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Basic Training

A human being is born already having a wealth of knowledge about the world, just like a wasp which doesn’t need a university degree to build its nest. The information on how to live is written in our bodies and accessed as soon as we need it. Plato said that while studying we merely recall things rather than learning something new. However, even if we have the biggest of experiences, there will be things we won’t be able to recall… Life is always changing, and there will be situations that we haven’t experienced before.

I like the Italian word “aggiornamento”, which is connected to “giorno” (a day); it means updating knowledge and making it closer to the current situation. We can also refer to it as the refinement of knowledge. The goal of such basic training is to get to know how to interpret the contemporary world. The values transmitted by our families and schools provide us with behaviour strategies for modern situations, which we may face without having any information about them in our genetics. Culture makes an update to nature, and the level of our competence rises.

Even with a good upbringing, every person and every generation has to acquire some life experience on his or her own, without parents or teachers by their side. If the intellect accompanied by the cultural resource doesn’t manage to deal with some situation, it can result in adaptive stress or even a trauma. A trauma is followed by an engagement of the primitive strategies of survival, written in our genes “just in case”.

It’s cool to be at school

Even the situations we don’t consider extreme can potentially be stressful: the first time in a nursery, the first day of primary school, having a brother or a sister and other similar events which are quite natural.

Going to school is presented to children as something joyful but trying to get along with rough children and dealing with a strict teacher can cause dramatic emotions for a sensitive child. Having a newborn brings happiness to the family. Yet when the attention of the parents shifts from the older child to the baby, the older child may be in a situation that can bring about a mixture of positive feelings and those emotions that can be hard to bear.

The list of such potentially stressful situations also includes tension in the family, moving to a new place, going to a new class at school, etc.

In life a person faces many experiences: changes in the body during adolescence, passing entrance examinations for college, looking for a job, getting married, having children, climbing the career ladder at the office, overcoming the death of loved ones, resolving social tempests, learning how to take care of his or her health, losing a job, entering retirement. All these events are natural parts of our life, but every single one of them requires adaptation. In many cases this adaptation is obtained through strain and can even lead to a feeling of defeat.

The problem is that the consequences of what we have been through leave their print on our psychosomatic profile.

Time of change

A constructive drawing of a person, a simple test, can prove this. Draw an image of a person using rectangles, round-shaped elements and triangles. There should be 10 elements in the drawing. Now specify the age of the character.

It is most likely that the age of the character will point back to some crucial moment in your life. Body proportions in the drawing that are unusually bigger and wider than the rest of the body can indicate areas of strain. Other parts of the body, which are often the limbs, are designated by triangles, which means they are in state of “desolation”. We’ll turn back to this test further on in this book. It is also described in detail in my book Geometry of Emotion (A. Ermoshin, 2008).

The situations described are connected mostly with adaptive stress. Yet as we have mentioned before, some cases do not only cause strain but significantly alter the state of health of a person. They catch the person off-guard and are so hard to embrace that they end up causing trauma.

It’s hard to go through it without getting wounded

It is hard to find a person who hasn’t experienced disloyalty of friends, disappointment in people who seemed to be ideal or aggression from other people for no reason at all…

Life isn’t all a bed of roses, says the proverb.

However, even the situations which are not so dramatic from the point of view of an adult could be traumatizing. For example, when entering an elevator, a person expects to go out at a certain floor in a minute or two. But all of a sudden, this device designed to save people’s energy, stops, and the light goes off. This is just a temporary stop. Somebody will certainly come to help, because people need the elevators and their functionality is monitored. It is enough just to press the emergency button if the person wants the help come sooner. Alternatively, the person could knock loudly on the doors to get somebody’s attention. Also usually it’s possible to use a mobile phone which almost everyone has in his or her pocket, or the person could just have a rest, think about things or even meditate. Is there any difference between a person at home and the same person inside an elevator? Usually there isn’t. All the power stays with this person, all the inner self-regulation mechanisms, which have been forming for thousands of years, work the same way!

This is how an adult, a self-assured person understands the situation. Yet a boy or a girl could imagine that he or she would never go out of this unfortunate elevator or see his or her parents ever again…

That isn’t true, of course, and soon everything will be fine but because of this loss of self-confidence, even if it’s just for a moment, a child’s mind might “catch” this fright, and it “settles down” somewhere inside and begins to control the state of mind even after the child gets out of the elevator. (This is exactly what happened to my patient Julia; you will read her story later in this book). The fright generates the fear. Even the thought of the unpleasant experience.

Enthusiasm of a bouncy dog brings no joy

Psychological traumas can be caused by the situations when a person encounters circumstances which are threatening for their life or for their honour and dignity, and which he or she is not ready to face. A large dog decided to play with a three-year-old girl, kicked her down and tore her dress. How will she react? Would she be able to sympathize with the dog’s enthusiasm and feel the joy of life? It is unlikely, as she definitely doesn’t have enough self-confidence. Instead, she feels afraid.

A person who has enough “resources” reacts differently. Serge has just got out of a suburban train and suddenly he gets gripped by the neck from behind by a large man from a crowd of drunken friends. It’s a do-or-die situation. These guys have been recently discharged from the army, there’s no way he can beat them. Serge tries to loosen the grip a bit and asks the aggressor: “Wanna become friends?” – “Yeah!” answers the bully suddenly. The bully then loosens the grip, they get acquainted and in a minute the jolly crowd decides to walk Serge home so that nobody could bother him. The shocking gesture of the bully masked a clumsy attempt to make friends. Serge helped him to understand this and was rewarded for it.

There is a bright feeling of assertion growing in Serge’s body from his capacity to answer life’s challenges. And in the girl’s mind there is a dark strain.

The goals of this book include presenting a solution for such tension resulting from a trauma. We will begin with fears, as this kind of problem is particularly frequent. All of my observations are based on a large medical practice and are verified by the work done with a number of patients.