by Stanley
There were these upsets with my partner. Afterwards I’d feel bad because I would start to lose my cool. I wasn’t very well behaved…. Ah! That phrase rings a bell: ‘not well behaved’. Reminds me of when I was a kid: wanting something from my mother and her not giving it to me. Even now, I’m not sure what it was I wanted from her, but whatever it was she couldn’t give it and I would get angry and obnoxious. It’s the same family game. I don’t know whether I wanted something from my partner and she couldn’t give it or whether she wanted something from me and I couldn’t give it. Probably both. In any case, I’d get obnoxious.
Just getting hold of this was enough to make me feel a little better. I hadn’t worked anything out. I hadn’t solved anything; and it was still confusing. But looking at the whole thing, I had paid enough attention to it to put some time and space between me and the past. It helped me locate the past instead of reliving it, like I did when was upset.
Of course, a single process like this didn’t turn my life around, but over a longer period of therapy I began to get into the habit dealing with myself like that. Over small things and bigger difficulties I began to handle myself by taking, as it were, a second look – a look that created a space for the past. Not that I was doing focusing continually. But whether it is a disturbing mood or a serious upset I am not stranded in present-time with it, taking everything literally; at the back of my mind I know there is always more to a mood than meets the eye; and just that, by itself, is often enough to defuse it.
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Your body is a dynamic organism with an evolutionary history measured in millions of years – it’s a powerful package set up to survive. But more than just surviving, we have the urge to live creatively toward the enhancement of wellbeing. However, we all know that these natural urges can be subverted by unfavourable circumstances – remembering that there are families and cultures that are not exactly incubators of human well-being. Then too, there is the unavoidable impact of bad times: illness, deprivation, loss, earthquakes. All of this, all of it, we can call ‘non-survival experiences’.
The common denominator of the non-survival experience is that it is difficult to live forward from it; and the more severe it is, the more difficult is to live through it unscathed. Months afterwards, people in Christchurch are still suffering the effects of earthquakes without quite knowing the emotional and physical costs.
So too, long ago trying to deal with tangled family circumstances you can get even more entangled in your own sometimes devious tactics to survive. To get through it one can twist oneself into an alien. Dysfunctional families are particularly damaging in this respect.
Bad times are situations where it’s hard move and function in ways that’s good for you – they tend to be times where you are frozen. Typically, there’s no way out, no movement. And the memory of it goes on not moving. In this way, we can say that some aspect of a person can be said to be ‘stuck in time’. Times when you successfully escape or fought back don’t count as ‘stuck moments’ – obviously, because you weren’t stuck.
Stuck moments manifest as physical tension. Even something as simple as not speaking up when I should, can manifest as a tension around my throat or a constriction in my chest. This was a time, perhaps, when it was too dangerous to speak up; maybe too dangerous even to be seen. Although I may not notice it, some part of my body goes on carrying the tension and stress. Physical tension is frozen motion that persists as bodily memory.
It’s as though someone had taken a flashlight photo in the midst of a real-time crisis, but this photo also contains recordings of my physical and emotional state at the moment of crisis. Of course, there is no separate photo recording – all this tension is mapped into my nervous and muscular system. This is the body’s memory.
The body’s memory is a physical repository of past experience. [1] The body’s memory has nothing to do with words, explanations, rational thought or insight. The body’s memory operates in a way that doesn’t need awareness. It is a necessary and instinctive response to what was once experienced as danger.
I can’t actually remember this physical memory as I would ordinary memories, like what I had for breakfast this morning. The body’s memory has nothing to do with actually ‘remembering’ in the way we understand this. We are talking about the body’s memory; and the body’s memory is not cerebral, but somatic. It is not literate, but organic. These are memories that are mapped into my flesh and blood. When the body’s memory is activated, I, as a conscious being, may have no idea of what is going on. But when it is re-stimulated it changes my mood and behavior.
Many of my moods are caused by my body being reminded of some past event that was non-survival. It reawakens the experience of stuckness. I then relive it without remembering it. When reliving a past event I am in it; it is literally happening again. (Although, not ‘again’ because there is no time in it, no space between me and the original event.) The event is not happening in the past, it is happening now. I relive the past as though it is the present. That is precisely what ‘restimulation’ is.
In therapy or counselling I actually create the past by putting space and time for the event to happen then. By calling it up I create a ‘then’. I separate the incident from present-time. Instead of reliving the past, I locate it.
This therapeutic locating is not the same as remembering what I had for breakfast. And, most importantly, locating is not ‘wallowing in the past’. Locating a memory is often felt rather than remembered in the usual sense. There is always an element of interpretation when we try to understand it. This is not to say we can’t have an accurate feel for it. The felt-sense of it can be quite definite. We learn to trust this different way of knowing – sensing rather than rationally knowing. But the important thing is, by touching upon it, however lightly, we locate it in a different space-time.
People sometimes feel that once they have told the story of a past event that it’s over and done with. ‘That’s it. I’ve said it all’. And indeed, many therapists today will actually discourage a client from remembering. It’s the latest fashion precipitated by the hasty application of brain research. This is a killer because it closes the door on all the infinite subtleties that stir the imagination. The past is never a series of simple facts; it is never done with – if only because the past is always stirring up something that newly reverberates with the present, slightly changing the scene. This is not repetition, but discovery. Locating a memory does not reinforce it, it unenforces it.
I can almost predict that someone will accuse me of being far too concerned with the past with the danger of ruminating and wallowing in it. People who go on about ‘living in the present’ don’t realise that their so-called ‘present’ is not crystal clear and pure, but contains large chunks of past of which they are totally unaware.
My analysis here does not, of course, exhaust the complexities of the personality and it may seem an oversimplification – and so it is. I’ve done this deliberately for the sake of laying stress on some salient truths of great practical importance.
[1] We could analyse this in terms of neuroscience and brain functioning. But I am trying to say it in terms that we can understand using our psychological way of knowing.
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