When there is early trauma, the ensuing biological dysregulation forms the shaky foundation upon which the psychological self is built.
When individuals have had to cope with early threat and the resulting high arousal of unresolved anger and incomplete fight-flight responses, adaptive survival mechanisms develop on every level of experience: behavioral, emotional, relational, physical, and physiological. The seemingly diverse issues presented in Table 8.1 reflect some of the many symptoms that an individual with the Connection Survival Style may develop. These varied symptoms reflect the systemic dysregulation and developmental posttraumatic stress that affect people who experience early trauma. As we will see, this systemic dysregulation disrupts the capacity for connection and social engagement and is the thread that links the many physical, emotional, behavioral, and cognitive symptoms of individuals who have experienced early developmental/relational trauma.
Early trauma and its associated physiological dysregulation are often at the root of psychological difficulties such as low self-esteem, chronic anxiety, and depression. The conscious and unconscious shame-based identifications that result from early trauma center around feelings of not belonging, of feeling unwelcomed, rejected, unlovable, bad, wrong, and even sometimes alien or not quite human. Individuals with the Connection Survival Style experience themselves as outsiders, disconnected from themselves and other human beings. Not able to see that the traumatic experiences that shaped their identity are due to environmental failures that were beyond their control, individuals with this adaptive survival style view themselves as the source of the pain they feel.
Individuals with early trauma experience symptoms on a continuum of less to greater dysfunction depending on the degree of trauma and the coping survival strategies they have developed. Since early trauma is more widespread than commonly recognized, most adults are affected by some elements of the Connection Survival Style. Those on the more symptomatic end of the continuum have experienced years of emotional struggle as well as many challenging physiological problems. Their efforts to understand and come to terms with their deep-seated physiological and emotional distress often leave them filled with shame and self-hatred. Individuals with less obvious features of this survival style may not consciously realize that they experience a diminished capacity for joy, expansion, and intimate relationship. If they are aware of their difficulties, they usually do not understand their source. Managing the physiological and psychological fallout of early trauma can require so much energy that there is often not enough left over to enjoy life. Early trauma is difficult and confusing not only for those who have experienced it but also for those who treat it.
In NARM, Connection is the name given to the first stage of human development and the first organizing life principle. The degree to which we feel received, loved, and welcomed into the world makes up the cornerstone of our identity. When our capacity for connection is in place, we experience a right to be that becomes the foundation upon which our healthy self and our vital relationship to life is built. The Connection Survival Style develops as a way of coping with early shock, developmental and/or attachment trauma, and as a result of feeling unloved, unprotected, and unsupported in the first stage of life. In reaction to trauma, infants experience their environment as threatening and dangerous; their reaction is to cling to others or to withdraw into themselves. Their capacity to enjoy life is compromised from the very beginning, and as a result, they do not develop a full sense of self. Early trauma compromises their sense of safety, their right to exist and be in the world, and their capacity for connection. Therefore, they do not learn what it feels like to have a sense of self, to be connected to their body, and they are left frightened of intimate connection.
| Do you prefer to recharge your batteries by being alone rather than with other people? | Yes | No |
| Did you need glasses at an early age? | Yes | No |
| Do you suffer from environmental sensitivities or multiple allergies? | Yes | No |
| Do you have migraines, chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, or fibromyalgia? | Yes | No |
| Did you experience prenatal trauma such as intrauterine surgeries, prematurity with incubation, or traumatic events during gestation? | Yes | No |
| Were there complications at your birth? | Yes | No |
| Have you had problems maintaining relationships? | Yes | No |
| Were you adopted? | Yes | No |
| Do you have difficulty knowing what you are feeling? | Yes | No |
| Would others describe you as more intellectual than emotional? | Yes | No |
| Do you have disdain for people who are emotional? | Yes | No |
| Are you particularly sensitive to cold? | Yes | No |
| Do you often have the feeling that life is overwhelming and you don’t have the energy to deal with it? | Yes | No |
| Do you prefer working in situations that require theoretical or mechanical skills rather than people skills? | Yes | No |
| Are you troubled by the persistent feeling that you don’t belong? | Yes | No |
| Are you always looking for the why of things? | Yes | No |
| Are you uncomfortable in groups or social situations? | Yes | No |
| Does the world seem like a dangerous place to you? | Yes | No |
TABLE 8.1: Recognizing the Symptoms of Early Trauma
The identity of adults with early trauma is shaped by the distress and dysregulation they experienced in early life. Our earliest trauma and attachment experiences form a template for lifelong psychological, physiological, and relational patterns. Difficulties in the initial Connection stage of development undermine healthy psychological progression through all later stages of development, impacting self-image, self-esteem, and the capacity for healthy relationships. Trauma in the Connection stage becomes the basis for diverse cognitive, emotional, and physiological problems. Table 8.2 lists common sources of the two principle kinds of early trauma: developmental/relational and shock trauma.
During this first stage of life, the fetus and infant are completely dependent on caregivers and on a benevolent environment. As a result of this complete vulnerability, an infant’s reaction to early developmental or shock trauma is one of overwhelmingly high arousal and terror. The vulnerable infant, who can neither fight nor flee, cannot discharge the high arousal and responds to threat with physiological constriction, contraction, core withdrawal, and immobility/freeze. Anyone who has pricked an amoeba and seen it contract and close in on itself has witnessed this process of contraction and withdrawal. As with all living organisms, constriction, contraction, withdrawal, and freeze are the primitive defense mechanisms infants utilize to manage the high arousal of terrifying early trauma. In the infant, this combination of high arousal, contraction, and freeze creates systemic dysregulation that affects all of the body’s biological systems. The underlying biological dysregulation of early trauma is the shaky foundation upon which the psychological self is built.
Both early attachment failures and shock trauma before an infant is six months old can have a lifelong impact on an individual’s health and capacity for relationship. Neuroscience confirms that early trauma is particularly damaging. Since the hippocampus is responsible for discrete memory, when trauma occurs early in the development of the neocortex and before the hippocampus comes online, many individuals show symptoms of developmental posttraumatic stress yet have no conscious memories of traumatic events. Early trauma is held implicitly in the body and brain, resulting in a systemic dysregulation that is confusing for people who exhibit symptoms of traumas they cannot remember. It is equally confusing for the clinicians who want to help them.
Early Events That May Cause
Long-Term Traumatic Reactions
From Conception to 6 Months after Birth (partial list)
Attachment and Developmental Trauma
• Being carried in the womb of a mother who does not want you
• Being carried in the womb of a traumatized, dissociated, depressed, or anxious mother
• Serious consideration of abortion
• Mother abusing alcohol or drugs during the pregnancy
• Feeling rejected, blamed, or even hated by one or both parents
• One or both parents struggling with Connection issues themselves
• Attachment attempts with a dissociated, chronically depressed, anxious, or angry mother
• A psychotic or borderline mother
• Being made to feel like a burden
• Physical or emotional abuse
• Neglect
• Adoption
Shock Trauma
• Attempted abortion
• Mother’s death in childbirth
• Premature birth
• Long, painful delivery
• Extended incubation with insufficient physical contact
• Early surgeries
• Significant traumatic events for the mother or other members of the family
• Death in the family
• Traumatic loss and bereavement
• Being born into wartime, depression, significant poverty
• Intergenerational trauma such as being born to Holocaust survivors
• Natural disasters
TABLE 8.2: Early Sources of Trauma
The internal experience of adults traumatized in the Connection stage is one of constant underlying dread and terror. Whether conscious or unconscious, dread and terror are always in the background of their experience. In the adult with the Connection Survival Style, the nervous system has remained in a continual sympathetically dominant global high arousal. It is this global high arousal that drives and reinforces their profound and persistent feeling of threat. The sense of threat, together with the feeling of danger and lack of safety that accompany it, trigger hypervigilance (an incomplete defensive-orienting response): ongoing feelings of high arousal, lack of safety, continuous sense of danger, and hypervigilance function together in an interconnected closed system, one reinforcing the other. Although not as obvious, individuals who have collapsed into freeze and dissociation have the same underlying levels of high arousal.
The lifelong impact of early trauma is generally underestimated by medical and psychological professionals. It was not long ago that physicians believed that infants, because they have no explicit memory until about eighteen months of age, would not remember any early trauma that happened to them. From today’s perspective, it seems bizarre that it was only in 1988 that the American Medical Association first officially recognized that infants feel pain. As a result of the belief that infants do not remember trauma and do not experience pain, surgeries performed on neonates often involved curariform paralysis using a medication that kept these young patients from moving but did not deaden their pain. Children exposed to this kind of experience felt pain and panic while frozen and helpless. Although this kind of surgical trauma is extreme and no longer happens, it is important that parents and medical professionals not underestimate the effects of early surgeries and other traumas on a young child’s nervous system and identity.
It is useful to distinguish four phases during which traumatic experiences form the Connection Survival Style: (1) prenatal trauma and prenatal attachment; (2) birth trauma; (3) perinatal trauma; and (4) attachment and relational trauma, which include neglect, abuse, and ongoing threat. Each phase flows into and influences the next. Early trauma impacts the body, nervous system, and developing psyche, and its effects are cumulative. Trauma experienced in an early phase of development makes a child more vulnerable to trauma in later phases of development. For example, prenatal trauma can make birth more difficult, and a traumatic birth can affect the subsequent process of attachment.
The topics of prenatal and perinatal trauma, neglect, abuse, and adoption would require books of their own to do them justice. This chapter can only highlight some of the significant elements in each of these areas and describe how they are relevant to the development of the Connection Survival Style.
Symptoms that are present in varying degrees when there is trauma in the first four phases of development are:
• A sense of constant threat
• High arousal
• A thwarted fight response
• Freeze-dissociation
• Numbing, splitting, fragmentation
• Acting in and acting out of aggression
• Diminished aliveness
It is important to understand that these symptoms may occur simultaneously, loop back upon themselves, and continuously reinforce one another.
The prenatal period is one of the least understood yet most significant phases of human development. Within a period of nine months, growth proceeds from a single cell to a fully formed infant. Until recently, the gestation process was viewed as primarily genetically determined, and prenatal development was considered to be relatively immune to external influences. As technology has advanced, a more sophisticated examination of the gestation process has become possible. It is now apparent that birth is not the beginning of a baby’s awareness, and that events in utero, both physiological and psychological, influence future development. It is now known that environmental influences, including the mother’s capacity to attach to her unborn baby, affect the developing fetus.
Attachment Theory has focused on the relationship of the mother and infant after birth. Prenatal and perinatal specialists have been working to extend this focus to include the importance of the attachment process and other environmental influences before birth. Women have intuitively known for thousands of years that experiences during pregnancy impact their developing fetus. It is only recently that scientific evidence supports what women have always known.
Factors in prenatal trauma include:
• The mother’s emotional and physiological health
• The mother’s relationship to her own pregnant body and to her developing baby
• The relationship of the father to the pregnancy
• The atmosphere in the family
• The relationship between the mother and father
• The wild card of fate, such as being born in wartime
When persistent biological distress is part of fetal development, the distress is held in implicit memory at the core of that individual’s experience. Prenatal psychobiological distress often underlies persistent anxiety and depressive states that have no other obvious etiology and are an important characteristic of the developmental posttraumatic stress disorder that affects individuals with the Connection Survival Style.
The womb is the universe for the fetus, the first experience of existence. Initially, it was thought that the womb formed a barrier that kept the fetus safe from influences that could harm its development. However, the thalidomide tragedy of the 1950s proved this to be false. Thalidomide was a tranquilizer/sedative thought to be safe for pregnant mothers. Its toxic effect was dramatic: it resulted in the birth of children with severe limb abnormalities. The thalidomide tragedy forced the realization that the fetus could be severely physically traumatized in utero and its development permanently affected by external influences.
In 2005, The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism published a seminal study by Yehuda et al. documenting the transmission of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) directly to the fetuses of pregnant women exposed to the World Trade Center attack. Women who were diagnosed with PTSD, as identified by specific biological markers, gave birth to infants who showed the same biological markers. This study clearly documents that a mother’s psychological and physiological experiences influence the fetus in the womb and impact its development. The empirical data of Yehuda et al. support the reality of prenatal trauma and have developmental implications that can be expanded beyond obvious shock trauma events such as 9/11. If a mother is chronically depressed, angry, anxious, dissociated, or exposed to continuous stressors during pregnancy, the experience has an effect on the baby. Additionally, physiological stressors, such as drugs, alcohol, and even dietary deficiencies, create distress in the mother’s system. The fetus reacts to the mother’s states of distress with its own distress. The only way the fetus can cope when mother experiences chronic distress states is by going into contraction, withdrawal, and freeze. Instead of an expansive nurturing environment, the womb becomes a toxic, threatening place in which the fetus is trapped. Biological distress lies at the foundation of psychological distress. Early chronic physiological distress undermines subsequent psychological development, creating psychological symptoms that may not become apparent until later in life.
Having experienced prenatal trauma, the nervous system of an individual with the Connection Survival Style develops around a core contraction/withdrawal and freeze/paralysis response. The fetus, as is seen clearly in videos taken in utero, goes into physiological contraction and withdrawal when it experiences stress or threat. The contraction/withdrawal reflex and the related fear/paralysis reflex are part of nature’s wisdom and a defensive capacity shared by animals and human alike. Even one-celled amoebas visibly contract and withdraw into themselves when pricked by a pin. The intensity and duration of withdrawal increase with repetition and the chronicity of threat. This point is relevant to the experience of the fetus when it endures chronic and repeated stressors. Because the fetus goes into a parasympathetically dominant freeze state before the nervous system is fully formed, physiological resiliency is impaired and subsequent psychological resiliency does not develop adequately.
The disturbance at this stage is global and is referred to in Somatic Experiencing® (SE) as global high intensity activation (GHIA). GHIA is understood in SE to refer not only to activation in the autonomic nervous system but also in the central nervous system. In NARM, we use this term to include all the major systems of the body. GHIA affects every system and every cell within these systems: skin and connective tissues, brain chemistry, organ systems, nervous and endocrine systems, and the immune system.
Birth trauma has been widely researched and written about. The emphasis in this book is not to elaborate on what has already been written, but to point out that unresolved birth trauma and the resulting coping mechanisms leads to the development of the Connection Survival Style. As with prenatal trauma, traumatic birth experiences, such as being born with the umbilical cord wrapped around the neck, lengthy painful delivery, Cesarean birth, forceps delivery, and breach birth, can trigger profound threat reactions of high arousal, contraction/withdrawal, and fear/paralysis responses in the newborn, all precursors of the Connection Survival Style.
Even with loving parents who are fully capable of strong attachment, trauma can find its way into an infant’s life. Historically, incubation for premature infants was itself the source of profound trauma. Tragically, until relatively recently, it was not known that premature infants needed significant, caring physical touch and that touch has a powerful organizing impact on the nascent organism. As a result, in the past, babies were left in their incubator without adequate nurturing touch. Although loving parents can mitigate such a traumatic beginning, the effects of inadequate contact can remain in the physiology and psychology of the developing child and later, in the adult.
Margaret Mahler, MD, used the expression dual unity to describe the early period of development in which mother and child are merged in such a way that they function as one. Following Mahler’s thinking, and consistent with Yehuda et al.’s research, NARM holds that in the merged state between mother and baby, there is an energetic exchange wherein even subclinical states of chronic depression, anxiety, and dissociation in the mother leave physiological traces in the baby’s core experience. NARM uses the term traumatic symbiosis to describe this process, which impacts the physiology and in turn the psychology of the developing baby. The understanding of traumatic symbiosis informs later clinical interventions. Much of the distress that adults with the Connection Survival Style describe is really only partly their own distress and often is the result of maternal distress and other environmental failures.
Attachment Theory, beginning with John Bowlby and continuing to the present day, focuses on the importance of successful early attachment for the development of the capacity for healthy relationships. The focus in this chapter is to elaborate on how inadequate attachment, particularly during the first six months of life, is experienced as traumatizing. We include coping with attachment trauma as one of the primary precipitating factors in the development of the Connection Survival Style. As Daniel Siegel, MD, and Mary Hartzell communicate in their book Parenting from the Inside Out:
For those whose histories included a sense of emotional unavailability and a lack of attuned, nurturing parenting, there may have been an adaptation that minimizes the importance of interpersonal relationships and the communication of emotion.… As this adaptive response continues, children may have a decreased connection not only to their parents but to other people as well.… In addition there may be a decreased access to and awareness of their own emotions. (pp. 134–135)
Although there is valuable confirmation and support from the neurosciences on the impact of inadequate attachment and attachment failure on the brain, there has been a significant disconnect between neuroscientifically based Attachment Theory and somatically oriented psychotherapies. Since re-regulation is best supported by referencing the body, and since the importance of the body is often not understood in traditional therapies, this lack of somatic understanding limits the effectiveness of many current clinical interventions. NARM attempts to bridge this gap by grounding Attachment Theory in bodily experience and working with the mindful awareness of adaptive survival styles.
Infants need loving parents in order to learn to regulate the various forms of arousal their vulnerable nervous system experiences. A mother must be able to respond to and match her infant’s positive emotions and join in the joy and excitement of their shared play. It is through these attuned interactions that children develop secure attachments and acquire the resources and autonomic resiliency that lead to a capacity to live life fully. Resources and autonomic resiliency will help individuals effectively cope with the later challenges and traumas that life brings. It is through loving contact that infants learn to modulate their levels of arousal and through which the capacity for social engagement develops. Ideally, the infant learns autonomic self-regulation from attuned mothers and caregivers who provide a framework for successful attachment. Unsuccessful attachment, neglect, and the absence of loving connection are traumatic and leave a legacy of impaired capacity for self-regulation that can last a lifetime.
In the earliest stages of development, there is a continuous interplay between shock trauma and developmental trauma. Shock traumas, including early surgery, an infant’s or mother’s illness, death in the family, and global events such as being born into wartime, have a disruptive effect on the attachment process. In these situations infants are affected not only by the shock itself, but also by how the shock negatively impacts the attachment process.
An example of the interplay between shock and developmental trauma can be seen in infants who have experienced prenatal trauma. At birth the already-traumatized infant is in a disorganized and dysregulated state. Studies show that it is more difficult for a mother to bond with a distressed baby. A traumatized infant presents the mother with significant regulation and attachment challenges that do not exist in a non-traumatized newborn.
Some infants are born to parents who do not have the maturity or capacity to properly care for them. Other infants and children are blamed and made responsible for their parents’ frustrations, pain, and unresolved psychological issues.
When parents are emotionally inaccessible, neglectful, or abusive, infants respond to the ongoing negative relationship with a sense of threat and high arousal. Infants with neglectful and abusive parents live in ongoing dysregulated states that severely tax their developing nervous system. Early relational trauma has a serious impact on the infant’s capacity for connection. In infants, states of threat and distress are expressed through crying and screaming, reflecting sympathetic hyper-arousal that is accompanied by elevated levels of stress hormones. Not only is the attachment process severely disrupted, but the developing brain is affected at a critical formative period. The effects of early relational trauma leave infants without resources for self-regulation and at the mercy of distressed and disorganized states that are the precursors of the Connection Survival Style.
Unfortunately, some infants are born to parents who do not want them and openly reject them. They are seen as an imposition; their very existence is rejected. When infants experience such profound rejection, they internally withdraw, collapse, and fail to develop the necessary neural pathways for connection. Babies manage such rejection by limiting or shutting down their aliveness and by dissociating. The impact of growing up in a family where they feel hated creates an impossible challenge, and they react to the ongoing threat by disconnecting both from the environment and from their internal experience, engaging the primary adaptive mechanisms of the Connection Survival Style.
Children who grow up in an atmosphere where there is continuous threat of physical and/or emotional abuse, or those who are on the receiving end of real hatred, cannot flee and cannot fight back. When the caregivers who are supposed to love and protect them are the source of threat, an impossible dynamic is created. The child’s only option is to freeze and dissociate, a pattern that develops into the Connection Survival Style and continues into adulthood.
Children who are hated learn to hate themselves. Children on the receiving end of rage and abuse have the dual challenge of needing to endure both the terror of abuse and the impossible dilemma of managing their own rage toward the parents they also love. The normal biological response to abuse and threat is deep rage and a powerful fight response. When the object of that rage is the beloved parent upon whom the child is completely dependent, children’s fear of their own rage adds to the sense of threat. In order to protect themselves and the attachment relationship children split off their rage and hatred. It is life saving to use splitting as a survival mechanism, but this adaptation comes at a great price. The child’s need to protect the image of the parent by becoming the “bad object” can leave a lifelong legacy of shame.
Splitting off rage is a powerful energetic process resulting in diminished access to strength, self-assertion, self-expression, and the life force itself (see Figure I.2). Usually, the split-off rage is turned against the self, creating a wide range of symptoms. When abuse is persistent and ongoing, the splitting and disconnection trigger the adaptations of the Connection Survival Style.
Neglect is often a more challenging traumatic experience than is overt abuse. Neglect is the absence of necessary elements for life rather than the presence of definable threat. Insufficient holding, attunement, nourishment, attachment, and touch are experienced as a profound but undefinable threat.
When there is early neglect, it is held in implicit memory in the brain and body and becomes one of the core psychological features of individuals with this early survival style. At first, when needs are not met, infants will protest, but when neglect of basic needs is chronic, infants resign themselves and physiologically shut down. Traditionally, the term failure to thrive is used to describe infants who perish from neglect, such as the infants left untouched in Romanian orphanages. Individuals who experience neglect and survive do so by disconnecting from their bodies, going into freeze and dissociation.
It is not unusual for individuals who were adopted to develop the Connection Survival Style as a way of adapting to early trauma and loss. Adoption presents the infant with particular challenges; it is not just the trauma of separation after birth that affects the infant. The trauma of adoption can begin prenatally when the mother does not emotionally attach to her developing fetus. The need of adopted adults to seek out their biological parents can be explained at least in part as a way of trying to come to terms with early attachment trauma and the associated feelings of disconnection. Being placed in a foster home for a significant length of time before being adopted or repeatedly being passed on to different foster homes can be the source of significant attachment trauma. Adoptive mothers may feel rejected by their traumatized infants’ inability to attach, which in turn may cause them to withdraw from their infant in subtle or overt ways. Early placement into a loving family can mitigate previous attachment trauma. Nonetheless, clinicians who work with adults who were adopted as infants will recognize the dysfunctional relational patterns that sometimes remain in place for adoptees even when their adoptive families were quite loving and capable of healthy attachment.
When early life experience has been traumatic, the trauma lives on in the form of ongoing high-arousal states in the nervous system. Unresolved high arousal becomes the source of a relentless, nameless dread, a continuous sense of impending doom that never gets resolved. Since early trauma is fairly commonplace, most adults experience some elements of the Connection Survival Style. The following descriptions focus on the more severe end of the continuum but nonetheless are relevant to most of us.
Adults who develop the Connection Survival Style are engaged in a lifelong struggle, conscious or unconscious, to manage their high levels of arousal. They struggle with dissociative responses that disconnect them from their body, with the vulnerability of energetic boundary rupture, and with the psychological and physiological dysregulation that accompany such struggles. As a result of having gone into freeze at an early age, the infant, child, and later the adult is left with a narrowed range of resiliency and a compromised capacity for self-regulation. Individuals feel awkward within themselves and shy away from social contact: they narrow their lives in order to avoid stress and manage their anxiety.
Physically, adults with the Connection Survival Style present with diminished aliveness, sometimes with a lifeless, absent look and at other times with a chronically fearful look. Overall, individuals with the Connection Survival Style have a frozen, under-energized appearance—pallid complexion and a lack of vibrancy, passion, and fire. Underneath this shut-down exterior is an extremely sensitive, often hypersensitive being. Their bodies are braced, contracted, and tight. The psychological fragmentation they experience can be observed in their body as an overall underdevelopment and lack of symmetry.
Individuals with the Connection Survival Style often feel relief at understanding that their difficult symptoms have a common thread, what we call an organizing principle. Their struggle with high levels of anxiety, psychological and physiological problems, chronic low self-esteem, shame, and dissociation with its related difficulties all constellate around the organizing principle of connection—the simultaneous experience of both the desire for connection and the fear of connection.
On the more extreme end of the spectrum are individuals who have no conscious desire for connection. Connection is experienced as threatening, and connection with emotions and the bodily self is experienced as painful and uncomfortable. Nonetheless, no matter how deeply out of consciousness the desire for connection is buried, it is always there. Since the need for connection is at the core of our human existence, individuals who are no longer in touch with this need—and even seemingly experience the opposite need to disconnect—have had to shut down the most basic element of their humanity. As a result, the more disconnected individuals are from their desire for connection, the more psychologically and physiologically symptomatic they tend to be. Low self-esteem and poor self-image; pathological shame and guilt; phobias; anxieties, including a generalized fear that something bad is going to happen; and many other symptoms are commonly experienced by individuals struggling with the Connection Survival Style. It is essential to understand the organizing life principle of connection to work effectively with these seemingly diverse symptoms.
Early trauma creates profound distress and disorganization in the nervous system on all levels of bodily function and ultimately leads to distortions of identity. The relentless overall feeling that something bad is going to happen reflects the reality that something bad has already happened and is being carried forward unconsciously.
Individuals with the Connection Survival Style create specific content to name the feeling that something bad is going to happen, a state of hypervigilance characterized in NARM as nameless dread. A named and identified threat is better than nameless dread. Naming and creating a narrative for the nameless dread is the Connection individual’s attempt to explain the internalized arousal resulting from early trauma. These attempts can be seen in such symptoms as chronic shame, diverse phobias, and pathological fear of death, to name but a few.
The diverse fears, elaborate rituals, and obsessive thinking that characterize obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) can be understood through the prism of this mechanism as an attempt to name and manage nameless dread. There is relief in seemingly identifying the source of a nameless dread. People with OCD, not being consciously aware of the profound high arousal in their nervous system, find a certain comfort in identifying a threat: “If I shake hands, I’ll get germs and get sick”; on hearing a loud thump while driving—“Did I just hit somebody?”; having checked several times, they perseverate—“Maybe I did not lock the door” or “Maybe I left the stove on.” Attempting to identify their sense of threat and developing elaborate rituals to manage the threat, as painful as it may be, feel preferable to the nameless dread. Therapies that work only with the behaviors and irrational thinking but do not address the underlying high activation miss the most important element of this trauma reaction.
The defensive-orienting response (see this page) is a specific sequence of biological reactions characterizing how human beings respond to threat. A basic element of the defensive-orienting response is its alerting function: the body is hardwired to search for any source of threat. This is a natural survival mechanism. Individuals with early trauma are locked in an uncompleted defensive-orienting response. Having an ongoing sense that something is wrong, they look for the source of the threat they feel. Not realizing that the danger they once experienced in their environment is now being carried forward as high arousal in their nervous system, traumatized individuals have the tendency to project onto the current environment what has become an ongoing internal state. These individuals try to locate the danger, but because the danger is now internally generated and no longer coming from the environment, a pernicious cycle develops. The mind attempts to make sense of this internal biological dysregulation by finding an external cause for the continuous state of inner arousal. It brings short-term comfort to name a fear even if it is inaccurate, but it creates even more long-term distress.
Many individuals with the Connection Survival Style, not knowing the actual source of their distress, create explanations that are designed to help them make sense of their symptoms. Once the nameless dread has been named, it becomes what in NARM is called the designated issue. The designated issue can be fear of death, a phobia, real or perceived physical deficiencies such as being overweight or other perceived “defects,” as well as real or perceived psychological or cognitive deficiencies such as dyslexia or not feeling smart enough. The pitfall is that because of chronic dysregulation, many individuals do develop real physical problems that then become the focus of their lives. Designated issues, whether or not they have a basis in physical reality, come to dominate a person’s life, covering the deeper distress and masking the underlying core disconnection.
Unfortunately, creating a designated issue ultimately causes more distress. Designated issues may take many forms and occupy a person’s attention, becoming the focus for his or her lifelong struggle. The designated issue functions protectively, giving a frame of reference for the underlying feeling of distress. Individuals with the Connection Survival Style believe that if only their “problem” could be solved, then they would be happy. The content of the designated issues must be heard and addressed, but ultimately, designated issues are of secondary importance to the primary theme of disconnection and dysregulation.
Paradoxically, solving the “problem” of the designated issue represents a greater threat than not solving it. For example, those clients who designate being overweight as their life issue find that when they successfully lose the weight, they cannot tolerate the vulnerability and emotionality of being thinner. Focusing on the designated issue diverts attention from the underlying unrecognized high arousal, dysregulation, and disconnection that drive the nameless dread. When this underlying high arousal has not been addressed, individuals feel the nameless dread more intensely when they no longer have the designated issue as a frame of reference.
Self-image and self-esteem problems often begin in the difficulties of this first developmental phase. The original holding environment, which includes caregiver relationships, becomes a significant part of the template of who we come to believe ourselves to be. An infant feels no separation between self and environment; both the successes and the failures of the early holding environment are internalized and form the core of our self-image and self-esteem. As such, early trauma and attachment difficulties have a negative impact on our sense of self.
Individuals with the Connection Survival Style, more than any other survival style, have experienced profound early environmental failure. The experience of a deficient early holding environment is often at the root of the adult’s low self-esteem. Lifelong feelings of shame and deficiency are typically found to accompany the distress states caused by early trauma. Infants cannot experience themselves as being “a good person in a bad situation.” Failure of the holding environment is experienced as failure of the self. Infants who experience early trauma of any kind experience the early environmental failure as if there were something wrong with them. Later cognitions such as “There is something basically wrong with me” or “I am bad” are built upon the early somatic sensation “I feel bad.”
The precursors of chronic shame, low self-esteem, and other distortions of the self often begin in the Connection phase. The internalized environmental failure, held as distress in implicit memory, creates the strong distortions of the sense of self and leads individuals to feel chronically unloved, unlovable, and without value. Simply understanding that their shame reflects the environmental failure they experienced rather than who they are has helped many people who suffer from lifelong patterns of low self-esteem, shame, and a sense of worthlessness to see themselves in a new, more compassionate way.
A common refrain from individuals with the Connection Survival Style is “Life has no meaning” or “What’s the point?” or “We’ll all be dead eventually anyway—what does it matter?” Searching for meaning, for the why of existence, is one of the primary coping mechanisms that both the thinking and spiritualizing subtypes of the Connection Survival Style use to manage their sense of disconnection and the despair that disconnection brings. When a baby’s introduction to the world has been unwelcoming, painful, and traumatic, the world is experienced as cold and unloving. Seeing the world in this way, thinking subtypes try to ignore it by living in the realm of ideas and searching for meaning through the intellect. Spiritualizing subtypes believe that even though the world is a cold, unloving place, at least God (or the Buddha or a higher power) loves them, and they search for meaning through some form of transcendent connection.
Because of their early trauma, both thinking and spiritualizing subtypes disconnect from and bypass bodily experience and close personal relationships. Bypassing the body is a defensive process that cannot be sustained long term because the dysregulation of the body eventually leads to symptoms that cannot be ignored. The coping mechanisms of intellectualizing and spiritualizing ultimately create more disconnection. NARM holds that the key to meaning in life and connection to the spiritual can most effectively be found when our biology is regulated and our capacity for connection is developed. It is through connection that coherency of mind, body, and spirit, expansion, engaged relationship, and aliveness are possible.
When trauma is early or severe, some individuals completely disconnect by numbing all sensation and emotion. Disconnection from the bodily self, emotions, and other people is traditionally called dissociation. By dissociating—that is, by keeping threat from overwhelming consciousness—a traumatized individual can continue to function. Adults with early trauma have turned away from their body and retreated into the mind or live primarily in energetic or spiritual realms. When individuals are dissociated, they have little or no awareness that they are dissociated: they become aware of their dissociation only as they come out of it.
Dissociation is often misunderstood and pathologized. Dissociation is a human response. In reaction to trauma, the dissociative process is a life-saving mechanism that helps human beings bear experiences that would otherwise be unbearable. If human beings did not have the capacity to dissociate, many individuals would not have survived the hardships of their lives. Given the history of human suffering, it is doubtful that our species would have made it this far without the capacity to dissociate.
Dissociation is an everyday life process and affects everyone; it is part of the continuum of existence and as such is a universal human issue, not simply a pathology. We are all disconnected and dissociated to one degree or another. For example, arriving at a destination without any memory of having driven there is an everyday experience of dissociation. Though not necessarily pathological, this experience helps us see how we can be dissociated and still function.
It is a paradigm shift to think of dissociation as a bodily process; in NARM dissociation is seen as more physiological than psychological. The process of living fully in the body is functionally the same as being fully present in the moment. The body lives only in the present moment. In the mind, we can remember the past or think about the future, but we can be in the present moment only by being fully connected to the body. The more disconnected we are from our body, the less we are in the present moment. Not living in the present moment, we live life through the filter of past experience, particularly through the filter of unresolved traumas. NARM holds that the path of healing is a path of reconnection and that the way to be more fully in the present is to resolve our developmental and shock traumas.
Compassionate understanding of the pain and fear that drive the dissociative process is critical to healing the Connection dynamic. Having undergone the earliest and most difficult traumas, individuals with the Connection Survival Style tend to be less in their body and therefore less in the present moment. Because of their early trauma, dissociation is often the only state individuals with the Connection Survival Style have ever known. It is more challenging, though not impossible, to help individuals discover their body when they have never experienced it.
Early-traumatized individuals energetically disconnect from the ground. Their energy and self-awareness are pulled up from the ground, out of the body, and focused in the head. In NARM they are the thinking subtypes of the Connection Survival Style. When individuals with this coping style are asked what they feel, they will tell you what they think. Spiritualizing subtypes disconnect from the body completely so that body and emotional awareness are limited or nonexistent. These individuals keep their awareness in the energetic field. Even though they can be very attuned energetically, there is so much dysregulation in their nervous system that they are uncomfortable in their bodies and prefer to live on a more esoteric or ethereal realm.
When adults with early trauma continue to dissociate, this life-saving mechanism comes to function automatically even though it has outlived its usefulness and is now creating more distress. In short, the dissociative response develops into a lifestyle. Dissociated individuals develop a pattern of living that minimizes relating with other human beings. Friends, career, and relationships are developed to limit connection because too much human contact challenges the disconnective process of dissociation. Dissociative lifestyles are sometimes diagnosed as social phobia without understanding the global high arousal that drives the phobia.
Disconnection sets up a pernicious cycle. To manage early trauma, children disconnect from their bodies, emotions, and aggression, foreclosing their vitality and aliveness. They also disconnect from other people. This disconnection, though life saving, produces long-term distress because they feel exiled from self and others. Seeing other people live in what one client called “the circle of love” and the distress of feeling “on the outside looking in” heighten both shame and alienation.
NARM views dissociation on a continuum ranging from numbing to splitting to fragmentation. Just as a coyote with its leg caught in a trap chews it off in order to escape, in attempting to manage early trauma, the organism gives up its unity in order to save itself. Numbing, splitting, and fragmentation create disorganization on all levels of experience. Unmanageable levels of overload that overwhelm the organism’s capacity to process are experienced as distress, and when distress becomes unbearable, the organism manages first by numbing, then by splitting, and finally by fragmenting. These life-saving dissociative processes exact a terrible cost.
It is useful to differentiate between two types of numbing experiences: what NARM calls the dimmer switch state and the breaker switch state.
The dimmer switch state: Many individuals, looking back on their experience of dissociation, report that they felt as if they had been swaddled with bandages or gauze that had the effect of diminishing the intensity of all their experience, particularly their emotions. Some have used the metaphor of coming out of a trance state, others as having been on Novocain. It is not that they had no feeling at all, it is just that all feeling had been dulled or muted. The experience of coming out of this dimmer switch state is consistently described as feeling the body more acutely; literally seeing things more clearly, including brighter colors, more visual acuity, and being more present and aware of one’s surroundings.
The breaker switch state: The breaker switch state, commonly called “shock,” occurs when all emotion and sensation shut off, literally as if a breaker switch had been thrown. In the therapeutic process, a surprising number of clients say that they feel nothing when asked what they feel in the body. The question itself, “What do you feel in your body?” is confusing and anxiety producing.
It is natural to react to an inadequately supportive or threatening environment with increasingly aggressive strategies: first protest, then anger, and finally, when those are not successful, rage. The problem is that for a vulnerable and dependent infant or child, expressing aggression may create more danger. Dissociation, in addition to numbing the pain created by parental failure, also helps children disconnect from their own aggressive reaction to that parental failure. In addition to managing the external threat, infants and children must also manage their own internal aggressive impulses. They manage by splitting off, disowning, and projecting these aggressive impulses.
Melanie Klein and other psychoanalysts view splitting primarily as a psychological response to the frustration a child experiences when early drives are not met. NARM sees split-off aggression as the result of early trauma—not only as a psychological process but also as a physiological process. Hate, rage, and the fight response that children feel toward neglectful or abusive parents is managed through psychological splitting and physiological shutdown; there is a functional unity between the process of psychological splitting and physiological shutdown. From conception, physiological splitting is one of the primary protective mechanisms used to manage the overwhelming charge of such intrusive intrauterine threats as surgical procedures, chemical toxicity, and traumas experienced by the mother. In later life, this early high sympathetic arousal is experienced, consciously or unconsciously, as aggression, rage, and hatred.
In addition, NARM maintains that persistent destructive and aggressive feelings on the part of a child are not normal to development; they are a response to early trauma, particularly the relational traumas of neglect or abuse. Abused and neglected infants and children split off aggressive impulses toward their parents in order to maintain their loving feelings for them, and to protect the attachment relationship which is as essential as food or air. No matter how neglected or abused children are, they endeavor to protect the love they have for their parents by disowning the conscious awareness of their hurt and their angry reaction to that hurt. Therapists who work with children are used to hearing abused children defend their parents and blame themselves for the abuse they have experienced. A common refrain from abused children is “My dad didn’t really mean it; he was just having a bad day” or “I slipped and got this black eye.” Protecting the image of the parent can continue into adulthood; a client who was severely abused as a child once said, “My dad wasn’t abusive.… He took the strap to us a couple of times a week but only when we needed it.”
When children split off significant aggressive impulses, they see only two possibilities: to identify as good but powerless—acting in—or as bad but powerful—acting out (Table 8.3).
• Acting in. On one level abused children see themselves as good but powerless; on another, they experience parental abuse as their own failure, turning their aggressive reactions against themselves. Children unconsciously think, “Only abusers have anger. I don’t want to be like the abuser, so I won’t feel any anger.” They still carry anger, of course, but it is split off and turned against the self.
Early-traumatized and abused children, without access to their aggression and fight response, feel like outsiders. Their identification with being good but powerless sets them up to be victims. Not able to fight back, these are the children who are picked on by other children who sense their vulnerability; this reinforces their experience as victims. As adults with little or no access to their own aggression, they remain identified with a feeling of powerlessness and continue to disown and project their split-off anger and rage. These individuals reenact the role of victim by continuing to act in their aggression against themselves and become psychologically and physiologically symptomatic.
Individuals with the Connection Survival Style act in their anger in the form of self-hatred. They hate themselves for feeling unloved and unlovable, for never feeling that they fit in; they believe that there is something basically wrong with them and that the abuse and neglect they experience is their fault. They hate themselves for their perceived physical flaws and their psychological symptoms. They often feel that their body is their enemy. They hate their body for the fear and distress they experience and may focus their hatred on some real or imagined physical inadequacy: “If it weren’t for my nose [hips, fat, skin, hair, shortness, tallness, small breasts, etc.], then I would be happy.”
The Distortions of Healthy Aggression
Expression of a core need …
→Meets with frustration
→Triggering protest
→The protest is unsuccessful or penalized
→The protest escalates to anger
→The anger becomes overwhelming or is punished and split off:
• The anger is turned against the self: acting in
• The anger is turned against the environment: acting out
TABLE 8.3: Distortions of Healthy Aggression
Adults with the Connection Survival Style have split off significant amounts of aggression. They present as meek and mild, sometimes very cerebral and sometimes otherworldly and ethereal. They don’t know that they are angry except toward themselves, often to the point of self-hatred. Integrating their split-off aggression—learning neither to act it in nor act it out, transforming it into healthy aggression—is key to reconnection with the bodily self and the world, to increased aliveness, and to coming out of dissociation. They fear that if they allow themselves to feel their anger, they might hurt someone. For individuals with the Connection Survival Style, the therapeutic key is to get in touch with and reintegrate the split-off aggression slowly. Integrated, healthy aggression leads to increased capacity for self-expression, strength, and individuation (Figure I.2).
• Acting out. Some individuals with early trauma, particularly when they have a history of abuse, begin acting out their aggression as children; initially they act out against younger children or animals. As adults, power and control become primary themes in their lives: these individuals identify with the bad/powerful aspect of the split and act out as abusers and perpetrators. The bad/powerful aspect of the split is expressed as anger against the world: “Life is a jungle”; “It’s about the survival of the fittest”; “I give ulcers, I don’t get ulcers”; “Winning is everything”; “Fuck them before they fuck you.” In these cases, continually acting out aggression develops into what later becomes the Trust Survival Style (see Chapter 4).
Some individuals spend most of their lives acting in, living a lifetime of despair and self-hatred, for the most part disconnected from their anger. In a minority of cases, the aggression that has been turned against the self erupts and is acted out against the environment, sometimes in a violent way. A refrain sometimes heard after an episode of family violence is: “He was such a meek and mild guy. We would never have thought that he could do such a thing.”
Many individuals with the Connection Survival Style, without going to the extreme of developing a personality disorder, use fragmentation as a coping mechanism to manage overwhelmingly high levels of arousal and painful emotions. On a biological level, fragmentation creates a lack of coherency in all systems of the body. When trauma is particularly severe and/or ongoing, the dissociative response is correspondingly more extreme: from a psychobiological perspective, individuals use fragmentation as the coping mechanism of last resort. On psychological and behavioral levels, fragmentation can be gauged by the lack of consistency and degree of disorganization in all aspects of life. Some people lead chaotic lives, are unable to hold steady jobs, and have chaotic relationships. Fragmented individuals cannot organize a coherent narrative of their lives. Fragmentation, in one of its most pathological forms, is diagnosed as dissociative identity disorder, formerly called multiple personality disorder.
In this section we consider two interrelated dimensions of bodily experience: physiological function and physical structure. Physiological function relates to the internal workings of all systems of the body, and physical structure describes patterns of tension and collapse that can be seen in a person’s musculature and physical appearance. In humans, as in all living organisms, there are continual feedback loops between physical structure and physiological function that affect every system in the body, down to the cellular level. Each adaptive survival style has characteristic patterns of hyperarousal, such as tension and bracing, as well as patterns of hypoarousal, such as collapse, that affect both physical structure and physiological function in specific ways.
We cannot understand the adaptive coping process of the Connection Survival Style without first understanding the impact of the stress response on the body’s flow of energy. For non-traumatized adults, one of the natural ways of managing the high arousal of threat is through muscular contraction and mobilization as well as through visceral constriction. As mentioned earlier, these reactions are designed to be time-limited responses that are discharged when the threat is over. However, the physiological challenge for individuals with the Connection Survival Style is that threat was experienced before the brain, nervous system, and musculature were well developed. Fetuses and infants are primarily visceral systems and central nervous systems without a developed musculature. The only protective responses available to them are to shut down and freeze the central nervous system and visceral system.
Energy flow in the body is managed by contractions of the transverse tissues called diaphragms. The most well-know diaphragm is the respiratory diaphragm. For individuals with the Connection Survival Style, the high arousal of early trauma is managed through powerful, chronic contraction in all the diaphragms of the body, most prominently in the respiratory diaphragm but also the diaphragms at the base of the skull and in the eyes, feet, and joints. There is also, as Porges has documented, a freeze response mediated by the dorsal aspect of the vagus nerve. These contractions and freeze responses result in severe disruption of energy flow in the body. This systemic inhibition of energy helps us understand why any upsurge of sensation, emotion, or feeling can be so difficult for individuals with the Connection Survival Style. It also helps us see why therapeutic approaches that do not address physiological dysregulation are limited in their effectiveness when working with early trauma.
Developmentally, the dorsal aspect of the vagal system develops first, followed by the ventral aspect, which is directly involved in social engagement, the capacity to connect with other human beings. When the dorsal vagal system reacts to manage early trauma, the ventral aspect does not develop adequately and can remain impaired throughout life. In individuals with the Connection Survival Style, the physiological impairment of the SES is directly observable in the lack of emotion and expressiveness in the face, the lack of contact and engagement in the eyes, and behaviorally, in the social anxiety and withdrawal they experience.
The impact of early, chronic developmental and shock trauma on health leads to poorly understood and often lifelong ramifications. Early trauma creates pervasive systemic distress that leaves a person vulnerable to disease processes that may not appear until later in life. For example, the role of systemic inflammatory processes in the development of many diseases is a primary focus of current medical research. Though it has not yet been scientifically validated, NARM maintains that one of the poorly understood links in the development of systemic inflammation is trauma, particularly early trauma. With inadequate parenting, infants are subject to chronic, cumulative, and unpredictable stress. The resulting combination of undischarged high arousal, freeze, and dissociative strategies create profound dysregulation in all the systems of the body, particularly in the brain and in the nervous, endocrine, vascular, and digestive systems. This systemic dysregulation is a significant part of the life experience of individuals with the Connection Survival Style and leaves them vulnerable to numerous disease processes.
The Impact of Early Trauma on Health
Undischarged High Arousal→Contraction/Freeze→Systemic Dysregulation→Chronic Health Issues
TABLE 8.4: Effects of Early Trauma on Health
The word boundaries is widely used in psychology and somatic psychotherapy, but its meaning is often unclear. Our skin is a boundary; it is our physical boundary. There is also an energetic dimension to boundaries. Our energetic boundaries constitute the three-dimensional space that surrounds us: above us, below us, and around us. Because energetic boundaries are invisible, it is not generally understood that they are real and have profound implications in our lives. Energetic boundaries buffer us from the outside world and help us regulate our interface with other people. Each of us has a sense of our own space and what is comfortable to us within and around that space. For example, everyone has had the experience of someone standing too close and wanting distance from that person; this is an everyday experience of boundary impingement. Just as the skin marks the boundary between the body’s inside and outside, the energetic boundary defines personal space. And just as a cut or a blow to the skin is painful, we experience an energetic boundary impingement or rupture as threatening and anxiety provoking.
Intact energetic boundaries are accompanied by a feeling of personal safety and a capacity to set appropriate limits. We normally become aware of boundaries only in their absence or when they are impinged upon or ruptured. Since we are not usually consciously aware of our energetic boundaries, the experience of a boundary rupture can be puzzling and distressing. Traumatic events that occur before an individual can orient to danger leave that individual with the internal sense that danger can come from anywhere, at anytime. When there is chronic early threat, boundaries often never form adequately and become severely compromised; when boundaries are compromised or missing, we become symptomatic.
In the Connection stage of development, trauma compromises boundary development and creates boundary ruptures. The inability to develop adequate energetic boundaries has profound implications. Many of the psychological and physiological symptoms of the Connection Survival Style can be better understood from the perspective of compromised energetic boundaries. Connection individuals’ struggle with compromised boundaries is often misunderstood and pathologized: they feel crazy because of their extreme sensitivity to environmental triggers. Practitioners, friends, and family often reinforce these individuals’ negative feelings by communicating that it is “all in their head.” It is not. Table 8.5 lists the characteristics of healthy versus compromised energetic boundaries.
People with significantly compromised energetic boundaries describe themselves as feeling raw, sometimes without a skin. Compromised energetic boundaries lead to the feeling of being flooded by environmental stimuli, particularly by human contact. Conversely, such damaged boundaries can also lead to the feeling of “spilling out” into the environment, not knowing the difference between self and other, inner from outer experience. The inability of a traumatized person who does not have adequate energetic boundaries to filter external stimuli makes the world seem continuously threatening. Compromised energetic boundaries are one cause of the continual sense of threat and high arousal that lead to hypervigilance.
Because of the breach in their energetic boundaries, individuals with the Connection Survival Style use interpersonal distance and self-isolation as a protective mechanism, as a substitute for their compromised boundaries. They develop life strategies to minimize contact with other human beings. Adequate energetic boundaries are among the missing resources for socially phobic individuals.
Examples of Healthy Energetic Boundaries
• Feeling comfortable in one’s own body
• Feeling an implicit sense of safety in the world
• Feeling a clear sense of self and other
• Being able to say no and set limits
• Knowing the difference between self and other
Examples of Compromised Energetic Boundaries
• Extreme sensitivity to other people’s emotions
• A raw feeling of walking around without “skin”
• Energetic merging with other people, animals, and the environment
• The sense that danger can come from anywhere at anytime
• Hypervigilance and/or hypovigilance in general or in specific directional vectors such as from behind
• Environmental sensitivities and allergies
• Feeling uncomfortable in groups or crowds
• Agoraphobia
TABLE 8.5: Characteristics of Healthy and Compromised Energetic Boundaries
Intact energetic boundaries function to filter environmental stimuli. Inadequate or compromised boundaries, on the other hand, allow for an extreme sensitivity to external stimuli: human contact, sounds, light, touch, toxins, allergens, smells, and even electromagnetic activity. As energetic boundaries form, many individuals with the Connection Survival Style report a decrease of their sensitivities to environmental stimuli.
Commonly, projection is viewed as a psychological process and considered a “primitive” defense mechanism. In NARM, projection and the role of the eyes in the projection process are understood from the perspective of the functional unity between a person’s psychology and physiology. Most therapists are surprised to discover that projection, which is normally considered a psychological defense mechanism, is a physiologically based process that has profound psychological implications. Hans Selye and his groundbreaking research on the stress response documented that with high levels of psychological stress, there is a narrowing of the visual field: tunnel vision is part of a survival response that provides focus when life is threatened. Individuals with the Connection Survival Style, having lived with an almost continual experience of threat, have chronic narrowing and other distortions of the visual field.
The eyes reflect a person’s emotional state. It is said that the eyes are the windows to the soul. This may or may not be true, but they are definitely windows into the nervous system: in the eyes we can see aliveness, availability, enthusiasm, joy, or, on the contrary, we can see fear, deadness, absence, distance, dullness, depression, or disconnection. The eyes of individuals with the Connection Survival Style reflect the difficulty they have with making contact. They may avoid eye contact in general, or their eyes may be out of focus, giving them a distant or unavailable look. Their eyes may look lifeless, sleepy, or wide with fright. The lack of presence and the undeveloped social engagement system give the eye region, and sometimes the whole face, a sallow, waxen quality. In addition to the eyes, the diaphragms at the crown of the head and cranial base are extremely constricted. Connection clients commonly complain: “I sometimes feel like I have a clamp on my head that just gets tighter and tighter when I get upset.” Tension in these diaphragms causes headaches, one of the most common physical complaints of the Connection Survival Style.
How contraction in the eyes and cervical areas abet withdrawal from experience was understood by Reich as an actual blocking of the diaphragms at the cranial base, the tentorium, and in the region where the optic nerves cross. In Reichian theory, what is called the eye block engenders a depression of all bodily functions and a systemic reduction of energy available to the organism. To the degree that there is contraction and disengagement in the eyes, we do not see the reality of our environment. When we are not present to who or what is directly in our vision, we live in fantasy. For example, if a child is bitten by a dog, all dogs may become trauma triggers. If the adult that child becomes sees all dogs as dangerous, that individual is not using his or her eyes. He or she is not able to distinguish in the present moment which dogs are dangerous and which dogs are not. The ideal of seeing the world accurately is related to the process of being present, in the moment and in the body.
Transference is a projective process related to the ocular block. It is a nearly universal human phenomenon that affects all of us. For example, when a man responds to another person as if he or she were his mother, he is literally not seeing the other person; he is not using his eyes. As a result, he is living in a fantasy; he is responding from his adaptive survival style to unresolved past experience.
The resolution for transference and trauma triggers is to see what is actually in front of us without an overlay of fantasy or projection. One of the most effective ways to help individuals with projective patterns is to invite them to engage their eyes, to orient themselves to their environment in the present moment. As soon as individuals begin to use their orienting response, they become more present, and projections begin to dissolve. Because of their early trauma, individuals with the Connection Survival Style have the greatest tendency to use projection as a coping mechanism. The process of resolving projections takes time of course, but understanding the functional unity between the physiology and the psychology of projection gives therapists a significant tool to interrupt and help resolve projective distortions.
The complementary and interwoven elements of experience discussed in this chapter identify the issues that need to be addressed to support the healing cycle for individuals with the Connection Survival Style:
• Working through early trauma
• Developing the right to “be”
• Supporting the ventral vagus and social engagement system
• Increasing the capacity for attachment, connection, and relationship
• Developing self-regulation
• Working through self-hatred, self-judgments, and identity distortions
• Tolerating increasing aliveness
• Seeing through the illusion of “designated issues”
• Coming out of dissociation
• Integrating aggression
• Being present in the body
• Repairing boundary ruptures
• Dissolving the ocular block and reestablishing the exploratory-orienting response
• Working through projection
• Learning to live in the present moment
How to work with these elements from a clinical and personal growth perspective is elaborated in Chapter 10.