Abraham Maslow said, “What we call normality in psychology is really a psychopathology of the average, so undramatic and so widely spread that we don’t even notice it.”5 Normality is a form of arrested development, where the developmental process has stopped prematurely, incomplete.6 The work of developing ourselves into our full potential is personal transformation.
We have all experienced moments of transcendence, induced by religious ritual, a peak experience, hallucinogenic drug, meditation, near-death experience or other means. This experience provides a “glimpse” of the vast possibilities beyond normal everyday consciousness.
Many people now see development beyond normality as the logical culmination of human development. In the first phase of life, from childhood to middle adulthood, we are becoming individuals, learning to meet the demands of family, work and society. In the second phase, which begins, according to Carl Jung, with the “midlife crisis,” we begin to turn inward, to reconnect with the Self, the center of our beings. In the first phase we built and developed our egos and in the second phase we transcend them.7
DREAM WORK AND PSYCHODRAMA
In our practice we use dream work and psychodrama, two specialized techniques which are adaptations of hypnotherapy. Psychodrama provides an opportunity for the client, in a group therapy setting, to structure his/her internal psychic reality externally and to interact with the representation created. The person whose story is being enacted selects other group members to play the roles of characters in the psychodrama, perhaps his boss, his spouse or his parents. We might also represent his fear, his courage or the feeling of isolation by having a group member play that part. Subpersonalities or shadows can be enacted in psychodrama very effectively, providing clients with a fresh viewpoint of themselves. The identified client has entered a hypnotic trance state, similar to a dream state or to the state one is in while in hypnotherapy, which adds to the intensity of the lived experience.
Psychodrama is highly effective because it is experiential; it taps deeply into unconscious material, it is corrective and it is a group process. Psychodrama allows an internal experience to be externalized and experienced from a new perspective. For example, the impact on a client’s life of overwhelming responsibilities is immeasurably more powerful experienced in a physical way than it is merely discussed verbally and known cognitively. We might place something heavy on the client’s shoulders to let him really experience how burdensome the responsibilities have become. “Give that heavy burden a voice. What is it saying to you?” Then we have words to correlate with his experience of the heaviness on his shoulders. Also, we concretize experience visually, kinesthetically and viscerally. For example, a family sculpture (a technique popularized by Virginia Satir), with family members placed physically in relation to each other, could demonstrate visually how distant the antisocial brother is and how clinging the oversolicitous mother is.
Psychodrama helps to access the deep unconscious, engaging the body kinesthetically and activating body memories, which take us like sonar to early traumatic experiences or other deeply-held unconscious material. When an individual is in the actual physical posture or movement that accompanies a traumatic reaction, it becomes more palpably real. We might assist a client, whose tendency is to want to withdraw in the face of conflict, to express it by physically walking away from his scolding spouse. Then he is confronted in a visceral way with the isolation and loneliness that he also wants to avoid. We can help him to walk into his relationship with his wife and to withdraw from her as many times as it takes for him to realize that he needs to find a new solution, something he hasn’t tried before.
Psychodrama is corrective because in it we can re-write history. We can react differently than we did originally, saying what we couldn’t then, protecting what we couldn’t then and setting much-needed boundaries. A client can see the abused child who was him/her sympathetically, contrary to the judgments and shame which have filled his/her self-experience ever since. This correction often takes the form of re-working missed developmental stages. The corrective experience encourages the client toward re-experiencing the old, unsettled conflict, but with a new ending.
Advantages of group work include the efficiency of benefit to multiple group members of one member’s session. Often, the participants who play roles in a session or those in the non-participating audience find their issues getting triggered during someone else’s session. Also, participants benefit from the modeled social learning provided by observing other members’ coping strategies, resilience and triumphs.
Dream work is an ideal way to access the deep unconscious. In our dreams, the lowest parts of ourselves—the shadows, unacknowledged urges and unexpressed emotions—speak to us. So do the highest parts of ourselves—the denied aspirations, spiritual yearning and wise acceptance of life’s conflicts. Often, however, we need a supportive forum and a skilled facilitator to make sense of the messages our dreams are offering. In hypnotherapy or hypnotic psychodrama, we can invite those symbolic dream images to speak for themselves, just like we do with a sensation or symptom in the body: “Give it a voice and let it speak.” Then they take on a life of their own, no longer constricted to the exact script of the dream, but opened up to a dialogue with the individual whose unconscious presented him with the dream in the first place. Who better to elaborate the meaning and message of these dream figures than the one whose mind presented them? Not the therapist, and not a book on dream symbols. Probably not the everyday, conscious mind of the client either; the magic of working with dreams in this hypnotic trance state is the access it provides to the part of the mind which created and offered the dream in the first place, the client’s unconscious.
Sometimes a traumatic event is so intrusive and devastating that the ego experiences it as overwhelming. The threat is greater and the response is to create a more divisive split. As with the previous example of the child trapped alone in the house, this typically happens because options for physically getting to safety are not available, as can occur in war, natural disasters or the situation of adults abusing the children in their care, since children (as dependents) need to keep living with their caretakers. In this sort of instance, the “other” that is created cannot stay connected with the victim’s ego, serving as an ally like the shadow did. It must retreat deeper within, to unconscious levels.
Let’s return to the example of the abused child. As the soul begins to split away from control of some aspect of the ego or personality, that fragment of the personality is forced to align itself with something else to run the show…and it connects with someone “bigger than life” to try creating safety and to meet basic needs. We use the analogy of “running away to the circus” to describe this need. The aspect of the child created in this manner is called a complex and it has a core of the child’s essence, but it also has a much more forceful identity borrowed from circus characters from the “collective unconscious,” a term coined by Carl Jung. The personal unconscious is a gathering of experiences unique to each individual, while the collective unconscious collects and organizes those experiences that are common to all of us. The trauma state associated with this complex is much more autonomous from the ego than any shadow, so when it appears, it explodes into activation—suddenly, unexpectedly and with power. It “possesses” the individual and compels the ego to comply. The ego gives in immediately because the arrangement is intended to insure safety and survival. And for those who developed the complex as children, it’s been in place for as long as they can remember, in most cases.