My latest tangent has been to explore my family dynamic yet again, but with eyes that are wiser and more ready to embrace the real nature of my struggles. So much of my resistance to looking at the family stuff has been from this core belief that I fundamentally am indebted to my family and could never be justified in criticizing them without being delusional. Of course that doesn’t mean I didn’t do this. It just means that the more I was complaining about my family in the past, the more it corresponded with period of my life where I felt more delusional in my depression.
So this is a very healthy exploration of my family, but at the same time it isn’t healthy. I already felt the burning feeling of my old suffering and it certainly did make me a little crazy. I had to get through that layer in order to get to the better stuff.
It started while I was at my psychiatrist’s office. He doubles as a psychoanalyst though I wasn’t really sure where we stood and hadn’t been intentionally opening up to him as a result. In a weird way, this was a blessing in disguise because he made me actually confront the issues rather than acquiescing to the scripted role of a patient analyst bond.
He says to me “I don’t understand. You give me these analyses about you but no raw data.”
So I told him where I came from, that I had been through a horrific year, that I was fired from my job after losing a friend in a terrible car accident. I gave him some concrete details about the job itself, how my boss made me feel like a complete idiot, how she harassed me and manipulated me every single day bringing me down to the lowest I’ve ever been, how I had been sort of publicly outed as a ‘fool’ because my desk was front and center in the office and I was escorted out of the building under the snide gaze of my coworker.
Then he asked me if this was the first person in my life to treat me this way. I began to tell him about my complex family relationship. How my mother and I were so inseparable but at the same time how much she taught me to hate my father and forced me to be her analyst. How my father was painfully absent throughout so much of my childhood and yet how I hated him so deeply for that. He said to me something along the lines of, “Don’t you think that this is abusive?”
I was put in that weird space that lives in me when this question is raised. I didn’t want to say yes because I think my mother has a very special, unique soul and I love her very much, but I also think she made some critical mistakes in raising me. “So you feel responsible for you mother,” he comments.
“Absolutely I feel responsible. No one else can take care of her the way I can and she is a hopeless soul without me.” As narcissistic as this sounds, there is a grain of truth here (at least I think so right now). She is put down by everyone around her and has a very delusional understanding of how the world works. “She’s a good person. An innocent soul. I don’t want to say she’s evil because this is what I see primarily in her.”
To which he response, “So she’s horrible. She’s got beauty in her soul, but she’s also horrible.” At first I wanted to protest, but then I remembered reading so much about ambivalence and it’s role in my life, how I needed to learn to start embracing ambivalence. So I said, “Yes, I suppose that is correct,” and tried to sit with the discomfort of the conflicting emotions.
I was very upset coming out of that, but it opened a new line of inquiry in me. I realized that I hadn’t really looked at my family’s impact on me with the utmost respect that it requires. I allowed myself to internalize my sisters’ rhetoric about how it wasn’t that hard and how I was always treated more specially than them. But the deep understanding wasn’t there, and now it affects me because I feel awkward sitting in the first person, telling my own narrative.
After a wonderful research binge on the internet, I read a couple new texts that I felt were really important for me. First, I studied Andre Greene’s concept of the dead mother theory, which argues that mothers who are emotionally unavailable for their children (presumably because they are grieving for the loss of their husbands) create a kind of emotional footprint on children that will keep her presence with them throughout their adulthood. This is a simplification, but whatever.
This pushed me into reading about family theory, including concepts like ‘schizophrenologenia’ and ‘triangulation’, which both reference the dynamic that played into my upbringing. Finally, after reading a hefty chunk of Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, I felt like I could stop. The insight that I needed to have had formed.
The situation at home was complicated. I’ve mentioned a million times to others how I was my mother’s therapist and that my dad was never home and emotionally was completely unavailable. But I didn’t really look into how that could impact my sense of self. I knew that I liked to intellectualize things because it made it much easier to look at emotions that were dangerous, but I didn’t like to look at why I was so afraid of these dangerous emotions.
I think I will have to write about my family drama in another post more accurately, but for now I’ll stop by noting that after I had sat with the implications of my parents’ continuing conflict with each other, I realized that I was recreating my mother’s dynamic in our relationship despite my attempts to stop it. It was literally impossible to avoid considering how ineffective my previous investigations had been into my history. In my inability to withstand the pain of relationship chaos, I had avoided telling Mischa some of my deep frustrations with our relationships. I had probably remained fully unconscious of them until this point.
Today Mischa was being brusque and frustrating and I can’t really say what caused me to open this up, but I started to say to him that I felt our relationship was boring. It was hard to say, but I didn’t really know what else to do. I really started to realize how difficult it is for me to conceptualize a more harmonious way of bringing up unharmonious emotions that I feel guilty about. It doesn’t actually help that I say how guilty I feel because that doesn’t actually communicate anything to Mischa. It just tells him that the topic is really taboo in my head.
We started to unravel the pieces bit by bit. There was so much pain left over on both sides from my year of deep depression. He felt like there was no space for his emotions and I felt like it was his responsibility to know how to deal with that. I felt like he was blaming me for the situation and he said something along the lines of, “I never blamed you for being depressed. I just knew that this was some monster that affects you and you are the helpless victim of it.”
I told him that I didn’t think it should be seen of that way. It makes the struggling, victimhood themes way too strong. The point of this depression is that we learn how to deal with it now and when depression hits again, maybe to him next time, he will know how to deal with it. In fact, the depression could be a catalyst for a greater relationship. We could use this period of depression to learn to explore conflicts together more deeply. We could be one another’s true soul mate instead of just living the day by day, incessantly cleaning, afraid to talk about the stiffness, secretly resentful, and just mindlessly trying to convince ourselves that this is something better. I said to him, “This phase of our relationship is all about compassion and if we don’t work together to understand how these negative experiences impact us, we miss out on the most important aspect of compassion.”
“But why is it that when we have these conversations I feel like a giant fuck up?” He said with a real look of concern on his face.
“Well obviously I’m throwing my mother shit at you,” I started. “You are probably feeling put out by my use of introverted intuition in arguments when you are on the losing side. But above all, I think I don’t feel safe enough coming into these conversations to be affectionate, open, and loving amidst us discussing really difficult issues. I expect that you are going to be angry with me. I know you are going to suspend yourself in silence. And that scares the shit out of me.”
I guess I felt so victimized by our emotional setup that I didn’t feel I had the right to create a space where we could address our fears and dreams affectively. So much was contingent upon me having a healthy sense of self, something that I’ve perpetually lacked. With a feeling of dependence and failure mixed into my choice to be in this relationship, I could never give myself the right to stand up for myself. And as a result, I’d just attack him when I couldn’t bear it anymore. It was frighteningly similar to the setup that Alice Miller described in which a client fears the silence of the analyst because she knows it will be like facing her ambivalence mother all over again.
I give Mischa credit because he really softened up after this. I had a sudden image of us being that archetypal pair of lovers who experience the world together and it felt like things would be ok. I felt like I could relax and that things were not hopeless.
The Child Philosopher 