LoBD

"Individuals who have not achieved object constancy /object permanence still relate to reality using the defensive of splitting. They are unable the identify the feelings of others and view them objectively.

An infant fears that once mother is out-of-sight, she is destroyed, not having the capacity to visualize a permanent image of her. This can be demonstrated by the developmental tool of a game called, peak-a-boo. When the hands of mother are pulled away, viewing her face, the infant is delighted and saddened when not in view.

Adults who are splitting relate much in the same way that the infant sees reality as all-good or all-bad with polarized view points. The mental representations of good and bad are not integrated and prevents them from seeing the one they destroy is the same one who soothes and comforts. They do not have a tolerance of loving and hating toward the same person, unable to see them as some good and some bad. They cannot tolerate ambivalence hence the term, splitting.

The individual who causes the frustration is seen as all bad, and if pleasurable, then all good. In the same way, these traits are often seen with those who are depressed one minute and elated the next. This behavior can be seen in toddlers who throw temper tantrums. The toddler is frustrated with both poles of thought, dependence / independence and hate / love. For this reason the parent / therapist would do well to provide a "holding environment" and contain the unintegrated feelings, metabolize them and give meaning. Once they have the cognitive equipment and skills, able to achieve object constancy, then the internal struggle is relieved. Ultimately, client / toddler needs to experience the good-enough-partner / good-enough-mother while holding feelings of "bad" primarily toward that object.

Since the therapist / mother is not always available, the client / toddler needs to find other ways to internally soothe and comfort, then entering into the transitional process. The effect must be experienced in doses in which the client / toddler can handle them."

http://www.toddlertime.com/mh/terms/splitting.htm


To describe my own diagnosis -- as a parallel to your Angelica complex -- I'd call it an Angel complex. Basically, the realization eventually struck me -- and caused a severe amount of distress -- that people aren't perfect, and what that means is that my idealizations could never be real; my expectations were impossible to meet. That's when I got the idea that I should just give up on being close to anyone altogether.

To tie this to your entry: when I was 17, I went to the supermarket, and fell in love with the cashier. Why? She looked at me. While I was checking out, her gaze locked with mine, and it stayed there, frozen for several moments -- I couldn't stop thinking about her after that. 10 months later I got up the nerve to get in touch with her, then I ended up talking to her online, then I visited her at the market; but the manager yelled at me for talking to her, and told me to leave, so I did. That didn't go so well; after that we talked less, then a year or so later I was saying something to her and she got angry at me, told me to leave her alone and stop talking to me.

BUT it all goes back to the Angel complex: part 1 of which splitting is a common defense mechanism. My interaction with that girl was limited -- as yours was limited with the girl you mentioned in your entry, that you wouldn't shoot if you were to go rambo at school -- and so it was easy for me to idealize her. I only knew her as the girl who'd looked at me like that; it was, to me, a passionate maternal gaze. I've had almost no closeness in my life, and that was one of the most intimate moments I remember; and it was with a perfect stranger.

So I saw her as all good; when things went wrong, I saw her as all bad. For 10 months I fantasized about her -- being in a relationship with her, by the way, seldom (if ever) anything sexual -- basically, I idealized her to suit my exact needs for affection and acceptance. And again, it was easy to do this because I'd only seen her once, and never talked to her.

I did the same thing with a girl about two years ago; I 'fell in love' with her, though I didn't know much about her at all. I'd only talked to her online, I think only exchanging a couple words with her in total when I saw her at school; so I found her online, started talking, and things were okay for a very short amount of time, and then I started projecting all my idealizations onto her. I saw her only as good in my mind, because she didn't do anything to hurt me; again, with the splitting, people tend to see things as black or white -- if a person's behavior is good, then they're all good, and can have no bad qualities, and vice versa.

So anyway, as you like quirky/bitchy girls, I gravitate towards the ones that strike me as open and caring; and it has nothing to do with them, and everything with me, which is why I continue to avoid relationships. When that girl started to show that she was getting overwhelmed by me, for example, I started to dislike her; I started to get angry at her -- really angry.

Did she do anything wrong? She did everything but anything wrong; but acknowledging the truth about the situation was irrelevant. I was INCAPABLE of seeing her as anything but bad, because I'd realized her humanity -- her inability to cope with the ridiculous amount of personal information I was mercilessly unloading on her, and expecting her to respond to in kind.

And I unloaded so much because it was easy to; I hardly knew anything about her, and I'd only talked to her on an instant messaging program, so I could make things up about her in my head. I saw a good quality in her -- that she listened well, and didn't say hurtful things to me -- and blew it up into -- literally -- an angelic portrait. There really was a time where I thought of her like that; and the whole time, I was reduced to an infantile state of longing for her. I wanted her to take care of me; I wanted her to be nice to me; I wanted her to accept me; I wanted her to make me feel safe, and I wanted her to make my loneliness go away. Those were all impossible; I elevated her to the status of an angel, and I talked to her as if she were one -- and that led to me sucking the lifeblood out of her, and after enough of that, she blocked me, like the other girl who came to do the same thing later.

This may seem disjointed, but it really seems to be essentially the same thing as your Angelica complex; it's an innate attraction toward the people upon whom its easiest to project our innermost needs and desires -- usually someone we don't know well.

As far as the Angel complex goes, the final result of it -- at least for now -- seems to be the imagination of a transitional object; like a toddler's blanket or stuffed animal, I have an angel in my head who I call Jenna -- the name just came to me one night -- and I go to her for support when I'm going to bed at night. People think I'm smart, but in reality, I'm on par with the psychological make-up of a 2 year old; I shut down when I get close to people because seeing that they're incapable of meeting my needs is painful, and I still project false images onto people if I'm not careful about what I'm doing. Jenna is kind of my bridge between my personal reality and the overarching reality; it's okay to have her, because as far as I can see, she really is an angel -- she isn't human, and when I go to her for support I know that she'll be completely accepting and receptive in every way.

Like if you don't mind me being too personal, you mentioned at one point in my SBox something about not knowing how long you were going to hang around here; I was going to send you a message back having something to do with me not wanting you to go. It was going to be a lot more personal than that -- and it was going to be personal because, at that moment in time, I was projecting my idea of a mother onto you, no joke. I almost started crying because I didn't want you to leave; I felt like a kid pulling at his mom's dress as she's walking away.

And I've done that with so many women; I look at those I've fallen out of contact with, and more times than I care for, it isn't uncommon for me to find myself picturing them in my head and saying "please help me." I don't say anything because I don't want to make people angry, but it all comes down to that tugging at mom's dress thing -- please don't leave me here alone, or please don't go, or please talk to me, or please care about me, or please be with me -- it's a seemingly endless cycle of helplessly grasping at anyone who might possibly help. Like I have no mother, and so anyone in the crowd who looks like they might be able to help me becomes a candidate for that clinging and crying.

It's so easy to magnify people, or to attach to people you barely know, especially when you're so desperate for that attention and acceptance and affection. I don't know about you, but I remember all sorts of things from my childhood that left me psychologically arrested, like all the times I didn't know where my dad and my mom were -- they'd just leave without saying anything -- and I remember screaming for them one time, running around the house while having a panic attack, then running around the neighborhood and asking my neighbor if they knew where my mom was. I was hysterical; and I remember about 12 girls I projected those idealizations of a mother onto, and all of them rejected me, and for now, it's led to a point where I feel like I'm losing touch with reality, able to carry out daily functions only if I depersonalize and dissociate, and possibly heading into the territory of having hallucinations as my image of Jenna gets more and more elaborate, my hope for human closeness plummets into nothingness, and my grasping to my transitional object -- the Angel complex -- the Angel in my head who acts like a blanket a toddler becomes irrevocably obsessed with -- is getting out of hand.

And it continues, because I try to explain it to the people 'close' to me, and nobody cares. Everyone thinks I'm fine, and the people I care about don't talk to me and treat me -- it feels like 99% of the time -- like I don't exist. So the little kid in me says screw them, I can go insane and kill myself, and nobody would care anyway, so it doesn't matter. I feel incapable of believing that anyone would care if I died.
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SO. All this being anecdotal, I'm hoping you can tie this to your entry; the Angelica complex and the Angel complex seem to be very similar -- the only difference is that the Angelica complex deals with projecting things onto other people, and the Angel complex deals with projecting things onto an imaginary figure -- so it, in essence, stays a projection, and is continuously recognized (some of the time) as such.

I've fantasized about shooting everyone at school before, plenty of times; back when I was in high school I thought about it all the time. More than that, I'd think about specific individuals, and how I'd kill them; but most often of all I'd think of 'fake-killing' a girl I was interested in at the time. I'd make up some scenario about scaring her and making her believe I was going to kill her, and then I'd explain how that wasn't what I wanted to do, and it would be the cheesy romantic happy ending. It was pretty demented, looking back on the details, but to me, it was nice. Anger and violence have never been a TRULY serious problem for me, because I recognize them now as being born out of rejection and longing for affection, not a desire to hurt other people. The desire to hurt other people was just a masquerade; in reality, I wanted to get people close to me, to understand me, and at one point I thought violence was the only way I could do that.

And that was always represented by that figure, somewhere in the fantasy, that I wouldn't touch; the one I'd want to save from my own violence, like a hero or something.

That ties right into the whole subjective omnipotence thing in infancy, though -- how the infant calls and the mother responds, so it gets the idea that it gets whatever it wishes for -- and how it's stressful to cope with the idea, later on, that the mother and the infant are not one, that it isn't omnipotent -- and neither is the mother -- but dependent on other people, so on and so on.

I must be really smart and mature, you know? Like how right now I failed to say as much about your entry as I did my own feelings, how I was probably trying to use this comment as a jumping board for establishing some abstract connection to make me feel less vulnerable, and how I feel like my entire mind is a bunch of shattered fragments on the ground, and I still would probably be perfectly capable of clinging to your dress like a little kid because I'm effectively selfish and desperate beyond measure for affection and acceptance.

I look around the world, and see that so many people are just like me; I can only imagine it's the few -- too few, far too few -- that are adapted to live adequately in this world. Behind the masquerade of logic, uprightness, reasonability and respectability, lies something quivering; reading over your entry was like a slap in the face, reminding me that I'm not alone in my frailty.

There's a song by Roy Harper called "Grown-Ups Are Just Silly Children." I think that title says enough.

Anyway, I hope you don't mind me writing all this, and thanks so much for posting this entry; your thoughts may be in your own head and no one else may be able to understand you fully, but remember that you know plenty about me just by reflecting on things about yourself. It's like the quantum mechanics idea of phase entanglement; particle A and B are connected in such a way that if you make an observation of A, it will say something about B...

http://www.drchinese.com/David/Bell_Theorem_Easy_Math.htm

"Now we will ask another simple question: if we measured the polarization at any one of the 3 angles, what is the likelihood that a neighboring measurement at one of the other two angles will agree with the results of the first? For example, if we knew the polarization at A, what is the likelihood that B would be the same? Or if we knew the polarization at B, what is the likelihood that C would be the same? Or if we knew the polarization at C, what is the likelihood that A would be the same?"

I think quantum mechanics has a lot to say about humanity; and looking at it on a superficial level, I think that though I'm particle A and you're particle B, by observing myself, I know more about you. The common string of humanity; the quantum connection of phase entanglements that run between every human heart.

Anyway, that's enough for now, but I still think it's worth mentioning that despite all the mental fog and Angelica and Angel complexes and so on and so on and so on and so on, I just want to go have a picnic somewhere right now with someone, I want a hug, and I want it to stop being gray and cold outside. As many have said before, the truth is simple; at the heart of all these complex problems lies a single something; like a king and a queen surrounded by an elaborate fortress with all sorts of defenses and walls and decorations, etc...

Humans are fragile creatures; there's no way around it. And perhaps it wouldn't be so beautiful if it were any other way.

Thanks for sharing.