1.I just talked to my mom. It was fun but I had to disassociate.
2. There is a specific self that talks to my mom. She needs me to be that way. When she is happy I am happy too, to a point, so I become the self she needs me to be.
3. I will know in a bit whether this dissociation hurt me. Right now I’m still keyed up and reeling.
4. I do know that I feel enormously tired and that I don’t know how to come down.
5. J. came right after the call to tell me something and I had no idea how to talk to her. She belonged in another universe entirely.
6. From Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport:
7. I think we all dissociate to some extent when we talk to our moms, but their is dissociation and dissociation.
8. I am quite dissociated these days. When the little girl is not raging the dissociation wouldn’t be bad except I need to interact with others and it’s exhausting.
1. We as a society, as a civilization, are so ignorant when it comes to feelings. We want to do so much, achieve so much, yet we are deeply unknowing of the building blocks of personal and collective growth.
2. We are impatient and in a hurry. We don’t have time for anything. We are poorly trained to the long view.
3. A lot of power and money is staked in our being so.
4. Here is how we resist:
we listen to others.
we ask them questions and listen deeply and attentively to the answer.
Many thanks to Jen for this beautiful drawing! Please use with permission.
1. I have been letting the little girl into the room.
2. The little girl is all manners of terrified/hurt/angry. She is difficult to deal with. The adult finds her a torment. The little girl is not a torment to herself, I don’t think, ‘tho sometimes she thinks she is bad.
3. She does not think she is bad when she is listened to and heard!
4. After about 2 years of pleading and kicking and screaming and explaining my analyst seems to have learned to talk to the little girl with tenderness, age-appropriateness, respect, and intelligence.
5. Adult me is always listening in and ready to yank the little girl back if things go wrong. The little girl’s meltdowns are brutally painful.
6. I think my analyst is afraid the little girl will get her back up if she, the analyst, uses “you” when talking to her. So she (the analyst) mostly uses “we,” as in “we can’t sleep when we are scared.”
7. The little girl would like to be talked to as a unique and well-seen “you.” In the country she comes from, this “we” sounds patronizing and diffusive. I can’t gauge whether it is the same in English.
8. Donald Trump, acquitted, immediately proceeded to kick up the dictatorship. This is absolutely terrifying. I am terrified as an immigrant and a lesbian. I am terrified as a naturalized citizen. AND I am Western European and White! The fullness at my heart goes out to all people of color in Northern and Central America now. It is terrifying. I will fight for and with you.
9. Since the little girl started talking to the analyst the adult person’s body (same as the little girl’s body?) has experienced so much less pain. For weeks she had hardly been able to move! Her body is now limber by comparison. The little girl and the adult person are so grateful to the analyst!
10. Today the little girl talked to the analyst about her childhood. She was scared at night and she couldn’t sleep. Her mom was barely there for her. She tried to be there for her youngest sister, who was in a crib. The younger sister slept in the same room as the little girl.
11. After the session she slept and had this dream:
she is an adult and also a child. she, her middle sister, and her mom are staying somewhere strange. the dreamer (me) is exhausted and disabled with a serious chronic illness and she cannot go with her mom who is
showing a lifetime of drawings in a gallery. when she is finally able to join her mom in the gallery she finds that the exhibition was and still is a smashing success. her mother, though, is detached and disconnected from all this, as if she couldn’t grasp or care about any of it. (i think the exhibition is really the dreamer’s—my—accomplishments, and the dreamer’s middle sister’s many accomplishments too).
the dreamer, exhausted, returns inside. “inside” is an underground labyrinth of small rooms, with a low ceiling, narrow, with arrowslits for windows. the dreamers asks her sister, is mom coming to get us? her sister, a bit scared, says, yes, yes, she said she would. the dreamer looks outside and it’s getting dark. she knows she won’t be able to find the exit. she is stuck. she feels terror creep over the surface of her body, make its way inside.
12. She woke up.
13. Food and hot drinks always help dispel the phantoms of past trauma. We thank our Lord and also the earth for the lovely food that restores integrity to the fragmented mind and body.
1. The other day I quoted three lines from Gentleman Jack — I am sure they are pretty accurate but I am quoting by heart.
2. As always, I can’t write in full discursive paragraphs about this because my mind is tired and fragmented, so let me use again numbered paragraphs.
3. I have always known that being a lesbian made my life difficult, but this TV show, alongside painful and incremental seeing of myself as someone who had a lesbian childhood/adolescence/twenties/life in analysis, ripped a veil of not-knowing.
4. Women go to great lengths to convince themselves that “it’s nothing.” Gay women, straight women, trans women, all women.
5. Ann Cvetkovich talks about lesbian trauma (trauma qua lesbian) in An Archive of Feelings, which I read years ago (this is not a perfect digital copy but it’s free so THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH to those who put it online!). The second chapter, “Trauma and Touch: Butch-Femme Sexualities” does particularly good work at describing the kind of pain that butches, and femmes, in different ways, accrue simply in virtue of being. The kind of butch the chapter describes is very much not the kind of butch I am, though, so, even though I was really taken by this chapter, I couldn’t apply it to me.
6. Still, if you don’t know anything about lesbian pain and lesbian trauma, this is a good thing to read. It’s particularly good because it emphasizes how femmes and butches heal each other in ways that an uninformed, quick-judging eye would find dysfunctional (hint: it’s not dysfunctional if it helps).
7. My non-lesbian, lesbian-ignorant analyst has brought me here. She has created a space in which I can grieve decades of ungrieved lesbian trauma. Sometimes you need a lesbian therapist. Other times you just need a good therapist.
8. The instant the veil of not-knowing was ripped I knew everything. The parts fell into place like tetris bits. I knew and knew and knew. And I knew that this pain started pretty fucking early.
9. Parents of queer girls: don’t underestimate the suffering of teeny tiny queer girls in playgrounds, day cares, and kindergartens. The world is truly, really designed to make them feel like they don’t belong, however good the intentions of those who surround them.
10. [flashback of tiny me tantruming in my underwear because my mom wanted me to wear a skirt].
[flashback of early grade-age me approaching the director of the choir I sang in and loved days before Christmas night because he had said, “Boys wear blue pants and white tops, girls wear blue skirt and white tops” and I knew that a) I would have to miss Christmas if he didn’t allow me to wear pants and b) I would (probably) have to lie to my mom as to the reason why. People: I loved that choir. I loved it so much I was crazy about it. And I. would. have. missed. Christmas. night. mass. Small me approaches director: “Can I wear pants?” Director looks at me puzzled, waits a beat that lasts a lifetime, then, barely thinking, says, “I don’t see why not.” People: this kind of relief, you get it a handful of times in your life. I ran all the way home and jumped on all the little walls and cavorted like mad in the street because I could sing at Christmas night mass].
11. But no, no, no, these are not good examples. These things are easy for an aware parent to catch. This is what is difficult:
When your little girl’s heart is silently and inconsolably broken because the little girl she is friends with and loves passionately does not love her passionately back because she, your girl, is just too different and the games she, your girl, plays are not the games the little friend plays and yes, yes, they are friends, but the little friend is mostly friends with other girls who are more like her. And your little girl bends herself over backward to find points of commonality: she asks to do homework together, she walks her little friend home, she brings her cookies — she tries all the things. And her hopes are raised with each successful and intimate encounter, then dashed like clockwork the following hour or the following day.
Your little girl has awesome little boy friends she gets along with like a house on fire, and a beautiful little girl friend you can do absolutely nothing to convince to passionately love your girl back.
1. The first analyst I had, analyst A, was a lesbian. This really helped validate me as a lesbian.
2. I think few comprehend the degree to which same sex loving people may be able to deny to themselves their same sex loving and even their identify as same sex loving people. We think we are bisexual. maybe. We think we can be straight if we try hard. We think all manner of things that don’t make any sense at all.
3. I write in numbered sections because I am suffering greatly and my mind is fractured. Writing in sections imposes outside order to the inside disorder and does not demand that the mind strain too much to achieve inner organization.
4. My current analyst, analyst B, is not a lesbian and does not know much about queerness, meaning, she knows as much as a competent analyst living in America in 2020 knows, but has not specifically devoted time to learning queer studies.
5. Maybe I am in touch enough with queer me that this will not have a great impact.
6. I love B but of course I can keep loving her even if I decided not to work with her. But I’ll work with her through now. This is necessary.
7. No one knows the future.
8. This is such a rough time. I am confused and fragmented. I need to allow myself whatever helps me to pull through. I am steeped in the Mad movement and not too fond of drug companies and the way the pharma-psychiatric-legal system dehumanizes people, but right now psych drugs are the only way to buy me a crutch to last this terrible time. I hate it when our desire to maintain the purity of our ideals make us feel like frauds for doing what is good for us.
I knew there were lesbians in the production team of this show at
1. Anne, to God/the skies/the ceiling: “Don’t you do this to me again.”
2. Ann: to Anne who is a million miles away, via the mirror, telepathically: “Don’t leave me.”
3. Anne: to Ann, who is holding her and looking at her with tenderness and reassurance: “Don’t hurt me.”
(This may just be historical accuracy, but that the two protagonists are both called Anne/Ann seems to me a sign of exquisite depth of understanding. Here’s one reason: the patriarchy has codified nomenclature in such a way that this never happens to heterosexual couples. Other reasons to come when democracy is in less acute meltdown and I’m less anxious and despondent about fascism in America #IowaCaucases).
Hey therapists of the world dealing with more or less dissociated, more or less integrated little kids living in adult patients. Know that:
1. These traumatized little kids have been waiting these many years to tell their side of the story, which is the whole of their story.
At the root of their suffering is the fact that no one ever wanted to know, and when they acted as if they did, they didn’t really hear, and by hearing, validate.
Listen to them. Trust them. If they made it this far, they are very good at knowing what they need.
2. They may be bitter and wary. The best way to get through to them, as to every human really, is to ask questions. Everyone loves to be asked questions — except the few who don’t, because their answers never led anywhere good (hint: they love questions too, but you have to earn it).
3. Most of these traumatized, more or less dissociated, more or less integrated children were never asked any questions at all. No one ever said, why are you doing this? And this, what are you doing this? And this other thing: why are you doing it? And: what do you want? What do you need? Why are you scared? Tell me, I’d like to hear. I am insanely interested in you, your very, very good reasons, your story, every single one of your thoughts and feelings and desires, however strange or bizarre or confusing any of them may feel to you. I want to hear it all. Tell me.
4. There are things the children within the adults who are your patients might never say unless you ask. They are very trained to assume adults do not want to know. If you don’t ask, they may very well assume you, like all the adults in their world, are not interested.
5. Psychoanalysis trains therapists to make space and let the voces within emerge organically. I don’t think this always works with people suffering the aftermath of severe childhood trauma, who consequently have split, dissociated children howling in pain inside. You need to ask. You need to be the adult they never met. They have been longing all of their lives to be asked.
(Sending this to my analyst, with very little hope it will make any difference, but we do try, don’t we. We try and try and try, and then, eventually, one day, we say, enough).
1. I think it’s been 2 years with this analyst: more? Some of us have trouble finding a good fit. Psychoanalysis, the discipline, is in love with making us feel — those of us who have trouble finding a good fit — that it is our fault. Or that we should turn somewhere else. Or that we should stay untreated.
2. Of course we don’t have the luxury of staying untreated, and, really, there is no one else.
3. Whose problem are we? What if psychoanalysis* really is not for those of us whose hurt is deep and massive and goes way back — and what if really there isn’t anywhere else? Maybe we are no one’s problem except our own and, if someone loves us, theirs too.
4. Does this mean that psychoanalysis fails? Maybe not. Maybe psychoanalysis is fine with being only for some people. It already is for some people — White (very few psychoanalysts of color), affluent enough, articulate enough to talk their pain through, resilient enough to stick it out for years.
5. Maybe no one, really, owes me anything, not even my analyst, who fails me repeatedly at something very, very important to me, which she regrets, and tries very much to give me, again and again, in a feedback loop of good will, love, and hurt.
6. And why should anyone owe me anything? Why should anyone owe anyone anything?
7. But this is know: I owe it to myself, and those I love, to keep trying, with the assistance of professional healers or alone, to keep trying to salve my wounds, find a way through the madness, and maybe hope the wounds won’t hurt so much, one day.
8. Here’s a confession though. I believe in a world in which we all owe each other however much love we have to give. And this love is not a smile or courtesy. This love is easing up other people’s pain, seeing them, sharing a bit of the road with them, giving whatever respite and joy they need.
9. But the trick is, we are all responsible only for our part in this. We are not entitled to others’ love. And if we die alone, unloved by other humans, we still will be able to say, I have loved.
* This blog uses “psychoanalysis” as meaning psychodynamic psychotherapy, either applied intensely as psychoanalysis proper (however you understand it) or applied intensely or less intensively as therapy.
4. My analyst, who understands my being a lesbian pretty much not at all, won’t ever watch it. Maybe it’s important for queer people to see queer therapists?
5.
6. Why was there so much bitterness from my gf toward me tonight? What have I done? What should I do?
inside(r) psychoanalysis 