New Development: Completely Unexpected

Speaking from my own experience, your feelings from the early stages of life will be reflected in your kneejerk, instinctive reaction to things. If one of the issues you suffered from is neglect, well, that is very difficult to deal with because there may be no events / memories to refer to. The effects of neglect are like having a ghost torment your soul because you act or feel a certain way because of an absence of parental attention / interaction / affection. There are feelings of emptiness. I have found existential therapy to be somewhat helpful. And, while emptiness is one of the feelings of neglect, I did not find Buddhist therapy of much help even though emptiness is one of its core beliefs. We have similar backgrounds; feel free to PM me if you have questions. All the best to you!

I think "burning daylight" says it all! I want to finish this marathon before the lights go out!

Well, me, I think you're lucky. You feel angry and sad. All I've been able to do thus far is get rid of the regrets. I need to feel angry and sad. I'm sure I DO, way in there, feel angry and sad. But I have no connection with them at all. You see, I was the "perfect kid." The kid who never broke the rules my parents made. Who made them proud. I came up with a serious and solid false self that was total. The only crack in the facade was anxiety.

I feel absolutely the same way. And it IS melodramatic! Those feelings have to be so overwhelming and terrible, judging solely by their aftereffects, that they are a bomb or bombs. I'm with you. You tell me your progress or problems, I'll tell you mine! Take care.

My mother's eyesight was fine. She just spent half her time away in a far distant part of her head. She did this all her long life. For very substantial spells. I remember being with her for hundreds of hours during my adult life and putting up with her physical presence/mental absence. She never exhibited any anxiety or depression. She just had a strange relationship to life. Particularly life with others. She dealt quite easily with any form of human contact that did NOT involve intimacy. She ran away from intimacy, ran away to someplace in her head where no one could follow her.

So I'd bet that babies really need reactive, reassuring, communicative faces to look at and attach to, whether mothers have vision problems or other more mental problems. Thanks! Take care!

Thanks, Terry! But it didn't happen in the past because I thought or felt I couldn't handle it. Not at all. My T's felt they couldn't even discuss such a thing with me, and they never did. So I never had the choice. I'll be happy now doing what T thinks is appropriate, but me, personally, I'd prefer the direct route and will so say to her. Again, thanks!

I don't know about you or your T, but thoughts of suicide and being disliked seem to me to be just the kinds of thing that therapy exists for. As well as depression. A lot of this may have to do with your T's personality and professional views and convictions, rather than the specifics of your situation.

But in a sense, your T's views are irrelevant. It's YOUR views and priorities that count. If you feel a sense of urgency, I think your T should do whatever he can to accomodate that feeling. I certainly DON'T feel that you should be overrelying on what you think (!) are T's views. YOU'RE setting the agenda in every way, shape or form.

I don't think that anybody is SUPPOSED TO accomplish anything in therapy. Supposed by whom? T? Society? Psychologists in general? No. Uh-uh. Accomplishments in therapy are things YOU want to do and choose to do. T's contribution is what they call in Washington "ways and means." You OWN your therapy. No-one else. And if your therapy is successful (I think) you will NOT NEED further support from therapy. Touch-up jobs now and then, I'd suppose, when something you thought was a dead issue stirs to life again. But not just forever. That's MY view. Thanks, and take care!

ygrec thought i'd posted to u again..maybe in another forum. idk. your T will pace you as you can safely go. i feel my T is my buffer to guide me. it is still painful but yet 'no pain, no gain'. i choose like you to continue nevertheless. we are similar in age. but i have to be honest, sometimes it is very difficult for me to 'feel' without becoming overwhelmed. that's why having a T is better, imo. BTW your years of therapy-like mine-have not always been fruitful. sounds like you've found a good one. i recently became aware of stuff i have never touched before 20 yrs later in therapy. but i'm working on this as we speak. sometimes i have to step back..not long tho..so i can reenergize.

Thanks, unhappyguy. You're completely right about kneejerk reactions. They're a dead give-away. But I've known and been aware of them for quite some time. What they don't seem to help me do (this may or may not be other people's case) is feel my way back into the original feelings that gave rise to the kneejerk reactions. I don't know whether that's because those feelings are pre-verbal, pre-memory or what.

As for neglect, I think that's all I suffered from. I wasn't battered or deprived of food. I didn't have to witness any physical violence between my parents or anyone else. No. The problem was my mother's instinctive flight from intimacy with anyone, something over which she didn't have any control. In fact, though she did it all her long life, I very much doubt she had any idea she was doing it.

I don't feel emptiness. And I very much wonder whether the immediate reaction to neglect is as nebulous and evanescent as you describe it to be. To a pre-verbal, pre-toddler, diaper-laden infant, neglect is as threatening, if not more threatening, than physical violence. So we're talking about reaching back to somehow touch and feel those immediate baby feelings.

And thanks for the invite! I certainly will PM you. Take care!

hmmm . . . I don't know if it's possible to remember pre-verbal thoughts and feelings. Perhaps you could look through some old baby photos of yourself for clues? Focus on the expressions on your face.

It's interesting that first borns, in our cases at least, fared better than some or all younger siblings. My experience includes much more than maternal neglect - There was verbal and emotional abuse too. Perhaps the worst part of the neglect is that I never had toys or learned how to play, making friendship with others difficult. I could go on but will not bore you . . .

One therapist once said I was the most well adjusted abused child he had ever met since I did not abuse drugs or alcohol and was not a sex addict. He also said he could not help me.

I suggest you proceed slowly when investigating your original feelings. While the self-knowledge that will bring may open your eyes further, the really important part is how you will use it in your present adult life. Considering what happened to your siblings, you are indeed a survivor, something to be very grateful for. You managed to find love and stay married for over 40 years! Considering your background, that is a huge achievement! All the best to you.

Well, I just wrote something that might sound like the opposite on your other thread, but now that I read what you wrote here, I think you're right. I don't know. I agree that it's good if your t goes at a pace you want, if you really understand what you want I guess. Before, I wanted results but I wasn't comfortable enough to be open to talk about the stuff I needed to talk about with t. I did a little better today. I'm disappointed it has been taking this long, and there's a long way to go, and life is going by. But I'm trying to appreciate life as-is more, and appreciate what therapy can do, even though it's slow, because getting frustrated with its pace just makes things worse. Actually, now that I did that, I think I made a little progress today and I'm hopeful I can move along again. I was worrying that you were doing what I was doing- setting yourself up to get frustrated by wanting to go at a fast pace- but maybe you are actually in a really good place to make progress, or maybe you've learned how to do it better than I have.

Dear learning1,

No mistake now: I want to go as fast as is consistent with steady, measurable progress. If I have to slow down, if I have to repeat something I've done before, I'm happy with that. I assume that for various reasons I'll have to vary my speed, for example, when I'm seeking out the basis for a particular emotion and "lose the trace" and have to continue to search for it. One's unconscious is sneaky (sorry to personalize it, but that's how I think), and will throw up roadblocks which I'll have to tear down or get around.

To me, the key to progress is not only willpower, but very much also being willing and able to shift gears whenever necessary, to change approaches, to be eclectic in choice of analytic modes, to always have a part of my mind standing to one side and observing and judging whether something different is required for regular, steady progress to be made. And even with all this, I'm quite sure that from time to time my unconscious will have me stymied. It does that so well.

So, no, I don't think I'm in a "better place" than anyone else with regard to therapy. Nor have I learned to "do it better." (I'm still a beginner on most of this.) I just have this strong sense of urgency combined with a serious personal commitment to do what it takes to "get there" in as short a time as possible. And I'm entirely reasonable about the definition of "short."

Take care!

In my opinion, the single biggest barrier to your progress will be fear. It seems as though you are certainly willing and open to what's in front of you, but whatever you least want to say, you must.

Whatever action you most want to avoid, you must do.

If something catastrophic does happen you must trust your ability to handle it, to tolerate it, and step out of yourself and look at it critically.

Getting in touch with your emotions is important, but having the courage to *think* about those emotions is equally is beneficial.

A lot of people will say that there is more than one way to do therapy correctly, and this is absolutely true, but the vein that underlies each method is courage.

I've come to think of myself as a lioness with a night light. My therapist loves this.

Pre-verbal: I finally got rid of a feeling of waiting forever for something to happen. It was like a feeling of depression, it was a definite sense - it would happen at work, or if I was waiting for T, or at home alone - just this very stressful feeling of the wait being dark and never-ending. And I never noticed anything unusual about it until it was GONE, which has been in the past two years since I stopped seeing my family of origin. But pretty sure that was the waiting for mummy, since even the old neighbor lady next door chastised her for leaving me alone and dirty in my crib too long, and that story was told many times. I mentioned it to my T - it is kind of nebulous, ghostly.

Photos: are very telling. Even the taking of them - I remember my mother hurting me every time she grabbed my wrist for a photo op - I guess we didn't hold hands very often. There are pics of my cousins hugging face-to-face with their moms or dads, but I am always facing away from the parental unit. At my brother's wedding (30 yrs ago), our family portait has me perched on the outer arm of my dad's chair, facing away, a position I unconsciously insisted on - I told the photographer this was 'my place'.

The David Wallin book on Attachment was very helpful to me 4 years ago - it seems like a lifetime ago now. I had no idea what was supposed to have happened in those early years, but reading that and a lot of stuff - klein, wallincott, bowlsby, basically buying out amazon! schore is great, so many names already listed elsewhere here - AND getting attached to T for those 3 hours a week, AND getting attached to people HERE for 16 hrs a day! - no that's not right, I SLEEP 16 hrs a day - anyway, life seems different and possible.

Anyway, just wanted to share my experience of what that nebulous stuff is like - because it's like, how do you know what you don't know? You don't, that's the problem. I don't know if I'm surprised or not that you're a mediator, Ygrec - I often served that role at my jobs. We learned to be super attentive to nuance and detail in order to survive.

Super attentive to detail? Did someone say super attentive to detail? Lordy....I so get this one! I work with animals a lot and watch them responding in this same way...they need to do this to survive, and watching them make tiny adjustments is fascinating. Also like a lot of people out there, my career choices have been governed by tapping this attentiveness. I've been in various mediator roles myself over the years.

Sorry for hijacking but I think maybe a thread on ATTENTIVE TO DETAIL in therapy? I think my minute assessments of my T must be really trying. Oh well. It's part of the territory!

mcl, I don't have a problem with so-called hijacking! Be my guest! Tell us what relevance "attentive to detail" has for therapy? I don't quite understand your first three or four sentences! Please try again!

Sure...I'll try. I'm hyper-vigilant. I know this. There are aspects of this character trait that I positively cherish for good reason. I would make an excellent scout and spend lots of time in the woods. Hear slight noise, see the first signs of seasonal changes, detect nuanes in terrain, animal behaviors, all of the "noticing" that comes with being a perceptive person. It blows my mind, actually, when I notice that other people don't spend much time....noticing.

The downside is that of course, I'm not correct when it comes to people's emotions, beliefs, behavior....any more often than others might be correct...even though I have my head on a swivel, I certainly can't read peoples' minds (nor do I want to do so! Yikes!). But I am often accused of "reading things into" situations and detecting nuances that...well, just aren't there when it comes to other people! I jump to conclusions a lot...in therapy and elsewhere... Being "very sensitive" is great, but sometimes has its downsides. I was brought up in a volatile, dangerous, brutal household, and was eternally scoping things out, watching the winds, worrying when it was going to blow. I guess my hypervigilance is a hallmark of growing up in a situation of brutality (I think abuse is too tepid a word).

therefore, I'm a huge pain in the *** in therapy. This is the aspect of my difficult T experience that is hard for me to own. Being afraid of my T and watchful, hypervigilant to signs of his frequent annoyance, disapproval and lack of positive regard --all of that sux. I am exquisitely sensitive to body language, which means I work well with animals. I have trained quite a few horses.... And I have the nerve to tell my Ts when their body language intimidates me. My candor doesn't always go over very well. Lately, I'm thinking, well, too bad. better you should KNOW

Being hypervigilant means you are sometimes able to see problems at a fairly early stage...and vigilance, of course, can even have a protective quality (see The Gift of Fear, a book about this)...but at its worst, it keeps me at a distance from others. Sometimes people interpret this as shyness and when they do, I think, oh, how charitable of you. If only you knew.....