Sitting in a cafe, I noticed myself drawn towards someone else in the cafe who happened to remind me of my first love 45 years ago. I instantly banished and shut down my thoughts, noticing that my creative flow instantly shut down as well. I tried to recover my original feeling but could not. Sitting with my thoughts as I ate my breakfast I became aware… “oh, this is the stuff of psychoanalysis, inner conflict.” Part of me was drawn to that person I glimpsed in the cafe, and another part of me felt threatened by my feelings of attraction. My defensive system instantly shut down my feelings of attraction, leaving me momentarily numb. Opposing impulses, internal conflict, and defenses is the raw stuff of psychoanalysis… and one of it’s many contributions to psychotherapy in general. I found myself musing about how this contribution squares with current day attachment-based psychotherapy. And, of course, it didn’t escape my notice that I coped with the emotional conflict through the well-worn defensive pathway of “intellectualization.” (to be continued)

Commonly, when I am in a rutt with myself where some negative state has overcome and captured me… in addition to trying to sort out the events leading up to the stuck emotional space, I often find it valuable to do some form of “thought experiment.” First, I feel into the state that I am in (which is often a global undifferentiated kind of feeling), and then I imagine some part of the picture as as different, that is, I factor out some part of the picture, or change it in some significant way… and then I check back in with myself and observe if and how my mood shifts as I imagine this or that piece of the picture as different. I am repeatedly surprised how this simple procedure can powerfully shift my perspective and clarify my mood. As a result the mood becomes less global and I am often able to emerge out of it.

This process can be hugely clarifying. Most “out-of-sorts moods” are global states, with huge overgeneralization in the negative direction (mixed in with “learned helplessness.”) The thought experiment takes down the overgeneralized global state and replaces it with a more differentiated landscape. This alone can often shift a mood into a more realistic state that has hopeful prospects. And the clarification that comes with this process can open up an awareness of action that one can then take to improve the situation.

So much of the wounding we look at in therapy is in the area of “needing and wanting but not having.” And what this forms inside of us. And then what happens to us, when through changed circumstances of a relationship, the “needed and wanted” is now within our reach… when we have long ago formed core beliefs about ourselves and others based upon the assumption of “not having” what is “needed and wanted.” Commonly, the core belief that “I don’t have what I need” persists even when contradicted that I now have what I need. This, I think, is at the heart of so much of our work in psychotherapy.

So often, when we form a core belief about ourselves and our relationships with others, new experiences that that contradict the core belief, do not necessarily change or update the core belief. The new and better experiences are often internalized to create a layered belief system, with the new experiences being used to support a positive outside defense against the core negative belief, but largely leaving the internal belief unchanged at an unconscious level.

Quotation from Mother Teresa found in Reflections on Working Towards Peace…

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”

Commonly, I think the following repercusions unfold in many of us following unresolved early trauma. First, in a variety of ways that emotional wounding happens to us early in life (and not so early), which we are unable to effectively process and integrate… and in various ways we wall off from these assaults to our safety. Over time we learn to go forward in our lives but there is this feeling inside that something has been left behind or is missing or amiss. And then over more time we form a compensating strategy or reparative fantasy that redeems us and gives us hope. Only, because our strategy is based on walling off what really happened to us, our compensating actions ultimately ring hollow. It’s like apples and oranges, no amount of a large supply of apples is going to really repair a problem in the area of our low supply of oranges. In this vein, no amount of outer adult professional success is going to repair a childhood experience of not feeling loved! Yet, some variety of this strategy is what we humans typically do, generation after generation. To this formulation I want to add one additional piece… and that is how common low self-esteem is an end result of this compensating pattern. For one, the wounded love feeling from the original injury never really goes away but instead resurfaces and confluences years latter with our adult ambivalence and self-doubting. And this latter ambivalence and self-doubting almost inevitably occurs because internally we sense that all of the adult success in the world does not truly succeed where we most need it to succeed… to heal the damaged and unloved feeling inside. This can contribute to “the fraudulent feeling” that so many of us carry deeply inside.