Trauma in the Creative and Embodied Therapies

When Words are Not Enough

Anna Chesner, sissy lykou, Anna Chesner, sissy lykou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138479210
• eBook ISBN: 9781351066242
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

Trauma in the Creative and Embodied Therapies is a cross-professional book looking at current approaches to working therapeutically and socially with trauma in a creative and embodied way.

The book pays attention to different kinds of trauma – environmental, sociopolitical, early relational, abuse in its many forms, and the trauma of illness – with contributions from international experts, drawn from the fields of the arts therapies, the embodied psychotherapies, as well as nature-based therapy and Playback Theatre. The book is divided into three sections: the first section takes into consideration the wider sociopolitical perspective of trauma and the power of community engagement. In the second section, there are numerous clinical approaches to working with trauma, whether with individuals or groups, highlighting the importance of creative and embodied approaches. In the third section, the focus shifts from client work to the impact of trauma on the practitioner, team, and supervisor, and the importance of creative self-care and reflection in managing this challenging field.

This book will be useful for all those working in the field of trauma, whether as clinicians, artists, or social workers.

Part I

Wider perspective

Chapter 1

Sociopolitical perspectives on trauma in a world in crisis

“The personal is political” revisited

sissy lykou

Sociopolitical trauma is seen as a range of experiences: from political violence against African American and Afro Caribbean people, to the shocks still experienced by those living in Northern Ireland, to the recent refugee crisis, as well as to the ongoing inequalities faced by women. How do society, politics, and history contribute to the creation and continuation of individual, intergenerational, and collective trauma? I will try to form an interdisciplinary understanding of trauma, where the self, in its intrapsychic, interpersonal, and transpersonal guises will be approached via a consideration of the autobiographical, relational, and political body (Allegranti, 2011). All this will be accompanied by the view that an individual’s mind-body flow is in relation to past (e.g. the Holocaust), present (e.g. racial and gender discrimination), and future (e.g. the uncertainty of numerous dislocated refugees in Europe).

When I embarked on this venture of first researching the literature and then writing about sociopolitical trauma, I had my direct clinical experience in my mind-body and this informed and shaped my framework, which I can now describe as psychosocial (e.g. Agger, 2001). The psychosocial framework is an attempt to address several observations and issues with the recognition that there is an ongoing and circular interaction between the individual soul and its social environment.

The clinical experience I refer to was in Sure Start children’s centres, working with mothers and their children under five years old. Ken Loach’s (1994) movie Ladybird, Ladybird was my main educator as I attempted to understand, but mainly, to support and fight for the rights of the mothers using the service, who were often in a precarious state, fearing their children would be taken away. In the movie, the main character, Maggie, is a mother of four from an abusive and poverty-stricken background. Social services only check on her and her capacity to bring up her children and offer no emotional support, no opportunities for change or a better life for her and her children. Her four children are taken away from her and she falls into utter despair, pain, and an unbearable sense of loss. She eventually creates a reparative relationship with Jorge, a kind man who accepts her unconditionally and wants to share his life with her. But Maggie is already stigmatised by the social services and society as an “unfit” mother and when she falls pregnant there is a decision that her baby will be taken away as soon as she gives birth. Through my therapy work with the mothers of several groups I was running all over London I witnessed the intergenerational trauma caused by the oppression of women and the underestimation of the impact of the cycles of insecure attachments, as seen also in Maggie’s story.

Why, though, did I need to watch the movie in order to educate myself?

This is one of the many examples of gaps and vagueness I have faced in my practice after qualifying and in connection to my own upbringing as a white working-class woman from a small European country, and the limitations that this upbringing carries. Students in psychotherapy trainings are taught that trauma is an outcome of mainly familial aetiology. Although there is a gradual shift in trainings towards a better emphasis on the social and intersectional, there is very little input in terms of understanding the impact of internalised history and of hegemonic structures and ideology (Hollander, 2017). To correct that bias, my writing has a strong element of a personal embodied exploration of my professional position in relation to trauma and its roots and consequences.

How do experiences that are far beyond people’s existing frames of reference eventually transform into trauma? How are self-concepts affected when under pressure or new circumstances? How do history and political systems force personal incongruences that lead to trauma? And how seriously do we take our client’s despair in relation to existential anxieties, social alienation, and the estrangement from nature?

There is a plethora of writings on intergenerational, transgenerational and cultural trauma and it is not within the scope of this chapter to go through it and explain the differences. But I do want to invite you, the reader, to reflect within your mind-body continuum on the following narrative, allowing at the same time your own history to be present in your reading:

A war never occurs in just one place or one life. It ripples out in waves of violence that linger – shadows of the official war – lurking behind closed doors, long after the peace treaties have been signed. That war moved from my uncle’s psyche [Vietnam war veteran] into mine, through the chambers of my heart, and into the underground trenches of my belly, in the rivers of blood that covered me that day [when he shot himself in front of the author when she was a young girl]. It slowly and invisibly whittles away at my immune system, my memory, my sense of worth, and even my will to survive, until I tried, just like my uncle, to seek out and kill the enemy in myself.

(Matz, 2019)

When I first read Matz’s story from the “I” and “we” position that she writes, it became clear to me that when we talk about/work with political trauma, we are not simply dealing with a collection of symptoms, but with an overall destruction of individuals and/or of the social and political structures of a society (Hamber, 2004).

Therefore, in this chapter I am attempting to shed some more light on the notion of sociopolitical trauma as a “temporal rupture of identity (…), as a wound to the social psyche and body” (Roberts, 2018, p. 2). In the examples I am using, the defence mechanisms of denial, repression, and dissociation are witnessed and described as processes that modern subjects go through, mirroring biographical, historical, social, and cultural traumas (Herman, 1992; Roberts, 2018).

The nightmares of history and political violence will be part of my reflexive writing that focuses on the betrayal of trust that erases relational ethics and recreates trauma (Audergon, 2004), and on dispossession as a forced – and out of the individual’s control – structural dependence on social norms (Athanasiou, in Butler and Athanasiou, 2013).

I have chosen to focus on two specific sociopolitical causes of trauma. The first is in relation to the financial crisis in my native land, Greece, and my dad’s death because of it. The second is connected to the #MeToo campaign and the silencing and abuse of women. These causes have shaped me both as a person and as a therapist and, thus, my writing takes a theory-practice way of being perspective rather than a description of a specific psychotherapeutic approach. I hope this also explains the reason why I have not tried to go into any further reflections on all the sociopolitical traumas referred to above.

For confidentiality reasons, the case vignette of the second sociopolitical cause of trauma is a composite based on the material and relational experiences of many different clients, not of an individual.

Not knowing who he was any more: the power of subjectivation¹

My dad’s name was Yiorgos and his surname, Lykos, means “wolf” in Greek. I start with this detail as my dad’s story deconstructs the myth of wolves being dangerous to people, and similarly the myth of a working-class father, who lost his business, being a danger to the neoliberal system that demands continuous productivity.

Dad was 59 years and 11 months old when he died, and he was supposed to be able to take his pension when he would become 60 years old. He actually took his life slowly, by not taking his heart medication for many months and storing the boxes at the far back of his wardrobe, in the small flat he had recently moved into after having to leave the family flat with all its memories, comforts, and containment that the latter provided him.

The financial crisis in Greece started in late 2009 and the country has been buried in debt since then. The word “κρίση” (meaning crisis) is in people’s everyday vocabulary, political chaos and social turmoil are established parts of the reality, social exclusion and homelessness have increased dramatically, and hundreds of thousands of well-educated and at productive age people have migrated. Unemployment has been significantly associated with the 40 per cent increase of suicide mortality rate (e.g. Basta, et al., 2018), while there is also the hidden number of suicides due to the Orthodox Christian church dominance and their prohibition of burial if someone has taken their life.

My dad’s death is one of those hidden suicides. He left no goodbye letter, was not sure when he would die as he took his life in the least painful way he could find, but which also meant that he was carrying this secret on his own for a long time. My sister found him in a coma on the floor of his living room and he managed to stay alive for seven hours. I was not quick enough to reach him, given that I live in London and he lived in Athens. After dad passed away, my sister and I found on his bedside table the letter from the pension office that denied him even a reduced pension simply because he had not paid his contributions for the last year and the owed sum had reached an impossible level for paying due to the interest added every month.

I often have a desperate feeling when I think of dad and how he must have felt having worked very hard his whole life (he had been working since he was fourteen), having contributed to the economy for so many years and then having to silently accept that he would depend on his two daughters – one of whom had migrated to find a better future – for the rest of his life. The image of a man of similar age to dad comes to mind: that man was at an Athens pension office with a blank face, exhausted presence, and curved back. He burst into inconsolable crying when the officer coldly told him that he could not take any pension at all until he paid all the missed contributions. “You can blame the IMF and the Germans,” says the officer and the man holds a piece of paper, his body shaking and begging for some mercy. An example of the individual suffering from the cultural trauma of a collapsed economy and a country in social disturbance. Whenever I think of the officer’s response, I always feel my body shaking, as if the image of that man, whom I had seen after my dad had passed away, had mirrored all the trauma I had vicariously experienced through dad. McPhillips (2017) postulates that cultural trauma is not something that is done to us but a social process we actively co-construct. This is where my shaking transforms into tension, freezing and immobilisation as expressions of anger and deep disappointment. Hollander (2017) sees neoliberalism as a shaping force of unconscious fantasies, conflicts, and defences and consequently I see the myth of “the IMF and the Germans” making Greek people suffer, as a co-constructed – by the Greek elite, the new-wealth class and corrupt politicians – cultural trauma.

There is a fundamental question for a human who can no longer live their life, who has to accept dependency after a whole life of autonomy: who are you? Athanasiou (Butler & Athanasiou, 2013, p. 75) says in regard to this question “… its multilayered personal, political, ethical, and affective undertones of impingement, dislocatedness, and even astonishment underlies contemporary debates on recognition.” “Recognition” is a term of some importance in contemporary debates in philosophy, gender studies, and social theories, as well as in relational psychoanalysis – a debate at the crux of questions about how psychotherapy deals with the wider sociopolitical context. Butler (ibid.) makes the distinction between self-definition and recognition and reminds us of Fanon’s notion of the self as socially constituted. In the financial crisis, the “who are you?” has become a form of trauma that bends people, destroys their sense of self and leads them to a regressed state of the Lacanian first stage of relational mirroring with its fragmented body image – as described in his Écrits: A Selection (Lacan, 1977). Considering Winnicott’s (1960) notion of “going-on being” under these circumstances and within a traumatogenic culture, I cannot help but think that almost any defence will eventually be subsumed even when trying to maintain it (Hollander, 2017), and that this process takes place in slow motion.

When my dad had to close his coffee shop in June 2013 because he owed quite a lot of money to the tax and pension offices, he started his lonely journey of losing himself in personal private concerns that, although he rationally knew belonged to the collective, he could not, at an emotional level, sustain or make the connection between the collective instability and his own personal crisis. He avoided discussing with us, his daughters, any practical matters as if his unemployment or financial difficulties were personal failings – rather than a social problem (Jones, 2012). Shame would water his eyes, that shame that I can now see as the result of what Layton (2004) calls “normative unconscious”; that denigrates any attachment needs, that over-evaluates agentic capacities and only values attitudes such as competition and self-reliance.

Depression finally took away from dad any sense of agency in the world. He would socialise only with my sister and sometimes with my mum, his mum, and his brother. His physical health declined and on two occasions he fainted but dismissed the incidents and refused to go to the doctor.

Dad used to express his love by holding my hands and caressing them. I learned from him that words are not necessarily the best way to express one’s self. The last time I saw him, almost a month before he died, he held my hands while I was in the stranded train to the airport and he was on the platform and I remember my strong feeling of belonging to our family and the values of love, care, and sharing. But what had happened to dad’s belonging? Rozmarin’s (2017, p. 476) definition of belonging resonates with me: “… (it) is a crucial aspect of human experience” where one feels “singular within shared pluralities” (emphasis in the original). In retrospect, I imagine that dad’s sense of belonging had become alienated in his embodied trauma of loss of his position in the society, of his autonomy and hope for life; in other words, in his political incapacitation (Athanasiou, 2019).

“Trauma (…) devastatingly disrupts (…) the sense of stretching along from the past to an open ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: Wider perspective
• PART II: Clinical perspectives
• PART III: The impact of trauma on the therapist and embodied supervisory approaches
• Index