trauma – Becoming Human

Trump versus Clinton – political psychology and patriarchy

If the US Democratic party had chosen Bernie Sanders as their presidential candidate – which of course they didn’t, but that’s another subject – there seems little doubt that he would be on course for a landslide in today’s presidential election. Instead, we might wake up tomorrow and find that it is Donald Trump: despite his displaying an abundance of characteristics any one of which would classically have sunk the chances of any previous presidential contender. The world could very easily, therefore, have been very different from how it will now be even if Clinton wins. And yet surely any voter who would have voted for Sanders would rationally prefer Clinton to Trump. What explains the dynamics of this process?

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Mononormativity

“It seems certain that the habit of marriage has been gradually developed, and that almost promiscuous intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world.” – Darwin, The Descent of Man

Let me add a few more words of explanation to what I wrote yesterday on the subject of mononormativity, a term coined by Pieper and Bauer (2005) to refer to the normative social matrix of monogamy in its various cultural manifestations. Sociological research into mononormativity is very much in its infancy, meaning that unfortunately there is not a lot I can base myself on in order precisely to map the concept and its influence (I think we have some idea of the economic circumstances under which the monogamous norm developed, but little real grasp on the social mechanisms which maintain and enforce it).

When I was fourteen, the world around me, uninvited, started changing. The hitherto somewhat annoying subspecies known as “girls” suddenly became objects of intense fascination – and intense fraternal rivalry. Handicapped by my childhood emotional injuries, and with no manual to follow, I was ill-placed to play this game. It didn’t take long for this to become clear to me, and so, rather than make a fool of myself, I placed my erotic ambitions on hold; instead I focused on getting into a position of financial independence from which I imagined I would be better able to shape my life. At fifteen, I developed generalized fasciculations which, though it turned out they were benign, I was convinced were the onset of a muscular wasting disease. This was the state in which I spent all of my later teens and my college years.

My pubescent sexuality was born into a social context, one in which I knew, was linked to and cared about the objects of my affection; but it was soon divorced from it. Unable to develop in an integrated way, the sexual drive was transferred to images and fantasms, objects without social context and unable to receive love, with which I engaged in a perplexed monologue. I am sure I am describing here the sexual development of a majority of teenage boys of my cohort in our culture.

Several years ago I did quite a bit of work on my childhood traumas, but this particular, pubescent trauma I never paid much attention to. I have at least the impression that it is generally supposed in psychoanalysis that the resolution of earlier experiences will also resolve later ones and that these latter need no special attention. But this, I now think, is not true; this part of my life also needed to be revisited. Until recently, I had never given it much thought.

In fact I did not give it any thought recently either, but I received a gift of healing during a shamanic soul retrieval session which specifically related to this, and since then I have actively been trying to make friends again not only with my inner child, but also my inner fourteen-year-old : a much unloved and forgotten creature. That I suddenly adopt a caring attitude to him, asking him to contribute to my adult life, is, I am sure, a great and unexpected relief to him.

Pubescent male sexuality is a bubbling soup. The objects of ones affections are not chosen according to some fixed set of preferences: it is a time of experimentation, and tactical opportunism, a game in which one seeks to optimize a complex equation involving not only the girl one is dating and sexual payoffs, but also ones reputation and position in the group. Exclusive partnering, advocated usually by the girls, who to be fair also need a mating strategy, is discovered to be part of the rules of the game, adaptation to which is a pragmatic necessity; it is, however, absolutely alien to the subjective experience and every teenage boy knows it. We are by nature polyamorous, but once we discover the sweet pleasures of the union of body and soul, we dive deeply into it, forgetting, in the intoxication, that the circumstances which enabled it had a lot to do with pure chance and assuming that the rules we played by enabled the reward we obtained.

I think it is by now an established scientific fact that, even if sexual appetite may experience a monogamous phase at the outset of a relationship, this does not last for very long. Monogamy in the early days of a relationship may be natural, but subsequently it is only a choice – or no choice at all. Nevertheless, not only the myth, but the institutions of monogamy pervade society, compelling an unnatural compliance with their dictates on pain of social disopprobium, ostracism or worse. In the same way as society is androcentric and heteronormative, it is mononormative.

Mononormativity does violence to our biological nature and severely limits our extraordinary ability and desire to love. And as I have argued elsewhere, restoration of our biological nature is a prerequisite of sustained spiritual growth, at least at the community level, because human beings are not going collectively to be happy in an environment to which they are biologically unadapted.

In its origins, tantra was as iconoclastic in regard to mononormativity as it was in relation to other social institutions such as diet and the caste system. Tantric practitioners frequently did not even know the identity of the person with whom they entered into sacred union. All this though, of course, was devised in a world far removed from our own. Today, the central image of Shiva and Shakti in yabyum enjoys wide appeal in part because it can easily seem (although this is clearly an incorrect interpretation) to endorse the primacy of monogamy – these primal characters are indeed destined to each other and alone in the universe.

Now, while some schools of tantra orient themselves towards couples practice, this is certainly not generally the case: indeed I know few practitioners who are, by conviction, much less de facto, monogamous in the traditional sense. Nevertheless, I would maintain that societal mononormativity influences practice more subtly. People may embrace a rarefied, ritualized interaction with the opposite sex, even a very intimate one, but they do it in a spirit of dissociation from the biological foundation of their sexuality, in a way which is almost ascetic, and certainly unerotic.

My inner fourteen-year-old is mystified by this disenchantment. He wants a place at the table. He likes it messy and raw. Indeed, this for him is alignment with ecstasy; the ascetic, transcendent imagery is incomprehensible.

We can live a life in alignment with spirit only if we are aligned with our biological nature. Then life’s experiences wake us up, move us in new directions, bring healing and creativity; just as falling in love always has, the world over. We are in a state of bliss when we are constantly falling in love with all around us, the physical and biological world and also our fellow human beings. For me, if I review my life, my sexual instinct has always been the major driver of healing and renewal. But that instinct, like the spirit, blows where it will. I am not its master; and in fact I am not the master of anything about myself, I am more like a servant of myself, curious to discover who I am and what I can do and experience in the world. This attitude of humility and service towards ones own essence is, I think, key to the spiritual life and to alignment and abundance.

This is why I insist that all notions of mononormativity within a couple must be banished if its component parts are serious about their spiritual life, and indeed about living their relationship as an adventure in growth and healing. One simply cannot place any a priori constraints on where the breath of spirit may blow. Because we have absolutely no idea, not even the remotest basis for an idea. Radical honesty within a couple only makes any sense if it is based on radical honesty to oneself, a person one cannot presume to know but is always discovering. One cannot bind this unknown self. Indeed, the discovery of self, this unbinding of Prometheus, is the spiritual path.

I do not think this makes dyadic relationships impossible or even undesirable, but I think it is a very strict condition regarding which, at the level of aspiration and shared values at least, no compromise is possible. When desire taps on my shoulder, that is a moment of opportunity and rebirth. I owe it to myself, my partner, and the world, to greet her with open arms.

Paraphilia

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, Dan Savage, whose work I generally respect, sometimes really grates on me. One of the subjects on which he clearly has no idea whatsoever is sexual paraphilia. In this letter, someone writes to him clearly tortured by extreme violent sexual fantasies (“EVSFs”). Although he does at least urge that person to see a therapist, he also writes:

You could be seeing causation where there is only coincidence. There are a lot of people out there who didn’t suffer the kind of abuse you did—or any kind of abuse at all—but who nevertheless have EVSFs.

This statement is typical of Dan’s views on kinks, but he has never to my knowledge made any attempt to justify it. And, quite honestly, what does he, or does any of us, know about the life experiences of people who may well themselves have repressed all recollection of early childhood trauma? Whilst I support the position of accepting paraphilia and the safe exploration of paraphilia, I entirely disagree as regards its etiology; paraphilia is obsessive-compulsive and it is always attributable to a disturbance in natural sexual development. Persons with a paraphilia, even if they do not experience it as suffering, would have a lot to gain from the path of inquiry to which it invites.

The psychodynamics of paraphilia, predictably misinterpreted by the American Psychiatric Association, have been explored in the path-breaking work of Robert Stoller. As I have mentioned before, Stoller’s view was that paraphilia was ubiquitous but neurotic. He argued for its tolerance, but not for missing its psychoanalytic message. As more recent work has emphasized, the primary biological role of human sexuality is group bonding. Scripted sexual behavior, on the other hand, attempts to discharge ego trauma; it is not oriented to the other but to oneself. This should be only a transient phase in sexual development, but persons with paraphilias are stuck there. (It should also be emphasized that paraphilia is a narrower category than kink – sexual behavior is acquired, in part also cultural and a question of fashion, and interest in certain forms of behavior, even if it may have been formed in somewhat unnatural circumstances in childhood, should not be labelled paraphilia if it is merely a part of repertoire and not an obsession. The neutral label of kink is often misapplied to paraphilia.)

Paraphiliacs will argue that they can be in loving relationships, in which bedroom fantasy does not spill out into all other domains of life. I accept this. We all know that it can be compassionate to indulge another’s addiction, and uncaring constantly to point out that they would be better off without it. Nonetheless one lives a freer, fuller life when addictions are overcome.

Paraphiliacs will also tell us that they are happier than the rest of us. That may also be true. Many of us are walking around with an entire buried world of fantasies in our preconscious, unavowed and unbefriended; they are sought outlets for drives which instead have to find less healthy outlets elsewhere. Embracing this submerged shadow world would make us all healthier and happier.

Nonetheless, Dan makes categorical and unsubstantiated statements in his attempts to normalize kink. Why? It seems this is because, at root, his position on homosexuality tends often to be unreflectingly nativist. He presents matters as if no homosexual has any choice as to their sexual orientation and that it is for this reason that it must be respected. The more other socially frowned upon forms of sexual behavior that can be found and similarly labeled innate, the more he can rally voices behind the (laudable) gay rights agenda.

This is not only unscientific; whilst understandable, and possibly good tactics in the past, it is at this stage in our collective social development a grave mistake. Without loss of generality, I believe it is obvious enough that some people’s homosexual orientation is innate, whereas others engage in homosexual behavior rather because it is, for them, in the nature of a paraphilia. Whether consensual, victimless behavior is native or elective should not matter from the standpoint of the law. After all, religion is the ultimate elective fantasy; if its exercise is protected, all other rights must follow.

Persons with EVSFs have them certainly because they have suffered some form of abuse – they are not innate. Being able safely to avow and explore these fantasies may well be a crucial stage in the process of emancipation from the collective consequences of this abuse in their adult life, which doubtless goes way beyond the fantasies in question. Whether, unaided, BDSM is sufficient as therapy is, to put it mildly, much more open to doubt. Compassion requires us to recall the broader picture and to support the individual in all aspects of their healing process.

Trauma releasing exercises

I am just back from the three-day introductory training in David Berceli‘s Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE). These exercises and Berceli’s work are well worth knowing. Surprisingly enough, there is no Wikipedia article on Berceli and his work. The article on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) does not mention it either, nor somatic approaches to PTSD at all, even though these have been about for a long time and must in any case be more effective than the “recognized” approaches, CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy), EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) and medication.

Berceli (as far as I can see) takes his basic model of the somatic effects of trauma from the work of Peter Levine; in any case the models are very similar. To summarize, the basic idea is that the human animal has (for some reason; we shall come onto this) suppressed a natural response to coping with stress, which needs to be reactivated for healing to occur. However, the two differ considerably in terms of methodology. Levine’s approach, known as Somatic Experiencing (SE), which is quite widely practised in Europe (though not a lot in Belgium), requires exploration of the trauma and the felt sense of the body in response to it. As such, it borrows from Gendlin’s ideas on Focusing and more generally is, it seems to me, within the intellectual tradition of Gestalt therapy. By way of contrast, Berceli’s approach, like most somatic psychotherapy, is more purely process-oriented. As such, it does not require or even directly encourage exploration of the traumatizing events, and particularly not by the therapist; rather, the focus is on what the body is doing in the here and now and on the ways in which the body’s natural attempts to self-regulate are hindered or can be supported. The independence of method from the client’s personal history offers some considerable advantages, since it makes possible group work and relies less on the skills of the therapist.

Berceli’s therapeutic method borrows from Bioenergetics (I may update this article when I have read his books, so check back), rather in the tradition of Alexander Lowen. Its aim is therefore to produce involuntary trembling in the body. Unlike Lowen, there is no element of talk therapy within the method, though Berceli does say that his method can be integrated within others, so leaves the door open to syncretic approaches. Significantly, however, the trembling is reinterpreted compared to the Reichian tradition, to which Lowen remained loyal. Rather than being glossed as the release of sexual/life energy held in stasis by the body, it is interpreted as the reactivation of the post-freezing response of animals described by Levine: “When it is out of danger, the animal will literally ‘shake off’ the residual effects of the immobility response and gain full control of its body. It will then return to its normal life as if nothing had happened“.[1]

Why is this response suppressed in humans? For this, Berceli seems to have no deeper or more convincing answer than does Levine: “Most human cultures tend to judge this instinctive surrender in the face of overwhelming threat as a weakness tantamount to cowardice. However, underneath this judgment lies a deep human fear of immobility. We avoid it because it is a state very similar to death. This avoidance is understandable, but we pay dearly for it.“[1] In other words, the response is suppressed by the ego under the weight of social stigma attached to it. Neither Levine, nor Berceli, as far as I can see, has (or even looks for) any evidence of this claimed stigmatization. Many bodily functions may be disrupted by trauma, but this does not mean that those functions themselves are necessarily stigmatized. Thus this appears to me not very convincing, and basically it eschews a psychoanalytic explanation of ego defenses and their role in the developmental process. There are lots of criticisms which can be easily leveled not only at the model, but also at how the practice relates to it. Most basically, the question arises as to why the practice does not endeavor to, nor succeeds, in simply reestablishing this response and allowing it subsequently to play whatever role it needs to play in the individual’s further experience. Rather it is recommended to continue the practice on an ongoing basis. It therefore does not constitute a “cure” for PTSD, but a door into another dimension of experience. Berceli explicitly encourages such an understanding, and views his work as transformative on a global scale. This is laudable and I thoroughly support it because I believe he is on to something; but it is not convincing theoretically.

The great advantage of Berceli’s exercises over classical bioenergetics (and over Reich’s simplified anatomical model of the biological basis of character formation) is that it is more anatomically informed, and results in exercises which are shorter and easier to carry out. This makes it more suitable for the problem it is intended to address, since persons suffering the physical developmental impact of childhood trauma are often limited in their range of motion. These exercises should absolutely be considered for use in all those contexts where people currently employ Lowen’s exercises (though not his whole framework of Bioenergetic Analysis, which he himself acknowledged did not have the clinical success he hoped for) and its derivates, such as Osho’s active meditations. Because Berceli’s exercises directly solicit and progressively release tensions in the hip adductors, iliopsoas and muscles of the pelvic floor, that is, in all of the major muscles primarily involved in the orgastic response, and they are more easily taught and experienced than existing alternatives, they seem to me the basis for a more effective practice which clients will better be able to follow and stick to (they of course do not substitute for other exercises used in group therapy the purpose of which is rather to generate than to release tensions, which will then be released in other ways).

The other great advantage is that the method can be employed in a very wide range of contexts, from schools to palliative care, contexts in which bioenergetics or anything else “explicitly” psychotherapeutic would have no chance of penetrating. It does not need and does not really have a unifying discourse, which minimizes resistance. People are willing to try it out who would never go near (or for that matter be able to afford) a psychotherapist, and stick with it because, after all, it is only their body doing what it wants to do, and it is hard to be against that.

On the other hand it would at least seem not to be a complete system for spiritual liberation in the sense we derive ultimately from Reich. Berceli applies his technique way beyond the boundaries of PTSD, presumably because people have reported positive effects in those contexts, and has some awareness of the endemic and embedded nature of societal trauma, but the need for wide appeal seems to prevent him from going deeply into underlying societal issues in the radical tradition of much psychoanalytic thought. I am not saying this is a bad choice. Perhaps it is an excellent one. But ultimately, personally and at societal level, one does need to go there. Refusing to do so will always limit the benefits that can be attained.

What Berceli’s discourse seems to me to lack is an understanding that the disruption of the trauma response is ultimately due to the fact that social experience, being so far from the natural state of man, continually regenerates trauma. On top of distorting ego development, social experience also acts in the present. Our shared cognitive models of the world and the human need for relationship continually pull us back to a depressed, unhealthy state, and would do so even if all “residues” of specific trauma were somehow dissolved. We touch here on the manner in which Berceli’s approach is most fundamentally incomplete. It is essentially solipsistic, and presupposes, ultimately as a matter of ideology, the ability of the individual body to regenerate in the absence of regeneration of the collective body and the social tissues, which although they are just as ossified as the somatic tissues, are not directly brought into vibration by the practice. This cannot work. An interpersonal dimension of therapy and practice is absolutely indispensable if we are to begin to reprogram the social mechanisms which propagate and perpetuate trauma.

So I guess that makes me a big fan and a big critic at the same time. However I will do and use the exercises and I recommend them to you to.

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[1] See http://www.traumahealing.com/somatic-experiencing/art_chapter1.html