Unhealthy relationships: how connections with your own body are broken

How can you use your body? What can it do? Walking, eating, drinking, exercising or having sex, talking, sitting. And this is normal, healthy functionality. But those who are prone to self-harm or other types of disturbed relationship with the body (hypochondria, body dysmorphia, eating disorders) use the body differently.

As children, many of us wrapped ourselves in a cold wet sheet and ran out for ice cream in order to finally get sick and take a break from the hated chemistry. We ourselves “created” diseases for ourselves, but in most cases we stopped doing so as we grew. To deal with our body in this strange way as adults, we need to feel that it «lives» separately from us. Psychoanalysts call this phenomenon body splitting or dissociation.

Is it not with me?

Remember how in childhood our older sisters and brothers “joked” — they took our hand and forced us to beat ourselves with it, saying: “Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you doing it?» Splitting off is when we do something similar with our body, perceiving what is happening as a kind of dialogue, as some kind of relationship.

When «I am not my body, but there is a separate me — and a separate body», we have the opportunity to express various feelings in relation to it. Splitting off the body is a rather serious violation, which requires what is called «double trauma». Double trauma is when both mom and dad “sinned”.

Who am I in your eyes, mom?

Maternal trauma is an early trauma that a mother inflicts on a child at a time when it is most important for him. First of all, we are talking about deprivation, about depriving a child of something that is critically important for him. The mother is either physically absent, or she is unable to perform some of the emotional functions that she should perform in relation to her child.

Psychoanalysts believe that the main task of the mother of a small child is to be a kind of “mirror” for him. When a child is born, he does not know who he is, what he feels, what the world is and what is happening to him in general. Have you seen how mothers talk to their children? They say: “Here comes uncle”, “Here you are looking”, “Here you are hungry”, “Here your stomach hurts”, “Here you are laughing”, “Oh, how you smile!”, “And here are your fingers” , «And show me your ears!» That is, mothers, as it were, reflect the child himself.

Mothers introduce children to what they are. Even at the age of 35, we can come to our mother and say: “Mom, what do you think about this?” And this is completely natural if there is a healthy relationship between us. We ask: “How do you like my haircut?”, “How do you like my lecture?”, “How do you like my choice?”, “Do you think I’m funny?”, “Do you think you can love me?” — it’s all about the mirror, about «reflect me myself.»

If the mother fully takes over this function when the child is very small, then everything is fine. But it happens that she spends little time with him, is emotionally not included, suffers from depression or does not get along with her partner. Then she lacks the strength to be a «mirror» sufficiently. And then there is a great danger that the child will form a so-called diffuse or blurred identity.

With this type of identity, we are forced to build relationships with the world all the time, based on new information, because we have a diffuse, changing «I». If today I consider myself a kind person, I build relationships with the world based on this. And tomorrow I feel bad, worthless — this changes absolutely everything: my relationship with work, with my lover, with myself, with food, with money.

Such changes occur outside of my will, and I switch between these states quite quickly. And the main task during the therapy of the borderline personality is to learn to maintain a stable self-image for a long time. This is the main reason why a person acquires a borderline organization.

Borderline is the middle level between a normal, relatively healthy existence and psychosis, that is, a violation of contact with reality. Self-harm of any kind says that we are facing a person who does not necessarily have a pronounced borderline disorder, but borderline features are definitely there.

Healthy ways to deal with yourself, with life, with the world require a lot of strength. For example, turning to self-support, telling yourself — “You are fine, everything will be fine, look how much you did yesterday” — this is a complex mental skill, although it seems very simple. It requires a huge amount of energy and a lot of stability.

Maternal trauma destroys a person’s psyche so much that he is not very good at coping with who he is — and because of this he is forced to resort to less healthy ways. It is easier for a border guard to inflict damage on himself, this requires less energy costs from him. To hurt himself is to do less work than if he tried to support himself.

All about my father

So, the child does not find in the mother what he needs. The more distant the mother, the more inaccessible — the more the child has a desire to turn to his father in order to satisfy his needs for love, attention, intimacy. And if the father is ready to give it, then everything is fine, he can “smooth out” the sharpness of the child’s feelings.

But, unfortunately, it happens that he inflicts a second injury. «Paternal injury» is a symbolic rather than a specific title. It can be not only dad, but also a brother, nephew, family friend — any close and significant man. Not finding what we are looking for in the mother, we turn to the world of men, but there we find violence — physical or even sexual.

And it is when trauma in one way or another affects our body that we become able to «separate» from it. Survivors of a natural disaster may develop PTSD but are less likely to self-harm. But after sexual abuse, this may well happen, because here something completely unbearable happens to an already dysfunctional child. And the only way to survive what is happening to him is to “fly out” of his physical shell: this helps to survive, to survive terrible events.

How does this happen? With a predictable beating, for example. This is when dad is late after work, and everyone knows that he got drunk. He will now come and arrange a brawl. And now you can start preparing for it. If I am beaten, then at some point, in order not to experience this pain, I will “separate” from the body.

Clients prone to self-harm recall stories like this: “It is already becoming clear that my older brother will be home from school, and I lie and look at the wallpaper. And there are flowers — and that’s it, I’m already in the rose garden! My body is lying here, and now the beatings begin — but I am no longer there, not in my body. I’m in the rose garden.»

Separation from the body in moments of such difficult experiences and suffering really helps to survive, because it is simply impossible to experience all this. But we understand that “surviving” does not mean living, does not mean responding to the world around us and coping with its difficulties in healthy ways.

Split Body Functions

What functions can the body perform in a broken relationship? Psychoanalyst Matthias Hirsch in the book «This is my body … and I can do with it what I want» indicates the following «tasks».

The body assumes the role of a victim of violence

For those who have been abused, it is important to regain a sense of power. One of the most devastating, traumatic feelings of an abuse victim is their powerlessness: “Something was done to me that I didn’t choose, that I couldn’t resist.” And this unbearable feeling requires that it be vented somewhere, expressed somehow.

And I want to regain my strength, to take an active position. If we are being abused, it is very important that at least some parts of the «I» regain power. Some object appears, a victim of violence — “But this is not me! And then I can take back my power and control.” And with the help of such a painful and dangerous action, you can feel like not a victim of violence, but a person who has power and control.

The body becomes a transitional object and mother’s surrogate

In infancy and early childhood, we want complete power over the mother. And our development dispels the illusion that we really have it. And the idea is replaced by realistic and rather disappointing beliefs that this is not so.

At this point, the so-called transitional object often appears in children. Soft toy, warm blanket, pacifier. That is, it is some kind of object that resembles a mother. It is always something soft, warm — or something that you can suck, chew. And this subject is in full our power.

Then we «think» like this: «I can’t have my mother’s breast, but I can have this particular nipple. And I direct all the feelings to her that I would actually send to my mother — but she does not belong to me, and I cannot do this.

The more opportunities we have to express and show directly to mom the feelings associated with the impossibility of possessing her, the better. The less we really need a transitional object to which we can express both love and hate. But this is precisely his main function — to be loved and hated, and to be in complete power.

In a healthy version, the transitional object is a toy or a blanket; in an unhealthy one, it is one’s own body. And we do need transitional objects, but it’s not normal for the body to become one.

If we cannot express love and hatred towards our mother, then we will express them towards our own body. And in the same way, we can take something from our body in a strange and terrible way that a mother could give us — for example, hugs.

The body gives us boundaries

The tension experienced by someone who has a tendency to self-harm can be quite extreme in its intensity. And clients often report that it becomes intolerable before self-harm episodes. They also report that they were in a trance — and this is a special mental state. Being in a trance, we do not know who we are and where we are, we lose the sense of ourselves. We are sailing around the chaos. This tension is so intense, we do not understand what to do with it, we are sincerely afraid that now we will disintegrate both mentally and physically.

Inflicting damage on ourselves, in such a terrible way, we get out of the trance, and also regain power and control. It gives us the feeling that we don’t need anyone but ourselves to calm down right now. We do not need to go to someone with this, because it is difficult, others may refuse, reject. It’s a tremendous sense of relief that I can take care of myself.

But, of course, this is an extremely unhealthy, extreme way to return to reality on your own and reclaim your boundaries.

see me

Self-harm is also a kind of statement that helps to “bring” the inner pain outward, to make it visible. It’s a message: «I’m in terrible pain, but I can’t tell anyone about it.» From the point of view of psychoanalysis, we would be mistaken if we assume that the main goal in self-harm is to experience pain and suffering.

People do this not to feel pain, but to feel power and control — and therein lies the paradox. It is wrong to associate internal dynamics with suffering, love for suffering, the desire to hurt oneself in such cases. After all, if all this is solely for the sake of pain, then it turns out that we do what we are running from — and again we become a suffering child. And we do not want to know this child at all.

We hurt ourselves in order not to feel pain — and this is the splitting, this is the inconsistency of the situation. So we stop feeling like victims and become rapists — those who control what is happening.

Live in harmony with your body

How can we help ourselves if our relationship with the body is broken? Unfortunately, almost no one can cope with an effort of will — and it is better to seek help from a specialist. And you need to be prepared for the fact that psychotherapy will be long. You will have a difficult and lengthy — at least two or three years — work with trauma.

And, most likely, therapy will become a part of life, and not something one-time. At first, meetings with the therapist will be intense, then they will go into the background. We meet when support is needed, once every two weeks or once a month. It’s definitely not a question of ten meetings. But in this way we can learn to live more efficiently, learn new ways of dealing with ourselves — and, of course, with our bodies.

You can watch the lecture on broken relationships with the body in full at psychologist Anastasia Dolganova’s Youtube channel.