Things are meant to bottom out somewhere. I guess there is no a-priori reason why they should, but things are meant to bottom out somewhere.

Sometimes it is thought to be constitutional excess of agression
Sometimes it is thought to be constitutional structural vulnerability
Sometimes it is thought to be fear of loss of object
Sometimes it is thought to be fear of loss of objects love
Sometimes it is thought to be fear of fragmentation / annihilation

There is meant to be bedrock. When we reach bedrock there our spade is turned and we cannot dig anymore.

What are the defences for?

To guard against bedrock.

Sometimes people talk about some state that is meant to be experienced in infancy. I'm not so sure about that...

But I have a hard time distinguishing between loss of object / loss of objects love / fear of annihilation.

I mean if object goes away you don't experience objects love anymore. To lose an object just is to lose the love of the object. To be left without the objects love... Is to fragment / be annihilated.

He left me. %#@&#!. He %#@&#! left me. I needed him. I don't need him anymore. I don't %#@&#! need anyone. %#@&#! people. I hate them.

and i can't sleep. recurrent nightmares. flashbacks. intensely bad feelings. can't put them away... i'm eating. i'm eating a lot. carbs and chocolate and the like to fill my body up to fill my body up to stuff it full such that it gets heavy... heavy like a stone... hurts some, yes. but helps to numb things. dull ache. lethargy. better than the short sharp shocks better than the anxiety where everything is tinged in black. better than the screaming. better than the black dripping down peoples faces... i hate this. i hate me. i hate me so much.

see what happens when you care about someone? something happens and they need to do something which involves their forgetting all about you. they %#@&#! off and somehow you are supposed to be able to just forget about them and continue on with your life. forget about them and then when they return and want to take you out of your box out of your cage and play with you you are supposed to be all happy they have returned.

well %#@&#! that. the world doesn't work that way. i'm not anyones %#@&#! pet.

i hate people

get the %#@&#! away from me

bang bang

and i understand how its supposed to go
but it didn't go that way for me
my mother pushed me and pulled me according to her needs
so i turned away from her
and my father left me
he knew what she was like and he left me
didn't think about what she was doing to me
left because of what she was doing to him
and she got worse of course because it was just her and me

and every night i cried
didn't know what was wrong
but every night i cried
unsoothed emotion
fragmentation
annihilation
every night i cried

and he didn't care about me
didn't think on me at all
left me for better things
and didn't look back at all

and part of me still is locked away

started to trust
started to come out

but now is left and forgotten

and the fears are coming back

its not rational

but the breaking up
annihilation

and he isn't allowed to just put me away until he chooses to take me out again
i don't work like that
i don't work that way
and i won't just trust him when he comes back
not sure i can trust him again

but i won't be going back

not after this

[SecretGarden]

You need to go back to see what the real story is.
You need to go back to express what you express here.
You need to go back to say what you need to say.....
To him....and all that he represents.

Regain your power.
Break out of the cage.

Regardless of what the story is.... you are experiencing what you are experiencing. It is relavent to your past and it is relavent as you move in to your future.

Do it.

hey. he said he was busy. or 'just +++ busy' to be precise. so... it isn't that anything bad happened. it isn't that i said something wrong in the emails. it is just that he is... busy. too busy for me.
:-(

understandable, of course.

but it hurts.

:-(

next friday...

we will see.

((((SecretGarden))))

[SecretGarden]

He has kept his lives separate.

He is preparing to reintegrate back to the work a day world. ]

His response to you is inadequate in many ways. He is plugging back in. You have been plugged in the whole time.

He has not just been too busy for you but for others I am sure....

But I undersand.... YOU are the important one. And you would like to feel that way.

Sadness, Anger, Hurt, Bad Names, Good Names, Hope, Anticipation, Joy .... all wrapped up in one and not necessarily in that order... jumbled.

Forgiveness? Reintegrating....moving forward....

Empathetically,

SG

Oh alex, I very much understand your feelings. and it makes me mad and sad at the same time. I'm mad because some T's don't realize how important it is to some of us to be heard. argh!! ....maybe they don't realize the right way to listen to us and the way we need to be responded to..... ... but they should!!

that "state of infancy" you refer to .... could it be healthy "attachment"? I think that's what I'm missing(among other things ).... never got "unconditional" attachment.... where the world revolves around the infant and the world is safe and warm.

My dad didn't leave, he just turned his attention to the TV and ignored all that was going on..... like a pillow on that couch, he didn't interact or protect. He saw and knew it all and did nothing.

Doing nothing-- like not responding-- can be such a painful situation.

All I can think to say....(sorry not very good at expressing)... is that it sucks!! It sucks that T's are only human with their own short comings..... when one needs them to be flawless with complete understanding and compassion-- to make up for the things one might have missed at too young of an age to have a voice or truly understand it all.

Please try not to hate yourself.... it's not your fault.

Thinking of you.

mandy

[Perna]

Two words, perception and perspective. The #1 thing I think I love my T for was how, in the beginning, she was forever frustrating the heck out of me :-) saying, "It's not like that." Turns out that became my favorite phrase of hers and I missed it when she quit saying it (and complained she had quit saying it :-) When I'm confused or my thinking isn't "right" I at least know that much and tell myself, "it's not like that" and give it a rest, waiting patiently until I understand, hoping/knowing/having faith that eventually I will.

[lauren_helene]

Alex I'm so sorry. It is maddening to me that all any parent needs to do is love their child(ren, provide a safe and happy environment and help mold them into good people.

Most of us are in therapy and/or are suffering because we didn't get this. It helped to start us off not ready for the world. We didn't have an emotional foundation for which to build upon.

All we can do at this point is save ourselves. The journey to do that is hard work, painful, at times discouraging.

The reward? Internal and external contentment that quiets the deamons and allows us to enjoy every day, every minute.

That is what I wish for you Alex and for everyone here.

[RACEKA]

Almeda24fan,
You said that so good. It is so true.

thanks guys. hurts, yeah. i've been reading the archives a little to try and remember him.

does anyone have any thoughts on the 'bottoming out' stuff? i've just recently come to understand that the different analytic theories have different notions of what is at base (where analysis stops, basically). i guess i didn't think that they had one... but... they do.

seems ego psychology is big on innate / constitutional drives. thats why kernberg goes on about 'constitutional agression' with respect to BPD, i guess...

i found something on how kohut thought it was about fragmentation. about how little kids are in this unintegrated disorganised state. that mother helps integrate the experience. that eventually the experience gets integrated into a self.

i'm not sure i buy the notion that an infants experience is a 'blooming and buzzing confusion' (not sure who said that). empirical evidence seems to be that an infants experience is actually fairly organised... sigh. makes sense of t's wanting to spend a lot of time with his kid though... if he thinks its more fragmented than me :-(

(sorry that was a really stoopid thing to say).

sigh.

but annihilation / fragmentation, yeah.

but i do find it hard to seperate that from the other things...

i'm sure kohut said something at some point about experience that can't be put into words. i get that too... tend to somatosize it...

rational understanding, of course.

to get lost in it is meant to be psychosis...

what do people think?

[Perna]

Kohut jives with my experience. My mother was in the hospital for a brain operation a couple months before I was 2 and I just "sense" stuff and my first memory is from around there (I got lost and my father "found" me) but I had a heck of a time working in therapy for a couple years because it was all 2 year old through 4-5 year old and there's not a whole lot of words there yet. My mother had aphasia when she came home from the hospital, would come up with the "wrong" word ("hand me my elephant" instead of "comb") and I was just 2 and learning to talk; I still have trouble when I get anxious or excited, lose words or get them jumbled. I went through a phase where I had to correct the world's grammar, spelling, and other word mistakes; figured out if you made mistakes with language I had to correct it or you'd die :-(

Maybe people have different "bottoms" depending on their life experiences and when things started/got bent and what went exactly went wrong? I have an odd, personal theory, too long now to know anymore if it's really "true" but I started gaining weight as I started getting better in therapy (was 127 pounds when I started therapy and am now 270) and feel like I "moved" myself into my weight in order to move out of my head and into the world. Kind of like creating my own armored vehicle :-) I let the obvious non-working psychological protections go, worked things through, didn't need them anymore, but made a different kind of physical boundary? Maybe like I have, you can make your own "bottom" theory that works for you? They're theories! Your guess for you is probably better than some "expert's" guess for you.

I'm so sorry alex.

I was gong to say what the F did he give you the email okay for then? But then I thought that possibly he is busier than he thought he would be. Overwhelmed. .. human? The unexpected happens to T's, too.

Separation is so hard. But it's so prevalent in our lives, so I hope too that you will think about not forcing permanent separation. Retaliation won't fix it. Being in control of the separation won't fix it either. It's there and will be there until you see him again and talk about how angry and lonely and frightening separation is.



ECHOES

... In his paper on narcissistic rage (1972), Kohut describes certain kinds of patients as follows:

"These patients initially create the impression of a classical
neurosis. When their apparent psychopathology is approached by
interpretation, however, the immediate result is nearly
catastrophic; they act our wildly, overwhelm the analyst with
oedipal love demands, threaten suicide - in short, although the
content (of symptoms, fantasies, and manifest transference) is all triangular oedipal, the very openness of their infantile wishes, the lack of resistances to their being uncovered, are not in tune with the initial impression…." [p 625-626]

The nuclear psychopathology of these individuals concerns the self. Being threatened in the maintenance of a cohesive self because in early life they were lacking in adequate confirming responses ('mirroring') from the environment, they turned to self-stimulation in order to retain the precarious cohesion of their experiencing and acting self. The oedipal phase, including its conflicts and anxieties, became, paradoxically, a remedial stimulant, its very intensity being used by the psyche to counteract the tendency toward the breakup of the self - just as a small child may attempt to use self-inflicted pain (head banging, for example) in order to retain a sense of aliveness and cohesion." [1972 626-627].

(hence the notion that erotic attachment and positive transference is a defence)

Kohut suggests that psychodynamic conflict is used itself as a defence against the deeper danger - the breakup of the self. He refers to the cohesion of the experiencing and acting self as 'precarious'. Thus the fundamental danger is of fragmentation. Kohut did not have much to say about states of fragmentation per se, appearing to view them as characterising psychosis and inherently beyond the reach of analysis. He was more concerned with the threat of fragmentation and defences against this.

Disintegration anxiety is difficult to articulate and communicate, compared with other more specific anxieties (such as the series Freud described: loss of the object, loss of love, castration). Kohut (1977) wrote:

"… the expression of the ill-defined yet intense and pervasive
anxiety that accompanies a patient's dawning awareness that his
self is disintegrating (severe fragmentation, serious loss of
initiative, profound drop in self-esteem, sense of utter
meaninglessness) … may initially be veiled; the analysand may
attempt to express his awareness of the frightening alterations in the state of his self through the medium of verbalisations about circumscribed fears - and it is only gradually and against
resistances that his associations will begin to communicate the
central content of his anxiety, which, indeed, he can only describe with the aid of analogies and metaphors." [p 103].

Even secure attachment is built on a substrate of the fragmented self, since it is, for any human baby, only the ministrations of the mother that hold back the threat of bio-psychological disintegration. This is the background threat of annihilation - which I think corresponds to what the Kleinians viewed as the manifestation of the terrifying death instinct.

I have encountered other instances in which the patient has not suffered overt abuse in childhood, but the mother's rejection of the child's own communicative initiatives and his or her needs for understanding and empathy have been so profound that the potential authentic self is pervaded by shame and its development is blocked. In such instances the early environment was perceived as fundamentally opposed to the child's actual authentic self and as intent on replacing it with a preferred alternative. In these circumstances the child may internalise the psychically murderous environment and the murder of the authentic self then continues internally throughout later life - the process being particularly activated whenever genuine emotional intimacy and attachment threatens.

http://www.selfpsychologypsychoanaly...g/mollon.shtml

hey perna. yeah... memories are hard. psychologists distinguish between different kinds of memories. one kind of memory is 'explicit' memory that is linguistic, (propositional or narrative) in form. another kind of memory is 'episodic' that is picture-like in form. i guess it is episodic memories that have emotional experiences associated with them (research has shown that episodic memories tend to be formed around fairly intense emotional experiences). they aren't linguistically encoded. as such... communicating them can be hard (what one is doing is kind of superimposing a narrative / interpretation over the top of them).

memories that we have before we are verbal are episodic. later memories can be episodic too, though. i struggle a lot with episodic memories. flashbacks. intrusive images. mostly after i was verbal. a lot of emotional dysregulation though. mostly between 7-... well... the present, i guess. though i do it less now... mostly in the hours between sleep and wake. sometimes i have to come home, though, because it starts involountarily and i have difficulty distracting from it. its like i kind of go into a trance or something... have to come home and try and sleep...

> Maybe people have different "bottoms" depending on their life experiences and when things started/got bent and what went exactly went wrong?

yes, i think thats right. Freud focused on the oedipal phase, i guess. he thought that people who had other fixations simply weren't suitable for analysis (hence he didn't worry so much about what was wrong with them). because he focused (or fixated lol) on the oedipal phase he thought that analysis bottomed out at constitutional drives (e.g., desires that couldn't be analysed away). though... i don't know too much about that... and i could be way off...

since Freud other theorists have become interested in earlier phases of development. in particular (or where I've focused my reading) the oral phase. the oral phase is pretty early. to do with security and the like. i guess fear of annihilation makes sense there. once again i suppose it is taken to be constitutional (biological) in the sense that theorists go on about how the infant isn't able to self-regulate (Lacan said something about infants being 'born too early' (relative to other species) because our heads would be too large to be pushed out if we stayed in the womb longer. the price we pay for such a developed brain is that we need more intensive care once we are born. if we don't get appropriate external regulation by our mothers then the risk of biological and psychological annihilation / death is very real. (the notion is that infants would be in rather an excruciating emotional state if it wasn't for the mothers external regulation of their emotional state).

> I started gaining weight as I started getting better in therapy (was 127 pounds when I started therapy and am now 270)

maybe... (i'm saying this in the gentlest way possible) maybe... that is about substituting certain (relatively maladaptive) defences for certain other (relatively adaptive) defences?

i used to self harm (cut / burn) and use a lot of illicit drugs as defences against my dysregulated mood. relatively maladaptive. i've stopped with that now. i've turned to alchohol and food. relatively adaptive. a great deal more socially acceptable.

progress to be sure...

hey echoes. yeah, i think he turned out to be a great deal busier than he thought he would be.

> Being in control of the separation won't fix it either.

well... it could help. part of the fear is of being out of control of the situation. i guess the urge is to punish, though... mostly it is about not saying you are going to do something when it is unlikely you are going to be able to do it. i guess i also get thinking on 'how busy can you be?' takes five minutes to send a brief email and yet he sent NOTHING until i txted him. i guess he hasn't been checking his email...

> ... talk about how angry and lonely and frightening separation is.

hmm... yeah... i don't know we will get to talking about that. i don't know how it will go. i find this kind of embarrassing to tell you the honest truth.

i know that it is perfectly understandable that he would take time off to be with his wife / kid. its a lovely thing to do to be honest. i guess i'd worry more if he wasn't taking the time off to be with them. i also understand that its very unlikely to be all 'happy families'. her hormones are probably raging and they are both probably sleep deprived and stuff... i also understand that this doesn't mean that he doesn't care about me. that even if all his attention is consumed by this (which would indeed be understandable) its certainly not going to stay that way for ever. he will probably be jolly grateful to return to work / normality and even if it takes a while... things will get back to the way they used to be.

but it hurts. i feel a bit jealous. i feel really embarrassed that i feel jealous. i think thoughts about 'i bet baby isn't as fragmented / distressed as me and i bet i need him more than baby does'. and i feel ashamed for thinking that. i console myself with the thought that his wife is probably being mega***** right now. that he will be counting the days until he can return to work (not to be in particular) but just throwing himself into his work more generally. i don't wanna be thinking these thoughts / feeling this way.

i have been losing it a bit... hallucinations and the like. lack of sleep... nightmares. waking up to feeling very distressed about... fragmentation. fragmentation. i do get a bit psychotic at times. fragmentation, yeah. someone said to me that it was okay if he was my core self for a time... i guess its okay if he is around so when i think on him i can find it but i feel like my core self has been ripped away.

i've had a deadline which i've basically missed. maybe not irrevokable... i'll work on it tonight and tomorrow. i'll throw myself into my work. but my core self is gone and there is such pain... and hallucinations... and i've really had to shut myself away from the world for the last few weeks. because i'm likely to cry inappropriately or make a really snarky comment or say / do something very inappropriate.

((((echoes))))

he is back at work on Monday. Our appointment isn't until Friday, though. Apparently this week falls on the 'off' week so I don't get a Tuesday session. I guess he has 4 days to readjust to being back at work before I see him. I just hope... I just hope... That he isn't tired and distracted. Because... That would hurt too much. Maybe thats the point. If I don't go then he will get the chance to read the emails I sent. How I disclosed a lot of really hard stuff to him and then got scared. How I told him that I felt abandoned. About three weeks ago. Give him a chance to properly adjust back to being at work. If he is tired and distracted... It will hurt too much. I don't want to hate him right now and I don't want to fall apart because he gets sick and he gets tired and I can't deal with his mortality and weakness right now. I'm %#@&#! falling apart and I need him to be strong.

[SecretGarden]

How do you envision your first visit back? It sounds like you have given this alot of thought. Although earlier in the week would be fun I think you have pointed out many benefits to being later in the week on his first week back. Who is in control on this visit?