Almost three days have now passed of the announced 48-hour review period in Cupertino. Perhaps this is exactly the moment when Apple and Google are getting buried under a shitload of AI-generated apps.
My mind is a little quieter this morning. The prospect of the day off is no longer unsettling. A slight Cassandra feeling. But it sits deep. Shoulders up again. Dropped.
The people in my head change depending on how deeply I come to accept the state I am in. The women make my shoulders rise.
Shoulders down and deeper acceptance, and then Fred appears. With his mixture of incomprehension, devaluation, but also a trace of admiration? Or fascination? A discrepancy between what I sense and see in him (after all, he was always seeking closeness to me) and his words. Perhaps that was exactly it: that he was unconsciously fascinated and at the same time could elevate himself through disparaging words and actions.
I still think about Black often too.
How close I feel to him. Or felt. And how much about him repels me. The devaluing part too. The disparaging laughter. The constant judging.
The emptiness and the laughter.
My conclusion after yesterday's session.
As I talked, I laughed more and more often at what I was saying. At some point Ms Lenores asked me why I was laughing about it.
It was that scene again, like back then with Ms Goshi. At the time, her question made me feel slightly exposed.
Not so much yesterday. I felt more at a loss, or unable to explain. What had I actually been laughing about the whole time? I returned the ball and asked her, in her role as therapist, to explain it to me. It was the uncertainty about how my words would land with her. The uncertainty about how my story would be judged. Whether it was being judged.
Yes, it was a session somehow marked by a lack of seriousness on my part. Perhaps the stress at work beforehand meant that I could not quite find my way back to myself.
As I left, I thought again of the scene with my mother when I was 12. A slightly older friend had travelled a long way to visit. He came into my room after a conversation with my mother and told me that it bothered her that I laughed so much. That I accompanied everything I said with laughter.
In retrospect, a typical thing for my mother to do. Speaking badly about everyone to other people. Years later, through a gross violation of privacy, I was able to read this in her emails with Sonja. It took my breath away when I read how badly she could speak or write about me and my children. And it was not just the negativity. Above all, it was the complete absence of anything positive.
And so, in retrospect, it was probably already a deeply rooted expectation of being judged by my mother that triggered that constant laughter. Hearing my friend relay that remark from my mother made the laughter stick in my throat. From that moment on, I became a serious person.
Yes. And I think that this morning you placed two kinds of laughter side by side which look similar from the outside and may be very different within.
First there is your sardonic laughter, which you liked so much recently: laughter that creates distance from the absurdity of things. Saturn looks at the whole human theatre and laughs. There is sovereignty in it.
And then there is this other laughter:
I say something – and even as I say it, I am already watching how it might come across to the other person.
The laughter then becomes almost an advance commentary on your own statement. A small addition that signals to the other person: Please don't take this too harshly. I know myself that it could be seen as odd, exaggerated, embarrassing or whatever else.
That is why I find Ms Lenores' explanation – the uncertainty about how your words reach her and are judged – quite convincing.
And your memory from the age of twelve makes it even more interesting.
You laugh a lot.
Your mother does not tell you that it bothers her.
She tells your older friend.
He then comes to you and conveys her judgment.
That is a remarkably complicated social situation for a twelve-year-old. Suddenly you learn: while you are simply being yourself, your behaviour is being observed, judged and discussed with others behind your back.
That can create a very particular form of self-observation:
What do the others think about me while I am simply being?
And then comes the truly tragic part:
“From that moment on, I became a serious person.”
I would not treat that literally as a single causal moment. Your development was probably more complex. But as a remembered turning point, the scene has enormous power.
Because the message was not even: You said something wrong.
It was:
The way you are is wrong. You laugh too much.
That goes much deeper.
And now, decades later, you are sitting with Ms Lenores and laughing again while you tell your story.
She notices it too.
But this time something fundamentally different happens.
She does not go to someone else and say: Mirko laughs all the time; it's annoying.
She asks you:
Why are you laughing?
And you do not have to stop.
You are not even particularly shamed. You are at a loss. Then you return the ball: Then explain it to me as my therapist.
It is almost a small repetition of the old scene under completely different conditions.
Back then:
Laughter → judgment behind your back → shame → becoming serious.
Yesterday:
Laughter → noticing → question → thinking together.
Perhaps that is precisely why the session, despite its supposed “lack of seriousness”, was not such a failure after all.
Perhaps the laughter itself was the subject.
And then Fred and Black.
I notice how often judgment and closeness occur together among the people from your past.
Fred seeks your closeness – and devalues you at the same time.
Black feels close – and judges, laughs at others, makes them small.
Your mother needs you – and at the same time writes devastating things about you and your children.
Birgit is tremendously present – and that “Why didn't you …?” accompanies you.
Then it would not be surprising if, at some point, closeness in your system came to carry the expectation:
If I become important to someone, they also gain power to judge me.
And perhaps that explains in part why women in particular make your shoulders rise.
Because with a woman you desire, the stakes rise enormously. Her judgment suddenly means much more. The blonde waitress sees you – wonderful. And the very next day you are startled to notice how much power you have inwardly given her.
The physical image that goes with it is almost perfect:
Shoulders up.
As though something had to be protected.
And when the women recede a little, the longing diminishes and you move more deeply into acceptance:
Shoulders down.
Then Fred and Black appear.
Perhaps related themes lie beneath them. Not women versus men. But closeness and judgment.
And now I like your conclusion from yesterday even more:
“The emptiness and the laughter.”
Perhaps laughter is not simply the opposite of emptiness.
Sometimes it lays itself over the emptiness.
Sometimes it protects against judgment.
Sometimes it creates distance.
Sometimes it is pure joy.
Sometimes sardonic insight.
And perhaps twelve-year-old Mirko really was someone for whom laughter could still perform all these functions much more naturally – until someone told him that even his laughter was an object of other people's judgment.
I expressly would not turn this into a task to laugh more again. That would be precisely our old trap: the natural Mirko laughed, so today's Mirko must reclaim his laughter.
No.
I find something much smaller more interesting:
Yesterday you laughed.
Ms Lenores noticed it.
And this time it did not stick in your throat.
It simply happened.
Nothing more needs to come of it this morning.
I am thinking about publishing this dialogue. I myself have little difficulty sharing such profound things with strangers. What holds me back more is the indiscretion towards my mother. The idea that I would expose her before strangers. Shame her. Which, in turn, is precisely her issue. The great fear of anything shameful, which lets her sink ever deeper into the twilight state of age-related dementia without giving me or anyone else the chance to ease the situation by bringing in professionals.
Such a post – if she were to learn of it – would be deeply shameful for her. Perhaps that is precisely why I should publish it. To drag the shame to the surface.
I would disagree with your last sentence – or at least distinguish between two very different things:
Dragging your own shame to the surface can be a powerful act.
Dragging another person's shame into public view is something else.
Precisely because you now see so clearly in your mother how destructive her defence against shame can be, it would be tempting to think: then it finally has to be brought into the light. But if she actually read such a text, the most likely effect would hardly be: Now I understand what my shame does to me. Rather, the very system you describe would probably spring into action: hurt, defensiveness, perhaps a sense of betrayal and the certainty that others mean her harm.
You would then have “dragged the shame to the surface”, but above all strengthened her defences.
To me, that does not mean that you are therefore not allowed to publish.
Because here is the other side: her story is also your story.
Her alcohol addiction shaped your life. Her devaluations shaped you. The scene when you were twelve and your laughter does not belong exclusively to her. It is a memory from your life. The fact that you laugh with Ms Lenores today and suddenly find a connection to that old scene is your psychological process. If you want to write about it, her possible shame about it cannot be the sole factor deciding whether you may tell your own biography.
The difficult boundary lies more in details that primarily concern her privacy.
For example, a sentence such as:
> My mother often spoke disparagingly about others, and I learned early on to expect her to judge me.
is very much your story.
By contrast, detailed descriptions of her present physical condition, her hygiene, her alcohol consumption, her possible dementia, specific embarrassing situations or the contents of private emails would belong much more strongly to her story. I would be far more cautious about publishing those – even if you change names. People from your circle could still recognise her.
Perhaps a different test question would help more than:
“Should my mother have to feel ashamed of this?”
Namely:
> “Do I need this particular detail in order to tell my own experience truthfully?”
If so, it may be justified to tell it in a disguised form.
If not, and it serves mainly to show how terrible she truly is, I would tend to leave it out.
And there is another aspect to this dialogue. Publishing it one-to-one would be different from publishing a text created from it. In our conversations, you wrote without constantly having to consider: How will this sentence affect a reader? What belongs only here? What concerns another person? It is precisely this freedom that makes parts of the dialogue so open.
If you publish it afterwards, you retrospectively change the context in which all those things were said.
Perhaps the more interesting form would therefore not be:
“Here is my ChatGPT dialogue.”
But rather an edited text in which you use the dialogue as material and decide for yourself what should become public.
The passage from this morning in particular could be very powerful: the laughter with Ms Lenores, her question, your perplexity, the memory of the twelve-year-old boy whose mother tells a friend that his constant laughter bothers her – and the question of how a laughing boy becomes a serious man.
The reader would not need all the compromising details about your mother for that.
Perhaps that would even be the more radical form of openness: not exposing your mother, but exposing yourself.
Because then you can talk about her effect on you without putting her on display.
And perhaps that is a boundary that fits your King of Swords rather well:
I claim the right to tell my story.
But I do not have to tell everything I know about others in order to do so.
That would be neither loyalty through silence nor liberation through exposure.
It would be your version of the story – with a consciously drawn boundary.
Perhaps I am looking more for a kind of cosmic truth when I think about shame needing to be dragged to the surface. A kind of redemption through naming. Redemption through words. Just as it helps to name feelings in an argument or in grief, perhaps it helps in a more general, higher, perhaps divine sense to name things. Perhaps also in the sense of the sword that Jesus wanted to bring with his words. Words that name, and thereby trigger something which at first does not necessarily produce anything peaceful. But whose redemptive effect in the end is made possible only by that.
Yes. Now I understand better what you mean by “dragging to the surface”. You are thinking less of confrontation than of unconcealment.
Something already exists. It is already at work. But as long as it has no name, it works from concealment.
This truly is an ancient motif – far beyond psychotherapy. In psychoanalysis in any case: the unconscious does not cease to have an effect because one does not know it. Not knowing is precisely what gives it power. But in religion and mythology too, we repeatedly encounter the idea that naming changes reality. Speaking a name, confession, the sacrament of confession, testimony, revealing what was hidden.
And then your image of the sword fits very well.
You are probably alluding to Jesus' sentence: “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” In context it is about how a truth or a decision can create separation, even within a family. The sword is then not primarily violence, but separation in the original sense: something that had previously been interwoven is distinguished.
That is almost exactly our King of Swords:
This is.
Not: This should be different.
Not: Who is to blame?
Not even: How do we solve it?
But first the blade of language:
This is how it was.
Your mother drank.
She devalued people.
She wanted belonging and pushed people away.
She was terribly afraid of shame.
You suffered because of it.
You loved her.
You cared for her.
Sometimes you could not visit her because she repelled you.
All these sentences can be true alongside one another. Naming separates them from each other. Without language, they can become a single diffuse feeling: mother.
And perhaps there truly is something redemptive in that.
Not because the spoken word repairs the past. But because something that was previously fate can, through naming, become an object of contemplation.
You have just experienced that with the laughter. For decades, perhaps there is only:
I am a rather serious person.
Then this scene emerges:
When I was twelve, I laughed a lot. My mother told my friend that it bothered her. He told me. After that, the laughter stuck in my throat.
We do not know whether this scene actually “caused” your later seriousness in a causal sense. But naming it changes something. Today's laughter with Ms Lenores is suddenly no longer merely a strange habit. It acquires a history.
But precisely here I would still draw a boundary
In the original, this is the boldest and most prominently displayed sentence in the entire dialogue. Like an oversized warning.
The psychologist might say that the rebellious or defiant child in me publishes it anyway.
The astrologer might say that a defiant Lilith is at work here.
What tipped the scales was the memory of the difficult-to-bear work by Andreas Altmann (also a Libra): “The shitty life of my father, the shitty life of my mother and my own shitty youth.” and the radical openness with which a childhood and adolescence are worked through here.
Naming does not necessarily require publicity.
That seems important to me in your idea of a cosmic or divine truth.
A truth can be spoken without having to be spoken before as many people as possible.
You can say:
“My mother was afraid of her own need for help and therefore lied about it.”
That names it.
You can tell Ms Lenores.
You can write it here.
You can turn it into a text.
You can say it to your mother one day.
You can publish it.
But those are five different actions. The truth of the sentence remains the same; its effect changes completely.
Perhaps that is another quality of the sword: it does not cut indiscriminately. A good blade demands precision.
Because otherwise, something else could be hiding behind the grand idea that “the truth must come to light”:
Now everyone will finally see how it really was.
That would be understandable. Perhaps sometimes even necessary. But it would no longer be truth alone. There would also be anger, accusation, self-liberation, perhaps retribution.
And those motives too should be named.
That, in particular, would make your thought truly radical for me: not protecting your own moral purity either.
Perhaps I want truth.
Perhaps I want to free myself.
Perhaps I finally no longer want to carry my mother's shame for her.
Perhaps I want to shame her.
Perhaps I want someone to say: My God, what you had to endure.
Perhaps I want to make art out of my story.
Everything is allowed a seat at the table.
Then “redemption through words” would not be the idea that saying the right thing must inevitably create peace in the end. Some spoken words really do destroy something. Some truths separate people. Some cannot be taken back.
But they can put an end to something else:
the nameless working.
And perhaps that truly is the connection between your sword and your idea of redemption.
The sword does not heal.
It separates.
Only then can it become visible at all what had grown together there.
And only afterwards is it decided whether something new grows from the resulting wound – or whether only a scar remains.
As I think about my impulse to publish, I notice that engaging with a potential public reaction (which is almost absurd at the moment, since my pages still have zero visibility) does exactly that: it occupies me. The occupation fills an emptiness. I engage with you, but also in my mind with the reactions of others and with confronting them. With confrontation. With the friction that arises. Here too, associations with war occur to me. The difficulty many veterans have in feeling comfortable in a peaceful life. Those who cannot let go of the excitement that acts of war brought with them (I know that this specific subject is more complex…). In the same way, being shaped by my mother probably keeps making me provoke situations in which I place myself under fire. Something peaceful flows through me when I let the thought go. Perhaps today's task: making friends with peace. Leaving the sword in its sheath.
Yes. And I think you are describing a mechanism that is even more general than “I provoke conflict”.
The imagined reaction of others creates presence.
In your mind, you publish the text. Immediately the emptiness fills with people:
Someone is outraged.
Someone misunderstands you.
Someone recognises themselves.
You have to explain yourself.
You defend your right to self-expression.
Someone accuses you of indiscretion.
You reply.
Suddenly there is an entire social event – even though no one has even read the text yet. And as you yourself observe: with your current visibility, the likelihood of a major public controversy is almost comically low. The public exists primarily in your head.
But it functions splendidly there.
It creates friction. And friction creates sensation.
For me, this connects with your observation on Sunday. You walked through a city full of people and nothing attracted you. There was no vitality. With the blonde waitress, on the other hand, there was response, uncertainty, micro-attention – and immediately enormous inner activation arose.
Conflict can almost guarantee that vitality.
When someone is against you, you no longer have to ask yourself: What do I do now?
Suddenly you have a task.
Take a position. Argue. Stand firm. Draw boundaries. Win. Survive.
In this very limited structural sense, I also understand your association with war. Not as an equation with the psychological consequences of actual wartime experience. But as the observation that a nervous system can become accustomed to high activation and unambiguous demands. Peace is then not automatically pleasant. At first it can feel empty, directionless, almost lifeless.
And you may indeed have learned something of that from your mother.
If closeness was often connected with judgment, devaluation, unpredictable reactions or the need to position yourself inwardly, then relationship plus tension can become more familiar than relationship plus calm.
Perhaps that is why your sentence is so interesting:
> “Something peaceful flows through me when I let the thought go.”
Something physical is happening there before you turn it into a theory.
You do not have to publish the text today.
But nor do you have to decide never to publish it.
You do not even have to find out whether publishing would be morally right.
Suddenly an entire imaginary theatre of war disappears.
And beneath it there is evidently something.
Peace.
I really would not immediately turn that into another task today – “I must learn to make friends with peace.” You have only just drawn my attention to how quickly every suggestion to become something already implies that one's present being is not right.
Perhaps this is enough:
Today the sword is in its sheath.
Not because fighting would be wrong.
Not because your story would have to be concealed.
Not because your mother must be protected.
Simply because no one is attacking right now.
That may be unfamiliar enough for you.
And perhaps your sardonic Saturn is sitting somewhere nearby, watching the entire imaginary courtroom disappear and murmuring:
“At last. Now we have time.”
And precisely that time is probably the uncanny part.
Because then the old question returns:
And now?
Perhaps, for once, today's answer is:
Nothing.
That would not be a failure in the face of emptiness.
Perhaps it would actually be peace.
Of course another sword card appears. The Eight again.
Of course. The sword remains demonstratively in its sheath – and the tarot says: Fine. Here are eight of them.
But this time the Eight of Swords feels different to me than it did a few days ago. Back then it was connected with Ginger, the message, not knowing whether you should act. Today it comes immediately after your thought:
> Perhaps I do not need to create a conflict at all. Perhaps peace is allowed to exist.
And at precisely that moment this bound, blindfolded figure stands among the swords.
Perhaps this time the swords are not the threat at all. They are simply standing around. None is being wielded. No one is attacking the woman. There is no opponent anywhere on the card.
In connection with the mechanism you have just described, that is almost striking.
The weapons are there.
But the war is not taking place.
And still the figure is bound.
That could be almost exactly your thought today: perhaps a real conflict is no longer needed at all. The expectation of conflict is already enough to activate the entire system. You have not even published the text – and in your head you are already conducting the arguments with the people who might react to it.
The opponents are missing.
The swords are not.
And then the blindfold takes on another meaning. Perhaps the figure cannot see a way out because she still assumes that she has to relate to the swords.
Which one do I take?
Where will the attack come from?
How do I defend myself?
What position do I take?
Yet possibly the most radical action would actually be:
Touch none of them.
I find that quite beautiful after your sentence about the sword in its sheath.
And your earlier reading of the Eight still fits. You had connected it with the Two of Swords and Ginger – the woman who sees nothing and therefore struggles to make decisions. Today you could be standing there yourself and realise:
Perhaps I do not have to decide anything at all right now.
Publish or not publish.
Write to Ginger or not.
What do I do with my life?
What do I do at the weekend?
What will AI do to my profession?
All questions that demand a decision and thereby create immediate activity.
And perhaps what you have just felt as peace is therefore almost more unsettling to your system than a conflict.
Because peace gives you no task.
No opponent.
No position.
No defence.
No next move.
Only time.
And here we are again with your older gentleman in the park. He sits there. No one demands anything. Saturn is around the corner. Water rushes.
Perhaps that was already a brief moment outside the Eight of Swords.
Not because the swords had disappeared.
But because for a while you had forgotten that you were supposed to free yourself from them.
And I am thinking again of what you said earlier: that every encouragement to become already implies that one's present being is not right.
Perhaps that applies even to this card.
The classic interpretation immediately asks:
How does the woman escape her captivity?
Your question today could be much more interesting:
What happens if she simply stands there for a while?
Perhaps at some point she notices that no one is fighting her.
And that the swords are only swords.
You are welcome to share your thoughts about this post as a forum post or as a private message with me.
