The Anarchic* Psyche of Michael A Leavy

I don’t imagine I need to say, “read part 1 first”?

I imagine I do need to say “trigger warning: passing (and possibly gratuitous) reference to sexual abuse of a child.”

If you haven’t read the introductory blog you might wonder about our use, now and again, of the 1st person plural pronoun. Though there is only one Michael at the keyboard, there are, as you can gather from the content of some of the posts, multiple active occupants in our psyche, so the plural pronoun is often preferred. There are many occasions, though, on which, for any number of reasons, the singular seems more apt, so it appears regularly as well.

Third aberration: instability

Everything I’ve ever encountered about inner children – and there’s been a lot of it – seems to operate on a model of: they’re there, you find them, you heal them. Oversimplified, obvs, but I had the impression of a kind of stability after my initial reading was out of the way. And it was all reading, by the way – books – the Internet was in its infancy back then; but I don’t see much that’s different on the Internet nowadays, and not only is much of what I read twenty to thirty years ago still in print, it’s still on the shelves at B&N.

But back to the point: isn’t inner child work portrayed an awful lot like, how should I say?, real world work? Whether it’s Bradshaw from thirty years ago or a video from last year. Pretty much like parenting real kids, but in your head. Hard work, yes: but it’s not like it’s a different number of kids every days, blending in and out of each other, changing appearances, swapping identities… Some days there’s no 3-year-old, some days there is; some days it’s the 8-year-old who held on to the repressed memory of going down on Dad to keep him away from our little sister, sometimes it’s the 7-year-old; some days the 11-year-old took our courage for sexual exploration with other kids underground, other days he discovered it; some days they’re vomiting up frogs, other days they can’t stop dancing no matter what we do…

Well.

The later arrivals, the non-inner children, have proven even slipperier, nothing but retcons down the years, entire groups disappearing and (sometimes) reappearing. Very dreamlike, and all contrary to the sort of careful schematics I recall from Freud and Lacan and all the subsequent therapeutic approaches.

Which might not matter, but don’t we need to understand in order to heal? And maybe of more concern to me now: don’t we need to organize in order to identify our market niche? How can we pull ourselves together if my inner children can’t even keep their genders straight?

Fourth aberration: inner children in their 20s

Okay, the last question was a bit hyperbolic, if not hysterical. Here’s the story that prompted it. Six, seven years ago we had major, major surgery to remove a sublingual tumor. During the first few weeks of recovery I was just too out of it to play the role of adult to the whole posse of inner children and other operators and agents. Nineteen-year-old Michael (so we thought) stepped up to fill in as the interim Adult (inner child work), Self (IFS), or Ego (shadow work). He did an excellent job of it, too, but it left him exhausted and stunned.

In the aftermath, he spent months curled up in a ball, recovering from the strain. When we visited him, the landscape in his vicinity always seemed turned on its head, somehow. By his choice, only Female Michael kept him company during the day; at night, he slept in my arms, as did everyone (fancy trick of ours!) but since everyone did, that was sort of anonymous unless one of us called attention to it.

In time, he felt ready to step back into active life, but only after he had made one change: they were now an hermaphrodite. This prompted them to become the first Michael with a name other than Michael (um, Hermy).

And there’s this: remember that parenthetical “so we thought” from a bit ago? What that was about is this: it wasn’t just 19-year-old Michael who stepped into the role of “Big Guy,” as they called me back then, it was a merging of 19-, 20-, and 21-year-old Michaels. Took us years to figure that out. They hid it from me at the time: they knew how guilty I felt about letting go of the responsibility and didn’t want to risk me refusing to do it if I knew that a couple of them (or was it all 3 of them?) were going to disappear in the process. Then they “sorta forgot” about it.

I guess I haven’t even addressed the “aberrant” part – inner children over the drinking age (which was 18 in Michigan, where we grew up, back when we were growing up). Fact is, my oldest inner child is 27. Just sort of seems wrong on its face, but back in infancy we got in that habit of chipping off a piece of the self to survive and never lost the habit (so to speak – obviously we gave it up in our late twenties). Anyway, just one more way I got it all wrong. Back to the story:

Eventually, we caught on that we were short a couple of guys and realized that the merger had happened; it was only in writing this entry that I realized that they’d pulled the wool over my eyes. And their own, too, for a while. Force of habit: a little sleight of hand to survive.

That’s why I mistrust the clarity in all the therapeutic schemas one encounters in the various media: there’s just too much misdirection in the mind. Or, at least, the wounded mind – but are there any that aren’t, at least a little? Freud said that all infants are insatiable. To be fair, even the purveyors of the schemas, know it, too – there’re only so many parenthetical qualifications you can add to a text, after all. Still:

What I’d like to add to the mix with my story, if I can, is a sloppier, slipperier view of the self, so that other people can get to know themselves without saying to themselves: no that’s wrong, my insides aren’t supposed to look like this?

How about yourself? Done any kind of inner work and found that you couldn’t line your self/selves up with the model(s) on offer?