who are seeking their own healing, and help them to deal with their own traumas on a fresh footing.
Lily Anagnostopoulou
April 2015
‘So little… so much pain…’
‘Good heavens, we need so little, so very little, to live a normal healthy life… and so much pain is caused when we don't have it.'
These were Nikos’ first words in the therapy session after he had been connected with the need to be hugged by his mother when he was young. He did not have to undergo psychotherapy to realise that his mother had not been the hugging kind.
She took care of her family like all good mothers. She kept us clean and fed us well. It was a good family! Often, if not always, I was alone in the yard or at home and, as I grew up, in our local neighbourhood. I believed that this loneliness helped me to become a good and efficient student and a successful businessman today. It never occurred to me that I was ‘concealing’ so much pain…
What Nikos was ‘concealing’ and not expressing in words was betrayed by his body. He was strong and well-built but his trunk, spine and the nape of his neck were particularly taut. His facial features were also taut. His feet were planted firmly on the ground as if to say ‘nothing can shake me, I'm strong and healthy'. His breathing was from the chest, shallow, with a tendency for the outward breaths to be restrained. He was particularly cautious, initially asked a lot of questions and was quite sceptical in the therapy sessions, and he was not too keen on the physical contact. He was particularly intelligent, which enabled him to set himself up as the star of the family with his academic and later his professional successes.
He came to me mainly to seek my help with his marriage because of certain family dysfunctions. Yes, that ‘so little’ mentioned by Nikos is of such great importance to the infant. Body contact, the gentle sound of the mother’s voice, her breast and breastfeeding are, when they are there, those things that give a child a firm foundation on which it can begin to explore and take its first steps in the world. And the question the child repeatedly asks is: ‘Am I welcome here? Is the world an hospitable place?' The first time this question is asked is in the womb. And this is where the child begins to open itself up to life – or shrink back, with this shrinkage manifesting itself later in the body as contractions, tautness in the muscles, when the joints, instead of serving as bridges to allow the free flow of energy, obstruct and trap it.
In work on transforming blocked patterns of feeling and expression, the most essential tool is the responsive life of another human being.1
Wilhelm Reich called our ability to feel other people’s blockages in our bodies ‘neurovegetative identification’. Stanley Keleman refers to the same phenomenon by the term ‘body coordination’.
Nikos’ treatment did not begin with the recall of some forgotten experience from his childhood. His knowledge of how he had grown up was there, ‘adorned’ with a variety of mental constructs to keep the pain away. The catalytic element is making the connection. In therapy, an encounter with pain always dissolves it, literally. Pain, deep pain, exists for as long as the experience is cut off from the consciousness, excluded from it, and lacks emotional charge. This is the defence mechanism we use in order to hide from the truth. This is what lies at the heart of our neuroses.
In repressing painful experiences we become fragmented because the pain experienced ‘then’, at the time it happened, was too great for our psychosomatic system to deal with. The pain is deep and often goes back to a time when there were no words in which we could mentally articulate the experience. This is why words and mental constructs are unproductive.
As the work with Nikos continues on this level, he will have no need of ideas or compulsions in his attempt to control the surfacing anxiety, whatever form it takes (sexual problems, anger, panic, psychosomatic problems etc.). Needs which were not satisfied in the past can be the cause of our problems, our neuroses. Satisfying these needs is the aim of the therapy. Repressing these needs even more only provides a temporary ‘solution’ to the problem, causing us to become even more fragmented than we already are.
By reliving and satisfying their needs in the present, the individual feels more aware and in greater harmony with their inner life. One might reasonably ask: how is it possible to satisfy needs or deficiencies from the time in the womb, or to heal traumas that occurred in childbirth or childhood?
Whoever has worked with therapeutic techniques like those used in biosynthesis understands how this can happen because they experience it directly. When a therapy session takes place we work in the present, but at the same time the past also emerges in the present, in the ‘now’. Consequently, in the therapy session the ‘then’ becomes ‘now’. Thus, we have the ‘now’ of the therapy session and the ‘now’ of the past, which is just as powerful as it originally was. And all our actions touch this timeless NOW, which gives us the strength to bear the pain that we were unable to bear when we originally felt it, and in the therapeutic ‘now’ we take what we did not take ‘then’. In this context, an adult who relives a childhood experience and cries like a baby is in fact a baby! And when they relive traumatic experiences of childbirth or other events, bruises often appear on the body. The body’s memory is unimaginably powerful.
Therapy makes patients more sensitive in both body and mind. They may become sad, though not depressed. They may feel pain but they will not be crushed by it. They may experience crises but they will not feel despair. They cope with daily life and its difficulties with the maturity of a person who is aware and with a vitality springing from an energy that is no longer restricted by old blockages of repressed experiences.
Good heavens, we need so little, so very little, to live a normal healthy life… and so much pain is caused when we don’t have it.
Yes, that ‘so little’ is of such great importance to the infant.
1. David Boadella, Lifestreams: An Introduction to Biosynthesis, London, Routledge Kegan & Paul, 1987.
INTRODUCTION
‘We often reject our ignorance, which we unconsciously mistake for knowledge.’ The first time I used this phrase was in my doctoral thesis, which was entitled ‘The cleansing of the mind as a strategy for providing psychotherapeutic support for patients with severe physical ailments.’ For me ignorance has always been a guiding light in my career as a professional psychologist/therapist. And however much satisfaction I obtained from my work as a therapist, I always found there was something missing from the process. The feeling that something was missing was also the basic motivation for my development. As time passed, I realised that what I was really looking for was a deeper level of therapy, one that would touch the causes and the essence of people’s problems. I was not satisfied with working on a superficial level, nor with adopting one-sided approaches to people. My search initially led me to explore the spiritual dimension of man and to writing my doctoral thesis, in an attempt to wed modern psychotherapy with spirituality and prayer. In my quest to find out how to heal people, slowly but surely I was led to understand the essence of all healing, which is none other than human fulfilment. And what prevents human fulfilment is trauma, any kind of trauma that blocks the free flow of energy ‘within’ a human being and the exchange between this energy and the whole of Existence, from which we cannot be separated.
About ten years ago I was given the opportunity to realise that, in my ignorance, I had made the mistake of not recognising a different kind of knowledge. As a psychologist/psychotherapist, I was invited to take part in a TV programme and next to me in the studio sat a woman I did not know. Before the programme began, as they were adjusting the lighting, out of politeness, as we had not yet been introduced to each other, I
