He seems to create a crisis out of nothing. Everything
is fine, then some trivial thing upsets him. The theme is: “everything was
going well - now its all spoiled”. Say you are on holiday with this person. He
has planned and looked forward to it for months. He seemed to be overjoyed to
have at last realised a dream. On the second day, suddenly and without warning
– something you said, some trivial mistake by the waiter – and everything is
ruined. He becomes bad tempered and the whole holiday is tarnished. What
happened was an idealised dream was shattered. In such a case you will notice
that the degree of upset is always directly proportionate to the intensity of
the fantasy.
The story begins with the dream of the perfect holiday
and proceeds towards the bursting of the bubble. That’s the way the story goes,
the way it always goes. The promise of happiness ends in a terrible letdown
that robs one of ultimate satisfaction. The awful truth is that
the state of happy anticipation actually sets this person on the road to
disaster. You see, it’s written in the story. It’s happened so many times that
whenever he is happy, somewhere inside him he
knows what’s coming because the story has already been written.
Naturally, in life there are many upsets that are not
trivial; the cause in present time is real enough. But because it also triggers an old story it is harder
to get over than it would otherwise have been.
Thinking again about that ruined holiday: if there are always
terrible consequences to being happy a person can get to the point where they might
avoid anything that promises satisfaction. Suggest something they might enjoy
and they will find an excuse to knock it back. It’s better to be permanently toned-down than
to risk anticipation. Happiness is the inevitable road to doom. You’ve seen
people who are determined not to experience any satisfaction; or if they do,
they hide it. It’s as though they are convinced that if the fates find out they’ll
drop them in the poo !
A single memory is not just a still snapshot of a past event.
Each memory is a story with a beginning, middle and an end. So really, a
cluster of memories is really a cluster of similar
stories; and because they are all condensed together, when a cluster is
restimulated the same story will happen again.
There’s one story of this kind that is probably the most
powerful and devastating. William James noted the serenity of pre-natal
existence, the tranquility of immersion in the amniotic fluid. Freud said it
was the source of the mystics ‘oceanic feeling’, the sense of one oneness with
the cosmos. Somebody rightly called it a state of ‘liquid love’. In any case, you
could call it the ultimate bliss of perfect union. Everything is very much
alright, until all hell brakes loose in the crushing and agonising contractions
of labour where the infant literally faces death.
For most of us this incident is tucked away in the recesses
of the unconscious. Out of sight and out of mind. Only those who have recovered
birth and relived it in full, have any idea of just how terrifying the
experience is – and the enormity of the shock. You might call it the mother of
all let-downs. And it is a story that can be retold, with many variations, over
the course of lifetime. It is the source of that fatal conviction that happiness
ends in disaster.
*
But clusters of memories and the stories they contain are not
some kind of fatal human mechanism to which we are all doomed. It is true, as
Rupert Sheldrake tells us, the more times something happens the more likely it
is to happen again; but we are not the helpless victims of our past, doomed to
repeat bad experiences. We certainly can get over traumas, so what is it that
turns a trauma into a breeding ground for repetition?
If trauma is not followed by a special kind of
conscious attention it becomes an attractor for further traumas that
adds to the cluster. At its broadest level what repairs trauma is attention. A baby can fully recover from
a bad birth experience. It depends on the quality of attention the child
receives afterward.
We could say that the quality of attention the child needs is
love. But ‘love’ is one of those portmanteau words that is so loaded it can
mean anything.
The kind of attention I mean is the
granting of being to something that is exactly the being it is.
Can I say that again because you might need to pause over it
to get it:
It is the granting of
being to something that is exactly the being it is.
With a person it is not simply a passive letting them be. It is actively grants them exactly who they
are and how they are. To do this you have to be able to get how they are.
Getting it is the key. Here’s an example. When
we have unsuccessfully tried to get a point somebody is making we struggle to
understand. Then, the light turns on and we say, ‘Ahhh, now I’ve got it’. Getting it means consciously grasping the
whole of what they mean. This is a creative act. Such communication is not
passive. You are not a blank slate on which you allow them to write. You actually create what they mean – or as
near to it as you can get. You create what already is. When you grant being to another
person – it is the being they already are. When you really boil it all down, getting it, is the same as Rogers’ unconditional positive regard. You want
them to be just as they are and for them
to get themselves as they are. This is the central pillar of person-centred
work whatever modality the therapist is using. With it, almost anything will repair,
without it nothing will.
If a person is upset they don’t need you to help them get
over it, they don’t need advice or sympathy. Before anything they need you to
mirror them, to actively reflect their state of being. It even got that name in
early person-centred work. It was called ‘reflecting’ – a powerfully effective
style that is neglected by many modern counsellors. It doesn’t even feature in
much present day training.
A person who is struggling needs to know that you actually
appreciate the struggle itself. Not just
viewing it as something to get over, but that you actually grasp what the
struggle is like. To try to minimise the struggle so as to achieve the goal is
the greatest mistake.
Even if you can get the way someone is, they may not be able
to get themselves the way they are.
They can’t grant themselves the being they actually are. Past traumas persist and
repeat because of the deficit of this kind of attention.
As a baby, of course, you couldn’t give it to yourself. And
this can be true even in later life. The deficit persists and repeats. One says
colloquially, they just don’t love themselves. And they actually can’t. They
have to experience being given it. They
have to receive it as it should have been
given. The root of the problem is in the past and they are trying to repair
the past. It can be done, but sometimes the deficit is so bad it’s a long hard
road to receive this gift from another.
It is so dangerous to
go back there, as it were, and trust somebody because the stories of the way it
always goes are so powerful.
contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz
(03) 981 2264
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