Critical Dance: On Psychotherapeutic Set Theory

I want you as the dream
Not the reality

• Kate Bush

I love him who lives for knowledge and who wishes to know that one day the Overman may live. And thus he wills his own downfall

• Nietzsche

Part of overcoming trauma is learning that the triggers cause us pain do so in an attempt to protect our own body. The triggers cause nerve impulses that have been conditioned to protect our own body.

Although these nerve impulses are ultimately intimately tied to whatever “we” is, we ourselves classify ourselves distinct. If we’re allowed to get mystical, the nerve impulses overcome us. Whatever daemon we be, it succumbs to the terrors.

If we are to use understanding and reason as weapon to battle, we have to first understand how the separation and distinction work. We are the machines that separate and designate in order to create a whole. Inside a trance, the daemon sleeps in operation. We do as are programmed. To separate and designation to create a whole.

The universe stripped of personal concern, is just a series of separation and designation. We as separated machines designate a particular shape that continues the fractal mechanization.

We experience the mechanization as a loop when the daemon comes out. Outside of a process, we, a process, process process. To what end? For our body, the end self-protection. But what is our body?

Our body is part of a process and wants to be inside a process without disturbance. Once disturbed, the daemon analyzes the process for its own survival. Our body itself is defined by its sensitivities. The sensitivities that get triggered by trauma.

The universe pulsates. Where it can, it grows. It grows to self-preserve its sensitivities. Sensitivities being process of appreciation. As the universe pulsates, it learns to appreciate.

If we define ourselves via these sensitivities, we are the conclusion.

What does it mean to be sensitive to understanding or understand sensitivity from the first-person perspective? Here we can separate and distinguish.

We create bodies. When these bodies are disrupted, we react. It feeds into itself. Our reaction creates bodies. Points of boundaries and identities.

We create dogma out of the appreciations rather than the sensitivities. The sensitivities of the universe is continuous. The dogma forms from a looping appreciation. Using sensitivities to force a form. A form being an appreciation, dogma forces an appreciation from the sensitivities.

For the sake of the individual, an individual exists within a community body. The boundaries of the city are founded by dogma.

What we can believe is what we’re sensitive to. How we shape these believes form the boundaries of our self. How these boundaries are sensed by the greater community of individuals form the boundaries of the community.

If each member’s sensitivities are protected and ensured, then they’re free to be sensitive bare of dogma. Sensitive to what? To what boundaries?

Regardless of the boundaries, they have to be sensitive to the protection and self-preservation of the body.

There’s a point of creativity that is important for our sensitivity. The universe is creation in motion. To express our sensitivity is a dance, a rhythm that extends to all of the universe. The dance is sustained based on the dogmatic support that influences its expression.

A preying falcon, for example, is dogmatic in its expression. Its reoccurring sensitivities taking a specific form that we label as a lifestyle filled with predictable events. We take note of this and re-create our own self. The rhythm of the falcon reaches our own and we synchronize. We reshape our dogma in a way the falcon doesn’t. The same cycle of the falcon and we re-shape how we see it. First as spiritual, mythical. Then in terms of science. Then in terms of Picasso paintings and Rorschach tests.

Are you dancing? Why or why not? Are you steeped in the rhythm? Why or why not?

Sometimes you need someone to let you know it’s real. A dance partner to explore the boundaries of the rhythm of creation. Other times, we dance alone in synchrony with a universal sensitivity. Regardless, the community is always present in the sensitivities since it’s the body that allows our body to exist. We’re not feral nor rootless. We descend from people coming together in patterns and we’re somehow involved in this pattern. We can’t escape the pattern, only add to it.

When that protection seems to disappear from trauma, our sensitivity becomes dogmatic about its forms to protect the body.

The question becomes, how do our bodies form from the separation and distinction we play a part in separating and distinguishing? Most of the process is accompanied by dogma but there is a continuous sensitivity to changing the dogma based on our bareness to the sensitive. In this bareness, sensitivities synchronize with sensitivities outside the body. We re-wire our dogma based on the consolidation of two foreign sensitivities. Two bodies, patterns that form one.

As established patterns, we can continue the process that makes up our body within the community or we can explore alternative patterns. Exploring alternative patterns is dangerous because it opens the community to danger. The positive is that exploration synchronizes the community with the greater whole.

The greater whole is the pattern that allow us to be a pattern. To be synchronized with the greater whole is to become synchronized beyond the foundation of community. For us, community is where we identify ourselves as living individual. The greater whole for us would be a greater synchrony with our ecology. The greater foundation of our lives.

Our community and our ecology differ in dogma, or form, or pattern.

Ecology forms a pattern of us. This pattern forms into a point of immediate separation and designation. Insofar as we are separate from this ecology, we distinguish this separation into patterns.

The question of free will is how much control do we as a separate thing have over the patterns we weave. We’re intimately connected to these patterns insofar as our synchrony relates to them. Our synchrony is determined by the patterns we struggle to separate and distinguish.

Whether it’s focused on a 9 to 5 job, raising a family, scamming someone, the patterns we weave create forms that participate the pattern of ecology. Where our community stabilizes its own existence. Where our bodies take form.

So for trauma, it would be important for the community to take into consideration the barriers, dogma, shapes and patterns it shares with the ecology it sustains it. To move towards less trauma with more sensitivity.