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Jung on the therapeutic value of abreaction (pp. 130-132, CW16) (update from 01/2010 post)

November 8, 2025

Here is a source quote from Jung, with a comment from me, on the importance of recognizing it is the dissociation itself that needs healing. Given the early conditions…glint in the eye of our parents, fetus, infant, toddler and on up, it is the nature of the situation that we will all have a number of unbearable split off episodic memory based encapsulated trauma complexes. Each of these, at the time, required the activation of psyche’s super power – dissociation – to survive. While life preserving at the time and into the mid-life, these dissociation based defenses do not allow vulnerability and emotional intimacy. Before we can heal we have to first “cure the cure” ie: let go of the dissociation based defenses, before we can get to the healing of the original overwhelm. Blur states, getting triggered that is, provide the energy to eventually pierce the encapsulated trauma complex, allowing us then more conscious access. See what you think about Jung’s take here:

“. . . the trauma is either a single, definite, violent impact, or a complex of ideas and emotions which may be likened to a psychic wound. Everything that touches this complex, however slightly, excites a vehement reaction, a regular emotional explosion. Hence one could easily represent the trauma as a complex with a high emotional charge, and because this enormously effective charge seems at first sight to be the pathological cause of the disturbance, one can accordingly postulate a therapy whose aim is the complete release of this charge. Such a view is both simple and logical, and it is in apparent agreement with the fact that abreaction, i.e., the dramatic rehearsal of the traumatic moment, it’s emotional recapitulation in the waking or in the hypnotic state – often has a therapeutic effect. We all know that a man has a compelling need to recount a vivid experience again and again until it has lost its affective value. As the proverb says, “What filleth the heart goeth out by the mouth.” The unbosoming gradually depotentiates the affectivity of the traumatic experience until it no longer has a disturbing influence.”

We recognize, Jung on McDougall, however that “the essential factor is the dissociation of the psyche and not the existence of a highly charged affect and, consequently, that the main therapeutic problem is not abreaction but how to integrate the dissociation. . . .that a traumatic complex brings about dissociation of the psyche. The complex is not under the control of the will and for this reason it possesses the quality of psychic autonomy. . . .it pounces on him like an enemy or a wild animal…” “Abreaction then is an attempt to reintegrate the autonomous complex, to incorporate it gradually into the conscious mind as an accepted content, by living the traumatic situation over again, once or repeatedly,” (pp. 130-132, CW16)

Categories: blur, Complexes and More, Connecting the Dots Series, Learning to Think and Work Symbolically
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…A Different Kind of Homewrecker…? Bringing My Own Dissociative Enactment to the Table

October 7, 2025

Author note: Rather than embedding hyperlinks throughout the text, I am listing them by titles at the bottom.

Early on the morning of September 18th, 2025, I generated a post with the title: A Different Kind of Homewrecker: When the Inner Antagonist Gets Exteriorized and Embodied.

By mid-afternoon I was able to recognize something of my own deeper process, and see my choice in words – labeling one party as a homewrecker – as evidence of my own passive aggressive defenses. I then re-titled it: A Very Serious Microfracture in Communication: When the Inner Antagonist Gets Exteriorized and Embodied.

Yes I was hurt. Yes I was deeply saddened by the very real impact of the activation of an Exteriorization of an Inner Antagonist on our friend group. And then, reflecting on my agitation about it all, I was able to begin to connect with my anger. I recognized it, felt it, struggled against it, and finally dropped down into it. It seemed we were all hijacked – at some level – by the emotion. What we can see from the outside looking in, in the face of a strong, triggering perturbation (how about that word!) provides a snapshot of our core defenses. And it seems psyche’s channel changing super power is dissociation. Why might we be so conflict avoidant?

Recall Bromberg’s observation: “When emotional experience is traumatic (more than the mind can bear), it remains unsymbolized cognitively, and the mind recruits the normal mental function of dissociation as a means of controlling both the triggering of unprocessed emotion schemas that were created by trauma and the release of ungovernable affect of hyperarousal that could threaten to destabilize its function.” It is helpful to recognize this core fear concerning the potential release of the ungovernable affect of hyperarousal that could threaten to destabilize its (the mind’s) function. I believe this detail may be at the center of the Adverse Childhood Experiences research. Our survival depends on our ability to do whatever it takes to change the channel, rather than risk falling apart, symbolically getting eaten alive or thrown on the broiler.

Back to my process: I could begin to see how my decision to write about my/our process, through the lenses of my model, was clearly in the service of my own dissociation of how upset I was at the time of the microfracture. Turning to my symbol system as a way to “work” with the complexity can also be seen as a candidate for my “mistake” and the “… the endless repetition of the mistake…” in DH Lawrence’s poem Healing. As in I learned how to defensively go into thinking and analyzing rather than simply feeling feelings. From this perspective, I relied on my tried and (not!)true partial cure defenses. More on that later.

Bromberg makes the point that what the patient needs to get better is for the important other, therapist, whomever can consciously participate, to bring their own enactments to the table. For each of us, how sensitive are we in tracking our own moments of dissociation? What happens if we become dedicated to bringing them forward at our first opportunity? It is another way of saying, best practice is to own your own stuff. Try to spot the evidence of your own “raw material” driving your vulnerability to a microfracture.

In recognizing the frame “A Different Kind of Homewrecker” was in reality name calling and assigning blame to one party, othering that person if you will – I could see the evidence of my own dissociation. I was caught in/participating in the split. Yes, the actions and impacts driven by the Exteriorization of an Inner Antagonist does pull mightily for that split. We can work on being in the presence of powerful energies/affects which pull for devolving into an identification with one side or pole (think for example of the pair: Dominant Harshness versus Vulnerable Woundedness) of our own complexes, without becoming complexed ourselves. See Edinger’s discussion on Emotion and Invulnerability to Fire for an image of this important super power here.

As it happens, the very best clues for which complexes are driving our enactments can be found in how it all feels when it goes down. In the immediate aftermath of a complex activation, what is palpably present in the room will, like a dream state, be an out-picturing of the core conflict(s). By this, we start with the basic image of The Experiential State; something has happened and the two participants in the scene each have their full expressions and affects associated directly to what just happened. This is psyche’s shorthand for bringing forward our entire history with regards to loving. See Representations Averaged and Generalized over Time to read more about how this comes out of our earliest infant experiences.

Beyond my theorizing, I now need to say something about my complex activation, my vulnerability to the blur: working from the conflict in the room, what could I learn about my Inner Antagonist? What was I projecting into the room onto someone who could carry it for me? Over a few days of process with myself and my wife, I landed on the presence, in the room, of a He-She-They-Who-Structures-with-a-Vengeance function/figure/other/antagonist complex. What was revealed through this encounter was the degree to which I continue to suffer – not consciously enough – with a less than relational, rather rigid, would be director. Like a critical parent introject, a task master who doesn’t get a more balanced approach. I have this longstanding sensitivity to what I perceive as others, who would in choosing for themselves, in effect choosing for me. Part of how this opened things up for me was in playing it out as a core couple complex dynamic. When can we discern He-She-They-Who-Structures-with-a-Vengeance is in the room? Of course my wife and I have different ways of approaching structuring our world(s). While I would like to share more on this soon, I’m going to leave it there for right now.

Importantly, we are all dreaming this dream together. Or rather, our complexes are co-creating this shared dream state. The key to sorting this out is asking the question in what ways is this my dream? And at the same time, in what ways it is each person’s dream? How can we understand what it looks like if each of us is having an encounter with an exteriorized inner antagonist. If you can only talk about your experience of an actual other person, you have locked out exploration of how that actual other has been employed by psyche to carry something for you in your dream process. This gets into Freud’s manifest versus latent contents and psyches use of compromise formations or what I like to think of as psyche’s camouflage tool (see below). When an actual beloved or friend shows up/populates a dream, we do want to consider all the associations to that person; we do not want to stop there. In an Active Imagination session, we can ask the recognizable outer world figure to take off their mask and show us who is calling from an earlier place. Who is showing up now via the dream, looking for dialogue and integration or release?

Again, the key concept here is enactments drive microfractures in communication. Bromberg suggests we make our own dissociative process available to working through the rupture. Modeling the capacity to sit together and find new language for what just happened is the work of becoming conscious. The sub-symbolic mode of experience needs our help, in relationship with each other, to move into the symbolic mode of experience.

Today I touched on my recognition after the fact, of my own dissociative reaction to a powerful activation in a friend group. I wanted to zero in on the startling and critically relevant implications of Bromberg’s discussion of this work: sitting together in the aftermath of enactments (micro/macro-fractures in communication), bringing our/my own dissociative experience to the table, is how we can support our cycles of rupture, repair and reconciliation. We honor those not-consciously-bidden parts of ourselves who show up, in the service of the re-integration of our lost selves/self-states. While early in life reliance on dissociative defenses was life saving, it becomes life-denying.

Enactments: Setting the table…together

A Very Serious Microfracture in Communication: When the Inner Antagonist Gets Exteriorized and Embodied*

Source: Wilkinson on Microfractures in Communication, Rupture, Repair, and Reconciliation

Source: Sandner/Beebe on Dominant Harshness and Vulnerable Woundedness Complex Split

Representation of Persona Submitting to Emotion

On The Importance of Getting Triggered

Co-Created, Dissociation Enabled Enactments

Emotion and Invulnerability to Fire

Couple Power Struggle as Compromise Formation?

Philip Bromberg on Self – States

Helpful posts for background:

Categories: blur, Complexes and More, Conscious Enactment, Learning to Think and Work Symbolically
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A Very Serious Microfracture in Communication: When the Inner Antagonist Gets Exteriorized and Embodied*

September 18, 2025

The Microfracture frame is a reference to Wilkinson’s work here. Here I want to walk us through the usefulness of Edward Edinger’s writings on the exteriorization of an inner antagonist. The link takes you to a post titled: A Consciousness Challenge: Recognizing the Inner Antagonist in the Outer World. (I will track down the quote and add to my source quote collection lower left)

In my world, this is a very real problem which needs some special language to help us recognize when it is in play. Once you can see it, you also may find it hidden in plain sight…with a surprising frequency.

Edward Edinger suggests we consider the possibility conflict in the outer world is psyche propelling us into a situation specifically for the purposes of learning something essential. The timing reflects our readiness in the moment to consider the next piece in working through a complex. From this perspective, what we are in conflict with is an exteriorized, embodied, Inner Antagonist. This is a radical notion. What is the teaching?

For this to be a real thing, we need to understand psyche’s powers to project. And that we understand this will be unconscious to the ego. Recall, we only project what is truly unconscious (to the ego), and that projection is how psyche gets a split off piece of our depth work back out into the world, as an assist in beginning a sorting process where in at some point we can recognize it is our own shadow driving this. Because the true meaning is unbearable to ego consciousness, if you notice you are being asked to carry someone’s exteriorized inner antagonist, and try to talk about it with the person who is relying on this defense, they will not be able to consciously see what you are trying to point out. That is the special challenge. If you understand the dynamic and can feel the pull to carry the emotional tone associated with the antagonist, but do not get pulled into the force field created by this level of projection, you can be chill enough to experience the blur and even offer some help. My plate Representation of Persona Submitting to Emotion offers a map to support trying this on. The bad news is when someone gets strongly complexed, imaged by shall we say – Hansel and Gretal and the Witch in the gingerbread forest setting – in the moment one can become identified with either the Witch or the vulnerable child state; which ever one gets control of the steering wheel, the other gets projected onto the environment. AND it can switch in a nano second. The GOOD news is when you can see this, you can help by containing the Witch and supporting the vulnerable child state in being powerful enough to send the Witch back into the dream time. This requires a capacity to stay conscious within a blur state. Both the here and now and the dream time are activated in this altered and altering state of consciousness.

Before going into some theory which helps us think about how complex and yet often utilized these defense are, I want to make a case for a very useful try on with stuff that erupts into the environment like a bad dream. And that is, simple put: imagine this is a dream, your dream. When both parties can aspire to take 100% responsibility for where each goes within an outer world encounter – with or without video coverage – we have our best chance to get to the deeper layers of work which drive our repetition compulsions – or – episodes of enactment which fit our re-enactment of the wounding dynamics. The Edinger teaching after all works in both directions: how is what I’m getting from you an encounter with my Inner Antagonist, while at the very same time, what you are getting from me is an encounter with your Inner Antagonist? This is a truly awesome complexity!

When you wake up with a start from this dream, grab your journal and start writing as fast as you can to capture everything that just happened, as if it was your dream. Treat it as a communication from your Guiding Self. Include as much detail as you can. Keep adding to your depiction of the setting(s), scenes, speech, feelings, sensations, all of it. Note your spontaneous associations, call for memories. Try to get busy with all of that in an effort to get inside with your own process.

Remember, if you have just encountered conflict in the world, in what way are you being shown an inner antagonist? This helps us find our way into the co-created, dissociation enabled enactment which will show us, like an out-picturing of our soul wound via the dream time, what our core resonance or reactivity is about. Why now, why in this way has this come up?

And while we want to give serious consideration to the actual others in our relational world who will populate our dreams, intense feeling toned episodes always point back to our earliest challenges. It is the deeper level of personal developmental history and ancestral complexes at play in the dream at hand. In short, what can I hope to learn about my cast of inner antagonists?

Back to a depth psychological view: How is this impossibly complex defense even possible? From the psychoanalytic side, Christopher Bolus has described the defense mechanism employed here: “Kleinian psychoanalysts, in particular, have focused on one way in which a person may rid himself of a particular element of psychic life. He does so by putting it into someone else.” See the linked post for an interesting case illustration. I have a more lengthy comment on his observations in my post Projective Identification: Informing the Experiential State.

I am wanting to restate that assertion: One way in which a person may rid himself of a particular element of psychic life is by putting it into someone else. If like most, you have not heard about this power, try to think about if this could be true. The implication being that until we are ready to embrace parts of ourselves which through our known histories likely could not have survived our childhood conditions intact, we/psyche can just rid ourselves of them by just putting it/them into someone else? Mind blowing really. And try on what it might be like to have someone make such a deposit of emotionally charged experience into your core, and not notice it came from outside one’s self? Another big wow. It is also true that if/when we share similar core conflicts – core shame – we are more vulnerable to taking in these projected antagonists and becoming identified with them as if they were only our own self. Meaning we don’t see that the sometimes dramatic shift in our mood reflects something was put into us by another.

Suffice to say now, whenever we get triggered, get our buttons pushed, or simply are on the receiving end of an emotionally charged offering, with or without getting activated, it is important to consider, how might this be something deeper trying to come into consciousness?

For more on the subsymbolic and symbolic worlds and the role of enactments, see my Bromberg review post: Enactments: Setting the table…together.

*If you saw this offering before 2:30 PM on 9/18/25, you would be reading: A Different Kind of Homewrecker: When Inner Antagonists Get Exteriorized. Sitting with the post today, it has become obvious the use of label Homewrecker, whatever I was thinking, and I do have thoughts, was to jump into the deep end of the name-calling which has been such a toxic part of our political discourse/discord. Name calling reduces our world to othering; from complexity devolving into either/or, in contrast to both and more. It reflects an activation of splitting and scapegoating defenses. These primitive defenses are hardwired. Dante’s Divine Comedy describes a special place in Hell for Sowers of Discord (written between 1308 and 1321). It does not recognize the shared complexity. Seeing this I was able to connect more consciously with my own sadness and deep discouragement about the seriousness of the impact on family and friends when we can’t choose to be with our own contributions to the disharmony. When name calling seems to be again tolerated… My sincere apologies.

Let’s leave it there for now….

goodby for now,

chuck

Categories: blur, Communications from the Dream Time, Complexes and More, Connecting the Dots Series, Conscious Enactment, Dream, Learning to Think and Work Symbolically
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Ask Chuck: A Great Question about Self States

March 12, 2024

I was pleased to get an email from a reader asking: “… I had a question about self states or emotional states. How do I get out of a self state or an emotional state? For good.”

The short answer is we want to recognize self-states as important parts of ourselves that historically could not find a way to stay conscious, given our sensitivity and complexity. Growing up and getting stronger means they can start to rattle and make themselves known, and we want to commit to honoring their request to be in relationship, and begin sorting out who are they really and what will our relationship to them be? Some of these emerging self-states are actually the internalized/introjected parental and authority figure “others”, who, populating our complexes, contributed to our rejection of parts of ourselves. Lots more on that via Donald Kalsched’s work with the archetypal predator/persecutor complexes. Not going there now.

Having some additional communications with the person asking the question, I am going to connect some dots tailored to the backstory. Note, recognizing one’s sensitivity and complexity, potentially a mixed blessing at best, seems actually to me like winning life’s most important lottery!

Of note, most of us have grown up believing the key to success in life depends upon the development of a well functioning ego based consciousness, which then can identify and apply best practices in everything we do. It is interesting to remember Donald Winnicott, from the psychoanalytic side, believed a successful, integrative analysis resulted in one achieving a unit – self personality. In contrast, a Jungian perspective recognizes a multiplicity in consciousness as the rule. Jung’s concept of ego and Self, imaged as the ego-Self Axis, is extremely useful. It lends its self to a non-denominational, ancestral, archetypal understanding of consciousness in relationship to the unconscious, or collective consciousness. It also addresses the developmental stage dynamics working for and against remembering what has been unbearable. We will close with more on that below.

I am thinking the reader is familiar with self – states through prior study or analysis, or, has reviewed some of my posts on the importance of the concept (see Philip Bromberg)

In his (my Source Quote) discussion, Bromberg notes when at times he might think a person’s mood has shifted, he has learned rather to consider a shift in self – states as the explanation for the change in mood. He then offers this review:

“For those who are not yet totally at home with how the concept of self – state is different from a shift in affect or mood, let me offer a one sentence clarification: Self – states are highly individualized modules of being, each configured by its own organization of cognitions, beliefs, dominant affect and mood, access to memory, skills, behaviors, values, actions, and regulatory physiology. (Chuck’s bold)

These highly individualized modules of being sound like active, dynamic willing entities with minds of their own!

Take a minute to think about what this (having your own cast of highly individualized modules of being characters within) might mean to you. And, where might they come from?

We can start with orienting to the concept of evoked companions. When I just googled evoked companions, an excellent paper popped up reviewing some of the literature around the concept as it informs the development of spontaneous imaginary characters from early childhood and throughout our lives. And the importance of recognizing this capacity for interacting with these figures as a power, not a pathology. For here, it serves to provide context around our experience of finding unknown presences in us, coming into our world, which can be confusing and frightening.

An early mentor put it this way: After about the first 24 – 48 hours of being born, the infant is never alone, because enough actual interactions have occurred with the mother and caregivers to allow the infant to experience connections with the evoked companions; something of each of those experiences with the actual others taking care of us, provides psyche with enough to begin forming internal representations of the holding environment; when a new need arises, the associated state then evokes internal representations of the presences of the caregivers who have attended to us earlier in our very short time in the world. We are wired to begin connecting, with the help of these evoked companions. See my Developmental Considerations for more on the importance of of the gradual evolution of this internal representation of being held, refueled, and released. Countless traces of interactions, averaged and generalized over time, become the condensed, composite template for one’s Experiential State.

In every childhood, there are tremendous pressures put on the child to conform with expectations to behave, in short. A beautiful image of why this is so can be found in Robert Bly’s A Little Book on the Human Shadow:

“Let’s talk about the personal shadow first. When we were one or two years old we had what we might visualize as a 360° personality. Energy radiated out from all parts of our body and all parts of our psyche. A child running is a living globe of energy. We had a ball of energy, alright; but one day we noticed that our parents didn’t like certain parts of that ball. They said things like: ‘Can’t you be still?’ Or ‘It isn’t nice to try and kill your brother.’ Behind us we have an invisible bag, and the part of us our parents don’t like, we, to keep her parents’ love, put in the bag. By the time we go to school our bag is quite large. Then our teachers have their say: ‘Good children don’t get angry over such little things.’ By the time my brother and I were twelve in Madison, Minnesota we were known as ‘the nice Bly boys.’ Our bags were already a mile long.”

And he offers this gorgeous description of our arrival, ‘trailing clouds of glory,’:

“The drama is this. We came as infants ‘trailing clouds of glory,’ arriving from the farthest reaches of the universe, bringing with us appetites well preserved from our mammal inheritance, spontaneities wonderfully preserved from our 150,000 years of tree life, angers well preserved from our 5,000 years of tribal life – in short, with our 360° radiance – and we offered this gift to our parents. They didn’t want it. They wanted a nice girl or a nice boy. That’s the first act of the drama. It doesn’t mean our parents were wicked: they needed us for something. My mother, as a second-generation immigrant, needed my brother and me to help the family look more classy. We do the same thing to our children; it’s a part of life on this planet. Our parents rejected who we were before we could talk, so the pain of the rejection is probably stored in some pre–verbal place.”

…so the pain of the rejection is probably stored in some pre–verbal place. Somehow, somewhere in psyche, the unconscious, our bodies, all these rejected part of our selves, self -states, remain, continue on, waiting for the conditions conducive for them to re-enter our consciousness.

While we’re here, this pre-verbal place is also the realm of the sub-symbolic mode of experience, in contrast to the symbolic mode. Much more on that later as it informs our vulnerabilities to enactments.

As it is our fate, all starting out as infants, we will be overwhelmed at many points in life, and it is helpful to acknowledge and appreciate psyche’s life-saving super power of dissociation, or what we think of as the splitting off and encapsulation of unbearable, whole episodes of experience. It is as if dissociation functions to take the 110 voltage wired ego off-line in the face of 220-10,000 voltage traumatic physical and emotional episodes of overwhelm.

We can/will go on, but one more key concept for right now: recognizing the blur.

As in “healing only occurs within the blur.” When I first heard my psychoanalytical mentor reference this profound notion, at about age 41 for me, I immediately recognized how important it was to understanding the healing process. He went on to clarify that the blur state represented a betwixt and between state where in what was happening in the here and now, for real, was activating a remote time and space experience of something unfinished in our emotional life. Which is to say, our here and now experience is somehow infused, as if in a dream, with some emotionally charged unfinished business. This can be thought about as a co-created, dissociation enabled re-enactment of the wounding. The blur state refers to the peculiar experience of finding one’s self in this activated state.

Learning to recognizing this it-is-going-to-be-uncomfortable-state is key to begin having more choice in when to go there. Preparing to go there may be psyche’s first half of life task.

For a story like imaging of a number of important inter-related concepts, see my companion pages: Couple Experiential State Complex: Re-enactment of the Wounding and the Couple Experiential State Complex as Activated Threshold.

The key concept here is we all have lots of parts of ourselves that have become lost to us along the way, from birth to now. And our life’s work is re-integrate those split off parts. This requires building the capacity to hold what in earlier life was unbearable. This ultimately requires being able to consciously suffer the powerful affects evoked by unbearable traumatic experiences. Typically, this is the work of the midlife and second half of life. If one is called to this early, the challenge is to know how powerful it is and that psyche has your back. Think of it as a totally precocious midlife initiation. Because it is just that. It can be very helpful to begin to orient to Jung’s Ego-Self Axis Separation and Reunion frame.

In closing, here is an observation which suggests what we can try do to reconnect with our precious little lost selves: do your best to create/embrace opportunities to dance with your inner child:

“In healthy families, a baby forms a secure attachment with her parents as naturally as she breathes, eats, smiles, and cries. This occurs easily because of her parents’ attuned interactions with her. Her parents notice her physiological/affective states, and they respond to her sensitively and fully. Beyond simply meeting her unique needs, however, the parents “dance” with her. Hundreds of times, day after day, they dance with her. … There are other families where the baby neither dances nor even hears the sound of any music, in these families, she does not form such secure attachments. Rather, her task – her continuous ordeal – is to learn to live with parents who are little more than strangers. Babies who live with strangers do not live well or grow well.”

Be well and, borrowing from Joyce Vance,

We’re in this together,

chuck

Categories: Author, blur, Connecting the Dots Series, Individuation, Initiation, Learning to Think and Work Symbolically
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“For it is important that awake people be awake…”

April 4, 2020

These days, with most of us striving to keep up with best practices in containing and mitigating the pandemic, a powerful line from William Stafford’s poem A Ritual to Read to Each Other has been coming to mind:

“For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep…”

I’ve always appreciated this observation as a quite gentle reminder that human beings are always at risk for losing track of important realities. Just try not to touch your face.

I did ponder for about twenty years the meaning of the image of the breaking line. What could Stafford be talking about? I found myself settling on the idea perhaps it is as obvious as moving from a conscious state into a dissociative experience/enactment.

If you are not familiar with the poem, check it out. It is quite an orientation for all who talk.

Categories: blur, Conscious Enactment, Poems
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Co-Created, Dissociation Enabled Enactments

February 7, 2020

I am bringing the post below to the top of the posting page to refresh/review some of the key concepts:

I’ve been working on integrating Philip Bromberg’s psychoanalytic based theory and practice into my symbol system, the heart of which is captured in the observation: healing only occurs within the blur.

To the extent this is true, we want to prepare ourselves to take advantage of emotional activations, as they signal opportunities for spontaneous healing entering or erupting into the everyday space. In my Couple Experiential State Complex as Activated Threshold post I make the case getting triggered pulls us, in the here and now, into an altered and altering state. Our shared blur experience, enabled by our co-created, dissociative defenses, facilitates a re-enactment of a wounding. We want to wake up in this moment together, and see if we can identify the elements of the self/other original experiential state scenes which are behind us getting triggered. Recall as long as they remain split off from and not fully inventoried by consciousness, these highly charged episodic memory based scenes are not diminished by time and space. These wounds of overwhelm experiences inform our invariant organizing principles and are stored in psyche’s black box so to speak, in their image and affect formats.

From the Bromberg/Bucci teachings, we want to begin to identify our ways of being. It seems the essential try on here is to be on the look out for enactments: emotional states and actions which, when examined, can be seen as manifestations of the subsymbolic mode of being. The critical point of this detail is what is stored in our bodies, split off from consciousness with the help of encapsulation defenses, can only find it’s way back into consciousness via unconscious, compulsive, emotionally laden actions. Such actions, however habitual and familiar to both parties, reflect, in the words of Alice Miller, our bodies presenting their bill: “The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Out intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, our perceptions confused, and our bodies tricked with medication. But some day the body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.” Note this is a different sound bite on Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score offering.

Enactments are typically organized at the level of body experience and make their presence known affectively. These are actions which are not entirely conscious at best; when observed and noted over time, one can see the core emotional patterns. For me, these are the experiential state complexes driving our co-created, dissociation enabled blur experiences. My image for this sphere of engagement is:

Co-created Tangle of Complexes: Yours and Mine

I believe Bomberg is clear about our need to engage with the subsymbolic mode, as the way to help bring it’s teachings, needs, into the symbolic mode, enabling conscious connection and reflection; finding words together for those experiences for which we had no words.

The concept of blur states recognizes our natural tendencies to want to put our best foot forward. It’s just that something gets triggered, putting us on a slippery slope, and we’re left with figuring out what just happened, is happening.

Jung used the concept of participation mystique to describe those experiences in a relationship experience reflecting a mutual level of unconsciousness.

For more on what psyche may be hoping to accomplish through blur enactments, see Observation: Healing Only Occurs within the Blur.

Categories: Author, blur, Complexes and More, Connecting the Dots Series, Conscious Enactment, Learning to Think and Work Symbolically, Uncategorized
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Enactments: Setting the table…together

January 11, 2020

In the post below, Enactments: Problem AND Solution? I brought forward some of Philip Bromberg’s observations on the meaning and role of enactments in work with trauma survivors. My Setting the table…together title is shorthand for the importance of our efforts to get our own enactment experiences out on the table, in a manner that is useful to the patient. When a rupture occurs, how we struggle together with the hidden meaning (recognizing the subsymbolic mode of being for the gift that it is, and working directly too bring it into the symbolic mode through our shared discovery process) is the work; yours and mine. When something disrupts/disallows our working this rupture/enactment through together, we will be unsettled as hell. How about them apples!

A part of this that I find so helpful, and so resonant with my interest in the meaning and implication/application of healing only occurs in the blur, is the emphasis on focusing on the emergence, via enactments, of the subsymbolic world.

Again and again Bromberg brings us back to the idea of one dissociative process conditions for another; the work is in our engagement with what shows up, palpably, in co-created dissociative enactments. For this to be fruitful, he suggests:

“During the analytic process, a main part of the analyst’s job is to find words to get his own experience of enacted communication out on the table in a manner that facilitates the patient’s ability to do the same….”

Furthermore, citing Levenson, Bromberg illustrates “…how the analyst’s being pulled into an enactment is not a technical error but an inevitability. (and) … how working one’s way out of the mess of an enactment is a core ingredient of therapeutic action, and how neither patient nor analyst can free himself from the grip of a “mess” without the others help.”

Pause on that one: being pulled into an enactment is not a technical error but an inevitability. And: neither patient nor analyst can free himself from the grip of a “mess” without the others help.

Here we have direct support for privileging (my choice of words) the analyst’s efforts to find words for his/her/they own experience of enacted communication.

The idea of privileging the detail finding words to get his own experience of enacted communication out on the table is interesting from the legal sense of the word. It seems to point to an exemption. An exemption from best practices? We do take seriously our responsibility to maintain a conscious observing presence throughout our work with patients; at the same time, this direct support for acknowledging the presence of the subsymbolic layer, as manifested in tracking our enactments, yours and mine, seems to suggest having an active relationship with one’s own unconsciousness, in the service of meeting the patient in their subsymbolic experience, is a most critical component.

Given that, we could ask, would we be comfortable saying getting activated and submitting to a dissociation enabled co-created enactment is a component of best practice? The question is a bit of a puzzle. Perhaps the answer is: “by degrees.” If the therapist, or trainer, or organizational leader, or intimate partner, and so forth, slips into an intense moment of unconsciousness with an acting out component, for all who could see, to see, then what? My advocacy for thinking in blur terms conceptually, is the recognition the violation, as a betrayal of trust, is initiatory for the one on the receiving end of the enactment.

Recall I have suggested that in the absence of good enough ritual elders, traumas can be lived through, but remain essentially incomplete initiatory experiences. At some point, in the midlife or later, we need to open up this encapsulated, episodic memory centered trauma complex in order to re-integrate the split off material and thereby gain conscious wisdom in the ways of the world.

Importantly, perhaps more so if the originator of the wounding is in a leadership position, if the enactment is met with enough consciousness to help the originator get his own experience of enacted communication out on the table, this episode can be deeply initiatory for both/all participants. Given the relative primitiveness of these defenses, offending parties may not be able to use the resources available to surrender to the transformative opening, as John Perry observes in some happy moment. Clinically speaking, for the originator to resist direct participation in the working through is not a conscious choice. We bear witness, and contain the enactment as consciously as we can.

I prefer coding these episodes as re-enactments of the wounding in that the scene, when formulated into an experiential state image, points back to the entire relationship histories of both parties present in the action. That the trusted other presents not as her/they/his known self, but in a possessed state, can be shocking, stunning, deeply upsetting, infuriating, but, really, when I am triggered by anothers submitting to an enactment, pulling me in to add my fuel to the fire, I do want to look primarily at my vulnerability to being confused about what is really going on. This is what co-created means. If I can only focus on what the other did, in this real time moment, I will be stuck feeding the complex, and continue to suffer the re-traumatization of the wound that informed my trigger. Together we have reinforced enough intensity in the conflict between us to disallow either the opportunity to breathe and drop into the core. When one can see the core driving the enactment, one can begin to consider what type of conscious enactment, or portrayal, might enable a transformative shift.

Citing Levenson and Sullivan’s work, Bromberg suggests … “working in the moment with transference and counter-transference experience provides the most powerful context for therapeutic growth.”

“… The process of consensually finding the ‘right words,’ language that symbolizes a new shared reality, is the basis for the development of intersubjectivity where it did not exist... When patient and analyst can each access and openly share their dissociated experience that has been too dangerous to their relationship to be formulated cognitively, the process through which this takes place begins to enlarge the domain and fluency of the dialogue and leads to increasingly integrated and complex content that becomes symbolized linguistically and thus available to self-reflection and conflict resolution…”

“I thus argue that what has been labeled the analyst’s self revelation, if used as a negotiable element in the ongoing relationship, is not only permissible but also necessary: a part of the developmental process that Fonagy … calls mentalization, through which subsymbolic experience is allowed to become a part of the relational self rather than being interminably enacted. …”

“…the Boston group’s findings support the view that “process leads content, so that no particular content needs to be pursued; rather the enlarging of the domain and fluency of the dialogue is primary and will lead to increasingly integrated and complex content…”

On a side note, Christopher Bollas has written beautifully on the image of countertransference readiness. There are always two patients in the the consultation room: “… the other source of the analysand’s free association is the psychoanalyst’s countertransference, so much so that in order to find the patient we must look for him within ourselves. This process inevitably points to the fact that there are two ‘patients’ within the session and therefore two complementary sources of free association.”

These combination of observations, or what sound like core clinical truths, all point to the importance of finding a way to be present in the therapy in one’s own depth process, including what I am calling the blur.

Categories: Author, blur, Complexes and More, Connecting the Dots Series, Conscious Enactment, Learning to Think and Work Symbolically, Transference and Countertransference
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