metonymy4u

Those of us who have experienced un-grieved childhood trauma can understand, as perhaps few others can, that the problem becomes one of relationship. If I was an information processing theorist, I would say that we construct a rule that says, “other people are worthy of existing and I am not.” As Paul Russell pointed out in a 1970s essay that I read when I was 15 (and felt that it described my life precisely – a notion that my mother, one of my abusers, was unable to fathom at the time despite the fact that it was she who had given me the essay to read), “relatedness–any kind of relatedness at all–is the unmastered task of the borderline.” Russell’s essay is wonderfully prescient in that he anticipates much of what we now know about borderline personality disorder, though he was not able to go far enough. The situation as we now understand it is that relatedness is also the unmastered task of the environment. To quote Marsha Linehan, “The notion that there might be a fatal flaw in the social fabric—in the human and social relationships of the society in which the person finds herself—is frequently not considered.”

What the radical genuineness of DBT and FAP do for me is that they help me undermine the habits of a lifetime, modeled to some extent by those sentences, but also captured in the metaphor of the hungry tiger—the tiger I learned to survive for the first 20 years of my life. That was my developmental task, to survive chronic physical and emotional abuse—abuse that stemmed from the hunger of those around me to use me for their own purposes: the adolescents who threw me in a hole in the ground when I was 6 and tried to drown me, the parents who chronically invalidated my emotional experiences to safeguard their own emotional vulnerability, the peers that branded me the “trouble maker” or the “scape goat” so they would (perhaps) not have to face their own terrifying inadequacies. The skills I learned from them served me well – I survived years of suicidal urges, self-invalidation, avoided grief, losses that should have killed me or turned me (like many in my family), into an alcoholic—all before I discovered DBT as a therapist. My peers in medical school used to joke that I “was going to be the one in the bell tower someday,” and I don’t think they were wrong.

Once when I was sitting retreat with the Tibetan lama Mingyur Rinpoche, I asked him what he thought of a person like Hitler, given the Buddhist assumption that we are all trying our best at all times? Was the Hitler who wiped out my grand-father’s family in the ghettos of Nazi occupied Poland also trying to do his best to secure happiness for himself, like all sentient beings? And does such an episode indicate that it is time for humanity to move beyond the bounds of the good vs. evil dichotomy? To the first question he responded by pointing out that Hitler committed suicide at the end of his life, thus highlighting the universal presence of suffering. He ignored the last question. I think now that he did so because the question of human relationship is not just such a problem. It is something else entirely.

I believe that what happens to survivors is that our lifetime habits are influenced by a constant, never-ending anxiety of violence – the actual violence that I survived and the potential violence that, I fear, I too am capable of. However, just as I know now that the shame of others’ violence towards me is not mine to bear, I also know that the value of the good/evil metaphor cannot be cashed in for some sort of existential redemption. In our crash and burn world, the dogs will go on with their doggy lives aboard ships that have somewhere to get to. And for that, I am grateful.