I was watching this very interesting video on Dr. Lee Merritt’s very good website http://www.drleemerritt.com/ and came across this interesting talk by a German psychologist. I find it vaguely painful as it amounts to an erudite and reasonable cri de coeur asking what the fuck is wrong with the world. I don’t know what follows what I am about to describe, but this I found useful. It is very roughly 15 minutes in.
He created for his own purposes a tripartite system for trauma. There is the healthy self, which remains. There is the cut-off traumatic self, which has more fear, pain, shame, and rage than it can handle. It keeps tripping psychic circuit breakers, shutting the system down. And there is the Survival Self, which is an ad hoc patchwork of psychic resources which works continually to keep the person functioning, despite having what amounts a cauldron in them which threatens continually to boil over, pushing them into either hyperarousal or life dimming numbness, which are flip sides of the same coin.
Here is the thing: trauma creates the need to run or fight or abase oneself, but only the third is possible, now, and it is not healthy. Both fight and flight reactions, in calm places far from the scene of the crimes, are inappropriate, but nonetheless demanded by some part of our psyche.
What I will suggest is that cycling awareness between the three parts creates for the psyche an illusion of movement sufficient to at least partially indulge this panic driven need for escape.
I noticed perhaps a month ago, and this is one of the ideas I have been leaving on the back burner, that when I shake in my bed–which happens just about every night if I am not drunk–each shake has contained within it a whole picture. If you can slow down that fear pattern, images and contexts appear. The task is drawing out what have become automatic patterns, slowing them, making them weaker because slower and less intense, and creating parts which can be processed.
It is a surreal, interesting, and healthy feeling to go through an unpleasant scene, but realize that in the past I would have “seen” (felt or sensed)–completely unconsciously–merely the first image, then redirected and dissociated instantaneously without even realizing it. Since that energy has to go somewhere, in me it goes into shaking.
I remember a therapist once asking me what the images were that so terrified me. The answer was I have no idea. I rarely see anything, and what I do see I can usually respond to consciously–to be sure often weakly and with fear, but I have long training in facing what I am afraid of.
Here is the image I will suggest: the side of picture. Imagine a picture frame, seen sideways. There is no content. All you know is that it is there. Awakening from traumatic madness, beginning to build pathways between the parts of the psyche, involving slowly turning that picture around, and slowly weakening its impact through time, by adding time, and by adding space. By doing it more slowly, and by expanding both my sense of self and the size of the picture, such that the atoms of paint come to have gaps between them, and the whole is no longer hard, but soft.
I have literally had the feeling, going through some images–mostly in my dreams recently–which I KNOW were things which caused me such terror in the past that I could not feel them, could not see them, could not begin to process them.
Let us say my task is to move two tons of potatoes from one side of the room to the other, and my past experience has been having the full two tons dumped on my back every time, crushing me. This is not a contest that can be won, or a challenge that can be endured. It has to become smaller, much smaller.
This is the way. I continue to pursue all modalities I know of, including neurofeedback, Kum Nye, Autogenic training, AVE training, Yoga, and silence. All of these techniques work, to some extent, but the whole thing is held together by a fixed desire to learn to SEE what it is that I am, who I am, what is hidden in me. It involves courage, determination, and great persistence.