Posts from — March 2008

It’s been really helpful for me to write out the links between some of these psychological terms. Of course, I would say that when it comes to writing about my dissociation because there’s great relief when you can finally see the whole picture of what you think and feel.

In fact with all this writing this afternoon, I may be at my limit of what I can handle piecing together. I may need to take a nap soon. Perhaps to both recharge after learning and seeing so much and to put a little distance between myself and all I am coming to terms with. Plus I’m getting hungry.

But before I sign off, I do want to say that I’ve been stringing things together kind of assuming that my few readers will understand things that I would never have articulated to them. Please ask me lots of questions about this so that I can be more assured that I really am communicating what I mean here and thus you can really know me and so that I can have the chance to be more aware of the assumptions I make.

From almost day one Andrea and I talked about enmeshment, how I was so linked to my family that I had no identity of my own.

When I say “talked about”, I don’t mean to say that we frequently came back to it as a topic of conversation. It was too overwhelming for me to get my head around. So we would touch on it when we were able.

Over time it became clear that it wasn’t just that I didn’t have and was not encouraged to develop an identity of my own but that there was so much closeness in my family that there was also emotional incest going on. They would take from me emotionally in order to soothe their own anxiety.

As Andrea said this morning, in college and in my twenties I was not only on my own and not supported. There was also emotional incest going on. They were still taking from me even though I was supposed to be focused on the task of launching myself in the world.

Perhaps these two things are linked – enmeshment and emotional incest – by the closeness of proximity. Without a separate identity, I had no boundaries, and so I was easy to be taken from.

One thing I have always remembered Andrea saying is that in order to make a decision you have to know who you are. When you know who you are, the decision is much easier. It’s our feelings about ourselves and situations that help us to know who we are. For me I had been dissociating for so much of my life that I didn’t even know what my feelings were.

A couple of months ago in therapy, probably in the fall, I said to Andrea that I was so frustrated because in my relationship with my husband I could FORGET that he loved me. I would be going about my life and it was like I was estranged from our love for one another.

At first she comforted me and said that this is actually quite normal for couples. It’s okay to get caught up in life and to become a little distanced from one another after a time of closeness, etc. Even to forget a bit. But I insisted this was different.

It led to an incredible moment when I remembered times as a child when it was like my mother didn’t remember me. I would be going along and everything would seem fine and then out of nowhere I would be on her bad side. I would be trying to be so good but somehow it was like all of that didn’t matter.

So again some of this is normal. It’s normal for parents to have bad days and to be upset and even be upset with their children. But what wasn’t normal in my household was that my mother couldn’t integrate her ambivalence toward me because her own identity never got firmly established. So she either liked me or didn’t like me. And when I was needy I overwhelmed her and she did whatever she had to do to protect herself from being overwhelmed by me, including leaving me to cry for hours and hours. I learned to take care of myself and to look toward meeting her needs rather than meeting my own, even as a very young child.

Andrea was telling me about some of her dissertation research years ago on parenting and that she delighted to find a line in the research that succinctly summed up the essentials of parenting – that a parent must find a way to integrate both their intense love for their child as well as their negative feelings toward him or her, even their hatred. If they could do this, the child would learn that they could be loved even in the face of their “badness”. Again, not sure I’m getting that just right but I’m in the ballpark. Another way of saying this is that the child would learn that they could be lovable if not always liked.

I did not grow up knowing that I could be bad and still be loved. So I always, always, always strove to be good. This is why I never experimented with drugs or alcohol. It would have irrevocably put me in the bad category and jeopardized my chances at being “safe” in my mother’s love.

So the only way I could possibly succeed in being safe was to be enmeshed with my mother, meaning I could not form an identity of my own. This was such a force in my life that this was even true well into my thirties and despite the fact that we were separated by thousands of miles. More about Enmeshment in a new post soon.

But first, last night I was pondering all of this and saying to myself that this was a huge charge I was making and could I really be so bold as to say that my mother never found a way to both love and hate me at the same time.

Then I remembered something I’d been celebrating in my relationship with my husband. We’d had a small conflict in the fall. Of course, I’d been noticing any and all of my feelings and I started to notice in this conflict that I would get upset with Thrane and then think that I would have to leave him or at least being upset with him seriously questioned the validity of our marriage. Oh argh. It was an awful feeling to notice. I’m impressed that I could even be calm enough to stand feeling this way. But after noticing the feeling it didn’t have as much power and later it was a big deal for me to be able to say that I was upset with him and I didn’t feel like I had to leave him.

Today Andrea and I were talking about this and she added something that I’m still a little confused about but that felt right. I hope I can articulate it. She said that I was in a no win situation around my emotions. I would think I was crazy for feeling upset about something (because I didn’t let myself feel my own negative feelings) but I would also feel crazy WHILE being upset (like feeling like I would have to leave my husband). With those two choices, my only real option would have been to dissociate and simply not feel anything. I know I haven’t quite captured what she said but this also is true. It illustrates how convoluted things have been inside of me because I never learned how to integrate my ambivalence until recently.

On Tuesday of this week Andrea used a term that made a lot of sense to me. Interpersonal violence.

We had known for a while that as a child I never wanted to do to others what I saw my mother do. Mostly I talked about this in terms of being judgmental. So I would avoid making harsh criticisms of others. Until recently, I didn’t even FEEL anything close to harsh criticism. In fact I would pride myself on always remembering the humanity of people including despots.

But Tuesday something got me to talk about watching my mother. I’d been remembering specific people that worked for my parents in their business and how hard it would be to watch a person’s almost inevitable decline in my parents’ estimation. Even if the person quit and was not fired, my parents would comment – wow, we had no idea how really badly things were with so and so. They were doing awful work. We’re lucky they left. If the person was fired, the vitriol was equally bad. Someone could start out on their good side and then end up on their bad side. It seemed to me that this was very easy to do.

Andrea pointed out that this could have gone down differently. They could have still been critical of the person and framed the conversation in terms of whether or not the person was a good fit or not and how their conclusions about this were formed over time and with experience. As people they could have taken that approach. As parents, they also could have recognized that I was watching and that I cared about the people that they were talking about. I cared because I spent time with these folks when I was not in school.

Instead anxiety about the business ruled the home. Mealtimes were spent talking about the business, talking about employees. I was largely invisible during those times.

So it was helpful for me to have Andrea name what I was witnessing as interpersonal violence. It resonated within me because as a child I wasn’t vowing to not judge people. I wouldn’t have really had those words even. I was really vowing not to hurt people.

Andrea talked more about interpersonal violence today and said that in recent times it has also been deemed that due to the psychological impact of children observing violence that even just watching violence is child abuse.

I’m not sure that I’m going to get all the words right but she said that boys respond by trying to be a superhero and fixing it all. They have to be strong and responsible and try to prevent what is happening. It often leads to narcissistic tendencies.

For girls and for me (and again I heard it in one swoop and didn’t totally capture it all), I turned it inward. I thought that I was the problem. If I could fix myself, then I could fix the situation. So I vowed that I would not be critical of others, but also that I would not be a cause for my mother’s vitriol. If I could be perfect, then the interpersonal violence would stop – everywhere. If my mom was happy with me, maybe she wouldn’t be so upset with others.

Some of the most shocking times in recent memory would be when I would get off the phone with my parents and have this really funny sensation within me that if only I could do something different, then things would be okay. Then I could have a relationship with them. Then there could be peace. But I started to realize that that could not happen. Worse, I started to see that as I lived my life in ways that felt really good to me, that there were more and more times when I would leave a phone call thinking that it would all be okay if only I were different.

Because I wanted to avoid criticism, I had no way of looking objectively at people. So when I sensed that there was something wrong with my husband, I did not say to myself that this was a bad fit for me. Instead I assumed what I always did – that I could and must fix the situation and that I was the source of the problem. If I fixed myself, then I could fix the situation.

You can imagine how impossible this would have been for me. But it was complicated by many other dynamics. More in my next post.

This morning I had a phenomenal conversation with my therapist Andrea, but the great stuff that’s happening today first started during a walk with my neighbor.

I walk with this neighbor two to four times a week. I’ve been doing this since sometime in December or January. She is very keen to get out, and her enthusiasm has really ensured that I meet my goal of walking at least three times a week. Given that I have other dear walking partners, I have gotten quite fit.

But my point is that though we walk together quite frequently I have chosen not to tell her much about why I have been taking this sabbatical. I wanted to be sure that I would have an outlet away from my emotional work to just chit chat. Based on our conversation this morning, I think I also wondered if she would be able to understand because my own belief that there has really been something wrong has been so shaky. In fact, coming to terms with my inability to trust and believe in myself and my assessment of things has been at the core of my work.

This morning, though, I felt differently, like I would be okay sharing more. We happened to talk about getting pregnant and based on some things I said she asked me if we were actively trying. I told her no and that we were waiting until I worked through some childhood abuse issues and had given myself the time and attention around this that I deserved.

We’d also been talking about how I knew when I was married to my first husband that I needed to do everything I could not to have children even though my hormones were telling me I NEEDED a child and because I knew that I was in a horrible situation that I would never want to bring a child into. Based upon this statement of mine, she said that I actually sounded pretty well off. Like I had managed to be pretty sane despite it all.

In the past this would have been a deadly statement for me to hear. My ego or whatever would have jumped all over me and reinforced what I already believed (falsely) that I was stupid and ridiculous for wasting so much time looking back at my life when in fact there were so many others who were so much worse off. It would have reminded me of friends who grew up in prisoner of war camps or who had to delay going to college for ten years due to the suicide of their father a week before they were to leave for school. Or the seven or so other out of this world stories friends of mine have.

You had a stable life, my ego would tell me. Forget about all of this. Your worries are not important. Don’t waste your time. Get over it already.

But this morning it was different. I had the wisdom to know that my friend didn’t know the full story. I had the wisdom to know that as good as things looked for me on the outside that that high functioning had obscured the harm done and even kept the abuse happening. I also could trust myself to know that I would only have stopped my life for the last two years to focus on something significant. Finally, I also knew that she did not have to understand at first mention AND I could still value her friendship even though I felt sad that she didn’t get me in such an important way.

This is a big deal and is one of those small experiences that reinforces that you’ve come a long way.

I have had some very painful, difficult, challenging and awful couple of weeks. But somehow it also seems to be that the emotional work of my sabbatical is coming together. At different points along the way I have said to myself and my therapist Andrea that I feel like I am getting the strength underneath me in my legs enough to really stand up. I feel that again coming out of the last couple of weeks. My blogging today will be my attempt to chronicle this and solidify my understanding of what is happening to me.

I thought about taking a drive to my favorite plant outlet to process all of this stuff (about an hour and a half drive) but decided that I would be more environmentally friendly by sitting here in front of my computer writing to the blogosphere!

I was talking to Andrea today about how I’ve been counting how many weeks it’s been since my brain last dissociated. (Dissociation happens to me when I am trying to talk about something or wanting to feel something that another part of me finds it hard to handle. What happens for me is that my brain suddenly becomes fuzzy, I can’t remember what I was trying to express, and I want to go to sleep.)

Andrea chuckled because dissociation is like an addiction and thus like something I would want to celebrate not having experienced. In the past she’s told me that it is one of the hardest addictions to break and that it often begins in infancy.

So it’s been seven weeks for me.

It’s dawning on me this evening just how much doing stuff is my attempt to stave off the loneliness. It’s painful being lonely. It’s not something you want to feel. I’ve also just been so used to spending so much time by myself that it’s kind of surprising that I would not like the way that feels and want a change. But this change is almost beyond my comprehension. How in the world would it feel to not feel lonely?

I don’t mean to say that I feel lonely all the time. I don’t. Especially with my husband.

What I’m getting at is that I think there’s a way to feel surrounded and held in love in a way I haven’t had the capacity for before. Like maybe I could feel so held by this love that I could seek out people when I’m lonely. Hmm. Just that I say that makes me think that when I have been lonely in the past I also have felt alienated from people so that I only feel more lonely.

There’s a richness to my life that I’m aiming for. A richness that comes from knowing that I am loved and cared for no matter what.

I have been feeling lonely lately. We have a number of social things planned but I still feel lonely.

One thing Andrea and I have uncovered is that when I was a child the only way I could know myself was to be alone. This was because in my interactions with my parents, I didn’t have a chance to really be myself. I was too focused on their needs and how I could meet them.

So now I am with people but I don’t feel overwhelmed by them because somehow or another I have firmer boundaries. I am also more able to be myself with people. So I don’t have to come home and recover from being with folks.

And so today, even though we have more social things planned than I would have needed for a balanced life months ago, it still feels like I am coming up short. I have more capacity for people and I need them more now.

I started this blog back in January, but I haven’t posted very much. I’m kind of dipping my toes in the water with the writing here. Rather than thinking of posting regularly, I am going to just post when it feels right.