Abdication of emotional responsibility?

Sarah Mohan
Jul 25, 2017 · 5 min read

a fair question

Someone commented on one of my posts in a way that I sensed was critical. When I asked for clarification, this was the response:

“ I think if I sound critical it is because I do not understand the need for multiple characters in a psyche…so I’m chiding you for dissociating from your anger, and calling her something that is not you. I have always found that sort of thing an abdication of emotional responsibility. Of course, you could truly have a dissociative disorder — and if that is true, I am sorry. That’s a pretty big deal if that’s true.”

In a recent blog titled Not Myself, I described a moment during my last therapy session: a very strange feeling was the satisfaction I felt, tearing my therapist to shreds, watching her struggle to respond.

It was strange because I have never wanted to attack her or question her abilities. I adore her, and I had strived to protect her from the side of me I feared she would hate me for if I ever let it out. I do this with everyone I care about, or whose respect I want. But sometimes that other me flips into the control box and rips into someone. When I am feeling the anger, and the satisfaction that accompanies it, it still feels like me, another me, and I am going for the jugular, and I don’t care about anything else.

After this has happened in a relationship, I often feel that I don’t care if I ever see or talk to that person again. I could easily cut someone off. Even you. Yes, you. If you’ve been my friend for a long time, you’ve probably felt the knife at least once. If you are part of my family, I know you have felt it.

Sometimes I regret it later, and want the person back, sometimes not. Although I am in no way ready to lose the relationship with my therapist, another part of me evidently is.

Fortunately my therapist is trained to handle craziness like this. She did not get defensive or change the subject or slip at all in her therapeutic footing. She definitely felt the knife — I could see it in her face. But even though I was trying to hurt her, she took it upon herself to handle that hurt and not throw it back at me. The beauty (I could even say blessing if the word didn’t make me want to retch) of working with a great therapist is that something like this simply opens up a lot more to talk about.

In a safe, neutral environment, I got to experience and hear myself express the anger I could not own. Have I been holding onto anger at her all along? It seemed so when it came out. But I never felt it accumulating. Never once. It was hidden away in another pocket of me. She had to invite it out. It took us a long time to get to the level of trust where this could happen. The happening was spontaneous, but not unplanned for.

I believe I have been suffering from a milder form of a dissociative disorder for most of my life, not the extreme form where you wake up in another city and have no idea how you got there. My therapist says it’s a spectrum. Almost everyone dissociates to some degree. I’ve often felt like nothing but a shell, as though essential chunks of me were missing. Other people seemed like real people, and in comparison I felt like either a paper doll, or a monster. These labels are ways of talking about an experience. Shamans call it soul loss. Whatever it is, it’s invariably tied up with trauma.

Now that my therapist has felt the cutting anger of one of my “parts,” as she calls them, I feel a lot safer. Even though I haven’t seen her since it happened, even though we haven’t talked about it yet, I am ready to own the anger because, precisely because, she did not excommunicate me for it. So I don’t have to excommunicate that part of myself any more for her. I think that’s how it works, with a competent therapist.

As for abdication of emotional responsibility — “abdication” implies choice. I stopped feeling anger around the age of five. Gone. The last angry episode I remember is when I was probably four and was put on a couch for a time out in another room during a party my parents were having. I stabbed the nice red upholstery over and over with a pencil. I remember it vividly, the satisfaction of it. I don’t remember if I was punished for that. I never felt anger again that I can remember until I got married and my husband called it up. Maybe it was there all along, maybe it was even expressed, but I don’t remember any.

So I don’t think abdication is the right word. I think repression and dissociation are the right words for whatever happened to my anger in childhood. Slowly, and I mean slowly, since my divorce in 1996, I have started to reclaim it, take responsibility for it. Vipassana meditation training was very helpful at the beginning.

But I’m not on the “peace and love” train any more. Sharkey appeared recently to help me use, rather than try to bliss my way out of, or “simply observe” anger. When he first came into my mind, I saw him as a man in a suit, like a card shark, but not a cheater, just someone very clever at “playing his cards.” I wrote that Sharkey “steps down the voltage.” Sharkey provides me with a socially acceptable way to utilize anger. All I have to do is think about him and I become able to express myself strategically in a situation, without either wimping out, or ripping another person, and our relationship, to shreds.

I don’t even think it was Fighter my therapist talked to. Confusing, and the names maybe make it even more so, but these feeling states do come with distinctive characteristics, like personalities. Anger for me seems to have layers of compartmentalization. Fighter is the most basic, like an animal gone wild, defending their young, all teeth and claws. Sharkey is the most urbane, says only what needs to be said. I think there’s a still nameless one in between. That’s the one who was speaking to my therapist, maybe with Fighter behind her, and Sewer in back of that. This one is more like a an archer, very skilled, mentally sharp, able to pinpoint a weakness and take careful aim at it, on purpose.

I’m trying to be as honest as I can, while still allowing myself the latitude to take risks that may amount to fabrication. It’s a process, this exploration. I believe the lies will all come out in the wash if I keep at it.

Just for fun, here’s a music video that my ex-husband, former mortal enemy, and now friend, sent me last year. A perfect blend, like our marriage, of the cry for love, and the rage that makes it impossible. After 18 years of this, we broke our way out.