Student and Therapist Newsletter Archive
   - Emotional issues

+ Sabotaging behaviours. - June 06

+ Relationships - May 06

+ How do you get someone to look at their issues if they don’t want to? - November - 05

John,
Just want to let you know I found your book remarkable. I was surprised how you managed to talk about such heavy stuff - the meaning of life etc. - without being heavy. Bloody funny in fact.
I can think of quite a few patients who will definitely benefit from reading it. Before I recommend it to them I have a question.

You talk about sabotaging behaviours and you say that once you see them you don't have to do anything about them because they will just fade away. Won't some people use that as an excuse to do nothing?

Thanks again.
L.M. Sydney.

>>>MY COMMENTS:

Glad you enjoyed the book, thanks for the feedback.

When it comes to giving ourselves a hard time we're like MacGyver. We can make a rod to beat ourselves from . . . anything! Any old bits and pieces lying around. So as soon as we see a sabotaging behaviour we immediately start giving ourselves a hard time about having it.

'What have I done! I'm so dumb.'
Whack! Whack! WHACK!

Then we start giving ourselves a hard time about how we need to make some drastic changes to stop doing whatever the sabotaging behaviour was in the first place.

'That's it, I'm never - smoking another cigarette - drinking another beer - eating another pizza - . . '.
Whack! Whack! WHACK!

It all adds up to a lot of disturbance and makes a great reason for not looking in the first place,
and not looking is much worse than finding an excuse to do nothing.

Once we see a sabotaging behaviour and more importantly the logic behind it, we immediately see the price we're paying, or put another way, we see the value of it.

When we value something highly we hold it close to us and are reluctant to let it go, we worry about people taking it away from us or that we might misplace it.

When that same something diminishes in value we're not so careful with it. We leave it lying around and eventually we loose it.

It's the same with sabotaging behaviours. When we value them highly, unconsciously that is, we hang on to them for dear life. But once we see them and the price we're paying for them we immediately re-evaluate them. Once we value them less we start to loose them.

Let's say Billy overeats and as a result is overweight. Try as he might he still finds himself in front of the refrigerator at 2am. He's reluctant to look at his sabotaging behaviour because he thinks at some stage he will have to stop eating so much.

This thought makes him very uncomfortable in two ways. He is consciously upset because he doesn't think he has the discipline to stop eating as he has tried and failed many times before. He is also disturbed unconsciously and I will explain why in a minute.

Lets say Billy accepts this idea that looking at what might be driving his unconscious behaviours doesn't necessarily mean he will have to change them. After some looking he realises that the reason he eats is because he will feel insubstantial if he doesn't. He started over eating when he was a scrawny kid and he used to get pushed around a lot.

Billy realises he is paying a high price in health and happiness so that he can feel substantial. Does this stop him going to the fridge at 2am? Not straight away. What happens is that each time he finds himself at the point of overeating he can't help but remember why he is doing it.

At the beginning it will start with an inner tussle at the fridge door.
'Why am I doing this?'
'So I won't get pushed around?'
'But people try and push me around anyway?'
'I want cake!'
'It's not really going to help.'

Sometimes he will eat the cake sometimes he won't. As time passes he will walk away more times than he eats. Eventually he will have the conversation without leaving his bed and eventually he won't even wake up.

I've seen it time and again with patients. Once they know there's no expectation on them to change, they begin to relax. Then they realise that there's no way they can fail and when they realise that they are much more willing to look at what's going on for them.

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***QUESTION***

Dear John,
Your newsletters are great. Is there some way I can get back issues?
I'm not sure if this is strictly speaking a craniosacral question but I'll ask it anyway and you can let me know.
I have a patient who has, in the past, had a pattern of getting together with the wrong type of man. By wrong type of man I mean unsuited and unfaithful.
She is single at the moment and is having treatment to help her not make the same mistake again. She has become almost phobic about it.
The problem feels like it is coming from a trauma in her system but I'm finding it hard to localise.
Any thoughts?
N.A.
Adelaide.

>>>MY COMMENTS:

When we think of emotional trauma we generally think of very obvious events like being in a war zone or getting caught in a bank robbery or witnessing repeated domestic violence and so on. What is usually lost on us is the subtly of trauma and how good we are at compensating for it.

Generally speaking, emotionally we deal with what we can and what we can't deal with we contain. Often we can be so compensated to trauma that we no longer feel it to the point of not knowing we were traumatised at all.

Here's something that happens regularly for me in practice. When someone first comes to see me I take their case history. I ask them lots of questions about a variety of things, one of them being, have they had any trauma in their lives?

Often people who say they have had no trauma in their lives are the very ones who have big releases on the table, often in the first session. During the release they remember the trauma they thought they never had.

When someone tells me that they had a happy childhood I'm generally suspicious, not because I'm cynical but because of the way we travel through our childhood and how we experience it.

I'll explain. . .

In the natural world, one of the first things a baby animal does is find out how to get to safety. For most animals safety is usually represented by a place. So the first things a baby bear does is find out how to get to his cave. The first thing a baby fox does is figure out how to get to it's den and so on. It is hardwired into their survival instinct.

We humans are not so different. Our survival instinct is just as strong, the primal imperative to find safety is there but the mechanism is different. For us safety is not represented by a place like a cave or den but by a person and our proximity to that person. Usually our primary caregiver, which is usually our mother.

Human babies are not capable of physically moving themselves to safety. Unlike other animals we don't hit the ground running. It takes at least 18 months for us to get the running thing together.

For us the mechanics of getting to safety are more sophisticated. Instead of getting to safety, we develops ways of getting safety to come to us.

As babies we put a lot of energy into working out and maintaining our ability to summon our parents. That way, if we are in mortal danger we'll be able to get to safety. The thing to get about this is how primal it is. It's not like we just want Mummy to come over so we can feel better. It's a deeply rooted survival instinct.

So the first thing we do as babies is establish and test our mechanism of safety. For most of us the first mechanism we use is crying. We cry and our parent responds. We breathe a sigh of relief and pop off to sleep.

Throughout the day we will test the safety mechanism. One of the ways we test it is by ensuring that we have good communication with our mothers.

How do we do that when we can't talk?

Words make up only 7% of communication so when you think about it, it's not that hard. We initiate a nonverbal communication with our mother through a series of coos and facial expressions. Unconsciously Mothers know what's going on and respond with a series of sounds and facial expressions. When we are happy that the mechanism is working we bring the 'conversation' to a close and pop off to sleep again.

Lovely, ah if only it lasted. For most of us it doesn't. Mainly because our parents were babies themselves at one stage too and have their own issues which often get triggered by the presence of . . opps! . . a baby.

So the next time we use our safety mechanism, nothing happens. No parent. No safety. This causes us incredible distress. Not just little baby distress. 'Oh look, Timmy is upset.' I'm talking intense physical distress.

This physical distress babies feel has been measured in what were called, 'blank face' experiments. In these experiments babies were monitored for their vital signs. Heart rate, blood pressure, temperature and so on. The focus was on the non-verbal communication that went on between the Mother and baby.

The Mothers were instructed to participate in the communication when the baby initiated it, but to stop half way through by making their faces go completely blank and unresponsive. Hence the name.
Blank face experiments.
Oh never mind.

The results were dramatic and disturbing. Almost as soon as the Mother made her face blank, not only did the baby start to cry but it's vital signs started to jump off the scanner. Breathing and heart rate increased, temperature rose. If the mother continued to remain blank the baby began to cry to the point of hysteria..

If the mother continued to remain blank, the baby eventually stoped crying and chillingly, turned it's face away to one side in what could only be described as despair.

Even with a responsive parent a baby will have developed a number of safety mechanisms very quickly after birth. Just to help me illustrate a point let's say a baby has established 40 ways of getting their Mother to come over by the first month of their life.

Let's imagine the baby maintaining those 40 mechanisms keeping them all lined up next to each other in a row. Then one day the Mother frightens the baby. This could be either directly or through drifting off and being absent because of their own issues.

For whatever reason the effect on the baby is very disturbing. In the moment of being frightened by their Mother, the baby will simultaneously try to get away from and get closer to their parent.

What?

The thing they are trying to get to, safety, is also the thing they are trying to get away from, danger. The effect of this in the baby can't be underestimated. Remember all the mechanisms the baby had neatly lined up? It's like dropping a big boulder right in the middle of all those neat safety mechanisms. The mechanisms all get smashed and we can spend the rest of our lives sitting on the nursery room floor trying franticly to fit the pieces back together.

If we feel threatened enough we can experience the intense distress that was measured in the blank face experiments except now we are a grown man or woman and feeling like that is 'silly'. Not sophisticated and can you stop that shaking please.

It doesn't stop it happening but we deny it a lot more as adults. Who cares that it's a deep primal imperative. We can go from relationship to relationship with a lot of intellectual reasons why each one didn't work out,
'He didn't satisfy me needs.'
'She wasn't exciting enough.'
'We drifted apart.'
'He never got the real me.'
'She never understood me.'

And so on, when really what was going on is the unresolved baby part of us still trying and failing to find safety.

Safety?

Yes, just safety. Sad but true.

It will give you an idea of why people can go so loco when it comes to relationships. This feeling of trauma you are getting from your patient could be in this area.

If you want to learn more about this whole field it's called Attachment theory and was first described by a British psychiatrist called John Bowlby in the 1950's.

My sense is that what happens in a session is this primal imperative finds safety and the alarms bells start to ring a little less loud and eventually stop ringing over time.

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***QUESTION***

Dear John,
I am enjoying your profoundly irreverent letters very much. I think you are a naughty man.
I have a patient for lower back pain. She also has many emotional conflicts and issues within her. She shows no interest in addressing these issues. The opposite in fact.
Here is my question.
Is it possible to invoke someone to address their issues if they don't want to?
Kind regards.
N. V.
Singapore.
P.S. Be nice.

>>>MY COMMENTS:

Cute . .
When someone first comes to me for treatment, after the initial, 'Hello', and 'Take a seat.' etc. The first question I ask is,
'What can I do for you?'
and then I shut up,
and wait.
Whatever their answer is, is what they are asking me to help them with.

'No kidding Sherlock.'

That may sound obvious but it's surprising how many therapists don't get it. From the sounds of it, you might be one of them.
Whatever they answer to question, 'What can I do for you?'
'I want to sleep better.'
'I want the headaches to stop.'
'I want to stop attracting the wrong man/woman.'
'I want to stop feeling so anxious.'
'I want to get rid of my fibromyalgia'

It goes to form what I think of as a contract between us. It forms the boundaries within which I work and a declaration on their part of what they want assistance with.

Let's say someone asks me to help them with a very physical problem and while treating them, I palpate lots of emotional disharmonies. If the emotional disharmonies are NOT causing the particular physical symptoms I have been asked to help with, then it would be very bad juju for me to try and start working on the emotional issues.

First and foremost it's disrespectful.
It's like passing someone on the street who is struggling to carry a new TV into their house. They ask me to help them carry the TV into the house with them. I do this but once inside the house I get a dose of 'Queer eye for the straight guy,' and take it upon myself to redecorate the hall, stairs and landing because, 'Let's face it, this person has shocking taste!'

Secondly, it's more efficient to stick to the contract because it can always be renegotiated in the future.

Here's a question. How come you are able to palpate the emotional issues in the first place?

Oh, okay I'll answer it. You can only ever see what you are shown.

If you stay within the bounds of the contract, it leaves space for the person to say to you down the track, 'I think I would like you to help me deal with my emotional issues.'

It may sound unlikely but it happens. It's another form of trusting that the person will allow you deeper when they feel safe. You're job is not to invoke them to address their issues but to provide the safest space you can, allowing them to feel empowered enough to address their issues, if and when they are ready to.

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