Relationships
Part 5 - Different ways of experiencing the world around us

Psychoanalyst Peter Fonagy wrote a lot about this subject, calling it mentalization. No doubt he called it this in recognition of all the mental activity that is going on inside us as we sieve through what our senses and receptors are feeding us.

How each of us experiences the world will depend on how we perceive things. How we imagine things. How we interpret things. How we represent things. Just to be clear: when we say things, we are mostly talking about the actions, emotions and thoughts that come from both ourselves and others.

Fonagy noticed that how we view and experience the world has a lot to do with how we were brought up: how our parents experienced the world and how we experienced their experiencing – if that makes sense!

He argues the point that as well as strong attachments to our parents being really important to our well-being, learning how to use our mental states to process information is also really important for our relationships and our basic survival.

Fonagy discovered that good parenting can lead to children growing up able to adapt to situations quite easily, using all their facilities to regulate their psychological and emotional states. While poor parenting can cause all sorts of psychological disturbances, the child grows up unable to interpret actions, feelings, and thoughts and unable to adapt to stressful situations.

In this sense, what Fonagy is actually saying is that ‘attachment’ and ‘mentalization’ come from the same stable. A parent with good mental function is likely to be good at making bonds with their children. A parent with poor mental function is likely to be poor at making bonds with their children. This is because part of making attachments and connections with people is about the quality of how you experience what is going on.

Hopefully you will now see just how important this subject is: because whether or not you recognise yourself as having had good or bad parenting, secure or insecure attachments, basic or advanced ways of experiencing, you are living in a world full of people who are not on the same page/mental state/planet as you.

Here are a few examples of the vast differences between people in their ways of experiencing the world.

Some people are aware that they are in a certain mental state and that this will change over time. (“I know this mood will pass; it always does.”)
Other people are unaware of such changes, nor aware of having different mental states.

Some people are able to change their mental state in order to reduce discomfort or distress. (“I need to get out of this environment, so I’ll phone a friend and clear my head.”)
Others do not know how this would work.

Some people can update the notions they have of the world based on new information. (“Now I know my father was suffering himself when I was a child, I no longer take what happened so personally.”)
Others cannot or do not.

Fonagy saw different stages of experiencing as part of a human’s natural development cycle – from childhood to adolescence and into adulthood – although not everyone manages to remain within the final stage.

Babies and young children only have one dimension of experiencing. They do not know anything except their own inner world, which to them is the same as the outer world. For them, there is no difference between belief and fact. If a baby feels good, then they are good. If they feel bad, then they are bad. They are passive: things happen to babies without them being in control.