Student and Therapist Newsletter Archive
   - Relationships

+ Relationships - May 06

***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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