Ken Benau, Ph.D.
author bio at end of article.
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A session with “Lara”, a woman in her mid-50s who was a survivor of relational trauma (Schore, 2003), showed me several things about working with somatic memories, the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and shame. Relational trauma typically refers to trauma that develops in relationship between at least two people. Relational trauma often begins in childhood, where the child’s mind/body is repeatedly overwhelmed (as in abuse) and/or underwhelmed (as in neglect) by an adult, often a caregiver, and/or another person more powerful than the child.
By most standards, Lara experienced no childhood neglect. Yet, she lived with the embodied effects of being raised by a father who overworked in a desperate but failed attempt to please others and feel loved, and who expected Lara to do the same. Lara’s father grew up with a younger brother who was treated as the special one by their father. Lara’s father was never appreciated nor valued by his father, no matter how hard he tried. Unlike Lara’s father with whom she was closest, Lara’s mother was not very involved with nor emotionally present in the day-to-day life of her family.
Lara’s relational trauma, then, held the somatic and emotional memories of her parents’ chronic non-attunement and subtle but repeated invalidation of her as a person. Like her father, Lara was gripped by an abiding belief, at first outside her conscious awareness, that she was never good enough and had little value outside of what she could do for others. In my view, “never good enough” and “of little value” are invariably shorthand for “shame”.
Lara believed that if she didn’t fulfill her husband’s and sons’ expectations, she would be “out”, forever losing their acceptance and love. Lara’s overwork, lack of physical self-care and shame were all driven by an implicit belief that being loved was always contingent upon “what she did” rather than “who she was”. Following a Coherence Therapy and memory reconsolidation approach (Ecker et al, 2012), Lara’s implicit and later explicitly articulated belief was, in effect, “Deep down I’m not loveable enough to keep the ones I love, yet I must work desperately to hold onto what little I do have.” Lara’s belief was almost identical to her father’s belief, and therefore reflected the intergenerational transmission of relational trauma. While Lara and I had worked with these emotional and relational themes many times, they remained a virulent component of her intrapersonal and interpersonal landscape.
At the time of this session, Lara and I had met in mostly weekly psychotherapy for several years. Most recently, Lara and I had been focusing on the ways in which she felt chronically corrected and controlled by family members, primarily when Lara didn’t take care of herself physically. While Lara knew the “controlling” behavior of her husband and sons expressed their love for Lara, she still felt chronically anxious and on guard with, shamed by, and defensively angry with her family.
In this session, I mostly followed a somatically-informed, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy type approach (Ogden et al, 2006), coupled with a Coherence Therapy way of thinking (Ecker et al, 2012). After identifying the belief Lara held in response to being corrected by her family, I asked her to notice where in her body she held the belief, “I must do everything my family expects of me, yet I will never be able to satisfy them and will end up losing them and be all alone.” Together we discovered that Lara held intense anxiety in her gut, that she described as “a ball of energy and light”, “all twisted” and “moving like snakes in a tight bucket”.
Given our previous work, Lara readily connected her present-day somatic experience with her relationship with her father. Lara, now as an adult, and along with her father when Lara was a teen, both lived as though they had to compulsively DO things for loved ones or else be exposed as “having no value”, “irrelevant” and intrinsically “unlovable”. I viewed Lara’s belief that she had “no value” as indicative of a traumatically triggered, chronic, mind/body shame state, much like a flashback, as contrasted with acute shame that is a transient, emotional process (Benau, 2017; Herman, 2007; 2006). Most people think of shame as “an emotion” that comes and goes. However, the shame Lara and I were working with marked the recurrent, painful sequela of relational trauma that would persist until processed therapeutically.
I next suggested to Lara, and she readily agreed, that her “bucket” was part of the intergenerational transmission of trauma passed down from her father. Lara was left with an originally implicit and now explicit belief, as follows: “I have no value and will remain unlovable if I don't keep doing, doing, doing. And yet, my doing makes my family members worry about me dying, so they constantly tell me what to do and not do. This leaves me feeling judged and shamed, once again.” As regards Lara’s family fearing her overwork could kill her, Lara had had a very serious but short-lived illness several years prior. Lara’s health crisis was mostly stress-related, the result of overworking and not caring for her physical well-being.
With my gentle direction and using a familiar hypnotic technique, Lara was able to visually imagine and project outside of her the “bucket of energy” that held the somatic, energetic and emotional residues of intergenerationally transmitted trauma. As in Gestalt Therapy two-chair work (1969/1992), and consistent with a parts work approach such as Internal Family Systems (Schwartz, 1995), I next invited Lara to converse with her “trauma”, that is her bucket-filled ball of energy, and to ask any questions she had while also listening to any answers from her bucket. Lara began her dialogue with a question, “Why did you choose me?”. After a few rounds of the bucket insisting it was trying to prevent Lara from being unloved, Lara remarked with calm conviction, “I don't need you any more”. As Lara began to turn away from the bucket and its ball of energy, she told me the bucket energy “felt sad”. Lara believed she was “turning away” from her father and withdrawing her love from him, rather than the reverse. Lara’s belief that caring for herself meant harming her father is a common consequence of relational trauma, where the locus of control shifts from what was done to Lara to what she believed she was doing to her father.
By helping Lara give voice to her grief, she was gradually able to differentiate the father who taught her to DO, DO, DO, reflecting his reaction to being treated as having no intrinsic value, from the father Lara remembered as “lovely”. As Lara differentiated these two contrasting aspects of her father, the one she could never please from the one she experienced as “lovely” just by being himself, I soon realized Lara needed to feel more connected with her “lovely father”.
By now it was clear to both of us that Lara, along with her father, felt they had to keep DOING, even if it killed them. In fact, Lara’s father had died of overwork and a broken heart after his wife, Lara’s mother, left him for another man. While thinking of Rene Spitz’s (1946) work with orphaned children who were fed and clothed but not loved, I told Lara that all humans die, literally or psychologically, when left unbearably alone. Lara understood this immediately. I then asked Lara to imagine bringing her “lovely father” next to her and, after she did, to speak to her “bucket of energy”. I intuited that if Lara and her “lovely father” were emotionally and metaphorically “side by side” that they, that is present-day Lara and her internalized, “lovely father”, might discover a new relationship with their shared relational traumas. After imagining standing next to her “lovely father”, I asked Lara to state her new, emotional and relational truth, as contrasted with what she believed at the start of our session. Lara remarked, “I've got you Dad. I'm here for you. And I know you've got me. You're here for me. We don't need that bucket anymore. We both have value just the way we are.”
As we came to the close of our session, I borrowed from a therapeutic approach called The Comprehensive Resource Model (CRM), that works with parts of self and the intrapersonal effects of relational trauma (Schwarz et al, 2017). I asked Lara to thank her father for showing up, and to find a safe place to keep him in her body. Lara chose her heart and, when asked how that felt in her body, she said she felt “warm” in her heart. Still employing the CRM approach and consistent with Brainspotting (Grand, 2013), I asked Lara to find an eye position that corresponded to the strongest feeling in her body that reflected her connection with her father and her new truth, as italicized above. Lara’s eye position was used to somatically anchor and strengthen her new emotional, intra-relational and inter-relational truth. Having used this approach before, Lara quickly located her eye position. I then suggested that between now and our next session, Lara return to her eye position to access her connection with her “lovely father” and her new truth. This eye position would also help Lara quickly find a new, experiential portal to her loving and being loved, should her gut tension and its attendant meaning return, that is “I must DO, DO, DO or I will be of no value to my family”.
Closing
This session was informed by a memory reconsolidation (MR) perspective (Ecker et al, 2012), that led Lara to an experiential juxtaposition of her old and harmful set of beliefs, with a new and transformative, somatic and emotional/relational reality, that included Lara with her father (self with other) and Lara with herself (self with self). I was particularly intrigued by the somatic manifestations of the intergenerational transmission of trauma; its relationship with chronic, traumatic shame states (Benau, 2017; Herman, 2007; 2006), as evidenced by Lara and her father believing they had no intrinsic value; and ways of working with these beliefs somatically, from a MR perspective. I hope the reader will consider my integration of different ways of working experientially with relational trauma, as an invitation to discover approaches that work best for you.
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References
Benau, K. (2017). Shame, Attachment, and Psychotherapy: Phenomenology, Neuro- physiology, Relational Trauma, and Harbingers of Healing. Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis, 11(1), 1–27.
Ecker, B., Ticic, R., & Hulley, L. (2012). Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation. New York: Routledge.
Grand, D. (2013). Brainspotting: The Revolutionary New Therapy for Rapid and Effective Change. Boulder, Colorado: Sounds True.
Herman, J. L. (2006). PTSD as a Shame Disorder. Somerville, MA: Harvard Medical School.
Herman, J. L. (2007). Shattered Shame States and Their Repair. Somerville, MA: Harvard Medical School.
Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy. New York: Norton.
Perls, F.S. (1969/1992). Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. Gouldsboro, Maine: The Gestalt Journal Press.
Schore, A. N. (2003). The effects of relational trauma on right brain development, affect regulation, and infant mental health. Infant Mental Health Journal, 22, 201–269.
Schwartz, R. C. (1995). Internal Family Systems Therapy. New York: Guilford Press.
Schwarz, L., Corrigan, F., Hull, A., & Raju, R. (2017). The Comprehensive Resource Model: Effective Therapeutic Techniques for the Healing of Complex Trauma. New York: Routledge.
Spitz, R. (1946). Hospitalism: A Follow-up Report on Investigation Described in Volume I, 1945. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 2(1), 113-117.
Ken Benau, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist with an independent practice in psychotherapy and consultation in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dr. Benau works with children, adolescents and adults in individual, couple and family therapy. Dr. Benau has expertise in working with individuals who have experienced complex trauma, depression, anxiety, ADHD, learning differences and those on the Autism spectrum. Dr. Benau has a special interest in working with shame and pride in psychotherapy with survivors of relational trauma. He has published several peer reviewed articles on that topic, and is writing a book with the same focus.