Follow-up to 'Where is the answer?'

Though no one has asked, I want to address the “other shoe dropping” of my suicidal client. She does have this seemingly immutable identity of a death-waiting, death-needing-to-happen person. But she does give out the impression that were she to lurch over the Rubicon of symbiotic dependency with her mother, that may just bring her to a new world, one whose horizon wasn’t sick and stuck inside her. But there’s the additional sense that such a leap could be the death blow itself.

We had a session with good, relieving tears – that’s how she felt. Following those, her problem – somehow never yet stated – was: Do I exist if I’m separate from my mother? Everything is ripe and ready for her to move in with her boyfriend, who is seeming pretty good lately. She named self-deprecating obstacles to that. We shot them down with reality and humor. Seriously: We all laughed heartily. Breaking these objections, what she was left with were sanguine possibilities.

Is she a person if separated from her mother? I don’t know. How many of us are? Real “separation-individuation” is easily botched so early. I believe that most of us, children, are shoved to a distance from our parents rather than grow with then separate, like an acorn, already itself, falling from the tree then becoming more of itself. In this forced separation we are left bleeding out and in endless loss. It’s exactly that, see it or not. And unlike the physical, psychically one can bleed out for all the years of a life.

At this moment my hope is that she will push beyond the gravitational field, move out, live like a couple and endure the tragic, and the bleeding, and the incompleteness with mother. I think our inner life is so complicated that essentially we have to be diverted from it, while knowing it. That way – diverting while knowing – we can distance it with some unsatisfactory care, just like a parent does.