The Chair Incident: Embodied Anxiety and the Phenomenological Reorganisation of Lived Reality

Appendix X

The Chair Incident: Embodied Anxiety and the Phenomenological Reorganisation of Lived Reality

This appendix documents a lived phenomenological episode which unfolded during the development of this research. While apparently mundane in content, centring around a disagreement regarding ownership of a vintage chair belonging to a deceased friend, the incident became an unexpectedly revealing example of recursive affective escalation, embodied anxiety, symbolic attachment, and technologically mediated self-regulation. The appendix is included not as anecdotal autobiography but as phenomenological evidence of the kinds of embodied and psychic processes discussed throughout this thesis.

The event emerged during a period already saturated with grief, instability, and emotional overload. The author had spent approximately five years helping care for a close friend, Trudy, during periods of illness, ageing, and increasing vulnerability. During this time, the author became deeply embedded within the rhythms of Trudy’s domestic environment, particularly during the COVID period, where long durations were spent helping within the house, preparing meals, supporting animals, maintaining practical care, and sharing daily routines and conversations. Following Trudy’s death, certain domestic objects became emotionally charged through repeated embodied association.

Very soon after Trudy’s death, while the family were beginning preparations for house clearance and an antiques dealer was due to visit the property, the author specifically asked Trudy’s daughter, Lucy, whether she could keep two objects: a large Le Creuset casserole dish and a particular 1960s chair situated within the house. Later, over the extended period spent living within and helping manage the property after Trudy’s death, a set of repaired floral plates also became emotionally significant. The attachment to these plates emerged not through monetary or aesthetic value alone but through repeated relational encounters. Meals had frequently been prepared and placed upon them, followed by conversations about the visible repairs to the chipped ceramic surfaces. The author became increasingly attached to the signs of repair themselves. The visible mending of the damaged objects appeared to symbolically resonate with themes of care, continuity, fragility, and persistence.

At the time, however, these objects were not physically removed from the property. Lucy had specifically requested that objects remain in place until the legal and practical processes surrounding the house sale had settled. Consequently, the chair remained physically present within the property despite already being psychologically claimed by the author.

A close friend of the author, John, who had also known Trudy and had spent time within the property, later expressed interest in the same objects. He specifically mentioned liking the chair, sitting in it while smoking, and wanting to keep it. The author responded directly at the time, stating that the chair had already been promised to her. Nevertheless, during a later period when John moved out of the property and collected his belongings, he also removed the chair without explicitly asking again for permission.

When the author later discovered the chair missing and telephoned John, he explained that he had taken it and installed it within his own home. During this conversation the author experienced what retrospectively appeared to be an affective freezing response. Although internally distressed, she found herself unable to clearly articulate objection or enforce ownership. Instead, she responded ambiguously, stating that they would “have to think about it.” This ambiguity would later become psychologically central to the recursive escalation that followed.

The author repeatedly described experiencing profound discomfort with confrontation, particularly in situations involving emotionally important relationships. This difficulty appears closely related to patterns associated with neurodivergence, ADHD, rejection sensitivity, and people-pleasing behaviours. Rather than producing direct conflict, the situation initiated prolonged recursive cognitive looping. The author became increasingly trapped between competing emotional imperatives:

• the desire to preserve the friendship,
• guilt surrounding confrontation,
• resentment at perceived emotional trespass,
• feelings of being emotionally overpowered or unable to assert boundaries,
• grief associated with Trudy,
• shame regarding personal passivity,
• and a simultaneous inability either to relinquish the chair emotionally or decisively reclaim it.

The chair gradually ceased functioning merely as furniture. It became an affective and symbolic node around which multiple emotional systems organised themselves simultaneously. The object came to contain grief, attachment, memory, conflict avoidance, self-worth, shame, and unresolved mourning. The author repeatedly oscillated between contradictory internal positions:
“I must ask for it back,”
“I should let him keep it,”
“I’m being unreasonable,”
“He should never have taken it,”
“I don’t want to lose the friendship,”
“I’ll resent this forever if I say nothing.”

The recursive nature of this internal conflict was intensified by the fact that both parties appeared, over time, to avoid directly resolving the emotional ambiguity surrounding the chair. Retrospectively, the author felt that both she and John may have unconsciously hoped that, if left unaddressed, the discomfort would gradually dissolve into the background of ordinary life. However, while the unresolved tension appeared temporarily dormant, it had not emotionally disappeared.

During this period John informed the author that he had personally restored and reupholstered the chair and that it had become established within his family home. This revelation intensified the author’s distress. The chair no longer appeared temporarily displaced but psychologically absorbed into another domestic environment. The author experienced increasing feelings of passivity, emotional displacement, and inability to reclaim an object already associated with unresolved grief and symbolic attachment.

Several months later, the author’s lodger, Philip, moved out of the property where the author was developing a new studio space. During the process of reorganising the studio and sorting through old boxes and stored belongings, the author unexpectedly encountered numerous emotionally charged materials, including letters from her deceased mother and photographs of Trudy. This process initiated an acute resurgence of grief. Psychoanalytically, this moment became significant as an unexpected reactivation of mourning through material encounter. The “lost object” returned not abstractly but through domestic traces, archival fragments, letters, photographs, and symbolic objects embedded within lived memory.

The author described becoming unexpectedly overwhelmed by grief during this process. It was at this point that the emotional significance of the chair re-emerged with renewed force. What had previously appeared tolerable suddenly became emotionally unbearable. The author found herself becoming intensely distressed at the thought that one of the few objects she had specifically asked to keep from Trudy’s home was permanently absent from her own life.

The recursive nature of this process became increasingly visible through repeated drafting, revision, and analysis of potential text messages sent to John. These drafts themselves became phenomenological artefacts demonstrating attempts at emotional regulation through language. The author repeatedly attempted to minimise her own emotional needs, soften requests, apologise pre-emptively, protect John’s dignity, reinterpret events in ways that reduced interpersonal threat, and repeatedly contemplated abandoning the request entirely in order to preserve the friendship.

At several points during the process, the author attempted psychologically to relinquish the chair entirely, not because attachment had diminished, but because the emotional burden of unresolved interpersonal ambiguity became almost intolerable. The author explicitly described fantasies of permanently suppressing personal resentment in order to avoid confrontation:
“Maybe I should just let him keep it and sit with the resentment forever.”

At the same time, the inability to fully relinquish the object emotionally produced increasing bodily and psychological destabilisation. The conflict itself became technologically mediated through recursive textual drafting and AI dialogue. Because direct interpersonal communication repeatedly failed due to fragmented phone calls, work interruptions, emotional avoidance, and inability to sustain clear discussion, the author increasingly processed the situation through recursive written communication and technologically mediated reflection. In this sense, the AI dialogue itself became part of the affective holding environment through which emotional regulation, symbolic externalisation, recursive self-analysis, and phenomenological clarification occurred.

Simultaneously, bodily anxiety escalated:

• dread,
• stomach constriction,
• anticipatory panic,
• emotional flooding,
• catastrophic projection,
• recursive future modelling,
• autonomic tension,
• and inability to focus elsewhere.

This period became phenomenologically significant because it revealed the extent to which emotional ambiguity reorganised lived reality itself. The author later described the sensation as a form of dimensional destabilisation in which emotional uncertainty generated proliferating imagined futures and recursive cognitive branches. Reality no longer felt singular, stable, or bounded. The world narrowed around the unresolved symbolic object while simultaneously expanding into uncontrollable possibility structures.

The eventual resolution emerged not through formal argument but through a brief conciliatory text message from John stating:
“No problem… come round, have a coffee, and grab the chair. Don’t stress.”

The phenomenological impact of this message was immediate and profound. The author described a sudden embodied transformation:

• muscular release,
• nervous system decompression,
• emotional relief,
• restoration of cognitive clarity,
• reduction of catastrophic projection,
• and a renewed sense of inhabitable social reality.

Importantly, the emotional intensity of this relief itself became theoretically significant. The experience revealed that the preceding distress had not been abstract cognition alone but a fully embodied reorganisation of affective world-relation. Social reassurance produced immediate bodily transformation. The world itself appeared to expand again following relational resolution.

This incident subsequently became conceptually important within the development of the author’s theory of technologically mediated phenomenological narrowing and flattening. The event demonstrated how diffuse embodied emotional overload may become recursively organised around symbolic objects, and how affective states may subsequently be externalised, stabilised, and negotiated through symbolic surfaces. The incident further strengthened the author’s understanding of AI phototherapy not merely as image production, but as a technologically mediated process of affective containment, symbolic compression, and recursive embodied regulation.

Within this framework, AI-generated images are not understood simply as aesthetic outputs or representations. Rather, they function as temporary stabilising surfaces through which diffuse affective complexity may become narrowed, flattened, externalised, and rendered phenomenologically negotiable. The chair incident therefore serves as a lived phenomenological example of the same recursive affective mechanisms underpinning the broader methodology of Phantom Mirror and AI phototherapy.