"As I sit here with you, a picture keeps coming into my mind -an image of someone biting their fist, holding back a yell, swallowing a scream. I remember when I first started therapy, I found it very hard to cry. I feared I'd be carried away by the flood, overwhelmed. Perhaps that's what it feels like for you. That's why it's important to take your time to feel safe and trust that you won't be alone in this flood-that I'm treading water here with you."
~The Silent Patient
Her silence was like a mirror - reflecting yourself back at you.
And it was often an ugly sight.
Intimacy requires the repeated experience of being responded to.
But our ability to contain ourselves directly depends on our mother's ability to contain us. If she had never experienced containment by her own mother, how could she teach us what she did not know? Someone who has never learned to contain himself is plagued by anxious feelings for the rest of his life, feelings that Bion aptly titled *nameless dread* endlessly seeks this unquenchable containment from external sources- he needs a drink or a joint to "take the edge off" this endless anxiety.
📔: The Silent Patient
The psychoanalyst W. R. Bion came up with the term containment to describe a mother's ability to manage her baby's pain. Remember, babyhood is not a time of bliss; it's one of terror. As babies, we are trapped in a strange, alien world, unable to see properly, constantly surprised at our bodies, alarmed by hunger and wind and bowel movements, and overwhelmed by our feelings. We are quite literally under attack. We need our mother to soothe our distress and make sense of our experience. As she does so, we slowly learn how to manage our physical and emotional states on our own.
(Continued..)
With greater feelings come greater danger.
Tears collected in my eyes as I walked up the hill. I wasn't crying for my mother-or myself-or even that poor homeless man. I was crying for all of us. There's so much pain everywhere, and we just close our eyes to it. The truth is we're all scared. We're terrified of each other. I'm terrified of myself and of my mother in me. Is her madness in my blood? Is it?
-Alicia Brenson
Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later, in uglier ways.
-Sigmund Freud
It's hard to imagine two women more different than Kathy and Alicia. Kathy makes me think of light, warmth, color, and laughter. When I think of Alicia, I think only of depth, of darkness, of sadness.
Of silence.
-Theo
If people don't reply when you speak to them and never initiate conversation, you soon forget they are there.
I don't know why I'm writing this.
That's not true. Maybe I do know and just don't want to admit it to myself.
I don't even know what to call this thing I'm writing. It feels a little pretentious to call it a diary. It's not like I have anything to say. Anne Frank kept a diary-not someone like me. Calling it a "journal" sounds too academic, somehow. As if I should write in it every day, and I don't want to -if it becomes a chore, I'll never keep it up.
Maybe I'll call it nothing. An unnamed something that I occasionally write in. I like that better. Once you name something, it stops you from seeing the whole of it or why it matters. You focus on the word, which is just the tiniest part, really, the tip of an iceberg.
He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
-SIGMUND FREUD
It's odd how quickly one adapts to the strange new world of a psychiatric unit. You become increasingly comfortable with madness - and not just madness of the others but your own. We're all crazy, I believe, just in different ways.
Somehow grasping at vanishing snowflakes is like grasping at happiness: an act of possession that instantly gives way to nothing.
~The Silent Patient
A scream like skies', as deadly and strong as lightening, as sharp as blade, as black as night, as sad as sorrow, as pretty as moon, and as soothing as writing.
The little prince was not able to reach any explanation of the use of a street lamp and a lamplighter, somewhere in the heavens, on a planet which had no people, and not one house. But he said to himself, nevertheless:
"It may well be that this man is absurd. But he is not so absurd as the king, the conceited man, the businessman, and the tippler. For at least his work has some meaning. When he lights his street lamp, it is as if he brought one more star to life, or one flower. When he puts out his lamp, he sends the flower, or the star, to sleep. That is a beautiful occupation. And since it is beautiful, it is truly useful."
"I must endure the presence of two or three caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies. It seems that they are very beautiful."
"The fact is that I did not know how to understand anything! I ought to have judged by deeds and not by words. She cast her fragrance and her radiance over
me. I ought never to have run away from her... I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little stratagems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her..."
But the flowers was not satisfied to complete the preparations for her beauty in the shelter of her green chamber. She chose her colors with the greatest care. She dressed herself slowly. She adjusted her petals one by one. She did not wish to go out into the world all rumpled, like the field poppies. It was only in the full radiance of her beauty that she wished to appear. Oh, yes! She was a coquettish creature! And her mysterious adornment lasted for days and days.
"Before they grow so big, the baobabs start out by being little."
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