Black Holes, Event Horizons, and Psychotherapy

Where Did That Come From?

A young man enters his session, carefully notes that some of the books on the shelves have been rearranged.

A young woman enters her first group session and says that she feels out of place.

An older man in group suddenly becomes combative with the slightest apparent provocation.

Some people have very little idea of what drives their reactions. Others have a good idea, but the idea exists as if it’s its own entity. It’s seemingly untethered to any felt experience of the past or the true experience of the present.

Black Holes and Event Horizons:

Black Holes are created by the gravity of collapsed stars. The gravitational pull becomes so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape once it has been pulled in past a certain horizon. Event Horizons are basically boundaries that occur in space-time around Black Holes. Beyond these horizons, events become inaccessible to outside observers. They’re lost, not even visible, to anyone outside.

Felt experiences are the cosmic events of our lives. They come in all forms and textures. They may creep up on us, or they may rush us at the speed of light. Some are welcome in our orbit, so we allow them to linger; they become part of our visible, recognizable universe. Others may be harsh but relatively insignificant, and we’re able to eject them to a galaxy far, far away.

And then, there’s all that other stuff. The harsh reprimands, the betrayals, the unrequited loves, the shameful acts, the gut-wrenching losses.

So we learn to cope. We cry, we scream, we talk, we create, we party. Some of us are pretty successful in keeping our little corners of the universe spinning, and if we’re lucky enough, we’re only gently aware of the gravity.

Our Own Personal Black Holes:

But some experiences are so devastating, so violent, so voluminous, their weight so heavy, that their memories retreat. The Black Hole forms. And sometimes, other stuff falls in. Other stuff that reminds us of stuff we already buried. And the mass accumulates.

We may maintain some contact with some of the stuff, and we have some control over what we consciously reveal, what we let escape, what becomes observable or understandable to others. If we’re centered enough, our personal gravitational pull is powerful enough to have some say about what we let escape into the light of day. The Event Horizon holds. Mostly.

But Some of our experiences go rogue.

Just How Black is it really?:

Stephen Hawking (1988) challenged the absoluteness of the power of the Event Horizon. He wondered if these horizons are only “apparent horizons” and that they only trap matter and energy temporarily. What if something that falls into a black hole, beyond the event horizon, may reemerge in a different form, or “scrambled”. He pointed to the radiation around Black Holes (aka Hawking Radiation) as evidence that something does indeed escape.

Painful memories and experiences that get pulled into our personal Black Holes often reemerge as symptoms, distortions, or compromise formations. A similar process may happen during the life of an ongoing group; painful feelings or interactions may go under-cover for a length of time until they finally reemerge in an “unforeseen” dynamic that seems out of place until it is reexamined.

Our hypervigilant client that studies the arrangement of our office may have no conscious memory of earlier chaos in his life. Our female group member may not remember her first day at kindergarten. Or her feeling out of place in her own home. Our male group member may have tucked away a previous minor slight by another group member. But these memories are there, and they resurface when the conditions are right.

The Mass Inside Gives It Fuel:

When our most painful experiences and memories go rogue, they may also be stunningly explosive or surprising. To others, or even ourselves, they seem way out of proportion to whatever’s going on.

Back to Hawking:

Current theorists argue that Hawking Radiation actually originates from outside the event horizon, but that it draws energy from the mass inside the black hole itself.

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/light-escape-black-hole/

I’m no physicist (I only watch people who play them on TV ;), so I don’t know who’s right about the permeability of Event Horizons, but I do know that when these “out of proportion” reactions happen, the level of energy of the explosion is directly related to the mass inside the Black Hole!

Psychotherapy:

Hawking said that when objects fell into Black Holes, even if the information reemerged, it would be impossible to reconstruct what the original object was like based on that information.

Though we may not be able to completely reconstruct the genesis of an individual’s symptoms, we are committed to an effort to let the experiences escape, let them breathe, and help them shift shapes, emotionally and intellectually, as much as is possible.

Join me soon for Part II: Wormholes, Free Association, and Process-Oriented Psychotherapy: How to Get There From Here