P (Part 2)
Projection, PTSD, Punishment.
Projection
Nobody can mind-read. Even Derren Brown, by his own repeated admission, can’t mind-read. When we feel we can we’re sometimes describing empathy, or familiarity, or instinct. But often we’re projecting.
In olden times, a roll of film would be loaded into a projector. The projector was pointed at a cinema screen or a wall. The projector would be turned on, and the images on the roll of film would be projected large onto the wall. Therein lies the essence of how we project.
Here’s how that works.
Phillipa is full of anger: about life, about work, about money, about everything. But she hates feeling angry, because she fears that anger is the same thing as violence which is how her mother was when she was growing up. So as far as she’s concerned she never gets angry; perhaps even the people around her think “Wow Phil is never angry. How does she manage that?”
If they looked more closely they might notice how often she sees anger in others. “You see that waiter serving that table over there? He’s so angry.” Or she’ll comment on the students she teaches. “Wow there was a lot of tension in the room today.” Philippa is projecting.
Unconsciously the unendurable anger Phillipa has good reason to feel is being projected out and hitting the ‘screen’ of other people.
As Jung said “We’re only affected by ourselves.”
Projection is the lifeblood of much therapy. A client feels stuck so thinks the therapist is stuck. The client feels angry with herself but thinks the therapist is angry with her. A client is used to people telling him what to do, so imagines the therapist telling him what he should do.
When projection can be moved from being unconscious to conscious – essentially ‘I’m feeling this but I’m wondering if that’s me projecting” – then it can be a magnificent spur to clearing our mind and engaging with our own needs rather than our imaginings of others’.
But don’t get too excited yet; it’s not easy.
PTSD
PTSD began in 1980.
Balls. Of course it didn’t. PTSD has existed forever. But we only started calling it PTSD in 1980 when the DSM III (the handbook of mental illness for psychiatrists and therapists alike) called it that. Prior to that it was “shell-shock” and ascribed to army veterans returning from the second world war. But PTSD pre-dated even that; Charles Darwin wrote about it in The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals in 1872, a less famous book than his Origin of Species (which pre-dated it) but just as fundamental a contribution to our collective understanding of how emotions live and breed in our bodies.
Not everyone who experiences a trauma (an accident, an assault, an abuse) will suffer from PTSD. Indeed 60% of people won’t. They can experience it, find it horrible, cry or get angry about it for days or weeks and then move on with their life. They don’t ‘forget’ the trauma but they can carry it fine. But for 40% of people, the trauma gets stuck. Like food which the body can’t process gets stuck in our stomachs and gives us indigestion, our emotional experiences can become held and remain as a bruise on our lives.
Phil was chased by a blood-loving Rottweiler in a public park late at night. There was nobody there to help him and it was late: had he been savaged then nobody would have found him for many hours. He ran and ran and ran and, by some combination of huge strength and enormous luck he escaped unscathed by the rabid dog. He had to get away; had he not done so he would have died. Phil experienced a trauma. But, strangely, a day or two later he can scarcely remember it. He can tell the headline “I saw this dog coming towards me” and he can remember the ending “I was panting away on the other side of this wall and I could hear the dog but I knew he couldn’t get to me”. But he couldn’t remember the chase. Phil has PTSD.
When we are in panic mode part of our brain (the pre-frontal cortex, where our narratives get stored) is knocked out, and the “fight/flight” part (the amygdala, the fire alarm part) takes charge. Our brain puts all its resources into survival and ditches those parts which are into anecdote. That’s all great. After all, we don’t need to remember whether it was left or right we turned to get away from the dog, we need to be able to focus on doing what our body tells us in that moment.
The problem comes later. Our minds thrive on stories. Yet, here, Phil’s story has bits missing. It’s as if we have vital papers missing from a box file and we have no idea where they are in our office but they must be here somewhere. That’s why we get flashbacks or intrusive thoughts: it’s our brain picking up a piece of paper from another file and saying “Is this it?” Our trauma does not yet have a beginning, middle and end. And until it does we can’t relax because we’re not sure the story is over yet. That’s PTSD.
PTSD makes a past experience (often not remembered, or not fully remembered) play out in the present moment. We walk down a road, we hear a tiny dog woofing inside a house and we panic as if a Rottweiler is heading for our heels. We haven’t yet processed that “that was then, this is now”.
Therapy can be a place to try and do that processing. Sometimes a therapist can help you find those missing pieces of paper and gradually put together the distant memory in the safety of the therapeutic space. Sometimes it can be approached the other way: we don’t look at the rock that fell in the pond, we examine the ripples as you experience them in your life (trauma responses) and work our way through managing those better. Often some combination of this “top down” and “bottom up” approach can be helpful.
The final letter of PTSD (the D for disorder) is the crucial one: it’s literally a dis-ordering of your mind and experience. Therapy can be a great place to try and make some order of it.
Punishment
In the 1950s Mary Main developed the Adult Attachment Interview: twenty questions (and various sub-questions) which allowed a therapist to understand how a client experienced their childhood and how those patterns carried on into adulthood. Many of these questions are fundamental to how most therapists approach a new client. Number 8 can be neglected: how the client’s parents disciplined them.
Whether one had strict or laissez-faire parents, and no matter whether they were practical, psychological or physical in their punishments, the evolving child will inevitably draw a sense of core beliefs from the experiences they had. These can often be more complicated than first thought.
Pasha and Peled are two brothers whose parents treated them much the same. If either of them misbehaved they would be sent to their room for hours on end. Pasha had no problem with this: he liked his own company, he didn’t feel he lost anything by being in his room. For Peled, on the other hand, he found grounding highly anxiety provoking. He interpreted this as “We can’t deal with you, we want you to become invisible for a few hours”: a temporary expunging of himself from the family. As adults Pasha has internalised his childhood punishment: if he gets into difficult situations at work he finds the best plan is to withdraw and work out what he needs to do without the pressure of outside eyes. But Peled fears anything he does ‘wrong’ with his wife, boss or friends will result in them giving up on him. If he doesn’t get an expected phone-call from his wife he feels the kinds of lonely anxiety he felt as a child. For these two brothers the same punishments had different legacies.
Phia and Pippa are best friends whose parents treated them much the same. Their parents were anti-disciplinarians: they never punished their kids, never told them off, were big fans of allowing their daughters to understand the world in their own way. Phia felt she was the luckiest girl in the world, never fearing her parents, never unable to go to a party, always feeling trusted to live on her own resources. But Pippa was constantly anxious: for her, the absence of boundaries meant a presence of risk. “I could get into all sorts of trouble and my parents wouldn’t react.” Sometimes she’d even think “Maybe they just don’t care if I get hurt”. She had a rebellious teenage period – drink, drugs, smoking, late nights, anything to try and see if she could get her parents to take her confusions seriously.
Paddy and Penny were boyfriend and girlfriend and were treated much the same. Both their parents believed in corporal punishment and so if either of them misbehaved between the ages of six and ten they could expect a slapped hand or a smacked bottom. For Paddy, he accepted it as a clear marker of the moment he strayed over a line. It made him feel safe. But for Penny it was traumatising. Even though she was smacked only three times in her life she became frightened of what mistakes or misbehaviour could lead to; she instinctively felt “if they could hit me then, why wouldn’t you hit me now?” The closer the relationship, the more she instinctively braced herself for fear. In times of argument her body would seem to freeze. Somehow, somewhere, fear of punishment had burned itself into her personality.
Punishment can be an important therapeutic thread. Partly this is because it helps get a sense of the person and their upbringing (as per the Adult Attachment Interview). But it can also open up a sense of how the person might expect the therapist to ‘punish’ them (for instance for being late for a session, not knowing the answer to something, or being ‘difficult’). Maybe the client is fearful the therapist will not care enough to do anything (like Phia) and so will make attempts to make him care. Or maybe the client will be fearful of being humiliated (like Penny) and be in a state of readiness for whatever penalty might come her way.
Punishment can be tough to talk about in therapy – it takes us back to more vulnerable time – but it can be deeply valuable.
Next Week: Q
Qualifications, Queer, Questions, Quiet