The Dualistic Strain Around Objects - Fetter 4 & 5

After questioning your identity, and seeing that it isn’t what you thought it was perhaps through a radical shift, one is then left bearing the undercurrents of that identity — all those parts of yourself you didn’t want to see; all the mechanisms that seemed to work to get you what you wanted, and thus helped identify you from everyone else. Here, those tools no longer work, but they still have a signiifcant degree of momentum.

Seeing through your identity is like realising the CEO of a chaotic company was never actually there. His office was there, and thus the assumption that he was in the office held true, but when you looked, you couldn’t find him. That’s the clear seeing.

But the company itself, with all of its ingrained habits, frantic rushing around, and pinicked managers running on old, now defunct emergency protocols, is still operating on pure, unguided momentum.

The old tools no longer have any central authority, yet the cogs are still turning, often with intense and painful force, while it desperately tries to follow a business plan that no longer makes sense.

For me, after seeing through my identity back in 2018, all hell broke loose. My old patterns tried to reassert themselves, but it was just too painful to carry them through. Often though, I couldn’t stop the momentum. I became angry, shouted and swore at people, and developed intense desires seemingly as a way to compensate for its wrathful side. Seeing this in full swing is the beginning of the end of identifying with these unconscious processes, some of which are personal, and some of which are collective.

If you imagine fetters 4 & 5 are like two sides of the same coin, in that one pushes and the other pulls. In that sense, they are actually one fetter, but expressed as diametric opposites.

The pulling (fetter 4) is the compulsive movement towards what the self desires for its comfort, pleasure or security. The pushing (fetter 5) is the compulsive movement away from what the self finds threatening, unpleasant, or uncomfortable. One rarely exists without the other.

This pushing things away and pulling things close can seem all-pervading as the sense of who you thought you were begins to break down. As a result, this pushing and pulling can become quite intense, and can even be complicated by reactionary traumas. In those cases, the reaction is usually an unhelpful behavioral pattern or coping mechanism stemming from a traumatic event that causes various struggles in life. The behavior is an extension of an internal trauma that is trying to resolve itself. But the behaviour offers only temporary relief, and so the cycle continues.

So, the main point here is, as identification in a self dissolves, the raw reactivities that kept the identity intact, are usually experienced more directly and intensely, because the old framework is gone. This can also unearth trauma, which can look similar to fetter 4 & 5 reactivity.

Trauma is a dysregulated wound left in the body and mind when a deeply distressing event shatters the sense of safety, leaving a part of the self structure stunted or frozen in that moment. It’s a developmental blockade that tries to grow out of itself in various convoluted ways.

When doing fetter work, this is quite an important distinction to make between fetter reaction and a trauma reaction, because the fetter (the bind or psychological bond) is a cognitive/emotional belief that things should be different, which needs you to react in some way. It helps sustain the sense of who you are in relation to others.

A trauma reaction is deeper, and more somatic, nervous-based compulsion which might feel overly disproportionate, urgent or overwhelming. This can make trauma-based reactions resistant to insight, so adopting a fetter inquiry into these types of reactionary patterns can retraumatize the person. So there's that to keep in mind.

Recognising these distinctions can mean the difference between a failed guidance or a successful guidance. In the case of the trauma reactivity, it is best to compassionately educate the person being guided about how the fetter 4 & 5 reactivity can look similar to trauma reactivity, and that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong in that.

The fetter inquiry can still be relevant in these cases, (who feels this trauma?) but I’ve learned to tread carefully, some some poeple might need a different approach. Even today, I notice little instances of trauma-based sensations surface, but the reactivity is largely gone, at least in the way I understand it.

So, click here to go deeper into fetter 4 and 5.