Out of Restraints: Inspiration Inside-out and Upside-down
Ray Holland
Only after one hundred days of consistent work, only then is the light genuine, only then can one begin to work with the spirit fire.
Lu Dongbin, The Secret of the Golden Flower.
Restraints
How can anyone enter a strong man’s house and steal his possessions, unless he first ties up the strong man? Then he can plunder his house. Bible, Mathew 12:29
My father was the most emotionally shut-down individual I’ve met. I think that’s saying something, given that I’ve provided therapy to hundreds of men, many of them attorneys and engineers and predatory businessmen. Even in his nineties, my father remained an emotional cripple. So, imagine, my mother who developed little of her own sense of independence marrying this man. Without emotional insight, they then attempted to raise a boy who was energized, uncooperative, and outspoken (as children are known to be).
Surely that’s going to go sideways.
I was five years old when I was taken to the very Irish Dr. McGauran, a family practitioner who employed my mother for a while as his office manager. This was in an age before attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder became a diagnosis. Today an expert would say I met all the criteria, but there was no Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM) at the time. As I reflect on this boy from a Heart-drama perspective, I would neither diagnose him as “attention deficient” nor “disordered,” But the doctor did his best. I was semi-formally determined to have a problem with listening to adults. But there were few remedies and no medications to be prescribed.
Do you know who your parents turned to for help with thorny problems when the authority figures could not guide them? In my family, adults naturally looked to my great Aunt Lil for the fix. She was the matriarch. She was also a kleptomaniac. How do I know? For one thing, she worked at a psychiatric facility, and she stole the silverware that we used for years at family meals. The name of the institution was stamped on the spoons and forks. It is astonishing to remember that.
She also had access to what was, at the time, cutting-edge psychiatric technologies, and she found the perfect remedy to solve the problem. She smuggled out a physical restraint, the solution for those who do not listen to adults and cannot restrain themselves: a strait jacket.
I imagine at some point the concerned adults met as a kind of informal treatment team, and they decided this was the best way to keep me anchored in bed at night. I imagine my Aunt Lil arguing the straight jacket was efficient. She was all about efficiency in all manners of things, finding the quickest way of getting things done.
Today we would consider this abuse, but it was a different time. Just a few years before, my mother’s doctor (a different doctor) told her to take up smoking cigarettes because she was gaining too much weight during her pregnancy. She did what she was told, and it worked. She lost weight, and I was born prematurely and underweight. My mother died many years later of cancer, continuing to smoke even on her deathbed.
There are much worse stories than mine. But that’s not the point. I want only to assert that these events in my childhood helped to establish a filter on the world, beliefs and feelings and body sensations that strapped me down, bound and wrapped me up for years. Even now, when triggered in a familiar way, I recognize pressure in my chest and stomach, my arms weighted and useless. Embedded in this memory network, my body tells me I’m powerless, frightened, and I’m certain that my cries will go unanswered. This is the warped legacy of trauma.
Where do we go to be released from our restraints?
One of the most effective pathways out of my childhood bedroom was via the window, an escape hatch that was available only as an adult.
John Nolte, a master psycho-dramatist, who has literally directed thousands of such rescues, pointed me to the way. The pacing was deliberate. I had to get activated enough emotionally to cry out. I must rescue this child! He then pressed me to gather a rescue team, and set things in motion, prodding me to feel it in my flesh as I pushed against the antagonists of my childhood until something shifted deep enough to scuff up the imprints that words upon words upon words—talking therapy—had not reached.
I’ve been to that dark bedroom several times in dramas, but I was truly warmed up that night. Hot with emotional pressure. Looking back, I see I had been in a frozen state for months. It just did not let up. Until this portrayal of release, I was in a long slow flashback. I recognized that afterwards. A triggered state. The Barriers to my freedom were communicated in feelings, through a somatic ache and muscle tension, by way of vivid memories and dreams, via relentless disparaging thoughts and a pervasive self-loathing. When the enactment was complete, I was thoroughly emotionally spent, but I was also free, lighter in being.
Many of you will have no previous knowledge of experiential work (at least the term). You have not heard of ego-state therapy or, very likely, encountered psychodrama. So, I have provided a glimpse into what an enactment can look like in drama. But be aware that Heart-drama, the process I am offering as a way out of our restraints, may look nothing like this story of my own wounding. Unlike psychodrama, Heart-drama does not occur in a group context but is self-directed on a stage of creative imagination; and, since you are the director, it always unfolds in a way that is right for you, and at your own pace.
All experiential methods have some similarities, central among them they do not necessarily reflect factual data. They depict collisions between, or representations of, both conscious and unconscious influences, and they have the entanglements of metaphor or, even, symbols. It seems to me this is a mystery in the work; because the more openly and spontaneously you reflect on your life, without expectations or preconceptions, the closer you move to what is clear and understandable, while, simultaneously, there is an unveiling of complicated intersections of multigenerational patterns, archaic knowledge, repetitive events, silently communicated messages and energies that cannot be grasped and made into formulations by the cognitive mind. Multifaceted and many layered, you both discover the truth of what has happened to you, the impact of specific people, places and things, and you become initiated into a realm of experience that cannot be fully articulated by the utilitarian language our society favors.
As we inquire courageously, we find some explanation of the why we have shown up in narrow unsatisfying ways. For me, the drama I have sketched above helped me understand how I became a portrayal of Emotional Constraint itself and inhabited this limited character for decades. Barely embodied, disengaged from the heart of humanity, like many of the people I have worked with in therapy, I couldn’t deeply feel the world in and around me, and so was unresponsive to what this time demanded of me. As you might understand, Constraint was the one character I could enact convincingly given the experiential stage I was born on, until I finally woke up to reality in all its complexity and found a release, one buckle at a time.
Heart-drama can give the same release as the best psychodrama, if often less theatrically.
E.X.P.A.N.D.
Heart-drama is founded on a process I call EXPAND. It is a self-directed approach that I believe can be used to help individuals navigate difficult emotions and challenging situations, and to find peace from adverse experiences. EXPAND is an acronym that stands for Enlarge, X-pose the Barriers, Pain into Ritual, Alluring Future, Narrative of Meaning, Develop or Wither. I will explain that in some detail later.
The inquiry can seem familiar, for example, to several deep therapies but also to reading “spreads” in the Tarot or using coins to cast hexagrams in I Ching for divination, or playing with more archaic practices such as Alchemy or engaging with a shaman (if you happen to have one available); but I view EXPAND as similar to what Carl Jung called “active imagination,” a method that involves consciously entering into a dialogue with the contents of one’s own unconscious. In The Red Book, he depicted this as a form of inner reflection that allows individuals to access and interact with the symbols, images, and archetypes that reside within their psyche. By actively engaging with these elements, individuals can gain insights, discover hidden aspects of themselves, and foster personal growth and transformation.
Like Jung, I see daily introspective practices as a creative tool for individuation, the act of becoming a fully integrated and authentic individual. It is also a way to bridge the gap between what is unconscious/unprocessed and what is conscious/intentional, facilitating a deeper understanding of self and others, loosening our restraints and promoting psychological wholeness.
To use these effectively we must cultivate states of heightened awareness, presence, and self-compassion. If you can do this, and do nothing else, you will reduce stress, anxiety, and other negative emotions, but it is only one step (Enlarging) on the larger stairway leading to our healing and growth. Distinct from the EXPAND process, I differentiate Rituals as ways of responding to your increasing knowledge, actions to reinforce and best serve your growth and healing, and I have included suggestions in this book under the heading Pain into Ritual.
Interacting with images and memories and narratives can ignite the innate ability we all have to heal ourselves and be more empowered. This conviction is rooted in humanistic, existential, and experiential traditions which emphasize the importance of personal responsibility, self-awareness, and self-expression. I will offer examples and suggestions, but I always encourage exploration and experimentation, because you are the best director of your own dramas (as you are the best director of your life). Rather than following a set protocol or script, let your Inspiration—your Inspired Self—work with all parts of you, reminding you of your journey, both the suffering and the joys. Make this personal and morally right for you, paced to your window of tolerance. Develop your own artful methods to EXPAND.
Though every person I have directed in their drama has a different language and specific hopes, I believe what we all want at the end of all our exploration, to borrow from T.S. Eliot is to arrive where we started and know it, or, more specifically, to gain insight into what has been happening to us beneath the surface of both the interiority and exteriority, the inner and outer world. Only then can we fully make intentional choices.
