The roots of ruptures
Defences to feeling pain and defensiveness after impacting another
We are all, for periods of time or chronically, at the affect of unconscious defences that serve to protect us from feeling the vulnerability of exposure to aspects of ourselves. These defences in themselves can become as painful as the vulnerability they are protecting and further impact our capacity to notice other people's vulnerability in relationships with us. When unexpressed aspects of ourselves are playing out in relationships without conscious awareness (internal with self and external with others), ruptures are more likely to occur.
"It is a joy to be hidden but a disaster never to be found." - Donald Winnicott
The following are descriptions of some defence strategies that I have observed and learned from. Click on the slide show below to see some ways of understanding our defences to feeling intensity.
My intention with this exploration is that it may help your understanding and kindness with yourself and with each other - not to interpret or evaluate. This text includes some of the slide show text.
Emotional pain and physical pain are interchangeable and related in very similar ways to each other. Just as scars are protection for physical wounds, our defences serve as defences to emotional vulnerability.
This exploration aims to support our kind and understanding recognition of our defences when we notice them playing out in ourselves and in others. Understanding these defences with kindness can counteract the judgements that are often attributed to them. At the end of this chapter, there is a revised overview of some common reactive defences we might notice in ourselves and in others when receiving feedback after a rupture.
I believe we all have possible routes back to welcoming all the birds in our inner forest with kindness and acceptance and understanding that our personal power is enhanced when all the voices are included. How can we learn to listen to the quiet voices who are still learning to sing their songs?
Radical acceptance liberates our body's ecosystems from the hard-working, energy-consuming unconscious brain structures, and hormonal and nervous system activations keeping them in hiding:- our defences.
Our uniquely human upper cortical brain structures have given us the gifts of creativity and projection. The left hemisphere brain structures have given us the gifts of categorisation, rationality, grasping information and commodities to meet needs with a specific focus of attention. At the same time, the executive parts of the brain have the potential to cripple us from being able to integrate the right hemisphere brain's gifts of multi-dimensional perspectives that open our awareness of the bigger picture in the emergence of living.
The left brain structures register the emergence of living in fixed static pieces of data in images, symbols and concepts that are not necessarily updated. These past versions of reality are like maps that both inform and determine our unconscious creations of reality. The right brain structures receive through our senses in the uncategorised emergence of living. Iain McGilchrist, in his monumental book 'The Matter with Things' explores this in depth, and John Dupré, in his book 'The Flow of Things' illuminates how the reality of of all nature is in emergence and not in the maps of it.
Trusting our spontaneity is grown from trusting that our maps of living are congruent with the emergence of living. Our trust is mediated by the 'default mode network' in our brains that is active 24/7 with inner dialogue monitoring our participation in life. We can also be viscerally and emotionally inhibited by mirror neurones that 'have bent in on themselves' (as described by V.S Ramachandarin in his book 'The Tell-Tale Brain') with internal judgements, hindering, interrupting, repressing and muffling our self-expression and ability to trust our spontaneity in service of adaption and belonging to society.
This gift of our upper brain structure's creativity enables us to magically imagine ourselves in the future, to self-reflect and to make complex conceptual decisions. However, this can sometimes result in us literally believing in these projected realities and inhabiting a hologram version of life in tandem with the emergence of experience.
As the repression of overwhelming affective states is unconscious and automatic, accessing our authenticity can feel like a riddle as we search for clues in opaque pools. Asking ourselves “What do I want?” can be fraught with doubt when referring to outdated maps. Any map is outdated the moment the next moment emerges, and for this reason, left and right brain, integration is essential for navigating our lives and decision-making to navigate our relationships congruently with what is alive. Western society is largely dominated by left-brain commodification values, which, when disconnected from care, disables us from listening to ourselves and each other with attunement.
"We have become a race living in the reflection of experience instead of in it" - Deej Juventin
The viscerally felt affect we experience in our bodies, which we attribute to emotions, is also experienced by animals. However, animals do not have the same symbolic concepts we have attributed to these affective states. Many categorisations of emotions exist worldwide that attempt to symbolise collections of visceral feeling states in the body to support our shared empathetic reality with each other.
We are experientially blind as we experience the raw data of our internal worlds, senses, and relationships with our environment without symbols to represent this data. Our brains remember through the differentiated raw data of experience interactionally represented in symbolic forms.
Our mirror neurons create viscerally felt empathetic feelings between us that help us feel each other, and the symbols we share co-create bridges for us to meet in.
Humans have created, in civilized societies, a much more complex life than is natural for these animal parts of ourselves. This complexity can cause huge disturbances inside and outside of us.
The shape of water is changed by moss and the moss is shaped by water. The mutuality of moss and water. Isn't this the way we love, the way love propels our own unfolding. We are shaped by our affinity for love, expanded by its presence and shrunken by its lack - Robin Wall Kimmerer
Memories dry in similar ways to the way the life in moss is dried when not watered with attention and recognition. Our memories are out of awareness until we give them our receptive attention. Attention can be understood as synonymous with love and love simultaneously opens our receptivity.
Body Poetry is like water to moss, expanding dried projections onto life again. This is one way that Body Poetry facilitates differentiation and receptivity to what might be hidden from previously dormant fears. As you might have experienced, invisible elephants can be discovered hiding in the most innocent of symbols.
Radical acceptance with symbolised pain welcomes the vulnerability of feeling this to expand, come alive and belong again without repeating loneliness. Dormant elephants representing all we have not yet recognised, which facilitates integration, can also be activated when we don't see them coming and these can stampede our equilibrium.
Trusting our creative spontaneity and being conduits as practitioners for receiving other people's worlds with our heartfelt understanding is a lot easier when we are not carrying hidden elephants that might unexpectedly appear in the room out of our awareness. These may contribute to blindspots in our wise use of power. Our personal journey in integrating what might have felt heavy and indigestible can be usefully supported when we recognise our habitual defences to feeling these.
Some of our defensive strategies can be offensive and many of them may result in ruptures and disconnection. Our radical acceptance of these when we notice them mobilising in ourselves and in others can moderate our repulsion. This can contribute to liberating our body's ecosystems from the hard-working, energy-consuming unconscious brain structures and hormonal and nervous system activations, keeping our authenticity and humility in hiding.
This is an exploration naming some of the common, often unconscious, defences keeping our inner elephants (implicit memories still in pain timelessly) hidden and our moss (left brain maps) unwatered (right brain sensory receptivity).
If our self-expression is not accepted and threatens our belonging, fears of loss, hurt, and rejection can be painfully intense and potentially paralysing. The dorsal vagus nerve can disable upper cortical structures that support decision-making, awareness, attunement, and self-expression. Subjectively, this can feel like shame.
If the dorsal vagus could speak, it might say, "Hide me, please don't see me; if you see me, I might die".
It is my working hypothesis that SHAME originates from the meaning we assign to this biological nervous system response of wanting to hide in service of belonging.
This hiding and belonging simultaneously is like 'peekaboo' in the tension between connection and disconnection supporting our regulation with the intensity of being human. Defences to emotions serve to regulate how much we can bear to 'Peek' and 'Boo' in the dance of 'Peekaboo'.
The lively world of our emotions, fears and responses is like a great forest with its fauna. We experience those feelings as though they were wild animals bolting through the foliage of our thick being, timidly peering out in alarm or slyly and cunningly stalking, linking us to our unknown selves. - Paul Shepard
Selective negligence
This is the elephant in the room, our blind spot. This can sometimes be understood as a break in empathy for some aspect of ourselves using distractions to override seeing the elephant or literally not seeing it because it has never been recognised symbolically before. Unconsciously, memories in raw undifferentiated data without symbols or language to categorise them might be viscerally felt but with experiential blindness. We can also be experientially blind with our perceptions if we have no symbolic reference to what we are seeing.
As babies, we are born into the world with a wide undifferentiated focus. We learn shared attention, focus and categorisation of our experiences from the very beginning of our lives influenced by our caregiver's "niche '' of attention and focus. These neural networks are fired and wired as they are repeatedly activated. Where there is no focus of attention with categorisation given, the bushy dendrites of neurones that receive communications die off and we can become experientially blind to what we are unable to receive and therefore perceive. Our blind spots can be an expression of neglected attention with categorisation. Without this, experiences are stored out of conscious awareness.
Selective negligence is also a necessary defence against overstimulation. The ability to differentiate where we focus our attention is essential for supporting our serenity, decision-making and choices. We can notice this defence working for us when we witness suffering happening in other parts of the world and although we might be in shock attuning to the horror of this suffering, once the channel is changed or switched off, our channel changes too and selective negligence allows us to enjoy our lives simultaneously with the knowledge of others suffering. When selective negligence is not working, we can chronically suffer and our mental and physical health and wellbeing can health be impacted. Selective negligence supports us to park suffering and attend to what we need at this moment in relation to self-care and care for those immediately in a relationship with us. Selective negligence might be near impossible when a loved one, e.g. a child's life, is in danger. Selective negligence becomes a severe problem when it doesn't work to support us to park distress and suffering and attend to our needs and those we are in service to. As practitioners it is also a problem both when we are selectively negligent as bystanders of suffering and when we are unable to separate and differentiate from our client's suffering after the session has ended.
Without this ability to park distress and suffering, our attention may be scattered, resulting in reduced choice and decision-making. When we are suffering, the "affect" of the distress often dominates our attention. This disables our participation in being attuned and receptive to others and ourselves in relationships.
Hope
Hope is a defence against being with what is happening now. It can also be a projected future refuge from what we are experiencing now to relieve hopelessness. Hope can create a pause in suffering and activate decision-making to take action for change. Hope might be a light to guide us out from dark places and is a necessary defence for supporting optimism. For some of us, at different times in our lives, hope might be all we have.
“Hope is very often a refusal to know what is so, and steadfastly it is a refusal to live as if the present moment is good enough and all we really have. Hopeless is the collapse of that refusal, and it looks a lot like depression”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
Introjection - an aspect of maintaining belonging through adaption
This can be understood as our psyche's ingestion of parts of our identity that have been given to us so that characteristics of other people’s versions of ourselves become internalised. This can be understood as times we identify with what we have been "told" we are. This is a defence to expressing our authenticity and we may not know what that is under the straight jacket of introjected identity constructs. These constructs are often guarded by inner dialogue mentors in service of maintaining belonging at the expense of authenticity in alignment with our natural spontaneity.
This can sometimes be expressed as inhabiting, with pleasure, how another person names us or judges us in ways that dominate our beliefs about ourselves. We can find ourselves surrendering to judgements and sacrificing the dignity of our authentic values. This can sometimes be a revengeful pleasure in reaction, for example, "You call me this, then I will become this!" We are biologically wired to affiliate with power in service to our survival, hence "Stockholm syndrome" where a victim of torture will protect the abuser of power. This is wired into our body as a default response to maximise the avoidance of pain and loss of belonging which reads as safety even if it isn't safe. "Better the devil, you know", is a sometimes milder version of this.
Affiliation with power as a defence to helplessness:- if you can't beat it, join it - if you can't play with it, it's got you
This is a necessary defence in the face of adversity, feeling vulnerable or needing belonging. It is a defence that can involve seduction to affiliate with power or slavery going along with who is in power. It can be a defence using creative adaptation strategies to make the best of things and adapt to situations where our safety, power and belonging is threatened if we don't.
We are also naturally predisposed and biochemically rewarded to "going along with" what is bigger than us. Surrender can be pleasurable relief, letting go of the energy-consuming tension of being in opposition. Adaptions to make the best out of a situation can be as simple as making good use of what you have got, e.g. making lemonade when all you have are lemons, celebrating what makes you different before another insults you, celebrating fasting when there is no food, dancing in the rain when in a rain storm. Fasting is built into many spiritual-religious practices, probably stemming from environmental weather patterns that would have initially forced this out of adversity. If you can't beat it, join it!
The codes of conduct of our parents were once bigger than us. Families, communities and society are bigger than us. A defence to painful adaption might be to wholeheartedly inhabit a role that fits in with the systemic power structures offering us the pleasure of belonging and usefulness to the collective. We may inhabit roles in our societies with enthusiasm and go out the back door to inhabit secret ones with our affiliations swinging between them. These drivers may be internal parts of ourselves, making their needs big, so they are listened to in conflict with other aspects of ourselves suppressed.
In Stockholm syndrome, we can notice victims of violent or sexual assault defending and expressing loyalty to the person in the up-power role. This can also be understood to be a biological drive to align ourselves and affiliate ourselves with people in positions of power for our survival. Modern-day slavery in drug gangs, Pheodophile rings, cults, religious organisations, human trafficking organisations, brothels, etc, are examples of where misuse of power keeps power participants in subordination to serving the needs of the up-power positions. This has also been witnessed in Practitioner/teacher/workshop facilitator roles where the up-power role has default access to people in down-power roles to meet their sexual intimacy needs. People in down power roles and status might willingly go along with being seduced as recognition of their being valued. It is also common for students or clients to seduce up power roles to gain power affiliation, status and value. When we inhabit an up-power role, our wise use of power involves understanding human nature's needs to affiliate with this and resist seduction and seducing.
This adaption of our identity in service to belonging can gravely be a necessary part of survival in severe situations like sexual abuse, where a victim is forced to succumb to what is happening while being raped and may 'have to" express pleasure in this while being threatened with the pain of being harmed. This surrender of dignity and enjoying the pleasures of the abuse causes severe internal conflict from the intensity of this painful incongruence.
Retroflexion
Retroflexion ‘is the turning back’ of something onto the self.
The direction of energy when being angry or sad when being expressed is outward; so that if I am sad, I cry, or I am angry, I shout. When someone is using retroflexion defences, they turn that emotion back on themselves. People will often retroflect when it has not been safe or acceptable for them to express their emotions. Someone who is constantly told that ‘crying is for babies, will learn to retroflect their sadness and stop crying. In time, they may disconnect from their sadness and stop feeling it, so they might say, "I don’t get sad".
Reaction formation
Reaction formation is a defence where we inhabit the pole opposite position to compensate for strong feelings of aversion. These might be values that contradict our version of what we think is right. Our values and beliefs sit beside our ethics and these influence and secure our belonging and purpose in the world. The values and ethics we may have grown from often feel right regardless of opposites which might be defended against and judged as wrong. These are our holy cows. Any pole position can be understood as an "unfinished thought" where justifications and seeking evidence from others to disprove the validity of an aspect of being human are campaigned for.
We might find ourselves metaphorically standing on a podium or seeking out supporters of our viewpoint to secure our position with validity. Standing on a podium incites collective power or peer power pressure to reinforce our standing which collectively creates a bigger impact on the ones we are standing against.
This reaction formation can also be experienced as intense ambivalence in relation to something forbidden that we might have an adverse reaction to. This might be something or a way of being that we cannot allow ourselves to desire. This is an especially painful reaction formation defence when it is in service of suppressing what Jack Morin termed "troublesome turn-ons" in his book "The Erotic Mind". Troublesome turn-ons often arise from experiences in our lives when we lose our agency to speak up for and protect ourselves or feel overpowered or overwhelmed. These can be intensely campaigned against as a reaction to the intensity of the lust system magnetising us towards them. The pressure of this erotic charge can amplify the need to create a pole position in reaction to it.
Reaction formation can be understood as a way of transforming loss of power into power or helplessness into agency and has the potential to transform pain into erotic pleasure. Jack Morin speaks of our core erotic themes being an expression of this defence where pain from early life experiences is transformed into pleasure, fuelling what he termed "troublesome turn-ons '. This can be seen in intense erotic charge associated with reenacting roles in rape dynamics or betrayal role play or role-playing doctor and patient or parent and child etc. Role plays usually involve a down-power role motivated to re-experience and become empowered from a time when powerlessness was experienced. This is sometimes referred to as shadow play.
From a biochemical perspective, we also have inbuilt pain-pleasure regulation. For example, when injured, we have built into our bodies endorphins to transform pain into pleasure. We can see this being activated in some power over power under role play where experiencing extreme pain and being brutally dominated can result in euphoria and the surrender of nothing more to lose. This defence mechanism seeks to resolve the tension between the needs for control, power and agency and the need to belong to something bigger than us. However surrendering to erotic pleasure in these re-enactments can result in Emotional hangovers in reliving what hurt us morally, ethically, emotionally and/or physically in the past.
God can be understood as the Eros of nature, serving to integrate all matter, which is bigger than us. It makes sense that we receive a biochemical reward for surrendering what is hopeless and energy-consuming to fight.
This can be understood as "giving up" and "giving in" as a defence to feeling the pain of anger we can sometimes experience when we are fighting off entering into experiences. Maintaining boundaries of resistance, fending off and successfully inhabiting our personal power and speaking up for ourselves can be both painful and/or empowering.
Attempts to transform pain into pleasure in service of integration may not be utilising healthy strategies. Strategies can be good or bad for us. For example, succumbing to consuming food or substances might bring short-term pleasure but have a long-term disease affecting our physical well-being resulting in illness with emotional and physical hangovers. A useful perspective is that we have, as humans, creative minds for transforming pain into pleasure whether it is good for us or not.
Engaging in hedonistic activities, for example, for experiencing intensity for short-term relief from emotional pain may be a win-lose. Some strategies for this are destructive when acted upon without foresight of consequences, like unprotected sex, self-harm relief, dangerous sports, fast driving, gambling, alcohol, drugs, fighting, and forbidden sex that breaks attachment agreements.
“Partying at this time of ecological meltdown is not affirming of reality, but an abdication from it. It is a place of false refuge especially so when there is no evidence of an acknowledgement of affirming life as it is, for this would require of these people a heartbrokeness.”
― Stephen Jenkinson
Self-harming - ruptures with self
Self-harm can be seen and understood as an effort to feel something in the face of numbness. The intensity of the physical pain is better than the pain of feeling hollow and numb. It can sometimes be an expression of an aspect of the self creating an opportunity to be cared for and noticed.
This emptiness can seek relief with a desperate need to "feel something" by engaging in strategies that include the intensity of pain or exhilaration. Self-harm and seeking intensity in activities can achieve this relief from disassociation.
The intensity of feeling that these activities achieve "helps me feel alive"” Our inner ethics and morality in relation to win-win, win-lose, or lose-lose are the barometers for whether or not these strategies are useful for helping us feel alive. Embodiment practices support us in experiencing a fuller range of sensory receptivity rather than relying on this intensity to seek heat when we are feeling nothing.
Self-harming to feel the physical intensity of pain and to see the blood, for example, can also be a strategy to manage intense emotional pain by achieving empowerment with this physical activity in the face of feeling helpless and overwhelmed. Sometimes physical pain is easier to manage and care for than emotional pain. It can feel more translatable to be understood when it is physical rather than emotional. Emotional pain that feels impossible to navigate may sometimes become a physical dis-ease. At some stage when the dis-ease cannot be neglected any longer, the body will speak for us to be cared for. Feeling the pain in our body is sometimes easier than feeling the emotional pain. Body Poem can be especially useful in listening to the unresolved aspects of the self speaking through the literal physical pain. This can be liberating and possibly life-saving for these feeling states being translated into metaphor rather than into illness.
Projection
Projection is the psychic mechanism of differentiating undigested experiences from ourselves in order to integrate them with the help of others, reflecting back to us what we have not had the capacity to integrate on our own.
It is an expression of managing experiences of overwhelm by projecting aspects of self that are too hard to bear into another with the unconscious hope the other might help us digest and integrate this experience.
Projections can take the form of judgements of undigested rejections we have experienced ourselves or idealisations of our own sovereignty that we are still learning to value.
With integration, there is no psychic need to project or defend against exiled parts of the self if attuned acceptance has been felt.
Sometimes aspects of ourselves are easier to recognise outside of us in other people or in our environments. We can use the Feng Shui Body Poem to facilitate bringing alive what has been projected out of ourselves into the environment or into others. For some, this might be a way of discovering symbolic representations of feeling states that can then become bridges of communication in relationships to support shared understanding and recognition of needs. Some descriptive elemental metaphors we might use to share qualities of emotions…
... stormy foggy thick flowing soggy muddy solid dark light-heavy, rainy waves fizzing bubbling shining thundery bright sunny clear swirling drizzly rocky hazy calm streaming steaming
We can then facilitate the integration of these metaphors back into the body with clean language and Body Poem questions. For example
‘… and where in your body might that swirling water be?’ ‘... and if this swirling water that's in your belly had a voice and could speak, what might this swirling water be saying?’
Projective identification
Projective identification, developmentally, is an early form of communicating before symbol formation. This is a necessary survival mechanism to communicate the intensity of affect to our caregivers before we have language. Babies gesture and cry and powerfully communicate creating visceral channels of affective states in the caregiver. I remember not being able to ignore the discomfort of my children when they were babies (I still can't!) as I felt their pain as if it were inside me too. We are born into an MWe with our caregivers with differentiation of me and not me developing later as we learn to categorise and self-regulate our experiences through symbol formation.
A literal metaphor for this is: it's like magically putting the visceral sensations of an undigested "meal" into the "belly" of another to feel for us, out of our sight and awareness, by-passing direct language expression. The other can feel like a puppet acting out something that has been put inside them.
We can feel another person's experience inside our bodies, with our mirror neurons lighting up with theirs, but if they are unable to communicate their emotions through symbols, these are likely to be unconsciously expressed. This can feel incongruent. For example, the common experience sometimes referred to as passive aggression is when we are feeling furious when the other is smiling and saying to us, "What are you so angry about?"
Projection and projective identification
Projection and projective identification of our undigested parts can be integrated back through our mirror neurons which support us to empathise with others and we can sometimes feel the projected parts inside us again but this time not alone. The sentences in Body Poem hold these projections witnessed and accepted.
Confabulation
Confabulation can be understood as a rationalised projection about the past that is uniquely incongruent with other peoples rationalised reality. This defence is mostly outside of awareness creating memories from rationalised projections of assumed versions of reality despite contradictory evidence. Confabulating versions of reality are often serving the preservation of dignity and belonging. These frames of reference may not correlate with other people’s versions of reality, which might render a person lonely in their world with their dignity invalidated. The contradictory evidence of 'reality' might be too unbearable to acknowledge or there may be feared consequences if it is. Confabulation can also be in response to functional brain damage, eg Korsakoff syndrome, which results in loss of ability to store memory from B1 deficiency from alcohol use. Reality negligence can also be believed and substantiated with invented explanations when a part of the body has been lost or rendered paralysed from a Cerebrovascular accident (Stroke)
Confabulation might also be understood as our ability to rewrite and reframe history as versions of self are updated and sequenced differently. Everyone, to varying degrees, rewrites history as past events are revisited from new perspectives. This might be exaggerated when traumatic life events are being remembered due to memory functioning being disabled during traumatic experiences. Sometimes, a person might consciously reframe an experience with kinder understanding or can be created to justify an ethical pole position against another's version of reality.
A dilemma some practitioners experience is whether to believe or not believe a person’s version of events or whether to challenge or contradict these if they don't make rational sense. Invalidating another’s version of themselves or the world can contribute to further loneliness and separation. As practitioners inhabiting a stance of radical acceptance, they can learn not to reframe and update another’s versions of themselves and surrender more to the self-organising integration process, and it is not in the practitioner's domain to reorganise, reframe or interpret another’s versions of themselves.
We can facilitate a client in reframing, resequencing and integrating past experiences in new ways without doing this for them by asking questions like
‘What are you noticing when you recognise this … ?’ ‘... and what’s that like to notice and share here?’ ‘What are you noticing in your body as you remember this?’
We can support resequencing and reframing by asking questions like
‘... and what did you want to have happen that didn't happen?’ ‘... and what did you need when this was happening?’ ‘... and what was it like to experience this …?’ ‘... and if you could speak to yourself from here in the future now, what might you say to yourself back then?’
There is innocence in confabulation as the memory loss is genuine, and it can be seen as an effort to maintain identity without it updating to the current situation, which may be too painful to bear.
Repression
This is an unconscious process where experiences are stored in implicit memory out of conscious recallable awareness bypassing being stored in explicit memory. However, as Bessel Van de Kolk says "The Body keeps the Score". Implicit sensory memories can be observed as being held in a part of the brain called the Insula. The insula integrates communications from interception, exteroception and mental processing and activates call to action strategies to move away from or towards an experience.
Rigidity - Rationalisation and minimising
The rigidity can be understood as a way of rationalising, sequencing and making literal sense of experiences. This is important as part of symbol creation for holding feeling states in a communicable way. However, when experiences are rationalised before they are felt, this reduces emotionally felt meanings attributed to them. A person at the effect of this rationalisation of experiences might experience a loss of emotional expression with a sense of 'nothingness' with impoverished creative thinking and self-expression using embodied symbolism. An over-rationalised representation of an experience might be a drawing of a stereotypical cartoon flower or match figure that is difficult to read emotionally. The opposite, which is the 'Chaos defence', would be a a piece of paper loaded with detailed emotionally symbolic expressions that are difficult to read rationally.
Some ways of generalising emotions to stay hidden might be expressed like
"How are you?"
"Oh I'm fine, not bad, so so, ok, could be better, good ... etc"
Intellectualisation
Using reason to reduce anxiety and avoid overwhelm. Intellectualisation can be understood to be an enthusiastic redirection of unprocessed emotions by creating symbolic conceptual models of understanding that support sequencing and integration.
Manic defence to feeling vulnerability and pain
Mania can be understood as a creative defence to helplessness. Episodes of mania are often characterised by heightened energy levels, euphoria, increased confident sociability, increased libido, accelerated thought processes, difficulty sleeping, and increased productivity with obsessive focus or scattered attention in energy-consuming activities. It can be felt like an intense wave of taking action for change and 'getting things done' or experiencing adventures. This intense drive for change of state can creatively transform pain and suffering into something that is beautiful to witness, see or hear. Most great works of art, dance, theatre and music are examples of ways creativity transforms painful, frustrating, disabling intensity of affect into embodied symbolic forms that bridge these states in ways that they might be welcomed, received, acknowledged and accepted.
While the effect of this 'action taking' is in overdrive, a person seeking to alleviate helplessness, receptivity and attunement may be compromised. We can understand this from a nervous system perspective that sympathetic nervous system activation reduces the parasympathetic resulting in reduced sensory receptivity. While in action mode, SEEKING to change affective states of helplessness, loss of receptivity can inadvertently propel a person into commodifying others and substances and engaging in activities that hedonistically alleviate the pain (rather than creatively transform it). This can be understood as an accelerated drive taking action and engaging in strategies without the capacity to pause, relax and sufficiently digest and satiate. Being in a relationship with someone driven to change their affective state in these ways can be deeply challenging as being commodified or used is not relational.
Reduced receptivity while in these manic altered states seeking hedonistic ways of changing state impair judgement and tragically lead individuals to make decisions that impact self, others and relationships adversely. Frustration with 'getting' needs met can lead to heightened irritability, causing individuals to treat others harshly. Being in a relationship with someone commodifying you can feel like being hunted and reprimanded every time you get away. This is often dynamic in relationships where victim-perpetrator roles either get stuck in one dynamic or turbulently change.
The ability to integrate is impaired and can be like driving a car laden with unprocessed and undigested emotions and pausing momentarily at service stations for fast food. Goal-driven strategies without relaxed satiation lived in short-term memory circuitry can lead to motivations to intensify these as sensory receptivity shuts down, disabling a person’s capacity for feeling satisfied or grateful.
Feelings of exhaustion, helplessness and hopelessness might arise alongside the impact of self-harm and harm to others commodified in the process. We might understand this overdrive in seeking and engaging in strategies that don't fulfil or satisfy needs as a turmoil of unhappy endings that gets addictively repeated like gambling until you have lost everything. There can be devastation in the wake of a manic episode with emotional hangovers when awareness dawns about the impacts that loss of receptivity and attunement have had.
Holding space for a client in any part of this addictive manic cycle can be a challenge but understanding what this defence is serving can support us to resist sexualised requests that are part of the hedonistic addiction strategies. We might redirect them to a menu sex worker if they are hell-bent on fulfilling erotic gratification at any price. A person in an elevated frustrated manic state might use persuasion, manipulation, threats or seduction to maintain the high that's protecting them from their low. Mania can be ruthless causing pain in the drive against feeling it. This is one of the perils of sex work that leads so many into burnout fulfilling requests as commodities without limits being recognised, represented or honoured.
However, if the addict has reached enough rock bottom (e.g. they may have lost all their relationships, their genitals have stopped performing and functioning) they may be in a receptive attitude to learning new ways of being in the warm instead of the hot of life. Because response flexibility in relation to relaxation is likely to be impaired, somatic assessment is essential to understand where the resilient edges are. Slowing down and relaxing might open awareness of vulnerable aspects of self that might activate manic defensiveness so non-action-based activities like regulating breathing, lying down, body focusing, body scan and body poem should be moderated and only engaged in for short periods of time with attuned tracking of their resilient edges. The ‘I want’ translating to ‘May I?’ and ‘Will you?’ are essential somatic assessment practices, to begin with towards transforming the commodification of relationships with self and others into learning how to co-create attuned relationship agreements. Using the Wheel of Consent® as a structure throughout the sessions can facilitate a person gradually feeling more without overwhelm. Action-based somatic assessments like the distance game, take a walk with me, movement, and dance included as part of Wheel of Consent play might offer welcomed respite from opening sensory receptivity practices. Radical acceptance facilitating mini-body poems will test your acceptance limits, and as these boundaries and limits are tested, felt and understood, they form the relationship container. Within this, explorations into the feared territories that were manically defended against might be possible
Objective absolutes justification
Sometimes the subjective and objective get muddled.
Objective absolutes - "This a literal fact" about an aspect of reality that we can all agree is literally true.
Subjective absolutes - "I feel this" is sometimes projected into the objective to create rational justification as "I feel this subjectively" can be experienced as exposing.
Spiritual bypassing
A defence attributed to people in "spiritual" communities is Spiritual bypassing. It is meant as a judgement to attribute the lack of congruence between identity and authentic self, with identity aspiring to be enlightened while relationships are dramatic with intense affect and volatile emotionality.
We must arrive in our bodies in the flesh and bones of the third dimension and integrate the exiled unconscious aspects of self in shame-hidden, repressed pain before we can truly fly into timeless dimensions of altered states connecting with spirit, the universe and the cosmos. Without arriving in our bodies first, we are disembodied in limbo in a kind of hologram of heavenly realms referred to as spiritual bypassing.
This liberation from the dualism of right or wrong is heaven on earth, the integration of heaven and hell of being human.
We must find the courage and support to feel the fear of feeling the visceral third dimension of our bodies again. We must learn acceptance without interrupting it. We must reconnect our interoceptive and exteroceptive receptivity to enhance our intuition and, as Betty Martin says, notice, value, trust, and voice what we are experiencing.
Feeling fear takes courage. It helps us all to feel a little bit at a time within the range of our resilience and capacity to digest and integrate.
Sometimes, however, noticing is unbearable, leading to overwhelming chaotic reactions. Sometimes, repression and rationalisation defences are so effective that accessing our felt sense is like getting blood out of a stone. Both of these defences are frustrating to the person under their effect and to anyone attempting to have an attuned relationship with them.
When working with people at the effect of either of these defences, it can sometimes be helpful to invite projections into external environmental metaphors like the weather or types of landscape. Sometimes, I invite the person to imagine, "If you were an animal right now, what animal might you be?" "Describe this animal where it is, what it is doing and what it might be saying".
This invites the person to attribute aspects of themselves outside of the self that are less threatening than from inside the self. There is a possibility of harvesting these projections in the Body or Dream Poem, illuminating and enriching a felt sense of the inner world that can be remembered and recalled as aspects of identity that support belonging as part of nature, e.g. with an animal ally or identification with a part of nature. One could also play "If you were a flower what kind of flower are you? If you were a tree what kind of tree are you? If you were a type of dessert, what kind of dessert might you be?!"
Chaos confusion
Chaos can be understood to be disorganised thinking often expressed in dramatic turbulent experiences with a confusion of time (with what is happening now and what has happened in the past). In this respect, confusion can be expressed as noisy, distracting, dramatic data that nobody can follow or name, like being in the waves of the sea without respite.
'I am confused' can be understood as an unconscious defence against receiving information. There may be many reasons why confusion might also offer a respite and pause from taking in more data. It might be unconscious activations to help us not know something or there may be fears of knowing too much. If receiving hurt us in the past, brain fuzz and fog might be an unconscious visceral somatic reaction to not being hurt again.
Confusion with decision-making is often associated with a disorganised attachment where strong drives to go towards a caregiver are simultaneously in conflict with strong drives to run away from danger. The brain is driven to take action in opposite directions at the same time, which disables the sense of agency to appropriately respond to needs for safety and comfort. These drives can become chronically frustrating and result in a withdrawal from confident decision-making. We might welcome many people into our practice whose main challenge is decision-making. Self-reflection, decision-making, and learning are very compromised when there is a fog of confusion over a stormy sea. Confusion is a signal that 'it's too much'. and small experiences using the Wheel of Consent with Body Poem acceptance in little parcels of time is required for receptivity to open and trust again.
Curtain of sound
A wall of sound is like creating a curtain between you and me that I can see through but you can't. It enables me to talk to you, keeping you at bay so I don't have the agony of receiving any of you in case it hurts. As I am talking, I am learning from your non-verbal cues and through my mirror neurons that you are safe enough to receive from and be seen by. A little at a time, I will play peek-a-boo with you to test out if you will not reject me. I might reject you until I have the capacity to receive your kindness.
If we have been hurt, the GABA receptors in the insula part of the brain stop receiving data rendering decision-making based on projections. Trust is learned and earned and a person at the effect of this defence has once upon a time been hurt badly enough to shut down receptivity. Our patience, kindness and acceptance are essential as we wait with them for it to be safe enough. People know when they are being loved and accepted without us needing to say it. It is an act of trust in the self-organising intelligence that the vulnerable parts will show up to be listened to and to receive the care they lost.
"Kindness is the manifestation of integration"- Daniel Siegel
"You" or "One" feels
Using "I" statements can make one feel vulnerable, and as a defence to these feelings of vulnerability, projecting the personal ("I") into the collective ("one", "you", "we") can help alleviate this vulnerability.
We are all working towards the "I" feel, which can be experienced as exposing and vulnerable if what "I" felt has in the past been rejected. "You" feel or "one" feels can sometimes be as close to sharing "I" as we can bear. Projecting it out into "you" and "one" somehow projects our experiences into belonging to the collective "We" regardless of non-violent communication standards!
Body Poem epiphanies can reveal and expand into awareness aspects of the self that were like previously dried moss, requiring identity updates in ways that need adapting and acclimatising. Such insights are likely when entering into feeling more of ourselves through embodiment practices and trance states, which some aspects of Body and Dream Poem facilitate. With each identity update and epiphany, there is the loss of beliefs that have previously protected us from these. Herein is the birthing of our authenticity.
Grief is the midwife of your capacity to be immensely grateful for being born.
Grief is not a feeling it is a capacity. It is not something that disables you, we are not on the receiving end of grief we are on the practising end of grief.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
Accepting our defences and feelings liberates us from the hope of not being here and the hopelessness of being here. Body Poem simply witnesses all aspects of ourselves with attuned acceptance, offering a refuge of grief and humility with all that we are coming home to and an opportunity to feel congruent with ourselves and each other. All defences take energy to maintain, which might feel like mountains crumbling into the sea as we surrender to the grief of our authenticity and the divine joy of acceptance that births from this.
We can all benefit from emotional and erotic fluency. Like turtles swimming with ease in the water of our experiences, with sensory receptivity and the ability to come onto the beach and update our versions of ourselves with kindness and acceptance rather than feeling fried as a prawn on the hot sand of unbelonging!.
Reactive defences following a rupture
Reactivity versus response flexibility
We all have patterns of reactivity in response to receiving difficult feedback. It is important that we get to know these patterns since they are often early defined mechanisms formed in service to protecting our belongings, so they are often unconscious, and they can feel very compelling in the ways they justify themselves. In the above exercise, you are invited to notice these immediate, often unconscious and involuntary reactions. These usually fall into some of the following types of patterns:
Rationalise - reframe events and justify actions
Minimise - reframe the other’s version of the impact
Counter claim - reversing frames of reference of victim-perpetrator perspectives
Pathologise - interpret the other as projecting
Deny - reframe and confabulate events
Overlook power differential dynamics - shift accountability - justify that the other participated with free will
Justify - Justification of your actions
Make it all about you - Prioritising the upsetting impact on you from the feedback
Prioritising your intentions and disregarding the impact
Externalise authority shifting attention to someone else being responsible - making it someone or thing else’s fault
Withdrawal from engagement - Hide, cover up and seek secrecy; Seek a private compensation deal to pay them to cover up
Avoid - offer rationalised repair solutions, like no contact, to disengage from taking responsibility to make amends
Counter evidence to polarise the other; Seek alliances to support your position. Seek testimonial evidence from others to restore your professional standing
Our capacity to receive difficult feedback and to practise response flexibility rather than reactivity supports us in staying in connection with the person offering the feedback and engaging in any reconnecting steps or repair processes needed. You might notice some of the defences to pain acting out in the above list. This is another opportunity to spiral learn and deepen your kindness in relation to the defences you notice in yourself.
It is helpful to discover what conflict-avoiding strategies you have developed so that you can watch out for them and begin to have more choices about how you respond. It takes practice and repeated experiences of successful repair to truly believe that repair is possible and to uncouple conflict from trauma and loss of relationship in our deep beliefs.
Even when we are very skilled in remaining open and receptive and aware of our responsibilities as practitioners we can still get caught off guard when we receive challenging feedback when we are not expecting it or prepared for it. This is where our self-care becomes so crucial. We are much more likely to react automatically if we are tired, unhappy, unwell, hungry or un-resourced. Developing our personal power and our connection with our personal power is a fundamental resource which can support our wise use of role power.
And even when we are resourced and kind and skilful we can still find it difficult to receive very challenging feedback. In our up-power role of practitioner/coach/supervisor we need to remember that we are embodying a role of authority. Our clients/students may well project their past experiences with bad authority onto us. We may experience their challenging feedback as being completely unreasonable and out of all proportion to the event. This is because it probably contains a small amount of personal truth about us along with projections from past wounds. It is our responsibility to acknowledge and validate them to facilitate reconnection and not to react defensively.
We also need to acknowledge that as Sexological Bodyworkers, we are often working with clients in altered states of arousal, shame, nakedness, etc, which increases their vulnerability. This also increases our responsibility to more like 200% since it increases our impact. One well intentioned word or gesture can land in a way we didn't intend and can cause an enormous impact which we may find difficult to comprehend. It is our duty of care to allow our client to express their upset and we need to learn how to receive that feedback, which may appear to come out of the blue and be expressed with a great deal of emotion and pain.
Any response that disconnects us from our client will diminish our capacity to facilitate the reconnection and repair process. It is easy to see how angry, defensive responses disconnect us, but over-apologising, self-criticism, and shame responses are equally unhelpful.
Journal what you notice about your patterns of reactivity when initially receiving difficult feedback. Were you able to recognise any patterns from the list given?
Were your patterns different in different contexts (eg in-person, in writing or on a call? With a client, a colleague or your coach?)
How did the impacted person respond to your reactivity?
Was this soothing or inflaming?
What impact did it have on your relationship with the person offering you the feedback?
How might you further develop your response flexibility?
What might support you back into receptivity and acceptance with heart-felt kindness and understanding towards the other
How might you transform your remorse into learning and growth?
Journal about your patterns of reactivity (your initial reactions) along with the tools you use, or would like to learn to use, which enhance your ability to respond in a way that allows you to stay in connection (with yourself and the other).