TWO Understanding relating: reciprocal relationship procedures

Relating to different parts of oneself Exercise

Find a large sheet of paper and some coloured pencils. Also take your Psychotherapy File and any notes you have made so far. Sit on the floor with them and think about the part of yourself you feel most at home in. Choose a colour that you think represents that part and draw a shape in the centre of the paper. How might you describe this part? Who does this part relate to and how? Then map out the different ways in which you experience yourself, starting perhaps with roles such as student, friend, parent, or loner, or dancer. There might be a part that feels lonely, sad, or helpful, joyful or in control. Some parts may feel small and others larger, some will have qualities and others particular skills, such as cook or carer or joker. The next task will be to see if you can give feelings or behaviours to each of your parts, such as shy, impatient, unhappy, vulnerable, excited, accomplished; or angry, needy, depressed, illustrating the I in relation to the me that is the sense of yourself. When you have done enough, sit back and take an overview of the different parts of yourself. See which parts are dominant, and which are undeveloped. Ask yourself which parts are still in hiding or eclipse. Ask also which parts carry feeling and which do not.

03-Wilde McCormick-4370-Ch-02-Part 2.indd 37

02/03/2012 10:21:19 AM

38 THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF WHO WE ARE

Feelings and emotions

From infancy we form ideas and think about and experience the I that is growing in relation to whatever is other, beginning the important inner dialogue in relation to our experience. Like the seed in relation to the soil we are planted in, we grow within the garden of our early environment of family, our social and cultural structure and in response to its demands and prejudices. We learn to recognise, name and express or contain feelings and emotions through our daily life with caretakers. Feelings and emotions tend to get defined for us from these early reciprocal relationships. Whatever patterns our early caregivers had learned, will naturally be passed on to us. We may have been told we were demanding, or naughty, or angry because we were crying or frowning when in fact what we were feeling was something else, frightened perhaps, or confused. Drawing the life line (Chapter 1) sometimes helps us to see this long chain of family behaviour and attitude as we place our early caregivers in context. People brought up by fathers who had been traumatised by the terrible First World War might have experienced them as cold and rejecting in relation to their feeling shut out, when in fact these fathers were silenced and frozen by the horrors they had seen. And whilst this understanding does not alter our experience, it helps us to feel that what we received was not to do with us personally, and to feel less guilty and responsible in relation to feeling bad or worthless. What is considered emotional in families may be responded to in a variety of ways. Many people with eating disorders, for example, have often had their emotional needs responded to with food and not recognised as having individual and separate meanings. When we are afraid or feel threatened as a child we experience the feeling as a sensation in the body. If our fears are responded to with understanding and support we learn to recognise the body sensation as being connected to fear and we are able to find words for our feeling and sensation and thus express ourselves appropriately. In giving words to our sensations and feelings we learn both to define our experience and in doing so to make a slight space around it, allowing us to develop self-soothing and selfcare and to be able to befriend our fears. These skills are of huge importance throughout a life that will inevitably bring unexpected, fearful and demanding experiences. If our fear is met with a rejecting, belittling and dismissing response our fear learns no words but remains as an unmet body sensation, and we do not learn emotional literacy. We will therefore need to seek different ways to address this nonverbal body experience. We might find reparation through a nurturing relationship that encourages us to care for our fear. Or, more problematic, we might have to seek soothing or relief through avoidance or

03-Wilde McCormick-4370-Ch-02-Part 2.indd 38

02/03/2012 10:21:19 AM

UNDERSTANDING RELATING 39

withdrawal, through substances or behaviours that compound our problems rather than meet them. So if what is in fact our hurt or pain or fear gets expressed as angry rebellion or acting out, this invites anger from others, and compounds our problem. As we identify how our feelings have been interpreted and the reciprocal roles around them, we start to understand the difference between feeling and emotion. Feelings remind us we are alive as human beings and are responding to the outside world! They are in essence quite simple things that communicate through our bodys experiences such as happiness, joy, wellbeing or anger, sadness, fear or jealousy. When not entangled in thoughts, feelings can rise and fall like waves in the ocean throughout our daily life. By practising awareness we can watch this process and allow its natural rhythm without any interpretation from our thinking mind. Every one of us has a feeling nature. Feeling is an important function in terms of our sensing, valuing and sensitively judging situations. What can be more difficult, though, is experiencing feeling without being emotional. Emotions are more complex and denser in quality. They are a combination of our feelings, our thoughts and body sensations that have been, in early life, defined for us by our environment. They are the result of feelings becoming attached to ideas from our past experiences recorded in inner dialogue about what is possible and allowed and what is not. When feelings are identified as emotions they create distortions in thinking and acting. Examples of how this might be active in inner dialogue are:
If I show angry feelings he/she will hit me. If I show Im scared they will leave me. If I expose my need they will laugh.

So we are seeing that for many of us feeling and emotion get blurred together and develop in the course of relationships that provide definitions. Being seen as emotional, or having our emotions interpreted as just drama, is often a cultural judgement on any emotion that is seen as excessive. What constitutes reasonable emotional expression in one culture is unacceptable in others. One example is in expressing the emotion of grief after bereavement. In Eastern countries wailing, rocking, being dressed in black and supported for a year are a widows rights and offer a rite of passage; in Western countries we are encouraged to get over it and move on, as if feeling and emotion had no value or purpose. Feeling angry, hateful or resentful and responding to anger and rage from others is one of the most charged areas within families. Anthony Ryle, the founder of CAT, says:

03-Wilde McCormick-4370-Ch-02-Part 2.indd 39

02/03/2012 10:21:19 AM

40 THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF WHO WE ARE

A very large percentage of depressed and somatic symptoms are located in the inability to express anger in a useful way. [in conversation with the author]

Often our feelings grow into emotions that get generalised as moods and moods accompany particular reciprocal roles. For example: low mood might be associated with a reciprocal role of withholding in relation to anxiously waiting.

Out of our emotions come our actions

So emotions tend to be dominated by our inner dialogue around what we tell ourselves inside about what we can tolerate and what not. As we well know, once we have become dominated by our emotional response it is much more difficult to remain centred or express ourselves clearly to others. Either: We may just shut down and go silent with everything swirling around inside. Or: We may swing from one emotional state to another, feeling out of control. We may have a particular way of controlling responses that seems to conceal our forbidden feelings but may elicit them in others, such as in passive aggression. We feel angry but anger is forbidden so we sulk, withdraw, eat to excess, and others are furious, frustrated and angry. Learning about our internalised dialogue with all the parts of us is an important step to self-awareness and to choosing how to change.

Reciprocal roles and core emotional pain

As we saw in Part One, everything we experience about being a person happens within the context of our relationship with an other. The British child psychologist D.W. Winnicott (1979) said theres no such thing as a baby, meaning that the baby does not grow alone, but with others who care for the baby in various ways. We come to know ourselves, and slowly become conscious, through the signs, images and communications toward us and in response to us, from others, and the meaning these communications inspire. The reciprocal nature of relating is learned first via our bodies through touch, holding, sound, smell and atmosphere. Each one of these experiences is accompanied by expressions of feeling and a language of gestures, rhythms and sounds. We have an inbuilt ability to identify with the other. For example, newborn infants stick their tongues out in response to someone sticking out theirs. We have mirror neurons that have been discovered to be

03-Wilde McCormick-4370-Ch-02-Part 2.indd 40

02/03/2012 10:21:19 AM

UNDERSTANDING RELATING 41

the biological basis for empathy, for being with and feeling with another human being. For most of us mirror neurons and other implicit knowings which are not yet fully understood continue to help us become attuned with ourselves and others throughout our lives. Our early experience in reciprocation with our all-powerful carers invites a number of what are defined in CAT as roles. Each role is complex and describes how we see, respond and interpret, how we feel and attribute meaning to, and how we act with others and in internal dialogue with ourselves. As we are always in dialogue with other in both anticipation and relationship, these interactions are called, in CAT, Reciprocal Role Procedures. As we saw earlier, the experience of being held safely creates an internalised capacity to both hold and be held with the resulting healthy island feelings of secure, happy, loved. An experience of being left or neglected leads to an internalised abandoning part of the self in relation to an abandoned self with feelings of being dropped or feeling unwanted and bad. And these early experiences are anticipated in relation to both ourselves I to me and others self to other. Feeling held when helpless and fed when hungry and crying offers a reciprocal dance between caring and being cared for and the resulting feeling is contentment and safety. In our growing brains the growth of the frontal lobes that govern thinking and reflecting is assured, and we are free from the chemicals of fear. Conversely, feeling hungry and being deprived of food creates a reciprocal experience of needy and helpless in relation to controlling and withholding, and the feelings, not yet understood, but held in the tissues of the body, are of anxiety and rage. The sense of potential healthy self is restricted.
The epidemiology of the mental and physical health of children and adolescents the world over reflects: the genomes they inherit (and the modifications those genes undergo in utero); the pregnancies that led to their births, whether their mothers survive those pregnancies, and whether their births were welcome; the parents, the neighbors, and the neighborhoods they inherit along with their genomes; when and where they live (by cohort, by country, and by province); the air they breathe; the water they drink; what and how much they eat; the schools they attend (and by whom they are taught what and for how long); the energy they expend; the family status in the social order; the friends they have; and last but not least, the amount and kind of medical and psychiatric care they receive. (Eisenberg and Belfer, 2009: 2635)

Most of us experience a mixture of early life care. All of us carry a repertoire of reciprocal patterns learned from early care relating to care and dependency; control and submission; demand and striving. These patterns

03-Wilde McCormick-4370-Ch-02-Part 2.indd 41

02/03/2012 10:21:19 AM

42 THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF WHO WE ARE

are internalised automatically and serve to maintain the self in the social world. They become our automatic pilot. Once named and reflected upon they can be made sense of, adjustments may be made to the more problematic roles, and new, healthier, reciprocal roles can be created. Deficiencies of early care such as excesses of control and demand or a critical, judging and conditional acceptance may lead us to suffer from psychological problems. Major inconsistencies or unpredictable responses such as violent acting out or traumatic separations and abandonments which are not explained or understood leave us out of dialogue, feeling lost, confused and bewildered.

Parent and child reciprocal roles

The analogy of the seed in relation to the soil gives us a context for the evolution of our reciprocal role relationships. As well as environmental influences we must also consider the individual nature that is uniquely ours it isnt just what happens to us, its what we make of what happens to us and how we act. We are not looking to blame an early life seen as fixed and irredeemable. We are looking at that rich mixture of what happened, how we met our experiences, and at what now needs to be revised and changed. So, in the earth of the early environment we learn a three-way pattern of relating to the world, others and ourselves: One pattern is connected to the way we feel towards others and our reaction to them. The second pattern anticipates the way we have learned that the other person is going to react towards us. The third pattern is the way we relate to ourselves inside. For example, if my early experience has been with a mother who was perhaps absent for a lot of the time either because of illness or depression or because of having to go to work, or simply because I didnt feel close to her my core pain may be around abandonment or rejection and part of me will feel like an abandoned or rejected child. I will also carry an abandoning or rejecting other and act in a rejecting or abandoning way toward others, or toward myself, unable to accept my own or others efforts as good. My internal dialogue will be reflecting themes of feeling rejected by a rejecting other. I may talk in a rejecting way to myself; telling myself off or not caring for my needs. The inner dialogue may be mild and occasional, and it can become repetitive and ruminative, giving rise to anxiety or feeling obsessed with anticipating rejection.

03-Wilde McCormick-4370-Ch-02-Part 2.indd 42

02/03/2012 10:21:19 AM

UNDERSTANDING RELATING 43

Sometimes our early reaction to quite small problems with parents, or small instances of absence or neglect, can be quite extreme, and until those reactions are modified and looked at afresh they live on to inform the way we relate to others in quite a profound way. We all suffer from our attempted solutions to our core emotional pain. Sometimes our more problematic reciprocal roles are compensated for or accompanied by reciprocal role procedures derived from good experiences such as kindness or positive examples of care, however small, from others. We may also benefit from a rich imaginative life that supports us through fantasy and dreams that are meaningfully different from the environment we endure, and we are able to make these work for us. There are some people who survive the most neglectful and abusive of backgrounds who have been able to create a healthy island from which a healthy self beams in openness and grace in spite of it. There is no clear reason for this except for the hypothesis that within their natural being is the means to transform suffering and create meaning and inner strength. Or, this potential for a healthy self, which is in all of us, has been nourished by one good experience of a loving attitude.

Re-enactment of early life parent/child roles

What we learn from early experiences becomes a sort of hidden rule book laying down patterns of relating. We can play either role, inviting others to play the reciprocal role. It is important to grasp that we learn both roles (the judged and the judging role, for example). As well as the coping child role, we learn to force others to play the reciprocal role as well as treating ourselves in the same terms. Thus our core wound is maintained by both the damaged and the damaging aspects we learned early on. Look through Table 2.1 and notice how you respond to each section. There may be thoughts, feelings, body sensations. Follow your response, in order to discover your own repertoire of reciprocal roles. Using the words or images that come to you, write down your own connection with patterns of reciprocal roles. Remember that we manage ourselves emotionally as we were managed and cared for. We get used to it, and what we have known becomes part of us. This means that the same sorts of things keep on happening to us in relationships. These old patterns give us a clue about the structures of relationship patterns that lie underneath. These are the learned patterns we can revise. As you record the relationship patterns you have got used to, you will be finding descriptions of the ways in which you look after yourself, how you expect to be responded to by others and how you relate to others.

03-Wilde McCormick-4370-Ch-02-Part 2.indd 43

02/03/2012 10:21:19 AM

44 THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF WHO WE ARE

Exercise
Using your developing new voice, the voice you are internalising in this book, of me as author and therapist also in you, write down the areas in your life that work well and, where you can, assess the following patterns. For example: The care you experienced What you felt Some good experiences GOOD ENOUGH Not too good Lovable Responsive held Not too bad Sense of self Trusting trusted Loving Secure Loving loved Caring Cared for Healthy Put the words you choose to describe your healthy self into your healthy island.

There may be many variations in the actual words used to describe your experiences, and it is important for each of us to find our own. We are not looking to find literal answers. For example, it is quite possible for us to recognise feeling punished when weve been criticised as if we have been beaten physically. If the word punished best describes our core pain then its important to understand the three-way process that lives on in our relating. Our internalised punished child self expects others to behave in a punishing way towards us. We may unconsciously choose others who behave in a punishing way, thus maintaining the core pain punishing/punished and coping devices such as being cowed or pleasing. Our internalised punishing adult self may continue to behave in a punishing way, creating demanding timetables or being overcritical, beating up on the internalised child self and maintaining a feeling of punishment. Or, we may behave in a punishing way towards others, particularly those who appear punishable, and remind us of our own cowed or wounded self. Quite often our coping mode only works partially for us and is accompanied by depression or other symptoms. Sometimes we evoke a punishing response which seems to confirm the original pattern and deepens our depression or other psychological or physical symptoms. Another example is of the childhood experience of abandonment. This might invite an internalised abandoned child, whose experience was either of actual abandonment or of a parent or caregiver who felt remote, depressed or preoccupied. And then there would be the internalised abandoning adult, who continually abandons their child self by not attending to needs, or who chooses an abandoning other in relationships, which keeps the core wound in search of healing. As we grasp how these patterns of relating continue, in our present everyday life, we may expect all three roles to be enacted at different times, or within the same relationship. The child role still feels fresh

03-Wilde McCormick-4370-Ch-02-Part 2.indd 44

02/03/2012 10:21:20 AM

UNDERSTANDING RELATING 45

Table 2.1 Patterns of care that can dominate our relationships until we revise them
The way we experienced care ABSENT Rejecting Abandoning CONDITIONAL Judging Belittling split Demanding Blaming TOO TIGHT Overcontrolling Fused dependency Flattening TOO LOOSE Anxious Not there Abandoning TOO BUSY Overlooking Depriving Silencing ENVIOUS Envious Hated Picking NEGLECTING Neglecting Physical neglect Emotional neglect Mental neglect Attacking ABUSIVE Abusing VIOLENT Abusing states Attempted solution (survival pattern) placating parental child striving striving hypervigilance hypervigilance rebellion flight into fantasy giving in avoidance anxious striving nowhere world

What we felt rejected abandoned judged humiliated crushed blamed restricted merged flattened anxious fragile abandoned

Reciprocal role (with self and others) rejecting rejected abandoning abandoned judging judged admiring rubbished exacting crushed blaming blamed controlling controlled merging merged flattening flattened abandoning abandoned distancing distanced overlooking overlooked depriving deprived silencing silenced harming harmed hating hated picking picked on neglecting neglected switching states unstable states unstable states attacking attacked abusing abused fantasy of perfect care fragmented hitting out hitting self

overlooked deprived silenced

excessive striving searching not there

envied hated picked on neglected hurt hurt/angry fragmented attacked abused

magical guilt self-sabotage self-harm cant take care mood swings feel in bits unstable states develop false self bully/victim

hurt/abused

split into fragments unexpressed rage

03-Wilde McCormick-4370-Ch-02-Part 2.indd 45

02/03/2012 10:21:20 AM

46 THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF WHO WE ARE

and sore, but it is maintained, within us, by the adult role. Thus the two roles are reciprocal, they go together and need to be understood in this way. It is important when embracing change to look at both ends and not just strive to heal the wounded child. We also need to modify the adult reciprocal role; to recognise when we are picking on, punishing or rejecting toward ourselves or others and find other ways of being. When we are able to see that the way we feel is maintained by the tension between both roles we can learn to choose healthier ways to relate. When early experiences offer no relief from painful or unbearable anxiety and fear, and we have no way of processing this, the different feelings may get split off into different parts inside us. Sometimes there is no connection between the parts and we find ourselves in emotional states with no idea how we got there. In Part Five we will be describing the more unstable states of mind and looking at how to create a continuing observer within oneself.

Exercise: inner dialogue of relationship

Self to self
Rest your attention on the general flavour of your close relationships, starting with the relationship you have via inner dialogue with yourself. Take your time. Notice how you think about and speak to yourself inside. You may find you have imaginary conversations, with real-life or fictional others, and that there are themes to these. Themes might include trying to be heroic, or happy, or pleasing someone; conversations may be being critical, judging, or encouraging, hopeful or longing toward an imaginary other.

Self to other
Notice how you anticipate how others will behave toward you, especially in close relationships. Notice how this anticipation manifests in the tension in your body, in your thoughts. You may anticipate and hope for special words only to be met with words that do not meet your hopes and expectations and you end up feeling disappointed or dashed. You may anticipate harshness, criticism and hold yourself back or even make yourself vulnerable to what is expected. Notice all your reactions when with others. As you explore your own reciprocal roles and notice the core pain of the child-derived role such as punished, criticised, bullied, forgotten, think about what you would feel if you saw a child being treated as you were.

03-Wilde McCormick-4370-Ch-02-Part 2.indd 46

02/03/2012 10:21:20 AM