A Hard Fall

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.
Fyodor Dostoevsky

Self-deception is possibly the most insidious force in the universe. And yet…it is also a wonderful way of protecting ourselves. We constantly rationalize the things we do in defense of our fragile egos, not realizing that we are in effect building Castles on top of sand. Eventually these castles collapse however, and we are left wondering how we keep ending up back where we started.

This happened to me today involving a relationship I had recently become involved in. Although I have thoroughly threshed the fields of much of my intrapersonal baggage, what I hadn’t considered was how little work I’ve done on assessing how where I’ve been affects the way I interact with others outside of a therapy session.

So I became involved with a woman. A beautiful, intelligent, thoughtful woman, who pushed some buttons in me that I hadn’t realized were still there.

Throughout my life I’ve been highly successful at sabotaging interpersonal relationships. Although my whole career such as it is has been based on building these relationships in a therapeutic setting, this has not been a skill that readily translates.

The funny thing is that many prominent Psychologists and in particular relationship experts, have a history of unstable interpersonal relationships including at least one divorce. Hmmm.. Why? Perhaps because we are so adept at identifying weakness in other people, as this is what we have been trained to do. Verbally we can quickly put together convincing arguments about someone’s “defensiveness”, or “projection” when in fact we are merely using our own significant training in defense of our own egos. Ultimately this is a doomed strategy and people who rely on it may finding themselves winning little battles while losing the much more important war of intimacy and emotional connection.

Why? When people are hurt they say things that they normally wouldn’t say. The result is often a destructive reaction formation where we mask our hurt by developing an emotionally hurtful persona of our own, and personally I have let my own hurt speak for me on way too many occasions.

Which brings me to the point of this diatribe. Yesterday I fell back into this destructive pattern so easily and so readily that I was actually startled at my own degree of verbal abusiveness. Were those really my vile words coming out of my mouth? Yes in fact they were, and although I quickly realized the error of my ways, it was too late, the damage had been done.

You can’t always put the genie back into the bottle when it comes to a well-placed verbal attack. These are the kinds of words that leave psychic holes in people’s sense of self, and these holes then become incredibly difficult to repair. I have spent a lifetime discussing these wounds with my patients and trying to provide a “corrective emotional experience.” Meanwhile I’ve inflicted plenty of my own.

So today I ask myself, just who the hell am I so mad at? What are the roots of this anger and how can I get it out in the open, deal with it and then finally put it to rest. Patterns, even for the most thoughtful of people are still very deeply entrenched, and mine are as much so as anyone's.

I go to bed today tossing and turning. Craving a drink and needing one to help me sleep. I realize I am in a highly dangerous emotional state. I do a number of mindfulness exercises to calm myself down. I am an expert in these techniques and often teach them to others, but unfortunately this doctor cannot heal thyself. I drive to the 7-11 and buy a quart of cheap vodka. In the parking lot I take a deep swig and feel the rush of healing emotion wash over me. I am in trouble. Deep trouble.