is staggering – and this is due not only to ignorance but also to vested interests.
A lack of sensitivity on the part of the mother during pregnancy is a decisive factor in the development of the embryo. What is her own psychosomatic state? How does she feed herself? How does she take care of her body? How does she communicate with the child in the womb? Is she in a calm state of mind or fraught with anxiety? Is she depressed? Is she mourning for someone or something? How is she mourning? What kind of relationship does she have with her partner? All of these things play a role. I am not saying there is an ideal mother or a perfect moment for bringing a child into the world (in many cases there is no such moment). The difficulties and the problems are part of daily life. It is impossible to banish pain, insecurity, sadness and danger from our lives. However, it is one thing to be sad about something and quite another to feel ground down by it. It is one thing to feel a rational kind of insecurity, one which presupposes our acceptance of the fact that we cannot control everything, and quite another to feel that we are at a dead end. Our bodies react in accordance with the way we take in and interpret events, not the events themselves. Here I would like to strongly emphasise the fact that our assimilation of events – which, as I have already said and will go on to show through a number of different clinical cases, determines the way in which we are affected by them – does not always take place on a conscious level.
When we consider the defenceless baby in its mother’s womb and the fact that it is fed by its mother’s emotions – emotions that are converted into biochemical changes, and other things besides – then we can understand just how important the mother’s responses to the realities around her are.
Perhaps we should pause for a moment and consider an obvious fact: we do not bring children into the world to fill gaps in ourselves or our social lives. Children are not fashion accessories. Neither can they seal the cracks in a marriage that is on the rocks. When they are used as tools to satisfy other purposes than their own existence, this fact is recorded in their system as a violation, with serious consequences for the child’s development. The adage ‘like attracts like’ could not be truer in this case. Every experience has its own energy. One trauma, in terms of energy, will attract another trauma, and one violation will always draw another in its wake. Energy-wise, victims of rape attract their assailants, who have the energy of rapists. In the same way, phobic individuals attract the energy of psychopaths.
PATIENT: Now I can understand why in every grade of junior and senior high school there was at least one teacher who made passes at me… The word ‘victim’ was written all over my face and I was the only one who couldn’t see it.
V. Ch.: Let me put it differently… you weren’t the only one who didn’t see it. The only people who saw it were potential violators. It is they who have the ability to pick out victims.
The first part of this dialogue was spoken by a woman who suffered her first violation in her own home, at the hands of the person who should have given her security: her own father. From that moment on, right up until the time she was healed, there was not a single school or workplace she found herself in where she was not assaulted by at least one other person. It is a well-known fact that, in the majority of cases, rape victims have a history of being raped.
Sexual harassment, it should be stressed, is not the only way in which an individual’s personal boundaries can be violated. Our personal boundaries are not firmly fixed from the moment of our birth. They are built through relationships which respect our individuality as children and, through the respect shown for our personal rate of development, at each individual stage of it, by the adults who are taking care of us.
Our boundaries form the basis of our relationships
Examining a patient’s main developmental deficits, mainly in respect of their personal boundaries, is a priority for the therapist because it is on the basis of this examination that they will create the essential support framework that will enable the patient to relive their traumatic experiences in a safe therapeutic environment.
Man is always a single, indivisible entity.
Without boundaries we cannot exist as individual entities. With inflexible ‘limits’, with fixed impenetrable borders, we cannot exist as a society of human entities. And no human being who lives without the society of others is truly human. This brings us back to what the ancient Greeks and the Church Fathers believed: no individual human being can exist on their own; a human being on their own is not really a human being at all. Our personal energy fields cannot exist without the society of other human beings.
| AN EXAMPLE OF OUR PERSONAL BOUNDARIES can be seen in the cell membrane. The cell membrane is the boundary which separates the internal part of the cell, which forms part of our being, from what lies outside and is alien to it. The membrane is flexible and permits a two-way flow of material through it. It allows good, useful and nourishing elements to flow in, while safely keeping harmful elements out. It also allows the waste matter produced by the consumption of nutrients to pass out of the cell and to remain outside it. Consequently, the cell’s boundaries never take the form of fixed, constant and impenetrable borders that protect us by keeping us securely sealed off from the ‘dangerous’ outside world. |
Let us consider the example of an individual that is suffering from severe depression, a person who is shut up within themselves. From the look in their eyes it is obvious that no energy is flowing through them. They are like a closed circuit. If they are not connected with other people, they will remain dead as a person. More than anyone else, they need to be connected with other people, which will draw them out of their isolation and give them energy to live – and yet this is so hard for them to do. It is as if the depressed individual has no heart. Of course, they have a physical heart but they have no energy, no energy flowing from the heart through the neck to the head that would make their eyes shine with vitality. Eyes without a heart are vacant; they do not encourage others to make contact. If you shake hands with someone without that person’s eyes establishing contact with you, then it is a frigid meeting. No energy is flowing. In such cases do not expect to see the kind of healthy flush and warmth that is generated when two people meet and can see joy in each other’s eyes. When one meets a depressed individual, it is like coming into contact with a cold fire, one which generates no heat because no energy is flowing. The bridge which links the heart with the head is ‘blocked up’. This happens to very many people, not only individuals suffering from depression. And all those of us who work in the healing profession know that depression is not a severe form of sadness. Depression is a deficiency of energy.
When a person is functioning on the level of the head, they are thinking and often become lost in the maze of their own thoughts, but their thoughts have no connection with their heart. It is the same with their speech: when they speak and their utterance is not a ‘silent’ sound in the brain, their speech is not connected with their heart. In this case, the shoulders play a Procrustean role by obstructing the free flow of energy from the heart to the head and the mind. By releasing the flow of energy from the heart to the head we can connect a person’s speech, eyes, understanding and thoughts with the heart. The existence of a connection between the heart and the head is of decisive importance for any individual because it will determine to a large extent the quality of the relationships that that person will have with other people, leaders and movements. It will determine the role their heart plays in lending depth and colour to their life.
The relationships of a mature person are not determined solely by the heart. They are influenced by the heart and the emotions but also by the cold reasoning of the head. We do not follow leaders or movements only with our hearts, neither do we function merely on the level of our heart and our emotions, without rational thought. Nor do we fall in love only with our hearts, independently of the rest of our bodies, without using our heads, embarking on a love affair which, instead of uplifting us, brings us pain and misery and causes us to lose our personal sense of self.
We should also unite our legs with our hearts because they will
