My Psychoanalytic Journey

I entered therapy to stop ruminating. I could not stop thinking about my ex-boss, my ex-girlfriend, and my father. No matter where I was, no matter what I was doing, I couldn’t go more than a minute or two without remembering how one of them had wronged me.  Yes, I told my therapist, Laura, they had wronged me. I wasn’t saying I was perfect, but their treatment of me had been premeditated, callous, injurious. My ex-girlfriend, for example, had lied to me again and again, assuring me that she loved me and would never again see that other man. And of course, I later found out, she never stopped seeing him. Laura seemed genuinely interested in my story, so I kept sharing it, one grisly episode after another. She would ask what feelings accompanied my ruminations, and my answer every time was anger. Pure, visceral anger. I felt so much anger that I would often fantasize about enacting revenge, imagine sending my ex-girlfriend a mean text message or embarrassing my ex-boss in front of his f

I’m sitting on a brown leather couch, nestled between two pillows. One of the dogs walks along the shag carpet, and then the other dog, who has been sitting next to me, gets us and leaps — leaps — over the first dog. She lands on her feet and then scurries away. My heart whirls. I can’t believe what I’ve just seen. And no other witnesses, just me, just fat, blubbery me. That’s how my story begins. At least how I remember it beginning. My mom will later tell me about the day I was born, how she was bowling with my bubbie when she went into labor. My dad will tell me how he waited with my mom in the delivery room, and Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night” came on the radio. I remember none of that, of course. Just the brown couch, the shag carpet, the leaping dog. The brown couch appears in my next memory too. This time I’m standing on it, leaning against a windowsill, tears running down my cheeks, snot down my nose. My dad is carrying a suitcase to his car, and then he looks back, and I

Several years ago, I briefly became obsessed with self-help books. I’d just gone through a bad breakup, the type of breakup that feels like your soul has been ripped out. Only imagine your soul being long and tightly coiled like your intestines, and imagine the universe ripping it out little by little. The breakup had been bad enough, but now my ex wanted me back. I knew that we shouldn’t be together. I also sensed that resistance would be futile.  And so out of desperation, I started reading self-help books, and before long I had become convinced that she was “a borderline,” maybe “a narcissist,” that she had ensnared me through her “love bombing,” that I had become “trauma-bonded.” These books helped me feel like I was regaining power, and I managed to stay away from her.  Until, inevitably, I didn’t. We resumed dating and enjoyed six beautiful weeks together, and then, true to our pattern, things got progressively awful, and we finally broke up again. I have no doubt that there are

I became a member of a process-oriented therapy group without really knowing anything about these groups. If you know something about process groups, then my first sentence no doubt has you laughing. That’s a good premise for a comedic movie, no? If you don’t know about these groups, then you’re probably as confused as I was that first night. “Process” is therapy-speak for your present emotional experience. If you’re in a process group, you and the other group members are expected to talk about your respective present emotional experiences. It’s inevitable that you’ll sometimes talk about the past or the future, but your goal is to stay in the present. And yes, telling a group of strangers your innermost feelings is as awkward as it sounds. If you acted this way in everyday life, people would unfriend you on social media and make a point to cross the street when they saw you coming. In a process group, however, this behavior is not just tolerated but demanded. And yet things can still

I’m lying on Laura’s couch, wishing I’d remembered a dream from the previous night. It’s one of those days that I’m not sure what to talk about. “I keep thinking about my old boss,” I finally begin, “the one from the elementary school. Just the same old thoughts, the same old mental loop. I keep fantasizing about sending him this mean email.” “What does your email say?” The thought of answering embarrasses me, a sign that I need to answer. “I tell him that he’s not qualified to run a school. I tell him that he’s a giant asshole.” Laura says nothing. “And of course I would never send that email. And of course I know he’s not an asshole. He’s a person just like me. He’s a person with his own story and his own pain. Again, the same endless loop — remembering what happened, getting pissed off, reminding myself that he’s not the monster I sometimes make him out to be.” “What gets missed in all this,” Laura says, “is your experience.” This is one of those lightbulb moments. She’s said these

Introduction An affect is an innate, automatic, physiological response to a stimulus. The response involves a change in the rate of neural firing, and this in turn results in changes in one’s facial muscles, voice, and autonomic nervous system. The response is experienced as rewarding, punishing, or neutral, and consequently, it motivates us to act in a certain way. The stimulus can be intrapsychic or extrapsychic, and the stimulus can enter into our conscious awareness or stay out of our conscious awareness.  A feeling is our awareness of a specific affect. An emotion is our awareness of a specific affect combined with our memory of other times we had that affect.  Affects serve the vital function of enhancing our survival and well being. They primarily do this by communicating information (to ourselves and others) and by moving us to action.   Affects Tomkins listed affects by their weak and strong forms.He considered the first six affects to be primary affects and the last three aux

Dynamic Systems Theory Dynamic Systems Theory Demos advocates a dynamic systems view of personality. Dynamic systems theory states that the behavior and development of living organisms is determined by both endogenous and exogenous principles. Endogenous Principles. As stated by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, living organisms are born with “highly complex organization” as well as an endogenous impetus governing “initiation or action and function.” One corroboration for this claim came several years ago when embryologists studied the roundworm, an incredibly simple organism with just 959 cells. Although each embryonic roundworm developed into a similarly structured adi;t roundworm, “no set of cells followed the same pattern” of development; rather, there “seemed to be an infinite number of routes taken, yet the end product was always the same.” Exogenous Principles. Had our evolutionary history been different, we might have not developed into bipedal walkers. When environmental influences (or