Words make worlds real
From this link. (also mentioned in one of my previous entries.) Page down to below the question in bold, to where she starts talking about the cognitive dissonance that she experiences when she hears someone say something that isn’t true.
1. That is very much true for me. I would really like to be in therapy to talk to someone about this and a bunch of other stuff but not if they’re going to ignore or disbelieve me.
2. It’s really hard for me to separate other peoples’ beliefs about how the world works from my own, like about how if you go to a lot of therapists and can’t get effective help it’s your own fault, versus my experience of having actual, severely life-impacting problems that get ignored or dismissed by therapists.
3. Even though I can’t separate other peoples’ beliefs about how the world works from my own, I also can’t resolve serious contradictions. So I wind up saying them both over and over and getting more and more upset, because on some level I’m desperately hoping that someone will say “yeah, those two worldviews really are in severe contradiction with each other” and “here is why that is happening” so that I’m not alone and I’m not the only one who can see it and it makes sense in a way that has been put into words. It is extremely, extremely distressing, because it is frightening to me that I do not have a way to resolve the two and feel intense pressure to make the other person’s worldview be true, but I am unable to do so because it is not true, and I am frightened that I will never be able to resolve the tension or even get anyone else to notice or care that it exists, and it is extremely distressing to me to be abandoned to what for me is a task that is impossible to solve but that I cannot be ok with until I have solved it, because it puts my ability to trust in a coherent, predictable reality into question.
4. I’m not making this up. I’m not exaggerating. This is the first time I’ve been able to verbalize what the problem is in this way. I am actually aware that you almost certainly find this bizarre, irrational, and wrong. That doesn’t make it less painful for me.
5. When I cannot trust in a predictable reality, it doesn’t mean that I experience a less predictable reality. It means that I am frightened and in pain, and am unable to force myself to cease believing in my own reality, but if I have been abandoned to the task of having to make things right for other people, and my attempts to communicate have not resulted in the other person even recognizing that my reality is not the same as theirs, I don’t have anything else I can do other than keep the two beliefs circulating in my head. If I’m capable of responding in a healthier way, I start stating both as if I believed they were both true. If I’m not capable of responding in a healthier way, I take it out on myself.
6. When I get extremely irrational and start flipping back and forth between extreme accounts of what I believe or what I think is happening, it’s because I cannot come up with any other way in which to talk about what’s going on and also can’t cope with a reality in which the unresolvable contradiction is not observed or acknowledged no matter how bizarre and unbelievable it is, or the existence of the unresolvable contradiction is being attributed to me as though I’d come up with it on my own.
7. When that doesn’t work, I am sometimes able to verbalize that I’m in a great deal of pain, and having that acknowledged helps. At other times, I physically hurt myself, emotionally hurt other people, or break stuff.
8. It would be really nice to be able to talk to a therapist about this, but it’s very hard to do that when a therapist has a strong belief in my capacity to overcome difficulties, and is trying to treat me by pressuring me to share that belief. It’s also very difficult when I try to talk about this and I’m ignored or refocused on something else, because that replicates the problem. I’m still not able to deal with the problem, the therapist doesn’t believe it exists or could exist, and it’s now falling to me to fix the contradiction between their beliefs and my own.
9. I feel very angry and very whiny about the fact that I want the therapist to be helping me, instead me being placed in the position of making the therapist’s worldview come true for them. I feel extremely entitled to the belief that this is a morally wrong thing for me to be asked to do, but I also feel very immoral for holding a belief that strong.
10. You can tell me some variant of the belief that no one can actually do anything “to” another person without their permission. That’s great. Can I come live in your world where things like this don’t happen to me? I’d like to get there, but I can’t seem to get out of my own world.
I think the flip side is that the lack of words makes worlds unreal, and when I can’t get my words together, the world becomes unreal and that is very frightening because it feels like it is actually happening to me when that happens. The world becoming unreal.
