hey. i think sometimes there are so many things there all mixed up together that the answer probably isn't going to be 'it is x' or 'it is y' it will probably some mixed up combination of x and y and z... sometimes the feeling of badness... well... Schore is pretty focused on the attachment bond, I guess. He talks about how (m)others regulate the infants emotions. sometimes (because of their %#@&#!) (m)others can react to the infant with fear or anger or something like that, though. and then the (m)other does look other. especially if the infant was in a happy state 'mummy look at me!' and then to see other instead of (m)other... he thinks that is the origin of shame. expectation of mirroring and finding other. it can lead to a sense of feeling bad... don't know if that helps.

i've not gone to therapy a couple of times because various things came up for me. conferences and the like. didn't stop me feeling abandoned ;-) maybe... you miss your t. and if you have been abandoned before then that lonliness can feel pretty horrid, huh.

i meant... i didn't want to go back. forward is okay. back isn't okay. but if one has to go back to move forward... well... i don't like it is all.

of course i actually talked to him today. this morning. feels an age away already. receeding fast... but i talked to him about how i really don't think that anything much happened to me. and he said he understood that i didn't remember... and i reiterated that i don't think it is that i don't remember... i really do think that nothing much happened to me. i was just lonely that was all. and i never did get along with my mother. she was invasive. or i felt invaded at any rate. she was loud and boisterous and i found her to be overbearing and invasive. and so i receeded... into books... and i talked about it for a while. and cried a little. and he said it was good. really important. and we will revisit it. and he seemed really pleased.

so maybe that is what it is about. just kind of talking about it. a lot of the time it wasn't really that anything happened. it was just that i felt really really awful. and i couldn't take that to my mother because she wasn't soothing at all. and so i had to struggle with the feelings myself. and i didn't know how to soothe myself. and so they amplified. and those feelings are what is the hardest, i think. and that they are so hard to verbalise because nobody ever talked me through it and i never talked about it before and it is really hard to put it into words.

memory is hard. cognitive psychological wisdom is that 'every retrieval is a new encoding'. that means that everytime we remember things are added so next time the additions and the memory is all jumbled up. some things are fairly factual. 'dad left when i was 7'. but WHY he left... i don't really think there is a fact about that... and how it affected me. especially if you are dealing in the episodic 'flashbulb' memories... each remembering alters the memory and IMHO facts of the matter are irrelevant because the real issue is the FEELINGS. processing the feelings. getting through the distress.

hope you are feeling okay today. take care of yourself.