Quote:
Originally Posted by here today
I've been thinking about this a lot.
Things were/are a little different for me. My vindictive, attacking responses were kind of dissociated, in their own separate "part". Along with knowledge of what triggered them, which included a feeling/awareness of "hurt" inside me. AND, importantly I think, awareness of negativity in how people treated me sometimes. It was like I was just cognitively oblivious, blind.
Do you feel any "hurt" at or around the same time as you attack your T?
"Hurt" can also lead to hate, I expect. Does that ring true for you?
I reexperienced the "developmental trauma" of feeling/being rejected by my last T and definitely hated her. Still do sometimes. That feeling also connected up several months later to feelings I had had as a child, but dissociated. I can now experience both hate and love toward the female relatives and "role models" whom I felt rejected by, or the memory of them, who were around when I was a child.
But I haven't internalized anything else yet. May never? I'm old so maybe that makes a difference, too.
The theory of self psychology suggests to me that what I may need now is some "alter egos", people somewhat like me, who are easy for me to empathize with because we are similar and vice versa. Or something like that.
I'm definitely not a perfect person, and in fact somewhat of an oddball temperamentally. So it's been kind of hard.
Still, it would be nice if my kind of "personality disorder" could be overcome in some way. I'm still working on it.
Are you looking for anything in addition to the ability to experience a fuller range of feelings? Any changes in social relationships, etc.?
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I'm wondering what you mean by saying that your attacking responses were dissociated. For me, my rage (and also other stuff) is/was dissociated as well - in my non-therapy life I barely ever got angry to anyone, mild frustration was the most I experienced. The things I've experienced in therapy are/were definitely coming from a part unknown to me before starting therapy. For a long time I could see that things happened to me in therapy and I could remember and recount them afterwards but I couldn't connect to them emotionally. I mostly still can't but while previously I absolutely couldn't reflect on anything while in those (I would say borderline'ish) states, now I've discovered that I can at least a little bit, which is a new thing to me. It seems to me that when you talk about dissociated experiences you mean something different?
It actually took another therapist (whom I saw because of a temporarily moving) to realise that my self is fragmented and consists of parts - not in a DID kind of way, but still parts that don't have much connection between each other. While seeing him I had several dreams and I made few spontaneous drawings that according to him expressed very vividly the inner fragmentation. I think my T (whom I had seen 2 years before this move) thought that I'm much healthier than I really was - just because I was fully functional on the outside. I came back and over time I was able to convince my T with the understanding I've obtained about myself with the help of the temporary T.
It seems the attacks to my T have always been related to some hurt but the hurts of such a huge magnitude that it's even impossible to understand at that moment what they are about. It's the hurt of feeling completely invisible and non-existent (and you can't say it because you're not existing), of feeling locked into a too small place where you don't really fit in and don't have enough room, the feeling of being completely alone in the world and no one seeing it. Then the anger has been about the T not seeing/sensing it (while I'm not displaying any sign of any distress, but the distress increases and increases and finally it gets out of control). The anger and rage has also been related to him instilling hope into me as if pleasure from closeness and intimacy with other people would be possible for me and my own judgement at that moment that there is an invisible but unbreakable glass wall between me and this pleasure and my belief that he doesn't see it. Things like that.
Maybe for me things are different - I don't remember the feeling of loving my parents. In fact, I don't remember the feeling of loving anyone when I was child. Didn't even know that love exists. I discovered the childish love towards a parent in therapy and I also discovered parental-like love in therapy. These discoveries were very important to me to understand what is or should happen between me and my kids. These experiences gave me the framework that I had completely missing. Although I instinctively made many things right with my kids, I did not understand the child-parent relationship conceptually. I was certain that by the age of 3 my kids don't want to have anything to do with me (as I remembered from my own childhood and I thought it was normal).
I have discovered that I have two concepts of "mother" in my head - one is stemming from my childhood and related to my own mother and the feelings related to this concept are ones of irritation, disgust, boredom and such. Previously, when someone talked about something about mother (whether his/her own or in general), this concept was activated and I couldn't understand how people want to do anything with their mothers. Now I also have another concept of mother, which has emerged based on the maternal-parental love I have experienced with my T and which I can also relate to when I think about how my kids relate to me. This concept does not activate automatically though, I have to consciously choose to activate it but I have it and I think this is a very concrete internalisation artefact related to my T.
Do I have any concrete goals other than experiencing fuller range of feelings? Not really. As I said I'm extremely introverted and although I have some people in my social circle, I meet with those people perhaps once per 2-3 month and I don't really have any close friends besides by H. Being with people drains my energy, I guess because I present some kind of facade I believe they want to see - I have absolutely no idea how to honestly present a fragmented self socially. I also do not worry about not having particular goals. I believe that the goals come when I'm ready for them and it's pointless to have goals for which I'm not ready anyway.