Scattered pieces

I recently commented on an entry of Ivory’s, and included information from an article titled A failure of curiosity by Janet Migdow.  Unfortunately this article isn’t available freely, but I’ll describe the content here for those who are interested.  It’s an article that has stayed with me for many months, it offers an interesting insight into the therapeutic relationship between an intelligent woman diagnosed with DID and a therapist who is willing to examine their own processes and thoughts.

The first part of the article gives the therapists background – her drive to help people, her natural curiosity that was evident from childhood and her desire not to lose that curiosity.  She writes:

“I have always seen curiosity as the quintessential characteristic of a good clinician. I have never thought curiosity alone would make the consummate clinician. I simply think that, without a burning curiosity, becoming a therapist is a useless endeavor.”

(Migdow, 2008, p. 46).

Midgow describes the client as “Dr. B., a Caucasian, fifty-six-year-old, uppermiddle-class, professional woman of mild manners and distinguished bearing” (Migdow, 2008, p. 48), diagnosed with DID.  She had been a client for 6 years and over that time had stabilised to the point of becoming more aware of the parts and increasing her functioning.  Part way through their journey together, Dr. B. starting turning up late for sessions.  This lateness coincided with the topic of the sessions becoming more banal, with Dr. B. deflecting any attempts to probe deeper into the issues at hand.  Migdow describes this sort of deflecting as hypnotic - as a person who has done this sort of deflecting, I understand what she is talking about, it becomes hypnotic for the person doing the deflecting as well.

It was at this point, that Migdow recognised that she was bored.  She had gone from a place of deep respect for her client, to a place of boredom.  Migdow looked for issues within her own life to have brought her to this place, but identifies that the dissociative fragments encourage detachment from the issues.  This detachment allows Dr. B.’s skill with social chit-chat to maneuver the topic away from anything too deep (or scary).

After forcing Dr. B. to be aware of an incident where she is showing obvious signs of distress, it is revealed that it is the dissociative system is protecting both the client and the therapist from the events of the past.  The secrets were still being so carefully protected from everyone, with this chit-chat seen as the best method to continue all diversion from the truth.  Dr. B. had never realised that this was another of the systems defenses and had always associated it with there being “something wrong with my brain” (Migdow, 2008, p. 51).

Migdow (2008, p. 52) explains the sensation as:

“… you feel like a door cracks open in your mind, you experience yourself as noticing something familiar and then you forget not only what you noticed but the fact that you noticed anything at all. You feel frightened of what you glimpsed and frightened that your own mind seems elusive.”

The explanation for lulling both the therapist and client is found… she isn’t bored, or boring… she has an incredibly protective system that thought the secrets and safety of the host must be maintained in any way possible.  This became a turning point in the therapeutic relationship… one where the right road was found, but the telling was hard (butchered Dante quote).

This article has at times given me hope – it helps me to understand that some of the waffle that I do is possibly aimed at self-protection.  I often find myself losing getting lost in the twists and turns of a conversation within therapy, but I’ve always associated this with me being stupid and not being able to keep up.  The article also helps me when I’m in the denial, this could be another diversionary technique to stop me from delving too deep into the past.  I know that my self-injury could be seen as either a diversion or a scream for help…

So much of what we do is aimed at trying to uncover our truth, but that is a hard road that has been protected for many years.  This article shows how one therapist realised that the road was constantly being passed by and only with strength and knowledge can we go down it.

As a note, while this article particularly dealt with the relationship with a person with DID, I think that it could be translated to almost any therapeutic relationship.

Reference

Migdow, J. (2008). Failure of curiosity. Psychoanalytic Social Work, 15(1), 43-52. doi:10.1080/15228870802111781.

When we started this blog over a year ago, we never thought we’d maintain it for any length of time.  We’d previously tried journaling in paper format and never been able to maintain it for longer than a week.  We never knew what to say, and quite frankly the idea of writing down our thoughts was terrifying.  This is possibly why we had so much trouble with doing a time-line with Liz on Monday.  I know that we consider the written word incredibly important – our escape while growing up, was to curl up in the Sun somewhere and read for hours on end, escaping into an imagined world.  Books and words were our safety, journaling and written based therapy exercises could be seen as a threat to that sense of safety.  Online blogs aren’t tactile, and we associate online writing with work, so we can do this as it doesn’t have the same emotional ties that a book has.

In many ways, we treat this blog as our journal.  The problem is that we know we have a small group of readers for our work here, so we can’t be as honest as we should and we get hung up with worrying about others perceptions of us.  We’ve tried creating separate online journals, but each of these has failed over time.  It is often when we need to write the most, that we shut down and don’t write anything.  Instead of reaching out and trying to express/process the pain, we go back to our old coping mechanisms of cutting everything and everyone off.  It’s only recently that I’ve been called on this – friends and Liz have accused me of shutting them out, I know I do it and can see it happening, but am powerless to stop it (at the moment).

Now that we have this site, we’re going to start another journal.  Maybe this one will work, I don’t know.  Today we went to the Zoo and it was interesting as Aimee wanted to write about the trip here.  But she is 9 and nearly illiterate, I wouldn’t expose her/us like that here, but it is the sort of thing that we should add to a private blog.  Looks like I’ll have to get M moving on creating the new private journal :)

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Now playing: Ludwig van Beethoven – Symphony No. 3 in E flat major (‘Eroica’), Op. 55: Marcia funebre, Adagio assai
via FoxyTunes

I noticed a very odd thing yesterday while playing FarmTown on FaceBook…  My issues with having a large personal space, seem to translate to my online avatars.  In FarmTown, you can go to market to sell your produce and see if someone wants to hire you to harvest their crops or plow their fields.  If you’re waiting to be employed, your avatar can be “standing” with a number of other avatars for a period of time.  There is a certain amount of psychology that goes into the strategies behind being hired – the “spammer”, where you repeatedly ask to be hired; the “dancer”, where you move around or get your avatar to dance on the spot; or the “loner”, where you get your avatar in a spot alone so they’re easily noticed.  I’ve always adopted the “loner” strategy, and have always attributed this to my game strategy.  I now realise there might be something more to it.  I can sometimes cope with another avatar being near or overlapping mine for a short period of time, but never long – even my ugly little avatar must have a large personal space.  For those of you who think I’m being cruel about the relative ugliness of the avatar, you obviously haven’t seen FarmTown graphics – they’re UGLY!

I wonder if this is an indication that I’ve been playing the game too long and are therefore personalising it too much, or whether I have extreme boundary issues.  When Carol (previous therapist) asked me about arranging the room in a way that I felt comfortable, we did an exercise about personal space.  In order for us to feel even mildly comfortable, we had to be in one corner of the room and she had to be in the opposite corner.  We would’ve preferred for her to be outside the room, but that wasn’t feasible.  During therapy with Carol, we’d often end up on the floor tucked around behind a cabinet that she had – this was mainly when the young ones were present.  They often felt a need to hide and create physical barriers between us and Carol.  During sessions with Liz when the young ones are present, there is still a pull to sit on the floor in the corner, but we’re too scared to do it in case it makes us look too odd.

We felt that need to sit in the corner today during our session with Liz, Aimee and SO were strongly present and felt like hiding.  It was a rough session in many ways – the main topics of conversation were denial and self-injury.  It brought up a very odd concept of how to cope with the denial.  We’d tried to construct a basic timeline of events to try and create some order out of the memories, but had found it too difficult to write them down.  We got about four events written, but then the derealisation started.  As this way of coping and “getting the memories out” hadn’t worked, Liz suggested something which is too bizarre for my very literal brain – think the memories or whatever is bothering me onto a piece of paper, fold it up and give it to Liz to keep.  This will mean that we don’t have to worry about those pieces of information again as they are being kept safe and separate from us.  To us this didn’t make sense…  How do you “think” something onto a piece of paper without writing it down?  How does giving Liz that piece of paper signify anything?  It was all too abstract and alternative for our very concrete, narrow way of thinking.

A therapist once told us that our education was lacking because we hadn’t studied any of the Arts.  That’s true, we don’t understand the beauty in art, music or philosophy.  In many ways we deliberately avoid studying them, because if the intellectuals amongst us get hold of the ideas they have this tendency to strip away the magic and enjoyment.  So we take photos because they’re fun… we listen to Beethoven, Foo Fighters, Brooke Fraser or any music because it moves us at the time… But when it comes to having to think through an abstract idea, we need the intellectual ones to come on board with some assistance.  This is fine, unless they get faced with something which they can’t dissect or reason through logically, then it sort of gets lost in their cynicism…