it's not the feelings that are the problem

it's the unrelieved (and unrelievable) accumulation that's the problem. The inability to find relief. Or help. Or anybody who actually gives a shit, on a daily, real, actual basis. In my life. In my actual, real life. Not online. Not via phone. Not by paying some complete stranger a bunch of money.

What I bloody fucking well need is someone who actually, genuinely, gives a shit.

The worst thing about it, I think, is the gradually increasing disconnection from reality. I no longer know what is real. I spend so much time lost in thought - reading, watching movies - that 'reality' is a concept that no longer has much meaning. Who cares? What difference does it make in a world, a country, a culture, where everything is manipulated by those with the most power to mold the world around them to match their own perceptions? When the average person might as well be living in a video game for all the contact they have with the actual people in their lives. In this country, people are absorbed in the lives of fictional characters and celebrities (and what's the difference, really?) while consigning responsibility for the real feelings of the real people in their lives to - someone else. A shrink, preferably - a paid 'carer'.

I swear to god, if I see another pair of people walking down the street while having separate cell phone conversations and paying no attention whatsoever to the person they're actually with, I will fucking kill them both. Or at least smash their fucking cell phones and scream at them, Fucking pay attention! Or a couple at a restaurant busily playing 'who's more important' by competing to see who can spend the most time on their strawberries rather than fricking talking to each other.

feels like i'm becoming someone else

as if I am no longer myself.

As if, in the process of pruning off unwanted people, trying to block out painful bits with which I can no longer cope alone - somehow, I'm losing track of who I am. As if I am slowly being carved away, til nothing is left.

I looked in the mirror just now, and I didn't recognize myself at all. Who is this person? I wondered. Where is grasshopper? Where has she gone? I have become so much in the habit of hiding everything 'unpleasant' that I fear I'm losing myself entirely.

I don't know who I am.

How can I find myself? Is there a map? Who knows the way?

let's see what happens

Keep returning to the image of the wolf chewing off her leg to escape the trap. Feels like that's what I have done/am doing with my family: Escaping the 'trap' of my family role is so essential to my survival that I have no other choice.

So I do what I have to do. In a way, it simply feels like, What happens if I do this? Like, Ok, here are several 'choices'. You've already tried the other one; tried the path of 'good girl, do what's expected'. It was seriously fucking you up; was killing you, whether anybody outside of you can actually perceive that fact is beside the point. You're the one who has to live in here, with you, inside these feelings. You're the one who has to make the choice: should I stay or should I go. It seemed clear to me that 'stay' = death; 'go' = life, or at least the possibility of same. Hope. Potential. Go toward the light, grasshopper, and I don't mean the one at the end of the tunnel, or the one they talk about in near-death experiences. I'm talking about growing toward the light of hope, the way a blade of grass grows, simply, toward the sun.

And not to make it sound as if I take this choice lightly; it's just that, once the agonizing is done, once the choice is made, one simply has to move on. The outcome will reveal itself in time. Hopefully, I have not made a choice that is as dire as chewing off a leg; hopefully I will soon find some metaphor that... wait just a goddamn minute. I've just realized that the societal 'shoulds' have leaked into my brain again while I wasn't looking. 'Put on a happy face'. Fuck that shit - it's the same ol', same ol', Don't bother me with your problems, kid, only dressed up as fancy, NewAge (pronounced like 'sewage') bullshit.

Ok - lather, rinse, repeat. Each lesson will be repeated until learned. Etc.

So it's society, and perhaps my family, as my up-close and personal representatives of same, who insinuate the 'wolf-chews-off-leg-to-escape-trap' meme into my head. Uh huh. Ok.

Now what? Find new meme, grasshopper, one that works for you. Second verse, same as the first means you haven't escaped the cage yet. You've stuck your head out, looked around, not sure it's safe out there. Frying pan, fire. Which to choose? The known tigers inside the cage, or - what? It's beyond the edges of the map, or as the old-timers used to say, Here be dragons. The unknown.

Stepping off the map.

i grew up listening to men's voices;

the women in my life were largely silent.

Unlike the stereotypes of family gatherings where the women chatter like hens, flocking together to gather and sort and sift the details of family life, the women in my family seemed fragmented - nothing held them together, at all, except the fact that they'd married men who were brothers. They rarely seemed to have much to say to one another; my mom's few comments about my aunts seemed catty and resentful (which, these days, I might attribute to being trapped in patriarchal, emotionally oppressive marriages - it's all about competition for status within the constraints of the passive, wifely role).

I don't even know what my mother did at these large clan gatherings - in my mind, and in many photos, she is simply absent. Maybe I picked up my penchant, at least in later life, for lurking at the margins of rooms, evading the limelight, from her? Funny how these things don't become clear until a great deal of time has passed, until one is able to view things from some distance. Up close, the details blur, it all becomes part of what is; there's no ability to sort, categorize, attribute, make sense of things. One thing just happens after another, with seeming randomness. The pattern, if there is one, doesn't emerge until one can look from afar, as if viewing the scene of one's life from an airplane high above.

***
It strikes me that, after dad died, mom must have begun making up for lost time: she became an unending chatterbox, one of those oblivious yammerers who'd hold you in the death grip of painful, relentless detail about people you'd never met (and never would) and couldn't care less about; it was as if, by filling every speck of airspace solidly from edge to edge with the trivia of the lives of random strangers, no stray unwelcome thought about her own life could intrude. It felt (still feels) like a kind of static, the blank screen on the TV when there's no reception. I once, puzzling over this strange affliction with my younger brother, referred to it as 'Radio Mom'.

It was as if, no matter when you called or stopped by, no matter where you were or what you were doing, she'd immediately drop into whatever train of thought was uppermost on her mind - such as a minutely detailed and exhaustive (exhausting?) post-mortem of a visit to her favorite coffee shop, and exactly what the favored barista said, and what said barista was doing with her life, and how the barista's friend had told a story about yet another acquaintance...by this point I'm beating my head against the wall to keep from screaming "shut up!" at her in absolute frustration and mind-numbing boredom. "If I ever get like this?" I said to my brother, "shoot me. Just shoot me. Put me out of my misery."

***
These thoughts were triggered by reading Caroline Knapp's essays, realizing that never have I been inspired into a flood of self-expression by a woman author before.

Why is that, I wondered? And realized that I grew up reading books by men, about men; I think I identified with male characters more than female ones, and working out the above ideas about the silence of the actual women in my life reinforces this notion.

I've had to consciously seek out women writers, women filmmakers, women whose stories get told as loudly and unselfconsciously as mens'.

You know what? There aren't many. Women's stories, I mean. Women are largely eradicated from the history books; a token woman here and there - Joan of Arc, Madame Curie. Many, if not most of the women who are allowed to make it into the halls of fame have tragic stories, as if women are only truly likeable if we suffer, a lot. But silently, and with a smile on our faces, troubling no one with our woes. The most celebrated women are those who sacrifice themselves to the men in their lives - fathers, husbands, brothers, sons. Florence Nightingale; Queen Elizabeth; Mother Teresa. The ones who are canonized are those who serve, endlessly, unquestioningly, unstintingly. Those who rebel? are dead - Thelma and Louise is the first example that comes to mind.

Wandering, random, meandering thoughts aside (oh no - I'm turning into my mother! Aaaagggghhhh!!!) I think Knapp's writing inspires me because she's so unapologetic, and mostly seems not to be trying to be clever or to impress you with her wit and erudition. What she says is so plain, honest and open - not quite raw - more as if she's simply speaking to you, directly from her experience, hiding nothing, a seeker after truth. Maybe that's what resonates for me: This honesty, this willingness to hold nothing back if by doing so one is able to expose, to uncover, the truth. Such as it is and what there is of it.

finding the story

that allows you to be released from the incessant expectations of others. A framing, a way of telling the truth, that allows you both to be who you are while acknowledging the way you are inevitably shaped by the world around you.

Reading The Merry Recluse, the last essay in the book by the same name. She describes the moment that this phrase arrived in her mind, and how it freed her from the mindset that had trapped her before in the unflattering, often unsympathetic perceptions of others about singlehood.

Re-framing. How does one do it? I feel as if this is exactly what I seek - the right phrase, the right angle from which to view my life, my circumstances, my story, so that I can tell it in a way that is pleasing to me. To hell with what everyone, anyone, else may think. Who knows what they think, anyway? Most people don't know their own thoughts much of the time, as near as I can tell. Thoughts are like the weather - the zen concept of monkey-mind, that running, endless, often meaningless commentary that's like tuning in to Stream of Consciousness Radio, 98.wacky on your dial.

Like all things, I think it just happens when the moment is right - the seed is planted, you've watered it well. But you just have to wait - there's no forcing the sun to come out, to warm the soil to just the right temperature for the right number of days for your little seedling to pop out of its safe cocoon of dirt. It'll happen when it's ready.

***
Reading further, she captures almost perfectly the ambiguous feelings of being single, caught between enjoyment of one's 'freedom' and envying couples and families:

Why don't I want that? That's what comes up. Why do I find the fantasy - husband, family, kids - exhausting instead of alluring? Is there something wrong with me? Do I have a life?

I think it's what she describes in a previous essay, Time Alone:

Isolation - the impulse to isolate - is about fear and self-protection; it's about creating a cocoon, a place so seductively comfortable it becomes difficult to leave. It is not, strictly speaking, about solitude, although access to solitary time certainly comes in handy. But I can be isolated - can feel isolated - in a roomful of 25 people, at a party, in the middle of a week that's peppered with social obligations. The sensation has to do with flight, with distance, with a compulsion to erect barriers and hide behind them, lest others see how fearful I am beneath the surface, or how troubled. Get me out of here. That's the feeling. I am uncomfortable. I need to be alone.
[...]
That's the difference between solitude and isolation: solitude is calm and serene, isolation is fearful; you bask in the one, wallow in the other.
[...]
...how quickly solitude can turn to isolation, how quickly that soothing sense of self-sufficiency can be replaced by the sense of estrangement, and how difficult it is to get back into the world once you've stepped away from it, as though you've entered some alien obit and can't quite propel yourself back into the normal, human one. Solitude is about cultivating peace and quiet; isolation is about yielding to fear, and the more you yield to fear, the tighter its grip on you becomes. Spend too much time without people and the simplest social activities - meeting someone for coffee, going out to dinner - begin to seem monumental and scary and exhausting, the interpersonal equivalent of trying to swim to France.

She captures, for me, the essence of what it is to be terrified of other people. There's this mystery, some secret that everyone else seems to know but somehow you've never acquired the knack for: being at ease around others.

Knapp doesn't seem to have the tendency toward self-examination that I seem to have developed (maybe from reading too much 'self help' stuff) - she seems, more often than not, to simply tell her stories as if she were slightly detached, observing herself from a distance.

Maybe this is what writers do? Or maybe, even, is why they write? They can't speak of what they 'see' in real life, it'd be too strange, too odd, too awkward. Since there's no one to speak to about it, no one who seems to share that exact experience (or who's willing to admit it), they have to let it out via the relative anonymity of print. The word 'confessional' comes to mind, (which, I realize, is not an original idea). A way of purging all the bottled-up feelings, longings, desires, frustrations of a lifetime. A way to let it all out, but at a safe distance from whoever might receive this message in a bottle. Thus is the socially awkward, shy, introverted recluse converted into a powerful voice who can speak for all the others out there who are unable to find such an outlet. Her voice channels the longings of all those who, like her, wish they could break out of the cage of fear and shame.

Which is why 'merry recluse' is so powerful, at least potentially: It reframes her story from sad, shy spinster to a woman of life and letters who chooses this path for herself after careful consideration of her options.

Of course, once again, I'm reminded of fundamental misattribution error, the human penchant for explaining things in the ways that are most convenient to maintaining our self image or view of the way things should be. A bit of rationalization is always handy for taking the edge off of too much raw, undiluted truth.

Unfortunately I don't think it worked for Knapp any better than it works for most of us - the need for real, genuine, fulfilling human connection cannot be assuaged by any amount of mental contortionism. The reality is, we simply need other people. Whether we're able to actually get said needs met is another question altogether.

But I think it gave her peace, at least temporarily. As one who has spent much of my life agonizing over where I went wrong, starting long before I'd really had a chance to actually make many mistakes of such life-changing direness*, I'm glad she was able to find some respite from the pain of feeling like an outsider, if only for a moment. That she was able to find some joy, even a kind of grace, in being exactly who she was. And that her 'moment' is captured in print allows the rest of us to see where she went, and feel a little less alone in our own struggles. As a fellow recluse, I am grateful to her for leaving her story behind for all to see.

And I'm under no illusion that she did it for me, or you, or any other reader - she did it for herself, as we all do: the hope that somewhere, sometime, someone will see who she is (or was, she died in 2002) will vindicate all that pain, all that suffering. That it will not have been for naught :-) She did not go quietly.

***
I feel as if Caroline Knapp sacrificed herself, in a way; she died of cancer, which to me is the demise of ultimate self-sacrifice - being eaten alive by all the buried angers and resentments of a lifetime. (My father died of cancer, and I still think it was because he always pretended to be 'fine', no matter what. Put on the happy face. He had hundreds of people at his memorial service, which I know I never will: Because I'm not nice. Or, at least, I'm trying to no longer be 'nice' in the ways that are damaging to my physical and mental health. I've had plenty of people say I'm a 'nice' person in ways that caught me off guard, given that I grew up feeling like there was something fundamentally, basically wrong with me.)

Not to accuse her for her own death; however, I do believe that by swallowing the poison of being 'good', one result is that we die a slow, painful death of being silenced by our goodness.

I have never really wanted to be 'good'; I chose it as the lesser of the weevils (once again).

Now I'm trying to break out of the trap. Easier said than done. Dad lived to be 48; I'm 46. We'll see how far I get. Grandfather managed to live to be 90-something in spite of what appeared to be a lifetime of depression masquerading as taciturnity. Maybe living out in the country was part of it? Who knows. Dad's side of the family (except for dad) seem to be of fairly hardy stock. It's a liability in some ways - no matter how sick you are, you still look frickin' healthy as a horse.


*As evidence I offer this 'poem' from a pain-filled teenage night in a college dorm room, feeling alone, terrified of the loneliness, seeing my life stretching ahead as a desert from which I would never escape:

bitterness, pain, tears - self-pity for a life wasted
carelessly spent, irreplaceable, unredeemable
null and void
a cancelled check.

once begun with clean, pure slate
opportunity, limitless; capabilities, unbounded;
slowly dribbles away, like an hourglass' sand
till naught remains but dust.

a faint powder, mere residue
marks the passage of a soul
scarcely noticed, the remains soon forgotten
scattered far and wide by the winds of time.

in pursuit of a unified field theory

Seems like all these posts, thoughts, ideas - pretty much everything I've ever written or read or talked about has something to do with trying to find the underlying pattern, the key, the link, the rosetta stone, the magic decoder ring...

The problem with all these attempts at understanding is that I can't understand it with my brain. That's the basic fallacy, the fatal flaw behind the failure of most 'therapy' or what have you to achieve any long-term, lasting, sustainable change: The change needs to come from the system, not the individual. When the system changes, the individual's experience will change; her sense of being supported by the system will change; and suddenly, voila - she no longer needs to change.

The problem was never with her in the first place. The problem was (and continues to be) that she does not get what she needs from her environment.

A friend once passed along this anecdote about how cells work. He'd been under the impression that cells are designed to sort of 'hunt' after certain chemicals in their environment. That is, that a cell that is meant to 'capture' (layperson language) some substance from its environment - say, sodium, for example - sort of motors around its universe until it 'finds' some sodium and then munches it up, kind of like a very tiny PacMan.

But the reality, according to this friend's friend (a more science-y type), is that the cell evolved, and is designed to exist, in an environment that naturally provides a certain amount of sodium.

So it's not so much that the cell 'hunts' for what it needs - it's designed, by nature, to be 'receptive' to the thing it evolved to need. In other words, it's a sort of symbiotic relationship: The environment has a bunch of sodium, so a cell in this environment gradually adapts to having a lot of sodium in its environment. In fact, it comes to expect (at a biological level) that there will be a certain amount of sodium in its environment.

The cell doesn't have to go hunting, at all - it just sort of sits there and 'waits' til some sodium bumps into it, and then absorbs it right up. Yum! Happy cell! :-)

I think damn near every 'problem' humans have can essentially be likened to an inadequate supply of sodium in their environment.

Now, you can say, But humans are smart, and mobile, and we can go and find what we need. We don't have to just sit there and wait!

True. But I contend that that ability to hunt for what we need arose in times of environmental stress - that our organisms evolved in times of plenty, and that the 'adaptations' such as nomadic behavior, were later add-ons to cope with our resources suddenly drying up.

The problem is, once we're out of the 'drought' period, we continue to use those same adaptations as if they were still necessary. The organism doesn't seem to naturally 'reset' itself - it seems to get 'stuck' in whatever mode current conditions demand, regardless of whether conditions revert to 'normal' (meaning, the environment in which the organism evolved its current characteristics).

trauma bond

Feel like a little beacon sending out my signals, seeking that connection I never got as a child, that essential feeling of belonging, somewhere. Like a little tracking device, radar, homing in on any 'source' that might give me what I need. Keep trying to attach, attach, make up for what was lost. I think some people meet that need (or attempt to meet it) via the modern idea of 'romance'. If you want to know what I really think, I'm beginning to believe that all modern-day versions of so-called 'love' are more or less some attempt to satisfy that deep-seated need, to whatever degree it went unmet. And in most western cultures? It went severely unmet. Read Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller, The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, anything by John Bowby and Mary Ainsworth on attachment theory. Anyway...

I, like many others, still carry that hunger inside me. Every day, sometimes many times each day, that hunger awakens, and gnaws away at me, trying to get my attention, trying to get me to do something about it. I read somewhere that the vagus nerve modulates the 'connection' impulse - that is, it's directly involved in the translation from 'need' to 'action', and that when satisfaction of the connection 'need' gets repeatedly blocked by one's life experience, eventually a sort of numbing occurs, a separation between the upper and lower halves of the body, as if a major wire had been cut. I experience this viscerally, the image that comes to mind is of that magician trick where the assistant appears to be cut in half yet still alive, each half contained in apparently separate boxes.

(Randomly popped into my head just now: Wonder if the whole phenomenon of 'cutting' fits in here somehow? Unbearable emotional pain blocked from conscious awareness demands expression, relief; cutting floods the system with many of the same pain-relief/pleasure chemicals that 'love' does? I bet bulimia works along similar lines.)

I speculate that what is called 'sex addiction' (do I have the right term? I think it's a stupid label, just as I tend to think all pejorative labeling does no good whatsoever, only adding insult to injury) is a response to this 'disconnect' - sex, particularly orgasm, triggers all kinds of 'bonding' chemicals that appear to be essential to our physical, mental and emotional well-being (chemicals such as oxytocin, for example).

So the drive to have sex is actually an appropriate response, in some ways - the organism is attempting to get its needs met in spite of the so-called 'logical' brain's message telling it that its instincts are bad, dangerous, wrong or harmful.

The problem is that when one's 'connective' hardware, or programming, or whatever language works for you, goes haywire, then no amount of sex is going to cure the problem. Sex without love, without intimacy, without a whole hell of a lot of patience for the emotional turmoil that inevitably accompanies the untanglement of such deep-rooted trauma, will generally only serve to exacerbate the problem. It would be like substituting soy burgers for a real beefsteak - the body craves iron, red-blooded heme-source; the soy tickles the tastebuds, but fails to satisfy. You could eat a million of them, and get really fat, and still be starving. In the same way compulsive sex becomes a really horrible kind of junk food for the soul.

Following this train of thought, the article (which I may try to hunt down a link for, no promises) suggested that sublimatory activities such as exercise (which is often suggested by self-help books as a way to take the edge off), may actually be counter-productive, in that it takes energy and focus away from the real need and distracts it toward a substitute which, while possibly triggering some of the same chemicals released in the body by loving, connected touch, in no way shape or form compensates for the lack of love. In other words, it's yet another kind of junk food.

Our culture seems very attached to this junk food approach to life, on all levels, and seems to become more so every day. Going against this lemming-like march into a robotic, sanitized, emotionless future feels like a gargantuan, sisyphean task.

There are many ways people find to cope with, hide from or mask these unfulfilled needs. Some ways are considered more socially acceptable than others. The one thing that seems to be unacceptable in our culture is to actively, openly seek to have one's needs met.

Because needs are, in and of themselves, shameful - a sign of weakness.

people who are unaware of subtleties

think said subtleties don't matter.

For example, when I sit concertmaster of a group, I like to know in advance who the other players are going to be. This helps me map out in my mind what the various power dynamics are likely to be, and to conserve and/or build my energies accordingly (it takes a lot of energy for me to stand up to people who might like to undermine my position, for example. And trust me, there are plenty of those - regardless of who's sitting in that chair, there are some who suck up to the person, and others who will pretend that you're no better than they are, and therefore undeserving of respect.)

The conductor, on the other hand, often thinks (or appears to think) of us as interchangeable cogs in the machine of her orchestra, and fails to recognize how the intricate power dynamics of a group can make or break its functioning. It would be as if the four horses pulling a carriage all wanted to go different directions, and yet were harnessed together in such a way that they were forced to pull the same way. They would appear on the surface to be pointing the 'right' direction, but the hostilities between them would be visible to a close observer as a misplaced hoof, or bared teeth, or a certain stubbornness that manifested in the horse being uncooperative and belligerent. Said hostilities would slow the carriage down, at the least, and make the team unruly and difficult to manage at best. The driver would have to spend a lot of energy micromanaging, and would further stir things up by over-using the whip.

People who are harnessed together to meet an external goal not of their own choosing (which I think is a fair description of the mercenary mindset of many freelance musicians), will tend to be businesslike, in other words, 'professional', but there won't be the kind of camaraderie that allows there to be a true joy and freedom in the music. Which sort of tends to kill its spirit, if you ask me...

Working for a conductor who's oblivious to these dynamics is, I imagine, like working for a politician: The guy is always saying what he thinks people want to hear in order to keep his position; he does a lot of sucking up. And yet when he's around people he thinks owe him fealty, he tends to mistake peoples' deference for fear, and can often be quite dismissive of their questions, needs and concerns. Sometimes people like these see the mere fact of asking a question as a sign of weakness. Blargh.

I find the best way to deal with people like this is to be slightly abrupt, almost rude, and a little demanding; it keeps them on their guard and reminds them not to take you for granted. Keeping your distance can be a good thing. Especially when they then kiss up to you to try to woo you back (why am I suddenly thinking that this sounds a lot like an abusive relationship???), it's good not to give in.

power

Well, still workin' on understanding this whole 'power' thing. The more I think and read and write about it, the more it seems to influence every goddamn last tiny interaction with another human I ever have.

It's frustrating. I know I'm supposed to just 'accept' it, not fight it - but dammit, seems to me there has to be a better way. Or, at least, another way. A different way. An alternative.

It's just that no communication, no matter how small, is ever what it appears to be on the surface. There are all these complicated ways in which people are constantly vying for position, seeking to establish their position in the pecking order.

If you behave in some way that appears to this person to be outside their beliefs about where you belong in the hierarchy, they will almost immediately find some way to try to 'force' you back into the position they think 'belongs' to you. (Argh, this is making my brain hurt.)

we have far less control than we like to think

From The Emotional Brain (1996) (bolds mine):

One of the biggest surprises from LeDoux's work is that there may be no such thing as the limbic system -- a brain structure that has been supposed to underlie emotion and motivation. All students are taught about the limbic system, LeDoux said, "but in my opinion, it's no longer a valid concept."

[...]in 1974 and 1975, experiments carried out on so-called split brains attracted his attention. In people who had had the connection between the left and right brain hemispheres severed, the left side often did not know what the right side was doing. But emotional information seemed to be leaking across the hemispheres, suggesting a different sort of wiring than for language or movement.

He said that at the time cognitive scientists tended to confuse emotions and feelings. LeDoux says that emotions are hard-wired, biological functions of the nervous system that evolved to help animals survive in hostile environments and procreate. The emotional systems underlying fearful, sexual or feeding behaviors are pretty similar across species, though each emotion may have its own separate neural wiring.

Feelings, in LeDoux's scheme of things, are "red herrings," products of the conscious mind, labels we give to unconscious emotions. "What we really want to study is the brain system that generates emotions," LeDoux said, not the higher brain systems that read meaning into them. Because many researchers thought they first had to understand consciousness and feelings, he said, they were intimidated and stayed away from emotions.

One of the biggest surprises from LeDoux's work is that there may be no such thing as the limbic system -- a brain structure that has been supposed to underlie emotion and motivation. All students are taught about the limbic system, LeDoux said, "but in my opinion, it's no longer a valid concept."
[...]
On closer examination, LeDoux found that the amygdala is designed to detect predators. For example, when rats are threatened, they emit very high frequency (20,000 to 30,000 cycles per second) screams. When another rat hears this scream, a signal goes from the auditory cortex, where sounds are processed, directly to the amygdala. In other words, says LeDoux, when these sound waves penetrate the rat brain, the amygdala is instantly activated even though it does not "know" the sound is coming from another rat.

The human brain is similarly wired, LeDoux said. A visual stimulus, perhaps the sight of a snake on a dirt path, will travel to the amygdala in a few thousandths of a second. The human amygdala contains cells that fire in response to expressions on faces and may also react to objects of fear.

But, LeDoux said, the amygdala is specialized for reacting to stimuli and triggering a physiological response, a process that he would describe as the "emotion" of fear. That is distinct from a conscious feeling of fear, LeDoux said. Feelings, he said, arise from a second, slower pathway that travels from the ear to the amygdala and then on to the higher cortex. There, the frightening stimulus is analyzed in detail, using information from many parts of the brain, and a message is sent back down to the amygdala.

If the message is a false alarm -- hey, it is a stick and not a snake -- the cortex will try to abort the amygdala's alarm signals. But the person will have felt a jolt because of the initial arousal of the amygdala.

This double pathway is very different from the limbic system that is taught to every biology student, LeDoux said. The limbic system is a hypothetical construct of pathways in the forebrain, which contains the hippocampus, amygdala and a few other tiny structures, that supposedly gets all sorts of sensory input from the external world -- sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste -- as well as from the viscera. When these sensations are integrated in the limbic system, emotional experiences occur.

Such double wiring can create problems for people, LeDoux said. Neural connections from the cortex down to the amygdala are less well developed than are connections from the amygdala back up to the cortex. Thus,

the amygdala exerts a greater influence on the cortex than vice versa.

Once an emotion is turned on, it is difficult for the cortex to turn it off.

are things like asperger's adaptations to dysfunctional culture

a wild idea occurred to me today: Is the dramatic increase in social 'disorders' actually in fact the response of the human organism to prolonged exposure to the unnatural requirements of life in a capitalistic culture like the U.S.?

that Charlie Brown feeling

you know the one - Lucy puts the football on the ground in front of Charlie Brown, waits for him to kick the ball. Charlie Brown comes running up, draws his foot back to give it a good kick, and - Bam! Suddenly he's flat on his back on the ground.

Why? Because that b*tch* Lucy yanked it out from under him at the last minute. And she does this every time; and he keeps falling for it. Why??? Is he stupid? That's how it seems. But there's part of you that knows he's just a trusting soul (some would say 'gullible'), and you like that about him. You just wish he wouldn't get suckered over and over and over.

Some people are just like that.

This came up because I was thinking about my mom and her perpetual emotional unavailability, and how that felt, and how hard it was to figure out that that was what was going on; it took me most of my life to even notice, let alone understand. And I still puzzle over it; I mean, she's there, and she's looking at you, and she appears to be interested.

And yet - and yet. It's like there's this big, empty, aching void where the feeling of connection should be.

It finally dawned on me that it's because she's never actually there - she's sort of needy, and clingy, but not really listening. Or - she's sort of listening for something that she needs to hear, rather than listening to what you're saying, and trying to go where you are - empathize, or something. It's like trying to play ball with somebody who stands there and watches while you throw it to them, and every single time the ball ends up on the ground at their feet because they've made no effort whatsoever to catch it.

So the way this feels like the Charlie Brown thing is that she appears to be there, right up until the last minute. Until you actually need her, until that split second where the rubber actually meets the road. At that moment of truth, when you need her most, she isn't there. She vanishes, like the Road Runner, in a cloud of dust. (Need better analogy - RR knows perfectly well what she's doing. Mom, on the other hand, has no clue.)

In other words, she appears to be there, but really, she's not. Whenever you go to lean on her, there's nothing there to lean on.


*Yes, I'm a feminist. Yes, 'bitch' is a woman-derogating term. Unfortunately, in a patriarchy it's hard to come up with cuss words that have the appropriate oomph. So fuckin' sue me.


***
Ok, so now a quote, since my own words don't quite seem to be taking me where I'm trying to go. From a book called The transforming power of affect (bolds mine):

Unresolved disorganized attachment: Failed affective competence
Not feeling and not dealing. The unresolved-disorganized caregivers lose both contact and coherence; momentarily paralyzed on one side or the other of a dissociative state, they become unable to parent, and in that moment the child undergoes the trauma of loss.

Fear, a major disruptive affect if not relationally contained, is transmitted to the child, who is left completely unprotected in the face of helpless parental abdication.

Fancy language aside, what this says, as I understand it, is that fear is too big an emotion for little kids to handle alone. The only way they learn to handle it 'competently' - that is, handle it in such a way that they don't remain stuck in a fear state - is by having a grownup show them how.

Generally what this means is that the grownup gets down on the kid's level (either literally or metaphorically or both), and tries to see what the child is afraid of. Sometimes it's something obvious, like a spider or a scary person. But sometimes it's something that we as adults have 'learned' not to find frightening - for example, the way lots of small children are frightened by clowns.

Aside - I have to say, once again, that I'm feeling like the inability of autistics like ballastexistenz to be fooled by the surface 'act' that most 'grownups' (at least, Western ones) put on may actually be a feature, not a bug. In fact, said sensitivity, receptivity and perceptiveness may actually be a direct line back to our more connected-to-reality forbears, who didn't see themselves as 'separate' from the natural world. What I'm trying to say is, the level of dissociation required to function in our 'modern' world is actually quite unnatural. It may be functional, in that it serves a purpose, but the real question should then be: Whose purpose? To what end do we routinely, practically from birth, cut ourselves off from all the aspects of ourselves that make us most human???

The driver, I think, is capitalism. Greed, yearning for that which we don't have, causes people to cut off damn near every aspect of themselves that might prevent them from 'keeping up with the Joneses'. Along these lines, yet another comment mined from a comments thread over at ballastexistenz':

The fact is, that determining the moral worth of individuals is very much a capitalist view of things. After all, to the capitalist class, individuals are a resource to be exploited in making and selling goods and services to make profit. So if a person can’t do that, or at least not without lots of expensive ’support’, then from a capitalist point of view they are useless and therefore worthless. Of course, as the capitalist class control society, their world view is that of society.

And why are we so driven to 'keep up', to compete, to elevate our status at any and all costs? As somebody said somewhere, You can win the rat race, but you're still a rat...

Is it worth it, really? And if not, how do we extricate ourselves from this squirrel cage we find ourselves in?


***
Another thought stirred by some comments at BE's about how some of those labeled 'disabled' may try to denigrate or 'other' each other in order to get higher on the pecking order: It made me think of 'culling the herd', how the weak and elderly in a group of animals (or humans) would be allowed to fall by the wayside or would sometimes be actively killed so that they wouldn't slow down the rest of the group, or 'weaken the bloodlines'. Maybe this kind of thinking is still operant, at a subliminal, lizard-brain level? People who are 'normal' would never question this kind of 'thinking', because they'd never be the ones to get culled. Anybody who fell outside of 'normal', though, might live in unending fear of being the one to be left behind to die.

trauma, attachment

Social attachment and the trauma response (bolds, emphases mine):

Human beings are strongly dependent on social support for a sense of safety, meaning, power, and control.

Even our biologic maturation is strongly influenced by the nature of early attachment bonds.

Traumatization occurs when both internal and external resources are inadequate to cope with external threat.

Physical and emotional maturation, as well as innate variations in physiologic reactivity to perceived danger, play important roles in the capacity to deal with external threat. The presence of familiar caregivers also plays an important role in helping children modulate their physiologic arousal. In the absence of a caregiver, children experience extremes of under-and over arousal that are physiologically aversive and disorganizing. The availability of a caregiver who can be blindly trusted when their own resources are inadequate is very important in coping with threats. If the caregiver is rejecting and abusive, children are likely to become hyper-aroused.

When the persons who are supposed to be the sources of safety and nurturance become simultaneously the sources of danger against which protection is needed, children maneuver to re-establish some sense of safety. Instead of turning on their caregivers and thereby losing hope for protection, they blame themselves.

They become fearfully and hungrily attached and anxiously obedient. Bowlby calls this "a pattern of behavior in which avoidance of them competes with his desire for proximity and care and in which angry behavior is apt to become prominent."
[...]
The separation response

Primates have evolved highly complex ways to maintain attachment bonds; they are intensely dependent on their caregivers at the start. In lower primates, his dependency is principally expressed in physical contact, in humans this is supplemented by verbal communication. [One researcher] suggests that language is an evolutionary development from the mammalian separation cry that induces caregivers to provide safety, nurturance, and social stimulation.

Primates react to separation from attachment figures as if they were directly threatened.

Thus, small children, unable to anticipate the future, experience separation anxiety as soon as they lose sight of their mothers. Bowlby has described the protest and dispair phases of this response in great detail. As people mature, hey develop an ever-enlarging repertoire of coping responses, but adults are still intensely dependent upon social support to prevent and overcome traumatization, and under threat they still may cry out for their mothers.

Sudden, uncontrollable loss of attachment bonds is an essential element in the development of post-traumatic stress syndromes.

On exposure to extreme terror, even mature people have protest and despair responses (anger and grief, intrusion and numbing) that make them turn toward the nearest available source of comfort to return to a state of both psychological and physiologic calm. Thus, severe external threat may result in renewed clinging and neophobia in both children and adults. Because the attachment system is so important, mobilization of social supports is an important element in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

dissociation as survival mechanism

Zoning out? How the body copes.

Dissociation is a survival mechanism
Dissociation is a state. It's a protective mechanism called up by the nervous system when it reaches its maximum capacity to process stimulation (both internally and externally).

Imagine having to interact with people all day and by the end of the day you can't speak another word. You go home to regroup, anxious to get into your latest book. But you can't concentrate. You keep "floating" away into a thoughtless and timeless void. Oddly enough, your favourite book seems boring.

Dissociation caps the keyed up and restless energy underneath. It numbs the body so that one feels less internal distress. It's a good temporary back up plan devised by nature for coping when we feel overwhelmed. But it has its drawbacks.
[...]
[One therapist] likens dissociation to a circuit breaker shutting off when house wiring gets overloaded.

vicious cycles

those of us who didn't get what we needed as children grow up to be

people who can't get what we need...

...because we didn't get what we needed as children.

How fucked up is that?????

Not our fault, but definitely our responsibility...

Picturing a plant in a pot on wheels carrying its own watering can and portable sunshine around with it. Is this what they're trying to tell us? Or am I missing something?

when I cry

it's scary, because I need for someone to hear me, and respond, and yet that terrifies me, at the same time - if they respond, I need them not to cling to me, thinking somehow that the crying is about them (you won't believe this, but it's happened more than once, not just with my mother.)

I need to hang on to somebody, desperately. I mean, not that the hanging on itself would be desperate, but I mean I really need it, badly. It's like I'm trapped in this place where I can't go forward and I can't go back and I can't go sideways and I can't go anywhere, really, except just sit here and wait for it to stop.

Sometimes I try the Jack Daniels; sometimes that works, for a few hours. Tried it this afternoon - not working - slept for about an hour, brief relief, but as soon as it faded, I'm back in this gritchy, scritchy, dry-eyed need to cry, to hang on, to bellow, to wail. To just hang on.

Why won't they let me? Why is it such a bad thing, such a horrible thing, to need something from somebody? How did things get to be this way, so that everything in human relationships is upside down and backward from the way it's supposed to be???

***
With my first partner (the five-year one) I kept up the 'autonomous' facade* - I think it's even part of what attracted him to me in the first place. I had that self-sufficient, yet somewhat nurturing air that so many men seem drawn to in women - I think it gives them the sense that we'll play 'mommy' for them, while never needing anything in return (which is, of course, what proper mommies do). It's funny (not) how the culture provides neatly for men to get unmet childhood needs met in their adult relationships - in fact it's almost set up that way - and yet women? Well, we're pretty much just fucked. In every way you can think of. And I know I've said that before, probably in exactly those same words. And I'll probably say it again.

My brother would say that's 'playing the victim'. Hm. Since when is 'pointing out a systemic injustice' the same as 'playing the victim'? Maybe you'd rather we went all Mary Antoinette on your asses and started chopping off heads? We could do that, y'know. In fact, Ms. Bobbitt had an idea along similar lines that put the shoe nicely on the other foot for a change. Gave a whole new realism to the idea of a 'castrating' whatsits.

I wouldn't mind meeting some of men's needs if they felt equally obliged to meet mine in return.

***
Once I understood what was going on, after the five-year partner and I split up, I searched long and hard for someone who'd be there for me. Never yet found him, but did find guys who were able to provide bits and pieces of what I needed, now and then.

The problem was that those tiny tastes only whetted my appetite - the effect was to bring to the surface the mountain of unmet needs that I still had to deal with. I can't deal with them alone, because they're relational; I can't meet them with a therapist, because that person is being paid to be a 'friend', in ways that only underscore (for me, at least) the falseness of the relationship. In a way the very use of therapy in and of itself is re-traumatizing, because it says that I can't have what I need unless I pay for it. Which is pretty goddamn fucking insulting if you think about it for even a split second - that I have to pay for things which should be a taken-for-granted, inherent, built-in part of every child's relationship with her parents says, yet again, that I am somehow so fucked up that I don't even deserve to have my most basic needs met.

What a fucking vicious cycle.


*To clarify, it wasn't really that I kept up the 'facade' of autonomy - it's more that I didn't even know I could ask for anything from a partner. I hadn't yet read all the self-help books that say that it should be a two-way street and all that.

this

Why do I resonate with practically every line of this story? I was never in an institution. I've never been diagnosed with anything (thank god!) I've experienced traumatic shit from therapists - being told I didn't feel what I felt, being laughed at, being told I had no problems, that I was going to be fine (despite having been depressed on and off for over 20 years).

But it's as if everything else about the story is true. They never medicated me - but they certainly shut me out, in every way they could think of. I remember one night with a boyfriend in college, curling up in the cold on the front porch, hoping someone would come pick me up. No one ever came, of course, and I eventually dumped the boyfriend. I've since learned at least to choose ones that could sense my distress and respond to it, even if they didn't stick around long after they realized how much reassurance I really needed...

The basic experience is: Your needs are too great. Your needs are too much. You are too much, in and of yourself. You take up too much space; you're too loud; you're not pretty enough. You're too smart, it's annoying, stop it. And yet somehow do everything we tell you to do without us even having to tell you to do it, let alone telling you how. Just do it. Just know. Just get the hell away from us and leave us alone.

From BE's blog:

I think there’s evidence that much of the therapy to do with traumatic experiences actually makes them worse. Certainly, there’s no way I’d go near therapy these days anyway since it’s part of what got me into this mess, and often it just perpetuates this kind of thing.

There’s a very simple but powerful poem written about the kind of situations you describe, though. The author of the poem, S. Marie (a pseudonym, she wrote a book called CAPTÏV) was writing about child abuse within a family, but this is a very good description of the effects.

They told me:
Don’t be ugly,
Don’t be pretty.
Don’t be stupid,
Don’t be smart.
Don’t be loud,
Don’t be shy.
Don’t be here,
Don’t be there.
Don’t be wrong,
Don’t be right.
Don’t be sad,
Don’t be glad.
Don’t be sick,
Don’t be well.

Don’t be.

Within psychiatry the word for the effects of living under that constant level of simultaneous bombardment and helplessness is ‘complex PTSD’, although I have a lot of trouble with psychiatric illness-type metaphors (and I view most psychiatric diagnoses as metaphorical) for awful experiences.

Interestingly, although institutions are a classic environment for developing this ‘complex PTSD’ thing, psychiatry never mentions them. (You can read more about the standard-psychiatry view of this here.

I’m going to do a really long quote from an interview I did with a friend of mine on the subject of institutions, and since the interview is super-long I’ll just quote part of it that has to do with how my responses were altered:

Laura: [The experience of institutionalization] makes me different. I’ve been away from it long enough that I don’t think I currently have any active sort of psych survivor behavior. But I can certainly spot them in other people…

Amanda: What kind of behavior?

Laura: Oh gee. I spotted it in you right away. How do I describe it? You were an obvious case of it. You had a kind of submissiveness that is not so much… it is a kind of submissiveness but it’s not submission in any kind of normal way. Especially since you were oftentimes looking for where the rules were, so you could follow the rules. Without necessarily appreciating the fact that there weren’t necessarily any rules for any particular event or… I don’t know how to describe it. You were waiting or looking for the institution around you, as if, it’s like, “Where is it, it’s hiding here somewhere!” This is not necessarily a very constructive behavior out in the real world, because it is particularly passive in many ways, and because it is sort of like looking around for it. I really got a sense that you were looking around all the time for the rules. And terribly terrified that you were violating all the rules. And meanwhile not necessarily getting what actually should be done, because you were busy looking for the rules. It’s a paradox there.

You had real problems with initiative, and since in the real world initiative is kind of what you actually have to do, the fact that you really had serious problems with initiative, combined with the fact that you were always looking for the rules, made for a really bad combination.

That’s something I see, but I certainly wouldn’t consider it the only thing I’d look for, if that makes any sense. Another thing, certainly, for you, was that you could not deal with the possibility that you’d done anything wrong without total panic. And that, simply telling you, simply correcting you in any way shape or form, created instant and total and absolute panic and terror and whatnot. And this makes perfect sense to me, because if you violate the rules, if you’ve done something wrong, in an institution, to the point where they’d point anything out at you, that means you’re in deep danger. So you may very well find yourself at the end of life-threatening abuse. And therefore it was very difficult to communicate things to you at times because you couldn’t deal with a correction just as a correction, because to you a correction meant a very dangerous situation indeed. Which isn’t normally what it is in the real world, but it certainly is exactly what it is in institution-land.

Amanda: And then there were the apologies…

Laura: Oh yes. The neverending… to properly read the apologies, read them as “Don’t hurt me! Don’t hurt me! Don’t hurt me! Please! Don’t beat me up, don’t tie me down, don’t torture me!” Which, I obviously had no plans on doing any of the above, but again you were reacting to the situation as if you were still in the psych hospital. And that obviously wasn’t the case, but again that’s a typical PTSD sort of thing. And I certainly understand it very well, because that kind of an experience really makes an imprint on a person for life. You can’t go through that experience of reaching that absolute bottom level of human experience without being seriously affected by it.

Amanda: As I recall it wasn’t just actions I was afraid of, it was thoughts.

Laura: Oh yes, of course. I didn’t go through that, but then I didn’t go through brainwashing. You did. I fortunately spent most of my time in places where they kind of throw you in there, lock you up, and kind of forget about you. I think the only time I ever saw doctors at state hospitals was when I was being admitted and when I was being released. So there was nobody there playing warp-your-brain with me.

Except for one thing: People had occasionally attempted psychotherapy with me outside of those kind of places, and fortunately I was able to get away from it, because I had no special orders to make me go through it. And my experience is that that stuff really twists your mind around. Given a choice between psychotherapy and getting drugged, I would easily pick getting drugged. It’s one thing to have your brain deadened — of course the third choice do neither of the above is my first choice — but, it’s one thing to suppress one’s thought and it’s another thing to get it all twisted up.

Psychotherapy messes with the brain. It basically tells you up is down and right is left and whatever. And especially when one is experiencing that level of badness, one is very vulnerable. I mean it is precisely the kind of thing that people who try to brainwash other people, the kind of environment they try to generate, because at that point people are very vulnerable, and you’re more likely to get them to do anything. I think it’s not accidental that what’s been happening to prisoners in Iraq, the things that they were doing to break down the prisoners, it makes a lot of sense. Terrorize people and humiliate them and make them feel as vulnerable as possible, and in fact people do tend to become emotionally and mentally vulnerable as well.

And so psychotherapy in that context can really mess one up. I mean all it takes is a therapist who thinks they know everything about you, they know all about your life, they know what you’re thinking, they know what you should think, they know what you’re experiencing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they tell you about what they know, and they tell you what you should know. Whether or not it has anything to do with reality.

They can really badly warp one to the point where, I never got to that point but I could easily picture it going to a stage where you truly did not know who you were. Just completely turning a person inside out and upside-down. And I think you had that experience. I didn’t, but I can certainly see it happening. And that kind of manufacture of an unperson is… is just… very bad. And I think that’s very much what was done to you. And I merely had enough of it to be aware of what could happen. And I’m very happy that I did not have to put up with much of it, courtesy of, hooray, bad insurance!

hyper-individualism as defense mechanism

if you don't have to consciously 'know' how you were left isolated and alone by your parents, then you don't ever have to face up to the absolutely terrifying fears of abandonment that accompany such deprivation, at a most soul-searing level.

If you define autonomy as a position of strength, then such language can hold the night terrors at bay. Maybe. Or, with a little help from our friends, Jack D., or possibly prozac, whatever your soul-numbing medication of choice might be.

If only we could reach for true healing, instead. If only we could learn to reach for each other, instead of curling in on ourselves like little hermit crabs, like the sea anemones that fold themselves up out of sight when touched.

imprints

still reading the same thread over at ballastexistenz, it's fascinating, the parallels. And what's so cool about it is how open everybody there is about their experiences - there's none of the so-called 'NT' bullshit about pretending it never happened. In fact, I wonder if that could essentially be the definition of NT: The ability to pretend that heinous shit that really happened to you never happened. Whaddya think? Am I on to something?

Second verse, same as the first: We're pattern-matching creatures. It's considered a feature, not a bug, the most basic aspect of humans that supposedly differentiates us from the rest of the critters. That, and our overgrown limbic brain (to be discussed elsewhere, maybe.)

So, if that's a given (and I'm going to assume it is, for the purpose of this post), then we tend to imprint experiences in a way that allows us to use said experiences for future reference. Sort of like a massive data-base, a big flip file of experiences that we then use to catalog current experiences into a sort of primitive binary of 'safe' versus 'not safe'. Or at least that's my best understanding/explanation of things at the moment.

***
This comment tickles more thoughts:

I much prefer not being reminded that I’m seperate from things around me…

Reminds me of yet another thing I read 'somewhere', about someone from a culture where, when she moved here ('here' meaning, a western culture, forget which one - she was, I think, from somewhere in Africa, possibly South African? Fuzzy.) Anyway, she described the most major culture clash for her as shifting from a world view where she really didn't think of herself as a separate being, was not so aware of herself as an 'individual' the way her new roommate in this new culture was. Quite a shock for her, and quite a revelation, for me, reading her comments. Wish I could find a link, but that was in a Google land long ago and far away, not sure how I ever stumbled across her in the first place.

I'm going to speculate and guess that not all cultures experience 'individuality' the way Americans do, exactly because of the aforementioned early childhood experiences of 'detachment' rather than attachment. In other words, our hyper-individualism (here in the U.S.) is a direct outgrowth of our childrearing practices, that separate mother from child far too early for the child's healthy sense of self. Contrary to western belief, this 'healthy sense of self' includes a really intense sense of interdepence, rather than the fierce (and false, I believe) sense of so-called 'autonomy' (or 'independence') that is so revered here.

when your mother never lets you separate

and yet never gives you what you need at one and the very same time.

This is a very basic form of gaslighting, or perhaps colonizing, or perhaps there's some other word. In fact I know there are other words for it, lots of them. But just now I'm trying to find my words, my own understanding of this.

Again reading ballastexistenz, she's talking about knowing the edges/limits of her own body, proprioception (sensory awareness of the objects around you, I think is what this means?) and the blurring between her sense of self and other.

When people have used this language with her (at least in the posts I've read so far), she seems not to understand. She's still in 'defense of the mother' mode - rebels against the refrigerator mom diagnosis (which I'm not saying she or any other autistic or other kind of person has, just trying to reflect what I've 'heard' her say so far in my readings).

From my own experience, learning to separate from my mother is key to me becoming an adult. I've remained a child so long because I had to, for so many years, be the parent of my parent; show her the way; help her through her emotional difficulties. If I hadn't drawn the line years ago (much to her resentment and not-so-subtle guilt-tripping, though childlike), she'd still be doing it to this day.

As it is, I experience a sapping of my will, a drainage, if you will, of my essential psychic energy. What some of the touchy-feely woo-woo types describe as a 'psychic vampire', and they talk about 'cutting the cord' between you and this person. Also in 'chi' terms, I've seen language that resonates somewhat that says we 'give our energy away' to these people - it depletes our most vital energy source, which in that language is kidney. I don't understand all this at any 'logical' level, but at a gut level I find some truth. The language(s) (all of them) tend to bother me somewhat with their specificity and didacticness (is that the word I mean?), but I use them because they're the closest approximation I have at the moment to what I think I'm experiencing. (Any more disclaimers and I'll be in the next solar system.)

I feel guilty, right this very minute, for cutting my mother out of my life, for drawing the line in the sand, for saying to her, Now I have to live my life. I cannot be your best friend, your big sister, your little buddy any more. I need you to grow up, so that I can, too.

But she won't. She's happy where she is; there's nothing driving her to change. She gets what she needs, more or less, by being who she is. So what can I do?

Well, I can do what I've done: Walk away. But that doesn't appease the hunger for a real mother, as I've probably written about a million billion bajillion times now. I'm still hungry.

I'm learning to let people feed me, when they can and will, like my neighbor the other day. I'm learning how not to demand that people take care of me, but to ask, like a grownup, and to graciously accept when they say, Sorry, but no. And to take the anger that sometimes results (depending on how compassionate the person's refusal seemed), and try to use it to seek help elsewhere - as an impetus to learn from the encounter, which people are true friends and which are simply not. And go ahead and regret or be sad about the loss of - what - an idea? Maybe it's more like a betrayal, a sense that you thought your relationship was one thing, while really, it was something completely different.

The blog entry and comment thread that stirred up this current post was this one. I'm alternating between reading it and writing here...a commenter I'm just reading is talking about understanding boundaries in a 'rational' sense but not having a good 'perceptual and emotional' sense of what boundaries are, or perhaps where they are.

This is what happens when you have a mother who is simultaneously intrusive, needy and unresponsive: She's in your face all the time with her needs, and yet is never there when you need her.

Feels like I should set that off in some way, in all caps, or print it out and frame it, because it pretty much sums up the whole 'victim' thing - playing the martyr, what have you - all the accusations we get that we bring it on ourselves.

Well, no, we don't, actually. We learned this stuff, at a level so deep, so primal, so instinctual that it's a wonder we have any access to it at all, really. When you get down to it, the miracle is that I've survived this long without my construct of reality clashing/crashing/impingeing (sp?) on something-or-other so severely that I came to a grinding, creaking, squeaking halt.

Or, come to think of it, I have come to a grinding, clashing, creaking, squeaking halt. This little machine that is grasshopper can no longer wobble forward on its duct-taped, chewing-gummed, paper-clipped, safety-pinned, and otherwise jury-rigged wheels. The sucker jest ain't hangin' together any longer.

And it's been great, I wouldn't trade it. It's given me an amazing run for my money!

But now I'm ready for a different kind of experience - a kind of connection that I know exists - I can feel it, smell it, taste it, hear it coming. Moments like with my neighbor the other day tell me that my gut belief that there is another way is true, and not a made-up fiction such as the bullies and other power-over types seem to like to believe. The trick is to create enough 'space' for myself to live in this un-coerced way that I prefer... (and for my next trick I'll be usin' Archimedes lever, watch out!!!!!! :-) :-) :-)

***
See, what I grew up with with my mother was the exact opposite what I needed, of what any child needs. What you need is someone who's there when you need them, and not there when you don't need them. Finding the right teachers is the trick. Course, they say, when the moment is right, 'the teacher will appear', or some such. Which sort of feels like what my neighbor is, but I'm afraid of looking at it (him?) directly, for fear he'll disappear. Kind of like the evil eye or something - don't draw attention to something precious by making too much noise about it!

And that's a thought: Can one develop a kind of complex PTSD from an endless series of relational disappointments, over and over and over again, like Charlie Brown? Constantly feeling betrayed and let down? Constantly feeling the rug pulled out from under you? It's the feeling of nothing being safe, no one being trustworthy, no one you can count on, ever. It seems to be the mantra of our culture: 'Take what you can and give nothing back,' like the pirates' code. Remorseless, unforgiving, unrepentant.

***
Skipping back and forth again between ballastexistenz and here, seems to me BE is talking about the basic sense of self that's supposed to develop when the primary caretaker (usually the mother) is sensitive to, and responsive to, the baby's cues about what she needs. Which includes the need to be left alone. If you read Jean Liedloff's stuff on Continuum Concept, she talks about how babies in 'the wild' (so to speak) were never the center of attention the way modern babies are. Primitive babies, or tribal children that she describes in her stories, are largely onlookers - passive participants, observers, in the lives going on around them. These babies gradually absorb adult behaviors simply by experiencing them - they're never, or rarely, activively taught how to behave.

For example yesterday I was in a restaurant and a little baby (just old enough to sit up on its own, not walking or talking yet) was in a high chair next to me. He started flailing around at one point, as if to get his mother to stop staring at him. I recognized the pattern, both from my own experience working through the stuff with my own mom and from my readings on the subject, and played a little peek-a-boo with him with my newspaper. He was instantly smiling and happy, and would have kept on playing the game if I hadn't gotten bored. Mostly I was frustrated with seeing, yet again, so many clueless parents everywhere...

And not being a parent myself, I realize it's an exhausting job, that I have no clue how hard, how endless, relentless and often thankless it is. But yes, I do have a little bit of a sense of it, from time spent with my nieces. I just don't have the 24/7 experience that actual parents do. I'm well aware of that. But still - sometimes it seems like parents create so much more work for themselves by fighting their babies' natural impulses. How much more peaceful life could be, or so it seems, if they just went with the flow....

Thishful winking, yes, I know.

***
Jumping back and forth again, reading a comment of BE's:

Combine that kind of stuff with being accustomed to being watched all day, and I suspect you could get someone who’s a little more confused than they even used to be about who could see their thoughts and who couldn’t. I know that I was out a couple years before I realized that nobody was going to jump out of the bushes and tell me how to walk or something.

Part of the feeling of 'vampirism' from my mother was that she was always watching me, as if she was waiting for something, wanting something, needing something. The 'observing' didn't seem to be passive - it seemed - somehow - needy? Or, that's not really the right word. 'Waiting' seems more accurate, almost as if she was trying to learn from me, instead of the other way 'round. Like she always needed me to 'lead', and not in the healthy sense that babies 'cue' their parents as to their needs by crying, thrashing around, what have you.

No, her needs seemed to be deeper than that - for someone to show her how. In fact, there have been times in fairly recent years that she's asked me literally 'how' to do something that I know she's being doing for years. Like boiling an egg, for example. It's really disconcerting, to have this person who's supposed to be your mentor, your support system, turning to you for help and encouragement. (And no, FYI, she's not senile. Just really, really dependent on others, and really, really good at denying this self-same dependence. Which feels like I'm making some sort of circular, or even possibly self-defeating, argument somewhere along the way. But hey - I'ma jest tryin'a work this stuff out here. That's why we call it 'Thinking Out Loud' in the subtitle.)

I suppose it would be different had the shoe ever been on the other foot. But it seems as if I've always been the one doing the leading, always the one venturing into new territory without a safety net, without a cheerleader, without a pit crew or emergency response team. Pretty scary shit.

And I know there are people who've been through worse - war orphans, people abandoned, beaten, abused by parents and other 'caretakers'; and yet, once again, I think it all comes down to expectations - you grow up in this quiet, well-to-do (or well enough-to-do), middle-class suburb. You think, at some entirely unconscious level, that these people are taking care of me. And yet, somehow, major emotional needs go unmet. As if you were actually living in some tiny, tarpaper shack somewhere, struggling through the Great Depression. As if, at any moment, all these bright, new, shiny things that dad strived so hard to obtain, would disappear, and you'd be back to your grungy, dirty, crowded roots. The nightmare never goes away.

So you project it into your reality, and your children experience your projected fears as if they're real.

Some really fucked-up shit there, know what I mean?

new territory

I think I only recently crossed over into new territory where I actually understand, in my gut, that it's ok to have another point of view.

I grew up with a mother whose felt view of the world was "my way or the highway". The irony of this is that these are the exact words she used to describe how her father treated her.

Same as it ever was, visited unto the daughters, yea and unto the untoldth, empteenth generation...fucked up, is what it is.

Anyway.

So what I'm getting at is that I finally really get what a friend said to me, years ago: Grasshopper, I don't need you to be like me.

At the time I experienced it as a 'validation', a blessing, a beneficience, a permission to be who I was. And yet, I didn't really understand it, because it went totally against my lived experience up to that point.

I mean, a few folks had mockingly tried to point out how I self-undermined all the time, but you know what? All I was left with was the feeling of being mocked, yet again. I never got the 'message' that they were trying to tell me, in their fucked-up and ineffective way, that I was ok the way I was. Another boyfriend seemed to puzzle over this too, once telling me that, You are a good person, grasshopper. As if realizing that I actually needed to be told this, to hear it out loud from someone who liked and cared about me. Fuck, was I ever messed up in the head! And LOTS of TLC. Never enough of that, should I live to be a hundred...

So when this guy said to me, I don't need you to be like me, I didn't really hear it - it was sort of vaguely like hearing it said about some other person, third person, at a great distance, not really about me at all. Like overhearing it said about another person in another room.

But now, finally, I'm beginning to get it, a little bit - through the lived experience of having someone actually help me, physically, tangibly, generously.

And now I'm afraid to rock the boat - afraid to ask for more, afraid it'll turn into something 'weird', afraid. Just afraid. So I hid out in my little house all day yesterday, trying so hard to 'get it right', not knowing the rules, not knowing how to find out. Doesn't feel safe to simply ask, most people treat you like you're crazy for even talking about this stuff. You're just supposed to know, somehow, magically, just like when I was a kid.

Sigh. Well, maybe I'll work up the nerve to talk to him about it. Maybe it will come out ok. Or maybe I'll figure out a way to fake being a 'grownup' well enough to find out without actually 'talking' about it. Dunno.

puzzle pieces

Today's Google harvest:
There's a horrible diagnosis in the DSM called bpd, and I'm going to leave it at that - I don't want any more of it to pollute this blog. Bullshit Psychiatric Diagnosis is what we're calling it here. I only bring it up because all of these artificial categories have some overlap, and sometimes you find a bit of gold even in the deepest pile of horseshit...

Time did an article on this Bullshit stuff, here's the link, and a particularly useful quote from the comments thread:

...an interesting approach is Peter Fonagy and Anthony Bateman’s Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT), which has shown some preliminary results that are promising. The idea is summarized as follows:

“… a pervasive history of invalidating (non-mentalizing) responses from attachment figures generates skills deficits primarily in emotionally charged interpersonal situations where social-cognitive capacities are essential. The failure of interpersonal understanding further compounds the social stress, leading to major difficulties of emotion regulation and interpersonal problem solving – at worst, actively evoking chaos in relationships” (Mentalizing in Clinical Practice, 2008, p. 275).

In other words, when you grow up with parents who haven't a clue, it fucks with your mind. It messes you up. It programs that little blank slate of your developing psyche with a bunch of weird-ass, unhelpful shit that keeps you from learning how to read other people's emotions and interact with them in useful ways, especially in the most important relationships in your life, namely, the close, so-called 'intimate' ones. (I say 'so-called' because I'm doubtful, skeptical that very many people really have genuinely intimate relationships. I think most people have a lot of sex, and when that runs down, they either have a lot of fights or a lot of silence, and if they stick together after that, it's usually out of habit and no other better offers coming along. What, me, a cynic??? Surely you jest...)

Another comment that I'm saving because my gut agrees with what she says, but my mind can't quite come to terms with the 'language' she uses, which I think is the product of a particular era of shrink-speak, in which brine she seems to have been immersed for some time. She's responding to another commenter, the two of them appear to be longstanding opponents (boy, I'm having to work really hard here not to use any dismissive language. Interesting - and scary - to see how consistently and automatically it crops up, like dandelions in the lawn).

The quote (bold mine):

You're an abuser Sally, maybe not the welts and bruises sort, but the emotional, deeper, more insidious and damaging form seems to be your preferred method of pathological abuse. Why don't you see a doctor? Oh, right.

To colonize is to invade and occupy territory, it's the transfer of one population (the abuser) to another (her target). Welts and bruises are preschool, what abusers want is psychic territory; ownership of their target's voice, her subjectivity, and sense of self, who she is and what she's all about. That's what successful abusers steal. It is the most difficult violation to overcome, but those who have come with radar, and see it a mile away.

I think what FP says is true - possibly not about Sally (don't actually care to take sides), but about the concept of colonizing, which seems useful to me. If I'm understanding it at all (and not sure I do, yet), it seems a bit like gaslighting, which is essentially a mindfuck dressed up in prettier words. Somebody who takes a special kind of sadistic pleasure in messing with your head, and then revels in the control they have over you because of it. Images of puppeteers and marionettes come to mind - scary...

I'm thinking that women get this diagnosis when they've been 'kicked' so many times that they become like a rabid dog, the first reaction when feeling threatened is to snarl and snap at people, to keep them away. Which, when you think about it, is a pretty normal reaction to threatening behavior.

***
Search string "bullshit psychiatric diagnosis" came up with Has American society gone insane (bolds mine):

Is American society a healthy one, and are those having difficulties adjusting to it mentally ill? Or is American society an unhealthy one, and are many Americans with emotional difficulties simply alienated rather than ill? For Fromm, "An unhealthy society is one which creates mutual hostility (and) distrust, which transforms man into an instrument of use and exploitation for others, which deprives him of a sense of self, except inasmuch as he submits to others or becomes an automaton." Fromm viewed American society as an increasingly unhealthy one, in which people routinely experience painful alienation that fuels emotional and behavioral difficulties.
[...]
The essential confrontation for Fromm is not about psychiatric drugs per se (though he would be sad that so many Americans nowadays, especially children, are prescribed psychotropic drugs in order to fit into inhospitable environments). His essential confrontation was directed at all mental health professionals -- including non-prescribers such as psychologists, social workers and counselors -- who merely assist their patients to adjust but neglect to validate their patients' alienation from society.

Those comfortably atop societal hierarchies have difficulty recognizing that many American institutions promote helplessness, passivity, boredom, fear, isolation, alienation and dehumanization for those not at the top. One-size-fits-all schools, the corporate workplace, government bureaucracies and other giant, impersonal institutions routinely promote manipulative relationships rather than respectful ones, machine efficiency rather than human pride, authoritarian hierarchies rather than participatory democracy, disconnectedness rather than community, and helplessness rather than empowerment.In The Sane Society, Fromm warned, "Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man. The specialists in this field tell you what the 'normal' person is, and, correspondingly, what is wrong with you; they devise the methods to help you adjust, be happy, be normal."
[...]
Both the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard and psychiatry's DSM (the official diagnostic manual in which mental illnesses are voted in and out by elite psychiatrists) have much more to do with dogma than science. Both Scientology and psychiatry embrace science fiction technobabble that poses as scientific fact. In Scientology's "auditing," the claim is that the Hubbard Electropsychometer (E-Meter) can assess the reactive mind of the "preclear" by passing a small amount of voltage through a pair of tin-plated tubes that look like empty soup cans wired to the E-Meter and held by the preclear. But psychiatry is no more scientifically relevant, as its trendy chemical-imbalance theories of mental illness have shelf-lives of about a decade, with establishment psychiatry most recently having retreated from both its serotonin-deficiency theory of depression and the excessive-dopamine theory of schizophrenia.
[...]
Scientology and establishment psychiatry have something else in common. They are both orthodoxies that deal harshly with their ex-insiders who have come to reject them. Currently, psychiatry is the more prevailing orthodoxy, and, as George Orwell explained, the mainstream press does not challenge a prevailing orthodoxy. Orwell wrote, "At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. ... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."
[...]
It is my experience that psychiatry, Scientology and fundamentalist religions are turnoffs for genuinely critical thinkers. Critical thinkers are not so desperate to adjust and be happy that they ignore adverse affects -- be they physical, psychological, spiritual or societal. Critical thinkers listen to what others have to say while considering their motives, especially financial ones; and they discern how one's motivation may distort one's assumptions.

A critical thinker would certainly not merely accept without analysis Fromm's and my conclusion that American society is insane in terms of healthy human development. Perhaps a society should not be labeled insane just because it is replete with schools that turn kids off to reading, for-profit prisons that need increasingly more inmates for economic growth, a mass media that is dishonest about threats to national security, trumped-up wars that so indebt a society that it cannot provide basic health care, a for-profit health care system that exploits illness rather than promoting health, et cetera.

A critical thinker would most certainly point out that there have been societies far less sane than the United States -- and Erich Fromm made himself absolutely clear on this point. In the barbaric German society that Fromm fled, disruptive children who couldn't fit into one-size-fits-all schools were not forced to take Adderall and other amphetamines, but instead their parents handed them over to psychiatrists to be euthanized. Fromm, however, knew that just because one could point to societies less sane than the United States, this did not make the United States a sane, humanistic society.

***
An interesting way of looking at coping mechanisms, Early maladaptive schemas, will just link here for now to keep track of it.

Just want to say, I really want to see all this harsh judgmental language just disappear, go away, go poof. Now. Immediately. It's bullshit, counterproductive, does more harm than good. People who need the kind of 'help' these things purport to offer are usually operating from such shame-based places of damaged self esteem to begin with, surely it's not helpful to further burden them by labeling our naturally occuring coping mechanisms with such words as 'maladaptive'? Why not just say, 'adaptive', and leave it at that? Then we don't have to further shame ourselves for having coped to the best of our ability with impossibly limited resources.

In fact, you could say we were fucking geniuses with our coping mechanisms, or as Alice Miller honors it with the title of her book, Drama of the Gifted Child. That word 'gifted' is meant to represent the ways in which children cope with variously fucked-up parental situations to get their needs met the best they could with inadequate resources. Anyway.