Читать книгу Overcoming Shock - Diane Zimberoff - Страница 12
ОглавлениеSometimes a traumatic event is so intrusive and devastating that the ego experiences it as overwhelming. The threat is greater and the response is to create a more divisive split. As with the previous example of the child trapped alone in the house, this typically happens because options for physically getting to safety are not available, as can occur in war, natural disasters or the situation of adults abusing the children in their care, since children (as dependents) need to keep living with their caretakers. In this sort of instance, the “other” that is created cannot stay connected with the victim’s ego, serving as an ally like the shadow did. It must retreat deeper within, to unconscious levels.
Let’s return to the example of the abused child. As the soul begins to split away from control of some aspect of the ego or personality, that fragment of the personality is forced to align itself with something else to run the show…and it connects with someone “bigger than life” to try creating safety and to meet basic needs. We use the analogy of “running away to the circus” to describe this need. The aspect of the child created in this manner is called a complex and it has a core of the child’s essence, but it also has a much more forceful identity borrowed from circus characters from the “collective unconscious,” a term coined by Carl Jung. The personal unconscious is a gathering of experiences unique to each individual, while the collective unconscious collects and organizes those experiences that are common to all of us. The trauma state associated with this complex is much more autonomous from the ego than any shadow, so when it appears, it explodes into activation—suddenly, unexpectedly and with power. It “possesses” the individual and compels the ego to comply. The ego gives in immediately because the arrangement is intended to insure safety and survival. And for those who developed the complex as children, it’s been in place for as long as they can remember, in most cases.
The archetypal characters at the circus are indeed larger than life and carry the intrigue that has captivated humanity. Importantly, we could say that they’re eager to be “adopted” by a child because then they too can split, allowing part of these great figures to essentially run away from the circus and go home with the child.
At this point, the child has a working relationship with the circus character, but the archetype is more powerful than the child and has a life of its own. The more traumatized the child is—the deeper the split—the more overpowering the circus character, because its power is needed in response to the trauma. In fact, when the trauma reaches a state of shock and effectively severs the child’s soul or essence from running the show, the circus character completely takes over to the point of physiological changes.
Addiction is an example of how the autonomous complex (the part of the psyche that split off) can take control so that we cannot say no to it. Not, at least, until another, healthier adult (an aspect of the individual’s adult ego not severed from the essence or soul) is ready to replace the archetype as protector and companion to the “inner urchin.” We’ll talk more about addiction later in this book.
Ultimately, though, we need to separate the essential or “real” person from the introjects (qualities and beliefs from parents, priests, teachers, abusers, etc.) that one took on and eventually identified with; and in the same way, to separate the individual from the archetype, replacing it with the original essence that was always meant to guide the ego. To accomplish this, we need to return to the circus to find the characters someone identified with and to finally undo the original bargain. However, the circus that was so easy to find when we were children—when we were full of wonder, awe and imagination, and also desperate for protection—may not be so easy to find as an adult. So we use ritual ceremonies, symbols, fairy tales, dreams and intimacy with another human being to find it once more.
The circus characters with whom the trauma victim forms an alliance are really archetypes who can fulfill the victim’s needs that have arisen from the trauma: perhaps a sense of protection to allay existential fear, nurturance to soothe feelings of abandonment or proactivity to calm helplessness. This is why the circus character who is selected depends on the person, the trauma and the circumstance. Here are some examples of characters with whom a child may create this alliance:
THE BARKER
He reaches out with a hearty “Step right up,” calling passersby to come and “play the game.” He makes false promises, feeding the fantasies and hopes of family members. He is generally manipulative and not to be trusted. He knows how to tell “sweet little lies.” He’s the player who only loves you when he’s playing. People often buy what the barker is selling, only to leave the encounter disappointed, if not distraught. He knows that it is the sizzle that sells and, not having much steak to offer, may not pose an insurmountable obstacle to getting what he wants. Once you buy the ticket, he has turned his attention to the next opportunity.
THE FAT WOMAN
The Fat Woman eats and eats and eats some more, using all that fat to protect her from her emptiness within or from unwanted advances from men. She has found a perverse form of control in her life, a way to deny control to those who try to tell her what to do with her body. Perhaps her mother wants her to be thin and delicate like a ballet dancer or perhaps her father wants her to be tantalizing and sexy. She is creating a buffer from the truth, a shock absorber.
Frankie is a very overweight woman who is desperate to find answers for herself. She ran away to the circus and became the fat lady at a very young age. One reason for this is that she perceived her mother to be at the circus and it was the only place they could connect. So they hid together, cooking dinners, baking cookies and cakes and generally being the joyful fat ladies who loved to cook, eat and entertain others through food. Frankie presents herself as joyful, laughing and joking with others, and is a very sociable person in general. However, underneath, as is usually the case for the jovial fat person, we find a very depressed and self-deprecating woman with a lot of skills and talents that she herself does not recognize.
Frankie appears extremely uncomfortable in her own body and candidly will say that she would love to lose the weight but nothing has seemed to work for her.
When we rescued her from the circus so that she could begin to recognize her true feelings, she became aware of just how scared and empty she felt inside. There were so many messages from a very young age about how stupid she was, “Can’t you do anything right?” and “You’ll never amount to anything.” She felt shame and then she went immediately into shock, feeling numb and disconnected. We regressed her back to the source of the shame and she went back to being an infant, left alone in her crib with the bottle having fallen out of her mouth. No one comes; no one cares. There was scene after scene of being alone and hungry, then crying herself into oblivion.
This is a different type of abuse than many people experience. This is the abuse and trauma of severe neglect: a young baby with nobody there to care for her or to address her very simple need to survive. We call this need shock and we will discuss it later on. When basic survival needs are not addressed, the baby will often stop crying and just exist in a state of shock. The baby is quiet and has run away to the circus at this very young age, because staying in the real world is unbearable. This shock defense at such a young age is probably what kept her alive, but later on became a pattern that nearly killed her. And that is the irony of the shock defense. She eats herself into oblivion just to feel alive, in an attempt to meet these basic survival needs for comfort and to quench the overwhelming pain of deep emptiness and hunger within that she’s had since childhood. And now the obesity is killing her! What was a protector has become a saboteur.
THE TATTOOED MAN
He is covered in designs, which are distractions from seeing what is underneath; tattoos make him appear not to be naked. The tattoos are intricate designs, sometimes beautiful or sometimes scary, but always captivating. The tattoos are not really part of this man, although they seem to be. The tattoos are an elaborate, superficial disguise that says, “Go ahead and get lost in the anecdotes and minutiae of what I present to you; you’ll never know the real me, because I’m hiding behind a maze of mirrors.” The tattooed man decorates himself to attract others, and yet at the same time to deflect their attention.
THE MUSCLE MAN
He can guarantee safety because nobody messes with him. He is proud of his power and demonstrates it at every opportunity. In fact, he may tend to belittle others or bully them because it is a way of showing off. He spends an inordinate amount of time training and developing his power as well as trying to impress others with it. He always feels like he is competing with others and wants to be “one up” on everyone, belying an unacknowledged insecurity deep beneath the macho façade.
THE CONTORTIONIST
She can make herself small enough to fit into a tiny space. She is double-jointed, and will bend over backwards to accommodate someone else’s requests or demands. In fact, she bends in ways that most people won’t or can’t. Her strength is the agility to compromise like a chameleon.
THE SWORD SWALLOWER
He willingly takes into himself what is obviously self-injurious. He knows that he can withstand the assault as long as he stifles any natural reflex or reaction, disconnecting from his body in order to use it for performance.
THE MAGICIAN
He is a master of sleight of hand, able to mystify others with his razzle dazzle, diverting attention from his trickery that creates the illusions. He alludes to a connection with higher forces and access to supernatural gifts, but in fact employs cheap gimmicks and tawdry tricks. The magician sometimes falls into the trap of believing his own publicity, forgetting that he is merely mortal and entirely fallible.
THE RINGMASTER
She is in control of everything: all three rings at once. She is a master of multi-tasking and appears capable of managing the chaos all around her with ease. She feels most at home with high drama, dazzling spectacle and a dizzying array of activities. She has learned to manage everyone in her life by selectively calling attention to one or two at a time. She shines a spotlight on the loudest noise, the flashiest act or the most demanding character. And then she redirects the spotlight to the next drama. In this way, she can be the center of attention without actually revealing anything about herself.
THE CLOWN
Clowns are very powerful. Some use gallows humor in order to keep everyone laughing and to distract them from noticing the clown’s deep pain of loneliness or despair. Other clowns are sad and dejected, downtrodden and bullied or sneaky and mischievous. But in each case, the clowning is distraction to cover up a fear of intimacy, which feels too risky without the buffer of clowning around.
THE TRAPEZE ARTIST
She thrives on the thrill of freefall between letting go of one stable and secure home base and attaching to the next. She relies on her excellent sense of timing to avoid the disgrace and danger of falling. And she also must rely on her fellow trapeze artists to catch her when the time comes, and to hang on tight. When she becomes truly accomplished at this feat, she may be tempted to perform without a net in order to add more suspense. She can often be found flying high above the mundane details of most ordinary lives, dazzling other people with her extraordinary adventures. For this reason, she is actually quite dependent on those others to catch her when she falters.
THE TIGHTROPE WALKER
He keeps everyone looking up (away from what is really going on down below), fearing catastrophe but bringing relief when he makes it. He has learned to “walk a tightrope” between disasters on either side, and his movement is intensely constricted. He feels right at home in situations and relationships that demand concentration to navigate, and that allow no deviation from the “straight and narrow.” The balance is precarious, and even the slightest tilt one way or the other would be disastrous. The balancing wires are almost invisible, so everyone believes the fantasy of his death-defying feat.
An example of this character is Ashley, a woman who came to us from a very conservative religious community. Ashley is the mother of three children, two boys and a girl. She was in a very dysfunctional marriage that began early in her life to a man from the church to which her family belongs. Her parents were behind the marriage and as a young woman, she felt she was pushed into this almost “arranged marriage.” As she began to develop in her personal and professional life, she realized that being married to Fred was like having a fourth child. He was emotionally immature, unable to bring home a decent salary, and he floundered around in his life about what he wanted to be when he “grows up.”
Ashley has known for quite some time that she is gay. She had no interest in sex with her husband, or any man for that matter. She has had several encounters with women about which she carries a great deal of shame and guilt, especially living in such a conservative community. She is realizing that she has grown up in shock due to fearing a very violent father and seeing a terrified mother, who herself was in a great deal of shock. The main way that Ashley has come to know herself is through hypnotherapy and Jungian dream work. Her dreams over the years have clearly indicated that she has a deep, dark secret buried beneath the surface, which she does not want to face or even look at.
At an early age, she learned to walk the tightrope between having her deep needs for love and nurturing from a woman met in secret and keeping up the pretense of being devoutly religious in a conservative community. Her affairs with women were usually started by the other woman, so Ashley was able to justify to herself that she didn’t instigate the relationship. She also walked the tightrope, carefully balancing between her desperate need for love and appearing to maintain her image as a married woman, a devoted mother and a consistent churchgoer.
As the years went on, Ashley had a successful psychology practice. Her training, based on self-examination and personal growth, led her to finally release her shame and admit, first to herself and then to others, that she was gay. Next she was able to reveal that her marriage was a sham and that her children had been raised believing in lies; the lies that, as they got older, became more and more clear to them. She could no longer participate in the rigidity and shaming atmosphere of her church and her community. She could no longer keep up the pretense of being a devoted wife to a man she didn’t respect, love or admire. She was married to an immature man and she was tired of taking care of him both physically and emotionally.
Finally, Ashley felt she could no longer keep up the highwire routine. She did have below her, however, the huge safety net of a very supportive professional community, which assisted her in moving to a new environment with like-minded people and gently stepping down from her highwire act.
She gained the courage to speak openly and honestly with her now-teenage children, who actually had watched her development and were not surprised at all that she was gay. Nor were they nearly as judgmental about her life as she had been. Ashley realized, as she peeled away the layers of shock that kept her frozen in self-deceit, that it was the shock that had allowed her to live in a dream world for all those years. It was the shock that kept her frozen in fear, shame and turmoil, and perpetuated the lie that all was well. No longer having to balance on that high wire, Ashley discovered a new zest for life along with increased creativity and the ability to manifest many more of her gifts that had been buried deep below the shame and fear.
THE ESCAPE ARTIST
The Escape Artist can always find a way out of every predicament and flees every entanglement before you know it. He always seems to feel trapped and that he therefore needs to extricate himself. Relationships become threatening or suffocating when the other person wants true intimacy, so it’s time to leave. He doesn’t want to stay too long in any one place or job, because the longer he stays, the more tied down he feels. He is at his best when the challenge is great, so he seeks out people who demand more of him than he is willing to give. That way he gets to do what he enjoys the most and what he is the best at: abandoning others. Actually, he is running away from ever being in the position of being abandoned by someone else.
THE STUNTMAN
He loves being shot out of a cannon because it requires one to be fearless. He is seeking attention and thrills through danger. Live dangerously, seek the thrill of narrow escapes and feel alive by cheating death. Sometimes one can achieve this by getting involved in a sinister or creepy subculture. The more spine-chilling the feats of daring, the more recognition he claims. And underneath the bravado, he has a numbing disregard for his own value and worth.
THE MONKEY/ORGAN GRINDER
The organ grinder plays his organ while a cute monkey sits on top, holding out a cup to take money. The monkey has a leash around its neck and is dressed up in cute little outfits to attract the children. The monkey looks appealing but is actually a captive and is being used as a ruse by the Organ Grinder.
Frances has recently had a series of physical problems. These directly followed some deep work she did to begin to take her life back from her very dominating mother who uses the church and church rules to control her and the entire family. Just as the monkey is the captive of the organ grinder and the organ grinder is captive to the circus, Frances ran away to the circus at a very young age to become a captive of her mother and the church. At the age of forty, Frances still lives with her mother, has never been married and described herself as feeling strangled, unable to move or breathe. After bringing all these deeply buried feelings to the surface, Frances ended up in the hospital with pneumonia for quite some time.
After she recovered and was about to continue to unravel the deeply repressed relationship between herself, her mother and the church, Frances slipped and fell on some ice, breaking a few bones, and again found herself in the hospital, unable to move or take back her power. She knew on a deep level that this was her internal small child, still afraid of confronting her mother. But Frances was determined to salvage her life and take it back from her mother and the church. She had a powerful dream where she saw a small child, trapped in a freezer, and then she saw herself as a small child with a dog collar around her neck. She knew these were powerful symbols of her life. Through the power of psychodrama done in a trance state, she was able to uncover the full meaning of the dream symbols.
Using the dream symbol of being trapped in the freezer, Frances regressed to age four where she had polio and was in an iron lung. They told her she could not move and tied her down so that she couldn’t even if she wanted to. She was clearly in a deep state of shock, exemplified by the symbol of being in a freezer in her dream. She was terrified as no one explained to her what was happening and no one was allowed to touch her. She felt abandoned, terrified and confused. Her mother was not there and the nurses were very mean. The conclusion she made about herself was, “Something is very wrong with me,” and the decision was, “I’ll have to figure it out myself.”
Then she was regressed again and went back to the cold, judgmental womb of her mother. She sensed that her mother was unprepared for another baby and would have had an abortion if it weren’t for the church rules. Her father was also very unhappy, feeling that they certainly could not afford another baby. She was very underdeveloped at birth, due to lack of proper nourishment from her mother, and was placed in an incubator. She began to get the symbolism of the freezer from her dream on an even deeper level. The empty womb of her mother and the incubator were both places she felt trapped and were both devoid of warmth, nurturing or any type of support that a baby needs. Her need shock was severe and so she became desperate to please her mother and the church, because these seemed to be her only chance at human contact.
Another image came to her as she became older and that was that she was a monkey with a collar around her neck, performing for her mother and the church. She realized that she had been in shock her whole life, at least since the incubator, and that her mother led her around by the “monkey collar” with rules and regulations and fear of God’s punishment all her life. Just a few of the rules were “Go to church every day, don’t think for yourself, don’t speak unless spoken to, your ideas are stupid, I know what’s best for you,” etc. In her psychodrama, she was the monkey being pulled by the collar.
But Frances began to pull off the collar to take her agency back. She said, “Your rules are choking me and I’m going to think for myself. I am going to make my own decisions and I can make my own decisions!” She became stronger and more powerful as she took her power back from her mother and the church. She knew it was her experience with pneumonia that brought her to awareness of how she was feeling suffocated. She felt thankful for the experience of being trapped in the hospital, which brought back the memories of the iron lung and incubator which kept her in shock much of her life. She reclaimed her power, her voice and her ability to think and make decisions for herself. This was a powerful session where the client, through a series of adverse experiences, was able to see her life more clearly and heal the deep patterns of shock that had trapped her for so long.
THE LION TAMER
Her job is to domesticate the wild ones, even at great personal risk. This can be a legitimate strategy for dealing with abusive caregivers: do whatever it takes to calm them when they begin getting agitated, anticipate their needs and provide them before the demands become abusive. Or perhaps crack the whip and try to overpower the wild one. The methods vary, but the lion tamer is always vigilantly aware of her lion’s mood, hunger level and readiness for violence. Taming the lion is a great challenge and is never completely accomplished, but rather must be re-established in every encounter. And any self-respecting lion tamer will show off her prowess by placing her head in the lion’s mouth; she knows that her success and reputation depend on demonstrating just how dangerous the wild one that she is taming is. So she has a perverse vested interest in keeping her lion wild.
THE JUGGLER
He is able to amaze everyone by keeping multiple balls in the air or plates spinning, attending to each one only enough to avoid it crashing to the ground. He challenges himself right to the limit of what anyone thinks is possible to balance, and as soon as he masters that challenge he adds another ball or another plate. More is always better. It requires focused attention, keeping his conscious awareness narrowed down to the immediate task at hand. There is always another task just at the point of crashing, demanding attention. It is never-ending and soon becomes exhausting.
THE ROUSTABOUTS AND THE CARNIES
These are unsavory characters who do the grunt work. They are the only truly essential ones in the fantasy because they hold it all together. They build the fantasy, day in and day out, providing the structure for the illusion. They are hard workers…but only until payday. In other words, until they get their short-term desires met. Then it may be time to go out and “celebrate.” They can’t understand why anyone feels betrayed when they do, because that was the only motivation for doing the hard work in the first place. The irony is that everyone needs to depend on them for the existence of the structure and yet they are truly undependable.
THE BUSINESS MANAGER
The Business Manager is busy in his separate office, counting the money and disconnected from the goings-on all around him. His only connection with the others in the circus family is to pay them off. He has a vital role, but manages to accomplish it while remaining detached. The office is an effective place to hide from involvement with others and to receive social rewards for doing so. He can hold himself as superior to the Ringmaster, above the high drama and dazzling spectacle, while capable of just as much multitasking.
