I haven’t experienced what you have, Ididitmyway, but I resonated somewhat with your situation, especially as you described in your second post.

I had lots of ineffective to harmful therapy, as you know, and so I did a lot of research on my own and found that Kohut’s ideas on the self, and the ways that its development can get derailed so to speak, explained a lot of my trouble to me.

He postulated that children need adults to function good-enough in 3 ways to support the development of a healthy self. His theory, to me, goes beyond just attachment to other ways in which caregivers or extended family members provide, if the child is lucky, what he or she needs, eventually, internally in order to have a healthy (adult) self. The 3 poles of the self (as you probably know, but for anybody else that might be interested) are grandiosity, idealization, and twinship or alter ego. Part of where my development fell down, I think, or got derailed was that I never felt enough “like” or accepted by anybody in my extended family environment to feel OK being myself in the world and developing my own ideas about a “calling”.

I don’t know that I have multiple passions like you but I was a girl science geek in a culture and time period where women were supposed to be homemakers – or nurses or teachers. There were some in America who weren’t, of course – but not in my family. I went off to pursue math and science in college and work in that field – but I didn’t fit in anywhere socially. When I was social I tried to follow the social rules as I had learned them as a child. I therefore “fit in”, of a sort, but never as myself. I was therefore “fake”, but not consciously so. Consciously I was honestly being the best person that I could.

Eventually all that fell apart and therapists have not helped me much with that at all. But in the last year I have been trying to consciously focus on the feeling of being “like” other people now that I am having more to do with them, and it feels like I’m growing a self that can not only idealize others and feel grandiose about myself but also begin to feel like a real part of groups of people beyond myself. It’s very hard to describe. I did feel a part of my family growing up, but it’s probably because all the women were enmeshed. I’ve now separated from them so this is extremely different. I’m “too old” to have a calling now, but it’s more like just being myself, within the group, is a calling. And I’m loving it, or beginning to.

It’s something I think more therapists should be aware of. Especially for clients, like me, who had problems with identity.