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Wandering swirls

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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.
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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

Image
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 experience involves the coming together of certain emotions. These always involve self deprecation.
The feelings may include fear, anxiety, shame, anguish and despair. In addition feelings associated with diminishment. It is the combination of these feelings with a background anxiety that gives rise to the felt power or force of the swirl.










We continued with the swirls theme for ages. Many of our thoughts are in various blog posts in several blogs.
They can be found here:
And here in a blog called Vortex which we started in 2011:


Where does the swirl come from?

A possibility-early childhood experience of insufficient affirmation or affect.
If one cannot ask for what one needs-(as a child)-then thinking and feeling are affected.  So the individual is forced into a space of minimal agency where there is no way to negotiate in daily life.  This involves a lack of voice.
Someone else holds the initiative and this feels shameful, and leads to the swirl experience.
A swirl looks like this:
A swirl feels like this:
I feel helpless, worthless, hopeless
I have no energy, no purpose, I feel isolated
I feel overwhelmed
I am in despair and afraid
I am in a space devoid of hope
Some of this also was posted in a beautiful blog platform called Jux, which closed down some years ago. It was a site that allowed for full page images and text.
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At around this time our discussions moved from swirls to the themes of death and dying, distraction and old age. Ken argued that everything was a distraction undertaken to avoid confrontation with death. 

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