Last week, I travelled to Stockbridge, Massachusettes, to attend a conference on psychosis. Wonderful event, a storehouse for learning. An enormous validation for my way of working either without, or with miniumally invasive methods, including medication. Was intensely happy to hear that the next years conference is to be held at San Francisco. But  the conference, remarkably informative, isn’t really the subject of the blog. My round trip to Berkshire and back was extremely intriguing, and it is to that trip that my post is dedicated. I had tremendous experiences along  the way, that contributed to my understanding of the human psyche, and of course I pondered on the developmental aspect of our societal behavior.

The planning stage went smooth. I had sent in an abstract last year, and had been invited to speak. Booked a ticket a few months ago, and got a great price on it. Asked a friend to babysit the kids while I was away, and she was gracious enough to accept it. The problems really started with my writer’s block. I developed tremendous resistance and could not get myself to write. Looking back, I wonder if that resistance caused all that followed, or if the resistance itself was a sign of things to come, for the trip to East Coast became a series of disasters.

The day was bright and chirpy on Nov 5th. The sun was warm and brilliant and I happily prepared to drive to SFO which is four hours away on a good day. I had booked to fly to BDL. I would leave SFO at 1:00 pm on Friday, and reach BDL at 12:00night, rent a car and drive to Stockbridge, a small town approx 2 hours away, to present on Saturday.  I had finally written up my paper, but hadn’t finished the last 3 slides but since the subject involved my daily work, I was ok with that.

The first little glitch – that had gone unnoticed by me – the neighboring dogs and cats all suddenly were poo-ing in my front and backyard. Being a Jungian, I should have heeded the sign. A few weeks before my departure. I misplaced my existing debit-card, and got a temporary one which did not have my name on it. The bank promised to mail me a replacement within the next 30 days. So in addition to my credit card, I carried around with me this debit card which had the words “Preferred Customer” on it instead of my name.

The lady at SFO asked for my credit card to check me in. My carry-on bag turned out to be 2″ longer than their prescribed length, and I was asked to check it in. Whoever coined the term “small is beautiful” had been onto something! This, along with the fact that airlines have stopped serving meals on the flight, would add another $100 or more to my cost of airtravel. Suddenly the fare didn’t seem to lucrative as the airline has projected it to be.

After checking in, I proceeded to the departure terminal. “Proof of indentity please?” just before the scanning machine.  So I put down the book I am carrying, put down the coat I am carrying, unzip the backpack that weighs a 100lbs and has all these silly electronic gadgets that I am required to carry just so I may be judged “normal” – the cellphone, the pc, the camera, their chargers, their adapters, converters and so on and on and on. To extract my wallet from this electronic jungle takes some doing.  After several minutes of trying, wishing, praying and ignoring the shuffling feet of the people behind me, I give up, squat and dump the electronic zoo onto the floor. At the top of the pile – bottom of the backpack – is the desired wallet. I extract my identity from the wallet and hand it to the homeland security guy. Without glancing at the picture he gives it back and asks for the boarding pass. I scrambled to shove all the stuff back into my backpack, but like evils of Pandora’s box, these are difficult to fit back. After much struggling, I manage to dump almost everything except a couple of books back, stagger up and hand him my boarding pass. He stamps it and waives me towards the security check.

On the belt, I put the backpack in a tray, then walk towards the beep-beep gate, hoping to glide thru. No such luck. The guy looks at me and waives me back, muttering and pointing downwards. I have no clue, so I retreat in confusion, and try to move forward again. This time a loud whiplash : “SHOES!” as several cops menacingly walk towards me to restrain me. “What about them? ” I ask, holding my skirt up so they can see the top of my boots, see that I am not concealing any weapons. In Fresno, where I live, when you enter secured places, you’re supposed to lift your pants to reveal the top of your shoes. By now he is positively seething with impatience “Take them off” he barks. I look around and realise all are required to take off shoes! So I unzip my boots and take them off. “PUT THEM IN THE TRAY”  Gosh, why didn’t you say so? So I put them in the tray but by now I am reduced to a quivering mass of jelley. Images of a psychotic mother and hapless infant (causing psychosis in the infant psyche) arise in my mind. Where was this fear coming from? Had I ever been assaulted in infancy? Had someone screamed this way at me then ? Or was this the first time, hence my regression to infantile stage of confusion and fright? Because of my training, I knew better than to buy into their projective identification – it is pretty evident to me that my tormentor must have been abused as a child, else he would be incapable of such behavior towards others.

Then I thought – soon we would be required to walk thru the gates in the nude. How would they arrange that? Will we have to pass thru a room full of cameras or will there is a His and Her section – like restrooms – where men and women will strip us down and search us in greater detail – what if someone is carrying a small gun shoved up their a** ? Just like the drug cartel had done. The image repulsed me and I remembered a psychologist from the East Coast (Masachusettes) that I got acquainted with, on Psychology Today. She was an epitome of paranoia, she assumed all her patients were dangerous and she needed to be protected from them by law, and by the licensing board. We often would be at the opposite sides of this debate of whether the people themselves are dangerous, or whether it is the therapist’s unconscious aggression  and psychotic tendencies induce patients into becoming irrational. Whereas my patients are mostly respectful of me, and extremely honest, trusting, and trustworthy, for some reason her patients are disrespectful, they stalk her, run away with her money, and on one occasion had even attacked her. After carefully hearing about her interactions with her patients and observing her interactions with colleagues, I had come to a silent conclusion that her patients were less disorderd, it was her interaction with them that caused them to behave this way with her. It was her own paranoia, and disorder that she projected on the patients. Her patients responded to that the only way they could – by becoming as psychotic as her. In that moment I understood  how the American govt was engaged in a similar dynamic with the rest of the world.

As I expectantly waited for my backpack at the other side of the metal detector gate, a buzzer went off in the distance. I heard the words “Security check” as if in a dream and watched someone drag a backpack off the rollers and walk towards me. I was sufficiently dissociated by the trauma by now, and realised my backpack had caused the beep. Despite the depersonalisation, there was this nagging fear that I couldn’t understand. The cop said “May I open this?” “Sure, go ahead!” I said. Would it have mattered if I had said “no?!”  I wondered if someone had stashed away drugs, or weapons in my bag without my knowledge. The movie Bankok Hilton flashed before my eyes, but the ego found that level of fantasy unsustainable. I watched him dump out everything, and caught the sympathic eyes of the passer byes who nevertheless were secretly glad it was me, not them. One passer by mumbled the words “the clever actually manage to get away with bombs in their bags, and then these guys take that frustration out on the innocents!”  I felt invaded by the cop’s dirty masculine hands trained to rape our belongings. He seemed to be taking a perverse pleasure in caressing things that were intimately mine, and I resented that.

Coming from a psychodnamic perspective, I believe this feeling of terror I was made to experience is the precise feeling that the govt, and homeland security, deliberately wants to inflict on people. Perhaps this is the emotion that they think will keep the airports safe. Unfortunately, the so called “bad” people are immune to it, and only the innocent suffer. Such behavior causes more hatred and ill will than anything else. Which is the topic at my next conference where I speak on the the origins of hate. So this incident seemed pretty epigenetic, if you know what I mean.

There was nothing spurious in the backpack, of course, but that didn’t matter to the cop, so he asked me to separate the backpack and the laptop. So I unzipped and took off my boots again, went back, and repeated the whole process, placing the pc and the now molested backpack in two different trays and had them pass thru the metal detector. They got past the detector without a problem.

I am neither from Middle East, nor a Moslem, but my name has an Arab ring to it, Sameer being a popular Moslem Middle Eastern name. Profiled as an Arab, however unwillingly, I could not not feel empathy for all the Muslims and/or Arabs trapped in such situations, and a strong distaste for the US governments’ policies of discrimination, hegemony and oppression. At that moment, being treated this way, my sentiments could not be anything but anti-American. I experienced and understood how hate is born out of such helplessness and degradation that the cops were inflicting on me with their delusional and paranoid ideation and inaccurate profiling. I wondered if their fear arose as a compensatory defence against an innate sense of shame at having tormented more than half the world thru warfare and oppression, or were they just narcissistic in their organization? Were they specifically trained into a narcissistic attitude, or was the recruitment system designed to ferret out and select the most narcissistic/anti social profiles and enhance an anti social attitude ? Their behavior had nothing to do with my identity, or even with who I am, or was at that moment. To me it was indicative of their own pathology. The feeling passed in a few hours, days, but I had learnt a new experience of reality.

I headed towards the designated terminal. The place was like a fancy mall – eating joints, clothing, music shops, pharmacy, you name it, it was there. The music seemed too loud and blaring. The lights were flashy. I felt I had landed at the strip in Las Vegas – a place that I mostly detest. The severe pollution invaded the core of my being, and my first impulse was to run away from what seemed to me to be such a vulgar overstimulation of senses. Was this what the wars, and “colonization” was about, what it was for – so we could have this allegedly “superior” life? So we can taste orange chicken in a flashy restaurant, or we can sip Champaigne in a bar, where scantily clad women served to titillate our senses further ? For this millions of mothers lost their sons and millions of daughters lost their fathers all over the world? For this children were raped, and wives widowed? Survivor guilt clouded my mind, and my calm and peacefully serene life in the small town Fresno, at that moment seemed like life in a monastry – safe, protected, wisdom oriented – and such pollution and noise seemed terribly intrusive and invasive.

I was hungry by now, and chose a quiet corner in a least crowded restaurant, wolfing down my meal in silence. The glare and the noise seemed deafening, so I decided to shut out the overstimulation by reading a book. Couldn’t find it and realised I must have left it in or around the metal detector. Should I risk an encounter with those cops again, or should I just go without the book? It was one of my favorite books, and a very powerful read, so I decided to go back. Burger in hand, I picked up my stuff and marched back to the metal detector area. I tried to catch the attention of many cops, none of them had time for me so I walked to the gate and tried to cross it -I knew someone would notice me if i did that ! At the time I felt what Osama Bin Ladin must have originally felt – failure trying to get noticed and heard, failure to get anyone to give me back what had been mine.

Immediately several cops descended on me and barked orders and questions. I calmly explained that I had left a book here and wondered if someone had seen it. One of the cops escorted me to a table around which were a bunch of them in splits over some hapless passenger’s plight. My escort asked them for the book. “Whats the name of the book?” the other cop asked me. “The Search for the Lost Mother of Infancy” I said. “”Whats the color of the book?” he asked. I wondered how many copies of that book they had found in the last few minutes with that name, and said “its a black hardcover version” Still unwilling to return my book, he said “can I see your identity?” There was no reason for him to ask for my identity, of course, because my name was not on the book, and my relationship with the book could not be directly established, but even if it were the case, I was inside the security zone, and the two – boarding pass and identity – had been already correlated. he could just have used my boarding pass! The hungry wolves just wanted to play with the food as long as it breathed. Surrounded by cops, and under their watchful eye, I knelt on the ground, emptied my backpack for the third time in the last 30 minutes, and handed him my driving license. He didn’t even bother to look at it, and handed the book back. I remembered reading somewhere that “cops are just a bunch of bad guys on the good side of the law.”  At this moment I seemed to have become the butt of jokes. I pushed the stuff back into my backpack, and a warmth washed over me, the warmth of embarassment and shame. Its an alien emotion for me, and I realised that the cops were well trained to induce that. In the background, the big screen TV was blaring about Obama’s visit to India, where he had gone to woo a billion and a half Indians to help him infuse new blood into the dying American economy. Was it the shame of having to go to a third world country for business, was it that shame that the cops were projecting on me?  Or was it my name that had an Arabic ring to it? Was it the envy and fear that the success of Indian immigrants in US evoked? Or were they as charming to their own as well? A feeling of sadness and a sense of pity for the typical American women enveloped me. I have travelled widely in the world, and lived in many countries, but I have never experienced such general disrespect for women and children, and for the welfare of women and children, in any other country. I certainly don’t think generally women as a gender, in Eastern countries are disrespected. Erich Noumann’s thesis on “The Fear of the Feminine” arose in my imagination. Once again I could only feel sorrow for the American women and childen trapped in such a masculine society that had no sense of respect for vulnerability. There was more to come…

I reached BDL at 12:00 in the night, and took a bus to Enterprise Rent A Car. I had booked the car many months ago. I looked for my credit card, but couldn’t find it. Regretfully, I realised that the lady that helped me at the check-in at SFO, had probably walked away with it. But I had a debit card, my bank had plenty of cash in it, and I had a pile of $100 bills so I felt safe, or so I thought. The man at the counter refused to accept the debit card. I repeatedly requested him to call my bank to check, I offered to log into my account and show him the cash that I had, I offered he take a blank cheque as a deposit, anything in return for the car. He refused. I tried to point out that I had booked the flight, the hotel, the car with my debit card, and they were under a contract to rent me the car, I pointed out that I was a very frequent and regular customer at Enterprise Fresno, and he could have access to information pertaining to me on the Enterprise database, and I even said that I was a woman stranded in an alien place 2000 miles from home and it was well past midnight. Nothing. It just irritated him. I felt this surge of pity for his wife, and his daughter, and his mother. A man so devoid of compassion and gentleness and helpfulness – what would he have to offer to the women in his family? These behaviors are not in isolation, they represent a general pattern of relating. I wondered how he traumatised them in their everyday life? I also wondered how he had been traumatised by his mother, to reach a state of such disconnection from the world. I then asked him what I could do, given the circumstances – and he said he did not care, maybe I could take a cab! “In the middle of the night? Two hours drive thru deserted highways? I would be too scared!” He just shrugged his shoulders and left.

I tried two other car rental agencies, but all had the same response. I cursed myself for leaving my own country and coming to US. In India, even today, most people would offer a solution, even offer to drive 2 hours to make sure the woman stranded in an alien place, remained safe. I pondered on the role of early object relationships. Especially the very early interaction. The infant doesn’t sleep with the mother here. It sleeps in the cold isolation of a crib! As a consequence the bond with the feminine, the nurturing aspect, the anima, is significantly weak. What you haven’t got in life, you cannot give to others. It was this cold isolation that was being projected on me at this time. I was used to the warmth of the mothers touch in bed, in infancy and thru childhood, and how I missed that warmth at this time.

I stayed the night at a nearby hotel run by an Indian couple who pampered me to no end which helped me repair myself. Next morning, they ordered a cab for me, and helped me load my bags into the cab, and gave me a hug on my way out. I drove straight to the conference, and totally exhausted by the end of the way, looked forward to sleeping at the small hotel I had booked in. The hotel – a motel actually – also happened to be run by an Indian couple. I reached there at 9:00pm, exhaustion etched on my face and demeanor. The owner, a middle aged guy, expressed profuse concern and empathy at my condition. Before he went to bed the night before, he had turned on the heater in my room, and had left a map with a list of eating places where I could find food if I had wanted to eat. In the morning when he realized I hadn’t checked in at night, he had become worried and had called my cellphone (which I had turned off) to find out if I had been safe. When I explained to him what happened (over a cup of coffee), he waived the charges for the previous night, and helped me into what he said was the biggest and the best room in the hotel, for the same rate. I insisted on paying at least $20 to cover his expenses from the missed night. He asked me what time I had to leave in the morning, and where my conference was being held. I told him the address, and asked him if he could call a cab for me at 8:50 am. He thought for a moment, and then said “This place is about 10-12 miles from here. It will cost you about $30. You’ve been through a lot, just come out to the front desk in the morning and I will drive you there.” After the ordeal and the coldness I had experienced, his words made my eyes misty.  On the way to the conference next morning we briefly  shared our history.

Saving $30 wasn’t what made me emotional. It was the feeling of not being isolated, of having someone I could turn to if things got worse. I had felt starved of humanity, now I felt I wasn’t alone – isolated and cold – in my “crib.” I had human connection, a world that cared about what happened to me. A world that was not exploitative, nor harsh. A world that saw me as a human being, rather than as an opportunity, an object to be exploited for money. I knew some of my previous experiences in US formed a template for this experience of the moment, and I struggled to separate the moment from its past.

In the last analysis, it isn’t how much money we make, and how big a car, or a house we have. In the end, all that matters is how we have touched the life of others, and how we have been touched in turn. For those who are incapable of touching others, or being touched, money becomes a compensatory mechanism – a sadomasochistic tool that is as numinous as the human soul, except that it is a soul taken over by the devil. Those of us who can experience the vulnerability of a human soul, are blessed with humanity, with emotion, with compassion. We can experience the fullness of life, and share that fullness with others. Those that do not retain human characteristics, they become dissociated automata…like those cops who caused and openly reveled in the misery of the passengers, Rent-A-Car guys who were rigid about their policies and procedures to the exclusion of human behavior, and their humanity.

On the next day, a wonderful lady from New Mexico offered, and when I expressed reluctance, insisted on driving me back to BDL. It was a 3 hour trip for her. Such random acts of kindness surprise me, but keep my hope alive in humanity so I gratefully accepted her offer. On the way to the airport, she told me her stories, of how she had spent a good part of her life in India, and with American Indian tribes in New Mexico where she had had learnt compassion and love, and I told her my stories and how I had to learn to be rational, learning to be afraid and mistrustful in this society. A moving towards and meeting of cultures. A connection was established, an emotional connection that would never have been possible had I refused her offer and taken the cab back (which I did contemplate for a while). From her ways, I knew that she had been contained, either by her mother, and/or by other people in her life, or by her deities…and she was passing that containment, compassion, love and caring onwards to the world….we could only give what we had received, and love was the only wealth that mattered anyway…

Since the next conference is in SFO, I insisted that she had to come and spend at least a week with me exploring the Yosemite mountains. A beautiful human bond was born out of her compassion and care.

Many more glitches dogged my trip. At each stage, I felt brutalised by the masculine businesses and institutions that represented the reality of American life – and I was nurtured by the feminine, that represents its traumatised people who suffer silently, and can only heal themselves thru compassion and love, by sharing trauma that is inflicted on them by the callous, linear, unemotional patriarchical system. Devoid of any contextual reference, a referential benchmark of another (nurturing) culture, most aren’t even aware of the extent of their traumatisation except through the expression of their unconscious rage that manifests itself in the million wars that US government mandates, through the million wars that the US soldiers fight all over the world and through the disillusionment of the returning war veterans.

To this day I, and countless South East Asians, continue to consider America as a transitional place, we are unable to associate the label of home with it, because the home that we have experienced in our childhood had not been only a place of opportunity and wealth creation, it was not exploitative, nor punitive, it had always been nurturing and tender, home was never associated with cold, callous, ruthless and traumatising. Our developmental lenses are the only tools we have to make meaning out of our experiences, and they are deterministic. Hence when immigrants are asked for their unquestioned loyalty, the interpersonal relating experiences with individuals native to this country encourage us, but the lack of home-like experiences, lack of benevolent institutions, laws, lack of a societal mother, cause most immigrants to remains suspended in the transitional space, for our experience of our own culture is maternal, and nurturing, not paternal and punitive.

M.

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