Chapter 2 – The Vicious Circle of Damming Up

The natural cycle: every phase carries the seed of the next – winter too, death too. It belongs to our nature. Life only becomes blocked when we try to hold on to one phase.

When the solution becomes the problem

You may know this from your own life. You sleep badly, so you drink more coffee in the morning. With more coffee, you sleep even worse the next night. So you drink even more. Each single step is sensible. And yet the sum of the sensible steps leads ever deeper into the problem they were supposed to solve.

In the first chapter we saw this pattern three times: the straightened river that gets higher dykes, the armoured person whose outbursts are answered with more strictness, and the pent-up money that is lured out with interest while letting debts grow. In this chapter we look at the pattern itself more closely. Because once you have recognised it, you see it everywhere – and you can start to act differently.

Repress, rigidify, destroy

Bernd Senf described this pattern as early as 1981, long before he turned to money. At that time he was working through Wilhelm Reich's discoveries about human character, and he noticed that Reich had found something that reaches far beyond the individual:

"Increasing repression of conflict accordingly leads to increasing rigidification and destruction, which can be discharged outwardly as brutality and inwardly as psychosomatic illness."¹

So, three steps. A conflict is not resolved but repressed – pushed away, papered over, not looked at. The system in which this happens rigidifies – it becomes harder, narrower, less mobile, because it takes strength to keep the conflict down. And at some point the pent-up tension breaks through destructively – outwardly as violence or inwardly as illness.

What is special about Senf's idea is how widely it applies. For him a "living system" is not just a body or a river, but every community: a partnership, a family, a group, an association, a party, a state.² Wherever conflicts are not carried out but pushed away, the same movement begins.

Why it keeps getting worse

When a conflict is pushed away, it does not disappear. It reappears somewhere else, in a different form. And because the new form is not recognised as the old one, it is treated separately again – and pushed away again. Senf described this mechanism precisely in 1984:

"The dynamic of escalation lies in the fact that, to solve the problems arising from destroyed self-regulation, means are used again and again that deepen even further the destruction of self-regulation that has already begun."³

That is the core of the vicious circle. The remedy that helps weakens precisely the ability the system would have needed to help itself. And the weaker this ability becomes, the more the system needs the remedy. This is how dependence arises:

"The destruction of holistic connections destroys the ability of systems to regulate themselves naturally and thus creates dependence on external interventions."⁴

Senf found a bitter image for this:

"The more you cut off people's legs, the higher the sales of crutches."⁵

And the prosperity of a country, he adds, is then measured by how many crutches it produces – not by how many people still walk on their own legs.

Three examples

In the individual. A child who longs for closeness and does not get it learns to switch off the longing. As an adult, they feel an emptiness they don't understand – and fill it with food, alcohol, shopping, screens. Brief relief, then emptiness again, then more of the same. Senf described how early deprivation later becomes addiction and compulsive consumption, and how easy it is to do business with this emptiness.⁶ What is being satisfied here is not the person's need, but the market's need.

In the state. A state whose taxes are not enough to service old debts plus interest takes on new debts to pay the old ones. The problem is shifted, not solved – and it grows. Senf describes economic policy after the Second World War like a story of addiction: first the state gave the economy ever new "shots" of freshly created money, with creeping inflation as a side effect; then came "withdrawal treatment" with high interest rates and austerity programmes that hit the weakest hardest.

"The system had become addicted to shots of money …"⁷

And neither of the two "doctors", Senf writes elsewhere, looked after the actual cause – the leak in the circulation through which the money drains away.⁸

In society. When tensions grow in a society – through crises, unemployment, fear – it looks for culprits. A manager is sacrificed, a government overthrown, a minority declared the enemy. Senf observed this in stock market crises:

"Somebody has to be sacrificed, regardless of whether he is individually responsible for the bursting of the speculative bubble or not."⁹

Chasing away the victim feels like a solution. But it is just another act of repression. And Senf shows something else uncomfortable: by excluding certain people – as "criminal", as "mad", as "foreign" – a society can go on considering itself healthy:

"With the exclusion or destruction of these parts, the rest of society appears healthy and normal."¹⁰

From coercion to self-control

At the beginning of many vicious circles there is open violence. The peasants in England who were driven off the land and forced into the factories. The child who is hit when it cries. But at some point open violence is no longer needed. People have internalised the coercion. They keep themselves in check:

"What was originally external violence becomes structural violence; what was originally external domination becomes self-control."¹¹

Nobody needs to wield the whip any more when everyone is their own taskmaster. And because rigidified people live in rigidified conditions, the two support each other:

"Once set in motion, the rigidification of the social system and the rigidification of the people within that system condition each other."¹²

This is also why domination persists so stubbornly – even where everyone complains about it. Senf writes a sentence that is uncomfortable and that we will look at more closely in chapter 8:

"That is why dismantling structures of domination is so enormously difficult, as long as the exercise of domination is not only a need of the rulers but also a need of the ruled."¹³

Nobody forces us to look at our phones every few minutes. We do it ourselves. I only realised how deep this dependence goes when the devices failed. On a five-day sailing trip, water leaked in during the rain, right above the chart table where my smartphone was lying – it was ruined (I tell that story in chapter 15). And on the same trip the Simrad, the electronic navigation device on board, broke down too. Without both, I thought, we are blind. But Michael, the harbour master, gave us nautical charts, marked a route with anchorages for us and showed me how to measure distances on the chart with dividers. Navigation like in the old days. We sailed around the island of Rügen without a compass, by sight alone, from landmark to landmark, and in the end the little island of Greifswalder Oie helped us take our bearing.

That taught me more about dependence than any book. The ability to find my own way was not lost. It was only buried – under a device that had taken it away from me. That is exactly what Senf means by destroyed self-regulation: the more the crutch does for us, the less we trust our own legs. Sometimes the crutch first has to break for us to notice that we can still walk.

How to get out of the circle

If the vicious circle arises from pressure and counter-pressure, then more pressure does not help – not even the well-meant pressure of outrage. Senf is very clear about this:

"For dismantling structures of domination, it therefore does little good merely to be outraged about them morally or politically."¹³

What then? Senf answers: regain the buried ability of self-regulation – and protect it where it still works. To the extent that this succeeds, the dependencies dissolve by themselves.¹⁴ For the river that means space, for people contact and liveliness, for money an order in which it can flow without having to be lured.

And where do you start? Senf gives a simple answer:

"These rigidifications are to be tracked down at all levels – beginning with oneself, in one's social relationships …"¹⁵

This is not a retreat into private life. It is the insight that a rigidified person cannot build a living society – and that everyone who frees themselves a little from their own rigidity breaks the circle at one point.

How a child learns to block itself

How such a circle begins on a small scale, I see in every family. When a child starts to walk or talk, the parents are delighted. Every step is celebrated, every new word. But when the child then talks a lot, romps around and makes noise, it feels the parents' anger. And it puts a block on itself, so that this energy no longer flows so freely.

On the first day of school it continues. Now it has to sit still and keep quiet. But the energy flows anyway – just in another direction. The child disrupts in a different way, is told off again and puts on an additional block. And so on, year after year. These blockages don't only cost strength because you constantly have to hold something back. At some point they suddenly discharge – as violence, against others or against oneself. That is Senf's vicious circle as it plays out in a single human being.

Tantra takes the opposite path. It does not fight the energy, it lets it flow again. As a bodyworker, I am privileged to experience how such old blockages dissolve through touch and massage. They often sit where you would not expect them: in the fascia of the abdomen, in the yoni – as tantra calls the female sex – and in the anus. These last two places in particular are never touched for healing in a whole lifetime, because ordinary masseurs are not allowed there. So precisely what has been pushed down deepest stays there. Such work only happens with explicit consent, in a clear, protected setting, and every no is respected – because it is meant to dissolve what was once fixed against a person's will, not to wound again.

To be honest: That feelings "settle" in certain regions of the body is experiential knowledge from bodywork, not a measured fact. Research on connective tissue (fascia) and on trauma in the body is young; it shows that stress and body tension are closely linked, but not where exactly anything is stored. Test it on your own body – like everything in this book.

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Exercise: Your vicious-circle map

For this exercise you need a sheet of paper and a quarter of an hour.

1. Pick one problem that keeps coming back in your life – in the body (tension, sleep), in a relationship (a quarrel that always goes the same way), at work or with money.
2. Write in the middle: the symptom.
3. Write next to it: What do I do when it appears? (The "solution".)
4. And below: What happens afterwards? Does it get better – or does it come back in another form?
5. Draw an arrow from there back to the symptom. Do you see a circle?
6. Finally ask yourself: What is actually being pushed away here? Which conflict, which feeling, which need lies beneath the symptom?

You don't have to solve anything. Seeing the circle is already the first step out of it.

Exercise: Letting the breath flow again

The map shows you the circle in your head. This exercise lets you feel it in your body. Take an hour.

The first thing a person does in order not to feel an emotion is: hold their breath (chapter 5). That is why the breath is also the simplest way back. All the great breathing schools use this – pranayama in yoga, Jeru Kabbal's Quantum Light Breath meditation (QLB), Wim Hof's breathing technique. Here is a simple form to get to know it:

1. Lie on your back, knees bent, one hand on your belly.
2. Breathe in deeply through your slightly open mouth, first into the belly, then into the chest. Let the breath flow out again without a pause – don't push, just let go. And breathe in again straight away. Inhaling and exhaling become a circle without stopping.
3. Stay in this circle for at least 30 minutes, ideally up to an hour – before that, you usually don't feel much yet. Your hands and face may tingle; yawning, tears, laughter, trembling or old images may come. Let them come. Nothing has to happen, everything may.
4. If you feel dizzy or your hands cramp, simply breathe normally again until it passes.
5. To finish: breathe normally, stay lying down, feel into yourself for five minutes. Where has it become wider? Where is something still tight?

For your safety: Intense breathing can lead to dizziness and brief loss of consciousness. Never practise in or near water, never while driving, never standing up. If you are pregnant or have epilepsy, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure or a mental illness, talk to your doctor first. Don't practise alone the first time: find an experienced companion or at least a person who stays with you until the end (I explain in chapter 3 why this matters). This applies all the more to the Wim Hof method and advanced pranayama.

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Notes

1. Bernd Senf: "Konfliktverdrängung und Systemerstarrung. Grundlagen einer allgemeinen Theorie der Emanzipation" (Repression of Conflict and the Rigidification of Systems. Foundations of a General Theory of Emancipation), emotion 3, 1981, p. 2.
2. Bernd Senf: "Konfliktverdrängung und Systemerstarrung", 1981, p. 4.
3. Bernd Senf: "Triebunterdrückung, zerstörte Selbstregulierung und Abhängigkeit" (Suppression of Drives, Destroyed Self-Regulation and Dependence), emotion 6, 1984, p. 1.
4. Bernd Senf: "Triebunterdrückung, zerstörte Selbstregulierung und Abhängigkeit", 1984, p. 6.
5. Bernd Senf: "Triebunterdrückung, zerstörte Selbstregulierung und Abhängigkeit", 1984, p. 14.
6. Bernd Senf: "Triebunterdrückung, zerstörte Selbstregulierung und Abhängigkeit", 1984, pp. 13–15.
7. Bernd Senf: "Zinssystem und Staatsbankrott" (The Interest System and State Bankruptcy), Ästhetik & Kommunikation 93, 1996 (online at berndsenf.de).
8. Bernd Senf: Der Nebel um das Geld (The Fog around Money), ch. 7 "Die Problematik des Zinssystems" (PDF berndsenf.de pp. 4–5).
9. Bernd Senf: Der Tanz um den Gewinn (The Dance around Profit), Kiel 2004, ch. D, book p. 197 (PDF p. 48).
10. Bernd Senf: "Konfliktverdrängung und Systemerstarrung", 1981, p. 25.
11. Bernd Senf: "Konfliktverdrängung und Systemerstarrung", 1981, p. 24.
12. Bernd Senf: "Konfliktverdrängung und Systemerstarrung", 1981, p. 22.
13. Bernd Senf: "Triebunterdrückung, zerstörte Selbstregulierung und Abhängigkeit", 1984, p. 11.
14. Bernd Senf: "Triebunterdrückung, zerstörte Selbstregulierung und Abhängigkeit", 1984, p. 11.
15. Bernd Senf: "Konfliktverdrängung und Systemerstarrung", 1981, p. 39.