Butterfly People. Life In A Cocoon

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

Author: Azamatova Galina

- Luda, is it yours? Found it after school on the back desk.

Elves, trolls, green mountains … Zhenya immediately understood whose it was.

An eccentric girl in a hoodie hurriedly walked to the teacher's desk and took the disc with the game.

Yes, thank you - she said dryly and averted her red eyes from the night computer vigils.

Tousled hair, thin transparent arms, thin shoulders, an angular but gentle face … Butterfly Man. Only in a cocoon. Luda was not friends with anyone, avoided personal conversations and had never looked into her eyes … But she wanted to look into her eyes. There was some depth, purity and artistry in them. "I still love schizoids." - Zhenya thought to herself. For some reason, she wanted to get close to a strange student.

“Do you like to play?” She asked amiably. You know, sometimes I do too. I even know people who make games. Would you like to meet them?

-No…

-Why?

“What if they turn out to be disgusting?” Luda suddenly cut off. And I don’t want to think that good games can be created by these … vile people”

-Well … By the way, are you at the stop? Let's go together?

Since then, their routes to their home began to intersect. And over time, the "elf" began to like the new teacher. She even divided the class into "good" Evgenia Sergeevna and disgusting classmates. She basically had a tendency to divide the world into good and bad, vile and beautiful. Her drawings on the margins of her notebooks spoke of the same: elves and monsters, dirt and cleanliness, black and white.

Why is that?

Luda's extreme thinking is a vivid example of splitting, one of the lowest psychological defenses of our Ego. This is the inability to combine positive and negative into one whole at one time. Either strictly black or strictly white - it all depends on the purely subjective momentary criteria of "goodness" and badness "and the context of the situation. For example, when Evgenia Sergeevna listens to Luda and is interested in her world - she is "good", but if suddenly her beloved teacher changes the route and goes home with her boyfriend, she will suddenly become a bad and disgusting traitor. One and the same person, but in completely different shades. Living with splitting is difficult. After all, it is impossible to understand: what is the world after all? Are there good or bad people around? And what am I myself? Splitting leads to extreme chaos and instability in any relationship.

The roots of this phenomenon go back to early childhood. The fact is that the strict division of the world into black and white at first helps the little person to navigate in a new space for himself. According to Melanie Klein, at an early stage, splitting teaches the baby to distinguish between objects and their properties. And it looks something like this: there are two mothers for a baby: one is good (who loves, feeds and sings lullabies), and the other is bad (who leaves, looks angrily and may even hit). Over time, the child learns to "combine" two mothers into one. He begins to understand that mother simply can be different: sometimes good and affectionate, and sometimes tired and strict … However, when a small person sees too much cruelty, indifference or coldness from his mother, such a “union” does not happen. The fact is that the awareness of one's own uselessness and unimportance is too traumatic for the child's psyche … Therefore, the splitting process does not go away and begins to protect the child from cruelty and indifference on the part of the most important person. The image of the “bad” mother continues to split off from the “good” one and begins to be diligently supplanted. In addition, the image of a "bad" and "good" mother is closely associated with a "bad" and "good" self-image, as well as with positive and negative emotions.

For example, Luda's mother was not very ready for motherhood. She came to Tambov from a small village and dreamed of a beautiful life. Everything turned out spontaneously. A new acquaintance, an office romance, an accidental pregnancy and … "did not agree."Lyuda appeared, and it was necessary to do something with her. The girl was often left for a small fee with Larisa's aunt, one of her mother's friends. She had thickly painted eyelids and her hair smelled of paint. Luda was afraid of her. And when my mother again and again went in search of a "beautiful life" she felt fear, anxiety and that she was "bad." At such a tender age, it is extremely important for the child's psyche to maintain a sense of maternal affection and security. Therefore, Luda had to “split off” the image of an indifferent, unloving party girl from her beloved image of a fairy mother and push it further into the unconscious. Over time, this model was firmly entrenched in the little head: both the outer and inner world of the girl became black and white. She also took up the “splitting off” of the “bad” part of herself from the “good” and cleaning up the negativity in a dark closet. However, not everything is so simple: what lies in the closet of the unconscious will seek a way out. Always. For example, with the help of other psychological defenses.

So Luda began to resort to projections. “They are cruel people. Very angry. Even scary. They can kill. “- she once said to Zhenya in one of her confidential conversations. So she projected onto other people her aggression towards her mother, whom she was ashamed to express openly. A complete lack of attention, constant chatter on the phone, new men of mothers … I think Luda can be understood. By the way, the girl tried to escape from this indifferent gray reality by means of denial. She simply denied the fact of living in the provinces, in a cramped apartment with an indifferent mother, by going into a fantasy world. There she was the wood elf Freya. That is what she was called in a computer game.

The trio of splitting, denial and projection is often a "cocoon" for the schizoid, the hypersensitive butterfly man who tries to withstand the cruelty of this world. This "cocoon" has a beautiful scientific name - schizoid defense.

Psychological walls protect the fragile inner world. But they also prevent him from becoming more beautiful and expressing himself. The “wall” of splitting takes away the possibility of stable, reliable relations, the shutters of projection and denial - the opportunity to see the world as it is and adequately develop in it. But you really want beauty and the feeling of flight! And schizoids want to. They are simply afraid of new wounds. Truth.

“Luda, look me in the eyes. What do you feel? Are you glad to see me or upset? I’m very glad!”- said Evgenia Sergeevna to the little“elf”after the autumn holidays. Luda smiled. She was lucky. She met Zhenya and faced the warmth and sincerity of human relations. And by the way, he is going to go to a psychotherapist. Who knows, maybe in a few years she … suddenly ceases to be a schizoid. Maybe she will make friends, and one day she will even fall in love with a nice guy and go on dates. And what do you think?