JOURNEY TO HOME
Quintessential Therapy and Beyond
Rachel B. Aarons, MSW, PhD
Copyright © 2009 Rachel Aarons
Smashwords Edition
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Copyright © 2009 Rachel Aarons.
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This book is dedicated to my sons,
Kieran and David,
who mean
everything to me.
I hope that the writing of this book
played a part in their
becoming
the remarkable human beings they are
and that the
reading of it may offer
inspiration in their life journeys.
Contents
The Logic of the Therapeutic Journey
Breaking the Spell
PART THREE: SILENCING THE SUPEREGO
PART FOUR: WRESTLING WITH THE SHADOW
Round One: Anger
PART FIVE: MORE WRESTLING WITH THE SHADOW
Round Two: Neediness
PART SIX: LOVING SELF, LOVING RELATIONSHIPS
PART SEVEN: BEYOND PSYCHOTHERAPY
This is a book about a journey. It is a journey that is intensely personal and at the same time universal. If I didn't believe that it was universal, or at least widely applicable, I wouldn't have written about it. That voice in my head, the one that keeps rattling on: “Who cares what you think?” “Who cares even less what you went through?” “Who do you think you are?” That voice might have drowned out my resolve. It might have convinced me to retreat in silence, tucking my pretensions out of view.
After all, to write a book, I imagined, one would have to be stunningly creative, courageous, or smart. Or at least, one would have to have accomplished some world-shattering, momentous feat that awaited history's notice. But none of this applies to me.
At times it still seems remarkable to me that people do relate to what I have written and do find meaning in my story. For I am nobody of extraordinary or special importance. And this is exactly the point. It dawned on me that it is my commonality with others, my humanness that I have to offer. And my willingness to share it with you.
Who reads a book on the therapeutic journey? Who am I to picture out there?
Presumably you are people who have an interest in human development and are perhaps clients of therapy or therapists yourselves. (Hopefully, these are not mutually exclusive categories.) If you are reading this book, you may be looking for some understanding of your own process of healing. You may be seeking a structure to give meaning to your life and perhaps to provide a direction for change.
A structure of this sort would have to be theoretical in the sense that it would provide an intellectually valid way of interpreting a whole range of life experience reaching beyond individual autobiography to a general human level. To be viable, this theoretical structure would have to be intimately connected to the issues we struggle with in our daily lives, in our most important relationships, and in our work.
I believe the hope for connection lies in the presentation of lived truth. The theory I present is, by its nature, very abstract. The truth, however, is very concrete. In the bridge between these two, hopefully, you will find a meaningful connection.
As a therapist, I have a deep and compelling interest in people and their lives. My daily commitment to therapy is the reality behind every page. I've spent many, many hours closeted in a tiny room, sharing with one person after another their profoundly moving stories. These were people who had come to heal, moved by some anxiety, frustration or pain in their lives. They came to me assuming that I knew something about how they could heal. They told me about their pain and often they did heal. But how did it happen? Perhaps I would sound knowledgeable and they would be grateful, but what had really happened? It was, at bottom, a mystery.
In my evolution as a therapist, each theoretical framework I embraced gave its own answer to this question, but I noticed that people kept healing even though I went from one theory to another. Each methodology I employed claimed that it was the way that worked but, again, it appeared that people were progressing equally well no matter what the methodology.
Was it some magic I possessed? Was there some great wisdom in me that opened the way? If so, I had to admit I did not know how to define it. Nor could I use it to hasten my own healing. There were times when I would look with an admiration bordering on envy at the way my clients would resolve issues that I remained stuck with. If I could help them, why couldn't I help myself? Or did it have anything to do with my helping? Could it be that I was essentially a witness to a process they were undergoing that had little, if anything, to do with me?
If there was such a process, I wanted to know more about it so that I could get on with my own work, both as a therapist and in my own healing. It is my belief that we who are therapists are often doing this work because of a need for healing in our own lives. Yet isn't it curious that we hardly ever talk about our own work, our need for healing, or how we heal?
In our consulting rooms and in the therapeutic literature, we rarely offer more than a few passing remarks about our own struggles. We always talk about other people. We focus on the client. We offer case studies and case examples. We are ashamed to acknowledge that we are engaged in a process of healing ourselves. We think we would lose credibility.
It is a sad comment on the field of psychotherapy that we believe we need to hide behind a mask of invulnerability, that it has become a daring venture to use frankly autobiographical material in a book about therapy and that, rather than personal experience being a confirmation of one's intimate knowledge of human struggle, it could be seen as a potential basis for discreditation.
It is my intention to challenge this belief. This book, in its presentation of deeply personal material rather than anonymous case material, constitutes that challenge.
I would urge that this new level of disclosure by a therapist be regarded as a necessary step in the direction of greater honesty in psychotherapy, a direction that I believe is long overdue. Many may, certainly the orthodox will, disagree with me - likely in unflattering terms. But, fortunately, there is no better training for the challenge of standing one's ground in the face of discreditation than growing up in a dysfunctional family. This book will show in depth why this is so.
I invite you, then, to join me in this journey. It will take place on two parallel tracks, one theoretical, the other personal. It will be clear from the change of typeface when I have switched tracks. As I develop the logical structure of the therapeutic process, I will interweave personal anecdotes that are intended to illustrate and clarify the points in the theory. As these points are connected in one coherent whole, so the anecdotes are connected in one story, which is one person’s life.
This journey could be characterized as a “victim’s” journey. Let me say right off that I am not unaware that in using the term “victim” rather than the more popular term “survivor,” I may ruffle some sensibilities. While this particular ruffling is not my objective, nonetheless, I take this risk because I believe it is imperative to explore in depth the process of victimization and, to do so, we need to have a term for the correlate of the abuser in the dynamic of an abusive relationship. If, as I will maintain, the roles of victim and abuser are both inevitable and inevitably reciprocal, then we all, on some level, need to come to terms with the victim in ourselves.
But we do not need to stay there. This book does not advocate resignation. It is, on the contrary, a call to arms. The goal is to find a way to transcend the victim position, to overcome both abuse of ourselves and of others in order to learn how to love. If this is a victim's journey, it is every bit as much a journey out of victimization. We will be most empowered to move out of the victim position when we can name it and recognize it for what it is.
Nothing in my life story has been invented or altered to prove a point. My constant consideration has been to represent, as closely as possible, the truth as I experienced it, while realizing that it is always my viewpoint, my truth.
It is not my intention to blame, castigate, or condemn anyone. Quite the opposite: the learning of this entire endeavor is the appreciation of our humanness. Ultimately, the goal of writing this book and the goal of therapy are the same - the development of a sympathetic witness who can both see and love the self.
Self
and Other:
The Logic of the Therapeutic Journey
“To be really human is the thing that
most humans don't want to
be.”
A.H. Almaas
PART ONE: THE LOGIC OF THE THERAPEUTIC JOURNEY
To begin the journey, I want to talk about a process. It is the process of therapy: that is, it is the process that is engaged whenever transformation or healing takes place, no matter what the methodology.
I believe that there is an underlying process that is common to diverse therapeutic systems - the elephant that is being touched by our blind hands - and that this underlying process is logical.
To say that it is logical means that if you look at its structure, you will see that it has certain essential features which I call “principles”, some of which are definitional and some explanatory, and that it follows a pattern through time in what may be termed cycles or even a spiral.
If I am right, this process should appear strikingly familiar to you and you should recognize these principles as true and maybe even obvious. Otherwise, I am wrong in my formulation. Therefore, I would expect to elicit responses like: “yes, of course;” “I knew that;” or “that's what happened to me.” My objective is to articulate that which is known and common, not to offer something radically new and different.
Consequently, it would not be a significant criticism of this point of view to argue that it lacks novelty or originality. In fact, the contrary would be the case. What I am offering claims to be a phenomenology of our human experience, a form of universal or archetypal journey, and one that we can all, on some level, recognize.
I maintain that although there are different languages of therapy, and perhaps different routes to get to the same goal, the fundamental process is the same and is what makes therapy “work”, when it does.
Psychotherapy is not the only form of thought that is concerned with this process. It is depicted in mythology and religion, in literature and art, in fairy tales and folk songs. But psychotherapy is most distinctively concerned with this process in that it is our modern style of journey-making. It is, as Jung suggested, modern man's search for a soul. [1]
The fundamental process of therapy is, I believe, a process of becoming oneself - that old cliché which, I will maintain, is true and accurate as to what occurs. But how can we understand the meaning of this process? How is it possible to “become oneself?”
In order to make sense of the notion of becoming oneself, we have to make sense of the notion of not being oneself which lies behind it. How can I become myself unless I am, in some sense, not myself? But if I am not myself, then who am I?
On this point, John Welwood says:
Process-oriented psychotherapy, as I practice it, has a larger purpose than just coping, controlling, or feeling better. It's about connecting with the truth of who we really are. To understand how therapeutic inquiry can help us connect more deeply with ourselves, we need to recognize the nature of the basic distress or “dis-ease” that lies at the root of all our psychological problems. We have all turned away from certain areas of our experience that caused us pain as we were growing up - such as our anger, our need for love, our vulnerability, our will, our sexuality - and have withdrawn our awareness from them.” [2]
It is in the recovery of these lost areas that the process of therapy can serve, according to Welwood, as a bridge to the reintegration of the self.
Clearly, therapy would not need to reintegrate the self were it not already fragmented and damaged. Recovery of self implies a prior loss of self. Integration presupposes disintegration.
Most of us acknowledge the possibility of not being ourselves. We say: “I was not myself today.” “I can't be myself with you (my husband, my boss, my father, my mother).” “That person is not who s/he appears to be.”
Yet if we stop to think about it, how can we make sense of this notion of not being who we are?
We have in our language a concept of denial in terms of which it makes sense to say that someone is “in denial” about themselves or denies a truth about themselves. It is not simply that they do not know the truth. It is that they know it but, at the same time, deny that they know it.
For example, one of my mother's frequent statements took the form: “I'm not [fill in verb]___ing but ...”For example: “I'm not criticizing but …” or “I'm not complaining but …”In such statements, my mother succeeded in accurately describing what she was about to do in the very process of denying that she was doing it.
If I pointed out that she was, in fact, [fill in verb]____ing (e.g. criticizing, complaining), I would be soundly reprimanded for my perpetual misinterpretation of her. This misinterpretation was proven definitively by the statement she had just made insisting that she was NOT!
The posture of self-righteousness that inevitably accompanied such pronouncements should not be dismissed as mere pretense on her part or as an unfortunately all-too-obvious attempt at deception. She was not being dishonest. She genuinely meant what she said. And she was utterly convinced of her own rightness.
It would be necessary to say, then, that a person in denial is simultaneously deceiving (or attempting to deceive) themselves.
The possibility of self-deception is, as the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre [3] noted, a remarkably curious phenomenon. It is easy to see how one person could deceive another person by keeping information secret or hidden. But it is not so easy to understand how information could be kept secret or hidden from oneself. Are there walls in the mind? Secret rooms? Compartments where information could be kept by oneself and yet away from oneself?
To be not oneself, to be in denial, and to deceive oneself all imply that it is possible for the self to be split and divided against itself.
Our principles have to begin, then, with the formation of the self and how the self can get split or damaged in the first place so that it, later, needs to be healed.
* * *
When I had just turned six years old, I was sent to a distant summer camp for two months. My sister insists I was five but, five or six, it amounts to much the same thing: I was very little. Camp Kawagama (pronounced Ka-wa-gama, with the emphasis on the second syllable) was situated seven hours’ train ride from my home. As if the prospect of seven hours in a train wasn’t daunting enough to stretch the imaginative capacity of a little girl who had never been away from home, the camp was on an island! It took another three-quarters of an hour by motor boat to get there. No matter how well I could swim at age five or six, it was clear: there was no way to get home.
Not surprisingly, I was dreadfully homesick. I don’t recall if any of the other children suffered as I did, but I know that I was in agony. I went to my sister’s cabin and curled up in her bed, clinging to the scent of something familiar.
My sister was seven years older and, at first, she cradled me like the mother I wanted her to be. Everyone was sympathetic, for a little while, but I was not about to let go. I still remember vividly how I clung to her and I hung on – for dear life.
They pulled me, screaming and thrashing, away from her bed and carried me, crying and kicking, away from her cabin. I was barred from going there again. I still remember standing at a distance, staring at it wistfully. How inaccessible it seemed to me: Cabin 11 – the only one on stilts.
* * *
Our first principle is:
1. The self is formed in relationship.
This principle means that as far back as we go in the development of the self, we will encounter self in the context of other selves. There is no lone ego out there riding the range, fulfilling its solitary destiny on earth, the only living being against a backdrop of the setting sun. We are in this game together. It means that we cannot have a self in the absence of other selves; that is, in isolation. In particular, we need other beings like ourselves. Self requires other people.
This is true in the sense that the experience of limit to the self requires that which is other or not-self. Only in this way are we able to distinguish the me from the not-me. It is in the interaction with other people that the self gets defined as separate from that which is outside it. In order to define the self, we need boundaries that mark the distinction between self and not-self. In order to define boundaries, we need others.
The second principle states:
2. Boundaries are the interface
of self and other in relationship.
This distinction between self and other is thought to occur as the infant learns to recognize that the whole universe is not itself. The breast walks away or is forced upon us. We come to realize that other people are independent and not under our control. This insight is frequently experienced with frustration and makes our babies howl - even when they inhabit adult bodies.
Here, at the core of the formation of the self, we discover in germinal form the template for difficulties in relationship. We want others to fill us, to feed us, to keep us comfortable and satiated. We want security and comfort which comes from outside.
The glitch is: the outside is not under our control. It is no less than terrifying when we come to realize that the possessor of our life supply can disappear in an instant, without warning, perhaps forever. We stave off conscious realization of this terror but we act it out.
This fear of being abandoned is a driving force underlying many of our interactions with others. We panic at the possibility of rejection. We hang on for dear life. We try in a multitude of complex and cunning ways to ensure that the other will be there for us, meeting our needs. Of course, the other will likely be doing the same thing - just as vigorously.
It has frequently been observed in marital therapy that the classic relationship between spouses takes the form of parent/child interaction. A recent example is the book Dancing In the Dark [4] in which the authors, Doug and Naomi Moseley, analyze mother/son and father/daughter patterns of relating in married couples.
If we believe that our significant other is as necessary to us as a parent is to a baby, then, inevitably, we will try to control the other to keep them in the caretaking role. If we feel that the other is trying to control us and get us to parent them, we will probably resist. The ubiquitous control battles of the marital domain begin to make sense.
On a deeper, even more primordial level, it is not so much control of the other as it is obliteration of the distinction between self and other that we seek. We yearn to merge with the other, to dissolve the boundary between self and other in order to recreate that mythic primal fullness and unity. It is this deep yearning for union that is at the heart of romantic love - in its agony and its ecstasy.
We can hardly underestimate the extent of human suffering that is derived from this yearning. Perhaps, if the universe poured into us unendingly in exactly the ways we wanted and needed, we would never know ourselves to be separate. But this is impossible. Inevitably there is a rupture; the harmony is shattered, and our contentment is destroyed.
Even intra-uterine existence is not the uninterrupted bliss it is imagined to be when we are said to have a longing to go “back to the womb.” In actuality, it can be a place of turbulence, tension, and apprehension. It can be a suffocating, stuck place, a place we may return to repeatedly, whenever we drop into hopelessness. Through the use of methods such as hypnotherapy and body work, we can re-experience our pain and our contraction against this pain going right back to the foetal state. Yet it is true that it is only through pain and contraction that limit will be introduced and only through the experience of limit that the self is born.
* * *
I tried to phone my mother. (I knew, even then, that there was no point in phoning my father.) I lined up dutifully every evening after supper waiting in line with my heart racing until the turns ran out and I would be sent away to try again the next day. Finally my turn came and the camp director, a child psychologist, spoke to my mom first. I don’t know what she said, but when I told my mother how miserable I was and that I wanted to come home, nothing ever came of it. I was not allowed to call again and I stayed at camp for the whole two months.
I suspect they must have discussed the fact that I was homesick and concluded that it would just go away. It’s as if by the act of giving it a name and a status of predictability, it became okay for them to ignore my pain. Imagine our treating medical symptoms that way! Or perhaps, because I was a child, rather than seeing in the vulnerability of childhood the need for nurturance and protection, they saw it as a pain diminished, one that would pass away quickly and easily, one that didn’t count.
The truth is that it never went away. It was a pain that was to be relived not only every day that summer but countless times in my life as the trauma of Camp Kawagama was reenacted again and again.
It was also the pain that woke me up to the utter helplessness of the human being. At five years old, I learned that I was entirely on my own.
I remember standing at the water’s edge on an isolated spit of land called “Rocky Point” at the far end of the island, staring across the unending expanse of waves, dazed by the terrible ache of my loneliness. It was the moment of my first suicidal thought, although it was sixteen or seventeen years before I acted on that thought. How many days and years of depression were accompanied by that aching emptiness, punctuated by the words from a forgotten poem: “If I cried, who among all heaven’s angels would hear me?” [5]
Why didn’t my mother hear me? Why didn’t she care? If you knew her history, how she lost both her parents before the age of eight and was picked on by her siblings, how the one brother who was good to her and whom she adored died when he was twenty-two and she was seventeen, and her lifelong history of depression, perhaps you would understand her inability to respond to the loneliness of her child, both the one who was inside her and the one that was me.
* * *
The need for limit to the self is not new information in the psychological literature. It was known, for example, by Piaget. [6] But there is a further implication of the need for other which has come to occupy a new focus of attention in current psychology, for example, in Object Relations theory. [7] It is the fact that we cannot have an image or sense of ourselves in isolation from other people. In order to get an image of our self, we must have a reflection of the self from a point of view that is outside of and separate from the self. Therefore, others are necessary for us to have a self-image. We gain our picture of ourselves through the mirroring of others.
Hence the third principle states:
3. Self-image is the result
of mirroring by the other.
We must pause to recognize that, through the mirroring process, something truly momentous is happening, something that creates a fundamental change in the self.
Not only is the self becoming separated from the other, ushering in that deep yearning for reconnection that underscores the drama of relationship. But a further schism is occurring in which the self is becoming separated not only from the other but also, at the same time, from itself.
This internal schism is inevitable because, in order to have a sense of self, there must be a distance or separation within the self - what may be called a splitting process - between the I that senses or reflects and the I that is sensed or reflected upon. The process of splitting into subject and object is labeled in philosophical terminology as a “reflexive” process. It follows, then, that consciousness of self is a reflexive process that includes at least two levels - the self that is (the object level) and the self that looks at the self that is (the subject level). Self-awareness requires a subject and an object, the seen and the seer.
In other words, for the self to have an image of itself, it must take itself as an object that can be reflected upon. It does this by taking a perspective on itself as if it were an “other” to itself. In this basic phenomenological triangle, we become simultaneously object to the other and object to ourselves. We forfeit the unity of our being in ourselves in the same moment as we forfeit the unity that we had with the other. Fragmentation shatters unity.
As the self turns itself into an object, it becomes capable of turning against itself, just as others can do. Herein lies the possibility for self-judgment, self-attack, and self-deception. The birth of consciousness of the self is the birth of a self, divided, containing within itself the possibility of becoming divided against itself.
* * *
Not only was it not okay to be miserable at camp, we were supposed to be thrilled. The point of view adopted by my parents and many like them in our upper middle class nouveau-riche neighborhood was that it was a privilege to be sent to such a camp. Since it was so expensive, (they reasoned) we were lucky to go.
I did not realize the grotesque irony of this perspective until a phrase in Joan Borysenko’s book Guilt is the Teacher, Love is the Lesson caught my eye. Recounting her awful experience at a summer camp, she described the place as a “surrealistic concentration camp.” Suddenly I had the image of thousands of well-to-do Jewish kids being herded into buses and trains and shipped off to camps every summer by parents who had just survived World War II. This was 1947 or 1948. In this bizarre twist of fate, the ultimate degradation had become a status symbol. Summer camp was the “in” thing.
It was the implicit duty of we-the-favored-children who were fortunate enough to be sent to camp to reassure our parents that they were getting their money’s worth by smiling broadly and acting suitably enthusiastic on Visitor’s Day. Anything less than unreserved appreciation would have been felt by my parents as ingratitude of a most unforgivable sort. It also vindicated their two months of leisure spent, without kids, at the golf club. After all, my father worked very hard as a furrier in the winter months and thereby deserved a relaxing summer. My mother did not want to be a “golf widow,” so she followed suit. I remember asking only once if I could stay home from camp that year and my mother’s incredulous reply: “But all the kids will be going to camp! What would you do all day?” It was a given that I would be going to camp every summer after that.
Reflecting on this incident some years later, my sister remarked with the same tone of incredulity: “What made you think there was any alternative?” She had obviously surrendered to inevitability from the outset. This must have made it difficult for her to put up with a whining, clinging little sister who would not give up. She did not go with me to talk to the camp director. She did not plead my case with our mother. She did not even put an arm around me and comfort me in my misery. What did she do? She stopped talking to me. After that brief offering of solace, she promptly withdrew and quit trying. She became cold and inaccessible, thus establishing the ongoing pattern of our relationship. From then on, she treated me like I was - in some mysterious way I could never grasp – constantly “in the way”, a nuisance, someone she could barely tolerate.
I felt the label “pain in the butt” long before the words emerged that finally clarified the sense of being unwelcome I had carried for years. A felt sense like a blue-grey watercolor wash that colored my life in its somber tones. What I missed entirely was the nuance of admiration that came with her exclamation: “But what made you think there was anything different? Anything else that was possible in life?”
* * *
The splitting into subject and object which allows for the possibility of a self divided also allows the self to take up a position vis-à-vis itself - to see itself, as it were, from the outside. This possibility of viewing itself from the outside may be called a meta-level and is known in therapy as “the witness position.” To be a witness is to be able to view oneself with what Milton Erickson called “open curiosity” and what Welwood calls “unconditional presence,” that is: “the ability to remain open and inquisitive to our experience, without bias, agenda, or manipulation of any kind”. [8] It is one of the primary tasks of the therapeutic process to develop this ability to occupy the witness position.
To move now from the general to the particular – that is, from the process of developing self-image in general to the particular self-image that each of us has - requires that we consider the distinctive mirroring which occurs in the family of origin.
When a client comes into therapy, we know that the particular self before us has been formed by having been in a particular family. Our client's self-image will likewise have been formed by the reflection he or she got from being in that family. In this sense, all therapy is family of origin therapy, whether this is explicit or implicit in the process of therapy itself. The self that comes into therapy is the product of a relational history, and we will see this history reenacted in the present in each person's current relationships, including their relationship to their body, to God, and to the therapist.
What we discover is that mirroring is not a passive reflection but an active shaping and distortion of the self for two powerful reasons.
The first reason has to do with the fact that the “mirrors” themselves have been shaped and distorted by their own family histories. We are looking at a process in time, passing from generation to generation. Dysfunction produces dysfunction. We are victims of victims.
Our family members, because of their histories, have needs of us. They need us to be certain ways and they put pressure on us to be so. Threat of abandonment or withdrawal of love lie at the root of all pressure. Family members see us through the medium of their own needs of us, not dispassionately, as we are. To perceive another not as they are, but as we need them to be or desire them to be, is called fusion. It is a seeing through the defenses we erect to get our needs met.
For example, suppose I feel threatened and unloved whenever you disagree with me. I may believe that I need you to agree with me so that I can feel loved. Therefore, I may let you know, both verbally and non-verbally, that you are lovable when you agree with me. I commend you for being “agreeable” in both meanings of the term – i.e. someone who agrees is pleasing to me. You discover that when you agree with me, I seem to love you. Now we both feel loved. We have established a cozy collusion. In such a relationship where my disagreeing with you is fundamentally unacceptable, what will become of my sense of self?
Mirroring thus involves putting subtle and not-so-subtle pressure on the other to comply with our perceived needs of them.
Why, we might ask, do we let others put pressure on us to be as they desire? Why do we accommodate to their needs of us? Just as we said that the mirroring selves are not passive, similarly, the selves that are mirrored are not passive either. The second reason comes, then, from the side of the mirrored selves. We, too, have needs that become actively engaged in the mirroring process. In fact, we are invested at the level of basic survival.
Principle four states:
4. Each person needs to be loved and to
matter.
As infants and children, each of us needs our parents' love and approval. If not love and approval, at the very least, we need to matter. These needs are perceived not as a luxury but as a matter of survival. They are necessary for life.
It has been shown that human needs for emotional and physical closeness are basic biological needs on a par with physiological needs for food, water, and warmth. In the studies of French psychologist Rene´ Spitz, [9] war-orphaned infants whose physiological needs were taken care of nevertheless sickened and even died because they were not adequately held and rocked by the beleaguered staff of the orphanage. This research revolutionized psychology. We can never again conceptualize human beings as purely physical creatures. We are essentially beings in relationship.
Our needs for love and acceptance are primary and compelling. Narcissism arises out of the frustration of these basic needs.
On the surface, narcissism presents as an intently engrossed self-absorption that seems to betoken extreme self-love. Narcissistic people are those of us who are so preoccupied with our own needs and wishes, it is as if we believed that nobody else could be as important as we are. Yet it is precisely because these needs were not adequately met in our earlier lives that they have become so pressing. It is because of the fear that they will never be met that they occupy such prominence in our lives, often to the exclusion of anyone else’s needs. What lies beneath this insistence on ourselves first and foremost is not self-love but self-doubt. We doubt we are worthy, that we are good enough to be loved.
What, we may ask, is the opposite of love? The answer is not hate but indifference. Love and hate are close bedfellows. They are intense ways of connecting, one positive, one negative. We can use rage to sustain connection. Sheer indifference severs connection. It is the experience of being flung into insignificance, nothingness, the void.
* * *
When, as a little girl at Camp Kawagama, I gazed out at the waves on Rocky Point, my longing was a longing for something different from what was given and permissible, a fantasy of something beyond the waves, something I called “home.” While it gave me loneliness and isolation, it also gave me consciousness. It was a kind of rude awakening. It was as if I implored the universe: “If this life I live is so deeply disappointing, what else is there?”
I could speculate that I became a philosopher, a romantic, and a rebel all in that moment’s gaze. The “pain in the butt” designation carried with it the millstone of alienation as well as the heady freedom to be myself. Disappointment danced with daring. I was launched into the stormy pendulum swing of grandiosity and inferiority depending on how I was feeling about being different. “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” has as its logical counterpart: “If you can’t join ‘em, beat ‘em.” I guess you could say I did both. I was skating on two skates headed in opposite directions. I strove for acceptability and then I repeatedly blew the acceptability game by taking some bold maverick stand. I could no more rest in the rebel role than I could in conformity. My sister put it succinctly when she said with a mixture of envy and disdain: “You were weird!”
What earned me that designation? It was years before I ventured to pose that unmentionable question. My sins were trotted out like soiled underwear. “You ate yogurt! You liked classical music! You lived in the country! Remember that hayride you took us all on? Those artichokes you served us?” I was taken aback to discover that these were the visible signs that had marked me with the “disease” of unacceptability. She herself was a germ-free traditionalist. By then, I had ventured far beyond the confines of the suburban Toronto Jewish housewife model by marrying outside the faith, studying Philosophy (a distinctly unfeminine subject), moving out west, and eventually becoming a single parent by choice.
Would my disease have progressed to such epidemic proportions had I realized that the cost of conformity might have been so easily averted by simply being a secret yogurt eater?
* * *
As we look into the mirror of our loved ones' faces, we discover that we are not, in some respects, what they would have us be. We see ourselves with parts lopped off (for example, me minus my dissatisfaction or my neediness or my unconventionality). Most love is conditional: “I'll love you if …”
In the provocative style of R.D. Laing, lets consider this Laingian knot: [10]
The parent says (in effect):
“You bad girl. You are bad to talk back to me. You are bad to be angry. To be angry is bad.”
“I am good when I tell you you're bad. I'm angry when you're bad. But I'm not bad when I'm angry at your being bad because I am helping you to be good.”
“If you are good, then I will be happy. Good girls do not get angry and talk back to their parents. They are happy being good.”
“If you are a good girl, then you'll be happy and I will be a good parent.”
“Be my good girl and we'll both be happy and I will love you.”
For the child, parents are like giants; they are bigger than life. They are like the blown-up image of the wizard in The Wizard of Oz, with booming voices and huge faces and magical powers. We believe that parents must know best. We cannot risk thinking otherwise.
There is a deep primal block to acknowledging serious flaws, limitations and faults in our parents.
Principle five states:
5. Each child wants to believe that his
or her parents are okay.
Herein lies the idealization of the parent and our clinging, beyond all logic, to the lofty image we project. In the words of Stephen Levine:
How often are we like the battered child on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, being carried gently from the room by the compassionate matron, who reaches over the matron's shoulder shouting “Mama, Mama,” to the woman in custody between the policemen on the other side of the room, arrested for burning the flesh and breaking the bones of this child? [11]
We cling to our abusers - or to our fantasy of them.
* * *
It is true that camp might not have been the abandonment trauma it was for me had it not inescapably illuminated the fact that my family were not as they pretended to be. At various times the unwelcome truth would surface against the backdrop of protestations to the contrary and we would all hasten back to the reassuring posture of being a loving family … in public at least.
I, more than anyone, tenaciously resisted registering what was going on – the pain behind the pretending. I clung to the fantasy of a loving family in the face of all evidence to the contrary. My father was angry most of the time. My mother was depressed. My sister told me that in her fifties she was asked what love felt like and suddenly realized that she had no idea. Feeling was a disability in that world. Everyone went through the motions, feeling empty and not knowing why.
Of course, it was a spawning ground for addictions. My sister equated having a good time with drinking too much, my father with eating too much. My mother popped an enormous array of prescription medications, and my brother walked around in a three hundred and fifty pound body insisting that he had a happy childhood.
It was a normal family, not dramatically different or worse than the majority of families around us. Nor was there any evil intention. Everyone was doing their best with what they knew. And everyone was hurting.
I was often told that I was the “lucky” one because I was born when my parents had money (enough money, at least, to send us to camp). But, well before I was sent to camp, I was sent to nursery school at age three and I had to stay in that school for three years because I was too young for kindergarten. Remember, this was a long time before preschools were popular so this was a very unusual thing. My mother’s rather enigmatic explanation of why I was sent to school so early is that I wanted to go … ??
There were several nannies in my first three years of life and then one who arrived when I was three and a half and stayed in my life for the next thirty-six years. My mother complained that she had to fight to be the one to give me my bath - and I accepted this statement at face value without noticing any peculiarity. It was the nanny who was beside me when I had my afternoon naps, when I had whooping cough, when I got my first period and when I graduated from high school. It was the nanny who was there when my parents began wintering in Florid - first for two months, then for four months, then for six months of each year.
But I dearly wanted to believe it was all okay. One of our family sayings was: “When the chips are down, it’s your family you can count on.” They were there (except for my mother) when, at age twenty-three, I awoke from my coma, discovering I had not died, despite ingesting over fifty of my mother’s Seconal tablets. “Enough to kill a cow!” the head nurse told me. So why didn’t it kill me?
My brother, a lawyer by then, told me that I would be sent to jail if I did not enter the Psych ward because it was against the law to attempt suicide. I believed him and I was terrified of going to jail.
My sister said she thought I was “just trying to get attention” and that it was “a real bother” and just like me to be a pain in the butt.
My mother took to her bed and was very distraught. She never came to visit me. I called her from a pay phone in the hallway of the Psych ward a few days later. I remember her words exactly. She said: “How could you do this to me?”
Then she added: “I want you to know that if you ever try this again, you will take me with you. You will be responsible for my death as well as your own. I want you to remember that.” I have always remembered.
Nothing more was said of it. Nobody asked me why I did it. I probably could not have answered them anyway.
* * *
This brings us to the most fundamental dilemma of the self.
Given the choice between believing that our parents are inherently mistaken, inadequate or bad OR that we are, we inevitably choose the latter. It is better to believe that the fault lies in us than to acknowledge the flaws in our parents.
Where there is a conflict between what they say about us and what we feel, we assign the difficulty to our feelings. “It must be me; I’m bad; the problem is me.” Even when we have no idea what we did wrong, we remain convinced that we are to blame. And we carry this conviction into adulthood.
How often have we seen our clients pull back in guilt, confusion and panic at the prospect of betraying their allegiance to their parents. The child in us confronts this inescapable dilemma:
I need Mama.
Mama says (in effect): “Be who I say you should be.”
Either Mama is right and good and if I do it, then (maybe) I will be loved.
Or Mama is wrong and bad and I am overwhelmed by fear, an innate primal fear that I will die, cast out into the void without my lifeline.
As a child I depend on the parent both physically and emotionally to survive. So what do I do? Inevitably the child “crosses over,” as it were, to the parental perspective and thereby abandons him or herself.
Hence, principle six states:
6. The child identifies with the
parent and loses empathy with him or herself.
As this two-step from self to other has been described in depth by psychoanalyst Dr. Alice Miller, [12] I refer to it as “the Alice Miller two-step.” It has also been termed “identification with the aggressor” [13] in writings on abuse. At the deepest level, it constitutes the fundamental split in the self.
Because we believe we are bad and yet we need love, we have to change ourselves to get it. Our accommodation to the other's needs of us produces the false self.
If I am what you want me to be, I am compliant. If I am not what you want me to be, I am defiant.
In the first case, I shove down my anger and become compliant (developing, for example, back problems, depression, or even in the extreme, cancer). Or I refuse to suppress my anger and become defiant, acting as if I don't really need your love and approval at all. In the first case, I surrender to my need for you and my anger becomes disowned. In the second case, I identify with my anger and my neediness becomes disowned.
At their root, both compliance and defiance are responses to the threat of abandonment or collapse of the primary love bond. This threat is inevitable for all human beings because there will always be areas in which we feel that we did not get the love and attention we needed. Consequently, in those areas, we will develop defensive systems to compensate for what we feel we missed and to give us ways to survive.
Both compliance and defiance have in common the fact that one's responses are determined by the other, rather than by the self. In the former case, your “yes” is my “yes”; in the latter, your “yes” is my “no.” In neither case, am I free to determine my own “yes” or “no.” I abandon my autonomous self by referring my responses to the other and thereby acting from a false self. Contrast this false self with true autonomy aptly described by a poster I once saw as: “being whatever I want to be … even if my mother approves.”
The false self is a self in reaction, an image or script written, not by me, but by the other. I look outside myself for my validation, responding to an external point of reference. The false self is, therefore, my accommodation to your demands of me.
Whatever does not fit this adapted self is relegated to the not-me, the part I call the shadow, the part that is disowned. The shadow, in this usage, is the part of me that is incompatible with my accommodation to your script for me. Hence the self becomes split into false self and shadow.
Principle seven states:
7. The false self is the child's
accommodation to his or her parents' image. The shadow is the
disowned, unacceptable part of the self.
In this way, the child's identification with the parent involves a loss of empathy with the split-off child or shadow part of the self. The split-off child becomes suppressed and repressed. It is the self we do not want to see. Inside of each of us is a child we have abandoned, screaming to be loved.
* * *
It is curious that during that first summer at camp, almost all the youngest children, including myself, contracted chicken pox. We were placed in quarantine in the infirmary and cautioned to stay away from all the other campers.
It was no fun at all being sick in that strange place without my mother. I recall waking up in the middle of the night in the pitch black realizing with panic and dismay that I had no idea how to find the john.
What was tremendous fun, though, was chasing other campers, all bigger than us, who ran from us yelping and squealing in all directions. What a surge of power that gave us! Having chicken pox became a weapon of extraordinary magnitude for a pock-marked bunch of five and six year olds who managed to sneak out of the infirmary. If desire for revenge can be understood as a natural response to having one’s face rubbed in one’s helplessness, this goes a long way toward explaining the enormous delight we took in this escapade.
To be marooned on an island, separated from my parents, and then quarantined in the infirmary, separated from the rest of the camp, still strikes me as a remarkably dramatic introduction to powerlessness.
Near the infirmary overlooking a swampy area by the shower house, a cage had been nailed up on a high pole. The atmosphere was dank and faintly macabre. I knew I was not supposed to be there. I was frightened but I had to see what was inside that cage.
It was wooden and had wire netting stretched across the open side that faced downhill toward the shower house. I did not like to have my back to the showers that were inexplicably menacing to me, but it was the only way I could see inside the cage. I stood on tiptoes rather precariously. There was something black in there. Just as I peered in craning to see, it let out a piercing screech and scraped its huge black wings against the wire barricade.
Did the crow see me? I never knew. I was flying down the hill as fast as my legs would carry me. At the time, I thought it was, without doubt, the most evil thing I had ever seen. I did not understand that it had simply outgrown its cage and was screaming to be free. Nor did I see in this trapped, wretched creature someone who was rather like me.
* * *
In order to keep ourselves from seeing the shadow part of ourselves, we have to suppress or repress it - that is, make it unconscious. The function of the defense system is to keep the shadow suppressed.
The guardian at the gate of the shadow is the Superego or what Robert Firestone [14] so aptly calls “the Voice.” It represents the internalized parental injunctions that form our negative self-image, the inner critic that tyrannizes us from within with its system of shoulds and don'ts. It is, in effect, an inner self-policing system that compels us to follow the script of the false self and to deny conflicting aspects of ourselves that have been repressed in the shadow.
We now face a deeper level of psychological distress. The split in the self is an inherently untenable solution that generates inescapable pressure from within.
What has been forced into the unconscious by denial, gains power as a sort of subterranean or underground force. What has been disowned remains primitive, indirect, and unresolved. It creates an agitation in the self that presses for resolution. Thus, the more the shadow is suppressed, the more it will be acted out.
The implications of this inner pressure will be felt on two levels. First, what is unconscious in one generation will be acted out in the next. Second, what is unconscious in one's own past will be acted out in the present.
Due to the force of the shadow, the past dogs us. It can never be shucked off and discarded for good. The shadow drags the repressed aspects of the self into the present and forces us to face them again and again. We will inevitably reenact our family of origin issues in our relationships with significant others, including bosses, employees, spouses and children.
Intimate love relationships are particularly hard hit. We inevitably project our unfinished business with our parents on to our partners. The postures of compliance and defiance we spoke of earlier will appear as conflict phobias and control battles in the marital sphere. Because of the inevitability of this type of projection, it is difficult to know, as Virginia Satir used to say, “mit whom we are having the pleasure.” [15]
* * *
It has been said that one can look at a person’s life from the perspective that it has all been lived emotionally in one key place. [16] Camp Kawagama would be that place for me. My life could be portrayed like the TV series “The Prisoner” as a succession of bold and daring attempts to escape the island and be free. (I always liked that series.) And I was always trying to escape the expectations that imprisoned me.
“Tune in tomorrow for her third and final daring attempt to leave Toronto. Watch reruns of her bold forays out of the affluent Jewish ghetto that was Forest Hill.” (Honestly, as I wrote the manuscript, I made a typo and typed Forest Hell!) Remember that I was “a nice Jewish girl” who was supposed to marry at nineteen, settle down in Toronto with a nice Jewish doctor or lawyer and have babies. University education was considered a waste of time for a girl like me.
Yet my first job was at a YMCA day camp. I did not marry until I was 26 and my first husband was an Irish Catholic. I did not have babies until I was close to 40 and had moved out to the west coast of Canada, as far from Toronto as I could get. I got two Masters degrees and a Doctorate. Perhaps all that education warped my mind. I fell in love with an English Protestant atheist (although he may have changed his mind about God later) and ended up a single parent alone and in debt. The episodes line up all too readily.
It would be no surprise to reenactment theorists that even forty-five years later, I was longing for a beloved I could not see and could not even telephone. And into the next generation, my son was longing for the man he called his dad, who refused to see him and would not return his calls.
As I write, I have to ask myself: am I still trying to write my way out of camp?
* * *
With the split of the self and the denial of the shadow, we enter the realm of distortion of both self and other. We have seen that the child idealizes the parent and suppresses information that would acknowledge basic faults, limitations and flaws in the parent. To this extent, we deny the shadow in the parent. At the same time, we deny the shadow in ourselves as we assume images that are either inflated (pretending we are better than we are) or deflated (pretending we are worse.) In fact, however, the one does not exist without the other. If our conscious stance is superiority, our feelings of inadequacy will be present on the unconscious level. If we present ourselves as inferior, our pretensions to grandeur will be hidden in the perfectionistic expectations we have of ourselves. Grandiosity implies inferiority and vice versa. Both are rejections of the self as it is.
In his book, Compassion and Self-Hate, Theodore Isaac Rubin says:
Any distortion of self, either in degradation or idealization, must be viewed as rejection of actual self and is therefore self-hating. Thus, exaggerated opinions as to one's abilities are no more, no less, self-hating. Rejection of reality as regards self, whatever form that distortion takes, always makes for destructive repercussions in terms of actual self. [17]