Body Psychotherapy. Vassilis Christodoulou
take place.
People who have not developed flexible and stable boundaries are capable of connecting and having contact with others but are incapable of developing relationships. Relationships presuppose the existence of boundaries. Let us take the example of a person whose boundaries have been violated and the person who is responsible for the violation. Without effective body therapy, the victim and the offender might remain connected for ever. This connection, however, can never be regarded as a relationship.
The same thing happens in the case of people who, as children, had parents who did not respect their individuality. I am not referring to the type of parents who flagrantly violate their children’s boundaries by sexually molesting or having penetrative sex with them. I am referring to those parents who, under a variety of pretexts, become abusive by expressing their own sexual repression and problematic nature, without assuming responsibility for their desires, which very often remain unconscious. The harm, however, is done. When a parent, without respecting the privacy of the moment, enters a toilet just when a child of theirs, who is old enough not to require their help, is busy attending to his or her own personal needs, this constitutes a violation of the child’s personal boundaries. Another violation of this kind, and one which is also recorded in the child’s system, is when a parent asks a child or teenage son or daughter to clean their back while they are in the bath, or when a mother asks a son or daughter to fetch her sanitary napkins because she is on the toilet and cannot reach them. The victims of such violations will have a deficient sense of self. Their relationships, based on a weak will and an insufficiently integrated self, will be tossed about uncontrollably by the winds and the waves, which will push them either very close to or very far away from the other person in each relationship. They will also suffer in respect of their needs and their desires. It will be difficult for them to distinguish their own needs and place them above the needs of others. As for their desires, it will be difficult for them not only to place them above the desires of the other person in a relationship but also to recognise them as their own, distinguishing them from the needs of others. To this category belong all those who may be described as having an ‘as if’ or ‘false self’ personality.
Our modern societies do not love children
Our modern societies are only euphemistically called ‘child-centred’, however much we like to characterise them as such. Societies whose main priority is the production of material goods are bound to be less joyful and to turn life into a struggle for existence. In these societies – and however harsh it may sound, it needs to be said – people do not have the time to raise healthy children. Haste in itself and the lack of respect for a child’s own rate of development constitutes a violation and is recorded in that child’s system. How many mothers, under the relentless pressure of work, stop breastfeeding their babies very early on? And what about all those mothers who, either as a result of being misinformed or as a result of the belief that they might lose their breast shape, do not even breastfeed their babies? This deficiency will be recorded as a trauma, with the resulting effects. The same thing happens in the case of an adult who holds a child in such a way that they show no respect for the sensitivities of the child’s body. The young human being that has just seen the light of day and come into direct contact with the outside world for the first time – without the protective buffer of the womb that nourished it and helped it grow from a single-cell organism, an amoeba, into a fully-formed human being – is much more sensitive than some people would like to believe. Whatever the child might store in its memory as an engram, the original experience, if it is a traumatic one, will never be erased. What is trivial and unimportant for an adult may often be of great importance to an infant. For example, many early traumas that we come across in therapy originate in bad, sudden or hasty manoeuvres by the medical or paramedical staff during the process of childbirth. In no case should the delivery room become a factory production line as a result of financial or any other kind of pressure. Human beings produce machines; we are not machines ourselves. I can clearly recall the crying and wincing of a helpless infant displayed by many of my patients when, despite the fact that my surgery was properly heated, they trembled with cold as they relived the experience of their birth. Only a warm hug, a gentle caress and a loving, welcoming smile could warm them up.
Oh my God, where are they putting me? Why don’t they leave me inside my mummy? They’re holding me upside down and putting me in something made of metal. It’s even colder than the room. I don’t like it… I want my mummy.
Mothers, however, are, like almost all people nowadays, subject to the dictates of a biomedical model that cares more often about the comforts of medical and paramedical staff, operating schedules and the orderly running of the health system than patients. And here there is a lack of information, while the amount of misinformation is staggering – and this is due not only to ignorance but also to vested interests.
A lack of sensitivity on the part of the mother during pregnancy is a decisive factor in the development of the embryo. What is her own psychosomatic state? How does she feed herself? How does she take care of her body? How does she communicate with the child in the womb? Is she in a calm state of mind or fraught with anxiety? Is she depressed? Is she mourning for someone or something? How is she mourning? What kind of relationship does she have with her partner? All of these things play a role. I am not saying there is an ideal mother or a perfect moment for bringing a child into the world (in many cases there is no such moment). The difficulties and the problems are part of daily life. It is impossible to banish pain, insecurity, sadness and danger from our lives. However, it is one thing to be sad about something and quite another to feel ground down by it. It is one thing to feel a rational kind of insecurity, one which presupposes our acceptance of the fact that we cannot control everything, and quite another to feel that we are at a dead end. Our bodies react in accordance with the way we take in and interpret events, not the events themselves. Here I would like to strongly emphasise the fact that our assimilation of events – which, as I have already said and will go on to show through a number of different clinical cases, determines the way in which we are affected by them – does not always take place on a conscious level.
When we consider the defenceless baby in its mother’s womb and the fact that it is fed by its mother’s emotions – emotions that are converted into biochemical changes, and other things besides – then we can understand just how important the mother’s responses to the realities around her are.
Perhaps we should pause for a moment and consider an obvious fact: we do not bring children into the world to fill gaps in ourselves or our social lives. Children are not fashion accessories. Neither can they seal the cracks in a marriage that is on the rocks. When they are used as tools to satisfy other purposes than their own existence, this fact is recorded in their system as a violation, with serious consequences for the child’s development. The adage ‘like attracts like’ could not be truer in this case. Every experience has its own energy. One trauma, in terms of energy, will attract another trauma, and one violation will always draw another in its wake. Energy-wise, victims of rape attract their assailants, who have the energy of rapists. In the same way, phobic individuals attract the energy of psychopaths.
PATIENT: Now I can understand why in every grade of junior and senior high school there was at least one teacher who made passes at me… The word ‘victim’ was written all over my face and I was the only one who couldn’t see it.
V. Ch.: Let me put it differently… you weren’t the only one who didn’t see it. The only people who saw it were potential violators. It is they who have the ability to pick out victims.
The first part of this dialogue was spoken by a woman who suffered her first violation in her own home, at the hands of the person who should have given her security: her own father. From that moment on, right up until the time she was healed, there was not a single school or workplace she found herself in where she was not assaulted by at least one other person. It is a well-known fact that, in the majority of cases, rape victims have a history of being raped.
Sexual harassment, it should be stressed, is not the only way in which an individual’s personal boundaries can be violated. Our personal boundaries are not firmly fixed from the moment of our birth. They are built through relationships which respect our individuality as children and, through the respect shown for our personal rate of development, at each individual