Quantum psychology: We are opposite times, opposite feelings at once

 

I have come to believe that all psychopathology is formed in contradictory dualities: the running away from and the transformation of childhood bad feeling.* A result is a self that is replaced by and defended against pain. It is both buried and it is false. It is both different from and a lessening of what it would have been had pain not become pre­dominant in the child’s life.

We are real and unreal, the “true” and “false selves” – constructs described by psychol­ogists over the last century.**

A consequence of psychotherapeutic healing process addressing these dualities is that when we get better, we get worse. If, for example, a person such as myself were to brute-force deny his self-medicative magical thinking, he would immediately feel more of his present – a “good” awakening to life – and his past – the bad. Until a few years ago, I could only bring myself to consume foods from a health food store or restaurant. This was one of probably many ways for me to avoid feeling terrible, a terrible feeling directly anchored in my childhood fears, lostness, chaos. The mental force of the urge to edible purity was so predominant that it hardly mattered to me if something tasted good. I could be “happy” with utter blandness as long as the food was magically nutritious. By “magically,” I mean that what mattered to me was the aura of health, not the fact of it. The most decadent sugary desserts were acceptable, if they were sold at Whole Foods.

Now, letting the psycho-chips fall in anarchy, I have dropped my Olympian standards and have instantly felt both better and worse. I would say that not only is this progress, but it’s the only prog­ress we can experience beyond the shallow palliatives of cognitive or behavioral process.

My Obsessive-Compulsive Personality-disordered client has run away from childhood pain in her need for mental perfection. (There is no real perfection of behavior or accom­plishment: What she needs is the magical thinking, the aura of perfection.) She has transformed her childhood bad feeling to depression and passivity. We want her to be better. But to question her defenses is to become weak. In her strength.

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* Childhood pain, though we look back at it as a chapter in the psychology books and not as a horror, is unsustainable. This is why defenses begin to form immediately: vengeful fantasies, tics, distractions, distinctions (I had a fine coin collection), clinging, distan­cing. Because we begin to escape, internally, as soon as we’re trapped, we come to lose awareness of the fact that our feeling is intolerable. The remainder of our lives consists of the avoidance of it.

** https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2015/02/real-self-written-at-noisy-whole-foods.html