The concept of self as a hanger

A metaphor that I often use to explain the concept of self is a hanger… made of building blocks. We build the hanger up one block at a time until it has a fixed structure that you can drape pants and coats (life experiences) on and upkeep a consistent concept of who you are and make sense of the world around you.

When we are born our mind can be thought of as formless, pure sensation and perceptions. Close and consistent contact with caregivers slowly forms those sensations and perceptions into groupings. One group can be hands and bottom, water or dry wipe, cleaning wet and dry, cold, diaper, changing board, light, and baby powder. Another group can be excruciating hunger pains in the stomach, holding and caressing, breast or bottle, warm milk, drowsiness. These grouping begin to form rhythyms and life’s rhythyms create form. These become primary building blocks for conceptions of the self. How do I feel at different times, how do I influence my surrounding, what kind of reactions do I illicit from my surroundings, how to live in my environment…

Picture a four year old sitting cross legged on the floor and in front of that child are a bunch of legos. What do you imagine the child doing with those legos? Trail and error, experimentations? Is there someone else there or is the child alone with the legos?

 

Yesterday I talked to someone who said that his mother was always exasperated with his slowness and lack of following instructions and she would have left him alone. Made him sit away, maybe in a corner, by himself, to figure out what to do with the legos. Some other child might have been given a pre-packaged lego set that came with instructions. Another child might have a parent or guardian sitting beside them saying, ”That’s so good, wow, you made that? Good job! Keep going, you’re really good at building. (What is it???).” The child left alone to figure out life, form and ”I” by himself has a different path. Even now, he says he constantly second guesses his decisions in life, spending a lot of time and energy worrying about the past and future, finding it really hard to live in the present.

That might be the biggest benefit of having a cohesive self, an ”I” that stays intact: the capacity to be present in the moment and enjoy the very basics of life- being alive. Buddha teaches that the self is an illusion. In my role as a psychologist, I would say that you have to have a cohesive self before you can deconstruct it and ponder an abstraction like ”freeing yourself from conceptions”.

Life is full of bumps and bruises as well as profound realizations. These shift our blocks and mould our hanger. After a period of re-alignment the spine of our hanger falls into shape and carries our experiences and learnings once again. Actually, like a live cell in our body, the more evolving and changing the form is, the more stable it is in the long run. We experience anxiety during the re-alignment phase.  Some times if what we encounter is very acute or traumatic lego blocks fall out of the hanger. And we have to use psychological energy to ”keep our selves together”. Sometimes our hanger can disinegrate, as in psychosis, and we fall into an abyss. A depressed hanger colors our clothes. A hanger with a personality disorder has used a glue to put the hanger together which can be a bit toxic, it keeps the self togther, but I can not thrive. 

Our primary relationships give us the building blocks for our hangers. In fact all our relationships, throughout our lives, are building blocks. During adolescence, the shaping and building of our hanger is rather intense. Many experiences teach us about who we really are and how to swim in our surroundings. We need support in all phases of our lives. Sometimes it’s good to take a good look at our hangers.

I guess you could say that professionally I am in the business of hangers, giving support for building and inspection.

Summa summarum:
We need our relationships and experiences.

We need support.

We are allowed to change and stay together.

Life is best when it living it doesn’t take too much out of us and we are able to be experience our essential presence, be present and thrive.