Psychotherapy Blogbriefs is about my experiences, learnings, discoveries, thoughts and suggestions as a therapist in Santa Fe over the past 18 years, and as a human during the course of my life.
There is a felt terror that underlies many common efforts to avoid contact with the deeper dimensions of the self. This can be called the existential terror surrounding death - or, more descriptively, I think, the sense that one will disappear, and cease to exist - or the terror which attends early experiences of neglect or abandonment by primary caregivers (which is, after all, the reflection of the very real possibility, known by the body in its wisdom, of its own demise). However one wishes to name it, this terror is a primal experience which requires a certain direct attention, and even some significant degree of conscious surrender or acceptance, on the way to re-establishing the total commitment to and reconnection to oneself that will be the basis for psychological integrity.
It is terrifying to approach this core, and the prospect is often associated with a belief that one will be swallowed up by the immensity of the experience. This fear is an exaggeration. One does not disappear, but one is transformed, which may be tantamount to the same thing in one sense at least. Who one has experienced oneself to be may indeed change very significantly.
In other words, with the proper understanding and the proper commitment, and, I will add, with the proper guidance and support, it is possible to approach this terror safely, and to not only survive this approach, but to learn to experience a depth of psychological freedom and wholeness that perhaps no other process will offer.
And yes, this does enter into the realm of the "spiritual", but let's not be too quick to define that realm in simple terms.
The structures of personality are strongly built. They do not tend to be very flexible, or subject to easy change. Instead, they provide a concentrated base upon which a life can be established, developed, grown and understood. This is not to say that these structures are altogether desirable, or altogether admirable. They have their purpose.
When it is determined that these structures are not serving one as happily as one might wish, questions arise as to how they might best be approached, worked with, influenced, transformed or shifted. A typical response that one sees in therapy is the expectation, the hope, the desire, that they will be amenable to being discarded, and that this strategy will be, or ought to be, relatively easy, if only it is conceptualized properly, and the right intention is set into motion. This response is not usually explicit, or even conscious. It can be surmised though without too much difficulty, and brought into awareness so that it can itself be examined and reassessed for its relationship to reality.
Here's how that reality tends to look: in line with the first paragraph, the typical response, with its attendant expectations and hopes and desires, will need to be abandoned, and in its place what will be needed is a set of more appropriate and realistic expectations. Central to this new set of expectations will be the willingness to cultivate and develop a new kind of relationship with the offending personality structures. This new relationship will be one of friendliness and acceptance, forgiveness and humility, with regard to all of one's imperfections and flaws, all of those aspects of oneself that one instinctively wishes to discard out of hand.
This new relationship is actually motivated by very pragmatic considerations in the therapeutic context. It embodies the wonderful paradox that the kinds of changes one might wish to make will in fact be facilitated by an attitude of acceptance, rather than by hostility and aggression toward oneself. Indeed, the very act of acceptance and forgiveness loosens the inflexible structures of personality and renders them more amenable to the kinds of reshaping one might desire, while a strategy of aggressive self criticism elicits an internal and rather automatic response of defensiveness and tightness, thereby further strengthening the very structures one wishes to alter.
This is a surprisingly radical concept at first, and so is not as easily undertaken as you might imagine it would be.
I had a client recently talk to me about how he is re-claiming an essential aspect of who he is, an aspect that he has been ashamed of, and that he has tried, for many years, to bury, or deny, or cover up with an assumed persona. The shame he has felt regarding this foundational dimension of his personality is in part the result of a rather abusive fundamentalist religious upbringing, the hell fire and brimstone variety, which although he could never truly accept it, still it had a profoundly formative effect on his relationship with himself. He has felt, all of his life, in some inescapable and horrifying way, BAD, or perhaps even evil - the orthodox terminology is, of course, sinful. Hopelessly sinful.
Now that he is in the process of learning to truly appreciate and even love himself - not egotistically, but with a genuine caring and kindness toward himself - he is becoming able to re-view his past, his family, his culture, and to begin to appreciate some of the qualities of this culture that are indeed central to who is really is, while at the same time, he is becoming able to separate out those aspects of his past that have been injurious, and to not, as it were, throw out the baby with the bath water.
Re-integration. Discernment. Healthy psychological and emotional - and, yes, even spiritual - boundaries.
Let's clear up some of the wide spread misunderstanding about what constitutes trauma. For most people, it seems, trauma means war, or personal violence, or a car wreck, or rape, or other heinous treatment of one kind or another. Of course, these are indeed traumatic circumstances. Similar effects derive however from other, more common, more insidious forms of experience as well. Growing up with controlling caregivers, or with addicted caregivers; being neglected in essential ways as a child; being made to feel consistently wrong or bad; being consistently and offensively criticized; being shamed; being ignored or "tolerated". These and other everyday forms of traumatic experience can result in a personality that exhibits many characteristics of the trauma survivor, including chronic feelings of shame or abandonment, anxiety, depression, anger problems, compulsivity or obsessive thinking, low self esteem, confusion, sexual dysfunction, and fears of intimacy.
The traumatic profile can be subtle or it can be dramatically obvious. The effects of trauma can be sudden and acute, or they can be chronic and long established. Identifying trauma is not a matter of making comparisons (oh, that person has gone through so much more than I have), but of being able to recognize the effects in your life of previous experiences, and being able to name what is actually taking place. This then opens the door to a realistic assessment of causal links, and to a more realistic, common sense approach to treatment and to recovery.
On the theme of the proper "client" in couples therapy, let's talk a bit more about
the challenge of finding the dynamic balance of needs, preferences, personality styles priorities and dreams in a healthy committed relationship. Since we have proposed that the proper client is indeed the relationship, and not merely accommodating two individuals, finding this dynamic balance is an ongoing creative process requiring attention, awareness, willingness, commitment and skill, and not, as is sometimes imagined "automatic". In other words, it takes work.
Example: he often feels abandoned, unappreciated, disrespected and dismissed in the marriage, and as a result becomes either withdrawn or angry or both. She has a need for a lot of structure and personal space, and can be quickly reactive and curt when things aren't done the way she imagines that they need to be done. This dance goes on with slight variations, and it is difficult for this couple to catch themselves in the midst of it, in order to see the dynamics as they exist, and negotiate desired changes,
Negotiate. This is a key. Almost everything, we might say, is negotiable, in a fundamentally loving and caring relationship, and it is in these negotiations that the balance we're after will be found. So, in session, he drops down into the most emotionally vulnerable place I've seen him, and cries deeply while talking about his desire to be "held" by her, literally held, rather than experience the distance that he often feels from her. She is receptive, but also somewhat cautious or reserved about her receptivity. As we explore, she shares that she doesn't always want physical contact between them to have to end up in sex, which she says is pretty much what he wants.
I assure them both that the terms of contact can be negotiated so that both parties can be satisfied, and that there can be the win-win outcome that we always ideally seek. This will require enhanced sharing/communication between them, compromise, self awareness, realistic needs assessment and skills for meeting these needs, as well as a developing recognition of which needs can be met within the relationship, and which, perhaps, cannot.
Dr. Marsha Lucas, PhD. has on her website rewireyourbrainforlove.com
a short video on the brain effects and relationship benefits of mindfulness meditation. It's very straightforward, and clearly and simply explains what neuroscience has discovered about the process of creating new brain connections through meditation. Highly recommended.
Seems to me that any thoughtful person would have to be curious about what it is that would allow someone to remain in a relationship when there have been multiple betrayals within that relationship. Why wouldn't that person simply pick up and leave the betrayer behind? Oh, yes, we can assume that there is love in the relationship, on both parts. Yet this clearly isn't enough to either prevent the infidelities, or to create a happy situation. Then, of course, in the aftermath of these betrayals, there is broken trust, and this breach runs in both directions now, since the betrayed party has taken to secretly spying on the betrayer by looking at emails and texts.
So what would allow this situation to continue? Is the betrayed party simply a masochist, addicted to being hurt? Maybe they feel that they don't deserve anything better. Maybe their self esteem is so low that it somehow feels right that they should sustain these injuries, and that they should forgive them repeatedly, rather than taking good emotional and spiritual care of themselves.
In any case, unhappiness abounds, and it becomes clear that something will need to change. How can effective and healthy changes then be made?
