internal secessions

So, this is not about any specific relationship. It's also not a current issue, but simply a pattern I hope to some day break away from.

No matter the type of relationship, whenever one ends, it is hard for me to understand who I was within it. I remember my actions and reasons for the most part, but I no longer feel any connection to them. There is a discontinuity, a break from who I was then, and who I am now.
In friendships, this is small, and some connection can still be made, but in romantic partnerships this is hughe. An insurmountable schism between me now and me then, an almost total lack of identification, of continuity. I say "almost" only because I can relate to who I was then in the same degree as I can relate to any other human being unconnected to myself.

Does anyone else feel like this? How do you deal with it? Has anyone gotten over this? Is this possibly simply based on my lack of coherent sense of self and when and if I manage to get me one of those the issue will go away?

Thanks!

It's interesting that you bring this up.


I came across some old pictures from various points in my life and the feeling was surreal.

It feels as though I have memory lapses, or that I've buried the past in deep chambers. I have a difficulty reconciling who I am in this present time with my past selves. So I end up feeling pretty disjointed or fragmented.

The only thing I can think of to integrate my sense of self is by perhaps keeping a journal or scrapbook and looking at photos more often. For the past that has happened, I could perhaps write small chapters of various segments of my life and telling my story through my present day eyes; but, to do this, I think I'm going to have to deal with grief. I've had a lot of loss, or that I am so sensitive that those losses seem bigger to me than they would for the average person. Maybe that's why I've buried parts of myself in deep chambers.

Thoughts?

That sounds like a deeper, more profound experience than mine, or perhaps I have yet to uncover the depth of these losses of self and others. To me, whenever such a relationship ended, all I felt was relief, to be alone again, to be free. Now, sometimes I feel grief, but it is not the relationship I grief (I think), but the loss of a continuous sense of self. I'm not sure about any of it, I think I would need to go deeper to uncover what exectly it is that I feel. I do think I remember all of it. It is my childhood that I have in part blocked out, but these past relationships I remember, I just can't relate to it.

The feeling of fragmentation you discribe however is the same. It can be very hard to endure this feeling, and I think I would need to sit with it and try to get comfortable holding it if I am to integrate these things. I think you are right about the scrapbook, and writing to explore these chapters of life. It sounds like a very good idea to me, espacially as writing in itself slows things down, and on the one hand forces one to sit with the feeling, and on the other does provide a proxy -the paper- to distance oneself from it a little and observe it as if from outside. There is an element of fragmentation to this, too, but perhaps to a usefull degree. I think I will try this, thank you.

I think perhaps for you it would be good to set a timer and start this process more slowly, because it sounds like the accomanying emotions might be very overwhelming. How are you with sitting with them? Would be a good idea to discuss this idea with our respective therapists (if you are in therapy)?

This feels very much like a thought in progress, like wip. I feel like I'm just starting to think about these things, and to notice them. I'm curious and maybe a little cautious what lies behind the next corner (and the next and next after that).

I feel like it was me in those relationships, but I ask myself why I was in them. I look back on how they went bad and feel disconnected about myself in that way. I wasn’t being my authentic self to have put myself into a relationship that was going bad and ending. I wasn’t my best self to have put myself into a relationship that made me feel insecure, unhappy, smothered. I’d like to distance myself to think that wasn’t really me. But it was me, lol, at my worst.

This is connected to your diagnosis, have you read about a schitzoid personality disorder? It may be that at some point the challenge may fall under being under autism spectrum disorder.

Yes, I have read about it, but I tend to prefer to leave the thinking-in-boxes to the professionals. I prefer to just consider my options, what I can do to manage myself (my symptoms, if you prefer), rather than to research deeply on how the symptoms a person with SPD has may be managed by a clinician. I don't have the ressources to dive deeply into potential strategies that work with others with my diagnosis, but I do have the resources to try out stuff and see what works for me.

My T thinks your idea to write about those things is a very good idea. He encouraged to make it more specific and perhaps focus on what was bad, what was good and what maybe I could have done differently.