...........................by Stanley
......The determination to make things OK when they are not OK begins early in life. The game of pretend is what kids do best; they are wonderfully competent at transforming reality into what they want it to be. Fine, when you are pretending the lounge sofa is a fire engine, but not so good when you are trying to make a miserable home life into a feel-good happy family. No two people are the same, but I’ll tell you a story of the way it can go.
.....There is a limit to how long a kid can keep pretending against all odds. Reality will break though when family quarrels or dysfunctions are too overwhelming, forcing the child to endlessly renew its efforts to make the environment safe and nurturing by sheer wishing and willing. It doesn’t have the power to change reality, but it can fantasise, it can pretend.
......I can pretend that if I am good enough it will make them happy. Trying to make myself good enough for others can turn me into a lifelong people-pleaser.
......Of course, I can pretend I don’t need a family and go off on another tack. There are a thousand clever ways to make it all better: ‘At least I’m good at school’ is one way; or ‘When I grow up I’m going to… – imagined futures overriding the present; adults euphemistically call this ‘having goals’. Or much later I can make like I’m a successful entertainer, amusing everyone; or even getting to be an actor, singer or performer on the stage, actually creating a big approving family – admiration on a big scale.
......Come to think of it, each profession is also a form of pretending. To have a profession is to profess. To make this real to myself is to constantly keep up the fantasy of actually being what I profess.
......All these devises, you might say, are perfectly harmless, even necessary in the game of life. Where they become questionable is when they are used to suppress the bodily felt-sense that something is not-OK. Trying to pretend over the top of anxiety is hard work. But no amount of physical or mental juggling will really help – only a direct address to the bodily felt-sense of something being not-OK, giving up trying to make it OK. Daring to look at a persistent sense of something wrong that’s been with me longer than I can remember.
......Ages ago when I first began to pretend everything was OK I thought that if I wanted something badly enough it would happen – a kind of infantile positive thinking. I suppressed the not-OKness into my body and my body has been carrying it ever since like a low grade illness. It can turn some people into hypochondriacs, imagining that the body is only physical.
......The body can remember what really went wrong, even if I have forgotten; and when I first begin to look at it, it feels like an uncomfortable physical sensation, a feeling I am so used to I no longer notice it. It’s a vague discomfort. Then the work begins of tracking this vague something, unraveling a long, tangled but precise history, going back to my childhood.
......It’s not that I have forgotten the factual events of the past, not a question of ‘recovered memories’. I can remember what happened, but I had forgotten the way it was, the sharp feel of it, the implications, the endless ramifications, and of just how it keeps recurring in my present life.
......My own story surprises me because it is so different to what I had pretended; and yet, in a way, it doesn’t surprise me because I knew it all the time – at least, I could always sort of sense it there.
.......And when it is unraveled there is a relief in being able to give up the constant struggle to make like everything is OK. It’s then I realise this struggle has been far worse than the reality I was trying to suppress – a reality that belonged to the ever present past
.......But for a Great Pretender like me the first step is to admit everything is not-OK.
.......I’m not fine – how are you?
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Friday, April 4, 2008
THE CRITIC
...........................by Stanley
.....Many people are aware that they have a troublesome inner critic, realising that they can be, at times, far too harsh and judgemental on themselves. ‘I’m my own worst enemy’, they will say.
.....Over the years this internal critical in the personality has been given different labels. Freud called it the super-ego. Searching to name it, a client of mine came up with ‘The Clobberer’ – very descriptive. Fairbairn called it ‘The Anti-Libidinal Ego’ – good, because it is critical of any form of pleasure; later he called it ‘The Internal Saboteur’ – full marks, because that is exactly what it is.
.....But whatever we call it, it is that part of you that makes you wrong, useless, ugly or stupid. It specialises in accusations that you are – on the whole – a failure; and whatever you do is wrong. Sometimes this internal critic is in the background, sometimes right in your face.
.....The Internal Saboteur makes one very sensitive to other people’s criticisms; then both internal and external attacks join together to make a devastating onslaught.
......There is little one can do directly to change this setup. Strategies, like positive thinking, designed to live over the top of it, are useless. The Internal Saboteur is a real problem and it is not subject to control. It is, as they say, ‘its own person’, with its own agenda. I am not speaking figuratively. It is structurally separate from your own ego. Often it opposes with subtle and ‘reasonable’ criticism. Needs and wants that are already a bit shaky are easy targets. It makes impulsiveness and pleasure suspect.
.....The Internal Saboteur is a split off part of your own psyche you would have given birth to a long time ago. It would very probably have been a time when you were dependant and an essential relationship failed you. You went on trying and failing to get what you needed until eventually you turned against your need. ‘I don’t want it – I don’t want them – they can go to hell’. The whole thing is then repressed and dissociated, but goes on fighting every needy impulse from then on.
......It is a brilliant solution when you are a child. It turns off the pain and you feel independent. The problem is that it is not just a denial of ‘them’, it is a denial of yourself, the most central part of you: the core life impulse that moves you forward every moment, urging what you want, what you need. By this act of self-preservation you have created another centre in your personality – one that essentially denies that it wants what it wants. It splits you off from yourself. It can make you painfully ‘good’, afraid to put a step out of line in case you cop it. The Internal Saboteur will keep you in line.
.......But if you retain a rebellious spark of life in you, you are up against the Internal Saboteur. Everything that is really good for you, this other centre in you sabotages, opposes, criticises, downgrades. It can be unbelievably cruel. This situation can be so bad that it can destroy every impulse in life that’s worthwhile. It can lead to depression and suicide. Or it can continually harass you like a low-grade infection. Or it can lie in the unconscious waiting for you to feel particularly self-satisfied before it attacks.
......I tell you, the Internal Saboteur is no joke; no mere metaphor, but a stubborn fact as real as your body.
.....You have to really get this before you can work on it. You will realise what I mean by ‘getting it’ if you re-read my last post on ‘Notes from a Groundhog’. There it is, not jibbering in the background, but right out in front – a full frontal attack.
......My experience there is an example of how the Internal Saboteur can strike in reaction a personal win, a soulful breakthrough. It simply cannot stand any hint of narcissism or self-satisfaction – and so it bursts out of hiding, revealing itself in all its viciousness. In my case, I can own it, guilty not of what it accuses me, but acknowledging it as a starving, angry and repressed part of myself; acknowledging also that I gave birth to it as a way of surviving when I was in dire straits, long, long ago.
.....Many people are aware that they have a troublesome inner critic, realising that they can be, at times, far too harsh and judgemental on themselves. ‘I’m my own worst enemy’, they will say.
.....Over the years this internal critical in the personality has been given different labels. Freud called it the super-ego. Searching to name it, a client of mine came up with ‘The Clobberer’ – very descriptive. Fairbairn called it ‘The Anti-Libidinal Ego’ – good, because it is critical of any form of pleasure; later he called it ‘The Internal Saboteur’ – full marks, because that is exactly what it is.
.....But whatever we call it, it is that part of you that makes you wrong, useless, ugly or stupid. It specialises in accusations that you are – on the whole – a failure; and whatever you do is wrong. Sometimes this internal critic is in the background, sometimes right in your face.
.....The Internal Saboteur makes one very sensitive to other people’s criticisms; then both internal and external attacks join together to make a devastating onslaught.
......There is little one can do directly to change this setup. Strategies, like positive thinking, designed to live over the top of it, are useless. The Internal Saboteur is a real problem and it is not subject to control. It is, as they say, ‘its own person’, with its own agenda. I am not speaking figuratively. It is structurally separate from your own ego. Often it opposes with subtle and ‘reasonable’ criticism. Needs and wants that are already a bit shaky are easy targets. It makes impulsiveness and pleasure suspect.
.....The Internal Saboteur is a split off part of your own psyche you would have given birth to a long time ago. It would very probably have been a time when you were dependant and an essential relationship failed you. You went on trying and failing to get what you needed until eventually you turned against your need. ‘I don’t want it – I don’t want them – they can go to hell’. The whole thing is then repressed and dissociated, but goes on fighting every needy impulse from then on.
......It is a brilliant solution when you are a child. It turns off the pain and you feel independent. The problem is that it is not just a denial of ‘them’, it is a denial of yourself, the most central part of you: the core life impulse that moves you forward every moment, urging what you want, what you need. By this act of self-preservation you have created another centre in your personality – one that essentially denies that it wants what it wants. It splits you off from yourself. It can make you painfully ‘good’, afraid to put a step out of line in case you cop it. The Internal Saboteur will keep you in line.
.......But if you retain a rebellious spark of life in you, you are up against the Internal Saboteur. Everything that is really good for you, this other centre in you sabotages, opposes, criticises, downgrades. It can be unbelievably cruel. This situation can be so bad that it can destroy every impulse in life that’s worthwhile. It can lead to depression and suicide. Or it can continually harass you like a low-grade infection. Or it can lie in the unconscious waiting for you to feel particularly self-satisfied before it attacks.
......I tell you, the Internal Saboteur is no joke; no mere metaphor, but a stubborn fact as real as your body.
.....You have to really get this before you can work on it. You will realise what I mean by ‘getting it’ if you re-read my last post on ‘Notes from a Groundhog’. There it is, not jibbering in the background, but right out in front – a full frontal attack.
......My experience there is an example of how the Internal Saboteur can strike in reaction a personal win, a soulful breakthrough. It simply cannot stand any hint of narcissism or self-satisfaction – and so it bursts out of hiding, revealing itself in all its viciousness. In my case, I can own it, guilty not of what it accuses me, but acknowledging it as a starving, angry and repressed part of myself; acknowledging also that I gave birth to it as a way of surviving when I was in dire straits, long, long ago.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
D.H.LAWRENCE ON THE ROLE OF THE FATHER
................................by Elizabeth Hope
........Relating to the first evening of our series of seminars on ‘Siggy and his Successors’, Elizabeth Hope came up with this interesting quotation from D.H.Lawrence, whom most of us know only as a novelist. Apparently, he wrote a remarkable number of essays that remain neglected and generally unknown. Elizabeth says, “These essays by Lawrence have much to add to our discussion of ' psychodynamism’. I thought this quote would have been useful for the father's role when it arose the other night.” Here is the quotation from Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious by D.H. Lawrence:
............' But if the child thus seeks the mother, does it then know the mother alone? To an infant the mother is the whole universe. Yet the child needs more than the mother. It needs as well the presence of men, vibration from the present, body of the man There may not be any actual palpable connection. But from the great voluntary centre in the man pass unknowable communications and untellable nourishment of the stream of manly blood, rays which we cannot see, and which so far we have refused to know, but none the less the quickening dark rays which pass from the great abdominal life centre in the father to the corresponding life centre in the child. And these rays these vibrations are not like mother vibrations. Far, far, from it. They do not need the actual contact the handling and caressing. On the contrary the true male instinct is to avoid physical contact with the baby. It may not even need actual presence. But present or absent there should be between the baby and the father that strange intangible communication, that strange pull and circuit such as the magnetic pole exercises upon a needle, a vitalistic pull and flow which lays all the life-plasm of the baby into the line of vital quickening , strength , knowing. Any lack of this vital circuit, this vital interchange between father and child, man and child means an inevitable impoverishment to the infant.
..............The child exists in the interplay of the two great ‘l’s, the womanly and the male. In appearance the mother is everything. In truth the father has actively very little part. It does not matter if he hardly sees his child. Yet see it he should and touch it sometimes, and renew with it the connection the life circuit, not allow it to lapse, and vitally starve his child.
........Relating to the first evening of our series of seminars on ‘Siggy and his Successors’, Elizabeth Hope came up with this interesting quotation from D.H.Lawrence, whom most of us know only as a novelist. Apparently, he wrote a remarkable number of essays that remain neglected and generally unknown. Elizabeth says, “These essays by Lawrence have much to add to our discussion of ' psychodynamism’. I thought this quote would have been useful for the father's role when it arose the other night.” Here is the quotation from Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious by D.H. Lawrence:
............' But if the child thus seeks the mother, does it then know the mother alone? To an infant the mother is the whole universe. Yet the child needs more than the mother. It needs as well the presence of men, vibration from the present, body of the man There may not be any actual palpable connection. But from the great voluntary centre in the man pass unknowable communications and untellable nourishment of the stream of manly blood, rays which we cannot see, and which so far we have refused to know, but none the less the quickening dark rays which pass from the great abdominal life centre in the father to the corresponding life centre in the child. And these rays these vibrations are not like mother vibrations. Far, far, from it. They do not need the actual contact the handling and caressing. On the contrary the true male instinct is to avoid physical contact with the baby. It may not even need actual presence. But present or absent there should be between the baby and the father that strange intangible communication, that strange pull and circuit such as the magnetic pole exercises upon a needle, a vitalistic pull and flow which lays all the life-plasm of the baby into the line of vital quickening , strength , knowing. Any lack of this vital circuit, this vital interchange between father and child, man and child means an inevitable impoverishment to the infant.
..............The child exists in the interplay of the two great ‘l’s, the womanly and the male. In appearance the mother is everything. In truth the father has actively very little part. It does not matter if he hardly sees his child. Yet see it he should and touch it sometimes, and renew with it the connection the life circuit, not allow it to lapse, and vitally starve his child.
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