[sittingatwatersedge]

from a recent post:
There is a feeling that deep down, I am a bad person who needs to hide my truest self. . .even though when I try to figure out why I am bad, I can't think of any reason. But it's just something that I feel. And I am afraid that if people really knew me, they would not like me. I'm afraid they only like the surface me.

here is the result of childhood abuse, acquired before the child could even talk.
No amount of reassurances, no amount of positive assertions from others or from oneself can make a dent in this most basic idea of self, which poisons all, in spite of all What is the antidote?

[Sannah]

Addressing the source and extinguishing it. Preverbal treatment continues on through out the childhood. I think the most common message that we get is that we do not have value. What helped me was to realize that I received this treatment because of my mom's issues not because I wasn't valuable.

[sittingatwatersedge]

Originally Posted by Sannah

Addressing the source and extinguishing it.

but how do you address the source? How do you extinguish it?

Have you read John Briere's work? Your question reminded me of an article of his that I read recently. He talks about preverbal assumptions, and if I recall, he talked about how those assumptions are hard to change. I believe his point was they were most effectively changed by showing (through new relationships), than by verbally telling. It might be worth looking at...

http://johnbriere.com/stm.htm

[sittingatwatersedge]

Originally Posted by notme9

Have you read John Briere's work? Your question reminded me of an article of his that I read recently. He talks about preverbal assumptions, and if I recall, he talked about how those assumptions are hard to change. I believe his point was they were most effectively changed by showing (through new relationships), than by verbally telling. It might be worth looking at...

http://johnbriere.com/stm.htm

yes thanks! I did read Briere's book, and also John Chu's ("Rebuilding Shattered Lives" - both excellent). They seem to think that through transference experience, the preverbal "knowledge" can be refuted - but if it's true that transference only occurs early in a therapeutic relationship, if this "knowledge" isn't refuted then, what else is there? I don't think I have transference for my T (both females).

[imapatient]

Originally Posted by sittingatwatersedge

but if it's true that transference only occurs early in a therapeutic relationship, if this "knowledge" isn't refuted then, what else is there? I don't think I have transference for my T (both females).

Transference occurs with all relationships. It just means that the way one thinks or behaves when relating to others is influenced by past relationships such that people aren't necessarily dealing with other people in ways that are strictly related to their present circumstances, their actual relationship with that other person. It isn’t just related to curiosity about a T’s personal life, sexual issues, desire to have a regular relationship with, etc.

My T recently described it to me this way: There are primary objects and secondary objects in our lives. The main primary objects are our parents (but not only them). Transference occurs when the way we relate to a secondary object is (partially) shaped by the experiences we've had with primary relationships, i.e. we play out conflicts and other issues with a primary object with a secondary object. He described those primary object issues as being a "fuel" for playing out those issues with secondary objects. Therefore, we can overreact (or underact)--or whatever else--in responding to a present situation because it's being hypercharged by the primary object experience. A man who had major problems with his mother might have a particular pattern of counter-productive attitudes and behavior relating to women in general in ways related to the issues with his mother.

You have transference with your T, you just don't recognize it yet. The reason that relations with a T to address primary object issues can be superior to those involving other secondary objects/people is that the underlying issues are explicitly and deliberately addressed with the T—that’s the whole point of being there and the T is supposed to be “objective.” You don't usually talk about your underlying and unresolved issues with your parents with most regular people in your life, e.g. acquaintances, dentists, waiters, Target cashiers, because it is awkward, a boundaries issue, and because those other people aren’t usually interested in hearing about your issues with your parents let alone wanting to dwell on them and try to work them through with you.

[ECHOES]

There is a feeling that deep down, I am a bad person who needs to hide my truest self. . .even though when I try to figure out why I am bad, I can't think of any reason. But it's just something that I feel. And I am afraid that if people really knew me, they would not like me. I'm afraid they only like the surface me.

This could reflect a lot of things. One thing T and I talk about is anxious attachment and the insecurity that leaves behind.

I have periods of silence that aren't censoring that she refers to as preverbal. It's like I have feelings and ideas there somewhere but completely out of reach and there are no words for them. It's really hard to be in that state, but comforting to be there with T because she understands and accepts.

[sunrise]

Originally Posted by sittingatwatersedge

No amount of reassurances, no amount of positive assertions from others or from oneself can make a dent in this most basic idea of self, which poisons all, in spite of all

Ummmm, who says? I think that's a very dark view. Does your therapist share your vision? I would be worried to be with someone with so little hope. The truth is, if we see "well-adjusted" people who do not seem to suffer the effects of pre-verbal trauma, we do not even think to look into their past, so we miss all these people from our "scorecard" who had pre-verbal trauma but turned out fine. In my second session with my T (it shocks me a bit now to think we did this work so early), we went back to my pre-verbal state (i.e. infancy) during EMDR and did some healing. I don't feel that my most basic sense of self was poisoned, so this isn't a universal response. We did other early life work on other occasions during ego state therapy. The latter is really empowering, because it teaches the executive self to go back and help the traumatized younger selves, to rescue and care for them.

Anyway, I think there are a lot of things in life, both in and out of therapy, that can be healing to pre-verbal trauma. I'm not saying it's easy, or even possible for everyone--a lot seems to be chance on what comes later in your life, but it is not so overwhelmingly dark for all as you suggest. Different experiences and techniques can help different people. Are you going in a direction in therapy that you think will help? If not, follow your gut.

Originally Posted by sittingatwatersedge

if it's true that transference only occurs early in a therapeutic relationship

I haven't heard that before. Can you say more? When is it supposed to occur in therapy? Within the first month? If it occurs later, it is not considered transference?

I don't think I have transference for my T (both females).

If you believe transference is essential to your healing and you don't believe you can have it with females, then you could try a male therapist and see how it goes.

Keep the faith. Healing is out there.

[Hunny]

What is the antidote?[/QUOTE]

I like to think of it as, less warlike and more of a, coming alongside the preverbal, but a branch of EMDR that has worked quite well and is more gentle (as usually does not cause a client to go immediately into fetal position) is OEI, Cook/ Bradshaw

http://oneeyeintegration.com/contactus.htm

I mention these T's because they have used some creative methods around transference. Studies with rape victims and work with First Nations child abuse has been part of their work.

Hope this sheds some new light

Hope

[sittingatwatersedge]

Originally Posted by sunrise

I think that's a very dark view. Does your therapist share your vision? I would be worried to be with someone with so little hope.

don't worry, I'm not violent.

[Sannah]

Originally Posted by sittingatwatersedge

but how do you address the source? How do you extinguish it?

Figure out what caused your issues and then examine and understand it. I have done this with every one of the issues that I worked through. We all didn't have optimum development while we were growing up. What went wrong? This is what is causing the issues now. If you have the belief that you are bad now, this idea came from your reactions to your experiences/environment while you were growing up. It can be understood and worked through. I hope this makes sense.........

[Simcha]

Originally Posted by sittingatwatersedge

but how do you address the source? How do you extinguish it?

Haven't you addressed this somewhat with your T yet?
Talking about it with an enlightened, educated "witness" is the greatest key to overcoming it. Therapists are great for that role.

Yes, it can be overcome. Talking is the only way though.

From Alice Miller, PhD.:
The Essential Role of an Enlightened Witness in Society

By Alice Miller, Ph. D.

Since adolescence I have always wondered why people take pleasure in humiliating others. Clearly the fact that some people are sensitive to the suffering of others proves that the destructive urge is not a universal aspect of human nature. So why do some tend to solve their problems by violence while others don't?

Philosophy failed to answer my question, and the Freudian theory of the death wish has never convinced me. It was only by closely examining the childhood histories of murderers, especially mass murderers, that I began to comprehend the roots of good and evil: not in the genes, as commonly believed, but often in the earliest days of life. Today, it is inconceivable to me that a child who comes into the world among attentive, loving and protective parents could become a predatory monster. And in the childhood of the murderers who later became dictators, I have always found a nightmarish horror, a record of continual lies and humiliation, which upon the attainment of adulthood, impelled them to acts of merciless revenge on society. These vengeful acts were always garbed in hypocritical ideologies, purporting that the dictator's exclusive and overriding wish was the happiness of his people. In this way, he unconsciously emulated his own parents who, in earlier days, had also insisted that their blows were inflicted on the child for his own good. This belief was extremely widespread a century ago, particularly in Germany.
I found it logical that a child beaten often would quickly pick up the language of violence. For him, this language became the only effective means of communication available. Yet what I found to be logical was apparently not so to most people.

When I began to illustrate my thesis by drawing on the examples of Hitler and Stalin, when I tried to expose the social consequences of child abuse, I encountered fierce resistance. Repeatedly I was told, "I, too, was a battered child, but that didn't make me a criminal." When I asked for details about their childhood, I was always told of a person who loved them, but was unable to protect them. Yet through his or her presence, this person gave them a notion of trust, and of love.

I call these persons helping witnesses. Dostoyevsky, for instance, had a brutal father, but a loving mother. She wasn't strong enough to protect him from his father, but she gave him a powerful conception of love, without which his novels would have been unimaginable. Many have also been lucky enough to find later both enlightened and courageous witnesses, people who helped them to recognize the injustices they suffered, to give vent to their feelings of rage, pain and indignation at what happened to them. People who found such witnesses never became criminals.
Anyone addressing the problem of child abuse is likely to be faced with a very strange finding: it has frequently been observed that parents who abuse their children tend to mistreat and neglect them in ways resembling their own treatment as children, without any conscious memory of their own experiences. It is well known that fathers who bully their children through sexual abuse are usually unaware that they had themselves suffered the same abuse. It is mostly in therapy, even if ordered by the courts, that they discover, stupefied, their own history, and realize thereby that for years they have attempted to act out their own scenario, just to get rid of it.

How can this be explained? After studying the matter for years, it seems clear to me that information about abuse inflicted during childhood is recorded in our body cells as a sort of memory, linked to repressed anxiety. If, lacking the aid of an enlightened witness, these memories fail to break through to consciousness, they often compel the person to violent acts that reproduce the abuse suffered in childhood, which was repressed in order to survive. The aim is to avoid the fear of powerlessness before a cruel adult. This fear can be eluded momentarily by creating situations in which one plays the active role, the role of the powerful, towards a powerless person.

But this is not an easy path to rid oneself of unconscious fears. And this is why the offence is ceaselessly repeated. A steady stream of new victims must be found, as recently demonstrated by the paedophile scandals in Belgium. To his dying day, Hitler was convinced that only the death of every single Jew could shield him from the fearful and daily memory of his brutal father. Since his father was half Jewish, the whole Jewish people had to be exterminated. I know how easy it is to dismiss this interpretation of the Holocaust, but I honestly haven't yet found a better one. Besides, the case of Hitler shows that hatred and fear cannot be resolved through power, even absolute power, as long as the hatred is transferred to scapegoats. On the contrary, if the true cause of the hatred is identified, is experienced with the feelings that accompany this recognition, blind hatred of innocent victims can be dispelled. Sex criminals stop their depredations if they manage to overcome their amnesia and mourn their tragic fate, thanks to the empathy of an enlightened witness. Old wounds can be healed if exposed to the light of day. But they cannot be repudiated by revenge.

A Japanese crew shot a film of therapeutic work in a prison in Arizona, where the method was based, inter alia, on my books. I was sent the video cassette and found the results very revealing. The inmates worked in groups, talked a lot about their childhood, and some of them said, "I've been all over the place, and killed innocent people to avoid the feelings I have today. But I know that I can bear these feelings in the group, where I feel safe. I no longer need to run around and kill, I'm at home here, and I recognize what happened. The past recedes, and my anger along with it."
For this process to succeed, the adult who has grown up without helping witnesses in his childhood needs the support of enlightened witnesses, people who have understood and recognized the consequences of child abuse. In an informed society, adolescents can learn to verbalize their truth and to discover themselves in their own story. They will not need to avenge themselves violently for their wounds, or to poison their systems with drugs, if they have the luck to talk to others about their early experiences, and succeed in grasping the naked truth of their own tragedy. To do this, they need assistance from persons aware of the dynamics of child abuse, who can help them address their feelings seriously, understand them and integrate them, as part of their own story, instead of avenging themselves on the innocent.

I have wrongly been attributed the thesis according to which every victim inevitably becomes a persecutor, a thesis that I find totally false, indeed absurd. It has been proved that many adults have had the good fortune to break the cycle of abuse through knowledge of their past. Yet I can certainly aver that I have never come across persecutors who weren't victims in their childhood, though most of them don't know it because their feelings are repressed. The less these criminals know about themselves, the more dangerous they are to society. So I think it is crucial for the therapist to grasp the difference between the statement, "every victim ultimately becomes a persecutor," which is false, and "every persecutor was a victim in his childhood," which I consider true. The problem is that, feeling nothing, he remembers nothing, realizes nothing, and this is why surveys don't always reveal the truth. Yet the presence of a warm, enlightened witness - therapist, social aid worker, lawyer, judge - can help the criminal unlock his repressed feelings and restore the unrestricted flow of consciousness. This can initiate the process of escape from the vicious circle of amnesia and violence.
—Alice Miller, 1997

[sittingatwatersedge]

Originally Posted by Simcha

Haven't you addressed this somewhat with your T yet?

no, I guess I'm just lame.

After I started T I heard from my older sister that there was a lot of violence & many kinds of abuse going on in our house until I was about 4 or 5. But since I have no memories except one (won't mention it for potential triggering) how can T and I "explore" them. that's the thing - if it happened before you had words to record it with - pre-verbally - you can't tell the story. And telling the story, as I am learning, is essential to treatment of trauma.

BTW thanks very much for the link to the Alice Miller site, there is a lot of good reading there.

[Simcha]

Originally Posted by sittingatwatersedge

no, I guess I'm just lame.

After I started T I heard from my older sister that there was a lot of violence & many kinds of abuse going on in our house until I was about 4 or 5. But since I have no memories except one (won't mention it for potential triggering) how can T and I "explore" them. that's the thing - if it happened before you had words to record it with - pre-verbally - you can't tell the story. And telling the story, as I am learning, is essential to treatment of trauma.

BTW thanks very much for the link to the Alice Miller site, there is a lot of good reading there.

Your welcome for the Alice Miller stuff. It's REALLY a good website. I know it made me feel a hell of a lot more sane when I read some of her books (she's a German speaker but they've been translated into English; that's why she isn't as well known in English speaking countries--German language speaker only).

Why would you be lame? Your not. I was just probing you to see if you had discussed anything like this with your T yet because I suspected you hadn't but I wanted to make sure.

You do have some memories, and that's where you begin. You start on the edges and work your way in. NEVER go too fast. Now that you are old enough, you can start to match feelings from your pre-verbal stage with your pre-verbal experiences.

In my case, and I suspect a lot of others who were abused too---my abusers (and those complicit in covering it up and turning a blind eye--grr) would mix the bad in with the good. They'd do something good for me and then turn right around and become abusive. That makes memories from childhood years sometimes difficult as they are muddled.

Do you like your T? Is he/she trustworthy so far?

[Simcha]

Originally Posted by sittingatwatersedge

no, I guess I'm just lame.

After I started T I heard from my older sister that there was a lot of violence & many kinds of abuse going on in our house until I was about 4 or 5. But since I have no memories except one (won't mention it for potential triggering) how can T and I "explore" them. that's the thing - if it happened before you had words to record it with - pre-verbally - you can't tell the story. And telling the story, as I am learning, is essential to treatment of trauma.

BTW thanks very much for the link to the Alice Miller site, there is a lot of good reading there.

I forgot to say that Alice Miller herself expresses a lot of her feelings in her paintings and artwork. That's one place you can start too, even if you can only draw stick figures!

It's worth noting that language is not the only way to express things. In therapy with children who do not yet have a vocabulary, therapy takes the form of play, art, and music. Something to think about...

PS: It is the silence around the abuse that not only allows it to perpetuate, but also to fester in the minds, hearts, and lives of those who were abused... there is a great deal of shame around abuse still in our society; if shame was dealt with properly I suspect we would find a great deal many more people were abused than originally thought.

Do not feel defective over things you had no choice over! You are not alone!

[sittingatwatersedge]

Dear Simcha, you are very kind. sorry I snapped at you.

[Simcha]

Originally Posted by sittingatwatersedge

Dear Simcha, you are very kind. sorry I snapped at you.

I didn't see it that you snapped at me but free hugs are always great to have!