Benjamin's Blog

I came across this fascinating article in the Independent recently - Divorce in the internet age: It’s complicated - To move on after a relationship ends, you need to be able to forget. But how can you when the internet has such a long memory?

This article brings up the pressing issues of boundaries in personal relationships.  In the digital era, we are confronted with a dizzyingly swiftly changing landscape in personal boundaries;  privacy has evaporated from the concept it once held a hundred years ago.  A thousand years ago, nothing much would change in a hundred years.  A thousand minutes from now, things will be changing as fast as they ever have in the history of human society.  What is this doing to our sense of personal boundaries and how does it affect the nervous system?

Relationships are built on the ability to connect from a place of separateness and health.  Only when I am whole in isolation, can I truly bring myself to relating.  But this ideal is almost never reached in the human condition, so we are encouraged to approximate.  To do this, successfully, society creates norms.  These become the boundaries of human experience within which we are encouraged to remain.  So monogamy seems to be such an idea in most cultures; perhaps strengthening the family unit and discouraging the random coupling and decoupling which could destroy the fragile fabric of an early civilization.  These external norms replace the need in ourselves to be perfectly self-regulating.  If we follow the rules, we are encouraged to believe, then everything will turn out fine.

To evolve from there, and therefore in effect to choose our own path (such as divorce, in this case) we need to find a way into the deeper truth of our own boundaries.  In trauma work we look at two layers of personal boundaries; one is internal and regulates what gets into and out of our deepest psychological and emotional core; and the other is external and governs the behaviour we allow and manifest.  Each has a two way function; we let stuff in, and we let stuff out.  It takes years in recovery to perfect these boundaries and to get them to a point of functioning healthily in the background, regulating our experience of ourselves and others.

The digital age can come crashing through these boundaries in a startling way.  Boundaries need time and practice to develop, and new experiences, new ways in which to have them assaulted, are too much too fast too soon for our finely calibrated systems.  We are stone age instruments in a fibre optic blizzard.

With trauma work, we always retreat to a baseline position of “slow down”.  It usually is the opposite of what the dysregulated nervous system is wanting to do.  So with digital communication, with email, with facebook, with twitter, and especially in time of stress and crisis, like a divorce, a retreat to a pre-digital era is most likely to nourish our prehistoric pace of nervous activation and discharge.

Benjamin Fry works across a range of services and media using personal, professional and scientific expertise to help people to a baggage-free life.  A published author, and a past columnist for The Times and Psychologies magazine, Benjamin is a social activist in mental health.  He founded Get Stable in 2010 to get effective treatment paid for by the state and his great passion is to bring treatment, which works, to all levels of society and across all severities of conditions.

Benjamin treats individuals in his Chelsea private practice and at his residential clinic, Khiron House, and can be contacted on 020 7589 0595.

The answer is yes, (or no) it doesn’t matter…

Relationships are the final frontier of mental health.  The journey to “should I take him back or not” begins a long time before with the loss of the self.   This loss comes from the incomplete process of the automatic response of the nervous system to threat in our environment, and usually starts in early childhood.

Trauma is the medical name for these incomplete nervous system processes, but when people hear the word in common language they think of events far more serious or obvious than they can usually locate in their own lives.  For hundreds of millions of years organisms have been refining their response to threat.  We are at a time in the evolution of that system when things have gone a bit wrong.  It may even become our ‘Darwinian Achilles heel’.

Our responses to threat are supposed to go smoothly through an arc from mild adrenaline response, to fight or flight, to freeze; and crucially back again.  The human system is the only one to get stuck and not be able to return.  This means that threats in childhood become frozen into the potential energy system of our bodies, like little unexploded bombs.  And there they sit, sometimes for decades, until something, or someone comes along to set them off again.  And that’s when the fun starts.

Nothing can trigger these explosions (or as we call them, trauma reactions) like another person, and of course particularly that special other person.  The problem is that these reactions are always themselves incomplete, and can indeed often restart the whole nervous system activation process because they themselves seem like a new threat.  So usually there is a repeating cycle of stimulating these very difficult experiences, which have been waiting around in the body (trauma is in the body and not in the event) just waiting to find a way out, but not completing them (which we call discharge).  So the experience itself becomes a trauma, and the original trauma gets refrozen.

Oddly, part of our experience of this is to like it.  We get magnetically drawn towards our trauma templates and trauma cycles.  The body knows what it wants to do, which is to discharge this energy, and unconsciously this innate wisdom takes us there.  These relationships we get stuck in which go round and round but never work are actually just manifestations of our trauma cycles trying to release over and over again and needing the trigger of the other person to do it.

Of course, that is not a healthy relationship.

Pia Mellody, one of the architects of health in relationship has a model of human behaviour which goes roughly as such; I’m born perfect, I get screwed up and don’t reach full maturity, I behave oddly as a result, so my relationships are a disaster.

The cure is to work on the relationship from the inside out, from the self with the self, rather than with the other.  Only then can I bring myself next to another from a position of health.  Then I will be triggered into my own trauma (guaranteed) but I will deal with it in my own psychological and physical space, and not try to use the other person to medicate my reaction.

That work on the self, and the trauma reduction work specifically, freeing us by completing trauma and stress cycles, is the work that we do at Khiron House.  Watching people’s relationships blossom as a result is one of the most gratifying fruits of our labour, but you only get there through doing the hard inner work first, during and after.

So in this case, the answer to the lady’s question is “yes, or no, it doesn’t matter; what’s important is how you take care of yourself and the work you do to free your body from the acculumlated energy which this relationship is triggering.”

Benjamin Fry works across a range of services and media using personal, professional and scientific expertise to help people to a baggage-free life.  A published author, and a past columnist for The Times and Psychologies magazine, Benjamin is a social activist in mental health.  He founded Get Stable in 2010 to get effective treatment paid for by the state and his great passion is to bring treatment, which works, to all levels of society and across all severities of conditions.

Benjamin treats individuals in his Chelsea private practice and at his residential clinic, Khiron House, and can be contacted on 020 7589 0595.

A recent article published in the Guardian discussed how Jasmine Harman’s mother’s obsession with hoarding was having a hugely negative impact on their lives…

In trauma theory we work a great deal to manage the transition in the nervous system and in the body, from the sympathetic nervous system to the parasympathetic nervous system.  The difference between these two nervous systems is that the sympathetic nervous system activates our response to threat, and the parasympathetic nervous system regulates our response to being in environments where there are no threats.  So when we’re treating people who struggle with making this transition naturally (who we might call ‘dysregulated’) we look to find internal ways to make a person feel like they’re in an environment in which they have, what we would call, resources, because a resource is the opposite of a threat.

When this internal architecture is not in place, people will look to all kinds of external crutches on which to rest their difficulty in regulating their nervous system.  Many of us are familiar with the most usual suspects; drink, drugs, sex, gambling, relationships, food etc.  However the same dynamic can be manifest in many more weird and wonderful ways.

Hoarding is very often simply a way for a person to gather around them as much as possible of what physically feels like a resource.  In this case, every single object in Vasoulla Harman’s home will have an association, a memory,  a smell, a relationship; something that feels like security rather than a threat.  If you remove all of those objects from around that person all they are left with is the reality of their own dysregulated nervous system, and from that place their only experience in life will be of responding to threat.

So, the reason that they gather all manner of things that makes no sense to anyone else, is that they begin from a place in which they live in an incredibly uncomfortable personal biology.  Looking at the bigger picture, in general in our lives all battling behaviour from alcoholism to hoarding can be explained in terms of understanding the individuals difficulty with regulating their nervous system, in the absence of these other interventions or behaviours.

So what this person needs before she’s confronted about removing resources from her home is professional help to expand the resources within her internal psychological architecture.  This work can be done with excellent results by a nervous system specialist.

Benjamin Fry works across a range of services and media using personal, professional and scientific expertise to help people to a baggage-free life.  A published author, and a past columnist for The Times and Psychologies magazine, Benjamin is a social activist in mental health.  He founded Get Stable in 2010 to get effective treatment paid for by the state and his great passion is to bring treatment, which works, to all levels of society and across all severities of conditions.

Benjamin treats individuals in his Chelsea private practice and at his residential clinic, Khiron House, and can be contacted on 020 7589 0595.

Maria and Simon Paxton recently declared in the Mail On-line that they were so much closer now they were divorced.  How can this be?

Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that “hell is other people”.  Well there is no greater hell in another than a broken relationship.  So why would a divorced couple get on better when not married?  The answer is quite simple if you understand trauma theory.

Every experience has two components; firstly a “trigger” and then a “reaction”.  Much of what we do in our trauma work therapy is to firstly identify the difference, and then to work on the nervous system to calm the reaction.  So the first step is to actually know that there are two factors involved.  Two.  Sound familiar?

In every relationship this dynamic is mirrored.  The “other” of Satre fame is my trigger, and my trauma reservoir feeds my reaction, which if strong enough feels like “hell”.  The unending dynamic of relationship is trigger and reaction, trigger and reaction, trigger and reaction.  Now when we add in the romantic and domestic element of a relationship, we add fuel to this fire of reactivity.

Much of the experience of a close relationship, like a marriage, is a suspension of disbelief that we are now “safe”.  This security allows us to access vulnerabilities which were previously just too overwhelming to permit.  In some ways, therefore, we become less stable, not more, when we feel firmly held in a loving bond.  This can be seen as a relief; we can stop holding on (there is even a film about this called “waiting to exhale”).

However, the problem is that this letting go results in us accessing even more reactivity, which results in us blowing up even more and even bigger to the same triggers as before.  That’s why we usually have our biggest rows (and if we’re honest often show our worst behaviour) with the people we love the most.  Lovers quarrel in a way that people who just know each other a bit never do.  Love, and the activity of being “in” love, turns up the dial on our reactions to the triggers coming from the loved one.

So when we fall out of love, take a break and then meet again years later, the other person hasn’t changed (they still provide the same “triggers”), but we just don’t react so much anymore.  We are not so open to them, and therefore not so bothered.  In fact, we might say something like “I can’t believe I used to…”

There is another layer to this too.  Just by not being “in” love anymore, we remove not only our reactivity, but also many of our triggers.  We tend to project a great deal of stuff onto those we love, the residue of unfinished business with our first love objects (usually parents), and so we are actually manufacturing much of the content of the triggers too, not just our reactions to them.  Being “out” of love tends to fracture these projections and hence calm down the supposed triggers.

Love needs real skill and self-knowledge to navigate.  We work on boundaries to bring reality to our triggers, and on trauma reduction to calm down our reactions.  Then “other people” can be our heaven, because we return our own biology to where it was meant to be, an Eden of self-regulation.

Few things seem to ruffle Simon Cowell’s feathers, but his recent home invasion got to him.

Home is the perfect metaphor for the intra-psychic search for somewhere in the body which feels safe.  We live in topsy-turvy bodies which have lost the capacity to “regulate” themselves.  The complexity of the human system has caused a breakdown in communication between at least two large parts of the biological system, and as a result we can often feel out of control.

Feeling in control is how we counteract this systemic problem in our species, and coming “home” is one way in which we like to do this.  In trauma work, we often talk of a person coming “home” when they begin to develop the capacity to re-exist inside the “container” of the biology of their own bodies.  This means that they are not too much for themselves.  A baby needs a mother to hold him or her when distressed but an adult can most of the time contain him or herself, if they have a healthy nervous system without too much of a trauma reservoir.

For those of us carrying a lot of baggage, our reactivity means that we can not contain ourselves.  So we look to external agencies to do this for us; people, relationships, behaviours and chemicals will often do.  But nothing is more sacred than that place we try to come back to for safety and recovery.  In our modern culture we have made this our physical house, our home; but in the spiritual traditions and architectures which run much further into the history of human thinking, our home is a place within, a place which we have lost due to the accumulated effects of untreated trauma (or simply unfinished stress cycles).

This can be more easily addressed and cured now than at any point in modern history.  Contact Us now and allow us to help you come home.

A comment on Twitter this week led me to the article in the Daily Mail headed

“Who needs to talk when you look like that! Bikini-clad Kate Upton speaks just seven words in new ad to plug American satellite provider”.

The connection with trauma?  Well, once you understand the nervous system, you can understand a lot about human behaviour.

The nervous system has two branches; the sympathetic and the parasympathetic.  These are real things like my right and left arm.  The sympathetic is in “sympathy” with the threats in your local environment and it regulates the excitement in the body.  The parasympathetic regulates relaxation.

In most animals these things work pretty well, like our own heart and lungs, and they go about their lives flowing naturally from excitation to relaxation, in syncc with their environment and activities (like hunting or being hunted).  In the human being, things have got a bit off whack.

The complexity of our brains is such that we have lost the capacity to recover from an overload of the sympathetic nervous system (such overload often referred to as “trauma”).  This means that we are stuck in an “on” phase of the sympathetic nervous system, even if we appear to be calm; actually we are in the “freeze” response, not calm at all.

As a result our nervous system is “dysregulated” and so we spend all of our time trying to avoid being sent through the roof into the top gear of the sympathetic nervous system, and then the rest of our time trying to recover by trying to trigger the parasympathetic nervous system.  What this looks like is (a) controlling our environment, and (b) seeking pleasure.

So, as you already know, it all comes down to money and sex.  All we are really doing most of the time is trying to control our world and reduce its impact on our out of control biology.

And men know this, so they will sell you either (a) more money, or (b) more sex.  Neither message needs an essay; a pretty girl and an offer at £9.99 will do.

Delighted that Addictions Today magazine decided to publish my article.  It isn’t easy to read the colourful pdf so here’s the copy.  It’s quite long but I hope you’ll find it interesting…

 Background

I was in the grips of what would classically be called a nervous breakdown a few years ago, and as a psychotherapist myself, I was naturally highly resistant to thinking that I was in any way mentally ill.  I thought I was just a little bit worried.  In fact, I was descending into a near psychotic state of anxiety, masking depressive episodes, and looking back on it was clearly very, very ill.

Over and over a friend, who was a psychotherapist who specialised in addiction, would tell me that I had to go to the Meadows in Arizona for help.  My reaction to this at the time was probably coloured by my opinion that she was in general just a little bit over keen on this institution, which had helped her as a patient considerably; in fact I probably thought that if I called her up and told her that I had lost my dog, the advice would also be to go to the Meadows.  In this case though she recommended it for trauma.  I knew I needed help for trauma, but why would I go to a rehab for that?

Unfortunately I became so ill that it didn’t matter much what the rhyme or reason for getting help was, I wasn’t going to survive without it.  I had exhausted the private and state options in the UK without success, so the Meadows seemed like the last throw of the dice.  Much against the prevailing opinion of both my family and the one I came from, I dropped myself tranquilised and hysterical onto a plane to Phoenix.

What is Trauma

A little ironically perhaps, it wasn’t actually the Meadows were I got well.  They have a little after-care unit called Mellody House (named after Pia Mellody who founded much of the clinical work at both) which they advertise as extended care for trauma.

I went there with a friend who had been through the primary programme with me; he was on his fourth rehab for drug addiction, and I was newly medicated into some kind of stable state of mind.  We went through exactly the same programme in primary treatment, and exactly the same programme in extended care.  I saw him last weekend and he was doing really well; as I hope am I.  So this raises the question, what has a drug addict got in common with a florid neurotic, and why would the same treatment programme get them both so well?

Rather boringly these days, my answer to almost any question (see lost dog example above) is always the same too; trauma.  I have become a benign zealot in the wake of these experiences, my subsequent learning and clinical practice.  Trauma has become a well-thumbed noun these days in acute mental health and addiction care, but the word is bandied around a little too freely.  As a diagnosis, or even treatment plan, it can point to many places in its current wide-ranging use.  However trauma does have a definition, and it doesn’t come from a description of behaviour, or in a proscription for care.

The Body Knows

The first thing you need to know about trauma is that it is in the body, and not in the event.  Trauma is a biological process, independent of our minds, and even our species.  Almost everything you need to know about the bio-medical aspects of trauma, and how they relate to the human condition can be found in Peter Levine’s book “In An Unspoken Voice”, which summarises his 45 years of research on the topic.  His clinical conclusions from this work were the foundation stone of the treatment protocol at Mellody House.

Peter Levine began his academic career with a doctorate on medical neurobiology and has concerned himself during much of his research with the behaviour of animals as they flex their stress response in the wild; preying on and being preyed upon.  His work is grounded in common factors across mammals and other species, and the bio-medical systems of organisms over millions of years of evolution.  Coming from a background in psychotherapy, it makes a nice change from “tell me about your mother/father”.

There is much less subjectivity in the topic when it gets grounded in some fairly basic science.  The application of the treatment it implies remains somewhat of an art, but at least the discussion of the theory behind it gets more and more grounded the further you go into the specifics of the biology of trauma.

The Unfinished Cycle

Taking a mechanistic view of the body (you can forget the mind for now), we can quite easily begin to see where the problem lies, for both mental health sufferers and addicts.

When a biological system responds to threat, in our case through the reptilian brain in the brain stem, or from the mid-brain limbic system, much of our response to this threat is hard wired.  Our pro-frontal cortex at the top of the head (the place where we do our thinking, and often our therapy) is not required.

Our response to threat will go through different phases, which correspond themselves to different phases of complexity in evolution.  At the most benign level, we engage with threat socially, like at a UKESAD dinner, testing who is friend and who is foe.  If voices are raised across the room, we might escalate to our adrenalin response, a preparation perhaps for a full blown reaction.  Once furniture starts flying, we will move quickly into the “fight or flight” response, which is a highly activated state of physical intelligence.  We are ready to fight for our life, or if we judge this to be a losing strategy, to run for our life.  In this response, the body is running its own show, hardwired from evolution to engage only with the lower parts of our brain.  The cognition, the pre-frontal cortex, is largely parked in neutral.

From this place of super-activation, we can go one step further.  If all the doors are blocked, and our assailants armed with multiple machine guns, we will become aware of the hopelessness of both fight and flight, and move in an instant to “freeze”.  We often talk about dissociation, or being out of our bodies.  Addicts will often relapse in this fog, reporting that it was almost as if someone else was doing it.  This seems inconvenient, but in that initial moment of self-protection, the freeze response was a vital defence against a terminal overload of the nervous system.

Animals which survive such a stage of being attacked in the wild can recover.  If their predator is distracted and does not kill them, the frozen prey will emerge from this biological stasis, and begin to recover its vital functions.  Over and over again Levine observed this process; and every time it was a natural reversal of the biological stepping stones which led to it.

Coming out of freeze brings us right back to fight or flight, and through the discharge of this energy back to a calm, regulated place for our nervous system and latent threat response.  Polar bears can do it, bunnies can do it, impalas can do it; we can’t.  We seem to have a problem with running around like a wild animal in the throes of self-defence, when we are in fact minding our own business at a bus stop, alone on a wet Wednesday afternoon.  That extra piece of our brain, the wonderful verbal meaning-making pro-frontal cortex gets in the way.

When I am discharging energy from a frozen fight/flight response and I’m just sitting in a safe place with safe people, I feel pretty silly.  But I used to find it terrifying, and impossible.  In fact I had to learn to do it all over again; I had lost the natural arc of letting my body return to health years ago, probably in infancy.  The consequences of losing this birth right of my nature have been severe.

The Effects of Unfinished Business

Imagine all of that energy trapped inside me, struggling to get out, unable to stay in or to leave.  That would be pretty uncomfortable.  Then imagine getting a big cattle prod and sending an electric shock into the middle of that unexploded bomb.  That’s what trauma is like, both when dormant, and when activated.

In its resting state, it will simply dysregulate my nervous system, so that my response to threat is either constant, or binary (on/off rather than proportionate).  This leaves me highly reactive, and is a cornerstone of mania and anxiety.  To compensate, I may sink from this sympathetic nervous system response into the place where my body is programmed to spend time at rest, the para-sympathetic nervous system; and when I overdo this, it will look like lethargy, despair and depression.

When this background dysregulation is hit by a specific trigger, all hell typically breaks loose.  The pressure on my system to discharge this energy may only be matched by the resistance to the danger of this discharge signalled by the parts of my brain that prefer to stay in control.  It is this tug of war between the pro-frontal cortex and the limbic system that keeps me in a place of extreme biological discomfort and might lead to other people treating me like an unexploded bomb, at best.  Sound familiar?

What It Does To Us

Over a few thousand years, humankind has become quite adept at coping with biological dysregulation, which is epidemic in our species.  Since it is a biochemical problem, introducing chemicals into the biology can be a great temporary cure; so drink, drugs, food and medicine have all become popular choices.  But external chemicals aren’t the only way to change my biology; sex, love, fantasy, gambling, risk, intensity, these are all great ways to change my relationship with my body, my nervous system and my biology.

The other great escape is to recreate the initial conditions of the trauma itself.  This sounds paradoxical, but actually if your limbic system is sending constant alarm bells into your cognitive system telling you that there is great danger, right now, in your body, then getting into an environment, or a relationship, or an activity which matches these non-verbal signals is a great relief; often it’s the only time when a person with trauma feels “whole”.  Hence, “I know he’s bad for me, but it just feels so right, etc. ad nauseam.”

Of course, if it works the relief is tremendous, and the desire to return to it can be overwhelming.  Couple this with an addictive nature, genetic predisposition, or whatever else you subscribe to as the pre-conditions for an active addiction, and the outcome is guaranteed, with all of the ensuing problems we know about.  There is much work to be done on the behavioural choices when faced with biological dysregulation, and the cognitive activity that goes along with so much unexpressed energy, but the real cure, if you like, is to work from the bottom up, removing the drive for all of this in the first place.  That’s whyy both me and my roommate got well in treatment, me from my anxiety and him from his addiction;  we both had the same fundamental problem, addressed by the same fundamental treatment, even though our more complex functions expressed this problem in different behavioural and cognitive ways.

And What To Do About It

The first injunction of Peter Levine is to go slowly.  Our resistance to resolving our trauma is due to the way that this discharge itself overwhelms us and pushes us back into a trauma response, so you can’t rush it.  Once that is established, the key idea is to simply allow the body to do what it needs to do, and to get the brain largely out of the way.  This is obviously much harder done than said.

You can start the process as simply as with a book.  A well-known addiction therapist recently said to me that he had lost count of the number of clients who had read Peter Levine’s first book “Waking The Tiger” and immediately felt better about themselves.  There is a lot of shame reduction in understanding the biology of behaviour, and on a deeper level, the more the cognitive brain knows about the process the less it will resist the body’s instinct to resolve trauma.

Therapeutically there are a number of body-based systems of psychotherapy (usually guiding the awareness into the body rather than touching it), and Levine’s, Somatic Experiencing, is one of them.  In its most basic form, it is an invitation to the client to become aware of the sensations in his or her body, much like Gendlin’s focusing, and then to track this “felt sense”.

If a client has a difficult sensation, or thought or feeling, then the idea is to “pendulate” from here to a much safer sensation, memory or feeling; and to iterate this process a number of times.  So for example when I am working with a client cognitively (which is my training) and they mention that they are feeling something in their body, I will pause to check that out.

Me:        so just take a moment to notice that sensation

Client:   my chest feels really tight

Me:        see if you can just be with that feeling without trying to change it and let me know what happens next, if anything.

If this resolves itself, then you can move on, if not, you might like to bring the client back to a safe place, either in their body or via an external resource

Me:        is there a place in your body which feels good right now?

Client:   no

Me:        can you think of a place, or a memory which helps you to feel good/safe/in control?

Client:   yes, my uncle’s cabin in the woods.

And help them to transition their felt-sense back to something which promotes an internal feeling of security.  This can then be gently and carefully iterated if necessary.  The key is to just offer a brief window into what the body is trying to express.  It is not necessary to try to do all of the work which a trained practitioner might do with these techniques.

Just this simple idea has allowed so many of my sessions with clients to stop cycling around a series of baffling ideas, and to begin to ground in the resolution of a discharge of somatic energy.  If this works for a client, or they seem to get something from it, I will often recommend that they go to see a specialist in this work.

This got so frequent in my practice once I returned from treatment and began working again that I actually set up my own residential clinic in the UK, modelled on Mellody House, to make this work available for the people who, like I did, continue to suffer so much with so little effective help.

The body is a vast resource of untapped intelligence in treatment.  Addiction is usually a compulsion to medicate.  This work allows a route into the source dysfunction which requires the medicine.  Resolution in that place can be life-long and life changing.  I recommend it!

Benjamin Fry set up Khiron House in Oxfordshire and London offering extended care for mental health disorders and addiction.  www.khironhouse.com

I came across this interesting blog about an article in the latest issue of Vogue and thought I’d share it with you…

http://www.buzzfeed.com/amyodell/what-happens-when-moms-tell-their-daughters-theyr

Killer: Karl Burman, 24, right, chopped up pregnant Shauna Lee's, left, body before dumping her remains in a wheelie bin

Fall out from disappointing relationships can take many forms.  The sudden and violent nature of their reversal is a surprising phenomena and yet the oldest narrative of human society.  But what drives this terrible dysfunction?

A part of every relationship is an entry into fantasy.  The more traumatized we have been in our earliest relationships, the more fantasy we invest in our adult ones; we are both frightened by relationships and desperate to find that long lost early ideal one.  So we create an illusion so that we can survive and this is what is commonly known as ‘the honeymoon period’.

This will wear off as reality intervenes and at that point we all suffer.  The more broken our relationships were as children, the more we will suffer the boomerang effect of having our fantasies reduced to the reality of normal human suffering and dysfunction in relationships.  Thus the virgin becomes the whore overnight, and the rage that this can bring up is a reflection of the pain of the original separation, a dissorganised attachment to the original care giver, usually the mother.

In this case Karl Burman probably had a fantasy that he now had that one person he needed to make his world work (a projection of his mother) but what she really wanted was a real child (and in this case two) and so the abandonment of his infancy was felt all over again, but this time the infantile rage came with an adult’s body.  With deadly effect.

The path to healthy relationships lays in reducing the effect of past traumas, particularly from early childhood, and in learning to keep the adult experience in the present.  An indespensable guide to this can be found in Pia Mellody’s book ‘The Intimacy Factor’.

Much of the drama of life comes from the combination of two separate factors.  Firstly we are all familiar with the experiences that confront us in what we might call the real world.  In trauma theory we would call these triggers.  They are the real events which confront us in our life; in this case perhaps the split from her previous boyfriend, but could equally be something as benign as a sharp word, a familiar smell or someone’s overwhelming personality.

The second part of our life’s drama comes from our reaction to this trigger.  In trauma theory we understand that as we go through life with unfinished reactions to prior events, we accumulate a defecit of unfinished business.  This becomes our trauma reservoir, which can be like an unexploded bomb.  So when a trigger hits the bomb, there is an explosion.  That partly explains why two identical situations affect people in such different ways; the triggers can be the same, but not the reactions, because each person carries their own unique set of unfinished reactions to prior events.

Mostly our response to this is to seek to gain some kind of control over triggers.  If we are reactive, then we want to be triggered less.  That’s common sense and makes our lives more bearable.  In this case, Charlotte appears to have taken the popular idea that if “I just look right then I’ll be ok” to the ultimate extreme.  Firstly she has engaged in a fantasy world, where everything will go her way, and therefore there will be no triggers; and secondly when, in fact, things have not gone according to plan romantically, she has upped the ante to fully inhabit her fantasy as much as possible.

Unfortunately whatever Charlotte looks like, her reactivity will remain the same to the triggers which will always be out there.  The real path to security and safety is to lessen the trauma reservoir so that everything is more bearable.  That is the path to true freedom, anchored in the reality of our own inevitable vulnerabilities.