Got To Be Real

Some Scattered Thoughts on AI, Realness & Internal Family Systems Thinking

“Foucault gave us the maxim that each age gets the form of madness it deserves and that every form of madness is a parody of the reigning form of reason. Pathology reveals normality. In the same way, each format or technology of communication implies its own disorders. Madness shines a bright light on hidden assumptions about communication.” - Broadcasting and schizophrenia

It’s 2023 and I’ve been somewhat obsessively listening to podcasts about AI technology. There’s something about the topic that I find deeply unsettling and also genuinely fascinating. I have very young children and I try to imagine what the world is going to be like when they are teenagers, say, in 2037, and I feel like learning about popular uses of Artificial Intelligence is giving me a useful window of imagination into their future.

I’m a therapist who works with people that struggle with extreme states of consciousness, and I’m also someone who has struggled with serious mental illness myself. One of the symptoms I’ve had to wrestle with since I was a teenager is a sense that I’m not a real person, that I’m just faking who I am, as if I’m a character in someone else’s story. I’m come to understand that there are a lot of people who have some version of this dynamic in their lives, it’s often called “impostor syndrome.”

I think humans, because of our evolutionary mimicking nature, have struggled with different versions of this for a long time. At least some of us have. We have individual identities but we are also naturally pack animals and we are designed to act like the people around us for survival. But for those of us raised and babysat by modern mass media culture, the question of what is “real” takes on deepening layers of dimensions. I can only imagine that AI technology is going to make it even more confusing to try and understand what is “real,” because it’s already confusing enough back here.

What is Real?

When I was a teenager I hung out with anarchists and punk rockers and one of my favorite things to read and carry around in my backpack was a manifesto written in 1967, translated from the French, called “Society of the Spectacle.” It was a Marxist critique of contemporary consumer culture and it began with the lines:

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

Much of the text, translated from French and full of obscure leftist jargon, was pretty impenetrable to my 16 year old self, but I felt like it helped me understand the world around me, it was like putting on a pair of Xray-Spex and seeing underneath the layers of fake reality to the Core of Existence. At the heart of Society of the Spectacle was this idea that authentic social interaction has been replaced by a representation of social interaction: the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing. In other words, everyone was just posing at living rather than actually living. As a teenager, I was always looking for what was real, and trying to be as real as I could be. Around my friends, the worst thing you could be was a poser. Which was very hard when you are constantly trying to figure out who the hell you are surrounded by other people trying to do the same thing.

(Image by Eric Drooker at drooker.com)

Internal Contradictions

It is beyond the scope of this brief article to explain all the ways that I came to feel like I wasn’t a real person, but I understand that it probably began when I was a little kid who went back and forth between two parents with very different ideas of how to raise me, and who didn’t have the emotional capacity to communicate their authentic feelings about each other except sideways through me. In order to survive I had to act like different people at different houses, and I learned how to be manipulative to get my emotional and material needs met, as all kids do. Another way of saying this is that I learned how to lie about myself, and after awhile, I wasn’t sure what was true and what was just a story I created.

As a teenager hanging out in the punk scene and the creative social movements on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, there was a lot of posturing about being “real.” The harder your life story, the more “real” you were. I was living with my mom on the Upper West Side, at the time a middle class neighborhood, and most of my friends were kids who had run away from home and were living in the taken over abandoned building around Tompkins Square Park. I was constantly navigating the middle class internal pressure I had to perform academically with the part of me that just wanted to be free and travel, and to be “real” the way I saw my friends. Like many teenagers I created a persona to help me survive and be accepted into a group.

In some ways my first psychiatric hospitalization at 18 reflected this tension: unable to hold the contradictions in my life after my first year of college, I ended up believing I was just a character from a TV show and my presence was harkening the end of the world. I put my life back together with the help of a lot of antipsychotic drugs, but the underlying, unresolved issues remained inside of me and came back out a number of times

How to Unlock the Multilayered Prison

I have a number of clients in my therapy practice who talk about feeling like they are faking their way through life, or that they have parts of themselves that are dishonest, or that they feel like they are hiding some deep, dark secret that if revealed, everyone would hate them, they would be ostracized. And this is not just my clients, this seems to be a somewhat common aspect of the human condition. Something deep inside our consciousness fears being thrown out of the pack and left to die alone. We often torment ourselves with these stories about how terrible we are: some parts of us torment other parts of us. The real torture usually isn’t happening out in the world, it’s happening inside our heads.

The way I’ve come to understand and work with this set of phenomenon is through a modality called Internal Family Systems. The basic idea of IFS, is that we all have multiple parts that have relationships with each other, and that everyone has a core Self that is curious, compassionate, creative and courageous. It’s a very practical way of practicing therapy because it starts from the premise that fundamentally, we are all good, and if we can find bits of that goodness, it’s possible to explore the other parts, which are also fundamentally good, but might be working at odds with each other.

The key piece I find so liberating with IFS work is that there’s an understanding that we can heal ourselves, that there’s nothing fundamentally broken about us. There are exiled parts that are the ones that hold most of the psychic pain, and protector parts that are trying to keep our internal systems from melting down, usually by hiding the exiled parts. But often times the protector parts have different strategies that end up in polarizations, which can weak havoc in what’s happening inside of us. Our inner worlds inevitably reflect what’s going on in our outer worlds, or what was going on when we were young.

With my clients I’ve come to recognize how useful it is to be able to make space for their different parts to be seen and heard. In order to do this, we first have to understand the nature of the system: that we are multiple and that we have a Self. Then it takes some time and patience and lots of curiosity and compassion to unravel the internal relationships. If there are inconsistencies, or lies, in our stories, that’s inevitably a sign of multiple parts not talking to each other. There’s always good reasons for all of it. Allowing the different parts themselves to see they are part of a larger system, and that they are not alone, is a critical part of the puzzle.

If I hadn’t had such extreme experiences in my life, I think this model might seem pretty crazy, but it fits very well with my lived experience of life. In the case case of my own internal system, I was raised by people who were in intense conflict with each other, so I developed intense conflict within myself. My parts were at war with each other, but it was an internal war. The key to unlocking and releasing the inner conflict is all about finding enough Self energy to witness all the different parts and allow them to express themselves and be seen. It’s like having to mediate people that hate and mistrust each other, but inside of ourselves.

Dishonesty

To get curious about dishonesty can be a very productive avenue for exploration in therapy, because it’s always interesting what we’re not honest about. In order to do it we have to have enough self-compassion to realize that the parts not being honest are just parts, and they always have reasons for hiding the memories, or creating new stories, or wanting to die, or hurting other people, or any number of things we do as the wounded pack animals that we are.

When I was in my early 20s it was too hard to face the pain of my childhood and I created a whole new part of myself, a persona of a freight train riding, squatter punk from Lower East Side of NYC. My outer exterior was a lot tougher than I actually was on the inside. I did such a good job of creating a new persona that when I went home to New York City after years of being gone I was shocked to discover that I was actually just a soft, middle class kid who was bullied in school, who was still heartbroken about his dad dying when he was 13, and was filled with self loathing. I felt like the ultimate fake.

It wasn’t until months later, after having everything fall apart: being suicidal, being in the psych ward, living in a halfway house, getting put on multiple psych meds that quieted the noise in my head, that I remembered the different parts of who I was, and that I had compassion for my different parts. And as it turned out, my freight train riding part wasn’t so fake after all, I was just complicated, and that was okay. It was like coming back to myself. Or it was like my different parts coming back to each other and being able to hang out. And the way they communicated with each other was through writing, and then sharing writing with other people.

Artificial Friends

Okay, the thing about playing around with Chat GPT and watching what’s happening in the world of AI is that I can’t help but thinking about what my life was like when I was a child. I grew up in the early 1980s watching many hours of television a day and back then there were fewer channels and it was slower, but all of that media colonized my consciousness in such a deep way. My imaginary friends were TV show characters: Mr. T from the A-Team, Gary Coleman from Different Strokes. I watched all of those John Hughes movies and let them tug at my pre-adolesecent needful emotions. I mainlined pop culture, it worked its way inside of me until I became part of it, until it felt like it became a part of me.

There’s this amazing article called Broadcasting and Schizophrenia that’s about the way radio technology informed the nature of mental illness and how the blurring of lines between the real and the imaginary affects us as humans in our pack animal ways. What I remember about being a kid was that I was SO FUCKING LONELY. I had a hard time relating to and playing with other kids. I didn’t like playing team sports but I sure loved playing Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and Space Invaders. I was so disconnected from my body. I was really unhappy.

(these were some of the characters in my head when I was growing up. They were part of my internal family.)

So I KNOW how vulnerable young minds can be, we suck up whatever is in front of us. If we don’t have people around us that can show us how to do things with our bodies we will end up attached to screens, that’s just the reality of life these days. I’m not putting a value judgement on it, that’s just the way it is. From the time I was 16 I always related to the androids in Blade Runner because I felt like I had other people’s memories implanted into my mind. I still think it’s an incredible metaphor for the way popular culture ends up in our consciousness.

From the way things are headed it seems pretty clear that we’re going to be building relationships with robots, there are going to be kids my children’s age who have robot companions, the same way I got stuck in front of the TV set in the 1980s and it seemed totally normal. I’m sure a bunch of those kids are going to be fine, they’re going to turn out adjusted to the world around them.

But some of those kids are going to turn out like me and have full on psychotic breaks where they lose touch with any sense of consensus reality and I don’t think it’s going to be because of their biological “mental illness.” I think it’s going to be because the world is fucking crazy and some people are more sensitive than others. These things are just on my mind and I’m trying to make sense of it like everybody else.

In Conclusion

Until I started thinking of myself as having multiple parts, I was pretty convinced I was a really fucked up person: a liar, an identity thief, someone with a “serious mental illness.” When I realized that I have all these different parts inside of me that not only have different perspectives, but have different sets of memories, it made me realize how confused I’ve been my whole life about the nature of reality.

The person who’s sitting here writing these words right now, trying to let you into my mind, juggling these different memories and thoughts and understanding of the world, this is a part of me I call The Scribe. He’s got a perspective that the individual parts do not. As I’m writing these words I feel full of Self energy and I have some kind of an agenda: I want you to understand what it’s like to live through my eyes and I want you to be able to relate to it. I have lonely parts that want companionship.

The way I’ve come to see it is that you, the reader, are part of my external system. You are part of the audience that is allowing me to unburden some of these old stories and feelings, you are my part’s witness. If you are connecting to my words through this electronic medium then there is some kind of mysterious healing taking place between us. Some kind of alchemy that allows old pain to transmute into lessons for the future. And it is definitely real.