Notes on a Schizoid Childhood

Notes on a schizoid childhood.

This could be a bit long, so you might need to pour a cuppa tea, or just skip it altogether.
May be of interest to psychologists only.
(That’s my disclaimer out of the way.)

I went for psychotherapy to learn how to deal with a desolate infancy/childhood and its after effects on my adult life.
My poor mother was desperately mentally ill with deep lifelong depression.
The unwanted daughter of a local prostitute. She could give me nothing. She had nothing to give. My endless crying activated her own pain, and so the heirloom of distress passes down through the generations.
(When babies/children are consistently left to cry themselves to sleep, psychosis may well appear in later life.
Sleep becomes their anaesthetic to pain.)

At forty years of age I still felt like a victim of total post natal neglect.
I could still remember screaming in my cot until my throat ached so hard that I gave up the fight for life, and fell asleep - turning my back on a world I was no longer connected to, and wanted nothing more to do with.
I screamed myself into a hernia at thirteen weeks, and had to wear a truss to repair it.
I wanted to die, so I killed off all interpersonal connections.
I Stopped Crying - nobody ever came.

These experiences, if repeated a number of times, create a lasting schism, a deeply serious break in the continuum of life from conception to death, creating the classic schizoid character, which in many incidences will lead to schizophrenia.

Somehow I managed to ‘bring myself up’ feeling totally disconnected from both my parents, and in fact from the world at large.
I thought I might die of loneliness - there was no significant other (mother) for me to internalise.
One time I mentioned to my doctor that I grew up in a desert figuratively speaking, which promoted him to ask, “what Saudi Arabia?”
I got the impression that he wasn’t taking me too seriously.

I had a dislocated life, always trying to reach out to people for affection (a mum) but continually hungry because of my ‘otherness.’
I still needed to cry to a mother I never had.
This then was the dilemma I needed help to sort out in therapy.

(Continued in Notes on Meditation.)

 

My heart goes out to you, you have had such a bad start to this life.

It's miraculous you were able to lead a somewhat happy life!

 

Thank you so much Ann.
I must tell you - I made a passion of getting well.
I read everything I could get my hands on with regard to childcare and the growth of love, the growth of an ego.
I ordered books published by the Tavistock Press by eminent authors in Psychology and Analytic Psychotherapy.
I managed to whittle disparate threads of the possible understanding of mental illness down to three authors:
RD Lange
Donald Winnicott
John Bowlby.
Understanding their concepts saved my life.
ie - I wasn’t mad - I wasn’t bad
I was quite simply just neglected.

I had made it.
xx

 

Two of the greatest minds in the study of psychology and mental illness:

Donald Winnicott



John Bowlby