Posted by LlurpsieNoodle on August 22, 2007, at 18:14:38
Well, aside from wading through the sections on fear of one's toddler bits and pieces being damaged (ugh Freud...) it has helped me think a lot about self destructive things.
The ultimate self destructive act, of course being suicide. Usually the best-laid plans are consciously or subconsciously affected by some primordial need to be rescued, and the accompanying coercion of the authority figure to provide care.
I figured out one of the sources for my self-destructive tendencies. Happened when my T was away, also happened when I switched T's recently. Boy do I feel like a dumbass. I was expressing self-injurious and suicidal thoughts as to accelerate my bond with T. Expecting him (or pdoc?) to come and rescue me, or at least take care of me in some abstract medical sense (medical being the only context in which I've experienced compassion from the maternal figure-- like when I was sick).
Am I a bad person for being coercive? Is self-destruction inherently a manipulation of another person in order to demand more nurturing attention?
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The other thing I read was about how anxiety out of control leads to all kinds of maladaptive behaviors. A dysregulation of the ability to deal with anxiety often leads to a guilty fear where we constantly expect punishment from without. Since people don't actually punish us as much as we believe we deserve, we pre-empt them and apply our own version of "suitable" punishment.Another possibility is the expression of rage following anxious dysregulation. I'm personally not so familiar with this, aside from expressing rage against my parents. Rage at their failure to take care of me as a wee one. Rage at their inability to protect me. Ironically, rage at the passive parent and withdrawal from the violent parent. Sure makes calling home an ordeal...
Rage scares me. Especially when people seem out of control and are lashing out. Another thing that happens is defiant behavior, even in the absence of something/someone worth defying. Consistently contrary behavior arises from disordered attachment to a parental figure in which we want more from them, but we are simultaneously furious with them. We extend our fury to other stimuli, and before we know it we are defiant and oppositional to nearly any relationship, especially relationships with authority figures, bosses and the like.
And then there's the coercive manipulation. This one was framed more as a psychopath-type thing. The abdication of personal responsibility for moral actions leads to a person forming alliances (hopefully with powerful allies) and then manipulating them through threats to carry out nefarious deeds. All of this happening without much direct aggression being exchanged between the aggressor and the victim. The victim feels attacked from all sides, and the allies don't often realize the source of the attacks. Meanwhile the person with the agression feels little responsibility for his or her own actions since he or she was not directly connected to the victimization.
*****
This is what I did with my afternoon. Of course by the end of it I was convinced that I have schizophrenia, borderline and a whole bevy of other conditions. Mostly it was to get my mind off of the fact that my cat had been missing since 7am yesterday am. We scoured the neighborhood. no kitty. when we came home from shopping he was there. ((((kitty))))-Ll
poster:LlurpsieNoodle
thread:777863
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20070822/msgs/777863.html