1. Heart Loss—Tragic Vision

“Recall that attuned play amplifies joy, excitement and yes indeed surprise. A positive state in turn allows individuals to experience a situation as safe, to feel unrestrained to take risks, to explore novel pathways and to be creative.” Allan Schore

Inspiration notices an emotional rippling, checks it out, explores how it shows up in the physiology of the characters. If it’s important, then it’s familiar. In Working Without a Net, 1995, Morris Schectman, writing about the workplace, described “the familiar,” as a reaction in our gut that leads us back to a deeper, earlier source of emotional angst. ^[ii]We follow the familiar to identify the origin of this energy that has been driving us into predictable actions that may have served us in our family but now undermines us.

When faithfully followed, the familiar often leads to the Tragic Vision. Following the familiar is the same as an EMDR therapist encouraging a client to “float-back,” following a feeling state that leads back in time to the Touchstone Memory of their traumatic history, an early, symbolic, memory that will then become a target for therapeutic work.

An emotional response is also the guide for “a spiral” in a typical psychodrama, transporting the protagonist to where they need to go, back or forward, or to some other emotionally charged realm.  In Moreno’s terms, we move to the birth moment (the status nascendi), the place (the locus), where the problematic response (the matrix) first emerged.

In the Heart-drama, the feeling often leads us to the core drama, allowing us to bring vitally important obstacles on to the stage, making what has been a largely unconscious more conscious. Here, we intentionally slow down the pace.

Into the Neuro-Biological-Creation Story.

“In the middle of the journey of our life

I found myself within a dark woods

Where the straight way was lost.” 

                          Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

 

You may have the awareness to articulate at the start the tragic trail that you need to explore. But sometimes, in the Enlarging, you can feel suddenly compelled in an unexpected direction. However we get there, our most compelling dramas have embedded in them a bleak portrayal of reality and a right hemisphere knowledge of the deepest injuries. For those of us who have an attachment disruption, or for whom other trauma has fundamentally altered our reality, we can find ourselves inexplicably immersed in the surplus place where we lost our Heart. Though the details differ, and the actors and settings are personal, though the wounds vary, and the perpetrated acts of evil can be quite specific or fragmented or barely remembered (an indeterminate feeling of dis-ease), one soul-destroying, psyche splintering, Heart laceration is often indistinguishable from another.

Often, we remember a young child hurt by those who they turned to for protection and nurturance. Because young children need caregivers for survival, they will suppress their own needs and drives, will cease living in their own bodies and even in their own reality. To maintain a low-quality attachment, they lose their authenticity.

Of course, that’s not the only tale your Heart-drama may depict. There are many different portraits of calamity and unspeakable heartbreak. A sudden death of a loved one. Illness. Accidents. Natural disasters. Violence and cruelty. Abuse. War.

The Core

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood.

        Theodore Roethke, In a Dark Time

Like a village enacting a ritual to invigorate the world, returning to the creation story, with hopes of flooding the present with renewing life energy, the Heart drama similarly transports us in time and place. Following the familiar, returns us to a personal mythic moment, a turning point; but rather than finding renewal, this territory feels hopeless, even paralyzing. Especially the first time you return, you recognize there are hostile transpersonal forces that have no concern or compassion. It’s commonly a place of remembered despair and great suffering that was beyond the ability to confront. And, when this is the core of our trauma, expect to be triggered, to be back in emotional excess. And, though old voices might be quite insistent, what they know is not objective knowledge.

“The world is dangerous.”

“I’m flawed and unlovable.”

In the face of these right-brained cognitive flashbacks, the left-brain chokes and offers nothing intelligible.

This is the heart of a heart-drama for so many because we live in a traumatized and traumatizing world. Where we find ourselves is not an accurate historical time, but rather a representation of how events have been stored in our nervous system. Expect the Heart-drama to depict both what has happened and the adaptation. At this level of Work, you may notice how a protective response began to solidify into a façade or Abnormal defense structure, driving Pain underground, and/or fueling addictions. You may notice what pushed self-sabotaging repetitive patterns that have enslaved us or left us frozen.

When we get to this moment in a psychodrama, everyone in the room can feel it.      

A warning. Prepare yourself. Make sure you have someone to call. Make sure you have a list of ways to ground yourself. Take baby steps on this trail of tears.

A Tragic Vision

“The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy, and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experience you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character.”  Carl Jung, Letters (ed. 1973)

At the Heart of the Heart-drama, there is a woman sprawled on the ground, surrounded by animal beings, a gathering of mute but protective energies. This is an ancient imagining. There is a mythic, archetypal nature to these important places. We return, when we spiral back, approaching a very personal historical agony, but this space also holds a “surplus” which we may unpack, later in reflection, as a multigenerational wound, an energy formation, a constant in human suffering. It is a reality filled with a symbolic excess, sacred in some inexplicable way. Such an encounter has been called a mysterium tremendum, a tremendous mystery. It is profound and can trigger dread when we first return to these Fallen landscapes.

What makes it possible for us to revisit this darkness without being further traumatized is the light of Inspiration, our Inspired Self, our great capacity to witness Truth and Beauty. We are protected as if by the Holy, held in the arms of the numinous, a spiritual presence that allows us to attain profound clarity.

 Why this painting?

This painting asks only for awareness and curiosity.

Here I will warn you to titrate in and out of this Heartbreak. Prepare yourself for this exploration as if you are crossing the gates of Hell, where the character(s) you find may have abandoned all hope.

You will need clear resources. What actions can you do to pull you out of drama? Walks in the woods? Community activities? Who can you call? Sponsors? Mentors? Therapist? Friends who are open to walking with you in the dark?

Inside Out:

A despairing composition evolves from this center, the locus, the birth moment. Injury shrieks a tale from deep recesses in our embodied nervous system. The story is a hopeless description of reality. For those of us who have an attachment disruption, or for whom other trauma has fundamentally altered reality, we can find ourselves inexplicably in this Fallen world, sometimes abruptly, sometimes waking into it from dream. Sometimes it is a slow-motion immersive flashback.

A terrorized girl is locked in a cage, with an addiction poking at her, a criminal ex-boyfriend sexually demeaning her, while the present boyfriend is telling her it’s her fault that she has been so abused. “You whore!”

A physician enacts his fantasy life as a cabin boy plodding about a whaling ship. He wishes to be left to his own thoughts, focusing on his small sphere of responsibility, avoiding contact, and ignoring the way his wife prods him. He interprets her cries for attention as unjust criticism, until he recalls how his father disdainfully treated his mother, their marital arguments becoming quite brutal, abusive.

We enter the Heart of it, triggered back into emotional excess Always a place of despair and great suffering. Though I believe there is a more powerful source that heals us (“the real therapy” Jung describes) even in the most broken space, especially in the most broken places, we may need to do this Work for some time before we come to this understanding in our bones.

Our first and primary challenge is to maintain sufficient Inspiration so we can remember that this is not an accurate historical time, but rather a representation of how events have been stored in our nervous system. If we can maintain enough Dual Awareness, we see how our protective response at the time solidified and hindered us, fueling Self-deception, but it was, too, a survival adaptation. There is clarity when the drama reveals how what happened to us has pushed us into self-sabotaging repetitive patterns, enslaved us or left us frozen. And we see, too, the suffering of a vulnerable mammal at the mercy of unintelligible forces.

Upside down:

Many in our virtual society loudly acclaim that this inner exploration is a delusion. Or the Real Work is to become anti-fragile. But this belief so widely misses the mark that it must be called a pathological delusion. It invalidates the courage required to face our deepest fear. And it drives the madness of our time.

My experience has been that the most inflated right-side up, well-defended personas, are sleepwalkers, intentionally blind or not, unconscious or not, largely oblivious to the Upside-down society they drift though, numb to a culture elevating characters who are flawed, even maniacal, dangerous to us all. I believe this is a result of hiding so long from their own Heart loss. To maintain the disconnect, in the service of fragmentation, the Abnormal works to tolerate, invalidate, deny, compartmentalize, and normalize the most apparent cruelty, and to keep the dark creation stories unremembered.