Their Eyes Were Watching Screens

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If you have been to college, you have probably studied Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. But in case you haven’t or your memories of your Philosophy 101 class are fuzzy, here is a recap: The Allegory is Socrates’ depiction of the effects of education on a soul. Picture a cave where people are chained to the wall, and all of their lives they have been facing another blank wall. In the center of the cave, behind the people, there is a fire. In between the fire and the people, objects are passing by, so the people live watching shadows of these images on the wall and they think they are so real, they give names to them.

They don’t know about the fire. They don’t know about the people parading the images. And they really don’t know that above them, there is an exit out of the cave that leads outdoors, into sunlight.

The person who is in the cave thinks that the images are reality. But when they are unchained – and Socrates holds that education of the soul has the power to break these chains – then they see the reality of the fire and the objects around it. If they move higher in their learning, they see the sunlight and are drawn towards it, for they see that this is truly reality.

I was thinking about this description of ‘enlightnment’ ever since our world has been transformed by our smart phones, and our eyes have constantly been watching images on screens. It’s a testament to the grasp Socrates (and his student, Plato, who recorded his thoughts) had on human nature that it is still a very relevant explanation for the distortions of reality we face. One only needs to think of a teen who is driven to suicide due to online bullying or the grandmother who succumbs to rampant dissatisfaction and depression based on the images, the false reality, gleaned from social media’s images of other peoples vacations or grandchildren.

Lately I have been reading a lot about the brain, and the allegory is also a fitting description of our minds. The cave is the unconcious mind and the sunlit outside is the freedom we have in the conscious mind. We are in prison by our subconscious mind due to the beliefs and habits it holds onto, and these can very much feel like chains and shadows. Social media and the images it feeds to our unconsciousness keeps us locked up to the degree that we have wounds and limiting beliefs in our unconscious mind. When we are set free and can move beliefs from the unconscious to the conscious mind, the chains are broken, the truth of the reality of our wholeness is revealed, and we are set free.

How then are we supposed to use our technology, if it so easily generates shadows for us that clearly trigger thoughts and feelings from our subconscious mind that are hanging out in our basements like boogey men? I think about my 14-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter who have just started out with their own smartphones, and all the other children who are being handed these rectangles, not knowing that with out the proper education, they will become shackles for them?

The key word in this whole allegory is education. Plato believed in the correct formation of a soul, so taking into account the whole of our lives and habits helps us see the ones that are good for us and the ones that aren’t. Learning about makeup, cooking, and gardening on social media? All good things. But constantly being bombarded by images and voices when we haven’t already filled our souls with strong foundations of truth and beauty can mess with even the strongest social media user.

During my own social media fast I have found that my education has shifted from mindlessly scrolling to reading more books, diving deep into particular works of writers and thinkers. It has been really wonderful to sit with one voice for a period of time, to digest it, to get to know it, and to inform my thoughts in a meaningful way instead of stay in my mind for a fleeting moment, only to be driven out by the next stream of ideas and voices. I have so much respect for people finding their voices on social media, but the thing I personally struggle with is I can’t hear anything amid the sheer volume of them. And I know it really stunts me from sharing writing there because I don’t want to add to the noise. I want to be reflective, and then share. And to do that I need to study.

I also really struggle with the weaknesses of our brains that get exploited by social media. After watching The Social Dilemma which details this exploitation, it is hard to un-know how these weaknesses operate, and that everyone is being primed to be a consumer, to give over their most precious commodity – their attention. In Phenomenology, a recent modern branch of philosophy (which Pope John Paul the Great wrote his dissertation on) our attention goes by the name of intentionality. It is the core of our experience of living as conscious beings. It is the root of mindfulness, of meditation, of prayer. If we are giving all of that up to the hands of an algorithm, what does that mean for our experience of being alive?

For me, one of the most troubling parts of consuming social media has been having this distrust of what I am consuming. I am constantly asking, is the person creating this content looking for attention? Genuinely trying to share goodness and truth? Trying to sell me something? There is a lot of goodness, joy, community and humor to be found on social media. But the ways in which real life filters me from judging people – even just connecting to their basic 3-D humanity – are sometimes stripped from me on a two dimensional screen. This is why we see so much online vitriol. People forget that the other person is a daughter, sister, friend because of the apparatus they are using to connect.

On social media, there have also been many people who I start out enjoying, but when they start to post every single day about intense experiences and insights, they get watered down because of the platform I am consuming them on. Their thoughts look less like pearls of wisdom and more like shadows meant to manipulate my feelings and pull my attention by their confessional quality. I start to fatigue of the intensity of knowing their thoughts so up close, especially when they are louder and more frequent than those of my husband or my sister or my best friend. Without even being fully conscious of it happening, because it happens lightening fast, social media makes me judge others poorly at times. Not always, but the few times it does makes me happy to be taking a break.

Right after I wrote the first draft of this post I read this article on the Paradox of Abundance (which I found via Mama Needs Coffee blog). It arrives at these same conclusions about the abundance of information. Much like food, people are realizing that they need to think about what they are consuming if they want to be better, and they need to be consuming less. With so much abundance, more people are consuming more while a few elite are forgoing the surplus, using discipline and getting fitter/smarter. The idea of being free from the information overload sounds very appealing.

It all makes me glad to be avoiding social media and whittling away at my book stack on my nightstand/Kindle/Audible. It makes me want to stick to listening to voices that spend time in reflection instead of posting every day to please algorithms. If they have lasted the test of time, even better. And I know I am not alone. In fact I think people are on their phones hungry for something, and they want to know the truth about reality. Our eyes are watching screens because we are craving light, we just need to make sure we remind ourselves that all we need to do to find it is step outside.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

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A few years ago, I sat on the bleachers at my son’s baseball game on a warm spring day. I had one of my 9 month-old twins in tow and as we sat down, I recognized a friend from church. We both mothered many, and had always just had a bond that looked like waving enthusiastically at Mass and chatting afterwards for a few minutes until our kids’ patience expired.

So it was lovely to have many long innings before us to talk, and to play and feed cheerios to a happy baby between us. As we chatted the conversation turned to difficult stages of our kids, and then suddenly, the difficult pain of having emotionally unavailable mothers. In an instant, we were into a deep tête-à-tête, sharing wounds and nodding in understanding. Neither of us were stuck in a victim stage, both of us were accepting that our mothers were wounded themselves. But in comparing notes, we gained understanding about the impact it had on our lives, especially our roles as mothers, and found healing in sharing our stories, and the peace that comes from knowing you are not alone.

The season of Lent has just begun, and it’s helpful to remember that any progress in the spiritual life has to take an inventory of where we are at. We need to know our Point A to get to Point B. But I think the tricky thing with a mother wound, or any major needs that we had in a relationship that didn’t get met, is that the stories we tell ourselves might be so subtle, so woven into our views about ourselves and the other people in our lives, that it can be hard to really see them at work, halting our progress and sabotaging us.  We might not yet know that there is both the original trauma, and also the ways it compounds because of what we let the story become, the things we let it mean, the ways we let it define us.

The easiest way to spot them is to look for the flare ups. Look for the friction in our relationships. Our wounds have a way of surfacing when they get poked, so if we want to find the wounds we just need to see when they are playing defense. When we are angry, disappointed, persecuted, outraged, and frustrated.

I thought my mother wounds were all dealt with, and I had detached with love, and met my needs by mothering myself and looking to Mary for maternal guidance. But grief and healing is an ongoing process, it’s not linear. I had gone through many rounds of healing, but this Lent it is abundantly clear that I need to dive deep once again and find further healing.

What I learned from my friend that day on the bleachers was that there are other people out there with the same wounds. I am not alone. And we all have the power and the potential to heal. So this blog post is for anyone who has a trauma, maybe it’s a father wound, maybe it is abuse of another kind, to tell you that you are not alone, and you can heal. Lent is a great time to do this, because healing our wounds frees up more room in our heart to love God and others. It also feels incredibly freeing and life affirming. In loving our selves well we can love others well too. How do we do this? By diving deep into stories that are true and healing, and expose the ones we tell ourselves that are lies and damaging.

For me this has always come through books. It can be tricky to be a Catholic in the self-help world. Religion can be misused to manipulate and guilt people, because it has all the hallmarks of tribal thinking for unhealthy people. Not surprisingly, there can be a lot of rejection of religion and in turn replacing it with New Age practices or rugged individualism. It is understandable given the abuses that have happened in it’s name, but despite the evil or mental illness that lies underneath such abuse, truth and love are not only the essence of God, they are the essence of healing. God’s desire to heal us is the central message of his life, of the Gospels. My faith has helped me heal so much, and I have grown the most through the truths of the Catholic Church and its sacraments and tools like the Rosary, all of which point to turning deeply to prayer. The more I ask Him for healing the more I have found it.

Very often the healing that is the answers to those prayers have come from self-help books. The ones about healing a narcisstic mother wound helped me start my journey. I just listened to Difficult Mothers, Adult Daughters and have come away with a much lighter heart after doing the exercises. And Brene Brown offers tremendous insight from anyone needing to heal from shame and feelings of worthlessness (spoiler alert: it is everyone) so any of her books are helpful. And most recently I have been diving into The Mindful Catholic by Dr. Gregory Bottaro which brilliantly marries the worlds of psychology and faith and is so dense with insights I will be working through it for a long time. Highly recommend.

This exercise from Difficult Mothers, Adult Daughters has been eye opening for me so I will leave it here for you. It is finding the starting point – moments where we are hurting or agitated – and it follows that thread down to the stories we tell ourselves about it. Of course the wounds in us started with someone else’s woundedness, and they don’t need to be minimized, but the ongoing damage was unknowingly perpetuated by our subconscious mind repeating the untrue stories we told ourselves after being hurt. They weren’t there for me, so I must be someone who wasn’t worth it. Though this is geared towards healing from our mothers, I really think this excercise can be used to uncover wounds from anyone in our life.

I did this with two examples in my life, and the roots of shame, pain, and worthlessness revealed themselves in such a shocking way. I thought I was strong and confident, but the lingering brokenness from the stories I told myself was so clear and were totally at work in my life. It was amazing to see it and to let. them. go. 

Pick one example of a memory or interaction that causes you pain.

1.Write down as many uncensored details about this event – what she should have done, how your life would have been different if it hadn’t happened, etc…

2. Pare it down to the bare facts with no judgment i.e., My mother said ___. 

3. Ask yourself what you made it mean about you. Write it down.

4. When you think about what you wrote in step 3 how do you feel? 

5. List the things you do or don’t do when you feel that way.

6. Describe what your life looks like as a result. 

7. Sum up your story as briefly as you can. 

My mother (or friend, husband, sister, co-worker, boss) said:

I made it mean that I am:

There is a part of me that feels: () because ()

And when I think about that I feel:

And when I feel that way I:

As a result I:

The author writes that it is very important to forgive yourself for the things you told yourself about yourself that aren’t really true. In fact, she maintains that when you find this lie, this ugly untrue story, tell yourself the OPPOSITE story. She uses an example from Martha Beck’s book Diana, Awakening which is an allegory where Diana has experienced the most woundedness any of us could imagine. She is abandoned in a dumpster by her mother at birth and adopted by abusing parents. Understandably, she tells her self the story that she is garbage, unwanted, unworthy of love. But her guide tells her to tell herself the opposite story.

That in reality, She was infinitely worthy and beautiful and strong, and the people in her life were not capable of handling this or seeing this. They made the mistake of abandoning her, of devaluing her, but in the end she left them, because she knew she was capable of building a beautiful life full of joy and goodness.

It is so powerful to flip these scripts, and to consciously see the stories we tell ourselves. I hope this helps someone to find a starting path to healing if they need it. I am so grateful for mine, and look forward to where it will take me. It isn’t easy to share our hard stories, but when we do we will find we are not alone. And we find that if we are willing to work through the mess, to go through the Good Friday of our wounds, we find the beauty of the Resurrection.