Personal Development
Coming to terms - Part 7 - dealing with toxic emotions
25/09/08 10:22 Filed in: Psychology | Child Abuse
I’m going to say only a little about the toxic emotions that are a legacy of child abuse here. I have no need or wish to revisit, remember or re-experience them now. I have moved beyond that a while ago, thankfully.
There was another step that for me, and I suspect for others too, that was critical in the process of recovery. I have alluded to it briefly here in passing but that’s all. I never recovered fully as a result of the process of recalling and allowing myself to feel the toxic emotions I had inside me. I needed to feel these emotions in order to understand and release them. There was another step for me beyond confrontation too, that as I will explain later was right for me, but it is not right for everybody since sometimes confrontation can present appalling and unacceptable personal risks. The final step was to forgive my father the abuse he committed against me. Only after I had moved through forgiveness was I finally free. It was forgiveness that finally relieved the burden of suffering I carried within me.
It wasn’t such a very neat parcel. I must say that too. Some of the legacy of abuse persisted in how I lived my daily life. There was a part of me, which wanted to see continuity in my life, which chose to build upon an existence founded in dysfunction. I should have made greater and more fundamental changes especially in my working life. I know that now. I made a mistake at the time.
Anger: I had a real difficulty in expressing anger. First, I had associated it with my father’s aggressive abuse, and second as an abused child it was never safe to express anger. Anger was connected to the things that hurt me too.
Suppressed anger is dangerous. Many survivors turn their anger inwards. Introjected anger may become depression, anxiety and self-loathing. Others may express it in inappropriate aggressive behaviour or withdrawal from social or personal relationships.
One of the great lessons in recovery is the release of anger, to do it safely and to direct it at where it belongs, to the perpetrators of abuse. Anger can be expressed safely and need not be overwhelming. We can turn it on and turn it off. We can also learn to control anger and express it appropriately.
All adults have feelings that are rooted in childhood development. Those left over from abuse may be very powerful, and sometimes destructive.
Fear and anger are both very natural responses to the threat or act of violence. Anxiety is related to fear and comes from not knowing what to expect within the family.
Shame and guilt are terrible demons and coming to terms with these may present the adult survivor with real problems, however, their presence should tell you that you still hold yourself responsible for the abuse in some way. You are not responsible, and you were a powerless, innocent child. Put these feelings back where they belong and that is with the abuser and not with you.
Adult survivors internalise shame when they identify with or idealise parents who abuse them, abandon them and fail to confirm or value them as people. Shame becomes part of a package of self-blame, self-destructive thoughts and self-sabotaging behaviours. During the childhood years this bundle of negative feelings evolves into a major part of the survivor's sense of self.
There may be other feelings of alienation and hopelessness that may result from too many disappointments or a sense that you are resigned to life and have lost any belief in its ability to be better. These feelings will always tell you something about yourself, do not try and ignore them; only when you have heard their message will they go away.
I don’t believe there are any shortcuts here. If you don’t reconnect with these feelings and see them for what they are, they will continue to haunt your adult life.
Whatever anyone says, I don’t believe you can skip this step either. I, and others survivors I have known, have used a number of harmful mechanisms to “numb out” these feelings when they get too strong. Some adopt a workaholic lifestyle in order to block out the feelings. Others try to “self-medicate” and anaesthetise their pain and strong emotions by using drink and drugs. Stifling anger and rage may simply mean that the victim expresses it as aggressive, anti-social and abusive behaviour.
I’m going to make a recommendation here. I don’t often do that. It’s about therapy. There are therapies and therapists I have known where they encourage their clients to engage in endless reflection. They don’t work! You get mired up in all that pain and it’s the therapist’s job to facilitate your finding a way out. But I’ll make one positive recommendation and that is that an appropriately qualified therapist can be of immense help. Dealing with all these feelings can be very confusing. Often they arise in an untidy and messy way. Often it is difficult to work out where they come from, what they mean and what belongs to where.
So here it is, I would recommend cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) provided by an appropriately qualified therapist who has an understanding and knowledge of child abuse. I like CBT and find it immensely helpful. CBT maintains that the meanings that one attaches to one’s emotions, no matter how incongruous they might be, are within common sense and are accessible to one’s own cognition and understanding. I agree.
Very simply described, CBT is about discovering emotions, understanding them, their meanings and their context, and discovering where or to what they belong. It acknowledges that emotions and the meanings we attach to them may be sensible or not. It is also non-judgemental.
As the man who developed CBT, Aaron Beck, wrote, “(For the cognitive behavioural therapist)… eliciting a person’s cognitions (meanings) becomes important when we attempt to understand their relationship with incongruous emotional reactions. It is about discovering an individual’s emotions based on that person’s peculiar appraisal of an event or experience.”
What is great about CBT, in my view, is that it is entirely focused on healthy and constructive outcomes, on recovery, and that its administration usually covers relatively short treatment courses and time-scales.
Please note: Psychotherapy and psychotherapists are a matter of personal choice and selection. Should you be in or be considering psychotherapy it is best that you find the therapy most appropriate to your needs and personal situation. The views here represent only the opinions of the author.
There was another step that for me, and I suspect for others too, that was critical in the process of recovery. I have alluded to it briefly here in passing but that’s all. I never recovered fully as a result of the process of recalling and allowing myself to feel the toxic emotions I had inside me. I needed to feel these emotions in order to understand and release them. There was another step for me beyond confrontation too, that as I will explain later was right for me, but it is not right for everybody since sometimes confrontation can present appalling and unacceptable personal risks. The final step was to forgive my father the abuse he committed against me. Only after I had moved through forgiveness was I finally free. It was forgiveness that finally relieved the burden of suffering I carried within me.
It wasn’t such a very neat parcel. I must say that too. Some of the legacy of abuse persisted in how I lived my daily life. There was a part of me, which wanted to see continuity in my life, which chose to build upon an existence founded in dysfunction. I should have made greater and more fundamental changes especially in my working life. I know that now. I made a mistake at the time.
Anger: I had a real difficulty in expressing anger. First, I had associated it with my father’s aggressive abuse, and second as an abused child it was never safe to express anger. Anger was connected to the things that hurt me too.
Suppressed anger is dangerous. Many survivors turn their anger inwards. Introjected anger may become depression, anxiety and self-loathing. Others may express it in inappropriate aggressive behaviour or withdrawal from social or personal relationships.
One of the great lessons in recovery is the release of anger, to do it safely and to direct it at where it belongs, to the perpetrators of abuse. Anger can be expressed safely and need not be overwhelming. We can turn it on and turn it off. We can also learn to control anger and express it appropriately.
All adults have feelings that are rooted in childhood development. Those left over from abuse may be very powerful, and sometimes destructive.
Fear and anger are both very natural responses to the threat or act of violence. Anxiety is related to fear and comes from not knowing what to expect within the family.
Shame and guilt are terrible demons and coming to terms with these may present the adult survivor with real problems, however, their presence should tell you that you still hold yourself responsible for the abuse in some way. You are not responsible, and you were a powerless, innocent child. Put these feelings back where they belong and that is with the abuser and not with you.
Adult survivors internalise shame when they identify with or idealise parents who abuse them, abandon them and fail to confirm or value them as people. Shame becomes part of a package of self-blame, self-destructive thoughts and self-sabotaging behaviours. During the childhood years this bundle of negative feelings evolves into a major part of the survivor's sense of self.
There may be other feelings of alienation and hopelessness that may result from too many disappointments or a sense that you are resigned to life and have lost any belief in its ability to be better. These feelings will always tell you something about yourself, do not try and ignore them; only when you have heard their message will they go away.
I don’t believe there are any shortcuts here. If you don’t reconnect with these feelings and see them for what they are, they will continue to haunt your adult life.
Whatever anyone says, I don’t believe you can skip this step either. I, and others survivors I have known, have used a number of harmful mechanisms to “numb out” these feelings when they get too strong. Some adopt a workaholic lifestyle in order to block out the feelings. Others try to “self-medicate” and anaesthetise their pain and strong emotions by using drink and drugs. Stifling anger and rage may simply mean that the victim expresses it as aggressive, anti-social and abusive behaviour.
I’m going to make a recommendation here. I don’t often do that. It’s about therapy. There are therapies and therapists I have known where they encourage their clients to engage in endless reflection. They don’t work! You get mired up in all that pain and it’s the therapist’s job to facilitate your finding a way out. But I’ll make one positive recommendation and that is that an appropriately qualified therapist can be of immense help. Dealing with all these feelings can be very confusing. Often they arise in an untidy and messy way. Often it is difficult to work out where they come from, what they mean and what belongs to where.
So here it is, I would recommend cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) provided by an appropriately qualified therapist who has an understanding and knowledge of child abuse. I like CBT and find it immensely helpful. CBT maintains that the meanings that one attaches to one’s emotions, no matter how incongruous they might be, are within common sense and are accessible to one’s own cognition and understanding. I agree.
Very simply described, CBT is about discovering emotions, understanding them, their meanings and their context, and discovering where or to what they belong. It acknowledges that emotions and the meanings we attach to them may be sensible or not. It is also non-judgemental.
As the man who developed CBT, Aaron Beck, wrote, “(For the cognitive behavioural therapist)… eliciting a person’s cognitions (meanings) becomes important when we attempt to understand their relationship with incongruous emotional reactions. It is about discovering an individual’s emotions based on that person’s peculiar appraisal of an event or experience.”
What is great about CBT, in my view, is that it is entirely focused on healthy and constructive outcomes, on recovery, and that its administration usually covers relatively short treatment courses and time-scales.
Please note: Psychotherapy and psychotherapists are a matter of personal choice and selection. Should you be in or be considering psychotherapy it is best that you find the therapy most appropriate to your needs and personal situation. The views here represent only the opinions of the author.
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Coming to terms - Part 6 - a personal episode
23/09/08 17:54 Filed in: Psychology | Child Abuse
I was a bright child. I loved books.
My first memory of paternal difficulty was about books.
I loved those young boy’s classics from way before I was born, Just William and Jennings and Darbyshire, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn too. I was younger than eight years old, perhaps five or six when I started reading those. We lived in a two-up, two-down house in a run-down “slum-clearance” area of London. Often I found my emotional life in books. My home life had never been rich in affection, although my Gran lived downstairs and she may have been one of the first adults to give me the love and affection I never knew at home…upstairs, as was.
One night I had been reading happily. I read fast. That particular night, I had been reading one of those “William” books borrowed from the library to which a kind-hearted neighbour took me. I was devouring this book. Maybe I’d read eighty or a hundred pages that night. My father came to turn off the light. He quizzed me about what I had been reading. Proudly I told him. He questioned what I had read in disbelief. It’s when the trouble started. He snatched the book from me and whipped through pages asking me questions. I answered each one. I had read the book after all and I was enjoying it. He refused to believe my reading speed. I was puzzled. "I was only reading, Dad." As I answered more and more of his questions, he became more and more angry. He threw down the book on my bed and struck me hard across the head before casting the room into darkness.
My father felt ambivalence about my brightness. It was his trophy but he was also jealous. I didn’t understand his jealousy then, not till much later. By the time, I was eight, I was like a performing seal jumping ever and ever higher into the air to catch the fish that would win his love and praise. Some said I was a “gifted child”. All I knew was that I got stuffed in rooms doing numerous things like IQ tests and calculus when I would have rather been climbing trees and playing football. I longed to be a “normal boy” from a “normal home” with a “normal family”.
The hoops of achievement were set higher and higher. I managed to jump through most of them. When I didn’t, I was beaten, humiliated and tortured. My father was tough. He was a real man! He had been a member of the royal marines. He knew about killing. He had fought at the siege of Crete, fought against Hitler’s crack parachute squadrons. He had sat in a hole for days shooting men coming from the sky. Some time during my recovery when I was talking to my mother, she had said, “It was there he killed his first man…many men. From then on, I knew he was marked as a man forever.” He escaped from Crete. Many British soldiers died there. I have sat alone in their graveyard at Souda Bay reflecting on his life.
I got royal marine training too, aged four. My father held me below water until I inhaled it, choking, suffocating, wanting to vomit and feeling terrified. At age 13, before I was “rescued” from home, I lost my best school friend in a drowning accident at a school swimming class. I blamed myself for that too. Is it any wonder that to this day I am hydrophobic? I still am and I would love to swim. Maybe one day…
Sometimes doing something exceptional at school won his praise. I won a national essay-writing prize for a story about the feelings of a boy stranded in a cave cut off by the rising tide of the sea. The adult judges didn’t realise I was writing about me.
My childhood experience equated achievement with love but also with pain. In adulthood I continued the same habit, all on my own. But I never did it for myself. In my heart, I did it for him in a strange sort of way. I set the hoops of achievement ever higher, never taking any credit or reward for what I did. After all I didn’t feel I deserved anything, only shame and guilt. By the end of my twenties, I was doing pioneering in computing. I even sat in the think tank where the first PC was conceived.
In my quest for love, I did the “first of that” and the “biggest of this” in world technology terms. I always pulled it off at great personal cost. My insides were empty. They were so full of pain and grief. I never took proper rewards either. I never felt I deserved them. I was an empty hollow shell. It hurt like hell. It never got any better. I was left with nothing. I told myself it was my fault.
My first memory of paternal difficulty was about books.
I loved those young boy’s classics from way before I was born, Just William and Jennings and Darbyshire, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn too. I was younger than eight years old, perhaps five or six when I started reading those. We lived in a two-up, two-down house in a run-down “slum-clearance” area of London. Often I found my emotional life in books. My home life had never been rich in affection, although my Gran lived downstairs and she may have been one of the first adults to give me the love and affection I never knew at home…upstairs, as was.
One night I had been reading happily. I read fast. That particular night, I had been reading one of those “William” books borrowed from the library to which a kind-hearted neighbour took me. I was devouring this book. Maybe I’d read eighty or a hundred pages that night. My father came to turn off the light. He quizzed me about what I had been reading. Proudly I told him. He questioned what I had read in disbelief. It’s when the trouble started. He snatched the book from me and whipped through pages asking me questions. I answered each one. I had read the book after all and I was enjoying it. He refused to believe my reading speed. I was puzzled. "I was only reading, Dad." As I answered more and more of his questions, he became more and more angry. He threw down the book on my bed and struck me hard across the head before casting the room into darkness.
My father felt ambivalence about my brightness. It was his trophy but he was also jealous. I didn’t understand his jealousy then, not till much later. By the time, I was eight, I was like a performing seal jumping ever and ever higher into the air to catch the fish that would win his love and praise. Some said I was a “gifted child”. All I knew was that I got stuffed in rooms doing numerous things like IQ tests and calculus when I would have rather been climbing trees and playing football. I longed to be a “normal boy” from a “normal home” with a “normal family”.
The hoops of achievement were set higher and higher. I managed to jump through most of them. When I didn’t, I was beaten, humiliated and tortured. My father was tough. He was a real man! He had been a member of the royal marines. He knew about killing. He had fought at the siege of Crete, fought against Hitler’s crack parachute squadrons. He had sat in a hole for days shooting men coming from the sky. Some time during my recovery when I was talking to my mother, she had said, “It was there he killed his first man…many men. From then on, I knew he was marked as a man forever.” He escaped from Crete. Many British soldiers died there. I have sat alone in their graveyard at Souda Bay reflecting on his life.
I got royal marine training too, aged four. My father held me below water until I inhaled it, choking, suffocating, wanting to vomit and feeling terrified. At age 13, before I was “rescued” from home, I lost my best school friend in a drowning accident at a school swimming class. I blamed myself for that too. Is it any wonder that to this day I am hydrophobic? I still am and I would love to swim. Maybe one day…
Sometimes doing something exceptional at school won his praise. I won a national essay-writing prize for a story about the feelings of a boy stranded in a cave cut off by the rising tide of the sea. The adult judges didn’t realise I was writing about me.
My childhood experience equated achievement with love but also with pain. In adulthood I continued the same habit, all on my own. But I never did it for myself. In my heart, I did it for him in a strange sort of way. I set the hoops of achievement ever higher, never taking any credit or reward for what I did. After all I didn’t feel I deserved anything, only shame and guilt. By the end of my twenties, I was doing pioneering in computing. I even sat in the think tank where the first PC was conceived.
In my quest for love, I did the “first of that” and the “biggest of this” in world technology terms. I always pulled it off at great personal cost. My insides were empty. They were so full of pain and grief. I never took proper rewards either. I never felt I deserved them. I was an empty hollow shell. It hurt like hell. It never got any better. I was left with nothing. I told myself it was my fault.
Coming to terms - Part 5 - recognition and remembering
23/09/08 10:42 Filed in: Psychology | Child Abuse
I talked about remembering abuse; the word "remembering" may be misleading. I had never forgotten what had happened to me but I had made my memories safe. They were like a set of dissociated, abstract events that I had disconnected from my feeling self.
Psychology textbooks often write about “remembering” and “re-experiencing” abuse. I am not sure about the “re-experiencing” word either. What I did was to allow my past emotions to gain their expression in my conscious self and re-connect with my sensory (how my body felt) and behavioural reactions (how I responded to abuse) at the time. It was painful and often confusing. Both the pain and the confusion passed. I did not wish to get mired down in it. In hindsight, I have seen others who use partial recollection as a form of self-destructive behaviour. What looks like an effort to come to terms with abuse has become a masochistic, self-punishing engagement with it. I suspect, and this is very hard for me to say, that they feel their engagement with abuse or emotional neglect gives their life meaning without which they might feel lost. These poor souls may be so mired down in the pain that they are unable to see beyond it. Perhaps because they have become so accustomed to living the pain in their daily lives, they fear what they might feel is an emotional void beyond it.
I have touched on aspects of pain here in earlier posts. I have no need or desire to go back and recount the circumstances in which that pain arose. Pain hurts and I needed to move beyond it. This first part of recovery, the re-engagement with the emotional and physical suffering of abuse carried with it so much pain, but there was not a void beyond it. What I felt was a personal liberation; a liberation into conscious realisation, emotional potential and a reconnection to my own humanity as an entire person.
An abuser will generally try and attach blame to the victim in the abuse. They will say they are inflicting pain because you are bad, unworthy of their love, abnormal, stupid, corrupted by the devil, a freak, a pervert, someone who should not mix with others. The intensity of these assertions increases as the abuse increases. The abuser frequently maintains that his or her acts of violence are a punishment for the manifestation of the child’s behaviour or even its existence (“My life was a whole lot better until you came along. You have taken everything from me. You don’t deserve a life!” ) These abusive behaviours are cruel and insistent. The abuser may demand that the child sanctions their being deserving of punishment. Like in sexual abuse, he may say, “You’re a filthy, disgusting little pervert. You don’t deserve my love. What are you?” I heard that one often enough in bouts of ritual humiliation.
All of these assertions and justifications of the cruelty of abuse erode the child’s identity and its positive sense of self. They undermine its ability to grow into a whole, integrated, loving adult. Worse still is the inversion of the abuser’s destructive assertions into the victim’s self-beliefs. The victim, who is dependent on the parent for its survival, comes to believe that is they who are responsible for the abuse that has been inflicted upon them. The child will frequently believe that what they have experienced is simply a normal part of growing up. They will believe that whatever happened to them, they deserved.
Recognising abuse for the child is impossible. Children (generally) do not have the emotional and intellectual capacity to understand what is happening to them. For the abused child this inability to understand is further compounded since the abuse itself will frequently arrest, disrupt or disturb their normal emotional development.
I lived with high degrees of fear in my childhood. I can remember the dread I felt about going on a family holiday when I was eight or nine years old. My fear was such that I could barely eat and frequently I shit my pants. This was no holiday. It was one or two weeks open exposure to terror and humiliation. My incontinence stopped as soon as the holiday ended. My father’s working days were the best for me. Spending two weeks with him was a horror.
Why I mention fear is that is that fear is more often than not the block to remembering. My first attempts at remembering came with massive rushes of fear, fortunately with remembering came recognition and realisation too. Three thoughts carried me through the fear. They were about recognition. They almost became a sort of mantra to me. They went:
1. I understand and believe that I had no power over my father’s abuse of me. I recognise and hold him completely responsible for that abuse.
2. My abuse belongs to my past and I fear it no longer. My memories of abuse while painful can do me no harm. Memories have no power over me.
3. I wish to claim myself back as a whole person. I no longer fear my father, as I know he is powerless to hurt me now.
Remembering, recognition and re-experiencing are only the first steps in coming to terms with child abuse. They are also the most important and difficult stages of recovery.
Next: Dealing with the aftermath of abuse…understanding toxic emotions.
Psychology textbooks often write about “remembering” and “re-experiencing” abuse. I am not sure about the “re-experiencing” word either. What I did was to allow my past emotions to gain their expression in my conscious self and re-connect with my sensory (how my body felt) and behavioural reactions (how I responded to abuse) at the time. It was painful and often confusing. Both the pain and the confusion passed. I did not wish to get mired down in it. In hindsight, I have seen others who use partial recollection as a form of self-destructive behaviour. What looks like an effort to come to terms with abuse has become a masochistic, self-punishing engagement with it. I suspect, and this is very hard for me to say, that they feel their engagement with abuse or emotional neglect gives their life meaning without which they might feel lost. These poor souls may be so mired down in the pain that they are unable to see beyond it. Perhaps because they have become so accustomed to living the pain in their daily lives, they fear what they might feel is an emotional void beyond it.
I have touched on aspects of pain here in earlier posts. I have no need or desire to go back and recount the circumstances in which that pain arose. Pain hurts and I needed to move beyond it. This first part of recovery, the re-engagement with the emotional and physical suffering of abuse carried with it so much pain, but there was not a void beyond it. What I felt was a personal liberation; a liberation into conscious realisation, emotional potential and a reconnection to my own humanity as an entire person.
An abuser will generally try and attach blame to the victim in the abuse. They will say they are inflicting pain because you are bad, unworthy of their love, abnormal, stupid, corrupted by the devil, a freak, a pervert, someone who should not mix with others. The intensity of these assertions increases as the abuse increases. The abuser frequently maintains that his or her acts of violence are a punishment for the manifestation of the child’s behaviour or even its existence (“My life was a whole lot better until you came along. You have taken everything from me. You don’t deserve a life!” ) These abusive behaviours are cruel and insistent. The abuser may demand that the child sanctions their being deserving of punishment. Like in sexual abuse, he may say, “You’re a filthy, disgusting little pervert. You don’t deserve my love. What are you?” I heard that one often enough in bouts of ritual humiliation.
All of these assertions and justifications of the cruelty of abuse erode the child’s identity and its positive sense of self. They undermine its ability to grow into a whole, integrated, loving adult. Worse still is the inversion of the abuser’s destructive assertions into the victim’s self-beliefs. The victim, who is dependent on the parent for its survival, comes to believe that is they who are responsible for the abuse that has been inflicted upon them. The child will frequently believe that what they have experienced is simply a normal part of growing up. They will believe that whatever happened to them, they deserved.
Recognising abuse for the child is impossible. Children (generally) do not have the emotional and intellectual capacity to understand what is happening to them. For the abused child this inability to understand is further compounded since the abuse itself will frequently arrest, disrupt or disturb their normal emotional development.
I lived with high degrees of fear in my childhood. I can remember the dread I felt about going on a family holiday when I was eight or nine years old. My fear was such that I could barely eat and frequently I shit my pants. This was no holiday. It was one or two weeks open exposure to terror and humiliation. My incontinence stopped as soon as the holiday ended. My father’s working days were the best for me. Spending two weeks with him was a horror.
Why I mention fear is that is that fear is more often than not the block to remembering. My first attempts at remembering came with massive rushes of fear, fortunately with remembering came recognition and realisation too. Three thoughts carried me through the fear. They were about recognition. They almost became a sort of mantra to me. They went:
1. I understand and believe that I had no power over my father’s abuse of me. I recognise and hold him completely responsible for that abuse.
2. My abuse belongs to my past and I fear it no longer. My memories of abuse while painful can do me no harm. Memories have no power over me.
3. I wish to claim myself back as a whole person. I no longer fear my father, as I know he is powerless to hurt me now.
Remembering, recognition and re-experiencing are only the first steps in coming to terms with child abuse. They are also the most important and difficult stages of recovery.
Next: Dealing with the aftermath of abuse…understanding toxic emotions.
Coming to terms - Part 4 - making it safe
22/09/08 13:59 Filed in: Psychology | Child Abuse
Recovery, why bother? Isn’t it simply too frightening? After all one is moving to an “unknown”, might that not be worse than living in one’s present state? What’s to be gained by dredging up the past again? You should pull yourself together, buckle down and get on with life! How could you show such disrespect for the people who brought you into the world? Isn’t recovery simply a choice?
I could make a list of at least a hundred remarks and questions like the ones above. I’ve heard all those and more, those and others which have been said to me, some very recently.
I suppose recovery may be a choice, but it’s not much of one. It’s a little like saying “sickness is a choice”.
I’ve touched on a few of the problems and difficulties arising from a legacy of child abuse. Here’s a longer list: Anxiety; depression; self-sabotage, self-destructive behaviours that may include addictions, compulsions, and suicidal ideation; relationship problems; sexual difficulties; social alienation; low self esteem and numerous physical ailments.
There is some pain in recovery. Perhaps what is important to remember is that having survived abuse, one has already dealt with the worst aspects of that pain. There can be no pain greater than the experience of abuse itself.
Remembering the abuse and re-experiencing all the feelings that went with it are only the first two steps in a very long process of recovery and healing. Recovery may feel like a risk too. Everything is a risk and the balance to be made is one between healthy and harmful risk.
When I started writing about child abuse, I hadn’t intended to talk about this at any length, only to reflect on my own experience. My messages and e-mails have caused me to reconsider and say a little more.
To approach recovery, it’s important to feel safe in doing so. Child abuse is about being and feeling unsafe. If you don’t feel safe then you won’t progress in your recovery.
Recovery might mean facing painful memories, powerful negative feelings, and possibly self-destructive behaviours. To withstand those reactions, you need to feel as safe and strong as possible. It is essential to have supporters and allies who will give freely of their time to you, and that they understand what it is you are doing. I had a therapist too. I was, after all, undergoing training in psychotherapy, and training therapy was a mandatory requirement of my educational course. Dealing with this issue in the middle of my course may have added a year or so onto the time it took me to qualify. But it really was worth it.
My therapist helped me only a little. The fact that he was non-judgemental when I experienced some very difficult feelings was the greatest help he gave me. The real help came from elsewhere. Sometimes the sources of that help and support were a surprise to me. I even made new and lasting friendships as a result of the experience. I made a plan. I alerted my doctor too. She was very positive and supportive.
I chose a time when I could absent myself from work if I didn’t feel up to it. I suppose in total I needed to take somewhere between four and six weeks off work in a period that ran over about a year that covered the initial phases of recovery, mainly the remembering and re-experiencing phases.
On the odd few occasions, when my feelings seemed overwhelming and out of control I made a point of making no decisions. I tried to take myself off to somewhere quiet and safe at such times. The comfort of knowing that someone else was around if I needed them helped me a lot.
Timing is important, as is setting the pace and structure for recovery. I felt strong enough when I approached recovery although at times going through recovery, I did experience doubts as to whether I’d actually make it.
Although I got through the process, I didn’t do well at every stage. One area where I did very badly was in resolving potentially abusive relationships first. I had a very public life. Directly or indirectly I was responsible for several hundred people in my working life.
One coping mechanism that I had developed was that I took responsibility for many people close to me. It wasn’t healthy. It was avoidant behaviour too. It was a survival mechanism that I learned somewhere along the way. Its rationale went that if I took responsibility for someone else then they couldn’t harm me as they might if allowed to act of their own volition or if I depended on them. So I had a hyper-responsible, independence that was impossible to sustain. Only in the aftermath of recovery did I realise that this is what I did.
Of course, (and what I hadn’t seen at the time as I could not see it), this drew damaged and abused children to me like a magnet. So when they picked up that I was attempting to recover, I didn’t tell them but they sensed it, they flew at me from everywhere with infantile rage and destructiveness as their weapons. There is nothing as terrifying as infantile omnipotence since it knows no mercy or compassion. It's simply terrifying!
A short while into recovery, I had to change all my personal telephone numbers to make a distance between these damaged people and me. Sorting out this mess alone took me about four years following my first round of recovery. It was a living nightmare that cost me dearly in so many ways.
This issue can be so very complicated. It is also very important. The experience of abuse in childhood can determine not only how we shape our adult relationships, but also our perceptions of how we might be treated by others. Our perceptions may become self-fulfilling prophecies or they might influence our ability to distinguish between what is happening to us now and what happened to us in childhood.
If one has never resolved one’s childhood abuse, research has determined that one stands a very high chance of repeating it with a spouse, colleague, partner of friend.
Resolving abusive relationships as part of recovery from abuse is, in my view, one of the most critical and important steps in achieving a successful outcome.
What else? It’s a good idea to look at one’s life and get help in areas where one is exposed to crises. Many child abuse survivors live lives that are characterised by constant crises in all areas. These can relate to money, work, jobs, accommodation as well as personal relationships.
I’m still dealing with the aftermath of the messes I made. My life used to go from soaring highs to crashing lows. I have known what it is like to be an entrepreneurial multi-millionaire to someone struggling to keep out of the bum’s night shelter. All of my feelings about myself have changed, as have my values and beliefs. Having had an experience last year, perhaps it was a wake-up call, where I almost died from a bacterial infection, my values, beliefs and how I want to spend time in this world came into sharp focus. There may be a little disjoint in my life now as I work on it. I realised not that long ago that I should have made some big changes rather than what I did which was to try and salvage, build on a life that had its roots in dysfunction.
Some lessons take longer to learn and I’m still working on them.
Okay, last point. In recovery, be good and kind to yourself. Find ways of gaining sensory, emotional and intellectual nourishment. I have a whole host of these. I love art and music and make my own version of both badly! I love cooking, writing, the countryside, walking and cycling too. I love my friends most of all as my real friends allow me to be me and like me for who I am…what’s more I even love writing in this blog. Even writing here I make self-discoveries all the time that are enriching and satisfying. Anyone for a cuddle? (I love those too!)
I could make a list of at least a hundred remarks and questions like the ones above. I’ve heard all those and more, those and others which have been said to me, some very recently.
I suppose recovery may be a choice, but it’s not much of one. It’s a little like saying “sickness is a choice”.
I’ve touched on a few of the problems and difficulties arising from a legacy of child abuse. Here’s a longer list: Anxiety; depression; self-sabotage, self-destructive behaviours that may include addictions, compulsions, and suicidal ideation; relationship problems; sexual difficulties; social alienation; low self esteem and numerous physical ailments.
There is some pain in recovery. Perhaps what is important to remember is that having survived abuse, one has already dealt with the worst aspects of that pain. There can be no pain greater than the experience of abuse itself.
Remembering the abuse and re-experiencing all the feelings that went with it are only the first two steps in a very long process of recovery and healing. Recovery may feel like a risk too. Everything is a risk and the balance to be made is one between healthy and harmful risk.
When I started writing about child abuse, I hadn’t intended to talk about this at any length, only to reflect on my own experience. My messages and e-mails have caused me to reconsider and say a little more.
To approach recovery, it’s important to feel safe in doing so. Child abuse is about being and feeling unsafe. If you don’t feel safe then you won’t progress in your recovery.
Recovery might mean facing painful memories, powerful negative feelings, and possibly self-destructive behaviours. To withstand those reactions, you need to feel as safe and strong as possible. It is essential to have supporters and allies who will give freely of their time to you, and that they understand what it is you are doing. I had a therapist too. I was, after all, undergoing training in psychotherapy, and training therapy was a mandatory requirement of my educational course. Dealing with this issue in the middle of my course may have added a year or so onto the time it took me to qualify. But it really was worth it.
My therapist helped me only a little. The fact that he was non-judgemental when I experienced some very difficult feelings was the greatest help he gave me. The real help came from elsewhere. Sometimes the sources of that help and support were a surprise to me. I even made new and lasting friendships as a result of the experience. I made a plan. I alerted my doctor too. She was very positive and supportive.
I chose a time when I could absent myself from work if I didn’t feel up to it. I suppose in total I needed to take somewhere between four and six weeks off work in a period that ran over about a year that covered the initial phases of recovery, mainly the remembering and re-experiencing phases.
On the odd few occasions, when my feelings seemed overwhelming and out of control I made a point of making no decisions. I tried to take myself off to somewhere quiet and safe at such times. The comfort of knowing that someone else was around if I needed them helped me a lot.
Timing is important, as is setting the pace and structure for recovery. I felt strong enough when I approached recovery although at times going through recovery, I did experience doubts as to whether I’d actually make it.
Although I got through the process, I didn’t do well at every stage. One area where I did very badly was in resolving potentially abusive relationships first. I had a very public life. Directly or indirectly I was responsible for several hundred people in my working life.
One coping mechanism that I had developed was that I took responsibility for many people close to me. It wasn’t healthy. It was avoidant behaviour too. It was a survival mechanism that I learned somewhere along the way. Its rationale went that if I took responsibility for someone else then they couldn’t harm me as they might if allowed to act of their own volition or if I depended on them. So I had a hyper-responsible, independence that was impossible to sustain. Only in the aftermath of recovery did I realise that this is what I did.
Of course, (and what I hadn’t seen at the time as I could not see it), this drew damaged and abused children to me like a magnet. So when they picked up that I was attempting to recover, I didn’t tell them but they sensed it, they flew at me from everywhere with infantile rage and destructiveness as their weapons. There is nothing as terrifying as infantile omnipotence since it knows no mercy or compassion. It's simply terrifying!
A short while into recovery, I had to change all my personal telephone numbers to make a distance between these damaged people and me. Sorting out this mess alone took me about four years following my first round of recovery. It was a living nightmare that cost me dearly in so many ways.
This issue can be so very complicated. It is also very important. The experience of abuse in childhood can determine not only how we shape our adult relationships, but also our perceptions of how we might be treated by others. Our perceptions may become self-fulfilling prophecies or they might influence our ability to distinguish between what is happening to us now and what happened to us in childhood.
If one has never resolved one’s childhood abuse, research has determined that one stands a very high chance of repeating it with a spouse, colleague, partner of friend.
Resolving abusive relationships as part of recovery from abuse is, in my view, one of the most critical and important steps in achieving a successful outcome.
What else? It’s a good idea to look at one’s life and get help in areas where one is exposed to crises. Many child abuse survivors live lives that are characterised by constant crises in all areas. These can relate to money, work, jobs, accommodation as well as personal relationships.
I’m still dealing with the aftermath of the messes I made. My life used to go from soaring highs to crashing lows. I have known what it is like to be an entrepreneurial multi-millionaire to someone struggling to keep out of the bum’s night shelter. All of my feelings about myself have changed, as have my values and beliefs. Having had an experience last year, perhaps it was a wake-up call, where I almost died from a bacterial infection, my values, beliefs and how I want to spend time in this world came into sharp focus. There may be a little disjoint in my life now as I work on it. I realised not that long ago that I should have made some big changes rather than what I did which was to try and salvage, build on a life that had its roots in dysfunction.
Some lessons take longer to learn and I’m still working on them.
Okay, last point. In recovery, be good and kind to yourself. Find ways of gaining sensory, emotional and intellectual nourishment. I have a whole host of these. I love art and music and make my own version of both badly! I love cooking, writing, the countryside, walking and cycling too. I love my friends most of all as my real friends allow me to be me and like me for who I am…what’s more I even love writing in this blog. Even writing here I make self-discoveries all the time that are enriching and satisfying. Anyone for a cuddle? (I love those too!)
Tell me a story! Part 3 - Healing stories
29/07/08 13:01 Filed in: Psychology | Healing stories
For a while now, I’ve been talking to people about whether writing about past and present emotional difficulties helps in transcending those difficulties…whether writing is a means of coming to terms with emotional upheavals and healing from them.
This post is going to be low on personal opinions; I would rather simply share some of my findings with you.
My first major finding would be that writing facilitates emotional understanding, that by writing about past difficulties, we frame those difficulties in a way that is graspable and comprehensible. Some people mentioned that they felt their physical health had improved as a result of writing.
Overall, those who seemed to get the most benefit from writing, and I’m still open on this particular observation, were those who imposed a fictional narrative of some sort. I’m not quite sure how this works but it probably reflects my own experience of writing too. Maybe it’s about the act of taking a messy, complicated or disturbing experience and turning the experience into a story that makes it more manageable. Perhaps, the dimension of adding fictional narrative somehow placed their personal story at a distance where they could see it more clearly. I’m not entirely sure.
People who wrote about personal difficulties over long periods of time derived less benefit from writing their stories, than those who set themselves short-term limits to write and wrote their feelings in a “splurge” without regard to style, content or grammar.
For people who wrote about their emotional pain over long periods of time, there was a tendency to get locked into a cycle of self-pity and endless introspection. This was most pronounced in those who published extended stories of personal anguish in a web log (blog) My overall impression was that what happened, more often than not, was that it attracted a club that held itself together through the sharing and mutual identification with the emotional difficulty. The odd one or two people reported that they found the identification of others with their personal problems normalised their experiences.
“It made me realise that this problem was not only about me and that it happens to others too.”
People found it generally useful to share and talk about those stories with those close to them or others involved in the life episode, but less beneficial to discuss the issues with the public via a blog.
For bloggers, I noticed a tendency to do transference and identification with others participating on their blog. This was not always helpful to the writer, to the person trying to come to terms with his or her own emotional past. There’s a piece here about five posts down the page on transference and identification if you are interested to know more.
For people who had written about past emotional experiences over an extended period, I asked, “How easy would it be to write a new story going forward in your life, to write the next chapter of your own life?”
This question was frequently expressed along these lines:
“Do you feel able to write stories about how it might feel to be empowered to lead the life you wish to lead? Are you able to pick up your “pen” (metaphorically speaking!) and say “Okay, that was all my story then, but I have my own life and I’m going to move on with the script?” What’s the next chapter?” By the way, if you did that would you feel you were letting yourself or others down, including the readers of your blog? What and how would you like to exist beyond the present?”
This question interests me greatly, but I’m unsure if I have a sufficiently large response to give feedback as yet. I have a notion that those whom I asked the question found it to be interesting “food for thought”.
So in summary, most people who used story-writing to come to terms with emotional difficulties, pain and upheavals, said that story writing improved their emotional wellbeing, and sometimes their physical health.
The greatest benefits were obtained when:
1. They wrote regularly for short periods of time in peace and quiet
2. They limited the time period for which they would write about a certain event, normally to less than two weeks
3. They wrote without attention to style, content, spelling or grammar, letting the story “spill out”
4. They wrote for themselves and not an audience other than those involved or those close to them
5. They wrote only when they felt strong enough and able to face the past difficulty
6. They imposed a fictional narrative on the story
There is little new to add to existing research here, although I did find the responses from bloggers interesting and I am not aware that this has been covered before.
This post is going to be low on personal opinions; I would rather simply share some of my findings with you.
My first major finding would be that writing facilitates emotional understanding, that by writing about past difficulties, we frame those difficulties in a way that is graspable and comprehensible. Some people mentioned that they felt their physical health had improved as a result of writing.
Overall, those who seemed to get the most benefit from writing, and I’m still open on this particular observation, were those who imposed a fictional narrative of some sort. I’m not quite sure how this works but it probably reflects my own experience of writing too. Maybe it’s about the act of taking a messy, complicated or disturbing experience and turning the experience into a story that makes it more manageable. Perhaps, the dimension of adding fictional narrative somehow placed their personal story at a distance where they could see it more clearly. I’m not entirely sure.
People who wrote about personal difficulties over long periods of time derived less benefit from writing their stories, than those who set themselves short-term limits to write and wrote their feelings in a “splurge” without regard to style, content or grammar.
For people who wrote about their emotional pain over long periods of time, there was a tendency to get locked into a cycle of self-pity and endless introspection. This was most pronounced in those who published extended stories of personal anguish in a web log (blog) My overall impression was that what happened, more often than not, was that it attracted a club that held itself together through the sharing and mutual identification with the emotional difficulty. The odd one or two people reported that they found the identification of others with their personal problems normalised their experiences.
“It made me realise that this problem was not only about me and that it happens to others too.”
People found it generally useful to share and talk about those stories with those close to them or others involved in the life episode, but less beneficial to discuss the issues with the public via a blog.
For bloggers, I noticed a tendency to do transference and identification with others participating on their blog. This was not always helpful to the writer, to the person trying to come to terms with his or her own emotional past. There’s a piece here about five posts down the page on transference and identification if you are interested to know more.
For people who had written about past emotional experiences over an extended period, I asked, “How easy would it be to write a new story going forward in your life, to write the next chapter of your own life?”
This question was frequently expressed along these lines:
“Do you feel able to write stories about how it might feel to be empowered to lead the life you wish to lead? Are you able to pick up your “pen” (metaphorically speaking!) and say “Okay, that was all my story then, but I have my own life and I’m going to move on with the script?” What’s the next chapter?” By the way, if you did that would you feel you were letting yourself or others down, including the readers of your blog? What and how would you like to exist beyond the present?”
This question interests me greatly, but I’m unsure if I have a sufficiently large response to give feedback as yet. I have a notion that those whom I asked the question found it to be interesting “food for thought”.
So in summary, most people who used story-writing to come to terms with emotional difficulties, pain and upheavals, said that story writing improved their emotional wellbeing, and sometimes their physical health.
The greatest benefits were obtained when:
1. They wrote regularly for short periods of time in peace and quiet
2. They limited the time period for which they would write about a certain event, normally to less than two weeks
3. They wrote without attention to style, content, spelling or grammar, letting the story “spill out”
4. They wrote for themselves and not an audience other than those involved or those close to them
5. They wrote only when they felt strong enough and able to face the past difficulty
6. They imposed a fictional narrative on the story
There is little new to add to existing research here, although I did find the responses from bloggers interesting and I am not aware that this has been covered before.
The Emperor's new clothes - On personal development and change
30/05/08 12:26 Filed in: Psychology and the social world
This post should be credited at its outset. It was inspired by the writing of another, an exceptional, talented and compassionate holistic counsellor, therapist and coach, called Tamera. You can find her blog here
A recent post of hers caused me to reflect on exactly how we exist in this world and about what holds us back in personal development, from realising our life’s potential and desires.
Living in a world dominated by rational science with its tendency to analyse and categorise our being means that we often compartmentalise ourselves into various states of thinking, feeling and being. We have notions of intellect and thought (rational powers of cognition, perception and differentiation), emotions, intuition and other personal traits like will comprised within our personal make-up yet we appear to express them separately. I know I’ve been tussling with this a lot. I have written about it before both here and in my “farrago”. I adopted the term “consciousness”, both individual and collective (social) to try and relate to our state of being in some sort of wholeness embracing all aspects of our existence.
Previously I wrote: “Notions of will, intellect and emotions working separately are unattractive (to me) since they suggest that areas of one's being might be compartmentalised and operate separately. I am certain that this is not helpful: It might be like, "I work with my intellect", "I love my partner with my feelings" and "my acts of assertion, achievement or success are achieved by my will". How saddening this is, to break up one's self in a way that allows one to express only a part of oneself in given contexts. This compartmentalisation is perhaps the product of post-industrial man, a new machine culture, where work, loving and social being, and success operate in separate personal domains. It is for this reason that I prefer the notion of consciousness where all of our faculties might operate together.”
I believe that what makes for an experience of wholeness in our life is a sense of enlightened consciousness – of being conscious of consciousness in a way. It’s an act of profound understanding, an awareness of our being in a world that exists both within and outside ourselves. But it is also a sense that we make our world and take responsibility for it. I believe it is this special understanding that facilitates progress, development, discovery, invention and change. Consciousness brings with it an awareness that our limitations are made by ourselves, either individually or collectively. Knowing and understanding the nature and source of our limitations can bring about the most wonderful possibilities of positive personal and social development, of change in our personal and social worlds.
Perhaps that is a little abstract so I’ll give a couple of examples that come to mind. I write endlessly about the nature of love. We experience love as an emotion within ourselves. What love means and what it stands for is influenced by a whole host of factors beyond ourselves. How we love is an integral part of our belief systems, of our consciousness, and of our culture that forms part of consciousness. Our beliefs about love are upheld by our families, our friends, the media, art and literature, politicians, churches and corporations, as well as our experience. Being conscious means that we have the gift of understanding, our own sense of knowing what love means and where our feelings, thoughts and beliefs about it come from. Being conscious also brings with it a sense of knowing that we may take responsibility and that we can change our lives and how we love. But it’s easy for me to say and much harder to do!
I have a certain understanding, a personal impression and sense of the wholeness that growing consciousness brings with it. What produces that sense of wholeness and often charisma in others, especially in those who become our leaders, is a sense of their own “personal knowing”: Of their consciousness of their own being in the world, and their sense of assurance that comes from taking responsibility not only for themselves in the world, but for their entire world. That’s a big one!
Perhaps the key barriers to consciousness (Others might say this differently: Some might say success or personal fulfilment. They are equally valid as they all go hand-in-hand) are about fear, self-esteem and self-confidence. Being conscious is not always a comfortable place. It can be scary too. Children in their innocence will often exhibit a greater degree of consciousness and fearlessness than us “conditioned” adults. It was a child, after all, that spotted that the “emperor’s new clothes” were nothing more than his “birthday suit”.
Being “unafraid” to express our self-belief is a wonderful release. I believe that the greatest antagonist to love is fear. Hate is not the opposite to love. It is fear. More than anything, I have come to believe that it is fear in whatever form that holds us back in our lives. Some fears are wholly sensible. They guide us in avoiding danger or life-threatening perils. That is the right place for fear. But so many of our fears are not so healthy. They are what hold us back in life, from the realisation of who we are and who we might be. Self-esteem might carry us forward where fear holds us back.
I know I’ve been guilty frequently of being held back by fear or negative self-beliefs too; more frequently than I would readily care to admit.
A little under thirty years ago I read the book “A road less travelled” by American psychotherapist, Morgan Scott Peck. I was riveted. It was sheer inspiration. I have read hundreds of psychology books since but this work still stands out. It’s about the journey of personal fulfilment. At the end of the book, Scott Peck talks about achieving a state of “grace”. (Can’t you just tell what will happen next? It did.) I’d call it something else. But he attributes the phenomena associated with “grace” as that which:
1. nurtures human life (and spiritual growth)
2. are incompletely understood by scientific thinking
3. are commonplace among humanity
4. originate outside conscious human will (the individual)
I believe he was very nearly “right on the button” but instead of developing a notion of consciousness in all its aspects of being in the world, he, in my opinion, goes completely off the rails and gets “God”. So that which he can no longer understand in terms of the world as it exists within the psyche and outside the individual, he attributes to a divine power. In a subsequent work he goes on to judge what is good and what is evil according to his newly found religious beliefs. For me at that point, he lost the plot. What a great pity. He had so much to say.
My point here is that psychology as a mode of personal exploration fails us. The answers are not all within ourselves but in our interaction with the world we make and our beliefs about that world. Only through an understanding of all the dimensions of ourselves within our world can we seek to understand it.
I believe that the biggest barrier to realising that understanding is fear.
Footnote:
Some people in the past have accused me of being naïve and idealistic. I know what they mean but I might express it differently. They claim that my work fails to acknowledge the realities of economics, economic survival and power in our lives. For me, economics and power are important dimensions of consciousness. They exist and are a fact of life. I am not sure that their consideration belongs here.
Much of our reality is informed by economics and power. It is the dominant paradigm (Dare I use that word?!) of our western world. I am sure, however, that its culture does not always serve us well. By necessity, we live with it and it would be “naïve” to believe otherwise. But often I question how well it serves us. I do not believe that focussing one’s life on financial, economic and power outcomes is likely to lead to any form of enduring personal fulfilment. Infinite economic expansion is impossible. Money is a medium of exchange and not an end in itself. We all need it. As the western world slides inexorably towards recession, perhaps a change in economic consciousness might show us the way out. For sure, some change is inevitable, although I am apprehensive about what it might be. So many periods of economic turmoil have found temporary relief in war and conflict.
So, to my critics, I know all about economics and power. We all see its distorted influences in our lives daily. But we accept it as a given fact of life. Only through developing a wider understanding of the world in we wish to dwell in as well as the world that exists, will it change. There is nothing inevitable or god-given in anything made by humankind. We can change. But we can only change by understanding the realities of what exists and that which might serve our future better. That is about consciousness; nothing more, nothing less. We make and we choose the world we live in as it in turn makes who we are. Consciousness, choice, and freedom are about taking responsibility for our world. And taking responsibility is a choice for us too.
A recent post of hers caused me to reflect on exactly how we exist in this world and about what holds us back in personal development, from realising our life’s potential and desires.
Living in a world dominated by rational science with its tendency to analyse and categorise our being means that we often compartmentalise ourselves into various states of thinking, feeling and being. We have notions of intellect and thought (rational powers of cognition, perception and differentiation), emotions, intuition and other personal traits like will comprised within our personal make-up yet we appear to express them separately. I know I’ve been tussling with this a lot. I have written about it before both here and in my “farrago”. I adopted the term “consciousness”, both individual and collective (social) to try and relate to our state of being in some sort of wholeness embracing all aspects of our existence.
Previously I wrote: “Notions of will, intellect and emotions working separately are unattractive (to me) since they suggest that areas of one's being might be compartmentalised and operate separately. I am certain that this is not helpful: It might be like, "I work with my intellect", "I love my partner with my feelings" and "my acts of assertion, achievement or success are achieved by my will". How saddening this is, to break up one's self in a way that allows one to express only a part of oneself in given contexts. This compartmentalisation is perhaps the product of post-industrial man, a new machine culture, where work, loving and social being, and success operate in separate personal domains. It is for this reason that I prefer the notion of consciousness where all of our faculties might operate together.”
I believe that what makes for an experience of wholeness in our life is a sense of enlightened consciousness – of being conscious of consciousness in a way. It’s an act of profound understanding, an awareness of our being in a world that exists both within and outside ourselves. But it is also a sense that we make our world and take responsibility for it. I believe it is this special understanding that facilitates progress, development, discovery, invention and change. Consciousness brings with it an awareness that our limitations are made by ourselves, either individually or collectively. Knowing and understanding the nature and source of our limitations can bring about the most wonderful possibilities of positive personal and social development, of change in our personal and social worlds.
Perhaps that is a little abstract so I’ll give a couple of examples that come to mind. I write endlessly about the nature of love. We experience love as an emotion within ourselves. What love means and what it stands for is influenced by a whole host of factors beyond ourselves. How we love is an integral part of our belief systems, of our consciousness, and of our culture that forms part of consciousness. Our beliefs about love are upheld by our families, our friends, the media, art and literature, politicians, churches and corporations, as well as our experience. Being conscious means that we have the gift of understanding, our own sense of knowing what love means and where our feelings, thoughts and beliefs about it come from. Being conscious also brings with it a sense of knowing that we may take responsibility and that we can change our lives and how we love. But it’s easy for me to say and much harder to do!
I have a certain understanding, a personal impression and sense of the wholeness that growing consciousness brings with it. What produces that sense of wholeness and often charisma in others, especially in those who become our leaders, is a sense of their own “personal knowing”: Of their consciousness of their own being in the world, and their sense of assurance that comes from taking responsibility not only for themselves in the world, but for their entire world. That’s a big one!
Perhaps the key barriers to consciousness (Others might say this differently: Some might say success or personal fulfilment. They are equally valid as they all go hand-in-hand) are about fear, self-esteem and self-confidence. Being conscious is not always a comfortable place. It can be scary too. Children in their innocence will often exhibit a greater degree of consciousness and fearlessness than us “conditioned” adults. It was a child, after all, that spotted that the “emperor’s new clothes” were nothing more than his “birthday suit”.
Being “unafraid” to express our self-belief is a wonderful release. I believe that the greatest antagonist to love is fear. Hate is not the opposite to love. It is fear. More than anything, I have come to believe that it is fear in whatever form that holds us back in our lives. Some fears are wholly sensible. They guide us in avoiding danger or life-threatening perils. That is the right place for fear. But so many of our fears are not so healthy. They are what hold us back in life, from the realisation of who we are and who we might be. Self-esteem might carry us forward where fear holds us back.
I know I’ve been guilty frequently of being held back by fear or negative self-beliefs too; more frequently than I would readily care to admit.
A little under thirty years ago I read the book “A road less travelled” by American psychotherapist, Morgan Scott Peck. I was riveted. It was sheer inspiration. I have read hundreds of psychology books since but this work still stands out. It’s about the journey of personal fulfilment. At the end of the book, Scott Peck talks about achieving a state of “grace”. (Can’t you just tell what will happen next? It did.) I’d call it something else. But he attributes the phenomena associated with “grace” as that which:
1. nurtures human life (and spiritual growth)
2. are incompletely understood by scientific thinking
3. are commonplace among humanity
4. originate outside conscious human will (the individual)
I believe he was very nearly “right on the button” but instead of developing a notion of consciousness in all its aspects of being in the world, he, in my opinion, goes completely off the rails and gets “God”. So that which he can no longer understand in terms of the world as it exists within the psyche and outside the individual, he attributes to a divine power. In a subsequent work he goes on to judge what is good and what is evil according to his newly found religious beliefs. For me at that point, he lost the plot. What a great pity. He had so much to say.
My point here is that psychology as a mode of personal exploration fails us. The answers are not all within ourselves but in our interaction with the world we make and our beliefs about that world. Only through an understanding of all the dimensions of ourselves within our world can we seek to understand it.
I believe that the biggest barrier to realising that understanding is fear.
Footnote:
Some people in the past have accused me of being naïve and idealistic. I know what they mean but I might express it differently. They claim that my work fails to acknowledge the realities of economics, economic survival and power in our lives. For me, economics and power are important dimensions of consciousness. They exist and are a fact of life. I am not sure that their consideration belongs here.
Much of our reality is informed by economics and power. It is the dominant paradigm (Dare I use that word?!) of our western world. I am sure, however, that its culture does not always serve us well. By necessity, we live with it and it would be “naïve” to believe otherwise. But often I question how well it serves us. I do not believe that focussing one’s life on financial, economic and power outcomes is likely to lead to any form of enduring personal fulfilment. Infinite economic expansion is impossible. Money is a medium of exchange and not an end in itself. We all need it. As the western world slides inexorably towards recession, perhaps a change in economic consciousness might show us the way out. For sure, some change is inevitable, although I am apprehensive about what it might be. So many periods of economic turmoil have found temporary relief in war and conflict.
So, to my critics, I know all about economics and power. We all see its distorted influences in our lives daily. But we accept it as a given fact of life. Only through developing a wider understanding of the world in we wish to dwell in as well as the world that exists, will it change. There is nothing inevitable or god-given in anything made by humankind. We can change. But we can only change by understanding the realities of what exists and that which might serve our future better. That is about consciousness; nothing more, nothing less. We make and we choose the world we live in as it in turn makes who we are. Consciousness, choice, and freedom are about taking responsibility for our world. And taking responsibility is a choice for us too.
Synchronicity - Part 2 - Fate, Destiny and Jonah and the Whale
06/05/08 23:06 Filed in: Psychology | Synchronicity
There is a difference between fate and destiny. The words fatal and fatality come from the same root as fate. Fate implies no choice and ends with death. Destiny requires our wilful participation in achieving an outcome that is desirable for ourselves and for others. In normal usage the words may be used interchangeably but they do have distinct and different meanings. In the Old Testament, destiny is linked to good fortune.
Jung wrote, "We are dragged along by fate to that which we refuse to walk upright…"
The culmination of synchronicity is the revelation of one's destiny, of the path through life that gives meaning to our existence, of our essential selves. That which we refuse to bring into consciousness or deny comes back to us as fate. Fate strikes us from without when we fail to heed its summons from within. Attention to synchronicity, to the meaningful details of our being, no matter if they appear chaotic or disorganised, helps us join and make sense of the unfolding processes of our lives consciously.
Destiny is frequently connected to our career. Our work in the world is often our means of actualising our potential.
Frequently I go through streams of thought and talk about them with my friends, and with one of my male friends in particular. We were chatting about this blog and I mentioned that my next short piece would be about destiny, fate, synchronicity and Jonah and the whale. Perhaps my friends think me a little eccentric but they do seem to have unending patience with my unravelling this story. But I suspect I may have seen my friends eyes raised heavenwards as I told him about what I intended to write here.
Many biblical stories are interesting to me in their portrayal of cultural archetypes and their value as fables or parables: Stories that exist to teach lessons and contain within them ancient mythological images that inform our culture and our consciousness, as well as our moral conscience. Why I like the story of Jonah is that it seems to be the biblical archetype of the refusal of one's destiny where fate and the reversal of fate occur through acceptance of destiny.
I shall retell that story without any religious embellishments as a secular myth. Jonah is called to be a prophet and refuses his calling. He runs from destiny, hopping off on a boat headed for Tarshish (thought by some to be Minoan Crete). But he is simply running from himself from which there is no escape. While at sea a huge storm brews up and tosses the boat wildly. The sailors pray to their gods, to several gods to be saved from calamity and death.
Jonah sleeps through the storm below deck until he is dragged from his bed by the boat's captain. The sailors decide to draw lots to divine who might be the cause of their problem and the lot falls on Jonah.
The sailors question Jonah who confesses that he is running from destiny, from his own special calling. Jonah in a moment of self-destructive guilt tells the sailors to throw him overboard, telling them that if they get rid of him then their lives will be spared. Perhaps this is an acknowledgement of the psychological death that occurs when we fail to be true to ourselves. The sailors cast Jonah into the sea.
As Jonah is about to sink, to drown and die, a whale swallows him. He remains in the dark place of the whale's belly for three days and three nights. It could be any dark place and most of us have known those places of being in darkness and struggling over our future lives in one way or another. But he remains in that dark place meditating his destiny; of his purpose in life, Jonah eventually accepts his purpose with truth and sincerity and the whale spits him out onto the shore.
What a wonderful allegory about fate and destiny. Of course, there are one or two further twists in this particular tale since Jonah accepts his purpose then feels resentment about doing so. For a second time he is beset by misery and grief together with the desire to die yet again. Perhaps this is the reinforcement of the consequences, of the feelings of inner deadness that we feel at times when we are not true to our feelings and to ourselves.
It is a very good story!
There is something about synchronicity that I feel helps us to forge a lasting relationship with the universe and with life all around us - not just other people but a relationship with nature, the environment and the physical world around us. It is a peculiar aspect of our culture that encourages us to see ourselves as individuals serving self-interest but without any connection to the universe we inhabit. Many writers use the word "spiritual" here. Sadly, even though I have enquired of many people, I do not know what the word "spiritual" means! I did have one friend, now dead, who helped Chad Varah establish the Samaritans, a national charity in the UK that provides help and support to those who are despairing and suicidal. She was a committed Christian. I asked her what "spiritual" meant. She replied, "Don't you know? You are one of the most spiritual people I know." But I'm none the wiser. Still I don't have a clue. I do have a sense though of our existence being inextricably connected to and part of the cosmos we inhabit. I have a deep fascination with quantum physics that shows the infinite inter-relationships of the atomic structures that constitute our universe. It would be foolish to suppose that the world we inhabit in ourselves does not form part of that same universe.
Jung said, "We find our destiny on the path we take to avoid it." The greatest of human tragedies is to lose our power and potential of actualisation because of addictions or our involvement in relationships that are abusive, untenable or depleting. Great potential in us can simply fade away and no one will do anything to halt its waste or dissolution. The world will stand by as we throw away or reject our life's good fortunes. There is no guarantee that the whale may intervene for us as it did for Jonah. To take up Jung's words, they mean that we should look for our destiny in those parts of our lives in which we are refusing to engage. That is no easy task. I am not even sure, even at my age, where to start. Perhaps we should stop and look while we are running in the opposite direction! "Is my destiny scribbled on parchment, twirled in a bottle and hurled into the sea, to be stumbled upon only long after I am gone?"
Chance, chaos and randomness may all play a part in showing us our destiny. As chaos theorists have shown even its apparent disorder may be susceptible to a form of implicit organisation. Perhaps it is synchronicity that integrates the irrational, that which lies beyond our understanding, with the essence of our universal selves. Perhaps the trick is to perceive the sense in events despite their apparently random display.
Mahatma Gandhi may have expressed this tension between our existential reality and our universal truth most accurately. Humankind does after all appear on the one hand to have been ignorant and destructive, yet on the other, wonderfully responsive and restorative: "I see that mankind still survives after all its attempts to destroy itself and so I surmise that it is the law of love that rules mankind."
My acknowledgements to Dr David Richo whose book, "Unexpected Miracles: The Gift of Synchronicity & How to Open it" inspired this piece and also to the work of Carl Gustav Jung on which my thinking about synchronicity is based.
Synchronicity - Part 1
06/05/08 23:05 Filed in: Psychology | Synchronicity
For a very long time I have struggled with Jung's notion of synchronicity. Simply put synchronicity is the concept of meaningful coincidence, of the acausal connection - a connectedness between apparently disparate phenomena and events.
For me, the problem of synchronicity is that it is riddled with so much mystical jiggery-pokery on the one hand and ideas about fatalism and divinity on the other. There are so many esoteric deterministic elements that might be thrown into the synchronicity melting pot including ideas about pre-destination and pre-ordination. Who establishes that these coincidences have meaning or significance? Are events and phenomena not open to subjective re-interpretation in order to show their coincidental significance? Is the construction of the meaning and relatedness of phenomena and events simply an act of creating their subjective correspondence?
I shall suspend my scepticism and go off here on a short excursus, a voyage of discovery in words to see if I can articulate what I feel about synchronicity.
In case I am being too abstract, perhaps I should attempt to give one or two examples of synchronous events: A woman orders a red dress for a party but a black dress is delivered to her in error. As she is about to phone the shop where she bought it to advise them of the mistake, the phone rings. It is her sister, "Mother has died. You need to come for the funeral." The woman thought she was in control of her life; she believed she knew what would happen next. The synchronous event told her otherwise and outfitted her for what was actually coming next, something much deeper had occurred.
That is a powerful example. I know in my own life, there feels to be other purposeful connections that have been made that may not happened had my life followed its planned course.
We seek to understand our world in terms of cause and effect. I do not believe that everything can be understood in those scientific and rational terms. Cause and effect are the rationale of industrial man. It is a form of cultural and intellectual arrogance of the worst kind that maintains that the scientific mode of understanding is the only valid way of knowing and understanding our world. The obsession with rationality pre-dates industrialisation, but perhaps rational consciousness was a social pre-condition or a cultural pre-requisite of the change to be brought about by the industrial revolution. What is interesting is that it was the Catholic Church who seized upon rationality as the only way of knowing. During the inquisition and beyond, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of women were put to death by the Catholic Church for so-called witchcraft. To be a witch was to have a "heretical" belief either good or bad that could not be substantiated by rational proof. Of course, the only heretical beliefs one was allowed to hold were those religious beliefs proselytized by the Catholic Church itself. Inquisitions happened everywhere throughout the Middle Ages. To have non-rational beliefs was to risk being put to death; it is no small wonder that rationality has a stranglehold on our consciousness. But I digress.
Back to synchronicity: I am going to try and drop rationality for a while too and simply share the sense I have of synchronicity.
Synchronicities appear to cluster around significant events. Many meaningful coincidences occurred, for instance, when the Titanic sank and when Kennedy was assassinated. Also personal disasters or crises in our personal lives seem to invite synchronicity.
Perhaps synchronicity is the surprise that something suddenly fits! Synchronous events are meaningful coincidences or correspondences that guide us, warn us, or confirm us on our path in life. Coincidence happens at a specific moment. In this sense it is existential, tied to the here and now. Correspondences may continue. This is how synchronicity is essential, always present, in our human experience. Synchronicity may also be found in a series of similar events or experiences. It can appear as one striking event that sets off a chain reaction. It is always unexpected and somehow uncanny, almost eerie in its accuracy of connection or revelation. This is what makes it impossible for me to dismiss synchronicity as mere coincidence.
There may be synchronicity in the fact that our knowledge of our real issues, of ourselves and of our relationships, comes simultaneously with the strength to face them. We are usually in denial for a long time before we finally recognise and acknowledge our own truth. Synchronicity is in the fact that we often only let ourselves know when we can deal with what we know.
Synchronicity also occurs in looking back at one's life and seeing how it all prepared or instructed you for the realisation of one's full potential. A hidden feeling or truth may have waited to be awakened by the right person or circumstance, sometimes painfully. My destiny, perhaps, was to have had such a beginning. My neglectful and abusive father helped me practice for the independent and loving life I lead now. James Hillman writes: "This way of seeing removes the burden from the early years as having been a mistake and yourself a victim of handicaps and cruelties; instead it is the acorn in the mirror...." This may be light years ahead of what I wrote earlier.
Everyone and every event in life's drama is part of the metaphor of our personal development. The issue from an old relationship may not be: "how bad she was" but "how much I needed to learn." Most of us keep meeting partners who show us exactly where our we need to work on ourselves in order to become ourselves, e.g., men who abuse, women who are unfaithful. The wounds are openings into our missing life. Often, the only way in which a lost piece of ourselves or of our history comes back to us is through another person. The unknown is scary so people and events come along that help us go there. This is synchronicity. The only mistake we make is hanging on to some people too long or too briefly. We ask, “How, why and with whom did I do that?” We fall into the trap of taking them as literally themselves instead of metaphorical forces that have come to boost, chide or light our way in life. “Who finally pointed the way beyond my limitations?”
My personal jury has been out on synchronicity for about 15 years now. It looks like it just walked back in and voted in its favour. “Now who or what took me there?” I wonder. Time will tell me all I need to know so long as I listen carefully and pay attention.
My acknowledgements to Dr David Richo whose book, "Unexpected Miracles: The Gift of Synchronicity & How to Open it" inspired this piece and also to the work of Carl Gustav Jung on which my thinking about synchronicity is based.