I discovered, in my seventieth year and after two-plus decades of professional equanimity, that I can be triggered in a crash-and-burn, cut-off-my-legs-and-throw-them-at-you kind of way. Out of the blue, sight unseen, a troubled individual, never a client, slandered my character and competence. Any experienced therapist would know how to handle this: blandly and with very convincing faux compassion. Instead, I spat back. When I later emerged to clarity, I remembered that it is not good to attack someone this fragile, even if their pain must be expressed as rage and cruelty. Unmitigated pain of unmet needs for love and mirroring is the basis of almost all our dysfunction.
This experience, including its repercussions, has provided an interesting lesson. Not in humility or the necessary rigors of professionalism, but in the Real Self, the child self that never leaves despite our elevated adult charade that forms over time, or by brute force instantly in one’s teens or twenties.
How much do we want to be our adult persona? How much do we need it, versus needing the reality of our true feelings? And how absurd is it that we live both together, in a sloshy bottom-heavy fusion that is not determined, at all, by the identity we want to be? We are a repository of swill in a gentlemanly carton.
To my surprise, people seem to be appreciative of this fact, though I believe they are OK to know it only from the genteel distance of a New York Times comment:
The interesting and deplorable question from a human – that is, psychological – perspective is: Why is it so hard to be an adult who can welcome, or at least tolerate, the truth? What happens to us as we grow up that makes us require “wish thinking” (Christopher Hitchens’s term) for the rest of our days? In my therapy with adults, I sometimes point out – with no disagreement so far in 23 years – that “we don’t have an ‘inner child.’ We are the inner child. The adult persona is just the window dressing.” (https://nyti.ms/3sZDs7e#permid=117317365)
For me, allowing forty years of subterranean frustration, followed by thirty years of a self-made but benign straitjacket to crack open was merely the acknowledgment of reality, mine and my abuser’s. I am the necessary child and the necessary adult. She is, too, and deserves dirt and sympathy. Neither apology nor condemnation is predominately right.
There is little that is right in the adult world.
That Armageddon of childhood leaves a neurological imprint that remains a template, a feeling-pattern database, far into our "adult" life. The Borderline (and others) is just the empty space where a parent should have been (nothing to introject). Yes, it's intergenerational, like the feeling equivalent of blue eyes.
ReplyDeleteThat's quite the generic explanation, though generically correct. A lot more than 'empty space' caused this individual's special brand of irrationality and self-generated viciousness. There would have been a raft of failures along the developmental timeline following the initial mother-child botch.
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