Trauma-born Sensemaking and Living to Die

An interview with Shay Welch

I do not feel alive because I am trapped in a world that is too small for me. I feel so much so much of the time that it feels like my skin is ripping apart. And to look around and feel trapped because there is nowhere to go, because there is nowhere that has space for me, is sometimes incomprehensible. And because there is nowhere to go, it is boring in a way that cannot be described. That kind of boringness, and that kind of boredom, is enraging. It has been noted that people with borderline personality disorder very specifically engage in head banging. I do. I have. I want to a lot of the time. This is why. Existential boredom feels like a slow murder of myself by the world that cages my very being.

			-Shay Welch (2024)

Shay Welch in boots

On a Friday in early November (2024) I flew from Montreal to Atlanta to collaborate on a public art project with Shay Welch, philosopher, aerial dancer, and Scholar in Residence for the City of Atlanta’s public art program. Welch is interested in the possibility of participatory sensemaking between artist and audience in public performance. I am defining participatory sensemaking as a focus on emergent relational dynamics of interactions, such that the dynamics take on a life of their own in continuously determining what matters to each participating individual. In this case, Welch wonders, even if there is physical distance between audience and performer, if there can be a measurable relational process between the body of the spectator and the body of the performer that plays a role in determining what matters to each. She also wonders who engages and doesn’t engage with public art performances — especially people who feel that such art isn’t FOR them. I was interested in those questions too, so I went down for a pop-up performance on the Atlanta Beltline that Welch had curated, to see if we could fine tune ways of measuring engagement and relational dynamics in a public art setting.

By the time I get there Welch has commissioned short performances from a range of street performers, including a mime, a break dancer, a belly dancer, a butoh dancer and more. So in my mind I’m picturing buskers surrounded by delighted families and couples out for a day at the park. We have plans to measure how long people stop as they walk by, analyze their facial expressions, get a sense of what they’re paying attention to most, and interview them about what they took from the performances. Welch has gotten ethics board approval, acquired $50 gift certificates for reimbursing interviewees, and put up signs for the public.

But when I get to Atlanta there are a couple of hitches. First, Welch has been laid low by a flare up of central sensitization syndrome – more about that later. She is in excruciating pain. Second, something that Welch has recently learned – and I’ll learn very fast — is that busking isn’t what it used to be. Now, when people see someone performing in a public place, they assume it’s a private performance for a TikTok video and they avoid it like the plague – both to avoid ruining someone’s video but also so their faces aren’t shown all over someone else’s social media feed. My image of buskers surrounded by a happy circle of onlookers was out of date.

Still, on Saturday morning Welch takes some muscle relaxants, we collect Welch’s longtime partner in crime, an engineer and fellow circus artist, and go out and set up outside a high-end shopping mall in a touristy part of the Beltline where we have permission to do our thing. Welch and her friend argue joyously and affectionately the whole time (philosophers love to argue). We recruit some passers-by with $50 gift certificates to watch the 15 minutes of performance (though almost everyone thinks it’s some kind of con) and be interviewed afterwards. Good thing, because everyone else actively avoids our performance space, scuttling by as fast as they can, covering their horrified faces. A few people stay to watch for a few minutes, well outside of the cameras we’d set up to gauge their responses. Of the people we interviewed, most of them got something out of the performances, but nobody thought their tax dollars should be spent on it.

Some unauthorized art

Overall Welch expressed a lack of optimism about the value of official public art on the beltline. Other challenges being the likelihood of solitary performers being attacked and any physical art installation being vandalized within hours. But by way of contrast, after we pack up we take a tour of some unauthorized (as well as some authorized) graffiti art, to see art that people are spontaneously making on their own behalf. They show me a tunnel that is owned by no-one, where local artists are constantly adding more and more graffiti. Where artists can’t be stopped from making art. They tell me how a charity, wanting to get in on the spontaneous public art action, tried to close the tunnel off for a $150-a-plate fundraising dinner. Within 24 hours the community had gathered and painted over all of the graffiti. The general take-home being that, at least in Atlanta, public art seems to thrive best in opposition to institutionalization.

Some more unauthorized art

In the end, we had to throw out our preconceived ideas about sensemaking and public performance. At least in Atlanta. But we did have fun. And because Welch couldn’t go anywhere, and I didn’t have anywhere to go, for the rest of the weekend we just talked.

Me & Shay and some authorized art

Apart from her focus on art, Welch has written incredibly eloquently about living with borderline personality disorder (BPD), resulting from chronic trauma, and her frustration with psychiatrists who fail to take the voices of those living with mental illness seriously. Her descriptions of what it is like to be incredibly sensitively tuned to others’ signals and intentions was a revelation to me. From a personal perspective, I once was in a relationship with someone who, due to childhood trauma, would have surely received that diagnosis had he gone anywhere near a psychiatrist. It was painful for all concerned. Welch’s writing had given me a lot of insight into what his experience with me must have been like, and what had motivated patterns of interacting that had confounded me at the time. And because she writes explicitly about how participatory sensemaking breaks down for BPDers, I wanted to interview her about that too.

Many of Welch’s papers describe the well-reasoned logic underlying behaviours that are typically considered — by clinicians and the public —to be irrational and, well, crazy. And I’ll say straight up that it’s hard to write a new piece about Welch and her work because she has written so prolifically and eloquently about it herself. Welch writes academic papers that are pure poetry. They’re alive with phenomenological experience and held by an impeccable and crystal clear scaffold of reasoning. So the most efficient way of writing about her thinking is basically to make a collage from her written work and interview material.

Some background on Welch. Her official title is Dr. Welch, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Spelman College in Atlanta, but her personal history is as far from the stereotype for a philosophy professor as you can imagine. She’s written about that extensively too. A recent interview that includes a lot of her backstory can be found here.

Living through and with Extreme Affective Intensity

It feels like I’m living with my finger in a light socket.

In one of the articles she has written describing the experience of BPD, Borderline Personality Disorder: The Trauma Memory and Affective Dysregulation in Participatory Sensemaking, Welch leads with a standard diagnostic definition: “The primary list of BPD symptoms includes an unstable conception of self, unstable interpersonal relationships, a deep fear of abandonment, stress induced paranoid delusions and dissociation, excessive impulsivity, self-harm and suicidal behaviors, and extremely chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom.“

But then she peels down to the raw experience of how trauma gives rise to the impersonal diagnostic description above. “In many cases, it is the extent to which the trauma buries itself in the body that, I think, can make it so extraordinary. During prolonged interpersonal abuse/neglect induced trauma, the feelings of a pounding heart, the pleading of the body to resist in conjunction with its forced compliance, the guilt, the feelings of pre-reflective shame and disgust and dirtiness live with forever in your body memory through experiences of mania, depression, affective instability, dissociation, and potentially worst of all, your immune system, where it wreaks endless havoc.”

Havoc such as the extreme pain of central sensitization syndrome, which in Welch’s case has kept several armies of doctors employed in the attempt to diagnose and treat it. But she describes the most defining feature as the emotional extremes she experiences.

“Most notably, for many BPDers, there is constant rawness that cycles through extreme affective highs and lows. A person can cycle through multiple affective states repeatedly through a day or over the course of a couple of days. The affective dysregulation many BPDers experience makes it nearly impossible to have any sense of control over when, what, towards whom, from whom, why, and how one will be assailed by their emotions.”

Existential Boredom

Paradoxically these extreme emotional cycles give rise to what Welch calls existential boredom. Because of the intensity of affective experience, “BPDers live with a deep sense of emptiness that can make the world itself feel deeply meaningless…. not only are people with BPD who suffer chronic emptiness merely prone to boredom, they experience existence as boring due to their existential feeling of being disconnected to, and disengaged from, the world—we are existentially bored.”

Living to Die

Existential boredom in turn leads to a pattern of behavior Welch calls living to die. “Generally speaking, if one engages in episodic, but repeated, behavior that they know can easily lead to death and are ok with it, and actually like that part, and know that they do it to feel alive enough to overcome existential boredom to stave off actual suicide, then one can be said to be living to die.”

For me, it is my primordial phenomenological affective sense, as if I came out of the womb in chains. It is the feeling I’ve felt all of my life and I’ve fought against it at great peril to myself. Even just thinking about it now makes me feel like my chest is going to start to rip open…. To me, it is my overwhelming need to escape. What I really want to do is sensuously melt away into the universe. I don’t need to go someplace I belong, I just need to go away from here…. But suicide isn’t much of an interesting or sleek way to excuse myself from the universe. And I am nothing, if not sleek. So there’s only one other option for me: live to die.

For Welch, living to die has taken various forms. Back when she was younger it was hard living. More recently riding a motorcycle and risky acts of aerial dance. She explains, “I like to max out with sensory input, but it can't be externally enforced. I have to grab it and bring it to myself. If I go see a concert, which I do regularly, which brings me quite a bit of pleasure. Or before I was injured, I would go to nightclubs and dance and the lights and the sounds and the people and all of those things, it will freak me out and it will start to make me sort of panic a little bit. But as soon as I get where I'm going, whether it's in the mosh pit or in my seat, and the music starts playing and I am engaged with music, then I completely calm down.”

Or riding the motorcycle: “There is a vibration to the motorcycle. And you sync to the vibration, and then you are no longer separate from the motorcycle. And you know that when the motorcycle leans you're leaning. So I never do it because I'm afraid. Or because I'm seeking being afraid, right? It calms me down. A lot. It's like I put my hands on a motorcycle and then it just starts to go. And it'll vibrate and my breathing will sync to it, and then I just kind of sink into the motorcycle. And then because I know how to ride a motorcycle and it's all automated I'm just leaning. Leaning. Leaning. Leaning. That's why corners are really soothing for me; unlike when I'm going in a straight line, like if I'm driving a long distance. If I'm on the highway and I'm going in a straight line my mind goes nuts. But if I'm in a high-stakes, intense, complicated-technique environment I am at one with the machine and I just lean. And if you see me in aerial, I spin a lot.”

Welch in aerial performance

Clinicians

Once source of major frustration for Welch is clinicians who generalize about BPDers based on experience that is primarily with people in extreme crisis. Not to mention the philosophers who repeat those generalizations without talking to people with lived experience. She has written that, “Clinicians need to stop producing analyses of non-normative ways of being in the world solely according to patients that are institutionalized or under heavy monitoring. To paint thousands and thousands of people with diagnosed ‘disorders’ based on extremely small samples of those who have gone over the edge is not only unjust, it just yields inadequate and incorrect research.”

In conversation, she elaborates, “Imagine somebody who only had 15 patients in their clinic who were in crisis — where the patients in crisis are screaming at psychiatrists and trying to cut themselves, and they're like, ‘Nobody loves me. Fuck you!’ You know what I mean?

The problem is when these same clinicians generalize those traits and conditions to everybody who has borderline personality disorder. “‘Oh, this is what it means to be affectively dysregulated. And this is what it means to be impulsive. And this is what it means to have suicidal ideation. And this just all means that they're crying out for attention.’”

It is a problem of clinicians for not getting up and going out into the real world to meet with us. To put forward research that defines us all as deficient, without seeing the good in most of us, is irresponsible. We may be Mad, but we are not those who need to be controlled, at worst, abnormal, for the most part, or pitied, at best. There are times at which some may need to be controlled and there are times when some of us need to be pitied, but for the majority of us, this is not the totality of our lives. Given the way we are described, and given the way that we are regarded as abnormal and non-normative, aka “difficult”, much of our relationships are imbued with excessive gaslighting by either Sane others, which becomes incorporated into the already existing biases of clinicians to further push us into the margins.

For example, says Welch, “There are people who say that people who have borderline personality disorder are just morally bad people who have vicious characters that we allow to perpetuate and worsen, and that the only way that we can be fixed is by exposing us to intense moral training. And one of the things that you'll see that's written in almost any —even in feminist — philosophy of psychiatry pieces is the same thing that you'll hear just about every psychiatrist say, which is people with BPD are the most difficult patients to work with.“

So what clinicians need to do, she writes, is to “Understand the lived experiences of so many of us who have found some, if only a few, ways to cope, to get by… “

Without understanding those of us on the street, they will never truly understand us behind their doors. I wouldn’t imagine it to be far-fetched to say that most who theorize about BPD are likely to pass by more strangers with BPD on a night out, and even have pleasant intellectual conversations with, than they have ever had clinical experience with. Clinicians and theorists need to understand us as we are as a collective in the world first, before they can portend ostensibly thorough research about the handful—if even that—of us they’ve had “interactions” with. For this reason, I think it is imperative for those clinicians and theorists to listen to us, take us seriously, and only then—in partnership—help us develop plans for safe and effective modulation.

Shay Welch, Atlanta 2024

Body Memory and Participatory Sensemaking

According to Welch, people who have experienced consistent trauma report experiences of heightened empathy – awareness of others’ feelings and intentions — alongside alertness to signals of danger and high levels of arousal. Traumatic body memories — those formed by abusive interactions — shape interaction habits in ways that are outside of expected social norms.

As Welch writes, they “complicate one’s ability to be in relation.”

For example, “For many BPDers… their procedural memory produces embodied dispositions to mimic others as a way to navigate interactions and social relationships…”

This can beget “electric sensations of intimacy.”

As a result, “There are no smooth or moderate or ‘normal’ implicit habits for interaction or ways of knowing how to relate with others. This makes most relationships for the BPDer dangerous and/or harmful and/or magical.”

Such “gratuitous” intimacy with others also creates high levels of empathy, which are one of the BPD superpowers. This empathetic sense is particularly tuned to signs of danger.

Welch, in conversation, continues, “So if I'm in a workplace interaction, with a dean or department chair or something, I’m really tuned in to what they're doing because I have to be very on track so that I can start to anticipate what's coming.” When a professor is called into a meeting with a dean or a chair, Welch points out, what’s coming is rarely good.

“It's always being ahead of the game in terms of knowing what people are going to do days in advance of when something happens, and I'll know that something's building up.

Ironically, this superpower for empathy can actually disrupt interaction patterns because while the BPDer can read others exceptionally well — and is particularly alert for signals of threat — their own trauma-informed interactive patterns are hard for others to read. Participatory sensemaking is disrupted because the interaction is imbalanced. “Many of us are communicatively alien to others,” Welch writes. “Our comportments aren’t quite right, our communications don’t carry the suitable gestures or accent or intonations.”

What’s more, with their affective intensity, BPDers can dominate interactions, reducing the others’ autonomy, which is a necessary condition for sensemaking to be participatory. For example, Welch explains, “I'm unable to control the volume of my voice, and so my voice volume goes up and down and can get really loud and then can get really soft and then can bounce. And so I get perceived as aggressive. But I just can't control the tone of my voice, regardless of what we're talking about. It doesn't mean anything. And I dominate the participatory sense making. I end up dominating it because they become so vulnerable to what my voice modulation is doing to them. And they're having nothing but a response to me as opposed to with me. And so meaning is attributed to me, and that meaning is that I am a bad person.”

Welch attributes the heightened superpower for empathy in BPD to a form of what she calls desperate rationality. “When I wrote about in my second book, Existential Eroticism, was a highly sophisticated rationality that abused women operate on. I use examples of sex work and domestic violence. You know what game theory is? I develop a non-ideal version of game theory that accounts for abuse and how women who are having to make rational choices under desperate situations are in a non-ideal game interaction with their abusers. And so what they have to do is trick their abusers into thinking that they're being obedient in order to make long term strategies of survival, right? So, like, instigating being slapped in the face as opposed to being kicked in the kidneys later. Because you have to know your abuser really well and know which sorts of things will set them off. And you can also tell when something is building, so you better cut it off. Get it now before it gets too bad. And that's what a lot of abused women do. The account that I developed is called desperate rationality because people always like to say that abused women are either dupes or victims. And then my point is that these bitches are smarter than anyone you could ever imagine, because they are still alive, right? They are still alive, even if they're in the relationship. And the reason why they're in it is because they know that they'll probably be killed if they try to leave. So they try to make their setup in such a way that it's survivable. By allowing certain kinds of abuses. And not letting things get too big. And making it tolerable to stay because you can't leave.”

Welch writes, “Obviously, not all persons with complex post-traumatic stress disorder and BPD develop and reason from a desperate rationality. But I do think that borderline empathy is an affective skill that motivates desperate rationality. This manifestation of a sophisticated form of affective framing develops from needing to perceive and read the intentions and emotions of others for knowledge needed for choice making in relation to flourishing, or at least survival. They reason from an epistemology of danger.”

But, again, interactions can break down as a result.

These traits are not exactly charming for very long. I believe, and others who have used this form of empathy as a means of survival, that we are able to sum up another person better and faster than another person can assess us. And it is true that many people enjoy being seen. To an extent. When they want it. But being seen, being read, being assessed, being resisted, being flooded all the time eventually drives the Sane to withdraw from the shared practice of worlding with the Mad. I firmly purport that when most BPDer’s empathetic capacities protect them from another’s misuse, that is when they are designated as manipulative.

This difficulty in shared meaning making, which is crucial for flourishing, results in loneliness that feeds suicidality. “We know we don’t belong, we want to belong, and we know that our explosive affective episodes make it hard to be loved. And nothing feels worse than being rejected by someone you want in your life.”

And yet… I point out that have spent the weekend enjoying listening to Welch and her close friend and longtime collaborator happily arguing nonstop, like a pair of old men, with the greatest love and enjoyment. The sensemaking in this bantering duet is patently participatory.

“Yeah. Because she won't admit it but she's crazy too, right? That girl is crazy as can be. She has a certain kind of crazy that allows her to absorb.“

each mind hides a thousand minds, a bee’s hive, whirring wings of thought. that’s where the voices come from. other people can’t hear them, you see, their other voices—they don’t know that they have so many minds, so many multifarious minds inside that single one. they divide themselves up. they eat the world like pie.
 
but they’re the blackbirds, oh yes, trapped in that warm, butter-browned flour—they don’t know it, but they that look so whole on the outside are black, sharp-winged chaos within. they walk as if on solid ground; they walk as if they know the truth, as if there is one, but there isn’t. they make it look so solid, so safe, but they’re all on thin ice. it’ll break at any moment. break, break, cold cradle falling, & there’s black black water within—
 
storm-carriers. that’s it. it’s as if this little leaf, so whole & green, carries the whipped whirlwind within it. is that what the human is? observe it: so neatly stitched up on the outside, as if by patient hands, but inside its mind is deceit within self-deceit. a hall of mirrors. smoke of dust. ashes within bone within ashes—a long corridor of voices, forgotten rooms, & do they remember? no. they don’t hear their own minds. they’re untouched by their own sounds, unmoved, unheard.
 
but I’m not. I hear everything. (near) everything. the shoe-makers in the wind, thin leaves wagging like tongues—I hear it all, tender storm of words, levels climbed, voices whispering. down down down the bough breaks— down. so gentle. small flowers unlocked like safes. jewels of thought within. stolen all stolen, & released into the night—no voices are mine, all voices are mine, inner & inner & out through the wall. climb up the esplanade. see the dead man fall.
-Hive by Pooja Mittal Biswas from the Mad Poetry Project

All of the quotes from Welch’s written work are extracted from the following two papers:

Welch, S. (2024). Borderline Personality Disorder: The Trauma Body Memory and Affective Dysregulation in Participatory Sense-Making, Kenney Institute Journal of Ethics.

Welch, S. (in press) “Living to Die: BPD and Enduring Suicide Attempts”. Oxford Handbook of Phenomenology, Values and Clinical Decision-making in Personalised Mental Health Care.