Steve_Bamlett_blog

Daily writing prompt

Do you have a favorite place you have visited? Where is it?

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Where is my favourite place?  It is a place we construct by inviting (perhaps even willing) the senses to respond as if they were elsewhere – in some other space and time than the present, rather than somewhere in the present function of the neural mechanisms of the brain.  Hence my favour place has no agency except that I can give to it – beware relying on it as if it had such power!

Guided imagery therapists conclude that your ‘favourite place’ (also called a ‘special or safe place or space) is nearer than you think and involves no physical travel – attaching back to such a space happens inside you. It is always an illusion akin to a controlled dream or day-dream and need not have imagined parameters -space an be as wide as you like, and lack the usual signals of ‘grounded’ experience. some guided imagery script workers move from a space,- a beach in the sun with the sound and smell of trees and sea to an imagination of the body floating, requiring nothing to uphold its security, though it must employ the senses of the body’s touch on its own boundaries and the orifices at which senses enter the body – some use a cloud that has sense characteristics, a kind of felt soft support with something like sound informing its structure – perhaps in the performance of its consructing script.

Some theoretical thinkers in the area relate the place to the ‘secure space’ defined by attachment theorists– a place in which were assured of the mutuality between external forces in the world and our sense of inner independence and exploratory adventure. In the end, it is a function of relationships and the internalisation of their security without only the optimum of felt external regulation of the self. Such spaces have defined borders in line with the security needs of the personal need that constructs them for themselves, or adapts them from a guided script enough for the person ‘travelling’ there to ‘own’ them.

I do not know how anyway will answer this prompt. Perhaps they feel a need so forceful to think that no experience of theirs is so personal as to be driven by the real and are reconstructed from real memories – that week in Italy (in beach, mountain or lake) or the place of transit through the woods near their home with a dog who feels part of their nature, or even an enclosed room with vistas. But to ‘favour’ such places is already to have mentalised it (the process is sometimes called ‘visualisation’ but that neglects the fact that to favour it is to know it by other senses too – at least touch and feel (willed or necessary for support), smell and sound . We can’t favour anything personally without such internalisations and introjections of its equivalence within the registering nervous sysyem. Theorist like to say to clients or pupils that the central nervous system has no way of distinguishing ‘real’ experience of place from imagined or dreamed ones.

Personally I do not believe that is true, for forces of cognitive-affective evaluation are not always centrally controlled – as far as I am concerned the Unconscious can always take a role, and not always a beneficent one, inventing its own Boo Radley (or other Gothic monster). See my blog partly on Boo at the link on his name. Uncontrolled sources of fear and threat then can live in the place we had not noticed before re-entering it and which were not accounted for in its evaluation as ‘favourite’.

The theorists give us rules for the procedure – such as graduating our entry and exit – but they do this precisely because the place has no agency but those you give it – and some you give unconsciously. In the end, the aetiology of selves has to be confronted, with caution, for there the ‘wild things are’ too (see my blog on Maurice Sendak).

With love

Steven xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx