Steve_Bamlett_blog

How are you feeling right now?

My real problem with this prompt is how to hone in on what the questioner might mean by the phrase ‘right now’. That’s because I cannot determine enough that’s static or detachable enough from the motion of time in all of its manifestations to fix upon a ‘now’ on which to base my answer. Moreover, am I alone in finding that being asked the question sometimes prompts changes in mood as one turns within in order to look and to determine the specific feeling that is predominant. Of course no-one asks this question with that intention, nor is my response one that presumes any such intention or ill motive.

I think one can answer such a question best when you think you ‘know’ you are depressed, for such resistant  knowledge might be defined, the psychotherapist Aaron Beck insisted, as a kind of cognitive bias: a belief that endures more than it would in less depressed moods that one is somehow locked or trapped  in depression. And what we register in this case is this time-challenging belief, sometimes a core belief in some individuals and therefore the more resistant to change, that such a mood cannot ever be changed and is a fixture of one’s personality; resistant to either external circumstances or inner dynamics.

My own feeling is that Beck and his followers in this account of the aetiology of depression tell only half the story, being too locked themselves cognitively into the notion of the primacy of the cognitive and behavioural independent of social and biological factors that cause depression.

But the Beck view serves its purpose. It emphasises that if we think we know how we feel ‘right now’ we will be without doubt simplifying the shifts of mood in response to external and internal prompts and forces. No-one who can properly read the account of other people’s emotional states, whether as stories told by a human analysand in psychotherapy or a character in a well conceived novel could truly accept the simplification of how human beings experience the passage of time.

I am reading at the moment Paul Lynch’s 2023 novel Prophet Song and it captures the agency of time in the assessment of mood or feeling so well. Try, for instance, trying to describe what the female narrator, Eilish Stack, is feeling right now, in the following sentences:

Watching the other families on the beach, her footprints lone upon the sand, searching in the faces of those that pass by gathering the light and releasing light into night, and we reach but cannot touch nor take what passes, what seems to pass, time’s dream. And yet these days have given the snowdrops to bloom.

Paul Lynch (2023: 54) Prophet Song Dublin, A Oneworld Book.

This is a peculiarly richly conceived knowledge, intelligent about the agency and feel of action and reflection in Frameworks of the passage of time, but its intelligence, in my view, is just a correct one. It registers the difficulty of saying how I might be feeling right now. I don’t say that just to nit-pick but to insist that we will never understand the processes of mental variation and enduring problems without insisting on these complexities.

Too often mental health services oversimplify as a means of rendering themselves as they think, capable of intervention with others, but at the cost of being agents of worse outcomes in the person helped than no help might have produced otherwise. But, let’s not over generalise. There are truly good people in mental health services no doubt.

So when asked the question, it is likely that what I am feeling is whatever the reflexive dynamic that has been prompted by the question itself amounts to. And, if I had to capture one microsecond of that feeling, it would be one of being alive to sensation, thought, effects of body action and emotion that wants to get the most out of the moment. And that feels truly positive, however open I am to changes into other experimental states that might be necessitated by metamorphoses of all these factors in time that aren’t all in my control. Perhaps very few are in my control.

All love

Steve