Re-enactment. 5th July 2021.

A conversation via Zoom.

And so it began - very well! He told me how much he had enjoyed our conversation in the previous week, and how pleased he was to continue in this way, so pleased that I'd decided to change our contract, that I'm no longer a client - now a mentee.

He said -  "you know for a while I thought what are these sessions for really, a piece of paper to pass a course! Could be so much more than that..."

Well, my ideas had been steamrollered in the previous dialogue, for sure. But the emotional price I was paying was worth it; he had enjoyed talking to me so my skill in conversing with a person as if from within their world-view is validated! And I had learnt a lot about standard, counselling theory which would be used in writing my assignments. The cost to me, well it felt more like a challenge than actual cost. I felt as I have felt in many lectures or computer games, that I am not good enough, can't do it, I'm not clever, fast, intelligent or knowledgeable enough and should just shut up, nod my head and give in. 

But I don't. 

The cost to oneself of speaking and receiving a reply to a different statement or question, is self doubt. Following a year of being lied to by my husband, and then discovering that everything I'd imagined was actually true, I trusted myself and I trusted my feelings. 

I wanted us both to slide into the waters and swim to the other side of so much more.. 

I began our discussion from where he had left it; the word re-enactment defined as a memory that has a numinous quality, a feeling of being dragged into a whirlpool, entrapment. 

Now he heard me

He - "Entrapment, that’s a really good word for it - and I have to say, this distinction between memory and re-enactment isn’t in any book. This is the language I use because I find it useful...There are many books on trauma and I find them a curates egg. Many of them contain an unhealthy dose of magical thinking - like just go and do some EMDR which is the height of magical thinking!

I genuinely wish to discuss this, but obviously - in his tone of voice - this isn't something worth following up right now. He explains that he has clients coming to him telling him that EMDR has retraumatized them. I think - but I don't say - if it works for someone they won't seek a different therapist, so you will only see people for whom previous therapy hasn't worked.

I say -  "You feel strongly about this"

I'm asking about his feelings - he ignores me and continues:

He - “Which brings me onto something - if trauma is going to be your main focus.."

Me - "No, its part of the journey, I'm taking this opportunity, anything to be explored.."

He - "I think that answers a key question I wanted to explore with you - about your last email, because I thought, there are some things in it which are PhD level!"

As flattering as this statement is, I have to disagree. I thought I'd been very clear and concise - and as terms can have multiple meanings it is useful for us to agree how we are going to use words. And then we are talking about Don Cupitt and the episteme shift. Oh pure joy of discussion here, perfect! Yet what I'm hearing is someone explaining that meaning is constructed from reality perceived through developmental biases - while I am proposing bias is changeable, based on more than childhood experience.  

And right now for sure I am experiencing someone describing reality biased by something. 

I always found that something so interesting. 

Factor X

He believes developmental biases  are key, therefore it is vital to ask a person how they made their assumptions about reality - and  for Kit this means seeking their understanding of their developmental biases. 

He - "Because these influence their perception. If one remembers one's childhood as being victimised and powerless, and then goes through life replicating that. One hopes that when they finish therapy, their past will have changed, they will no longer relive those events as victim - the child who was helpless, who did have things done to them, who is no longer the child who is helpless can now have the power to make his own choices.."

Therapy as a mission to rescue the victimised child. 

My view of re-enactment relates to the present as a kind of resonance. 

I explain:

Me - "re-enactment feels like a  whirlpool, numinous - something operating - things going wrong in the present, It is like warning lights on dashboard saying no oil! But warning messages are not always accurate - especially on computers! I believe that when a person starts remembering the bad stuff, there is something similar happening to them in the present, it has the same emotional tone as the past. Definitely for me, I thought the feelings were about the past. I was stuck on the form, the images of the past. The emotional tone was the same, but all I could remember were the images, the events. But truthfully - I  was failing to recognize the same (external) dynamic operating in the present."

He continues - "I think this is why Transactional Analysis so important. Most of what happens to us we forget. What we remember is about our identity, and that’s where the ego states come in. All are present tense, always about identity.."

Is this the crossroad, is this where we really agree and disagree? 

Identity - we agree I think - operates as an organisational template about who and what we are and do. But - and this is where we disagree - I don't see  re-enactment as regression. I see it as a heightened awareness of wrongness, interpreted as if it is an echo of the past. The template one has at present, is out of date, updating it - seeking the location of power, the true nature of threat and experiencing one's own meanings, is vital.

Again it sounds as if we are so much in agreement, but there is a difference. 

We are taught that clients keep repeating the past, keep on making the same mistakes because the past has caused damage. Certainly bad memories are compelling, and it can seem as if bad memories are almost gluing themselves to good ones to create a cascade of despair, detachment and behaviour that leads to further alienation and pain. 

Postmodern therapies assume that the 'damage' is a tangled network of 'bad memories' - activated by the present and sets about constructing a better version. There is no intermediate theory of ego states, or concepts of damage or causes except those described by the client. There is no search for 'the smoking gun' unless a client wants to do that. The Dhammapada (and The Stoics) stated that 'with our thoughts we create the world'. Steve de Shazer went further ' with our words we create our thoughts'. Words are the keys to deconstruct and, reconstruct meaning. Dialogue - for SFBT - is biased by curiosity, courage and hope. And change comes through doing the problem differently!

Meanwhile, intrusive bad memories need a safe shell to be placed around them before they can be re-contextualized; this is the 'externalising' and 'mapping' processes of Narrative therapy. First task, to find the words and images that encapsulate the problem as something a person has, rather than something one is...let's look at it. What is happening - how are power, and threat operating in your life right now....

I say - "Counselling, it is as if it is always up to the individual what happens to them. But sometimes it really is the others, sometimes the external situation really is that bad. So, thinking in terms of a continuum, sometimes I think a client can be held too responsible for how they feel. And in PCT therapy I would reflect back a person's concerns about real world events and that can have devastating consequences - that magnifies the person's expressions of powerlessness and fear in the name of helping them to accept their feelings; in effect creating a horrible feedback loop that will drown out any hope."

There is a long pause here followed by:

He - "Yes <pause> I put a new article on my website, all I'm going to say is it is based on all we have talked about. Have a read and see what you think. It is about the depth of perception and how we respond to things."

Me - "You used the term depth of perception - are you saying that it is like ultimate and relative truth?

He - "What I mean is the depth of one's perception of an event is ultimate in other words, the event doesn't exist in itself, it exists as something perceived by the perceiver and that's all the person has, there can't be anything else. And so one of the key things in therapy is to ask how did a person arrive at their set of perceptions, in other words their biography which led them to a set of assumptions about reality and those assumptions about reality will be brought to bear on whatever it is they are perceiving at any given time. and if all goes well by the time they have finished therapy sessions their perception will not be the same as when they started."

At this point - as he goes on to talk about childhood and how memories are changed in the present I believe that I  hear personal memory - his memories - I hear an emphasis on developmental impact. But mostly I feel it, and  begin to see myself a privileged position...should I be annoyed, or concerned? 

That I hear more about him than he hears about me.

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?