Excerpt from Chapter 2
First, the "pictures" you see when you recall a traumatic memory are fundamentally different than the pictures you see when you remember normal memories. Traumatic memory and normal memory are very different types of memory, and neither is necessarily all that accurate. On the other hand, there really is no "false memory syndrome." There is no diagnostic category in psychiatry or psychology that goes by that name.7
To keep from getting too confused with this category of process-work, let us look at the whole problem from the point-of-view of your deep unconscious. Pretend that you are the person-in-charge of the unconscious of a girl who has been sexually abused from age 8 until age 18. The abuse happened, on average, twice a week. Simplified math reveals that you are thus dealing with about 100 traumatic events a year times 10 years, which equals 1,000 events. How are you (as the person-in-charge of this girls unconscious) going to organize a healing process with all that information to collate, store, and eventually surface into conscious for final resolution?
Well, the unconscious is not without its own resources. In fact, these resources organize the life of the unconscious in a remarkable way. This is accomplished through archetypes. The famous psychologist, Carl Jung, discovered this amazing organizational tool when he was studying dreams and developing his theories about the collective unconscious. An archetype, according to Jungian theory, is an organizing principle, or a universal template. It is like a cookie-cuttera pattern that can take many individual forms. Or, it is like a file foldera bunch of individual characteristics can, for example, describe the Mother, or Father, or Soldier, or Lover, or Boss archetype. (Archetypes are so important they usually get to be capitalized.)8
The person-in-charge of the unconscious will collate those 1,000 abusive events around about a dozen organizing principles (archetypes). To keep the math simple, let us say there are 10 organizing principles. So, when the healing process engages for our example woman, she will clear 10 events (rather than 1,000). Each of the 100 individual events, therefore, is representative of a similar theme and reinforces the impact of that theme. Each of the 10 healing events, then, becomes archetypal. In other words, the discreet memory she actually processes and clears may not have actually occurred as she remembers it in the healing process, but it did occur in either symbolic or composite form as it is remembered.
This brings us to the next question: What is the exact nature of this archetypal theme or organizing principle? Here is where the idea of damage comes in. As stated above, the event or abuse you went through is not as important as how you took it. The archetypal response is to identify the damage-pattern so that the abusive events can condense around that particular pattern. For example, one archetypal theme may (and usually does) have to do with getting rid of my curiosity ("Why are you doing this to me?" type questions can really get a child in trouble). So, the damage done to my psyche is that Ive repressed my curiositysplintered it off and denied its existence. This damage-pattern, then, reveals itself as the wounded inner child that is seen in the memory itself.
Since the language of the unconscious is a symbolic language, we can recognize the wounds we carry by both the nature of the wounded child that represents it and by the nature of the event(s) that caused it. These inner children, because they are archetypes, symbolize all that we have repressed or denied in ourselves in order to survive. They represent the true damagewhat we lost as a result of being abused or traumatized. When we rescue them from the scenes within which they are trapped, process the emotions associated with that scene, and "make it all better" for them, we heal. What "healing" ultimately means, then, is that we integrate a piece of our fractured wholeness. (For example, we reclaim our curiosity.)
Additionally, the damage that the traumatic memory is witness to is also symbolic, because that damage had more to do with you repressing parts of yourself than it had to do with abuse. In sum, each wounded inner child you rescue is a representation of one of your damaged or splintered-off potentials (joy, playfulness, curiosity, innocence, integrity, etc., that had you kept these potentials active would have gotten you killed).
7. The definitive work on this is Memory and Abuse by Whitfield. It is worth noting that Charles Whitfield is also the author of A Gift To Myself, one of the books I recommend as a workbook in the deep healing process. In addition, Whitfield was a founding member of the inner child movement through the classic, Healing The Child Within, which he published in the early 1970s.
8. Synopsizing Jungs work in a footnote is clearly impossible. What is relevant to our discussion is that Jung broke the unconscious into two parts: the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. In his theories, the personal unconscious was filled with stuff that was unique to the individual; whereas, the collective unconscious was the home of the archetypesthe universal patterns that have been present since the beginning. What Jung did not do was situate these archetypes developmentally. In other words, there are archetypes that attend to the archaic, magic, mythic, rational, existential, and transpersonal realms. Technically, then, a powerful healing-helper Archetype for a "borderline" disorder would be from the magical level, and so on.
The leap Im making in the text is grounded in the idea that the personal unconscious cannot fully contain the raw energies of trauma, but the collective unconscious can. Traumatic material, therefore, moves into the exact stage of a more stratified collective unconscious. Here the trauma is reconfigured into its own Archetypal patterns.
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