On the basis of my experience, I think that the cause of an emotional disturbance is to be found in the infant's early adaptation. The child's needs for respect, echoing, understanding, sympathy, and mirroring have to be repressed, with several serious consequences.
One such consequence in the person's inability to experience consciously certain feelings of his own (such as jealousy, envy, anger, loneliness, helplessness, or anxiety), either in childhood or in later adulthood. This is even more tragic in that we are concerned here with lively people who are often capable of deep feelings.
These people have all developed the art of not experiencing feelings, for a child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother's love or the love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress her emotions. She cannot even experience them secretly, 'just for herself'; she will fail to experience them at all. But they will nevertheless stay in her body, in her cells, stored up as information that can be triggered by a later event.
Throughout their later life, these people will have to deal with situations in which these rudimentary feelings may awaken, but without the original connection ever becoming clear. The connection can be deciphered only when the intense emotions have been experienced in therapy and successfully linked with their original situation. (10-11)
Accommodation to the parental needs often leads to the 'as-if-personality'. This person develops in such a way that he reveals only what is expected of him and fuses so completely with what he reveals that one could scarcely guess how much more there is to him behind this false self. He cannot develop and differentiate his true self, because he is unable to live it. Understandably, this person will complain of a sense of emptiness, futility, or homelessness, for the emptiness is real. A process of emptying, impoverishment , and crippling of his potential actually took place. The integrity of the child was injured when all that was alive and spontaneous in him was cut of. In childhood, these patients have often had dreams in which they experienced themselves as at least partly dead.(14)
It is one of the turning points in therapy when the patient comes to the emotional insight that all the love she has captured with so much effort and self-denial was not meant for her as she really was. In therapy, the small and lonely child that is hidden under her achievements wakes up and asks: 'What would have happened if I had appeared before you sad, needy, angry, furious? Where would your love have been then? And I was all these things as well. Does this mean that it was not really me you loved, but only what I pretended to be? The well-balanced, reliable, empathic, understanding, and convenient child, who in fact was never a child at all? What became of my childhood? Have I not been cheated out of it? I can never return to it. I can never make up for it.
Even as an older child, she was not allowed to say or even think: 'I can be sad or unhappy whenever anything makes me sad or happy; I don't have to look cheerful for someone else, I don't have to suppress my distress or anxiety to fit other people's needs. I can be angry and no one will die or get a headache because of it. I can rage when you hurt me, without losing me.'
(17)
An adult can be fully aware of his feelings only if he had caring parents or caregivers. People who were abused and neglected children are missing this capacity and are therefore never overtaken by7 unexpected emotions. They will admit only those feelings that are accepted and approved by their inner censor, who is their parent's heir. Depression and a sense of inner emptiness are the price they must pay for this control. The true self cannot communicate because it has remained unconscious, the therefore undeveloped, in its inner prison. The company of prison wardens does not encourage lively development. It is only after it is liberated that the self begins to be articulate, to grow, and to develop its creativity. Where there had been only fearful emptiness or equally frightening grandiose fantasies, an unexpected wealth of vitality is now discovered. This is not a homecoming, since this home has never existed. It is the creation of home. (22)
Points these people have in common
A false self that has led to the loss of the potential true self
A fragility of self esteem because of a lack of confidence in one's own feelings and wishes
Perfectionism
Denial of rejected feelings
A preponderance of exploitative relationships
An enormous fear of loss of love and therefore a great readiness to conform.
Split-off aggression
Oversensitivity
A readiness to feel shame or guilt.
Restlessness.(46)
Depression as Denial of the Self
Depression consists of a denial of one's own emotional reactions. This denial begins in the service of an absolutely essential adaptation during childhood and indicates a very early injury. There are many children who have not been free, right from the beginning, to experience the very simplest of feelings, such as discontent, anger, rage, pain, even hunger - and, of course, enjoyment of their own bodies. (46)
The Accumulation of Strong, Hidden Feelings
Depressive phases My last several weeks before strong emotions from childhood break through. It is as though the depression has held back the effect. When it can be experienced, insight and associations related to the repressed scenes follow, often accompanied by significant dreams. The patient feels fully alive again until a new depressive phase signals something new. This may be expressed in the following fashion: 'I no longer have a feeling of myself. How could it happen that I should lose myself again? I have no connection with what is within me. It is all hopeless … it will never be any better. Everything is pointless. I am longing for my former sense of being alive? An emotional outbreak may follow, accompanied by strong, legitimate reproaches, and only after this outbreak will a new link with repressed experience become clear and new vitality felt. As long as these reproaches are directed towards those who are responsible for harming us, a great relief is the result. (64)
It is precisely because a child's feelings are so strong that they cannot be repressed without serious consequences. The stronger a prisoner is, the thicker the walls have to be, and unfortunately these walls also impede or completely prevent later emotional growth. (68)
