Feeling, Relating, Existing

Relationships

Shards of a Beloved

Robert D Stolorow Ph.D. on July 5, 2018

Memories keep a lost love alive.

Memories keep a lost love alive.

Resilience

Failure to Protect

Robert D Stolorow Ph.D. on February 22, 2018

Failure to protect is a form of emotional trauma.

Failure to protect is a form of emotional trauma.

Emotional trauma discloses painful truths about our existential vulnerabilities.

Without the ability to protect against danger through anticipation and prediction, people are left with unmodified feelings of endangerment. Safety is revealed to be an illusion.

Because trauma so profoundly modifies the universal or shared structure of temporality, the traumatized person quite literally lives in another kind of reality, an experiential world felt to be incommensurable with those of others. This felt incommensurability contributes to a profound sense of alienation and estrangement from other human beings.

Grief

The Emotional Topography of Grief

Robert D Stolorow Ph.D. on June 19, 2015

Loss—especially traumatic or tragic loss—creates a dark region in our world that will always be there.

Loss—especially traumatic or tragic loss—creates a dark region in our world that will always be there.

Because we are limited, finite, mortal beings, vulnerability to trauma is a necessary and universal feature of our human condition. Suffering, injury, illness, death, heartbreak, loss--these are possibilities that define our existence and loom as constant threats. To be human is to be excruciatingly vulnerable.

In virtue of our human finitude, heartbreak is built into our caring engagement in the world.

Whether a therapist’s expression of emotional understanding will produce therapeutic or counter-therapeutic effects will depend on the emotional meanings that such expressions have for the patient.

People often remain endlessly in unhappy, abusive, or depriving relationships by blaming their suffering on their own shortcomings, their not having “gotten it right” yet. Such an interpretive pattern can keep someone futilely trying to get it right forever.

Existential honesty owns up to the inevitable heartbreak of loss.

When we dwell with others’ pain, we enable their shattered emotional worlds to gradually transform into bearable painful feelings that can be seamlessly and constitutively integrated.

My prolonged severe pain was a black hole at the center of my emotional experience, sucking into its darkness aspects of my engagement in the world.

Death and loss are existentially equiprimordial. Existential anxiety (Angst) anticipates both death and loss.

Sarah Stark’s novel, "Out There," contains rich and valuable descriptions of the essential features of emotional trauma in general and of combat-related trauma in particular--the shattering of innocence, the disruption of temporality, the alienation and estrangement, and the longing for a sibling in the same darkness.

In the course of describing his experience of grief, Julian Barnes fleshes out in excruciating detail how traumatic loss entails the collapse of one’s world, a reconfiguring of time and space, a sense of profound estrangement from those who are not grief-stricken, and the dread of a second loss that impends with the passage of time—the fading of memory of the lost beloved.

Unconscious

Whatever You Want

Robert D Stolorow Ph.D. on July 1, 2014

In perceptual accommodation, I see myself (and you) the way you see me (and yourself), in order to secure a needed bond with you. My subjective reality is unconsciously surrendered and is usurped by yours.

In perceptual accommodation, I see myself (and you) the way you see me (and yourself), in order to secure a needed bond with you. My subjective reality is unconsciously surrendered and is usurped by yours.

Most often the term finitude is used to denote our temporal limitedness—our mortality. But the term can be seen to encompass all the ways in which finite human existing is limited, and they all can be sources of emotional trauma.

Traumatic loss shatters one’s emotional world, and, insofar as one dwells in the region of such loss, one feels eradicated.

Freudian Psychology

Emily Running

Robert D Stolorow Ph.D. on April 10, 2014

In the experiencing of authentic temporality, the whole structure of human existence has to be brought into view—namely, that it is authentically intelligible only in terms of its stretching along between birth and the possibility of death, between two abysses of nothingness.

In the experiencing of authentic temporality, the whole structure of human existence has to be brought into view—namely, that it is authentically intelligible only in terms of its stretching along between birth and the possibility of death, between two abysses of nothingness.