In this particular case the key that broke down the barrier of time – or rather, as I see it, unified time – and brought what was in the subconscious into the conscious mind, was the patient’s statement that ‘they're not taking any notice of me’, her feeling that she was being ignored.
They don’t care that I’m watching them… I feel afraid.
She was breathing with even greater difficulty, she felt as if she was suffocating and could not cry. Fear was preventing her from crying and breathing properly. The three-year-old infant was so afraid that she could not even express what she was experiencing by crying and this was why she felt as if she were suffocating… Only when she felt my secure embrace was she able to release her tears, to sob and to give vent to her grievances.
Why, oh why, oh why?
Now, in a secure environment, she could release her pain, her tears and the feeling of suffocation. This young woman had completely forgotten this incident with her parents, yet today whenever she recalls such painful experiences, she is able to overcome them, recognising the love and care that she now receives from her parents. Typically, in this case, the body, its organs and every cell in the body had preserved the experience and the information intact: the information that ‘my survival is being threatened’ and the protection provided by the body’s contraction in response to the perceived threat had remained unaltered through time.
The accumulation of such toxic residues merely as memories does not cause emotional problems or disorders. Often, I must say, not even a memory of an experience exists, in the sense of a mental recollection. It is a shame: most people lose their inner equilibrium and die without really having had the chance to consciously choose the path to healing. This is why if we want to help and to heal a person, we should constantly ask ourselves the question ‘WHAT IS MAN?’ We have our accumulated knowledge and we use this to guide us as we go along but we should never, never use it as a fortress and entrench ourselves behind the security of our knowledge and experience.
Experiences which remain in the cells as pieces of information, keeping them in a state of alert, cause changes which in the course of time can manifest themselves as purely physical illnesses. Consequently, what causes the illness is not the mental recollection of the experience but the relevant memory and information, as it has been recorded in every cell of the body. In terms of energy consumption, the cost of keeping this painful information ‘away’ from us is enormous. We exchange one kind of pain for another. Most kinds of chronic physical pain stem from this unconscious exchange.
During the same therapy session, the young female patient who had turned up in a cheerful frame of mind as a result of the pleasant morning she had spent with her mother and the shopping they had done together was connected with another traumatic experience she had had at the age of fifteen. At first I observed that her palms were agitated. However, when I asked her what she was feeling and if she understood what it was that her palms ‘were seeking’, she said that she did not know. There was no assistance from her conscious mind. I knew, however, that our connection in the eternal present, which is beyond all normal time, would help us overcome this obstacle… A slight sensation at a particular point in the sole of my foot led me to exert pressure at the same point on the sole of her foot. At first her body convulsed, then shook, then she began to cry loudly…
In front of everybody, in front of the little kiddies… in front of my friend… why, oh why?
There was anger, there was resentment, yet when the time came for her to claim and defend her personal space, she was initially overcome with paralysing feelings of guilt. She could feel her father’s belt lashing her body. She felt so ashamed that her mental anguish eclipsed her physical pain:
In front of my friend, in front of the little kiddies… Oh my God, I want to murder them and get out of here! I don’t want to hear their voices ever again!
She was afraid of her anger; it was lethal. At first she did not want to tackle or release this anger and she was suffocating with guilt.
But they’re so good to me now…
When, with my support, she allowed her system to release the anger that had built up, she was able to relax:
I’m alright now, I feel as if a weight I never knew I was carrying has been lifted from me… I’m okay…
Psychotherapy: a journey of ‘return’ and unification
Human beings never exist in a cultural vacuum, neither do they grow in isolated independence like trees. The people that come for treatment are, without realising it, seeking the unity they have lost. They invite us to join them on a journey of unification. I prefer to call it a journey of ‘unification’ rather than a journey of ‘return’ because the latter suggests a backward movement and, as I shall show later, this journey only appears to be in a backward direction. The body, the material we work with, dwells in the present. Man’s mind travels in time; the body and the spirit, the unified whole that we call ‘man’, lives in the eternal present of God, where he or she encounters the Spirit that lives in the timeless yet dynamic and never static present.
Our patients, then, invite us to join them on a journey we are familiar with. A journey we made when we held the hand of our own therapist. We entered the maze and from the light of the chest and the upper world we descended into the dark underworld, to the realm of the belly and the emotions. There, in the depths of the unconscious, we encountered the Laistrygonians, the Cyclops and the wild Poseidon and we emerged safely, much wiser for the encounter. And, like the poet, we now know who it is that sets up the Laistrygonians, the Cyclops and the wild Poseidon in front of us, together with all the other things that rule us from the realm of our fears. We are not afraid: we have made the journey, we have seen the fossils of our fears, we have affectionately witnessed the way in which our childishness stacked these fossils up before us like obstacles. We have also learnt, however, to have an infinite respect for our patients when they resist… anything less might cause a new trauma. Like a bright light, the corrective experience will illuminate the shadows and, like a fresh breeze, will blow away all the phantoms that keep people from being their true selves and whole, unified human beings. When each of us went our own way, following his or her own path as a therapist, perhaps at first we only had a faint idea of what we later came to understand very well: the road to maturity is an unending one. Ithaca has not fooled us… however much one discovers one’s own unity as an individual, the achievement of unity with the Whole Man and the circumstances in which he lives constitutes an unending journey through life. The layers in which pain is wrapped conceal real treasures… Many will be content with making just a little progress and many others will refuse to embark on the journey; such reactions are simply natural consequences of the inner fragmentation that has taken place. A direct encounter with trauma is no easy matter… Neither is a direct encounter with trauma enough for us to bring healing to it. Yet such an encounter is necessary, though it may not always take place on a conscious level, in order to introduce the corrective experience which is the only real way to unification.
In some cases the traumas spring up in front of us, like targets created long ago that cannot be ignored. In many cases, however, we will have to do some groundwork, we will have to clear the way, to dismantle obstacles blocking our path, or to build, to create supports and bridges to open up the way to the trauma and to healing. A balanced person is a healthy person and a state of dynamic equilibrium is a healthy state to be in. Whatever upsets the balance, however deep down in the darkness of the unconscious it may be, will show signs of life. The longer we turn down the invitation to confront the trauma, the more formidable the challenge of taking a fresh look at a case we thought had closed will seem. Once, our tendency to flee as quickly as we could from the pain of the trauma was the right response, and indeed may even have saved us. Now, however, we have different capabilities and more choices. We hang on like survivors
