People-Icebergs

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

Ice blocks that have frozen over for years cannot be melted …

This text is a continuation of the previously written article "The Curve of Love". For those who have not read it, I recommend starting with it. In it, I describe the experiences of clients when it is impossible to receive emotional warmth from a loved one. Impossible due to the personality traits of the latter.

In the same article, I want to focus on the personality traits of such close people who are incapable of emotional closeness.

I'll start with an example.

I remember a very vivid story from my personal experience. Several years ago, while in the hospital with my mother, I became a witness to the situation described below, which shocked me and was remembered for a long time. My mother's roommate was an old grandmother. Apparently, as far as I understood from the context, she suffered a stroke.

Determining her age visually was not easy. As I understand it, she worked all her life as a simple worker on the railway. You understand that it is not a woman's job to carry the sleepers. This undoubtedly affected her appearance. Therefore, she could have been 50 or 70. Although she looked at all 80. But this is not about that now - how many women after the war we have who have shouldered a heavy, unfeminine burden on their fragile shoulders and have renounced their female identity!

I was impressed by the others. Once her younger sister, who also looks like a grandmother, visited her. She behaved emphatically cheerfully, trying in every possible way to support her older, seriously ill sister. In addition to banal and useless phrases in such a situation, such as "Everything will be fine" and so on, the essence of her support was as follows - all the time she was staying, she stubbornly and obsessively fed her seriously ill sister, trying to shove her food spoon after spoon. As if in this action there was some kind of sacred deep healing meaning that only she could understand.

It was obvious that her sick sister, who was on the verge of death, now had no time for food! But she silently (as in her difficult life) steadfastly and patiently endured this "food violence" over herself. And only her expression in her eyes betrayed the feelings that were frozen in her soul! There was despair, humility, longing and hopelessness!

Something similar was happening in my soul. It was a persistent feeling of melancholy and despair from the impossibility of meeting two close people! Impossibilities, even though Death is silently standing next to them and watching what is happening.

Obviously, for these two old women, food turned out to be an equivalent substitute for many needs - for love, affection, care, tenderness. Those needs that turned out to be impossible in their life, not actualized and inaccessible to them. Those facets of emotional closeness with which they were not lucky enough to meet and experience. For these two old women, as well as for many women, and for men who survived the war, hunger, devastation.

This was a generation of traumatics for whom their whole life was a continuous trauma. In this difficult situation it was necessary not to live, but to survive … And they survived. As best they could. They survived by cutting off (dissociating) their living, emotional part, building up like a shell a compensatory survivor, clinging to life, a harsh, unemotional part. There was no place for "calf tenderness", and all this "emotional snot", there was no place for emotional warmth. The part of the personality that was responsible for "warm" emotions turned out to be unnecessary, unnecessary and deeply frozen. This was the harsh law of their lives.

French psychoanalyst André Greene wrote of a “dead mother” who was depressed while caring for a child and was therefore unable to maintain emotional contact with him. I think that in the situation of our post-war reality, a whole generation turned out to be such “dead parents”. And now their children - 40-50 year old men and women - are trying in vain, clinging to their departing parents, to grasp at least a little bit of emotional warmth. But, as a rule, unsuccessfully.

I understand the anger and despair of my clients trying to "squeeze a drop of milk" from their mother's dry breasts. In vain and useless … There he was not even at the best of times.

On the other hand, I understand the sincere misunderstanding of the parents of my clients: “What else do they need? Fed, dressed, shod …”They cannot understand their children, who grew up at another time. Well, they are not capable of emotional manifestations. The functions responsible for emotional warmth are not activated in their personal structure, and there are no such words in their personal vocabulary, or they are hidden under the thickness of shame.

Such people, as a rule, cannot be changed. Ice blocks that have frozen over for years cannot be melted. Their, in a certain way, the established personal structure, which has firmly absorbed the traumatic experience into their identity, does not lend itself to psychological correction. And the best thing that you can do here for yourself and for them is to leave them alone and not expect from them what they cannot give - warmth. And yet - to feel sorry for them! To feel sorry for the kind, humanly … It's available to you!

The other cannot be changed. Moreover, at this age and without his desire.

But not everything is so hopeless. There is a way out for you!

I see two good solutions here:

• Raise a “good inner parent” who can take care of your emotionally hungry inner child. I will not repeat myself, I made a detailed description of this process in my articles: "My own parent" and "How to feed the inner child?"
• Gaining warmth while working with a therapist.

Better to combine both of these options!