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Relational trauma and healing   (Part One)

“Firstly, people who carry early wounding and have injured instincts are prone to attracting people with more narcissism than is healthy and even safe. One could also say that we live in an era that fosters narcissism and predator mentality towards other people, animals and the planet itself….” (October 13th, 2019)

I have written about narcissistic trauma in previous posts and I think the previous one might be something I posted relevant to Wendy Behary’s book: Disarming the Narcissist: Surviving and Thriving with the Self Absorbed on October 13th, 2019. In this post today, I’d like to share some more resources, specifically, the episode: Holding Your Own with Challenging Personalities – staying (or becoming) secure in relationship with those with the personality structure of malignant narcissism at: https://therapistuncensored.com/episodes/tu-137-holding-your-own-5-malignant-narcissism-and-when-to-run-5/.  This is one of a series of six podcasts (https://therapistuncensored.com/episodes/) related to challenging personality traits high on the continuum, characteristics and dynamics of more functional and healthy relationships, and relational trauma and healing in the context of less and more severe narcissistic abuse, presented by Sue Marriott & Dr. Ann Kelley. Below each podcast there are notes, which makes it easier to engage with the material.

In this particular podcast Sue Marriott & Dr. Ann Kelley claim that we all have elements of self-centeredness and narcissistic traits, but when it becomes more engrained into our personality structure that is where many problems arise. They write: “Narcissism, at its core, involves a sense of entitlement, exploitation and extreme self-focus that loses touch with one’s ability to see the needs of others. Grandiose and covert narcissists can become so self-involved that they can completely dismiss others in extremely painful ways. However, they generally continue to hold relationships in value. Their primary difficulty lies in the tendency to idealize and devalue, which often leads to feeling misunderstood and mistreated. Thus, they can lack guilt because they often see themselves as right or the victim to injustice. However, when they do discover that they have wronged someone, they can feel significant guilt and shame. In malignant narcissism, there is a general void of guilt and shame…….. In malignant narcissism the value placed on others is primarily based on utility – what others can do for them. The relational aspect is void. They do not have access to guilt of felt shame. This has been cut off. The malignant narcissist expects extremely loyalty at all costs. Loyalty to them, not to ideals….. This type of thinking leaves open rational for retaliation and extreme vindictiveness…. One way to know if our relationship, family, company or country is being run by a malignant narcissistic ruler is to recognize that those under them are in a constant state of fear and threat….. One sign of a malignant narcissist is the cool and coldness with which they can seek revenge in a calculating manner….. If in a relationship with someone that has malignant narcissism, there is little hope of change. The focus must be for you to protect yourself, seek support or safely get out of the relationship….”

Summarily, people on the high end of the narcissistic spectrum are deliberately dishonest and deceptive, while accusing others. They need to dominate and so they often resort to aggressive strategies like provoking, bullying, and intimidating, where they might respond disproportionally and yell. They like being feared because it imbues them with a sensation of omnipotence. They cause deliberate hurt, blatantly lie about events. They argue in bad faith and then present it as if others are the ones who are unreasonable. They resort to gaslighting and attempt to confuse the other person and make them doubt their experiences or reality by lying, stone walling and confidence breaking. They prefer not to take responsibility for their actions and when others complain or resist their lies they will deflect, shift attention from themselves, project their own experience onto others and go into attack mode. Even though it is not visible at first sight narcissists may have extremely fragile egos and a shaky sense of self-esteem and are consumed with maintaining a shallow false self to others. Often in order to regulate their emotions, they crave false validation, which practically means they seek people who would side with them. They are addicted to attention and use tactics like lying, playing the victim card, smearing, slandering, triangulating, stalking, and other forms of social aggression and manipulative games to create networks (“harems and flying monkeys”). They also tend to perceive all interactions as a win-lose situation, and when they feel they have lost or have been wronged, they will accuse you and manipulate others in hurting you. They mostly don’t care about sound arguments, honesty or win-win resolutions, and most importantly, they lack the capacity to display empathy, feel what it is like to be in another’s shoes.

Sue Marriott & Dr. Ann Kelley also provide suggestions about books. I have been reading one of their suggested books recently, Becoming the Narcissist’s Nightmare: How to Devalue and Discard the Narcissist While Supplying Yourself by Shahida Abrabi, and will probably write a summary of points and ideas that I might consider useful in the next post.

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Home

“…Ας αρχίσει λίγο να φυσάει, Να μυρίσει πάλι θάλασσα. Κι ας μας πάρει τους αδύναμους, Τους άρριζους μακριά. Ας μας στείλει σ’ άλλα μέρη – Απάτητα κι αμάθητα. Χορτάσαμε από ψέματα. Χορτάσαμε από ψέματα. Η γη είναι μεγάλη. Ας μας πάρει από δώ, Κι ας χαρούν τ’ αεράκι άλλοι….”  (Τραγούδι της Νατάσας Μποφίλιου / Στίχοι: Γεράσιμου Ευαγγελάτου)

Home is one of those words that can conjure up diverse emotions and sensations, ideas, images and metaphors. Just by writing the word on a sheet of paper and then jotting down what comes to mind generates a rich list of ideas and emotions. In his paper: Homelessness and the Meaning of Home: Rooflessness or Rootlessness? Peter Somerville writes that “Home can be argued to have at least six or seven dimensions of meaning, identified by the ‘key signifiers’ of shelter, hearth, heart, privacy, roots, abode and (possibly) paradise {ideal home}…….. Home as shelter connotes the material form of home, in terms of a physical structure which affords protection to oneself, and which appears to others as at least a roof over one’s head. Home as hearth connotes the warmth and cosiness which home provides to the body, causing one to relax in comfort and ensuring a welcoming and ‘homely’ atmosphere for others. Home as heart is very similar, but in this case the emphasis is on emotional rather than physiological security and health, with associated images of a happy home and a stable home, based on relations of mutual affection and support. Home as privacy involves the power to ‘control one’s own boundaries’ (Ryan, 1983), and this means the possession of a certain territory with the power to exclude other persons from that territory and to prohibit surveillance of the territory by other persons……” Home can be perceived differently depending on personal experiences and sociocultural context and can bring up diverse material for different people, but however, we define home, there seems to be a more common longing for home in all of us. Maya Angelou writes “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” This longing probably lives in all of us even those who may not have had the experience of home. Peter Somerville writes that “people may have a sense of home even though they have no experience or memory of it.”

Most of us crave home to such an extent that probably more than ever before, we invest heavily in our material homes, at least, in more affluent societies, and yet, many people feel a fundamental insecurity. In a psychoanalytically informed article I was reading a little while ago it was suggested that this might also have to do with feeling insecure about who we fundamentally are. From a Jungian perspective the home is often a symbol of the self. So, on an unconscious level, our preoccupation with houses might reflect our self or concern about ourselves, and might be part of an effort to feel secure in our own being. We may have an unconscious sense that home is our childhood bedroom or home, which can be preserved in our inner world as if in a time capsule. Or our sense of home, security and belonging might be derived from our physical adult homes and our geographical situatedness, but as vital as our houses and homes are for our survival and well being, our inner sense of home and refuge, and our capacity to abide in our own mental home also supports us to get through the rough. If we can abide or reconnect to this mental space often enough, in some sense, we get to carry a sense of home and rootedness with us wherever we go. How a person reacts to a situation is in part influenced by previous events and circumstances. Our responses are influenced by past and present experiences; however, our levels of resilience and choice can be enhanced when we have a more robust sense of emotional and mental refuge or home

For humans and other mammals, life begins in the maternal womb, which has been suggested as the model for our later homes. It is believed that the earliest homes created by human beings tended to physically resemble wombs. Many animals also create womb-like burrows. In many myths and stories action centres around the journey back home.  Our physical homes might be the place where we can stretch our legs at the end of the day with a cup of tea and it might be the smell of homemade food and freshly washed clothes on the washing line. It might be our children’s artwork on the wall or memories of meals with family and friends. But any disruption of this physical sense of security and home requires we ground ourselves in a deeper, more stable and ever flowing sense of inner refuge that we can derive from our mere beingness and living essence. We mostly find it in a place of internal stillness. Tara Brach says that in times of great stress, it’s crucial that we have pathways to relax our bodies, quiet our minds, and rest in a calm and steady presence. She suggests that through meditation we can gradually reach a home base of presence where we can find inner refuge that can carry us through difficult times and where we learn to momentarily at least let life be just as it is without dissolving. She refers to this as “reestablishing a friendly presence, relaxing with the breath, relaxing with the life that’s here. Letting everything be just as it is.”

Our sense of security and belonging also has much to do with the sense of feeling connected and valued by others. Research has shown that positive attachment and connection with others, enhances our sense of security, belonging and the felt perception of well-being. Rick Hanson writes that for most of our time on this planet, humans usually spent their lives within a few hundred miles of where they were born, doing the same things every day with the same people, embedded in a culture that changed little from century to century and that “these external factors provided a stable sense of home – but they are largely tattered, even shattered today.” In that sense perhaps the need to grow an internal sense of home as an anchor and refuge amidst the fast economic and social changes and turmoil we live in nowadays is more important than ever.

As one contemplates the word HOME, the lack of it as in homeless and homelessness also arises. Homelessness is associated with poverty, economic hurdles, severe trauma, abuse, lack of affordable housing, and maybe more broadly the absence of a context that provides a basic level of security, comfort, privacy and acceptance, but there are other forms of homelessness like psychological and emotional homelessness. Psychological homelessness may be the result of many interacting factors like chronic stress, social isolation,   diminished community and relationship ties, competition and overwork. The experience of psychological homelessness, which seems rampant in our contemporary societies, may include the experience of painful emotions of alienation, self-deprecating thoughts or feelings of not belonging, which can generate a crisis of identity. Emotional homelessness might be our response to developmental traumas and it might be experienced as the lack of a safe place to be with and to be able to express difficult emotions. This can take place when there has been some sort of disruption to our sense of safety and predictability early on or when there have been difficulties with early attachment to our primary caregivers. Over time our neurophysiology gets primed to fight and flee and if no help arrives to eventually freeze and shut down. We may have learnt to express only positive emotions, and suppression of emotions may have eventually been equaled with survival. Also, culturally, expression of emotions is not often supported or encouraged. Later in adulthood we may dissociate from our feelings or turn our emotions inwards, which can result in a sense of worthlessness or powerlessness, people pleasing behaviours and self sabotage, depletion, physical symptoms and disease; however, our emotions require some form of acknowledgement, processing or expression often within a relational context. If we cannot find a place where it feels safe to integrate our inner experience with our outer life we can feel emotionally homeless. In some sense we need to create a safe home for our emotions to be held, ideally, in relation with a safe other. Initially, going into increased levels of emotional activation might feel overwhelming, so we need to know how to return to a baseline inner resting state within a safe outer environment.

In one of his weekly blogs at https://www.rickhanson.net/be-home/ Rick Hanson uses the term “inner homelessness”.  He discusses how when our body is not hungry, thirsty or in pain, and when the mind is not disturbed by threat, frustration, or rejection, then most people settle into their resting state. He writes: “This is a sustainable equilibrium in which the body refuels and repairs itself and the mind feels peaceful, happy, and loving. I call this the Responsive mode. In a sense, this is our “home base,” our fundamental nature as human beings. On the other hand, when our body or mind are not in a state of equilibrium due to multiple causes then the fight-flight-freeze systems in our body get activated, and related experiences of fear, anger, disappointment, loneliness, shame, and spite occur in the mind. When this experience is chronic stress then the body gets depleted, and the mind gets “frazzled, pressured, prickly, worried, and blue”. Rick Hanson calls it the Reactive mode and says that these two modes of living are the foundation of human nature and we have no choice about the basic human needs they attempt to meet, which are safety, satisfaction, and connection. We have no choice other than to be in one of these two modes and that our responsive mode is our underlying nature….. because that’s where energy is conserved for life, where learning is consolidated and where our pains and traumas are healed.

Growing a sense of “inner home” can heal this sense of psychological homelessness and create a buffer for difficult times. Getting a sense of inhabiting our body through breathing and slow exhalations, through the experience of meditation and through our loving connection to the body feels like a home coming and like a more unshakable belonging. This sense of being home can occur through staying present with our senses, sensations, movements and actions, the context we find ourselves in, our environment all the way out to the planet and even the vast Universe. The sense of simply being might be the underlying essence of feeling at home. This sense of inner home feels like the silence behind our thought chatter and calm stillness and the embracing  of all aspects of oneself with love and compassion. Returning to stillness over time helps stabilize the calm within. It is the sense we have beyond our story, our identifications, our aches, fears, reactions and circumstances. Connecting to this inner sense of safety and unconditional worth also feels like integration each time. In Dan Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness mindfulness metaphor and practice, which I will not go into now, but have referred to in older posts, there is a segment called the hub of awareness. Over time I have noticed that irrespectively of how one is feeling in the present or what one is dealing with, there is this almost surprising and constant sense of a fundamental joy of simply being alive when one is resting here. I cannot say for certain, but as far as I can know at the moment, this might be an expression of our inner experience of being at home within our body and the world. It also seems to be constantly available every time we become still and check in, no matter what may be salient in our life in the moment.

Settling our attention inwards, we arrive a little closer each time to all the parts of who we are and to whatever is salient in the moment. Eventually, as self awareness increases and more integration takes place there is a return to a somewhat familiar sense of being. Through meditation the layers of our past conditioning and accumulated life suffering, which are blocking us from this sense of fundamental okayness slowly fall away. Whenever we are able to settle into ourselves we settle into a feeling of being okay because we are alive. If there are a lot of things going on in our life when we connect with this sense of inner home we come to the realisation that beneath the problems we are still here, still alive and basically okay. It seems that we have this inherent capacity to feel more equanimous despite the things, we may be weathering. To conclude, for many people the word home is associated with some sense of stability and safety, the opposite of feeling “homeless”. We could say that the same experience associated with having a safe and trustworthy physical home applies to our sense of “inner home”, as well. We can cultivate stability and steadiness in our mind and heart. (Tonya Alexandri, Syros, January 6th, 2021)

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“This award is not just for me. It is for those forgotten children who want education. It is for those frightened children who want peace. It is for those voiceless children who want change.” Malala Yousafzai

More quotes by Malala Yousafzai

“There are two powers in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen. There is a third power stronger than both, that of women.”

 “We realize the importance of our voices only when we are silenced.”

“If people were silent nothing would change.”

Here in Greece during this lock down situation, where most products and items for sale are available only through a click-away purchase process, bookstores have opened for the public during the holidays. Browsing through the shelves of bookshops this time seemed like a treat and I could not but think about how many small pleasures we tend to take for granted. Being in Athens during this second lockdown I got the chance to visit a few bookshops and in one of their children’s department I found a book that touched me and moved me to tears, and so I decided to mention it here today. The book, written by Rebecca Langston George and illustrated by Joanna Bock, is about Malala Yousafzai’s story, who at the age of seventeen received the Noble Prize for Peace after being shot three times for standing up for the right to an education for girls.

In brief, Malala was born in 1997 in Pakistan. She developed a thirst for knowledge early on through the influence of her family, and especially, her father, who was a passionate education advocate and wanted to give her the opportunities that boys had in their culture.  He also ran a school, so school and learning were a big part of Malala’s life since her toddler years.  However, in 2007, when she was ten years old, things changed dramatically for her family and community. The Taliban began to control the Swat Valley, where she lived. By the end of 2008 they had destroyed 400 schools. Girls were banned from attending school, and cultural activities like watching television were prohibited.

Malala remained determined to go to school believing strongly in her right to an education. Together with her father she stood up to the Taliban and in 2009 she started to blog anonymously on the Urdu language site of the BBC using the name “Gul Makai”. She was eleven years old when she wrote her first BBC diary entry titled “I am afraid,” where she described her fear of a war and of going to school. In May of 2009, Malala became an internally displaced person, after having been forced to leave her home and seek safety hundreds of miles away. On her return home, she used the media and continued her public campaign for her right to go to school, and over the course of the next three years, she and her father became known throughout Pakistan for their determination to give Pakistani girls access to a free education. Her activism resulted in a nomination for the International Children’s Peace Prize in 2011, and that same year, she was awarded Pakistan’s National Youth Peace Prize. But, not everyone was happy with her campaign to bring about change, and on October 9th in 2012, Malala was shot three times, by the Taliban, on the bus that was bringing her and her friends home from school. One of the bullets entered and exited her head and lodged in her shoulder. She was in a critical condition and four days later she was moved to an intensive care unit in Birmingham in England, where she was taken out of a medically induced coma.

Fortunately, even though she would require multiple surgeries, and repair of a facial nerve to fix the paralyzed left side of her face, she hadn’t suffered major brain damage. In March 2013 Malala began attending school in Birmingham and on July 12th on her 16th birthday, she visited New York and spoke at the United Nations. That same year she published her first book: “I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban”, and was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by the European Parliament. In 2014, through the Malala Fund, the organization she co-founded with her father, Malala travelled to Jordan to meet Syrian refugees, to Kenya to meet young female students, and to northern Nigeria, where she spoke out in support of the abducted girls who were kidnapped earlier that year by a terrorist group, which tries to stop girls from going to school. In October 2014, Malala, along with Indian children’s rights activist Kailash Satyarthi, was named a Nobel Peace Prize winner. At age 17, she became the youngest person to receive this prize. Malala said: “This award is not just for me. It is for those forgotten children who want education. It is for those frightened children who want peace. It is for those voiceless children who want change.”

Reading the book brought up deep compassion  for this courageous girl and concern about whether she was well and what her life was like currently. I thought about her mother and her family and what it must have been like for them to see their young loved one been shot almost to death for simply desiring to learn and express herself. It is in these moments that we realise that even though we human creatures are capable of much horror, we also have the inherent capacity for unconditional love, concern and wishing well for people we have never met. We are not only wired to hopefully care about the safety and well being of our own sons and daughters, but those of others as well. It was good to learn that Malala has grown up to become an active proponent of “education as a fundamental social and economic right”, and through the Malala Fund, she empowers girls to achieve their potential and become agents of change in their communities. And this year she has completed her Philosophy, Politics and Economics degree at Oxford.