the Uncovery Phase. What it involves is making contact with the hurt and lonely inner child who was abandoned long ago. This child is that part of us that houses our blocked emotional energy. This energy is especially blocked when we have experienced severe abuse. In order to reconnect
What does leaving home involve? How do we do it?
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with the wounded and hurt child, we have to go back and re-experience the emotions that were blocked.
When we form emotional energy blocks, they seriously affect our ability to think and reason. Our mind is nanowed in its range of vision. We are contaminated in our judgment, perception and ability to reason about the concrete personal events in our life. (Such emotional blockage does not j seem to impair abstract or speculative modes of thought.)
Once our practical judgment is shut down, the will, which is the executor of our personality, loses its ability to see alternatives, and is no longer grounded in reality. The emotionally shut-down person literally is filled with will, i.e., becomes will-full. Willfulness is characterized by grandiosity and unbridled attempts to control, and is the ultimate disaster caused by toxic shame. Willfulness is playing God; it's the self-will run riot refened to in 12-Step programs.
The only way to get our brains out of hock and cure our compulsivity is to go back and re-experience the emotions. The blocked emotions must be re-experienced as they first occurred. The unmet and unresolved dependency needs must be re-educated with new lessons and conective experiences.
Our lost childhood must be grieved. Our compulsivities are the result of those old blocked feelings (our unresolved grief) being acted out over and over again. We either work these feelings out by re-experiencing them, or we act them out in our compulsivities. We can also act them in as in depression or suicide, or project them onto others as in the interpersonal strategies for transfening shame.
We must leave home and become our own person in order to cure our compulsivities. Even though I was in recovery, I had never left home. I had never uncovered the sources and set-up for my toxic shame. I had never done the "original pain" feeling work. I had never dealt with my family of origin. Original Pain Feeling Work
Any shame-based person has been in a family of trauma Children of trauma experience too much stimulus within a short period of time to be able to adequately master that stimulus. All the forms of the abandonment trauma stimulate grief emotions in children and then simultaneously block their release.
I watched a man and his young daughter in the airport recently. I was getting a haircut and he was sitting two chairs down. He constantly scolded the child, and at one point angrily told her that she was a lot of trouble, just like her mother. I assumed he was separated or divorced. As he walked out, he slapped her a couple of times. It was really painful to watch. As the child cried, he slapped her again. Then he dragged her into the ice cream parlor
and bought her ice cream to shut her up. This child is learning at a very early age that she's not wanted, that it's all her fault, that she's not a person, that her feelings don't count and that she's responsible for other people's feelings. I can't imagine where she could find an ally who would sit do" with her and validate her sadness and allow her to grieve.
In a healthy respectful family a child's feelings are validated. Trauma is bound to happen somewhere along the way in any normal childhood.
As Alice Miller has repeatedly written, "It is not the traumas we suffer in childhood which make us emotionally ill but the inability to express the trauma."
When a child is abandoned through neglect, abuse or enmeshment, there is outrage over the hurt and pain. Children need their pain validated. They need to be shown how to discharge their feelings. They need time to do the discharge work and they need support. Each abandoned child would not become shame-based if there was a nourishing ally who could validate his pain and give him time to resolve it by doing his grief work
I think of a healthy family I know in which the father was severely injured in a home accident. The six-year-old son was playing outside when he heard an explosion. He was shocked to find his father bleeding and apparently crippled. The father directed him to call an ambulance. A neighbor kept him until his mother returned from work The boy was in a state of shock The mother took him to a child play-therapist. He was afraid to go into the basement of the house (where the heater was). He was angry with his mother for not being home and his father for going away (being taken to the hospital).
Over the next months the boy worked his feelings out in the context of symbolic play. His mom and dad were both happy that he was able to express his anger toward them. (Shame-based parents would have guilted him for expressing anger.) They gave him support as he worked through his fears of going into the basement where the new heater was. They shared their own feelings with the child.
In order for grief to be resolved several factors must be present. The first factor is validation. Our childhood abandonment trauma must be validated as real or it cannot be resolved. Perhaps the most damaging consequence of being shame based is that we don't know how depressed and angry we really are. We don't actually feeloxa unresolved grief. Our false self and ego defenses keep us from experiencing it. Paradoxically, the very defenses which allowed us to survive our childhood trauma have now become barriers to our growth. Fritz Perls once said, "Nothing changes 'til it becomes what it is." We must uncover our frozen grief.
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I remember my paternal grandmother ridiculing me because I was in hysterics over my dad going out to get drunk. He had just had a fight with my mom and left the house in anger, vowing to get drunk. I began to cry and was soon out of control. I was ridiculed and shamed by this grandmother. I was told that I was a "big sissy" and to get hold of myself. I've never forgotten this experience. Years later I still canied the unresolved grief.
SUPPORT
The greatest tragedy of all of this is that we know grief can naturally be healed if we have support. Jane Middelton-Moz has said, "One of the things we know about grief resolution is that grief is one of the only problems in the world that will heal itself with support." (For a clear and concise discussion of unresolved grief read After the Tears by Jane Middelton-Moz and Lorie Dwinell.)
The reason people go into delayed grief is that there's nobody there to validate and support them. You cannot grieve alone. Millions of us adult children tried it. We went to sleep crying into our pillows or locked in the bathroom.
Delayed grief is the core of what is called the posttraumatic stress syndrome. As soldiers come back from the war, they have common symptoms of unreality: panic, being numbed-out psychically, easily startled, depersonalization, needing to control, nightmares and sleeping disorders. These same symptoms are common for children from dysfunctional families. They are the symptoms of unresolved grief.
"GRIEF WORK" FEELINGS
After validation and support one needs to experience the feelings that were not allowed. This must be done in a safe non-shaming context. The feelings involved in "grief work" are anger, remorse, hurt, depression, sadness and loneliness. Grief resolution is a kind of "psychic work" that has to be done. It varies in duration depending upon the intensity of the trauma. One needs enough time to finish this work. In dysfunctional families, there is never enough time.
At our Center for Recovering Families in Houston we do a four-and-one- half-day "original pain" workshop. We use the family system roles as a way for people to see how they lost their authentic selves and got stuck in a false self. As a person experiences how he got soul murdered, he begins his grieving. Often the therapist facilitator has to help him embrace the feelings because they are bound in shame. As a person connects with his true and
authentic feelings, the shame is reduced. This work continues after the workshop. It may go on for a couple of years.
There are many other methods for doing this original pain work. It must be done if the grief is to be resolved and the re-enactments and compulsive lifestyle stopped.
Corrective Experience
The unresolved grief work is a re-experiencing process, liberating and integrating your lost inner child.
Since the neglect of our developmental dependency needs was a major source of toxic shame, it is important to reconnect. Each developmental stage was unique with its own special needs and dynamics. In infancy we needed a mirroring of unconditional love. We needed to hear words (nonverbal to an infant) like "I'm so glad you're here. Welcome to the world. Welcome to our family and home. I'm so glad you're a boy or girl. I want to be near you, to hold you and love you. Your needs are okay with me. I'll give you all the time you need to get your needs met." These affirmations are adapted from Pam Levin's book Cycles OjPower, soon to be published by Health Communications.
I like to set up small groups (six to eight people) and let one person sit in the center of the group. The person in the center directs the rest of the group as to how close he wants them to be. Some people want to be cradled and held. Some want only light touching. Some who were stroke-deprived don't feel safe enough for such closeness. Each person sets his own boundary.
After the group is set, we play lullaby music and each person in the group communicates one of the verbal affirmations while touching, stroking or just sitting near the subject.
Those who have been neglected will start sobbing when they hear the words they needed to hear, but did not hear. If a person was a Lost Child, he will often sob intensely. These words touch the hole in his soul.
After the affirmation the group discusses their experience. I always try to have a mixed group so that a person hears male and female voices. Often a person will report that he especially loved hearing the male voice or the female voice, since he never heard it as a child. Sometimes if a person has been abused by a parent, he will not trust the voice that corresponds to that parent's sex. The group sharing, hearing the affirmations, being touched and supported, offers a corrective kind of experience.
I also suggest other ways people mighf get their infancy needs met as those needs are recycled in new experiences. They usually need a friend who will give them physical support (lots of touching), and who will feed
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them (take them out to eat). They need lots of skin satisfaction. They may need a nice warm bath, or wrap up in a blanket. They may want to try a body massage.
We go on to toddler needs, repeating the group process. Since the toddler needs to separate, we let the person sit near but separate from everyone. I usually do an age-regression type meditation, in which I ask the one in the middle to experience himself as a toddler. I give affirmations like, "It's okay to wander and explore. It's okay to leave me and separate. I won't leave you. It's okay to test your limits. It's okay to be angry, to have a tantrum, to say no. It's okay for you to do it and to do it your way. I'll be here.'You don't have to hurry. I'll give you all the time you need. It's okay to practice holding on and letting go. I won't leave you."
Again the group shares after each person has heard these affirmations several times. Frequently people express deep emotions as they share. Often they remember an episode of abandonment that was long forgotten. Some get into more unresolved grief-work.
We go through all the developmental stages through adolescence. Adolescence is important because many people went through painful abandonment and shaming incidents during adolescence. Remember! Arnold?
I usually ask each person to write a letter to his parent(s) telling them the things he needed that he didn't get.
Wayne Kritsberg has them write the letter with the nondominant hand. I sometimes follow his lead. Writing with the nondominant hand helps create the feeling of being a child. Great emotion is discharged as the person reads his letter to the group. After the letter is read, I ask the group to give the person the affirmations that conespond to the unmet needs that he described in his letter to his parents.
Toward the close of the workshop I have each participant encounter his Lost Child. I cannot describe the power of this exercise. I have put it on several of my cassette tapes. There's no way to convey its power through the written word. I'll outline the meditation. You can put it on a tape recorder and listen to it. I recommend using Daniel Kobialka's "Going Home" as background music.