RESTIMULATION

RESTIMULATION

One day I will write a little piece about my early encounter with Dianetics, the forerunner of Scientology, that super psycho-religious, money-making con-game that has since grown into a monster. But for now, I just want to tell you about an idea I learned in those early days when it was just new-hit psychotherapy. It was buttressed by a clumsy, over-simplistic theory, but one of its ideas I have since refined to suit my own observations. It is the simple notion of ‘restimulation’.

It occurs when a present-time event triggers a past moment of trauma so that the person reacts physically and emotionally as they did in the original incident. The memory of the past trauma can be fused and identified with present-time in such a way that there is little awareness that the emotion and physical reaction is coming from the past.

It can happen on a quite small scale. Let’s say some years ago you were going through a bad time – say a marriage breakup. There was an awful moment when it hit you just how bad it was. You were waiting at a cross-walk of a busy intersection in town – that’s when utter disaster of the loss struck you. Suddenly you felt a deadly fear. Years later, without really knowing it, every time you approach that same cross-walk in town, a bad mood overtakes you or a pessimistic dread drifts in – without knowing why. That exact geographical place is the trigger.

Another example would be how I always put off going to bed. It is eleven-o-clock and I feel tired, but I lie on the couch watching television until I drop off. At three-o-clock I’m still on the couch, reluctant to go to bed. If I ask myself, ‘what is it I am avoiding’. I remember as a little boy. I don’t want to go to bed. I’m afraid of the dark bedroom and the shadows in which I can see faces; or I might have my repeated nightmare of being buried alive in a coffin. I have learned since that this nightmare itself was the restimulation of an earlier incident: the terror of being trapped in the no-exit just before birth.

You can see from this that restimulations can occur in chains. In this last example, birth is the first no-exit, trapped situation. But throughout life there are many other instances of a similar nature. Some have only a remote similarity, but just enough to act as a trigger. Crowded buses, lifts, the compacted crowds at Concerts in the Park make me slightly uncomfortably closed in. But it’s really surprising how worked up I get when I’m trapped in a social situation and I can’t get out of it. I hate it.

There is one interesting device that that psyche uses to avoid restimulation. It’s a strange one. It is a maneuver I only cottoned onto recently. It has to do with comfort zones.  It’s about going back before an original trauma. That’s where it was most comfortable – before it happened. To move forward in time is to move into the trauma. So it is that one can get stuck at a level of mental and emotional development.

Let us say that the biggest trauma in this person’s life was the separation from mother at an early age because of the mother’s illness after the birth. For some reason the child never really recovered from this blow and grows up shy and withdrawn. Her only comfort zone is the warmth and protection before the mother’s illness. The child grows up but doesn’t develop. She stays at home, is never really present at school and avoids engagement with the world. Later, she has the most god-awful conflict between launching into life and staying at home, remaining in the comfort zone prior to the first trauma; but launching into life equals launching into what comes next. She knows what come next. After the comfort zone is the shock of losing your mother. After her warmth, loss and isolation comes next. The idea of moving forward is too much. The result is a breakdown. Her libido, her life force, is pressuring her to risk it and it precipitates her forward into the trauma that is waiting. The breakdown is her way forward.

 It is very easy to tell people that they should move out of their comfort zone, but if they are ensconced in a place prior to a trauma, only they know what comes next if they start to move forward. When they even think of leaving home or leaving a marriage, all they get is a subliminal terror they try not to notice.

Life is a minefield and comfort zones are scarce. So, hey, when you do find a safe and comfy patch – what’s the hurry !

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264