[~EnlightenMe~]

This is a quote that speaks to me. It is by a psyhoanalyst, Dr. Philip Bromberg in his book, The Shadow of the Tsunami. I find it fasinating but am not sure if anyone else will be interested. The last two paragraphs verbalize eloquently how I feel and how many of us feel on the board from what I have read.

. . . that these self-states . . occur in a context where self-continuity is threatened. I'm speaking of experiences that have been invalidated as "real" by the mind of some significant other who used language not to share these experiences but to "translate them out of existence. When the original "other" is a primary attachment figure, a parent or an other whos significance is interpersonally similar to a perent's, that person holds the power to destabilize the child's mental state by rupturing a relational connection that organizes the child sense of self-continuity. In order to preserve the attachment connection and protect mental stability, the mind triggers a survival solution, dissociation, that allows the person to bypass the mentally disorganizing struggle to self-reflect without hope of relieving the pain and fear caused by the destabilization of selfhood. Dissociation narrows one's range of perception so as to set up nonconflictual categories of self-experience as different parts of the self.

Inevitably, desire becomes corrupted. THe child's healthy desire to communicate her subjective experience to a needed other is infused with shame because the needed other cannot or will not acknowledge the child's experience as something legitimately "thinkable." THe attachment bond that organizes self-stability for the child is now in jeopardy. She feels, not that she did something wrong, but that there is something wrong with her self; that is, something wrong with her as a person. To survive this destabilization of selfhood, she sequesters the not "illegitimate" part of her subjectie experience by dissociating the part of herself that knows it to be legitimate. She has a dissociated a part of her subjectivity that originally felt real and thus "legitimate"and because it is dissociated the child starts to doubt her own legitimacy as a person. She is thereafter in doubt both as to her own legitimacy as a person and the reality of her internal experience.

As an adult, she is left with a sense of something bad having happened to her but that sense is not organized as a cognition; she is left not with a memory that is felt as belonging to "me" (a declarative memory), but with its affective ghost in the form of an uncommunicable statae of longing that shrouds the implicit memory. The longing is a "not-me" ghost that haunts her because her own desire to communicate it to her therapist from her intermal place of "illegitimacy becomes a source of shame in itself. Thus, her sense of shame is compounded: the first source of shame comes from her belief that what she feels will not be real to the other. The second source of shame derives from her fear that she will lose the other's attachment (and thus her core sense of self) because she believes the therapist will not attribute validity to her desperation that he know what she is feeling. This fear of attachment loss makes her even more desperate for evidence that the other has not indeed withdrawn his attachment, and the more evidence she seeks the greater is the shame she feels for seeking solace that is somehow tinged as illegitimate.

A patient's "longing" to communicate dissociated self-experience must be recognized by the analyst, but what must simultaneously be recognized is that she cannot mentally experience this longing as legitimate without being shamed by other parts of herself, leaving her feeling undeservign of consolation or solace. When she tries to tell you her secret, she is always "at a loss for words" because the real secret can't be told, at least not in words. The affective truth with which the patient lies becomes suspect by her as a "lie" or at least an exaggeration, and she is never sure a secret really exists or if she is making it up."
Dr. Philip Bromberg
The Shadow of the Tsunami
Pgs. 43-44

Wow........Im downloading this book. Thanks for sharing (((Antimatter)))

Oh no! Not available on kindle...

[~EnlightenMe~]

Yeah, it's a book written for therapists, but it helped me so much! Your best bet is to buy it online, like Amazon/Barnes and Noble, because they don't stock it in stores. Awakening the Dreamer from him is just as awesome, btw.