Ok, first what the hell is it?
Loosely translated it means a discussion, altercation, examination or confrontation, usually between a group of people...but Jung used it to mean a “kind of dragging of oneself to face oneself whereby one is forcibly positioned where the self may be heard...” James Hollis
This auseinandersetzung is undertaken in order to bring about “a change in orientation through which a new sense of self may occur.” James Hollis
Mr. Hollis points out aptly, “none of us who has gone through such a sea-change has ever volunteered. We were dragged there kicking and screaming, and no doubt we will be dragged there again.”
Welcome to my exact experience of sobriety and recovery...again, still.
FUCK!
“The obvious, then, that we can hardly have a conscious efficacious relationship with the Other when we have a deeply wounded relationship with ourselves. Consider, then, how difficult it is to have any relationship at all.” James Hollis
And now you are up-to-date current with where I am right fucking now. Welcome to my last relationship...
welcome to all my relationships...
Mr. Hollis goes on to say “All that I do not know about myself, all of my secret projects for healing myself of the wounds derived from my culture and family of origin, I am now imposing on you. All the complexes I have acquired in my life on this earth, you will have to suffer from me. How could I do that to you, while professing to love you? How can you do that to me, while professing to love me?”
And finally, “No one enters the therapist’s office whose adaptive strategies are still working. One enters therapy precisely because they have failed.” James Hollis
“One finds oneself making self-defeating choices in spite of the best of motives; suffering the recurrence of primal wounds such as abandonment or overwhelment, retreating before the insurgencies of the Self whose displeasure is expressed in depression, phobias, addictions and the like.” James Hollis
Welcome to my world right now. This is completely and totally where I fucking am.
“With all the wounds of this perilous condition we seek a safe harbor in that Other who, alas, is seeking the same in us. With the thousand adaptive strategies derived from the fortuities of fated time, fated place, fated Others, we contaminate the frail present with the germs of the past.” Again James Fucking Hollis.
And this I now see all too clearly. I know this is what I have been doing and I can also see this is what all my Others have also been doing. It is what you are doing too, whether you want to admit it or can understand it at all.
And with this acceptance and admission, I feel I stand perilously close to an edge over which I cannot see a bottom, or an ending or even another beginning. For me, at least right now, I feel totally and completely paralyzed.
I see that I have spent the last two years of my life attempting to get something from someone who absolutely did not have it to give. Sometimes I think it was because he didn’t want to, and other times, I am more sure that he just didn’t have it. Then there are those really hard times when I just feel like I was the long con who was the only one that refused to accept I was being conned.
Regardless of where I land, it is some excruciatingly painful shit to encounter. My desire to push it away, and down and off is fucking overwhelming. As is my intermittent desire to just start the whole fucking process over again with someone new. Find a new Other! That will work, except it hasn’t, like not even one time.
This is not to say that I haven’t learned along the way...despite what you may judge from your safe distance from my relational splash zone, I HAVE fucking learned things. Maybe not a the pace you think I should have or to the degree you think I needed to, but I have been over here dealing with my shit, and your shit and the attendant fucking dumpster fire that is our relational combo.
So where I am now is standing on the edge of my own internal conflict. This auseinandersetzung confrontation of myself with myself about myself. And it isn’t pretty, or fun. It also feels fucking awful.
Sometimes I wish my head would just turn off. I wish it would just disappear. I wish I was someone else, whose intellect and intelligence and thinking apparatus was dimmed, sometimes greatly, sometimes just a little. Thinking has always been the solution to all my problems, and so it is kind of a bad day when you realize that thinking was actually the acute issue all along. But try as you might, you cannot, ever, stop the crazy, malingering, confusing, self defeating thoughts from coming. Always thinking up new, old ways to manage the anxiety and pain and confusion these same thoughts conjure.
For now, my only real conclusion is that I am absolutely sure I have engaged in the above listed process. And my choices for Others has been and continues to be very flawed. I can see now that for whatever fucking reasons, I only select people to pair up with that are just as fucked up as me, or worse off to be clear. And I can now see (I know, I know many of you could have told me this a decade ago - but I COULDN’T FUCKING HEAR YOU!) that no matter what I had to get to this particular bottom, to learn this exquisitely painful lesson.
And now there is nothing to be done except to sit with it. To see how much I damage me, and any Others that might come along. And I just need to refrain from further engagement until I heal enough to make some different choices. This is not just romantic relationships, it is kind of all of them. So there is no accident my current relational holdings are dwindling swiftly and without further ado.
And I will own, it is awful. My relationship with myself, is and always has only really been a mirror of my relations with all of you. And I never saw that. I couldn’t, it was too painful. So I guess the edge on which I am currently perched upon is either going to allow me yet another round of the same old fucking bullshit, or I am going to finally turn that fucking corner and heal my relationship with me to a point that a different relationship with any Others might be possible.
Currently, if I had to make an education guess, there is a lot of evidence that I will just go another round in the same ring and get my ass kicked again...but I am hopeful that this auseinandersetzung is not in vain. And that I might, really, this time change the trajectory and course of first my relationship with myself, and then, maybe, perhaps, with any Other that might happen to come along. You have been warned...
And again...still. FUCK might be changed into something a little more hopeful...like here, now, newly.
I really don’t know...it feels very much up for grabs and that feels very much like again...still.
FUCK!
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