The Scapegoat

kieferpix

We have all of us read how the Israelites fled 

From Egypt with Pharaoh in eager pursuit of 'em, 

And Pharaoh's fierce troop were all put "in the soup" 

When the waters rolled softly o'er every galoot of 'em. 

The Jews were so glad when old Pharaoh was "had" 

That they sounded their timbrels and capered like mad. 

You see he was hated from Jordan to Cairo -- 

Whence comes the expression "to buck against faro". 

For forty long years, 'midst perils and fears 

In deserts with never a famine to follow by, 

The Israelite horde went roaming abroad 

Like so many sundowners "out on the wallaby". 

When Moses, who led 'em, and taught 'em, and fed 'em, 

Was dying, he murmured, "A rorty old hoss you are: 

I give you command of the whole of the band" -- 

And handed the Government over to Joshua. 

But Moses told 'em before he died, 

"Wherever you are, whatever betide, 

Every year as the time draws near 

By lot or by rote choose you a goat, 

And let the high priest confess on the beast 

The sins of the people the worst and the least, 

Lay your sins on the goat! Sure the plan ought to suit yer. 

Because all your sins are 'his troubles' in future. 

Then lead him away to the wilderness black 

To die with the weight of your sins on his back: 

Of thirst let him perish alone and unshriven, 

For thus shall your sins be absolved and forgiven!" 

'Tis needless to say, though it reeked of barbarity 

This scapegoat arrangement gained great popularity. 

By this means a Jew, whate'er he might do, 

Though he burgled, or murdered, or cheated at loo, 

Or meat on Good Friday (a sin most terrific) ate, 

Could get his discharge, like a bankrupt's certificate; 

Just here let us note -- Did they choose their best goat? 

It's food for conjecture, to judge from the picture 

By Hunt in the Gallery close to our door, a 

Man well might suppose that the scapegoat they chose 

Was a long way from being their choicest Angora. 

In fact I should think he was one of their weediest: 

'Tis a rule that obtains, no matter who reigns, 

When making a sacrifice, offer the seediest; 

Which accounts for a theory known to my hearers 

Who live in the wild by the wattle beguiled, 

That a "stag" makes quite good enough mutton for shearers. 

Be that as it may, as each year passed away, 

a scapegoat was led to the desert and freighted 

With sin (the poor brute must have been overweighted) 

And left there -- to die as his fancy dictated. 

The day it has come, with trumpet and drum. 

With pomp and solemnity fit for the tomb 

They lead the old billy-goat off to his doom: 

On every hand a reverend band, 

Prophets and preachers and elders stand 

And the oldest rabbi, with a tear in his eye, 

Delivers a sermon to all standing by. 

(We haven't his name -- whether Cohen or Harris, he 

No doubt was the "poisonest" kind of Pharisee.) 

The sermon was marked by a deal of humility 

And pointed the fact, with no end of ability. 

That being a Gentile's no mark of gentility, 

And, according to Samuel, would certainly d--n you well. 

Then, shedding his coat, he approaches the goat 

And, while a red fillet he carefully pins on him, 

Confesses the whole of the Israelites' sins on him. 

With this eloquent burst he exhorts the accurst -- 

"Go forth in the desert and perish in woe, 

The sins of the people are whiter than snow!" 

Then signs to his pal "for to let the brute go". 

(That "pal" as I've heard, is an elegant word, 

Derived from the Persian "Palaykhur" or "Pallaghur"), 

As the scapegoat strains and tugs at the reins 

The Rabbi yells rapidly, "Let her go, Gallagher!" 

The animal, freed from all restraint 

Lowered his head, made a kind of feint, 

And charged straight at that elderly saint. 

So fierce his attack and so very severe, it 

Quite floored the Rabbi, who, ere he could fly, 

Was rammed on the -- no, not the back -- but just near it. 

The scapegoat he snorted, and wildly cavorted, 

A light-hearted antelope "out on the ramp", 

Then stopped, looked around, got the "lay of the ground", 

And made a beeline back again to the camp. 

The elderly priest, as he noticed the beast 

So gallantly making his way to the east, 

Says he, "From the tents may I never more roam again 

If that there old billy-goat ain't going home again. 

He's hurrying, too! This never will do. 

Can't somebody stop him? I'm all of a stew. 

After all our confessions, so openly granted, 

He's taking our sins back to where they're not wanted. 

We've come all this distance salvation to win agog, 

If he takes home our sins, it'll burst up the Synagogue!" 

He turned to an Acolyte who was making his bacca light, 

A fleet-footed youth who could run like a crack o' light. 

"Run, Abraham, run! Hunt him over the plain, 

And drive back the brute to the desert again. 

The Sphinx is a-watching, the Pyramids will frown on you, 

From those granite tops forty cent'ries look down on you -- 

Run, Abraham, run! I'll bet half-a-crown on you." 

So Abraham ran, like a man did he go for him, 

But the goat made it clear each time he drew near 

That he had what the racing men call "too much toe" for him. 

The crowd with great eagerness studied the race -- 

"Great Scott! isn't Abraham forcing the pace -- 

And don't the goat spiel? It is hard to keep sight on him, 

The sins of the Israelites ride mighty light on him. 

The scapegoat is leading a furlong or more, 

And Abraham's tiring -- I'll lay six to four! 

He rolls in his stride; he's done, there's no question!" 

But here the old Rabbi brought up a suggestion. 

('Twas strange that in racing he showed so much cunning), 

"It's a hard race," said he, "and I think it would be 

A good thing for someone to take up the running." 

As soon said as done, they started to run -- 

The priests and the deacons, strong runners and weak 'uns 

All reckoned ere long to come up with the brute, 

And so the whole boiling set off in pursuit. 

And then it came out, as the rabble and rout 

Streamed over the desert with many a shout -- 

The Rabbi so elderly, grave, and patrician, 

Had been in his youth a bold metallician, 

And offered, in gasps, as they merrily spieled, 

"Any price Abraham! Evens the field!" 

Alas! the whole clan, they raced and they ran, 

And Abraham proved him an "even time" man, 

But the goat -- now a speck they could scarce keep their eyes on -- 

Stretched out in his stride in a style most surprisin' 

And vanished ere long o'er the distant horizon. 

Away in the camp the bill-sticker's tramp 

Is heard as he wanders with paste, brush, and notices, 

And paling and wall he plasters them all, 

"I wonder how's things gettin' on with the goat," he says, 

The pulls out his bills, "Use Solomon's Pills" 

"Great Stoning of Christians! To all devout Jews! you all 

Must each bring a stone -- Great sport will be shown; 

Enormous Attractions! And prices as usual! 

Roll up to the Hall!! Wives, children and all, 

For naught the most delicate feelings to hurt is meant!!" 

Here his eyes opened wide, for close by his side 

Was the scapegoat: And eating his latest advertisement! 

One shriek from him burst -- "You creature accurst!" 

And he ran from the spot like one fearing the worst. 

His language was chaste, as he fled in his haste, 

But the goat stayed behind him -- and "scoffed up" the paste. 

With downcast head, and sorrowful tread, 

The people came back from the desert in dread. 

"The goat -- was he back there? Had anyone heard of him?" 

In very short order they got plenty word of him. 

In fact as they wandered by street, lane and hall, 

"The trail of the serpent was over them all." 

A poor little child knocked out stiff in the gutter 

Proclaimed that the scapegoat was bred for a "butter". 

The bill-sticker's pail told a sorrowful tale, 

The scapegoat had licked it as dry as a nail; 

He raced through their houses, and frightened their spouses, 

But his latest achievement most anger arouses, 

For while they were searching, and scratching their craniums, 

One little Ben Ourbed, who looked in the flow'r-bed, 

Discovered him eating the Rabbi's geraniums. 

Moral 

The moral is patent to all the beholders -- 

Don't shift your own sins on to other folks' shoulders; 

Be kind to dumb creatures and never abuse them, 

Nor curse them nor kick them, nor spitefully use them: 

Take their lives if needs must -- when it comes to the worst, 

But don't let them perish of hunger or thirst. 

Remember, no matter how far you may roam 

That dogs, goats, and chickens, it's simply the dickens, 

Their talent stupendous for "getting back home". 

Your sins, without doubt, will aye find you out, 

And so will a scapegoat, he's bound to achieve it, 

But, die in the wilderness! Don't you believe it!

Sylvia Plath

The Making of a Scapegoat

wildpixel

How Groups Project 

Their Stress Onto One Person

What the Nervous System 

Learns From It

Some people spend a lifetime 

carrying blame that was never truly theirs.

The roots of this pattern often reach back to our earliest experiences of belonging. 

Long before we have words for it, our nervous systems learn who is safe, who is not, what creates connection, and what threatens it. These lessons often remain outside awareness, quietly shaping how we experience relationships throughout life. 

For some people, the same role emerges again and again: 

becoming the person who carries the blame. 

As children, they may have been blamed for tensions within the family. 

Years later, they become the outsider in a friendship group, the employee who receives disproportionate criticism, or the person who somehow ends up carrying the emotional weight of a relationship, team, or community. 

The circumstances change, but the feeling remains strangely familiar. 

Because families are our first social system, the relational patterns learned there often shape how we experience the groups that follow.

How a Scapegoat Is Created

Families, like all human systems, attempt to maintain stability. 

When parents are able to acknowledge difficult emotions, take responsibility for their own reactions, and work through conflict directly, the system remains relatively flexible. 

Stress is distributed and processed rather than concentrated on one person. 

Unfortunately, not all families function like this. 

Sometimes unresolved shame, anger, fear, grief, or emotional immaturity remain largely outside awareness. These experiences do not disappear. Instead, they continue to influence the emotional atmosphere of the household. One way a family can unconsciously manage this discomfort is by locating the problem within a single person. In some families, it may be the most perceptive member, the one who senses or challenges the unspoken dynamics of the system, who is unconsciously assigned this role. 

Over time, one child may come to represent what the family struggles to tolerate within itself. The child becomes “too sensitive,” “too difficult,” “too emotional,” “too selfish,” or simply “the problem.”

This process is often described through the psychological concept of projection. 

Qualities, emotions, or conflicts that feel difficult to face are unconsciously attributed to someone else. From the perspective of the family system, this can temporarily reduce anxiety. If one person becomes the source of the problem, everyone else can avoid examining their own contribution to the situation. 

For the child, however, the consequences are significant. 

The people they depend on most for safety and belonging are also the people communicating that something is wrong with them. 

The nervous system receives two messages at the same time: 

Connection is necessary, and connection is dangerous.

What the Nervous System Learns About Belonging

The nervous system is constantly gathering information about the world and learns through repetition. When experiences occur often enough, the brain begins creating predictions about what is likely to happen next. These predictions help us navigate relationships and environments efficiently. Most of the time, we are not consciously aware of them. For a child who occupies the role of scapegoat, certain predictions may gradually become strengthened.

1. Conflict means danger. 
2. Belonging can be lost. 
3. Someone will eventually be disappointed with me. 
4. I am probably responsible. 
5. There is something wrong with me. 
6. It is my fault.

As these expectations become more established, the nervous system becomes increasingly attentive to signs that they may be about to come true. This is one reason many scapegoats develop heightened interpersonal sensitivity. They become highly aware of subtle changes in tone, facial expression, mood, and group dynamics. What appears to others as overthinking may actually be a nervous system attempting to stay ahead of potential threat. 

The nervous system is simply doing what it learned was necessary to maintain connection and safety.

When the Role Follows You Into Adulthood

One of the more painful aspects of scapegoating is that the experience often does not end when a person leaves home. Many adults notice that similar dynamics seem to emerge in completely different environments. 

• A workplace begins to feel strangely familiar. 
• A friendship group develops tensions that echo childhood experiences. 
• A close relationship evokes the same sense of walking on eggshells that once existed within the family.

This does not happen because people consciously seek out suffering. 

Contemporary neuroscience suggests something more subtle may be occurring. 

The brain is constantly predicting reality based on past experience. 

When certain relational patterns have been repeated thousands of times, they become highly familiar. Familiarity is not the same thing as safety, but the nervous system can struggle to distinguish between the two. As a result, we may find ourselves drawn toward environments that resemble what we already know. At the same time, we may interpret ambiguous situations through expectations that were shaped long ago. 

1. Criticism is anticipated before it arrives. 
2. Rejection is expected before it occurs. 
3. Responsibility is assumed before it has been assigned.

Metaphorically speaking, or in the language of Internal Family Systems (IFS), as an internalized part, an inner scapegoat may begin to form. Over time, a person can start blaming and rejecting themselves automatically. 

That is why it can be so difficult to break free from this conditioning at the beginning of the healing process. Yet the very sensitivity that once developed in response to danger may eventually help us connect the dots.

Reclaiming Flexibility and Choice

For many people, a turning point comes when repeating patterns become impossible to ignore. 

Whether through therapy, relationships, or life itself, old experiences start to make sense and pieces of the puzzle gradually come together. 

Recognizing that you may have occupied the role of scapegoat can be both painful and liberating. Painful because it sheds light on wounds that were often invisible for many years. 

Liberating because it allows you to see that many of the beliefs you carry about yourself were shaped within a system rather than reflecting who you truly are.

Healing often involves reparenting your nervous system. 

It is the slow reshaping of neural pathways through consistent self-compassion, rhythm, containment, and protection. Over time, the brain begins making new predictions based on new experiences rather than relying solely on the past. 

As evidence accumulates that conflict does not always lead to rejection, that disagreement does not always threaten belonging, and that other people’s emotions are not always our responsibility to carry, old expectations gradually lose their certainty. Possibility, choice, and flexibility return.

The inner scapegoat does not disappear but becomes unburdened. 

The very sensitivity that once scanned for danger can now recognize patterns, reveal blind spots, and support the healing process through discernment and insight. 

What was once organized around survival can gradually become a source of wisdom that serves both you and the people around you.

Magda Agatha

Sweet Darkness

Wallpapers

 When your eyes are tired,

the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone,

no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark

where the night has eyes

to recognize its own.

There you can be sure

you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home

tonight.

The night will give you a horizon

further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.

The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

David Whyte

in, The House of Belonging

The Strange Attractors

denko3d

 You are stuck in a moment and 

you don't know why. 

Can neuroscience help?

Lots of the time, you may act as though you were our own worst enemy.

No matter what, you always feel as though people don’t like you.

You keep falling for the wrong person.

You always feel the need to fix. Or be fixed.

Expecting always too much from people and ending up disappointed. Expecting always too little, and ending up disappointed.

You know that wrath and anger are bad for you but when the situation presents itself you become convinced that anger is the only possible reaction.

You know that overthinking is making your life miserable, yet your mind stays relentless.

You want to chase your dream but end up going for the safe option over and over again.

You sabotage the good thing going even though you objectively know that you are every bit as worth it as anybody else in this wide world.

You always end up playing the same game with others. Which one are you the victim, the rescuer, the persecutor?

You understand that asking for help is OK. You even recommend it to others but you still somehow can’t do it yourself.

You know it is not good for you to eat that much, drink that much, [ ?] that much (insert your favourite sin), yet you continue doing it (and hating yourself for it).

It just never stops. Old habits die hard and the self-loathing is never too far.

Why this happens? 

Why are we so often and so obviously working against our best interests? 

It is one of biggest mysteries of human nature and one that the modern neuroscience science is only starting to shed a light on.

But let’s stay with the phenomenon and the feeling for the moment. 

If we see life and every little decision we make that leads us to where we are and also include all the other things and events in life, big and small that all converge into coalescing a certain state of mind, and certain familiar train of thoughts and feelings that arise or erupt as paths we take on a multidimensional graph converging towards always the same point - that old feeling, that old unhelpful action, that habitual behaviour we resent yet still perform.

In other words, no matter what the starting point, we end up in the same position - it is like a there is a local black hole in the space of experience, cognition and decision making - and it is as though its gravitational pull is virtually inexorable.

I call these irresistible pulls, like the ones I describe at the start, the strange attractors.

Strange Attractors

Now forgive me for intentionally introducing this psychotherapy and science faux-ami. I totally know I am doing it.

For a strange attractor is formally defined concept in the dynamic of complex systems - you might be familiar with it from physics or mathematics of complex systems and the chaos theory.

Heads up, you don’t need to know about physics and mathematics to follow the rest of the thread of this piece. I think the ideas are intuitive.

Essentially, while a stochastic (random) system might seem to operate at random, because of the underlying laws, some seemingly stochastic (random) systems tend to evolve towards a specific set of states, no matter what are the starting points. These states, to which the system converges, are called the strange attractors.

If I want to be more precise, the attribute strange is assigned to those attractors that do not have simple and regular forms but are rather irregular or fractal in nature - for example see one well known attractor called the Lorenz’s attractor below. But you can ignore this for out intents and purposes here.

I am both wildly incompetent and perfectly comfortable with making this makeshift and perfectly outrageous marriage between the theoretical physics and psychotherapy practice. The important thing is - I am using it as a METAPHOR. But an interesting one to use to think about the phenomenon at hand. Sometimes the use of the right metaphors can go a long way.

Why am I bringing the funky geometrical shapes into the conversation about the mental states and the habits of our mind (that we would rather not have)? I will try to give an answer now.

Is a Mental State A Point in Some Space?

One beauty of mathematics is its abstraction. What that means that it can model everything. Mental states included.

So think about how you are feeling just now. Include in that your feelings, things that you think about currently in your inner life, the kind of atmosphere that prevails internally. The ideas and facts from life that dominate in that inner landscape. The people that occupy it and what is the tone that they add into that mixture of an internal state. Include into this how much energy you feel you have, what is the overall state of your body. And anything else that seems relevant.

All of those things provide different coordinates in a multi-dimensional space (I don’t really know how many dimensions we should be talking, but certainly more than two or three) - and we find ourselves in one point of that space at any moment of time.

The assumption I am making here is that there is a link between that state configuration and the state configuration of the brain in that moment - at least in some ways.

In the end of the day, if we always end up feeling the same feeling, coming to the same conclusion, making similar behavioural decisions, it is because there is a aspect of the brain that wind up in the same state - feelings, decision making, thoughts are all a brain states, after all - or at least a portion of a state of the brain in a given moment of time. 

These states are not universal of course, although some element of it might be, but generally are relative to the specific context of each individual, with its idiosyncratic history, cultural context, initial wiring and genetics and probably some other factors I am forgetting here. All these elements are our priors. For our priors are serving as gauge against which all the decisions, positions and what we wind up feeling and doing are calibrated, on the light of new experiences.

And some priors or set of priors carry much more weight than others. 

1. For many people, the culture they grow up in is a strong prior. 
2. The relationship with the primary caregivers is likely a strong prior. 
3. Some other experiences - a strong emotional experience or a traumatic one is likely to shift the priors. Others yet might carry less weight but still count.

I write a little more about this stuff here.

To use geometry and the chaos theory to model brain states is of course not mine. I want to point here to one paper that gives an overview of how these brain states could be linked to mental states. There will be many others.

Remember, here, I am mostly using it as a metaphor.

Settling in the Local Minimum

The main idea to remember here is the following: 

That when it comes to some complex systems the following occurs: 

No matter what the starting point is, you end up in the same place. You end up in that strange attractor.

I use the strange attractor to as a metaphor for all those instances - so common (ubiquitous?) in therapy presentations - of mental states or behaviours that we so often seem to gravitate to, often times despite our better judgment (as illustrated in the beginning).

One way to represent this is using the idea of peaks and valleys on a graph (or indeed 3D graph as on the previous figure). Once in the vicinity of a valley the ball will roll into the bottom of the valley, regardless of its starting position.

When we think of those inexorable traits, behaviours and maladaptive decisions from the beginning - it is like no matter what we say to ourselves, what we rationally decide or how different this situation is from a previous one, we end up feeling the same way. We are like that little red ball.

From Metastability demystified — the foundational past, the pragmatic present and the promising future

This is still, at this point a metaphor, as I don’t know what is the space in which this landscape exists and what is the specific process by which our brain decides to go down the valley slopes into an already well known state.

I really want to emphasise the exploratory nature of this idea and a huge amounts of epistemic humility that I hold here, while still wanting to advance a hypothesis about different types of psychological stuckness.

Two really important questions immediately stand out for me:

1.Are these local minima attractor states glitches in the system, a design feature or the necessary trade-offs of system design (the most likely scenario IMHO)? In the end of the day, any biological system has finite resources when it comes to space, energy and other biological devices for implementation.

2. Can we hack it?

Yes, and the two points might be interconnected as the answer to the number 1 might help us think about how to do the number 2.

Escaping the Attractor: 

What Would Need to Happen?

Now, what this out of left field appropriation of concepts theoretical physics has to do with anything psychotherapy?

Obviously, in my mind it has EVERYTHING. Now, I don’t know how much it translates? 

Also, to fully give you an answer to that question you will have to give me a bit of time (in another essay).

To do this, I will likely have to venture into how brain makes decisions. 

Decisions tainted with emotion, decision that go against our better judgement. 

Decisions in different contexts. 

All in hope to get some ideas as to how to jolt the system, destabilise it, so it escapes its strange attractor.

Am I saying that the neuroscience has solved all the questions necessary to do that? 

No. But, I do think we are starting to know some things that can be used here especially when it comes to understanding how the brain assigns value in different social context, peer pressure and what our value system is.

So to recap:

Old habits of the mind die hard, and we end up going into same habitual states - similar feelings, behaviours, conclusions about life and others - even if those do not necessarily match the objective reality AND are not in our best interest

Being in the same affective, behavioural etc state is likely to be underpinned by a similar neural state

The brain is a complex system

Physics knows about laws of complex systems and why some of them converge to specific attractor states while they seem random

Ana Lund

 

In Good Time...

 

IGNANT

Life can seem an endless maze,

The twists and turns, lulls and delays,

But things always fall into place...

In good time.

Friends will sometimes go away.

Some may disappoint or others betray,

But new ones will come to stay...

In good time.

The hurt of getting something wrong,

And the lesson it often brings along

Are there, you see, to make you strong...

In good time.

Kindness freely given away,

Unnoticed now, will somehow find its way

Back to you and come to stay...

In good time.

Efforts seem not to pay to plan?

Forge on friend, doing the best you can.

Fortune will find the deserving man...

In good time.

Life can be tough, there's no doubt,

But hope is the thing we can't do without.

Right things with joy will come about...

In good time.

Abimbola T. Alabi

Anticipation Is Its Own Kind of Suffering

Why the body and mind 

often begin breaking down 

before anything has even happened

People come to me with panic attacks, rumination, insomnia, chest tightness, and the persistent feeling that something is wrong, and when I ask what is happening in their life, they often begin by telling me there is no real stress, nothing specific to point to, no clear reason they should feel this bad.

But if you keep listening, the stress is usually there.

A woman is waiting for biopsy results and trying to act normal at work. A man is waiting to hear whether he will lose his job and tells himself there is no point thinking about it until he knows. Someone else is waiting for immigration papers, board results, a court decision, or one conversation that has not happened yet but may change the shape of everything. Another person is lying awake night after night because something in a relationship has shifted, and even though nothing has been named aloud, the body already knows life is no longer moving inside ordinary time.

What strikes me again and again in clinical practice is that people often do not recognize anticipation as a stressor in its own right. They are looking for an event that has already happened, something they can point to and say, this is why I feel the way I feel. If life has not declared itself yet in that formal sense, they tell themselves they should still be calm. 

People around them often reinforce this, telling them to wait, to relax, not to upset themselves before anything has actually happened.

But that is not how human beings work.

Very often the body begins paying earlier. Long before anything has happened in the official sense, a person may already be living under the pressure of what is coming, and that pressure begins showing itself in sleep, appetite, concentration, mood, and the overall shape of a day. Outwardly they may still be functioning, answering emails, showing up to work, caring for children, speaking coherently, moving through the visible tasks of adult life. Inwardly something much more consuming may already be underway.

This kind of strain is easy to miss precisely because it hides inside ordinary functioning. People think they are only waiting, when in fact many of them are already wearing themselves down. 

What exhausts them is not only the event they fear or hope for, but the long period before it, when nothing has fully happened and yet the mind and body can no longer remain untouched by what may be approaching.

We tend to speak of waiting as though it were empty time. Often it is not empty at all. It fills thought, sleep, imagination, appetite, and the emotional tone of a day. It can narrow a life before anything has officially changed in that life. 

For some people, prolonged anticipation becomes one of the hardest parts of the experience because the body is already trying to live with a future that has not yet taken final form.

~

Part I. Neurophysiology: What Prolonged Anticipation Does to the Body

Once anticipation takes hold, it does not remain a thought you can simply put aside. 

It begins changing the brain and the body together. 

The brain starts treating the unresolved future as something important enough to prepare for, and that preparation affects far more than mood. It changes sleep, muscle tension, digestion, appetite, energy, focus, and the basic feeling of being inside a day. This is why someone can appear steady and still feel consumed from the inside. Part of them is already living in relation to something that has not happened yet.

The brain is built to predict. 

It is always trying to work out what may happen next, especially when something ahead feels meaningful, threatening, or life changing. Under ordinary circumstances, prediction helps us move through life. We anticipate traffic, another person’s mood, the next sentence in a conversation, the small changes that let us adapt. But when the future carries emotional weight and remains unresolved, prediction becomes harder to turn off. The brain begins treating uncertainty itself as information that requires attention.

This is not only a vague feeling of worry. Several systems become involved at once. The amygdala tracks emotional salience and possible threat. The insula keeps reading the body from the inside, which is why uncertainty can become chest tightness, nausea, restlessness, or the sense that something is physically wrong. The anterior cingulate cortex monitors conflict, error, and mismatch, the feeling that something has not yet resolved. The prefrontal cortex tries to interpret, regulate, and make decisions, but it is being asked to regulate a situation that still has no final data. The hippocampus brings memory and context into the process, comparing the current uncertainty with older experiences of danger, loss, waiting, disappointment, or hope.

This is part of why rumination becomes so difficult to interrupt. 

The mind keeps returning to the same question not because the person is weak or irrational, but because the brain is trying to solve something that has not yet become solvable. It scans for clues, runs possible outcomes, replays details, and searches for anything that might reduce uncertainty before reality itself has done so. People describe this in ordinary language all the time. They say, my mind will not shut off. I wake up already thinking about it. I cannot stay with what is in front of me. I keep checking my phone, my email, my messages, my body, the clock. Underneath that language, the brain is often doing the same thing: staying alert around something unfinished.

The body follows quickly. Once the brain gives uncertainty enough importance, the hypothalamus, autonomic nervous system, and stress-response pathways begin preparing the person for something that has not yet arrived. Sometimes this activation is obvious, with chest tightness, shakiness, shortness of breath, nausea, restlessness, or sudden surges of panic. More often, it is quieter and more constant, showing up as a slightly faster heart rate, an unsettled stomach, tension in the jaw, and shoulders that never fully drop. A person may still sound composed, still work, still parent, still answer questions normally, while privately carrying a body that has not fully come down from readiness.

Sleep is especially vulnerable because exhaustion does not automatically produce rest. Many people can still fall asleep because the body is tired, but the sleep itself becomes thinner, with repeated waking, early-morning alertness, more intense dreams, and the feeling of opening their eyes already braced, as if the waiting resumed before the day even began. When vigilance systems remain active, the brain does not fully surrender the night to restoration. It keeps some part of itself available to monitor what is pending. The person may technically be sleeping, but they are not recovering in the way sleep is meant to restore them.

Attention changes too, but often in a way that is harder to see. A person may continue moving through the day with enough competence that nothing looks obviously wrong, yet their concentration has become divided. They may find themselves rereading the same line, losing the thread of a conversation, or beginning one task only to realize that their attention has already drifted back toward the unresolved question. The pending result, the delayed answer, the conversation that has not happened, or the atmosphere that has shifted without explanation begins to pull on attention from underneath. Life continues, but it takes more effort to stay inside it.

Appetite and self-soothing often shift as well. Some people lose hunger almost entirely. Food feels heavy, unnecessary, or strangely irrelevant. Others eat more often, not from carelessness, but in repeated attempts to create a few minutes of relief. Some reach for sugar, screens, scrolling, cleaning, exercise, work, or any ritual that gives the body a temporary sense of control. These responses are not shallow. They are the body’s attempts to regulate itself under tension that has gone on too long.

What makes anticipation so expensive is that the body prepares for action without ever receiving the action that would complete the cycle. If danger becomes concrete, the body can respond. If relief arrives, it can soften. If loss becomes definite, grief can begin to gather around something real. But under prolonged anticipation, the person remains mobilized without release. They cannot fully fight, withdraw, mourn, decide, celebrate, or reorganize because nothing has fully landed. Energy is being spent, but it has nowhere to go.

Over time, this becomes a real physiological burden. The HPA axis, cortisol rhythm, autonomic tone, noradrenergic vigilance, immune function, metabolism, sleep, and attention all keep adjusting around a future that still has not taken final shape. 

These adjustments may be useful for a short period. They become wearing when they continue day after day. This is why people under prolonged anticipation often describe themselves as foggy, depleted, emotionally brittle, physically off, or unlike themselves before anything definitive has happened. The strain is real because the brain and body are already responding to a future they have not yet been allowed to meet.

Part II. Psychoanalysis: Why the Mind Suffers Under Suspension

What makes prolonged anticipation so difficult is not only that the body stays tense. It is that the mind cannot settle into any honest relationship with what is happening. Or rather, with what is not fully happening yet. Psychoanalysis has always been concerned with the way human beings suffer not only from events themselves, but from the meanings, objects, wishes, fears, and fantasies attached to them. Under prolonged anticipation, the object of feeling is present and absent at the same time. It exists powerfully in the inner world, but it has not yet taken enough external form for the person to know what to do with it.

That is why the psyche has difficulty finding its position. The feeling is already real, but the reality around it has not stabilized. The mind does not know whether it is preparing for attachment or separation, disappointment or arrival, protection or surrender. One part leans forward while another braces. One part begins to imagine a future while another tries to prevent the injury of believing too soon. This leaves the person suspended in a state where feeling has intensity, but no settled form. The mind keeps trying to orient itself around something that continues to matter before it has become something it can fully know.

This is where people often become harsh with themselves. They say they are overthinking. They say they are too anxious, too attached, too preoccupied, too affected by something that has not even happened yet. But the psyche is not built to treat unresolved significance as if it were nothing. If something matters enough, and if it remains suspended long enough, the inner life begins organizing around it whether the person wants that or not.

That is why the same thoughts return over and over. In psychoanalytic terms, repetition is often an attempt at mastery. The mind returns to the scene because it cannot yet complete the scene. It rehearses conversations that have not happened. It imagines outcomes and then revises them. It goes back over the smallest details, a pause, a tone, a look, a change in timing, as if enough attention might force the truth to reveal itself. This is not simple worry. It is an attempt to give psychic form to something that has emotional force but no final shape.

The problem is that the mind cannot fully symbolize what has not yet become definite. It can imagine, rehearse, anticipate, and defend, but it cannot complete the deeper work of understanding what the experience means. The feeling arrives before the fact. The body may already be frightened, hopeful, protective, or attached, while the conscious mind still has no stable reality to interpret. This creates a strange inner burden: emotion is already moving, but meaning has not caught up. The person is left trying to make sense of something that has entered the inner world before it has fully entered life.

That is one reason this kind of suffering can feel so disproportionate from the outside. Other people see no event, no final loss, no formal change, and they assume the distress must be excessive or misplaced. But inwardly the person may already be living with enormous emotional reality. They may be saying goodbye to one possible future, clinging to another, defending against disappointment, and secretly moving toward what they still want, all at the same time. The ego is asked to hold incompatible positions without being given enough reality to choose among them.

This is also why time begins to change under prolonged anticipation. The present loses some of its natural weight. Hours pass, but they do not feel fully lived. A morning can be consumed by waiting for an answer that may not come. An evening can be shaped by what was not said, what was delayed, what may happen tomorrow. The person is no longer moving through time in a simple forward direction. Part of the mind is pulled ahead into possibility, part of it keeps returning to the last meaningful sign, and the actual moment becomes harder to inhabit. Waiting turns time into something uneven, stretched, and strangely unreal.

Psychoanalytically, one of the cruelest features of suspension is that it interferes with containment. Feeling keeps rising, but there is no stable reality to contain it. The mind tries to build a frame around the experience, then has to revise that frame again and again as new signs appear, disappear, intensify, or contradict each other. What should become memory, decision, grief, relief, or action remains in an unfinished state. The psyche is forced to keep updating itself around something that has not declared its meaning. Over time, this becomes exhausting not only because the person is waiting, but because the inner world has to keep reorganizing around a reality that will not hold still.

That is why prolonged anticipation wears people down so deeply. It is not only fear. It is the way life keeps going while some private part of the person remains stuck at the same door, waiting for it to open or close. Days pass. The calendar moves. Other people make plans, finish errands, celebrate things, complain about ordinary problems, and the person may be doing all of that too, but inside there is a constant drain. They are tired in a way sleep does not fully fix. They may look back and realize that whole weeks have gone by, yet emotionally they have been living inside the same unanswered question. That is a special kind of suffering, and it deserves to be named more clearly than it usually is.

Part III. Examples of Anticipation That Exhaust the Nervous System

Some forms of anticipation are easy for other people to recognize because the stakes are visible. A person is waiting to find out whether they need major surgery. Another has heard the word diagnosis but still does not know what the next year of life will actually require, how much treatment, how much pain, how much loss, how much change. Someone else is waiting for a professional board decision that will determine whether years of work remain intact or begin to unravel. Another person is waiting to hear whether a contract will be renewed, whether a deal will go through, whether the future they were counting on will still exist a month from now. 

Even before the outcome arrives, each of these possibilities begins to exert pressure. The answer is still pending, but the body is no longer neutral. It is already responding to what may soon become reality.

Anticipation can be just as exhausting when what is coming is deeply wanted rather than feared. Someone is waiting for news about a manuscript that matters more than they admit aloud. Someone is preparing for a move that feels less like logistics and more like the beginning of another life. Someone is counting down to the birth of a child, the opening of a long imagined project, or a reunion that has been carrying emotional weight for months. From the outside this may look like excitement. Inside, it can still be depleting. The mind keeps moving ahead, the body keeps leaning toward a future that is not here yet, and by the time the hoped-for moment arrives, some people are already tired from having lived toward it for so long before it became real.

There are also situations in which the truth is felt before it is formally named. A workplace can enter a stage where everyone senses that something is changing, yet no one says it plainly. Meetings continue, conversations keep circling the same unspoken issue, decisions are delayed, the atmosphere changes, and people begin adapting around something no one has directly acknowledged. A family may be waiting on one necessary decision while daily life continues in a strange performance of normalcy. These situations are exhausting because people begin organizing themselves around a truth that has entered the room before it has entered language.

The relational version is often harder to explain because there may be no official event to point to. No declaration has been made. No promise has been given. And yet the body may already know that something has changed. A person who once felt peripheral no longer feels peripheral. A conversation that should have passed like any other remains in the body afterward. A shift in tone, timing, privacy, warmth, distance, or restraint begins to matter more than the person wants it to matter. The difficulty is not only desire. It is the strain of carrying an emotional reality that has become too significant to dismiss and still too undefined to rest in.

This is why anticipation is not limited to frightening events. 

It can gather around danger, hope, longing, love, delay, ambition, illness, uncertainty, or any situation in which life has already begun changing before it has openly changed. 

The cost comes from the same place each time. 

A human being begins living in relation to something that matters deeply and still has nowhere final to land.

Conclusion

Most people can survive very hard things once they finally know what is happening. They may not welcome it, and it may still break their heart, but once reality is clear, the mind and body are no longer trapped in endless uncertainty. Even painful truth gives a person something solid to face, grieve, resist, accept, or begin adapting to.

What breaks people down in a quieter and often crueler way is limbo.

It is the in between. The stretch where something feels life changing, but still has no answer. The days when you are waiting to find out whether you are seriously ill, whether something is ending, whether something will begin, whether the thing you fear is coming, whether the thing you long for is real, whether life is about to open or close and you still do not know which. You are not safe, not settled, not grieving, not relieved. You are suspended there, carrying constant tension with nowhere to put it.

And that kind of suffering is rarely named for what it is.

People often reduce it to overthinking, anxiety, sensitivity, or an inability to tolerate uncertainty. Very often they are describing something far more real and far more punishing. They are describing what happens when a human being has been bracing for too long without resolution.

That is why this state can feel almost unbearable. Because the mind and body are not built to live indefinitely inside unresolved tension. Fear of catastrophe can do it. Fear that something is dying can do it. Longing for something that still has not happened yet can do it. The body does not care whether the awaited thing is terrible or beautiful, it only registers that something important has not resolved.

This deserves more language than we usually give it.

Because some of the worst suffering in human life does not begin when the blow finally lands. 

It begins earlier, in the long tense space before it, when nothing has happened yet and the whole body is already paying, while life keeps moving and some private part of you remains at the threshold, still waiting to begin.

Vera Hart

The emptiness inside

 

Pexels

 

Why, why, why do I feel so empty?

With emotions overwhelming me, emotions I cannot even express to either myself or people outside of myself…

Shouldn’t I be already past this? Shouldn’t I just accept my own emptiness and my difficulty with describing my own emotions already as a part of who I am?

Pray tell, dear brain that is an intimate friend, ally and enemy… Why must you still insist on continuing to fight me? Why must you still insist on trying to instill the same bullshit about me that I’ve ingrained by shitheads that only live in my past? Why the fuck are you just as stubborn as I am?!

What must I emotionally need to do to ensure that you’re feeling loved instead of thinking impossible/illogical things that make you feel worse about yourself,

while you feel so pained, trying and struggling to heal and survive, from yesteryear’s bullshit?

How much bullshit must I take to ensure that you survive? But for what cost on my already fluctuating and fluid mental health?

Fuck it, time to fight my way through life’s bullshit and haul ass to free myself from this hell I made for myself… especially an inescapable self-hatred I need to keep clawing my way out of.

My wings still work and they’re thankfully not clipped,but they’re going to need years to rest, while my claws are available to me, because my claws are still working well so that I can use to continue fighting against the bullshit I subconsciously believe about myself (or rather what was taught to me).

Sometimes it feels like I am not actually getting myself anywhere nor actually making myself a lot better since it’s like I don’t actually care about myself, but more so still trapping myself in the bullshit made about me, and the shit that I made myself believe to make myself palatable to those who’ve wronged me in the past and to those who’ve said a lot of bullshit against me. But then again… doesn’t this feel like that when you’re progressing?

I guess that this is a part of both life and the messy bullshit that is the human experience, no matter how ‘holistic’ people make progress in self-work to be.

I guess there are many things that I can do,

to fill the emptiness inside.

Bloody Winter

The Hunger That Success Cannot Feed

Actress Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout

 Why achievement often leaves 

a deeper emptiness exposed

You crossed the finish line. You hit the number. You earned the rank, closed the deal, built the thing everyone said you couldn't. And for a moment—just a moment—it was enough. 

Then the silence came back. Not the peaceful kind. The hollow kind. 

The kind that sits beside you in a room full of people celebrating your name. You smiled. You said the right things. But somewhere behind your eyes, a question flickered like a candle in a draft: 

Is this it? 

If you have felt this, you are not broken. 

You are simply honest enough to notice what most people spend their whole lives running from.

The Daily Meditation

"It is not that I am brave enough to endure evil, but that I am wise enough to know that nothing I can lose is truly mine—and that what I seek outside myself was never outside myself to begin with."

— Seneca, Letters to Lucilius

The Diagnosis

The pain here is not the pain of failure. 

That kind of pain, at least, has a clear address—you know where it lives and what caused it. 

This pain is stranger, more disorienting. 

It arrives dressed in the clothes of success. 

It knocks on the door of your proudest moment and sits down uninvited at your own celebration.

We are not taught to expect this. From the time we are young, we are given a simple map: work hard, achieve, feel fulfilled. The map promises that the destination is real. Nobody warns you that arrival can feel like loss.

Three symptoms you may be carrying right now:

1. A restlessness that intensifies precisely when things are going well, as if your nervous system does not trust the calm and keeps scanning for a new problem to solve

2. A quiet shame about the emptiness—because you know how many people would trade places with you, and you cannot explain why their envy doesn't make you feel better

3. A compulsive forward motion toward the next goal, not because you are excited about it, but because stillness feels dangerous, like standing on ice that might crack if you stop moving

These are not symptoms of ingratitude. 

They are symptoms of a soul that has been fed the wrong food for a very long time.

The Unpacking

Seneca is not asking you to care about nothing. He is asking you to notice the architecture of what you care about—to see whether what you are chasing was ever capable of giving you what you actually need.

The Shadow is the belief that external proof—achievement, status, recognition, wealth—can fill the cavity inside you. The Shadow is not evil. It is simply a misdiagnosis. You feel a real hunger, a genuine ache, and the world hands you a very convincing menu. The food looks right. It smells right. And it works, briefly, the way sugar works—a spike, then a deeper crash than before.

The Light is the recognition that the hunger is not for more, but for meaning rooted in something that cannot be taken from you. Not meaning as a concept you read about, but meaning as a daily practice—a felt sense that what you are doing is aligned with who you actually are, not who you were told to become.

Here is the thing most people miss: 

The emptiness after achievement is not a malfunction. It is a messenger. 

It arrives not to punish you, but to tell you that you have been solving the right equation with the wrong variable. The chest that tightens when you get what you wanted is not weakness. It is your deepest self, knocking from the inside, telling you that the door you just opened leads to another hallway, not the room you were looking for.

The room you are looking for cannot be unlocked with accomplishment. 

It requires a different kind of key altogether.

The Parable

In 168 BC, the Roman general Lucius Aemilius Paullus defeated Perseus of Macedon at the Battle of Pydna—one of the most decisive victories in Roman history. He had ended a war, humiliated a king, and secured Rome's dominance over the Greek world. Wealth beyond calculation poured into Rome as tribute. Paullus walked at the center of a triumph so grand that the Roman crowd wept with pride.

And yet, in the weeks that followed, Paullus buried two of his sons. The elder died five days before the triumph. The younger, three days after. He stood before the Roman people at the height of his glory and gave a speech that historians have preserved not because of its military brilliance, but because of its devastating clarity. He told the crowd that he had asked Fortune for a trade: let the grief, if any must come to Rome, fall on his own house rather than on the Republic. He accepted the weight.

What Paullus understood—standing at the peak of everything Rome had to offer—was that the external world had no architecture strong enough to hold a man's soul. Triumph and grief arrived in the same week, through the same door, wearing different faces. The victory did not protect him from loss. It did not fill the space where his sons had been. The laurel wreath and the funeral torch are the same temperature when you are holding both.

He survived. Not because of the triumph, but because he had built something inside himself that the triumph could neither give nor take away. 

The Stoics called it apatheia—not indifference, but an inner stillness that does not depend on the weather outside.

The Modern Mirror

You do not need to be a Roman general to recognize this pattern. 

Open any feed, on any platform, and you will see it running in real time. 

The founder who sells his company for eight figures and posts a thread about how lost he feels six months later. The athlete who trains for years, crosses the finish line, and collapses—not from exhaustion, but from the sudden absence of purpose. The person who finally gets the following, the revenue, the approval—and then lies awake at 2 AM wondering what comes next and why the answer does not excite them.

Modern life has industrialized the Shadow. 

We live inside systems specifically designed to harvest your hunger and sell it back to you as a product. The algorithm does not want you satisfied—a satisfied person stops scrolling. The culture of metrics and milestones turns your inner life into a scoreboard, and scoreboards need to be updated constantly to stay relevant.

The specific headache this solves: 

If you have been building—a business, a body, a brand—and you feel the creeping suspicion that the thing you are building will not deliver what you are expecting from it, that suspicion is not pessimism. It is precision. You are right. The thing you are building cannot give you what you actually want, unless what you are building is also, simultaneously, an act of building yourself—your values, your presence, your capacity to be fully alive in ordinary moments.

The ancient answer is not to stop building. It is to build from a different place.

Bee Hiiv