Turning our ghosts into ancestors

So, I got to the chapter in The Brain that Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge, on Turning Our Ghosts into Ancestors – Psychoanalysis as a neuroplastic therapy, and the illustration used for this chapter was a man who had lost his mother when he was two and who had difficulties, about which he was particularly upset, in his relationships with women.

I found this chapter somewhat disturbing, to say the least, and may or may not have cried a river (someone asked me the next day why my eyes were all bloodshot, but how could I explain). Some excerpts:

The child who loses his mother at this young age is almost always struck two devastating blows: he loses his mother to death and the surviving parent to depression. If others cannot help him soothe himself and regulate his emotions as his mother did, he learns to “autoregulate” by turning off his emotions.

...

It has recently been discovered that early childhood trauma causes massive plastic change in the hippocampus, shrinking it so that new, long-term explicit memories cannot form. Glucocorticoids [released in stressed infants] kills cells in the hippocampus so that it cannot make the synaptic connections in neural networks that make learning and explicit long-term memory possible.

This might explain why I have next to no memories of my Dad before he died and fairly sparse memories of early childhood. (I thought this was actually quite normal, till I discovered that others could remember being four.)

Admittedly, the man in his illustration lost his mother at 26 months, when the brain is in a crucial phase of development, whereas I lost my Dad at 49 months, when most areas of it are more fully developed, and I doubt that losing a father is the same thing for an infant as losing a mother. And I have never had learning difficulties. For all the fact that my father died, three months later my Mum had a baby, I was then sent to school a third of the way through the school year, in the year in which I was only four and a half, then skipped most of it with a psychosomatic illness, when it did come to the end of kindergarten the teacher apparently said to my Mum, “you realise that she’s top of the class”. So, God knows how, but in the midst of the trauma somehow I managed to master the fundamentals of learning. And the reality is, I stayed at or near the top of the class, in most areas of competency (except drama!), throughout my education. So, I am not too concerned about my learning capabilities, and perhaps that is an indicator that all is well inside my head.

But the other psychological issues concern me more. I’ve always felt like there was something there, when it comes to men and relationships, that I just can’t find or get a hold of, no matter how I have tried. (This is the difficulty of experiencing trauma before the age of conscious memory.)

The man in the book felt like he was always searching for something, and had recurrent dreams to that effect, and had apparently had difficulties committing to women because he always felt like something else was out there (perhaps he appeared as the classic ‘commitment-phobe’), when all along what he was really searching for was his lost mother. And he also had the strange feeling, though he didn't know it as such, that being involved with other women was being unfaithful to someone else, namely his mother (so he was unfaithful to them instead – sad). What he needed to do in psychotherapy was unearth old memories and re-transcribe them, thus turning his ghosts into ancestors. I have no such feeling of searching, and I don’t have any recurring dreams, but sometimes I wonder if subconsciously I am not waiting for something. One day when I was growing up, and must have been in my double digits age-wise, we got a new lounge-suite (when plonking down on the old one might mean you landed on a piece of wood in the underlying structure), and I had the thought, ‘but if Dad comes back now and sees this new couch he might think we don’t live here anymore’. I knew it was silly even then, but I thought it all the same.

It would be a stupid thing for me to do to make up psychotherapy on myself on the internet (I’m pretty sure that’s in the rules of things not to blog about) but I think relational issues can be compounded by the ‘power of absence’ (I can’t remember where I read this idea initially) which is along the lines of the fact that, if you lose a parent of one gender, there is a certain kind of attraction or awe of that gender, that comes from them being absent (and explains why some children who lose the parent of the same gender find themselves with same-sex attractions, but when it’s the parent of the opposite gender, it only somehow magnifies the strange attraction to that gender – I use this as my excuse for why I am almost completely paralysed into inaction in the presence of someone I am interested in). Then, growing up without any affirmation or encouragement from a male presence has also meant I really don’t have a lot of confidence around men (and my Mum was often implying that I was unattractive, and men would not be interested in me, primarily because I was too tall – and the terrible irony of that is that I have discovered that men actually seem to expect tall women to have more confidence, not less, and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, because all the men I have been interested in have chosen someone shorter than me, because most women are shorter than me).

Sometimes I do wonder if I am blurring the line (I have tried to untangle this in the past), as I have a kind of yearning for the man to be the man, and take initiative and be protective, that is perhaps normal for women, but I wonder if it’s a trifle overdone, or more fatherly, in myself, and I feel quite extremely distressed (with a kind of ‘please don’t make me have to be in control’ sort of feeling), in situations where I feel like I am, or sense the need to be, taking initiative (and I can’t do this well at all in person), but then I get more distressed that I am unencouraging, so I will often go away and over-compensate or explain through other less-threatening means, and it is perhaps no wonder if men I am interested in think I am strange. But, that is enough psychotherapy guesswork.

I went so far as to google psychotherapists in Sydney, but the reality is I don’t have any known brain processing problems, in the grace of God I have been spared most everything on that long list of things you read of the deleterious effects on girls of not having a father, and my only known problem in relating to men is encountering one who likes me enough to ask me out (if I could get there I might work out if there is anything further, but not getting a tick in the box for “good family” doesn’t help in that regard either – men seem to be suspicious, and maybe they have reasons, of women who grew up without fathers – and sometimes I wish those who teach about relationships would leave off that criteria and give some people, who grew up in circumstances beyond their control, a chance), so perhaps it is unnecessary. And I do just sigh about how difficult it all is. The plasticity of the brain is indeed in many ways a marvelous thing, as well as it’s capacity for healing, but essentially we are still left in a world full of physical and psychological injuries and brokenness, that might mend but it will take hard work, and it makes me want to just take my leave at the first available opportunity. Instead I might explore psychotherapy.