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

[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.