Another voice from the soundtrack of my childhood falls silent. On January 28 Marianne Faithfull died at the age of 78. Her song, a compendium of addiction, eating disorder, tortured love of Mick Jagger, figurative and in her case at one point even literal homelessness, and a general landscape, a continuing background or set of loneliness, she could have been my twin. I was trying to remember the art class terminology of composition where there was a particular and poetic lexicon of design elements, like figure, ground and…I could not remember any of them except interestingly, “vanishing point,” which I guess is no surprise as it is probably the element I could most relate to. So, in terms of the poetry of art and music, the best I can do to name that loneliness, is nothing. Nothing was the landscape, the musical or visual, emotional ambient air I grew up in. So, Marianne’s rueful voice and story, what I knew (or imagined of them) were good and kindred company.
Growing up, most of my “friends,” certainly the more lasting ones, were distant, not quite imaginary but certainly not what we would call “real.” Back then, the word friend was measured more concretely, and the cyber variety counted in hundreds and even thousands now, were as yet not imagined, or not by me. So, my little “circle” could be counted on fingers, and may have worked its way eventually up to two hands. But at least, unlike the flesh and blood variety, I was able to keep them, and not drive them out in short order, due to petty jealousies, real or imagined betrayals or disappointments, or irreparable ruptures. And my own little in-crowd kept me from the stark and complete emptiness of lonely nothing.
By now if you have been with me for any long or short amount of time, you are well familiar with my continuing explorations of nothing, and admittedly my ongoing search for a more fitting, perhaps more sophisticated nomenclature for Neglect Trauma, one more likely to be deemed worthy of inclusion in the categories of Developmental Trauma, more descriptive than simply the often misunderstood or too-narrowly understood category of Neglect. By whatever name, as with any of us, loneliness was the theme, the ambient air, the background hue, the backbeat, the context, the ever-present and constant companion from the start. And that is precisely the heart of neglect trauma, or what Dr. Frank Corrigan has so aptly named attachment shock. Hard wired and designed, not to mention in every way dependent on the mother and/or most primary of caregivers, their withdrawal, loss, failure, unreliability or simple but utter absence is experienced as life threatening, truly and organically lethal. The infant body riddled with the lethal terror, comes to “know” the sensation, emotion and somatic experience of nothing, as the known sense of familiar, as a homeostatic baseline. Nature’s design of what biologist Sue Carter has coined “Sociostasis” is unknown. The search or quest for such balance, begins. The children’s book “Are You My Mother?” which many of us may remember, is hardly fiction. And the lack of mother, the essential other, becomes the basis for the lasting and pervasive, often nameless and elusive experience of ennui, depression, nihilism, desolation, pick your word. As Amy Tan reminds us in her exquisite Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir, (Ecco, 2017) loneliness is not about being alone, but rather about not feeling understood. I would add seen, heard, known, remembered, valued.
Many of us grew up in the company of many, often perhaps “too many” others. Feeling not understood, unseen, unimportant, not known are the heart of neglect trauma. In the US there is much buzz these days about an “epidemic of loneliness.” Some social and even medical researchers attribute it to social media, technology, the recent and lingering pandemic. I have to wonder if the “hidden epidemic” of Neglect trauma is chicken or egg, certainly no pun intended.
Gender
So, returning to Marianne, I was struck in noticing that for myself, how few of my imaginary friends were female. My circle was primarily peopled with (mostly young) men. Growing up in an age of feminism, although I strongly supported the causes of women and women’s liberation which were certainly a loud and welcome presence in my development, it was never my primary lens. And passionate about social justice, I was preoccupied perhaps to a lesser degree with women’s causes. And like many survivors of sexual trauma, I was confusedly ambivalent about the objectification of girls and women, at least as it related to me. On one hand it had humiliated, cheapened and scarred me deeply, on the other, in some weird way being desired also gave me value, appeal, and a conduit to the also ambiguous and fleeting connection and admitted “high” of sex. That, and also as an endurance athlete, my omnipresent quest to match or beat the men…Oy vey.
As I evolve my model of Neglect Informed Sex Therapy I become aware of another “symptom” category of neglect trauma, a variety of gender dysphoria. This is not to in any way cheapen or dilute the profound experience of non-binary biology and psychology about which I have much more to learn. But I am becoming aware both in myself, and many other neglect survivors, a dysregulation/ambivalence about one or both parents’ disappointment or even overt rejection of one’s assigned gender. I remember somehow knowing and ever feeling, that my father had always wanted a boy. The story went, that certainly one of us was always anticipated and primed to be “David,” who never did appear. Many like myself, grow up in families or cultures where male children are decidedly more valuable and more worthy than in some cases the even disposable female. I think I strove to be (unachievably of course) masculine enough to please him.
However, I am also discovering in my work with clients, that some male clients recall their mothers’ profound disappointment, even rejection or denial of their masculinity which may have resulted in gender identity or certainly self-image confusion. And many have never ever before talked about it. All the more reason for those of us who are therapists, but all of us really, to educate ourselves about the growing body (again no pun intended, really!) of knowledge and research about gender. I have made dumb and sometimes hurtful mistakes in language and pronoun usage. But failing to see is that much worse.
Rabbit
This morning around 3:00AM I happened upon another BBC treasure that I had not known about, World Book Club. Wow, what a goldmine for a lonely bookworm child of neglect, that I would have loved in my lonely bookworm childhood. An interview with an author about a particular book; readers from all over the world, calling in and emailing their questions and feelings about her book. It was amazing. The author this morning was Meg Rosoff, I had never heard of her, discussing her (young adults) novel, How I Live Now (2006, Wendy Lamb Books). It was like an interview with myself, Holocaust, attachment trauma, sexual trauma, eating disorder, addiction, loneliness, sex and relationship confusion, and finally therapy. And the novel was of course about all that. I thought what if…what if I had had a world book club when I was in the throes of nothing, what if I had had that book then, or one like it? What if I had had a community of readers, like the callers I heard from Belgium, Sweden, France and San Diego, USA? Would that have made a difference? Who can know? In any case it was a great find, and can be accessed at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003jhsk
Marianne died at age 78. I will soon be 70. Does that mean I am in the evening of the day? It is true that the rock and roll life is a hard life in many ways, certainly on the body. And her run with drugs was much rougher and deeper than mine, thankfully for me. But with the benefit of so much healing work, I feel so much more like it is the dawn, not the dusk, well some realities of the body notwithstanding…
I write this on February 1st. My sister and I have a longstanding tradition, and now that we have text messaging, it is all the more immediate. It goes like this, on the first of every month, you rush to say to the other “Rabbit, Rabbit!” Now of course we do it with Emojis. Whoever “gets there,” i.e. remembers and says it first, wins. In this case the sleep disorder is a boon, and I almost always win by the simple fact of being awake. Although occasionally I do forget. Well, today after I beat her out again, she sent me a history of the custom. What she found was it is a “highly scientific fact (!)” that if you say “Rabbit Rabbit” as your first words of the month, they will bring good luck all month. Additional irrefutable fact is that in worrisome times, the more mentioned the better. So, Rabbit Rabbit to you!
Today’s song:
