Living in the Borderland

The Evolution of Consciousness and the Challenge of Healing Trauma

Jerome S. Bernstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781583917565
• eBook ISBN: 9781135448783
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Living in the Borderland addresses the evolution of Western consciousness and describes the emergence of the 'Borderland,' a spectrum of reality that is beyond the rational yet is palpable to an increasing number of individuals. Building on Jungian theory, Jerome Bernstein argues that a greater openness to transrational reality experienced by Borderland personalities allows new possibilities for understanding and healing confounding clinical and developmental enigmas.

There are many people whose experiences of reality is outside the mainstream of Western culture; often they see themselves as abnormal because they have no articulated frame of reference for their experience. The concept of the Borderland personality explains much of their experience.

In three sections, this book examines the psychological and clinical implications of the evolution of consciousness and looks at how the new Borderland consciousness bridges the mind-body divide. Subjects covered include:

· Genesis: Evolution of the Western Ego

· Transrational Data in a Western Clinical Context: Synchronicity

· Trauma and Borderland Transcendence

· Environmental Illness Complex

· Integration of Navajo and Western healing approaches for Borderland Personalities.

Living in the Borderland challenges the standard clinical model, which views normality as an absence of pathology and which equates normality with the rational. Jerome S. Bernstein describes how psychotherapy itself often contributes to the alienation of Borderland personalities by misperceiving the difference between the pathological and the sacred. The case studies included illustrate the potential this has for causing serious psychic and emotional damage to the patient.

This challenge to the orthodoxies and complacencies of Western medicine's concept of pathology will interest Jungian Analysts, Psychotherapists, Psychiatrists and other physicians, as well as educators of children.

Jerome S. Bernstein is a Jungian Analyst in private practice in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Part I

Chapter 1

Prologue

The year 1971 was one of personal endings and personal beginnings. I ended a career in the federal Office of Economic Opportunity, and started a new consulting firm with a friend and business partner. We did social science consulting of the kind that was prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s and that had mushroomed with the War on Poverty.

That year was also a landmark year for American Indian tribes. Richard Nixon initiated what became the Indian Self-Determination Act. For the first time in the history of US tribal relations, American Indians would be given the right to decide for themselves what was in their best interest, to take over the administration of selected programs from the federal government, and, like other Americans, to make their own mistakes and to live with and learn from them.

In the fall of 1971, within weeks of approval of this Act, the newly elected chairman of the Navajo Nation called my business partner and said that he wanted to begin the process of restoring his tribe’s culture, language, and dignity through the development of a tribal Division of Education. His plan was that, henceforth, Navajo children would be trained by Navajos in their own language by bilingual teachers who would teach Navajo culture and religion with pride. No such tribal-wide program had ever existed, and the chairman was well aware that starting this project on the Navajo Reservation (comprising one-third of all tribal Indians in the United States, with a landbase about the size of West Virginia) would set a precedent and establish a model for all Indian tribes and for the federal government as well. We determined that I would go for a week’s consultation.

I did know something about the administration of school programs, but I had never been on an Indian reservation and had never met a tribal Indian. The assignment was daunting, but something deep within me said that there was a purpose in this calling.

When I arrived in Window Rock, Arizona, the capital of the Navajo Nation, the town was cold and lonely, desolate even. The desolation was accentuated by the ever-present wind, which seemed to remind me of a silent, persistent history that demanded to be heard. I met with the Division of Education staff and the staff of the newly established Navajo Community College to hear their ideas about priorities, resources, problems, and concerns. These meetings required traveling virtually the whole of the 26,000-square mile reservation.

Early in my stay at Navajo I learned that time for Navajos is more circular than it is linear, more of a kairos than a kronos. It was not unusual when asking a Navajo the time to hear the response, “Skin time or White Man’s time?” So the last day of my week, I was not too surprised when I arrived for a morning meeting to find it was to take place in the afternoon. After the meeting I raced back to Window Rock in hopes of catching the Division of Education staff before they left at 5 pm. I was an hour and a half late. I assumed no one would be there when I returned, but I hoped the offices would not be locked; I had papers to pick up before leaving for Albuquerque to return to D.C.

When I entered the office, I was surprised to see three men sitting on small wooden straight-back chairs in a tiny room that served as an office for the three people who shared the one government-surplus desk. I knew one of the men, Ralph, fairly well. I had spent a good deal of time with him during my week at Navajo. “We’ve been waiting for you,” he said. “We’ve been listening to you listen, and we think you can hear us. We have decided. We want you to come back.” Indeed, I had been listening intently. It was my primary “activity” that first week at Navajo. But I was unaware that they had been listening to me listen. This was a new idea for me. “I would like to come back and work with you,” I said. Thus began a five-year professional relationship with the Navajo Tribe. It was also the moment I began to learn the deeper meanings of listening. Over the next years I made many trips to Navajo, sometimes spending weeks at a time.

In 1972 I met Carl Gorman, a Navajo native, who was an artist and teacher of art and Navajo history, culture, and religion, and was a Navajo code talker during World War II. Carl was the founding director of the newly established Office of Native Healing Sciences. In that position he worked cooperatively with the Navajo Medicine Man Association, a recently formed consortium. At that time, Carl’s office and the Association had surveyed the Navajo medicine men in practice and concluded that the youngest medicine man was somewhere between age 68 and 72, and that there were few, if any, younger Navajos in apprenticeship. It was obvious that, if something were not done quickly, Navajo religion and healing would die out completely within 15 to 20 years. Carl worked with the Medicine Man Association to recruit apprentices to work with individual medicine men to learn their specific healing ceremonies.

Through these contacts, I was exposed to Navajo religion and healing over the next several years. This had a profound effect on me. I began to have healing dreams that involved Navajo and sometimes Hopi healers/medicine men. At the time I had been in Jungian analysis for more than two years, and I explored these dreams in my analysis. Over time, I realized that these dreams were leading me onto a new path: I was to become a Jungian analyst myself. In 1974 I was accepted into training at the C. G. Jung Institute in New York, from which I graduated in 1980.

One hot summer day in 1975 I was standing alone at the edge of a mesa at Old Oraibi on the Hopi Indian Reservation in Arizona. As I looked out at the vast expanse of desert below me, I imagined I could smell the ancient ocean that once covered the beauty that lay before me. To the west was the majesty of the still snow-capped San Francisco Peaks above Flagstaff. In the exquisite quiet of the moment I felt a presence. I looked up and saw two golden eagles flying toward me. They swooped down to within a few feet of my head, and, wings almost touching, flew together in a circle around me, as if they were doing a dance. They circled me three or four times, then flew off together to the west, disappearing into the brilliant horizon. I felt that their presence honored me, and that I had been brought there, to that place in that moment, to honor them. And in that moment I felt the mystery that was unfolding my life to me. I mused: “What is a fat little Jewish boy from southwest Washington D.C. doing at this ancient holy place at the edge of the world, immersed in Hopi and Navajo religion and healing?” And then I realized that one’s personal mystery is not rational at all. I could not have conjured the events that had brought me to the edge of that mesa, yet I knew I could not be anywhere else. It was here that my path and the mystery of my self had taken me. As improbable as it seemed, it was indeed my path. It took another 20 years for me to transcend strong family, personal, and professional ties in the East and move to New Mexico. But when I did, I knew I was coming home.

Chapter 2

Living in the Borderland – The pathological and the sacred: Hannah

The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Over these last few years I’ve come to recognize that the very practice of psychotherapy in its traditional form can be dangerous to one’s health, that a devotion to maintaining certain preconceived assumptions may actually prevent healing, for both therapist and client.¹

The year was 1992 when I finally moved to New Mexico, establishing my analytic practice in Santa Fe. One year later a woman in her early 40s contacted me and asked for a consultation.

Hannah had already undergone at least 12 years of therapy with both male and female therapists. She had a history of sexual abuse. At the age of nine she was molested by a man at a sleep-away camp she attended. She also suspected sexual abuse by at least two family members, although her recall of specific events was vague and shadowy. Since the age of 20, she had suffered from recurring nightmares with graphic images of a murderer coming after her. She had made suicide attempts as a teenager. Her five siblings suffered severe and chronic depression as well, and all had been sexually abused at some point in their lives. During our initial session she indicated that she again felt suicidal; the only thing stopping her was her care for her dog, who was dependent on her. Her depression and despair were constant.

Hannah was an artist. She said of her painting: “I don’t know how to bear the part of me that comes out.” She painted animals almost exclusively. Sometimes she included human figures, but they were shadowy, usually considerably smaller than the animal figures. Her paintings were dark, the animals always in stages of stress, deprivation, mutilation, and torture. Hannah said that although these paintings did express suffering and pain, at the same time she had the hope that they expressed the possibility of transformation. She also stated: “I can’t distinguish between my pain and the pain of other people. And it doesn’t help when I do understand it.”

Given Hannah’s history, I began our work with a traditional approach. I explored her family experiences and pursued in depth the issues of substance abuse, sexual abuse, and parental neglect. I employed the whole repertoire of techniques involved in a good psychoanalytic-psychotherapeutic approach, as we call it. This was helpful to some extent. But always during our sessions, I had the feeling that something was missing, something was not happening – some part of her was absent.

When Hannah brought her paintings into the sessions, things livened up considerably. I wasn’t sure if this was because her painting offered her a way of dealing with her depression, isolation, and despair, or if it was more than that. Yet, noticeably, we both sensed relief.

One day, a year or so into the work, she arrived at my office very distressed. Driving home from our previous session, she had found herself behind a truck carrying two cows. Her feeling was that the cows were being taken to slaughter. I pursued the standard approach of suggesting that she was projecting onto the cows, i.e. how she saw her life circumstance in the plight of these cows. She went along with me for a time. But then she protested in frustration: “But it’s the cows!” I pointed out to her that her response was an identification with animals she experienced as abused. She acknowledged the truth of my interpretations. She began to talk about all the animals in the world that exist only as domesticated beings, and their sadness. And again she burst out: “But it’s the cows!” After that last protest – by now at the end of the session – I became aware in myself of Hannah’s distress and her identification with the plight of these cows. And I also became aware of a different feeling in the room. The feeling was attached to Hannah, yet it was separate from her. It seemed of a different dimension. It was a new experience for me.

Some weeks later, Hannah recounted how she had gone for a long walk in the country and was followed by some stray dogs. As she described the experience, the room filled with pain and remorse. I asked her what she was feeling. Again we had a go-round like the one with the cows. And again she acknowledged her projection onto the dogs. But this time, out of character for her, she became angry – so angry that she took her shoe in her hand and hit the floor with it. “You just don’t get it!” she shouted, and slammed the floor again with her shoe. “It’s the dogs!” It was as if she were saying the dogs were projecting something onto her. The urgency of her tone and her uncharacteristic anger jolted me into the realization that my standard interpretations were not enough and somehow off the mark. Something other was happening in the room.

The next week Hannah came to our session with a dream suggesting the threat of sexual violation by me. The dream jarred me, and I knew I had better hear her. I began to listen to her more closely and tried diligently to shut off my mind and training. I tried to listen as I sensed the medicine man listens.

Over the next months Hannah struggled to wrench out of her unconscious the words to talk to me. Clearly she was extremely intelligent, yet at times it seemed she was groping for a vocabulary that was beyond her reach – a vocabulary that perhaps didn’t yet exist. Gradually, however, she did begin to communicate her feelings to me. And as she did, I was startled to realize that the things she was telling me I had heard once before.

During my analytical training I had also been learning from native elders and healers, particularly from my Navajo friend, Carl Gorman, from a Hopi elder whom I called Grandpa, and from a Hopi medicine man, Homer. These men were teaching me a new way of looking at life. I realized that here were people whose involvement with nature was completely different from the utilitarian, often adversarial if sometimes sentimental, attitude toward nature that had characterized the western mind for thousands of years. For the Navajo, religion and healing are the same. The psychic connection with nature is the source of – and at the same time is inseparable from – spiritual and physical health. Illness is a “disconnection” with one’s psychic roots.

As I listened to Hannah struggle to articulate her emotions, I did “get it.” It was indeed the cows. I realized that what Hannah was telling me was precisely the same message the native elders and healers were teaching me – and what my own unconscious was telling me through my dreams: Everything animate and inanimate has within it a spirit dimension and communicates in that dimension to those who can listen.

Darwin taught us that extinction occurs when a species becomes overspecialized and can no longer adapt to changing conditions. In my view, the most dramatic evidence of the western, overspecialized ego bringing our species to the edge of extinction is the game of Russian roulette we played with the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. This lasted for about 50 years from the post-World War II period until the early 1990s. As a consequence of this apocalyptic t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Epilogue: The Borderland – the place-of-potential-meeting
• Appendix
• Bibliography