THE TERRIBLE CONSEQUENCES OF BEING HAPPY

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.

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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

CLUSTERS OF MEMORIES

Memories grow in clusters, each one clinging to its like: physical traumas bond together; so do all the insults; I have a bunch of humiliating memories; a bunch of betrayals; a collection of lost loves. Similar experiences coalesce together and merge. Each single experience in a cluster, then, feels like all of them. Stan Grof has a good term for this. He calls them ‘condensed experiences’.  Similar memories can be bunched together so tightly that it’s hard to distinguish one from another. This is particularly true when the memories have been forgotten or suppressed. Often in therapy a person cannot tell where they are on time track; like a woman re-experiencing her own birth and also re-experiencing herself giving birth at the same time – with all the physical sensations of both incidents – two incidents: one at the beginning of her life and the other 25 years later in the same cluster.

In everyday life a cluster of memories works like a coalesced blob. It seems to search out incidents in present time that are similar to itself. Each present time reminder gets added to the cluster. Then, each time when someone leaves me or abandons me, all the past times of loss and loneliness surface and are all felt at once. When I sense someone is criticising me, the whole condensed experience of past criticism surfaces. I don’t react only to the real present time happening, but to the BIG EXPERIENCE, the whole cluster of my memories that are activated and felt all at once. I know full well what being criticised is like. Don’t tell me I can’t recognise it when I am being criticised !

So, of course, my reactions are over-the-top – far more dramatic than is justified by the present. I take things ‘the wrong way’. I am said to be ‘over-sensitive’, or ‘over-emotional’. And in all this I don’t blame my cluster for the upset, I blame the person who triggered it. Regardless of whether she was actually criticising me or not, I don’t blame my cluster because I don’t see it. I project it on to the present scene.  My life-long cluster of criticisms comes alive – happening right in front of me in the form of the present experience.

The other person might then say: ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to criticise you – I was just telling you how I felt’. To no avail. All I can see is that she was criticising me – it all feels the same as it always does. And indeed, it is always the same because all memories on this are condensed into a sameness; and this last one gets added to the cluster. Even though, in fact, I wasn’t being criticised, it feels like it; and it feels like it so convincingly that you wouldn’t be able to talk me out of it. You would probably get irritable with me for being so stubborn – which confirms that you are being critical.

In working with dreams you find that a dream image doesn’t just mean one thing, but myriad of associated memories, all with a similar theme; often wildly diverse, but all in the pull of a specific ‘cluster’ or condensation of memories. Freud was certainly on to this with his idea that the dream was ‘overdetermined’ which, he said, was the condensation of a number of thoughts (‘a multiplicity of connection’) in a single dream image. Freud neglected the seriousness of the body’s memory of pain and impact; these form the core of the most severe clusters that affect me.

Freud confined dream exploration to the patient’s verbal associations. Paying attention also to the physical associations with the dream is doubly productive.

Working on a dream, with attention to the body, a person can find themselves propelled into many diverse memories and fantasies scattered throughout life, all with some strange but compelling similarity, perhaps all with a similar body pain or discomfort – or maybe a childhood dream, a visit to the doctor, a new birthday bicycle, a scene at the beach 50 years ago when this woman looked at me and smiled. Somehow, collectively they all have the same strange association and meaning, the sensing of which deepens the feeling of my life.

There is one aspect of memory clusters I should mention. Each of these condensations of experience has a central core. This is the earliest experience that starts the cluster going.  As time passes it gathers mass, like a snowball rolling downhill. In 1950 Dianetics there was a good model for this. The core was the earliest experience and was called an ‘engram’. This might be a physical trauma like the painful squeezing of the head during the birth process. Later in life, perhaps in childhood, I receive a slap round the head in an emotional family row where I am also very anxious. This second incident ‘keys-in’ the original engram. From then on, key-ins can occur more easily. Every time there is emotional tension I feel overly anxious, headachy and trapped. Each time this happens I feel the original core experience – plus all the times it has restimulated. I can’t remember the contents of the cluster. This is impossible – but every time there is another key-in I feel all the effects at once.

Not all clusters have their origin in birth, but most begin fairly early on in life and set the stage for what is to come. Let’s take the example of the ‘bad father’, not the father who abuses, but the father who is a physical presence, but who is himself not there. The core experience is that of an ‘absence’ – but it is so general and consistent with every experience of him that it becomes normal. I learn to withhold in his presence – in fact, to not be there myself as well. I build up a cluster of experiences with men where there is a withholding.

This knowledge of the way clusters of memory work is very useful even though in person-centred work very early memories may not be addressed. With practically any negative experience one knows that inevitably there are earlier incidents of the same kind – if not the same, then with some element similar enough that their emotional energies are the bonded. Then, without seeking out the core early memories, one leaves space for them to appear – and they will when the time is ripe.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264