I am a great lover of words. It is hard to say whether I love words, color, or music more, of all the varied and vivid means of expression. I love them all. However, sometimes, I am struck by the poverty of verbal language and how deficient it can seem in conveying its message. Such was the case when recently I was visited by a fleeting whiff, almost like a less than a momentary blast of fragmentary memory. It was so lightning-quick and then vanished, almost like a trick of perception. Except it was so searing and real as to be unmistakable. It carried the label, however deficient, of my timeless, signature, and chronic childhood loneliness. Although it has hardly been a secret or a mystery that I was a desperately and hopelessly isolated little flailing misfit, what was jarring now, was the unbearably wrenching sadness that I did not remember having felt quite this way before. Might that be the most weighty and devastating bequest of trauma and neglect? Perhaps. I found myself pondering that question.
As a trauma therapist, I have invariably found that the unbearable morass, challenge, or chronic failure in the world of relationships was what most brought survivors to therapy. It seemed as if almost anything else was more bearable, but not being able to make a go of friendship, intimacy, parenthood, or other family ties drove a kind of urgency that “forced the issue.” It was simply too hard or too hard to keep on trying in vain to figure it out. Not that I was any kind of expert myself, but I knew plenty about what did not work; I could certainly read and learn, and intuitively empathy made sense to me. Although people seemed to think treating others as one would like to be treated oneself was a good thing, which is certainly true, treating people as they would like to be treated is even better. Why wouldn’t that be obvious? Most likely because of the preoccupation with oneself.
I pondered these questions from early in my solitary little life. I was a heady, bookish, introverted little girl who spent inordinate amounts of time quietly alone. Sadness was a default mode, like ambient air. It was not even noticeable but the omnipresent norm. When I conjure an emblematic self-image, I see myself in grades three through six, making the 30-minute trudge to school and back, reading a book. Walking and reading, how did I do that? Now when I see people walking and texting, I wonder how they keep from tripping. Back then, it was my daily routine. Is loneliness the worst of the symptoms of neglect? Sometimes it seems it might be. How can I forget that?
Therapy
Becoming a therapist was a natural progression after a decade or so of crashing and burning and finding that psychotherapy was the only thing that kept me from dying. Just as going to therapy had seemed not like a choice but a “do or die” proposition, so becoming a therapist, as for many of us, seemed like a “shoe-in,” so to speak. And what else was there to do? It was a job description that my childhood prepared me for, both in the care-taking-of-parents sense and also in the knowing or thinking I knew what was needed sense. I also knew I had a lot to learn, and so set about the seemingly endless and solitary task of trying to learn it; and trying to be good enough in a world in which, as ever, I never was.
And for the “loner,” lonely social isolate that I was, it was an opportunity to be in a way very “close” to people, or “important” to them in some way, that was not really “real,” like real relationships, but what I could handle and could provide. And there was also plenty of quiet alone time in my office, except when I was working, reading and thinking, and planning where I could go to study and learn next. As I got increasingly immersed in the then young sub-field of trauma, I did a lot of running/jetting around to conferences and training. For some reason. Although the US West Coast is such a trailblazer in so many ways, in the area of trauma, it simply wasn’t. So I was going everywhere I could learn.
And everywhere I went, I was that same little girl walking and reading by herself. I floated around conferences like a wordless ghost, always staking out my seat in the front row of every conference room, large and small, never speaking to a soul, eating my room service dinners holed up with a book, haunting hotel gyms at the wee-est hours. I never spoke to a living soul, lived out my historic invisibility while I accumulated a growing store of knowledge. They were productive years and desolate. It is strange and somehow dissonant to remember them. It is no wonder that the sudden lockdown of the COVID-19 Pandemic did not feel strange or alien. Like for many of us who come from neglect, it was a throwback to a whole life of a similar, if less “intentional,” social distancing. What was striking was to have a partner and two sweet and scruffy dogs and to be sharing the experience so widely.
Thinking about it now, I am astonished. How I am not alone, not alone in my small world, and not alone in the larger world. I have a team that supports and works with me. I don’t have to do it all myself! There are many people near and far, some of whom I have never met or touched in person but whom I can authentically say that I love and even who love me. There is you, reading these words. Maybe I will never see or know you. But maybe I will. And I even, at least sometimes, dare to believe you or people like you are there. Neglect did not prepare me for that, and neglect-informed psychotherapy has that among its tasks. To discover that loneliness, being alone is not a birthright or a death sentence. It is an aberration, and it can turn into something else. Even a wonderful life like what I have now.
Sometimes looking back, my life looks like a honeycomb: a structure of geometric encapsulated, hermetically sealed cells, each with its own signature content. Honey is sweet, and some of the cells are not without sweetness or bittersweetness. It all constellates to make this attempt at a story. The healing of neglect is about elaborating the story out of all the nothing, all the fragmented missing fabric of experience and/or loss. It sometimes amazes me when another piece floats forth when I have long been focused on other things.
“Oversight”
I have recently had the experience where a very dear client has felt shocked and incensed, abandoned and unseen by my gross oversight, negligence, and failure to see, comprehend and address her loneliness. It seemed mindless, senseless, colossally neglectful, and unconscionable for someone who is endlessly pontificating about the perils of neglect. She is right! How did this happen? How could I do that? Perhaps it is so “natural,” so familiar, and as we say, “ego-syntonic,” that it could disappear into the familiar field. My deepest apologies. A mistake I must strive to be mindful of and never make.
Today’s song:
