«Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere» (Einstein).
The Jungian method also corresponds to the new paradigm, because that paradigm has long been present in the East, from which Jung drew inspiration. It had been experienced and intuited there by mystics long before modern Western science provided proof.
Jung’s School of Analytical Psychology argues that the processes of growth are individual and unique, and are experienced through the “individuation process” that entails the ability to become more and more what one really is. When this does not happen spontaneously, it is necessary to seek the help of a therapist.
Jung also revealed the existence of a personal unconscious (what happens in a subliminal way during the life of each of us) and a collective unconscious (what has happened throughout the history of mankind), a sea of information with which each of us is in contact unconsciously, to which is added all the information of which we are aware. In effect it already describes the cognitive aspect of the quantum field, because Jung encountered this description in Hinduism and Buddhism.
All this information becomes intelligible through signs or symbols that must be listened to, decoded and understood. Each event while both waking and sleeping, even the seemingly insignificant, carries some meaning: every individual is immersed in an ocean of infinite information, being himself or herself information for others.
Thus Jung had realized the second rule of empathic care, “put the sick person – in our case the troublemaker– back at the centre”, in virtue of the principle of indi-viduation. He taught that every communication with patients has to come from the patients themselves, that is, from this interior tendency that would determine a slow, imperceptible process of psychic development.
To support patients in the task of realigning this internal tendency, you must know how to listen at any moment to their inner voice. And if for some reason the discovery process stops or stumbles, the therapist-carer must know how to reactivate it, at every stage of the treatment and with minimal stimulus.
Just as we cannot exclude listening to the language of the body, and to the meta-language that is beyond words, made up of sounds, silences, and the predominance of certain registers,53 so we must make at least some attempt to understand the signs, dreams and fantasies of the child or adult in difficulty, since it is from these that a complex web of psychological factors emerges, which are themselves organised according to a certain pattern. In a healthy individual, for example, dream images usually vary, while in the individual with problems they are repetitive. As long as the path of personal growth is hindered or interrupted by a problem or a disorder, these images will always be the same, and only begin to change, slowly and imperceptibly, through therapy.
Maria comes to me at twelve years of age. Her parents are separated, although living together, and Maria has just begun menstruating, suddenly changing from a shy, quiet and undemonstrative little girl into an whirlwind: she is irritable, agitated, aggressive and hyperactive. The mother and family doctor tend to think that this is “related to her puberty”, but then such behaviour is repeated at school and the teachers summon the mother. This convinces her to consult a therapist. I suggest family therapy, given the situation, but this is unacceptable to the parents, who are on the point of breaking up.
Maria has recurring nightmares in which monsters come into her room, or into her home. She tries to escape, hiding somewhere so as not to be touched by these monsters. Sometimes in the dream her home becomes all black, all dark. The monsters appear behind the blinds and then come in through the windows. Even when she is half-asleep, eyes closed, she feels hostile, evil presences. I do not understand where imagination begins and the dream ends because the girl is very confused, on the brink of psychosis.
We play a game: I put her in front of a box full of sand, with dolls, trees, pieces of wood and many other things that become abstract symbols in Maria’s hands. They become a means of representing the unexpressed, where words fail. With great effort, Maria reconstructs a scene in the box, with a bad man, a family friend who, when she was seven years old, lifted up her dress and slipped a hand between her legs: an assault suffered in silence, accompanied by intimidation by this authoritative adult, one of her father’s colleagues. Maria had identified this man with her father, who is very strict and repressive, whereas her mother is a vague figure, unstable, and so anxious that Maria does not see her as someone she can cling to. Maria has come to fear both the family friend and her father, and cannot count on the support of her mother.
It was this that made her more and more shy and taciturn, preventing harmonious growth. It was as if she were divided in two.
The conflict between the father and mother created another internal division, and her malaise, in a phase of life in which the body forced her to grow, exploded into excitement and exasperation that she was unable to express in any other way. This blocked her inner growth, now expressed by “bursting” with those symptoms, which were a way of shouting out loud for her problem to be acknowledged and treated.
The unconscious tends to allow us to grow in a harmonious way, developing an increasingly large and more mature personality. Jung called “Self” the Whole, or rather that portion of the Whole that organizes and regulates us in this development. The Self is also the centre of the origin of the fantastic or dreamlike images that represent the totality of our psychic life and that need to be decoded, since they contain vital information for us. The dimension of the Self must be distinguished from that of the ego, our limited, restricted, everyday consciousness, which is the part we know best.
The unconscious traces the paths to follow, and the ego should grasp them and develop, so as to become what the Self, this sort of inner “wise old man”, has in store for us. An ego that listens to the voice of the Self is, according to Jung, the greatest result that an individual can achieve.
This vision betrays the great influence of the East: remember that from the Buddhist point of view all beings have a perfect, wise nature that is temporarily obscured by their distorted and limited perceptions.
It would be wise for us to rediscover it, so as to be in tune with it and never part from it. In the end, all the meditative training and practices of this rich tradition are aimed at this. It is not a kind of static paradise located elsewhere, but an achievable state by which to live one’s life and death.
The secret design of the Self contains the infinite potential of the quantum field, which can “collapse” into a reality only in the presence of certain concomitant conditions. We contain within us all the archetypes, just as Michelangelo’s marble already contained the final work, and he explained that all he did was bring it to light.
When the potential for growth as intended by the Self cannot be implemented by the ego, a disharmony is created that we call disease. However, the process can be reversed.
So what are these mysterious events of our dreams and their manifested symptoms? Are they defects to be overcome or vital elements to accept, know and develop?
In the presence of a disorder such as ADHD, we must learn to see if the child is growing in his or her personal direction, becoming what he or she really is, or in the direction the parents would like. Therapists can discover this because it is through dreams, drawings and games that the Self of the child is manifested, through symbols and signs. They can also use games and symbols to remind the child that he has his own personal potential waiting to be realized, as when we show him a seed and ask him to imagine what it will become.
It is interesting that, once again, in the empathic care for children at the end of their life or when we care for the bereaved we often use metaphor as a language of communication. It is worth noting the views of biologist Bruce Lipton,54 who recalls that if as adults we have a wide range of brain wave frequencies, ranging from delta frequencies (the lowest, corresponding to deep sleep) to beta and gamma frequencies (the highest, corresponding to normal conscious activities), children from zero to two years have essentially delta frequencies. It is as if they lived in a state of receptive trance, allowing them to learn directly, automatically and precociously, even if “passively” and by immersion, enabling them to adapt to the world as soon as possible. They are like little sponges of pure empathy and tremendously impressionable. More than words, it is the state of the carer that has a huge influence on them.
Delta frequencies, strongly present up to six years of age, allow the child to “download” information without discernment, with the result that they take everything literally. Calling a child an idiot may have a metaphorical value for the adult, but the child feels condemned without appeal, because everything children see, hear and feel they believe to be true and becomes their reality. What they learn in the first six years of life, such as muscle coordination, language, or “that they’re idiots” remains strongly imprinted on the unconscious, from where it conditions the many subsequent forms of learning: enriching or inhibiting growth for the rest of their lives.
Theta waves are directly linked to the imagination. They appear between the ages of two and six, joining the delta frequencies and slowly dominating, which explains why, instead of “trying to reason with” children, it is much more effective at this age to communicate with them through images, metaphors, symbols and drawings. The state of impressionability we have just described does not end with early childhood. It is instantly “recalled” as soon as we find ourselves in a stressful situation that threatens our physical or psychological survival, as Canadian psychotherapist Annie Marquier55 points out, adding: «It is also well established that we carry with us memories that come from sources other than our current childhood (ancestral memories, the collective unconscious, “past lives”, however we interpret them), but which were recorded under similar conditions and respond to the same criteria and the same treatment».56 This helps us to understand the reason why to unblock the twelve-year-old Maria a symbolic language was used, suited to the seven-year-old Maria who suffered the trauma, as we will see shortly in the rest of her story.
Alpha frequencies, characterized by greater awareness, do not appear before the age of six, and beta waves are only activated after the age of twelve, which correspond to the specific activities of the cortex: concentration, reflection, analysis. It then becomes possible to communicate with the adolescent as with an adult.
All this is to say that not only do similar symptoms often correspond to different problems, but also that the mode of communication must be adapted each time to the person and the prevailing type of brain waves. On theta and beta waves among people with ADHD, see. F. Travis, S. Grosswald, W. Stixrud, ADHD Brain Functioning and Transcendental Meditation Practice, presented on p. 147. This, too, is “putting the patient back at the centre”.
And the therapist must be able to move children and parents on from the symptom to the problem, flushing them out from their “private fortresses” or “character armour” to gradually highlight aspects of their personalities that they would perhaps prefer to avoid looking at too closely – such as fear, shame or mistakes – or bringing out unknown talents. The latter will transform fear, shame or mistakes into growth opportunities: rather like Hercules in the myth overcomes his “labours” and emerges stronger. Obstacles, from this point of view, are re-evaluated. They become an opportunity to develop resiliency. Jung called that invisible aspect of us that is dialectically opposed to the ego, the “shadow”. It includes the obstacles, the true nature of which escapes us: they appear to be problems but their presence and overcoming them are always functional to harmonious growth, and thus to the achievement of joy and well-being when we fully realize our becoming.
It took a whole year before Maria managed to represent the story of the bad man in the sand box, and during that time I sowed other seeds. For example, I taught a relaxation technique (Autogenic Training, which we will discuss below) to cope with the symptoms of agitation, and let her know that those who have the power to get angry also have the power to calm down. It took a year of teaching her this method before she was able to apply it on her own. On the one hand, this means that without the representation of violence in the theatre of the box, perhaps the training would not have produced satisfactory results; on the other hand, it is also true that perhaps making Maria conscious of her own power changed her from adopting the role of silent victim to that of a victim able to accuse. The nocturnal monsters began to appear less often, and sometimes Maria told me about sweet dreams she had had.
It took another two years of therapy for Maria to recognize that even our greatest obstacles are there simply to be overcome. From then on, Maria abandoned the role of victim. It was only at this point that her agitation disappeared completely.
Autogenic means “generated by itself, without external induction from the outside”.57 Once a person has mastered the technique, it can be used in different ways, for different purposes and, above all, for themselves.
The goal is to achieve a physical and mental condition of absolute serenity and full relaxation that is established gradually and leads to the contemplation of what is happening in your body and in your mind. The technique is a form of passive and progressive attention and concentration on different parts of the body. To facilitate this new mental attitude, a series of phrases is repeated mechanically to prevent thoughts from sneaking into the mind and becoming jumbled up making it easier to listen to what happens in the body.
As a result of this new, unusual attitude, a series of physical and psychological changes spontaneously takes place. These eliminate, improve, modify and normalize all the negative effects caused by tension, anxiety and stress.
Usually, in the face of stimuli that exceed the individual tolerance threshold and depending on their intensity and duration, the body reacts with muscle tension, visceral spasms, small functional changes in the autonomic, neuroendocrine and mood mechanisms or with sensations of cold on the body and heat on the head.
Repetition and the continuation of stressful situations forces the body to keep adapting to external conditions as well as possible, but if tension is no longer followed by relaxation, the psychophysical balance wavers or breaks, leading to discomfort, disturbances and disease. This happens on the physical plane as well as on the psychic plane.
Autogenic Training has two levels, but what interests us most here, because it is easy to apply and fast, is the first. The exercises, which we will explain below, are based on mental calm, passive concentration on the body, narrowing of the field of consciousness and an attitude of introspection, which allows one to enter into a sort of passive doze, where cognitive processes become drowsy and spontaneous muscle, visceral and vascular relaxation occurs, with sensations of heat on the body, regularization of the respiratory and cardiac rhythm, and feeling of coolness on the forehead, and of calm and well-being.
Autogenic Training has been used for many years for psychological and physical recovery in the fields of sports, school and work, as well as relaxation training during spaceflight and in extreme situations. It is also used as a therapy for anxiety and sleep disorders, for psychosomatic illnesses and for problems such as hypochondria, which originate in the mind but affect the body, causing different forms of physical pain but without becoming a real illness.
The exercises of the first level begin with learning one of Schultz’s relaxation postures in an environment that has low lighting and, if possible, is silent. From this we move on to a sequence of six exercises, which begin and end with an image of inner calm that can also be visualized.
The second level exercises can begin, when requested, after mastering those of the first level. They relate to the processes of growth and spiritual elevation.
When he first comes into my office, Angelo is already quite old: he is about to turn fifteen. He is of average height, plump, unruly, angry and bulimic. «You can’t keep him still», his mother says. «He will destroy your office. At home we can’t take it any more: my husband is furious and my 14-year-old daughter is terrified. He rules us all. But who does he think he is, in his daydreaming?» That last sentence gives me something to base the therapy on. So, after collecting all the necessary information from the whole family, I turn to Angelo. «I see that you like to daydream». «Yes, very much, but they tell me I’m crazy». «I don’t think so», I say, «dreams are important and can help us a lot». «Really?» He replies. «Do you want to do some dreaming with me?» And I explain what it is, and that before starting with the dream, he must come with me into a state of relaxation (Autogenic Training) to allow the dreams to appear, just as at night dreams don’t come until you «turn off the light». After a few sessions in which he is doubtful, protests and is unsure, Angelo decides to enter therapy with the “dream images” which is the technique of guided imagination.
Guided imagination is a technique born from the advanced study of other similar techniques, such as second level Schultz’s Autogenic Training exercises, Desoille’s Rêve éveillé, Leuner’s Symbol Drama and Jung’s Active Imagination.
Guided imagination allows us to prevent the consequences of psychophysical trauma, decondition the effects of past traumatic events – revealed by images, signs and symptoms of maladjustment – and to modify reactions of failure to adapt, first in the imagination and then in reality. The method allows one to enter a very particular state in which one can live an imaginative production that emerges spontaneously from the unconscious and manifests itself without being hindered by any inhibitions. It is like being in an armchair and recounting a dream that is happening at that very moment. «Because it just is a dream», the patient feels encouraged to recount everything. In fact, for the therapist it is precious material because it is not restrained by any inhibition; one can read everything the patient has inside, even what he himself does not know how to recognize and therefore to express freely.
The main features of guided imagination are:
The main goal of guided imagination is basically to bring out the unconscious, inexhaustible deposit of fears and anxieties, images linked to negative emotions, and activate the cathartic function, that is, the liberation, release and venting of these emotions, the shift and sublimation of this released energy towards a personal and social balance.
In addition to the relaxation phase, characterized by reduced awareness of the outside world and by the lowering of critical consciousness and self-control, the therapy consists of three further phases:
How does Angelo’s story end?
After several sessions of physical and mental relaxation with Autogenic Training, Angelo begins his imaginary journeys, following the initial stimuli that I provide. We begin in the meadow, a place on which one can easily project one’s desires, fears, joys and frustrations. In the beginning, Angelo’s meadow looks bleak, with sparse, burnt grass, and it takes a long time and a lot of water to make it green, sparkling with dew and with high, lush grass. Finally there are even some flowers, butterflies and little birds. His inner emotional world – that Angelo felt as arid, desolate and expressionless – gradually fills with affectivity and healthy vitality. Moving on to another imaginary journey, that of the forest, Angelo sees himself walking, but he is very small, as if he were five years old. The dense trees loom over him, almost closing in on him. He is terrified and worried that the beasts he can glimpse in the dark will kill him. Suddenly, he visualizes himself as very tall, like a giant towering over the trees, which are below him, «like a blanket». He passes from an inferiority complex to a superiority complex, but feels at ease in neither of these situations: he is unhappy, angry and fearful, or powerful, greedy and evil. In short, he does not know who he is, what he wants, in what direction to go: he has not yet found his identity, his talents and the inner strength to develop them. Conditioned by an oppressive mother and an overbearing father, he cannot find a way out. It takes many imaginary journeys to decondition the negative images that Angelo carries inside himself and that prevent him from growing, but slowly his compensatory waking dreams, that his parents had criticized so much, turn into concrete reality. He has decided to enroll at an art school, begun to paint and finally feels adequate and happy.
Here is another case in which guided imagination proved useful:
Pietro is 6 years old. He alternates between depressive phases and phases of irritation, agitation and fear. He should be starting his first year but it is impossible to take him to school. He has attention disorders and now cannot even concentrate on playing. He has also developed a phobia of water: when they take him to the sea for the first time in his life, not only does he refuse to go into the water, but from then on he does not even want to wash. He wants to be always and only with his mother, at home. He has a three-year-old sister, who for him is another source of agitation and fear. Pietro does not even want to go near her, so his mother cuddles her even more, seeing her rejected by her brother, and also because, being younger, she feels she needs more attention. At the same time, she rebukes Pietro for his ridiculous behaviour, not realizing that in doing so she is pushing him further away from the little girl. The more she pushes him away, the more Pietro becomes aggressive and whines, showing obvious signs of regressions. Once he even pooed on the floor, and then broke his sister’s toys, “torturing” her dolls in various ways, ripping off a leg or gouging out their eyes.
But the symptom that is mostly driving his parents to bring him to me is the fear of water, so I decide to start from there. I start playing with Pietro as if the two of us were going together to the beach. At one point I make him visualize the sea, and I am his seahorse, his ally, on which he could leap for a new adventure. After some time Pietro goes into the water, and then even goes underwater, if only in his imagination. At that point, however, he becomes blocked despite the presence of his seahorse/therapist. A horrible big hungry fish approaches and he is afraid of being eaten. «Push it away», he says. «If you want, I’ll push it away, I’ll push it into the cave. But perhaps it is not as bad as you think. Let’s keep our distance, and see what happens, okay?» The fish in the cave becomes progressively smaller, and less ugly. This takes several sessions.
In the end it is a lovely little fish who comes to meet us with a smile. «You see, it’s coming to give us a little kiss», I tell him. This is what happens. Pietro even strokes it. Then he tells me that he likes it and wants to see some more small fish.
The fish was his little sister. The reason he was afraid of her was obviously the idea that all the attention he used to enjoy had been “swallowed” by her, and had been transformed into reproaches. He felt he had lost his parents’ continuous attention, the prerogative of the only child. That explained the “bad fish”. But what about the fear of water? One day, while his sister was in the bath, he had pushed her, wanting to make her go away (and perhaps drown her: children do not know half measures!). He was so horrified by this impulse that his aversion even extended to the water.
Reconciled with the fish, Pietro did not take long to reconcile with his sister and, of course, with water (and with his mother). The negative impulses hidden in the shadows turned into impulses of love. Pietro began to wash again and, to his family’s great relief, even to go to school. His attention deficit slowly began to disappear, as did his agitation and regressive behaviour.
Putting patients back at the centre means doing it continuously, at every moment. Nothing must be taken for granted. From the beginning of each treatment, you need to follow the change for which the children are already predisposed. But the change, though desired, may be perceived as painful, tiring, even dangerous. So you should never force the children. The “troublemakers” should be accompanied by listening to them empathically, always starting from wherever they are with regard to their change. Firstly, the children will be lead to experience small changes of little account, which apparently have nothing to do with the problem. Working on these little things helps convince them of their own ability to change, thereby preparing to achieve the ultimate goal.
“Troublemakers” (and not only them!) sometimes tell us what they feel, but they do not do so directly. As we have seen, they do it through stories, pictures, and even lies that they tell to avoid revealing certain parts of themselves that they find unacceptable. Pietro pushed his sister into the water, but this only emerged much later. At the beginning, it was water that horrified him. What really horrified him was his action, but it is only through empathic listening that one can grasp the symbolic communication.
Putting children constantly back at the centre means remaining open to signals, without ever judging on the basis of categories that belong to one’s own judgement systems or to other cases, or even to the same case but at another juncture.
We are in a second grade class, where a little boy we will call Michele has died after a long illness. Our team has been called to provide tools to work through the bereavement. The teachers tell us about a pupil who is apparently completely unfeeling, who they define, not without some bitterness, as «really insensitive». «I don’t give a damn that Michele is dead; he was not even my friend», he has told them, and the child, who we’ll call Gianni, repeats this to me. And indeed, when we tell the class the story of Dreamball, while all his classmates are concentrating, mesmerized by our reciting voices, Gianni appears uninterested, shuffling, looking around, flaunting a deliberate indifference and pretending to sleep.
After asking the children who they think the dolphin with wings is, and having obtained various responses, where the identification with Michele prevails, we suggest they draw Dreamball with the idea of building a kind of mobile sculpture to give to the parents of young Michele who is no longer with us. Gianni is the only one who draws two dolphins, one has wings and one not. Asked who the second dolphin is, he says, «the Mum» letting people think that it is Dreamball’s mother. In the tale, when the time comes for the little dolphin to spread his wings and fly, his mother encourages him with a large flick of her tail but does not follow him. Only Dreamball has wings, and not the other inhabitants of the sea.
Gianni’s dolphins are very accurately drawn, full of detail... and masterfully cut out. Gianni is therefore telling us something: that the story of Michele/Dreamball is really important to him, but that he cannot even imagine that such a long journey can be undertaken alone. He should have his mother by his side... While explaining Gianni’s communication to his teachers, we discover that his mother is, in fact, absent. Neither the teacher nor the head teacher have ever been able to contact her, not even once. This is Gianni’s great loss that is echoed in the death of Michele, and it is so difficult for him to process such loss, so much so that he chooses the path of denial. He cannot bear to think of his classmate alone. Nor can he think of the dolphin alone. Because he is projecting his own terrible loneliness onto Michele and the little dolphin.
The teachers discover a different side of him: Gianni is not an insensitive child at all.
Information of this kind does not emerge from simple listening, from the intellectual operation for which clinical records are the law and who knows how many other cases of troublemakers are projected on the history of the “troublemaker” of the day, forgetting for example, as is the case of Pietro, that not all those who are afraid of water have wanted to drown their little sister.
We cannot emphasize often enough: not only is each case different, but every moment of that case is a special moment, and the person is constantly changing, always different. «When you wash your hands in running water, you never wash the same hands in the same water», says a Himalayan proverb.
The state that allows us to be present and new moment by moment, free from projections, is the state of meditation. Since empathy is something that we all possess, of course we sometimes exercise it without even realizing it, but if we want to be sure to always find ourselves in the right state, or at least able to enter into it when we wish, training is necessary. Empathy, as we have seen, can be cultivated.
But let’s go back to the class we were discussing earlier.
After listening for a long time to the children talking about death (their grandparents, small pets and of course Michele), we suggest a meditation to them. The essential phowa (see p. 86) is usually performed for the dead (animals, grandparents or the classmate who is no more), but since we visualize them bathing and dwelling in the light, it is also indicated for loved ones or animals who are ill.
This traditional clarification responded, in this case, to a request from another child, whose sister had been struck down by an apparently incurable disease, which made the little boy feel terribly helpless. «I can’t do anything», he confided sadly to his teacher.
We preceded the phowa with shamatha and breathing, in particular slowing down as you exhale. Once they had visualized their loved one, the great exterior light and the small inner light in his heart, the children were invited to “erase” the contours of the person with an imaginary eraser, so that the outer and inner light could melt.
At the end of this meditation, the children commented on how difficult it was to erase the contours. And here there was a significant intervention by a teacher who has read “difficulty” as “fear”, and so asked them if they were afraid of doing the exercise. The answer was negative, it was only difficult. This is interesting, because the risk of projecting our way of seeing things onto others is always just around the corner, if we face the events in an ordinary state. In this case, the teacher was projecting her own fear: the fear of death.
Here is another case, where projection prevents the successful outcome of an intervention:
We are in a primary classroom to help the children to deal with the death of a classmate through the empathic method. During a relaxed break, we suddenly hear screaming in the hallway. I go out with one of our carers, who we are calling Edoardo, and we see a child – among one of those reported as having severe mental problems – rolling on the floor and screaming in the middle of the corridor, accompanied by the school counsellor whose job it is to deal with him when these crises occur. Edoardo and I start to practise meditation in silence, sitting down on the ground. I am closer to the little one, who is only a couple of meters away. The child, whom we will call Alfredo, looks at me out of the corner of his eye and seems reassured by the fact that I am beside him without trying in any way to control him. He throws his schoolbag at me by sliding it along the floor, without conviction, almost as if telling me to continue like that, not to try to “tackle him”, because if an adult tries to physically restrain his anger –which terrifies him to the point of even distorting his features – he will feel as if he is imploding, and there is nothing he fears more. This is the message that shows in little Alfredo’s every glance, gesture or growl, his face pale, his eyes dark-rimmed. This sign of lack of conviction, which appears soon after we entered the state of meditation near him, means that Alfredo has begun to calm down, but is not picked up by the school counsellor, whose face is as pale and exhausted as that of Alfredo.
I realize that he is about to “tackle him” physically, and ask him not to intervene. I would like to show him that there are other ways of coping with these crises. But the counsellor is gripped by the fear that the child might harm himself or others, and it is from this fear that he acts. He is projecting his understandable but clumsy feelings onto the situation, so his relationship with the event is definitely not “fresh”: it is a reaction, not an action, because it is conditioned by projections and fears. He uses his considerable bulk first to loom over the child on the floor, and then to contain him, like a straitjacket made of muscles. My attempts to intervene are of no use. Alfredo struggles, terrified by his own implosive anger, confined by the counsellor’s powerful arms. «Go away! Go away!» he shouts. In his voice there is an alarm signal. He is not just trying to avoid the implosion; he is also trying in his own way to protect us from the wrath that he feels inside. Even this cannot be grasped by the counsellor in his state of anxiety: in fact he picks Alfredo up bodily and carries him to the bathroom. After a few minutes the break is over and the counsellor returns to the class with me. He is replaced by the teacher in the corridor. Edoardo is still there, meditating. Alfredo emerges from the bathroom and curls up like a small animal in a corner, glowering out at the world.
Without leaving his state of meditation, Edoardo listens to the words of the teacher trying to distract Alfredo and finds a point of common interest with the boy. Later in his report he writes: «At that point I felt that a sort of contact had been established and I moved a few steps nearer and sat close enough to Alfredo to ask, «Can I stay here?» He gave a timid nod, and I sat closer. After a while I put my hand palm up on the ground next to his. There was no need for words, he immediately grabbed it and hugged me, resting his head on my chest. We stayed like that for a few minutes, then he made himself more comfortable, took my arm and wrapped it around himself as if it were a blanket».
While we continue working through the bereavement with the class, we see the teacher come in with Alfredo, who is holding Edoardo’s hand. The circle of children opens to let them join in, smiling in welcome and without hesitation.
The sufferer is usually frozen in the time and space in which the trauma occurred: there is no difference between past, present and future; there is no difference between here and there; everything is the same, flattened by suffering. Our task is to offer a renewed awareness of time and space, which will allow the sufferer to detach the present from the past and future; a different reading of the present that will exorcise the old past and imagine more possible futures.
David Rabiner58 reports that Russell Barkley, one of the world’s leading researchers and experts on ADHD, after arguing that there was no evidence that this syndrome conveys any advantages beyond what other people in the general population might have, stated that if an individual with ADHD shows particular talents, he would have been endowed with them anyway, even without ADHD. However, this was contradicted by a 2011 study by White and Shah, “Creative style and achievement in adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder”59 which opens an important window on “what the troublemaker will be like tomorrow” at college age. The study, conducted on 30 university students with ADHD and the same number without such a diagnosis as a control group, assessed their creativity by using three instruments:
The study showed that students with ADHD achieved much higher scores in the CAQ than the comparison students, in each of the 10 domains, including sciences, architecture and writing, and their showed preference for the “ideator” style, i.e., they preferred to generate multiple ideas, while other students preferred the “clarifier” and “developer” styles. In the ATTA the two groups had similar average scores, but an analysis of the various components of the test revealed higher scores by students with ADHD in tasks that measure verbal originality.
The authors of this study suggest that one reason for the greater creativity of people with ADHD lies in their lack of inhibitory control; deficits in inhibition make it harder to maintain focus on a single thought or idea and to screen out extraneous stimuli; this can result in having more random thoughts and ideas, and spending more time with multiple thoughts and ideas in one’s mind provides increased opportunity to draw interesting connections, which might contribute to unconventional thinking and enhance divergent thinking skills. In addition, creative activities may be more accessible to an individual with ADHD compared to other types of activity in which success depends, for example, on sticking to predetermined plans and/or working to find a single correct solution. Therefore, it may be that individuals with ADHD end up spending more time on activities that they find more congenial, becoming good at those.
This tells us that even when the troublemaker is little we can respect his “ideator” style by proposing learning activities and games that reward people who think differently. Of course, it is important to also gradually teach other ways of solving problems, because even if the grown-up troublemaker is more likely to be an entrepreneur than an administrator, entrepreneurs, no matter how creative, have to be able to put their plans into practice in a disciplined and consistent manner, if they want to succeed.
This study of young adults (and it would be interesting to repeat it with children and with a wider sample) should at least make us think. Rather than “stigmatize” our troublemaker as “disabled”, even if only in the sense of “lacking certain abilities”, it would be better to leave the door open to the possibility that they may have talents, and perhaps remind them of it every now and then to reinforce their self-esteem and at the same time support the development of their creative sides. It is important not to forget that communicating with someone who is suffering is a delicate matter, and it is even more so when the person is a child who, as we know, by the very fact of being a child takes everything literally.
Once again we find an interesting parallel in traditional Tibetan medicine, which is based on five Elements. We can define these “Elements” as subatomic realities, or “qualities” at the basis of every phenomenon, including the mind. They are manifested in three main types or psychophysical constitutions: Lung (Wind, or Air), Tripa (Bile, or Fire) and Beken (phlegm, or Earth + Water). Depending on which of them prevails dynamically, they eventually determine a unique combination for each individual, which determines in large part our personal inclinations, the ways in which we react, and so on: in short, our “character”. Creativity, mobility and activity are all features of the constitution Lung, Wind, but these characteristics can be enhanced by a series of concomitant causes and conditions ranging from diet to lifestyle and the quality of relationships. When the Wind becomes excessive, the person becomes hyperactive.
A child with ADHD is therefore not properly considered a psychiatric case, he only has “an excess of Wind”, which is manifested by various symptoms such as insomnia, difficulty concentrating, forgetfulness and hyperkinesia, that can be corrected by modifying eating habits (by decreasing foods that increase the Wind and increasing others with the opposite effect), behaviour (introducing psychophysical exercises such as yoga and meditation), and in general on causes of stress. In addition, there are traditional herbal remedies with the properties and qualities of those Elements opposed to Wind, i.e. heavy, stable and oily, to be administered in the hours of the day when the Wind element is most manifest (sunrise and sunset).
How much more heartening is this vision! We suggest adopting it in order to maintain a serene atmosphere that leaves the door open to change without drama, such as the change described below.
Above all, remember that there is nothing new under the sun: in jokes in all the world, and sometimes even in real life, the poor troublemaker is being scolded, and this is often accompanied by the gesture of pulling the ears. In Italian for instance, “pulling the ears” can have the meaning of scolding, and Pinocchio’s long donkey ears, which stand to represent his ignorance, are so long because they have been pulled so much. Interestingly enough, in the ancient science of yoga the mudra60 practice of pulling the ears is recommended every morning, simply to raise awareness. In reality, it is only this that the troublemaker is lacking, not wisdom!
As for the crises the “troublemaker” suffer, we’ll leave it to Einstein, who in our opinion gave the best definition possible, talking about the crisis of the world. He wrote about it in 1931, when the fallout from the great American economic crisis of 1929 hit Europe. Nazism was on the rise and Einstein, who was Jewish, would soon be forced to leave Germany:
«Let’s not pretend that things will change if we keep doing the same things. A crisis can be a real blessing to any person, to any nation. For all crises bring progress.Creativity is born from anguish. Just like the day is born form the dark night. It’s in crisis that inventiveness is born, as well as discoveries, and big strategies. He who overcomes crisis, overcomes himself, without getting overcome.
He who blames his failure to a crisis neglects his own talent, and is more respectful to problems than to solutions. Incompetence is the true crisis. The greatest inconvenience of people and nations is the laziness with which they attempt to find the solutions to their problems. There’s no challenge without a crisis. Without challenges, life becomes a routine, a slow agony. There’s no merits without crisis. It’s in the crisis where we can show the very best in us.
[...] Let us stop, once and for all, the menacing crisis that represents the tragedy of not being willing to overcome it».61
We would like to conclude this series of accounts about “troublemakers” by giving the floor to one of them, Kelly MacLean, a former child with ADHD treated with... daily doses of meditation, a blogger who tells her story:62
As a child, I considered having to sit still the highest form of torture. At times my dad would just scoop me up and lock his arms around me for 60 seconds. But like a wind-up toy held in the air, the second he put me down I would start going again at the very same speed.
One of the main memories from my childhood is people telling me I was obnoxious and feeling simultaneously insulted and proud. My parents referred to me as a “highly energetic” child, which is really a nice way of saying “textbook case of ADHD”. I remember the term “bouncing off the walls” being thrown around a lot, and I’m told that my tag line as a young child was “stop waffing at me” (no, I couldn’t say my Ls), which was counter-productive. I also remember having a frequently itchy head, but that is neither here nor there.
I remember one particular incident in my fifth year of life, where my mother, two sisters and I were all at the drive-up teller in the bank and I was bouncing around from back seat to front seat. [...] I joyfully leaped from lap to lap, trying to make everyone laugh.
By the time the teller finally forked over the cash (which felt like an eternity and a half to me, by the way). One of the hardest parts of being a “highly-energetic” child is having to wait for everything all the time. Every moment spent waiting feels as unbearable as watching the clock while a pregnancy test develops. Excruciating). I was bouncing around in the car when my mom opened the canister from the banker.
Now, it’s important at this point in the story to inform you that I had two very pretty and equally bouncy blond pigtails on the top of my head and that I was a petite, extremely cute little girl. Well the extremely cute part isn’t paramount, but it’s good for you to know that I had some redeeming qualities.
Anticipation overwhelmed me as the canister opened, for inside there surely lay tasty lollypops! Wrong. Inside were two lollypops and one dog bone. We did not have a dog. I was confused to say the least, but as the teller informed my mother, the dog bone was for, «your cute puppy jumping around the car!»
I still didn’t get it. Between uncontrollable sobs of laughter, my mother and sisters informed me that the banker thought I was a dog! Horror dawned. In that moment I decided that I needed to get a handle on my wildness so as to avoid becoming completely feral. What if people started making this mistake on a regular basis?! Was I doomed to become a dog-girl roaming from bank to bank in search of treats? Shortly after this incident I became a lifelong student of meditation.
I had already been sitting with my family for a couple of years at that point. However, as a 3- to 5-year-old I did little more than fidget profusely, giggle and generally disrupt the peaceful environment. After the dog bone incident, I started to take more interest in this practice, which had previously been labelled “boring in the extreme” and tossed into the same mental bin as waiting at the doctor’s office and Time Out.
But meditation began to fascinate me. How could my family members sit completely still and look as if they were enjoying themselves? The more I observed, the more I noticed that their behaviour changed markedly when they meditated. Everyone just got along better and fewer stupid fights broke out.
Before family meditation commenced, my dad would make me run around the house 10 to 20 times before sitting. Having burnt out some of the electricity in my body, with a good runner’s high going, I could sit relatively still for a few minutes and feel my breath, the cushion, and cheesy as it sounds, I could feel my heart. The best of my heart just sitting there. That was the most wonderful part of meditation, when you felt one with your own heart.
As a child, it didn’t take hours of meditation to get to that place, it took mere moments of stillness, of allowing myself to just be. I grew to really love meditation – like a secret garden within myself, I retired there when feeling anxious, sad, overwhelmed or even joyful. I came to crave this place of quiet, this welcome break from the fast-paced excitement that I ensured was every moment of my life.
As a teen and young adult, I learned to bring the two sides of myself together, peaceful and excited, still and wild. Instead of trying to block, put a lid on or drug this wild energy, as our society often instructs us to do, I found a way to channel it into its highest form – theater improv, sketch and stand up comedy. Which is what I now do full time.
I have accepted that everyone is always going to be “waffing” at me, and now I’m making a profit off of it!
To be completely honest, I still find meditation difficult at times. And my attention is still easily stolen away by – hey, look! A penny. I still enjoy the process of irritating people, and I still have an itchy head. Meditation hasn’t helped that at all. But now I have the tools to slow down the river of my thoughts and relax whenever I need to, to sit still for weeks at a time on meditation retreats (okay, I fidget more than most, just ask the guy on the cushion behind me). But for me, this is probably as still as it’s ever going to get, and it is enough.
I am so very grateful that my parents didn’t put me on Ritalin® or Adderall® but instead knew that between exercise, meditation, creativity and love, this energy could be transformed into joy. They trusted that what I needed to become a sane, healthy, happy adult, I’d had all along – a peaceful place inside.
53 There are many linguistic registers: for example, people with a high frequency of “I must” in their verbal expressions communicate a restrictive vision of life, a neurolinguistic programming that they had received at an early stage of life, which has to be deprogrammed.
54 Brain / Mind Bulletin, Los Angeles, personal communication by Bruce H. Lipton, Ph.D., quoted in Robert M. Williams, The Missing Peace in Your Life, Myrddin Publication, London 2004.
55 Annie Marquier is an expert in holistic and transpersonal psychology. She is head of Canada’s Institute for Personal Development, which she founded in 1982.
56 Annie Marquier, The Heart Revolution, Éditions Valinor, Québec 2011. Quote retranslated from the original French edition.
57 J. H. Schultz, Das Autogene Training (konzentrative Selbstentspannung). Versuch einer klinisch-praktischen Darstellung. Thieme, Leipzig 1932.
58 David Rabiner is Associate Professor of Research at Duke University; he discusses the subject in <http://www.helpforadd.com/2012/may>.
59 White, H. A., and Shah, P. (2011), Creative style and achievement in adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Personality and Individual Differences (50)5: 673-677.
60 A Sanskrit word relating to coded and symbolic positions of the body and most often of the hands, deriving from the ancient Vedic culture of India. Often related to obtaining results such as increased mental stability and so on.
61 Albert Einstein, The World As I See It, Covici, Friede, New York 1934.
62 <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kerry-and-kelly-maclean/meditation children_b_2992359.html>.