From 2007 for a few years we thought about and focused on something we called ‘swirls’ and it became part of a dark area, that lasted for a long time. Swirls was our name for what we thought of as a particular ubiquitous and extremely unpleasant, painful mental state. We spent a long time trying to define and explore phenomenologically this state: I feel helpless I feel helpless and worthless isolated and overwhelmed by something … in despair and afraid … in a dark space devoid of hope… Swirls is a metaphor Swirls is a metaphor to describe the painful experience of feeling sucked into an empty space, a vortex, where initiative and energy are drained away, replaced by helplessness and despair, panic and anxiety. When someone is in a swirl, that particular space constitutes their environment. What we were trying to do was to get inside the pain, we were attempting to see it, to describe it from the inside. The swirl...