"And how on earth does one go about finding the real trigger???
Or is that the whole problem itself?"
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Maybe if we all took a deep breath and said in unison, throughout the earth, "Janine, please call your office!" she would appear to give the words that only she can.
I am serious. She is so good, while I am just a clumsy buffoon trying to emulate her. :roll:
I'll try for two sentences, though: When we don't want to deal with something in our inner life, our "little helper" aka "the unconscious" helps us by hiding that something away where we don't have to deal with it. We are temporarily happy. (Oh, no. That's my two-sentence limit.)
What the heck. Screw the limit. Okay. Our little helper is such a fine fellow that he performs his task much better than "we" could on our own; in fact, we couldn't on our own, so he does it, and we just love him to bits for it. However, what our little helper and we do not know is that, like magic, the thing we allowed him to hide from us, because it is hidden and isolated from everything else in the universe, turns toxic.
All by itself, it turns into a poison, a fearful, terrible thing that is horrific and deadly. What's worse, what our little helper and we do not know is that each and every hiding place, though it seems so totally perfect for its task and so cozy and so well-protected, has an intrinsic and inevitable flaw.
You see, each and every hiding place will develop a "stress fracture," just like the ones that develop in steel. (That the word "stress" is such a useful word for us these days is something we can ponder later, but the imagery of steel breaking under pressure may help in visualizing why one's mind seems a bit "overloaded" (you should pardon the expression) at times).
So, no hiding place is actually very safe at all, because each and every one is going to develop a stress fracture. Through that opening, the something that our little helper hid so well -- that has now turned into a fearful, terrible thing that is horrific and deadly -- is going to seep out.
It escapes!
Well, don't you just know that our little helper is pyst bigtime? He's having caniptions up the wazoo and carrying on like God had outlawed smiling or something. He runs around trying to catch the poisonous something we asked him to hide away, but he cannot find it and hide it again. It has escaped and is just about to burst back into our consciousness as a very, very, unpleasant problem that we will HAVE to deal with. We are still unaware, however, that it has escaped and is out of its hiding place. We would very soon become conscious of the necessity of dealing with that old something..... unless....
Ever our darling helper, the unconscious now tries to "help" us even more ('ya gotta admire such dedication, though, don't you?) by causing us to not see the horrible something, which, if we gathered our mental strength up against, we could now easily defeat and neutralize (after all, the something has been hidden away for quite a while now, and we are older, stronger, and smarter, and we have better tools to deal with it than we had years and years ago when we hid it away). To "help" us from having to neutralize the poisonous something -- again, something we could now EASILY do if we could only see it (become conscious of its existence) -- our little helper creates a distraction for us so that we are too busy to go hunting down the poison so that we can neutralize it and finally be REALLY rid of it.
What is that distraction? Our little helper decides to enlist his little elves, the hormones, to his cause of being absolutely sure that the something we wanted hidden remains hidden. As I mentioned earlier, our little helper is not really the sharpest pencil in the box, although he'd probably kill me if he knew I said that to you, so please don't tell him, okay? Thanks. The hormones are not really very smart, either, you know. They only know their little knee-jerk reactions and not much more, so they obey our little helper, who, after all, is far more intelligent and worldly than they are. He, unlike they, knows English. They are very impressed with that, even though they don't understand a word of it. He tends to throw orange juice at them when he gets mad, and they just are really not into that at all. He tells them he will throw OJ at them all day unless they play golf nonstop 24/7. They agree. They'll play until they die, if that's what it takes.
The utter bedlam our hormones now cause is such that we seem to ourselves to be alternatively Buddhas, zombies, Mozarts, and worms and we are so worn out that we never have time to see the escaped something.
One day, though, we decide to tell our little helper who's boss. We befriend him, actually, and try to educate him a bit. We ask him what the
[email protected]#$%^&*( he is doing. We ask him what's wrong. He is a very funny fellow. He never answers a question directly. He needs to be spoken to obliquely, and he will answer obliquely. He will tell you where what you hid is headquartered and gradually he will even tell you what that something is -- after all, you have no idea at this point because you GOT TOTALLY RID OF IT LONG AGO. You have no conscious knowledge of what the poisonous thing is; only your little helper knows.
He will tell you where and what it is once he knows you are not out to kill him. He thinks he protects you, so his protecting his own existence is really, in his view, an act of altruism. He loves you desperately. He only wants your good. Unfortunately, he never fully grew up, and he never ever will. You are the grown up and he is your little helper. But you, the grown up, took advantage of him so long ago. You sought to remove pain from your life entirely, and you enlisted his help. Now you know that all of the hiding places will develop fractures and that no place is a safe hiding place. Your little helper didn't know that and you didn't know that. You are now both wiser. But you are the boss and you must never give up that status again. You must never entrust to him the intelligent care of your needs -- he is never going to grow up and deal with things as rationally as you. After all, would YOU have hidden that something away in a place from which it would later seep out and poison you? No, of course not. You are too intelligent. But your little helper is not all that smart. Oh, he's loyal and true, and he loves you to death, but he's more like a dog than anything else, when you get right down to it.
But, get him to talk to you, show him you care, get him to give up his secrets, and you will know the trigger.
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Some call this reintegration of the Self, where the unconscious and conscious are not so fully cut off from each other as to cause symptoms of anxiety, panic, and DP.
Psychoanalytic therapy is the best route for "making friends" with the unconscious.
I'm sure there are holes in my tale, but I hope you get my drift.
