psychological bits and pieces

[kaberett]

Trauma, etc etc etc.

Mass last Sunday: the tension between perfect unconditional love and judgement; compare & contrast with people (parents, lovers, whoever) being angry with you because (or so they or the narrative say) they love you; the impact this has on one's sense of reliability, ability to trust, susceptibility to abusive narratives, etc.

There is the specific thing, that I think isn't quite learned helplessness, where you become so inured to the reality that your desires/preferences/needs are irrelevant that you... stop knowing how to have them. It's not that you don't express them, it's that you don't have the first idea what they are or how to go about identifying them, and it doesn't even occur to you that you might have them. Is there a term for this, do any of you happen to know?

(It arises because I ended up dragging myself back out of it the hard way yesterday, set off by A getting home, which flipped me from "mostly fine" to "I want to cry forever", for values of "forever" that turned out to be "about two hours, until cooking dinner gave me a role to inhabit that I understood and could rebuild from inside". Meanwhile, I'm having a bloody good go at working myself up to trying to believe that the extent of the fucked-up dissociative everything is something that I'm somehow making up because of my overidentification with a fictional nonagenarian cryo-amnesiac supersoldier, rather than the overidentification being because the way recessional writes the choking on words and the nasty vicious unfair poisonous thoughts and the frantic screaming need for loud enough sensations to drown out the agitation is spot-on to my experience.)

Comments

[redbird]

I am not a doctor etc. but: even if the dissociation was in some way or part because of your identification with that soldier, which I don't for a moment think it is, it's a real thing that is affecting your life. (If I cry after reading a story, that's about both me and the story: someone else, or me in a different month, isn't going to have that reaction. The author did something, but they were able to do it because of the specifics of me the reader.

[macey]

Re: your second paragraph, I don't know if there's a term. But it's 80% of what I work on with my therapist, so I suspect if there was a widespread term, I would probably have encountered it (if you do come across one, plz share).

But yes right this. Because if you don't have wants or needs, then the fact that they're never met is irrelevant, right? They didn't exist. It's not that the people you love don't care enough about you to prioritise you. It's not willful obstruction - which I, at least, did face, and learned not to reveal wants because then they were weapons to use against me. And in face of that, why would I /want/ to want things? It's so much easier not to. I can never be disappointed that way.

(And even if I did have wants, and then have them disappointed, it's not like I'd be allowed to express that disappointment without being punished for the audacity, the selfishness, of daring to have desires.)

[ghoti]

why would I /want/ to want things? It's so much easier not to. I can never be disappointed that way.

is there a word for that bit? because yes, that. mostly w/r/t people, but still.

[kaberett]

I will ask mine when I see him next week!

And yeah, it's all shit, isn't it. (There's the adjacent thing of only being able to want things within a set of things that have been Deemed Acceptable e.g. because they're things an Authority Figure has indicated are acceptable, so.)

[macey]

Oh oh! And then the getting-deemed-ungrateful for not showing /sufficient/ want for Thing that has been Granted Unto Thee. that one's fun.

[sonia]

Possibly related to the term you're looking for: Avoidant Attachment, where the child has given up on the carers responding to needs. Also Disorganized Attachment, which looks like a combination of other sorts of insecure attachment, where the child feels both a survival risk of being harmed by the carers, and a survival need for care from them.

Also preverbal flashbacks.

I'm guessing you know about all this already, but in case not, I'll link to what I wrote about it a few months ago. It has links to more info at the end.
http://traumahealed.com/articles/name-memories-without-words.html

[kaberett]

Thank you for the pointers! I'm actually super uninformed on early developmental trauma, excepting the lived experience bit, so they're always helpful.

[quartzpebble]

tbkts has some on this! I think Trauma and Recovery does as well.

[sonia]

Glad it's helpful! In case your mom was less than ideal, I've been recommending this all over the place. "The Emotionally Absent Mother" by Jasmin Lee Cori has a ton of useful info, including a summary of attachment stuff. My review has more about it.

[milkymoon]

I don't know if there's a term either, but it's a familiar feeling. You know somehting is off, but you can't recognise exactly what it is, so you can't really ask for it. And no, you're not making it all up, though brainweasels will do that to you. And as redbird has said, your identification with that character is valid anyway. Fiction does that to people. Good fiction creates identifiable characters. They're mirrors to emotional realities. ♥

[ewt]

Not sure, but your second paragraph has untangled another bit of why I find Talking About Vocations Stuff hard in some contexts, so thank you for that.

[sfred]

*sends love*

[buttonsbeadslace]

I've never heard a term for it either, but yeah. For me, it comes up a lot re: sensory things. In order to conceive of the idea that I don't like something and I should avoid it, I have to be aware (a) that it's possible for a person to dislike that thing, and (b) that it's possible to avoid it. And... life has not prepared me to be aware of those facts when it comes to things like "rooms with more than two conversations happening in them".

But I do also have the same non-train-of-thought about other kinds of wants.

[vass]

(I hear this. <3 )

[davidgillon]

rather than the overidentification being because the way [personal profile] recessional writes the choking on words and the nasty vicious unfair poisonous thoughts and the frantic screaming need for loud enough sensations to drown out the agitation is spot-on to my experience

Sometimes someone gets a character so right for your own experience, it just tunnels straight through all the societal crap and disbelief we've had to deal with, and says 'Someone else gets this'. I think that's why Frida Kahlo's Broken Column spoke so strongly to me, because not only did it say someone else understood my experience of pain, and had been able to express it, but it came at a time when a lot of people at Evil Aerospace were outright telling me I was lying when I talked to them about my experience of pain.