Posted by Mark H. on February 5, 2001, at 19:47:07
In reply to Re: Inner Parents and Children » Mark H., posted by judy1 on February 5, 2001, at 17:59:05
Judy,
I'm not qualified to say. It could be an extreme example of protecting the "inner child." I've experienced something similar on rare occasions. I remember an instance during college, probably 25 years ago, when I was particularly depressed, and the sound of a vacuum cleaner outside a friend's dorm-room door produced the sensation that I was flying out of my body and out the window. It was very frightening at the time.
It's good to remember that concepts like the "inner child" and "inner parent" are just constructs to make it easier to talk about ourselves, especially when different parts of us hold different values, skills, memories, etc. I think it's important not to make too much of them, though, or we encourage fragmenting, as though we're talking about different people rather than different aspects of ourselves.
One of the most gifted and intelligent therapists I've worked with in the last 20 years uses Transactional Analysis as his primary modality. I don't know how widely used it is today, but it basically acknowledges three main ego states: Parent, Adult, and Child. It recognizes four primary emotions: mad, sad, glad and scared.
By keeping things relatively simple, I found it useful in keeping me from using intellect to obscure what I was working on. How do I feel? Mad, sad, glad or scared? It's easy for me to veer off into ever-more-subtle tangents of emotion, requiring more and more language to describe. Having to select from one of four helped keep me honest with myself, and gave me a place to start.
My references to "inner child" and "inner parent" come from that background in TA. The "inner child" movement in psychological literature arose independently of TA, however. Again, I think it's useful as long as we use it to help ourselves towards wholeness.
I strongly encourage people not to take diagnoses (labels) too seriously. If a diagnosis helps a person get effective treatment, and the treatment alleviates his or her suffering, then that's great. I'm Bipolar II, have refractive (hard-to-treat) depression, and idiopathic hypersomnia (I sleep too much). Knowing about those things and how they are treated led to a medication regimen that works for me.
However, if a diagnosis just puts a fancy, frightening Latin or Greek name to what we experience and causes us (or others) to think less of ourselves, then it adds no value. A friend of mine was recently told she had an "unspecified psychosis," for instance, which understandably upset her. What did it really mean? It meant her doctor had been treating her depression successfully with an anti-psychotic, and when she told him she was planning to move to another state, he quickly added this new "diagnosis" to her chart. She's the same person, before and after diagnosis.
Best wishes,
Mark H.
poster:Mark H.
thread:4306
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20010105/msgs/4446.html