Jiminy Vishnu Posted December 5, 2013 Share Posted December 5, 2013 Hey all, I was recently told about this article and found it really fascinating and in my case, devastatingly true. Hope some folks out there in FDR land find it useful as you heal and become the kind of person you were meant to become. At the end of an essay on the American painter David Salle in Janet Malcolm’s new collection, Forty-one False Starts, Salle asks the author, “Have you ever thought that your real life hasn’t begun yet?” It’s a sentiment many of us share. Increasing numbers of my psychotherapy clients complain of a life in which they play a bit part. They are fearful of really being themselves, and they don’t know who they are or what they really want and lose sight of their dreams. They skillfully and seamlessly discern and adapt to what other people desire. As a result, they long for lives in which what they value will be taken more seriously. In Toward an Emancipatory Psychoanalysis, the late American psychoanalyst Bernard Brandchaft called this “pathological accommodation.” Most of the time accommodators passively go along with what they believe other people want from them. They periodically get frustrated and rebel against what they imagine is expected in an attempt to carve out a modicum of freedom. Occasionally they punish the people they think are neglecting them. They are alienated from what they really yearn for. I’ve known pathological accommodators who worked at jobs they hated and married partners they didn’t love. The results? Depression, despair, and even manic attempts to break out of the stranglehold of self-neglect. - See more at: http://www.rewireme.com/explorations/training-your-weakness-in-relationships/#sthash.beyjJmgU.W5UynNcl.dpuf Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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