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DEFENSES:
LIFE SAVING THEN, LIFE THREATENING NOW
…Past Reality Integration (PRI) therapy is based on the idea that we all have a divided consciousness: one part of our consciousness sees the world through the eyes of the child we once were, and feels accordingly. The other part of our consciousness sees the world through the eyes of the adult we are now. Because of this division, we perceive and experience things quite differently, depending on which part of our consciousness we are accessing. For example one moment we can feel secure, ‘on top of things’ and competent, and the next moment we might feel depressed, angry, insecure, guilty, etc.
Maybe you recognize this, often sudden, change in the way you feel about yourself and your life. Normally nothing extraordinary occurs to cause such a shift, so we can’t make sense out of the change in the way we feel.
On an unconscious level, however, something does happen. What happens is, that we are confronted with something, usually a person or a situation, that reminds us, without us being aware of it, of something in our past. Actually it reminds us of something in our past that we had to repress when we were children. This unconscious remembering is what causes a shift from Adult Consciousness to Child Consciousness.
Past Reality Integration therapy is based on the idea that children do not receive what they need. Children need more than food, clothing and shelter, they also need physical and emotional safety, respect for their own identity, loving physical and emotional attention, support, encouragement and warmth. A child needs all these things to become a healthy functioning adult. However, children often grow up with caregivers who are not able to meet all these needs. Facing the truth that some or many of these needs will never be met is too threatening for the child, because her survival depends on her needs being met. In order to survive childhood, most of us had to repress the truth that some of our survival needs would never be met. We could not feel the emotional impact this had on us, and we had to deny the truth of the situation.
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(Repression) happens without conscious awareness. We are not aware that we use Repression, nor are we aware of what we have repressed.
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The process of Repression, dividing our consciousness in order not to feel the truth of our childhood, seems adequate in and of itself to do the life-saving work for the child (we were). However, as Jenson explains in Reclaiming your Life, Repression has a ‘helper’ called Denial. This helper denies the truth that has been repressed by substituting another ‘reality’ for the one that has been repressed.
For example: The emotional distress a child experiences when physically abandoned is too threatening to her emotional well-being to fully contain in consciousness. If she would fully realize not only that she was left by her mother, but also the meaning behind this behavior (the lack of love which made it possible for her mother to abandon her), the pain would be so enormous that life would no longer be worth living for her. These life-threatening feelings are repressed into the compartment that holds all truths that are too painful to feel. Then something extra happens to really make sure the Repression holds. The truth of the emotional neglect and physical abandonment is replaced by a lie, a lie that denies the existence of the truth. In this example it could be: “My mother and I are very close, she loves me so much, she wants to be with me, but she just can’t.”
When this child grows up to be an adult she most likely will still believe this lie – that she and her mother are very close. She might marry a man who emotionally neglects her and even leaves her. She would feel enormous pain about that, she probably would feel that she could not face living anymore.
The Denial, which saved her life as a child, threatens her life as an adult. No matter how much she still had going for her in her life, she would probably feel life has lost its meaning for her. She would feel this because that is what was true for her as a child. She had to repress the truth that it was life threatening to be left by her mother when she was too young to take care of herself and she had to repress the pain that would result from facing that truth. As an adult when a Symbolic situation presents itself (her husband leaves her), the old childhood feelings surface mercilessly. At the same time though she will still be absolutely convinced that she and her mother were close, and she will have no conscious knowledge of the depth of those terrible feelings she would have felt as a child when her mother left her. But she didn’t feel those feelings because the child she was could not survive feeling them, so she repressed those feelings and then used Denial to create a more palatable ‘truth’.. Her mother might very well remain the most important person in her life.
-The three types of denial
There are several ways to deny the truth. We define three. All of them serve to substitute another reality for what is the truth: False Hope (FH), False Power (FP) and the Primary Defense (PD). All three defense mechanisms helped the child we were to survive childhood, and all three continue to operate when we are adults. However, when we are adults we don’t need them anymore. The past is over and knowing the truth isn’t life threatening anymore, although it was when we were children.
Unfortunately our mind doesn’t recognize this. Every time we come across a Symbol (anything that reminds us unconsciously of the past) our consciousness shifts from the adult state (Adult Consciousness-AC) to the childhood state (Childhood Consciousness-CC).
Le Doux’s brain research explains how this mechanism works on a neurological level. A part of our brain, the amygdala, has a special function concerning threatening events. When something threatening happens the memory of that event is stored in the amygdala. The amygdala is able to operate independently from the part of our brain that is more rational and so memories of threatening events are stored in the amygdala without our rational brain necessarily being aware of it. The amygdala functions as a storage place for strongly loaded emotional memories. This storage process has an explicit survival function. Every time another potentially threatening situation is encountered, the amygdala compares the situation with the memories it has stored, in order to determine if the present situation represents a threat. If, after comparison, a threat is perceived, the amygdala will send out signals to alarm us.
However the amygdala’s method of comparison is not very accurate. It works through association, so only a small number of elements from the present situation need to resemble the past situation that was dangerous before the amygdala will sound the alarm. The responses that are developed in reaction to the amygdala’s alarms will therefore often be as outdated as the memories that triggered them. The storage and comparison ability of the amygdala is still vital to our survival: if we are confronted with real danger, we need an alarm to go off. But many events the amygdala still has ‘on file’ have become outdated, since they were threatening to us when we were children, but are no longer to us as adults.
LeDoux’s findings quite intricately show the brain mechanisms involved in the emotional mechanisms outlined by PRI theory. The words used are different, however the process described is identical. Every time the amygdala sounds alarm it is because something is working as a Symbol (it reminds us/our amygdala of something threatening in the past), and as a result we go into Childhood Consciousness: reacting to the present as if it were the past.
After being triggered by a Symbol into our Childhood Consciousness (CC), old pain is brought up and we start to feel terrible or at least uncomfortable. Since most of us don’t enjoy feeling pain, we then quickly move out of the CC and into the “Wall of Denial” – our defenses.
Many of us have learned to move so quickly from our CC to the Wall of Denial that we don’t even feel the old pain before we employ a defense mechanism. In that way we can completely avoid consciously feeling any pain. But pain is touched upon when we are confronted with a Symbol: And since our mind is convinced that the pain is present day pain brought on by present day events and we can’t tolerate the pain, our mind will use the defenses as if our life depended on them (because when we were children our lives did depend on them).
When we were children the defenses saved our life. As adults the defenses threaten our lives, or at least they make our lives a lot more painful then it needs to be. The childhood pain is not the problem when we are adults. It isn’t the old pain that has such destructive consequences on individuals, societies and our world. Our defenses are the course of the harm. Because of our defenses we engage in big or little wars (False Power), because of defenses we feel we are no good for anything (Primary Defense), because of defenses we persist in behavior that doesn’t lead anywhere and might even cause harm (False Hope).
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Le Doux confirms that the interaction during the first few years of life will lead to the imprinting of emotional lessons based on the harmony or disruption of the contact between parent and child. These emotional lessons have so much influence and yet are so difficult to understand from an adult perspective because they, according to LeDoux, have been saved in the amygdala as undefined, worldless blueprints of emotional life. These earliest emotional memories are imprinted at a time when a child does not yet have words for her experience. One reason why we can be so surprised by our emotional outbursts is because often they date from a time early in our life when things were still confusing and we had no words to understand what was happening. We do have the chaotic feelings but we lack the words for the memories that formed them.
For the child we were the pain was life-threatening, for the adults we are now our defenses are the ones that can destroy our life. The mentioned inaccuracy of the amygdala can have disastrous effects on our life because we might e.g. fight with or flee from the wrong person or situation. Before the cortex, the seat of rational thinking knows what is going on, the amygdalaa can react with an outburst of raw anger or acute fear. Reactions which would have been accurate a long time ago.
In order to heal it is of great importance to realize how destructive it is to defend ourselves against our old pain. It is a difficult job, but relinquishing our defenses is the most important aspect of the healing process outlined in this book, a process aimed at improving the quality of our lives and the lives of those around us.
It is my personal conviction that the state of being that the great spiritual teachers have described as enlightenment, is “nothing more” than that: a state in which we are no longer employing any defense mechanisms. Most spiritual teachers seem to say that enlightenment is nothing out of the ordinary, that it is not something we can work towards, because it is already here. It is our natural state of being. However we don’t realize this because we are not living in the present, in the moment that is now. Instead most of us are living mainly in the past, trapped in the illusion that that is what is happening now, making it impossible to see the present for what it truly is.
This description of what prevents us from living in our natural state of enlightenment much resembles what happens when we see the past reality and act upon those perceptions, while convinced that we are perceiving and acting upon the present. This is the nature of our defense mechanisms. An undivided consciousness – lacking defenses – would be able to fully perceive the moment that is now every time, as described by these teachers. And isn’t an undivided consciousness our natural state? The state in which we were created and born?
out of ‘Rediscovering The True Self’ by Drs. Ingeborg Bosch, Ingeborg Bosch PRI b.v., 2002
(www.pastrealityintegration.com )
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