05 Jul The Thing We All Hate Yet Could Be The Door To Healing
I was recently with some family members on a trip overseas. Great trip. Fascinating. Wonderful adventures.
Then one day my person reached for her wallet and it wasn’t there.
That meant all her credit cards, driver’s license, everything (well, thank goodness, she had left her passport in the room safe).
In seconds my relative was sobbing on the street, horrified, distressed.
Having known this person for many years I grabbed her by the shoulders and in a firm, calm voice said, “Stay here with us. Nothing bad is happening right here with us!”
I could see she was going down memory lane.
In her mind she was somewhere else in some other time, not here with us, on this street, in this country.
At the same time, other relatives there were saying, “She needs to have her feelings!” But I knew that if she kept spinning in this emotionally distress that she would be carving an old way of being into more concretized emotional and nervous system “reality.”
I knew she was caught in a re-enactment.
Re-enactments are trance states that are reactive states usually out of proportion to the circumstance. In their affective bigness they actually give us a doorway into non-narrative patterns that were laid down earlier in life. We all are molded by previous experiences and attachments. However that early pattern (which John Bowlby called the Internal Working Model) was laid down is generally how we experience and perceive the world.
Learning to remap those fundamental patterns is key to breaking free of the core beliefs in which we feel stuck, hopeless and despairing.
Back to my family member on the street.
I knew if she got lost in this physiological distress it would take a lot longer to drain out of her body. So, I stayed right there with her, using a calm voice and getting her to look around her, look at me, look at our other family to see that here in this moment, in this reality, nothing bad was happening. She was here, with family all here to take care of her, provide for her, make sure she was safe physically, financially, emotionally.
In this moment nothing bad was happening.
What she told us later is that at other moments in her past (when the template was being formed) she wasn’t allowed to make mistakes, nor were others around her allowed to do things imperfectly. There were always consequences, all of a painful variety. She learned to adapt.
But the past fear also stayed buried in her nervous system.
When mistakes happen the switch opens up this cavern in her mind and out comes this horrifying distress that she’s going to be all alone, ashamed, abandoned……
Our task as her positive connections, and the task in therapy, is to help someone stay in this moment, this very moment and to check out reality, creating a distinction between this moment and the past moments that are trying to come to the surface.
The good thing is those moments provide us opportunity to do, to be in the situation in a different way.
But that requires that our minds and bodies aren’t hijacked by the emotional distress. We need to keep one toe/foot in the upcoming distress while at the same time hold onto our capacity to witness, observe, stay present. (by the way… these are key components of mindfulness and concentration meditation practices, and ones I use a lot in the Becoming Safely Embodied Skills.)
Back on the street, we watched her body ease out of the tense hold it has on her as she left the state of pain that still lives in her body. In this wretched encapsulated state life comes out of the blue, hurts you, and you have no recourse to do anything.
So we did what everyone does in those situations, went and made the credit card calls to cancel and reissue cards. Got a little settled and then headed back out into the Grand Adventure of Life.
A few hours later, my relative reaches into another pocket of her purse and…….. yes…. Discovers her wallet. Right there, where it was all the time.
Yet at the moment of emotional escalation she was convinced, convinced, convinced that it was taken. She was so convincing that others of us didn’t push to look in other pockets. We were convinced with her.
I don’t suppose any of you have ever had anything like this happen to you?
Well, the truth is we all cycle in and out of these kinds of moments. For short hand we could call them “re-enactments.” Freud called this a compulsion to repeat. (sidebar: If you ever have the chance to take a course with Bob Fox in the Boston area on Repetition Compulsion I would encourage you to take it. Fabulous teacher and material. I’m hoping to get him to do a podcast with us soon……)
Re-enactments are, well, can be torturous when we are caught in the penetrating, usually unconscious, rhythms they hold us in.
As a therapist much of my “job” is to enter into re-enactments, willingly and unwillingly with people – to do this consciously instead of unconsciously, and in the process of it shift the outcome.
Much of what we do in therapy is to discover the range and cycle of the patterns we learned, often non-narratively, from our early environment.
We watch how these patterns show up over and over again in many different arenas (ways you might withdraw, react, people you are in relationship with, when you get defensive, on an done) We are looking for clues to this million piece puzzle, trying to get the scope to a manageable size.
In the therapy session I can support people in “remapping” these inner terrains by imagining new ways of interacting with the entrenched patterns of body, mind, and heart. Finding new pathways that become more familiar the more we traverse them. That means walking with people when they feel “stuck” or melt down emotionally, or withdraw and disappear and training them, over and over and over and over and over again to find a new more satisfying outcome.
All the training in the therapy hour does is prepare people for life.
Prepare you for those moments when BOOM! The old pattern comes right up and shocks us into interacting in old, usually not the most healthy ways. We can react in ways we’re later embarrassed of, ashamed of, horrified by……
The good news
Yes, there is good news. We can shift this deeply held patterns by first becoming aware of how they show up in all their permutations, increase our capacity to be with them without responding in the same old way, allowing whatever feelings are encapsulated within the pattern. Then, as pieces click into insight and awareness we are better able to shift.
What have you learned from being in re-enactments? How do you cope? Shift? Deal with them? Post a comment below.