Schizoid Compromise: It's Hard To Bear, But It's A Pity To Quit

Video: Schizoid Compromise: It's Hard To Bear, But It's A Pity To Quit

Video: Schizoid Compromise: It's Hard To Bear, But It's A Pity To Quit
Video: Schizoid Bears – Noctiphobia | Full Album 2024, March
Schizoid Compromise: It's Hard To Bear, But It's A Pity To Quit
Schizoid Compromise: It's Hard To Bear, But It's A Pity To Quit
Anonim

The schizoid compromise, as Guntrip described it, is the inability to be neither inside nor outside, nor belong to something, nor refuse it. If you translate this statement into the language of object relations - the impossibility of neither being close to someone, nor being alone.

It seems that this is a classic border conflict (go away / do not leave me), but in fact it is not quite so. In a borderline situation, there is no balance, this is a constant throwing, an incessant search for a stable point. And the suffering associated with this is the inability to curb strong, destructive drives, and life, which cracks and breaks under the pressure of these drives.

In the schizoid compromise, there is no throwing, this is the point of hovering, freezing. This is a life in which cravings and drives have twisted their necks. For safety. For the sake of stability. For the sake of saving what is at the moment. In order to maintain the ability to act and respond to the challenges of reality. And the price for that is giving up a sense of personal belonging and involvement. Price - a feeling of depersonalization / derealization, which in mild cases feels like detachment from life, inability to connect with your emotions, breathe them in, inability to fully live the valuable moments of your own life. In a deeper separation, this can be experienced as a constant feeling of inner coldness, emptiness, lifelessness, when a person compares himself with a robot, with a mechanism. Well, already in its clinical version - the emergence of a painful feeling of loss of emotions, when it seems that nothing can neither please nor cause despair. In itself, this state is experienced as subjectively very difficult, you can often hear that any experience of melancholy, no matter how gloomy it may be, would be a great relief.

But, one way or another, this is a successful search for a balance between a sparing regime, life inside the case - on the one hand, and external activity that protects and distracts from the world of internal experiences - on the other.

By paying this price, you can, having fenced off from difficult experiences, reach a fairly good level of activity, and sometimes even constant sthenism, when incessant activity itself becomes part of this fencing.

Depending on the energy level, on the intellectual capabilities and on the severity of the pathology of object relations, it can look from the outside as an outwardly prosperous life with some psychological problems, and as a difficult clinical situation.

Sometimes the growth of a personality defect after psychotic episodes in schizophrenia is the emergence of such a compromise at a lower level of vital energy and opportunities for integration.

This organization of life is based on the inability to passivity, to rest, to simply be in inaction, within oneself, and in this inaction to restore strength. Any passivity is organized in such a way as to distract oneself with something at the same time in order to "clog the air", even if it is an activity that is internally perceived as completely meaningless. The role of such an activity can be aimless wandering on the Internet, and eating, and watching TV shows, and even just obsessive thoughts that go in a circle and which cannot be stopped. If you have more strength, then this activity can become something subjectively more giving, but the main thing here is to organize your stay alone with yourself in such a way as to touch yourself as little as possible. Because contact with oneself outside of any activity, contact with one's own basic feeling of being, plunges into the world of poorly tolerated experiences, and, instead of rest and relaxation, on the contrary, is internally felt as destroying, sucking, digesting or dissolving.

But on the other hand, the need for rest, which has not been canceled, creates a powerful craving for passivity, in order to destroy one's own employment, which, on the one hand, protects, but on the other, continuously depletes. Indeed, in this situation, activity is always determined not by an internal desire and readiness for it, but as if it is an accepted external structure that simultaneously saves and rapes. The natural desire for rest in this situation is internally perceived as something deadly, something that will suck into the black hole of inaction, with the complete impossibility of returning to life again. In the speech of clients, this experience can be heard, for example, through their fears that as soon as they stop doing something regularly, they will finally and forever abandon it, that only by constantly maintaining a certain order and organization of life (an order that paradoxically combines extreme rigidity and extreme fragility), they can retain themselves.

Such clients usually come to therapy when this compromise begins to stagger and fall apart, when the internal resources are no longer enough to maintain the usual way, and exhaustion begins to determine the pattern of life. It can manifest itself either directly - through apathetic depression, or indirectly, for example, through a somatic symptom or the occurrence of other problems that do not allow you to live the same way anymore.

When working with such clients, recommendations based on common sense, such as "rest more, work less", or their more disguised counterparts like "but let's see what opportunities you have to relax, and how you could / won't allow to regain their strength "- for obvious reasons, they do not help. It is also a mistake to understand this kind of activity through narcissistic dynamics, when the inability to stop and pause is perceived by the therapist (and sometimes by the client himself) as a craving for achievement and recognition, and the work is directed to compensate for the force of this craving. Only the identification of a deeper level of fear of non-being can touch upon the basis of this problem. And it is possible to alleviate suffering here only through conscious contact with these basic fears, and with those intolerances that arise in the client when he is left alone with himself.

The way out of the schizoid compromise is a difficult task and is internally experienced as very dangerous. Indeed, only through immersion in these experiences inside the black hole of inaction and apathy, through the living of this hole and the horror of non-existence, is it possible to process them and restore the ability to live and feel with full breast. Often, the client is more than enough and an intermediate result, when it is possible to restore the collapsed schizoid compromise again or it turns out to build this compromise at a higher level of activity. But for those who are stubborn, persistent and feel the inner need for this, this is a task that requires several years of therapy, but it can be solved.

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