Perhaps it was better to suggest telling how it went, how the beginning had been, and then what had driven it ... in short, something like that.

And so, when she said: I tried, but I found nothing, nothing at all, I was not happy, but I remained confident ...

Elizabeth took us out of the mess, adding: and it is precisely because it did not resemble anything I had already known that I was conquered.

Until then, until I met him, no one had convincingly opposed me, no one had been able to contain me, I had always been the stronger, the one who knew everything and knew how to do with everything, no one had proved stronger than me.
I could not rely on them, on any of them, more fragile, weaker, less capable than me.

Arthur didn't look like anything I had already met, and he didn't act like the others I had met... that's where I felt I could, wanted to entrust myself to him.

Elizabeth's narration continues, rich and fluid, she needs very little encouragement, very few questions, and little by little numerous elements related to Arthur emerge, constituting Arthur.

Many elements also emerge that help us to identify the profile of the "characters" that, together, integrated into Elizabeth's egoic system, constitute what in common language is referred to as I, Elizabeth's I: I know well that the knot I have just touched is of formidable complexity, and that the recourse to "characters" is here only a narrative expedient,  we will come back to the issue later, knowing that we will struggle a lot to come to terms with it, but that we will succeed.

Iron Ldy

Elizabeth Lady of Iron, until a few years ago fervent believer, activist among the ranks of believers of a religion widespread in her country of origin, tempted for years to enter one of the many religious orders present in her country, model student, concludes on schedule high school and university course, always excellent evaluations,  easily enters a large multinational, recruited almost by force, skills and abilities not so common, it seems.

Many suitors coldly discouraged and irrevocably dismissed, many attentions to lead themselves so as not to arouse temptations, but her beauty and energy are powerful magnets.

Some attempts at serious engagement with peers, strictly framed in the perspective of marriage, no erotic concessions, as her religious faith imposes, even long-lasting engagements, then broken by her decision, the reasons had been: too unambitious, not very lively, boring.

And then, having recently passed the age of thirty, conquered total economic autonomy, obtained the recognition of a role of significant responsibility in a company (not the first in which she entered, a second large multinational from which she was recruited a couple of years after the beginning of her professional activity), she meets Arthur.

It is still only a sketch, but we begin to intuit a sort of design that Elizabeth nourishes, feeds, and tries to realize, putting into play the Iron Lady, who knows, respects and enforces the right rules, those that will lead to the right appeasement, to the right choice of the companion.

Iron Lady is a good name, chosen by Elizabeth herself, to indicate most of the aspects that have characterized, so to speak, Elizabeth's lifestyle until the meeting with Arthur, it is a good name to indicate the "character" that integrates and facilitates the use and activation of specific neural codes, the vast and complex plexus sequence of neural codes adopted and built by Elizabeth to ... for? To survive, of course, of which mating is certainly a part.

The fact is that the Iron Lady, evidently, is not able to handle the current situation, Elizabeth is threatened, the pain that torments her is proof of the real existence of this threat.

The Iron Lady is not able to protect what is threatened, she seems not to know the right rules, the right actions: what do we do?

Which is a very good question, only not complete: what do we do with respect to what?

A "what" of which today we know a little more, we know that it was protected for a long time by the Iron Lady, who now finds herself in a situation that she cannot "manage", proof of which is the pain that tortures Elizabeth.

The Veiled Lady

For Elizabeth, everything is clear: Arthur is gone, and he took everything away from her, destroyed everything, she is furious and desperate. What took away from her?

The family, first of all, she now no longer has the family tenaciously built and governed for fifteen years.

He took away from her husband whom she adored, honored and served faithfully

He took away her job

He took away her access to prestigious, highly coveted environments.

On top of that he destroyed her honor, demonstrating total lack of respect and consideration, leaving her for a cheap whore, and trying to keep that relationship hidden, which she had to discover by hiring a private investigator.

Which is not at all easy, given that Elizabeth has moved from her country of origin to another continent, and that her husband, for work reasons, is permanently on another continent ... but Elizabeth is tenacious and determined, and she succeeded anyway.

And despite all this, sleep is frequently interrupted by abrupt awakenings, and the image that appears in her mind is Arthur, she wants her Arthur back, if only Arthur asked her would take it back instantly.

During the day things don't get any better, when she's not busy caring for her children, or other tasks, her thoughts incessantly return to total, annihilating devastation, and then to Arthur, and to the whole painful affair, and then back to the devastation, and then to Arthur...

She has been going on like this for months, she is exhausted, she sleeps little and badly, she eats little and irregularly, she cries continuously, sometimes she gets angry and screams like crazy with her children who do not behave well, always attached to those damn video games, she finds sporadic relief by going for a run, but it does not last long, trying to practice some sport,  but it doesn't last long, trying to see people, but it's of little use... unexpectedly she found the solidarity of other women, some in her own troubles, others not, she is amazed, until then she had never thought that other women could be of comfort to her ... this is also of short and temporary relief, the torment begins again, the carousel resumes to turn, the carousel is hellish.

And then her failure, and already, she could not miss this hellhole, she failed, she got everything wrong, from the beginning.

This is a story that comes back and returns, it is Elizabeth in the flesh who presents it, I am a witness, as I am a witness to the fact that it is not Elizabeth-Iron-Lady  who is telling the story, it is not difficult to imagine how she would tell it, it is not difficult to imagine what she would do: hard, pragmatic, no concession to nostalgia and melancholy for things of the past,  in short, she's ironmade, isn't it? looking to the present, looking to the future... no, definitely the narrator is not Iron Lady.

Who is the one who narrates? We'll see later.

House

It takes a long time to find glimmers through which to try to pass to find the answers we need, but slowly we succeed.

Arthur was chosen because he was totally different from the one around him, apparently there is no connection with his history, his environment ... surprisingly, as far as we know about how mating works between subjects of our species.

And with patience some elements begin to emerge... yes, he has eyes of the same color as those of her grandmother...

What does grandma have to do with it?

As far as we know, one of the conditions that must be met, essential, in the choice of the companion, is that he brings with him at least a trait of someone who has helped us to grow, who has accompanied us, taken good care of us, in the first part of our life, let's say in the first ten years, to stay wide[1].

Well, it seems that we have found a first reference to realize and reason the configurations of the plexus sequences of neural codes that Elizabeth developed to "choose" Arthur and to build her Arthur.

To appreciate how significant this element is, it is necessary to delve a little into the story of Elizabeth... without ever forgetting that our purpose, our goal, is to be able to change, to generate change.

Without forgetting for a single moment that any change is the result, a side effect of learning, and that the substance of any human learning coincides with the modification, integration, development of the neural codes that guide and support our every action.

And well knowing, by repeated and consistent experience, that we can intentionally modify the configuration of plexus sequences of neural codes on condition (necessary and not sufficient) that we can place in real history, or at least very plausible, when, and for what reasons, with what benefits, that code was developed: even more so it is important to be able to carry out well this type of reconstruction[2].

Elizabeth lived continuously with her grandmother for the first eleven years of her life, in her grandmother's house, while her mother and father lived in a small apartment, built inside the small structure that housed the machinery and staff dedicated to the production of small series of precision mechanical artifacts, a few miles away.

Dad and mom were used to come at grandma for dinner, and then to go  back to the factory, Elizabeth stayed with her grandmother.

Mom worked with Dad, helped with the administration, suppliers, customers, banks, while Dad was constantly engaged in production.

Dad was a simple person, a technician who had reached the diploma of professional school while working, following evening courses: after a few years of work as an employee of a medium-sized company operating in the field of precision mechanics, he had decided to try the entrepreneurial path, on the strenght of the practical experience and the specific competence acquired while studying.

Mom had obtained a vocational school diploma, and then immediately found employment in an accounting firm ... she had talent in drawing, which allowed her to spend the little free time in that activity, accepted by the community and the family to which she belonged... community born centuries ago within a small valley of a mountain region, the same as which dad belonged.

Dad liked the bicycle, he didn't have time to practice, but for Elizabeth it was moments of pure happiness when, as a child, on Sunday only, she was put on the seat hooked to the handlebars, and dad vigorously pedaled along the road that went from grandmother's house to the factory, and then the return, a road of which she still remembers every single feet still today.

The eyes of the grandmother, in that painting, carry important meanings, even for those who, like us, have little imagination: Elizabeth, in fact, is given up for adoption to her grandmother, who takes care of her, as she knows and as she can, dad and mom are not there, except for very brief moments.

And then, not enough, dad dies, carcinoma, Elizabeth is five years old, her little brother is two years younger than her.

He too was given up for adoption to her grandmother, while mom continues to live in the factory even after the death of her husband... after a couple of years mom finds a partner, an artist, just like genius and unruliness, who lives with her in the factory, continuing in his artistic activity, without ever reaching significant successes, mom continues with the daily shuttle between factory and grandmother's house, Elizabeth and her little brother remain with grandma.

Mom decides that it is time for the children to live with her and her partner, Elizabeth is eleven years old, she is about to become a girl, perhaps  grandma is exhausted, and they are allocated, she and her little brother in a kind of kennel obtained in the part of the room that serves as a study for the mother's companion ... the solution is not the best, so the house is expanded, stealing space from the shed, but it is no longer a problem, meanwhile the company has developed, now occupies two thousand square meters, obtaining two more rooms is relatively easy.

So Elizabeth has her own room, all her own, and no longer sleeps in the kennel with her little brother's feet on her belly... story not bad eh?, but do you want us to be so lucky that the fellow artist of the mother, seeing this flower bloom, does not try to catch it?

We are not lucky, the so-called "harassment" arrives, secretly to mom, of course, Elizabeth subtracts and does not open her mouth, she would not be believed, mom does not notice anything, the thing goes on a few years, and when Elizabeth understands that it will not be possible for her to continue to escape because  the "provocations" are more and more frequent and forceful, she spits everything to mom,  who immediately calls a friend of her, a high police officer, and his fellow artist ... thirty minutes are enough, after which the artist is at the gate with a suitcase, while at a brisk pace he leaves to never return.

Without this story it would be much more difficult to understand that Arthur's blue eyes, just like those of his grandmother, for Elizabeth are of enormous value, they are home, they are the house, small, ugly, without spaces for children, but home, where grandma does what she can, for culture and age, it is not a lot,  she did not live a "normal" childhood, mom is down to the nitty-gritty, the business, and her business, the narration is gradually enriched during our meetings, details and details, paining and painful fragments, Elizabeth presents them with fluency, half smiles, nonchalant, I feel the current of emotions flowing below, I read the complex construction that plausibly holds those “light” narrations ... and I know that for Elizabeth that blue is home, I know, for a long time, that each of us, get back home every day, as soon as we can.

The theme "home" is very complex, the masonry and plant engineering is a pure detail of very relative importance, we will resume it later.

And we find solid clues that converge on at least one other key element, key both to the construction of Elizabeth's codes and to the choice of the partner: and it is Elizabeth herself who has named it, among the reasons for the rejection of previous boyfriends, already, ambition.

The father is ambitious, some photos that Elizabeth showed me portray him smiling, strong, full of energy, crushed in a few weeks ... and maman? Maman Iron Lady not? it is she who continues the project, it is she who does not give up a second, it is she who keeps the children at her mother, practical solution, very practical, it is she who keeps a failed artist at home instead of making room for the children, it is she who takes care and succeeds, certainly not alone, in the company she has found good shoulders and heads to lean on,  but she is there, from dawn to dusk, and even after...

For Elizabeth, all this, all this is also home, it is not at all strange that she is with grandma... it starts to become later, but this is another piece of history, now we are on the hunt for Arthur, who Arthur is, in and for Elizabeth.

Arthur

Arthur has grandma's eyes.

And Arthur is not only ambitious, but he is also much more than ambitious, bordering on delirium.

And he's younger than her.

And it's lively and full of ideas.

He is of a very wealthy family, and he is successful, in sports, at university, at work, which begins as soon as he finishes university, he is considered a high potential, and as such included in the development paths dedicated to business talents of the same large multinational in which Elizabeth works.

There they meet, Arthur woos her tightly, Elizabeth initially opposes, discourages him, but not too much ... she admits after a while that she had long begun to worry, after thirty, discarded four boyfriends ... she opposes that he is younger, six years of difference, that she is older, that she asks for more, that she is in a delicate corporate position, but he resists and continues the courtship ...

And Elizabeth gives in, and he is magnificent, he finds a way to take her to Paris, London, Rome, New York, Tokjo, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Vienna, to the enchanted Austrian castle that inspired Walt Disney...

Here, the Princess has found a home, Arthur is home.

 

 

 

What's missing

That's it? Home are the cerulean eyes of the grandmother and the ambition of dad and mom? Was Arthur accepted because he had blue eyes and was ambitious? We can’t yet see how, the fact that he is now with another woman and has become ex-husband, he is a threat to Elizabeth.

He had promised me, a few more years of work, ten, and then we would enjoy together the fruit of the great efforts and great sacrifices made in all these years, we would finish accompanying the children to their adult life, we would travel, we would keep company in old age.

When Arthur, eight years earlier, decided to seize a formidable professional opportunity, all hell broke loose: at that time they lived in the USA, they had moved there for a few years, Arthur had made a good chunk of his career, and the company had sent him there, Elizabeth had managed to get to the USA too, both worked a lot,  soon the first child arrived, then the second, Elizabeth was sick of doing the work she did, she was nauseous at the thought of having to go back to the office every morning, and do what her role required.

And so they decided that Elizabeth would quit her job, also to be able to better keep up with the children, very lively, and would help Arthur as before, as a personal advisor.

The role of Arthur was extremely challenging, very young, with increasing responsibilities, responsibilities that he himself went to look for, ringing one success after another, certainly for skill, but also for discreet strokes of luck, almost every day he returned home, to the family.

And then, seven years after the wedding, two young children at home, the turn comes, intensely desired and sought after, formidable, Arthur is very excited, Elizabeth destroyed.

Yes, the opportunity is formidable, still the result of skill and a fair amount of luck, but Arthur will have to move to another continent, in the opposite hemisphere, and this does not go well at all for Elizabeth: with young children, Arthur's destination is incompatible, the environmental conditions over there are risky for them, the education they will have to receive is impossible there.

It's weeks of hell, Elizabeth opposes, but Arthur is adamant, Elizabeth goes crazy, has to resort to drugs and psychological help, she is very sick. After endless discussions, furious quarrels in which Elizabeth, even physically, attacks Arthur, desperate tears, sleepless nights, they come to an agreement: Arthur will leave, Elizabeth and the children will move to a continent "close" to that of Arthur's destination, where environmental and cultural conditions are compatible with the need to protect and promote the growth of children,  Arthur will return home as often as possible.

If I had not let him go all this would not have happened, it is the refrain that for several sessions returns and returns in Elizabeth's stories.

Arthur leaves, and since then, so says Elizabeth, she is alone. Since then she is Arthur's secret advisor, she secretly attends his meetings, and then they discuss at length, Arthur does not have the ability to easily read plots, behavior patterns of those around him, she does, he calls her his sorceress, she often gets it right, the internet and the smartphone soften the forced separation and loneliness,  but she is there, with the children, alone, while Arthur is elsewhere.

He struggles to resist, but resists, for eight years they go on like this, while Arthur continues his ascent, they make money, a lot, they invest wisely, buy a beautiful house in Spain, for their holidays, where Elizabeth and the children go every year for long periods, where Arthur joins them when he can.

He had promised me, a few more years of work, ten, and then we would have enjoyed together the fruit of the great efforts and great sacrifices made in all these years, we would have finished accompanying the children to their adult life, we would have traveled, we would have kept each other company in old age, he had everything and threw everything away, for a floozy which is behind him to milk him dry,  and he understands nothing, damned idiot selfish swine.

Virtual environments

Just as the real environment is nothing more than the set of actions that we can perform to deal with them, the set of neural codes, neurograms and reflexes that we have that guide the actions we perform to deal with, the virtual environments, elements of our mind, impenetrable as is our skull,  that we use continuously to develop the best possible actions to be deployed in view of our survival, are the deployment of neural codes, neurograms that guide our actions which lack only the triggering of motorial discharge.

Virtual environments are not a "copy" of real environments, they are as real as real environments, since with full evidence they are made up of the unfolding of our neural codes... here we risk a little confusion, better to proceed in small steps: just like, for us humans, there are real environments, those that we reductively indicate, in common language, as reality, there are also virtual environments, to which other names are given, fantasy, imagination, internal world.

Both these types of environments are real, in the sense that for us they exist, they are different environments, but not for this reason one is more real than the other, of these differences we take into account, "using them", having to deal with them in a different way, in a way related to the differences we know.

Diversity that for us is usually well present and clear during our waking period, and that almost disappears during sleep, during which we have to deal with only virtual environments: of what "happens to us" in this interaction with our virtual environments sometimes we keep some trace, some piece, some clips,  we can describe fragments that we commonly call dreams.

And we have all lived the experience of the shocking concreteness of our dreams, indistinguishable for long stretches from what, during wakefulness, is our experience of interaction with elements of the real environment.

It is helpful to consider dreams, the fragments that we can report when awake of our adventures as asleep, as clues or proofs (and for me they are certainly evidence) of our incessant work of finding solutions to questions, to problems that we have not yet managed to solve satisfactorily, carefully avoiding taking them for predictions,  or even meaningless rantings.

It is not helpful to consider them as ways to fulfill desires, which are the forms that take our needs, vital needs that require adequate answers, better to limit ourselves to considering them as clues, traces, or evidence of our search for solutions, solutions that  then we can test, or we will have to test in our interaction with real environments.

This wonderful and extraordinary systemic property of ours, which I describe, simplifying for the sake of clarity, as of simultaneous access to interaction with real environments and with virtual environments, allows us to resort to the "instructions" that we have built in virtual environments to guide actions of very high precision while we are in interaction with real environments; it allows us to have an almost infinite "virtual" laboratory in which to build anything, prefiguring any result, conducting experiments, evaluating the probability of success: that this is the result of a long, very long evolutionary history, cannot be doubted, that this property of the human living system has emerged, "built" and stabilized through countless attempts for countless generations, and then come down to us, diligently and stably delivered to each of us through the double helix of our DNA,  it is for me the most extraordinary wonder in the universe.

Alignment and confirmation

A complex control and protection device of good functioning is also an integrated and integral part of this extraordinary wonder: between the two different environments, for the success of our operations, aimed at our survival, it is necessary that there is at least similarity, if not perfect alignment, the degree of harmony and dystonia between the two is constantly monitored.

This control device, like any other control device we have (and we have a considerable amount of them) is naturally connected to the alarm system and to the confirmation system of good functioning, more properly, respectively the nociceptive system and the proficeptive system.

If the environments are misaligned, the nociceptive system punctually signals it, graduating the signal strength mainly, but not only, according to the threats estimated as related to the degree of misalignment: the signal, unmistakable, is what we call pain, a particular configuration that assumes that element of the real environment that is our body.

For what reasons the mismatch between real and virtual environments is "classified" as a threat, of greater or lesser severity, does not seem to present particular difficulties of understanding: or the real environment has not yet reached the configuration indicated in our virtual environments, by definition the one we recognize as supporting our survival, and something must be done,  or we are "using" virtual environments and inappropriate code to deal with the current configuration of real environments, and more than ever something needs to be done.

The concomitant "push" to the action, that in those cases we experience, is a related and well-known specific configuration that assumes that element of the real environment that is our body, with greater or lesser urgency, intended to support the execution of life saving actions, that is, exactly those that obtain the effect of aligning the environments, the achievement of which effect is punctually reported by the proficeptive system : the signal, unmistakable, is the pleasure, with degree of intensity correlated mainly, but not only, to the level of alignment obtained.

Here, this work, for each of us, is incessant, when awake or while we sleep, knows no stops, breaks, or it is direct action of governance of interaction with real environments, or it is action of preparation carried out in our virtual laboratories, which incessantly achieve the alignment of real and virtual environments and, with this, the conditions for our survival.

Elizabeth lived alone for eight years.

Since the children are constantly with her, it seems she is not really alone, as their economic fortune increases, other people are around her in the house, and then there is the daily, daily commitment of counselor, of sorceress of the distant husband, what loneliness is it, then?

The blue eyes of the grandmother are the grandmother, and the grandmother is the set of wisdoms, codes, neurograms developed to deal with her, and also the set of cloned codes, copied, built in her company, codes to be used to deal with a lot of things, from hygiene to food, from the order of things at home to the magnificent dessert that the grandmother prepared for her and only for her on her birthday,  from the time of the game to the time of homework, and much more.

The same for mom, there are the codes for dealing with her and the codes of how-to-do-for a lot of things, how you dress, how you behave with strangers, how you behave with money, with work, of course, as soon as possible Elizabeth also gave a hand in the company.

Codes cloned, copied, built by trial and error that we have employed over and over again successfully, proof of which is that we have survived.

Complex sequences of neural codes integrated into "characters" to facilitate and speed up activation and execution: the speed of execution is a key factor for the success of our interaction with real environments.

Characters that must be taken as a way to indicate the integration of groups and possible groupings of plexus sequences of neurograms, and that are constituted as stable elements of our egoic system, literally parts of us, not much less ours and "concrete" than our limbs are.

Characters that can easily constitute themselves as elements of our virtual environments, and as such imperiously require alignment with real environments, whose possibility or impossibility of execution is associated, related to satisfaction or displeasure.

And finally, for each of us, these characters, literally, are home: it is with them that we have "built" our home, our shelter, our shelter, our safe place, and this house, adapted, modified, but recognizably our home, is the one that is literally in us, and remains in us and with us wherever we are,  and every day imperiously requires alignment.

And Arthur?

So far, Arthur is recognizably made up of numerous ancient codes of Elizabeth, from those developed to have to do with us, and from those cloned, copied and developed with Arthur, for example those related to the logic of investment management, which Elizabeth repeatedly recognizes to have learned from Arthur, we also find more, we will see it later,  but for the moment this may be enough to see Arthur not, as was once said, a simple pillar of Elizabeth's house, but like Elizabeth's entire house.

We better understand Elizabeth's intense happiness, the one she expresses in our conversations when she tells the beginning of the story, when she says "I belonged to him", in itself a statement that reverses the sense of what we have seen so far, like a mirror, but that faithfully reports the jubilation for having managed to align what until then had been impossible to align.

We better understand the strength, the violence of Elizabeth's reaction to Arthur's decision to leave.

Arthur is not a symbol, he is not the bearer of simple known signs of good old things, he is those things, he is made of those things, of those codes that are in Elizabeth's flesh and blood, he is finally home.

The physical distance, thousands of kilometers, the thinned out meetings, for eight years prevent Elizabeth from doing what she did before, every day, aligning the worlds and obtaining confirmations, forcing her to limit herself to obtaining alignment and confirmation through daily network connections, it is not enough, but better than nothing.

Easy to see in this a piece of his story, mom helping dad while maintaining an important role but of less visibility, and this is also a piece of the house, rebuilt from the beginning of the relationship with Arthur, a piece of the house that is aligned every day.

And the rest? How does Elizabeth find relative peace day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, for eight years?

The answer is partly in Elizabeth's violent recrimination: he promised me, a few more years of work, ten, and then we would enjoy together the fruit of the great efforts and great sacrifices made in all these years, we would finish accompanying the children to their adult life, we would travel, we would keep company in old age.

In common language we could say that Elizabeth, for eight years, has told herself every day, several times a day, this story, in systemics this narration is the side effect of the activation of specific plexuses sequences of neurograms that constitute specific virtual environments whose alignment is legitimately postponed, producing satisfaction.

The granitic conviction that this would be the case is the side effect of a future alignment repeated countless times, an operation that for Elizabeth has been constituted as an antidote and remedy of ready use that can be used in all cases of Arthur's misalignment, not only during the long periods of physical separation, but also, plausibly, in the face of Arthur's "listlessness" towards social relationships,  when he physically returned home, and towards marital relationships.

Antidote that worked very well, or almost, until the day Elizabeth decides to hire an investigator to get evidence of what she already knows.

 

 

Queen Elizabeth

I don't know what will happen anymore ... how can love do so badly... it's not love, or loving is not what I did, it was just feeding the little girl who is now even hungrier than before...

Iron Lady-mom, Nitty-Gritty-Grandma, Vengeful-Antiope, Princess-Child are some of the characters identified, and then, little by little, finally, Queen Elizabeth becomes more and more recognizable, more and more able to govern the difficult and complex interactions with difficult configurations of real and virtual environments, Arthur, Ethan, Frederick, mother, friends, suitors, new acquaintances that can open up opportunities.

It is Queen Elizabeth who now rereads, with me, some aspects of the complex relationship with Arthur: yes, Arthur said he had the same priorities as me, family above all, everything else comes later, but it was never true, for him above all there was and there is success, affirmation, social recognition,  power, rank.

And I have served him to conquer the position he has now reached, and I no longer serve him to conquer the next one he has in mind, his new mate can open the way for him, she is part of a caste that has those accesses ... I don't serve him anymore, probably.

I wanted the family, my family, the one I didn't have.

The Princess-Child has had to face multiple abandonments, from birth, and survive: in every cell of our body there is the wisdom of the extreme danger of being abandoned, written in our DNA, there is the instruction of being with our fellows, there is the instruction to suck the nipple, of the scream at the onset of pain, which recalls those who care for us, an impressive series of practical knowledge,  that do not require any consciousness, no awareness, no study, simple vital knowledge.

It is surprising that Elizabeth did not develop what is commonly called a gigantic guilt complex, or guilt, a privileged solution for all cases in which alignments fail, very plausibly also a protective device of our complex functioning, genetically inherited: in our conversations I would swear that no significant evidence has emerged.

Guilt that has been observed to manifest itself openly in the vast majority of children who suffer separation from one of the two parents: if dad is gone, if mom is gone it is my fault, a fault devoid of content, of "real" feedback, in common language imaginary contents, invented.

It does not  matter if  she leaves for work necessity, for termination of the marriage contract, for death, or for any other imaginable reason: the child has to do with abandonment, in our case more than one, we could say crudely and cruelly repeated, no matter if rationalized with the garment of the necessities of life, and had to find a way to square the inescapable task of aligning the worlds,  real and virtual, identifying and verifying the connections between the elements of one's life, in common language making sense to what happens.

Frederick has long since provided ample evidence of his intimate belief that if his father is not there, he is gone, it is his fault; Ethan doesn't have to struggle to find evidence that if Dad isn't with them, well, the fault is all his, as Dad never missed an opportunity to point out that Ethan wasn’t up to his expectations.

The Princess Unveiled

Elizabeth child, the Princess, how did she cope?

The memories are few, for the most part vague, as it is natural that it is, given the periodic "neural pruning" that each of us undergoes, the grandmother lives in a small town, her house is close to the school, and well soon Elizabeth goes and returns from school by herself, and then?

And then she is with her grandmother, and her aunt, who somewhat look after her, for the homework she has to make do, more or less she makes them ... and the playing? Ah yes, there was a cousin who lived nearby, older than her, and another child, two boys, and then her little brother, who was small and could not play their games ... sometimes they came to the grandmother's yard, they played boys stuff, she too, the fight, the war, once the cousin with an improvised bow pulled an incendiary arrow in a kind of warehouse not far away...

And then? And then nothing... I was very bored ... I could not go with my playmates, even if they lived nearby, they could not come at me, and then, when I moved to mom, I could not invite anyone, mom said not to invite anyone, never, she had no time to look after us ... once I went to a schoolmate, for me it was very strange, their house did not look like mine at all, her family did not look like mine at all.

Ah yes, before dinner there were cartoons, heidi, lady oscar, very unlucky, I liked lady oscar, I knew it all by heart.

At school? At first they were worried, because when a child bothered me I would take off a shoe and pull it on him... my mom never came, but she knew everything because my teacher was a friend of hers, she often called her to know how I was going, I learned this much later.

My favorite refuge was the closet, I didn't go to my grandmother to be consoled, I locked myself inside the closet, and I was there, in the dark, alone.

Elizabeth wanted a family, her family, the one she had not had, with a father and a mother who do not abandon their children, but take care of them, Elizabeth wanted to be loved, understood, understood, comprehended, respected, honored and never, never abandoned again.

Step by step we reconstruct together this design, what the Princess incessantly feeds, the house, the internal house, remains in the background, but the design necessarily includes it, the first boyfriend arrives, boring, not appreciating, seemed to understand, no ambition, got rid, the second arrives, a plain guy, mad of her, well, very appreciative , thank goodness, but he does not understand, zero ambition, got rid, then the third, more awake and cultured than the previous one, very appreciative, but boring, god, so boring, and then, no ambition ... no.

Then Arthur comes, perfect, the fact that he is younger presents dangers, you know, the females age earlier, on the other hand he risks less to disappear by death, and then she knows better, she is not entirely at the mercy ... What? For him too, is the family in first place?

And the game is done, Princess is finally happy, she has resisted for decades, and finally she has found her Prince, the end of a fairy tale that no one has ever told her, certainly not her grandmother, let's leave the aunt alone, good as gold but unmendicably stupid, certainly not the mother, the most beautiful game with the mother was to play fight,  and then go shopping to dress as-you-should, for the rest he had to work, always.

And Elizabeth, a little sad and melancholic, but with dry eyes and a tenderness that touches me thousands of miles away, tells me: and I believed in it , could I do something else?

Queen Elizabeth knows

Queen Elizabeth is able to do what none of the other characters is able to do: she is able to recognize the drawing, the drawing that has been nourished with the fear and pain of abandonment, foster care of the grandmother, diversity, loneliness, lack of company, only after the age of fourteen will she be imposed and allowed to be part of the scouts of the neighboring city,  in the face of excessive loneliness, excessive withdrawal from social relationships noticed by a friend of her mother, a design that has maintained the beam of the "house", and has gradually integrated respect for the strict religious rules of the milieu in which she grew up, she is able to recognize that she enlisted Arthur because perfect fulfillment of the design which lacked a fundamental piece,  not really falsifying his passport, but putting in the background and a little in the fog all the traits that from the beginning indicated that Arthur's drawing was not quite like his.

Queen Elizabeth is able to recognize and reconstruct her entire story, to recognize that all the time, and not only during the eight years of distance before the separation, she continued to feed, day after day, the great design of the Princess, she is able to recognize and accept that Arthur's erotic interest in her has quickly cooled,  oh yes, there was always so much to do, so much to work, and then Arthur loved to spend part of his free time in sports activities that excluded her.

Queen Elizabeth is able to recognize that even her erotic desire for Arthur was more the result of respect for the to-husband-all-is-granted rule than not proud flower of his body, more supported by the need to align the design of the perfect family, in which there is perfect understanding between husband and wife even between the sheets, than by the spontaneous need to appease the hunger of life with the beloved companion.

Queen Elizabeth knows that her children are her internal children, parts of herself, and that it is good not to confuse them with her boys, since they are boys, and no longer children, and with the boys it is not good to deal with them as if they were what they are no longer, certainly not yet adults, but certainly no longer children,  not an easy task, compared to which the repertoire of the grandmother and mother is almost totally unusable.

Queen Elizabeth knows that her boys suffer a bit of separation, they suffer from the fact that the father is no longer at home with them, few of their friends are in a similar situation, the majority have "regular" families, but since dad was rarely there for years, after all the thing does not change so much,  the plan would say that they will still spend time with him, alternating weekends and part of the holidays, a classic.

Queen Elizabeth knows that her boys are very frightened by her "mood swings", she knows that these are not mood swings, but that on the scene there are mainly the wounded, weeping and furious Princess, and then Antiope the devastator, and then Iron Lady, with all her iron rules to respect, who always calls them "love" and a second later shoots like a tiger if things are not as she wants.

Queen Elizabeth knows that the boys rarely have seen her, and that although the great design of the Princess provides that the children are never  abandoned, they have been mainly abandoned and left alone: dad not only, however, for most of the time away, but when there is often disappointed by Ethan and often quarrelled with Frederick (of course Arthur also has his own great design),  mother dedicated to making them perfect children in her perfect design, to align the real children to the children of the perfect design, with this ending up ignoring them, not to take into great account who and what they are, expressing satisfaction and love when the alignment succeeds, and disappointment, harsh reproach or silent indifference and rejection when the damn alignment fails.

Queen Elizabeth knows that her boys have every reason to be after their mother, for what she has mainly shown herself throughout the time of the perfect marriage, that winning their trust, becoming, for them and in them, mom-who-helps, will not be easy, but it is worth trying, and that there are chances of success.

Queen Elizabeth knows that, more than rights, for her, to be understood, to be comprehended, to be appreciated, to be loved are vital necessities, she knows that the abandonment and loneliness suffered by the princess are not only the "real" ones, dad and mom who physically are not there, dad who dies soon, but they are also those, even more ferocious and annihilating, suffered in the presence,  when you are not comprehended, appreciated, loved.

Each of these aspects has powerful reasons and roots, which through the systemic it is possible to identify and understand, this we will deal with in the next chapter, we still remain a little in the company of Queen Elizabeth: she knows that nothing and no one can guarantee to any living person hr/she will never be abandoned, that there is no contract or insurance policy capable of shielding us from this risk.

Queen Elizabeth knows that even she cannot guarantee to anyone, partner, children, friends, that she will never abandon them, even now that she knows what abandonment, in all its forms, is: she has done it, over and over again, not knowing it and not wanting it, it is true, but the fact remains, she has often abandoned her children, she has often abandoned her husband,  friends… everyone.

And now what do you do? The answer seems simple, there is nothing left but to unfold the skills and wisdom of Queen Elizabeth, and explore the possibilities of finding or building a professional activity whose contents and modalities are quite satisfactory, a good way to use the time and great energy that she still has at her disposal, and then do it.

Exploring the possibilities of reclaiming the interaction, the relationship with her boys, to support them in their task of increasing their self-regulation skills, to devote time and energy to study, sport, socialization.

Exploring the possibilities of improving interaction with friends and acquaintances, the possibilities of new encounters and new acquaintances, also in view of a possible new companion, able to understand, appreciate, love, and help ... difficult, very difficult, not impossible.

Exploring the possibilities of identifying an activity, so to speak, complementary, pleasant, different from work, which specifically helps to maintain balance, capable of providing possibilities for verification of virtual-real alignment skills, confirmation of one's abilities, and an adequate quantity and quality of interaction with our fellow human beings.

Simple, isn't it?

No, definitely not, Elizabeth's story provides irrefutable evidence.

 

 

Understood, appreciated, loved

Long live Queen Elizabeth! God save the Queen!

Certainly yes, we are happy, intensely happy to see that the Queen has arrived, she will put all things in place, she has the ability and the power ... let's get out of the similarity, extremely effective from a practical point of view, at least this I have directly experienced in many cases, Kings, Queens, Masters, are the most recurring names that find and welcome those who I help, names able to communicate, with very low margin of error, which is the character we are dealing with.

But our story is not similarity or metaphor, it concerns extremely concrete aspects of their lives, it declines the way it had to do with us, concrete, observable, in some way measurable, it only precise, in coherence with the purposes of our meetings, who did what.

And for us it is not entirely enough to observe and describe its appearance, greatly rejoicing in its coming, we are certainly rejoiced, but the question remains: Queen, King, Master, what the hell are they? Where do they jump out of?

They do not jump out anywhere, they have always been there, elements not yet integrated in this way, in the configuration that we call Queen, but present and operating: they are elements generated by the Symbolic Thought System, to correct and integrate the codes generated by the Operational Thought System.

Thought systems

The Symbolic Thought System and the Operational Thought System are not mushrooms that have sprung up now to legitimize and explain this very daring thesis, which converges and ends in the legitimization and (we hope) the crowning of a character, another constitutive element of our Egoic System: The Symbolic Thought System and the Operational Thought System are two distinct systems,  that appear in the course of our evolution as species, emergent properties (so the systemic paradigm allows to qualify them) of our neural system.

Emergent properties that are in turn identifiable as systems, that is, sets of integrated elements with a relatively stable and recognizable configuration, in constant interaction with specific and distinctive environments.

Accepting the reasonable risk of oversimplification, the Operational Thought System has as its reference environment a virtual environment (in turn an emerging property of our neural system) whose elements consist of a part of the Emotional System (I refer to the presentation of this and the other systems for reasons of space and opportunity,  and I refer, reluctantly, to one of my texts of 2016), exactly that part that records a problem that the Emotional System cannot solve using the elements and algorithms that are its own, classically of the type how-you-do-for: through the use of the numerous variants of the operations of sum and subtraction, yes, the fundamentals + and -, elaborates solutions,  that is, pieces of neural codes, coinciding with the activation of specific plexuses of the neural network, plausibly configuring them by trial and error, to be integrated with the pieces of neural code that constitute the unsolved problem, both in view of being able to replicate a copy that we have been able to observe of the configuration necessary to achieve the desired effects, and in view of the identification from scratch of the configuration necessary to achieve the desired effects.

In short, copying as you do to unscrew the nut of a bolt or find a way to unscrew the nut of a bolt that blocks the opening of the lid of a sturdy armored glass box that contains excellent food, and deliver the code to the Egoic System for subsequent possible use are tasks of the Operational Thought System.

The Symbolic Thought System, a much more recent evolutionary achievement, has as its reference environment the Operational Thought System, exactly that part that records a problem that the Operational Thought System cannot solve using the elements and algorithms that are its own, classically of the type that-what-is-this, or that-sense-has-this.

The "algorithms" of combination and connection used by the Symbolic Thought System are at least all those that we have known for millennia under the name of rhetorical figures, grouped into the three classes known as similitude, metonymy and synecdoche; through the activation of the Symbolic Thought System we find the answer to the question: what intentions of the individual who is approaching the armored glass box containing good food, which has the lid firmly fixed by an M20 bolt, with a wrench in his hand.

Queen Elizabeth is a character whose elements were already well present in Elizabeth's incredibly vast repertoire of neurograms, configured by the Symbolic Thought System, able to "read", to recognize the operational codes that have been integrated into the other characters, in the Princess, in Antiope, in Iron Lady.

Queen Elizabeth is able to recognize the great design, built piece by piece over decades, to recognize that she enlisted Arthur also, if not especially, to, in his words, feed the hungry child, able to "do" everything that the other characters are not able to do: Princess, Antiope, Iron Lady are extremely stable routines,  ready to use, obliged to provide obligatory answers to all questions, situations they encounter, situations that are read as copies of those already seen and resolved.

Queen Elizabeth knows that the truth is that only the operational codes are repeated, not the configurations of the environment we are dealing with, subject to continuous change, perhaps imperceptible; she knows that for some eminently "practical" purposes, many changes are negligible, but that it is not good, it does not help, nor to try to stop the change, negligible or relevant, nor to blindly resort to the known codes to govern the interaction with changing environments, denying their variation to bring them back to the known environmental configurations with respect to which the old codes have been successful.

The search for appeasement

Queen Elizabeth now knows a little more about the roots, her roots, the need to be, today, understood, a need that, like every human being, has always had, from the beginning of her life, a need that over time, in the course of its development, has gradually taken on more articulated and complex forms of possible satisfaction, all attributable to the primary need to keep our worlds aligned,  real environments and virtual environments, to have continuous proof of their good functioning.

But today, the form of the appeasement of this fundamental need is the congruent one, in harmony with a splendid fifty-year-old woman, an expert in the world and life, mother of two children much more than facing adolescence, the result of obedience to the imperative and inescapable order to reproduce, genetically inherited, experienced, intelligent and capable professional, temporarily not in service,  wise administrator of substances collected to protect a good quality of life.

A form of appeasement markedly different from that necessary for the five-year-old child, already abandoned and then fatherless, different from that necessary for a girl sent to an educational institution run by nuns, different from that necessary for the young woman who completes her high school studies, different from those that follow to get to today.

Legitimate and necessary appeasement to be sought and found by resorting to codes, so to speak, updated, of adequate richness and complexity to govern the interaction with the complex environments with which she has to do today, with the subjects with whom she has to deal today.

You know, systemic or not, being really understood, comprehended requires interlocutors able to do it, and with the desire to do it, you can not ask everyone, not young children, too soon, friends? Friends? well, yes, perhaps, certainly we can not escape the need that the companion, once found, understands and comprehends, we can do without that for a while, even for a long time, but not too long, there is a term, beyond which, as they say, the relationship dies even if the partner is still there,  close to us.

As Elizabeth's story, certainly not the only one in the world, shows, it is possible for us to "force" the evidence that the other understands and comprehends us, transforming the evidence of the no into an acceptable yes, not complete, but acceptable: the Princess and Iron Lady can only enlist, but they cannot, by definition, provide the companion, reciprocally, what the companion must provide them,  day after day.

And there is no possible doubt that this need, precisely that of being understood and comprehended, is alive and strong even in the companion.

Queen Elizabeth now knows a little more about the root of the desire to be appreciated, she knows that it comes from far away, she knows that in part this desire plays with the need to be understood and comprehended, being appreciated is a form of confirmation of one's good functioning, but that there is more, it has to do with one's place in the community.

Not being appreciated is a threatening condition, which brings us closer to expulsion from the community, to abandonment, to being abandoned and being alone to cope with all the dangers, risks, struggles of survival: this is also written in our DNA, it serves immediately, as newborns, pushes us to do everything possible to stay close to those who take care of us when we are not yet able to provide minimally  to ourselves, it pushes us to seek, nurture and maintain contacts and bonds.

Being appreciated is a favorable condition to remain in the community, a little safer, a little more protected, the group is stronger than any single subject: the command is very ancient, scrutinized and confirmed through countless generations.

Belonging to a group, to a community is one of the correlates of being appreciated, another related is the rank, it is the possibility of obtaining a higher rank, a condition generally coveted, some more and some less, at least in appearance.

Rank is not a joke, it means having to deal with the right, recognized by the group, to greater or lesser ease of access to vital resources, to the choice of partners, to greater or lesser protection from the attack of predators or competitors, human or not.

Also because of this need, the form of the necessary appeasement changes in the course of our lives, and so it is also, of course, for Elizabeth.

The exact words used by Elizabeth to communicate her magnificent insight are a great start to try to deal with the third aspect, let's take them back:

"I don't know what will happen anymore ... how can love do so badly... it's not  love, or loving is not what I did, it was just feeding the little girl who is now even hungrier than before..."

On love, loving, being loved, artistic production is impressive, for millennia, the scientific one a bit less, but still imposing, can we ever say something more, something different? Statistically, it seems unlikely to me.

We, here, are interested in some pieces, we are far from any claim and expectation of exhaustiveness: basically, it is the name of an emotion, human and, apparently, not only human.

It manifests itself with differentially recognizable degrees of intensity, while keeping its configuration stable, we have a fair number of words to explicitly indicate these differences, and subtle differential classifications related to contexts, loving sports is different from loving one's child, although we accept that it is always about love.

Like all emotions, joy, fear, anger, love is a sort of marker, associated with a series of environmental configurations, which indicates almost instantly which plexus sequences of codes can be activated and which cannot: specifically, those codes that have to do with approaching, preserving, protecting are "favored".

And I would stop here, for our purposes this may be enough: the root of everyone's deep need to be loved, primitive, crude, but of enormous strength, is to have close to us what and who protects us, that and who acts for our survival.

The root of the deep need to love is the relentless search for environment configurations conducive to our survival, and, once found, the protection, preservation of those configurations.

Again, and, here, for the last time, also because of this need, the form of the necessary appeasement changes in the course of our lives, and so it is also, of course, for Elizabeth.

Queen Elizabeth knows this, and she can modify the codes so that she can find adequate and legitimate appeasement, in harmony with who she is today.

Antiope, the Princess, Iron Lady, they don't know, for them everything is already known and solved, it's just matter of finding and enlisting a new Arthur, the drawing is a bit battered, but in part you can recover ... and if you do not find him, never mind, we will do without him, it is matter of being patient while the children grow up, you know, adolescence is a difficult period, they will make it, I did it in much worse conditions, they are privileged, it is a matter of letting the gentleman time do its job, and sooner or later even the old Arthur will cease to be a cause of pain,   and, finally, it's about finding a job... up, let's get busy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The unstable government of the kingdom

Perhaps this time we will be able to formulate an answer to the question that we still have outstanding: what threatens Elizabeth, and what is threatened, to the point of keeping her in a condition of continuous pain?

The traces, the signs of a deep sadness, of dejected despair are evident and unmistakable, the painfulness of this condition repeatedly and repeatedly declared, the disorder, the irregularity of rest, sleep, appetite, mood swings characterize the state in which Elizabeth is.

We now know a lot more about mood swings, Elizabeth knows a lot more, but the pain is zero or very reduced only when Queen Elizabeth governs, and it returns to being more or less what it was before when the other characters "regulate" the interaction with the environments.

And what Elizabeth and I have repeatedly observed and experienced is that, after having identified, in some way given stable form to Queen Elizabeth, on the scene they continue to reappear and rule Princess, Iron Lady, and, more rarely, Antiope, carrying with them, very recognizable, the burden of pain, of acute and present pain.

For what damn reason, from a functioning that obtains excellent results, which basically eliminates  pain and sorrow, we return to the hell from which we have come out, reseeing the stars, we return to activate characters that are inevitably accompanied by pain and sorrow ...

The results we have obtained several times, and several times verified that they were undoubtedly related to the government of Queen Elizabeth: the interaction with the boys benefited, for a couple of weeks they stayed at the table with her instead of fleeing each in their respective videogames just swallowed the last bite, sometimes they did not even show up; Frederick ceases to reject her when she tries to get closer to what makes him suffer, getting the painful confession of "why does everyone always abandon me?", Frederick accepts that she approaches while he is angry and sulky, instead of sending her away as he did before, and they invent together a thing to do together, which they will then do several times later,  getting close, lying on a carpet looking at the stars together, is little, yes, very little, but a few words come out, while before it was the wall; Ethan with great embarrassment asks her indirectly for help, he is having episodes of nocturnal enuresis, it happened even before, and Ethan did everything to hide the thing; quiet and lucidity in managing the intemperances of the ex-husband who seems to have totally forgotten some clauses put in black on white in the consensual separation agreement; the wonder of an old friend not seen for long time, Victoria, who is in a situation quite similar to hers, now are six years, a cheating husband, in fact constantly absent, children of the same age as Ethan and Frederick, separation legally recognized impossible, and she for six years every day finds and tries the same pains of Princess Elizabeth,  for the same reasons, nothing seems to change, Victoria is amazed to find her old friend, after only six months from the separation, so .... thus.... so transformed, here, serene, smiling, quiet, only few hints of sadness, at times, the story of the events of the past months, nothing more intense, beautiful as she did not remember having ever seen her that way, Elizabeth herself who says she felt, shortly after, finally, completely, free, Arthur no longer means anything for her, no thorn is planted in her heart when she has to do with Arthur,  in the real environment and in the virtual environments, just a hint of sadness for not having known and been able to do better for herself, for the boys, and confidence that she would find the way, a new way, to solve the difficulties and overcome the obstacles she encounters today, ways, instructions, codes that she does not have yet, but that she will know how to build,  a little at a time.

And while, one after the other, over the course of weeks, we collect these results, Princess returns to dominate, and then Iron Lady, and the children remake the wall and take refuge in video games, Arthur is the pivot around which the infernal carousel of anger, despair, revenge, harsh reproach revolves, none of those he meets is up to it,  there is no one interesting, there is no decent job for her, no job that really interests her, even the club goes to hell, to hell golf, to hell with walking, to hell even the dog, crying, pain and sorrow spread unchallenged.

Pain

We have already hastily solved the issue of pain, it is a sign of threat, let’s move on, we do not have time… well, now that time is better to take it: we systemics know 1) that any behavior we observe makes sense, 2) that any behavior observed is the result of the identification of the best that the subject can do, 3) that any behavior we observe pursues and achieve,  or at least try to achieve, a benefit, a gain.

And so, if Elizabeth returns to enable Princess and Iron Lady there are good reasons, even if we do not find even one, there are, even if for now we can not see them, find them: if we can not find, with the greatest possible precision, these specific good reasons, we will not be able to identify either the roots, what feeds these behaviors,  nor the benefits that these behaviors achieve or try to achieve, nor explain how it is possible that this "going back" is the result of doing Elizabeth's best: all these elements are essential to help Elizabeth make decisions, to take and follow paths that do not lead her constantly and invariably to feel pain and sorrow.

Decisions and paths that Queen Elizabeth has successfully identified, but which, with full evidence, lead to fruits and benefits that do not have the same value, the same "weight" as the fruits and benefits pursued and achieved by Princess and Iron Lady, it does not have the slightest importance that we, now, fail to identify them, or that,  in our opinion, there are just none: what is "in our opinion" is worth little or nothing, the point is what and how it is according to Elizabeth, Elizabeth who provides with great continuity the evidence that employing Princess and Iron Lady is better, for her, than employing Queen Elizabeth, despite the obvious pain and sorrow that this has entailed, entails,  and continues to entail.

We all know what pain is... or not?

I do not believe there is a living human being who has never suffered, experienced pain, all humans know the experience of pain, the forms and ways are manifold, some forms and ways of expression have specific names, each of us knows a good part, if not all, and distinguishes without hesitation, to say, between the stomach aching from indigestion and the stomach aching from worry,  between toothache and headache, between chest tightness from love disappointment and chest tightness from overexertion.

So we all know what pain is, in a more or less "rich" way.

Many know that humans are endowed with a nociceptive system, which is precisely the system in charge of managing the painful sensation, in its various forms and intensities , in relation to the different parts of our body.

Few know how this system is made and exactly how it works, and how to modify, in a targeted way, its operation.

Few of us pay attention to the obvious meaning of pain, wonder about the meaning of pain, all taken, necessarily, by working to reduce it, if not eliminate it, which we almost all achieve with some success.

Yet it is good to have, and use appropriately, this additional form of knowledge of the nature of pain, a reliable answer to questions that may be: what do we do with pain, why we must necessarily feel pain, for what reason among all the possible ways that could be found, nature, our DNA builds us so and gives us a nociceptive system that uses pain as a form of signaling.

As often happens in human things, investigating the obvious leads to the non-obvious, the non-granted, sometimes to the mystery, the non-immediately-evident: it seems to me not so obvious to consider pain as salvation, as precious and, at least for now, indispensable, an element of salvation.

Just as it does not seem so easy and simple to keep in mind, while we are under the attack of pain, that in the vast majority of cases death is still far away.

Nor that even when the pain does not have, as far as we can observe, a source, a "physical" source (at this moment I endure the pain following a small surgery that I underwent yesterday), nevertheless there is at least one source, one reason, one good, very good reason, not infrequently more than one, to feel pain.

We may have doubts, we may not even be able to identify what the hell has happened or is happening that correlates with our painful feeling, but we can be sure that, if we feel pain, even mild, even very mild, we are dealing with a threat to our life.

For all of us it is quite obvious that the intensity of the pain we feel is directly related to the severity of the threat, even if science and scientific research indicate numerous conditions, seriously threatening, that are not intercepted and do not activate the nociceptive system: hypertension is just one of the examples, there are many.

Still science and research indicate conditions in which the high intensity of the painful signal does not always correspond to a serious threat to our lives, the so-called heel, tallonitis,  could be an example.

So the nociceptive system is wrong, does it provide us with wrong information? It seems to me unfair this possible conclusion, better to consider it as a system that has limits of functioning, specificity of operation, and perhaps trying to realize and account for the possible reasons of the limits and specificities of the functioning of this very precious system.

Hypertension has not been put, so to speak, under strict control, in our evolutionary history, plausibly for the reason that arises after exceeding forty, the first limit of the life cycle of the human machine ... even when there were no antibiotics someone reached sixty, seventy years of age, but they were very few, usually you died earlier, mother nature's experiments are incessant and without limits, so to speak, taking care of hypertension was not among the project priorities.

The heel is vital to be able to move quickly, and you have to take the greatest care of it, whatever offends it puts us at the mercy of the predator, and therefore watch the heel.

In any case we can nourish the greatest confidence in the confirmation of the reliable correlation between pain and threat to life, if there is pain then there is threat, if there is sorrow then there is threat, we feel sorry if and when something threatens us: the painful signal, the pain, immediately opens a path that we can try to follow to find out what threatens us,  what can take us away from life, and try to prevent it from happening.

The great design

Princess and Iron Lady are bearers, they write and are inscribed in a drawing, consisting of an unknown number of virtual environments, which has become impossible to align with real environments: in the pattern Elizabeth is understood, comprehended, appreciated, loved and never   abandoned, nor betrayed, cheated, despised, ignored, the companion has his own priorities, but for both the family is first and above all,  money, success, prestige, luxury are little or not at all relevant; she and Arthur, together, assiduously take care of their children, whom lovingly they help to grow, to become great, beautiful, strong, wise, balanced, with strong and good values, the real ones, not the papier-mâché ones of the modern world, inconceivable, simply inconceivable to abandon them, if not for causes of death ... but this possibility, which nothing and no one can exclude neither for himself nor for others, is remote, very remote, they are both still young and enjoy excellent health, yes, Arthur has put on weight, and she too, but nothing significantly worrying

She and Arthur have a number of friends, whom they regularly associate with, family friends and family advocates, all good and capable people, who share their good and healthy values, values that she and Arthur respect and observe in their conduct in their private life, in the social one, in the professional life; friends who have children, like them, children who largely become good friends of their children, are part of the same sports team, many are schoolmates and playmates, feel solidarity with each other, help each other willingly and spontaneously, being with peers is good, it helps a lot.

They take holidays together, the four of them, sometimes only them, sometimes with friends, spend this free time pleasantly together, in peace and in an affectionate and generally loving atmosphere, there is no lack of disagreements, you know, we are human, impossible that it does not happen to occasionally quarrel, but it is never anything serious, we understand each other, we comprehend each other,  we talk about it, we clarify shadows and misunderstandings, we remain friends.

And the two of them? Elizabeth and Arthur? Well, they're still young, healthy, they love each other, it's natural isn't it? it happens by itself, we look for each other and we meet, work commitments, social commitments, the care of children, and, uh, yes, also of parents, who remained home, far away, but they are still quite young too, in good health, we see each other every now and then, in a good and affectionate atmosphere, like all grandparents they also rave about their grandchildren,  and they complain about the brevity and scarcity of the encounters, but not so much, that little bit of sport that you have to do, it is not good to get lazy, apart from the belly that tends to continue to grow, you know, age often brings with it these changes ... well in short, the time that remains is just a little, the days are challenging, and in the evening you are almost always very tired .. but even between the sheets they find comfort, love, pleasure, both are, as it were, even imaginative, they continue to explore despite the fact that they have been married for years now, it would take more, but how do you do it?

Elizabeth helps Arthur in his work, little or not at all visible to others, if not during some occasions, Elizabeth has an enormous esteem for Arthur, for how he acts, and there is no lack of opportunity to weave his praises, Arthur appreciates her very much, he often tells her that without her he would never have succeeded, there is no lack of opportunity to tell friends,  to anyone, how extraordinary she is.

We could go on a little longer, but I think it may be enough, more or less this is the pattern that I can report, extracted piece by piece during the encounters with Elizabeth.

It is Elizabeth herself who recognizes, at a certain point, that it is an impossible design to realize for anyone, not only for her: I was not at all surprised of that, Elizabeth has considerable talents and abilities.

Piece by piece, together, we tried to see and understand why, why for each piece things are or did not go like this, if they could have gone there, under what conditions, or if they really could not work.

I leave out, for reasons of brevity, opportunity and confidentiality, the inventory of what did not go as the pattern indicated, of all the reflections, observations, connections iwe dentified, I will only say that, to a large extent, only the last chapter worked relatively well, that of working together, renamed Award-Winning Company, all the time, until the separation.

The fruits, frankly enviable, from the point of view of the speed with which the Award-Winning Company (no one can escape the extraordinary resemblance to the story of Elizabeth's mother and father) has accumulated a small fortune, part of which has been, without any resistance and objection, immediately recognized as property and unquestionable prerogative of Elizabeth,  at the time of the separation, they are more than sufficient testimony of the good evidence provided by both on the front of the management, as they say, of the business.

And even the set of mutual statements of esteem and great appreciation are, on the record, much more than sufficiently proven.

Elizabeth, with me, takes lucid and conscious note of the distance between each punctual aspect identified in the pattern, part of its virtual environments, and their counterparts identified in real environments: to be precise, Queen Elizabeth, with a hint of sadness, but quiet and pacified, takes note and explicitly attests to the veracity of our shared feedback.

At the next meeting, the Princess starts again undaunted with her gloomy lament, Iron Lady with her reproaches, Antiope with her threats of death and destruction, the inevitable frame, pass me the metaphor, of the painful pain, acute and relentless.

Is it a hoax? A hellish game in which I found myself, against all my desires and expectations? And even if it were, how and where do we find the answers we are diligently seeking?

 

 

Five-star hell

We can try to focus and describe, as best we can, the costs and benefits of the old road, along which we meet Princess and Iron Lady, and of the new road, along which we meet Queen Elizabeth.

And we can also tell ourselves that we now have a reasonable answer to the initial question, what threatens Elizabeth and what is threatened.

She is threatened, more, prevented, the satisfaction of the fundamental need to be able to align the worlds, virtual environments and real environments, and obtain proof of its good functioning: the fact that there are no "real threats" out there only makes things worse, pushing Elizabeth, in the inescapable search for a solution, to come to terms with the second response towards which we are all pushed in these cases,  and that is the suspicion of being crazy, fool, it is we, our systems, our codes that do not work, that cannot deploy what is needed for our survival, despite the abundance of resources that Elizabeth has.

If Arthur had died, which Iron Lady and Antiope invoke with some frequency, well, the pattern, however frayed, it could have been saved, could have accepted widowhood with much greater serenity and composure... yes, the knots of the children would have remained, the knot of a couple relationship of no less difficulty in resolution, the knot of unsatisfactory social relations, the knot of a work in tune with his talents, breaches in the hull of his ship stuffed for decades, but she would have managed to align the worlds, and to continue the navigation,  Somehow.

But Arthur is not dead, he is very alive, and he continues to be successful, and the pattern, so far, can not be renounced, except for short stretches.

It's true, we have seen it, Queen Elizabeth manages to align the worlds, she manages to stop the backlash of "then I got everything wrong", she can at least start to loosen the knots that remain to be untied, when there is Queen Elizabeth that pain, that sorrow, are no longer there.

When there is Queen Elizabeth, children are young boys, wonderful strangers to know, surprising, unsettling, to help in achieving balance and autonomy, in the expression of their talents, a task for which we are not prepared, the "friends" are almost all good acquaintances, or simple acquaintances, real friends are few, very few, the fingers of one hand are enough to count them,  meetings with new subjects are not for the purpose of enlistment, membership in the club is just a way to have access to network nodes of relationships that can open up possibilities for good meetings and good opportunities ... ah yes, opportunity of what?

We still do not know with certainty what Elizabeth's talents are, what she could deal with satisfaction, we are still searching, and sooner or later something we will find, some clue is there, still tenuous, but there is no hurry, we will continue to work on it, in the quiet of mind and heart that Queen Elizabeth can provide.

But... but?

But for all of us it is difficult, quoting from an old movie, we cannot forget who we are, nor we belong to.

For all of us, at every awakening, the world in which we find ourselves must be rebuilt from the foundations, the complete activation of our neural system brings back into play everything we have inherited, the result of the evolution of living systems that lasted over four billion years, everything we have cloned, copied or built by trial and error, codes that literally build reality,  our specific, in many ways unique and unrepeatable reality, codes that we deploy to deal with our reality, inflexibly aimed at protecting and sustaining our survival.

Work that is done in a few seconds, of course, rarely with the "participation" of our awareness, work that has more than reasonable assumption that environments can present themselves with configurations hostile to our survival, and the first thing to do, the first thing that is done, always, is to rebuild everything that protects us from possible threats.

In one word: home

Nitty-Gritty Grandma, Princess Child, Iron Lady Mom are home, so it was at every awakening for almost five decades, Queen Elizabeth arrives much later, arrives late, not nourished by the emotions felt for eighteen thousand days, not built by unknowingly cloning pieces of codes of grandmother, mom, dad, who has been in the company of Elizabeth,  or by copying them.

They are the answer to the pain and sorrow of abandonment, to the point that we would not even find it too daring to think that Elizabeth's house is recognizable to Elizabeth thanks to the pain and sorrow, as well as for the presence, the activation of what somehow protected her.

It is quite rare, as far as I know, but not so rare, that pain, pain, are used in a different way from what we will expect "normally", not as warning signs, but as signs of life, as evidence of good functioning: some athletes are happy when they feel the pain of the accumulation of lactic acid in the muscles,  the phenomenon of boys and girls who procure small painful cuts is increasingly widespread.

It is not impossible that, for Elizabeth, who has always lived in the jungle of sorrow, that jungle is home, a place where she knows how to move, knows what to do, and that she is uncomfortable, a little strange and estranged, when she does not find the marker of the sorrow, a marker that comforts her, because for her it is a sign that she has got  home.

In any case, the obscure words with which Elizabeth begins to take temporary leave from work with me, pronounced in a sore tone, are now illuminated, with all probability they are the reverberation of what she found as an insurmountable wall "let's stop, I can't do it, it's not mine, it's not mine..."

At each awakening the misalignment recurs, and the first shelter, the safest house she has managed to build is the one made up of the characters developed for decades, where she finds that emotion that confirms that she is at home, that specific emotion denoted by the name of familiarity, feeling at home.

At times, she manages to "put in the background" the usual characters, and to activate Queen Elizabeth, a configuration that, although not complete, not firmly stable, nevertheless shows a surprising ability to effectively govern the kingdom: it seems plausible that precisely this condition of work in progress has been emotionally marked as only partially familiar.

A few weeks before the suspension we had a clash that I felt as very hard, even under the guise of a "civil exchange of ideas": having recognized that the configurations of the environment, in particular of the real environment, naturally have the property of calling into play the codes mainly used to deal with them, we were trying to see what we could change, or attendance,  or the configuration of the real environments that recalled the known codes into play with particular intensity.

The idea was to find some breathing space, to reduce the "old" stresses a little so that she had a little more time and energy to allow her to "familiarize" the Queen, there were very visible signs of fatigue.

A few days earlier she had told me that she was no longer so happy with the house she was living for some years, set up by her, given the almost total absence of her husband, even if she had made wipe everything that had belonged to Arthur out, she had been surprised to distinctly feel that feeling, a feeling that had never occurred before.

Who was talking to me was undoubtedly the Queen, I considered excessively invasive, at that moment, to go deeper, probably we would have ended up facing the evidence that the house she had set up was one of the expressions of the great design, the result of the use of the well-known characters, who continued to make it difficult, if not to prevent them, to stably govern as Queen,  and that, like Queen, she legitimately needed a different configuration of environment... it was not the right time, I postponed the matter.

And so, when a few days later we tried to take care of the environments, of the way she spent her time every day, I hoped that we would be able to resume that thread, which I saw as very promising: as I touched the house button a ruckus happened, this house is my home, it's fine as it is, I put it on myself, alone,  it's mine... that day there was no Queen, it had happened many other times, and the sessions with the other characters had been very hard, although generally, at some point, Queen peeped out and more or less resumed the reins.

But that day there was nothing to do, the session turned, as rarely had happened, into a sterile update on the progress of the work, the children, the club, the search for work, the inevitable last bullshit of the ex-husband, various and possible.

Leaving home? Move? Of course, if I am forced to do it, I need much less than what there is, it takes much less than what I have, when the children will be autonomous, still ten years, more or less, I give up everything, backpack, and I go around the world, there is so much to see, so much to discover, I will travel, what I have always wanted to do,  and that I have not been able to do, in short, a little yes, but too little, I do not need anything or anyone, where I will be I will find what I need.

This was the only piece from which to try to extract something that could call the Queen into play, a crumb could be the clue to her talent, to be explored ... the rest was evidently the result of the known codes, yet another presentation of a possibility of final defense, of total withdrawal from everything and everyone, based on the denial of the existence of needs, numerous and complex, inescapable, yet another variant of the already known zurück zur Natur.

It is not given to us not to seek and obtain shelter and protection, it is not given to us not to have a home, no matter if the one in the real environment has the shape of a roof of branches or an attic of a luxury palace, of a shack hidden in a forest or of the Palace of Versailles, our virtual house can only be modified,  never left.

And often, as we see, to modify it so that it adapts to what we need, it presents great difficulties, we risk remaining prisoners of the house built decades before, perhaps a dollhouse, why not, while what we need is a house suitable for an adult, fully developed subject ... I know, similarities and metaphors are not part of scientific language, but I do not forget or easily allow us to forget that these expressive forms indicate concrete things, activation of plexus sequences of neural codes.

Nor do I forget that scientific research, which progresses and discovers ever better truths, does so using all the repertoire, similitude, metonymy, synecdoche, without this repertoire it cannot proceed.

However , Elizabeth seems to have, not one, but a thousand reasons: pain, sorrow, fear are so painful to endure, but there, in the old house, sheltered by the old house, they have been put under control.

The new house is not yet, the Queen is not yet felt familiar, althoughshe  has also given excellent proof of herself, to the known and "tamed" pain of the old house, now it adds up, the pain of fear is added, unknown in its developments, inevitably intertwined with the exploration of unknown territories, and as such potentially dangerous, which, it is true,  they promise wonders, they promise a better home, not inhabited by pain and sorrow...  they promise, but still this new home, this new and more effective shelter is not ready, I can not feel it familiar, I can not feel it home.

And, at every awakening, it is the old house that gives me immediate hospitality, sometimes, if I am not too tired, I can go out exploring, I can activate the Queen, sometimes not, and this scares me, and makes me rush back to the old house: yes, it is hell, I know this hell,  I've been living there since I was born.

And then yes, it is certainly a hell, but it is also a five-star hell, the result of the tireless work of Iron Lady, of nitty gritty Granma, of the Princess, the villa is princely, the treasure is safe, the children are a bit problematic, oh well, I frequent higher-level people... what can the Queen offer and bring as a dowry?

And we are at a crossroads, plausibly the one Elizabeth is facing now: either we look for and find a way to "strengthen" and stabilize the Queen, who, never forget, has already given ample and convincing proof of satisfactory functioning, or let's give up and keep the five-star hell.

The obstacles to the path of finding a way to strengthen and familiarize the Queen seem insurmountable, we can accept that it is basically for this reason that Elizabeth asks us to stop.

For now, and I don't know how much longer, Elizabeth has been there, and for weeks, at every awakening, in the middle of the night, in the morning, or after the sporadic naps, the miracle of the reconstruction of the world is repeated, the design that cannot be aligned, the prompt intervention of all the well-known figures, of all the well-known characters present for decades,  sometimes even of the Queen.

And for weeks, several, too many, we are there too... to be exact, I'm there too.

Am I waiting confidently that Queen Elizabeth, alone, without my help, will complete the job? Honestly, no.

After about four weeks from the suspension, I receive an update directly from Elizabeth, she writes to me that she is eliminating everyone, giving up all those who are not aligned with her, who do not approve and appreciate immediately, without ifs and buts, her actions, her statements, her decisions, her thoughts, her beliefs, starting with the mother,  liquidated among the first, followed by another, her dearest friend, already a witness at her wedding and godmother of the firstborn, liquidated in a few minutes after two decades of intense and affectionate friendship ... she does not say it expressly, but it seems to imply that I am liquidated too, as you see we do not have much to say, I find nothing better than sending her an emoticon, the one with a half-mouth smile.

Those operations for me have the flavor of a purging, sense and purpose seem to me easily readable, let's get out of the way the opponents of the design and the current rulers, Princess and Iron Lady, the solution is to align, as much as possible, the real environments to the infernal design.

The press silence is maintained for many weeks, then, candid candid, one Sunday she writes to me, asking if everything is fine, and if by chance I told of her to a guy, her former colleague fifteen years ago, whom she recently saw again after about ten years of silence.

A lapidary "no" is the answer I send, silence is the second comment to one of his annotations, which follows my laconic "no", of crypto-conspiracy flavor: very strange, magically after years we contacted each other again and during the call he used terms and logics that are very "systemic", he confirmed that some contact had occurred in the past, evidently it left his mark.

This exchange falls after some time, I had finally begun to write the story that now, step by step, I am going to conclude, as best I know and can, I decide not to process it in any way, certainly not to embroider on it anything, I take it as a simple expression of a vital signal, she is alive, and plausibly in good health ... and stuck at the point where we left off.

I keep thinking and writing, or at least trying.

The picture seems complete, but I still have the feeling that something has still escaped us, in part, maybe not completely, perhaps it is better to take another good look at the path taken, in a nutshell, Elizabeth suffers like a dog because her drawing, salvific, over and over again patched up, can no longer be aligned.

The same figures through which he built it over the years are at the same time parts of the design and configurations used to deal with the environments, they are home, sore until the meeting with Arthur, happy or forced in happiness as much as possible for fifteen years, and then again miserably sore.

In the "happy" years the execution of the drawing has borne good fruit, children, money, status, family, work, rewarding labors and pains intensely lived for over thirty years: and now everything is over, everything is destroyed.

To be exact, and it is better to be precise, the design is "destroyed", the fruits remain, and are fruits of value, the family remains a family even when the spouse, for some reason, is missing, the form is different from before, the substance remains.

The design was built and implemented, bringing undoubted and evident benefits and advantages, concrete fruits, and above all "protecting" Elizabeth during the years of growth, her development and maturation, and, again, continuing to protect her during the fifteen years of marriage.

Now Elizabeth is about to turn fifty, the same design can no longer be pursued, nor does it seem very sensible to try to start over, another Arthur, ambitious, even without blue eyes, fertility is over, other children will not come, so many variations to do, mission impossible: then we try to modify it, keeping what is good,  and changing what is no longer, was one of the steps we tried, and although for me, at the time, it was not possible to answer the question, so then, what do we keep?, well, we would have seen it together, step by step.

I was not very impressed by the fact that Elizabeth had proposed the similarity with a fortress to be restored, that the design had also, if not above all, a strong defensive value, of protection from the attacks of enemies, it seemed to me to be there without great difficulty, but the thing sounded a little unbalanced.

We tried, but the drawing proved to be much more resistant than expected: the boys returned children, the difficulties and the efforts with them returned to present themselves in the known forms, Iron Lady, the Princess continued to take the reins nack,  Iron Lady and the Princess continued to recur.

Why?

What is the advantage, the benefit of continuing to nurture and try to achieve, to align a design that has recognizably ceased to bear fruit?

Why, at each awakening, is the sorrowful house rebuilt?

This continues to escape our grip, we cannot afford it.

 

 

 

Verdict: NOT GUILTY

Of course everything would be easier if we had Elizabeth to help us... or maybe not, as you know.

And now, what do we do?

I don't know, I really don't know, it keeps buzzing, in my head the same refrain: the drawing is the remedy, the "personages" are part of it and are the defenders, even if they do not only that, the remedy neutralizes, in today's life, the sources of pain and sorrow that have tormented Elizabeth for at least two decades,  a more than ambitious pattern, in short, a film stuff, it is an old design, today, facing again an abandonment, the design emerges forcefully, still to avert and fight what had presented itself in the first two, three decades of Elizabeth, but it is too frayed, it does not hold, it does not stand, it does not stand,  it is Elizabeth herself who recognizes it, but we cannot modify it, like a spring puppet keeps jumping out of the box.

I am sure that, even if I do not know, do not understand, how this is possible, what sense it has, well, I know that it is the best thing that Elizabeth can do now, I know that if it happens there is at least one good reason, maybe more than one, but which, goddam, which? What?

If Elizabeth rehabilitates Iron Lady and Princess, despite their obvious inability to govern the complexity of her life today, despite having experienced and verified her possibility of resorting to Queen, obtaining very different results, there are reasons, but which ones, damn, which ones?

Solid shelter, although painful, the old one, very effective but random, the new one,  impossible to familiarize it, make it stable, but why, for heaven’s sake, , why?

It is an abandonment, with all that it brings with it and implies, agree, but it does not happen to a five-year-old girl, it happens to a fifty-year-old woman, completely different resources, and remains, unquestionably, the starting fact: nothing, of the real environment, now seriously threatens Elizabeth.

It risks becoming an idiotic refrain, if Elizabeth acts as she acts the threat is there, at each awakening the armies rise up and the fight begins again, what Elizabeth sees and knows, what appears before Elizabeth's eyes while the fog of sleep fades ... not the pattern that is the remedy, not Iron Lady and Princess, they too are the remedies, remedy to what, remedy of what?

If we still do not see it, we do not have a prompt and clear answer, not even Queen Elizabeth has it: she could intervene if she knew, but she does not know.

Iron Lady is an answer, not the source, not the threat, at least she answers, as she knowsand as she can, Queen Elizabeth does not know how to answer, since she does not see any threat: here, this is a point on which we could ask Elizabeth to enlighten us, to tell us what appears before her eyes, what arrives first at the threshold of her awareness,  of his consciousness at every awakening, a sort of Proustian exercise of recherche.

It does not come only, or mainly, the elaboration of the state of the art of the real environments in which it is located, if it were so it would not raise the armies.

We do not have this answer, but we have fragments, many, scattered, not connected, let's see if we can recover them and connect them ... A suspicion, for some time, I have it, I keep it at bay, I run the risk of "inventing" a convenient solution, a nice idea that puts everything in agreement but that does not grasp the truth of Elizabeth, it only serves to pacify me.

In recent years I have encountered several puzzles of this type, some have presented themselves to me extremely close, others have been brought by clients and tarinees, and there is a common thread that, over time, seemed to emerge ... let's go back a bit, to the step where we asked ourselves how Elizabeth had to deal, from the beginning of her life, with abandonments, and with what abandonments.

Guilt

We noticed that, strangely enough, there were no signs that referred to the classic solution that every child adopts, which seemed that Elizabeth had simply endured the pain (the threat) of repeated abandonments.

Both of the "physical" abandonments, given up for adoption to the grandmother, mom and dad who appear and disappear like spring puppets, then soon orphaned, and of those omnipresent and continuous abandonments constituted by not being comprehended, grandmother does not understand her, she has to do, the aunt can not understand, dad and mom do not understand, sometimes there are flashes of light,  on the bike with dad, the game of fighting with mom, then back in the "normal" abandonment ... the comfort of the darkness of the closet in which he takes refuge is a small thing, but perhaps not so small.

Elizabeth, like all living humans, has an absolute need, for her proper functioning, to align real environments and virtual environments, to obtain continuous evidence of its good functioning, to identify what connects to what, what causes what, what is a consequence of what, in the common language of "giving meaning",  also to make sense to what happens to her every day, to make sense to abandonment, to abandonments.

Abandonments that, it should never be forgotten, are close, for our babies, to pure catastrophe, life is at stake.

What we usually call imaginary guilt is one of the forms of the predisposition, plausibly genetically inherited, to resort to a very particular solution when we face insoluble problems, of the type of those constituted by the abandonment by our fellows, especially in that phase of our life in which the presence of who-takes-care-of-us is of particular relevance for our survival.

In other cases, this special solution takes the name of magic, of magical thinking, capable of generating a connection between elements otherwise impossible to connect, as an "answer" otherwise impossible to obtain, the speech would take us further, and in inaccessible territories, perhaps another time.

It is at least plausible that even Elizabeth, despite the absence of handheld evidence, ended up adopting this solution, to make herself, in a certain sense, bearable and relatively dominable the continuous experience of abandonment: it is my fault.

Guilt brings with it the finding of inadequacy, defectiveness, motive, reason and cause of abandonment, impossible, for the little child, to consider the possibility that it is the great, the care taker, that kind of omnipotent demigod, to be guilty, defective, inadequate, not up to the task: the genetic predisposition, plausibly, also takes into account the need to favor the so-called "sociality",  protect belonging and permanence in the group, the rebellion against the incapable care-taker is less "winning" than quiescence... and then, statistically, better an incapable care-taker than no care-taker.

And even the rebellion that occurs quite frequently during adolescence is not at all incompatible with the initial and prolonged attendance of the solution: it is my fault.

The contents of such guilt, of imaginary guilt, rarely present difficulties in finding, any detail, appearance, action, can easily be integrated: with the words that are conquered in the course of development are described configurations that, who knows how long, they have been presenting themselves in the virtual environments of the child, I am ugly, messy, I am not able to do this or that,  I did not answer properly, I am stupid, ungainly, I did forbidden things, very rich repertoire.

The fault is, in these cases, a magnificent solution: in this way the worlds align, and we have at least one way to deal with this hostile configuration of the real environment, we govern at least the taking shape, knowing its source, in a certain sense we "control" it, it is no longer something that can appear out of nowhere, impossible to predict how threatening, it is no longer meaningless, unconnected.

Of course, the price is high, we are lacking, defective, inadequate, structurally at constant risk of being sent away, difficult to be appreciated, even if we can try to hide the guilt, sometimes we succeed, maybe even often, maybe even for very long times, until they discover us we are safe, hiding the guilt is a hard job, very tiring ...

Step and review, I look for and go back to looking for clues, if Elizabeth has taken that path, from the beginning of her life, if she has found and fed that solution, then this is what is presented to her before anything else in the mists of awakening, the abandonment from which she was struck almost a year ago may have recalled the solution of the past,  they have discovered you, of course it is your fault, you are inadequate, defective, they have caught you ... the pattern, Iron Lady, Princess rush instantly.

Very soon Elizabeth and I crossed, several times, the step of "I got everything wrong", in the face of the abandonment of her husband, the landslide of the pattern, after having for a long time railed against the selfish bastard, the painful horizon of "I got everything wrong, from the beginning" opened.

The story, the narration, their contents, are reverberations, side effects of code execution, who was speaking, who was saying "I got everything wrong"?

Not Iron Lady, by definition she is never wrong, not the Queen, she knows and understands that we can only use what we have and we know, that the knowledge acquired, conquered "after" can not be used "before", that we have done our best, that we can only do our best, always, for life; the Princess is small,  a little girl, plausibly it is she who takes, again and again, the path of "I got everything wrong".

To this I oppose, firmly, I "feed" the Queen with what I have best in my repertoire, and then Queen puts the pieces together, and after a while we stop starting along that path: but that "I did everything wrong", its obvious correlates, I am wrong, nothing is good or valuable in me, refer to the ancient solution of the child,  it's my fault.

Another path taken was that of "Arthur, yes, that’s he  is worth, I am worth little or nothing, I know how to do little or nothing of true value, marginal", also to this I oppose, with no less firmness, and, as before, Queen puts things right: "I am worth little or nothing" again refers to guilt.

And again, towards the children, compared to the difficulty of opening up to a different way of dealing with two teenagers in difficulty, "I am an inadequate mother, I have always been, I first abandoned them, I am a disaster, they deserve better"...

And again, eros, the healthy and just enjoyment of erotic excitement, of the explosion that rewards our obedience to the first law of life, substantially prevented ... on this the "clash" was very hard, he threatened me with violence, enjoining me never to touch the subject again, shouting that it was totally unacceptable that an authentic, deep, true relationship could be based on this.

Yet there is no woman or man who can honestly deny that the lack of "this" is proof of not being truly loved, truly appreciated, welcomed and truly comprehended, that intense and prolonged efforts made to obtain “proof”  tell the companion everything he needs to know about how much he is really attractive, loved, wanted,  desired, special and unique, in a language that precedes each language, the content of which cannot be contradicted or denied in any language.

How eros, substantially blocked and unsatisfied, is connected to Elizabeth's drawing, it was not possible to deepen, even more so how this "curious" side effect is connected to Elizabeth's "original fault", of which the drawing is son, fruit and remedy: there are many possibilities, but the only one of value is that of Elizabeth.

As yet to be discovered is the connection with the "curious" and declared absence of passions, nothing has really ever fascinated me, not in my memory: that the connection is there is out of the question, many possibilities, again, the only one of value is that of Elizabeth.

According to the fragments we have collected, to their circumstantial value, the guilt, that fault, the best solution that the little child Elizabeth could adopt when there was a vital need for an immediate solution, we therefore end up finding it in all the significant areas of Elizabeth's life, the so-called "self-esteem", being a mother, being a wife, self-expression through work.

Dear Queen Elizabeth, you must know it too, the clues that I brought you, for you, are enough: that imaginary guilt, which saved the Princess when you were not yet there, is what comes first, in the fog of awakening, to tell you that you are in danger because guilty, to begin the work of rebuilding the worlds for wakefulness,  to trigger almost instantly the protections that have worked for decades.

O, our Queen, you must know, so that you can act wisely, and, at each awakening, guard and sentinel, before the alarm that raises your armies is triggered, regally, as only you can do, you distinctly pronounce your verdict: you have not stained yourself with any guilt, be at peace.

 

 

 

What remains to be done

There are still some paths to follow, some initiated, others relatively new, others substantially new: Queen Elizabeth could certainly do it alone, with what she has found, with these last "pieces" that I will send her, striving not to oblige her, but to favor better that I know and I can the possibility that Queen sees them, looks at them,  and, my hope, they will appropriate it.

After all, they are his legitimate property, we have worked a lot and intensely together, the effort has not been small, on either side, the fruits are of both, certainly also his.

So my work is finished, my goal achieved, my service concluded?

For now no, not yet: far beyond my understandable desire to have the proofs that Queen succeeds and leads a satisfying life, something that, by trade, I must be ready to give up for the best advantage of my client, my trainee.

My desire is one thing, my need for proof concerns me, the love (yes, just love) that I have for what I do cannot and must not neglect to honor at all times their freedom, the right to self-determination, as we said many and many years ago, our autopoietic nature, and still concerns me: wanting to be present and informed at all costs can mean what it must not,  control, pirate selfishness, nothing good. And this can hinder them.

My work ends when we both find that it is good to separate, perhaps temporarily, who knows, without a certain term, without prohibitions, without faults, both confident and at peace.

Free.

Until then, as it is now towards Elizabeth, it is only suspended, sine die, as they used to say, suspended, not finished: and even now, to consider it completed, I need something more than what is on the table, I remain in service, willingly and of good cheer, for my whole life, if it is to be so.

I like it that way.

There are still some things that the Queen does not know, or risks forgetting, in science and conscience, including the difficulty of "seeing", in the parts of the pattern although made, or in the things used daily, pieces of the old shapeshifting code, capable of presenting themselves in different forms, but bearers of the obligation to the same destination, in a very similar way to those plexus sequences of neural codes that constitute the ancient solution found by the Princess:  of course they are neural codes, what else could they possibly be?

It took us a considerable time, despite my support and concrete help (yes, that's right) to flush out something that has long remained hidden from both of us, and that, in a certain sense, only the sad and imperative suspension imposed by Elizabeth has allowed us, in the end, to bring to light, just enough so that it can no longer hide in the darkness of unawareness.

According to the program, to the "standard" software, the Queen could not and should not exist in the current configuration, know, not even imagine, to have to do with the side effects of an imaginary fault, a code elaborated in part millions of years ago, and then completed at the beginning of Elizabeth's life: even now we count on the probativeness of the clues we have collected,  it is quite possible that we will not be able to recover anything else, althoug with the best goodwill and the most honest intentions.

And, because of its configuration, it is not possible for it to deal with what does not fall under the grip of awareness, of self-consciousness: why?

We can read these constraints as an expression of our protection devices, here specifically dedicated to preventing, or making very difficult and unlikely, changes of the codes that have been successful, in a way not very dissimilar, conceptually, from how the system files of our computers are protected: they are normally hidden and protected, not visible to normal browsing,  and made uneditable, attempts to overwrite or modify sequences are prevented.

The solution is-my fault, in the specific configuration adopted by Elizabeth was an effective solution, a key code to allow her to "work" in that context, having to do with what she had to do with: better to secure her.

To deal with these codes it is necessary, at least initially, at least for a while, to have the help of someone, alone we can not do it, change these codes, although not impossible, is an extremely unlikely operation, entrusted to the random combinations that dot our existence that can be configured in such a way as to "oblige" us to a change of code.

The "external" aid, although possible, is effective only under extremely restrictive conditions (again the effect of our protection systems), satisfied which, to some extent, it becomes possible to deal with the old hidden and protected codes: the basic software provides that we execute "orders", that to a limited extent we integrate the operational codes so that they are suitable to govern the interaction with some environmental variables,  which, over the course of generations, can change, adjustments to the type of keyboard, the language of the automatic corrector, font styles, and little else.

Elizabeth could do it alone, but, so far, in science and conscience, it is extremely likely that it would take a long time to complete the work, while, with valuable help, the times would be much tighter, and the effort plausibly less.

The knots to finish untiing, or to untie, we know them, at least the main ones

Stabilize the defusing of the continuous reconstruction of the ancient pattern, and, with this, the blind rearrangement of Iron Lady and Princess to the government of interactions with environments, in particular environments, real and virtual, that concern the people who are part of his circle, starting from Elizabeth herself.

Stabilize Queen's garrison in the governance of interactions with environments, real and virtual, that pertain to her young boys, living systems.

Stabilize Queen's garrison in the governance of interactions with environments, real and virtual, that pertain to the new, legitimate, possible companion, really able to understand, appreciate, love and help her, knowing that in turn she will be able to do the same, free from the ancient pattern and from the coercions that the ancient pattern imposed, even, if not above all,  from those concerning eros.

Stabilize Queen's presence in the governance of interactions with environments, real and virtual, which relate to the identification of areas and methods of expression of its talents in the perimeter of work, and in the perimeter of those activities necessary to complete the set of alignments and obtain confirmations of good functioning, outside the perimeter of work.

Of course, I remain on guard.

Epilogue

Thumbelyn

Iron Lady and the Princess keep the Queen locked in the highest tower of the castle, yes just what looks like walt disney's castle , and do not allow anyone to see her, nor do they allow her to receive visits, mines less than ever.

It was entirely predictable that, this being the case, I would not be able to share with the Queen what I tried to describe here, and so I would not be able to complete the task that the Queen herself had assigned to me: I needed a stratagem, and, after a while, something came to my mind that could work.

I report here the letters sent four years ago, omitting to report, for confidentiality, the answers obtained from time to time.

 

Dear Elizabeth

I want to publish the story of the work done together, of which you have already seen the first chapter, which I have integrated with a new piece, maybe you have not seen that.

As you have been able to verify, I have made sure that you could not in any way be recognizable, and I have kept my guard of confidentiality in writing the following chapters: I would very much like to have your consent to the publication, even if nothing of what I have written, as you will see for yourself, breaks the necessary confidentiality.

For this reason I send you, in preview, the second chapter: I would like to publish it on my site on Friday, and I hope that your consent will arrive between today and tomorrow.

The same I will do for the following ones, there are twelve short chapters in all: I will certainly be happy to receive any of your comments and observations.

See you soon

UB

 

Dear Elizabeth

I thank you for the diligent speed of your answer, no less than for the frankness, which is proper to you, and which for me is very precious.

I understand and share some aspects of what you have written to me, others I understand and do not share, others I understand perhaps, and I do not share them, so far ... but it is quite possible that it is my lack of understanding that negatively affects the much desired sharing.

The question, in my humble opinion, seems to arise in an excessively complex way in order to be serenely resolved with an exchange of emails, and, as far as I can count on the solidity of the knowledge that I believe I have of you, I am completely confident with respect to our ability to identify a solution acceptable to both.

For this reason I propose to see us very closely, I think that fifteen minutes will be more than enough to satisfactorily settle, for both, this divergence, which between us must not and cannot exist.

Above all this is for me the reason for the urgent need to meet: it is possible for me tomorrow, Thursday, at 11:30 (your 10:30), or Friday at 9:30 (your 8:30)

Of course, until we have met and found the necessary composition, I suspend the publication, which also, for me, now has great relevance and urgency.

I look forward to your nod and your possible alternative proposal

I reciprocate the hug

Ugo

 

Hello

It is urgent for me, and I am not obliged to explain why. Necessity? It does not seem to me to be a necessity, for now I see it more as an opportunity: a negotiated solution to a unilateral solution seems to me to be largely preferable.

We have two desires, one each, so far seemingly irreconcilable, zero-sum game, we know how it ends.

Negotiating can allow us to try, at least, and it is not excluded a priori that we can find a good solution, in my opinion there are very good possibilities.

But we need to negotiate.

The alternative is, brutally described, that you limit yourself to the action of denial of consent, and I decide, in freedom, since nothing obliges me to fulfill your wish, what to do: I do not like it at all.

Give me credit to know, with a sufficient degree of security, who I am dealing with: your commitments are important, and I think mine are too, I think fifteen minutes will be enough, the two options I can offer you are Saturday morning, my 10:00 am, your 9:00 am, or Sunday morning, my 9:00 am, your 8:00 am

Let me know

UB

 

Hello

I am happy with the solution we have found, I send you a chapter a day, keeps the doctor away, excluding this weekend that you have dedicated to you and the guys: I trust your commitment, I do not need any proof that you have really read what I send you, if you want to send me notes and comments they will be more than welcome,  at your complete discretion.

More or less I will see you in about ten days, and we will review the matter together.

I wish you good work

 

We negotiated, briefly, I sent one chapter a day, after two weeks Elizabeth asked me a few more days to send me her "feedback", she was engaged in a complicated real estate operation, granted without a fuss, then the feedback came.

 

Hello Ugo

Thank you for your patience, and the creative way of being there even if I don't want to 😊

 

I reread again the pages you sent me, a violent and colorful summary of this last year.

I will not hide from you that in some passages I really stiffened. I do not even hide the pain that they have resurfaced, the shame for things said with anger and malice that perhaps today I would no longer say with the same enthusiasm, but then that was the way in which emotionally I could face things, at the same time the awareness that some dynamics are now dismissed.

In general if you want to publish I would not want such defined references anyway, there are parts of the description that are not accurate, like me model student, or the timing of betrayal and the overlap of the two lovers ... but at the end of the fair nothing changes. It is only the surface, the crux of the matter lies elsewhere.

You have my ok, in a few years, as you told me, this story no longer belongs to me, what I had to keep is inside me and in the eyes of my kids who every day teach me what it means to love and be there.

 

I think of Arthur less and less, it still makes me angry to think of useless lies and extreme disrespect. But it's no longer my problem. Every day I discover that a real us was only for a short time, or maybe not even for that, that the illusion of happiness was only such, I was happy with my pattern, but in reality we lived differnt film.

Sometimes tears still fall but only for brief moments.

The desire to die has given way to the desire to resume my life, for me and for my kids. I don't need Arthur for that.

I unhinged some ancient codes, thanks to a meeting that I never thought I could accept; instead, I found the space of the soul and in real life that allowed me to recognize a sweet, passionate and sensual Elizabeth.  I breathed beautiful sensations, as a protagonist, not as an appearance, timeless moments, they do not have a future, probably, but it tastes good and that's okay.

Another paradigm, new, which leaves room for new perspectives.

Work: something is moving, and I'm happy, even if it's a small thing, it's mine... now I'm a bit tense about the interview, an assignment that is my dream, but that could totally change the management of time.

I'm also afraid that after so many years I'm no longer so prepared and performing to do what I like to do ... I know that spirit and motivation are not linked to career, but to rebirth... I don't want to hope for it but if it will be 'I'll see how to deal with it

 

The road is still unclear but some things are defined. I don't leave the boys, I don't give up being in their lives, even if it means changing my ambitions.

If a man has to enter this situation he must be able to conquer me and have the qualities of soul and life that serve to understand and be there for me even so.

I am under no illusions, there will be many hard moments... but I know in which direction to move.

 

I will also have to recover some connections that I left out, for a while it was necessary, but not a day goes by that I do not feel that I miss them and they are part of my heart.

Ciao

Elizabeth

 

Last hearing

I asked the Queen for an audience, and I got it.

Elizabeth's story retraced, smooth and orderly, what she had written to me, opening a little more explicitly on the meaning and relevance of having found "a sweet, passionate and sensual Elizabeth", her encounter with her desire, of depth and intensity never felt before, in all her life, and the upheaval of her full appeasement,  never happened before, in her whole life.

In me it was jubilation.

And a shadow of regret, partly linked to the desire, disappointed, mine and her, to obtain these results in a shorter time, and with minor efforts ... it only took us a few minutes to recognize that it would not be possible, and that even what I accused myself as "slowness" in grasping clearly and decisively the knot of guilt (chapter 11) was a posthumous illusion, Elizabeth's processing and integration times could not be accelerated more than this.

Partly linked to not having been able to see, first hand, the full achievement of the five objectives we had identified, to have to be content with a "partial" on some:

pain: zeroed, apart from a few, rare, occasional peaks ... nothing compared to before, satisfactory rest, although in these days troubled by the excitement of the encounters, repeatable and repeated, with the full appeasement of his full desire, the prospect of the possible new work, appetite, as above.

new job: in addition to that of his dreams, two other opportunities, minor, but satisfying

new companion: in progress, maybe it will not be this, but now we know that it is possible, we have the proof

Ethan: in progress, good intermediate results

Frederick: in progress, school this year a disaster, but in recovery

 

Now Elizabeth desires and needs, in her words, to breathe, to resettle, of time.

And so I took leave, in peace, both visibly moved, she saying bye Virgil, and I ... do you want me to miss the joke? Bye Queen, beautiful, the stars, eh?

 

Conclusions and thanks

The separation distress now presents itself to us as something quite different from the common representations: is this the case for everyone?

So far it seems extremely unlikely, the unrepeatable originality of the events of each living human does not seem compatible with any "standard format": on the basis of the elements that I have been able to collect first hand, and that certainly concern only a few subjects compared to the "all", I too remain a little surprised by what we have found, on which I will reflect again.

It seems to me, however, that it is possible that, in the moments of separation, some shared aspects can be found, the first of which could be the relative marginality of the separation itself: it is not so much the separation, in itself, that is the source of pain and pain, as the side effects related to the separation.

Side effects that for each have, plausibly, different shapes and configurations, reflecting the different configurations of the codes, a distinctive and unrepeatable trait of each: we are similar from the point of view of our systemic configuration, we are / have very similar systems, and we are simultaneously different, little or a lot, compared to the codes.

The house, for each of us, has considerable diversity, the internal house, I mean, and I believe plausible that the separations are configured as a kind of virtual earthquakes that tear the house apart, depriving it of the trait of protection that we had given it: as we have seen, home are the characters and patterns, the events will therefore be different in relation to the characters of each and the drawings of each.

The thread of guilt often emerges, I think it is extremely rare that as children, during our development, it does not happen to be affected by abandonment, in one or more of its many forms, and even rarer that, to some extent, we do not resort to that ancient solution, always ready to use: separation is constituted as a trigger that has strong chances of being able to reactivate those ancient "solutions",  even in the absence of drawings and characters strongly rooted in that particular solution, in short, even when the house is not mainly made up of elements that are the remedy for abandonment.

The story of Elizabeth left by her husband can be read in many different ways, another Elizabeth could have been hurt, but considering that her husband was practically never there, what eros? ah yes, that stranger, that the conversations were boringly always the same, business, business and still business, it sucks, that the treasure was safe, that yes, she is fifty years old, but she is lively, handsome, that when she enters any room, well, she has personality, as well as beauty, and makes a great impression, excellent health and energy to spare,  in the end it was better that he got out of her way, maybe she could have squeezed him a little more, but you know, the science of the then is the only exact science.

Or we could take Arthur's point of view, and read the story using the canvas of the second episode of an old film, 1966, Germi director,  Ladies and Gentlemen, the outcomes are certainly different, Arthur did not have to end up in the hospital, after quindese ani de amor.

Another Elizabeth, not this one, not our Elizabeth... another Elizabeth, capable of those answers, would hardly have entered into that story, and the events of her separations would most likely be very different from those we have met here.

Looking for a "standard" response to separation distress, capable of eliminating separation distress is a vain task, even before impossible, our uniqueness, the uniqueness of each living person makes it so: to each his own.

That there are other common elements, although of different configurations, it seems evident to me, from our story emerge, so to speak in the background , to grasp and elaborate them in a satisfactory and understandable way we need other narrations, other events.

I deeply thank Carla, Raffaella and Stefano, for their precious help, for the rich and stimulating exchanges of these months, for having tried their hand at reading and discussing each chapter, my long narration of the events of someone they did not know, of reflections and thoughts only partially familiar to them: I do not think I would have made it by myself,  the path, although clearly identified for me, was decidedly impervious.

And I certainly thank Elizabeth.

Postface

I wanted to wait four years, before publishing this article, certainly not for reasons of "seasoning", but for due caution in protecting Elizabeth's privacy ... which, of course, is person who does not respond to this name, as well as do not correspond to a good set of data, age of some subjects, places, trades, and more.

I have necessarily kept faithful the references essential to the satisfactory understanding of what I have tried to present here: apart from the understandable and excusable narrative "falsifications" that I have summarily indicated, the narration is truthful, responding to the narration of events.

I gladly admit my infinite esteem and total recognition of the Freudian genius, who has been my companion and "virtual" teacher since my early adolescence, at that time date back to the first readings of the three essays on sexuality, and then of the lessons of psychoanalysis, for me shocking and difficult to understand in those years, and then,  in the following two decades, of the entire work, which I purchased, in installments, in a Feltrinelli bookshop,  given the scarcity of money of the "ordinary" students.

Now the opus, in the beautiful volumes published by Boringhieri, the result of the small savings of a young student (now decidedly old ... but still an active student) is on a shelf in my son's bookstore, every blessing be on him, and in my kindle... for some time preserved there, the last re-readings date back to a few years ago, but it is with me, a comforting friend in the daily search for meaning, for connections between what happens to me and what I observe around me, answers today better than yesterday, and tomorrow again unsatisfactory.

I had thought of titling this work Elizabeth Q. , aping the famous work Anna O. , imaginative game harmless but pleasant: my friend saw and tried to describe what no one, never, before, had managed to guess, and was stopped, in his brilliant work, by what he had before his eyes, by what real history had brought to his beach, .

My story begins a little more than a hundred years later, he could not see what I saw, the personal computers, the color monitors, the network, the formidable research on mirror neurons, it is up to me to recognize these limits, without denying that, unlike the Freudian "faithful", without guilt or merit, it fell to me in fate to continue the work of the master and friend,  the privilege of telling him, with unchanged esteem and affection, that his ego is too poor and lacking, and so is the Super Ego, and so is his  unconscious, the I, his Libido, and so almost everything he has been able to describe... certainly much better than the nothing that preceded him, chapeau.

It remains, for me indisputable, the grandiose intuition described in one of his last works, Constructions in Analysis, synthesis of what he has crossed and observed since he set fire to the second part of the Entwurf einer Psychologie, to start decisively and without regrets to open the psychoanalytic path, taking up some extraordinary fruits of the great plant of hysteria studies. It would be long to bring back to exactly this ganglion what we might call the power of narration, not here and not now.

Intuition that offers as an axiomatic the imperative need to provide word and story to the story lived by the patient, a story erased by neural pruning, by the mechanical, cyclical, producing functional removals to "stabilize" the maintenance of the evolutionary level that each of us reaches, progressively more complete and complex, while going through the first and second childhood, to face the first adolescence.

It is not matter of "reconstructing the trauma", it is that reconstruction or plausible construction is a necessary condition, not sufficient, to try to modify those codes that, often decades later, without our knowledge, support and guide the execution of our actions.

The practical evidence of the usefulness and effectiveness of  the "narrative" construction or reconstruction finds full correspondence  in one of the foundations of the systemic theory of human behavior and the practice of systemic "intervention": it is certainly still a hypothesis, very strong, but a hypothesis, the solid and unquestionable feedback that perhaps we could or can obtain from neuroscientific research, to date,  there is not, the empirical feedback of so many researchers and practitioners of the care of the soul is too often collected with methods and practices so dissimilar as to make it little or nothing usable.

 

In the practice of systemic intervention, supported and guided by a robust systemic theory of human behavior, it invariably proves to be an obligatory "pass", towards which to tend, in view of the fruit that we invariably manage to grasp, the stable "conquest" and recourse to plexus sequences of neural codes, with and through which to govern, as effectively as possible,  our interaction with real and virtual environments, with what we are dealing with, in the name of well-being.

Systemic intervention that is, in science and consciousness, only and simply an educational intervention.

It is an educational intervention that all of us, for centuries, should have been able to enjoy, from the first years of life, and that we have been denied: not already by a protective and malevolent imaginary "authority", prone and obedient to the commands of those who, equally imaginary, have drawn for us the classic crossroads from which we "choose" the best path to take,  rich or poor, exploiter or exploited, victim or persecutor, wise or ignorant, in order to perpetrate unjust predation, the privileges of the few, the labors of the many ... these yes, they are totally imaginary characters, although they populate almost every type of non-scientific narrative.

And not even for scarcity of available resources to devote to evolved, necessarily systemic education, enormous and superabundant resources are today deployed in support of the education that we all know, obtaining the fruits that we all have before our eyes.

If the whole species Homo Sapiens, in every part of the planet, acts in this way, as it is very easy to find today, there is a reason, at least one.

 

 

[1] Jared Diamond, The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee, Radius Random Century Group Ltd 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA, 1991, see Chap.5, see Chap.5

[2] Freud, S. (1937) Constructions in Analysis. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 23:255-270