Trauma and the Capacity to Feel: Clinical Issues with Patients who have

Suffered Early Trauma

©
Donald E. Kalsched, Ph.D.
Bucharest, Romania
October 24, 2021

Introducting the Topic

My title today is "Trauma and the Capacity to Feel: Clinical Issues with patients who
have Suffered Early Trauma" and so I'd like to say a word about this title. When we
speak about Trauma in general, we are referring to the fact that many of us, whether we
consider ourselves trauma-survivors or not, have been given more to experience in this
life than we can bear to experience consciously. And while this may be a part of the
human condition in general, there is one group of people who, through no fault of their
own-- have the added burden of acute, unbearable pain in childhood, before they have
developed the capacities to experience such experience.

For these unfortunate individuals (and often we are among them), the feelings of
unbearable pain, fear, disappointment, dis-illusionment, dis-grace, shame and humiliation
are simply “too much” to be registered in the normal ego as it is forming. We say these
feelings cannot be “metabolized” or “integrated” into the evolving ego-identity of a child.
This leaves a "gap" in the ego that is filled with shame. Now a healthy child needs a core
of self-esteem and a sense of goodness around which to cohere a resilient sense of self.
He or she needs this in order to go on functioning as a person in the world. And the dark
trauma-related feelings of fear, shame and badness threaten to annihilate that sense of
wholeness. So what happens to these feelings? If we have a trauma history they are an
empirical part of us, so we can’t just pretend that they never existed and make them ‘dis-
appear’. Or can we?

Well, enter what we call “dissociative defenses.” Dissociative defenses regulate what is
allowed to be experienced by the ego. If feelings are too much, these defenses can dis-
connect from them--literally attack them as not-self visitations and banish them to the un-
remembered past. If despairing feelings threaten to overwhelm us we can numb
ourselves, or throw an invisibility cloak over the most painful memories. Because of our
creative imaginations, we can create alternative illusory worlds within which to live—
sustaining illusions—alternative realities that label our trauma histories nothing more
than “fake news”. We can create “stories” around these alternative realities that provide
us with enhanced outer “identities,” but at the expense of the often tragic inner truths that
lie deeper in the soul-ful childhood parts of us. In these often-exiled childhood parts, lie
vulnerable, wounded feelings that we don’t want to deal with and yet, that we must deal
with if we are to heal from trauma and come into a full relationship with reality.

The problem is, that when we dissociate our trauma-generated pain we also dissociate a
lot of other feelings, so we find that, when dissociative defenses take over, our very
capacity for feeling itself is injured. If we are afraid of certain shameful feelings

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associated with trauma, we often become afraid of feelings in general. We become
affectively compromised and we cannot be fully alive.

The late Paul Russell famously said that “Trauma is an injury to the capacity to feel” and
this captures the true tragedy of trauma and its symptoms. It would be one thing if we
had traumatic experiences and these could just be banished and encapsulated and we
could go on living—like a muscle with a cyst of foreign material in it. The muscle
functions pretty well anyway. But trauma doesn’t seem to work that way. When we
have a toxic “cyst” of traumatic pain and suffering encapsulated in the psyche behind
dissociative defenses, then our capacity to feel in general is compromised. Especially our
capacity to feel the vulnerable, human feelings that make us attractive to other people and
open life up to the joy and pleasure of what it means to be fully alive.

Jung recognized that feelings are the foundational medium of our psychological life. In
fact, he acknowledged, they are the window to life. Early in his professional career, Jung
made a definitive statement about his understanding of the psyche: "The essential basis
of our personality", he said "is affectivity. Thought and action are, as it were, only
symptoms of affectivity" (Jung, CW 3, par 78).

So, in Jung’s tradition, affect--feeling--is the essential focus of our work as

psychotherapists. We are always working to try to increase the affective competence--the
emotional literacy--of our patients. We are always working with the vulnerable feelings
that don’t want to be felt—with affects, and their resistances…..with feelings and
dissociative defenses against feelings. In other words, we are always working with the
human heart, and with the opening or closing of that heart. A heart that has been
hardened by dissociative defenses will hopefully soften and open once again—in the
compassionate presence of another person who understands, and who can help hold the
underlying pain that has required dissociative defenses.

Epigraph on Heartbreak

So, speaking of the human heart, let me give you an epigraph that contain the seeds of
what I wish to communicate today. We’ll return to it at different points in our time
together. It represents some advice from Pema Chodron for people who are struggling
with depression. It’s a paraphrase because I can’t find the original quotation, but it goes
like this:
Slide
"Let your heart break and drop the story..."

I think we all know (more or less) what it means to “let our hearts break.” It means to let
ourselves drop into tearful feelings of grief or heart-ache in the body and to stop holding
those feelings back or covering them over with mental defenses. This is not a simple
matter for the trauma survivor whose heart has been broken catastrophically and must
never risk being broken again. So “let your heart break” is not such an easy directive for
people with a trauma history.

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And what about “drop the story.” As we’ll see, the “story” that Chodron advises us to
drop is a story that we tell ourselves about our lives and it often serves as a defensive and
protective narrative, designed to help us cope and to keep up our hope in the face of
underlying pain we’d rather not know about, much less feel. In order not to “know about”
or “feel” the truth of our inner experience, we will need powerful dissociative defenses to
help us construct private myths to live by. And this is the point of these stories. The story
surrounds our broken hearts with a narrative that makes sense out of our lives and gives
us a sense of self-esteem and agency and meaning. It also directs some of our aggression
outside the self and tells us what parts of the world threaten us. But it often takes us
away from our inner lives and away from our feelings--hence away from a deeper truth
about ourselves--away from the soul. If we have a trauma history, often the stories we
construct are written around a gaping hole in the center of us where there’s a lot of
heartbreak and a lot of shame. There’s nothing wrong with these self-protective stories.
We need them in order to cope and survive in the world. Trauma survivors need them
desperately and cling to them with a vengeance.

But if we want to heal from trauma, we’ll have to find ways around them, or even, as
Pema Chodron recommends, give them up. We'll have to "drop the story." We’ll have to
find alternative “interpretations” of life that include the deeper feelings that remain
unconscious in us, calling for recognition. Fortunately, with the help of the Psyche, we
can often “see” the fugitive heartache hiding in our defensive narratives and in the
repetitive "stories" we tell about ourselves. As you’ll see in my examples today, the
fugitive heartache is often represented in dream material, as a lost or wounded child.
This “child” is often found hiding in a “system” of powerful protective or persecutory
“forces” that I have called the Self Care System. I’ll describe this protective enclave in a
moment.

In any case, it helps to know about this “child” and its Spirit-protectors. And it helps to
be able to “see” the ways our dissociative defensive systems are constructed to protect—
and (unfortunately) also persecute—this child. It is also important to recognize that these
defenses operate autonomously. It is not “we” who do the defending. These defense-
“mechanisms” do it for us. If we know how these defenses operate and why, then
sometimes we can trick them into giving up their control--control over the wounded inner
child who as we’ll see, is a carrier of the soul.

Structure and Dynamics of the Self-Care System

As many of you know, I have had a special interest over the last several decades in the
structure and dynamics of the inner world of individual patients who have suffered
severe early childhood trauma. The people I’m talking about are individuals who
encountered experiences in the course of their development—often in their early
childhoods-- that were so shocking or so overwhelming or so painful that they were
unable to integrate the feelings that they generated. In order to go on living, certain
powerful psychological defenses (represented in their dreams as archetypal powers) came
to their rescue and chopped up their traumatic experiences into pieces—so they could go
on living without a full memory of what they had been through. These defenses all fall in

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the category of the most primitive defenses we encounter in psychological life—
otherwise known as “dissociative defenses.” I began to see these defenses appearing as
personified “Great Beings” in the dreams of the trauma survivors I was working with.

The level of violence in the inner worlds of the patients I’m describing was shocking to
me when I first discovered it, and it didn’t seem to go together with the conflict model of
the psyche I had learned from Jung. There seemed to be very limited capacity in these
patients to hold conflicting feelings. They were very easily shamed if they felt needy or
vulnerable and they were almost always highly sensitive people. Their emotions—if they
let themselves feel them--were vehement and overwhelming. Their defenses had to be
equally powerful in order to manage and regulate their extreme emotions.

Let’s imagine a small child—a girl, aged 5 say-- who—every Sunday with her mother
and older sister off at Church, is taken down the basement by her father and under some
pretense about her misbehavior, is sexually molested. Suddenly her dependent love and
attachment to her beloved father is met with violence and pain and complete
disillusionment—soul-murder as one writer described it. At this moment something
remarkable happens. The soul is not murdered. Suddenly, our little girl is on the ceiling,
looking down dispassionately at her small body being violated below. She may know
what is happening but she doesn’t “feel” it. We call this dissociation, and it is described
by the late Phillip Bromberg as an “escape when there is no escape.” Dissociation “dis-
connects” us from our whole experience—chops it up into pieces, and then distributes
those pieces to different parts of the psyche or the soma—there to remain unconscious
and un-remembered.

When this child grows up, she will “know” in one part of her mind that something “bad”
happened with her Father in that basement. If she goes down there, she will start to get
anxious but she won’t know why. She won’t be allowed by her dissociative defenses to
think about it or to feel about it or to have sensations in her body connected to what
happened. She will only know that she feels terribly ashamed about herself and she will
conclude that this is because something is wrong with her—something's bad about her,
inferior, defective, stupid, ugly or just plain missing what other normal people have.
Such chronic shame is almost always the legacy of trauma and dissociative defenses. It
gives trauma survivors additional reasons not to go anywhere near their painful feelings
of injury, because these feelings are now laced with shame.

As I was able to observe the inner worlds of trauma survivors like the little girl in this
example, (who were later my patients) I gradually came to see (in their dreams) self-
portraits of the dissociative defenses that came to their rescue. And I was able to observe
similarities from patient to patient in the way these defenses functioned in the inner
world. I called this pattern of inner dynamic forces and their organizing principles, the
Self-Care System, and my first book The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of
the Personal Spirit, is a record of these discoveries. The SCS, as I understand it, is made
up of archetypal “powers,” arranged in a dynamic “system” of defense and self-
regulation. And one of the primary functions of this system in the inner world of the
dissociative mind, is to defend a vulnerable core of the traumatized childhood psyche

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from further violation. This means preventing certain painful feelings from becoming
conscious in the ego. So ultimately, the SCS constitutes a defense against feeling in
general—and especially the vulnerable, dependent feelings that have been annihilated in
the abused child. The system's motto, like the Jewish Defense League, is “Never Again!”
“Never Again” will you experience this pain. Never Again will you attach to someone
who can hurt you like this.

I’d like now to tell you a few clinical vignettes that will illustrate how these archaic
defenses came into view for me. Along the way, we’ll explore ways of working with
patients who are highly defended by the SCS in order to get at underlying feelings that
are necessary in the process of healing. As we’ll see, the psyche seems to cooperate in
this process.

Black Captain and Child

I once had an initial psychotherapy session with a tough business-woman (a real-estate

agent named Diane) who was beautiful, bright, and highly successful in her field. She
had a reputation of “taking no prisoners” as the saying goes, but she also had a lot of
trouble in her intimate relationships. She had grown up in a home where both parents
were alcoholic and her emotional life as a child had been completely neglected. She had
been a highly sensitive little girl but she was shamed for her sensitivities and mocked for
crying all the time. As a result she became tough and counter-dependent, inwardly
ashamed about her own childhood needs and intolerant of her own underlying
vulnerability.

She came to see me after her boyfriend had hurt her feelings by showing an interest in
another woman. Instead of telling him how hurt she was, she blew up at him, cursed him
at the top of her lungs, and threw him out. Now, without him, she was bereft. She was
ranting and raving about his leaving her, trying desperately not to feel her grief as she sat
with me. Slowly she calmed down and I tried to bring her attention to what she was
feeling underneath all the anger, asking her just to sit with me, focus on her breathing,
and tell me what was going on inside. A pattern emerged in which she would tear up and
begin to cry—then would pull herself together, make some black-humored cynical joke
and then sit nervously biting her knuckles until her pain came back and she gave in to
sobbing once again. During her tearful moments she was able to relate her current pain
to pain she had felt growing up at home, where she felt so abandoned by both parents. I
thought these insights were amazing for a first session and that they were a good
predictor of possible future work together. Our remaining time during this initial hour
was spent moving back and forth between her acute inner pain and the self-sufficient
defense against it. At the end of this difficult session in which I had been quite moved by
her struggle and her courageous tears, she gathered up her things, stood up, stuck her chin
out and said on the way out the door “don’t worry! I will never bring that puking,
mueling little brat in here again!” I was shocked.

That night she had a dream that she reported at our next meeting. I saw this dream as a
commentary on our session and a beautiful out-picturing of her defenses. In her dream,

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she was the captive of a menacing dark male figure dressed in black, who was captain of
a boat floating on an inky dark river at night—a kind of pontoon boat. (The dream
reminded her of the movie “Cape Fear” starring Robert Mitchum which I personally
remember as a very scarey movie.) She was chained at the ankle to a young girl—about
7 or 8 years old so she couldn’t escape because of the way this child held her back. She
could hear the Black Captain approaching. He trapped her on one of the pontoons along
with her young companion. Pushing my patient aside, he ruthlessly kicked the child into
the water and then shoved her under water with his boot. My patient kept trying to pull
the child up with the chain, so she could breathe, but the man kept pushing her under,
intent on drowning her. My patient woke up crying and in a panic for the little girl.

I felt this dream was providing me and my patient with an image of exactly the process
we had gone through together in her session. The “child” in herself would come “up”
from the unconscious, cry tears of grief and heartache, then my patient would push these
feelings away and retreat into her “mean-girl” defense. But the dream added some
important information. Apparently, it was not she herself, my patient, who was cutting
off her feelings, but the “Black Captain” in herself. He, apparently couldn’t tolerate her
experience of sadness and vulnerability. In other words, he had been installed in her
inner world as a defense against the “child” in herself and against the heartbreak resident
in this “child.” I thought it was important that my patient was on the little girl’s side—
trying to keep her alive so she could breathe.

But the violence of the Black Captain was amazing to both of us. In our session this
violent figure tried repeatedly to cut her off from her sadness and catapult her out of her
body and into her head—into her tough self-sufficient “story” where she lived most of the
time. We see in this example how the violent defense is trying as best it can to regulate
how much feeling is allowed to become conscious in the ego. It keeps pushing it “under
water.” Trying to render it unconscious. When my patient summarized her response to
the session, saying “don’t worry….I’ll never bring the puking mueling little brat in here
again!” it was not she herself speaking to me, but the black captain with whom her ego
was identified!

Over the years, I have found this violent inner figure—here the “Black Captain”-- in the
dream material of many patients. Here are two additional examples. Notice that these
menacing, violent figures seem to be out to “kill” the child in the psyche. This can be
misleading. I have come to realize that the violent figures do not really want to “kill” or
obliterate the “child” in the psyche. They want to “kill” the patient’s relationship with it,
i.e., cut it off from consciousness. Sometimes the only way they can keep the child
“inside” the defensive system, is to attack and de-moralize it.

Second Case: Mike and the Child-killing Bomber

A 40 year old high school football coach named "Mike" came to see me for what his wife
described as "anger issues." Apparently Mike was in various road rage incidents and he
often got into fights in bars. Mike was seemingly addicted to his rages. He had been
arrested for several felonies as an adolescent. But the main problem now—an the issue

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his wife was most worried about-- was that Mike was starting to have uncontrollable
fears and anxieties about losing his new-born son—an infant who had been born with a
medical condition and was especially fragile. The medical condition was not life-
threatening but my patient found himself holding all-night vigils, crying uncontrollably
over this infant’s crib, fearing the boy would die. When I saw him, Mike was highly
agitated, could not sit down in his sessions, and spoke to me while pacing. Gradually,
over several weeks, he sat down and we began to explore his history which included
regular beatings by his militaristic father and other humiliations when he was very small,
like being collared and attached to a dog chain in the front yard to keep him from running
away or destroying things when the parents were away.

As his therapy began and Mike settled into the empathic field of my attention in his
weekly hours, he began to feel some of the raw pain and tearful sadness about this
history. This was not easy for him. Usually he would present some horrific detail about
his childhood with a dismissive macho attitude--like the dog-chain incident. Then, out of
the corner of his eye, he would see the painful look on my face, as I took seriously the
humiliation that he must have experienced as a little boy. This gave him permission to
feel some of his own pain and the result was increasingly that he could let himself drop
into his own vulnerable feeling experience….and a lot of it was grief and sadness from
his childhood that existed “underneath” his bravado defenses. He started to have a lot
more feeling in his sessions. This in itself worried him. He confided in one session that
he’d had the fantasy that I was maybe trying to “feminize” him and make him gay. One
day he brought this dream:

We're in a huge hotel. I am a body-guard for this child who seemed sacred or
special in some way--almost like the Christ Child. He's in an adjoining room.
Somehow the child doesn't know who he is. I can feel the presence of an evil
person--someone who has come for the boy and is very close by. I become
vigilant....alert! Then there's an explosion set off by the "evil one". I run into the
child's room. He's 5-7 years old. The explosion occurred next door to him. The
child is in shock. I recognize him and know who he is...the images of his life
flash by me. I sit down next to this boy: "Who are you!" I shout. "Do you know
who you are?" His eyes remain fixed, then roll up in the back of his head. I see a
little smile on his face. Perhaps I have made contact with him. But he won't look
at me. I feel so frustrated. I leave the room crying out of helplessness.
Then in a final part, I'm trying to tell this dream to a man upstairs. A woman
present has instructed me to tell him the whole story. I'm relieved at the prospect
of this but am blocked...like I've had electro-shock or amnesia...I can't remember
the boy's life story. I think perhaps I should go back for his history but I'll never
escape the "evil one" if I do. I feel compelled to wake myself up.

A couple of Mike's associations were important. To the child in a trance, he associated

his own hardened inner child--the part of him that had stopped attaching to anyone. But
this child, the dream now made clear was somehow "sacred"--it held something of his
own vital potential. He also felt huge compassion for this child and remembered once
seeing a picture of himself having his hair washed by his mother. He brought the picture

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into therapy and showed it to me. “I look so innocent” he said with tears in his eyes. The
explosion set off by the evil one Mike thought was like the anger that often exploded in
him to cover up and defend against the pain and torture of his early life. And to the "man
upstairs" he associated to me, his analyst (my office was upstairs in the village where I
practiced).

Mike could relate to the dream ego's ambivalence in telling his story--part of him blocked
by dissociation (the electro-shock and amnesia) and afraid that if he allowed himself to
feel his early pain, it would arouse his violent defenses--the "evil one." This process of
recovering his feeling-memories against the oppression of his defenses was precisely
what was happening in his therapy. He was dropping his macho defenses and letting the
young and innocent part of himself feel the heartbreaking pain and shame of his early
life. He thought he had lost his innocence forever but here it was again. But the “Mad
Bomber” in himself did not like this. He was now seemingly aroused and agitated by the
fact that Mike was risking his story and all the feeling in it with me, his therapist. He
therefore trie to “kill” Mike’s awareness of this “child.”

Third Case: Beth, the Serial Killer and Child

“Beth” was a pediatric physician in her mid-50’s who consulted me because the breakup
of a relationship had left her depressed, withdrawn, and unable to work—dead inside. She
told me she had many years of prior therapy and analysis, but nothing lasted, adding to
her sense of failure.

She was very depressed when I first saw her, constricted in her body, frozen in her
posture, thin and disheveled like a waif or an orphan. Like many patients with survival
defenses, she was functioning but not living. “I want my Spirit back,” she said, with a
great sense of longing in her voice. Her life reminded me of the I-Ching phrase,
‘Difficulty at the Beginning.’ Born in poverty to Eastern European Jewish parents who
were both Holocaust survivors, she spent much of her early life as a refugee and
immigrant as the family tried desperately to leave a communist-dominated Eastern
European country. At 9 months of age, she was near death with a Smallpox infection and
had to be quarantined in a big-city hospital far from her parents--kept in isolation for a
whole month before she had even been weaned. Beth had no memory of this early trauma
but later in life, any hint of abandonment could send her into a panic.

“I have severe abandonment issues,” Beth said in an early session. ”I can feel really tiny
and vulnerable—very condensed inside …a fear of reaching out and getting hit or hurt.
When I’m depressed, it’s all consuming. I’ll go into a dissociated place…daydream a
lot….consoling myself that I’m practicing my own death…..I can’t live so well but I
know how to “die”—that’s what I say to myself-- so it won’t be so bad later.”

The week prior to our first session, while Beth was anxiously (and excitedly) anticipating
the hour, she had a dream that gave us a picture of her inner world and its major players.
It did not exactly make her want to come to therapy. Here’s the dream:

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 “I’m watching a therapy situation in a house by the ocean. The therapist is a
young man. The patient, also a male, is lying on the couch. The therapist is
trying to hide his sexuality…he has a hard-on. Something ominous is about to
happen. I go into my “observer” mode and can see this as if it’s in the future.
The patient wants to bring his child to the therapist. There’s a cabinet in the
office which looks like a child-cabinet full of toys and playthings (it even has a
label—“Child” on it) but I can “see” that inside are knives and ropes and the
implements of torture. The therapist is really a serial killer. If his patient brings
his child here, the child will be sexually violated, then murdered. I want to help
the man and his child…to warn them about what lies ahead.”

Beth knew instinctively that this dream and its inner figures showed us something of her
psyche’s fears about therapy, and she told me the dream in our first session. “Being a
patient is difficult” she said….”I’m so self-sufficient….you can’t help me…that’s my
operational assumption. I marvel at anyone who gets in.”

We see in this dream Beth’s unconscious fears about opening up her inner world. She
wants to “bring her child to therapy” but the violent persecutor inside fills her full of dark
illusions—conspiratorial theories-- that increase her terror.

Eventually Beth was able to “bring her child” to therapy and that’s another longer story
that I don’t have time to tell you today. Suffice it to say that with every success in Beth’s
courageous plunge into the unbearable pain of her inner world, there would come an
“attack” by the system—an impossible migraine headache or a sense of hopelessness
defeating her hope. It was a constant see-saw battle.

Summary of Cases:

So in all of our three cases, Diane, Mike, and Beth, we witness the activation of violent
dissociative defenses—a Black Captain who tries to kill a young girl who is chained to
the dreamer, a Mad Bomber who blows up a child (just as Mike is beginning to get in
touch with his early childhood pain), and an evil serial killer-therapist who is trying to
lure a young child into his lair to kill it. These violent defenses are all activated as my
patients begin to drop into their early, un-remembered childhood pain, grief, and fear—
to let their hearts break a little and "drop the story" told to them by their repetitive
defenses.

It’s as if the defensive system sees the wounded “child” with its fragile vulnerability as a
threat. In all three cases, we see how the defense is activated just as contact is made with
the early traumatic memory and the unbearable feelings pain associated with it. In other
words as the “child” comes to presence in the therapy. The violent figure is a killer of the
feelings personified by this “child.” In all these cases, it is clear that powerful aggressive
forces, outside the ego’s awareness, cannot tolerate the painful feelings contained in or
represented by the inner “child.” Therapy for all three of these individuals was a struggle
to get underneath the defensive system and to make contact with the vulnerable feelings
vested in this “child.”

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 Slide
[Blake’s Good and Evil Angels and Child]

Here’s a mytho-poetic image of the Self Care System that I’d like to interest you in
today. In it I think you’ll see at least two of the figures we’ve been talking about. It’s by
William Blake from the Tate Gallery in London and it’s called the Good and Evil Angels
Fight for Possession of a Child. In this three-part image you see a Dark Angel on the left,
in this case shackled to the flames of Hell, with unseeing dead eyes, looming out of the
background as though searching for the infant who is fleeing into the arms of the Bright
Angel on the right. The Bright Angel, standing on a cloud, is connected to the celestial
world of light and holds the child away from the menacing dark angel on the left. The
child is clearly terrified and, as we all know, this terror is part of the legacy of trauma.

Mythologically speaking we could think of the Dark Angel on the left as Lucifer after his
Fall from heaven and we could think of the Angel on the right as Lucifer in his “pre-
fallen” state. Here he is: the Radiant Lucifer, the light-bearer, God’s greatest lover and
completely identified with the splendor and radiance of the Divine. According to the
Apocryphal literature of the early Christian period, this Beautiful One is destined for a
Fall.

[Slide of Resplendent Lucifer]

The story of this “Fall” is told in two versions—the pride version and the lust version.
The pride version is very interesting psychologically because it’s described as a trauma in
heaven. The story, in brief, is that the radiant Lucifer looked into the mind of God one
day and suddenly, to his shock and dismay, discovered something that God was
planning….. something unbearable—unthinkable--traumatic. God was planning to come
down into time and space reality and incarnate as a man! A man with mortal flesh and all
the disgusting realities of the body. Reportedly, this so shocked and enraged Lucifer that
he led a rebellion of many other angels and they fell from Heaven into the nether regions
where they became the emissaries of darkness—the demons, organized by the head
demon, the Devil himself.

[Slide of Lucifer Falling, Lucifer Landing]

I tell you this story in part, because at one point in my explorations of the inner world of
trauma, I got very interested in the iconography and phenomenology of Hell as an out-
picturing of the defensive enclave I call the Self-Care System. And I got especially
interested in the imagery of Hell inspired by Dante’s famous Divine Comedy, the first
third of which—the Inferno-- is devoted exclusively to Dante’s descent into Hell.

If you’ll recall how the Divine Comedy starts, Dante is in the middle of his life and is
depressed. His beloved Beatrice, who has departed this world, looks down from Heaven
and realizes that the cure of Dante’s depression must be a guided descent into Hell where
Dante (she proclaims) must have a more conscious encounter with the parts of his

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experience that have led to his depression—in other words with his early, un-
remembered, dissociated pain. She chooses Dante’s favorite poet from Antiquity—none
other than the great Virgil himself—to guide him. Virgil has been living in the outermost
layer of Hell, free from the deep suffering of the lower regions. He is there with other
ancient poets, writers and artists who, because of their “original sin” and the fact that they
were born before Christ’s coming, are still subject to imprisonment. In any case, Virgil
knows the territory, so to speak, and takes Dante down through the various gates where
he must confront all the traumatically painful parts of his life that have been rendered
unconscious, i.e., consigned to Hell.

So Hell, in this telling of the story would represent the “system” I have been describing,
overseen by the fallen Lucifer and his minions. Here is an image of the various layers
and spirals of Hell starting at Limbo on the upper left and descending to the “pit.”

[Slide of Botticelli’s Hell]

And at the very bottom of this funnel—in the 9th circle, surrounded by fire and ice is the
fallen Lucifer himself. And perhaps you can imagine my pleasure when I discovered his
name in Latin, which is “DIS” from which we get all our dis words—disconnection, dis-
heartened, dis-possessed, dis-ease, dis-aster, which means to be separated from your
stars. And of course the most important “dis” word of all--dissociation. So here’s the
Lord of Dissociation—the great dis-connecting, dis-heartening “engine” of dissociation at
the heart of the SCS. If you’re interested in more details of Dante’s descent to confront
this monster, you can read about it in my book Trauma and the Soul where I devote a
whole chapter to Dante's great story.

[3 Slides of Dis]

As an archetypal figure, Dis would represent pure evil or pure hatred or pure negation—
violence personified. We’ve already witnessed him in our three examples, appearing as
the Black Captain, the Mad Bomber, and the Serial Killer. In the inner world, he often
appears as the Critic, the Adversary, a persecutory inner voice…..criticizing, accusing,
causing shame.
[Blake Image Again]

On the right, with the child in its arms, is a bright angel un-tethered and free, moving
toward the light and up into the head, away from affect in the body. As a Spirit-being
he/she is associated with the celestial or upper regions of the psyche/cosmos, including
those aspects of the mind which allow us to transcend our impossible feelings-in-the-
body and our physical limitations (including the “impossible” realities of our mortality
and death). As an archetypal figure this angel would represent all the uplifting and
idealizing energies that make for sustaining and life-supporting illusions-- all the positive,
idealizing energies and affects associated with optimism hope and love. If the dark angel
is persecutory, the bright angel is protective. In its protective role, this angel is crucial in
the life of the trauma survivor, providing hope where hope has been crushed.

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Unfortunately this hope must often be woven around sustaining illusions. When the
trauma survivor comes into therapy this Angel is often projected onto the therapist who
inherits some of the idealizations that are crucial to support the arc of the developing self
of the patient. Heinz Kohut, the late American psycho-analyst who was important to me
in my own development, pointed out how crucial these idealizations are in regulating
self-esteem for the individual who has suffered the amount of emotional neglect that
these patients have experienced. Kohut also describes how important it is for the Angelic
projections to be "disillusioned" slowly as the patient encounters the human limitations of
the therapist. This can be a painful process for the therapist as his or her wings start to
fall off and his halo starts to tarnish.

Edward Edinger in his book Ego and Archetype (p. 59) has given a beautiful example of
the arrival of the Bright Angel in one of his cases. As his severely traumatized female
patient started therapy she had a dream he reports as follows:

"I have been banished to the cold, barren wastes of Siberia and am wandering
about aimlessly. Then a group of soldiers on horseback approached. They threw
me into the snow and proceed to rape me one by one. Four times this happens. I
felt torn apart and paralyzed with cold. Then the fifth soldier approaches. I
expect the same treatment but to my surprise I see pity and human understanding
in his eyes. Instead of raping me he gently wraps me in a blanket and carries me
to a nearby cottage. Here I am placed by the fire and fed warm soup. I know this
man is going to heal me."

Edinger relates this dream to the onset of the transference, but not the usual
understanding of transference as the simple projection of the parental image. Edinger
says that his patient's dream gives a picture of the deep healing experience that comes
from a profound repair between his patient's traumatized ego and the inner source of
sustainment and guidance that Jung called the Self. Here's what Edinger says:

[experiences like this] are usually handled more or less successfully by means of
good human feeling and established theories concerning transference. However, I
believe, a realization that a profound nuclear process involving repair of the ego-
Self axis is taking place gives an added dimension to the understanding of the
transference phenomenon. Furthermore, one is then able to understand the
therapeutic experience in the larger context of man's universal need for a relation
to the transpersonal source of being." (59)

So the idealizing energies that circulate in therapy are very important to healing and the
Bright Angel in Blake's illustration, represents these. In Jungian terms, this Angel would
stand for the positive and bright side of the Self while the Dark Angel would stand for the
dark side of the Self. While Jung's concept of the Self is implicated in our image of the
Self Care System, it is important to note that both these Angels are part of a dissociative
system. In other words, as I see it, they represent the primitive idealizing and diabolizing
energies of the Self that are recruited for defensive and self-regulatory purposes. So
instead of being allied with what we ordinarily think of as the Self’s integrative and

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wholeness-producing effects, when dissociated from the ego, these archetypal opposites
conspire towards splitting and encapsulation—all in order to prevent the ego from
becoming conscious. They constitute a major problem in the healing of trauma’s legacy.

One way the Bright Angel conspires to make things difficult for healing, for example, is
that it can represent unrealistic ideals that the trauma survivor's ego is always falling
short of. The Bright Angel can seduce the trauma survivor into obsessive mental
preoccupations and perfectionistic demands, which the embodied ego is always failing. I
have also seen this Angel become active in seducing the trauma-survivor into various
states of bliss or oblivion obtained through addictive substances (alcohol, drugs) or
compulsive activities (sex, overeating) etc.

This angel can also cast spells. It can put the ego in a trance—throw an invisibility cloak
over a painful memory, create amnesia barriers between different parts of the psyche, or
put the inner child into shock. Here’s the way Emily Dickinson puts it in her poem
“There is a Pain so Other.”
[Slide of Dickinson Poem]

There is a pain so utter

That it swallows substance up
Then covers the Abyss with Trance—
So Memory can step
Around – across – upon it
As one within a Swoon –
Goes safely – where an open eye
Would drop him – Bone by bone.

So if the dark angel specializes in violence, the Bright Angel is a master of illusion. If
the Dark Angel is “Dis”, the Bright Angel is “Bliss.” Remember that both these Angels
are part of a dissociative system that is trying to suppress or encapsulate the fragile,
wounded, injured child inside the system and prevent it from getting “out” into the world
where it has already encountered a Reality that it can’t bear.

In a child's early life, it's often the Bright Angel’s job to keep hope alive even if it has to
create illusions to do so. Sometimes this Angel appears as a special animal who
companions the child who has been abandoned by all human friends. The bright angel is
also a seductive identification-figure for the psychotherapist in his/her temptation to
counter the nihilistic voices of the inner critic (dark angel) and to give the patient some
hope.

Here’s a story I love about the Bright Angel that I once heard from Edward Edinger: It
comes from Esther Harding who knew the mother of a 5 year old little girl who suffered a
traumatic moment in her childhood.

The mother sent her young daughter to her father's study one morning to deliver
an important note, written on a piece of paper. The little girl went off to deliver

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 the note. Shortly thereafter she came back in tears and said "I'm sorry mother,
the angel won't let me go in". Whereupon the mother sent the daughter back a
second time, with the same result only this time more tears and distress. At this
point the mother became irritated at her youngster's imaginative excess, so she
took her little girl by the hand and the two of them marched the message over to
the father. As they entered the father's study, the mother stopped on the threshold
and saw her husband slumped in his chair, his drink spilled on the floor, dead
from a major heart attack.

This story brings home to us the miraculous and daimonic powers of the archetypal
psyche in its efforts to preserve the innocence of this child which is confronted with the
reality of death--too much experience, too soon.

On a trip through Maine on one of our drives from Connecticut to our Newfoundland
summer home, Robin and I stopped at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland and saw this
image painted by Henrietta Wyeth called “Death and the Child.” I immediately thought
of the story I just told you.

[Slide: Death and the Child by Henrietta Wyeth]

You can see the angel here, covering the child’s eyes so the child does not have to look
directly at the impossible reality of death. It’s simply too much Reality. It must be
mediated by the human connection and if that’s missing, then the Bright Angel will step
in an do it as best she can.

[Blake’s Two Angels and and Child]

The Dual Child in the System

Some final comments about the “child” in the SCS. Just like we have two Angels,
representing the light and dark sides of the inner world, I have also come to think of the
child in the SCS as a duality. On the one hand, the child seems to represent the
empirical, historical child, carrying the early wounding of trauma in its little body, now
banished from consciousness—exiled like an orphan-- living in the darkness of the nether
world without hope of redemption or discovery. This is the wounded, shame-based child
that carries the heartbreak that our defenses do not want us to feel. And yet, as we know,
it’s always this forsaken part of the self—the orphaned parts of ourselves-- that hold the
key to recovery. Here is an image of the Orphan from an ancient Egyptian tomb.

[Slide of Orphan]

It portrays a child sitting alone, naked, thin, knees pulled up and contracted in grief or
shame. It conveys a sense of intense mourning by one who is "bereft"--one of the
meanings of the Greek orphanos. Other meanings are without parents, fatherless, a
desolate dark place, deserted by everyone--the loss of a primary foundation of support--
parents, homeland, religious identity, sense of worth, abject loneliness. The image of the

14
orphan evokes our compassion, especially because of its link with the young and
helpless, the innocent child, the baby animal--left to the mercy and hardships of the
world.

Jung discovered something very important about this Orphan image—namely that it is
not just an image of human misery and misfortune. There is also something sacred about
the Orphan. Something soulful clings to this image and this may have to do with the fact
that even though the Orphan is rejected and abandoned by its human parents, it often
finds itself parented by miraculous forces--animals, fairies, nature herself--at least this is
true in much of mythology. The Orphan may thus find itself sustained by inner resources
that are not available to the more fortunate children of the world.

These considerations help us understand why Jung found in the archetype of the orphan a
deep inner foundation for individuality that he compared to the philosopher's stone--the
major goal of the alchemical process. On the famous stone that Jung carved in his garden
at Bollingen there is some beautiful poetic language about the orphan.

[Slide of Jung’s Quote on his Stone in Bollingen]

I am an orphan, alone; nevertheless I am found everywhere, I am one, but opposed to

myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father
nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a
white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the inner
most soul of man. I am mortal for every one, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons
(MDR 227).

Those of you who do psychotherapy and pay attention to dreams will recognize these
injured, dis-illusioned children who make their appearance—often as healing energies are
beginning to circulate in the therapeutic “field.” (We saw images of these wounded
children in the dream of Mike and the autistic child that the Mad Bomber is trying to
destroy or in Beth’s dream of the “child” that the dreamer “wants” to bring to therapy,
despite the “serial killer” therapist. Much of the creative work of psychotherapy is
involved in recovering these “children” and their unbearable feelings, bringing them out
of the defended fortress of the SCS into the light of ego-consciousness. This is the
painful work that John Bradshaw so beautifully described back in the late 80’s and 90’s
in books like Healing the Shame that Binds You and Homecoming, Reclaiming and
Championing Your Inner Child. He has many useful exercises for reclaiming the exiled,
orphaned children from the unconscious.

And one of Bradshaw’s most important contributions is that when we do this—when the
banished, unbearable feelings of the wounded child are brought back and given
embodied, feeling-full expression—when we let our hearts break, as it were-- there is
something ineffable that comes with them. We don’t know what to call this ineffable,
numinous “something” that clings to the wounded child as it returns—the human soul?
Pre-traumatic innocence?.....our core vitality affects?......our god-given right to be

15
here?......Bradshaw calls this ineffable presence, the Wonder Child. And he links it to
creative regeneration of the fractured, shame-based self.

In any case, we have to think of the “child” in the SCS and in our Blake image as a “dual
child”—part empirical and human, part ineffable, innocent, and as Jung described it,
divine…..a representative of the archetype of renewal itself. Here’s an image of this
“child of renewal.”

[Slide of Adoration of Infant Jesus]

This is Gherardo Delle Notti’s “Adoration of the Infant Jesus from the Uffizi Gallery in
Florence, painted somewhere in the early 1600’s. Notice where the light is coming from.
This is the child born at the darkest time of the year, in miserable circumstances, without
a mortal father, but with a star over its cradle in Bethlehem. This is the dual child—both
forsaken and chosen, human and divine, mortal and immortal.

Jung’s Discovery of the Dual Child in the SCS

Jung found his way to the dual child in the Self Care System-- and as often happens--this
“child” came to presence for him at one of the most painful, traumatic times of his life—
1912, right after his painful separation from Freud and all the friends and colleagues in
the Psychoanalytic movement. As those of you who know this history will recall, Freud’s
rejection of him was brutal and at first, Jung was too defended to let his heart break about
it. But for 28 sleepless nights in 1912 he sat in his study late into the night, numb with
despair and a searing sense of loneliness. He was listening to contemptuous inner voices,
mocking him, belittling him, telling him he was a fraud and had nothing of value to offer.
These were the voices of the Dark angel….the voices of Dis.

Then one night, filled with tears and a desperate longing, he let himself fall apart. He let
his heart break and stopped struggling with his critical voices—with the corrosive “story”
they were telling him about his shameful failures. “I let myself drop” he said. Jung
picked up his pen and began writing a kind active imagination dialogue with himself.
"Meine Seele, meine Seele, wo bist Du!?" (RB 232) My soul, my soul, where are you?

"Do you hear me? I call you….are you there? I have returned I am here
again...Do you still know me? …Give me your hand, my almost forgotten soul."
(RB 233)

And then, in the deafening silence, Jung heard a response. His soul responded. And it
came back to him in the voice and image of a child.

"Who are you child," Jung asked….

"My dreams have represented you as a child or as a maiden. I am ignorant of

your mystery. Forgive me if I speak as in a dream...(233)

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 "How strange it sounds to me to call you a child, you who still hold the all-
without-end in your hand. I went on the way of the day, and you went invisibly
with me …. You upheld my belief, when I was alone and near despair. At every
decisive moment you let me believe in myself." (233)

"The spirit of the depths taught me that my life is encompassed by the divine
child. From his hand everything unexpected came to me, everything living. This
child is what I feel as an eternally springing youth in me. (RB, p. 234) I had to
recognize and accept that my soul is a child and that my God in my soul is a
child." (RB244)]

When Jung says “everything living” came to him from the divine child, he is clearly
linking this image with the human soul which we think of as the core of our aliveness.
And the soul is uniquely a creature of two worlds. It stands for the sacred essence of our
aliveness, the divine spark of our true person-hood, but it takes up residence in the mortal
body and suffers in this body. It is the personal vehicle for our deepest subjectivity and
therefore is intimately involved in the psychotherapeutic process.

Many years later, Jung came out of the night sea journey or nekyia recorded in the Red
Book with a conviction…the central conviction of his entire authorship, namely, that
there is a sacred dimension to human life which is also discernable in the suffering of the
individuation process…if we learn how to attend it, how to cultivate it imaginatively, and
how to keep a channel open to it. And this sacred dimension often comes to presence
during the worst suffering that human flesh is heir to and it appears in the image of a
child—on the one hand the rejected and despised child--the orphan. Then, if embraced,
the orphan's twin, the pre-traumatic innocent one--the divine child.

Jung’s discovery of the dual nature of the soul-carrying child gave him a new respect for
regressive work in analysis—namely the importance of returning to traumatic childhood
memories. But he took this regression a step further than Freud did. That’s because his
implicit model of the psyche contained two worlds and Freud’s only one. Jung noticed
that when his patients regressed back to early childhood memories (this also happened to
him!), it was not just to recover dissociated pieces of their history, but in order to make
contact with a core of the self that was hidden in the unconscious and needed for any
future progress in life. Here’s how Jung framed his understanding:

[Slide of Jung Quote on Regression]

"As against this idea [that regression leads only to pathology], therapy must
support the regression, and continue to do so until the "prenatal" stage is reached.
It must be remembered that the "mother" is really an imago, a psychic image
merely [not just the personal mother]…Hence the regression leads back only
apparently to the mother; …but goes back beyond her to the prenatal realm of the
"Eternal Feminine," to the immemorial world of archetypal possibilities where,
"thronged round with images of all creation," slumbers the "divine child,"

17
 patiently awaiting his conscious realization. This son is the germ of wholeness,
and he is characterized as such by his specific symbols.

In the darkness of the unconscious a treasure lies hidden, the same "treasure hard
to attain" which …is described as the shining pearl, or, to quote Paracelsus, as the
"mystery," by which is meant a fascinosum par excellence. It is these inherent
possibilities of "spiritual" or "symbolic" life and of progress which form the
ultimate, though unconscious goal of regression (Jung, 1912b: paras 508-510).

In other words, at crucial times when we are stuck and empty, or out of touch with the
vital instinctual basis of our personalities we must go back before we can go forward.
We go back first to the injured empirical child in the psyche and we try to make room for
its injuries—those unbearable feelings, despite the resistances thrown up by the system.
(Jung spent hours playing on the lake shore trying to recover his actual childhood
memories) But then behind or underneath or deeper than this empirical child, we find the
“shining pearl” the “divine child” the lost and slumbering soul. We discover that this
soul--this hidden treasure" is embedded in the very fragmented experiences and painful
memories that are defended by the System. When we sift through these shards of
memory, when we let our hearts break and drop the repetitive self-care story, we find
new life.

Later in his life Jung generalized his personal discovery:

[Slide of Jung by Lakeside and Quote]

“In every adult there lurks a child – an eternal child, something that is becoming, is
never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention and education. That is the part
of the human personality which wants to develop and become whole.”
C. G. Jung Collected Works Vol. 17. Para 286

Conclusion

I started this talk with an Epigraph from Pema Chodrin i.e., “let your heart break and
drop the story”. We saw how Jung did this in his study after 28 nights of listening to the
corrosive, shaming “story” told to him by the Dark Angel in his Self Care System.
We’ve seen in several examples how the SCS resists this dropping into heart-break
because it fears a re-traumatization of the inner child and it’s motto of resistance to
feeling is “never again.” We saw how Dante, suffering in mid-life from depression is
asked to suffer more consciously by actually going down into his un-remembered pain
against the resistance of his Dis-associated defenses…..feeling the pain of his past and
confronting the nihilistic monster, Dis, that lives inside him and causes him to feel shame
and self-loathing. Here’s Dante, in mid-life--about to “let his heart break and drop the
story.”

[Slide of Dante in the Dark Wood]

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And here he is with his guide Virgil…..and over the gates of Hell it says…

[Slide of Dante Entering Hell with Virgil his Guide]

“Abandon all Hope, Ye who enter here.” In other words, you have to let your heart
break and drop the story…..the story of hope as you’ve known it. In other words, all
“false hope”—what Martha Stark calls “relentless hope”…..the illusory hope of the
Bright Angel. Real hope, the story says, will come to Dante (and to all of us) after an
honest encounter with the vulnerable painful feelings that have been rendered
“unconscious” by our dissociative defenses…..after a descent into our own private
“Hells.” Another way to think of this “moment” is that Dante is on the way to transform
his neurotic suffering into conscious, authentic suffering—suffering that includes the
shameful vulnerability that he hasn’t let himself feel consciously.

[3 Slides of Children in Limbo]

And true to our theme today, when Dante voluntarily surrenders to the darkness—guess
what he finds there? Lost children. Orphaned parts of himself, wounded shame-
burdened parts of himself stranded in the inner world under the menacing oversight of
this guy, who rules this nihilistic nether world from the pit.

[Slide of Glowering Dis]

We’ve seen him before as the three-headed “Dis” devouring otherwise innocent sinners
in his three terrible jaws.

[Slide of Three-Headed Devouring Dis]

Let me give you an example of how this symbolism might show up in an on-going
clinical process. A young female psychotherapist who I was supervising was working
with a middle-aged man who had come to see her for depression and anxiety. They had
been working together for 6 months and my supervisee’s patient had begun to feel safer
in his therapist’s presence, but he couldn’t find much to talk about and was becoming
more and more uncomfortable in his therapy—wondering what he was doing there. Then
he brought in a dream.

Here’s the dream. He was walking on a beach, and up ahead he spotted a young boy,
about 14, standing waist deep in the water. The atmosphere of the dream grew ominous
and suddenly he saw sharks circling the boy. Then the boy disappeared under water and
there was blood everywhere. He rushed to the scene, plunged into the water and pulled
the boy, badly injured up on the beach where he administered CPR. He was very upset as
he told his dream

After exploring the dream for awhile, my supervisee asked her patient what was going on
in his life when he was 14. He went blank for awhile, shook his head, looked visibly

19
agitated, and then burst into tears. It turned out that at that age, his otherwise idyllic
childhood had ended. He found out his father was having an affair, cheating on his
mother; his parents marriage blew up in an ugly divorce with custody battles for the kids.
He had to live with his Mom who became a serious alcoholic….he got into drugs. His
normal life ended. He felt he lost his innocence forever….all at the age of 14. He had
not talked about this in his previous 6 months of therapy. In fact, he had totally
“forgotten” about it.

As this patient opened up to his tearful feelings and explored them in the compassionate
presence of his therapist, his depression started to lift. He somehow felt more alive and
less of the chronic shame that had haunted him.

So let’s see if we can connect some of the dots here. We might think of the 14 year old
boy as a personification of this patient’s unbearably painful feelings, which were long-
since dissociated and consigned to the unconscious in order for him to go on living—
albeit as a depressed, anxious man. This “boy” is like those lost children in the caves of
Limbo under the supervision of Dis. As this patient’s therapy begins, he begins to dream
and in his dream, we see both the lost, orphaned feeling content (the 14 year old boy) and
the defenses against these feelings (the sharks). The sharks are none other than a violent
image for his dissociative archetypal defenses. They dismember you and that’s what Dis,
the guy on your screen, does.

In her therapy with this patient, my supervisee brought his attention to this lost,
dissociated time in his life and the 14 year old boy he was then—and he started to cry—
he let his heart break about those years and the painful memories came back. These were
tears he had not been able to feel until now, because this orphaned “boy” was completely
isolated and surrounded by archetypal defenses—by “Dis.” Now, with the help of his
therapy, he is re-connecting to this lost “boy”—to what he always thought was his lost
innocence, and he is recovering that innocence on another level in the compassionate
presence of his therapist.

This case is a good illustration of the chronic, depressed, unconscious suffering of

trauma—the way the Self-Care System protects us from the emotional truths of our lives
with a kind of “story” that lets us go on living--and the acute, conscious suffering that is
required to make contact with the lost children of the psyche. I’d like to conclude my
remarks today by telling you of an important essay on these two forms of suffering,
which I highly recommend.

Summary and Conclusion: Two Forms of Suffering

It’s written by Helen Luke in a chapter called "Suffering" in a book of her essays called
The Way of Woman where she describes these two kinds of suffering….one that keeps us
stuck and one that brings us home—to ourselves.

Luke begins her essay with reflections on how much easier it is to simply be with
someone who is authentically suffering and who has embraced their sadness vs. someone

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who is continually victimized by their suffering and always trying to escape from their
pain into "happiness."

Slide of Luke’s Quote

Deeply ingrained in the infantile psyche is the conscious or unconscious

assumption that the cure for depression is to replace it with pleasant, happy
feelings, whereas the only valid cure for any kind of depression lies in the
acceptance of real suffering. “True suffering belongs to innocence, not guilt….
(Luke, 1995: 57).

[when] the innocent part of us beings to suffer, the weight [under which we have
been crushed] becomes a sword. We bleed, and the energy flows back into us on
a deeper and more conscious level. What is more, … there is always an implicit
universal meaning even in the carrying of small miseries. Every time a person
exchanges neurotic depression for real suffering, he or she is sharing to some
small degree in the carrying of the suffering of mankind, in bearing a tiny part of
the darkness of the world. Such a one is released from his small personal
concerns into a sense of meaning. … Thus the smallest act, may "have an
influence, as the Chinese sage puts it, at a distance of a thousand miles" (Ibid.: 59,
Italics Mine).

Luke's ideas are especially meaningful if we remember that the Self-Care System's major
purpose is to keep the innocent part of us out of suffering. That’s the orphaned part. It
accomplishes this by keeping the “child” in us locked inside a system of defenses, mute
and unexpressive of its pain. The SCS prevents us from really experiencing our true
feelings of grief, sadness and loss and by substituting a melodramatic story of victims and
perpetrators that looks like suffering and feels like suffering, but never leads anywhere
and in fact is far preferable to feeling the feelings that might truly break our hearts.
Letting our hearts break and the innocent parts of us "out" lets us shoulder our own share
of the human condition--a "tiny part of the darkness of the world." This, I think, is why
authentic suffering moves us when neurotic suffering doesn't.

Accepting the human condition and the darkness of the world, has not been possible for
the trauma-survivor. This is because the survivor has been given more to experience in
this life than any of us can experience consciously. The Real has been too much--has
shocked and overwhelmed the survivor’s capacities to metabolize unspeakably painful
affective experience, thus requiring dissociative defenses. A separate nether world is
created and in its inner fortress something of life's potential--the vital innocent core of
aliveness--is preserved and protected from further suffering--but at the price of a
violently chopped up inner world. Whole experience is dis-integrated and the soul is
"sold to the Devil," i.e., to "Dis." In this way the harsh realities of the human condition
are avoided and the survivor becomes, in James Grotstein's terminology an "Orphan of
the Real" (2000, 214).

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When such an "Orphan of the Real" has the courage to make a witnessed descent into
his/her inner world and begins to consciously take responsibility for the self-loathing, the
shame, and the deep sense of brokenness that is inevitably a part of trauma's legacy then
everything changes.

This sounds straight forward, but it is not. Asking our patients to suffer the unbearable
pain of their traumatic childhoods is one of the most difficult things we do as trauma
therapists. It means asking the wounded and innocent parts of them (and also of
ourselves) to come out of the defensive enclave in which they have been sequestered and
risk experience that has been dismembered by defenses and now wants to be "re-
membered." It means more than simply "loving the patient back into health" which is
what we try to do if we identify with the Bright Angel in Blake's image. It requires
muscle and clarity in our work, because we must at some point and in some measure,
stand up against defenses and help our patients to let their hearts break. It helps to know
that there is a part of them that wants this too, and that we must not mistake their
sometimes intractable resistance as “them.”

Plus, what we are offering these patients is something that they have rarely experienced
in their suffering—a sense of emotional attunement and companionship. It is only the
human connection that makes giving up the Self Care System worth it. The fancy word
for this in affect-theory is “co-regulation.” We enter the maelstrom of painful feeling
with them—when they allow us--and help them to regulate themselves just by being
present.

Martin Buber said this happened in a realm he called the “inter-human” And we will end
tonight with his wise and moving statement about it:

Man wishes to be confirmed in his being by man, and wishes to have a presence
in the being of the other. The human person needs confirmation because man as
man needs it. An animal does not need to be confirmed, for it is what it is
unquestionably. It is different with man: Sent forth from the natural domain of
species into the hazard of the solitary category, surrounded by the air of a chaos
which came into being with him, secretly and bashfully he watches for a Yes
which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person
to another. It is from one [person] to another that the heavenly bread of self-being
is passed. (Buber, M., Knowledge of Man, p. 71)

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