Annalynn life script currency analysis

Results



Uniqueness ++

One & Only +++

Feelings +

Power +

Reverse Status +

Sex

Beauty

Pied Piper

Booze +

Food +

Violence

Money

Words ++

Drugs



Analysis









You are quite unique Annalynn as this is quite an unusual set of results that you provide. The main thing I can say about it is that it could be reflective of disordered attachment. I know you a little bit but not a lot so I will have to speak more generally.



Research shows that children who grow up in a monomatric family will tend to have singular attachments in adulthood. This could be seen to represent the script currency of one and only and uniqueness. Especially the quality of the exclusion of others. Children who grow up in more polymatric families will have a more diverse set of attachments in adulthood.



In terms of psychological games this could result in what are called exclusion games. These are played the best of all by teenage girls. Those who establish peer groups and then keep some others out of them. This is not saying that you do such things just that you would be hypersensitive to such behaviour.



Because of the singular attachment there could develop problems with loyalty, betrayal and so forth, including exclusion games as mentioned before.







Of course there is nothing wrong or unhealthy about having singular attachments. From a psychological point of view if the needs for human contact are met in one or two attachments then there is no problem. Others usually have more attachments to meet those needs but as long as the needs are being meet then there is not a psychological problem.



The main danger is you put all your eggs in one basket. If the primary attachment figure dies or moves away then you may be left bereft of other attachments.



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Love and marriage

I thought everyone knew this but I was supervising the other day and this issue arose. So I told her I would write it down.

Marriage is not about love, marriage is about friendship. Marriage in western cultures is about two people living in close quarters for a very long time and endeavouring to maintain a friendship that is of a good quality. Not an easy thing to do.

Marriage is about this.

If two people are compatible at least to some degree in their Parent values that is a good start and one reason why cross cultural marriages can be a hazardous venture.

If two people can at times be caring and considerate of the other party that is a really good thing in a long term friendship (marriage). Random acts of kindness, unsolicited, can generate so much good will.

But probably most important of all is the Free Child contact. Two people who like each other, enjoy each others company and want to spend time together because its fun for them is doodle dandy thing to have in a long term relationship.

None of these have anything to do with love. I am using love here in the sense of a man and a woman falling in love romantically. What I have described above can happen in any relationship.

Love happens when a man and woman meet and fall in love in what is called the honeymoon stage of the relationship. The romantic stage when one gets all those good feelings about the other. This usually lasts 6 to 18 months. From a psychological point of view this is where the attachment between two people develops exponentially. As they fall in love romantically and add sex in there as well two people can develop a very strong attachment, one of the strongest that can develop between two people. Probably only surpassed by the mother - child attachment.

However as I keep banging on about, with attachment comes the desire to maintain proximity. With a strong attachment there is a very strong drive to seek the other out and be with them. People will expend tremendous efforts to maintain proximity with another where there is a strong attachment.

Of course the best situation is if a couple fall in love, develop an attachment and they are also good friends as I described with the FC contact and so forth. Then they have the desire to maintain proximity because of the attachment and also they like and enjoy each others company. Perfection!

Sometimes that does not happen. People who enter couples counselling often have an attachment. Thus they are very reluctant to leave each other because of the desire to maintain proximity (plus all the societal pressures), but the FC contact and NP caring of the other is a very distant memory. They may not even like each other, in fact they may actively dislike each other but they can’t leave because of the desire to maintain proximity. But there is no FC to FC contact left.

Marriage is about friendship and love is about attachment.

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Human attachment and addiction

This is a follow on from the post before on human attachment.

Sometimes however children do not go through the attachment build up followed by the attachment breakdown. Consider the experiments done by John Bowlby with attachment many years ago.

A mother and young child would go into a room that had a chair in the middle. In the room there would be toys and other interesting things for a child to look at and play with. The mother sits in the chair by herself or just talks with another adult. The researchers then simply observed what the child did and there were three patterns that came up.

1. Some children would stay next to mother but slowly and surely move away from her to investigate the room. They would move away and then come back and then move away again further and further each time. Checking on mother from time to time. This they called a secure attachment

2. Some children just moved away from mother did not look back at her or seek her out again and amused themselves with the toys. This is called an isolated attachment as the child did not use mother as a secure home base. Typical in later life of the schizoid personality

3. Some children never left mother’s side . They may look around the room at the interesting stuff but never left mother’s side in any significant way. This is called an insecure attachment. This is the psychological basis of the addictive personality. They never adequately learnt the process of the attachment breakdown.

The vast majority of children learn how to form an attachment. Those who don’t end up showing autistic like symptoms. Children will develop an attachment to a parent who treats them well and also to the parent who treats them badly. The need to form an attachment is that essential for the psychological well being of the child. The stockholm syndrome is an example of those who developed an attachment to their abuser as do young children.

However the process of breaking down the attachment is not learnt by all, those who don’t can develop the insecure attachment and continually seek mother’s side. As we know the essential feature of an attachment is the desire to maintain proximity with the attachment figure. Thus the child’s reluctance to leave mother’s proximity.

The dependent personality is the same and this explains the ‘drug addict’ type of drug user. These are the ones who find it really, really, really hard to stop using. People use drugs for many reasons and these are the ones often portrayed in the movies, usually live wretched lives and use up most of the health, legal and counselling resources in the community. In number they are quite small but they use up most of the resources allocated to drug users in the community because drugs ruin their lives, families and often they are outside the law and require health resources as a result of their drug taking. Listening to these people talk about the drug one finds an uncanny similarity to talking about a relationship with a husband or wife. The drug becomes their partner.

As they grow through life into adulthood they discover something that feels good for them. That can be anything with the most common ones being cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, food, sex, gambling, religion, another person and they in essence form an attachment to it. As they never developed the ability to break the attachment down they then form an insecure attachment with the ‘thing’. Thus they have a continual heightened desire to maintain proximity with it and thus one ends up with the addiction. It is an attachment problem.

In the histories of drug addicts one finds they have gotten off the drugs on many occasions. Their problem is not to get off the drug but to stay off the drug. When they remove self from the attachment figure (drug) they find it so difficult to maintain the distance that they they sooner or later again seek the proximity of the attachment figure and thus start using again.

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The serial nature of human attachment**

I have had prior opportunity to talk about the attachment process in humans. No matter what the relationship is when two humans meet they they initially go through a process of attachment development. I have used the relationship diagram to show this process.

Whilst all relationship go through this process they can do it in differing ways depending on what type of relationship it is

There can be the four stages of a romantic relationship that a man and woman go through.

1. Acquaintances

2. Honeymoon stage

3. Smothering - abandonment stage

4. Complete relationship

The honeymoon stage which usually lasts between 6 to 18 months is where the attachment builds up. Attachment building occurs when at least one of the parties views the other in an attractive and appealing light.

Then for some reason that is followed by a period where they couple set about separating and individuating from each other. They set about breaking down the attachment which they just spent all that time and energy creating. This occurs in the Smothering - abandonment stage of the model above.

Once done they set about doing the same again with someone else. This just seems to be the natural human condition. With attachment development of course comes the very strong inbred desire to maintain proximity to the other which is at the very core of human relationships and makes sure most stay together for that period. After the detachment period is ended they are more easily able to separate geographically if society allows such a thing. The love between them changes from an attachment based love to a FC to FC liking type of love. The psychological need to maintain proximity is reduced and they more choose to stay together (or not) rather than being biologically programmed to.

Hence we end up with the serial monogamy model of marriage. In a westernised family type of situation the attachment - detachment process takes about 7 to 10 years. After that they are more psychologically capable to geographically separate and this can explain why the divorce rate in such societies tends to hover around the 40 to 50 percent mark.

Of course the same can happen in the therapeutic relationship between the client and therapist. Compared to the marital relationship it is much more unequal in that it is more on the client’s side but the same process occurs as is shown in this diagram.

In the positive transference the client can develop a strong attachment and thus the desire to maintain proximity can be quite strong indeed. After that comes the negative transference where the client sets about breaking down the attachment they have just spent all that time developing. Once complete then the therapist becomes much less psychologically important to the client and the desire to maintain proximity reduces and eventually the client sort of outgrows the therapist and moves onto the next relationship. Again we have this serial quality in attachments in relationships.

Finally we have the child and mother relationship where the same takes place. The child spends the first two years developing a very strong attachment and thus a very strong desire to maintain proximity to mother. It then spends the next 16 years breaking down that attachment and separating and individuating. Whilst the overall process is the same it differs quite considerably in a number of ways than the two other relationships just described.

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A therapist's attachment**

I ran a short workshop last week on attachment and attachment in the psychotherapeutic process. Some interesting comments came out of it as participants gave feedback and asked questions.

At one point we spoke about the longer term attachments that can happen in therapy. One of the participants had been reading this blog prior to the workshop and asked a question about pre-verbal issues and their treatment.

I was going to suggest we did a demonstration rebirth but decided against the idea! With pre-verbal issues one is usually dealing with the more psychotically damaged person quite often with characterological problems or what is sometimes known as personality disorders or a third degree impasse in Transactional Analysis terms.

Doing co-therapy with Mary Goulding

The question was asked about how one treats the pre-verbal client and my answer was with attachment in the transference relationship. And amongst other things it is through this the client learns how to self soothe. The only problem is that it takes time. I am not aware of an expedient way to treat such characterological problems.

The question was then asked, how long is that? Usually 1, 2 or 3 years but in my answer I noted that my longest client ever was about 11 years. A very paranoid man who saw me once a week for about 11 years. There were a few breaks in that time but not many and none of them were long breaks. This brought a flurry of comment and questions.

After I stopped seeing him finally, he left and that was that. Months later on christmas day there was a knock on my front door. I went to see who it was and it was him! He said hello and handed me a Christmas present. We had a discussion for about 10 - 15 minutes and he left.

The paranoid personality type

This left me a bit perturbed as he had come to my home uninvited. This man could be very paranoid and could have created all sorts of paranoid beliefs system about me in his head. However I just let it go, did not hear from him again and forgot about the whole thing. Then next christmas day there was a knock at my door and when I opened it there he was again! I got another gift, we talked for 15 minutes and he left. This has continued every christmas since.

This has been good for me because after 11 years I got to know him very well and of course I developed an attachment to him. Of course as a therapist I need to be very careful with this and so forth. But after 11 years I had developed an attachment and this once a year continuity I like because it is a continuity of our relationship.

Sometimes clients complain that the therapy relationship is a one sided attachment wise which I agree with and then they complain that the only reason I see them is because they pay me and that if they died I wouldn’t even go to their funeral. Well if the man under discussion died I would go to his funeral.

The complaining clients are correct however and I would not go to the funerals of most of my clients should they ever have one. However I can recall two that I have gone to. At one I was even asked by the husband to give a short eulogy, which I did. That was of a woman who I saw for five years most of it at three times per week. So it was an intense therapy relationship and yes I did develop an attachment to her and I was moved by her death and emotionally moved at her funeral.

Let me tell you, that is not an easy thing to do, to see a client three times a week! What the heck are you going to talk about! If I see her Monday and then again on Wednesday there is not a lot of time for something significant to happen. However we managed.

At the workshop I also mentioned that over the years a few clients had legally changed their surname to mine. This brought consternation from some of the workshop participants asking if that was professional and ethical. My response was what is wrong with it? I can’t stop them anyway but of course they wanted me to agree with it which I did.

This has not happened for a long time and was in the early 90s if I recall correctly. These people had read about the Schiffian school of Transactional Analysis where Jacqui Schiff’s clients would change their name and so it was a follow on from that.

I must say that regarding the attachment or therapeutic relationship from my point of view this did have an impact. To me it meant something special and I was indeed very glad for them. I have not seen or heard from them for a long time now which is a bit sad. So clearly I did have an attachment of some kind with them.

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