Time Loop Therapy

It's another post, but I'm processing something and I have the tremendous privilege of having the emotional regulation that, in this case means I often actually need stimulus to bring forth the emotions I just need to feel, otherwise I will remain functional to the point of being able to facilitate a strategic offsite or whatever.

Yesterday, in a circumstance that would ordinary result in a feeling of self loathing, I got right into the game 'Rue Valley' a cheap (literally) derivative of 'Disco Elysium' but not a bad game. Here, on my blog to a Web 1.0 audience, I would recommend it.

It's a point and click adventure game with a Disco Elysium/Y2K comic art style. It's central conceit is a timeloop or a 'Groundhogs day' premise. Like GHD, the time loop anomaly has no explanation and frankly, I don't fucking care about a game developer trying to explain the how and why of a time loop. Again, like GHD the object of the game is to achieve the personal growth threshold the protagonist needs. It culminates in an event, but ultimately it is just a revelation.

Unlike GHD, the loop is not a day, but a 47 minute window. This I think works well in the context of an adventure game, and it certainly isn't the first to be based on a time loop, Minit comes to mind as well as Zelda: Moroccan Mask Fiesta* but being not an omnivorous nor avaricious video game consumer, I'm sure there are at the very least dozens more, plus many games just wind up having save and load states that are functionally time loops, though your avatar becomes just another NPC in the time loop.

Unlike other time-loop based games and media, Rue Valley places your avatar Eugene something in the closing minutes of a therapy session. That's where each loop begins. 

Now, just in case you've never reflected on a time-loop scenario before, even if you've watched Edge Of Tomorrow or Groundhog's Day, you ostensibly have infinite time, immortality, but a very finite domain of possibility. With a whole day and advanced military technology, such as in Edge of Tomorrow the range of possibility is a massive geographic area, Tom Cruise's frontier of possibility was largely determined by helicopter. You are going to get something roughly like a circle but irregular taking into account headwinds and tailwinds, but that range of possibility isn't even - the closer you get to the frontier the less time you have to do anything, so in simple terms, if you have 3 hours in your time loop, then any restaurant you can drive to in an hour, you have 2 hours to enjoy a nice long lunch, if you drive for 2 hours and 55 minutes, you are going to have to go through a McDonald's drive through or something.

Then consider, that Cruise's time loop in Edge of Tomorrow is a solitary experience. The 'novum' of Edge of Tomorrow, that makes it novel compared to Groundhog's Day (though not necessarily better) is that Emily Blunt plays a character that used to be in a timeloop. But Cruise has to invest some time each day convincing Blunt that he is in a timeloop, something she is well positioned to be credulous of, whereas any time Bill Murray needed to convince Andie McDowell he was in a time-loop (and I think we only see that once) it takes a significant investment of time and energy to overcome her incredulity, like Bill Murray has to perform essentially a Deren Brown level mentalist display in a Diner to get Andie's buy-in.

Beyond Emily blunt, there's going to be a degree of tedium built into Cruise's time-loop. You can figure out how to commandeer a chopper to go AWOL to Paris to try and convince a General to give you back an Alien Hive Mind tracking device, but it's going to be fundamentally different to the experience of say owning a car that you take a regular commute in. Instead of pressing a button on a fob to open and fire up your vehicle, you instead need to repeat a conversation ad nauseum that you know is the most efficient way to get in that helicopter and off to Paris, and that conversation is but a string of repetitive tedium you have to go through again and again to get to your experimental threshold where something new might happen. We see Cruise for example, having to march in formation every loop until he can roll under a truck and get to Emily Blunt's training area where he needs to convince her as quickly as possible that he is in a time loop in order to use her rank to get him on a helicopter to the next destination where he is going to tinker with something new.

Okay...

The Drama of The Gifted Child

Is what Rue Valley had me thinking about, because in the 47 minute loop, eventually you get dialogue options at the beginning of each loop to simply stand up and walk out of your Therapy session. This enables you to get straight in your car without checking into your motel and drive to a roadblock so you can walk to a bar that has a trail you can hike to a house you can break into all in 45 minutes so that you can have a 2 minute exchange with a man you need information from. 

You can't afford a minute of pleasantries with your therapist because it diminishes the possibilities of that 47 minute loop.

You also get dialogue options to call people on your phone to discuss big important things and under the conceit of a brief timeloop there is no reputational damage to be done by simply hanging up when you have the information you needed. 

In Australia, we are probably among the better nations in the world in terms of putting more people in reach of affordable mental health care. I'm told in my city, virtually no practitioners bulk bill anymore, so that sucks but it's not like there were salad days where every practitioner bulk billed meaning you could find as a matter of time, a therapist that worked for you.

And even when I was able to charge my sessions to medicare, no rebate or copayment required, this was only under the auspices of a mental health care plan - limited to 10 sessions per year, and the default was 5 with your GP needed to prescribe you an additional 5 with a repeat visit to the doctor's office and reevaluation.

I never had trouble getting my full ten compliment, but the structural limitations begin to emerge. If you don't gel with the first therapist you get a referral to, you don't get a refund on any consultations you've had. So if it takes two sessions to get the first therapist you try up to speed on your family of origin, recurring dreams, significant others and psycho-genic physical maladies, and then when they start attempting goal-directed conversations in your third session and you realize that you don't respect them enough to want to continue with them, you've used up 3 of your potential 10 subsidized sessions for the next 11 months, that's a huge switching cost for most people who can't afford $200+ a week or fortnight to simply retain a therapist.

Earlier this year I read a book called 'The Drama of The Gifted Child' first published in 1979, it somewhat predates I suspect, what "Gifted" came to mean in popular conscious. In the context of this book, gifted really does refer to the cynical definition '2% of the population + my child' teacher's attributed to parents of their students. But Alice Miller is using gifted in a sense that applies to pretty much everyone.

The 'gift' in that book, is basically the child's adaptive response to who their early caregivers are. Their protean brains wire up to make them whoever they need to be to get their basic needs bet by whoever their parents tend to be. The nature of this 'gift' then is quite varied, from a child that learns they need to have meltdowns to get what they need from their parents, to a child that learns they need to be invisible if they want to survive. 

Under adverse childhood experiences, I presume this gift becomes more a hardware issue - if an infant needs to wire up a certain way to survive infancy, then they likely wind up with fucked up endochrine systems that in adulthood will mistake danger for safety and safety for danger, going home with the drug dealing biker in the public bathroom sooner than the nice charity volunteer (who likely has his own issues) because the psychopathic criminal is familiar and the philanthropist is alien and strange.

But even more modal childhood experiences lead to drama inducing gifts, people who are basically alienated from themselves because they were shaped by responding to banal, run of the mill, parental anxieties. For example, the number of people of East Asian ethnicity that have commented that their only four career options they felt themselves to have were Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer or Accountant with the latter two being 'loser' status, but sufficiently respectable.

That's the premise of the book, and its a short read that holds up, I think I had an edition that was revised in the 90s or the early 2000s. What has me reflecting on it after playing Rue Valley, is the books frequent allusions to patients wasting time on a recurring formality, an anxiety, an insecurity.

That behaviour being needing to reassure a therapist that they had 'happy childhoods' with 'loving parents' what I might call from a managerial perspective giving the 'benefit of the doubt' or making 'conciliatory remarks' or some principle of charity, like 'steelmanning' your parents efforts to be parents.

In this context, the therapist is in the time loop, you are their patient, they have an hour, you need to reassure them as an adult speaking to a non-judgemental adult (at least having a non-judgemental conversation) over ten or fifteen minutes, how much you appreciate all the good your mums or your dads or any combination of the above did and how big the slice of the pie chart of your childhood is that didn't cause you issues at all.

As though, we engaging in therapy, are worried that a therapist will call child services and have us put into a group home with troubled youth at the age of 33. 

But of course, its not just time wasted, its perhaps the first major obstacle we face in a therapeutic process - that all the things our parents got right, are completely inconsequential in addressing mental health issues.

Furthermore, I find it totally plausible, that many patients will not disclaim how much they love and appreciate their parents once and be done with it, but qualify every reflection on their complicated relationship with their childhood caregivers over and over.

This is something I do, in part because its true, my parents got a lot right and there's a lot I appreciate, but there's also the element of it being a complete waste of precious resources that rings true as well.

Akin to Pete Hegseth taking the US Press corp. to task for failing to report the news 'patriotically' like the martyred mother he is. To the public interest, everything the US military gets right or does well is un-newsworthy in light of the goalless, illegal war of choice that has fucked up the entire global energy supply at tremendous expense to the US taxpayer both through military expenditure and raised costs of living where they most likely inferred point of the 'excursion' was to stop people from discussing the Epstein files, possibly with the delusional strategic objective of getting everyone in the US talking about how awesome and great the president is.

I think if you got stuck in a time-loop where at the conclusion of each therapy session rewound you back to the beginning of your therapy session, until you had the revelation necessary to begin the process of healing from your child-self's gift of a survival strategy perfectly tailored to your infant caregivers, by the 10th or 14th iteration, you would have come to the conclusion that you shouldn't spend 10 minutes talking about all the sacrifices you know your mother made for you and how difficult her own upbringing was and how good you had it in comparison and how you feel petty and spoiled complaining about your thing, and just go straight to the part where you acknowledge that your mother spent a bit too much time towelling off your penis as a child and what the fuck was that about?

Or just get to the part where you vividly recall your parents buying icecreams but they declined to give you your own one, offering you licks of theirs instead, and laughing at your dramatic refusal of this compromise, what the fuck was that about?

Or moving away from examples in the book that are likely timeless but very 70s, just get straight to the part where every time you looked up at your dad during your tennis lessons you saw him on his phone what the fuck was that about?

Or getting right into how your mum used to take you for a babycino and discuss botox injections with her friends and persisted in asking your opinion on cosmetic procedures she was considering right into your teens what the fuck was that about?

Conclusion

I struggle with this, I understand social norms intellectually, including taboos, even where I disagree with them it is hard for me to model behaviours that I think should be norms.

I for one, have an acute sense of fairness and even though I'd argue that my take in the recent post 'You Could Not Come To My House' reflects somewhat unflatteringly on my parents, I'm confident if I review it, it will contain one of these disclaimers.

What irritates me, with respect to fairness, is that I know people whose parents are basically, total cunts, like objectively shitty people and my own parents shit all over them, I wouldn't be surprised if these adult children of shitty parents haven't consciously wished they had my parents, and would scold me for saying publicly anything remotely critical of my own parents negative contributions to the man that I am and it frankly, fucks me off that these people will be publicly effusive in their praise of their parents, make speeches that mention how 'inspirational' and 'amazing' their parents are completely omitting the part where they told their kid 'your mother and I would have gotten a divorce but for you' and I feel safe saying that, because I know numerous people that have divulged to me their parents said this to them and it fucked them up, and these are the people who would benefit the most from just cutting the shit and admitting to anyone including themselves that you know, maybe their parents didn't try their best? Maybe they gave into their limits as human beings, but still failed to achieve a parenting threshold of excellence? Maybe opted to lie to themselves and ask their children to lie along with them rather than take responsibility?

It's not fair on my parents that the social norm is 'family is sacrosanct' and its the one thing adult children of shitbag parents have over those that were at least stable and solvent and non-physically violent. Emancipated adults generally are free to not 'show some appreciation, being a parent is hard' when they can open with 'my parents put cigarettes out on me as a baby.' 

Edge of Tomorrow, Groundhog Day and likely Rue Valley are all PG-13 rated media. PG-13 is okay I guess because it allows for occassional course language, some violence and perhaps references to drugs and alcohol. The sacrosanctity of parents, family in general, the taboo in speaking ill in public and even confidential therapy sessions where evidently too many of us feel the need to waste time on qualifiers for fear of being judged by a professional, that to me is G 'General' or 'E' Everybody.

I've also been reflecting since a friend reread aloud a memo from a legal department regarding our swearing like sailors for media that was supposed to be G-rated, that G is really a comforting fantasy for parents struggling with a core parental duty to model for their children that it is possible to be happy in an imperfect world. We were young, over 13, but at the time I gave the sensitive public the benefit of the doubt that they simply weren't aware that most kids by the age of 6 or 8 know "shit", "piss", "fuck", "cunt", "cocksucker", "motherfucker", and "tits" and use them in their vocabulary. 

The list of taboo terms I feel expanded around ten years ago to include "gay" "faggot" and "retard" with the distinction that most adults I know would likely be afraid to even use them on the 'mention' side of the use-mention distinction and I guess thats different because Carlin's seven words you can't say on TV adults definitely said off TV for a very long time and either successfully concealed their full vocabulary from their children or forbade them from saying them. But schools network kids up so one set of loose lips sinks the whole G-rated childhood dilemma.

I guess the point is G is a fucking delusion, pointless to the extent that it is disturbing when you meet a kid who is actually scandalised rather than thrilled to hear an adult refer to something as 'bullshit' or a 'piece of shit' and I think the parents that succeed in preserving infant innocence have luckily also succeeded in fucking up their child already.

The key is that friction, that inefficiency that makes it so we are stuck in a time loop, where no matter the behaviour I model, based on the persuasive case 'The Drama of The Gifted Child' makes, a bunch of time is going to be eaten up, day after day, from here to the edge of tomorrow, having to have the conversation where I convince each and every person to dispense with the formality of publicly projecting not-even-perfect-parents-but-above-average parents and ideal childhoods.