by Restin Wells
The dark side of the moon is often used as an analogy for the unconscious. But I never felt okay about that, as it conveys the picture of nothing much there but bare, gray geology: gray matter, in a vast gray nothingness. To me, the unconscious could better be pictured as the other side of the earth in Columbus' time. It's much more like the barely known Americas, teeming with bountiful, interactive, primitive commerce. It's hard to believe that human beings can be so unaware of the unconscious, and even refuse to take it seriously, when it actually comprises a large percentage of their mentality. It is to the great credit of the Designer that the directing center of the brain can carry on so much for us that we can be so ignorant about it and still develop into productive individuals.
In a way, the mind is also similar to a sophisticated computer. Despite the computer's mind-boggling complexity inside, it takes relatively little training to learn how to operate it. You don't have to know how to design one, nor program it, nor be an analyst. It actually prevents you from making all manner of mistakes that could foul up the works. It beeps at you, just as your mind dings you, for making wrong moves. It's better that way, both with the human and the computer. In regard to us humans, we "fix" ourselves with our common sense, the counsel of friends, or a good advice book. That's all it takes ordinarily. With our best efforts, and the natural restorative powers, we eventually work out of our tangles, and are better for it afterwards. But when all that fails, and misery persists, we are obliged to dig deeper for the solution.
Most adults don't recall the courageous steps, the myriad repetitions, and fine-tuning they employed to teach themselves how to cope with other people as they were growing up. By age twenty, most people relate passingly well to friends and neighbors. But with many others, something happens in the mind to put up a block against the subjects of feelings and relationships. Something happened, or a series of events, at home or elsewhere, that made it overmuch to keep dealing with feelings. So, the mind decides to deal with the events and the emotions by forming a neurological barrier around them, and buries them to the farthest depths of repression it can command. Furthermore, it continues to build layer upon of layer of "reasons" to not reveal that maneuver to you. It cons you into pretending feelings don't exist, then camouflages even that by getting you to believe feelings are stupid. If you have been through self re-discovery, you know how earnest the mind is at doing some of these defense mechanisms, and you have felt the surprise at the inequity of it. You realize that you yourself didn't think that up, but instead have been sold a bill of goods, so to speak.
I recall how my first thought, every time I began to reflect upon my childhood, was that I never had anything bad happen to me. That conclusion jumped right in there just like a knee-jerk response, as a trick to head me off, to keep me from digging into stuff. And it actually worked for many years. I had a lot of those corny little twists lurking around inside, and so do all of us who have a lot of painful stuff in life. But that kind of separate, primal thinking, on the part of the unconscious, is the set up for a cluster of feelings to begin living a life of their own. They dwell in the margins of your conscious self, like a band of outlaws, away from your influence. Then, if they grow enough, they begin to intrude and make trouble in ways you can't quite see. They become very much like an underground gang of kids, making trouble in a community.
You don't get rid of feelings by refusing to feel them. You merely exile them where they can carry on anyway, outside your supervision. In that manner, many adults bypass their early lessons about love, grief, and insult. Then, if a great disappointment or rejection comes along in adulthood, such as losing a lover, the pain may become so severe that it gets past the barriers against feeling. Then you have an adult overwhelmed with grief and humiliation, without a clue about how to handle it..with no ability to manage himself within the norms of society, or with regard to the rights of other people. Overpowering pain, and raw needs, come as a series of terrible crises to an unwise ego.
That was a main feature of my own case. I assumed I would die if I lost my loved person, the therapist, just as I really would have if I were a one year-old. In the usual course of maturation, the new discoveries about life build upon themselves until there is skill in dealing with strong emotions. But, when that training is missing, the appearance of a traumatic event in life is like being thrown into a boxing arena without knowing how to react fast enough to keep from being pummeled to death. Grief, rage, and fear come as a tidal wave, when you never learned to swim. It's as if the impingement of other people messing with your emotions, are too much, like full summer sun when you're pale from being indoors too much. The feelings feel so raw, and everything grates painfully, like a carrot grater rubbing on sensitive skin.
Many were the times I could hardly wait to get home from town, or work, so I could darken my bedroom, put a pillow over my head, grit my teeth, and try to blank out the dastardly world and its outrageous people! In order to have any confidence in this world I should have had all my emotion potentials in consciousness as I grew up: adjusting, re-adjusting, entwining with new knowledge and new social skills. I should have been involved with that as I reached young adulthood and found my life's work, my companions, and my standpoint with other people in the domains of business and occupation. But I grossly failed to do that..and paid the heavy price.
I believe that my experience with fear and insecurity, though clinically severe, is very important to everyone. In its mild form, division in the self isn't even considered an illness, but just a fault of being moody or neurotic. Everyone has his weaknesses and fears, that he tries to cover up, with varying degrees of handicap. Hypocrisy is a common way of being divided. If someone seems to do it on purpose, we call him a sinner; and if he seems to do it unawares, we call him "sick. " Yet, insecurities or aggressiveness, addictions and dependencies, are problems hard to face up to. Obsession with sex, formerly applauded by society-before-Aids, can be an addiction as compelling as the addiction to cocaine. Those sins, faults, or neuroses, or whatever you call them, are often the other side of a usually nice person. Multiple personality disorder, and dissociative disorders are the far end of a scale, but there are many degrees of severity and complexity leading up to those diagnoses. All of those problems appear to have a few things in common. A part of the self is split off from the main consciousness, but compelling you from behind a secret place in the mind.
Imagine that you are wearing a coat that has many pockets. You are walking down the sidewalk as a fairly normal person who blends in quite well. But you carry around a lot of "pockets" in your coat, in which you keep the different ways you can be. When you go to the bank, you pull out the "professional look" and tone of voice. When you're with a buddy, out on the town, you pull out the playboy style of street talk and macho manner. When you're with your sweetheart you just met last week, you pull out the "perfect person" style. But those are just a few of the outer pockets you deliberately use.
The inner pockets are additional repertoire. Many of our fears and bad habits are stashed in there, less conscious and less acceptable. They are stuffed down into deep pockets where we sort of pretend we don't have them. You can't seem to root them out and eject them so easily, as they are very "sticky" somehow. So, you try to ignore them and hope they don't fall out too often. We don't want everybody to know about them, but we become exhausted and trip up more than we want to nevertheless.
But the most troublesome pockets are the one we don't know about ourselves. Their contents are messy, disgusting stuff that somehow has a way of running interference despite ourselves. They are in hidden pockets, in inner linings where we can't readily see them, and don't want to anyhow. For examples, I may compliment myself for giving generously to a charity, but don't realize how stingy I am with the people who live around me. Or maybe I'm fearless in speaking up for my rights at a business meeting, but can't get up the nerve to say "I love you" to my spouse. Or maybe I'm a moral person ordinarily, but let me get going with the right kind of temptation and my will power flies away like a puff of ashes. The problem is how I don't get separate parts of my personality put together. I have a powerful resistance to facing certain shortcomings, so much so that I don't believe I have them.
The mind is really quite clever at keeping subjects apart that will cause you pain when they are together in the same conscious picture. The mind is sort of like an over-protective parent. It's dedicated to protecting from the pain of the moment, and to hell with the later consequences. The trouble with that arrangement is that the inner division causes lack of power and focus in life. When you float from one mood to another, or have your energies siphoned down into unconscious factions, you don't have enough energy for your conscious plans, such as school, work, or chosen career. You can't seem to get anywhere, get things organized, do stuff on time, and follow through. It's like trying to march through deep mud. It's like the dream where you're running as hard as you can, but just seem to go in slow motion, or can't get good traction on the ground.
Your main self, your conscious, reasoning self, is overcome with inertia, feels spacey and tired. Or, maybe you're still living with parents at twenty something and don't know why you just can't get with it in life. Or maybe you're married, or living with someone, and somehow your mate has the big responsibilities. And despite your vision of yourself as a street-wise, modern, powerful person, you realize in a moment of fearful honesty that you're actually dependent on someone else as if you were still a child. You just can't seem to take on the discipline of bills, insurance, full-time employment, etc. --like your partner is already doing, to keep you going. There's a reason why people are dependent in that way, and there is an answer to it. It doesn't seem to do any good to berate yourself or have other people scold you, either. Unfinished business in the unconscious is what divides your energy, and no amount of willpower or shaming will take the place of finding out what you are keeping secret from yourself. As the old saying goes, "united we stand, divided we fall". And that is true of the inner world as well as true for the nation.
Go to the seventh chapter of Romans, in the Bible, for a classic example of inner division. Paul exclaims there, "For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do." Well, we all should take it upon us to to discover where another secret part of own own self isn't the way we claim to be up front. We all have another side to us, even if we are not actually dissociative. We are all hypocrites in some ways, if only we can quit worrying about the other person long enough to look into our own selves.
Take the used-car dealer who cheats people all week, but is a deacon in church on Sunday. He may not have separate identities, but he does at least have a discrepancy in his character. He speaks with a forked tongue. He IS forked. He himself probably doesn't realize he is isn't honest. He is often held up as an excuse for people to scorn religion. Most people really do want to be decent, but they still have serious blind spots in regard to themselves. It is a psychological twist that the more I'm irritated by some habit in someone else, the more I'm having subconscious trouble with that very subject myself. I can be sure it's poking at a buried part of my own self that is threatened with exposure to my own judgment. It's often said of someone, "Everybody knows how he is but himself." That is both a spiritual and psychiatric problem, and the remedy lies in the interaction of both.
Well, I'm going into all this mainly because I want to help people understand identity dissociation. Having conflicts inside, or even being a hypocrite, is not identity dissociation, but helps in getting the general idea. The word "identity" involves the core of the selfhood. That is what makes ME. Identity is a definite person, an individual, not anyone else. In Dissociative Identity Disorder, the person recognizes he has more than one ME inside. Its different than just having changes of mood, or unconscious complexes, or alternating attitudes about things. But I wish to show, by things we all experience, how inner division in some people can be much more in quantity and quality than most people ever have.
Eventually, in the course of my recovery, I came to a place where I could bear the thought, a little while, that Dr. T was quite an over-bearing, heartless person who had a lot of nerve to try to force me to do therapy her way. I greatly improved from my efforts to devalue her to the child within who was so mistaken about her importance. I was getting close to having some say-so about the situation there.
From my formal studies, I realized I was going through stages every child faces as he grows up. Every normal child goes through a long term struggle over the need for a mother, and a need to be self-reliant. Everyone runs into the disappointment that mother isn't going to see and do all that is desired. It gradually dawns on the child that mother has faults and frailties, that mother falls way short of the super-mom of infancy. The child's life began with the genetically programmed bonding, the real needs for food and affection that sustain life. A growing need for self-assertion and independence enters into the development also. A conflict ensues that is both necessary and good. From that, the young person learns compassion, self-sacrifice, and how to cope with emotions. Balancing and adjustment continue on into adulthood. But, it makes it so much harder when the mothering never was nearly enough, or if it were actually abusive, or absent.
Matters already challenging for any mind become so complex that drastic means must be found to go on living. Yet, every person has had a mother, or parent substitutes. There is no escaping it, the issues come up again and again, as a child is drawn through the programming of his species, to take his place as an adult of his culture. But, I would say I'm fairly typical of one who got off to an erratic start. My mother was killed before I was one, and I was shuffled among families of relatives from there on. My infant mind dealt with the loss of mother, and troubles over substitutes, by employing a drastic defense at a very early age. I would need no one and feel nothing. My heroes would be horses, which were powerful; and Indians, who were Spartan. I skipped entire sections of important maturation. Yet, I strode through life smug in my victory.
But one day, my default came due, with about the same scenario as the IRS finding out where a long-sought tax evader lives. I found myself having to account for and rework the training I had missed, at least in token form, until something was satisfied. I did my missed lessons through the partnership of a therapist, whom my unconscious treated as if she were the mother required for the reparations. The repressed infantile part of my mind, where my sickness was focused, had long ago given up on my main self. It had put something like a vast Arctic Circle between itself and me, long before I started into therapy. And I, too, had run away from the sick child inside, as far as I could. I really did need therapy, and the therapists, when I needed them.
Therapy had an important place, in helping me to make the issues conscious again. Even my efforts to separate were part of the therapy process. I eventually became my own emergency helper, only because I couldn't wait for others to rescue me from the unbearable feelings. I was there for my child before the doctor could return my call to the answering service, or make an appointment after the weekend, and such. Like it or not, my sick infant inside had to settle for me, while we waited for more "qualified help." My sick part then gradually realized I wasn't so bad at providing for it after all, now that we were on speaking terms.
I was always there. I really tried to comprehend, and my response was immediate, even if it were not always the best. I was gradually winning my alter over.
Copyright ©
Restin Wells