From Chapter 2 of
"Don’t Try This at Home-The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder How I accidentally regressed myself back to infancy and healed it all" at AttachmentDisorderHealing.com/book/
When my second therapist Dr. Rita heard about my exploits last week with “The Inner Child Workbook” and the applesauce caper, she said, “Well, I thought you could do some reading, but we don’t recommend doing those exercises unsupervised.” Now you tell me; the damage was done. [FN1]
I was terrified by my lack of bonding (attachment) which the Workbook had revealed. But from the record in my 2008 notebook, I was too terrified to realize that I should try to describe that to Dr. Rita. Anyway, she had her own agenda, which caused more damage.
In guided imagery, a professional creates a script for a sort of dream sequence and has the patient imagine it, to uncover feelings locked in the subconscious. It’s a fine tool in the right situation, but this weren’t it.
“Close your eyes,” she said, “and imagine you’re going down, down, down below the ground. You emerge onto a path to a secret garden. You see a little girl about 5 coming toward you. Imagine you take the child’s hand; notice how tiny it is.” She had me sit with the girl by a stream awhile “to get used to each other,” then lean against a tree to “see whether she’d sit on my lap.” But I still could find no child inside me; trying just created more anxiety.
Next Dr. Rita said “Let’s ask the child some questions. Respond without thinking, from the gut. What’s your first memory of Father?” “A pair of slacks going behind a closed door,” I mumbled. Spontaneous, yes, and I’d never said that before, but that was me talking. No child involved.
“What’s your first memory of Mother?” “I got a B in kindergarten and I was afraid to go home. So I hid in the class bathroom trying to erase it. I wrote an A over it, but I got caught and it was really awful.” Again it came spontaneously, but this was me talking, and it was an incident I’d remembered all my life. I can still see the inside of the class bathroom door and feel the fear. But I’d just tried to forget it since Mom was a fact of life, like the weather.
“You had to put on a front because they didn’t accept the real you,” Dr. Rita announced. Me, I never would have thought of any of this. She, however, had a whole analysis: “Both your father and mother abandoned and rejected you.” Gosh I never would have thought of that, that sounds really embarrassing!
“You have ‘repetition compulsion’- you’re compelled to find men who abandon, so you can recreate the problem ‘on stage.’ So you can go back and fix it,” Rita went on. “But you didn’t break it – you don’t have to fix it.” I wrote that motto on a large 5 x7 file card and it’s still on my desk today. It sure sounded like plausible and useful data.
But where was the Adult Attachment Interview, needed to diagnose anyone starting therapy? It’s been around since 1994. Why didn’t she tell me about Attachment Disorder in adults like me, as well as in children? That might have given words to my terror at my lack of bonding. [FN2]
Instead it was all head talk, and the solution was even more head talk. Dr. Rita, my second therapist, concluded with the same advice verbatim that my first therapist gave at the end of my Oct. 11 blog: “Just let it go,” she said.
“Just stop trying to fix it with men, and let the past go. It’s an act of will.” Just think your way out of it. But “trying to fix the heart using the head, is like trying to paint with a hammer—it only makes a mess,” as I later learned – much later. [FN3]
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