Let us examine whether and how it is possible … to heal this fundamental infirmity of man…. The stages for the attainment of this goal may be tabulated as follows …
—Roberto Assagioli
We have posited that there is a profound brokenness in human life, a “fundamental infirmity of man” in Assagioli's words (see chapter 2). This brokenness is largely, in our view, the result of primal wounding, those failures in empathic love that give us the experience of being cut off from the source of our being, Self. Authentic personality hereby becomes survival personality as we seek to survive the emptiness, fragmentation, and annihilation created by these wounds. Driven by these inner wounds, inauthentic lives create tremendous suffering in the world.
The good news is that our essential nature was never lost. “I” may become attached to a survival unifying center, identified with survival personality, and caught in the survival trance, but “I” still exist. “I” is transcendent-immanent of all contents and structures of the personality, and, as such, our deepest nature is in essence not damaged by the traumatic events of our lives. “I” and Self remain in communion, as a reflected image and its source, even though this deeper reality is shrouded in the very real illusion that it does not exist—the journey of Self-realization is always present, however hidden. In Rogers' words:
This [actualizing] tendency may become deeply buried under layer after layer of encrusted psychological defenses. It may be hidden behind elaborate facades which deny its existence; it is my belief however, based on my experience, that it exists in every individual, and awaits only the proper conditions to be released and expressed. (Rogers 1961, 351)
Thus the human journey is one of waking up to that deeper reality, of realizing the unbroken I-Self union and all that it implies. According to Assagioli, this journey may be understood as occurring in four stages, what can be called the stages of psychosynthesis: (1) thorough knowledge of one's personality, (2) control of the various elements of the personality, (3) realization of one's true Self—the discovery or creation of a unifying center, and (4) psychosynthesis, the formation or reconstruction of the personality around the new center (Assagioli 2000, 19–25).
In psychosynthesis therapy, these stages emerge as a function of empathic love, of spiritual empathy. Spiritual empathy in effect sees and nurtures “I” who am buried within personality contents and identifications so that “I” may awaken and realize a more conscious and willing contact with the deepest imperatives of my being. In other words, the stages of psychosynthesis outline psychosynthesis therapy as it may lead from entrancement to disentrancement, from sleep to awakening, from survival to authenticity.
The stages of psychosynthesis are thus perhaps the most long-standing and broadest model within psychosynthesis clinical theory, illuminating the potential terrain that client and therapist may traverse over the course of therapy. In the 1930s Assagioli described the stages in the same article where he described the oval diagram (Assagioli 1931; 1934) and also included them in the first chapter of his book Psychosynthesis (1965).
Assagioli himself implied his stages constituted a clinical theory when he offered them as a way of healing the “fundamental infirmity of man” or what we consider the ravages of primal wounding. He saw the stages as a way by which human beings could become free from their “enslavement” and “achieve an harmonious inner integration, true Self-realization, and right relationships with others” (Assagioli 2000, 18).
As we explain in an earlier work (Firman and Gila 2002), we have therefore elected to add this fundamental infirmity to Assagioli's stages, including it as an additional stage to his original four, calling it stage zero, or the survival stage. We also renamed and elaborated his original four stages as: (1) exploration of the personality, (2) the emergence of “I,” (3) contact with Self, and (4) response to Self. But before exploring these stages, there are a few important interrelated points to consider:
Although the stages of psychosynthesis make sense as a sequential progression, they can and do appear out of order in actual lived experience. A reason for this is that they represent levels of experience that are always present, that is, “being in stage one” means simply this stage is foreground while the others are background. The psychosynthesis therapist needs to be ready for any stage at any time.
The stages can be seen across any time frame. That is, they may occur within a couple of minutes, over the course of a single session, or may be discerned in the broader outlines of a person's life. Holding this broader view of the stages, therapists can more readily recognize and facilitate them in whatever time frame the client is presenting.
We apparently are never finished with the stages. Given the mystery and depth of the human journey, it seems that all stages, including the survival stage, occur throughout the human life span regardless of how much growth and self-exploration have occurred (although perhaps at different levels of intensity). Clients and therapists alike seem never to outgrow them, and, as we shall see, it is especially important for therapists to be able to recognize these stages in themselves.
Lastly, and most important, the stages are not something “done to” the client by the therapist. The therapist's job remains as it ever was: to provide spiritual empathy, to love the client. The stages are offered not so therapists can move clients through them, but in hopes that therapists can remain empathic no matter what stage clients are encountering.
So, keeping these points in mind, let us now turn to an exploration of the stages of psychosynthesis that lead toward “harmonious inner integration, true Self-realization, and right relationships with others.” We shall outline the stages from a psychosynthesis therapy point of view and examine the types of issues faced by both client and therapist as they walk these aspects of the path together.
It is quite accurate to say, “We have all been impacted by nonempathic environments in our lives, and so have suffered primal wounding.” But this phrase seems mild, given the experience it is attempting to describe. To say it in another, more experiential way: we have all felt ourselves humiliated, discounted, and used as objects to serve the desperate need of others; we have all been abandoned, left to disintegrate in the face of unknown horrors; we have all felt the gut-wrenching plummet toward personal nonexistence. This may now seem overstated—but not to those aspects of us who bore the brunt of this wounding.
And we have all done whatever we needed to do in order to survive such degradation and annihilation—we have developed some amount of survival personality. That is, we have all had the life we were meant to live driven underground; we have all been entranced, brainwashed into forgetting our heights and depths; we have all been forced to live a pretence, burying our true selves.
Perhaps at some level we are ashamed of this, like prisoners of war who have succumbed to their brainwashing. But remember how extremely vulnerable we were, how completely dependent. As Tart points out, “The child's mental state is similar to that of the deeply hypnotized subject” (Tart 1987, 94). In fact, the principles that were used to form survival personality are precisely the same as those used by any cult, whether family, group, or nation. With no empathic holding environment, no authentic unifying centers, our intrinsic spiritual vulnerability and dependence—remember, we as projections of Spirit are profoundly dependent—was co-opted and used to control us. We need not be ashamed.
The survival stage or stage zero then denotes a way of functioning in which, after exposure to primal wounding, we become lost to our true nature. As outlined in chapter 2, we do this along three dimensions: (1) attaching to the survival unifying center, both external and internal, giving us some sense of connection and holding; (2) identifying with survival personality, coming to believe that this is who we truly are; and (3) becoming entranced in the survival trance, cut off from the heights and depths of our experiential range, that is, the formation of the higher and lower unconscious.
Living in this survival mode allows us to find a way of being within the nonempathic environment, eking out some semblance of comfort and security at the cost of being cut off from who we truly are. Given the profoundly nonempathic state of the world, it is not surprising that all of us are to some extent operating in survival; we have breathed this air since birth (see chapter 2).
But let us look in upon a client and therapist working within the survival stage. We will take an unorthodox approach here in which client and therapist will speak in “first person omniscient.” That is, it is highly unlikely that any client or therapist ever spoke like this, because we shall hear from both conscious and unconscious levels of each, taking an omniscient point of view.
Here I am, asleep, living on automatic, unconsciously acting out my survival patterns. I may abuse alcohol and drugs, attach to unhealthy relationships, compulsively follow my spiritual practice, use sex and romance as a drug, be out of touch with my feelings or body or intellect, and work too hard and too much.
Sure, I had a tough childhood, but I've seen worse. All in all, I think I got through it okay, though sure, I do feel empty inside when I think of those years. But hey, that's over and done with—nothing you can do about the past. Yeah, I suppose someone might say I've been neglected and abused as a kid, but I feel like I deserved most of what I got, or at least I came to believe that.
My parents, siblings, peers, school system, religion, and culture did the best they could, so I can't blame them. Sure, even without the blame, there is this emptiness and rage coming from somewhere but it seems disloyal and a cop-out to think they had anything to do with it.
Most of the time I'm fine with how I'm living my life. Yeah, I've got relationship and addiction problems—who doesn't? But ever since breaking up with my partner I just haven't been myself. Not a big deal, you understand, but I just don't feel right somehow. My friend suggested I try some therapy, so here I am.
But I am a little nervous with this talking about myself. I don't know what I will find. I do know I need someone who will not judge me, who will create a safety that will allow me to explore unknown areas of myself. Can you accept both my wanting to know and my not wanting to know?
So by “safety” I mean I need someone who will be with me, completely accepting all of who I am so I can feel safe to let anything at all come to light. In other words, I need someone who sees me, accepts me, loves me. Unconditionally.
My secret—even from myself—is that right at the center of me, so close I don't even know she's there, is hiding a wounded little girl. She has looked into the cold, empty night of annihilation. She has been treated as if she were nonexistent. Around her are gathered all my survival patterns. They are all about protecting her from destruction.
So therapy is actually pretty simple: if she feels that your love and understanding can reach the depths of this mystery, if she feels you can stand with me in it, my guard can be let down a bit, my defenses can relax. But if she feels unsafe, these patterns will remain strong and in control, even if they have to disguise themselves in new forms.
And she's finely tuned to when it's not safe—she knows only too well what it is to be unloved and unseen. Her wounds are a tremendously sensitive radar that allows her to pick up even the most subtle fluctuations of unloving and unseeing. She sees keenly when someone has a scheme for her, when they want something from her, when they see her as an object. And her wounds let her be aware at levels that you and I may not be aware of. So you and I need to be willing to learn about those levels as we stumble into them.
So can I trust you to be with me, helping me discover and travel where I want to go? Or will you act out your frustration with my destructive relationships? Or make me responsible for your pain about how my addiction is affecting my life? Or pontificate and advise me about how to live because you are worried about my choices?
You know this frustration, pain, and worry are all yours, not mine. Can you let go of the world from which such reactions come? Or do I have to start adjusting myself to take care of your feelings and expectations? It seems to me that adjusting—pretending—has been my whole problem from the beginning. My hope is that it can be different here.
But I know it's tough to work with me. I am locked into many chronic behaviors that are very painful, so it must be hard to sit with me week after week. I don't see much change in the patterns yet, but I keep coming back. You seem to be someone I can talk to. No one else seems to be able to put up with my stuff.
I do get irritated and frustrated that my client doesn't seem to get better. It's hard to love her when I see her suffering go on and on. At times I feel that if I could just find the right technique, get some more training, or read a few more books, I could stop her suffering. Maybe I'm not a very good therapist.
I have a few temptations here. One is basically imploring her to change: “For the love of God, woman, don't you see what you are doing? Shape up!” Here I want to teach, cajole, plead, maybe even scold a little. I feel responsible for her pain and need her to change. I'm a not-good-enough parent.
As she continues not to change I face a more embarrassing temptation: My love fades and I want to punish her, like it seems she is punishing me, to get back at her for making me feel like a bad therapist. A critical tone or a raised eyebrow, or even a stony silence might work well here. Or maybe I can just point out that she's identified with a “victim role,” that she needs to get off it and grow up. Even better, I can slap her with a diagnosis—that will show her this is all her issue and that she'd better deal with it.
When I really feel at the end of my rope, though, I can find myself withdrawing from her. Here I am inwardly saying, “Forget it, you are doing this to yourself so I just don't care.” That's me getting angry and abandoning her.
All of these reactions take me back to my own therapist for work on my wounds from childhood. I have to do that in order to remember that all these reactions are from my separate world, not from me being in my client's world with her. It's her life, not mine, and my job is to love her and be with her where she wants to go. She has her own will and her own connection to her truth; it is my job to see this, respect this, and follow this.
So I try to let go of my agendas and ask her where she wants to go, what she wants to focus on. Sure, if she doesn't know, I can help her. We might use any number of techniques to help her discover and clarify her intention. But anything I do comes from her own wishes; it meets her where she is walking on her path.
And yes, I still need to maintain my own professional boundaries in this. Like when I reminded her she needed to pay me for the missed session; or that I was not available for any social or business relationship outside therapy; or that I couldn't see her if she showed up intoxicated. But I didn't do any of this from a nonempathic, punishing, or diagnostic place (these are my problems, not hers). Instead I came from an empathic, respectful place, pointing to the boundaries I need to maintain as a container for myself and my practice.
Working this way is a relief in a way. Sort of like in Al-Anon, where those being affected by another's addiction learn to “detach with compassion.” My job is to walk with her, not carry her on my back, not figure out where she needs to go. Not be “codependent” or treat her as an object, a diagnosis, or a symptom. Just love her and trust her ability to find her own way, using my skill and training to help. She does have her own connection to Self after all.
Working in the survival stage, the therapist faces many challenges. We here are seeking to walk with someone who does not appear to be “moving” at all. Can we meet the person there? Can we remember that this seeming stasis is about negotiating the terror of primal wounding? Most of all, can we remember that our job is not the client's “movement,” but to be spiritually empathic, to love? Without this perspective, it will be extremely difficult to enter the client's world and all too easy to fall into the types of reactions described by the therapist in this example.
It is only through being loved, seen, and understood, that the client can ever feel safe enough to allow the survival patterns to de-integrate and transform. It is only spiritual empathy that can invite the client to connect to an authentic unifying center, disidentify from survival personality, and melt the frozenness of the survival trance. We can cajole and plead, scold and punish, push or pull, be subtle or direct, use this or that technique, but the most that will happen is that either the client will resist or the client will learn to form a new survival personality to please us—either way, the client remains in survival.
As in our example, the major challenge for the therapist working in the survival stage is to stay with the client and not get caught in the reactions coming from the therapist's world. Such reactions are quite simply the therapist falling into survival mode. The nonempathic reactions of the therapist are the workings of survival in the therapist.
One important reason we as therapists find ourselves in survival and acting out is that we forget the profundity of the primal wounding that pervades our relationship with the client. We think we are sitting in a well-lit office, comfortably equipped with our professional knowledge, addressing the unfortunate personal problems of others. But no, we are sitting with victims of a universal human tragedy. To sit with a client means, at a fundamental level, to look into the face of extreme human suffering. And explanations will not ease this suffering, insight will not cure it, techniques do not heal it—only altruistic love seems to answer it.
When we forget this profundity of our human encounter with the client, it is quite understandable why we find ourselves acting out; we are not prepared for the intensity of our responses. But obviously, in order to meet and assist a client in the survival stage, we have to be willing to meet ourselves at this level. It again becomes abundantly clear why it is so crucial that psychosynthesis therapists are on their own journey of Self-realization, grappling with the fundamental questions of human existence.
To the extent we can escape the grips of our own survival mode and provide this spiritual empathy to our clients, our spiritual connection to the client can begin to function. Here the client remains free to detach from the survival unifying center and bond to the authentic unifying center of the therapist; this transition allows the exploration of hitherto unknown regions of the personality and so moves toward disidentification from survival personality and disentrancement from the survival trance.
However, survival can be so completely engulfing and insidiously pervasive that it often takes a destabilizing event to awaken the person. These events can be called crises of transformation (Firman and Gila 2002, 50–53), because as painful and disconcerting as these experiences might be, they are ultimately invitations to move toward healing and growth—they may herald an awakening from the thrall of survival and a transformation of the personality toward authenticity. Therefore, it is important that therapists understand these experiences and are ready and able to walk with clients as they move through them.
Crises of transformation occur when there is some amount of disruption among the three dimensions of the survival system: attachment to the survival unifying center, identification with survival personality, and entrancement. Every crisis most likely has some involvement with each dimension, although the unique flavor of a particular dimension may be foreground.
From the point of view of attachment to a survival unifying center, a crisis of transformation would mean an experienced tension or conflict with the dictates of the survival unifying center and a loosening of the bond with it. We begin to realize the self-centered control wielded by the survival unifying center, to feel the oppression of this control, and to react to our lives being dominated by this:
I've gotten to the place of not caring if my parents come to the wedding. I'm going to marry her anyway. Too bad if she isn't of our faith, she loves me and I love her. Sure, I feel bad at the prospect of not having my parents there, even though that's their choice, not mine.
Ever since I was little, people always said I wasn't creative, that I should stick to what I know, but I just had to try to do art. Funny though—the first time I picked up a brush I felt bad and guilty, like I was disappointing someone or breaking some taboo.
I feel ashamed saying these things about my father, telling family secrets. In my culture we are loyal to the family always. No one should know about his drinking or what he did to us when he got drunk. But there is something freeing … after all these years … the truth.
This loosening of the bond with the survival unifying center can be inspired and supported by an encounter with authentic unifying centers. The person in our first example is obviously detaching from a survival unifying center and connecting to his marriage partner as an authentic unifying center (among others). Similarly, the other two examples show a connection to authentic unifying centers—art and psychotherapy—as contexts in which the individuals feel seen and held, and are willing to break the former bonds in favor of a new blossoming of their being.
In this encounter with authentic unifying centers, we may find ourselves unusually moved by a new person, place, or thing in our life—for example, a friend, therapist, book, endeavor, community, or philosophy—that invites us into being more ourselves. By contrast, we may begin to see that the environment we grew up in did not allow this, and that the conditioning from those early years has severely hampered our lives. At first we may feel we are betraying our early environment, but then may feel loss, grief, or rage as we realize the years we spent under its control, and finally perhaps glimpse a sense of independence and freedom beyond all these.
The faltering of the survival personality, allowing at least a momentary disidentification from it, may also trigger a crisis of transformation. Here there is some breakdown of our habitual survival identity and a confrontation with aspects of ourselves that were disowned in the formation of this survival personality.
I feel this huge empty hole at my very center, like I've lived my whole life as an empty facade, a movie set. Or it's like I'm a tall skyscraper whose windows reflect the life of the city, but it's got no one living inside. It just feels so sad. I feel worthless.
I've been so, so, so focused on other people, like I don't have a life of my own. And when I don't get credit for this, I feel hurt, angry. But lately I've been asking myself who am I? What's my life about? It's scary, it's weird, but I also feel freedom. Joy that I've never felt before. It's confusing.
Ever since my best friend died in that accident, I've taken a nosedive. My school work is suffering, my life doesn't make sense. I always thought I was this one way and now that's all gone … with nothing to take its place. I don't know who I am anymore. But maybe, just maybe … I can find out.
These are examples of disidentification from survival personality; these people have let go of their habitual mode of functioning and are engaging formerly hidden levels of themselves. As painful and confusing as such an “identity crisis” is, it is the way out of survival and into an exploration of many more aspects of oneself—and eventually toward a new, more authentic personality formation.
Although the examples used here are focused on the shift in identity, we can see glimmers of a disruption in the next dimension of survival, the survival trance. There is in these cases a newfound openness to a broader range of experience, a range including experiences of emptiness, sadness, and fear, and, as well, freedom, joy, and hope. Here lost aspects of the experiential range are being revealed, that is, disentrancement is under way.
A third type of crisis of transformation may present in the main as disentrancement. Here what is foreground is not so much the survival unifying center or survival personality, but the re-owning of the experiential range that was lost to these formations. Here the window of tolerance opens and suddenly the heights or depths that have been rendered unconscious by entrancement reveal themselves, sometimes in powerful ways.
I am consumed by grief. Does this ever end? I never thought I could be so devastated, and over a dog! I feel embarrassed—I didn't grieve my parents' deaths this much. I see just how much I loved Abbey, and she loved me. What a wonderful, loving, gentle being that dog was. I wished I'd known how much I loved her while she was alive.
I've been totally getting just how absent my father has been my whole life. My father wouldn't talk to me about me … my life … how I was doing except: “How was school today?” But then he wouldn't stay around for the answer. We looked great from the outside, though, so I never thought anything of it. Oh, he was mostly nice to me and mom—superficial again. It's only lately, when it's so hard for me to talk about my feelings with you that I've been feeling lonely and sad. I've felt this way all my life, really. I've been living on the surface all these years.
I was faced with telling the truth. Everyone was so close in this group, like a group marathon. And then she asked me that embarrassing question and I was so scared. It was like if I answered it truthfully I would be seen as a sham. All this time, a sham. I'd been hiding. For some reason I answered honestly, and in that moment my life changed. My body felt like a huge weight had been lifted off me, a weight I'd carried my whole life without knowing it. I felt connected to everyone and the whole universe. I saw there was nothing to be afraid of. Really, nothing, not even death. I felt part of a universal evolution.
All of these are expansions of the experiential range that can constitute breaches in the constricted limits of the survival trance, a disentrancement. In our examples, the individuals were moving beyond their survival reality to encounter both the harder experiences of grief, loneliness, and despair as well as the sunnier ones of love, freedom, and union. These were “new” experiences in a way, but in a way not: they were available all along at the higher and lower levels of each individual's experiential range but they had been split off and repressed, that is, the higher and lower unconscious.
So higher unconscious “peak experiences” (Maslow 1962; 1971) or “ecstatic experiences” (Laski 1968) and lower unconscious abyss experiences or “desolation experiences” (Laski 1968) can disrupt the trance and lead to a more conscious engagement with one's broader experiential range. Here there is a re-owning of one's original range of experience, a range truncated by the survival trance.
Again, we can see the operation of the other two dimensions of survival in these cases—detachment from the survival unifying center and disidentification from survival personality. The dog Abbey, the person's intimate partner, and the close-knit group are all operating as authentic unifying centers, allowing a blossoming of the person.
Lastly, let us point out that crises of transformation need not be “crises” in a dramatic, cataclysmic sense (although they can be that), but simply in the sense of a decisive or critical moment in which an inner or outer reality beyond survival is revealed. Whether pleasant or disconcerting, ecstatic or terrifying, crises of transformation are the doors out of survival into the subsequent stages of psychosynthesis. It is as if we momentarily take off the colored glasses of survival and catch a direct glimpse of the world more as it truly is. We become Plato's cave dwellers blinking in the sunlight.
Therapists whose clients face a crisis of transformation are challenged to walk through these different experiences with them, as clients de-bond from the survival unifying center, disidentify from survival personality, and undergo disentrancement. This means therapists must themselves be comfortable with these experiences so that they can embrace their clients' experiences without breaking the empathic connection.
How do you feel about your client walking through a long, agonizing dark night of the soul? Breaking the secrets and silence of their family of origin? Raging at parents, siblings, religion, or culture, even God? How do you feel about being with clients as their personalities seem to fall apart? Or being with clients who express ecstatic enthusiasm about a life-changing experience, having had a dazzling new vision of a potential new life?
As described in chapter 5, these positive and negative experiences can strongly resonate in therapists, triggering hidden primal wounding. Such transformations of our client's personality and experiential range challenge us to transform our own, and can place us up against any constrictions in our own personalities. The boundaries of our entranced survival personality may be breached here, exposing our own wounding. If we are not prepared for such a reaction in ourselves, we will undoubtedly act out, doing something to break our empathic communion with the client.
Also, some therapists, seeing this disconcerting distress or exultation in their clients, may immediately rush to eliminate these as “symptoms.” But these “symptoms” may be indicative of the de-integration of the problematic survival system and are in fact the doorways to healing and reintegration. It is only by working through these often difficult and disorienting experiences that the client can move toward a more authentic life. This does not, of course, preclude therapeutic measures that support this working through, including, for example, the proper use of medication if clients wish this.
If we are able to remain spiritually empathic with clients through their crises of transformation, they will be free to begin investigating and integrating the new dimensions of themselves revealed by these openings. They will be looking at new worlds of experience and will need empathic others who can walk with them as they explore and make sense of these worlds. Here they move into the first stage of psychosynthesis, Exploration.