My mother's dissociative disorder can be as frightening as what I saw at my grandmas. And it just so happens that this particular experience is contextualized by my grandmothers visit to the house.
She comes down the stairs, its about 12:30 AM, my brother and myself sitting on the couch watching TV. She comes into the room with her well-known anxiety and moves her way towards the end of the room.."my stomach hurts", she says. I look at her and try to commiserate with the pain and anxiety that this is evidently causing her.
I go into the kitchen, softly - like a mouse - and tell her, "mo, try to breathe". Breathe? Is that antagonistic? Of the possible choices that entered my mind - "don't be anxious", "don't be stressed" or the one she hates the most: "relax", this sounded soft and innocuous. But alas, she reads intentions rather than words. The word game doesn't work with people who experience very intense emotions. The forceful dynamics of a stereotyped behavior - how she acts - runs its course, like a script, until she is finished "resolving" the dilemma currently occurring.
This indeed is an adaptation she learned early on in life; but I can't help but wonder at the extravagance of my mothers dissociativeness than when she says to me "your face makes me irritable". This, apparently, is how I provoke her. My concern that her anxiety, stress, and incessant irritability may be contributing to this "ulcer" like feeling she claimed to be having, amazingly, her enormously defensive nature distorts this into me having the arrogance to talk to her with such impudence. How did impudence come up, you ask? This morning, after approaching me, and offering a deal to me, that if I washed the dog, she would take me to go get a coffee. Ok. Thank you for the offer. I do the washing, took no more than 10 minutes, and then went to her to tell her I was ready. She then snaps at me and tells me she's too hot. Wait. Because she finished off her statement with a softer, milder way of speaking, I responded with a mindful acceptance, saying in a heartfelt, sincere sort of way, "ok" with a playful tint. About 10 minutes later, I go back inside, and this time she snaps at me without the modulating kindness at the end. 5 minutes after that, I have the thought "she's so manipulative! She's going to get dad to drive me", which led to the thought "She knowingly took advantage of my way of responding to her when she speaks that way; and she also knew that she can force my dad to do whatever she asks him to". The thought, in retrospect, took me too far. It became personal. I felt she was a manipulative, controlling, "traumatizing narcissist" who mindlessly externalizes her anxieties. And also, perhaps, the presence of my grandmother "locks her in" (or unconsciously activates neural assemblies associated with this object i.e her mother) into a certain dramatic panache that perhaps wouldn't reach such intensities if she wasn't there. My grandmother too, is astonishingly dissociative.
That is a little Pollyanna sounding to me, because my mother is almost always passing in and out of irritable states, and in those states, she mindlessly and unconsciously believes her own horseshit unconscious constructions that I or my father or my brother or sister am causing her to feel anxiety. She is a woman who, after being conditioned by her own mother to find blame in the world around her (that is, made sense of her anxiety to herself by offloading any responsibility for her feeling states) has built up her own "niche", in a manner very like a beaver, where she can speak to other people and act against other people that helps her support her self-esteem (her sense of pride). The other people are my overly acquiescent father, who, if it weren't for his acquiescence, I wouldn't even exist. Then, her three child, of varying ages, and so, knowing a particularly "different" mother from the others.
My sister and I are sufficiently close enough in age (2 year difference) to have experienced a very similar mother. My brother, born 5 years 7 months later, experienced a more "mature", or affectively regulated mother. It also may have helped that she was told that her pregnancy would 'help normalize her hormones', by her psychic naturopath. The positive expectation did lead to a stability of "self", but unfortunately, there were still others selves, unresolved issues, that allowed her to live very dissociatively.
When she says stuff like "your face makes me sick", how else can I experience this other than a deep unhappiness that my mother can feel this way towards me - and maintain this nonsense. She cannot gvern her mind under distress; how obvious it is to any THINKING person that saying "your face makes me sick" is an emotional self-generated reaction being projected onto another person? And how unfair it is, to be a mind who formed under the auspices of this sort of individual.
She's a victim and an idiot. An "idiot" because she cannot use her mind. Why do I choose that word? Because she hurts me - and has hurt me - and this feeling is a real feeling in me; an anger at her for rebuffing my earnest efforts to help her; my true concern and compassion for her - can go unnoticed.
Her mind is a room with no central organizer. Once certain externalizing "affect regulating" strategies come into play, it feels sort of like being a doctor dealing with a psychiatric patient; the patient defends like a snarling wolf - rebuffing and opposing any effort you put into reasoning with her. Her intense emotional reaction compulsively organizes stereotypical defense reactions; her brain senses "michael is speaking to me in this way," which then triggers this quick defensive response "after what you said to me today (I rudely called her an asshole; for which I profusely apologized for) you have the audacity to talk to me this way?" Her mind dissociates the immediate context - what was just said earlier; information wont 'cohere' into a coherent whole, whereby something said earlier influences whats understood next, and so on. She returns again and again as if to protect against a certain feeling of herself as being worthless, pathetic, "wrong"; in short, shame. Her defense is an effort to feel a certain way vis a vis another person. She returns again and again to the same reaction, desperately maintaining the dissociation of dissonant information - information that will induce anxiety, fear, shame, and a general sense of mental incoherence i.e insanity. This is why she says to me "Your face makes me sick". She treats me as the same type of person who dehumanized her as a child - her mother, father, sibling, cousins. Her harshest relationships were with her parents, and their general, authoritarian ways, built into her a savage defense system against "potential manipulators". I was a potential manipulator, and will likely always be one, whenever she gets anxious like this. Hence, if she can't control her anxiety, she cannot help herself.
I joke from time to time - when she's healthy minded - that I would personally pay for therapy appointments, for instance, for help to "build up her mindfulness function", which I of course pepper with causal language to make it easier for her to accept. But even then she doesn't think she needs therapy; when she's happy, she needs to maintain the illusion of normality; the probability of a turn to a traumatic state of arousal is too likely; hence, when shes happy, she dissociates with still surprisingly high fidelity.
I can feel so debilitated by my anxiety, by a feeling of not being heard. It's a profound sensation that I've always had. My learned anxiety is itself a testament to my organisms desperate need to elicit recognition from the other. From my mother.
My brother can also be difficult to be around, difficult to talk to, because he cannot THINK when he himself experiences anxiety. He dissociates; his attention "spontaneously" moves to something else, his hand, his wallet, but most likely, his phone. And then, hungry for recognition, try to "seek out" his attention. I speak, I look, I speak, I look. I'm hungry for responsiveness; for recognition of my affective experience; indeed, for the very sense of my existence as a self.
This habitual response curbs my enthusiasm. I'm fighting with my self, at some current threshold that seems to be habitually crossed, that 'something is wrong with my voice', and in essence, my self. The voice is the psychological vehicle of self construction. The deepest, most profound feeling of self is associated with these moments of deep arousal, sharing of feelings, and the subtle, usually non-conscious awareness, that I am affecting other people in this way, which makes me feel this way (proud). Pride is the "point" within the human mind which commands our behavior like the sun commands the planets. We naturally 'drift' towards idealizations - this is how we "consciously" help ourselves. Our minds move this way as a compulsive reaction; an inveterate and automatic dissociator of the truth of the reality principle: there is an objective reality, such as, for instance, the necessity of the golden rule: do not treat others in way you wouldn't want to be treated. This rule spurs a type of consciousness we can call "conscience". Conscience pokes its head in when our normal defensive reactions, themselves built from a lifetime of threatening experiences, and understands "I am not thinking clearly here". Yes. It's ok to not always think clearly; there is nothing with discovering this; in fact, it is eminently right to realize the insanity of our human minds: vis a vis our idealized code to be "moral", we are insistently immoral when we deny the way non-conscious, defensive dissociative processes construct our perceptions by biasing our affects, attitudes and attention.
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