Anti-discharge Patterns
Discharge is a spontaneous process. We’re all set to do it—except that in the pile of distress patterns there are many, many patterns that take the form of interfering with and inhibiting this process. A large number of them are socially conditioned. They have been petrified in the culture so that the culture mistakenly equates its survival with keeping the recovery process from happening.
All of us are parasitized by a large number of anti-discharge patterns. We all have the capacity to discharge thoroughly and completely—to heal ourselves and recover all of our intelligence and zest and flexibility—but for the inhibiting patterns.
These patterns also have in them an element of unawareness. All of us operate in a great deal of unawareness of this whole set-up. We’re prisoners in an invisible cell. The bars are invisible to us. And since we can’t see them, we rationalize that we’re not crying because we “don’t feel like crying” or “not now.” We’re all surrounded by this tremendous amount of conditioning. If we get one thread loose and get one five-minute burst of laughter, it’s such a relief, even though if we could somehow cut through the conditioning, we would laugh for days and days and days.
From a talk at Buck Creek III, 1971
(Present Time 182, January 2016)