What a good session. I accomplished what I’d set out to do, for the most part, and together, Bob and I ventured further than I thought into related subjects. I first spoke about his health, and he assured me that its nothing serious, he thinks. I found it an honest assessment, as far as I can tell. That was important, because I have to feel free to see us both as human beings with many things going on in our lives. I care about him, for selfish reasons, but also because he’s a human being. Expressing that acknowledges both of us, and thats a good thing.
I’d meant to read from my journal here, and I printed out the last few diary posts to read, but I just spoke extemporaneously instead, as I could get to the root of the issue without notes, and go beyond.
I described how closely I related to Alice Miller’s description of the abandoning of the true self. I described the painting ‘Silent Scream’, and how that was another apt metaphor to Miller’s ‘Wall of Silence’ (though she meant that as the wall of the psychoanalysis community against knowing the truth about trauma, I relate to it as the self looking at a translucent wall, on the other side of which is the terrified child, who has been abandoned in order for the whole self to survive its parental environment).
A scream is a terrible thing, but a good thing. A silent scream though, is horrifying. When I turn to listen to my deepest feelings I sense this silent scream; That my feelings have been desperately trying to reach through to me to let me know my truth, but that they’ve fallen on deaf ears. The feelings get louder, and the ability to hear gets less. That’s repression, or at least supression, or reaction-formation.
Its no wonder that when I turn to listen it seems pretty loud!
As to ‘affect’, why do I cry in therapy? What am I feeling when I cry? We’re getting there, slowly. As strange as it sounds, I don’t know what I’m feeling when I cry, just that I am feeling something strongly. That is how cut off my conscious experience is from my feeling experience. Very sad, but improving. We explored this question a bit. I said that I’d recently had this image, while reading Miller:
I’m holding a newborn infant to my face. Our cheeks are touching, skin to skin. I feel the incredible depth of love reaching out from me and recognizing the whole person here, as an infant. Its a moment of pure tenderness and acceptance.
I don’t know if I’ve had that experience holding other babies. Maybe it was my brother? But I think its about me-as-baby. To be so cherished, just for existing. To be fully recognized and reached-out-to. Embraced in loving safety, but a safety which is emotional even more than physical. Since I’m seen fully, I’m loved fully. I don’t know why that is true, but it is. How can we not love everyone we meet then? Is this the special privilege of infants and parents, or is it just the potential human experience in all relationships?
When I enter that image and really feel the love of that infant coursing through me, I start crying. Why? Is it a memory, a wish, a recognition of capacity long stuffed under false things? My own capacity to love is not destroyed. Its in there. How wonderful!
So why the long face? 
Am I grieving the many years of forgetting this? Am I feeling the betrayal of myself, by myself? This is an entry into my self, and one that I will cherish and nurture. Perhaps that is enough for now.
We then talked about shame. I talked about Miller’s theory of how we attend to our parent’s anxieties if we experience them as interfering with our relationship. We talked for a long time about how a person can end up ‘learning’ that their feelings are wrong. I gave the example that if I’m yelled at or abandoned when I cry out for food, but receive food when I put on a smile and gurgle, and mirror my mother when she is less anxious, that I learn to hide my feelings.
But how then does this survival game end up with shame? Bob suggests that it might be like habitual dissociation from a childhood of physical abuse, but then he suggests that shame has no defensive value, a contradiction. I myself cannot yet see where I transitioned from “My feelings are not good” to “I am worthless”. I sense it, but have not entered the moment. In that moment there is gold, and I told Bob as much.
So we talked a long time about how we come to working models, how a child is shaped by anxious parents, how the parents get wrapped up in their shoulds, rather than simply being empathetically bonded with the child. We covered so much ground. I mentioned the idea that when the anxious parent fulfills her idea of what is loving behavior that she tells the child: “This is love”, and that this further erodes the child’s own sense of what is real. One half must believe the parent to keep up the survival game (meeting parental needs and expectations to reduce their anxiety such that they may remember to cover the basics of child care and not abandon us entirely. To create the possibility of future moments of relaxed presence in mutual empathic connection), while the other half knows that he doesn’t feel connected. “How can this be love? You say love is when we are caring deeply about each other, sharing togetherness, yet I’m not connected to you now. I can see you are pleased with yourself, and with me, but its only a game, don’t you see mother? You don’t see. Oh shit…..”.
The person putting forward a counterfeit of empathy without recognizing the lie. This is harmful. And I learned this. Its like a poison that sits shadowed in my whole body, preventing me from living. I must unlearn this behavior. Since I can feel the infant on my cheek I remember now…. I remember what love is really like, what it takes. Its so simple!
Can I really open this up and get re-rooted in this deeply feeling part of myself? Can I come to understand my shame? I’m frightened by the latter, but I know I can do it. I’ve felt this child against my cheek. He is real, he is whole, and he deserves my presence and nurturing, just for being in my care.
Parents, you chose to bring me into this world. I deserved your care. That you were too insecure in yourselves to give yourselves to love is understandable, but it isn’t forgivable. At least not yet. I have many fields of anger to cross. If I cross them and choose forgiveness, that is fine. But not before. My future depends on my ability to venture out unhindered by your anxieties, to face and experience my own, and to keep going beyond into the unfurling possibility of me. Right now this means pain and the door to righteous anger, and I’m going forward. I deserve the care you couldn’t or chose not to give me. This is how I’m able to do that.
…….
My doorway to my experience is through tears. I’ve thought some about this. Why tears and not anger? Why not fear or rage? Why not something else?
Crying is for me, historically, the least dangerous emotion, and the one thing I’ve had a hard time suppressing. I think it is the least risky thing to show. So I show it first in my relationship with my therapist, and indeed, with myself. If I can fully express my sadness, and the sky doesn’t fall, maybe then I can express my rage, fear, anger, confusion, loneliness, grief, humiliation, joy, tenderness, longing, hope, ambition, and everything else that is in there, locked up and lost to my waking life now.
Or is it that I just feel ’sad and a bit afraid’ as my affect seems to indicate? I don’t know. Maybe these are the most unfinished feelings, so they are prominent. Or maybe there is something else entirely?
And guilt. Lets not forget guilt. Shame and guilt go together, get mixed up. Why do I feel guilty? I think Miller would say that I feel that way because I’ve betrayed myself. I tend to agree. I wonder: “What did I do to feel so alone and cut off?”, and I must know, or I wouldn’t feel guilty. Or maybe I simply existed, and was cut off by people that couldn’t love for reasons of their own. Yet because they didn’t know this they projected their guilt into me?
I’m going to find out. Its a dark cave and I have candles. And I have a hand to hold onto while I go forward. That is all I need.
