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.

 

One kind of first catastrophe

 

My childhood was very frustrating, almost terminally frustrating, through all the pre-teen years. But I didn’t know it, was not aware of it. While I lacked the blueprint of ego strength and initiative that many babies arrive on planet Earth with, it is true that life is a “done to” affair for most children. They are not, in Alice Miller’s term, the “central actor” in their own lives, and are either welcomed or begrudged or disdained hitchhikers on their parents’ and others’ rides.

Many children have it worse, in tangible terms, than I did. For example, a recent client would be locked in the basement by her mother, sent to her grandmother, put in foster care, then back again. This would produce an especial quality of frustration different from mine, which was only subtle, invisible. I was left alone most of the time, sequestered in my room. And as a child needs to use his body – to have deliberate action that’s in direct sync with his thoughts and desires (at least much of the time), my room’s walls became a prison. Chairs and mirror and desk were like bullies, because they could not be thrown. They were in my way. They could not be thrown through the wall for my escape. The intimate, inanimate world was in my way.

There would also be the caregivers’ voices, their reasonable or negative voices like prison guards and walls and desks that blocked and intruded into our need to have our own moods and our own quiet.

For so many of us, the material world and others’ voices are still in our way. We still feel, at the bottom molecular level, the frustration of a mind effete, separated from its justice, its necessary action.

The client ignites ragefully when her husband rises from the sofa with an atypical body movement. The 18-year-old is “always furious,” smashing his fist in the wall, banging his head against the door, breaking his glasses, cutting his forehead. A man hurls the remote, like Zeus, when a button is dumbly unresponsive. My hearing aid charger has the nerve to slide off the desk onto the floor again. Sit there for goddamn ever, you little bastard. A man seethes, deeply, terminally, at life.

We don’t realize we’re still feeling this utterly creationist frustration, when we needed things to heed our command, so we were not disembodied wills and feelings. Nothing ever surpasses, replaces this primary catastrophe. Our first reality is impotence.

Remember this next time you rage, and hate, and rip out of existence a tangled computer cord.

We are layers

 

A simple way to describe the depth and difficulty of a person is to see that we are layers. We are layers of feeling that comes from the natural self, from pain, and from developmental failure. Many of us did not mature, to be in sync with our age and with our peers. Being the past in a present body and life brings its own recondite and unidentified feelings.

I am slightly in touch with my original failure to bond at birth and in infancy. Its own feelings are truly alpha-and-omega in devastation. They are largely hidden, an old invisible anchor. There is a later – childhood – layer that includes anxiety along with what might be called fearful wonder: organic pleasure mixed with global anxiety and depression and a feeling, not of inferiority, but an emotionalized sense of being “less than.” In adolescence, there came the layer of narcissism, sitting atop the earlier layers. From the beginning, there was the abyss of need, the never-met need for bond. This was the abject dependent person, always immanent in a character that may seem independent. Eventually, decades later, I came to detect my complete inability to move in the absence of a semblance of bond.

Now, there is the inscrutable feeling of being a helpful therapist (when I am). This layer is mostly melancholic. Can I call it a good melancholy?

And today there is going out on a blue and bright late Sunday morning, feeling the sun seeping in like mental health. It’s a good feeling. Which I know is riding precariously on the other layers.

We are all our layers at all times. It’s when the ones below are heavier, more steadfast than the surface that we come to therapy. Here, we’re facing a semi-impossible task: fiddle magically with our past existences, the anchors, while making much more of the sunny busy surface than it warrants. I do that a lot when I send my clients cartoons or engage with them in “problem solving.”