If the men try the door, find it locked and decide to leave, the threat is gone and—depending on the child—the stress of the event may not become traumatic. That is, it might not have created some kind of lasting psychological effect that needs to be treated. Granted, the child may be more aware of the world she lives in, but this isn’t necessarily an ill effect. This is an analogy for those things we see as threats around us that put us on edge, that stress us psychologically and that may have us withdraw or hide temporarily from a situation—maybe not physically but psychologically. As the threat passes, though, we can easily return without having been traumatized.
Let’s say, however, that the men don’t give up so easily and they break through the door. So now the child has to run deeper into the house and hide, perhaps behind a couch or under a bed. This is much like the way too many children have to run and hide more deeply within themselves from threats—not so often from intruders (strangers), but more often from those in their lives inflicting emotional, physical or even sexual abuse. Here, especially with severity and frequency, abuses or other violent situations become traumatic and cause the kinds of divisions or splits we’ll discuss later in this book.
The child hopes at this point that she has tricked the intruders by hiding and that this will carry her through the trauma. But suppose they find her under the bed. Now what is she supposed to do? They have physical control over her at this point and there is nowhere deeper into the house for her to retreat. So the one remaining option she has is to cut ties with the environment entirely, for her essence in this circumstance to fully break away from reality so that it’s protected from what is happening to her body. We and some other therapists refer to this primal level of dissociation as “soul loss,” requiring “soul retrieval” in therapy.
There are times when we protect ourselves psychologically in simple ways from those around us—in ways that may stress us, but that don’t cause any lasting damage or split that requires therapy. The more we are threatened, however, the more we need to retreat into our own inner “house,” our own psyche. The deeper we go, the deeper a split may become. With the deepest splits from shock, we find that part of the soul itself is disconnected from a person, and as part of the defense process, the ego may associate with the abuser who is causing the shock. We see this dramatized in George Orwell’s metaphorical novel, 1984, when Big Brother’s brainwasher O’Brien says to Winston Smith, the victim of his abuse,
We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.1
SHADOWS
Let’s briefly mention shadows here, because while they aren’t the focus of our book, they represent the response to a milder form of trauma. As we’ve said, any kind of psychic split from trauma is effectively a loss of some aspect of the individual, which is then replaced with an “other” who fills the void where the loss occurred. In the following chapters, we’ll illustrate the deeper splits of trauma and shock.
In the case of shadows, the trauma is real but more tolerable and the “other” remains closely connected to the original “me.” The split is put out of sight or “in the shadows,” so to speak. But it’s not an unconscious replacement that the ego is unaware of. Instead, this shadow is an identity of convenience, functioning in alliance with the ego to pursue their mutual goal of ensuring safety and satisfying needs. The shadow uses means that the ego would not, either because it is deemed to be bad or because it’s beyond the capability of the ego. In either case, the ego’s plea is, “Oh, I couldn’t do that.” Whether it is manipulation, seduction or being devious or defiant, the shadow replies, “Oh, but I can.”
As with other forms of trauma, the victim introjects (incorporates attitudes or ideas into one’s personality unconsciously) the traumatizer’s powerful qualities into the shadow. In other words, the tactics used by this shadow are determined by those of the source of the trauma, either mimicking them, standing in defiance of them or attempting to mollify them. If the source of trauma is a raging father, the child may develop a shadow that rages, one that stands in judgment of rage or a shadow that fearfully tries to anticipate the father’s needs and meet them before rage can erupt.
FROM HYPNOTHERAPY TO PSYCHODRAMA—THE TERMS OF OUR TRADE
The conscious mind, even though it is very important, is only about 10 percent of our mind. This part of the mind helps us to think, debate ideas, reason and process short-term memory experiences, all very important tasks.
Yet, the unconscious mind contains a full 90 percent of the mind!1 It holds long-term memory, to help us “learn from our own history.” This demonstrates the saying that if we don’t learn from our history, we are likely to repeat it, making the same mistakes over and over again. So even though our conscious mind may completely understand our dysfunctional relationships or self-sabotaging patterns, it is not capable of making the necessary changes.
What we have discovered by exploring the intricacies of the unconscious mind is that from very early in our development, we draw conclusions about ourselves which are programmed into the deepest core level of beliefs about ourselves. And then we make decisions about how to behave based on those conclusions. This behavior is so deeply buried in our operating systems that the limitations of the conscious mind do not allow us to find them or change them.
An example of this would be growing up in an alcoholic or dysfunctional family system. Having the experience of sitting at the dinner table with an explosive parent who pounds the table and emphatically yells, “You’re not leaving this table until you eat everything on your plate!” or sitting at the dining room table night after night with parents who are fighting, drunk or screaming at the children might cause children growing up in this family to draw the conclusion, “I’m a bad person.” Or “I’m not safe, even in my own family.” Then those conclusions may be followed by an unconscious decision about how to behave in order to feel safe. That decision might be, “I’ll just become invisible—if I become really small, perhaps no one will notice me and then I’ll be safe.”
Later on in life, such people may wonder why they cannot really be successful in reaching goals in their lives. They become aware, perhaps in cognitive therapy or counseling, that they keep on sabotaging themselves, hiding their own light, so to speak. Getting it all figured out in the conscious mind is certainly a good first step. But after lots of time and money spent trying to change this behavior of self-sabotage by talking about it, analyzing it and deciding to be different, most of us have learned the hard way that the self-sabotage continues!
Hypnotherapy has proven to be a most effective and efficient path to creating change within ourselves and our clients. Through hypnotherapy we learn that the way to change these old, stubborn patterns that have plagued most people for a majority of their lives is to have direct access to the unconscious mind, discover what conclusions and decisions are still operating and re-program them. This is just like the operating system of your computer. If you don’t upgrade the old system, it will no longer be functional. The old programs are just not sufficient to serve you. Hypnotherapy is a powerful tool