or admire. She was married to an immature man and she was tired of taking care of him both physically and emotionally.
Finally, Ashley felt she could no longer keep up the highwire routine. She did have below her, however, the huge safety net of a very supportive professional community, which assisted her in moving to a new environment with like-minded people and gently stepping down from her highwire act.
She gained the courage to speak openly and honestly with her now-teenage children, who actually had watched her development and were not surprised at all that she was gay. Nor were they nearly as judgmental about her life as she had been. Ashley realized, as she peeled away the layers of shock that kept her frozen in self-deceit, that it was the shock that had allowed her to live in a dream world for all those years. It was the shock that kept her frozen in fear, shame and turmoil, and perpetuated the lie that all was well. No longer having to balance on that high wire, Ashley discovered a new zest for life along with increased creativity and the ability to manifest many more of her gifts that had been buried deep below the shame and fear.
THE ESCAPE ARTIST
The Escape Artist can always find a way out of every predicament and flees every entanglement before you know it. He always seems to feel trapped and that he therefore needs to extricate himself. Relationships become threatening or suffocating when the other person wants true intimacy, so it’s time to leave. He doesn’t want to stay too long in any one place or job, because the longer he stays, the more tied down he feels. He is at his best when the challenge is great, so he seeks out people who demand more of him than he is willing to give. That way he gets to do what he enjoys the most and what he is the best at: abandoning others. Actually, he is running away from ever being in the position of being abandoned by someone else.
THE STUNTMAN
He loves being shot out of a cannon because it requires one to be fearless. He is seeking attention and thrills through danger. Live dangerously, seek the thrill of narrow escapes and feel alive by cheating death. Sometimes one can achieve this by getting involved in a sinister or creepy subculture. The more spine-chilling the feats of daring, the more recognition he claims. And underneath the bravado, he has a numbing disregard for his own value and worth.
THE MONKEY/ORGAN GRINDER
The organ grinder plays his organ while a cute monkey sits on top, holding out a cup to take money. The monkey has a leash around its neck and is dressed up in cute little outfits to attract the children. The monkey looks appealing but is actually a captive and is being used as a ruse by the Organ Grinder.
Frances has recently had a series of physical problems. These directly followed some deep work she did to begin to take her life back from her very dominating mother who uses the church and church rules to control her and the entire family. Just as the monkey is the captive of the organ grinder and the organ grinder is captive to the circus, Frances ran away to the circus at a very young age to become a captive of her mother and the church. At the age of forty, Frances still lives with her mother, has never been married and described herself as feeling strangled, unable to move or breathe. After bringing all these deeply buried feelings to the surface, Frances ended up in the hospital with pneumonia for quite some time.
After she recovered and was about to continue to unravel the deeply repressed relationship between herself, her mother and the church, Frances slipped and fell on some ice, breaking a few bones, and again found herself in the hospital, unable to move or take back her power. She knew on a deep level that this was her internal small child, still afraid of confronting her mother. But Frances was determined to salvage her life and take it back from her mother and the church. She had a powerful dream where she saw a small child, trapped in a freezer, and then she saw herself as a small child with a dog collar around her neck. She knew these were powerful symbols of her life. Through the power of psychodrama done in a trance state, she was able to uncover the full meaning of the dream symbols.
Using the dream symbol of being trapped in the freezer, Frances regressed to age four where she had polio and was in an iron lung. They told her she could not move and tied her down so that she couldn’t even if she wanted to. She was clearly in a deep state of shock, exemplified by the symbol of being in a freezer in her dream. She was terrified as no one explained to her what was happening and no one was allowed to touch her. She felt abandoned, terrified and confused. Her mother was not there and the nurses were very mean. The conclusion she made about herself was, “Something is very wrong with me,” and the decision was, “I’ll have to figure it out myself.”
Then she was regressed again and went back to the cold, judgmental womb of her mother. She sensed that her mother was unprepared for another baby and would have had an abortion if it weren’t for the church rules. Her father was also very unhappy, feeling that they certainly could not afford another baby. She was very underdeveloped at birth, due to lack of proper nourishment from her mother, and was placed in an incubator. She began to get the symbolism of the freezer from her dream on an even deeper level. The empty womb of her mother and the incubator were both places she felt trapped and were both devoid of warmth, nurturing or any type of support that a baby needs. Her need shock was severe and so she became desperate to please her mother and the church, because these seemed to be her only chance at human contact.
Another image came to her as she became older and that was that she was a monkey with a collar around her neck, performing for her mother and the church. She realized that she had been in shock her whole life, at least since the incubator, and that her mother led her around by the “monkey collar” with rules and regulations and fear of God’s punishment all her life. Just a few of the rules were “Go to church every day, don’t think for yourself, don’t speak unless spoken to, your ideas are stupid, I know what’s best for you,” etc. In her psychodrama, she was the monkey being pulled by the collar.
But Frances began to pull off the collar to take her agency back. She said, “Your rules are choking me and I’m going to think for myself. I am going to make my own decisions and I can make my own decisions!” She became stronger and more powerful as she took her power back from her mother and the church. She knew it was her experience with pneumonia that brought her to awareness of how she was feeling suffocated. She felt thankful for the experience of being trapped in the hospital, which brought back the memories of the iron lung and incubator which kept her in shock much of her life. She reclaimed her power, her voice and her ability to think and make decisions for herself. This was a powerful session where the client, through a series of adverse experiences, was able to see her life more clearly and heal the deep patterns of shock that had trapped her for so long.
THE LION TAMER
Her job is to domesticate the wild ones, even at great personal risk. This can be a legitimate strategy for dealing with abusive caregivers: do whatever it takes to calm them when they begin getting agitated, anticipate their needs and provide them before the demands become abusive. Or perhaps crack the whip and try to overpower the wild one. The methods vary, but the lion tamer is always vigilantly aware of her lion’s mood, hunger level and readiness for violence. Taming the lion is a great challenge and is never completely accomplished, but rather must be re-established in every encounter. And any self-respecting lion tamer will show off her prowess by placing her head in the lion’s mouth; she knows that her success and reputation depend on demonstrating just how dangerous the wild one that she is taming is. So she has a perverse vested interest in keeping her lion wild.
THE JUGGLER
He is able to amaze everyone by keeping multiple balls in the air or plates spinning, attending to each one only enough to avoid it crashing to the ground. He challenges himself right to the limit of what anyone thinks is possible to balance, and as soon as he masters that challenge he adds another ball or another plate. More is always
