Somatic and archetypal perspectives of the individual and collective multigenerational trauma at the root of the conflict between Catalonia and Spain
Foreword
When people have had a traumatic experience, they need time to restore their inner balance. For a while any stimulus that bears a certain resemblance with whatever it was that happened may seem intolerable to them. They may avoid the place, or the kind of place, where it happened; certain odors may provoke reactions of rejection, a voice or tone of voice, the sound of some piece of music or a language, or certain words may activate from discomfort up to violent reactions.
Some people try to organize their lives in order to avoid this kind of stimuli, but even if they manage to do so –often it is not possible- they develop symptoms of posttraumatic stress and take pharmaceutic remedies or other drugs to suppress them. As time goes by, underneath the threshold of consciousness, the pressure of the repressed energies, which would need to be metabolized in order to restore inner balance, rises. As the pressure goes up, the effort to keep them outside our awareness keeps growing.
Others take the necessary steps to metabolize their experience, assimilate what may be useful for the continuation of their lives and evacuate what isn’t. The lives of the people of the first group become narrower and narrower. They tend to get trapped in a vicious circle of endless repetitions of the dynamics that bring about similar conditions to those that have traumatized them. The patterns of behavior they developed to defend themselves against the sensations they could not tolerate and the sensitization to the stimuli that cause them are transmitted from generation to generation. These people live their lives disconnected from wide areas of their inner being in an attitude of defensiveness against an environment they experience as hostile.
The second group learns from their experience. Even though they may have suffered great hardship, as they process their experience, they learn to create better relationships, to appreciate life in general, their own as well as that of others. They learn to recognize and make use of opportunities that life offers them, and to help their contemporaries and successors to go on learning from their errors and successes as well as from those of others.
In this trilogy I would like to illustrate some dynamics of trauma, some activities that may help to restore inner balance and others that carve the traces of trauma deeper and deeper into body and psyche. And I would like to clarify a point that many people have a hard time understanding: how these traces are transmitted from one generation to the next. I have chosen three dates related to collective traumatic experiences that may show what heals, what traumatizes, what eternalizes trauma in a vicious circle and how one can learn from it in order to transform it into a spiral of learning.
I started out writing in Catalan, as the Catalan I have become. As the German I am because I was born and raised in Germany, daughter and granddaughter of German parents and grandparents, ten years after the end of world war II, I discovered Catalonia in 1977. I found a people who received me with open arms and a land where I could explore my inner life and find the distance from my home country that I needed to be able to put into perspective something that I did not know anything about, other than that is was making me sick and that it would make me die young, if I did not find out what it was and what I could do about it. I was able to become a part of the Catalan people and to develop what makes me happy and feel useful personally and professionally. Eventually, I found out what made me sick, first in the realm of my personal and family life, but only when I recognized the collective dimension of what was going on with me did I begin to get a sense of lasting resolution.
For example, in relationship to the Spanish and Catalan people, I am aware that, as a German, I carry a proportional part of the guilt of having helped the rebel forces under the command of Francisco Franco to overthrow the democratic rule of law of the Spanish and Catalan republics, to impose their totalitarian regime and to commit and hide a great number of crimes against humanity. From the point of view of somatic pattern recognition [Hansmann 1997, 2013] and archetypal pattern analysis [Conforti, 1999, 2019] the dynamics are very clear. These are the tools I use to recognize and describe the dynamics of multigenerational trauma and to help people to recognize the patterns they or their forbearers have developed to adapt and survive in an environment of war and dictatorship, and to develop behaviors that promote a satisfactory life in peace and freedom.
Even if this trilogy refers mainly to Catalonia and Spain, and to Germany, the dynamics that keep life trapped in a vicious circle of multigenerational trauma and that can transform it into a spiral of learning are the same in all countries of the world. I started out writing each part on the day indicated in its title, first in Catalan. Then I translated it into Spanish, German and English before the date of the next part. I wish it reaches many people in the whole world and helps them to leave the imprints of trauma behind and to create good relationships among us all.
During the work with my clients I continuously observe that the body responds when whatever it is that traps it in a pattern that causes pain is being recognized. A woman said, for example, she could not feel a part of her leg. It felt like it was not a part of her. I proposed that, as a test, we would understand this sensation as a truthful expression of reality, because it was possible that she might have started to tense that leg in this particular manner when she was a little girl around something she felt in the relationship with her mother, her father or another person close to her, and that this tension actually belonged more to that person than to herself. While I was talking, I held her leg and foot in my hands. It was impressive to feel how her foot started to become heavier in my hands, as the tension in her leg was letting go, while my words reached her ears, even before she could really form a rational understanding of what I was saying.
When tension lets go, the emotional contents it held underneath the threshold of consciousness come to the fore. When it is around affairs that belong to previous generations, it is often necessary to know some context in order to be able to understand what the sensations are pointing at. When you hit the target, the body responds. When it is nothing but speculations that go nowhere, nothing happens. For now, we do not know what the thing with the leg is about, but a piece of news, a movie, an add or a conversation of the people who sit behind one in a bus may enter in resonance with whatever it was that had happened and bring about a response in the body that will reveal a detail or part of the story. Or maybe in another session new information may come up. In this case, this is what happened. Little by little, a number of things are becoming clearer, which had been agglomerated in something like a big hazy overwhelming cloud that had been towering over her life, at times more heavily than at others; but it was always there. For now, it has not become clear what exactly is overwhelming. But gradually information comes to the fore that helps her gain a more detailed understanding of her family’s history. Moreover, there are observable changes in her body: the inner space in her body is more open, and her movements are freer; the symptoms on her skin are clearing and the opening inside is showing in her face and making her prettier.
The traumas and guilt we keep underneath the threshold of consciousness pursue us from the shadow of the unconscious; they create illness, bad relationships, failures, and bankruptcy. When we bring them to the light of consciousness, we discover that they are less scary and less painful than we would have imagined from the shadow they project. If we learn to recognize the sensations that flow in the body in the present moment, we can identify the sensations that belong to the traumatic situations of the past, without letting us be carried away by the defense mechanisms we have created or inherited. We can let them go and focus our attention on what is necessary in the present moment to create good relationships and a satisfactory life.
Part 1: September 11
Understanding the dynamics that take place when we get traumatized by an experience helps a lot to heal possible wounds, prevent repetitions and keep trauma reactions from becoming habitual patterns.
Habitual patterns
When we grow used to doing things a particular way, they become a habitual pattern, an unconscious automatic mechanism. This has many advantages. For example, when you learn to drive a stick shift car, the movement of letting go the clutch at the same time that you push the accelerator requires a lot of attention. But once you have learnt it, you don’t have to think about how to do it, it has become an automatic pattern. Everybody’s particular way of walking and moving, of modulating their voice when talking, specific idiomatic expressions, among many other things, are all based on habitual patterns that allow us to concentrate our attention on other aspects of the action. In ballroom dancing, for instance, when you have internalized the basic steps of the dance, you have created a habitual pattern and you are free to enjoy, to improvise and to play with different figures, without having to pay attention to keep up the basic steps that make this dance a tango, and not a waltz nor a foxtrot.
When faced with danger, living beings have developed a number of habitual strategies to stay alive and unharmed. Once something has triggered our alertness, depending on the kind of situation and the type of personality, we are prepared to flee, fight or freeze. This happens at high speed and is beyond conscious control. When the danger is over, even if we have come out unharmed, we need some time to calm down, reorient and let go the charge of energy and hormones that have been released by the experience. This may happen through trembling, tears, images of the event, shaking, etc. We need time to go over the events in order to understand what happened, what we did, how it affected us, what implications are entailed in what happened and what we did, and to finally restore inner balance. If we have suffered injuries, these steps may be important to fully heal.
If the traumatic situation is such that no flight, fight or freezing are possible or enough to avoid the impact of the trauma, as a last resource, the organism may collapse and enter a state of numbness. Like this there may still appear a chance to escape or, at least, the pain of having to die or to live under the traumatic circumstances will not be overwhelming.
Posttraumatic stress
If after having come out of a traumatic situation we don’t give ourselves time to go through the necessary steps to conclude the experience, learn from it and restore inner balance, the energy and hormones discharged by the trauma reaction will remain in the organism. Then one’s experience continuously reflects the sensation that the impact of something dangerous is imminent. According to the kind of trauma one has suffered, one remains in a state of permanent anxiety, prepared to fight or escape, or plunged in a depressive state of defenselessness and powerlessness.
A traumatic event like an accident, a loss, an aggression or being the witness of an accident or aggression is different from a severe long-term experience of trauma like abandonment, abuse, bullying, domestic violence, war, genocide. But independently of the duration of the traumatic situation, if inner balance is not restored, posttraumatic stress will weaken the organism. Apart from generating a variety of symptoms associated with different types of illness, this type of stress will also lead to a tendency to unconsciously create situations that repeat the dynamics of the original traumatic situation. And it is transmitted from generation to generation.
Multigenerational traumas
There are studies that demonstrate that posttraumatic stress is transmitted genetically through the male line. [f.e. Rodgers, 2015] The data suggest that in men who learn from a traumatic situation to process what happened, what they felt and did, to recognize situations that may be prone to lead to a repetition of the trauma and to find ways of responding to them that lead to a development of behaviors that improve their relationship with their environment, the positive effects of this learning affect the DNA and are transmitted to future generations. But also the harmful effects are transmitted leading to blind repetition of the habitual reactions that keep the traumatic imprint alive in a vicious circle of trauma, posttraumatic stress and retraumatization.
Beyond genetic transmission, a very important factor in the transmission of posttraumatic stress from generation to generation is early development during the first years of life. The nervous system develops in interaction with the environment. During the first year of life, in particular, first of all the right hemisphere of the brain and its functions organizing sensory perception develop. The sensations that take place in the body arise from the inner processes like digestions, breathing, circulation, etc., and from the relationship with the environment. The nervous system works at full power to organize the flow of all this sensory information, establishing and strengthening or weakening connections according to how much they are being used, and some even stop from being used at all. Sensations that are somewhat alike are being grouped in categories within the overall categories of «pleasant, unpleasant und neutral». Later, when we learn to speak, we associate meaning with them, which usually remains underneath the threshold of consciousness, but intervenes in the decisions we make later in life and in the behaviors we develop. We learn behaviors that are prone to produce pleasant sensations and avoid unpleasant ones. We don’t pay much attention to the neutral ones. In this manner we start to establish our habitual patterns.
From day one, infants tune into their environment as senders and receivers of a variety of subtle and not so subtle signals. The mother knows what the child needs because she receives the signals sent by the infant and the child calms down or is agitated by the signals sent out from the emotional state of the mother. This attunement is not limited only to the relationship between mother and child. All kinds of signals from the environment reach and affect us continuously. An example that probably everybody knows is standing next to an angry person. One does not need to be highly sensitive to notice the other person’s emotional state in one’s own body. Like this it can happen that all of a sudden you feel angry and irritated without really knowing why. The tendency to get entrained by the environment continues throughout one’s entire life, even though most of the time this exchange between the individual and their environment remains underneath the threshold of consciousness. To a greater or lesser extent, we all try to make ourselves insensitive towards the impact of certain kinds of vibrations and other types of information we experience as undesirable. But no matter how hard we try to protect ourselves from them, our system registers them and reacts to them, developing reactive behaviors and/or symptoms that may become diseases.
Imagine an infant of just a few months of age in the arms of his or her caretaker. The sensitivity of this little person is enormous, but the nervous system does not yet have the structures that would allow him or her to distinguish between feelings that are his/her own and those s/he takes in from the people s/he is in touch with. The infant is immersed in his/her environment and entrained by the emotional tone prevailing there. S/he feels everything in his/her body, including everything the caretakers strive to not feel, without any possibility to metabolize it.
Terror, revulsion, defenselessness and powerlessness
A mother never talked about what she had felt, seen and smelled as a teenager during the night of bombardment that had destroyed whole neighborhoods of her hometown and during the days and weeks afterwards. She had used a great deal of energy to make her body as narrow as she could in order to give no space to what she felt. Therefore, she had never been able to metabolize the experience of that night and those weeks. The mother needed tranquilizers throughout her adult life. Her health was unstable and she died prematurely. Her son adopted the same pattern as the mother, reducing the space in his body in order to not feel something he could not recognize, not in years of psychotherapy and bodywork, other than stating that it terrified him, it revolted him and it made him feel like being submerged in a mud pool of helplessness and powerlessness. The son had been taking drugs in order to not feel all this, until he realized that he would die of an overdose or develop a serious disease, if he did not do anything to break free from some kind of power that kept him under a spell like some kind of force field.
In hindsight the correlation between the mother’s experience and the son’s symptoms and self-destructive behaviors seems evident. But between the moment, when the son first started to seek professional help and when he was able to look into the direction of the traumatic circumstances in the lives of his family, many years went by. There had been some kind of wall that kept him from looking into that direction, almost like a tacit prohibition. It simply had not occurred to him.
His health improved a lot during the years he dedicated to the work of exploring the ways in which he had organized his experience in his body. His sensitivity became more refined. The self-destructive patterns lost their hold over his life. But the most persistent symptoms started to get better only when he began to make connections and recognized the roots of his own feeling in the war and totalitarian regime that had determined the lives of his parents and grandparents. Books, articles, movies, and documentaries helped him to imagine what his mother may have felt, seen and smelled during the bombardment and the weeks afterwards. The multigenerational collective context helped him understand the aspects of his own behavior and feelings that were hard to accept and that he had tried to anesthetize with drugs.
It was important for him to realize that he is not only a victim of circumstances, but that he is also an agent. What he does and doesn’t do counts, not only in his own life, but also in the life of the collective. There are things that are out of his reach, but there are others which he can change and, if he wants them changed, he has to roll up his sleeves and get to work. If he doesn’t do it, they might tend to contribute to create situations that are prone to repeat the trauma.
Shame
A grandfather who had worked in an arms factory never spoke about it. He had a wife and a son and in his hometown there were not many alternatives to make a living. He did not have a house and garden as one of his former colleagues who had left the job, because he could no longer stand the inner conflict entailed in making a living by manufacturing means to destroy the lives and livelihood of others like him. They were poor, but at least they did not have to pay rent, they could grow vegetables and fruit in their garden, and they also had some animals to feed themselves. This man did talk about how traumatic it had been for him to work under those circumstances. He was able to metabolize his experience and was healthy until his death at a very old age. He was one of the last people who were able to leave their job at that factory, because soon afterwards anybody who refused to work there was court martialed and shot for high treason. So the grandfather had to go on earning the keep of his family manufacturing arms, and his soul could not bear it. Even after the war, when the factory no longer existed, he tried to find release in sex and gambling and shopping luxury articles on credit, generating a debt he passed onto his son. Periodically, he went under in the darkness of depression and only wanted to die of shame and powerlessness.
Nobody had told any of these things to the granddaughter, but she followed her grandfather with a bipolar pattern, promiscuous behavior, a job that contributed to the pollution of nature and social inequality, and drug abuse, until she realized that she would have to change a number of things in her life, if she wanted it to be satisfactory. Little by little she managed to resolve one thing after another, but she felt a knot in her stomach that did not move in all those years. The knot opened, when she discovered that her grandfather had worked in that arms factory. There were photos that showed that he had had a knot in his stomach just like her. It is highly likely that he used it to keep his feelings outside his awareness.
When the granddaughter’s knot opened, among many other things, she began to feel that the ties of shame and obligations she could not fulfill, that had kept her stuck for so many years, became connections to her family through which love could flow even beyond death. Then, when she imagined what her grandfather may have felt working in that place, she recognized some of the most horrible feelings she had been struggling with ever since she was little, in vain, because whenever her defenses were low, they came to the fore. And in the background tone of her life they had been present at all times. The feelings were bad and, since they took place in her body, she had come to believe that they reflect how she really is, deep inside. She has always been striving hard to be good, but she never managed, because there always was an underlying sense of not being good enough, insufficient, even bad. When she understood the bad feelings within the context where they had had their origin, they lost their power. When the message has been received and attended to, the messenger can rest.
The pattern she created to protect herself against the bad feelings remains and, sometimes, under certain circumstances, the knot in the stomach makes an appearance. But it has never again had the power to dominate her behavior and feelings. It has become some kind of watchman who gets her attention, when it is necessary that the adult pays attention in order to avoid falling into the vicious circle of trauma and to take the spiral of learning to a higher level.
Unconscious guilt
A father held a leading position in a totalitarian regime and had ordered the execution of a great number of people and the destruction of numerous families who were in disagreement with the regime. He was convinced that his acts were legitimate and that he was fulfilling the requirements of his position. His physical presence was governed by an attitude of perpetual watchfulness over a hostile environment. His daughter was the apple of his eye and she did all she could to please her dad, but no matter how hard she tried, it always felt like it was not enough. The father’s love did not fill his heart nor did it reach his daughter’s heart. Nor did he feel any guilt over the destruction of so many lives.
In general, he could not feel very much. Feeling himself was intolerable. Therefore, all the things he could not feel within himself, he saw in others. His guilt separated him from his inner light. When you put something in front of a light, the light will project the contours of the thing with more or less precision, more or less distorted. The shadow falls on the immediate environment and, according to the circumstances, it may acquire enormous dimensions. The threat the father saw as coming from others kept growing, so his need to defend himself was increasing constantly, requiring more and more expenditures. As expenditures grew, the shadow of his guilt kept growing accordingly, so the threat became stronger and he needed to increase his defenses.
When he died, trapped in a web of intrigues and lies, for a moment, maybe, he could see his guilt; but it was too late. There was nothing he could do about it. A long time ago his daughter, the apple of his eye, had become the carrier of the guilt he had not owned up to. She continues to create webs of lies and intrigues in order to pursue the people on whom she projects what is now the shadow of her guilt, just as her father did. If she does not realize in time and does not change her course of action, just like him, she will notice only on her deathbed that she will leave the guilt of her actions and the actions of her dad in inheritance to her children, who will not be able to renounce it.
The posttraumatic stress which probably is the most difficult to recognize and resolve is caused by unconscious guilt. Unconscious guilt is very different from a neurotic feeling of guiltiness. Someone who has an unconscious guilt does not feel guilty. There is no feeling of guiltiness, not vague nor clear. Such people feel fully entitled and offended when someone suggests they may be guilty of something. They feel threatened, not because they are afraid their guilt might be discovered, but because from their vantage point others, who they project their guilt on, are guilty of threatening them.
Evidently, children and grandchildren are not guilty of what our parents and grandparents did and did not do. But if guilt is not owned up to, it grows, even when the people who acquired it through their deeds die. Even though the deeds were done in fulfillment of the legislation currently in force, if they harm the basic rights of living beings, they do create guilt. In order to make guilt disappear, it is necessary to own up to it and to repair the harm done as much as possible. The very least is to look and try to understand what happened in order to avoid further harm.
Therefore, the Law of Amnesty that came into force in October 1977 in Spain, for example, quite contrary to its supposed intention, constitutes a threat to public health. It was passed with a great majority of votes, since, as is quite understandable, many people wanted to go forward and leave the past behind. The existence of the disorder we now call posttraumatic stress had only just been recognized in the United States due to the problems presented by many veterans of the Vietnam war. The Law of Amnesty of 1977 led to an enormous number of crimes against humanity being filed away, without ever settling the facts. Not only in order to make a true amnesty possible would it have been necessary to investigate the facts, but also in order for the victims, the perpetrators and the witnesses to be able to metabolize the posttraumatic stress caused by the violence of those deeds, so that internal balance could be restored both individually and collectively.
The trials for peace and reconciliation held in the 90s in South Africa, on the other hand, created opportunities to face up to the traumas caused by the apartheid regime, even though there were no punishments involved. The outcome may not have been as positive as desired [Kimbles, 2000], but the trials did contribute to restore collective and individual inner balance on many levels. No law can make guilt disappear, not if the crime has taken place under its umbrella, nor if it orders its burial. The organism and psyche of the people who have made themselves guilty of an ethical transgreession will manifest their guilt in one way or another. If they manage to hide it from themselves and the whole world, at least one of their loved ones, generally someone weaker, a wife or husband, a child, grandchild or greatgrandchild will get entrained by the hidden forms of guilt. They will either repeat the deeds to make the guilt directly visible again or they will present symptoms that point towards the original guilt.
The alarming resurgence of extremist right-wing forces in so many countries of the world, without any doubt, is due to the difficulties entailed in recognizing one’s own as well as inherited posttraumatic stress, in managing it and in restoring inner balance. The violence of wars and totalitarian regimes is so extreme, that for the majority of people it still seems to be a question of survival to direct all their energies forward and to try to leave the horror behind. Too many people feel the need to perpetuate violence with the intention to impose their will on others who they consider to be their enemies, because they do not know that all parts of the world are interconnected and interdependent and equal on all scales of magnitude. For many, the inner work that is necessary to restore inner balance is intolerable or, at least, unthinkable, because they are trapped in the vicious circle of trauma without being aware of it.
Restoring inner balance
In order to restore inner balance in one’s own life and being able to contribute to a life in peace for everybody, those of us who can should do now the work that is necessary to recognize the traces of the traumas of our parents and grandparents in our own body and behavior as well as in public life. Only then can we be free to employ our energy as is fit without harming anyone. The vicious circle of trauma can become a spiral of learning, when we feel how much certain behaviors hurt us and others, even though they are habitual and we might be totally used to them. Recovering this kind of sensitivity is work that is not easy to do, but if we won’t do it, we’ll miss the opportunity to fully participate in the creative processes of life.
Research funds should be designated in order to be able to develop adequate service programs in education and healthcare. In order to gain access to a position of leadership, it should be a strictly necessary requirement to know the structures of one’s mind and body and their relationship with the natural and social environment. This entails also being aware of the traces of posttraumatic stress caused by the wars and totalitarian regimes of the last centuries and having learnt to manage it and to restore inner balance.
We need time to calm the inner agitation caused by trauma, to orient and to learn to distinguish what belong to us from what belongs to the experience of our predecessors. Letting go the energy and hormones discharged by the trauma reaction may entail trembling, tears, images of the events, shaking, etc. It will be necessary to create a safe space where these manifestations can be tolerated without being overwhelmed and carried away by them, where they can be observed and understood with the perspective of the context in which they had their origin in previous generations. We need time to review the events in order to understand what happened, what our ancestors did and how it affected them, what implications are involved in what happened and what they did, and how all this affects us. All this is part of the process of restoring inner balance.
One extremely useful tool in his process, that is readily available for everybody at any time, is the awareness of one’s body and of the motions of breathing. On one hand, the movement of breathing out can help orient our attention inwards and towards the floor. Like this we can learn to perceive the relationship between the space around the central axis of our body, the innermost depth of what we are as a living being, and the ground, our base of support in the natural world we belong to. When the inhale begins in that deep place while we perceive the relationship between our body and the ground, we can observe also how the space inside the body expand with the air flowing in from the space outside where it comes from. Like this we experience that really there is no gap in the connection between our body and our environment, between us and the world we live in.
It is a question of practice to make sure we allow these motions, to give ourselves time to let them happen, without imposing them forcefully, nor falling into the habit of breathing no more than the absolutely necessary for survival because we do not dare to feel the unpleasant contents held underneath the threshold of consciousness by the habitual holding patterns limiting the motions of our breathing; because these emotional contents will surface, when we let go of the holding and breathe more freely. When they do, it becomes possible to let their emotional charge flow to the ground and to let the ground carry the load of all that emotional weight, at the same time we can let the excess of emotional intensity flow out together with the air we exhale. In this manner Mother Earth, Father Sky and the collective of all life forms can help us manage the things that go beyond our strength and beyond the ambience of our competence. Afterwards, the inhale introduces energy, novelty and expansion into the system.
In this manner, breath by breath, we are present and in relationship with our environment, both on the material level as well as in terms of the potentiality of open space. Like this we can chose how to direct our acts and keep the helm in the direction we chose, while we learn from our own experience, from our peers and from those who came before us. We can help ourselves and one another to distinguish the bad feelings that keep us trapped in a vicious circle of multigenerational trauma from what is real now.
Collective rituals and celebrations
Apart from the personal work of individual people, rituals and celebrations of big human collectives can become an important contribution to the capacity to manage the traumas caused by wars, totalitarian regimes, terrorist attacks, and natural catastrophes, for the individual citizens, for the societies of the different countries as well as for humanity as a whole.
The Catalan commemoration on September 11, la Diada, is an excellent example of a celebration that helps the population of the country to overcome the trauma of the siege and genocide associated with that date. With a growing participation year after year at one of the main acts of the day, this year, 2018, far over a million and a half people have come together in peaceful vindication. The atmosphere shows a society that is becoming ever more united and mature. There is a general sound of conversations. Now and then there are songs and paroles. Some people play flutes or drums. Human towers are being built. All in all, the ambience is of festive togetherness. If the Spanish monarchy would seize this opportunity to own up to the guilt it is building up in present times on top of the guilt that has been transmitted, unacknowledged, from generation to generation throughout the centuries, if they would ask for forgiveness and make steps to repair the damages, instead of insisting on imposing at any price what they feel entitled to, it would surely open ways to find solutions for many of the problems afflicting Spanish society, beyond the Catalan question, and the vicious circle of trauma could become a spiral of learning.
Part 2: October 1
While trauma keeps us dumbfounded, the path out of it is paved with words, carefully assembled, piece by piece, until the whole story can be revealed. [van der Kolk, 2014]
Words that convey truth can heal
Words can heal, but they can also damage. Words can reveal the truth, and they can also hide it. Only words that reveal truth have the power to heal trauma and restore the bond with oneself and others that was severed by the defense reaction facing trauma. Falsehood creates separation. Who hides the truth can have no significant relationships beyond falsehood.
Not only the person who hides the truth intentionally in order to obtain some kind of advantage, separates from others and will be alone, but also those who do so without being aware of it, because the truth of something was intolerable at a given time in their lives and their system hid it automatically behind walls of tension in order to keep from falling apart and to be able to survive. They lose touch with themselves and are trapped in their reaction of defense against trauma, split off from their environment, until inner balance is restored, acknowledging the truth about what happened, about what they did and did not do, and, if needed, taking steps or allowing movements that might lead to a resolution of the trauma.
Without this balance, we get used to a life at the surface, without any depth. It seems as if what we see and feel through the filter of the reaction of defense against trauma really is the way we see and feel it. We try to compensate the constant dissatisfaction caused by the absence of significant human relationships in various manners, mostly through addictions, either to substances like legal and illegal drugs, medication, alcohol, tobacco, food, sugar, stress hormones, etc. or to processes and activities like work, sex, sports, control, shopping, power, television, etc. We do not want to feel because we are terrified by the sensations of inner emptiness, of the lack of deep bonds and by the images and memories of experiences we cannot remember and cannot forget that come to the fore when we relax. Also violence is a reaction of defense against trauma and expresses powerlessness and the inability to establish meaningful relationships with oneself and one’s environment.
We isolate sensations belonging to the traumatic experience and compress them into the smallest space possible inside the body to keep them underneath the threshold of consciousness with the tension of our muscles. The tension takes the shape of a habitual holding pattern and becomes an automatic mechanism, which is unconscious. Like this we can go ahead and even carve out a seemingly successful life for ourselves, but there is always the feeling lurking inside that it is not enough. No matter how many riches and successes we accumulate, there is always something missing. What is missing is the satisfaction of being deeply bonded with life.
A traumatized person is highly sensitive towards stimuli that may seem innocuous and insignificant, apparently. A smell, a glance, a gesture, a word can be enough to activate the defense mechanisms that have helped the person survive a traumatic experience. At that time, the automatic mechanism of the defense pattern takes over and it is like being possessed. The sensations that had been compressed into a tiny space outside conscious awareness flow over and inundate the person who loses control not only over what they do, but also over what they think, see and feel. They lose sight of present reality as well as the superficial contact with their environment they had managed to create covering the underlying lack of deep bonds. The dynamic that has been activated carries them right into the situation of the trauma, a moment before the impact of the worst.
Finding the right words
The whole system of a traumatized person is geared towards action, even in times of relative tranquility. Even though they are highly sensitive, their sensory perception is poorly developed, limited mainly to the distinction between good and bad, pleasant unpleasant, desirable undesirable. The functions of differentiation and discernment remain at this primitive level, which activates the automatic defense mechanisms against undesirable stimuli and keeps them away from the more highly evolved functions of analysis and rational understanding. Like this it is impossible to metabolize the traumatic experience in order to restore inner balance, and the person remains trapped in the vicious circle of trauma.
In order to come out of it, before anything, it is therefore indispensable to develop one’s abilities of sensory perception. The information that comes into the organism through the sensory channels is enormously diverse and complex. It is impossible to be aware of everything. And it is not necessary. A small region at the center base of our brain makes a preselection of data that are relevant for us at a given moment in life; for example, if your partner has broken an arm, all of a sudden you see people with their arm in a sling all over the place. But apart from this preselection of specific data, the sensory information as a whole is continuously being translated into something like a language of images which may rise over the threshold of consciousness through dreams, phantasies and daydreams. The images that appear express aspects of one’s consciousness, one’s personal unconscious or the collective unconscious. They can be translated quite literally in order to reveal information that helps orient one’s attention to where it is needed. [Kaufman, 2009]
Also the figures that arise from the relationship between the body, the ground and the space around as well as the different qualities of the breathing motions open an access to the fund of images of this pictorial language. In themselves, these relationships and movements shape images. Within the objective frame of reference of the coordinates of the gravitational field of Earth, the horizontal and the vertical, it becomes visible, for example, that someone moves their heart away from what is in front of them while straining forward with their head, maybe even with their eyes which almost pop out of their sockets. This person moves emotionally away from their environment and towards what they have left behind (the past). Holding their body in this shape, they put a lot of weight on top of their heart which tends to smash it and to interfere with its freedom of movement. With their eyes, they strain forward in order to reach what they see there, even though the biggest segment of their body moves into the opposite direction. Head and heart are in conflict and the guts are under strain. What this person feels is very different from what someone else feels whose heart is in line with their two legs that can take the appropriate steps to carry them towards what is in front of them. If the heart and the legs are in line with the head, head, heart and guts move as one. Then, the eyes can rest in their sockets, receive the images of what is in front of them and inform the different centers involved in making decisions, without any interference in the flow of information between the great center of emotional feeling, the great center of processing vital supports, and the great center of general computation. According to how someone occupies space in relationship with the coordinates of the gravitational field, they barely have space enough to breathe the absolute minimum of air indispensable for survival, or they can breathe freely and provide themselves at ease and abundantly with the energy that is available in their environment. The first kind of person is always exhausted, feeling overwhelmed by the requirements of life and dissatisfied because they are unable to cover their needs. The second kind are in relationship with their environment on all levels, they find what they need and enjoy being able to contribute to the whole what makes their life rich and interesting.
When you learn to observe the different types of images, they reveal all the information that needs to be metabolized in order to be able to assimilate what is useful for the system, to discard what is not or is harmful, and to develop an optimal relationship with the environment. The physician and psychologist Peter A. Levine gives an example of two leopard cubs that managed to escape from an attack by a lioness. In play they repeated the moves that help them to escape from danger unharmed for days. Apart from practicing the moves and perfecting them, during their games they also eliminated the stress hormones and energy charges from their system that had been set free by the fright and the flight. [Levine, 1999] Like this, the movements that saved them once become a resource that is available, when they may need it. But the mechanism does not dominate their everyday lives.
Also the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk insists in how important it is to integrate not only the traumatic memories but also to recognize the defense mechanisms we have developed.
… a central task for recovery from trauma is to learn to live with the memories of the past without being overwhelmed by them in the present. But most survivors, including those who are functioning well –even brilliantly- in some aspects of their lives, face another, even greater challenge, reconfiguring a brain/mind system that was constructed to cope with the worst. Just as we need to revisit traumatic memories in order to integrate them, we need to revisit the parts of ourselves that developed the defensive habits that helped us survive. [van der Kolk, 2014]
Special dates
The collective traumas like those caused by natural calamities, terror attacks, wars and totalitarian regimes affect not only the individual people but also society as a whole. The words that can heal the wounds may differ very much from person to person. But there is no one who has not been affected and does not need to metabolize the traumatic impact of the experience in one way or another. Collective events may create an opportunity to visit the traumatic memories and the parts of each person who have developed the defense habits that helped them to survive. This type of events fulfill an important function in the restoration of inner balance not only for the individual victims, the perpetrators and the witnesses, but also for society as a whole, because they create a foundation for improving life together and making more social cohesion possible.
The choice of October 1 for the referendum for self-determination of the Catalan people, for example, created an excellent opportunity for restoring inner balance after a prolonged traumatic state of affairs. On October 1, eighty-one years earlier, the supreme commander of the rebel forces against the democratic government of the Spanish republic was exalted “Chief of State”, with military help of the totalitarian regimes of Germany and Italy, a few months after declaring the state of war upon failing a coup d’état led by a military junta. There could not be any better date for the exercise of the democratic right guaranteed by the rule of law that had been violently overthrown by force of arms on October 1, 1936.
Oktober 1, 2017 opened a stage where the Catalan society and the Spanish society showed their different degrees of restoration of inner balance after the supposed end of the totalitarian regime following the death of the dictator and the re-establishment of the constitutional order of a state of law, plagued with contradictions as it is. Also the international actors took position and showed aspects that had been hidden in the shadow of their consciousness, which they would probably have preferred to keep hidden.
The capacities for integration of the Catalan culture have kept it alive, in spite of the many attempts to make it Spanish. Step by step, Catalan society is doing the work of restoring their inner balance.
On the other hand, the guilt of the Spanish monarchy, accumulated in the course of centuries, renewed and increased by the years of Franco’s regime, by the police violence of October 1, the king’s declarations on October 3, 2017 and the subsequent judicial persecution of the Catalan government and social leaders, keeps the Spanish society submerged in trauma. The weight of the guilt and the defense mechanisms against its recognition overwhelms it. It stuns those who see it but feel powerless facing the violence of those who want to hide it.
Instead of fulfilling their function of ordering public life for the common good, the powers of the Spanish state go on using their positions to obtain and protect privileges at the cost of the general population, as they have been doing for centuries. Instead of listening to the voice of the people, they activate their defenses with police and judicial violence, inciting violence in the Spanish masses with falsehood in the media, with snares and deceit, and with provocations aimed at trying to obtain a violent reaction from the Catalan population. A Spanish TV channel Antena 3, for example, showed images from a violent demonstration in the vestibule of the Parliament of Ukraine, while the speaker talked about the demonstration in front of the Parliament of Catalonia. What she said had nothing to do with the events that really took place.
If the Spanish society would receive truthful information, it would be perfectly prepared to take on the work of restoring inner balance. It certainly is not the most pleasant thing to have to acknowledge one’s proportional part of the collective guilt of one’s country, but it is very liberating. In the shadow of the unconscious it is threatening with terrifying dimensions. However, upon examination in the light of one’s consciousness, it reveals causes, conditions and effects that make it possible to understand our predecessors, ourselves and our contemporaries, to learn from the errors in order to not repeat them, and to repair the damage done as far as possible.
Those who have acquired guilt through their own actions have to face up to the consequences of what they did, of course, even if they did it under the unconscious influence of an inherited trauma or guilt. No matter how hard one tries to deny one’s guilt, sooner or later it will show in one way or another. Those who do not face up to their responsibilities leave them for their heirs, with surcharges. Accusing someone of a crime they have not committed in order to elope one’s own responsibilities is a crime. Fulfilling the political mandate a government has been elected for by the people is not a crime. To obstruct the fulfillment of this mandate, however, is a crime, more so, if it is done with violence!
At some point the German government has asked for forgiveness for having surrendered President Companys to the Spanish police and for the bombardment of Guernika. But I do not remember having heard anybody acknowledge the guilt for the German help which was instrumental in exalting the supreme commander of the rebel forces as “Chief of State” on October 1, 1936. The person who provided that help eloped from facing the responsibility for his crimes by committing suicide, his helpers where condemned for their crimes by international courts. Maybe the time has come when Germany should ask the Spanish people for forgiveness. Owning up to this guilt would help repair the damages caused and to identify the heirs and followers of the rebel forces against the democratic order that presently hold positions of power in the Spanish monarchy, so that they too can face the guilt they carry.
As a German, I carry a proportional part of the collective guilt of all Germans, even though I was born ten years after that criminal killed himself. The scars of the damages he caused are visible everywhere, the same as the damages caused by his companion, the supreme commander of the rebel forces, exalted “Chief of State”. Many of those scars have not healed and need attention.
An important step in caring for many of those scars would be that the carriers of that guilt would own up to it, even if they have not acquired it personally through their deeds and only have inherited it. But it is not necessary to wait until these people work up the necessary courage and integrity. The witnesses, the victims and their heirs are also under the effect of posttraumatic stress and need to restore their inner balance. As we provide ourselves with the attention that will help us recover, step by step, we advance towards a life together in peace and social cohesion, where also the heirs of the perpetrators will be able to find healthy ways to participate.
Part 3: October 12
Who are the invaders
[Wilson, 1984]
The invaders
He’s right, I thought at the end of summer 1984, when I was reading in the official publication of the Mohawk Nation, the Akwesasne Notes, what Darryl Wilson from the Pit River Nation wrote about the invaders. What is it with us? What makes us fight one another, deal out destruction, war, conflict, murder, rape, pillage?
Starting by exploring the continent of my own body, I became a student of the interrelationship between body, mind, psyche and environment in order to understand how we humans work. What I have discovered in 34 years of personal and professional research that have led me to become a DFA practitioner of Somatic Pattern Recognition and an Archetypal Pattern Analyst shows on all accounts that this violence is not an expression of human nature in itself, but rather is a result of not knowing our nature and being in conflict with it. Violence is a resource available to us that on the short run can get us out of a dangerous situation, but its costs are so high that on the long run it does not pay off and is not productive.
If we understand that violence is a result of not knowing the nature of what we are as living beings and of being in conflict with it, we can create conditions that help us explore our inner being and learn how to establish peaceful and generative relationships with ourselves and with others. Life has evolved to the present degree of complexity and diversity on the basis of affinity and cooperation. We are the result of this process; therefore, they are fundamental principles inherent in our nature. A culture that is governed by these principles fulfills the basic requirements for creating a prosperous and cohesive society.
Spanishness
Spain is proud of having discovered the “new world” in overseas that we call America, and every year on October 12, the anniversary of the discovery is celebrated as the national holiday with great fanfare, with military parades and ostentatious exhibitions of armament. The official story of the discovery hides the fact that those lands had already been discovered by people who had been living there for thousands of years and had built their own civilizations. It presents the invasion and colonization by means of sustained bloody violence as a heroic deed, a guilt that Spain shares with other European countries. Over the centuries up to the present days the Spanish state has hidden from its people the true costs of the wars and genocides perpetrated in order to expand the country’s territories. And for now, most state representatives and wide sectors of the population refuse to recognize the results they brought about. It is highly likely that they really are not aware of them.
On October 12, 2018, I heard an elderly Spanish lady try to say what the celebration of this national holiday meant for her. She was so moved that she could hardly speak. It was not camera fright, she was truly happy to speak about her feelings on TV. She said that what she felt was so big and so moving that it nurtured her for the whole year; the pride she felt was so great; she was so immensely proud of… she could not go on speaking because the intensity of her feeling kept her from finding words to describe what she was so proud of. A typical symptom of posttraumatic stress is that one cannot talk about it. A pride so great that it cannot be expressed in words is often the tolerable aspect of the intolerable side of the feeling: shame. Pride and shame are the two extremes of one and the same emotion regarding the value one attributes to one’s own person and acts as well as to any group one may identify with and its actions. A healthy self-esteem would be the point of balance in between the two poles.
The myth of the origin of Spain situates it at the time of the marriage of the so-called Catholic King and Queen of Spanish countries, although upon Isabel’s death, Fernando was no longer kind of Castile. So really there had been no unified kingdom. The Spanish name of Spain, España, is the Castilian translation of the Latin name Hispania which designated the geographic unit of the Iberian Peninsula. Isabel and Fernando actually did aspire to expand their territories to include all of the peninsula and more. They achieved most of their goal by means of organized violence, like in the conquest of the kingdoms of Granada and Navarra, of the Canary Islands and several parts of Africa. Marriages within the confined circle of close relatives were another means to expand their spheres of influence in order to include, for example, Portugal. Another important instrument of their royal power was the inquisition and the forceful conversion of Jews and Muslims or, alternatively, their expulsion. The invasion of the lands overseas provided a great part of the funds to finance all that warfare.
Evidently Spain was not the only country driven by greed to commit atrocities. But the fact of celebrating it as an expression of the country’s greatness, instead of admitting the crimes that were committed, owning up to the guilt and, to the degree it is possible, repairing the harm done, makes sure the moral and economic bankruptcy the Spanish state has been afflicted with again and again over the last five hundred years will repeat itself ad infinitum and engraves the traces of posttraumatic stress each year a little deeper into the collective soul of the Spanish people.
Archetypal functions
Archetypal functions are comparable to a kind of force field that organizes the flow of energy between two poles, like in a battery. In order to make an appliance work properly, the batteries have to be introduced into the appliance with the right orientation. If you put them in the other way around, the appliance will not work and may eventually be harmed. Also in the gravitation field, it is advisable to keep one’s feet on the ground in order to have a sound foundation and be able to find a proper balance and orientation of the body structures in relationship to this field. The same is true of the functions that belong to a person’s profession or social position or to the different institutions of public life.
The archetypal function of the state is the administration of public life for the common good of the people. Using the institutions of the state in order to accumulate wealth, power and privileges at the cost of the population is comparable to walking on one’s hands with one’s feet up in the air. For a while it may seem a spectacular feat, giving a high to those who demonstrate their power in this way, but the costs of staying in this position are exorbitant, there are not many things that can be done in this position and, sooner or later, one’s strength will wear out and the available resources will be spent.
The function of religion is to provide ways to connect with the creative force of life. Abusing this function for personal gratification and for the support of unsustainable structures of state power at the cost of the population will leave people without any refuge facing an exercise of power that undermines social cohesion and coexistence instead of facilitating them.
In the face of danger children will instinctively run to find refuge with their parents whose archetypal function, after siring, gestating and giving birth, it is to love, protect, nourish, educate and prepare them for adult life. If parents abuse these functions to satisfy their own desires or to yield to abusive state or church power structures, the danger is in them or is transmitted through them. Like this the intrapsychic and interpersonal fabric that make up the basis for coexistence as well as individual and collective life quality will be torn apart, and the development of humankind in general will get stuck in a vicious circle of destructive relationships.
Autonomous complexes of the psyche
We do not know how to use what we are because we have not learnt it yet. We are complex beings and it is not easy to manage the wide range of possibilities to express our being. Maybe it is because as a species we are relatively young and it is now that we begin to have the necessary abilities to learn how to go beyond the anthropocentric and egocentric point of view that has been dominating the cultural history of modern and contemporary times. As a matter of fact, on an historic scale, the five hundred years since Columbus decided that we was going to take six »specimen« of the people he found in the lands that he claimed to have discovered for his sovereigns are not a very long time. He did not give any thought to the fact that the people who lived there had evidently already discovered that land, because he did not recognize them as people with the same rights as himself and his sovereigns. Since they were not Christian, stated the law, they were not allowed to own land and it was alright to subjugate them and use them for whatever one wanted.
Basically, this attitude comes down to a question of territoriality and hierarchy, to gaining a position from where one can dominate others. These are functions that are regulated by the oldest part of our nervous system which coordinates vital functions like the rhythms of the heart, of breathing, of digestion, sleep and wakefulness, and the tone of our muscles that shapes our habitual holding patterns, as well as instinctive, ritual, territorial and hierarchic behaviors. This primitive part of our nervous system has changed little since its origins in prehistoric times. It does not know time.
Habitual holding patterns make us do things the way we do, because we do them this way, because we have always done them this way and, at this level, we do not know that we could also not do them or do them another way. Doing them the way we do has been useful for survival; this is obvious because here we are, alive, and we started to do them this way facing something that seemed to threaten our survival. It may have been something simple like, for example, feeling like one does not deserve to be loved, due to the bad sensations that are taking place in the body, no matter how much we try to not give them any space and be good. If we really are as bad as the bad feeling in the body seems to denote, nobody will want to love us, take care of us, and protect us, and as little children we cannot take care of our own needs, so we would have to die. But it may very well be that the bad feeling actually came from a trauma suffered by our grandfather during the war and our mother did everything she could to overcome the sensations that arose in her own body through contact and interaction with her dad, and came thus to be transmitted to our own body.
When we use the physical tension of our muscles to stop the flow of feelings that seem undesirable and this tension becomes habitual, the undesirable sensations remain in the body, underneath the threshold of consciousness as a continuous threat and will break through when our defenses get below a certain point. They occupy space in the body, emit a resonance and get activated in reaction to triggers that resemble the conditions under which they first appeared. Like this they lead us to create and recreate situations in which this kind of feeling makes sense; even if the initial conditions belonged to the life of a predecessor, they left their traces in our body, transmitted through contact, genetic material and the dynamics in the force field of our family.
The tension isolates the parts of the body and psyche that are occupied with these sensations and keeps them apart from the rest of our personality. In this manner they cannot participate in the development of the faculties of an adult. They remain anchored in the stage of development they had when we first began to separate from the sensations we keep hidden away in there.
Carl Gustav Jung called these isolated parts autonomous complexes of the psyche. [Jung, 1969] When something activates such an autonomous complex, it eclipses adult functions, as if the person was possessed or under a spell. Under the command of this reactivity people are able to perceive the world only in terms of their complex and are unable to respond to reason.
Cultural complexes
The director of the Depth Psychology Alliance James Newell describes a complex as
…networks of ideas and emotions that may have been forgotten, or simply were too complicated to fully process at earlier stages of development. Yet the energy contained in these complexes will continue to act autonomously, upsetting our best laid plans, regardless of our conscious intentions. (Newell 2018)
Not only people but also cultures can fall under the control of an autonomous complex. (Kimbles, 2000) Often, the early formation of a complex involves an underlying trauma. (Newell 2018) For now, research into posttraumatic stress has mostly been focused on the victims and witnesses of violence and other morally repugnant behaviors. But the debilitating symptoms of posttraumatic stress are also observed in people who commit violent deeds, even if they do so under legal protection and in defense of the law. (MacNair, 2005).
The fixed idea of the Spanish state about the unity of Spain is an example of a cultural complex. Apart from the economic expense, the bloodshed, the broken lives, the desertification and erosion of wide areas of their own country, one of the most devastating costs of the violence perpetrated to impose that idea on the peoples who have another idea is the disconnection of people from their own inner being. Unable to connect with themselves, they cannot connect with others or with the creative force of life.
A part of the Spanish collective psyche is captive in the network of ideas and emotions of those responsible for the bloodshed and the human suffering caused by their will to impose their idea at any cost and remains stuck in the stage of development of that era. Independently of the present conscious intention to function as a democratic state of law, the complex eclipses the faculties that would be necessary in order to be able to function as such. The Spanish institutions and wide sectors of the population are trapped in this network, because the ideas and emotions could not be processed at the time of the supposed origin of Spain, as doing so would have questioned, among other things, the myth of Christian superiority. The energy of these ideas and emotions continues to act autonomously and upsets democratic coexistence. The armed uprising of the rebel forces under the command of general Franco and the regime imposed by them is an example of a full-blown activation of this complex with effects that extend into the present day.
In order to wake up from the possession and restore personal and collective inner balance, it is indispensable to recognize the ideas and emotions of this network as what they are: the result of the aspirations of some power-hungry people who tried to make up for the disconnection from their inner being due to the trauma induced by acts perpetrated by themselves and by their forebears. Understanding these ideas and emotions in the context from which they arose helps the nervous system to update itself to the reality of the present time.
An interconnected and interrelated world
The reality is (and was) that we live in a world that is interconnected and interrelated on all levels, where concepts that concede superiority of some over others have no place. The unity of Spain cannot be achieved nor defended, not with arms nor with trials, because it is nothing but a desire of some that collides with the right of others to want something else. Really it does not exist. The use of violence to impose the will of some on others may work for a certain while, because it inspires fear. But fear paralyzes the human development of everybody involved: the victims, the perpetrators, the witnesses who look on without being able to do anything to stop the violence, and those who look somewhere else in order to not see it.
In order to be able to act responsibly we need a clear perception of the reality of what we are as living beings, as an individual, as members of the collectives we belong to, of our immediate and extended environments, and of the relationships between all these things. The first part of our nervous system that develops, once we are born, regulates sensory perception. The structures that allow the consciousness of existing as an individual, as an “I”, develop much later under the influence of the sensory experiences of the first months.
The knowledge of good and bad, which got us expulsed from the paradisiac times of fusion with everything belonging to the initial phase of life, makes us identify with the shapes in which we occupy space and move in life which we have created with the tension of our muscles in order to avoid bad sensations and striving to have good ones. But what is good from one perspective, from another point of view, may be bad, and vice versa.
The sensations that are scary, painful or undesirable for some other reason may be transmitting vitally important information. Keeping them outside our awareness may expose us to energies or situations that might endanger our survival. From the knowledge of good and bad derive two different motions: moving towards something or moving away from it, attraction, affinity, and love, on one side, and rejection and fear on the other. Rejection and fear fulfill an important function for our protection, but only the movement towards, affinity, attraction and love facilitate the development of life in the multiple shapes in which it expresses the complexity and diversity that make it rich and able to deal with any kind of situation creatively without fear. Moving internally towards the sensations that fluctuate in our body, even if they are scary, may reveal aspects of our history that can heal old wounds, reestablish broken bonds and open pathways where love and understanding can flow.
Learning to recognize sensations
The reactivity of habitual holding patterns based on rejection, fear, the hunger for power and the desire to be loved isolate people in their ignorance of the fact that when they exclude from their conscious experience those aspects of their own being which they consider to be intolerable, they create separation. In this manner, the refusal of the Spanish state to recognize the right for self-determination of the Catalan people, for example, creates the separation they fear and that makes them so angry.
As the shadow of the things we cannot see inside ourselves is projected on the environment, it is possible to recognize it through the sensations that come with the intense emotions certain people, attitudes or situations awake in us. Instead of letting us be carried away by reactivity, we can take advantage of the intensity of our feeling to see ourselves reflected in the mirror of the situation. In order to be able to do so it is indispensable to learn how to recognize the sensations that take place inside our body. It is the only way we can distinguish sensations that inform us of states that require a response from those that keep us stuck in the reactivity of destructive automatisms. Even if in the past they were useful for keeping the things we were not able to tolerate at the time outside our awareness, in order to be able to restore inner balance it is necessary to go beyond those automatisms.
As long as we are afraid of feeling the sensations that back then we excluded from our awareness, we remain stuck in reactivity to the situation of the past. The love for life gives us courage to face the fear of becoming aware of what we feel. This awareness might lead us to realize that we have to give up some privileges, but the interrelations and interconnections with the wonderful immensity of life are so much richer, more interesting and satisfactory than any privilege one may have obtained at the cost of others. In any case, consciously experiencing those sensations opens a way to transform the vicious circle of multigenerational trauma into a spiral of learning.
Epilogue
As of late, more than ever, a need to study the dynamics of trauma has become apparent, because an understanding of those dynamics may offer a key not only for an effective treatment for traumatized people, but also to help us find ways to resolve the humanitarian and ecological crisis, we have created.
People who have lived for a prolonged period under traumatic circumstances tend to become habituated without restoring inner balance, once the danger is over. They remain stuck in the defense mechanisms that had helped them to adapt and survive –fight, flight, immobilization, or collapse- with patterns of behavior that are governed by a primitive part of our nervous system that has not changed very much since its beginnings in prehistorical times. These mechanisms are transmitted to the next generations and, under the threshold of consciousness, may push them to reproduce similar traumatic conditions.
The nervous system needs some time to update itself and metabolize the traumatic experience, even and especially, when the symptoms appear in the generation of the children or grandchildren of the persons who originally suffered the trauma. We need to learn to recognize the sensations that belong to the experience of the past, even though the defense reaction against the trauma makes them appear alive, as if they were actually about something going on in the present. If parents or grandparents are still alive, we can ask them and let them tell us how they felt under the conditions that traumatized them. It is highly likely that they have dedicated much energy to shutting themselves off from what they were feeling. Probably during most of their lives they have done what they could to overcome the feelings they had not been able to admit and process at the time. It may be an opportunity also for them to finally digest something that has been producing symptoms, without anybody realizing what that really is.
Originally, in the first generation, it often was a question of life or death to keep silent and not speak about what one felt, what one thought and what one had experienced under the traumatic conditions of war and violent repression in totalitarian regimes. Moreover, the very dynamics of trauma often made it impossible to speak about any of it. In the second generation, sons and daughters had no access to the words that would have made possible a verbal representation of the events the parents were keeping locked up in silence, while in their implicit memory sensations, feelings and images of those events were registered, because even without words children are in tune with their parents. However, there being no words, all that remains unspeakable. In the third and fourth generation it all becomes even unthinkable, although there still are unconnected fragments of sensations, feelings and images. [Pijoan i Pintó, 2012]
Asking questions and showing interest for what our parents and grandparents experienced under those conditions can overcome the isolation produced by the silence and reestablish the deep contact that is inherent in the biological bond that unites us. While you listen to them, try to imagine what they must have felt like under those conditions, so that you can ask questions that help to bring forth the important things from oblivion. If they have already passed away, you can rely only on your imagination and on trying to understand through reading, movies, documentaries and conversations with people who have had similar experiences. Most of us know some anecdotes our predecessors spoke about, when we were little, but usually we never stop to imagine how we would have felt in the shoes of our father, mother, grandfather or grandmother during the war and under the totalitarian regime that had determined their lives.
Dedicating some time to this inner work allows the more evolved parts of the human mind to recognize and understand the habitual holding patterns that function under the regime of a primitive part of our nervous system and protected us against sensations that we could not understand at the time because the parts of the nervous system that are necessary to recognize and process them were not yet fully developed. In this manner the adult, evolved, parts of the person can take care of the younger parts that had been isolated, in the grip of the intolerable feelings of one’s own past or the past of one’s predecessors. Then, the organism and the psyche can assimilate whatever may be useful for the continuation of life and let go of whatever may be harmful and out of date.
One symptom of the effects of not assimilating multigenerational trauma is the reappearance of extreme right-wing forces all over the world with violent attitudes and behaviors against persons and collectives these groups consider threatening. In order to not fall into a vicious circle and to learn from the traumatic past of wars, totalitarian regimes and intolerable guilt and shame, it seems of vital importance to identify the traces of our predecessors’ unresolved traumas in our own bodies and lives. When you recognize the sociocultural historic and economic context of the lives of your parents and grandparents, as it is reflected in the unpleasant sensations that were imprinted in the tissues of your body during the initial period of your life, they become more bearable. Instead of falling into dejection, because there seems to be some kind of defect in how one is that has not been resolved, not even after years of therapy, as one begins to take charge of what one’s predecessors must have felt under the traumatic conditions of their lives, when one recognizes in one’s own body the sensations they could not admit and process under those conditions, instead of dejection, shame, suffering or anger, appear understanding and compassion and also a sense of gratitude for being able to live under better conditions. As the bonds that had been cut by trauma get reestablished and the love that connects the members of a family can flow again, the tension that was used to defend against those sensations lets go. Like this it becomes possible to feel, maybe for the first time in one’s life with full awareness, how one is connected with the social and natural world one belong to. The bonds of love that unite one with one’s family grow stronger, even beyond death. A deep appreciation for life, in all the shapes and forms in which it manifests, one’s own as well as that of all others, comes forth. Life becomes joyful, even in the face of pain.
I have started to write this epilogue on December 6, 2018, another special date: the 40th anniversary of the Spanish Constitution. Archetypally, in the life of a human being this is an age where one asks oneself: of the things I have achieved in my life so far, what do I want to keep and continue to develop for the remainder of my life? Of the things I have sacrificed in order to get where I am, what do I want to rescue? Of the things there are in my life right now, what do I want to leave behind? Article 2 of the Constitution keeps the Spanish society under the control of the vicious circle of its traumatic past: namely the presumption of the indissoluble unity of what one part of the Spanish nation (if such thing actually does exist) considers the common and undividable fatherland of all those that are considered to be Spaniards by this part, because on millions of people the condition of being a Spaniard has been imposed and still is being imposed by force and even with genocidal means.
Apart from the acts of assassination and the physical annihilation of people as well as birth control, the term genocide is intended "to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves [Lemkin, 2008 and Power, 2013], such as for example the persistent reiteration of the denial that the Catalan people actually is a people, continuous efforts aimed at making it Spanish, the attempts to suppress education in Catalan language, the cancellation of a great number of laws passed by the Catalan Government, the judicial persecution of government officials who have been elected by the Catalan people and a long etc. The crimes of genocide do no prescribe, not after eighty years, nor three hundred nor five hundred years. Back then, the genocidal efforts went far beond those that are still being prepetrated at present. There can be no amnesty without a trial that establishes clearly what crimes have been committed and by whom. A Constitution that includes a clause that can be interpreted as justifying the destruction of the essential bases of the life of a people and denies its existence as such keeps the country in conflict with a part of humanity. It cannot set any base for social cohesion and a life together in peace, not for the citizens of the country or for the country in relationship with all the other countries of the world.
No matter how many resources are being destined to cover up the crimes against humanity that have been committed in order to impose the indissoluble unity this clause vindicates and to give the appearance of a democratic state under the rule of law in spite of those crimes, the guilt does not disappear and the evidences bring to light what is real. This clause keeps the vicious circle of failed acts, bankruptcy and trauma that rules the Spanish state up and running. In order to become a democratic state under the rule of law, one has to learn to behave democratically. That means one has to accept the mandate of the people and allow that the persons that have been elected by the people to carry it out can do so without throwing them into jail, without persecuting them and without hiding behind formulations that, in themselves, are anti-constitutional, even if they have been included in the constitution –erroneously and by force.
In order to learn how to behave democratically, in the first place one has to be aware of the habitual patterns that shape a great many of our behaviors. Many of those patterns keep us anchored in the past, if we do not learn how to recognize them, both on the sensory and cognitive level, and if we do not begin to develop behaviors that are more suitable for present life. One way to access this kind of awareness is by learning to perceive the relationship between the body and its physical environment, i.e. the ground underneath and the space around it. If we become aware of how we occupy space with our body and how we move in life, we can regulate the shapes in which we do that and find alternative forms that allow gravity to sustain our weight and offer us more freedom of movement and responsiveness than the restrictive patterns that were developed under traumatic conditions.
Right now, what does the relationship between your body and the parts of the material world it is in touch with feel like? The pressure of the body’s weight against the surfaces it touches changes with the motions of breathing. If you cannot feel any change, it is because your breathing is quite shallow or because the way you sit or stand compresses the spaces inside your body. The air that flows into the body when you inhale has a volume and a weight. It expands the body and presses it against the seat and backrest, if you are sitting; and it moves your weight over your feet, if you stand. The movement of exhaling orients you inwards towards the space of the vertical axis through the center of your body and towards the ground. The muscles that have done the work of breathing in rest, as you breathe out. So, with the exhale, you can rest deeply into the very core of what you are as a living being as well as into the material world you are a part of. When all the air that flows out easily is out, it becomes apparent to what extent you can really rest in the depth of what you are and in the world you belong to. Do you feel connected? Do you keep a distance? Or keep the world at a distance? Do you enjoy a loving exchange and interrelationship on all levels? Are you afraid to let the outer world into the depth of the most intimate space of your inner being, of seeing or showing what you feel in there? Do you feel the joy of living in a wonderful world? Do you hide from a world you experience as threatening?
All we have to observe these things is the present moment. In order to recognize the sensations taking place in your body and to find, moment to moment, the shapes that allow the ground to sustain its weight in such a way that the relationship between the inner spaces and the outside space allows your breath to flow, deeply and calmly, without any hindrance, you need to learn and practice it. Then, you can feel that the sense of “I”, the ego consciousness, which you have created under the initial conditions of your life is deeply rooted in the self, the living being you are; and you can nourish yourself with the energy that flows along the axis that unites ego and self [Edinger, 1992], and realize that you are an individual that is both unique and universal at the same time. As such, you are able to take care of a proportional part of the collective multigenerational trauma that is embodied in each one of us.
The ability to recover from negative states is one of four abilities for which we humans have innate brain circuits and which are determinant for our lasting wellbeing. The other three are: the ability to maintain positive states, the ability to focus and avoid mind-wandering and the ability to be generous. [Davidson, 2018] Even people who get on a high horse with their chest inflated in order to conquer the objects of their greed have these abilities, as do those who hide underneath the gown of jurisdiction in order to judge people who fulfill the political mandate they have been elected for; and even those who spit out venom and lies whenever they open their mouths have these abilities. They do not know how to put them into practice, because they separate people into us and them. Their lives are governed by fear, rather than love, and they intend that we all get entrained by the fear and violence they convey. For the general good we should make sure to not get drawn in but to set boundaries with compassion and understanding of the causes. If we don’t know how to do that, we can learn to put the abilities that are inherent in our nature into practice and to recognize that we all are parts of the collective of living beings. The belief to be better than others or superior to them, to be deserving of a special treatment, covers up an intolerable feeling of shame, arising from the bad feeling in the body which seems to denote that one is worse than others or inferior to them. That is toxic shame, feeling ashamed for being what one is, a kind of shame that never ends. [Bradshaw, 1988] In a vicious circle it keeps creating shameful situations.
A healthy shame appears when one realizes that one has made a mistake. It lasts a while and then it is over. It helps to learn from one’s mistakes and find the joy that arises from the cooperation, mutual help and generosity that express human nature. But in order to get to this point, it is often necessary to first identify and deactivate the complex that eclipses one’s natural human abilities and drives one to disgraceful behaviors. In the case of a cultural complex, like the idea of the indissoluble unity of Spain, which possesses wide sectors of the country’s government and population, individual solutions cannot break the possession. In the grips of a cultural complex, people literally cannot see one another for who they really are. Cultural complexes “operate as a whole, beyond individuality. […] They become too big to be taken on and dealt with individually. They require a collective response.” [Kimbles, 2000] In order to elaborate and implement an effective collective response, however, it seems necessary that a sufficient number of people do the inner work of breaking free from the possession by the traumatic imprint they inherited. Sorting out and differentiating their own emotional contents from those that belong to the unprocessed experiences of their forbears will bring about more freedom of movement and responsiveness and, particularly, a margin of freedom to keep the inherited defense mechanisms against traumatic imprints from getting unconsciously activated in a vicious circle of reactivity to stimuli that bear a certain resemblance to the original trauma.
From the point of view of this archetypal pattern analyst and practitioner of somatic pattern recognition, the self-determination of the Catalan people in a Catalan Republic looks like a collective response capable of deactivating the cultural complex that holds the Spanish monarchy under its spell of bankruptcy and of restoring inner balance in Spain and Catalonia after the multigenerational collective traumas from where it arose. The benefits of the resulting reorientation and reorganization will surely have positive effects in other countries as well.
This trilogy has been written to celebrate the fruits of 30 years of work as a certified practitioner of the Duggan/French Approach for somatic patterns recognition as of December 20, 1988. I will never be able to put into words the extent of my gratitude for what Annie B. Duggan and Janie French taught me. It was exactly what I needed in order to be able to heal from what was making me sick. I hope I have been able to convey to you some of the help I received, and that reading my words has been helpful for you. If you would like me to help you sort things out, please contact me through the website www.dfa-europa.com.
If reading this text has been of benefit for you and you wish to offer some money in return, you can make a contribution to the Consell de la República, the Catalan Council of the Republic to help create a Catalan republic. To make a contribution to the council, you can register here: https://consell.republicat.cat/?locale=en_us. If you would like to make a donation without becoming a member of the council, you can do so here: www.defensaexili.org. Or you may make a contribution to the Caixa de Solidaritat to help face the financial retaliations against people for their participation in the organization of the referendum for Catalan self-determination in civic, peaceful, non-violent, democratic activities. You can do so here: https://caixadesolidaritat.cat/ , or with a money transfer into the account: ES31 3025 0001 1814 3361 5996
© Brigitte Hansmann, DFA practitioner of somatic pattern recognition and archetypal pattern analyst
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