Collaboration – The Daily Screed

What if my fundamental attachment fear isn’t abandonment, what if it’s that no one will ever reliably attempt to understand me? What if I can’t quite believe that anyone could be trusted to change something – to change themselves – when they can’t accommodate my needs? I think there’s a a developmental skill related to the non-verbal, collaborative process of an infant and their caregivers working together to establish communication and safety. My old therapist talked about that in terms like “[parents] just know” ¹This eventually devolved into my therapist making a claim about parenting that I disproved with my own experience, and them defensively telling me that my experience “was not typical” and therefore not a valid counter-example to their claim. Ableism and denial of lived experience are such useful therapeutic tools. I’ll be sure to adjust my … Continue reading how to care for another living being, but that’s hand-waving nonsense based on a model that imagine communication with infants is impossible. It’s a socially-acquired skill that’s developed collaboratively, and the psychology that ignores it is White-man narcy bullshit.

PIC is allergic to learning. They’d love a checklist, if one is available, but a 600 page manual would be useless to them. They’re only here to manage the emergency; there’s no time to learn a new skill. Other Me are better at learning, but PIC is pretty resistant.

Which is a real limitation on PIC as a parent. They can be infinitely patient, but they aren’t willing to change to accommodate this crisis. They can’t learn a new way to communicate with Me; there is no time to learn a new skill. PIC can provide comfort and aid and sharing, but not growth.

That’s a good opening demand for new a therapist. Demonstrate that you’re willing to grow with me.

Several years of second-hand exposure to psychology academia has convinced me that I am correct when I imagine I can’t — don’t want to — participate in that kind of study ²I knew this years ago, after doing all the school the first time. It’s one of the reasons why I don’t do school anymore, and most of why I’m not interested in more academic credentials even when they’re offered. But it’s sort of reassuring to come to the same conclusion now, with more space and a new perspective. It would be easy to be … Continue reading. It’s full of ideas I can easily prove are wrong and harmful and it’s not very interested in changing them. It’s full of White people pretending that their horrendous culture is “human nature” and full of hierarchical behavioralism that pretends first-hand experience and social observations (often from another cultural perspective) are the same. Plus it’s taught by people who are more interested in the institution than in helping people, which is difficult for me to tolerate.

But I shouldn’t imagine that my aversion to more school or PIC’s allergy to learning mean that I can’t have help learning, or that I need to eschew all the tools and research used by those systems. I can — have — learned lots of things about the psychology that’s useful to me, including from research papers and other academic tools, and I can have useful opinions on when it’s wrong.

It’s easy for me to believe that I have to mask when my needs don’t match the care available from professionals. It’s easy for me to believe — it’s common for me to observe — that not masking means I am denied access to all care, instead of just care related to that one need. And that’s a valid survival strategy that I should apply in many cases. But it’s shitty, and I should do what I can to prevent it in long-term relationships.

I’ve spent a minute thinking about how a session with my last therapist might go, if we worked on the parts that they can help with and I set a boundary to keep them out of the parts where I know they’re wrong. And I can cook up this scam. I used this scam before to get their help, I just was more cagey about what I was doing. But I want a therapist who is in on the scam, not the subject of it.

I’ve been thinking about eating at night. About the tension of that state. I’ve known it was high-tension, even before I saw the sleep-related switch recently, but I’ve got a new angle on it now. Part of the eating regulation issue is an unresolved conflict between the eater who needs more and PIC who says – look, this sugar snack is proof you have enough, take it and be done. There are better ways to communicate with Eater, but PIC has been allergic to knowing them. There were better ways to communicate with the Kids about eating, but I was 7 and it was all I could do to get them fed, let alone to manage their feelings about neglect and starvation. It’s a lot to ask PIC to change those decades of behavior, but maybe there’s a way PIC could stop being in charge of this aspect of eating.

I’ve spent a decade working on spending less time in high tension states. This has resulted in less need for PIC and more space for Me. I have worked specifically to spend less time with PIC managing anything that I do on an ongoing basis, because they never get better at it. And that’s mostly still a good plan. Learning to let go of that sort of tension was important and useful.

But I need an approach better than the one I used as a 5-year-old. I don’t want to murder PIC and take over their life. I don’t want to lock them up, to come out again only when I need their help offing myself. I didn’t murder toddler me and I don’t need to fear repeating that. PIC isn’t bad for Me, but they should only be assigned work they are well suited too, not just all the hard parts. They should spend less time working alone, so it’s easier for them to access other skills. And they should be more free to act when I do need them, instead of being bound by old survival fears.

I’m not exactly sure how to do that, but it feels like a plausible scam – to find the places where PIC is still in charge and figure out how to make those tasks I can accomplish without so much terror.

The screen is still not quite done. It the frame is ready but attaching the projection material has been challenging. I tried a number of mechanical attachments. With some prompting from Shanda about the last PVC screen I built (back in like 2005) I realize that on that one I used strips of wood to clamp down the fabric rather than attaching it directly. That wouldn’t be ideal here due to the rear-screen orientation and the narrower PVC. But after a number of experiments I found that hot glue works fine. It’s not perfect, but it’s also not a thing I need to perfect in this phase – the final screen will be using a diffusion coating on a glass or acrylic backing, not tensioned vinyl. So hot glue. It’s actually pretty quick to do but I only had a few feet worth of glue on hand, and the tensioning stage requires two people, and I still haven’t found my tool battery charger since moving, so there were some delays. But it should be done tonight, baring some new emergency, so we can have some movie time this weekend.

I’m down to my last week of leave. I’m glad to be getting the screen project done, and to have squared away many of the other things that has stalled out in our house. I am a little worried that I won’t be able to find time for them when I get back to work. I am a little worried that I won’t stay far enough out of depression to have any spoons for things that aren’t survival. I used to get things done by letting myself be constantly overburdened and using dissociation and other trauma skills to manage it in a never-ending high-tension state. But I don’t want that anymore. There are lots of parts of that with benefits, and it (usually) kept me out of depression, but it’s not the sort of person I want to be anymore.

On the bright side I’ll have a movie screen and Shanda has a couple of days off and someone recently dropped off a bunch of drugs at my house, so hopefully there will be a space for some escapism and some crying and lounging and some family in a place that I’ve adapted to suit me in a week when I don’t have to do anything but support myself while I’m at home. That’s not as good as having 12 more weeks off, but it’s a good thing to do with the last one I get.

I often demand of myself that these be coherent. That I find a through line and build them toward something. And that’s a good writing goal. It’s a thing I want to accomplish. It’s a lot to ask of someone who is trying hard to integrate a bunch of different parts into a single life. It’s a lot to ask of someone who often can’t be the same writer at noon as they are at midnight. I should find a way that I can do coherent work that spans sessions. But I should treat that as an art goal that I need to conform my life too, not an art skill that I can produce on demand.

ZiB

Stars for Later[+]

Stars for Later
↑1	This eventually devolved into my therapist making a claim about parenting that I disproved with my own experience, and them defensively telling me that my experience “was not typical” and therefore not a valid counter-example to their claim. Ableism and denial of lived experience are such useful therapeutic tools. I’ll be sure to adjust my experience to your model so you can “heal” me.
↑2	I knew this years ago, after doing all the school the first time. It’s one of the reasons why I don’t do school anymore, and most of why I’m not interested in more academic credentials even when they’re offered. But it’s sort of reassuring to come to the same conclusion now, with more space and a new perspective. It would be easy to be fed up after a few decades in school, and I was, but I was also right. It was reassuring to hear one of the therapists I interviewed say more or less the same thing — that formal education, while full of potentially useful facts and theories — is poorly aligned with goals of actually helping individuals via psychology.