Learner Therapist (53) … Revisiting an abuse to clear it

Torrey Orton

January 28, 2015

Guilt and trauma

 

I’m going to stretch a concept a bit here. Abuse has a well understood content in therapy, characterised by a range of behaviours which distort personal development at any age. The distortion I’m concerned with – guilt – is especially inculcated (a word I have never used out of disapproval of its implications for learning, but here is where it speaks its truth) by religions and cultures to establish internal controls meeting externally sponsored and sanctioned behaviours and values.

 

This social use of guilt as control is most notable in matters sexual and procreative of all descriptions. The controls (the abuses in question here) are aimed at ensuring that historical narratives of sexuality are sustained, in the process sustaining historical inequities and iniquities along with them. These are fought out daily today, within cultures and between them. They reflect transitions from normals to new normals in the most foundational areas of life.

 

So, what to do with such a historical distortion carried by a patient as part of her present stress overload burden (marriage / relationship breakdown, betrayals of various sorts, retrenchments, illness, etc.)? I’ve had a number of these patients, and in two cases resorted to the following strategy for deflating the guilt which drives their self-oppression: I suggested they go back to the beginning, back to their guilt’s self-acknowledged origins in their Catholic girlhoods.

 

There were two reasons for this suggestion. First, the origins in the Church entailed its own forgiveness through confession and, second, their present guilts from those origins are in a much changed socio-cultural context from that in which they grew up – notably the collateral sins of sexism in particular are on display, backed by the Church’s leaders’ failure to command right behaviour of its agents, the priests and nuns. Some of the things they had been taught to feel guilty about are no longer on the guilt feeding horizon, at least of everyday practitioners of Catholicism.

 

 A relevant example of the changed cultural context of the Church appeared in the NYTimes as I was starting this post. It exemplifies the results of the struggle against the guilting forces of the mid-20^th century, especially the Sixties. Columnist Frank Bruni, writing in the New York Times on 26 Jan. 2015 says,

“At my request, Gallup did a special breakdown of its “Values and Beliefs” survey from last May and looked at how the principles of people who identified themselves as Catholics diverged (or didn’t) from those of Americans on the whole. Catholics were only slightly less open to birth control, with 86 percent of them saying that it was “morally acceptable” in comparison with 90 percent of all respondents. But Catholics were more permissive than all respondents when it came to sex outside marriage (acceptable to 72 percent of Catholics versus 66 percent of Americans overall) and gay and lesbian relationships (70 percent versus 58).”

 

Finding an appropriately modern priest was a challenge in one case, but once found, the reduction in guilt was sustainable from that experience of a now unnecessary confession. Interestingly, the priest in question was also mature enough for the Church to want not to hear from him much anymore. The other example is still in the works.

 

What surprised me, for a while, was that such an idea should come to me so easily and offering it to the patients came equally easily. Priests, of course, play a role like therapists in being bound by a personal and institutional code of silence, and so when not in the role of judge as when preaching, they are safe carriers of ‘sins’. That’s a simple transferential equation.

 

The underlying reason, which I discovered by taking action, is that acknowledgment and apology from relevant authorities or authority figures, is an essential step in trauma recovery. It frees the traumatised of the self-critique which paralyses them in their trauma. Confronting the traumatising authority (something the patient has to do for themselves) lifts the lid on one of the traumatic dynamics.

Learner therapist (11) … Touches for life

Learner therapist (11) … Touches for life
Torrey Orton
July 30, 2011

Get a grip on yourselves before the roof blows off.

Non-verbal communication is recognised as much in its excess (hitting, slapping…) as its shortage (touch-free upbringings, non-contact sports….) in everyday life. More ordinary levels like handshakes and arm touches are the unconsciously applied media of daily interactions, from intimate to instrumental. Their therapeutic potential may be unnoticed. I offer three recent experiences for your appreciation.


M and A have explosively volatile struggles around their respective needs for care, powered by very different but equally searing injuries to self. These struggles have improved countably over three months of work (weekly) from daily 2-3 hour storms to weekly ones; from standing at the edge of the abyss of relationship implosion to enjoying each other much of the time. But still the volatility remains. The injuries will never fade away, especially his – he has a congenitally weak lower back. She only has interpersonally catastrophic parents, so far.


The signalling of their needs is still not fine enough and they turn any single glitch into another in the running sores of their past failures, still in often uncontrollable emotional flashes. Fine enough is what? It's a capacity to catch an emerging need default to disappointment when it's only a difference in the prevailing atmosphere of their joint life. Need defaults are moments like this:

Typically, he's having a bad back day, which means unpredictable pain grasping an apprehensive attitude (because always on edge for the unpredictable) and she's having a bad recall (which means direct experience of parental abandonments). He needs stillness; she needs a hug. Two into one don't go. He tenses and she pushes her need. She feels abandoned and he feels crowded. The great disappointment blast off.

Creating a fine enough treatment looks like:

This day they show up in therapy (session 12) with an increasing sense of achievement and a reminder of the distance to go – the blast off above, just a day before. In a guided revisit, they experience their respective hurts under control and agree that her hug is unreasonable for his pain. So then what? I ask her what would help her need for reassurance. She knows immediately and precisely: a held hand would do just fine.

I ask her to move a seat closer to him, within easy hand reach, and show him where to offer his hand. She places hers palm down just above her knee. He slides his under hers and she says "No". Through his shock he figures out the slide is a slip (but not what slip; it's the sexual one). She lifts hers and places his on top. Success. Abandonment defeated with visceral relief. Guilt at being unable to respond to her need fended off appropriately.

I think I may have primed this result by telling them a story of another couple (F and D) in their age range who were sitting in these seats a week before, separated by a similar need gap. It was crossed by the guy taking action to respond to her pain about their relationship arising from conflicted feelings about his responses to it earlier – that she often needed space and he needed closeness at the same moment. This typically happens at the end of the work day.

He initiated the same seat change spontaneously and grabbed her ambivalently available hand from a slightly cringed position in her chair. This allowed exploring just how close was too close, and considering how their attachment styles differed around a critical mutual reassurance behaviour. Joint distance regulation was tested live, and controllably, as they adjusted the hand holding to achieve optimum need fulfilment at the moment: giving help for him and acknowledging her distance for her in the same act.

These events seem to come in pairs and triplets, or just surges. A day later, a twenty years older couple (C and P) appeared, struggling with increasing success with rages driven largely by him and facilitated by her chronic passivity. His rage driver is an undiscoverable family history – an absent father of a one night's burst pregnancy untraceable by his mother, plus years of deception about his adoption heritage. At 17 he finally caught his otherwise caring adopters messing up their version of his life, an exposure he had long felt coming.


It leaves him hugely vulnerable to rushes of anxiety at perceived performance failures of his, or others in regard to him – a threat of not getting to anything on time will do it. This one was on the way to see me together, with her driving to pre-empt such a rage, but the tactic failing on the road. So,

...they had one of the blow-ups they so fear, but constrained enough by their joint therapeutic work to so reduce it that he just fumed in the passenger's seat about being late, maybe! Like the others above, these two had had a major explosion (first for some weeks) earlier that week.

Trouble is, the fuming is contagiously electric and bad memory inducing for her – will this be another rage or just a low grade trash fire?? So, she reached out to pat his head and he ducked away into a foetal sulk, with emanations of fury growth. They wondered what she could have done differently. It took us some while to come up with the insight that her intuitive touch had been conceptually right, only practically clumsy.

A head touch is not benign, but three others are: the shoulder, upper arm and forearm touches. These are almost universally recognised as OK touches, even between sexes/genders. Most others are sexual, domineering, or both.

The touch is essential to break the rage cycle once it has started. Words just feed it. The touch allows another level of consciousness to be accessed, wherein the path to freedom of the moment's disruptive passion.