unconscious memories of what triggered the shock and sent the clients into deep states of depression and learned helplessness. By providing a consistent and healing group atmosphere, we are offering an emotional support system in which the clients feel safer and safer to explore where their shock began and to get loving feedback if they begin slipping back into these shock states. The group becomes the laboratory where the clients can try out their new behaviors as well as a community where they can laugh, have fun and learn to play, often for the first time in their lives.
An alternate form of catatonia, hyperkinetic catatonia, appears with catatonic excitement symptoms of apparently purposeless agitation not influenced by external stimuli.14 This is an extreme example of the unresolved sympathetic fight/flight response, which typically precedes or follows the freeze response.15 The important thing to notice here is that there is no clearly recognizable threat to attack or flee. The person with this condition is reacting to a perceived threat that doesn’t actually exist in the present. Instead, it’s a memory from his or her traumatic past. This inability to differentiate past from present leaves the person feeling threatened from all directions and from nowhere.
When the catatonic state becomes lethal it is called malignant catatonia. In such cases there is generally an extended period of frenetic activity (sympathetic response) followed by stupor (parasympathetic response) and then death. In most cases (80 percent) there is no medical cause of death.16 Psychiatrist Ronald Gurrera argued that a hyperactive and unregulated sympathetic response, released from inhibition by the frontal cortex (via the hypothalamus), accounts for the death process, and suggested that “acute psychic distress” may be responsible for that disinhibition.17 It is the same process as the zebra who dies following a death-feigning parasympathetic dive. What does that mean in layman’s terms? The person has literally been “scared to death.”
DISSOCIATION
While it often has a negative connotation because of its deeper, more complicated levels, dissociation is a valuable tool we all have available to us. It is really just a matter of moving our consciousness from our bodies and emotions, sometimes inward and sometimes to nowhere in particular of which we’re aware. For instance, when we space out while driving or when we lose ourselves in front of the TV. In cases like these, it’s a protective process that allows us to better handle the stresses of life. However, we can also see dissociation from body and emotions from efforts like meditation and prayer.
The more deeply we are stressed or traumatized, the deeper the shock state is embedded and the greater this dissociation becomes. In moderate dissociation, we may flow into neurological experiences such as freezing, losing the ability to think or feel, entering a trance or temporarily leaving the body. As the split becomes more severe, a greater portion of us has gone into hiding by “running away to the circus,” and we have a circus archetype offer its protection by coming in to run the show. We can see that we’ve given up control to “something else” when we give in to an addictive or compulsive urge, or when a patterned behavior (anger, jealousy, shame, loneliness) jumps in as the automatic response to some situation. Someone who is habitually in a hurry, busy-busy-busy, doesn’t make spontaneous choices in every new situation but rather automatically feels urgency even when quiet calm and tranquility would be a rational and healthy choice. Perhaps his or her “Circus Business Manager” is running the show. When this level of control happens too frequently, it disallows the true person or soul from being involved in life, from getting to experience spiritual health, growth and transcendence.
To be clear, when splitting occurs, it is rarely a complete tear. The different parts of the psyche usually remain aware of one another, except in cases like Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder), where the part that has “run away” becomes lost to the remaining part, and each is unaware of the other. Where we do not have a complete split taking place, it is possible to have a variety of experiences.
For instance, a split may lead to a shadow. This means that the archetype is closely aligned with the rest of the personality. This shadow is able to get things done that the usual personality could not do, but wants to get done on some level. On the other hand, you may have a split where both portions are taken over by members of the circus and in these cases, the two elements may have various relationships with each other:
• Competition (My rational good ego tries to impose limits on my overeater by identifying as “The Critical Parent.”)
• Contentiousness (My rational good ego feels self-hatred or deep guilt for what the other did “in a weak moment.”)
• Conspiracy (My rational good ego makes excuses for and thus enables my overeater.)
• Punishment (My rational good ego responds to the overeater by saying, “Since you ate a candy bar, I’m just going to eat a dozen cookies. You’re hopeless.” Or, “Since you ate a candy bar, I’m going to deprive you of dinner tonight.”)
• Violence (Microsuicidal behaviors like dangerous driving, unsafe sex, obesity and non-compliance with medical treatment.)
The relationship can be complementary as well; that is what we are working toward: a well-integrated, mutually supportive set of parts that cooperate synergistically.
The Theory of Structural Dissociation by Ellert Nijenhuis and associates proposes that each aspect of a split can be thought of as a cluster of mental/emotional states, and that we have both an “Emotional Part” (EP) and an “Apparently Normal Part” (ANP) created by this divide.18 The emotional part takes on the trauma or shock, integrating it into this part of the personality and re-experiencing the trauma or shock when triggered by something that recalls it. The apparently normal part, however, splits off in order to continue running day-to-day operations. It fails to integrate the trauma, does not have a sense of it, and therefore is able to have such a disdainful relationship with the emotional part as in our examples above, where “my rational good ego” is really the apparently normal part. These autonomous parts of the individual share one brain, one heart and one nervous system. Yet they each have separate, identifiable patterns of reactions in the heart and brain.
The emotional part, or emotional personality, carries memories somatically, often pre-verbally, and experiences the memories of traumas as personal to itself. The emotional personality presents with the identity of a child, the arrested-development inner child stuck in time at the point of the original traumatizing event(s). The traumatized individual’s apparently normal part of the personality does not experience memories of traumas as personal, or may have no access to them at all. The apparently normal personality, dissociated from her body and her emotions, presents as, for example, the precocious caregiver, willing to tolerate age-inappropriate responsibilities. She is condemned to live life “on the surface of consciousness.”
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