Internal Resistance

Just when people were congratulating themselves on having abolished all spooks, it turned out that instead of haunting the attic or old ruins the spooks were flitting about in the head of apparently normal Europeans. Jung, After the Catastrophe.

This Fox, with his familiar attitude, anesthetizes fears, especially the ancient fears of being ostracized or laughed at, not being enough, never attaining love. Better to deny and become impervious and react with a sneer.

He meets us at the trail head with a practiced pretense of defiance. He claims he is the height of evolution, but he has abandoned pursuing anything elevated, and he is not the all-powerful growling force in the forest that he might pretend to be, though he makes a lot of noise.

However, he can still be dangerous if he comes down our path, potentially swallowing our Heart and our spirit and our courage, stopping us in our creative tracks.

Why this painting?

Most likely, Resistance is only an adolescent voice, playing a character called Fierce, illuminated by hubris. Some little boys like to claim that they have eradicated the darkness with their power. Often, they have just perfected a certain makeup and carefully positioned the spotlight.

But we must be careful. We live in a blind stream of spectacle and chatter of the mass-mind, lost in distractions until introspection seems impossible. The depths dissipate in this place. What is real has been replaced by a resemblance, an appearance, an on-line portrayal, not life but a facsimile, the way an android might be imagined to be a human, the way a marriage might look like a real relationship, the way intelligence might be mistaken for consciousness. Here the psyche dissociates. We distract away rather than face what is behind, above, below, preferring to ignore our Fierce materialism and capitalism and sexism and racism and other isms.

Enlarging allows us to meet the resistance, to know its puffery (if it has little substance), to investigate it rather than get lost in its compulsions and self-characterizations, to know the level of danger.

Inside out

If something in you wants to resist what your Heart seeks, then start there. Become curious. I will again encourage the technique of role-reversing. It allows us to encounter and differentiate perspectives, to step in and out of various characters on the stage (reflecting on both internal and outer stages) and to possibly go deeper.

When we get beyond Resistance, we may hear from the Awakened child or the Artist or the Lover who has been so long denied.

Upside down

Our society celebrates characters who seem stoically put together. Bros who get indignant and won’t be “pushed around.” Of course, there are times when we need courage to stand-against something, to act in the service of protecting the vulnerable. To be the firefighter who rushes toward the fire. This is real power anchored in experience. While those who present a front, a controlled surface or a defiance that protects the ego, are inhabitants of a realm where egoic gods are elevated. A land where they can remain safely ensconced, like adolescents choosing to live with their parents rather than take the voyage of discovery. We must find the courage to name them when they erect resentful boundaries to keep the Heart from growing, restricting travel to their womb-like basement and the virtual.

1. Heartaches-Family Mirroring

“Just because you got the monkey off your back, it doesn’t mean the circus has left town.” George Carlin

Some dramas are focused on family or on workplaces energized by attachment injuries.

In my family, the dining table took on great significance. I can vividly recall the color and shape of it, painted a bright and cheerful orange, lime green and electric yellow, colors better belonging to an ice cream parlor.

I remember the sensation of sitting in my seat (always the same seat), the pressures in my gut, my reluctance to look up and make eye-contact. The table was small, or I experienced it as too small to hide everything that might attract attention from my icy faced/simmering father.

The technique of spiraling back in time (following the familiar, or floating back) can recall such family experiences and reveal their significance by the activation in our nervous system. Often there’s a bully seated somewhere here who starts the fighting, looking for something disagreeable. They poke narcissistically with insults or challenges to their status or objections to their rigid rules that warrant an escalation or an invalidation or a nasty correction.

As a counterpoint, there may be the passive parent or absent one.

These tables are not democratic surfaces on which the feast is shared but, rather, emotional labyrinths with twists and turns and traps, unholy dangers. Perhaps you and your siblings struggled in the tension that could not be named. Often one child will become a mirror of a perpetrator, or they become heroes or terrorized truth-tellers, while others get scapegoated, powerless to fight back or become only robust enough to create havoc.

Introjects of the Bully

Describing the impact of such family systems, some therapists speak about introjects. Basically, these are aspects of important people in our life who seem to have magically been absorbed into us or recreated by us. For instance, a perpetrator introject is the part that looks like (has the posture of/attitude of/action of) someone who has abused us. This inner aspect of our mind may use the exact same words and act out abusively, pointing out our faults in a voice that is not ours, which is horrifying to recognize.

Sometimes the phrases or clichés that come out of introjects seem odd and amusing.

“Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.”

Sometimes it’s more disturbing.

“There’s something wrong with you!”

“Women are such bitches!”

“You need to be serious like your (workaholic) sister,”

“Your problems are nothing!”

“You make me sick!”

“Don’t be so needy.”

“Suck it up, don’t be so weak.”

A question worth asking is: “Who does that sound like?”

Many of us have found that when we have our own children, similar recordings from childhood suddenly turn on. We start to mimic our parents. Generally, parts like this don’t have much depth. But they can communicate very critical attitudes and demeaning beliefs.

We may not have reflected on this parroting until some horrible thing comes out of our mouth in a triggered moment, using the precise words or taking actions or conveying feelings that belong to someone from the past who is merged with us on the imagined stage. In a Heart-drama this kind of multigenerational mirroring can become quite striking (and disturbing). When these voices are allowed to unconsciously operate in, we feel crazy. But it is the craziness of a previous generation that is passed along like an idea-virus.

The mirroring can get quite multi-faceted. Frequently, there can be more than one voice. Two competing voices are common. When parents have had unresolved conflicts between them, then a polarity (like a court-room drama with defender and prosecutor) can show up in our psyche.

“I’m driven in my career (like Dad)”

“I want to be spending time with the people I love (like Mom).”

Sitting between these two conflicting parts often is a confusing mix of feeling states for us and is a drama worthy of exploring.