Dissociation is the adult baseline

 

In the way of imaginary coincidences, several current clients have brought to mind the many ways an adult may be lost to his “real self” – his original, formative feeling core – and therefore fundamentally dissociated from his lived life. Most adults, I’d bet, are sincerely fake, rather than fake sincere: The feelings they experience are surface chemicals, tossed by winds and yanked by roots of their deeper emotional structure. They claim to love their parent, but beneath that, they don’t. Young adults say they want to study Culinary Arts or Criminal Justice, but those aims evaporate when the sunrise opens onto the real world. A woman loves her fiancé one day, is disgusted with him the next, perpetually cycling. A man is a great financial success in his thirty-year career, and knows he had never wanted that work.

Here are the basic labels and states – random, not mutually exclusive, incomplete – of a person’s screen existence:

Repression and chronic defenses

Maladaptive daydreaming

Brain fog (non-medical)

Birth trauma

Depersonalization and derealization

All personality disorders (including psychopathy)

Dissociative identity disorder

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Substance dependence (see hallucinogen exception below)

Can never tolerate silence

Need to be constantly busy

The intellectual character

Depressive disorder

Bipolar disorder

Chronic anxiety and worrying

Obsessive-compulsive disorder

Psychotic disorders

Political identities, emotionalized attitudes, and “career” religiosity

Alexithymia

Please contact me for an explanation if you can’t accept any of these indictments. Alice Miller defined depression as “loss of the real self in childhood.” I have defined ADHD as a person’s “inability to sit still on a feeling” (with the “H” being the bodily tension resulting from the blocked feeling).

Who is a real person? Hallucinogens can de-repress the mind, bringing to the fore “the absolute feeling centre of the most painful and the worst that has ever happened to us” (P. Vereshack). Primal and related therapy can return a person to her child. The child, prior to oppression.

Why is this idea, reality and unreality, important? Because therapy that doesn’t collude with the false self (as all the cognitive therapies and many others do) wants to reach something more authentic: first loss and first success. The questions that arise then are * How deep should we go? and * How does the past meld with the present self?

There are no answers to these questions.