OUT OF MY MIND

THE COMPANY OF MEN – And why it is important.

Having written about women, and how important it is for us to have other women in our lives (https://www.drceccoli.com/2010/06/its-a-girl-thing/ ), it is with great pleasure that I once again step outside my world to dive into the other dark continent- the world of men, and how important men are to each other.

Men need other men- they need each others company. Men offer each other something that women can never give them – an implicit and embodied knowledge about being a man and all that it means and may come to mean. Yes, men provide something for each other that women are not a part of. And cannot be. Consider for example, D.H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love” – and the scene between the men when they fight each other, only to end up embracing each other in recognition: men argue, fight, disagree, and the more they do this the closer to each other they feel. Conflict and aggression, and the ability to work it out with each other, to survive each other in relation to each other, is part of the equation of masculinity. It is part of the way that men establish intimacy with each other. Men need to consort with their own kind, in implicit understanding, connection and validation. Men recognize each other in a million different ways that are specific to being a man: Gendered embodied knowledge that is implicitly known.

Yes, men need other men. The essence of all that is masculine requires the input of other masculinities. Not because women are not important, but because they are different and validate men through their difference. Men gift each other with identification – the implicit knowledge that comes from embodying the same developmental experiences which go on to  shape expectations and visions of manhood. Take men’s identification with their penis- consider what a lifetime of being able (and needing to) see your genitalia and hold it in your hands might do to establish that member of your anatomy as a crucial part of your identity, something that physically represents your sexuality, desire, sameness and difference. Women, on the other hand, grow up shrouding their sexuality, not being aware of it or what it looks like unless they go looking for it (and this is not so easy to do!). There is no reason for a woman to touch herself other than pleasure, and that takes women and their relation to their genitalia in a whole other direction- that of sexuality and societal prohibition. You may laugh as you read this but consider the psychological impact of it. For men, the connection to their genitalia is encouraged and culturally approved. That member of their anatomy becomes not only an identifying characteristic (it’s a boy!), but a physical part of their sense of self that embodies and shapes much of their identity and what is to come. Men are literally out there in the open, and amongst other men, from the very beginning. Perhaps this is why the comparison of size and “whose is bigger” often translates into what it means to be a man and conceptions of strength, vitality, stamina and power. Turns out size matters – but not in the way that is joked about.

Men need male friends, peers, mentors, role models. They need other men to participate in male rituals like contact sports, drinking, fighting, competing, sweat lodges, and all male groups. They need to play together, be competitive with each other and work out their aggression together. Identification, validation, support and creativity all stem out of such male to male experiences. Men also have a need to be intimate with each other, the kind of intimacy that stems from knowing the same developmental experiences and physical sensations, the kind that does not instill fear but recognition. Intimacy between men turns out to be a most important aspect of their identities and a source of creativity. There is a hunger in men for other men and a need to turn to each other for sustenance and definition, for company on the quest for defining and embodying masculinity.

The connection between men is primal and elemental. It is based on their shared anatomy and the way that it gives body to their subjectivity and individual notions and elaborations of masculinity and what it means to be a man. There is an implicit understanding- at a physical level- of what being a man is all about, and women cannot share in this. Much the same way that men cannot provide women with the kind of identification or validation that comes from knowing, from the inside, what something feels like.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ON MASCULINITY: And What It Means To Be A Man.

I have been keen to write about masculinity and men for some time now, and am aware that in doing so I am traversing the great divide of difference between us. As a woman, I cannot avoid these differences, nor would I want to, rather I intend to speak from a position of difference.

In thinking about men, and what makes them men, I was immediately catapulted into the cultural and societal spheres which dictate masculinity and establish -early on- those characteristics that are considered male, and those that are considered female. It became increasingly obvious to me that in our current cultural climate, and its emphasis on being politically correct and all inclusive, the demarcations of gender and gender roles have increasingly become blurred and that the definitions of masculinity and femininity, as well as the attributes that go into those labels have necessarily become more fluid and porous.

In psychoanalysis we have been slow to develop theories of masculinity. For that matter, we have been slow and awkward in addressing sexuality and gender all together. After Freud’s initial and misguided forays into female sexuality and the “dark continent” it constituted for him, psychoanalysis has for the most part continued to build theories of sexuality and gender around pathological formulations rather than healthy and functional development. It is indeed an occupational hazard that, psychoanalysis often begins by focusing on what goes wrong.  So, early psychoanalytic literature had little to say on the subject of men and masculinity, borne as it were from Freud’s dealings with his mostly female patients’. Early ideas about masculinity and maleness centered on genitality, and later on the need to dis-identify from the mother, so that masculinity became a repudiation of femininity. A reaction against. A necessary distancing from the all-encompassing maternal/woman, based on a fear of being ‘penetrated’ or eaten up (recall the vagina dentata) by anything female. There existed an inherent paradox to becoming a man, where it was necessary to strip away the boy’s identification with his mother in order for him to identify with his father.

Then feminism came along and began to revise Freud and psychoanalytic notions of sexuality and gender. Where men and masculinity had been identified with the phallus, and with attributes such as strength, logic, and firmness, feminism swept up men (particularly heterosexual men) and delivered them into more rounded, softer, interior versions of themselves. It rendered masculinity a more dimensional sphere of male identity, one that included women and the feminine and did not require dis-identification with them. Male sexuality was now allowed and instructed to become as fluid and multi-dimensional as female sexuality has always been. This is where things got blurry and more complex. Or perhaps this is where we unintentionally returned to Freud’s original observation that human beings are essentially bisexual, and what that actually looks like in real life: softer masculinities, tougher femininities – caught up in a permeable gendered space in which to play with one’s sexuality. Undoubtedly Freud stopped short of elaborating just what that bisexuality looked like or would mean, instead he took it down the road of biology. But think of it, in deconstructing gender from its solid lego-like quality into a softer assembly, we have taken the hard edges that defined separateness and difference amongst the sexes and opened up space for possibility and also potential confusion. In the current climate, what is masculinity about?

Again, psychoanalysis remains sluggish in this area. It has been queer theorists that have advanced the conversation the most, perhaps because of their “other” status and the potential space to think outside the proverbial box. The current generation of analysts speaks about masculinity as the impossible quest, as a false idea that can become too rigidified in cultural stereotypes or so porous as to put one’s sense of identity in question. Current psychoanalysis views masculinity as involving multiple representations of what it means to be a man. For example, we no longer believe that a man must repudiate his mother in order to become a man, rather the opposite. We now think that boys use their identification with their mothers in order to integrate the more “feminine “ aspects of themselves, and that separating from her is a much more organic process that continues throughout the adults lifetime, and involves relationships with other women. Such a developmental-integration-separation of and from mom, allows the space to form multiple identifications on the way to identity formation, and renders a plurality to the notion of masculinity that liberates it from an essentialist position.

Or does it?

There are others, like myself, who, while privileging the early relational dyad as constitutive of personality and psychic development, also argue that the body is a gendered container that necessarily limits the ways that identity is elaborated. In this case, the interiority of a man is shaped not only by his early relational field, but also by his physicality and the requisite experiences that it dictates, and so the question of what it means to be a man is best answered by looking at how a man copes with his (internal) uncertainty about who he is versus the reality of his gendered body (yes, the phallus again), and whether this leads to psychological constriction and a stereotyping of the self or to a sense of possibility. Masculinity embodied.

Consider the developmental experiences that are exclusively male: The ability to touch oneself for purposes other than pleasure, or what a lifetime of holding one’s genitalia, privately and publicly and with cultural and societal approval, might do in terms of establishing a sense of male identity, to say nothing of sexuality. Think of how aggression is rewarded in the male world, along with competition and strength, and how these notions begin to weave the texture of masculinity. Consider what the specificity of the male physique encourages and limits based on its particularities. This is true regardless of sexual orientation. A man is a man is a man. There, I’ve said it. And how he embodies masculinity is  best answered by attending to the interplay of his internal world and the relationships that have configured it, and his gendered reality and the developmental experiences it has occasioned.

Difference is a good thing.

Horcruxes and the Return of Bad Objects.

It has been a while since I wrote about Harry Potter and the particular magic that J.K. Rowling’s stories hold for me, and well, it just would not be my blog if I did not post about her alchemy from time to time. So Potter heads unite, here we go. Today’s post is about Horcruxes and the fact that most of us are them. Aha. We are all Horcruxes, in one way or another.

First, for the uninitiated in the Harry Potter series, a quick definition so that we are on the same page. A Horcrux is created by putting a part of oneself into an object (which can be human, as in Harry’s case). In order to accomplish this the self must be split or divided, which can only happen through a ”supreme act of evil which rips it apart.”  In the magic world of Harry Potter. creating a Horcrux is unnatural and only attempted by evil witches and wizards who divide their souls in order to remain immortal.

What, say you, does this have to do with anything in our muggle/non-wizarding world? Everything, say I.

In my practice I often see people who are tormented by parts of themselves that are experienced as excessive: too bad, too weak, too impulsive, too sad, too frightened- you name it- but the common characteristic is that they are ego dystonic and cannot be embraced as part of the self, so they are experienced as ‘not me’. As such, they remain split off from awareness, and the parts of the self that are acceptable, until (perhaps you have guessed it already), they return unannounced in the context of particular relationships or situations. Often, my patients cannot understand how this comes about, or why they remain in relationships or situations that seem to invite those parts of themselves to come out. Or worse, they find themselves caught in repetitive interaction patterns that bring about such ‘not me’ self states and leave them in despair.

In psychoanalysis, those of us who subscribe to the idea that we seek relationship from the very beginning of our lives, and that it is early interactions with our caretakers that wire our neuro-circuitry and determine many of our relational and intimacy patterns, think of such split off parts of the self as stemming from precisely those relationships-the early ones. When the vissicitudes of early interactions are traumatic, they require the infant to split off (and dissociate) experiences which are overwhelming and threaten his or her survival. The Scottish psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn, believed that such experiences become part of the structure of our personality, and are taken into oneself in order to maintain the connection and bond to our caretaker(s). By splitting off what is bad or overwhelming we manage to keep them loving and good, while the bad experience is taken in and then dissociated. Unfortunately, the fate of those internalized relational experiences is that they return from within and create conflictual states of being.

So perhaps the internalization of a bad object is our unintended way of becoming a Horcrux. We take in a part of another that arises in relationship to us, and we do so in an effort to survive overwhelming emotions arising out of interpersonal dynamics, which demand that the bond to the real other be maintained. Once a Horcrux (or bad object) is created it poses a real threat to our developing personality because of the continued presence of emotions and/or memories which haunt the self from the inside, placing an excessive focus on our internal world and reducing the possibility of new behavior in (relational) situations that mobilize the same emotions.

According to the Harry Potter Wikipedia, to create a Horcrux is to divide one’s soul — the “essence of self” — and it goes against the first Fundamental Law of Magic, which essentially states that tampering with one’s soul inevitably results in grave side effects. Boy is that right. Tampering with a developing sense of self does in fact result in grave consequences. In the Potter books, it is Harry who after witnessing the death of his parents, and surviving his own destruction at the hands of Voldemort’s wand, internalizes a split off part of the dark lords soul, unintentionally making him a Horcrux. Thus, part of Voldermort lives on in Harry, and stirs whenever he experiences frustration and anger, the very emotions that Voldermort thrives on. At those times, Harry withdraws from his friends, thinks evil thoughts, and speaks in parseltongue (Voldermort’s snake language)- all “not me” behaviors which trouble him yet link him to the dark lord. Fairbairn called this situation “the return of the bad objects” and considered it the cornerstone of emotional difficulties.

Furthermore, the parts of a person’s soul/self within a Horcrux can think for themselves and have certain magical abilities, including the ability to influence those in their vicinity. When Harry, Ron, and Hermione carry Slytherin’s locket(a horcrux) around their necks, they became moodier and begin to fight with one another. They are also unable to summon their Patronuses*  (good objects/thoughts) while wearing the locket since the fragment of the bad object inside is darkening their thoughts and exerting its influence. Not unlike what happens in relationships that stir early (troubled) interactional patterns and result in re-creating primal, emotionally traumatic scenarios. Or like the psychic aftermath of trauma, and the particular nature of dissociation:  the lacunae that form around unbearable states of mind -each self-state its own intricate universe. Or like our psychoanalytic ideas of projective identification and the taking in of another persons’ not me self-states,  perhaps as a temporary Horcrux to be used for understanding another and the others it relates to.

Perhaps the world of magic is not make-believe at all: it is our world and the internal theater that each of us responds to.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* For more on Patronuses please click on: https://www.drceccoli.com/2011/08/on-monsters-dementors-and-other-magical-beings/

THE MAKING OF IDENTITY – on fingerprints, bruises and scars.

In my work as a psychoanalyst, I often think that none of us can avoid the fingerprints of our early history, the particulars of who our parent(s) and/or caretakers were and how their distinct elements shaped us, the specific interactions that molded our relational self. We cannot avoid it, nor would we want to. Our parental legacy and its early progression, shapes who we are and who we become. That relational history is ours and ours alone – much like a fingerprint. Such fingerprints make us a particular character; an individual with our own emotional twists and turns. Fingerprints are uniquely ours. They are one of our distinctive, identifying characteristics. They are emblems that capture our individuality, like a birthmark that is singularly ours. Thinking of such physical imprints has helped me consider psychic experience, and particularly the experience of psychic pain in a similar fashion. Psychically, fingerprints consist of multiple, early interactions with significant others, each shaping parts of our identity, creating our particular curves, lines and dents. They cannot be avoided. Bruises and scars are to be avoided, but not fingerprints.

Consider the differences. Bruises are contusions and discolorations that come about as the result of an injury. They may or may not be indicative of the degree of physical trauma on the inside, but they are signs that something has caused harm. They are often sore to the touch and cause us, and others, to take notice. To move with care. They may be minor and disappear quickly, or quite profound and deep.

Then there are scars. Scars come about as the result of a wound. They provide physical evidence that an injury has occurred, a laceration, a gash, an abrasion that leaves a mark on the body. They are the evidence of trauma. Obvious to the eye and painful to the touch, they keep us from engaging freely in our daily lives. While they may diminish over time, they never go away. They fade and are survived but not forgotten.

Fingerprints are part of our identity. Scars and bruises are evidence of trauma. Big difference. While the way that we bruise, and our particular scars, also become part of our identities and who we are, (re)shaping our experience of ourselves, they are evidence of our run-ins with life and its circumstances, of external events and people and their effect on us, of the impact and potential damage that we are capable of inflicting on one another. Take for example, the scars of incest and sexual abuse. Or the way that violence becomes written on the body,  coming to life in the bruises and scars it leaves behind. Our psyche contains bruises and scars that may not be evident to the eye but instead, take hold of our senses and are experienced as painful and destabilizing areas, which like physical lesions, are tender to the touch and reactivate the pain associated with them.

The parallel between psychic suffering and physical suffering is similar in other ways too. Imagine if our psychic wounds were visible to the eye- if our personal lacerations were evident to all, much in the same way that scars and bruises are. Talk about the walking wounded! Perhaps we would take better care, take heed of the others’ pain. Hold a door open, offer up our seats, respond from our own understanding and experience of injury and pain. Respond with compassion. But I digress. The point is that psychic experience is embodied in our physical envelope and vice versa, and this has a powerful influence on how we move in the world, what parts of our bodies are free and which are frozen. What parts of us are open to new experience and what parts of us are closed to it. What parts of us are bruised and scarred. The psyche impacts the nature of our illnesses and ailments. It speaks through our symptoms, giving physicality to our suffering.

It is the nature of pain that it defies words and language and speaks through felt experience. Perhaps that is why when we can see that someone is injured physically we take heed, we hold the door and give up our seat on the bus. But what of the scars and bruises that cannot be seen? When we are able to be present with another, and open ourselves to experiencing them, we become aware of their psychic nevus. We can sense it and feel it. Pain, and particularly psychic pain cries out for such a felt understanding and only then is potentially represented in language- a language co-created in mutual experience. Psychic bruises and scars come about in relationship(s) and require relationship(s) to be processed, understood and perhaps healed. Much of the language of the psyche, as well as that of the soma, is experiential, and thus does not translate so easily to words. Thus the value of relationships and our need for them. Human connection at its best, with all of its multitude of individual fingerprints.

ON TALKING –IN AND OUT OF CONTEXT.

Ever have the experience of hearing something you said but in a different context? Listening to your words yet feeling like something is not quite right? It may be that the actual words are not quite the same, or that they are said in a different tone of voice or affectation, or tweaked so that they take on a different meaning under the different circumstances. Yep, you have been taken out of context- faced with a reality that was not intended in the first articulation of your words yet, here it is: your words coming back to you and they are not the same, not what you intended. Same but different enough to make you wonder if you actually said that. Out of the particular context in which you first spoke them, they become someone else’s words, taking on their meaning and not yours. Context is everything they say. And they (whoever they are) may be right.

I’ve been thinking about how important the context in which something occurs is, what is said and done, particularly in terms of how something is understood. The more I think about it the more complicated it seems to me. How does context establish itself in our lives? How does it affect and influence how we listen, how we hear and process information, and what we do with it? How does it affect what we say and do?

As usual, when I am walking in the maze of my thoughts, musing about the possibilities of something and finding myself at sea, I sit in my psychoanalytic chair. I fold myself into the space where I spend many hours in contemplation with another. The space where it is necessary to be at ease with not knowing yet continue to think and feel. Context made concrete. My office and my chair provide the context for my ruminations about such matters. So I will start there.

In psychotherapy, context is deeply and inexorably rooted in the relationship between doctor and patient. The language of treatment is relationally embedded. The relationship provides the context(s). How things are said and disclosed, how they are interpreted and perceived, and ultimately how useful what is said can be, depends on what is happening interpersonally between two particular people, and what each of them brings to the interaction at any given moment. This is the context of treatment.

While the boundaries of a situation may provide a contextual outline – in the clinical scenario this involves meeting time, fees, the use of the couch or chair, the person of the analyst, the actual office – it is only an outline, the actual context involves meaning as created and articulated by two people sharing and negotiating their worldview(s). People come to treatment because they are in difficulty and they expect that psychotherapy will offer them an opportunity to address and rectify this. That is the contextual outline of therapy, which then becomes richer through the development of the therapeutic relationship. In other situations, the contextual outline may also involve a work or professional setting, or a particular role or situation. While this contextual outline is established initially by the expectations of a particular situation it is then filled in with the colors and qualities of interpersonal transactions, the multitude of conscious and unconscious interactions that make up relationships.

I think of context as a fluid and porous mega-container that shifts and transforms itself on the basis of relational demands and self-other negotiations. Because context is established relationally it makes sense that much of its texture and feel comes from those explicit and implicit communications that lend an affective aura to situations. For example, I may say or point to something in a session that is upsetting to my patient, at that moment both of us are de-stabilized immediately: my patient because they feel misunderstood or caught out with something difficult, myself because I recognize that I have upset them, or worse, that I have touched on something that because of the way that I said it, or the implicit assumption I might have made about it, may have opened a wound for them. The context in this particular situation is emotionally charged, and what is said and done is flooded with those emotions, informing what happens next. While navigating those situations is something that psychoanalysts are usually adept at, my point here is that affect changes the context, shifting it, often to a historical and personal one, a context that operates under different rules of engagement. Transference and countertransference are contextual phenomena.

Because of this, the context of a situation and/or relationship can determine what the possibilities for growth and reparation are. Even within the therapeutic relationship, where the space is designated as potentially providing for both growth and reparation (providing a contextual outline) such context can shift on its head due to relational entanglements which may be so affectively de-stabilizing to both participants that terra firma is elusive and the power of historical context interferes with here and now interpersonal communication.

Couples often get into a similar tangle. Speak to one partner and they will tell you that they feel unheard, speak to the other partner and they will tell you that they can’t get a word in. Context. In this example both partners are at a stalemate. In order to advance a relational negotiation needs to take place to create a new context, one in which they can both talk and hear each other out. Whether this is possible depends on both partners’ ability to review what they are bringing to the situation (personal context) and how it is being triggered by the others’ actions. It depends on their ability to hold on to who they are, to their context, but not too tightly. It depends on the ability to hold on to who you are while being taken out of context.

Ah yes context. Transference. Countertransference. The relational dance. When I sit with a patient and they remind me of something I said, sometimes I remember it exactly- this is a situation in which both of us agreed and created the context. But just as often, a patient may recall something that I said differently, and has used that interpretation in a way that I had not intended. Taken out of context, my words, intentions and meaning(s) do not feel like they are mine. This situation is one in which my patient and I need to re-examine the dissonance between their understanding and mine, and how it came about. Often what we find is other meanings, voices and even self states have been activated by my words or affectation and its emotional impact on my patient.

Our ability to work and move within multiple contexts, known and unknown, implicit and explicit opens up possibility. This is as true of the therapeutic situation as it is of life. Context is relationally determined. And perhaps this is why we are constantly being taken out of context.

ON SEISMIC ACTIVITY – And the Disruption of the Self.

In my work as a psychoanalyst I spend much of my time in areas of experience that tend to be de-stabilizing to our sense of personal integrity and unity. I am speaking here of those times when emotion overwhelms us, disrupting our sense of being oneself and ushering in feeling states that cause a disturbance at the very core of who we are, altering our sense of self and our very reality. Literally breaking apart our ability to think clearly and undermining our sense of stability. Think of them as personal earthquakes, shaking up the structure of who we know ourselves to be and through their reverberations, ushering in parts of ourselves that belong to our personal history and the relationships that make up that history. Seismic activity that resonates with implicit knowledge that continues to reverberate within us and comes to the surface under specific circumstances that trigger it anew.  What is this dark magic?

We are talking here of emotional experience that remains unprocessed yet is known to us in its felt reality and may come about through our interactions with others, often particular others that speak the language of those particular emotions and re-mobilize them in interaction with us. As a psychoanalyst I have many words for such experiences: regression, transference, countertransference, enactments- to name a few. Such words make it simpler to identify those moments in treatment but they do not help in the actual processing of the experience. That has to happen relationally. At those times both my patient and I are surfing in the heart of a massive wave, negotiating it together on our surfboard, or more to the point- on the couch. Today’s post is about the experience of being overwhelmed and flooded by emotional information that remains at the core of who we are yet cannot be processed in its original relationship or interaction- it requires a new relational experience that offers a potential new outcome. In my book, this is what psychotherapy is all about.

The experience of personal de-stabilization is now well documented in the neuropsychological literature. Particular emotions mobilize specific neuro-transmitters in our brain, re-activating psychic solutions that are aimed at optimizing survival and re-stabilizing us. From a neurobiological viewpoint it is all about the return to homeostasis. However, from a psychological point of view emotional stability (and our sense of oneness) requires that we connect the emotions we are feeling to the knowledge that we have accumulated, bridging the divide created by the original emotional upheaval. It requires that we experience a different outcome within a relationship. This is because emotions are encoded relationally and can only be understood, processed and integrated interactively– through an ongoing negotiation with another.

In order for emotions and affect to be contained, understood and processed, mutual emotional regulation is needed- something that begins with our caretakers and continues throughout our lifetime in our relationships to others. To be able to self-regulate we must first have the opportunity to interact with another that helps us to process affective experience and wards off potential overload while engaging with us, or at least helps to mediate such overload. In childhood, what is potentially traumatic involves developmental milestones and their concomitant emotions and how they are negotiated (or not) in the parent/child dyad. Self -regulation is a process that is initiated dyadically and assimilated and internalized as the result of such ongoing dyadic interactions. Where such dyadic mediation has failed, because of parental limitations, absence, neglect, or abuse, affect resides in its raw experiential form and can therefore return with potent aftershocks. And all of this shapes our brain and nervous system, which then impacts our ability to negotiate relationships and intimacy in our life.

The language of affect resides in implicit memory. That part of us that knows, senses, intuits and responds from the inside. The part of us that responds from what is known, but yet to be processed by thought and language. Yet to be integrated into consciousness. But there. Much like the rumblings of an earthquake rearranging the grounding plates and creating seismic activity, that language can be activated by tone of voice, a particular look or movement, a familiar smell, a sound, or a specific interaction or circumstance. All triggers that set off our internal alarm system as we experience the internal quake. It can feel like a personal disaster. Hit 9 on the Richter scale. Yet it also creates the opportunity for change.

And for reparation.

 

PSYCHIC SURVIVAL – And The Packaging of the Self.

We are, all of us, finely tuned complex beings. Every day in my clinical practice I am reminded of this fact. Individuals and their lives, and life solutions are never simple. Instead, each person carries within them a dense cast of internal characters and experiences which lend their voices and truths to lived experience, often determining outcome and choices. This personal theater of relationships to others and to the world is the very basis of our experience- and often that experience is housed, felt and thought about in different parts of our self, in self-states that have emerged (often out of awareness) to help us get on with the business of living.

Working with people who have suffered various types of traumatic experience, has highlighted for me the fact that there are often many selves, or self states which hold different information about a person: different feelings, thoughts, experiences and memories. The degree of trauma is sometimes equivalent to the degree of psychic fragmentation and dissociation, but this is not always true. The fact is that our psyche is prone to dissociation in the service of maintaining healthy functioning and ongoing homeostasis, (for more on this click here: https://www.drceccoli.com/2010/08/on-being-oneself/ ). All of us dissociate to one degree or another in our daily lives despite our ongoing experience of being one self. And some times we rely more on one part of ourself than on others-because we need to. When trauma has touched one’s life it causes the dissociative properties of our psyche to become entrenched and take over, in order to prevent further destabilization, and this often means that self-experience becomes fragmented and held and managed by varying parts of the self.

This post is about personal marketing, about the packaging of the self and the make up of a personae who can navigate the demands of the world while protecting the truth(s) of the rest of the self, and its psychic unity and survival. This type of “packaging” is known to all survivors of trauma (regardless of the type of trauma) and  usually presents a particular and personally created incarnation that is based on strength, competence and total self-reliance. The trouble is that such packaging usually comes about as the result of environmental impingement on the self. It materializes as a palpable self to help navigate difficulties and prevent further psychic disruption and destabilization while managing life’s demands. Such packaging creates a “false self” that is adept at doing what is needed while maintaining crucial emotional ties and bonds to loved ones and protecting the “true(er) self” that has been injured, trespassed and/or traumatized. Quite a complicated state of affairs.

Since such a self is meant to insure survival, it comes about via the shaping of a self that mirrors what is expected from the adult caretakers that are involved in such survival. What is crucial here is to maintain the emotional connection to others through a mirroring of their perceived needs. Their perceived needs and not the self’s (ergo the developmental impingement). Furthermore, since this packaged self is forged out of a child’s psyche, it is modeled  in the rigid, inflexible, and omnipotent style that children often use in play when they emulate adults. Thus, while it may be very effective in managing ongoing life situations, it precludes the ability to contemplate other behavioral options or to develop the necessary coping skills to deal. And this is out of necessity: in order to develop social and behavioral coping skills one needs to experience the emotions and feelings associated with them so as to be able to think about them experientially. The entire purpose of  the false self or packaged personae is to avoid those feelings and get on with it. What makes such self-states false is that they are borne out of necessity for survival and do not represent the individual’s other needs, instead they act as protective shields with a singular purpose – to avoid further psychic disruption while maintaining a crucial emotional tie.  To call these self-states  ‘false’ is misleading – they are very real indeed and often contain many characteristics of the self which have  rigidified and become ironclad out of necessity. Continued reliance on such “packaging” insures emotional isolation and hopelessness as the rest of the self is likely to feel misunderstood and alone, as well as at a loss as to how to proceed without the help of a much depended on part of itself. This is one of the many reasons why people enter treatment: their (protective) false self has been working overtime, its armor cracking and revealing a much more complex emotional story .

It is often the case that our defenses, whether they exhibit as full on selves, self states or ongoing protective behaviors, come about to help maintain our psychic integrity but at the cost of keeping much of the information and feelings associated with the pain inherent in such experiences, out of our awareness. Thus, our package-like states require that we continue to act within a rigid set of behavioral alternatives (which came about out of necessity) because they are the only ones that such self-states know. Often when other alternatives become an option in treatment, they threaten the self precisely because they require new behavior and skills, which may make previous ways of functioning (and package-like states) not needed. Imagine relying on a part of yourself for most of your life and then finding out that perhaps it has been made redundant!

Psychoanalysts that work with trauma and dissociative states often address the need for integration: a kind of meeting of the self-states so that one can acknowledge the various parts of oneself, why they are needed, how they function, what they speak to, etc. Such integration rarely comes about smoothly. Instead it occurs over time and usually in relationship to an other who comes to know the self in relation to its self-states. Someone who comes to understand why the packaging was and perhaps still is necessary, and who helps bring about a voice and a say -finally initiating a dialogue that makes integration a possibility.

It was when I come to truly know and understand various patient self states, from my experience  of, and interaction with them, that a meeting of minds can take place, and only then is it possible for my patients to consider doing things that until that point had been managed by another part of themselves, packaged to take on that particular task(s). Treatment is not necessarily about banishing these  states, but about understanding their purpose and perhaps initiating a collaboration of sorts- leading to the experience and sense of unity that comes from really knowing oneself.

OUR USE OF OBJECTS – And Their Importance In Our Lives.

Several weeks ago I wrote a post on our internal world and how it is populated (https://www.drceccoli.com/2012/08/our-internal-world-and-how-it-is-populated/). I was drawing attention to the powerhouse that runs our life. In that post I focused on the significant players in our lives and our relationships to them. Today, I would like to speak about the rest of the internal population: the objects and things that become meaningful to us because of the way that we use them and the meaning that we assign to them. In psychological parlance we refer to this as object use.

The objects that populate an individual’s internal world are personal, specific and idiosyncratic in their meaning and use. Take food for example. For some of us, food offers many pleasures in its preparation, tasting and sharing. It immediately connotes  being with loved ones and enjoying it together. For others, food is simply something that must be dealt with, fuel for the body and nothing more. For still others food can be a substance to be abused, used to excess, having more to do with getting a reliable fill, satiating something that is wanting or hungry for something other than food, and/or managing a feeling or an emotion that threatens to be overwhelming. And for yet another group of people, food can become something to do without precisely because it threatens to stir up pleasure and address the hungers within. Food as an object can be used in many ways. And so it is for other objects as well.

Take reading as another example. For some of us reading is a pleasure, a way to gain information, engage in an inner dialogue, experience various feeling states and travel to foreign lands. It can be a playful activity that stimulates our imagination and creativity. It can also become a way of escaping the routine of our lives, our problems and responsibilities, or worse, it can become a way of avoiding our life altogether. Reading, as an object can be used in many different ways.

Our use of objects comes about from our early ability to play and the opportunities afforded to us to do so. I am not speaking here of having many toys, but of having early relationships that encourage exploration, curiosity and play. Relationships that facilitate the exploration of the world, the self, and the self in relation. Such relationships create a facilitating environment that makes it possible to move from relating to an object- as in this is my toy car, it moves this way and that way, to using the object: In my toy car I am a drag racer who is unafraid to bang up my car because it is the conduit to my experience and I can use it any way I want to. The difference between relating to an object and using it involves being able to do with it whatever is needed, to really use it for our own purposes. In essence, it involves being able to use it how we need to and learn from our experience with it. Unless we have had early relationships that have facilitated trusting our “play” and our use of objects to elaborate parts of ourselves and discover our own creative possibilities, objects remain, well, just objects- things with little and/or limited meaning. Object usage requires that we be willing to destroy the actual properties of the thing while being aware of its properties and the possibilities they bring to our lives.

What is of import here is that the more we are able to fully use our objects the better off we are, as they provide potential venues to understand and elaborate our experience. I often see patients who are isolated and withdrawn, full of pain and unable to connect with others. Such patients are often unable to talk about their experience with others because they do not trust that those others will be able to help them with their burdens. They have not developed the ability to use another or an actual object in a way that helps them flesh out their experience. Instead they turn to objects and things, including people, to mitigate their experience, often requiring the objects in their world to be uni-dimensional and rigid, and serve only one particular function- escape, distraction, satiation etc. Unfortunately, this continues a spiral of isolation and a return to the use of objects for their escapist function.

When  you think about how you use the objects in your life, what do you come up with? Utilitarian? Creative? Playful? Elaborative? Restrictive? Compulsive? What objects help expand possibilities and which shut it down? Think about the history of your usage, how long has your relationship to a particular object been around, where did it derive its meaning? What does the way you use it tell you about you? Would it help to review this?

In my work I often focus on how my patients attribute meaning to the things and people in their lives. I know that at least some of those meanings come from their personal, relational history and how it has been internalized .  I then focus on how that plays out  in our interactions. I have come to understand that such (object) usage tells me a great deal about my patients internal world and their experiences in life. It also tells me a great deal about where reparation might be needed. Our relationship is usually forged from the internal players in their world colliding with those in mine, in a space where it is possible to play many different roles and speak in many different tongues opening new possibilities within old interactions and behaviors.

WAIT WAIT DON’T TELL ME – On NOT Helping and the dance of mutuality.

It may seem curious for a psychoanalyst to write a post about not helping but that is exactly what I am going to do here. Three weeks ago I wrote about how difficult it is to sit and wait from the patients’ point of view (click here to read: https://www.drceccoli.com/2012/09/what-do-i-do-action-thought-and-change/).This week I turn to the psychoanalyst.

While most of us in the helping professions choose them precisely because we want to help, we would do well to consider just exactly what “help” means to us and how we go about being helpful. As a psychoanalyst I am often reminded that what I must do if I really want to help is wait. Wait for (and with) my patient, allowing them  (and me) time and space to process what has happened or is happening. Particularly when they are struggling with something. Wait with them. Wait for them to arrive at something while I attempt to shine a torch this way and that way, follow them and stay connected to them. Whatever I do I must not help. I must not jump to an interpretation, an explanation, a suggestion. I too must wait and sit with them and make room for their experience. It turns out that waiting is part of the experience of discovery for both patient and analyst.

My patients are the first to remind me of this even though they want me to help and come to see me seeking help. When I step in too soon, or go on about something I see, I often lose them. Or worse, I overwhelm them. This is because people know what is ailing them, and they also usually know what they can do about it, its just that this knowledge is often not available to them either because it has been exiled from consciousness because of trauma or because they have never had the chance to arrive at it without someone “helping”. Treatment provides the opportunity to share this with another, the analyst, who if he/she does not interfere with, but rather facilitates the space needed to talk about one’s life in one’s own way, can help one arrive at his or her own conclusions and decisions. In the best case scenario, the analyst facilitates growth by waiting for experience to unfold an by being present in each moment, aware of the shared mutuality it provides.

As psychotherapists it is easy to lose our way in our desire to help. Trained as we are to listen, tune in, wrap ourselves in the internal theater of our patients’ world while at the same time staying connected to ours and our experience, we may get ahead of our patients’ – anticipating, filling in, re-considering, re-narrating, all in our attempt to understand and help. Our trained sensitivity to the other aching to help them out. Relieve them of the pain. Soothe their discomfort. Show them the way. But wait, is the anticipation really impatience? Does it move us out of the discomfort of waiting, of sitting with them in whatever it is they need to sit with? Sitting in our not knowing? Hmmm. Sitting together saturated in emotion and in the moment is not always easy. Not moving until the other is ready to move, even though we may think we know the way, not so easy to do.

Here an analogy to the dance of Tango may give more body to my thoughts. Please dance with me through this. Through its assigned roles for leader and follower, Tango provides the opportunity for true equality and mutuality in its dance (for more on Tango read:  https://www.drceccoli.com/2012/01/he-said-she-did-a-return-to-gender-stereotypes-or-the-recipe-for-gender-fluidity/). In order for the dance of Tango to proceed smoothly and fluidly the follower must wait (there’s that word again!) for the leader to lead a step or a sequence of steps. She must wait while staying connected to the leader, until something is lead so that she can follow it. Once something has been lead there are plenty of opportunities to add a flourish, an embellishment, a step of one’s own. When the follower rushes the lead, anticipating it, she acts with partial information and assumes what is being asked or said. She misses the invitation to the dance.  In the anticipation one loses the connection to the other and in taking a step on one’s own the possibilities for mutuality are broken and the dance becomes a different dance, no longer danced in partnership. There are many reasons, all personal and idiosyncratic, to why one might anticipate the lead. The follower might try to ‘help’ the leader, or try to please the leader, or possibly demonstrate her ability.  While knowing the reason is important, to rush the lead curtails the infinite possibilities of mutuality and partnership involved in Tango.

And so it is in psychotherapy.

In therapy as in Tango, the roles that we embody and the power that they have – as leader and follower, as men and women, as masculine and feminine, as teacher and student, and yes, as doctor and patient- are different but equal. While they vary in terms of life experiences, knowledge, expertise, appearance, ability, and the like, what each person brings to the experience is different yet equal in creating the partnership and the potential for true mutuality. This is the space where discovery and growth take place.

Waiting for the other while remaining engaged is hard to do. Seeing and feeling someone else’s pain or shame or fear or anger and just being with it and them is hard to do. Surrendering to the experience of the other while remaining aware of ourselves and our desire to “help” is hard to do.

But that is what it takes to dance the dance of mutuality.

WHAT DO I DO? Action, thought and change.

Over many years of listening and working with patients, I have come to differentiate various degrees of thoughtfulness which, when considered and allowed to steep, move people toward action and change. In treatment, there are those moments when something clicks for the patient, when some piece of behavior sincs with history or memory or something implicitly known, an aha! moment that one has to sit with and consider- no doing, just thinking and holding on to what feels right.  Sitting with it. Those aha! moments are saturated with knowledge that releases slowly and over time, and helps us to create new meaning and understanding perhaps leading us to act and behave in different ways.

Then there is sitting with not knowing what to do, holding onto what we have identified and allowing our curiosity to help us view it anew and perhaps bring some answers. Sitting with not knowing is harder to do than one might think. Most of us, when confronted with painful behavior and experience and knowledge that threatens to bring on the possibility (or need) for change jump out of our thoughts and feelings and go directly to:

“So what do I do about that?”

It is the question that obliterates thoughtfulness and moves one into considering action- although what it really does is attempt to engage another into telling us what to do. Out of our own subjectivity and experience into that of another. It moves one from being present in the moment to thinking about the future and what action we could take. It is a way out of the moment while appearing to stay in the moment. It is a way out of thoughtfulness by appearing to be thoughtful. Exit introspection enter fear.

I think of the “what do I do about that” question as a signal that one is not ready to think about that. Rather, by shifting to the question of what to do we ignore the information we have just come to, we stop thinking about it and we engage the other in their opinion of what must be done. Sitting with the thing without knowing what to do is hard to do, and yet, new understanding comes about through curiosity and openness and just sitting with it. This is what leads us into thoughtful action and potential change. Sitting with it keeps us present with what we need to know.

Here is what I mean. A patient arrives at the understanding that her eating disorder has been her way of managing her emotions, something she has known for quite some time but on this day it becomes clear through an event that has upset her and through her feeling as we talk that we have hit upon an essential truth about her relationships to others and herself. A good moment but a difficult one, as it puts her face to face with a part of herself she has not been able to recognize before- and she does not like it. I can see the understanding in her face, her struggle with it and then I can feel her moving away from that recognition as she says to me: “So what do I do about it?” She has moved from the ability to feel her truth and get to know it from the inside to action and her reliance on my expertise and direction. She looks to me to tell her what to do instead of allowing herself to struggle with what she wants and would like to do. But no matter, we will re-visit this again, and each time make a little more room for thought and feeling so that it may inform any action on her part.

When confronted with the question “so what do I do about that?” I often reply “I do not know”. This is because I do not know. What I know is what the patient has done about that in the past, and how that has worked out. I know his or her attempt to adapt, survive, make good, etc. A faulty solution that usually reinforces symptomatic behavior because it stems from a protective, adaptive and often defensive reaction to whatever threatens homeostasis and triggers early emotional solutions which were necessary then but are maladaptive now. Patients usually come to therapy flummoxed because even though they have been applying their best solutions to their problems they remain stuck and in pain. They have been trying to do something about that for a long time.

While I do not know what any patient should do about their particular that, what I do know is that it requires time and space to think about it in the context of one’s life – our history, relationships, choices, memories, and ongoing interactions. I know that patients have usually gone about living their lives in the best possible way available to them, and that only they can know what to do about their lives- but such knowledge needs to be arrived at on one’s own and in light of what has been processed and experienced relationally. To my mind this is what constitutes good treatment- the opportunity to sit with another, who has expertise in human behavior and motivation, as well as in listening, observing and staying attuned, and who, rather than foreclose space by telling the patient what to do can sit with the patient in not knowing, allowing their experience to lead the way.

Hard stuff, but well worth it.