I just read a post on friendship and it made me think about the whole subject and turn to a poem on the subject I found years ago on a card in a bookshop. I won’t write out the entire poem but part of it says A friend will come to you when they need help. (A friend is also, by the way, there for you when you need help too.) But it made me realise how hard I find it to actually reach out and ask for help if I need it and how often when people ask things of me I start to feel a bit put out. I am happy to help if I am feeling strong and well enough and of course there are times we wont be able to help or be helped by someone not because they are a bad friend but maybe because they have other things going on. But with me the real issue is that I ‘don’t want to be a bother’ which is something my Mum used to say to my sister and I a lot in later years and ended up making her life so much harder.
I then started to think about my background and the entire subject of Narcissism and its something I had in mind to write a post on anyway a while back as I was reminded of the work of Alexander Lowen who worked with emotions in the body of his patients and often explored the roots of an abusive or non nurturant childhood that led to later difficulties in life with empathy for self and others, expression of feeling and narcissism.
What Lowen found from his own therapy and work with clients was that some patients found it impossible to reach out out of a need for attention, soothing or love. These were probably the babies or young children who were left to cry out pain or distress or hunger all alone or banished to their room (like me) and told to think about it without a loving adult presence there to mediate the powerful emotions for them.
What then results for the suffering child is a degree of overwhelm or emotional overload in the system and brain which is difficult to soothe and from what I understand overwhelms the more adult side of the brain (the prefrontal cortex) thus leading to problems later in life with emotional regulation when triggered by an event which reminded one of the situation of being in distress or need. What happens then is the person goes into shut down in an attempt to cope or ends up flying off the handle and may then be misunderstood by others. Therapist John Lee who has a background in addiction recovery coined the term “age regression” for just such an event. Complex PTSD specialist Pete Walker calls it an emotional flashback and I have also heard the term emotional hijacking being used for a similar state of affairs.
What happens to the child who learns they cannot look to outside world for understanding, empathy or soothing? What happens to the child who is frustrated or humiliated or denied in an unfeeling way by parents who fail to understand, modulate and respond to distress? Well that child is most likely to turn into an emotional avoidant or to have anxious attachment. According to Lowen they learn very early on to deny feeling and the feelings they most learn to deny are sadness and fear.
These feelings are denied because sadness evokes the longing for the true love and attention to their true selves they were never shown in childhood and can bring up shame and past humiliation. If they were not attuned to in childhood its going to be next to impossible for them to attune to themselves or to anyone else for that matter most especially when others are in distress which may evoke feelings of sadness and fear they cannot bear to face.
In face of the fear of feeling they then search for a sense of power and control and strength which means weakness must be denied as softer emotions must be denied. Its not a far jump from here to see that those of us who are emotionally needy and had a lot of rejection in childhood will also be draw towards this kind of person or become one ourselves. We may end up with pathological narcissism through no fault of our (their) own.
all of us are vulnerable to being hurt, rejected, or humiliated. Yet not all of us deny our feelings, try to project an image of invulnerability and superiority, or strive for power. The difference lies in our childhood experiences. As children narcissists suffer what analysts describe as a severe narcissistic injury, a blow to self esteem that scars and shapes their personalities. This injury entails humiliation, specifically the experience of being powerless while another person enjoys the exercise of power and control over one, I don’t believe its a single experience that shapes character, but when a child is constantly exposed to humiliation in one form or another, the fear of humiliation grows so structured in the body and the mind.
Such a person could easily vow “When I grow up, I’ll get power, and neither you nor anyone else will be able to do this to me again.” Unfortunately…. such narcissistic injuries happen to many children in our society because parents use power to control their children and for their own personal ends.
For narcissists, control serves the same function as power – it protects them from possible humiliation. First, they control themselves by denying those feelings which might make them vulnerable. But they also have to control situations in which they find themselves; they have to make sure that there is no possibility that some other person will have power over them. Power and control are two sides of the same coin. Together, they work to protect the individual from feeling vulnerable, from feeling powerless to prevent a possible humiliation
Humiliation or power over may be expressed by the parent in terms or restraint or beating or other forms of hostile treatment or it may come in the form of teasing or scorn or dismissing of the legitimate emotional reactions to hurt inflicted such as anger or tears. By these means the child is taught it has no voice and no power to affect things. The result is either submission (with repressed rebellion : i.e. passive aggression or refusing to eat or comply with parental dictates) or out and out rebellion and acting out later on. The child carries as a result hatred of the said parent for as Carl Jung has noted and Lowen confirms where the will to power takes control love cannot co exist. Thus the child grows up never knowing what it is to love and be really loved, attuned to and accepted for themselves. A substitute self has to form under these circumstances or defences against the vulnerability of the true or real self.
The parent my also attempt to control and mould the child through seduction or offers of special favours or treatment for compliance and abdication of their true needs, desires and feelings but making a child feel special in this way is yet another form of erasing the self and leads to problems later in life with emotional bonding in relationships.
Perceptively Lowen point out that such power has nothing to do with feelings and the body because it is all geared towards maintaining a certain image and sense of invulnerability to the vagaries of organic based forces (for example illness and aging).
Power can energise the image, but it does nothing for the self and feelings. In fact, as we have seen, an overinvestment in the image weakens the self. By the same token, an overinvestment of energy in the struggle for power reduces the amount available for sexual pleasure. Misguided about the true sense of sexual potency, the person seeks more power (and they are incapable of true intimacy which requires vulnerability).
In his book on Narcissism Lowen goes onto explain how the frustrated longings for love that a child naturally feels towards the parent become incredibly painful in the face of rejection, humiliation or thwarting. The child must also learn to reject the self which the parent could not tolerate in favour of the one they could and they must also reject the bodily feelings that went along with such a longing. Such people seek control of their feelings with their mind and they will lack empathy for the feelings of others they were never allowed to have themselves. Their ultimate goal is control over feelings and so they seek to suppress or deny them.
In such people energy then moves from being experienced fully in a body that shits and cries and moves towards a head that intellectualises. Energy becomes invested in the image or ego a person projects rather than in the true or real self. One begins to feel special or superior or above one’s body and feelings. People who were not allowed to cry or need in childhood or allowed to have sexual feelings below the waist will naturally begin also to armour their bodies.
A lot of Lowen’s bioenergetic work with patients focused on freeing up musculature that was chronically tightened in the jaw and chest, this tightening naturally happens from a young age when true needs and longings for soothing, recognition and affection were rejected and began to be supressed as well as expressions of sadness and need i.e. crying. Lowen’s primary work was to free up self expression in and rejection of a body that over time had to chronically learn not to need, want, desire, feel or express and was geared towards ‘attainment of selfhood’ as thus defined
the attainment of self hood..comprises self awareness, self expression and self possession. Being aware of oneself means being fully in touch with the body, but that is possible only if the person gains insight into the unconscious motivations of behaviour. Self expression denotes the ability to sense and express all feelings, while self possession means that one is in conscious command of this expression. Every chronic muscular tension blocks all three functions. The body work aims at helping a person feel this blockage,, understand it, and release it. This is a continuous process, since the release of tension occurs gradually as the organism learns to tolerate and integrate the higher levels of excitation associated with more intense feelings. Crying, that is sobbing is the earliest and deepest way to release tension. Infants can cry almost from the moment of birth, and do so easily following every stress that produces a state of tension in the body . One moment the baby’s body is tense, the next its jaw quivers, and then it breaks down into convulsive release of the tension. Human beings are the only creatures who can react in this way to stress and tension Most probably, they are the only ones who need this form of release.
We must also realise that crying is not generally acceptable by parents. It often annoys them, to say the least, especially when it persists despite their efforts to calm the child. Some parents believe that to respond to a crying child gives the child control over the parents. They see the issue as one of power. Other parents are out of touch with the true needs of the child and do not know how to respond. One parent told me that as he was walking and holding his crying baby in the middle of the night, he could easily have thrown it out the window, he was so angry. Can we imagine that a baby is insensitive to this feeling, that it isn’t aware that by crying it risks the loss of the love it needs? Other parents are more openly hostile, telling a crying child that if it doesn’t stop, they will give it something to cry about. And they do hit it to stop its crying. What child can continue to cry in the face of such a response? Then there are the parents who impress upon a child the idea that no one will love it unless it smiles It doesn’t surprise me that my patients have difficulty crying. I did. ..
crying is not the only feeling on needs to express…..it is not how much one cries (either) but how deeply one cries that determines the release.
It is interesting that in our culture it is often difficult to be able to be truly sad about anything, most of all our childhood. Various repressions exist which blocked us not only from feeling the deep truth of things but from expressing it and even knowing those feelings existed and were valid from the very start. So it bodes us well to remember that when we meet the distancing responses from others or have a hard time reaching out or responding the seeds of that behaviour lie deeply rooted in their (or our) past and have very valid reasons for it existing.
To be continued…..
Emerging From The Dark Night 