SENTIENT TIMES

Soft Intentions, Hard Results

By Peter Moore

Imagining outdated neural networks loosening and new
ones being built in their place has a cascade effect on
the endocrine system and can lead to an
experience of profound healing.

In my last article I described the amazing power of numbed or unconscious feelings and their consequent affect on our lives. The very nature of numbing means, of course, that we have no direct awareness of these feelings and how they may be influencing us, or how that influence then affects others. The remarkable thing about numbed feelings is that it is only the most dangerous or overwhelming feelings which have been numbed. I don’t mean that they are dangerous or overwhelming today, although they certainly seem that way if they begin to thaw out. They were overwhelming in terms of childhood experiences or capacities.

Our feelings play a determining role in how our communications are received. When couples embark on a relationship, after a while they may encounter all-too-familiar interactions and feelings which can remain stuck for years, even until death. There may be marked increase in these familiar feelings if the couple creates a family. What is happening here?

Repeated exchanges in one’s family of origin tell us when certain attitudes or feelings are forbidden. A well-known one, for instance, is the stereotype that men don’t cry—“Don’t be such a cry baby!” In fact, video observation of adult-infant interactions confirms this message non-verbally: male babies are consistently picked up less often than female babies. If expression of a feeling is routinely condemned, shunned or ignored, not only the expression goes away but the feeling does, too.

Actually, the feeling hasn’t gone away entirely. A negative feeling indicates that a need has not been met. If you conquer the feeling (by denying it or forbidding it), you haven’t dealt adequately and organically with that feeling. If you find out what the need is underlying the feeling, then meet that need, the feeling will eventually change, replaced quite often with a feeling of relief and lessening of tension. There may be a strong wave of grief or mourning mixed with the relief if the need has remained unmet for many years. However, the basic principle remains the same: unmet need leads to tension, the meeting of the need leads to release of tension. Often, the need is as simple as being listened to, or witnessed.

Obviously, if certain feelings are not handled appropriately, there is an increase in tension in the body. If this lasts for a while, the tension becomes chronic and results in the kind of characteristic attitudes you see in people’s bodies and faces. For instance, someone can be completely unaware of a tendency to frown, and, unconscious of long-numbed rage, be puzzled as to the amount of rejection they experience. Or their eyebrows remain too often fixed in an upward position, unconscious of a long-deadened terror, unclear as to why people he or she wants to be close to seem to become distant.

As the tension becomes more and more chronic, tissue gets less and less able to metabolize nutrients: it can’t take up fresh oxygen easily, nor can it rid itself of waste products. This is a set-up for tissue breakdown and eventually serious disease processes such as cancer. An example may help. A woman fears a new breakout of genital herpes; there are already the signs present. In a therapy session she is encouraged to express her rage completely as she begins to recount the story of when the symptoms began to emerge, in this case a flirtatious interaction between her husband and a friend of hers. In witnessing and experiencing her own strong anger, she validates this feeling and legitimizes her need for safety and loyalty in her relationship. Now her body no longer needs to express this as a symptom of disease.

Complete expression here means connecting her experience of anger with feelings in her pelvis, which is accomplished through encouraging her to move this part of her body in an angry and aggressive way. If standing, knees are bent and the muscles in the lumbar area have to be released so that the pelvis is allowed to swing freely. Too often when someone tries to express their deep anger they can lock their knees, retract their pelvis, and point a finger accusingly. In so doing, they lose contact with their ground and fail to get their point across.

Relational “disease,” so to speak, has a similar origin. Unmet and delegitimized needs remain as unexpressed emotions; the inhibition of expression results in tension, whether conscious or not. Body tension alters the choreography of the interaction between people in a relationship. For example, a person says something to their mate, such as, “I want you to be more physically affectionate with me,” but holds back the anger from this need being unmet in the current relationship, and certainly holds back the deeper, numbed anger at the narcissistic rage of a parent witnessed in childhood, not to mention the attendant hurt and betrayal. It is unlikely in this example the person would get a clear and satisfying response from the other.

The unintended consequence of this unresolved set of negative feelings is that it creates a loop where the unmet need remains unmet. The tendency in couples is then to try to control the outcome, which has further negative consequences. One method is to “try even harder,” by being a “good” or “perfect” partner. Since this is unsustainable it inevitably leads to disappointment—the need is still unmet, but now with the added cost of wasted effort. The other common method is then to berate the partner (“You’re never there for me”) or berate the self (“I knew I was no good/unlovable/sick anyway”), or use any of the tried and false defensive maneuvers: denial, withdrawal, acting or feeling needy, becoming strong and impervious, or acting out in a myriad of ways—an affair with a person, work, a car, shopping, reading, internet, drugs, etc.

There are several alternatives to this which break the go-nowhere cycle. One is to have the courage to unnumb and welcome the feelings brought about by the situation, and then to use these feelings as an historical conveyor belt back in time to moments in your early history where these feelings had a negative outcome. Once a scene or scenes in childhood have been linked to these feelings, they can be reworked in your imagination until a satisfactory ending is envisioned. (This is also a useful technique to use when waking up from a dream which has left you with a bad feeling: consciously go back into the dream, and redream the dream, making a new ending which results in a positive emotion.)

Another method is to meditate on how you see the neural networks and structures in your brain. How are they shaped in order to sustain the expectation of a negative outcome? Neural networks laid down as a result of important experiences, especially in the first year or so of life, are built with especially strong supporting proteins to make sure your body never forgets these survival lessons. This is especially true of traumatic experiences and why flashbacks to them are common. If you can imagine these old outdated neural networks loosening, and new ones being built in their place, to correspond with the satisfaction of your needs, and how this would have a cascade effect on your endocrine system, your energy system, and so on, you may experience profound healing.

An indirect way to achieve a similar result, but more in keeping with the relational issue, is a sort of bi-fold approach. First, ask yourself honestly if the current problem is one you have encountered before, either in previous relationships or in relationship to your childhood caretakers. Remember, you have survived these situations, and so you have real experiential proof, perhaps accumulated over decades, that you can survive without the current need (say, more affection) being met. But you don’t have what for the survival self is all that matters: experiential proof, over a similar duration, that you can survive having your current need met! So far, it’s just in theory, or patchy at best; which is why, to continue the example, you have selected an unaffectionate partner or shaped a perfectly adequate partner into one who behaves this way.

Here comes the interesting part. If you can interrupt any of the maneuvers mentioned above, you are in a position to put theory into practice. Ask yourself, just to be on the safe side, “Can I survive if my needs are met, if my spouse treats me with more affection?” Of course you can. Next, for the following two weeks, instead of making any request of the other, fully legitimize for yourself the validity of your need for more affection. You can even imagine how you would feel if your need was met on a consistent and regular basis, how you would feel in relation to your spouse if he or she became more affectionate. Remember to ask yourself, paradoxical as it sounds, “Is it my need to be treated coldly, to have no-one there for me, even though I’m well-practiced in surviving that?” Again, of course not. Picturing your spouse behaving how you would like and making it real in your feelings, being wise enough to allow the mourning to be present for all those times—years!—you may have gone without, all this brings surprising results. The mourning is important, because if you don’t do the grief-work as a price of admission to fulfillment, it’s like mortgaging your future for an imaginary cost-free gain in the present. It’s like the economist’s false balance sheet of excluding costs (such as pollution, resource depletion) while privatizing profit.

As an example, I told a client to stop all she was doing to try to get her partner to help around the house with chores. She’d tried sulking, shouting, pouting, browbeating. Instead, she was to validate completely, for the next two weeks, her perfectly legitimate need for equal help with household cleaning and the like. I explained the impossibility of getting her husband to validate her position while she herself had not. I also explained the emotional turmoil which may await her as she allows a man to function well for her (in more ways than just cleaning); and I asked her whether she was prepared to accept any and all grief which could arise for all the years that she had not been taken seriously, as part of the price she had to pay to open her system up, to soften sufficiently to allow herself to receive from him what she wanted and longed for. In the next session, she reported her pleasure and surprise at the change in his behavior.

After twenty-five years of therapy practice, I still marvel every time someone succeeds at changing something seemingly impossible through these less dominating, more soft, yet intended relational approaches, whether it’s with a partner, at work or school, with children, or with their own bodies.

Peter Moore continues to be busy with his growing family, but takes time away from them for his therapy practice in Eureka, California. He can be reached at (707) 442-7228.

SENTIENT TIMES
PO Box 1330 Ashland, OR 97520
PHONE (541) 512-1084 • FAX (541) 512-1085
dmokma@jeffnet.org