Perfection has the face of a ferocious peace

Perfection has the face of a ferocious peace
Eleonora Bombaci*

Ecobiopsychology permits with its theoretical framework marked by complexity and circular thinking, the formulation of hypotheses and the construction of significant and coherent connections in people’s life relating multiple levels and including elements of psychic and biological nature as well as images belonging to the natural dimension which, through the unravelling of a narrative that is both poetic and realistic, reveal the form progressively taken by the individual in his own history, and the root from which he originates.
The patient I would like to introduce immediately evoked in me the image of a meteorological phenomenon: frost. In meteorology frost is defined as a nocturnal precipitation due to the solidification of water vapor on the ground or on objects, which takes the form of grainy ice with a crystalline appearance. In describing this case I used the image of frost which gives the idea of something pure and shiny that covers everything, like a magical blanket of thin diamond fragments, but which in this enchanted and poetic guise, hides the cold of ice and declares the leap from what is gaseous and becomes solid without passing through the fluidity of water, of the emotional world.
It was in this form that Matilde emerged in my imagination. I described her history making use of her own words to permit the reader to get to the heart of the images and of her affective codes. When I received her first call, I had difficulty in recalling her to memory even though we had met two years earlier during a training project that I had organized for the Social Support Services where the patient worked as a speech therapist. Starting to connect memories, I recovered the image of a small, graceful, extremely feminine, refined and always discreet woman who had already given me the idea of something delicate and at the same time granitic oscillating between a rarefied image and a rigid personality... just like frost!
Matilde told me on the phone that she was going through a very difficult phase of her life and that she needed to understand what was happening to her. I decided to accept her request and we fixed an appointment for after summer. At meeting her, my first impression was confirmed, but I noticed an unexpected smile on her face and an attitude aimed at seeking an emotional contact. I thought that even frost, once touched, recovers its watery nature and I immediately felt the need to get in touch with her most crystallized components and begin to generate the right warmth to fuel that fire that in alchemy warms and transforms.
Matilde told me that she was 47 and was going through a period of profound crisis that required reflection and understanding of her own experiences, finding herself torn between her own needs and the relationship with her partner she considered equally important. During the lockdown, during the pandemic Matilde, who had lived alone for 10 years, had decided to move in with her partner Alberto with whom she had had a relationship for about three years, but the choice turned out to be negative because the patient immediately perceived the experience as "excessive ” with respect to the need to live her own spaces and daily rhythms according to a personal modality consolidated over time and crystallized in the possibility of indulging in new forms.
Matilde recognized in her partner an intelligent, cultured, sensitive and always very welcoming person, but during the cohabitation numerous moments of discouragement had led her to emotional closure and caused hostile behaviours. Matilde declared that despite wanting to cultivate her relationship, she often tended to escape and if not possible, she had experienced significant discomfort, also physical. During that “forced” cohabitation her body spoke through cystitis, followed by a vaginal infection, painful attacks of colitis and persistent insomnia. Matilde felt bad but could not understand the meaning of her discomfort, declaring: «I don’t feel well, I can’t understand why, so I attack him who doesn't deserve it, sabotaging every possibility of being happy. On the one hand, I feel like I don't want to lose Alberto, on the other I need peace, I once read a sentence: “perfection has the face of a ferocious peace”. It's exactly like that for me!».
Matilde told me that Alberto who was 49 years old, had a degree in economics, was a serious and committed worker, the classic good guy with sound principles, a practicing Catholic like herself, with a previous failed marriage and with two daughters aged 6 and 10 he managed together with his ex-wife in a harmonious and responsible way. They had met for the first time in 2015, a dazzling meeting but quite destabilizing for her. Alberto was a "family man" and did not find the strength to leave his family. A situation that prevented both from staying together and turned out to be very tiring on an emotional level. When they met again, the man had ended his previous relationship and they could begin to cultivate their bond, although each living in their own space and dating in the respect of his two minor children.
After the first meeting Matilde had this dream: «I was at home in my bed with Alberto. It was a warm and quiet time. I remember the wisteria-coloured sheets enveloping us like a cloud.». When I tried to interpret this dream together with Matilde, my hypothesis took root: the wisteria sheets were the only ones that she had purchased on her own, choosing them for their colour and soft fabric, her other sheets had been provided by her mother as a trousseau. Her family, coming from the South of Italy, was in fact very tied to the traditions including that of giving a trousseau to the daughters leaving their parents' home. So I thought I was faced with a woman who felt an evolutionary push also aimed at meeting the masculine, but in a tiring conflict with her own primary parts which made every step towards adulthood painfully "wrong". Oriented by the dream and by my first intuitions, I decided to delve deeper into Matilde's history.

The family history
Matilde was born with a eutocic birth, but days after the expected date. She was breastfed for a short time because she was not feeding enough and was quite small. In the first six months of her life Matilde cried a lot to the point that she was given a drug whose name she could not remember, to calm her down. Her parents were quite elderly by the standards of the time, having married at a mature age.
Her father was a worker and a blacksmith, he worked a lot and was often absent. Her mother was a housewife and had had another daughter 20 months before Matilde. Before giving birth to the two girls, her mother had had an abortion believed to be a mummified foetus and feared she would not be able to have any more children. This generated a period of great difficulty for the parental couple living together with his mother whose terrible character contributed to the worsening of the crisis. For this reason, they moved and with parsimony and sacrifice, created their family home making sure that their daughters lacked nothing.
Her maternal grandparents were wealthy, they ran a shop that took up all their time. Her grandmother was diabetic and before having three daughters, including Matilde's mother, she had had three miscarriages due to pregnancy-related diabetes. In Matilde’s memories, her maternal grandmother was a good woman and was an affective and significant figure for her granddaughters but also described as absent for her daughters and basically normative and bigoted.
Her maternal grandfather was a hard worker, few words and a lot of sweat. The gynaeceum of daughters determined a real educational delegation to his wife, but when he was present, he showed a joking and cheerful temperament.
Her paternal grandmother was a beautiful and capricious woman who had four sons, the younger was Matilde’s father. The woman never dedicated herself to her husband or her children, but they did everything to please her and receive her love.
This picture had been repeating for a long time also in Matilde's family, but this time it was her mother who had put her husband at the centre of everything. According to the patient, her mother behaved like a sort of child who had to secure her "parent" ‘s love and only later, when the communication between the couple gave way to silence and emotional distance, the woman came to understand her behaviour. In this regard, Matilde told me: «I saw devotion and commitment in my parents, but not the maturity to ask themselves who they really were and to express their needs, becoming strangers. It's really very sad, they didn't understand each other's suffering and they got stuck in time and judgments. This thing scares me a lot! My father was never able to understand other people's emotions and I always had the belief that if I had made a mistake, he would have helped me not because he loved me, but out of duty. He was a rock for everyone, but a cold rock. On the other hand, I believe my mother had empathic abilities, but depending on my father she couldn't choose independently. You had to perceive her love, like for the air, in fact I have an excellent sense of smell, but you could never really feel with her.».
This initial information about her family dimension and the history of her parental relationships suggested to me a rough structure, made up of actions linked to necessity and with little attention to the emotional world, at the same time I could observe a sort of entanglement which I would find in Matilde's experiences: there was a strong sense of belonging, not supported however by an equal capacity for acceptance and welcoming of the individuals of this family, there was a climate of emotional emptiness accompanied by a superego conception, in which there was no space for emotions, nor for an individual dimension. Proceeding with the patient's biographical information, she started speaking late but immediately well, and that consolidated my idea of ??a performance dimension aimed at perfectionism and satisfaction. of parental expectations, an idea that I also found in other aspects of her life.
Although she had achieved full sphincter control at the age of two, at the age of three Matilde experienced some episodes of enuresis, probably due to the separation from her mother for the inclusion in the nursery school. When little Matilde was 5 years old, her parents left for Florence because her older sister Lucia was diagnosed with type I diabetes, in line with the maternal family theme. Matilde clearly remembered every step of that moment, declaring a traumatic experience that was still operative: «When my mother left with Lucia I suddenly missed everything, she told me not to cry and I didn't cry for a month, but I remember that I was sent to my uncle's house or to my grandmother's, in an unstable context that I still feel in my memories as chaotic, excessive, noisy. I felt lost and disoriented, I was terrified without my mum. When they returned, nothing was the same as before: eating habits were turned upside down, everything revolved around my sister's needs and mum was always tired, anxious and less available than before. Just think that I was the typical little girl who never gave up on her mum. I left home for the first time at 25 but before each departure I used to sleep with her in the double bed. Still now I need to hear from her 2 or 3 times a day. After Lucia's illness I lost my peace, my Eden».
When Matilde told me about this painful episode from her childhood, I immediately related the description of her move to Alberto’s house during the lockdown and I hypothesized that the loss of her belongings and her spaces had a sort of resonance with this ancient event, consequently eliciting all the abandonment issues and the fear of losing her Eden. I wondered what projections were in place towards her partner. Why was Matilde unable to combine her own living spaces with those of a person she defined as important? Were the attacks and devaluing judgments that she sometimes reserved for Alberto an expression of that ancient anger that saw her deprived of her mother? And furthermore, how old was her anger considering that her mother had given birth to Matilde twenty months after Lucia’s birth, therefore probably very tired and already absorbed in the care of her other daughter? I was faced with a picture in which every emotion and every need was denied and sacrificed to a superior cause.
Furthermore, if we consider the meaning of type I diabetes in the patient's sister, we see how the field begins to take on increasingly coherent and defined traits. We know that diabetes mellitus is a chronic metabolic disease caused by insufficient levels of insulin produced by the pancreas. The low presence of the hormone insulin does not permit glucose to penetrate the cells, glucose remains present in large quantities in the circulation, but does not nourish the cells, intoxicating the body. I therefore hypothesized a condition in which the infrared dimension suggested the presence of nourishment, which however remained inaccessible, starving the cells and I thought that on the ultraviolet plane her mother's love, although present, was difficult to contact and, as in diabetes, the hyperglycemic-affective was toxic, because although it was based on symbiosis, it was never truly tuned to people’s needs. This process was observable in Lucia's somatization and abandonment anxiety, as well as in the primary anger, which I described referring to the very first years of Matilde's life. In this regard, the patient's words helped me: «I must restructure myself and I regret everything I have carried on my shoulders. How much effort I’ve made to never go off track, to be the little girl worthy of love! I find myself in conflict between the desire to be in a couple and the pleasure or security deriving from being alone with my books and my prayers, but the truth is that I can’t find space within myself for someone else, I am not able to look after anyone because, like Lucia, I myself am a hungry cell, or rather thirsty... we are hunger and thirst!».
Matilde defined her mother as reliable, helpful, collaborative and declared that she never argued with her. However, she also recognized the normative aspects and the weight of a judgmental and castrating education regarding femininity, considering the exhibition of the latter as a matter of lack of seriousness. Even in adulthood, the patient carried the weight of these judgments upon herself, always striving to be composed and appropriate, without ever allowing herself the slightest exaltation of her femininity: no make-up or painted nails ... «My femininity is connected to shame and those judgments have impregnated me so much that in situations that I consider excessive I become impatient and feel a sort of embarrassment, to the point of feeling the typical heat on the face of someone who, ashamed, participates in a crime».
The family education Matilde received was truly rigid, at times phobic towards anything that could represent some form of "disorder" within a defined framework with strict rules.
The two sisters studied at the scientific high school with profit and seriousness, fulfilled themselves professionally and conducted themselves in an impeccable manner during the period of adolescence, being allowed to go out only together and in the company of another family member, giving little confidence to those not part of the family or carefully chosen among acquaintances, almost always belonging to the oratory, to the point of pushing Matilde to feel a sort of fascination for priests she perceived as «divine and salvificly far from sex!» and to meditate at the age of 21 on taking the vows herself: perhaps in the idealizing framework of the masculine. Had Matilde imagined herself as the bride of Christ? The spiritual dimension was in fact still a refuge and a haven for her, but listening to her words, what supported her unfortunately also contributed to the maintenance of a rigid, crystallized dimension marked by sacrifice and a sense of guilt: the Holy Mother Church had taken the place of the maternal and did not allow any margin for exploration or transformation.
Before the current relationship, Matilde had had an important affair with another boy at the age of 27. He had been her first sexual partner, but she declared: «I know that at 27 you are grown up, but I wasn't mature enough. For me, sex was associated with pregnancy and eternal bond. I was afraid of it! I couldn't take the birth control pill because I was sick, so any approach was emotionally heavy for me. I did everything to make myself leave and, in the end, I succeeded, experiencing the pain of abandonment.». The reconstruction of these events and the connection to the profound emotional aspects allowed Matilde to grasp how the paradigm adopted with the masculine was the same already then, and how she always felt the need to test the relationship by attacking it, to test the love of the other to ensure herself not to find herself abandoned. The symbiotic overlap with the maternal also left her no escape: what her mother had experienced would certainly have also been part of her existence, without her being able to contemplate being anything other than this and coming to identify as her deepest desire, the idea of being alone, living in her own spaces, maintaining method, order and peace in her perfect world, responding only to herself and not dispersing energy outside, in what she herself defined as a perfection with the face of a ferocious peace: in short, fully living her family pattern and her own crystallized dimension where no mistakes or temptations were allowed. This iron conviction accompanied her until 2015 when she met Alberto and once again her very tidy crystal tower started creaking again taking her to undertake a psychotherapeutic path.

The psychotherapeutic work
The image of the crystal tower was often used during the therapy, and the patient gradually came to recognize the numerous maniacal aspects that had contributed to making her own fort impregnable and to generating great imbalance when she included others in her existence. Matilde told me: «I am very structured, quick and efficient, because everything is organized and tidy in my life. It's a valid system that makes me feel well that is why I feel good alone, I can have full control and I get pleasure from it. Then I have my habits, with food for example, I'm not adaptable at all: already at the lower secondary school I digested little and had to eat light foods, if I just feel tension in my stomach I make myself vomit due to the difference in potential, without using my fingers, just like my maternal grandfather did, perhaps we both have a PH that is not acidic enough to attack food as well as life and as in life, when I don't digest, I reject it!». We worked for a long time on these dimensions of rigidity and on the root that had generated them, and which was completely unconscious in the patient. This allowed Matilde to free herself in part from the tiring sensations she experienced every time she found herself requesting her perfect world a little bit of flexibility, we tried to stem her maternal incursions and Matilde managed to hear from her mother just three times a week, replacing the numerous phone calls with an evening message.
The recognition of her own emotional world and of those instances resulting from parental imprinting, transgenerational influences and an anxious-ambivalent attachment, contributed to putting order and experiencing her emotions in a less disturbing way, slowly regulating the heavily judging and the consequent sabotaging actions. The hypertrophy relating to the investment of the intellectual parts permitted to rediscover the limit of the emotional dimension, recognizing her strength and starting to welcome the authentic internal questions necessary to orient her thoughts without enslaving them solely to the controlling and obsessive dimension. Her nails were first dyed in the most disparate colours to then reach a pale pink and her face experienced the pleasure of makeup, all without feeling unworthy and without feeling ashamed.
Over time the relationship with Alberto took on a decidedly less persecutory connotation and the patient could allow herself to live the relationship, recovering an empathic dimension and the ability to contemplate the world of the other, without continuous threats of sabotage of the relationship and with a progressive recognition of her previously acted narcissistic core.
Being with Matilde was a very demanding experience, I had the feeling that, like frost, the minimal contact could melt it, destroy its crystallized geometry, which would also be a good thing, if it was not sometimes accompanied by the idea or fear on my part of undermining the hold. I grasped the Kohutian dimension of primary narcissism, strongly in need of reflection and at the same time defended in the idealizing component. It was all very delicate, I moved as if in a room full of fragile objects that could break at any moment. On a countertransference level, I asked myself what information to draw from these experiences, I asked myself about my methods, about the right times of my interventions, I tried to enter her world by prudently evoking the destructive chaos of childhood experiences, but I felt the duty and the urge to remove the patient's wetsuit so that her skin could "bathe" directly in the fluid of her own emotions.
The patient claimed: «Before I saw myself in the little Kore of the myth you made me read, far from my mother I felt scared, wrong and disoriented, now I can start looking at Persephone with greater confidence, living my adult dimension, but the fear of love which for me means being a whole and not the relationship between two, is still present. Marriage, for example, reminds me of fusion, perhaps because now I can trace this thing more clearly in the relationship between my parents, but it translates in me into loss and sacrifice». The primary emotional bond for Matilde had always been characterized by the fusional dimension and the lack of attunement, therefore in merging with the other she feared losing herself, once again having to sacrifice her own emotions, her own feelings; she wanted to give herself the opportunity to live as a couple, but she was very intimidated by the aspects that would imply a shared and defined plan, so after an initial phase in which this perception generated discouragement in relation to maintaining the relationship, we focused our efforts on the possibility of respecting the different stages of her growth, without skipping ahead and taking into account the delicacy of her experiences which, as a child, could begin to explore in all the relational evolutionary stages so far fixed in her tower of symbiotic matrix.
Matilde did not go and live with Alberto, but decided to buy a small apartment, giving up the precarious idea of renting and investing in her own adulthood without attacking her relationship and taking a small step towards a slightly more defined dimension which had always scared her. Her partner appeared open and enthusiastic about this step and supported her staying close to her with the right measure.
Regarding the issue of her partner's daughters, Matilde built an excellent relationship with them, thanks to her great sensitivity and her strong intelligence. They recognized her as an emotional point of reference and often confided in her before they did with their father. But it was still extremely tiring for her to absorb their impulsive and chaotic behaviour and she experienced with annoyance the dedication that Alberto reserved for them. She would accept losing her partner’s attentions (a partner still representing a symbolic mother) only if determined by a sacrificial theme, confirming that the only pleasure was derived from being together with him without interference; just like in her childhood fantasy when her mother was forced to move away from her because of her little sister’s health not considering the possibility of a shareable love. In my reflection, I also referred to the somatizations that Matilde had during the phase of cohabitation with Alberto certainly configured as a manifestation of this primary symbiotic nucleus, which, through cystitis and vaginal infections, signalled how the adult dimension required by the life of a couple turned out to be extremely painful for the little girl operating not in the direction of an adult encounter with the masculine, but rather in the fusional recovery of that original Eden with the maternal, without separation or individuative quotas.
As the psychotherapy progressed softening Matilde's shell and allowing her to see her own primary narcissistic parts and their operation in current relationships, the patient told a dream: «I was around 16-17 years old, I was in a house that I can’t recognize, I can see a white lizard with regular strawberry-coloured markings, I notice that it knows how to fly and glides on my hair. It had skills I didn't think it had them! So, I go down to the basement of this house, there is a big dog with shiny black fur, he is tied up and is in the dark. Next to me I notice a big, coiled green snake, I know it is a constrictor. With me there is another female figure, but she and I are in an antechamber while the animals are in the dark room.». When Matilde told me this dream, she reported that she was afraid that psychotherapy could lead to further distance from her partner because of the levels of awareness that she felt emerging within herself and the parts that she still perceived as involved in him. I found myself once again faced with an attempt to sabotage the possibility of being autonomous, of growing up and separating, together with the ancient fear of losing fusion with the other. I invited her to grasp in the theme of the dream the still present need to explore the "underground" of her soul, without fearing that this hellish journey could separate her, like little Kore, from her mother-partner. I involved her so that she could gradually recover that liquid dimension that is not present in frost and that would allow her to develop the right integrative function between the highly intellectualized aerial parts and the rigid ones of the manical behaviours and obsessive and intrusive thoughts crystallized in her. I showed her how her deepest requests had pushed her to accept them and bring them to consciousness, putting aside fears of separation involving her partner, which were nothing other than the distant echo of the maternal separation anxiety. I kept on trying to bring childhood emotional experiences back to current adult resources in a constant work of weaving. Led by a lizard with unexpected abilities, we metaphorized the possibility of surviving without necessarily amputating our tails, because her lizard could fly! While in the darkness of the unconscious, we accepted rabid dogs which however also represent the aggressive and dark dimension of a psychopomp animal which has the characteristics of a guide to the underworld, and finally we recognized the constricting power of a snake which with its chthonic parts evoked us the maternal in its uroboric dimension, but at the same time has the peculiarity of exalting the transformative force and of shedding its skin without messianically waiting for the ennoblement of its painful parts through sacrifice, as had happened with her reliance on religion, like someone who throws himself into the arms of a mother who bionianly transforms tiring emotions into digestible experiences.

*Eleonora Bombaci – ANEB Psychologist Psychotherapist, supervisor at the ANEB Institute School of Specialization in Psychotherapy.

Translated by Raffaella Restelli – Psychologist, member of the British Psychological Society (UK), Ecobiopsychological Counselor and expert in ANEB Psychosomatic Medicine. Linguist in ANEB Editorial area.

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