I was watching Piers Morgan’s “Life Stories” interview of Susan Boyle the other night.  She was talking about the horrendous bullying she suffered at school and how that had, in part, contributed to her determination to succeed as a way of proving her tormentors wrong.

People that are bullied feel bad about themselves.  They not only suffer the deep personal humiliation of the bullying, but they also feel bad about themselves for letting it happen in the first place.

Double Whammy

Being bullied is a double whammy: being bullied AND beating themselves up.  Isn’t that interesting; not only do they get beaten up, but they also beat themselves up.  Is there a link there?   Do they believe that it’s OK for them to get beaten up by themselves and others?

The answer to that question is, “Yes” – they do feel that it is OK to get beaten up by themselves and others.

Hurt and Engulfment

I’m sure that parents are doing the best job that they can, and I believe that different children in the same situation will make different decisions.

What I have noticed is that people that end up getting bullied felt hurt and engulfed by the things that their parents did to them as they were growing up.

Somehow people that end up getting bullied interpret their parents behaviour as a belief about themselves something like, “Good boys accept physical punishment as right and proper”.  There are two aspects to this belief: hurt and engulfment, and I believe these aspects have their roots in events that happened in infancy – before the brain had developed the capacity to remember things explicitly.

Primal Wounds

Primal Wounds are laid down in infancy (Neumann, 1973; Mahler, Pine and Bergman, 1975) and establish an early protocol for the way we interpret what is going on around us.  Hurt and Engulfment are two of these Primal Wounds (Stewart and Lee, 2010).

A Hurt Primal Wound leads to a hyper-alertness and a knee-jerk reaction to physical violence (not just violence aimed at you, it could be aimed at anyone – you might even get the knee-jerk response to something you’re watching on TV!).  If you have a Hurt Primal Wound, you will know what I’m talking about; you can’t miss it!  One effect of having a Hurt Primal Wound is that you get scared rather than angry if someone attacks you.  Another effect is that you internalise the behaviour, which leads to the behaviour of beating yourself up.

Engulfment Primal Wound is lot less easy to recognise.  There are a number of reasons for this.  By far the the biggest effect of having an Engulfment Primal Wound is that you don’t feel the need to get away from abusive people.  Another effect is that, not only do you not feel the need to get away from them, you actually feel obliged to be around them!

Because these Wounds come into being when we are infants, not only do we have no recollection of the original events that caused them, but we don’t know that we’ve got them unless it has been brought to our explicit attention!

Where Do I Go From Here?

Susan Boyle has found her solution to the problem, and she certainly deserves to have a happy life.  Unfortunately we can’t all be hugely successful celebrities!

So what’s the answer for the rest of us?

If you have been moved to make changes by reading this blog and you live in the Hinckley or Leicester areas, you can contact me on 07815 596 628.

I cannot promise you that these changes you want to make are quick and easy because they aren’t.  I will promise you that, if we do decide to work together, I will be with you every step of the way and I will stay in the process through thick and thin.

We humans sometimes seem to act as if we are the only animal on the planet. It’s almost as if we think nothing of bringing other species to the brink of extinction by taking away their habitat, and now it appears that our own survival may be under threat because of global warming.

This curious pattern is mirrored in all of us, because we all keep repeating self-destructive patterns of behaviour to a greater or lesser extent.

The reasons we keep repeating the self-destructive pattern can be found in our conscious and unconscious minds.

The Unconscious

It’s easy to think that our conscious mind is the whole mind, but that is a long way from reality. The fact is that most of our behaviour is motivated by feelings coming from the unconscious, and we can see extreme examples of this everywhere: binge drinking, morbid obesity, getting into debt, dangerous driving, etc.

So how is it that we all have at least mild levels of self-destructive patterns?

Unmet Needs

If a baby is hungry, uncomfortable, or feels threatened, she will cry. She has no awareness that Mummy is a separate person with her own needs – baby will make demands, and her cries will get louder and louder until Mummy does something about it.

If baby’s needs are not met, she experiences that as very traumatic – her very existence feels threatened.

Dissociation

One of the roles of the unconscious mind is to protect the conscious mind from traumatic experiences and memories, and so these threatening memories are walled-off from conscious awareness (this walling-off is called dissociation).

Characteristics of the Unconscious Mind

One of the chief characteristics of the unconscious that differentiates it from the conscious mind is it’s if-it’s-not-broken-don’t-fix-it nature. Whereas the conscious mind is constantly seeking to update and improve, the unconscious will tend to stumble upon something that works, and then never revisit it.

So the unconscious works in a very different way, and tends to find a way of dealing with something and sticking to it so that it can be quite difficult to change how we behave. As an adult we can get into a situation that our unconscious interprets as threatening in some way, our defences go up, and our conscious mind becomes blocked out by the dissociation. And so the pattern repeats.

It’s not that the unconscious mind is at fault for reacting in this way, it is a pattern that was laid down a long time ago and has never been updated.

The trick is to work out what triggers the dissociation, identify the behaviour and beliefs that are associated with the traumatic memory, and work out a plan of action to help you predict and avoid future eruptions. In the longer term, you will need to do healing work with the traumatised part to update the behaviour and beliefs that are associated with the trigger.

Beating Ourselves Up

What often happens instead is that we react to the trigger, don’t feel good about the way we have reacted, and then start to beat ourselves up. It’s a perfectly understandable reaction for the conscious mind, when it comes back online, to think, “Why did I react like that?”, but when you become aware of the unconscious mechanisms that drive this knee-jerk behaviour, we can see that beating ourselves up is not going to help that traumatised part.

Summary

Traumatic experiences in childhood can lead us to knee-jerk reactions in adulthood that don’t make sense to our own rational mind. The unconscious mind tends to operate on a if-it’s-not-broken-don’t-fix-it basis, so the beliefs and behaviour associated with these traumatic memories don’t get updated. The traumatic memories are dissociated, so when the trauma is reenacted in adult life we are not aware of why we react in the way we do and so, when the conscious mind comes back online, our own behaviour doesn’t make rational sense in retrospect.

When the knee-jerk reaction is self-destructive (as it usually is), we find ourselves repeating the same mistakes over and over.