Phenomenology Of The Edge Client

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Why is your child yelling? What does he want?

- He wants to yell!

Folklore.

An emotionally undernourished baby continues to scream for the rest of his life. Periodically falling into helplessness and causing universal pity or persecuting others and creating such unbearable conditions for others, in which it becomes simply impossible not to share something with him. But neither one nor the other can satisfy his hunger. This despair only makes his scream louder, cranking the Volume knob to the limits of human endurance.

For a baby, the whole world around him is an extension of his own organism, and his parents are organs for manipulating reality, brought to the periphery. Despair borderline personalityimplicated in the rage of a baby who does not agree to grow up.

The therapeutic experience for individuals with a similar character organization is that, despite their early infantile experience, they currently have a sufficient amount of resources to survive and go through schizoid horror. But in this fact, in addition to liberating ideas, there is also a hidden trap in the form of the need to build relationships not with an undifferentiated environment, full of everything you want, but with very specific people, circumstances and phenomena that are strictly finite, imperfect and who most of the time nothing to do with them.

Yearning for symbiotic relationshipdoes not mean at all that this is the best time to live, since this time is self-centered. This means that development implies the discovery of the same creatures next to you, scrambling out of the egg of all-encompassing uniqueness and looking around with anxiety and subtle disappointment that there is someone else around, looking with anxiety and even more disappointment, and so on.

The horror of the situation is that the time intended for saturation is long gone, and there is no way to go back in time to fix everything. Although what can be corrected here, become a less demanding child or choose more sensitive parents? At first glance, the situation is hopeless. At a second glance, it becomes clear that in order to correct the present, returning to the past is contraindicated, since, as you know, all the most important things happen right in the now.

One can regret that the past from a height, more precisely from a long distance of the present, does not seem as ideal as we would like, but the past is a reality that does not require correction and an attempt to do this only captures the feeling of helplessness.

The borderline client seems to be transmitting the following idea - if infancy, as a period of development, is responsible for the formation of personality, then an undernourished baby is like a premature fetus, which has not formed the organs and systems necessary for a full life. That is, the border client is “not like everyone else” at the level of the result - it turned out what happened. On the other hand, after all, “normal” children, unlike him, were given as much love as they needed, and then he was “not like everyone else” as a reason for such emotional rejection. Rejection for the borderline personality, this is an Achilles' heel, into which, without particularly aiming, almost everyone with whom she has at least some kind of relationship falls.

We can say that in the case of character organization, the semantics of borderline is determined by its location between neurosis and psychosis, but it can also be assumed that there is an almost insurmountable barrier between the borderline client and the people around him in the form of communicative features that ensure survival in conditions of an unfinished task. development.

The natural process of development assumes that the child receives enough recognition and support from the parents in order to form his own autonomy and in the future to live independently, relying on the experience of such relationships. The message of the parents in the case of the borderline person looks something like this - survival is possible only in the conditions of merger, but at the same time we decide whether to agree to it or not. Thus, in addition to being helpless, the borderline also acquires a sense of helplessness.

The absence or insufficient presence of an empathically supportive object nearby, containing the infant's chaotic emotionality in the symbolic order of attachment relationships, leads to pathological cleavage experience. What is not possible to survive must be split off and intensively controlled for the rest of his life, since any actualization of this anxiety leads to a frightening regression into a helpless infantile state. In other words, the borderline tries to control those drives that have not been properly contained and differentiated by an adequate environment.

The most obvious way to deal with this helplessness is to try to control others without appeal. The border guard does about the same with others that he received from his parents - he quickly enters into idealized relationships and punishes his opponent for any attempt to get out of this Procrustean bed. It is almost impossible to see a living person behind a veil of projections, and it is not even necessary - the borderline person does not need anything other than confirmation of his own significance, and thus diversity I-You relationship is not available for her. Such an attitude creates a communicative vacuum around the borderline, exacerbating the state of loneliness and increasing the rage with which the next hopeless contact is made. A kind of trap arises - the way in which contact is established, at the same time destroys it.

Another control method consists in suppressing natural expression, since it is experienced as too intense, flooding, blurring the boundaries and threatening either others or oneself, increasing the likelihood of rejection. We can say that the suppression of expression is carried out according to the same mechanisms that underlie the splitting, and then the border client forms an external reality around him, full of the same horror as the internal space. And then it is really impossible to escape from oneself, because wherever the borderline personality rushes, it ultimately rests on the starting point of this escape all the time.

Throwing in your ears communicative feature For borderline clients, there is an extremely large difference between the form of the message and the content, between the inner work that he does alone and what he is able to place on the border of contact. What the border guard is talking about is a modest tip of the iceberg, the main semantic thickness of which is only implied and which, in principle, cannot be adequately expressed due to the actualization of the fear of rejection. Nevertheless, this implied part is present in the dialogue and the attempt to listen to the text, while simultaneously decoding its implicit component, causes a state of confusion from the lack of coherence and fragmentation of the narrative, boredom and anger.

Difficulty of work with borderline clients is just how to withstand an alien dialect of a different organization of character, to make out the sometimes frightening reliefs of an unfamiliar territory through which you have to move, taking as a guide rather a storyteller than an accumulated baggage of knowledge. Not only learned rules do not apply to this territory, but all life experience becomes unclaimed due to the fact that there is absolutely nothing to apply it to. This eerie condition that one can experience in contact with a borderline client echoes the horror in which the latter has to live constantly.

therefore therapeutic the very ability not to run away from this experience into a more understandable and safe zone of selfhood, strengthened by the professional vertical, becomes the very ability to be near, thereby making the flooding emotions of the borderline client less frightening.

The tragedy of the borderline patient is that most of the time he is not available to himself. The control shows a way to take an external position in relation to what is happening, to be a witness only to the results of transactions and internal dynamics, alienating oneself from the experience that determines them. Metaphorically, the borderline client is on the borderline between reality and his own being, but there is very little life in this place. The borderline personality is sometimes surprised to find itself in a single act of conversation or activity, but this detection is very difficult to integrate into the paradigm of identity available to consciousness, since these split-off signals seem to come from another world.

The easiest way to silence a screaming infant is to eliminate it. Borderline personality makes it the most accessible way for her, through splitting off. Integration presupposes the opposite process, since existential hunger is related to emptiness and lack of self-experience, and not to a lack of positive emotions. In this case, psychotherapy does not guarantee the saturation of the eventual, external; it fills the boundaries of identity with the content that makes it alive and authentic.

Psychotherapy it is a process during which the client tries to do something that he cannot afford to do in everyday life.