Trauma - 28th June 2021.

25th June 2021

Notes:

I want to get to a place

 where we work together to do this mysterious, great something. 

A vision - walking the Camino 

to Compostela. 

A pilgrimage through story.

Exploring dark alleyways.

Oh my words to you 

I'm so bloody obvious. 

And I'm breaking rules... 

Aligning with truth and trust...

Discussion one.

Trauma -  28th June 2021.

The background.

I approached therapy with an open mind, and as if it was work. But, it was during the time of Covid lockdown and life took place on Zoom. My family were at home too. I felt restricted and stifled. 

I couldn't really talk. And after about eight sessions I was done. No getting out of therapy as a student. We agreed to talk about my course work, specifically in this session, about my research project. 

I would have left therapy if not for the course, but I couldn't face starting with another therapist - difficult to dig underneath my rationalizations, but I didn't want to explain even as little as an outline of what had happened to me again. 

Not yet. 

Nevertheless it felt deeply unethical for me to be his client. So I asked for our sessions to change focus, for him to be my mentor and I, the mentee, and this explains I think why we used his meanings and not mine. He took his role of mentor, to be teacher. That isn't really what I'd meant! But it was more ethical for me than being his client!

But yes, once I realised how I felt about him, therapy was done!

I fought hard to banish those feelings of falling for him, from my mind though. I called it an artifact of therapy, I called it transference. But ultimately I don't think that it is. And yes, that's a real problem. And in truth I don't have a clue what I'm supposed to do, because it wont fade. 

In August 2020 A boyfriend I used to go to gigs with in the late 1970s heard what had happened to me regarding my family; and got in touch. And he was so kind, so lovely to me and so integral to my recovery. It seemed to him as if we were meant to be. And it should have been a good match for both of us. There was a lot of joy and fun and electricity. 

Here is the thing, our experience of Eros set me free, his love allowed me to heal. 

So my first response was to step into his dream, and to dismiss my fuzzy, impossible thinking. But this isn't a fairy-tale and there isn't a happy ending. I simply couldn't love him. Actually, it felt like transference! Like stepping back into being a teenager, but with health issues! I stayed a weekend with him. But he didn't make my heart race, and what could we talk about? 

It was lovely to be wanted physically, but it was a kind of  - so what feeling - and that isn't good! 

I explained this to myself through other people's words: 'it's too soon for another relationship', 'I'm bound to feel apprehensive'.  

But it wasn't so. 

I wasn't apprehensive! 

I couldn't love him, someone else was in my heart. 

Meanwhile, he trusted his instincts and asked me if I was in love with someone else? 

I answered no - and as I said it, it sounded hollow to me. I didn't feel as if I was lying, I just didn't want to believe I'd do something so stupid as to fall for my therapist. So then I said yes, but the person doesn't know…

Despite saying it I tried very hard not to believe, and it was so easy for me to continue attributing the cause of my feelings to inaccurate thoughts. It took until December 2020 before a twist of fate, gave me the correspondence between intimations and reality enough to make sense of the impressions I'd formed - and the realization arrived with absolute clarity yet I continued to run though all the possible 'transferences' and reasons to consider this an anomaly, false, unreal. 

It seemed so reasonable to judge myself unable to interpret my feelings in any kind of accurate way. 

So once again I was denying the reality of my feelings, as I had with my husband and the reason was the same; the alternative, more true narrative is the unknown, unexpected and unknowable - Terra Incognita unmapped - undocumented. 

Plus I was experiencing hypervigilance, panic attacks, and I couldn't sleep. I had survived chaos, terror, destruction and then loss and grief, how could I be sane? 

I felt as if something had snuffed out my North star, and set the compass needle endlessly spinning. I'd lost my husband, my son and my daughter.

But, that 'I'm not sane' narrative isn't new.

Nor was it ever true. 

The session - via Zoom.

He - You seem to want to focus on what is trauma and how one gets beyond trauma?

Me - The real subject is altered states, I'm starting from the outcome - which is that post traumatic growth occurs. I think trauma creates an altered state of mind and during that altered state, given the right experience, positive changes occur in how a person perceives their life and the world - isolation and fear change into connection, acceptance and gratitude - reconnection can occur. So, for my research I will look at memories traumatised people report as opening up a profound turn around and change. I think that memories created during a traumatic period - because brain function is different - can be transformational. But this change ( self-reported by my focus group) occurred only because of trauma; the incidents would not have been significant without an altered state, without trauma.

Him - I have a paradoxical point of view, that instead of opening up and changing one's view of life, trauma affirms it. Have I ever had a client where trauma resulted from questioning everything they knew....the answer is no.

Ah, he hasn't understood at all what I mean. I said that trauma alters a person's state of mind. I haven't said that questioning 'everything you know' causes trauma. 

I don't bother arguing.

I say it again in a different way.. 

Me - Trauma is the shattering of a person's working model of the world. If someone now gets the right experience which scaffolds and recreates meaning....

He - I think we are going to have to ask the question, is that trauma - this experience might be difficult, this might change a person's view of life, but is it trauma? Trauma is, in my view, where the person's emotional resources are not equal to the person's emotional responses to an event and a person becomes overwhelmed. It's when the emotional, cognitive apparatus is overwhelmed and it sort of breaks. And then we have to say, and why does it break?  Well, because everything is developmental.-   developmental process from an object relations point of view... 'we are formed by relationship'. A parent saying. 'This is so sad but it is going to be ok'...or another response of dismissal and rejection. These are profound developmental experiences...Then a car crash, exam pressure - they will respond in one of  three different ways: secure, avoidant or ambivalent/disorganised. Attachment is a profoundly foundational way of experiencing things. The person with a secure attachment goes home and says 'now I'm safe' gets a hug and has a cry! But the other two may well experience trauma.

Hasn't he just said what I said - more or less?

I'm trying to fathom his use of concepts here!

Me -  A pre-existing dent distorts the whole map of this new reality. Not enough resources, or useful memories.(struggling because I'm using my own theories!) There are experiences that no one can get through unscathed. I'm looking at the shattering of meaning. You are saying that if there are kindly memories from childhood a person will always get through, I'm not convinced. I am defining trauma as the outcome of severe and prolonged stress (not what is stressful or why)  I think prolonged stress leads to trauma.

He - No. Prolonged stress may lead to resolution.

Me - loss of meaning and resources no longer function..

Robert Sapolsky - hippocampus/cortisol. 

The reference library goes off line.

He - (a sigh of exasperation?) In object relations it is called phantasy -with a ph. Phantasy is the filtering of experience through our developmental blueprint. The developmental blueprint leads one to be prone to trauma or unlikely to experience trauma. Trauma meaning, our resources not being equal to the emotional task. This raises the question, what are one’s emotional resources? And the answer to that question is - it’s entirely developmental. Proof - line up 10 people and give them an identical experience, you get 10 different experiences! Because developmentally they will have developed different blueprints. I’ve taken to describing to people who have been traumatised the difference between memory and re-enactment. Memory is something that happens, that we can recall and it has emotion attached, sad or happy, but we are not emotionally invested in it (he’s describing autobiographical memory) we know it happened, past tense but it doesn’t affect us now except for a few minutes as we remember it Re-enactment is very different, it is in the fibre of our being (episodic memory). So if someone had a very difficult, unsupported childhood and they are robbed at knife point their response may well be traumatic re-enactment. They keep replaying the point at which they saw the knife, and realising that their life is in danger. They are remembering it now because of developmental experiences pre-existing when they did not feel safe and there was nowhere to turn.

In my own experience the narrative that pain contains a re-enactment  - loss of security in the present, joining up with unmet ‘developmental needs and vulnerability’ - seriously got in the way of resolving my current and real problems. Things really were as bad as they felt. Memories from childhood weren't the problem. Ways of responding from childhood weren't the problem. What was actually happening was the problem! 

Not being able to get a full picture of exactly how bad things were, was the problem!

I'm thinking of flight 447, in which the pilot kept trying to raise the nose of the plane to get out of the cold air freezing the air speed monitors, and the storm clouds, then to stop the plane decelerating, then to stop the plane falling! He fought to keep the plane flying, by doing what made sense to him because of habit. 

The pilot would not have done this with a full picture of what was actually happening. He would have counter-intuitively tipped the nose of the plane downwards and everyone would have survived...

He didn't fail to do this because of his childhood.

He fixated on what he believed would work, and in the panic, he simply tried harder and harder because nothing was making sense!

Perhaps it takes the intrusion of something strange and leftfield to bring creative thought back online?

Me - (paraphrasing his words as if they are mine - echoing his tone of voice) Clients have a narrative of confirmation…

He - Absolutely - they say, of course this always happens to me. I’m not safe anywhere. And then that sense of ‘I’m not safe anywhere’ becomes background noise, becomes everything in my experience. Which is a re-enactment 'and I'm going to get beaten from pillar to post again’ at seven years old having just come home from school. Am I safe/ not safe? That's what I call a re-enactment rather than memory.

Me - Default settings - your argument is about default settings.

He - Because for someone else their default setting is punching back. Someone brought up with a strong sense of their physical self - which may also come from a traumatic place - to always be ready to defend.

Me - It seems to be a deterministic view - my research is about experiences that patch, restore, mend..

He talks about how some people are fine or vexed, by silence?! Seeming not to hear what I've said, or what I want to discuss. Resolute that a person's classification or their meanings and narratives are determined by phantasy. Unpicking why an experience is transformational doesn’t seem to fit anywhere in this discussion! Yet the whole of Person-Centered therapy rests on the concept of healing through acceptance of denied experience. This is Rogers 101!

He - People carry on with their ordinary lives, then something happens and it breaks them open. But it was there all along.

Me -But this presupposes that if someone had a perfect childhood nothing would break them ever. I disagree fundamentally. There are experiences that are so overwhelming. Everyone breaks.

He - A person makes secure choices because they had secure attachment. They don’t have the basic fault. The event doesn’t make it trauma, the ability to process or not makes it trauma.

I disagree totally with what he has just said; secure people make secure choices! There is aways going to be a situation that is FUGAZI for us. Once dissociation and panic have set in, memory is not enough. The brain has to use another mode. I'd say experiencing a memory of ultimate security crumbling as reality shatters the world might be harder to return from for the 'secure' person - they have no memory of having to save themselves. We agree that an inability to process creates trauma, but secure choices require ultimate knowledge, no one has that! I let his statement go. 

Instead I return to what people have reported, because this is the interesting bit!

Me -Something out of the blue changes the way they see things

He - Problematic because it assumes that there is such a thing as an experience in itself

Me -I get that all is warped by perception, pre-existing/developmental experiences warp the experience.

He - I’m not sure it warps the experience, I think it is the experience. Because there can’t be an experience without the experiencer.

Me - But there is an external reality, it is not a solipsistic universe

He - Yes, but the external reality is meaningless.

Me -Yes - the external is meaningless but the perception of the person is changed - by other people's reactions, by events in the present - these change, or create new meaning

He -But experiences that are called trauma are a confirmation of the basic fault bringing out something that was already there, or a potential

Me -But meanings change..

He - Not in trauma they don’t, Secure attachment - and a child feels safe enough to experience the flow of life, to learn and develop. Able to be intellectually and emotionally challenged. An avoidant child can’t experience emotions. An ambivalent child is preoccupied, thinking will people like me? Abandon me again? And they miss the flow! A disorganized child has a chronological fear that something will attack at any time. Can’t learn because the internal; world is so loud, the external world never gets in! We develop better with less preoccupation.

Me - But children from awful backgrounds may go either way; become abusers or work ceaselessly to prevent cruelty!

He - Essentially (the role of the therapist) its quasi parental - the parent in the therapist meeting the child in the client and recognizing the blocks in that childhood experiences that stop them moving forward and recognizing the deficits in the child who was the client. Helping them to get the things they would have done really well to have experienced but they didn't, but they are experiencing them now and sometimes they can experience them with the therapist and sometimes they can't and the therapist can give them the encouragement to go out into the world and experience them with the people they can - that is the work of therapy -It's not about an event, it's about the structure of the personality and remolding a person to make them more whole essentially, so there's not a vertical split anymore because the problem can I think always be characterized I think as a vertical split. In other words there is some part of a person's experience they are denying, they don't want to be in touch with, because being in touch with it is too painful.

I don't disagree, but I go on to explain that all therapy is an interaction, and therefore what we reflect back is our selection and our choice of words. What we reflect is biased according to the modality we use. My research therefore is to inform my biases; when I know more about how meaning is changed I will be better informed...This evoked a strong reaction from him because - as we all are taught to say 'therapy isn't about changing people' . 

My words were wrong, my bad! I should have used his terms: re-parenting and re-molding...

Nevertheless this dialogue provided me with the language and building blocks I needed to pass my assignments, and much clarity on what many therapists believe therapy to be.

He - well, this has all been very enjoyable.

And, overall it was. It was tough, it is tough not being heard. I didn't think my proposition deserved to be ignored - and it was - but he didn't get it, and that was down to me to some extent. I just don't understand why he doesn't get it?