Читать книгу Overcoming Shock - Diane Zimberoff - Страница 14
ОглавлениеWe have been using metaphors of running away to the circus and the witness protection program to describe children’s responses to trauma. In more clinical terms, the child’s ego splits when encountering an intolerable threat to safety. This splitting defense serves a twofold purpose: one, to fragment a painful experience, rendering it less unbearable by a process of dissociation and compartmentalization and two, to attempt repair, constructing a new and less distressing narrative which renders trauma less threatening to one’s personal sense of worth and identity.
According to Donald Kalsched, an expert in Jungian psychology, trauma can be defined as what happens when a negative experience cannot be dealt with through normal psychic defenses.1 Then a second line of defenses comes into play, defenses that are invincible and archetypal (in the sense that they are not personally elaborated and cannot be personally controlled). And the defense against the psychic presence of abuse must be at least as big, absolute, and divine as the forces behind the abuse itself.2 The child’s immature ego exists on the “magical level” (advanced by developmental psychologist Jean Piaget) or “mythological level” (developed by Erich Neumann, a psychologist and student of Carl Jung) of consciousness, and any parent of a small child is familiar with the unconscious fantasies that structure all of his or her experience.3 Here live the great bigger-than-life beings of the archetypal psyche and they can personify as either angels or demons, protectors or persecutors.
Kalsched highlights the vital protective role that dissociative defenses play when a person is threatened with intolerable trauma, psychic pain or anxiety which is severe enough to bring about psychic disintegration, or “the destruction of the personal spirit.” He suggests that trauma produces a fragmentation of consciousness in which one part of the personality regresses to an infantile state and another part progresses to a false and omnipotent adaptation to the outside world. A child’s psyche has to pay a huge price for this kind of archetypal defense, in that once the trauma defense is organized, all relations with the outside world are screened by this shield. What was intended to be a defense against further trauma becomes a major resistance to all unguarded, spontaneous expressions of self in the world. The person survives but cannot live creatively, continues to live but lives falsely, terrified of a future breakdown that has already been experienced but cannot be remembered. This is very common in people who have been diagnosed by our mental health system as Borderline Personality Disorder and Dissociative Identity Disorder. We believe that these are not actually disorders but rather creative survival defenses against intolerable, ongoing, abusive family situations.
Defenses are not only avoidance mechanisms, but also active constructions in the form of narratives, created in imagination and fantasy to support a positive sense of identity and personal worth when these are threatened by cruelty, hostility or indifference (emotional neglect) from those whom we love and on whom we are most completely dependent. To feel that one is of no value, unlovable or the object of hatred is unbearable. Trauma of this kind results in the defensive construction of imaginative narratives, which render the child’s experience of it more bearable and less threatening to the child’s very identity. Kalsched recognizes that “the inner sanctuary to which the beleaguered ego repairs in time of crisis is also a world that opens onto transpersonal energies.”4
Jodi’s Story
Jodi is the head social worker in a major psychiatric treatment facility. When you meet her, you’re immediately impressed with her professionalism, competence and extensive ability to manage her staff. She also is perfectly groomed and wears beautifully styled clothing from the very best boutiques.
When we first began doing hypnosis with her, it was mostly to help her manage the stress of a challenging profession and marriage. After many individual sessions, though, we felt that it would help her to be in a group in order to break through some of the defenses that kept her trapped behind her façade of perfectionism. Her first assignment was to come to group without make-up—without her mask. It was stressful for her to even imagine being seen in public like this.
As we continued to work with her, we grew to understand the profound extent of what that mask was covering up. In the end, it took years of deep clinical hypnotherapy before Jodi was able to open up to her own truth. Jodi grew up in a devoutly religious family from an authoritarian, Eastern European background. Her father was the head of the household and his mother—Jodi’s grandmother—lived with them to help raise the children and to protect their strict family tradition. So it’s no wonder that Jodi and her sisters grew up as high achievers, always looking perfect to the outside world in a compulsive attempt to bring accolades to this immigrant family, which was trying desperately to assimilate into the American way of life.
During her therapy, it was revealed that Jodi’s past was filled with addictive behaviors, which we saw as a way to continue numbing the pain she carried underneath her fancy façade. Jodi had used food and alcohol as far back as she could remember to numb the hurt which, along with fear and anger, consisted of deep layers of shame. In group, Jodi would always speak highly of her father, discussing at great length his many outstanding attributes and how much she loved him. When her father died, Jodi was devastated and spent months grieving his loss. Soon after, however, it started becoming clear that her beloved father had been sexually molesting her all during her childhood. In fact, her father had a very destructive, angry, erratic side to his personality that the whole family feared. When this facet of explosiveness came out, the mother or grandmother would send little Jodi upstairs to “quiet him down.”
As we worked together, Jodi slowly began to let herself know what her role was in this devastating family process. It became apparent that her role was as her father’s little mistress. Through the Jungian hypnotherapeutic approach, we saw how Jodi “ran away to the circus” and adopted several different personalities in order to survive. She had to find circus characters more powerful than her in order to deal with her abusive father. She became the tightrope walker in a childhood attempt to continue this delicate balancing act that had been assigned to her. Jodi also used the personas of the clown, to keep everyone laughing, the lion tamer, to keep her rageful father from hurting other family members, and the fat lady, in an unconscious attempt to perhaps repulse her father into stopping the sexual abuse. As she grew older, Jodi became the powerful ringmaster, always making sure that in one ring the family secret was being kept while in the next ring she was managing her father’s sexual appetite and keeping him from attacking others. In the third ring, Jodi was going to school and getting good grades while also managing the family image in the community and at church. In order to be less internally conflicted about all these different roles, Jodi artfully dissociated or split off from these parts of herself.
Dissociation is a natural process that occurs when children (or adults such as war veterans) are placed in untenable, painful situations for which there is no other solution. Like the millions of children who are abused, Jodi could not literally run away from home, so she ran away to the circus she had created in her mind.
