She Thinks I Work for MI6

A minor domestic crisis, the intelligence hidden inside anger, and why denying you are a spy only makes matters worse

At eleven o’clock in the morning, my phone rang.

For Rachel who was the one calling me, it was six in the morning. She had just arrived at work.

She lives in America. I live in Suffolk. She works long hours, reads voraciously, and has lately taken a keen interest in conscious awareness: watching thoughts as they form, noticing emotional reactions before acting upon them, and asking whether the story running through the mind is necessarily true.

This does not mean she has become placid.

Far from it.

On this particular morning, Rachel was incensed.

There are three women sharing her house. Rachel and one of the others work and are seldom home for long. The third woman spends most of her time in the house.

The previous evening, this third resident had posted a message in their shared WhatsApp group.

She wanted the others to stop taking telephone calls in the communal kitchen.

She also wanted them to walk on tiptoe along the hallway.

She was sensitive to noise, she explained. Even slight sounds caused her anxiety.

Rachel has considerable decorum. Even when furious, she remains recognisably civilised. Nevertheless, her verdict on the request was concise.

“Absolute bollocks.”

Then she stopped.

“Am I being irrational?”

This was quite a turn-up.

Something I had been saying about conscious awareness had evidently penetrated the defences.

I told her that her anger was understandable. But if she replied while still in its grip, she would create resistance and discord. The argument would cease to be about noise and become a struggle over territory, respect and power.

She needed to calm down before answering.

More importantly, we required intelligence.

“Look,” I said, “we need to conduct a psyop. We shall devise tactics worthy of the CIA.”

This was not entirely serious.

It did, however, produce the desired shift.

Rachel stopped being merely the injured party and became an observer of the situation. Anger began giving way to curiosity. Instead of preparing a counterattack, she could examine the system.

This is one of the central ideas in what I call Dokology.

You do not suppress the emotion. You step half a pace away from it.

You ask:

What is the signal here? What is noise? What do I know? What am I merely assuming? What response is most likely to produce the result I want?

The first working theory was straightforward.

Perhaps the third woman had become increasingly sensitive to her immediate environment. Because she was home almost constantly, her attention had tightened around every sound in the house. Ordinary footsteps, doors and telephone conversations had become intrusive events.

This does happen.

Attention is not passive. Whatever we repeatedly monitor becomes more prominent. A small sound that would once have passed unnoticed begins to arrive with a psychological red circle drawn around it.

The nervous system learns: This matters. Detect it immediately.

The more the person listens for the sound, the more readily it is found. The more readily it is found, the more threatening or intolerable it appears.

But it would be unwise to explain any of that to the woman herself.

Nobody enjoys being informed that a domestic complaint is actually an expression of their internal psychology. Even when the interpretation contains some truth, it is likely to be heard as:

You are unstable. This is all in your head.

A more intelligent strategy would acknowledge the distress, make some reasonable accommodation, and establish a boundary.

No unnecessarily loud conversations late at night. No slamming doors. Perhaps an agreement about quiet hours.

But walking on tiptoe through one’s own home?

No.

Compassion for the sensitivity; boundaries around the control.

I wrote up my preliminary assessment and sent it to Rachel.

Some time later, headquarters received a correction from the field.

Rachel had read my report.

It was elegant, apparently.

It was also missing crucial intelligence.

All the telephone calls took place during normal daytime hours. The third woman spent her nights drinking and slept during the day.

Rachel had already said that she would understand the complaint if people were taking calls at night or at six in the morning.

But these were ordinary conversations taking place well into the day, in a shared kitchen, during the brief periods when the working residents were actually home.

There was more.

When the woman first moved in, everyday noise had not presented a problem. The demands had begun later, after a previous housemate moved out. Rachel believed the woman had identified her as someone likely to accommodate requests, then gradually started modifying the household to suit herself.

Rachel and the other resident had refused to adopt the prescribed tiptoe.

The revised intelligence changed the model.

This is important.

Conscious awareness is not a ceremony in which we produce a clever interpretation and then defend it against contrary evidence. It is the willingness to notice that our first explanation was incomplete.

New facts arrive.

The model changes.

Perhaps the woman’s sensitivity was real. But she was also asking the entire household to reproduce night-time sleeping conditions during daylight hours because of a schedule she had chosen for herself.

The cost of regulating her discomfort was being transferred to everybody else.

That is where consideration becomes control.

Anger Is Not Always the Enemy

There is a fashionable misunderstanding of awareness which turns it into a form of compulsory mildness.

You observe your anger. You breathe. You recognise that everybody has their wounds. You become compassionate.

Then you permit the other person to walk over you.

That is not awareness. It is submission wearing linen trousers.

Anger contains information.

It may be distorted. It may exaggerate. It may drag old injuries into a new situation. But it can also indicate that a boundary is being crossed.

The task is not to annihilate the anger. It is to extract its intelligence without allowing it to dictate operations.

Rachel’s anger was telling her:

Someone is attempting to make me responsible for conditions they must partly manage themselves.

That signal was valid.

Her immediate impulse — to answer in kind — would probably have been strategically useless.

One can be aware of another person’s distress without agreeing with their interpretation of events. One can be considerate without surrendering ordinary rights. One can refuse an unreasonable demand without turning the person making it into a monster.

The clean response would concern observable behaviour alone.

Calls are being taken during normal daytime hours. The kitchen and hallway are communal areas. Excessive noise will be avoided. Normal conversation, cooking and walking will continue.

No diagnosis.

No lecture about drinking.

No demand that the woman get out of the house more often.

No midnight dossier detailing her character defects.

The strongest boundary is often the least theatrical one.

Why People Think I Work for MI6

There was an additional complication.

Rachel suspects that I may work for British intelligence.

She does not exactly believe this.

But neither has she entirely discarded the possibility.

My recommendation of “tactics worthy of the CIA” did nothing to improve matters.

Curiously, Rachel is not alone.

Over the past five years, perhaps ten people have independently entertained the idea that I am somehow connected to MI6 — or something even stranger.

A neighbour moved in last year. She is in her seventies, lively and convivial, and kindly invited me to eat with her.

By the end of our conversation, I was apparently either an alien or MI6.

It was all friendly. There was laughter. Yet underneath the amusement was a small but genuine movement of speculation.

Perhaps he is.

Naturally, denying it makes everything worse.

“That is exactly what someone from MI6 would say.”

The allegation is self-sealing. Every denial becomes supporting evidence. Remaining silent looks sinister. Laughing suggests professional composure. Changing the subject is evasive. Answering in detail indicates that one has rehearsed a cover story.

There is no route out.

But the recurrence interests me.

Why do people reach for this particular explanation?

I suspect it arises when somebody cannot easily place you within a familiar social category.

Most of us carry an unconscious filing system. We meet a person and begin classifying them.

Occupation. Class. Politics. Motives. Habits. Status. Tribe.

This is not necessarily malicious. It is cognitive economy. Once classified, the person becomes more predictable.

But occasionally someone does not fit the available folders.

A former national newspaper journalist living quietly in Suffolk. An author writing about occultism, consciousness, technology, folklore and psychological operations. A man who visits ancient burial mounds, studies systems of influence, asks unusual questions and responds to domestic disagreements as though receiving intelligence from an overseas station.

The ordinary categories begin to fail.

When the available explanation feels insufficient, the imagination supplies a hidden one.

MI6.

Alien.

Occultist.

Possibly all three operating under a joint agreement.

The unknown attracts narrative.

This is the same meaning-making machinery at work in the shared house.

One woman hears footsteps and does not experience mere footsteps. The sounds become evidence of disturbance, disregard or threat.

Rachel receives an analysis from a man in Suffolk who talks about field intelligence and psychological strategy. It becomes evidence that he may have worked for MI6.

My neighbour encounters somebody she cannot quite categorise. An extraordinary explanation begins to shimmer behind the ordinary one.

The mind dislikes an explanatory vacuum.

It inserts a story.

The Internal Intelligence Service

This is where the spy metaphor becomes useful.

We are all running an internal intelligence service.

Incoming sensations are collected.

Motives are inferred.

Threats are assessed.

Stories are constructed from incomplete information.

Much of this activity happens before the conscious mind knows anything about it. By the time we become aware of the conclusion, it often feels like an observed fact.

She is disrespecting me.

They are deliberately making noise.

He knows things he should not know.

He is probably MI6.

Dokology begins when we notice the difference between intelligence and interpretation.

What actually happened?

What have I added?

What alternative explanations remain possible?

What response serves my purpose?

Rachel’s first emotional assessment was that the request was outrageous.

On fuller examination, it largely was.

But the pause still mattered.

It prevented justified anger from producing an ineffective response.

Conscious awareness did not make Rachel more compliant. It made her more precise.

She could distinguish between another woman’s genuine discomfort and that woman’s attempted solution. She could acknowledge the former while declining the latter.

This is the practical work.

Not floating above life in a state of serene detachment.

Not pretending anger has vanished.

Not walking on tiptoe so that somebody else never has to encounter discomfort.

It is the ability to remain present while the internal alarms are sounding—to gather information, revise the model, and choose one’s next move deliberately.

Rachel will deal with the household situation.

I shall continue advising her from Suffolk.

And if anyone asks, I have never worked for MI6.

Which, unfortunately, proves nothing.

Field Report: Later That Day

I sent the account to Rachel as a plain Markdown file over Signal. Nothing in the house had changed. The difficult message still existed. The other resident remained exactly who she was. Yet Rachel felt light again.

The problem had been moved out of her body and placed where she could see it.

Sometimes awareness begins when experience acquires a shape.

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