Ghosts Of The Past In Therapy

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Therapeutic work with a client involves the question "Who is really speaking now?", Implying that at any moment of the session the client can "speak" in the mother's voice, convey the father's mood or speak on behalf of his unconscious parts. There can also be a collapse of space-time, when suddenly the past and the present become indistinguishable. And in this case, we can assume the presence of transgenerational transmission, when an artifact of a distant past, not directly related to the client, appears on the surface, requiring a special kind of sensitivity from the therapist. Of course, the family history unfolds as brightly and fully as possible when there is targeted work with it, as, for example, it happens in the framework of family systemic therapy or psychodrama. Working in other approaches, we somehow come into contact with family history and unravel its influence on life, but there is not always a space in which to give a voice to the "ghosts of the past", especially since their influence does not just continue to clearly live in us in the form of, for example, the chosen dynastic profession, but rather turns out to be buried deep in the unconscious.

The transgenerational field is often the space of the irrational and frightening, fantasy and overwhelming. This material appears as if out of nowhere and, being conscious, clears the perception of oneself and the reality around. "Ancestral syndrome", "crypt", "ghosts in the nursery", "collapse of generations", "ego visitors", "family mandate", "invisible loyalties", "hot potato", "family unconscious" - all these metaphors arise in literature trying to describe the phenomenon of transgenerational transmission.

How to grasp the voice of this Other? There are many techniques and techniques, but the most invaluable material is, of course, clinical illustration. In the September issue of the journal Transactional Analysis, an article was published in which the interweaving of transgenerational material into the therapeutic process is shown incredibly subtly and beautifully. And I think this text is very important to us. There is probably no nation that does not have collective trauma inscribed in the DNA of each of its representatives. And today, many of us live with these "dual identities." How trauma is transmitted, why and what consequences it causes - all this is outside the scope of this text, because now I just want to show a vivid and difficult illustration of how important it is to separate oneself from the experience of the past.

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CLINICAL ILLUSTRATION FROM THE SORROW OF GHOSTS: THE EMERGEMENT OF A TRAUMATIZED PARENT EGO STATE BY CAROLE SHADBOLT SOURCE: TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS JOURNAL, 48: 4, 293-307.

My client, Don, is over 60 and we have been working with him for some time. He is a tall, thin man, and the most striking thing for me at our first meeting was his gait, which made me associate with the movements of dancers and puppets. The ease with which he walked made it seem as if after our sessions he was just going down the steps, as if he were floating with the flow. I noticed that his voice was thin and shrill, coming from somewhere from his throat, not from his lungs.

On a conscious level, the leitmotif and focus of our sessions were his physical symptoms. However, Don could accidentally tell about an episode from his life, when he was in the right place at the right time, or, as he later ironically put it, in the wrong place at the wrong time. He talked about the rather horrific events in which he found himself in the center: fights, accidents, and the like. Usually it turned out that he was the one who could be counted on, as the one who knew what to do in a given situation: how to provide first aid, stay calm, climb a tree, call an ambulance, and so on. In such situations, he seemed to be alone, while the others simply stood in the background.

I noted to myself that the number of events that happened to him is much more than what a person can face in ordinary life, and I wondered how he got there, at this particular time and so often.

I remembered that I had witnessed something like this a couple of times, but Don found himself in such situations more than once. In addition, where he lived, he could be involved in dealing with minor emergencies; his days seemed to pass in constant running. He was that "guy who will do anything for everyone," mostly to his own detriment. Don smiled as he told these stories and accompanied the stories with self-deprecating, gallows humor-style humoristic humor, shaking his head, shrugging his shoulders, rolling his eyes upstairs before answering my question about how it happened, that he was accidentally at the center of so many accidents. … (I was, of course, careful not to shame this handsome man, but nevertheless I noted this fact).

Ultimately, perhaps inevitably, it began to cause us significant inconvenience, and he canceled our session an hour and a half before it began via email. He understood that we would need to talk about it, but he had a very good reason for canceling, one that he thought I would understand. And I really understood - he had to take a relative to the hospital - but at the end of the next session, when Don realized that I was waiting for the payment for the missed session, he bristled, his demeanor and behavior changed. Time came to an end, he said that, of course, he would pay and asked if it was possible to do it next time. We discussed this during the next session.

Two reasons Don sought therapy were depression and poor health. During the interview, he said that he feels as if he always needs to be on the alert, to be in combat mode, to be always ready. At the session, he brought his graphic black and white drawings, which reflected his emotional and bodily experiences. These were images of battles, where he was dressed in armor that he could not take off. His drawings reminded me of the work of some artists depicting war: harrowing, dark and lonely paintings in the style of Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, and Christopher Nevinson. Don felt his body as if he were wearing a badge welded to his chest, held in place by pins - a kind of armor that personified the emotionally painful events caused by desertion and betrayal of loved ones. He used language, metaphors and images of war, in which motives of trauma, defeat and an all-consuming fear for life sounded. He knew for sure that he did not want to make the same mistake and be like Captain Nolan, who was killed in a light brigade attack during the Crimean War. It is alleged that Nolan mistakenly ordered 600 horsemen to attack immediately, with disastrous consequences and now a notorious fact of history.

I didn't think of Don as a paranoid person; it didn't seem right to me. To a certain extent, I could explain his manner of speech by gender characteristics. He was interested in military topics and liked stories about battles, battles and brave soldiers, uniforms, tanks, Roman soldiers, chivalry, bravery and victory. At the same time, he felt sick, tired and confused; flu-like symptoms; labored breathing; pain and weakness in the arms and legs. He did not sleep well, and his wife sometimes woke him up, as she felt that his breathing had stopped. These symptoms, despite detailed examinations and differential diagnosis of myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome or arthritis, were practically not relieved during treatment, so he sought psychological help. He told me that he felt a split on a physical level. (We talked a little about the ambiguity of the diagnosis of neurasthenia or “wartime neurosis.” In World War I, the desertion for which soldiers were shot was a consequence of what we now understand as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which was first recognized and treated by Dr. Rivers at the Craiglockhardt military hospital in Edinburgh, his most famous patient being Siegfried Sassoon, a British war poet).

In therapy, we brought up a lot of material, but Don's symptoms did not clear up. In fact, he became even more aware of the battle with the badge and pins in his body, which often arose in our work along with his fear of making a mistake. Phenomenologically, intuitively and at the level of countertransference, perhaps, I often had the idea that he would leave at any moment, that he wanted to run out of the door, to hide. As a consequence, I sometimes asked him how our work was going. Okay, was his answer, everything is fine. And in general it was good, but despite the graphic accompaniment of his stories and a large amount of factual material regarding his family history, his mentally unstable mother, his father's drunkenness and military service, our work was somehow devoid of a certain depth, as as if remaining uninhabited territory. The day came when I had to cancel our meeting on Monday morning. I caught a bad cold and wrote about it to Don on Sunday night with an apology. In our next session, he spoke directly. His car broke down and knowing how he needed to keep our sessions intact, he only rented a car for the day to be able to come, only to find that I would cancel the session quite late the night before. And I think you guessed it that he wanted me to pay half the cost of the car rental. I refused. The question of paying for missed sessions has returned. Why did he have to pay me for not showing up, and I didn’t see the need to pay him what I didn’t come by myself? Or even compromise? Don didn't understand that.

Although I discussed this in supervision, I almost succumbed to the temptation to grant his request and told him about it. One part of me saw nothing against going to meet him, even knowing that the other part thinks differently. Despite the intrusion of these thoughts, to which I was already ready to react bodily, simply reaching out my hand for the checkbook, I realized that by giving him the money, I would make a meaningless, grandiose gesture that would drown out the “something” that had arisen at the edge of my consciousness from of ignored and split-off material that can take shape and take place between us in the office, something like buried psychic shrapnel.

When I followed "this", that is, I spoke with "something" that had arisen between us, a dramatic turn took place in our work. We delved deeper into the exploration and let the horrible traumatic military experience of his father emerge (that is, it just happened in an unexpected way). This trauma was not realized and not resolved by him, and he passed it on to Don, his devoted son.

“I wonder what you want,” I said to Don, “besides money. It seems so important to you that I make a concession. “I want you to understand that I have gone out of my way for the sake of others, but have not received gratitude for this,” Don responded. But he was speaking from a different ego state, not from the one from which he asked me to pay half the cost of the car rental earlier in our session.

I simply, organically, intuitively entered into a dialogue with this ego state. We can say that I used the dialogue between you and me Buber. The one who spoke to me was Fred, Don's father. Fred told me about the time when he was in the Burmese jungle, when his body was crippled, when he needed to breathe so quietly that the enemy did not hear him, when he slept while standing, when he moved through the jungle as smoothly and easily as could, so as not to be captured. One mistake could be fatal. He said that he saw how many of his comrades were killed before his eyes. “And what a gratitude I got for that,” said Fred (I felt a chill run down my spine). "I returned from the war to a broken trough: without work, my wife became a stranger, everyone was in their places, the celebration of victory was long over, everything was gray, people did not want to know."

Although I didn’t mention it, in parallel with Fred’s words fleeting memories began to surface in me, fragments of scenes of traumatic experiences: my mother in her youth during the bombing of London; my father, a young man in the navy; my grandmother, in the very beginning of middle age, is at home, waiting; her youngest son is terribly upset when he sees a hand in the opening of an exploded building; and then a very recent memory of me standing next to another psychotherapist in a UK church at a commemorative service, she encourages me to wear my father's military medals. I felt an intense, complex, deep emotional connection with Fred, with Don, with my family, with the past we shared in the present - a phenomenological experience for intersubjective living.

In subsequent sessions, Fred spoke of his horror, the overwhelming fear that he might be captured or killed, how he survived, his dead friends and his return to the UK. Sometimes his fear and trauma were felt on a physical level. His face was glistening with sweat, his breathing was shallow, his tired, thin, transparent body stretched like a bow, he was ready to run away. And he told all this half in jest. I believe that he also killed people, enemies. And although he never uttered these words, they still sounded in our space, remaining unspoken, but known to the three of us, because, of course, Don said all this. Fred, in fact, has been dead for years. Not everything is possible to say and not everything needs to be said, I remember, I thought then Fred was among the Chindits, and he survived this nightmare, but his body and his heart remained traumatized.

Like many men who fought in both World War I and World War II, Fred never elaborated on what happened to him in the Burmese jungle. It is a cultural, gender myth that the returning soldiers "did not want to talk about it." I have thought many times that such a conversation also requires a listener, and those who stayed at home waiting also ended up as emotionally traumatized victims of the war, who probably suffered the same terrible wound as if they were on the front line. These listeners, those who waited, were bombarded, almost without food, they were afraid that the postman would bring a telegram that would begin with the words “I am saddened to inform you that on this day a report was received from the military department, which informs about death … ", a telegram that will change life forever. How could they then become listeners and hear in such circumstances?

To this day, Chindits feel underappreciated for the tremendous contributions and sacrifices they made in the war. When Fred finally returned home months later, the celebrations for victory in Europe were over, the heroes were cheered, and life went on. Like many, Fred felt disconnected, unrecognized, unknown, depressed, emotionally and physically damaged. He was drafted as a young soldier in his twenties at the start of the war and returned as an emaciated and devastated shadow of his former self. He never attended a memorial service, never wore a medal, and never spoke to his family about his experience. After the war, Fred's life was not happy. He “lived in a pub,” could have an affair, lost his ancestral home in a fire, and left his young son Don to take care of his mentally fragile wife. This is where the scenario of Don's life probably originates, which consisted of being at the right time in the right place, thus tying him to his mother and creating the effect of parentification.

It is one thing to know the life story of our parents and grandparents, and quite another to discover in ourselves the pain and trauma that haunt us. Obviously, these "improper" injuries are dissociated. When they are on a conscious level and are confessed, I’ve found that they are accompanied by a feeling of shame, powerful and deep.

We reflected [in therapy work with Don] about the loss, grief and relative indifference of those who were not directly affected by all of this, causing him to be ashamed of the desire and need for recognition. The work with the parental ego state went on for several sessions, thanks to her, Don began to look at his symptoms in a different way, and they significantly decreased, although they did not disappear completely. He had arthritis, so his symptoms were real and expressed in the body, but on the other hand, they were symbolically associated with a ghost, with the symptoms that Fred suffered from during the time when he fought the Japanese in Burma. Don now felt himself and his ego states from the point where integration and restoration became possible. The invisible trauma of his father, embodied in him and haunting his unconscious, was now fully realized.

He deeply grieved, the rude masculine grief finally took on expression and was accepted, sounded like a hoarse groan - I rarely have the honor to witness such a thing. We deciphered his symptoms, revealing the symbols of trauma transmission, and he turned them into something that arouses pride, dignity, meaning and voice. He was filled with learning the history of the Chindits and, in fact, having written this article since it belongs to him.

In Lost in Transmission, Gerard Fromm very accurately describes the process of transferring trauma, as if he were present in sessions with Don and with me: “Those parts of their experience that people cannot fit into themselves, that excessive trauma turns out to be unbearable, unthinkable - all this falls out of social discourse, but very often it is transferred to and into the next generation, as affective sensitivity or chaotic anxiety. … The transfer of trauma can be the transfer of a task to "repair" a parent or avenge humiliation."

What Fromm wrote seems to be in line with what happened to Don and many others who lovingly, no doubt, bear the trauma and sadness of the unfinished experiences of their ancestors. Don described it in a more understandable way. He recalled a scene from the movie "Ghost," in which Patrick Swayze's dead character "borrows" the body of a medium played by Whoopi Goldberg, and tenderly, lovingly hugs grieving Demi Moore one last time in a slow dance. I assumed that Fred was the one who hugged Don, settling in his body, but for Don it looked different. “I hugged him, Carol. I put him inside myself, I loved him with my body, as I now understand, and now I can say goodbye, that's enough."

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