Tuesday, August 12, 2014

It's division's fault (sometimes).

When we're injured by the invisible forces of misattuned caregivers during childhood, we develop a genius survival mechanism. We divide and fragment. We divide all the treasures within, (that form self), and divy them up into pieces, and then bury them apart from each other. This ensures that when facing attack, we never lose all of ourselves. Think of a pirate burying his gold all over his island so that no one thief can steal all the loot.

In adulthood, if these treaures are still scattered and buried it creates a situation where you can't love and feel attraction to the same person. You can only feel sexual connection to someone that can't make you feel emotionally intimate and connected. The two primary treaures of love and libido are secreted away in 2 different places, always ever protecting you from losing yourself to intimacy. That's the classic experience of being sexually attracted to unavailable people while feeling repulsed by those most capable to love you back. For some, this is the unconscious energy behind polyamorous relationship(s). The playing with the distinct treaures at the same time.

It's also that this is the case when different intense senses of feeling come up in dystonic random and painful ways. One can be in some kind of basic joy and then completely hopeless with no sense of connection to their surround. You get buried by feelings. Once again, these are the sensations of those disjoined fragments popping up. You merge with pain and it becomes all of you because there is no connection to the rest of self.

The work in adulthood and especially in therapy, is to unbury all the treasures and reuinte them into a unified whole. That's what we refer to as , "integration".  And where one can't muscle into integration, then there's always the idea of consciously unintegrated. The threats we face in development aren't portable to adulthood (we aren't dependant on caregivers for survival and we have coping mechanisms) and so those same primitive defense mechanisms of buring the treasure no longer work. Adulthood is the  time to uncover what's buried away and gather it into one whole, for no other reason than this allows you to self soothe.

The risk of not doing so is that one never receives love and a libidnal connection to the same person, or when you encounter intense feelings, it seems like you merge with them. This so often is the condition that creates the impulse for suicide. This is the fertile soil for suicidal ideation when that impulse to die is simply the lost map to the other buried parts of yourself.