DREAMLIFE

The  notion that your dreams are trying to tell you something can be quite exhausting. Dreams seldom present you with any clear meaning; and mostly don’t appear to have anything to do with one’s current daylife concerns. But for people who are seeking some sort of spiritual or psychological answers, dreams seems to offer something, since they obviously come from somewhere deep within.

But there’s a nasty little trap here that can send you off on a fruitless struggle because dreams offer a puzzle that is just as ambivalent and problematic as life itself.

As a young man, I came up against the tricky question of dream interpretation. I would get annoyed with the ambivalence of my own dreams. “If they are trying to give me a message why the hell don’t they say what they mean clearly?”

I tried very hard, filling whole diaries full of my dreams and their meaning. But I always had the sneaky suspicion that I was trying to make them fit my explanations. I was trying to squeeze them into a bottle for which they were too rowdy and boisterous. I think now the perversity of my dreamlife was a strong resistance to being commandeered, hijacked by the narrowness of my mind.

It’s a mistake to focus on what a dream means. A dream isn’t symbolic. It doesn’t mean something else. It’s like insisting that a walk in the park has some hidden significance that’s more real than the park. This diverts our focus away from the experience of the dream itself and turns it into a head trip. The spiritual value of the dream doesn’t lie in left-brain rationality, it lies in the concrete experience of the dream itself. It is the connection with pure non-rational nature that does us good.

We should just value our dreamlife for what it is, just as we would value going for a walk in natural surroundings, provided, that is, we walk for the sake of the walk and not for some other reason. We could walk for the exercise or to give the dogs a workout. How about going for a walk just for itself.

Oh sure, a walk in the park is good for your health, but an over-focus on this this tends to diminish the experience and can turn a stroll into jogging or power walking. Your heart may benefit, but you will have missed the park.

Of course, our dreamworld is sometimes more like Jurassic Park than a civilised botanic gardens. So we have this ambitious relationship with our dreamlife; we can’t give it a singularity it doesn’t have. In premodern times dreams were important for their prophetic and divinatory value. This practice disappeared with the end of medievalism, only surfacing again at the time of Freud and psychoanalysis. Dreams were once again important, but again only for their practical value.

But spite of this focus on dream interpretation in psychotherapy it had some value because it encouraged us to pay attention to our dreams, writing them down, thinking about them. It allowed us to ‘free associate’ and to wander, expanding on the dream, dreaming it further. All to the good, but spoiled by the interpretation at the end.

The spiritual value of the dream lies in the connection to the pure experience of it, to its sharpness of feeling and sensation. I don’t mean the emotions it provokes, I mean the outlandish perceptions that hang around afterwards, the strangeness, the familiar unfamiliarity, the buzz of confusion, the vivid impact of the dream before it slides under the floorboards, out of sight as you come to daytime consciousness. I think our daytime consciousness is afraid of dreamlife because it comes from another realm and disturbs. Our daylife rapidly quashes the dream, so that five minutes after you wake up the memory of it has entirely vanished; and try as you may to remember – it’s gone. The dayworld suppresses all other dominions. Dreams are not welcome in our dayworld because they tend to subvert the dominant paradigm and unravel the world as we know it.

Look upon a dream as a visitations from another realm, another dimension – as though a UFO had landed in your backyard to take you on a trip. It is just such other realms that can expand the narrowness of our daytime consciousness if we can permit it to. Not that we have any choice. Our conscious mind cannot choose or decide on these things any more than it can decide to go to sleep. Insomniacs are told the way to sleep is to ‘let go’ ‘to surrender’ – but the conscious mind cannot let go. It doesn’t know how to. It has to be overtaken. This is why we use substances to surrender to those other dominions.

It’s quite impossible to decide to be overtaken, but we can change the way we look at these things

I did.

That will set us on the move. 

Just a little note here. I had nearly completed this essay early this morning when I found myself getting quite sleepy in front of the computer. I decided to lie down even though it was only six o clock.Then came this vivid dream. I found myself floating around the room singing ecstatically. A woman came to the door and gave me this gift. It was a large mechanical bird – mechanical yet full of life. I was quite alarmed by the way it clung to me. Then the woman gave me an aquarium from which emerged a snake that reach toward me. I awoke astonished at the vividness of the dream that could have lasted no more than five minutes. Holding my head in my hands I repeated over and over: what an amazing dream – what an amazing dream.

And it was – it was so real.

 

ATTUNEMENT

Thanks to the experiments of the ingenious Rupert Sheldrake we’re aware that dogs know when their masters are coming home. When the Victorian psychic researchers first thought about such things they called it ‘thought transference’; Mark Twain called it ‘mental telegraphy’. But  they eventually decided to call it ‘telepathy’, because what was being transmitted was more than just thoughts, but a whole range of images and feelings. Thus: tele (transmission) of pathos (feelings). Tele-pathy is about sympathy, empathy and responsiveness felt psychically, across a distance. Interestingly, how great the distance makes no difference.

Sometimes a telepathic message is obvious, but trivial and dismissed: “Funny you should ring, I was just thinking about you”. Sometimes it comes as a jolt from a sudden death of a family member miles away; or in the let-down of a mother’s milk when her baby needs her on the other side of town.

 

So much more communion goes on between people than we realise, but it goes on subliminally, that is, outside our awareness.¹ Some of the most important communications between people need no words at all. We can feel an atmosphere. We can sense the emotion in a look or in a subtle demeanor. Behind us we can detect  being stared at ; and no one has to tell us when we are 

                                                         *

People cannot respond to the inwardness of another if they are cut off from the subliminal level. Yes, they can talk to others. They can exchange greetings, they can even discuss politics or family problems. But without being attuned subliminally there can be no empathy, no instantaneous connection.

                                                      *

The subliminal attunement with another person is absorbing what has not been articulated. Attunement takes place below the level of cognitive awareness. It is not a representation, or a picture; it is not a portrait, a depiction; and certainly not a ‘case history’; it does not consist of data. We are not indulging in ‘interpersonal communication’. We seem to be two entities interrelating, but this is only the outward appearance. Real connection is the psychic event. This subliminal event is not just about you or me. It happens between us. The meaning of ‘us’ is not ‘you’ plus ‘me’. It is a third entity – a tertium quid. And when I experience it I see myself – only expanded; and when you experience it you see yourself, amplified. Something in you enlivens me; and through this, you are quickened too. This is where the boundaries that separate you and I are permeable.

                                                   *

Having sung the praises of silence and all that happen in that clairvoyant underworld, one should not minimise the value of words and of speaking out. After all, before counselling was even named it was called ‘the talking cure’. There is a dynamic relationship between speaking and silence, between our conscious analytical intelligence and the subliminal level. To speak, you first have to listen to yourself; and that means waiting in silence.

Looking into any difficult situation, you wait for an idea; you wait for the subliminal to assess the problem, to weigh it up, to evaluate it; and it does so under the hood. The subliminal will deliver its answer in the form of words that you can speak. Hearing yourself speak it aloud will strike up further questions for the subliminal to assay. So, its like a seesaw process – backwards and forwards, each step stimulating the other side in the ongoing process of unwinding and clarifying the problem.  When you are attuned to yourself, good ideas come through. The problem is constantly re-evaluated. That’s really what paying attention to the felt-sense is all about. The conscious ego cannot do this alone.

                                                             *

There can be a negative side to our subliminal connections, for example, in a home life where the atmosphere has been toxic. When we consider the influence of parents on a child there is more involved than would seem. More importantly there is the pressure of the parent’s subliminal psychology. This is absorbed telepathically by the child. It’s the hidden atmosphere of home life. Not unusually, there are aspects of a parent’s subliminal that are just the opposite of their declared intensions and overt behaviour. Thus, the subliminal atmosphere is completely hidden, both at the time and recalling home life later on.

                                                  *

The subliminal level of our being is intimately telepathic and not only with friends and relations. It is in potential contact with other realms of being. All the unusual phenomena we associate with psychic phenomena (psi) are experience by people who are more open this connection – and are sometimes flooded by it. It is also the source of our creativity and our madness. When this realm is felt just on the other side of the veil there is a vitality, an élan vital; and people will go to any lengths to have the connection, whatever the cost.  The whole world of drugs supplies this vital magic in our disenchanted and materialistic world. The war against drugs is the is the establishment’s fear of the subliminal realm and its tendency to dissolve habitual structures.

It is feasible to regard the brain as adjusting attunement, filtering, screening and excluding all that we do not require for our immediate survival. Altered states of consciousness such as those produced by LSD or MDMA, as well as the psychoactive plants used by many indigenous people, open the doors of perception dissolving habitual mental structures. The painted veil of common reality is torn aside, luring us into hyper-reality.

 Aldous Huxley, like Henri Bergson, Ferdinand Schiller, William James, Frederic Myers and others, believed the brain functions as a filter, normally shutting out perceptions, memories, and thoughts that are not necessary for everyday survival. Rather than producing consciousness, the brain largely diminishes what consciousness is capable of revealing to us.

 As astrophysicist David Darling says in his book Soul Search, ‘we are conscious not because of the brain, but despite it.’ ²

                                                                      ^* 

¹    Fredric Myers (1843 – 1901) coined the term ‘subliminal’. Under this umbrella term should be included what we have called in counselling the ‘bodily  felt-sense’, as well as various psi phenomena: telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance, near death experiences, past-life recall in children, poltergeist hauntings and ghosts, ufos and alien abduction, savant syndrome, cases of prodigious memories, channeling, out-of-body and mystical experiences, precognition, psychedelic trance states and hypnosis. All these are considered ‘rogue’ phenomena by current scientific paradigm.

 ²     http://realitysandwich.com/173104/brain_filter_removing_stuffing_keyhole/

 

 

 

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PARANORMAL AND THE THEATRE OF THE IMAGINATION.

Its not so much whether you believe in the paranormal, past lives, near death experiences, etc., but whether you can entertain them as a possibility. And by that I don’t mean just acknowledge such things in a broadminded sort of way – I mean entertain them with the full force of experience in the Theatre of The Imagination. This requires one, not to believe in a naive sort of way, but to entirely suspend disbelief, to throw yourself into what it would be like to wake up in the middle of an operation, exteriorized, watching the doctors and nurses working on your body; or to be a young child remembering how it was in a previous life and, for the child, like it was quite ordinary.

       Nothing convinces like an actual experience; the next best thing is to throw yourself into the hundreds of personal testimonies of those who know a paranormal experience first hand. And they know, not from just some theory – indeed, their experience often flies in the face of their established beliefs – but because they cannot deny what actually happened to them.

          I am not given to paranormal experiences – my ‘natural mind’ is too well educated – but I am blessed with a powerful Theatre of The Imagination where I can virtually enter into the experience of others – (which I suppose is a bit paranormal in itself!). This is what I have been doing this last year or so in my researches into the paranormal. Take for example the whole fascinating field of near death experience.          A near death experience (NDE) can occur during an operation or accident or illness. In a cardiac arrest the heart can stop beating for a few seconds or an hour, during which time the person may find themselves looking down on their body and the medical people working on it.

Then, typically, a NDE moves the person through a dark tunnel heading towards a light that grows brighter as they move towards it. When they reach the light it is common to experience being enveloped by warmth and love. Very often during this process their whole life flashes before them at tremendous speed; but their consciousness is so heightened that they are aware of every detail in just a few seconds. Very often they don’t want to come back. Sometimes the thought of their children and family turns them back, or they are told by a figure that it is not their time yet.

         It is remarkable that, in most of the thousands of recorded accounts, the NDE experiences are similar. The above is the typical, but there are interesting variations; and a very few NDEs are negative, carrying feelings of despair and isolation. According to US, German, Dutch studies it seems that around 4% of their populations have experienced a NDE or OBE (out of the body experience)*  With New Zealand’s population at four and a half million this would mean that 180,000 (that’s 1 in every 25 persons) would already know what I am talking about.

         People are loathed to discuss this stuff for fear of being thought crazy; and often the experience is so deeply soulful that it is too precious to risk it. The result is that there is a general ignorance of how normal the paranormal is.

Perhaps the most important aspects of a NDE is the effect it has on the personality. There is a change in quality of life values. They now find that they have more love and affinity for others, less interest in material possessions, the quality of everyday life is enriched and they have little fear of death.

Most of the theories about the paranormal leave me cold. What does fascinate me are the people themselves, how totally surprised they are to find themselves ‘outside the box’ with no explanation for it at all. I found my attitude here confirmed by many researchers in the field. Prof. Neal Gossman wrote: “Listening to an NDEr narrate a deep experience, especially in a one-one setting, constitutes a profound experience for the listener and is more psychologically convincing than just reading a whole bunch of studies”. 1

         Professor Kenneth Ring found that there was ‘a powerful positive effect’ that his course had on students who themselves had never had a NDE. This is what I meant about the Theatre of The Imagination and the suspension of disbelief. It allows us to have a virtual NDE giving us at least some of the changes in lifestyle that the real experience entails.

         It seems to make no difference whether a person was religious or atheist, good or bad, the experience and the effects are substantially the similar. These changes are not brought about through faith, but from their experience.

If you Google ‘near death experience’ you will get 34 million hits and YouTube is chocker full of personal disclosures, people who are all too eager to tell others what it was like. It is certainly a revelation to listen to them. Try one on YouTube. Here is a young woman of 25 who had a seizure at a party caused by those crazy strobe lights. It must have been flashing at the wrong frequency for her and it sent her into a seizure and a near death experience. You’ll like her. She’s spontaneous and genuine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-GHrsSqcNw

1   Gossman, n. Journal of Near Death Studies. Vol 28, No.4

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OTHER WAYS OF KNOWING

In a recent television interview with president Obama there was mention of some recent UFO sightings that had made news. Obama gave one of his most winning smiles and made a dismissive joke about it. It was effective - the subject was dropped. I wondered why people in authority were so nervous about discussing UFOs, and I thought it must be fear of being thought some kind of nut, that only weirdos and eccentrics take UFOs seriously.

To be thus tagged can be gravely damaging. In 1994 the Harvard Medical School appointed a committee to investigate professor of psychiatry John E. Mack. It was the first time in Harvard's history that a tenured professor was subjected to such an investigation. His crime: writing a book on ‘alien abduction’. The committee's draft report found “that it is professionally irresponsible for any academic, scholar or practicing psychiatrist to give any credence whatsoever to any … direct personal contact between a human being and an Extraterrestrial being…” After 14 months of deliberation, the Dean finally "reaffirmed Dr. Mack's academic freedom to study what he wishes and to state his opinions without impediment." 

Why all the fuss? What is it about this subject that so rattles the establishment? It would have been OK if Dr. Mack had found a psychiatric category for his abductees; but he didn’t. He treated their experiences as they themselves did – as something that really happened to them.

The question then arises: how do you prove what they experienced was real. And this brings me to the central point I want to make. There are ways of knowing that are outside the western materialist obsession with ‘proof’. As one skeptical scientist said: ‘If I can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist. This effectively rules out 99% of ordinary reality as we understand it. We can’t possibly live without taking our ordinary experience for granted. But if you are forced to accept something that contradicts your established world-view, it is a profound psychological shock – like, per example, suddenly seeing your dead grandfather drinking a cup of coffee at the kitchen table !

It’s bad enough to suggest that UFOs come from outer space, bearing in mind the unimaginable distances involved, but to suggest that flying saucers come from a parallel universe that involves no distance at all, is quite troubling. To suggest further that they carry extraterrestrials who abduct people into their craft for some nefarious purpose is just too much. The whole notion contradicts our world-view too drastically.

These difficulties can be overcome by expanding our conception of what is possible. But there is another difficulty that undermines our world-view more seriously. UFO vehicles and their occupants seem to have a double aspect. They can be tangibly physical. They can be tracked on radar, they leave physical traces where they have landed, like burn marks and radioactive soil. In the famous Fendlesham Forest encounter, US and RAF personnel came into physical contact with a saucer that had landed in obvious difficulties. One of them “plucked up enough courage to touch it.  It made him think of smooth opaque black glass”. He touched certain symbols on its surface. “The skin of the craft was smooth to touch” he said. “Almost like running your hand over glass. Void of seams, until I ran my hand over the unknown symbols on the side of the craft. The symbols were nothing like the rest of the skin, they were rough, like running my hand over sandpaper. So, the UFO was undoubtedly a solid material object.” ¹   

But there is a double aspect to UFOs; something we can only call a psychic component. Abductees report being bodily conveyed through the walls of their bedroom and to be in telepathic communication with the beings. Also the UFOs can appear and disappear in an instant; and they can alter people’s perception of time.

We tend to think that UFOs are either physical or psychic manifestations, products of the real world or only our imagination; but they aren’t just physical or mental – they are both. And it is this that really confounds our sense of reality. There is no way our existing world-view can accommodate such nonsense. Since the birth of science in the 17^th century we have separated soul, spirit etc. from the material world. The spirit is one thing and the physical world is a different order of being. The body is one thing, the mind is another. This is fundamental to our western common sense; and it is a completely artificial distinction. It leads to all kinds of problems, making science too easy and the psychic to hard.

Mack says that his people almost uniformly come out of their first abduction experience in a state of ontological shock.²  They are forced to believe in other realms of reality. They are absolutely certain that what they experienced really happened to them; they can’t deny it, and yet it contradicts everything they previously believed. For most abductees it eventually changes their view of life, enlarges it completely.

I’m sure this is why the UFO phenomena makes the established mind-set of western culture nervous. You will notice that skeptics don’t just doubt, they have a passionate need to disbelieve. They have a huge emotional investment in the paired down material view of life. They have the same reaction to alternative medicine, or to the I Ching; but UFO phenomena are particularly threatening. Because of their physical intrusions into real space they cannot be so easily dismissed as imagination.

The challenge that UFOs pose for us is about changing our ways of looking at things. We have to overcome this ingrained idea that things are either real or imagined, either matter or spirit. The indigenous people of the Amazonian rain forest and other shamanic cultures have a very different way of relating to the world. Reality is not split as ours is; they have a certain trust in an instinctive, holistic way of knowing. ³

I have had to learn this instinctive way of knowing in person-centred therapy. I know, for example, when someone is telling the truth. Well, perhaps not so much telling the truth as being truthful. It is unmistakable when a person is being real. It has nothing to do with diagnosis or case histories. It has to do with directly tuning in to someone reality, just as the shaman tunes into the reality of the rainforest. The barriers are down and one doesn’t just imagine or reason about the other – one knows.

¹    Pope, Nick, John Burroughs USAF (Ret), Jim Penniston USAF (Ret). Encounter in Rendesham Forrest. Thomas Dunne Books, NY, 2014

²   Ontology: the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being or what is ultimately real.

³   Shamanism: the animistic religion of certain indigenous peoples in which mediation between the visible and spirit worlds is effected by shamans.

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CHANGE OF IDENTITY

The matted gloves worn by the boy in the picture are filed with hundreds of bullet ants sewn into the glove with their stings facing inwards. It is part of the Coming of Age rite of initiation practiced by the Satere Mawe of the Amazonian rainforest. According to the Schmidt Sting-Pain Index, bullet ant stings are the worst in the insect world; and the boy must dance while he is enduring the agony. He is 12 years old and will have to endure this ritual twenty times before being considered ‘a man’. ¹ Whichever Amazonian first devised this piece of exquisite torture was a genius equal to the Marquis de Sade himself.

Given a sufficiently harsh dose of pain, humiliation or degradation the personality will undergo a deep transmutation. This is a piece of folk knowledge has existed since the first hunter gatherers of Upper Paleolithic societies created Initiation Rites of Passage for their adolescent young men.

Personality changes produced by traditional Initiation Rites all have one common purpose: the creation of a new identity that rejects childhood, replacing it with a personality that identifies with those inducing the trauma: i.e. the elders of the tribe or cult.

In primitive societies when a young man, still yet a child, undergoes an Initiatory Right of Passage he emerges from the terribly painful process a fearless warrior or hunter: ‘a man’. He has a new identity. In some societies the internal rejection of everything associated with childhood and the feminine is so thorough that, from then on, he will not even acknowledge his own mother. 

 I think what happens in such violent initiations is similar to the well known phenomena of falling in love with your abuser or torturer. Known as the Stockholm syndrome, for which there has never been a satisfactory explanation. ²

 I am going to suggest the explanation lies in the way a weak person under stress identifies with someone who is strong.

Under extreme stress I have a shift of identity. Where the abuser is convincingly enforcing his power over me something dramatically unconscious happens: I shift valence. I unconsciously appropriate him and his power by becoming him. I am no longer purely a victim.

This would explain why, having been being abused, I tend to become an abuser myself. I am acting out of the powerful ‘abuser identity’ I appropriated when I was the victim. Later, when I am dealing with a weak person, I will tend to shift into the abuser valance that is now one of my identities.

 It seems that the greater the pain of the abuse, the more complete is the shift of valence and the rejection of the former identity. This is why Initiation Rites of Passage in primitive societies are so extraordinarily prolonged and violent. They have to have an identity changing impact that’s overwhelming. It has to be so painful that the boy shifts out of who he is. His new identity will reject the identity (the child) that has undergone the pain, replacing it with the identity of the elders. He gives up himself to be them – in other words, he shifts valence into their more powerful identity and, with it, assumes all their habits and values. After this he can differentiate himself from any pain or suffering. He is now ‘a man’ of the tribe.

Rites of Passage are intrinsically conservative. They are designed to transmit traditional habits and to stifle individual creativity and innovation. One can see this at work in most religions and gangs. These groups derive their incredible persistence, in part, from the cloned identities of their devotees transmitted down the generations.

For girls of the Uaupes of Brazil traditional Initiation Rites are just as severe as for boys. The rejection of childhood and the creation of separate, authorized identity is still the goal.

‘When a girl reaches puberty she undergoes one month’s seclusion fed only on bread and water. Then the girl is brought out naked and beat with sticks by family and friends until she is either dead or blacks out. Once the girl wakes up, if she does, the beating is repeated four times. After the fourth beating the sticks used to beat her with are dipped into pots of fat and given to the girl to lick. She is now considered a woman worthy of marriage.’³   That she may be, but somehow, after that lot, I don’t think she’ll be leading the African Women’s Rights movement.

·                   

We could say that major steps in life are either forced by external conditions or by a Readiness for Change. Steps brought about by duty, severe crisis or social pressures are forced changes for which the person may not ready. A forced identity change usually arises out of environmental pressure or impact of some kind.  Such changes will tend to create a separate identity that rejects its former self, thus inhibiting the continual, natural flow of development. A radical change of identity causes a split in the personality, cutting it off from the previous identity and its memories. Rainforest rites of passage are an extreme example of this.

The psyche’s ability to assume and discard identities is a phenomenon that has not been fully acknowledged or studied. I’m not talking about schizophrenia – perhaps manifestation of this ability – I talking about identities that are assumed and discarded in the course of ‘normal’ life. For example, different people have different points in their childhood before which they can remember little or nothing. The cut-off happens early for some; for others quite late. A shift of identity can come about by finding oneself in a hostile or alien family. An identity is then assumed that seems to be what is required, often a copy of someone in the environment.

Each past identity has its own slant on life, its own emotions and its own memory. A discarded identity doesn’t just disappear. Depending on the severity of the rejection, a discarded identity has a strong and stable persistence in the unconscious.

One often hears people say, ‘part of me thinks this and part of me thinks that’. This is not just a cognitive variance of ideas. These are different identities in conflict.

I think if we regard of our serious conflicts in terms of different identities and the historical context in which they were created, we begin to sympathise with how we got to where we are. We begin to appreciate our own story.

As to the vexed question: which of all these identities is the real me? The answer is:

it depends who’s asking !

I

¹  Coming of Age: The Importance of Male Rites of Passage

Brett & Kate McKay

 http://www.artofmanliness.com/2008/11/09/coming-of-age-the-importance-of-male-
                                  rites-of-passage/

           ²   http://counsellingresource.com/lib/therapy/self-help/stockholm/

           ³  http://akorra.com/2010/10/10/top-10-odd-puberty-rituals/

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CONGRUENCE

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

William Faulkner

In the 1960s Carl Rogers introduced the term ‘congruence’ to indicate a person’s harmony with themselves. Roughly it means honesty, transparency – authenticity. To be in-congruent is to dissemble or to hide under a false appearance. A sign of incongruence would be, for example, smiling when one is annoyed or depressed.

For me, the greatest enemy of congruence is my strength of will to overcome my past. The one thing I don’t want to be is congruent with my frailty and dependence. This is who I still am, but it is not who I want to be.

I learned early on to protect my ego, my sense of self, by rejecting and disowning my weaknesses. As I grew up I also learned to be independent of those I needed. When they hurt me I was eventually strong enough to say ‘I don’t need them’ and to make it true. This ability became so entrenched that it developed into an automatic mechanism, so that my emotions are instantly cut off whenever I am reminded of my weakness and dependency. Then, I believe I really don’t care – but it’s a lie.

What really kicks in is fear and anxiety; and this goes back to my birth. Birth is a time when one is closest to death. Birth is a massive trauma. But now, when it is emotionally restimulated my feelings shut off. What I cannot shut off are the physical effects. I cannot remember the original circumstance of my terrors – but any slight reminder in present-time and my feelings automatically switch off; but not the physical effects: heartache, emptiness, fear and anxiety. These I do suffer, without knowing why.

 The event in present time that triggers the restimulation might only be that my partner shows a disinterest or contradicts something I was saying – that’s all.

But it’s enough. Instantly, before I am even aware of it, the shutting-off mechanism goes into effect. I don’t even know it’s happened.  All I feel is perhaps a slight irritation; nothing more – she often does that kind of thing – but that’s all right!

 Underneath, however, it isn’t all right. It goes deep; but I do not suffer it. My wall protects me from the threat of dying. The only effect I get is that hours later I feel depressed, my chest hurts – and I don’t know why. That night I can’t sleep.

My incongruence is not consciously purposeful. If you were to ask me if my wife has upset me I would answer in some general sort of way – without much feeling. No!  Not really upset – annoyed perhaps. As for my chest pains, maybe I should see a doctor; but I often get it and it goes away. I disparage its importance.

Since my wife is the most important person in my life, the one I most look to for reassurance, this situation happens quite often.  It is an aspect of my unconscious incongruence that I am unaware how much I am dependant on her. And any sharp reminder of it restimulates fear – which, paradoxically I cannot feel. In fact, throughout my life there have been hundreds of times when the same sort of event has happened – with kids at school, girlfriends, teachers and the like.

You may ask why I have such a wall up against the feeling of dependency. The answer is that like most people, I don’t want to know   my early childhood; how utterly dependant I was. I don’t want to deal with my fears of death and extinction again. But later in life, each reminder of it, each time someone disowns or misunderstands me, the ground opens up and it’s as though I’m there again.

So, even in my early days there grew a chain of events where I perceive myself as facing abandonment and death.

Eventually I developed an ego strong enough to be able to say, ‘I don’t care’ – and a will strong enough to make it true. My automatic cut-off clears me of my past. It’s all behind me now – except I have these queer psychosomatic problems.

*

This is how it was. But things have changed – I have changed. I have learned to be more honest with myself, to be more in tune with my felt-sense of how things are with me; to admit when something hurts, that it hurts; to admit to myself and to others my weaknesses and sensitivity. My therapist helped me, but thankfully she let me do all the work myself. With total acceptance from her I found it easier and easier to be myself.  It took quite a while, gradually learning to be authentic; but every step in taking down the wall was a step in the right direction.

*

ps. I trust the reader will be aware that the above is not autobiographical. I dramatise a fictional first person because stories tell truths better that abstract descriptions. And I wanted to tell a common theme without revealing anyone’s private story.

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