place, a sort of division between someone’s essence, or “soul,” and the ego or personality. The greater this division, the less the soul or the “real person” is controlling the ego aspect, and the more this ego comes under the control of an “other,” which we discuss next. When this happens, less of the person’s soul is able to function and accomplish his or her true purpose in this world.
THE LEVELS OF TRAUMA
You can gain a sense of how trauma becomes more severe and pushes us into different psychological responses through illustration. In the classic movie Home Alone, a child is left at home by accident and discovers that some crooks are going to try robbing his family’s house, believing it to be empty. So he takes it upon himself to outdo them and he rigs the home to defeat them. The movie was written as a comedy but, given that situation in real life, it would be a horror film for most children, especially the younger they were and the more they believed in the power of adults.
Think of a child in that situation, alone at home and seeing through the windows that the house is under attack. Two men dressed in black with masks over their faces have parked their car out front and are coming toward the door. The child feels powerless to do anything about it, so she may react in a number of ways depending on her previous experience. This could include tendencies she came into this life with, what some may call karmic or God-given tendencies.
One reaction would be to go outside the house before they reached the door and scream for help. Another might be like the boy in Home Alone. She might grab a baseball bat or some other form of defense and do what she could to protect herself. But most children find that option very difficult, because in most cases, the marauders coming at them are not only more powerful than them physically, but also psychically, since the magical thinking of a child gives adults a kind of “bigger than life” power. So, more than likely, that child is going to lock the door and hope they don’t break in.
If the men try the door, find it locked and decide to leave, the threat is gone and—depending on the child—the stress of the event may not become traumatic. That is, it might not have created some kind of lasting psychological effect that needs to be treated. Granted, the child may be more aware of the world she lives in, but this isn’t necessarily an ill effect. This is an analogy for those things we see as threats around us that put us on edge, that stress us psychologically and that may have us withdraw or hide temporarily from a situation—maybe not physically but psychologically. As the threat passes, though, we can easily return without having been traumatized.
Let’s say, however, that the men don’t give up so easily and they break through the door. So now the child has to run deeper into the house and hide, perhaps behind a couch or under a bed. This is much like the way too many children have to run and hide more deeply within themselves from threats—not so often from intruders (strangers), but more often from those in their lives inflicting emotional, physical or even sexual abuse. Here, especially with severity and frequency, abuses or other violent situations become traumatic and cause the kinds of divisions or splits we’ll discuss later in this book.
The child hopes at this point that she has tricked the intruders by hiding and that this will carry her through the trauma. But suppose they find her under the bed. Now what is she supposed to do? They have physical control over her at this point and there is nowhere deeper into the house for her to retreat. So the one remaining option she has is to cut ties with the environment entirely, for her essence in this circumstance to fully break away from reality so that it’s protected from what is happening to her body. We and some other therapists refer to this primal level of dissociation as “soul loss,” requiring “soul retrieval” in therapy.
There are times when we protect ourselves psychologically in simple ways from those around us—in ways that may stress us, but that don’t cause any lasting damage or split that requires therapy. The more we are threatened, however, the more we need to retreat into our own inner “house,” our own psyche. The deeper we go, the deeper a split may become. With the deepest splits from shock, we find that part of the soul itself is disconnected from a person, and as part of the defense process, the ego may associate with the abuser who is causing the shock. We see this dramatized in George Orwell’s metaphorical novel, 1984, when Big Brother’s brainwasher O’Brien says to Winston Smith, the victim of his abuse,
We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.1
SHADOWS
Let’s briefly mention shadows here, because while they aren’t the focus of our book, they represent the response to a milder form of trauma. As we’ve said, any kind of psychic split from trauma is effectively a loss of some aspect of the individual, which is then replaced with an “other” who fills the void where the loss occurred. In the following chapters, we’ll illustrate the deeper splits of trauma and shock.
In the case of shadows, the trauma is real but more tolerable and the “other” remains closely connected to the original “me.” The split is put out of sight or “in the shadows,” so to speak. But it’s not an unconscious replacement that the ego is unaware of. Instead, this shadow is an identity of convenience, functioning in alliance with the ego to pursue their mutual goal of ensuring safety and satisfying needs. The shadow uses means that the ego would not, either because it is deemed to be bad or because it’s beyond the capability of the ego. In either case, the ego’s plea is, “Oh, I couldn’t do that.” Whether it is manipulation, seduction or being devious or defiant, the shadow replies, “Oh, but I can.”
As with other forms of trauma, the victim introjects (incorporates attitudes or ideas into one’s personality unconsciously) the traumatizer’s powerful qualities into the shadow. In other words, the tactics used by this shadow are determined by those of the source of the trauma, either mimicking them, standing in defiance of them or attempting to mollify them. If the source of trauma is a raging father, the child may develop a shadow that rages, one that stands in judgment of rage or a shadow that fearfully tries to anticipate the father’s needs and meet them before rage can erupt.
FROM HYPNOTHERAPY TO PSYCHODRAMA—THE TERMS OF OUR TRADE
The conscious mind, even though it is very important, is only about 10 percent of our mind. This part of the mind helps us to think, debate ideas, reason and process short-term memory experiences, all very important tasks.
Yet, the unconscious mind contains a full 90 percent of the mind!1 It holds long-term memory, to help us “learn from our own history.” This demonstrates the saying that if we don’t learn from our history, we are likely to repeat it, making the same mistakes over and over again. So even though our conscious mind may completely understand our dysfunctional relationships or self-sabotaging patterns, it is not capable of making the necessary changes.
What we have discovered by exploring the intricacies of the unconscious mind is that from very early in our development, we draw conclusions about ourselves which are programmed into the deepest core level of beliefs about ourselves. And then we make decisions about how to behave based on those conclusions. This behavior is so deeply buried in our operating systems that the limitations
