CHAPTER SEVENTEENA Psychospiritual Framework for Healing
Have you ever seen a side-show demonstration in which a hypnotist chooses a strait-laced member of the audience, puts him in a trance, and then makes him cluck like a chicken? Perhaps the greatest fear people have about hypnosis is losing control of their minds to an outside force. As a nine-year-old, I angrily resisted the ministrations of a hypnotist hired by a friend's mother to entertain us at a birthday party. “You can't control me,” I fumed. Sadly, we're all already controlled by hypnotic images implanted early in life by parents, friends, clergy, the media, teachers, and seemingly random events. We all have myths that guide us, life stories to which we are profoundly attached, and we continue to act in these stories like characters in a dream. The hypnotist who controls us is not outside us, but within.
Consider the strange and disturbing case of Amanda, a social worker who literally felt that she was living in a dream. She often lost hours or days from conscious awareness and had no idea where the time had gone. Sometimes she would wake up in a strange hotel room and not understand how she had gotten there or what she had been doing. After one episode, she arrived home to find her husband in a state of panic. No one knew where she had gone. Later in the month, when the credit card bills arrived, Amanda was shocked to find charges that she couldn't recall making. It turned out that Amanda's body had gone on a spending spree, bought a new wardrobe, and then enjoyed three days of gambling in Las Vegas—activities that the quiet, frugal Amanda had absolutely no interest in.
Under hypnosis with a skilled psychiatrist, a personality called Shelly emerged and took over Amanda's body. Shelly had a smile that could light up the room in contrast to Amanda's very shy, tentative demeanor. Leaning back seductively in her chair, Shelly began to recount the story of the three fabulous days spent in Las Vegas while she had been in control of Amanda's body. Amanda had a textbook case of multiple-personality disorder, a fascinating and devastating response to trauma that has much to teach us about the nature of healing and the mind.
Some people who are severely abused or traumatized as children learn to survive in a particularly creative way. They dissociate from the terror, numbing themselves to what is happening and living in a fantasy—a set of images so realistic that the main character of their mental movie persists as an independent personality, or alter ego. For example, we know of a woman whose mother beat her when she was a child. She learned to “space out” when she heard her mother coming, and experienced herself playing outside. But someone, an alter ego or newly emergent personality, was left in control of her body to take the beating. That alter ego had unusual physical characteristics. It was an anesthetic personality that also had the capacity to encourage rapid wound healing. What a remarkable and creative response to pain!
Repetitive traumas may lead to several alter egos, which in some cases, may be totally unaware of one another. This is called multiple-personality disorder (MPD). There is currently heated professional debate over MPD. Although the disorder is listed in the psychiatric “bible,” the DSM (Diagnosis and Statistical Manual) 4, some therapists believe that the disorder is overdiagnosed. Others believe that it doesn't exist at all. The latter group argues that MPD is a creation of well-meaning therapists who hypnotically implant alter egos by suggesting their existence. In just this fashion, false memories of abuse may sometimes be inadvertently implanted by therapists. But it is important not to throw out the baby with the bath water. Just as many cases of child abuse are true memories rather than false memories, many cases of MPD are also the result of severe trauma.
For example, can you imagine being a child in Bosnia? Perhaps one day a shell explodes in the schoolyard and you watch as your best friend's head explodes into a shower of bloody splinters. A week later your father is killed by a sniper on his way home from work. Next month you are gang-raped by soldiers who believe that because your religious beliefs are different from their own, you are less than human. Your little sister then becomes catatonic when yet another bomb blast rips through the neighborhood. And your mother is so very sad that she seems to have lost the will to live. When I think of the holocausts that so many children have endured, not only in war, but also in the inner city and in the confines of “family” life, I can only applaud the intelligence of the human spirit in its ability to form alternate lives in which we can preserve at least some semblance of sanity.
An adult multiple personality might have alter egos both older and younger than their chronological age. And amazingly, some of these personalities are physiologically distinct. One might need glasses, while others have normal vision. One might have a severe allergy that goes away when another alter ego emerges. There are cases in which one personality is addicted to a substance like heroin and only the addicted personality will undergo withdrawal. There are even cases where one personality has non-insulin dependent diabetes and the others are metabolically normal. What an amazing demonstration of the powers of the imagination to change the body! While Uncle Dick and his cheese phobia (mentioned in an earlier chapter) might seem mild by comparison, we're talking about the same principle—the power of the images in our mind to determine the state of the body.
Having spent nearly a decade of my life as a cancer cell biologist, I have wondered if it could be possible to have cancer in one personality but not others. The answer to that question isn't known, but I would guess that in a very small minority of cases such a thing would be possible. I have certainly heard reports of people who had multiple sclerosis in one personality that disappeared when another alter ego came out for any length of time. But, as amazing as these findings are for the body/mind, they also open up a window on the soul.
In the early 1960s, a psychiatrist by the name of Ralph Allison found that he could hypnotize multiple personalities and regress them to the time when each personality was split off as a result of some trauma. But there was always one personality that told a very different story from all the others. It did not report being formed at a traumatic time. Rather, it seemed to be an eternal, immortal essence. Independent of the patient's religious background, this personality said things such as, “I've been with this person before they were born, and I will remain with them after this body dies.” It often characterized itself as a conduit for divine love or universal wisdom. Allison discovered that this core personality had remarkable insight, compassion, wit, and healing powers. If he could access it, this personality was often helpful in the therapy, with an uncanny knowledge of what the person needed in order to heal.
Allison dubbed this personality the Inner Self Helper, or ISH. Some of us might think of the ISH as our intuition, Higher Self, Divine Spark, or true Essence. When Miron and I first read about the ISH, it seemed strongly reminiscent of the core Self—the indwelling archetype of the Divine Essence that psychiatrist C. G. Jung had described. At about the same time that Jung described this core Self, with a capital S to distinguish it from our earthbound personality, or small self, the Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli also described a spiritual essence, called Self, at the core of every person.
Assagioli's work reminded us of the Buddhist image of the Rigpa (one's own true nature or Higher Self), as a sun that is always shining, although for most of us it is obscured by clouds. These clouds comprise the collection of opinions, beliefs, and behaviors that we develop as children to keep us safe in the world. They represent the hypnotic trance in which we live our lives. Assagioli calls these clouds subpersonalities. Spiritual systems such as A Course in Miracles describe these fear-based beliefs as the ego. The ego in this sense is different from its usage in standard psychological parlance as a strong and healthy sense of self.
Since we all have an array of subpersonalities, we're all a little bit like multiple personalities. Sometimes I'm in my writer or teacher subpersonality, and that can be very creative and life affirming. But if my entire sense of self was wrapped up in being a teacher, and then I retired, I might find myself seriously depressed, as do many retired people. Sometimes a woman is overidentified with the mother subpersonality and feels worthless and despondent when her children leave home. Subpersonalities are creative when we realize that they are part of our wholeness. They become traps when we believe that any one of them is the entire measure of who we are.
Some subpersonalities are obvious. I can recognize my teacher, mother, and lover roles. The images that play in my mind, the emotions I experience, and the feelings in my body are very different when I'm feeling the expansive exuberance of love as opposed to when I'm trapped in my fear-based martyr, rescuer, victim, or critic subpersonalities. Long experience has demonstrated that my rare migraine headaches usually occur when I've lost my sense of openness to the possibilities of the moment and am stuck in the angry, hurt, limiting images of the victim.
A remarkable woman by the name of Alice Hopper Epstein wrote a book called Mind, Fantasy and Healing about working with her subpersonalities and experiencing a spontaneous remission from kidney cancer. Her story was featured on the inspiring six-part series, Exploring the Heart of Healing, telecast on Turner Broadcasting in 1993 and 1994. The series was produced by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a membership organization dedicated to the exploration of healing and human consciousness, from which you can order the videotapes. (Information about the Institute of Noetic Sciences can be found in the Resources section of the Appendix.)
Alice, as she tells her story, was working unhappily on a doctorate in sociology when the cancer was diagnosed. Like many of us strivers and achievers, she was hoping that a doctorate would finally make her feel worthy and lovable. For, although she was surrounded by people who really cared, she described herself as unable to take in and experience their love. As she talked about her feelings of worthlessness and inability to experience joy, I felt her pain deeply because it was so reminiscent of my own in earlier times.
When the cancer was discovered, it had already metastasized to her lungs. The situation was dire. There was no proven treatment for metastatic kidney cancer, and Alice's only medical hope was an experimental trial of interferon. Since interferon treatment could not start right away, Alice and her husband, Seymour Epstein, at that time a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, decided to try a no-holds-barred psychological approach to healing. They chose to work with a psychosynthesis therapist. Alice soon discovered a child subpersonality—a five-year old she called Mickey—who seemed bent on self-destruction. Psychosynthesis utilizes very powerful exercises of imagination to heal subpersonalities such as Mickey and bring forth the wisdom that is latent within every wound. Alice completely gave herself over to this healing work.
When it was time to begin the experimental interferon treatment, Alice's x-rays showed that the lung tumors had shrunk substantially! Since her condition was improving, she decided to decline the interferon and continue with the psychosynthesis. Over a period of months, the cancers continued to shrink. Alice and her husband were able to track striking parallels between breakthroughs in the psychosynthesis work and regression of the tumors. Over a decade later, Alice is cancer free. Her life is also healed. Able to give and receive love, she radiates joy and a quiet peacefulness.
While stories such as Alice's are inspiring, they might also tempt us to oversimplify the link between cancer and the mind. Although Alice's tumors seemed clearly related to the subpersonality Mickey, such a one-to-one correspondence is probably quite rare. When I asked Alice's opinion about this phenomenon, she readily agreed. She theorizes that probably only a few percent of cancers are as closely tied to the set of beliefs, images, and behaviors that define personality, as hers was. But even if Alice's cancer had not been cured, her quality of life would still have been dramatically improved through the psychological healing work. As we've said before, the measure of our success is not in the length of life, but in our capacity to give and receive love.
In a spiritual sense, healing is the process of harvesting the teachings from our wounds. In the process, we develop true self-respect and the ability to see others with the same respect. This compassionate awareness leaves us open to the creative possibilities in all situations. When the clouds of ego clear away, we express the compassion and joy that really are our own true nature or Higher Self.
In the past year, we have heard a wonderful quote attributed to Ram Dass, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, and a nameless Catholic priest, which is: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” When this paradigm shift really sinks into our cells, we begin the process of awakening from the dream of our wounds to the power of the wisdom we gain in their healing.
