I’m going to reproduce here a short bit of writing I put on Twitter. It relates to what I said on last night’s Disaffected. This may resonate for those who were emotionally abused by their parents when they were children. I said something on the show last night, but it took a night's sleep to consolidate my thoughts.
That was the single piece of evidence I needed. “Emotions were not mirrored”. So we’ll written. It explains everything. That I always felt and still do as if I am wrong and bad for what I feel. I have this hunger to feel validated and often cannot seem to function until someone confirms that what I am feeling is valid.
This resonates so much with me. I don’t consider myself a victim. In so many ways I am blessed and fortunate and I want to take responsibility for myself, my actions and reactions. But there were significant, traumatic events in my childhood that still occasionally cause me pain and affect my relationships within my family. Having someone “hear” me and understand helps comfort me when I am hurting. But I also know I can’t rely on this reaction or become angry if it’s not forthcoming. I work on all this stuff frequently!
Funnily enough, there is actually one form of therapy that uses "limited reparenting" and that is schema therapy. It's actually very effective for BPD specifically, and many people who get schema therapy no longer meet criteria for BPD by the end of the treatment period. Of course you don't have BPD, and schema therapy is a two year commitment. However, it does demonstrate that many people do actually need to be reparented to fully heal.
Oct 29, 2023·edited Oct 29, 2023Liked by Josh Slocum
You are way too self aware to have any of those. :)
What I find most interesting about ST is that it's a relatively new form of therapy but its outcomes completely surpass anything we have seen before. Maybe the secret really is the reparenting? That being said, the ST textbook also says that therapists should "have good stamina" and "be prepared to deal with rage" as long as the client doesn't become violent.
I walk a knife edge sometimes. While I suspect I did have BPD, at least functionally, for a time when I was younger, I don't *think* I'm personality disordered now.
But I do have Borderline/Histrionic traits, and they come out hard when I'm under stress. It takes conscious effort to rein them in, and I fail a lot.
It's easy for me to feel uncertain and worried by such accusations, even though I know they come out of that person's own problems, and sometimes out of malice.
That's the price to pay for being unusually open about psychology, and one's own dysfunctions. I think it's worth it (frankly, I don't know how to be any other way), but yeah, it hurts sometimes. That's the way it is.
Personally, I think people with traits of PDs are very different from folks with full blown PDs. It all comes back to the fact that people with traits still have self awareness and empathy. They also tend to feel bad when they hurt others and do not exhibit insane levels of magical thinking.
This answer from someone (I believe) who is a therapist was so impactful for me. The difference between sometimes exhibiting a particular trait as compared to someone with a pattern of said trait, little self awareness, little empathy and lots of magical thinking seems important.
I am practicing as a therapist now, but still have six months to go before I am finished college and can call myself one. :) Glad to be of help though as I see a massive (humongous!) difference between people with PDs and people with traits of PDs.
It's even in the little things. Clients with traits who are late will be apologetic and concerned for your time, whereas clients with full blown PDs will almost certainly not apologise.
This reminds me of something I read concerning a psychedelic therapist who used LSD. The patient would take LSD and she would lie next to them and basically mother them -- I know it may sound creepy, but according to what I read very clear boundaries were set and apprently she had success with this. I'm forgetting the details and her name, but I do think that the psychedelic medicines could have some positive effect in this regard.
It actually doesn't sound creepy. Given that most people's problems are rooted in their childhood, boundaried reparenting can be invaluable.
"When working with any client, whether suffering from trauma or other psychological difficulties, the core therapeutic stance of the schema therapist is ‘limited reparenting’. This means that, as far as possible, we strive to meet the key developmental needs that were not met in our client’s childhood. And understanding that person’s history, as well as their schemas, tells us which needs are most pressing."
I so get you. My parents were each emotionally abusive, to each other and to the four of us kids. No one should have to grow up like that. Both of my parents did damage that can’t be undone. I had to learn to move past it- accept it for what it was, understand it, know that I was not to blame and learn not to do the same thing to others, especially my own children. My son and his wife have confirmed and affirmed, over and over, that I have not passed on that kind of emotional abuse, but even all these years later, the feelings crop up and I find myself having to actively stop myself from acting in a way that could be emotionally abusive. It is like a virus that lies dormant and can flare up. I can never be cured, but it can be managed.
My soul felt what you wrote. My mother labeled me the source of all her problems and tried several times to kill herself in my early youth. It took a long time for me to understand how that impacted me and my siblings. Now I see that pain is pain, we have all experienced and felt it to one degree or another, and I find it humanizes us to be able to share the experiences we’ve had with others and reflect on them. Thank you for so succinctly expressing something I’ve felt for some time.
I've been having similar thoughts about my mother. It wasn't quite as intense as your describe -- she never threatened suicide or anything like that -- but I feel like she expects me to love her, to give her all the love she never got. I'm not sure if I do love her or not, because she was always pressuring me to do so. At the same time, I know that she didn't the love she wanted, needed, deserved, when she was a child. I believe that ultimately only she can heal herself of this -- my dilemma is that I see this clearly, but I don't know how to tell her this, because, based on my life expereince with her, if I tried to describe what I saw she would say that I was "blaming her" and "calling her a bad mother", etc., etc., when I'd really just like her to learn how to love herself.
I say this with your best interests in mind, even though it's not pleasant. I mean well toward you, I do not mean hostility.
You cannot have what you want. You cannot change your mother. You cannot explain this to her.
All those things you want aren't real. You have a choice.
1. Continue to do it, hoping for the thing that is not real, and which will never happen.
2. Accept that objective reality you are faced with, and decide if you're willing to continue having a compromised relationship with an emotionally unbalanced mother, or stop having that relationship.
Thanks for sharing your story. I had a dysfunctional childhood, am a bit asperger's, very few people really get me, and I have a whole litany of pain and suffering I can share.
If there's one thing I got from getting older it was to stop getting so upset at other people's drama and to focus within on that connection with God or whatever you want to call it, and to let go of my own ego attachments, which means learning how to not take ANYTHING personally. I'm not great at it but getting better.
So I had a situation today where a very loud-mouthed person was spewing all sorts of nonsense, and normally I would have gotten a bit worked up by it, and I've just told myself to just let it go, and amazingly I was only slightly tempted to mouth off. And I felt much more at peace.
One of the things I think I developed from my youth was this obsessive need to try to fix and correct everything and everyone, and point out the crazy elephant in the living room. Only, doing so has just been bad for my health and never fixed anything, really, so I'm just going to take a cue from a really stupid thing I saw on a TV show recently, which was: EMBRACE THE MADNESS. Or at least, shrug my shoulders and say, WHATEVER.
That was the single piece of evidence I needed. “Emotions were not mirrored”. So we’ll written. It explains everything. That I always felt and still do as if I am wrong and bad for what I feel. I have this hunger to feel validated and often cannot seem to function until someone confirms that what I am feeling is valid.
I feel always feel like an invalid. I guess.
This resonates so much with me. I don’t consider myself a victim. In so many ways I am blessed and fortunate and I want to take responsibility for myself, my actions and reactions. But there were significant, traumatic events in my childhood that still occasionally cause me pain and affect my relationships within my family. Having someone “hear” me and understand helps comfort me when I am hurting. But I also know I can’t rely on this reaction or become angry if it’s not forthcoming. I work on all this stuff frequently!
Funnily enough, there is actually one form of therapy that uses "limited reparenting" and that is schema therapy. It's actually very effective for BPD specifically, and many people who get schema therapy no longer meet criteria for BPD by the end of the treatment period. Of course you don't have BPD, and schema therapy is a two year commitment. However, it does demonstrate that many people do actually need to be reparented to fully heal.
According to everyone who dislikes me, I have BPD, NPD, and secondary psychopathy!
😂 and a Nazi and a bigot, too!!!
You are way too self aware to have any of those. :)
What I find most interesting about ST is that it's a relatively new form of therapy but its outcomes completely surpass anything we have seen before. Maybe the secret really is the reparenting? That being said, the ST textbook also says that therapists should "have good stamina" and "be prepared to deal with rage" as long as the client doesn't become violent.
I think I'll pass...
ETA: Typo.
I walk a knife edge sometimes. While I suspect I did have BPD, at least functionally, for a time when I was younger, I don't *think* I'm personality disordered now.
But I do have Borderline/Histrionic traits, and they come out hard when I'm under stress. It takes conscious effort to rein them in, and I fail a lot.
It's easy for me to feel uncertain and worried by such accusations, even though I know they come out of that person's own problems, and sometimes out of malice.
That's the price to pay for being unusually open about psychology, and one's own dysfunctions. I think it's worth it (frankly, I don't know how to be any other way), but yeah, it hurts sometimes. That's the way it is.
Personally, I think people with traits of PDs are very different from folks with full blown PDs. It all comes back to the fact that people with traits still have self awareness and empathy. They also tend to feel bad when they hurt others and do not exhibit insane levels of magical thinking.
This answer from someone (I believe) who is a therapist was so impactful for me. The difference between sometimes exhibiting a particular trait as compared to someone with a pattern of said trait, little self awareness, little empathy and lots of magical thinking seems important.
I am practicing as a therapist now, but still have six months to go before I am finished college and can call myself one. :) Glad to be of help though as I see a massive (humongous!) difference between people with PDs and people with traits of PDs.
It's even in the little things. Clients with traits who are late will be apologetic and concerned for your time, whereas clients with full blown PDs will almost certainly not apologise.
This reminds me of something I read concerning a psychedelic therapist who used LSD. The patient would take LSD and she would lie next to them and basically mother them -- I know it may sound creepy, but according to what I read very clear boundaries were set and apprently she had success with this. I'm forgetting the details and her name, but I do think that the psychedelic medicines could have some positive effect in this regard.
It actually doesn't sound creepy. Given that most people's problems are rooted in their childhood, boundaried reparenting can be invaluable.
"When working with any client, whether suffering from trauma or other psychological difficulties, the core therapeutic stance of the schema therapist is ‘limited reparenting’. This means that, as far as possible, we strive to meet the key developmental needs that were not met in our client’s childhood. And understanding that person’s history, as well as their schemas, tells us which needs are most pressing."
https://www.pesi.co.uk/blog/2020/january/schema-therapy-for-trauma-(3-5)-limited-reparentin
I so get you. My parents were each emotionally abusive, to each other and to the four of us kids. No one should have to grow up like that. Both of my parents did damage that can’t be undone. I had to learn to move past it- accept it for what it was, understand it, know that I was not to blame and learn not to do the same thing to others, especially my own children. My son and his wife have confirmed and affirmed, over and over, that I have not passed on that kind of emotional abuse, but even all these years later, the feelings crop up and I find myself having to actively stop myself from acting in a way that could be emotionally abusive. It is like a virus that lies dormant and can flare up. I can never be cured, but it can be managed.
The dormant virus metaphor is excellent! That’s exactly how it seems to me.
I resonate deeply with this. Thank you for explaining in such a succinct, understandable way.
For me, it's like this chaos inside me that I want to see reflected back in the outside world. Fortunately, I possess empathy .
I know for a fact that empathy is the key piece to not inflicting chaos on others. This is why cluster B can be such a destructive force.
My soul felt what you wrote. My mother labeled me the source of all her problems and tried several times to kill herself in my early youth. It took a long time for me to understand how that impacted me and my siblings. Now I see that pain is pain, we have all experienced and felt it to one degree or another, and I find it humanizes us to be able to share the experiences we’ve had with others and reflect on them. Thank you for so succinctly expressing something I’ve felt for some time.
I've been having similar thoughts about my mother. It wasn't quite as intense as your describe -- she never threatened suicide or anything like that -- but I feel like she expects me to love her, to give her all the love she never got. I'm not sure if I do love her or not, because she was always pressuring me to do so. At the same time, I know that she didn't the love she wanted, needed, deserved, when she was a child. I believe that ultimately only she can heal herself of this -- my dilemma is that I see this clearly, but I don't know how to tell her this, because, based on my life expereince with her, if I tried to describe what I saw she would say that I was "blaming her" and "calling her a bad mother", etc., etc., when I'd really just like her to learn how to love herself.
I say this with your best interests in mind, even though it's not pleasant. I mean well toward you, I do not mean hostility.
You cannot have what you want. You cannot change your mother. You cannot explain this to her.
All those things you want aren't real. You have a choice.
1. Continue to do it, hoping for the thing that is not real, and which will never happen.
2. Accept that objective reality you are faced with, and decide if you're willing to continue having a compromised relationship with an emotionally unbalanced mother, or stop having that relationship.
No. There is no third option.
Good luck.
Thanks for sharing your story. I had a dysfunctional childhood, am a bit asperger's, very few people really get me, and I have a whole litany of pain and suffering I can share.
If there's one thing I got from getting older it was to stop getting so upset at other people's drama and to focus within on that connection with God or whatever you want to call it, and to let go of my own ego attachments, which means learning how to not take ANYTHING personally. I'm not great at it but getting better.
So I had a situation today where a very loud-mouthed person was spewing all sorts of nonsense, and normally I would have gotten a bit worked up by it, and I've just told myself to just let it go, and amazingly I was only slightly tempted to mouth off. And I felt much more at peace.
One of the things I think I developed from my youth was this obsessive need to try to fix and correct everything and everyone, and point out the crazy elephant in the living room. Only, doing so has just been bad for my health and never fixed anything, really, so I'm just going to take a cue from a really stupid thing I saw on a TV show recently, which was: EMBRACE THE MADNESS. Or at least, shrug my shoulders and say, WHATEVER.