The Felt Sense of the Soul Exploring the Dilemma

(22 slides)

creatively compiled by dr. michael farnworth

This next part is the difficult process of penetrating through our defended intellectualness into the realms of sadness, pain, hurt, woundedness and failure of our heart and the felt sense of the

body.

We have spent our life defending our tender and hurtful places and I doubt that this fourth part will do much in displacing that

defendedness, but here goes.

Think about these 4 levels of wounding…

• Level one: the effects of living being encoded with in our bodies as a type of traumatic stress syndrome.

• Level two: the early experience of infancy and the memories encoded via the amygdala such as uncomfortable sensations and feelings which we have no verbal or conscious memory of- that are part of all our histories.

• Level three: the pre-operational child that has an immature new brain and interprets the world around them with a self blaming mechanism when things go wrong or they feel threatened. The thoughts change but the feelings of being bad don’t.

• Level four: the trauma events and experiences of older childhood and adulthood that threaten our sense of meaning and purpose in the world such as accidents, assaults, failures, mistakes and betrayals.

One of the pioneers of attachment theory, Mary Main suggests that in relationship to abused and traumatized

children:

“It wasn’t what happened to them as children, but how they came to make sense of what

happened to them that predicted their emotional integration as adults and what kind of

parents they’d be.”

In other words, the child or adult, had to create a coherent and integrated story of their life that made sense to them before

they could change it and heal.

This coherent narrative of their life was pivotal and necessary to healing. It provided the mind with the power and tools to change

the brain (change of the hormonal, neural states and neurotransmitter pathways caused by the early

trauma).

Does it make sense that a person can have a wonderful childhood and have no conscious memories of anything bad

happening but still exhibit the symptoms of post traumatic stress and relationship dysfunction?

They may think they are bad, sinful or crazy.

What they need is to confront the stuffed and denied energies of their body and have time to create a coherent narrative that

makes sense to them.

They need to integrate and unify their life, the intellectual along with the emotional.

The mind can change the brain. Dan Siegel

(If a person can think new thoughts the brain is plastic enough to create new pathways and synaptic connections-)

This notion is pivotal!

Research by Dan Siegel, in his book, The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience, suggests

that a conscious declarative memory is vital in the integration of the energies, feelings and emotions of childhood abuse and

trauma.

This is what the healing is about a chance to make sense of what happened.

A very specific interpersonal neurobiology exists for each of us! But there can be a problem remembering it!

For example

• My wife Cindi has consented for me to share this incident in this lesson before we had even talked and explored some of the ideas in this lesson. She had decided to take out her old home movies (when she was 5-8 years of age) to watch them. What she experienced, surprised and shocked her. She could only watch them for a while before she became so disgusted with herself that she had to turn them off. The little girl, she once was and her efforts to be so good, triggered memories in her that she found so uncomfortable that she had to turn away.

• We had gone to see Napoleon Dynamite a couple of weeks before and she hated the movie because it triggered in her, her own feelings of being nerdy that she disliked the whole movie. Cindi had grown up in a family that had teased, made fun and had a major impact on her personality construct. She still carries the suppressed energies inside her..

• If early abuse and trauma memories, processed by the amygdala, the first three years of life, prevented an explicit, conscious, declarative (verbal) memory of them then the person would be threatened by these sensations and feelings and would have no vocabulary to explain them or their origins to them self or to others.

• In extreme cases (of abuse and trauma) they would feel crazy and mentally unstable.

• We have such conditioned contempt for the body and its energies that we look everywhere but to the inner life for the answers to our problems and issues.

The dilemma of early trauma

The tendency in this situation would be to repress the energies and engage in role playing and outer activities that would keep the

problem energies at bay.

Over time, this energy suppression would become part of the personality construct (a sort of body/character amour) that would isolate the

individual from the truth of their own inner life.

One would construct a cognitive world completely separate from the inner world of their body where the repressed energy would

be stored. (but which, overtime, would leak out)

A fragmented-schizophrenic personality

• A fragmented personality would be created to deal with the disharmony of living in one’s head and out of one’s body. Hypocrisy and feigned behaviors would be a good example of this disconnected living.

• This separation of body from mind is a common philosophical fault that runs through culture and religion. The dichotomized dishonesty of pitting body against mind is fundamental to our intellectual philosophical heritage.

• We extol the strength of the intellect while demeaning the emotions (whose origins were in the body) as weak and fickle.

Healing occurs with the reunion of the separated.

What would be the results of a personality that were integrated and the disowned parts reclaimed?

The philosophical competition that has been instituted in this culture between mind and body has been recently challenged by

scientific research reported by Candice Pert in her book: Molecules of Emotion ….

Mind doesn’t dominate body, it becomes body, body and mind are one.

(Candice Pert, Molecules of Emotions, p. 187)

Do we see ourselves as the enemy?

If we do then we have already set the stage for psychological warfare and contempt!

A house divided

“And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand. And if Satan rise up against himself, and be divided, he cannot stand, but hath an end.”

If you still want to embrace the culture’s philosophy and mentality in viewing the body as an enemy and something to be overcome I guess that’s ok but what do you then with the idea of

loving your enemies?

You still have a very serious dilemma…

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mystical. It is the source of all true art and science.

Albert Einstein

Could we say that the experience of our body is a mystical and beautiful one?

The opposite of a coherent narrative is an incoherent narrative.

An incoherent narrative is a life story that contradicts itself, that deceives with pretence and gets lost in role playing.

Life can bless us with giving birth to a coherent narrative if we are not afraid to enter the inner cave of our fear.

For as Joseph Campbell has reminded us:

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.

And the treasure we seek may be the felt sense of being at home within our self.

A treasure of feeling at peace, safe and comfortable within our own skin.

What a wonderful blessing that would be.

the end