when games more primitive than Pokemon Go are needed...

 So... I found Clinical Theology incredibly profound... and total hitting home on many fronts, and hence... very difficult to read. T_T never been really into phone games... but downloaded a few tower/city/farm building games in the past fortnight so I could read a few pages and then play games just to restore my sense of control... XD

last week it was 50% Clinical Theology and 50% control freak games, this week is 100% control freak games and no Clinical Theology... -_-|||| yah...

anyways... keeping a record of some of my favourite bits... T_T

The neurotic Christian, who is defending against his own dread by a reaction pattern which leans over backwards against despair into forced keenness, and against unacknowledged doubt into forced faith, thus relying on the cutting-off of his "bad-side", neither admitting nor healing it, is ultimately bound to be just as merciless towards the overtly afflicted who come his way.

To take flight from the inner threats intensifies their power over the psyche. The constant nagging fear of the uprush of inner feelings of annihilation keeps the ego constantly on the move. The mechanisms of defence are employed to keep on top of the situation. Even the Christian faith, which rightly understood would enable a man to turn and stand fast against this onslaught, is oftener used to give a man strength for his flight from reality. More commonly, the effect is either to intensify the introversion or swing violently away from introversion into the 'distractions of great undertakings', what Pascal calls the libido dominandi; or seek forgetfulness in sensuality, perhaps in debauchery, trying to leave his reflective self-consciousness behind him. But all this defiance is manifestly despair over his weakness.

The physician of souls must not be taken in by the commonest of all religious defences, the active attempt not to despair. The common statements "i am trying not to lose hope", "trying to trust God", "trying to have faith" are more likely to be evidences of hidden despair than of hope, of dread of non-being than of confidence in the new being.

The soul, reacting logically to its personal past, feels that God's eyes should see what the mother's eyes evidently saw, unattractiveness, worthlessness, the badness of its "being there" at all. God's eyes, it is felt, ought to express the same disappointment, the basic disgust that the mother's did. God ought not to offer acceptance and intimacy to a thing that a mother rejected and was ashamed of. "Let my shame go where it doth deserve.""My own mother, who knew what I was like, found me unlovable. You, God, must be mistaken. If you could see what the internalised eyes of my own mother are still looking at, You too would turn away in disgust." But the discrimination is one which the soul has not the wit to make. The adult cannot readily leap back to the correct insight about its infancy, or on to a new situation created by God's redemptive act. The truth is a contrast between the then and the now. "What my mother's sick or soured contemptuous looks seared into my soul, that I became." If the eyes of a holy Love can look upon this wretchedness and really see it, and in spite of what it sees, go on looking in kindliness and welcome, that, too, will evoke its own appropriate response.

The more godly or religious the parent seemed to be, or the more entrenched in an obsessional, inflexible sense of the rightness of all she does, the more difficult it is for the child to break out of her primary devaluation or annihilation of its being, to a new valuation, even in adult life, and even if God Himself be the person to offer it.

The great obstacle to spiritual progress, as St Theresa of Avila noted it, is a lack of the will to love in response to the love of God. Why this reluctance, if not because of the projection on to God of the distrust engendered by the original fall and by the terrible mother who seemed to have caused it? The love of God is felt to be, like hers, a demand that the child shall adopt all the correct attitudes of dependence and trust, as if nothing had ever happened. Preaching for conversion may rely heavily on longing and urgent appeals for decision. The preacher may need, and feed upon the response he seeks to evoke. He gives the impression that God shares his impatient hunger for the committed souls of men. This technique, of course, is calculated to sweep those who are for the most part hysterical personalities over minor schizoid obstacles into decision. But it drives the schizoid person deeper into his paradox.

This impasse can be broken only with the help of someone else who is able to overcome the defensive isolation without arousing further defensive withdrawal, and permit commitment without arousing commitment-anxiety. It is the task of the psychiatric and pastoral care to attempt this. Interpretation of these symptomatic feelings, when it is given by one who has overcome a similar sense of cut-offness in himself, or who has accepted it creatively, or has been accepted in spite of its continuance, is a service which invariably diminishes the sense of severance from common humanity.

more superego-y ranting

I hardly ever flip back to my old blogs (most likely from avoidance of embarrassment just in case i once upon a time used to be immature and hopeful and lively) and not surprisingly, ended up feeling like "oh did I once upon a time write such shit? " when I revisited.

such shit, however, esp in recent years, are often good sensible superego-y shit. the problem remained that I probably only intellectualised the good stuff and they never emotionally sank in.
well only if they managed to emotionally sink in back then... i would have moved forward and be at a better place by now.

or maybe not... just wishful thinking.

there have been quite a bit in the tabloid news of mothers killing their children lately. one story in particular made me quite shaken. The brief bits and pieces about said woman in the tabloid were diagnostic enough of bpd. and though my own mother may superficially be ordinary low key Asian in many ways, and thank God, never had the privilege of constitutional rights of bearing arms, the desire and determination in crushing my spirits and annihilating me existentially as a person, esp in my uni and intern and residency years, were perhaps much the same.

it has taken me many years to finally come to admittance that my mother is very clearly cluster b,(and had enough intelligence and conservative cultural background and a colluding husband to be able to fly under the radar and justify her actions to many), in the midst of all my guilt about being socially offensive and psychologically external locus of control and spiritually unforgiving and culturally incapable of filial piety and perhaps unfit to be a chinese human being now that i have publicly said really bad things about my parents...

guilt aside... i don't think i have really escaped her slaughterhouse yet, or maybe i will never make it. That very suppressed part of me which still desperately crave the very rare but very genuine moments she would approve and regard me as "my amazing, sweet, kind, beautiful, intelligent girl" (quoting very bpd Mrs Christy Sheats), will hold me there.
 and that is unsettling enough.

Frank Lake's intro in his Clinical Theology is very comforting at such times--

“The thickness of the repressive layer which covers up our threatening inner negativities is diminished by physical, mental, and emotional ill-health, an also by spiritual disobedience in those who have been well garrisoned in heart and mind by the Holy Spirit against the enemy within. But, as Freud showed, the return of the unconscious into consciousness is a function of abundant health as well as of ill-health. The abundantly healthy personality presses up against the barriers and limitations imposed by unconscious fears and expectations of defeat. Encountering resistances, it attacks them and drives them into the open. We must expect that that fullness of the Holy Spirit and the fullness of life within the Body of Christ will force the alien elements of despair, distrust, anxiety, rage, envy, lust and the like, which are each man's deposit from the intolerable passivities of infancy, to declare themselves before they are cast out。”

and i am so thankful, as i revisit the same again and again, of the years of noble and wonderful superegos i have collected over time, which i had leaned on to survive, and mercifully replaced parts of a superego that was merely a cluster b mother's devaluation ---

Masha---
"trust" does not equate "understanding". i personally believe, when I trust someone else, the responsibility entirely rests with me. It is I who wanted to trust you--you carry no responsibility. To me there is no such thing as "being betrayed", because I myself wanted and was willing to trust another person. When one starts to think one understands another, the thoughts of "being betrayed" would often arise. The presumption of "I understand you" is often the most frightening, whether it be between friends, colleagues, bf/gf, or family members...

King Baldwin---

When I was sixteen, I won a great victory. I felt in that moment I would live to be a hundred. Now I know I shall not see thirty. None of us know our end, really, or what hand will guide us there. A king may move a man, a father may claim a son, but that man can also move himself, and only then does that man truly begin his own game. Remember that howsoever you are played or by whom, your soul is in your keeping alone, even though those who presume to play you be kings or men of power. When you stand before God, you cannot say, "But I was told by others to do thus," or that virtue was not convenient at the time. This will not suffice. Remember that.

---and hopefully, hopefully, as time goes by, not mere intellectualisation of words above only.