This week has been a fun mishmash of animals--the new Zodiac, the Chinese New Year prompted some exploration into that Zodiac and the discovery that the animal of the year you are born is only the very surface of it really. It actually predicted some things that I wouldn't have expected it to predict. I ran across an article on Chinese mothering versus American mothering, and put it up on my Facebook page, expecting some indignant responses. I stayed carefully neutral, noting that I had never been a mom and that I used more of a Chinese approach with one dog and more American with the other. I am currently teaching my dogs to be driven from behind like horses so that I can use verbal cues to get them to turn corners ahead of me when we are out walking and I don't have to haul them back, and pull them around. Dogs are smarter than horses, they ought to be able to get it down pretty easily.
I am also reading a lot on psychoanalytic theory, and bipolar disorder, and its affect on one's life. As you can tell, I like to find things out. I am a knowledge addict--if I know enough, I can control my world--not, but at least it stretches the mind and offers real solutions versus something like alcohol or drugs which is merely a masking. So if one must be addicted, knowledge is a better one to have.
I didn't get any responses to the article--not a one. Apparently we Americans are smug in our belief that we the better mothers, and cannot even question that. It's too bad, because the Chinese style of doing things is going to be influencing our world, and we are going to need to understand it. A Chinese young person in rebellion against his mother is not a pretty sight for anyone.
One point that I keep beating on here is the need for acceptance of "good enough" better doesn't matter, only "good enough" does. And the reality that life never really is going to be good enough for our fantasies.
It isn't true that I am not a mother--I think that my friends could tell that. A female family physician is the penultimate mother in some ways--one reason that men are strongly attracted to them, and nurses. We offer, on the surface, the unconditional caring that our mothers never can give. When we form a relationship like that, psychologists call it a transference. That's why they say we marry our fathers or our mothers--we see in someone things like the parent with whom we have the biggest issues and try to work it out. Guess what, it happens with siblings as well. One sibling will assume the role of one parent, and one the other. The closer in age, the more likely this occurs. Your role with authority figures, like us doctors are all based on your relationship with your parents, and siblings. We spend our lives working out those issues--and that is how our brain matures! The resolution of those inner conflicts is how we become adults.
I am reading a book by a psychiatrist who makes the case for psychotherapy as a necessary part of psychiatry, and says there is something beyond the biological basis of the brain. I would take him one better--I think that psychotherapy changes the structure of the brain, creating new pathways, modulating pathways that allow us to create the unique Self that is each and every one of us. I think that religion does the same thing, and science, and every time that we have to solve a problem, or hug a child, or help a person. In short, every time that we suppress our own will for someone else, then we help create the modulating pathway that allows us to be us, and not our parents, or the infant that our brain must initially support.
Freud described this maturation event as the resolution of the Electra or Oedipus complex--the realization that we cannot marry our mother or father--and that it would be evil to do so. BUT we must first want to! What if your father is demanding, controlling, and the last person on earth you would want to marry? Thus begins the process of differentiation--the process that I am not my mother and not my father. Freud described the individuation process as happening at age 2, culminating at age 3. That is like saying that we should all be 153 cm tall and weigh 45 kilos when we graduate from high school. We are individuals, and this process happens differently for each of us.
We travel the Yellow Brick Road at different rates, encountering our own lions, tigers, and bears, wicked witches, and loving scarecrows. We discover how to unfreeze the metal in us, and find our lions of courage, or wolverines if you are Montanan...and in the end we find that the Wizard outside of us is a fake--that we have the wisdom we always needed inside ourselves. Then we can put on our ruby slippers, go home, wake up to real consciousness, and really appreciate it for its own reality.
My younger sister says that her strongest memory of me growing up is my plaintive wail most every day as we got ready for school, "Where are my shoes?" Now, could anyone tell me where I put those ruby slippers? And where is Toto? I can't go without him...I'll take my Kalo Chituwi and his picture, and it won't be for too long...
No comments:
Post a Comment