So how exactly did Levine, in his book In an Unspoken Voice: how the body releases trauma and restores goodness, help me solve a mystery of such longstanding – the meaning of my pool of pain?
Nancy’s story, remarkable as it was, would not have been enough to help me solve my decades’ long mystery feelings of loss, exile and intense grief.
The first flag to attract my attention to something else, though its relevance did not fully become apparent as yet, was when Levine examines the medical treatment model:[1] ‘The “healthy” (“protected”) doctor treats the “ill” patient. This approach disempowers and marginalises the sufferer, adding to his or her sense of alienation and despair.’ I didn’t fully clock all the implications for me of that word, despair. It did suggest though that fear and anger, the main residues that I was aware of from my hospitalisations, were not the only possible emotions to be derived from this form of trauma.
While his later references[2] to ‘tingling vibrations’ and ‘waves of involuntary shaking and trembling’ clearly resonated they still did not close the explanatory gap that needed filling.
Even when he begins to discuss emotions[3] and refers to the spectrum including ‘fear, anger, sadness, joy and disgust,’ nothing clicked still, even though sadness was mentioned, because I interpreted that list as applying to our full range of emotions rather to the specific ones activated by trauma.
It was a footnote on page 173 that lowered the drawbridge across the moat separating me from a fuller understanding: ‘The sense of a foreshortened life, of wordless despair, is a central characteristic of severe trauma.’ The words wordless despair were the keys to unlocking this forbidding gate.
It’s not that I resonate to the idea of a ‘foreshortened life,’ – far from it – but the feeling that I experienced when I came in contact with what I named my ‘pool of pain’ was so close to what those two words – wordless despair – describe. I suddenly realised that both experiences triggered by focused breathing while lying down referred back to exactly the same events in my early life. A Eureka moment again!
Unpacking some implications
What is also interesting is that on 22 September 1976, just two years after my Encounter Group revelation, as a member of a Transactional Analysis group, I felt strongly impelled, for some reason that I can’t remember, to work on my memories of my hospitalisations, but by a completely different method – psychodrama rather than focused breathing.
Initially the therapist tried to use hypnosis to put me in touch with my hospital experience. It didn’t work: my diary explanation is that I resisted it because ‘it was too close to chloroform.’ Only by using a fantasy of being safe on a raft on a sunlit sea was I able to step back into the nightmare:
Mum not there – then she was persuading me to stay – her going – my pained disbelief – the men’s ward – me watching the door ashamed of my tears among all these big people – the trolley coming – me wheeled away down shiny corridors – the sinister white coats and masks grouped round me – the pulling backwards – the holding down (two other members of the group enacted this) – the mask over my face (the therapist’s hand) – my surrender to my body’s anguished reaction – such deep sobs I could scarcely breath. The therapist holding me like a mother after the feeling had broken. Just what I needed. Such clarity in my eyes after.
(Incidentally, my aunt said to me later that she had been told that it took five people to hold me down the second time before they could chloroform me: I would’ve been about seven years old at the most at the time, and have no memory as specific as that myself.) Incredible as it may seem, even after this, the penny didn’t drop that the tears from the Encounter group were from the same source as these tears, and belonged with the anger and the fear: they were all to do with the same situation, but I still couldn’t make the link. Just as bizarre in a way is that I had no memory of having experienced this. If I hadn’t noted it in some detail in my diary I’d have been none the wiser now. The converse was true with my Wenlock Rebirthing experience: I wrote no details in my diary yet remember it vividly still. There’s probably an explanation for that but I don’t think it’s worth digging for right now.
More remarkably, and something I had completely forgotten until researching this situation to do a blog post decades later, was that I had written in my diary, on 17 September, just before the first tears I had ever cried for my father, and perhaps preparing myself for the TA group work I was going to request, ‘At the time when I fought the men who were trying to chloroform me, I needed my mother, but she hadn’t been there for me. That’s when I learnt it’s no use struggling, that when the chips are down you get left, that you’ve only yourself to rely on.’ Those words again.
There were other signs I didn’t understand.
One of the main ones was my fear of rage. As a child at junior school I was afraid of my own anger. I ran away from two fights I was winning, one against the railings at primary school and another, somewhat later, in the road just down from where I lived. I remember vividly feeling that if the fight continued I might do my opponent some serious harm. Levine points out how closely connected rage is to trauma,[4] and how much we fear this ‘rage and the associated hyper-intense sensations.’ He explains that ‘the fear of rage is also the fear of violence.’ It had never occurred to me, before reading Levine, to connect my fear of rage to the anger created by my being anaesthetised as a child alone in hospital. The question has come to my mind, since starting this sequence, as to whether I have dealt with the anger as persistently as I have dealt with the pain and fear. I may need to reflect on that more.
Further experiences in the encounter movement, which encouraged the acting out of anger, did nothing but convince me that repressing it was best. I developed an avoidance of confrontation because I was afraid it would trigger my anger and cause me to harm someone, not because I was afraid of other people’s reactions and any harm they might do to me.
However, as a blanket strategy, an absolute disowning of one’s anger is not good. We need to have access to our anger to help us protect ourselves, and others, from injustice and abuse. It was only later though that I came across containment as the alternative to acting out or swallowing my anger.
This is something Levine values as well:[5]
It is the ability to hold back, restrain and contain a powerful emotion that allows a person to creatively channel that energy.
How exactly might the hospitalisations link with a feeling of wordless despair in my case? Was it that once my connection with mum and dad was broken by my hospital admissions it never healed, so the loss became permanent? I say ‘admissions’ because I suspect, but cannot prove, that it was the second admission that was the last straw that broke the camel’s back. Does my well of tears spring from that? Is all this why trust is so crucial for me before love or even any kind of close relationship is possible? Once trust is broken I can maintain a pleasant relationship but without trust, there is neither love nor closeness, only a guarded kindness at best.
Did my implicit trust in books begin after my second hospitalisation, after the first, or slightly precede them both? I loved them more than people at that time, I think. They never betrayed me. The splintered trust after my hospitalisations was like losing my home — all feeling of complete safety and deep connection was gone. I was in a kind of exile. Is this what inspired the poem at the foot of this post, one that I thought was purely satirical when I wrote it, and was the ‘suicide’ in the poem in fact a metaphor which acknowledged the unconscious shutting down of a huge part of my emotional self, placing it in a kind of deep freeze that I tried to capture in The Freezer?
I am phrasing so much of this as questions because my inner sceptic won’t let me reach closure. It still suspects I may be joining the dots into a misleading but plausible picture. Time will tell.
Anyhow, maybe a residual post-traumatic sense of exile explains why my first pilgrimage triggered such deep tears: it felt like coming home (see link). However, it puzzled me why the well of pain still came back some times. Now I think I know the reason why: it wasn’t exile from the source of my soul that caused me such pain. It was something far more mundane than that. It was the abrupt and complete loss of my childhood connection with my family home. I lived there till I left for university in my teens, but didn’t ever feel at home again and never hankered to return there after my departure. It was duty rather than love or longing that took me back.
Another question, which has often been in my mind, is whether all this was the source of one of my scripts, the one about enhancing understanding in order to reduce pain, not just mine but other people’s as well. I have also often wondered whether this is what drew me to clinical psychology as a profession. Less important and possibly less likely, is whether my attraction to murder mysteries was a substitute consolation for my failure to solve my inner mysteries?
I don’t feel any of this undermines the fact that being born into a household steeped in grief affected me deeply. The history of grief almost certainly prepared the soil for the seeds which the hospitalisations planted, but would not in itself have been sufficient to account for the depth and intensity of the felt emotional pain. I think it’s been a red herring in my search for answers.
Even now, I don’t allow myself to get too attached to any place I live: is this also rooted in my hospitalisations? Are my roots in something far more portable – in my interior, the life of the mind? Is this why the inscape features so strongly on this blog?
More questions rather than conclusions again.
My books of course are important in this respect, and they would be fairly portable if I didn’t have so many. Kindle doesn’t quite do the trick. In the modern world relationships fortunately are also more portable than they ever were, as long as you have a mobile phone at least. Still, virtual contact doesn’t completely compensate for the lack of real proximity.
Final Thoughts
Basically, the core point is that what never made sense to me till now was my experience of the Encounter Group and the well of pain.
This may not be entirely my fault.
Levine has strong reservations about some of the methods used to connect people with the powerful emotions related to a traumatic event. They can culminate ‘in a therapeutic dead end.’[6] Included in his list, unfortunately, are the ones I sampled – Janov’s primal therapy, neo-Reichian encounter groups, and rebirthing. He is more positive about experiential therapies such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which I discovered much later and only read about and tested on my own, rather than signing up for the real process.
Anyway, I owe Levine for the important insights I’ve described, for which I am grateful, even though I recoil from his resolute reductionism, his insistence that we are only an animal and nothing more. On the whole that means less than the insights I have derived from reading this book.
Perhaps it would be fitting to close with brief quotations from towards the end of his book,[7] quotes which resonate with much of what I had learned already on my journey towards the insights I’ve shared in these two posts. That my beliefs and Levine’s are so close in many of these respects and so far apart when it comes to spirituality is another mystery, one which I don’t have the energy to engage with right now.
The ability to effectively contain and process extreme emotional states is one of the linchpins both of effective, truly dynamical trauma therapy and of living a vital, robust life. . . . Rather than feeling our emotions, we become them; we are swallowed up by these emotions. . . . [B]eing informed by our emotions, not domineered by them, is crucial in directing our lives.
References
[1]. Page 34.
[2]. Page 91.
[3]. Page 150.
[4]. Page 88.
[5]. Page 322.
[6]. Page 312.
[7]. Ibid.