Therapy Duo

Psychotherapy & Counselling for Individuals & Couples

Category: Trauma

Articles on Trauma

  • Depth Enquiry and The Memory Hole

    Depth Enquiry and The Memory Hole

    Depth Enquiry

    We’re pleased to announce a new page on the Therapy Duo site that discusses Amanda’s Depth Enquiry technique. She’s been developing this technique for several years now, and has achieved some remarkable results with clients.

    Depth Enquiry (DE) is an extension to EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing). DE can take clients to a deep level of remembering and reprocessing past traumatic experience. The gently supportive space provided by the therapist, in conjunction with the technique itself, serve to release natural healing. Clients experience significant relief, and in some cases are not quite aware of how this has been achieved. The process does not feel like hard work!

    The Memory Hole

    Then, with a movement that was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.
    – Winston’s action, in George Orwell’s 1984

    Orwell’s description of discarding a message (memory), followed by the internal notes about that memory, is a useful metaphor for what people who have experienced traumatic events (either recent or in childhood) attempt to do. There is evidence, however, that these memories become locked into an ongoing traumatic memory system, rather than being truly forgotten. And where they need to be is in long-term memory, so they can be experienced as being in the distant past.

    Depth Enquiry unblocks resistant traumas and negative beliefs using a gentle, supportive process.

    From the traumatic memory system the events relentlessly take their toll on the happiness and health of the individual. Despite Winston’s action with the message and the notes, all might not be turned to ashes, as he might have hoped.

    The ANP and the EP

    Recent researchers suggest that a traumatic event splits the healthy personality into these parts:

    • An Apparently Normal Part (ANP) that continues to adapt to the demands of daily living, and is motivated to appear normal in order to remain connected to the social world, and
    • An Emotional Part (EP) that holds the sensory perceptions of the trauma in the form of reliving the experience.

    Negative symptoms occur when the experiences of the EP become known to the ANP. The ANP tends to deny the experiences of the EP. The person has flashbacks and an associated sense of low self-worth, and is confused and defensive about the intrusions of the EP. It seems not possible for the trauma to be “devoured by the flames”.

    Yet a sense of freedom, of the trauma being truly devoured by the flames, is possible for people undertaking a process such as Depth Enquiry.

    Working with Amanda in Depth Enquiry

    Amanda delivers Depth Enquiry as a short program of 4 to 6 one to one-and-half hour sessions. (These can be undertaken in parallel with other therapeutic work, if necessary.)

    Please contact her if you’d like to have an experience of this work as a client; or if you’d like to train with her, to provide Depth Enquiry to others. (Training is available to accredited therapists only.)

  • Escaping the Narcissistic Bubble

    Escaping the Narcissistic Bubble

    Narcissistic Wounding

    We spoke in a recent article about Narcissistic Wounding in the couple relationship, and how learning to withstand this wounding can be a powerful way of transforming a relationship.

    The artist Louise Bourgeois had a deep understanding of narcissism, as evidenced by the rich art works she made over many years. In these works she often worked through woundings that had their genesis in her family of origin.

    It’s significant that her drawing shown here is called Fear: it depicts the way fear shuts us down from others, creates a bubble of narcissistic and reflective defence; a closed sense of self (possibly very useful when we were children, but now just an old barrier through which others can only superficially contact us). In an intimate relationship both people lose, the defended one and the one who attempts to break through.

    Narcissistic Defence in Couples Work

    In our couples counselling work we investigate and try to understand how these bubble structures have developed, and inquire into how they no longer serve us nor our relationships. Part of our bubble defence can exhibit as a hardness towards others. To change this situation both people in the relationship need to explore ways they can be more kind to each other.

    Kindness

    Kindness is of course at the heart of many religions, and that’s because kindness works – it takes us towards real peace, rather than towards the pseudo-peace of the defended bubble. As the Dalai Lama says:

    This is my simple religion.
    There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy.
    Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

    Kindness requires real forgiveness, and this, too, is at the heart of most spiritual paths and traditions. We could say its opposite is judgement. And it is often this, judgement, that we see couples focussing on.

    But how would it be to live without judging our intimate partner, to actually make an agreement that there will be no judgement in our relationship? We’ve seen such agreements work powerfully to change the dynamic in couple relationships.

    Foregiveness

    This forgiveness is not “I’ll forgive because it’s good for me”. It’s something much more foundational than this; an agreement to leave our bubble and really meet the other. We’ll have more to say on forgiveness in another post.

    (Image: Louise Bourgeois, Fear, 1999)

  • Beyond Narcissistic Wounding

    Beyond Narcissistic Wounding

    The Barbs and Wounds of Intimate Relationships

    Often couples come into therapy recounting an argument they’ve had. Each partner valiantly tries to get us to agree that their own position is correct. Well, it won’t work. We’re not there to be adjudicators. Actually, we’re not even there to resolve conflict (which may sound strange, but more on that later).

    What the couple is usually experiencing is repeated bouts of attack and defense, to-ing and fro-ing between the protagonists until exit and/or exhaustion of one or both parties occurs.

    Our approach is to stop the conflict immediately (both in the therapy room and as a strong suggestion for elsewhere). We suggest a number of simple approaches such as:

    • Only using “I” statements (“I feel…”, “I need…”)
    • Staying with feelings and sensations (feelings being characterised by being able to be described using a single word, such as “sad” or “worthless”; sensations being actual data received from the body)
    • Using the microscopic truth about what is going on inside us
    • Looking at the meanings we make in our interactions with our partner: see Staemmler’s model of interactions.

    The World of Feeling and Sensations

    When we encourage couples to enter the world of feelings and sensations, huge changes can occur. This world was usually already there, hidden from them; and it was usually the yearning of both partners to experience it and to interact from this world; but it’s unfortunately been blocked by the “bubble” of each individual’s defenses.

    In the image at the top of this article, the “pool” labelled Feelings and Sensations is shared – indicating that it can potentially belong to the “we” of the relationship, not just to the individuals separately.

    The Narcissistic Wound

    Narcissistic Wound - Detail

    When we’re wounded by our partner and the barb goes deep, it punctures our defenses, our guarded sense of self. This sense of self has been built to a greater or lesser extent in a healthy way, in order to survive the conflicts of normal growing up. The current view is that we all to some extent suffer some level of narcissistic wounding. (And it can be hard sometimes to decide whether it’s healthy.)

    So another powerful approach to working with conflict is for us to begin to get enough resilience to see the way in which our narcissistic wounding is being invoked in our struggles. We wrote in our previous article about the Dark Couple. This couple is fuelled in proportion to the inability of each of the partners in a relationship to see their own wounding.

    In other words, if we are unable to absorb the injury of the wound triggered by our partner’s barb, we give the dark couple energy; an energy that becomes redoubled if our partner fails to absorb our wounding of them in retaliation. It’s a vicious cycle of hurt and retribution (like an Old Testament story).

    Absorbing the Wound

    Absorbing the narcissistic wound comes only by admitting the existence of some vicious and unpleasant qualities in ourselves, without rebelling in defense and accusation. Can we own anything of what our partner is saying they don’t like about us (even 10% or 1%)?

    A gradual process of growth and maturity can occur for both partners as they begin to see the existence of the dark couple, and begin to be able to withstand and absorb their own narcissistic defenses.

    Understanding the Root Issues

    So back to the part about not resolving conflict. Foundational change doesn’t happen in a relationship by learning strategies for resolving conflict. That’s not to say that resolving conflict doesn’t help; it may be an enormously helpful step in soothing the couple, preparing them to do deeper work, and reducing the psychic injuries to others with whom they connect (such as children).

    But change really, deeply happens when both partners get an understanding, at the root level, of the unconscious energies that have driven their relationship. With such deep understanding, external changes (such as reducing conflict) happen by themselves – and sometimes even evaporate!

  • Warring Couples

    Warring Couples

    Stop the Violence

    We recently posted The Golden Rules of Relationships which highlighted the importance of feeling our feelings.

    Another way to say this is “Stop the violence within ourselves“. What violence? That caused by the self-imposed requirement, based on our experience in the world, to push down how we really feel, how we would naturally react.

    Soldier’s Heart

    We listened to a compelling audio piece (part of the recent Ultimate Mens Summit) in which Edward Tick of the U.S Soldier’s Heart talked passionately about the urgent need to provide tools to re-humanise returned service people and those who have been living in traumatic situations:

    The crusaders of the Middle Ages were considered, even after they came back from war, even though the wars were considered holy and blessed by the church … the crusaders were considered soiled and that they had fallen from grace, and that they had to perform penance for three years, non-violent penance, rebuilding the world, before they were able to take communion again and be considered to have worked their way back into holiness. We absolutely need to retrain people, to re-humanise people when they’ve been trained to kill, whether it’s in the military or the inner city or in prison … we do de-humanise people systematically and they ache to be re-humanised.

    What Ed’s taking about is an extreme case of what’s being played out in some relationships: people so hurt by trauma that a war continues to be played out. And here is where “Feel You Feelings” becomes an imperative, and also a task of some proportion.

    Re-Humanising the Relationship

    We need to remember that the relationship that has become a battleground needs to be re-humanised, and that there often needs to be some kind of ritual (non-violent penance) to enable that to occur.

    Some couples do this by daily recommitment to the process of change; some are helped in couples therapy to take this path of non-violent transformation.

  • From Illness to Stillness

    From Illness to Stillness

    A Rich Book on Illness

    We’re excited to hear about a new book From Illness to Stillness due out soon, by Michael Harrington.

    From the Introduction

    Uncovering your innermost being releases a wondrous diamond. Once it begins to emerge from the layers of conditioning, a realization dawns: you are ageless and timeless. When every free instant goes into this quest, you will no longer experience grace as the happenstance of a unique experience. It will be seen as the constant presence of all that is.

    Illness is a blessing that offers a great opportunity. Sickness and dis-ease are catalysts, divine karmas that offer us a chance to pull up our wheelchair, prop up the hospital bed, lounge on the couch and rest under the tree of good tidings. An illness has oriented us towards the inner quest, highlighting the only reality.

    A chronic illness was certainly not anything I thought would be part of my journey. I’m the health coach, the guy who climbed the Casaval Ridge of Mount Shasta, rode century bike rides and helped people restore and optimize their health. Besides, it wouldn’t look good on my resume:

    ‘Health Coach with chronic, undiagnosed illness now accepting new clients’. No, it wasn’t supposed to go this way. I believed that optimal health was in my control. If I took good care of myself, exercised, practiced hatha yoga, did Chinese energetic exercises, ate organic foods & drank organic juices, ingested high-grade super supplements- I’d be well.

    After two years of chronic illness, I realized that sickness just happens, like everything else in life. Maybe it stays a day, maybe weeks or months, or it lasts the rest of your life. What if it did last the rest of my life?! Did it really matter if a mass of intense sensations, thoughts and feelings, turned into a story called illness, continued to be part of experience?

    When chronic illness hit ‘my body’, it was originally interpreted as a disabling force. It was actually a fire demanding a deeper sincerity. As I began to include and acknowledge everything, witnessing the simplicity of what is, through eyes unclouded with right and wrong, this or that, a more complete recognition came to the fore. From this illuminating, but entirely natural perspective, life cannot be seen as a malicious force holding you down. Instead it is a magnificent orchestration unfolding in the most beautiful ways, helping you to unveil your own authentic, human design. I uncovered and released anger patterns, protective defenses, family & intimate relationship issues, covert and overt depression—all of the things that I had hidden from, spiritually-bypassed and separated from ‘all the rest’. The illness, at first seen as a robber who had kicked the door in and stolen my life, was in fact uncovering what was most dear. The greatest sickness, the only true illness, is forgetting what we are. Whether we are conscious of it or not, our entire lives we are attempting to ‘remember’ what we are. This ‘remembering doesn’t happen through the filter of mind but via the clear space of our innermost being.

    Today millions of people are living with chronic illness. A large portion of that group are so debilitated they cannot work and have full time caregivers. Some are on the street, homeless ‘throwaways’, labeled drug addicts, dragging themselves around like zombies in ‘Night of the Living Dead’. One of the main reasons this illness epidemic has come about: We are being systematically and purposefully bombarded with chemical pollutants and toxins- in astronomical proportions. Our bodies are being forced to cope with some of the most deadly poisons man has ever known: through our water, food, aerial spraying, industry and just about everywhere we turn.

    It is my sincere hope that if you or someone in your sphere has been given a disease label by the Medical Establishment, undergone a gauntlet of procedures, tests and surgeries, or inhaled pharmaceutical medications that have left you feeling even more depleted and sick, that I may be able to point you towards potential alternatives that are more in alignment with nature, remedies that actually treat the underlying toxicities.

    Like a tree in the forest during a storm our body, when sick, is undergoing a transformation. It might have been knocked to the ground but the root is alive. The tree-body has been forced to turn all its energies in a renewed focus- towards the essential – and must find a way to reach the sunlight. We don’t know what is going to happen to our body (the tree); the old form is being rearranged. If you have ever been in a forest at the end of a storm, right after the intensity, there is an unfathomable stillness. It was always there but now you really notice it; that deep recognition is the opportunity encapsulated in illness.

  • Riding the Horse of Fear

    Fear

    Fear is something we all, to some degree, have a relationship with. And we spoke in our last post about the brain’s bias towards negativity (see Understanding the Emotional Brain).

    Much has been written in the field of psychotherapy about this subject and how it plays out in our lives, whether consciously or unconsciously. The view of the existentialist psychotherapists (of whom Irvin Yalom is a great example) is that at the root of all fears are the four ultimate concerns: death, isolation, freedom and meaninglessness.
    Riding the Horse of Fear

    But What’s Our Relationship to Fear?

    The power of psychotherapy is in the investigation of our moment-to-moment relationship to what’s happening now. In the case of fear, we can ask in psychotherapy (repeatedly, if necessary) what our relationship is to it?

    One common such relationship is of resistance: we resist the experience of fear (by one or more of a range of potential strategies and addictions); we are afraid of fear itself.

    The Alternative to Resistance: One Person’s Experience

    Here’s a quote from Vicky Woodyard, a woman who has suffered greatly in losing both her 7 year old daughter and her husband to cancer.

    Fear is a part of the human condition – yours, mine and everyone else’s. But here is the challenge and the solution rolled into one. Ride the horse of fear consciously. Choose it. Resistance to fear is what perpetuates it. We all know this. It doesn’t matter whether your challenge is cancer or not, ride the horse of fear by your own choice.

    We highly recommend Vicky’s book LIFE WITH A HOLE IN IT: That’s How the Light Gets In – The Wisdom of an Awakened Heart for its fearless stance in relation to her experiences and to fear itself.

  • Understanding the Emotional Brain

    The Brain’s Response to Fear

    Last year we attended an ANZAP seminar Understanding the Emotional Brain. This started with a stimulating talk by Lea Williams and Russell Meares followed by a lively discussion on the subject.

    Lea Williams presented some recent work by her and her group on, amongst other things, the brain’s response to fear and its bias towards negativity. Our brains, from current research, evidently need five positive experiences to counter each single negative experience, in order to maintain a healthy equilibrium.

    And the fear response in the brain is complex and exhibits a dual pathway – the so-called “low road” and “high road”. In the primitive low road, the thalamus quickly prompts the amygdala into a fight-or-flight response (say, in reaction to seeing a snake on the path before me). However the slower high road, via the visual cortex, enables potentially a more considered response. (I realise the snake is just a stick.) Brain High Road / Low Road

    Brain Plasticity

    It’s not all bad news on negativity – research suggests that the plasticity of the brain is much higher than previously thought, and there’s potential for retraining negative brains in positive ways. And such positive ways tend to use the high road, rather than the immediate triggering of the low road. This research supports the efficacy of psychotherapeutic practices in creating new ways for the individual to react to old stimuli.