Elephant! What Elephant?

Imagine what it would be like to wake up one morning and find yourself able to read people’s minds, having the psychic ability to know clearly, not only what they were expressing, but also what they were withholding. No vague guessing – but knowing with a clear second sight – as though they were an open book. And suppose, too, that they had no idea that you could do this. It would pose quite a problem, wouldn’t it?

And here is a slightly different scenario. Suppose you could read, not just what they were consciously withholding, but also what they were withholding even from themselves: emotions and thoughts they actually had, but of which they were quite unconscious. That would be an entirely different landscape. One thing you would see is what is known as their ‘shadow’, aspects of themselves that they reject or, as we say, deny.

Having exercised your imagination thus far, what would you say if I said that before you could even speak, you had precisely this ability? The very young can see right through us. They can feel the unconscious of grown ups. They are wide open to people’s conflicts and muddle. The child has no idea of pretence or truth or falsehood or any sort of abstract judgment. The different rules of human engagement are unknown; so are all the defenses.  There are no boundaries, no comparisons, and no predesigned notions into which to fit their experiences.

Infants can be aware of your psyche, aware not with words, but with a felt-sense. They perceive grown ups just as they are; they are open to what people are actually being. They take in just what is there. That is until they learn not to; for, as the child grows up, it learns about what it is not suppose to know. In other words it goes into agreement with grown ups’ denials.

 The denial that something doesn’t exist when it obviously does is ridiculous – its like saying:

I can’t pronounce ‘hippopotamus’.

But you just said it.

No I didn’t.

Yes you did. I heard you.

Times up! If you want another half hour argument you have to pay.

I just paid you.

No, you didn’t… Look, I’m not arguing any more until you pay.

Here we have one of those classic sketches from Monty Python.

‘The elephant in the room’ is simply a metaphor for the denial of something that obviously exists. People do it all the time.

It is famously easy to demonstrate this impossible feat with any good hypnotic subject. You simply give the subject a posthypnotic suggestion that Fred is not in the room. You wake the subject and ask them if Fred is in the room. They, of course, cannot see him even though he is standing right in front of them. That’s a demonstration of a hypnotically ‘planted’ denial.

Now lets look at a young child in a family where one or another parent takes good care of the child but is emotionally withdrawn; lets imagine this adult also carries a repressed and denied rage at life. They show no overt anger or violence, but to the child there is an elephant in the room.

The child gets into what is known as a ‘double bind’ A double bind is an emotional dilemma in which an   individual receives two conflicting communications where one reality negates the other.¹

All the overt signs are that this is a devoted parent. But quite contradicting this is their unconscious hostility and the child is scared of it. The child is frightened because it feels like a bomb that can go off at any time. The fear in the child is a physical sensation. There have been one or two times where the bomb has actually detonated and the parent has thrown a tantrum, which is immediately put aside as though it didn’t happen, and things return to normal.

The child now has a mirror copy of the adult’s denial which amounts to the agreement that the elephant isn’t there. But in truth, it is always there. So that now both parent and child are in the same pattern of denial.

For the child’s inner life, this denial detaches his fear from its object (the parent) so that he is no longer aware what he is afraid of; a situation that can persist in life as a continuous nameless threat.

As someone once said to me, ‘I knew I was a bit scared of Dad, but I never realised that the anxiety I suffer from is exactly my fear of him. I never connected the two things. I had to really get what my fear of him was really like as a child. Then it hit me.

THE NAMELESS THREAT.

Fear is different from anxiety. Fear has an object – you know what you afraid of. You may not know why, but you know what you are afraid of. Anxiety has no apparent object. One has no idea what one is anxious about. Anxiety is, as they say, free floating. It is fear detached from its object by denial. We are looking at the ‘elephant in the room syndrome’. Remember, the whole focus of agreement in the family is that the parent’s destructive rage doesn’t exist. Nothing is said, but this silent agreement detaches the child’s fear from its object (the parent) and then persists as a floating anxiety.

What restimulates the anxiety is some signal that stirs the nameless threat in the unconscious; it surfaces physically. Physically only, mark you. The full force of the threat has been disconnected from any memories, leaving only the physical anxiety.

‘You try to tell me that my anxiety is because my mother was hostile to me. What nonsense’. I admit she may have been mad at me occasionally as a child – but that was a long time ago. I know she always meant the best for me. After all, she is my mother’.

That’s the story that keeps the anxiety in place.

*

The tale I have told is but one possible scenario. There can be many variations of it. I have dramatized just one. Every family has a different pattern of denial. There are always things we don’t talk about; its part of normal family life.

¹ Double bind theory was first described by Gregory Bateson and his colleagues in the 1950s.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz