Abreaction is leaning into negative emotions, embracing them, emphasizing them, enlarging them, experiencing them more fully–for the first time, if this is a truly unresolved trauma.
I have been doing a lot of this over the past several weeks. We hear about positive self talk. Fuck that. I’m doing negative self talk, about how I hope I fail, that everyone hates me and wants me to die, that nothing I will ever do will succeed, that I should be ground into the dirt. . .etc.
And this is working. What it is doing is bringing up latent emotions, and what might be termed non-verbal dialogue, which has been in my consciousness substantially all my life, but largely unrecognized, and to the extent it was, fought. “You say I need to die, but I say I want to live”, back and forth, endlessly.
There is no conclusion to this. Each “side” achieves momentary victories, but always there is a loss of energy, of enthusiasm, of connection with the inner self, of vitality.
So I decided to give this voice free rein to verbalize literally anything it wants. What has been happening is that my chronic anger is subsiding, I feel more calm, and I can think more clearly.
What I am realizing is that when I get angry over “nothing”–today, for example, the fact that cancelling a print job on my printer yields roughly 10x as many pages of gibberish as actually printing the document would have–is that the anger–the defensiveness, the sense of being under attack, the sense of needing to justify myself, the need to strike out–was already there. It was induced by the voice. I suspect most people with chronic anger issues–and I do want to be clear this is not a major issue for me, but it is an issue–are the same. They are fighting battles in their heads by proxy, and I think sometimes it is the very concreteness of the proxy–the bad driver, the IRS agent, the thoughtless coworker–that makes them attractive. At least they know WHAT they are angry at. The alternative is an emotion without a cause or object, which is very confusing.
Stan Grof talks about traumas of commission and omission. I believe these are his words. It is clear enough how to abreact actual abuse, but how neglect? How lack of love?
Ponder a parent who watches a child in pain, struggling helplessly with something, who watches the child, while the child is watching him or her, begging with their eyes for help, and who walks on without doing anything. Is the net content of this interaction, in which nothing has apparently been done–no one hurt or helped–neutral? Of course not. A clear message has been sent: you don’t matter. I don’t care whether you live or die. It might actually be more convenient for me if you died.
This would technically be a trauma of omission–love not given–but I would argue that in important respects all traumas are traumas of commission, in that somewhere, somehow, love that could have been given, understanding and help that could have been granted, was not. Certainly, there are limits to how much, say, the workers in an orphanage can provide love and comfort to all the children. But has “society” still not chosen to care, also? I think this is the way it works.
So a trauma of omission gets abreacted as self loathing, self hate, a feeling of helplessness, violence towards a self which seemingly deserved it–how else to explain these lacks, these gaps?
What I am trying to process, what I have been trying to process all my life, is the fact that not only were my parents incapable of empathetic, nurturing love, but that at many points in my life they more or less rooted for my failure, watched me flail around helplessly, and did nothing. They just moved on, without emotional involvement or connection.
Now, as I have often said, I don’t feel sorry for myself, and I don’t want this to be a Daily Me. At the same time, we as a society are so inured in some ways to one another’s inertia and anomie and disconnection, that I think truth telling is warranted and useful at times. It tells us what is out there.
And my feelings go through a sort of one way valve, in which I can express myself honestly, but need fear no blowback or emotional aggression. You can’t get to me. I have far, far too much practice surviving emotional assaults, having endured them daily for most of my formative years, and in internal dialogue since.
I think clinical, therapeutic psychology, in the long run, will need to turn to teaching and eliciting deep emotions from people in emotional distress. It will need to teach them not to hurt less, but to hurt more until they hurt less. The solution to PTSD is Hell. But is one large Hell that ends not vastly preferable to daily small ones until the end of a life blunted by a dependence on emotional pain killers or one sort or another?
Stan and Christina Grof’s book “Spiritual Emergency” was very useful to me in this regard. It broadened by horizon tremendously as to how much emotional pain someone can take, and my ideas about embracing difficult emotions come from them and Barry McDonagh’s “Panic Away” series; primarily from them, though. It is a focus of that book.