And then I'm giving him a card and his money in the card, and talking about how I feel I should offer him a white scarf in return for his teachings..
There is a poem, written in the card. It is the poem that I quote on the first page of my research project:
Dust of Snow
BY ROBERT FROST.
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
He asks me why? - Why offer a scarf?
I say - "Because that's how you do it, you offer a scarf to the teacher, and the money is in an envelope"
I am purposefully missing out the obvious, that I'm treating him as a lama.
He says - "He mentions a crow in the first line. I forget the title of the book - I haven't read it, but I've heard two different programs reviewing the book and saying...and it's a magical realist book, a modern book been out three of four years, about grief. And there is a crow in the book that plays the part of grief. Of course, by the end of the book the crow has flown away. But the crow all the way through the book represents the grief that they can't let go of - the crow that plays havoc with their life. But they still don't want to let the crow go. I wonder if that is what Robert Frost meant?"
Me - "They are quite ominous, and they are dark - and the hemlock 'as if of hemlock I had drunk' Socrates. Are there any associations with crow"?
He - "I'm trying to remember if there is a crow in the Bestiary, and I can't remember precisely. Because crows are black, it was probably some form - some kind of way of representing Satan, that's usually the way. Of course crows represent death in a lot of modern literature, crows pecking your eyes out when you're dead. Or sometimes before you are dead if you look like you might be dead and you are just helpless so; and crows do"
Me - "I'll bear it in mind"
He - "Yeah you don't want to be on a field when there are crows about if you are about to expire you really don't. The crows go for the eyes. Why the eyes I don't know"
Eyes again...
Me - "I remember being sat, on Glastonbury Tor, watching a crow. And there were onion rings - not the battered rings - crispy, like crisps! And this crow had collected...it had found some, and it was picking them up and arranging them. Then having trouble with them. Just playing with these rings"
He - "Yes, I wonder what it thought it was doing"?
Me - "Entertaining me"
And then we are talking about Bran the Blessed, or is it Brian Blessed - and The Tower of London.
Until I say - "Ah yes, my research - which was a joy to begin writing after the confinement of the assignment! So, I remember asking you questions at the beginning, And I looked at those questions again this morning to work out what you had said and what I thought"
He - "Remind me what the topic is of your research"
Me - "I can't honestly remember to be honest with you"
He - "OK, well that seems important"
Me - "No, it's not, no"
He - "It's not important to know what you are writing about for a piece of research"!?
Me - "No. I will explain for why. I started off not knowing as much as I know now. So what ever it was that I thought I was doing - in the doing - I'm discovering what I'm actually doing"
He - "What are you doing? Am I right in saying that your research subjects are only other people on your course?
Again mistrust - a question aimed to find out if I'm being 'ethical'.
Me - "Yes. I wanted people who had undergone a transformative experience; so they had been in a horrible place, and then something had happened and it changed it 'the way the crow - shook down on me...'. So, there is no reason why a crow shaking down a dust of snow would change anybody's mood - and yet...it does. And it did, I think what Robert Frost is alluding to, is true, those sorts of things happen. Random and weird events can transform. But me being me, I want to understand and know more...So I asked you about trauma. My view was a. and your view was..."
He - "Can I just check something before you go on? Because you are asking about transformative experiences, and you are also asking about trauma. Those two don't necessarily go together, presumably because you are asking about the two...depends entirely upon how you define trauma, If you have a very wide definition of trauma, then the two go together. If you have a more tightly defined definition of trauma, then not every body may have had an experience you can define as trauma. so it really depends upon how you define trauma"
Here is a repetition of the same glitch that occurred when we talked about this before. My argument is based on the observation that a traumatized person may experience random, non-traumatic events as hyper-significant and transformative.
Am I in error when I go with what he has said, rather than try to explain that my work is about 'altered states'?
Well, I don't need him to understand, and he seems very sure of his point of view. He seems to believe that the only remedy is the reparative relationship. I don't disagree, a reparative relationship may be the key for some people, but I also know that other remedies are available; my observation is that prolonged stress and trauma cause an altered state of mind, which leads a person to an alteration in perception and understanding - and - that this weird way of seeing can be part of healing. Let's call it the flip side of psychosis. As with EMDR, it isn't just thinking and experiencing, there is a definite way to think about the experience that causes transformation.
That stress alters perception is undeniable.
Links:
- Trauma related altered states of conciousness. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4440663/
- The Neuropsychiatry of Paranormal Experiences - https://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/doi/epdf/10.1176/jnp.13.4.515
The concept of using hyper-significant experiences as part of healing, begins I think with Jung who assiduously would unpack and imbue people's hallucinations and bizarre experiences - including his own of course - with respect and meaning. I follow on in his footsteps to the best of my ability. But for the sake of this conversation, I don't explain my point of view. I don't feel that there is any room for it here.
Me - "I sort of see what you mean, but if we look at the reality. Each person I asked - I mean I can't say if what they experienced was trauma or not. My understanding of your view is that trauma is an experience connected to - you quoted Balint 'the basic fault' - so for something to qualify as traumatic it needs to resonate with this fracture, this relational / developmental absence, this basic fault - this deficit - this lack of an internal soothing voice to remedy the event. But when people say something was traumatic for them, but from your definition it is only trauma if it intersects with a development deficit
He - "In terms of presentation - I think trauma is something which somebody brings which is sort of circular, it keeps going round and round that they can't get out of ; it may be cyclical. Lets say on some parts of the cycle they don't feel it - but they get to the bottom and they do feel it - and there is no way of getting off the cycle; no way that they know of getting off the cycle, so it keeps repeating - and there doesn't appear to be a way out. And that's, in terms of presentation, I would say that is trauma. So it wouldn't be something...let's say, that happened last week let's say...it itself. It might be something that happened last week that really resonates with something that happened last month, with six months ago, and when they were fourteen years old, and when they were twelve and so on. It feels like the same stuff.
Me - "The 'why does this keep happening to me...''
He - "That would be part of it yes. That's what I mean by the cyclical nature of it"
Me - "So it is a bit like a sense of being cursed"?
He - "Some people actually use that language. 'My life is cursed' or 'I am cursed'. That is absolutely trauma. 'Why do these things keep happening to me - why is the world like this'? That's their frame of reference."
Me - "Ah, OK - I didn't get that the first time that you spoke about it, that it is a reoccurring event. But I also understand trauma as happening when a person is trapped in a situation that they cannot physically remove themselves from. And there is something - the life threatening horror - of that situation and sensation of such disempowerment; that that is traumatic, it is inherently traumatic. That doesn't link to the past, it is that they have been too close to death"
He -"I think it is varying the question to ask if a situation can be inherently traumatic. Because different people have different levels of what will cause them trauma. So for example say, someone makes a living as a stunt-driver. And they are on the road and somebody isn't watching what they are doing and they are going over a red-light and they hit the car that the stunt-driver is driving. And immediately what comes into action is, the stunt driver knows what to do here, if I do this with the car I will be fine. and they get out and they have the conversation 'what were you doing running a red light like that?!' they are not traumatized because it is part of their experience. And so imagine a woman who was as a little girl of six let's say, lost her father in a car accident, and she was in the back - and she is already feeling vulnerable because she is six months pregnant, and the same car hits her, running the red light. She is much more likely to be traumatized, because she has that history. See what I'm getting at? So it's not about events, it is about the event's meaning "
This belief, as logical as it sounds; leads to a way of seeing and interpreting a person's behaviour that casts them as a victim of their past - it is actually the source of the notion that one is 'cursed'. I hear people who tried to manage an impossible situation say of themselves 'I was a doormat, I let him/her treat me like a doormat' and I say 'Perhaps you could not see any other way to make things better, you didn't want to make things worse for yourself - or worse for others; especially your children? It is quite possible too, that a stunt man finding him/herself in a car crash might feel totally powerless without a camera running and a plan! The future and reality are not clear. For instance, leaving doesn't end the relationship when there are children. And the idea that a healthy person will walk away when the abuse begins, creates more gaslighting. A person who stays, to try to hold the system together may be seen as suffering from attachment issues, a stunt man traumatized by a car crash - it can't be as simple as, there not being a plan, a medical crew, and a water tight insurance policy? Must be deeper issues (!) But the truth is, life is dangerous - people in helping professions don't always help. And there are financial implications, disruption to everyone's lives. Calling out a partner's abuse is dangerous...So, is it really all about transference, or is it about power?
He -"Because probably what will happen in this problem is transference. The woman who is six months pregnant will now associate herself with her unborn child. And ' is my child now going to lose me in this crash - the mother - in the way I lost my father'? All of these transference things will come into play. Whereas for the stunt-driver, who is on his own as a man - therefore he isn't pregnant! - and he is used to crashing cars, it's a bit like another day at work really! See what I mean?"
Me - "I am unconvinced"
He [laughing] "Oh, OK..."
Me - "I am unconvinced because the stunt driver has set out to gain experience of those sorts of events and has had plenty of experiences of similar events. At the point of crash, the stunt-driver is not experiencing something completely unknown and full of lethal implication. It is possible that the woman, after she had had her child and the child is now grown up suddenly she decides that she too will become a stunt-driver. You see I think that you might say that she couldn't make that choice, and I'd say, maybe she could"
He - "I don't know, we would have to go meet her and ask her!"
Ah, another 'we' moment or is it a Kohut manoeuvre to create the appearance of relationship? Is it an indication that he feels a unity with me enough to use we? For a fragment of time, less than a moment; like elemental particles that exist only during the most extreme of times, there is an us and we can do...then immediately I feel it flickering back into the void.
I label it as an artefact of energies and collisions, nothing more.
Whilst wanting to believe...
He - "But the blueprint will always play out one way or another. But some transferences are positive. Let's imagine a plane crash, and some people survive and others do not. And they have got the food that is on the plane..And that foods going to run out pretty quickly so then what do they do? So let's say there is somebody on that plane who was in the military, somebody who is medially trained, and so on. They already have a sort of protection around them because they are used to being in crisis situations. Somebody else, for whom this is a complete bolt from the blue and they work as an accountant let's say; they are not used to crisis situations, or maybe they are when it comes round to February and March but it is a very different sort of crisis. so there is a sort of protective element for some because of the transference they bring to this and a vulnerable transference for others. So even there in an extreme situation, the blueprint comes into play into what someone's previous experiences, and their associations with it"
Me - "Are you saying that the blueprint updates"?
He - "The blueprint is constantly reinforcing itself - unless there is intervention. In other words from a therapist, or from a healing sort of person which might be a particularly good friend or, I don't know, the child suddenly had a good step-parent when the original parent was awful. You know, that sort of healing experience in which case there is a chance of repair, But once it gets well established then it is very difficult to repair without conscious intervention like - well - therapy really "
Me - "So it must be chosen."
He - "Yes, because if they - so let's say a child has a terrible, terrible mother and dad leaves and takes the child with him and then he meets somebody else and they get married and then this child has a really lovely, caring stepmother and everything is thrown at her by this kid you know ' how can you be nice, because my mother was horrible!' and she just takes it, says 'I get it' and eventually the child relents and says 'you must be alright'. But even there the child sort of has to chose to relent and question and say 'maybe you are not a replica of my mother'...which reminds me, that sometimes when a client comes with trauma, because of the way they have organized their life the things they need to heal are not on their map. But sometimes the things they need to heal are to use that phrase hidden in plain sight. In other words everything they need to heal is already available to them, but they haven't been able to recognize it because their blueprint has been filtering it out. A bit like this child, who is kicking against her 'horrible' step mother who turns out not to be a horrible step mother after all - there, she is hiding in plain sight"
Me - "Good old inductive thought - the sun always rises because it does! Until it doesn't. Hmm back to what you said. You said the cure, the cure is the parent in the therapist meeting the blocks in the client. Client get's the affirmation they needed as a child...that was summarizing! Was that a massive over simplification"?
He - "It's a headline <laughter> it is an accurate headline I think"
Me - "It is accurate - OK. what else did I re-write? It's a reconfiguration of the meanings, empowering, a recasting of the narrative, externalizing the event and seeking wisdom. Sometimes it is like I'm a different person, did I write that ~sigh! Have you ever read Marris - Loss and Change - Peter Marris? So we take our meanings of who we are from everything; relationships, buildings, people, pets, everything and when anything is gone - like Birmingham! I mean when I was a child I thought it was a building site because of the war, but Birmingham is still a building site. But I am used to it because it has been this way all my life! I would feel more cognitive dissonance if it wasn't being knocked down and rebuilt all the time! - but I remember too, on the TV, slum clearances and people being really upset because their neighbourhood is being destroyed, uprooting their relationships with others, yet being moved to better homes. And if you try to pin that upset down - asking well what is it that they are upset about? - in someway it doesn't make any sense; their upset could be called denial or resistance to change. But it is so much more than that, it is deeper. Peter Marris explains this through his understanding that everything is part of our identity; the loss of something can lead to the shattering of the self because we are constructing self in relation to external reality. I come more from his end. So a transformative event changes meaning - an external event actually changes the construction of the self - or rather, it has the potential to do this. The transformative event is a something, a something changes the meaning. It arrives out of the blue for them, but for someone else observing, the incident may be nothing out of the ordinary at all! Yet it had the capacity to change everything because it resonated with the problem in the trauma"
He -"Hmm"
Me - "Oh, I keep using the word trauma! <laughing> I shouldn't use the word trauma but I don't know what other word to use for it. What can I call it so that it makes sense to you? So..."
He - "Well if by trauma we mean interrupting the...If by transforming the trauma we mean interrupting the cycle"
His tone of voice left no room for compromise. But really, the incidents people told me of did not interrupt any cycle; they catalysed a complete transformation in feelings and meaning. A moment before, the world had been a cruel and hostile place - afterwards, the moment of crow and snow - profoundly altered how they saw the world from that day onwards, continuing.
Me - "Except this isn't a cyclical thing, and I keep using the word trauma as they use it because I keep forgetting to update. But in this moment, the meaning of trauma is dis-created by...."
Dis-created. A good word methinks. I sounded then as if I was struggling, I sounded like I was a child actually. I guess his face said it all! And his tone of voice when he speaks leaves me in no doubt that I know nothing.
He - "You see this is why I was saying to define. Because you might say that somebody being told that they have to move house because their housing estate is being knocked down, and they will be re-housed. That might be very unpleasant. It probably isn't traumatic. But it might be traumatic for some people because of the thought that they brought to it"
I used to say - and this would annoy him - surely this is angels dancing on pins; meaning that the talk has in my opinion, stopped revealing anything useful or interesting.. In this conversation, we are now at angels and pins. And even as I write this I can feel how I felt then; that resolute, implacable conviction that surely he knows more than I do? I have to remember that he has failed to grasp my point. Nor am I arguing against therapy, but I am arguing against reparenting, or rather the prime importance of the reparative relationship as all of therapy! I distrust any salvation cult. A relationship based on mutual trust, a total acceptance of each other, the ability to challenge and to know that love remains; is what I'm offering to him to find with me. The difference between a real relationship versus the therapeutic reparative relationship is, that real goes both ways; paradoxically, during sessions I hear and accept so much of him. But, in keeping with our situation - I don't show it. I don't seek to touch body or soul - I 'guard my eyes', I shield my feelings. I think it could be true to say that he is more himself in the room than I am...And I can't be me because of the power imbalance. I've given him the power to shatter me...or rather, the metaphor of choice is, to throw me off the plane without a parachute!
OK, backtrack - I understand the background, his background; he told me of the experience that has created his view that I'm crossing boundaries. My understanding of his fear does not shield me from the consequences.
Honest dialogue is out.
We have teacher / student and pedagogy.
Writing the transcript and adding my thoughts addresses my absence.
Clearly I take against the concept that 'it's all developmental' and reparative relationship. As Huberman said 'stress makes children of us all' . Once the things in life that create 'us' are stripped away, we panic and fall apart as children do. For children this happens every day! Adults, we just have more security blankets, and have learnt how to use fantasy to delude ourselves.
And we are back to trauma - the word the people in my focus group used - that isn't trauma (according to his understanding of the word!) I'm saying - but I don't know what the word is if it isn't trauma? The people in my research project were in horrible situations - what was happening in their lives was too much - and by that I mean that humans naturally love and care for their families, for their partners, and when someone close is in danger, or is threatening them, and this stressor is ongoing - for months (obviously this has also been my own experience too!) a normal person reacts to the threat with anxiety.
I have a deep seated belief that reactions such as ghosting, or other forms of denying communication, and reconciliation, are dissociation - literally. And therefore indicative of a worse mental state than anxiety. I watched this happen to my husband as he shifted from anxiety induced by seeing our son's descent into madness, then rage - as fear took hold - into cold dissociation and leaving us...I entered 'cold dissociation' in moments of terror and then I came out again. I stayed with my feelings, I allowed the fear to wash through me and relaxed - because I had a good grasp on how trauma works and its remedy...compassion for self is the key.
The adrenaline led response, is anxiety. And one possible anxiety response is to keep believing that people are worth fighting for. If nothing is working the next stage may well be the need to run away, as the feeling of powerlessness threatens to become overwhelming. And finally there is avoidance, dissociation - at worst an opioid 'dorsal vagal' shut down. Which might feel safe, as it kills hope, kills relationship, kills repair. And it leads to discarding, throwing away...moving on (leaving broken people in your wake?). This place is hard to get out of...Opioids are addictive.
Broken begins with fighting for, becomes fighting against and finally slumps into can't care..
I'm saying - "Anyone in their situation would feel absolutely broken.."
He - "I don't know if I'm picking up the right thing here, but you mentioned shame and guilt - and if I have a client where there is shame, what I will hope to do it to transform that into guilt. Because they are fundamentally different. and whether one feels shame or guilt, again it is developmental. And the distinction I'm making is; guilt is 'I'm OK - I did a bad thing, I wish I hadn't of done it, I wish I had known better, I wish I knew then what I know now. Or, I did know better, but I still did it. But now I'm going to try to do something to try to put it right and then it will be spent, and I will move on' that's what I mean by guilt. Shame is; 'I'm not OK - and the reason that happened is because I'm not OK. I am the bad thing I do, they are synonymous' that's shame. And what ever your basic position is, 'I'm OK / I'm not OK' that's developmental. And that sort of shame is a form of trauma"
I'm not OK is a pure source of pain, and pain is a pure source of endorphins. So developmental, or addiction? And if it is actually closer to an addiction, the real question is now how to get out of the need to feel pain? 'Developmental' works here because blaming the parents creates 'righteous' anger, and that's a powerful drug.
"Therapy should generate dynamics of interaction in which people recover something in themselves (self-respect, love, legitimacy) as well as in others" (I can't remember who said this!)
But I don't seek to find developmental faults. Though scape-goating may not be anyone's intention, it happens; 'how could my mom/dad do that to me'?! How or why they did it, can't provide a cure, clients who use it - an it is a really powerful cocktail of rage, pain, sadness and indignation - are at a way station. Their destination, as long as they access all their feelings and move beyond the righteous ones, will be empowerment. That's what I've seen, and it is my personal experience. The only cure for a broken system is to negotiate a system that works, that may involve never seeing someone again, but I'm not sure. I say this as someone who has cut three people out of my life...albeit for very good reasons, but I absolutely see it as the worst solution. I'm not happy with it at all.
Me - "In the situations my research subjects were in, they felt 'shame' and 'guilt' but they were in a situation that was telling them - through the behaviors and words of others - that they should feel shame and guilt. So they felt - in their own words - shame and guilt...there just isn't any way for them to make shame actionable. They would have to agree that they were shameful. What they are really experiencing is exile. They are being turned into something/other/objectified and erased".
He - "But again, even an impossible situation where let's say, everyone's view puts me in an impossible situation because they all think that I'm in the wrong, or some say I should do this and others say I should do that - whatever conflict is going on; that conflict can be responded to without shame or guilt; with guilt, or with shame. There is nothing about the situation that necessitates any of those three responses. And the response is about the biography of the person and the meaning that they make of it. Because one could of course say, sod the lot of them! I'm walking away because I'm better than this - and that can come from an 'I'm OK' position'. Somebody with shame would never say that. Or one could say; 'these people say I should do this, those people say I should do that, I'm going to do that because I think that is the right thing to do. And those people aren't going to like it, they don't have to like it again, someone with shame can't say that. Because I'm OK with displeasing those people, I have to do what's right"
Me - "Well yes. Integrity"
But I can see that the subject of power within a relationship is missing from this discussion.
Integrity first, Western culture values a single-minded, perhaps obsessive focus on an individual's truth. Integrity is often defined as maintaining one's truth, one's values and beliefs and acting in accord with them no matter what!
Power, the ability to grant or deny the thing another person needs - a person with power controls what can or cannot be said because a person with power holds more resources than the person without power, end of. If a person in power defines you as X and you refuse the label, you better have an alternative source of whatever that person has the power to give you...or you will need something else to trade that gives you some power over them. End of.
'Sod the lot of them, I'm walking away' is the movie version, in this society when you take that stance you have a good chance of ending up homeless and without any qualifications.
Over to you, Maynard.
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