As I think about the work, it seems to me more and more evident that the primary job of the analyst is to validate the patient. You don’t have to agree with the patient. But what the patient says comes from a place that needs to be acknowledged as valid and true, and it is the analyst’s job to empty herself out of her thoughts and neuroses to make that place exist in her mind and soul, too — where the patient can see it mirrored into existence and legitimacy.
One of the features of the severely traumatized child is that, even as she considers herself entirely guilty for just about everything under the sun, she also and simultaneously considers herself entirely innocent. Any allusion to her responsibility for a bad action feels so preposterous as to be intolerable and it will necessarily cause extreme affect states. At the same time, telling her that she’s good falls on ears that have been deafened shut by trauma. Even though she desperately needs to hear that she is good, it is something she has no way of understanding.
The adult who embodies the traumatized child feels this way when she’s regressed. In these moments, blaming her for anything feels to her like an intolerable, unaddressable injustice, and will undo her.
We negotiate boundaries. Incessantly. Boundaries are that which defines when I stop and she begins. Boundaries make the baby whole.
Boundaries are less given than you might assume. Than people assume. I see boundaries inside me and I fight for them. I fight for them because they are the contour of my being. For me, it’s a question of existing.
She plays along. Sometimes you can see the pain in the corners of her eyes. That is when it becomes painful for both of us. Sometimes she embraces the transgression.
Judith Butler; Marjorie Garber; Samuel Delany; Michel Foucault: pleasure is in transgression.
I thought analysis was the blotting out of pleasure. I had to re-educate myself, de-traumatize myself. She taught me that analysis is about enhancing pleasure.
Is this fight over boundaries an exercise in pleasuring?
We hammer soft grass on a giant anvil. We made up the hammer and the anvil. We chose harmonizing colors so they turned out green and off-white. I wanted red but I compromised.
The grass isn’t hurt. The grass is as sturdy as the St. Augustine grass that grows on campus and rests on soggy turf sponge. Hammered, it gives out sharp juices.
We peel the juice like skin. An onion-paper peel and the flesh looks sunburned, barely hurt at all. It will scab and the scab will fall and the discoloration last years. A cut, even a deep cut, heals and disappears faster. Funny how that works.
Rug burns.
Exponential diversion. Mass of things. Collision, collision, collision ad infinitum. Who are you who plunge into me? Have we met? Are we relatives? I welcome you and your stench, the stanching of wounds, the worms you carry, the words, the fatuous constructs, hair tangles in the toilet and a ring of poo, shorn body sworn to a nobler cause, infinite giving, infinite holding, retention, release, you. I welcome you. I welcome you. I welcome you.
Colors are lukewarm. Space recedes. The other side. Only a glass pane. Invisible. Run. Stay. Remember you were born. Remember that first breath, that hope. Remember milk pouring warm into your tummy. Remember that first excretion. Remember skin. Remember the possibility. A world. For you. You. You. The world, yours. Space. Doors. New rooms. How can anything go wrong? How can anything go wrong?
This is interesting and, I must say, quite problematic. I’ll post it here and open comments. I wish I had time for a longer discussion. Maybe sometime.
Elyn Saks, Refusing Care, chapter 3: “Civil Commitment: How Civil?” saks civil commitment
I am suddenly very tired of some people. Please don’t judge me poorly. I think I have exhausted myself chasing them. I feel tired.
I realize there are people in my life who can give me x, where x is way not enough and way not what I want, yet I have spent years investing a tremendous amount of energy in the pursuit of more-than-x, an intimacy, a closeness, a mutual lovingness I should have known was never going to happen.
I have done this all of my life. My husband said to me once (a long, long time ago): “When people tell you something about themselves, you should believe them.” People have told me repeatedly, often in so many words, that they can only give so much, that they don’t like too much closeness, that they need time, that…
It’s not that I don’t understand what they are saying. I simply don’t believe them.
Now I see that I could not, simply could not, follow my husband’s advice. My mind was structured in such a way that the possibility of not pursuing, at all costs, intimacy with people I like and love was simply not there. I am learning so much about psychic structures. I am learning that people can’t help themselves. I couldn’t help myself.
I think I am learning for the first time in my life not to pursue people who don’t want to be pursued. What a concept. And here’s another concept I have learned but I am having a hard time, still, putting into practice: it is of no use whatsoever to tell people that some of their behaviors are damaging to them. It is infinitely more helpful to give them as much acceptance as we have to give and hold our peace.
But sometimes this need to tell and tell again comes from that other need, the need to get close to them. You need a solid measure of self-love to hold your peace. There is no peace at all to be held without self-love.
I have despaired for years (I say years but I should say decades) over the loss of friends I never had in the first place, some of them people who had no idea I longed so much for them, and would have been astonished to learn it. Now I’m sitting quietly, finally mourning their never-to-be-changed distance from me, their being not-what-I-want. I mourn my relinquishing of them and my relinquishing of a whole way of wanting, desiring, and having people. It’s being a long and painful mourning.
Once I had a therapist who was a kindly woman but didn’t know enough about the soul and the mind of people; I saw her for many years to little gain. One day, in a moment of what felt to me great openness and vulnerability, I told her about my anguish at the prospect of losing someone. There was huge anxiety and loss in that statement. I was in great pain. My therapist memorably and lapidarily said: “We can’t lose people because we don’t own them.” I count this as one of the two or three most useless/hurtful things she ever said to me.
They attacked my orifices (making free is attacking), all of them, one by one. Did you know eyes were orifices too? I realized it when they got attacked and oozing blue fluid leaked out. They came at them with sharp prongs, like fingers. If their nails were cut short they made up for it by pushing and pushing. Sometimes they pushed delicately and insistently, like caresses. The torture was unbearable. It tore me up. It shamed me to the core. Careless fingers played freely in my mouth, my throat, my nose, my ears, my butt, my little pink vagina, my thin delicate urethra, my eyes. I ceased to be human.
Thick green viscous fluid like motor oil poured out, puddled at my feet — fetid.
This is how I discovered I had been toxic all along.
I was cleansed. Empty of poison, orifices broken and widened, I took in all the emptiness of the world. What a miraculously ample supply! I merge with the emptiness of the world. My skin and my flesh are its vessels. I disappear in the emptiness within and the emptiness without.
Do you have a liver? Do you have lungs? Do you have a retina?
Mine were toxic motor oil. Now I’m pure.
I cross the line (back and forth, back and forth) —
Not a line but a chasmic divide;
What does a change of habit signify?
There’s no harm in recognizing the failure of birds to thrive.
I see my mom mistily at the airport; she hasn’t seen me — she doesn’t have rheumy eyes but we’ll give them to her for the occasion. She doesn’t have eyes at all. When i was little/younger/young i found great comfort in writing,
Also in clean surroundings, tidiness, the thrill of a white page.
Sometimes parting is just a gift.
(Are you illegal?)
There is no audience.
What to do with lifelessness but indulge it.
Terror is learned.
inside(r) psychoanalysis 