1/05/07 Friday 13:04

Well, I finished “Bush On the Couch”, and feel I’ve accomplished something. I also spent the morning getting caught up on the news, since I want to be informed about what the new Democratically controlled Congress will do.

It took a few hours. So this quiet time is dwindling.

I got a message from Valerie that said that Bill had once again put up a cold wall in response to a remark she’d made. It seemed there had been some hope that this time it could work. Writing her back, and through the prism of Bush/Couch, I had an insight about what he had really wanted in relationship. He probably told himself that he wanted to fall in love, have a partner and companion to share and do things with. But his actions have said that what he really wants is someone to reduce his anxiety.

This is what makes sense to me psychologically:
All humanity is born with a basic fear of destruction and destructiveness as a result of having brought about our own birth—our expulsion from paradise. Our primitive mind distinguishes between ‘good’ (that which brings us comfort and pleasure) and ‘bad’ (that which makes us uncomfortable). To the extent our caregiver is able to nurture us and be responsive to us is the extent that we can tolerate and manage our own anxiety about destruction. It’s the learning process of break-repair, the process of our own anxiety being absorbed, transformed, returned in a more workable form. We learn how to regulate ourselves. When things go wrong, that ‘bad’ side causes unmanageable anxiety and the person has to utilize defense mechanisms in order to reduce its potency. This is done through identifying with power, splitting himself into good and bad and then externalizing the bad, denial, compartmentalizing. (This tells me a little about the process of religion’s creation—from the big bang of our birth, to the creation myth, and the fall from grace to teach us that man is basically ‘sinful’ and it can be overcome with God’s help. In fact, he sent that help in the form of his only begotten son, whose death frees us from our sinful selves and ensures us a place in heaven.) To depart from these defense mechanisms is to threaten loyalty to the power and authority that was internalized. And that threatens one’s very existence.

So, when I get a sense of that loyalty, I see an allegiance to 50’s and early 60’s white america. The 10 commandments. Sunday school. People bowing their heads in prayer through a minister who then used a different voice and different vocabulary than ordinary to petition god. Not only do we learn that there is god, but we’re supposed to ‘worship’ him and ‘love’ him. And if there’s nothing like worshipful feelings on the inside, and no feelings of ‘love’, you try to adjust your feelings through will power. And the extent to which you can govern yourself with will-power is the extent you are a good person. Being good is a construct of will-power, and sustaining it. Anarchy would result if people didn’t use will power. Bad people don’t use will power. It’s a failure of will and character. Fat represents a lack of will power. That’s why fat people are despised, at least in our culture. We have to always be fighting the bad, and our ‘bad’ self will run amok if we let it take over. We’ll destroy everything.

In my life this has manifested as fearing my ‘sinful’ side; that any apprehension of grey in the black-white split was only my destructive side trying to seduce me to come over. That is why I doubted myself—I was always fearful that this side was trying to seduce me away from what was right. I was always afraid that given half a chance, I would destroy my own life by doing things that undermined it. So I was always looking over my shoulder for that destructive self, looking for glimpses of its fingerprints. Always suspicious of my own motives. Therefore always a hollow core of self-doubt. I always thought of psychological defenses as a way to fool myself and conceal what my destructive self was really doing—make excuses. Now I see it a little differently: I see the purpose of defense mechanisms is to protect the self from the anxiety caused by the ‘bad’ side. It’s to keep a sharp separation between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sides. There’s a big difference.

I have a sense now of the collective psyche of the American people. These are the people who said they voted ‘traditional values’ in 2004, who put Bush in power legitimately (as opposed to 2000) This is a big collective reality bought into by the majority of the population. To a great extent Gary’s doing it too. His emphasis over a proper appearance regardless of what lies behind it is a piece of evidence. The ‘supposed-to’s that he lets drop: Children should wear a coat, children should eat their food, children need meat—all in that tone that suggests these are moral values that have been written on high and brook no consideration of reality. When appearances are important they take on a life of their own, and maintain themselves for their own sake. It’s putting the cart before the horse.

Later

Scott’s coming home in about 50 minutes, Connor has basketball practice. I sense a heaviness in myself at once again losing this time. Yeah, I do see the kids coming home as a loss of sorts. It’s a loss of having not had to be all about the kids. And that’s essentially what I am when they are with me—I can’t deny that.

So part of being ‘all about the kids’ is being tolerant of Scott wanting to pull up my shirt and put himself under it, is being tolerant of being stopped or interrupted to hug him when he clasps himself to me; it’s living with the impatience and irritation—with the scrim which makes my perception tend toward negative. It’s hard work to try to set a good tone for children, when working from behind a screen of irritation and impatience. What would it take for me to be available to Scott without irritation?

First it would take a genuine desire that renders harmless or impotent any feeling of resistance—a genuine desire and pleasure in just meeting those needs. Take as long as necessary preparing dinner because he needs to stop me periodically to slip his hands under my shirt, or hug me, or has to be right there on a stool helping me cook.

I suppose part of what it would take would be a clear sense of what is reasonable in setting aside my needs for his.

I wish I had the desire. So, what could constitute the role of desire? The awareness that Scott’s living in a life that feels perilous and sad to him…perhaps that can temper my reluctance. Perhaps just seeing him more clearly.

Scott seems to be a person whose nature it is to experience more hemming in by social constraints. His is a nature that is always being hurried by others’ agendas. I’m afraid that has kind of a negative effect on his self-esteem. He must perceive that everyone who is impatient with him is angry, and that repeated corrections must mean he’s failing in some way. Especially when people get angry about having to repeat things to him.

I suppose what it would take would be to get a clearer look at Scott and find a way to give space to the part of him that really wants more room than what school, and his family are willing to give him. He always waited for me when he was a baby, and did it with a good nature, too. I keep him waiting often. I impose my timetable over his. Yet I’m very impatient with him when we’re trying to go somewhere and he’s not ready, or is straying from getting ready. I need to find a way to accommodate his freer spirit so that it’s not always in contact with noxious responses. I suppose one is just to start earlier. That one’s pretty simple.

It’s probably an accurate guess that all the Scott-under-my-shirt stuff is about himself wanting to feel safe and warm, maybe is a symbolic return to the womb where he felt those things in entirety. That he’s seeking this contact because he needs it in the face of the quicksand under his feet.

Another idea that comes to mind is that since he’s going to need redirection and thus the experience of coming up on limits more, that I need to counter-balance that with more positive experiences. Off-set the sort of negative messages he gets every time he’s told he can’t go any further. He needs the same message, but he needs it more frequently. Perhaps I need to count the number of times I need things from him, and set the threshold higher for when I feel that it’s ok to let my anger show through to make a point.

I don’t know if I can do these things for him. It just doesn’t come as easily from me as it did with Connor; and I suppose it’s because Connor’s limits were well within mine, so I didn’t have to push my own envelope as far to give him what he needs. I’m delighted at the literacy that he is showing and demonstrating with his inner self. He sees his inner self and how It works inside him clearly. At least at times. I do feel some credit, in that the hopes that my being emotionally open with him and teaching him that alphabet as I’m able has enabled him to have this awareness and Knowledge of Self. And to see it as separate from what happens to him.

I fear that I’m denying Scott the same opportunity to have this sort of self-knowledge in my impatience with him. When I think of what Connor has, or is developing as an internal Friend, and I think of what it would be like without It, and I realize that the quality of Scott’s life will be much less if he doesn’t also have the grace of that communion with himSelf.

Just as when I was a child, the abrasive feelings that scraped my nervous system determined my self-image for a long time—I saw myself in a negative light, since so many of my feelings were negative. When you feel bad most of the time it isn’t hard to think that you ARE bad.

Scott will be home soon, but I just realized that it might be illuminating to tell the story of my self through the prism of Klein’s theory of human psychological development, as interpreted by Justin Frank. I guess I already did, in a way. My underlying birth anxiety may have been supplemented by an anxious mother—mom being only 21, and I was her first; and she’s kind of anxious…

01/06/07 Saturday 16:17

…by temperament anyway. My underlying nervous system may have protected me in some ways…because my temperament was fairly mild there weren’t as many collisions with authority as there might have been to add to a negative sense of myself…kids can’t really win in those. They’re completely vulnerable. Their perception of themselves is formed in relation to forces they have very little influence over. It takes a long time, if ever, to realize that part of what have may have influenced one’s view of oneself may have been someone else’s unbridled, unregulated ‘spoiled baby’ in adult form. Some people I think never do separate themselves from what other people have told them they are; their self-conception was formed entirely by other people.

I’m feeling like there’s some important information here but I’m a bit at a loss in connecting to what was so inspiring to me in learning about temperament. I wonder if my underlying temperament may have been different from a disposition I may have showed the outer world.

7/20/06

Turns out that I’d forgotten about Gary’s company picnic that’s happening today at Oxbow park. So that’s kind of a bonus. Next week is Scott’s climbing class, and the following is Connor’s skateboard. Then vacation.

Darlene and Jenni and David came over yesterday evening instead of us going to Darlene’s. They only stayed about an hour since Jenni and David were tired and have an early flight out this morning.

We gave Darlene a thank you note that Scott signed—these are the first times that he’s written his name. She gushed over the dog on the cover, made no comment about his name, and left it sitting on the table. I’ll be glad to keep it anyway.

I guess it’s petty to write down things like that. But I’m going to go one better and mention that the talk she talked when I told her about the tickets indicate to me that she knows that sometimes caring for the kids is demanding for me; she knows that I want breaks from it; yet she’s never once offered to take them and do something with them—unless it’s been in her interest like trying to get to know Scott so she’d feel better about traveling with him. Yes, to be fair, a year and a half ago she said something about taking the kids for a day, or taking them somewhere, but never followed through with an offer. I suppose that meant she was waiting for me to ask. To my way of thinking, someone who’s serious about an offer like that doesn’t wait for a request; instead would call and say, “I’d like to take the boys to a movie. Would it be ok to pick them up on Thurs at such n such a time?” To me that’s a way of demonstrating a serious offer for help. Not waiting for a request.

Anyway that conversation with her told me that she knows I’ve been struggling and having a hard time, yet has done nothing.

It’s not that she owes me help. She doesn’t owe me child care. It is not an easy thing to take the two boys, especially since it’s evident that one of them doesn’t like her. Still, it is an opportunity to do something that would be accepted gratefully and would go a ways toward cultivating good will. If nothing else, I would think she’d want to spend some time with her grandchildren.

Enough grousing.

I really did enjoy seeing my family. We got along very well, and they were very understanding about Scott. He really only had one episode of crying and a near tantrum about Jolie playing with his things and him wanting only Cam to have it. Oh, yeah, and there was this thing about him not wanting Jolie to look at him. And the whole thing could have been headed off by me taking his two toys off the car-seat that we took from Denise’s car. It was placed on the back porch, and the next morning Cam found one of them there. For a while the three shared nicely and so I brought out the other one. That was a mistake because Scott wanted me to take it away from her and I wouldn’t while she was playing with it. He began to wail. So in exasperation I took him back to the hotel where he hollered that he “hates her”—“I like that boy, but I hate that girl”. After a while he wanted to watch cartoons, and I told him that in order to watch them he first had to go back to the condo and play nicely with Jolie: “No more ‘don’t look at me’, keep your hands to yourself and use a nice voice. He agreed to that, so we went back, and everything was great.