perception is that “I am the perpetrator.” And the deeper the shock, the more this seems to be true. We call this identification with the perpetrator “trauma bonding.” This is one of the new identity options for the person who’s entered the witness protection program. And many, many times, this translates into actually becoming the perpetrator on someone else at a later time—many who have been abused in early childhood become abusers of their own children.
5) ALTERATIONS IN RELATIONSHIP TO OTHERS
The deeper the shock, the more we lose the ability to trust or be intimate with others.
6) SOMATIZATION OR MEDICAL PROBLEMS
The nature of shock, as opposed to trauma, is that it is deeply embedded in the body itself—in the physical systems of the body: the nervous system, the heart, the brain, the limbic and hormonal systems, etc. This is why, as we mentioned previously, it is through those systems of the body that we can access information about the damage done and provide corrective treatment. This is a fundamental aspect of what modern medical practice is now calling integrative medicine. As we begin to understand the nature of shock and how traumatic memories are literally stored in the traumatized parts of the body, the use of clinical hypnotherapy can bring a whole new level of healing from trauma through understanding how to retrieve these long-buried memories literally frozen in the body. Unretrieved, they are silently at work, causing unease and disease in the body.
For example, a woman named Carol, along with her younger sister, was sexually abused from the very young age of three by her drunken father. After several years of this, he then brought in his alcoholic friends to sexually abuse them. This continued uninterrupted by her mother, who had to work to support the girls since her husband drank up all the money. This left the two young daughters in a nearly constant state of vulnerability, where they had to “run away to the circus,” and each developed several circus characters in order to survive the horrendous situation.
Since the traumatic experiences and memories are stored in the body, it is very common in these situations for young women to develop “female problems.” This can include painful menstrual cycles, severe endometriosis and even cancer. When the doctors try to treat the “symptoms,” the next solution is removal. Many women who have early hysterectomies often don’t know about the abuse that happened to them because they have been off to the “witness protection program.” Carol developed multiple personalities which were a result of needing to leave her constantly re-abusing father and his friends. Since her mother was unable to protect her, she developed a creative way to protect herself: literally new identities via the witness protection program. Her sister used alcohol and drugs to accomplish a similar escape from an intolerable reality, to self-medicate her shock.
Learning how to do mind-body work through clinical hypnotherapy can be the road that leads people out of witness protection and gives them the ability to return home.
7) ALTERATIONS IN SYSTEMS OF MEANING
Chronically abused individuals often feel hopeless about finding anyone to understand them or their suffering. They believe that nobody could possibly understand, and they despair that they will never be able to recover from their mental anguish. They have been exiled, for that is the nature of witness protection. You are cut off from every relationship that you’ve had, and you’re denied the possibility of creating new ones because that would only endanger your safety. The whole idea is to be invisible.
We have been using metaphors of running away to the circus and the witness protection program to describe children’s responses to trauma. In more clinical terms, the child’s ego splits when encountering an intolerable threat to safety. This splitting defense serves a twofold purpose: one, to fragment a painful experience, rendering it less unbearable by a process of dissociation and compartmentalization and two, to attempt repair, constructing a new and less distressing narrative which renders trauma less threatening to one’s personal sense of worth and identity.
According to Donald Kalsched, an expert in Jungian psychology, trauma can be defined as what happens when a negative experience cannot be dealt with through normal psychic defenses.1 Then a second line of defenses comes into play, defenses that are invincible and archetypal (in the sense that they are not personally elaborated and cannot be personally controlled). And the defense against the psychic presence of abuse must be at least as big, absolute, and divine as the forces behind the abuse itself.2 The child’s immature ego exists on the “magical level” (advanced by developmental psychologist Jean Piaget) or “mythological level” (developed by Erich Neumann, a psychologist and student of Carl Jung) of consciousness, and any parent of a small child is familiar with the unconscious fantasies that structure all of his or her experience.3 Here live the great bigger-than-life beings of the archetypal psyche and they can personify as either angels or demons, protectors or persecutors.
Kalsched highlights the vital protective role that dissociative defenses play when a person is threatened with intolerable trauma, psychic pain or anxiety which is severe enough to bring about psychic disintegration, or “the destruction of the personal spirit.” He suggests that trauma produces a fragmentation of consciousness in which one part of the personality regresses to an infantile state and another part progresses to a false and omnipotent adaptation to the outside world. A child’s psyche has to pay a huge price for this kind of archetypal defense, in that once the trauma defense is organized, all relations with the outside world are screened by this shield. What was intended to be a defense against further trauma becomes a major resistance to all unguarded, spontaneous expressions of self in the world. The person survives but cannot live creatively, continues to live but lives falsely, terrified of a future breakdown that has already been experienced but cannot be remembered. This is very common in people who have been diagnosed by our mental health system as Borderline Personality Disorder and Dissociative Identity Disorder. We believe that these are not actually disorders but rather creative survival defenses against intolerable, ongoing, abusive family situations.
Defenses are not only avoidance mechanisms, but also active constructions in the form of narratives, created in imagination and fantasy to support a positive sense of identity and personal worth when these are threatened by cruelty, hostility or indifference (emotional neglect) from those whom we love and on whom we are most completely dependent. To feel that one is of no value, unlovable or the object of hatred is unbearable. Trauma of this kind results in the defensive construction of imaginative narratives, which render the child’s experience of it more bearable and less threatening to the child’s very identity. Kalsched recognizes that “the inner sanctuary to which the beleaguered ego repairs in time of crisis is also a world that opens onto transpersonal energies.”4
Jodi’s Story
Jodi is the head social worker in a major psychiatric treatment facility. When you meet her, you’re immediately impressed with her professionalism, competence and extensive ability to manage her staff. She also is perfectly groomed and wears beautifully styled clothing from the very best boutiques.
When we first began doing hypnosis with her, it was mostly to help her manage the stress of a challenging profession and marriage. After many individual sessions, though, we felt that it would help her to be in a group in order to break through some of the defenses that kept her trapped behind her façade of perfectionism. Her first assignment
