You're lucky I'm writing this in a casual, low-intensity mood. I have had many clients whose life ended in childhood, but that their body went on, numbed by sudden pain-killing anesthesia – a "defense mechanism" – and pushed forward by the expectations and demands of their parents and by futile but necessary hope.
That statement is not dramatic or exaggerative. It would be obvious truth if you (many therapists, many clients) cast your eyes back on a moment when love from your parent burned up, when the feeling was only: security turned naked, connection disappeared, implicit assumption of love became a cold place in your brain and you now were heavy with emptiness and distress. In my case, I was around five years old when my mother, in immature pique, rejected me because I was angry with her. In clients' cases, it was when father said to them: "You'll never amount to anything," or mother said: "You were supposed to be an abortion," or when mother missed their birthday two years in a row (and then ever after) because she was a tax preparer, had finished her work by the April deadline, then took her well-deserved vacation with her boyfriend.
Cutting to the chase, if life ended then, if the impossible happened, and that impossibility is the reality behind our hologram adult identity, how can therapy ask us to do any childhood grief and loss work? To sink into the feelings of abuse or neglect? Aren't we likely to feel that old obliteration of our self?
Clients cry often. But I've noticed that those who grieve the most drastic, who "primal scream," are pulled away near the bottommost rung by anger or by thought. They cannot collapse in their total tragedy. To do that would be the final dimension of psychotherapy and healing: the child in mother's arms, going back to the beginning, redoing time.
They resist that eventual calm.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.