My journey in therapy began, when I was 32 years old—now, I am 58 years old. I entered therapy during a family crisis, which I describe in the scream “don't tell the truth” because I experienced anxiety that I no longer wanted to numb with Valium. Two years earlier, I had read Alice Miller's "For Your Own Good," which had shocked me and made me feel as if something that I had always know deep inside could connect with my consciousness. To this day, it is the book that has influenced and changed my life the most. Reading it gave me the hope that I could grow and change through psychoanalysis.
During those first 18 months of therapy, I worked with a psychoanalyst, Allen Siegel, who wrote “Heinz Kohut and the Psychology of the Self.” I felt understood and opened up as my feelings came alive, as I describe in “walls” and “if you do something for yourself.” He was open for my feelings and the pain and damage, which devastating separations had played in my childhood. He was not afraid of my anxiety, fears and feelings. But already during those first months of therapy. I had a dream about my father "accepting the truth" which expressed the trauma of incest that I had suffered through my father. We never looked at and questioned this dream. He was afraid to face the truth.
After my return to Germany, a painful crisis asked me to confront my first marriage and I started to write therapy by myself in a four-step concept of primal therapy introduced by a Swiss therapist. My writing enabled me to get in touch with my needs and gave me the strength not only to acknowledge and to stand up for them but also make them come true when I considered them vitally important. My needs took me out of my first marriage and away from my family and Germany.
When I fell passionately in love at 45, my writing alone could not help me anymore. Overwhelmed by anxiety, unable to sleep, I went back to my first analyst. It helped to be able to talk and feel understood. I could sleep again, and fall in love. But he could not help me deal with debilitating fights, or fighting voices, in my mind, and the tension and confrontations inside, all of which paralyzed me. After 2 years, a dream told me that I had to leave him. In that dream, I felt anger at Alice Miller for sending me twice into therapeutic "parking places" -- as my dream described the two forms of therapy that she had recommended and that had not provided me the self-confidence that I had longed for. Those "parking places" had helped me along for a while, with certain problems, and I had gained a lot of inner and outer freedom. But still I was a victim of my anxiety and suffering and still felt like a prisoner of my childhood. At first, the psychoanalyst suggested counseling for our therapeutic relationship. But my inside said a clear “no” to the voice on the answering machine of the therapist who was supposed to help us.
Allen Siegel was supportive and accepting while I looked for a new therapist, and we continued our sessions until I found two therapists in the fall of 1997. One was Richard Schwartz, who created the IFS model and has written “Internal Family Systems Therapy”. The other was Gina Demos, a Dance Movement therapist. I chose Dick to help me deal with the fights in my mind, and Gina to develop a relationship with my body and movement. I worked with both of them for 6 years. The work was at times extremely hard, yet amazing and fascinating. In the beginning, my body and soul said a clear YES to working with these two therapists.
I learned to see those “voices in my head”, or certain beliefs and emotional states that I carried, as parts of me—like inner entities that don’t go away because I don’t like them or because I know that they are not who I truly am. Although I don’t like them, they are still a part of me that is there for a reason, put there by traumatic, painful childhood experiences. Will power did not help to fight strange ideas in my head or bothersome, frightening feelings in my gut.
My so-called internalized mother, for example, continued for years to live within me as her way of thinking or as her beliefs that tortured and intimidated me through agonizing guilt feelings. At the same time, my reactions to her when I was a child still live inside of me too, sadness, anger, protest. Sometimes, when I reacted like that in the presence, it also was not what I really wanted to do or who I longed to be. I learned to check very carefully very intense, overwhelming feelings. Dick Schwartz sees the Self as a conductor of a big orchestra where the changed and liberated parts work together with the conductor, the Self, to “make music”—to live, and also to help those places inside that are still confused and hurting.
I also worked with a massage therapist who did Cranio-Sacral and Somato-Emotional Release massage therapy. This very gentle massage provided me the deepest form of physical and mental relaxation, which was most helpful after difficult therapy sessions. If pain or a memory would come up in a body part or through the body, I could talk about it and cry. Cranio-Sacral Therapy helped my body and mind deal with my work in Internal Family Systems Therapy where the incest finally could surface, and also the horror that my mother tried to kill me as a small child.
I learned to talk to parts and to physical symptoms. The most dramatic memory of that was an evening when I had very passionate sex with my second husband. In this marriage, my body came more and more alive the more I trusted my husband and our relationship. I was about to fall asleep, when a violent headache seized me. Too tired to write, I talked to it and asked it why it was there. The clear and unmistakable answer was that my father had committed incest with me, when I was 16 years old, traveling with him by boat to America. I could not deal with this information and asked it to wait until the next therapy session. I was moved when I read in Dorothy Lewis’ book “Guilty by Reason of Insanity,” how strong headaches are a sign in people with multiple personalities when they are switching into another personality. I have also noticed that I experience anxiety when parts have opposite agendas and fight over them.
The other devastating memory became clear during months of depression, marked by anxiety and sleeplessness—very well know symptoms during all of my life. During a culminating two-week period, I felt I was going crazy. It was my worst time in therapy. As I struggled to survive, the terrified part communicated that my mother had tried to shove something down my throat when I was a very small child, and almost had killed me. I realized that a child could never integrate such a horrendous experience. To figure out my feelings and what had happened was an immense task even for my adult mind that was flooded with the unthinkable terror, confusion, and deadly fear.
From then on I understood deeply why I had felt like paralyzed and absolutely powerless and voiceless with my mother. Every cell of my body remembered her as the greatest danger in my life—of which I had not been aware until I re-experienced this hell. My courage and strength grew after that in ways I had always longed for but that had seemed unattainable. I finally began to write my book and could publish it. A dream of 20 years could be fulfilled.
The impact of these two experiences with both of my parents went beyond that of the other child abuse I had experienced. During a time when my foot was impaired, and I dealt with issues of standing up for myself and standing securely on my own two feet, my foot asked in one therapy session to make the sculpture that is on the cover of my book. It asked me to honor and express my compassion with the small child and the teenager who suffered so unimaginably. They survived these deeply traumatizing encounters with a parent whom they deeply trusted, but their life-energy and spirit was zapped from them. My work in therapy claimed them back: “revisiting the queen mary—at the scene of the crime.”
Today, I see parts a clusters of feelings, thoughts, and/or beliefs, and I know that they may take on those of the abuser or perpetrator. They did not go away when I judged or condemned them if I did not like what they thought or believed. I learned to talk with them, trying to understand them. Then they would tell their stories, why they believed what they believed, why they carried certain feelings and fears. Dick Schwartz puts them into three categories: managers, firefighters, and exiles. In my work, we never “classified” parts. We just listened with compassion to what they needed to share and always, in a moving, beautiful part of my work with him, helped them leave their hell and places of terror and anguish, and change by taking them in a healing light.
By thinking of this light, I could internally recognize the emotional and physical reality of that part. Sometimes I saw the child in chains, or terrified hidden away, or I felt I had iron balls around every cell of my body that stopped my cells from swinging and vibrating freely. I visualized how the light melted the iron balls and my cells became free; how I would take the children that I found, away from my parents and out of their misery. I often accuse the parents and even tell them that they don’t deserve to have this child with them.
I or the light always say encouraging, tender, loving things to the child and change the sad image of the physical or emotional state I am in into an image of freedom and hope. It was and is great fun for me, to change dark, frightening inner scenarios, full of suffering. It is as if I can leave behind a trap, where I had been stuck as a victim, and can move on with newfound knowledge, wisdom, clarity and freedom. I don’t consider this a manipulation of my feelings, or of me. To me, it was a meaningful act of creating love for the child or the body. They had never heard encouraging, tender, loving words, and they had not known love, support, and true hope. It also made my present reality conscious to me because that reality was no longer the nightmare of the child—where my part had been caught.
Yet, in the end, I felt that both therapists were not truly on my side. They never asked me to forgive. They showed compassion for my suffering and fate. They never ‘analyzed’ or judged me. But I left my work with them after feeling deeply betrayed and because of a dream:
I am in my dance therapist’s office. At first in my dream, I am on the floor to show what it was like and felt like to be caught in the dark. I am crawling around on the floor and don’t know a way out. At first, I loose my voice and suddenly I cannot talk anymore; nothing can come out of me anymore. (I have experienced this feeling as if my throat and chest become paralyzed and I cannot talk anymore in several dreams and in real life, too. Especially when I am deeply moved and from deep within me my truth and my feelings arise and grow and need to be expressed.)
The same thing happens at first with my therapist Gina. But in my dream I rise from the floor and begin to speak up—my truth and my feelings—passionately, upright, erect, and self-confident. I am moving in her office in a very alive way and support what I say strongly with my gestures and movements. I tell her that I will end working with both therapists. I tell her that I was caught with them in illusions, in the ideology of giving and giving—but not empowered to think of myself, to truly respect my own true feelings and needs, take them seriously, to follow and to fulfill them. The most moving moment of the dream is when I get up, and walk upright, high, self-confident and passionately through Gina’s office, and talk in the same way.
Both therapists had not truly worked with their own childhoods and I also noticed a spirituality in them that I was not comfortable with and that seemed to cover their unresolved suffering. I think if a therapist represses his/her own childhood abuse and trauma, he or she cannot truly liberate the client out of the jail of childhood. The therapist remains a prisoner of childhood, and the client, too.
It was as if their fear of true liberation kept also me entangled. As if I did not dare to "come out." My dream showed me that I needed to make a step into life that I obviously was finally ready for but which they were not capable of. It is scary and difficult for me to realize that I have outgrown a relationship, when I truly respect, love, and appreciate the other.
When I ended my work with these two therapists, I had a strong, very painful sense of betrayal. I had hoped that my work would make me ‘self-confident.’ But struggling with too many emotions and parts, I felt held back, financially exploited, and I was exhausted and physically impaired through an ailing foot. This foot became to me like the sensor of how my fight for independence and self-confidence—for walking and standing up for myself, for my goals, my dreams, and my needs—was going.
In my work with my parts, it is amazing and fascinating how they tell me their deeply moving origin— even those that I do not like or that terrify me. Here is the link to a written therapy with my self-hatred, which deeply moved and changed me. What was called multiple personalities, or now is labeled as dissociative identities, is to me just a harsher breaking apart of the mind than how I experienced different states in my mind that I could not integrate.
When I think how peaceful my mind is now, most of the time, and that I can help myself when strong feelings, or even anxiety bother me, I know that I have accomplished what I longed for when I entered therapy. Working with my “parts” gave me the courage to write and publish my book, which I wanted to do for 20 years.
There were and are different levels where I wanted and needed to grow. My feelings needed to come alive, I had to understand and learn intellectually about what abuse is and what it does to the child. Then I needed to get in touch with my needs, and then I had to help my “parts”. And maybe there is more to come, I don’t know. With strong feelings, I always check if and/or how they are connected to my childhood. And in the end, my inner dialogue decides if, and how, I act on that feeling, especially in a relationship.
In the beginning of therapy, I wanted to overcome my debilitating anxiety and not depend on drugs anymore. But when I changed and opened towards life, new issues from the past would arise and still do. That I am able to help myself, that I am no longer at the mercy of anxiety, even if it arises, gives me a comforting sense of independence and freedom. And should I need support again, I would look for it.
Therapy gave me the power to break away from my past that no longer can run and rule my life, my feelings and actions. It empowered me to have an understanding, open, caring dialogue with what is going on inside of me, be it with my feelings, my thoughts, my needs, or my body. It allowed me to find and live the values that define me today, and to leave the destructive beliefs of my parents truly behind me. I could build the loving relationships I always longed for, while I learned at the same time to protect my boundaries, nurture my dreams, and become supportive of my needs and well-being.
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"My therapeutic journey" was written in 2005, but it was only in 2007 that I fully and truly understood why I felt so betrayed by my last two therapists. It was so strong that I felt the need to write a letter to both of them, which I did, to express my disappointment, my questions and my realizations. I know today that it is imperative that therapists work to confront their own childhoods and feelings in order to get in touch with and live their true, geniine needs. Helpful reading at alice-miller.com are her "questions to a therapist."
Although the two letters were different, the last paragraph was the same for both therapists and it said:
"When I think of my work with you, I feel as if I have been in a nightmare version of the parable of the “Good Samaritan.” You acknowledged my wounds, you seemed to pick me up and guide me on a path that promised self-confidence, health and freedom. But instead, I was misled back into the dark dungeon of childhood illusions where I was stuck and stumbled around in a maze of confusion and adoring gratitude for my “saviors.” Desperate for human compassion, meaningful guidance and a way out of the ravages of my childhood, I trusted two therapists who seemed to address my suffering. But it was an illusion that they were my saviors because my therapists were not on a path to leave that dungeon and that darkness behind; they did not know how to get out of it. The bandages and blinders of spiritual illusions and confusion, which they seemed helpfully to put around me, made me blind and powerless. I followed them on a path that took away my health, self-reliance and freedom. They did NOT guide me towards the power to protect my well-being and my interests."
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During my work for Alice Miller and her wbesite alice-miller.com, I have realized the importance of "Indignation as a Vehicle of Therapy," of expressing outrage and protest for the abused and neglected child, and of being able not only to realize where and how our childhood repeats itself in the present but also to protect ourselves from harmful repetitions of past self-destructive behaviors. Today, I use all forms of therapy, which I have experienced and learned, when things come up and trigger my past. I still write in several steps when I suffer greatly; I still talk with parts when I feel the need; I write angry letters that I do not send; I talk with my physical symptoms and feelings to understand them and empower them to tell me where I am not living true to myself and protective of myself. It seems to me today that with every form of therapy which I experienced, different problems were addressed that I suffered inside and in my realtionships. IFS addressed the dissociations that were the result of the severe traumas that I had endured and helped me deal with overwhelming (primal) feelings. As did the anger that I finally could express at those people that had hurt and harmed me, in the past and in my present life. I learned to understand and trust my feelings, but also to question them when I could see that they were unfair, unjust and stemming from my childhood.
Every step that I made into freedom and towards being on my side has protected my health, my well-being, my independence and autonomy. These changes were difficult and all painful, but eventually most liberating and rewarding. "Life is eternal change; penetrate through and find the peace beyond," is an inscription, which I once read. Therapy has empowered and enabled me to make changes in my life that I never could have dreamed of and never would have thought possible. They empowered me to live true to myself and the values, which I recognized as valid and important. This journey carried me far, far away from where I grew up, internally and geographically. In my biographical essay "Facing a Wall of Silence," published in 2001, I wrote: "I see my life as being in the service of overcoming silences, within me and around me." More and more, this need and passion have filled my life and in a new way now that I have begun my work as a therapist here in Mexico.
© Barbara Rogers
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Screams from Childhood
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