The Violence of Inner and Outer Environments of Trauma. From Childhood Imprisonment Towards the Freedom of Therapy
There comes a time in everybody’s life when we feel ready to look back, to search for answers, to get out of our “hiding places” of adulthood and to accept with courage our childhood scars and open wounds. The narrative of our history of life, or our autobiography is represented by that moment in time when we decide consciously to give a linear and chronological course and place to our unconsciously repressed and dissociated life events by giving them names and meanings thus shape in time and space and become entirely conscious/aware of WHO we have grown up into being.
And that is why psycho-biography enters the scene nowadays “to probe the conscious and unconscious inner life of the individual, with central areas of concern like childhood, conflict, coping mechanisms, creativity, interpersonal relations, parental messaging, personality development, trauma, and unconscious motivations” (Elovitz, 2022).
Meeting who we ARE means getting to know both our “false self” (Winnicott, 1960) and our “inner child”1, companions throughout our lives. As children we have the excuse of “not knowing”, as adults the ignorance of not knowing seems to save us time, but on the other hand can be a destructive force of life. It is not about what children do not know, it is about what adults eventually do not know. That is why our history and life biography is important and essential not only for us but for our next generations.
Atlas (2022) talks about “the dread of knowing” but I promise you that the moment we decide to consciously re-unite with our forgotten, unknown, confusing and painful past is different from all the other moments we have encountered it, because this time we are going for our past and we are not being haunted by it. Galit also says “unprocessed experiences always find ways to come back to life, to re-enact themselves again and again” because “time will not necessarily make the memory fade, instead, the memory will appear and reappear in different forms and will be experienced simultaneously as real and unreal”.
My strong belief is that between us and our past there are our traumas, that is the “inherited not-knowing” as well as it is not always about the personality of one but the history of many (one’s family history or one’s nation past) and it took me almost 25 years of exposure, re-enactments, running away from and wanting to know – to get to this moment!
Born and raised in Romania in 1975, I was an “unwelcome guest of the family” (Ferenczi, 1929) since my 15 years old sister was very decided in clarifying no other siblings are welcome in the family. Thus when my mother’s doctor told her she could not have another abortion (I was the 23rd) and my death would mean her own death, my parents decided to have me but give me for adoption. “The secrets of infancy are unformed events that leave traces in our minds but have no narrative attached to them. They are therefore the skeletons of our existence. They remain hidden inside us even as they give shape to our forms” (G. Atlas, 2022), the feeling of being unwanted and in search for someone to acknowledge and welcome my existence is the main motive of my life quests.
The couple I was promised to wanted me badly and although my parents did not give me away eventually I grew up with two couples of parents taking care of me. My sister could not handle it and ended up in a psychiatric clinic two years after my birth and then she run away from home and married an alcoholic, becoming a mother at 18th. “The traces of the past are everywhere. Repressed secrets become nameless dread” (Atlas, 2022)
My mother, as my initial emotional environment was depressive and in my adult life I learned she was also in a psychiatric clinic but nobody would talk about it. My father who wanted to abandon my mother because of an affair he had, was also going through a depressive state, since my mother, while being nine months pregnant with me, did not allow him to run away with his lover, saying “in order to leave this house you have to kill me and this child first”. According to Winnicott (1957, 1964) it is the mother’s ability to “introduce the world to the child in small doses” what later on becomes our capacity to be a “healthy person” with both “the feeling of the realness of the world “and “the realness of what is imaginative and personal”.
It seems that was the second time even the third or fourth time in only nine months since my conception, «death and I» were put in the same sentence, death of my mother if she does an abortion, death of my sister as the only child, death of my father’s love affair. I often think of how he had to choose between killing his wife and his child and being free to pursue his love. He was then sentenced for life, he had no choice. But on the other hand my mother had no choice too, so “choice” seems impossible sometimes WHILE compliance and “staying with consequences” IS.
Trauma, according to Bessel van der Kolk is when “a person is suddenly and unexpectedly devastated by an atrocious event and is never the same again” he says “the trauma may be over but it keeps being replayed in continually recycling memories and in a reorganized nervous system” (2014). The origins of trauma in Ferenczi’s work, who introduces concepts like “the terrorism of suffering” during childhood and how in cases of children of mentally ill parents “adults forcibly inject their will particularly psychic contents of an unpleasurable nature into the childish personality”, is defined as “actual trauma is experienced by children in situations where no immediate remedy is provided and where adaptation, that is, a change in their own behavior is forced on them – the first step toward establishing the differentiation between inner and outer world, subject and object”. (1932)
Thus maybe the misfortune of adults who do not seem to have or know their options of choosing in crucial times in their lives represent repressed unprocessed parts unconsciously “being forced” onto their children’s personality and behavior later on.
As my inner traumatic environment was being shaped by the situation of my family’s events, I was growing up into being a submissive and obeying child in interminable moments of loneliness and silence. I remember playing alone but mostly listening to Radio Theater every night in order to hear the sounds of voices. Later on my books were my companions. While in my adult therapy I remembered the violence : the image of my father beating my sister badly, I was 2.5 years old and my mother and I would watch, I then realized how afraid I was of my parents and why all my life I took on the role of the by-stander.
For me trauma is a conscious or unconscious event which violently attacks a person’s soul, mind and body in multiple ways and at various levels mostly due to its unexpected nature and unknown content. According to Glasser 1998, following Walker, 1970 violence is “the intended infliction of bodily harm on another person” as “conscious acts on the body of one person by another person”. Glasser also talks about two types of violence: self-preservative violence (or aggression) aiming towards negating or removing the source of danger and sadism (or malicious violence) aiming to inflict physical and emotional suffering. Sofsky talks about the “useless violence” (Levi, 1988) saying “violence erupts from the body’s boundary and includes all aspects of the human condition, addressing the whole person’ (R.J. Perelberg, 2015)
The pain inflicted on my sister’s body by my father was perceived by me as a child, as my pain. Even today I feel the pain of the hitting, the pain of not being able to save her, the pain of my mother holding me in her arms, her pain, the pain of violence of what I call today “my violent inner traumatic environment” forever. But I also know I was carrying the violence of my parents’ unhappiness as a couple. My mother was beaten by her father as a child, he was an alcoholic who killed himself. “Traumatic experiences are often lost in time and concealed by shame, secrecy and social taboo” (Van der Kolk, 2014). I was only 2.5 and the series of catastrophic events kept on going, my only memories are an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.7 when my mother ran with me in her arms down the stairs, and a lot of people died in Romania and a woman in black looking at me, I later on found out it was my grandmother, from my mother’s side who also died during those first two years of my life. “For the little child and how much more for the infant life is just a series of terrifically intense experiences”. (Winnicott, 1957)
My mother was working at the Major’s office; we would stay in the center of a small town in Romania, next to the City Hall, which became my second home. The Socialist Republic of Romania (Romanian: Republica Socialistă România, RSR) was a Marxist–Leninist one-party communist state that existed officially in Romania from 1947 to 1989. From 1947 to 1965, the state was known as the Romanian People’s Republic (Republica Populară Romînă, RPR). With the death of Gheorghiu-Dej in March 1965, Ceaușescu succeeded to the leadership of Romania’s Communist Party as first secretary (general secretary from July 1965); and with his assumption of the presidency of the State Council (December 1967), he became head of state as well. Ceaușescu was elected to the newly created post of president of Romania in 1974.
His secret police, the Securitate, was responsible for mass surveillance as well as severe repression and human rights abuses within the country, and controlled the media and press. People would be followed and imprisoned if they refused to become members of the communist party, in some cases after imprisonment if they would resist they would soon be declared dead due to unknown causes, usually food poisoning. Fear and rumoring were the mechanism people would be controlled and submitted. We were all “the same and equals” what I perceive today as “the monstrous and destructive effects caused by sociopolitical and horrifying violence”.
According to Herman (1992) a traumatic event is “a history of subjection to totalitarian control over a prolonged period”. As a child I did not know I was growing up in the prison of communism, I did not know the borders of my country were closed, I thought that is how the world is. But on the other hand I did not know the door of our house was closed and only death could help my parents find their freedom. Life was possible only if we stick together. “Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.” (A. Miller) Probably my profession as psychologist, which I consciously decided to study in my late 20’s, is my way of fighting all the inherited (unknown and hidden) mental illness and whatever produced in me my outer environment of trauma.
I was 14 when the revolution happened, 1989, and people went on the streets to protest against fear and poverty. The next thing I remember was seeing the execution of Ceausescu and his wife live on TV. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3Y1dmq2Hmk).
Ceausescu’s execution as a “shameful but necessary” act of freedom for the Romanian people represented for me at that fragile age a traumatic experience and is what I am calling today the “outer traumatic environment” which shaped part of what I am as a human being every time “I execute” whatever is feeling threatening to me, every time I cannot accept hierarchy imposed by fear and I see “dictators” in every Leader of any Group wanting to impose his views. “It is precisely because a child’s feelings are so strong that they cannot be repressed without serious consequences. The stronger a prisoner is, the thicker the prison walls have to be, which impede or completely prevent later emotional growth.” (A. Miller)
Is Romania the only country in the world who executed its President? The tendency of the Romanians today to judge their rulers and mistrust them is the same trauma being re-enacted. The guilt we all carry is unbearable. We became for one moment “killers” and that influenced our psycho synthesis as a nation forever. Until we deal with that, we are doomed to re-live it and I will forever avoid Presidents of fear I am so capable of executing them. Hobbes’s (1651) considered that human society consists of people warring against each other and that basically man is a ferocious animal who must be coerced into peaceful coexistence by a powerful tyrant. Law is essentially the law of the strong repressive leader; lacking such repressive external leadership, human beings would eventually destroy each other. Freud added to Hobbes’s view the idea of an internal tyrant, the superego, which represents the originally external leader, the father (J.M.G. van der Deenen, 2005).
The small height of a child, their fragility and desperate need for love and protection make children vulnerable to the adult behavior. I grew up funny and lousy but sad and alone. “The feeling of awe for the parents and the tendency to obey them normally disappear as the child grows up but the need to be subject to someone remains” (Freud) I would become a woman and a therapist either masochistically submitted to her men and traumatized clients or powerfully imprisoning them into the therapeutic frame and my romantic relationships, I would become the victim and the victimizer but under the pretence of a by-stander. As an adult I would be far away from what traumatized me but always in a hurry not to be caught again in any possible traumatizing environment. I would stay for days in my house or spend weeks working without realizing I would imprison myself repeating the pattern of “hiding”.
“The person’s self is the history of many internal relations. Each infant, child, adolescent, and adult (through the life cycle) experiences the – theoretically infinite – parts of the self articulated through the interplay of internal and external reality” (C. Bollas).
“Healing both requires and implies regaining the vulnerability that made us shut down emotionally in the first place” (G. Mate, 2019). Not even today I allow myself to be vulnerable; I am always “in control” or “finding solutions”. Winnicott’s “fear of breakdown” is “an experience of a breakdown earlier in life which cannot be returned to without help”. Did I die every time they wanted to kill me and they would not eventually do it? Was it too much for me to live against their desires to get rid of me?
During my years at Faculty I made a new friend, at that time Greeks would come to Romania to study. She invited me to visit Thessaloniki. My first trip outside the country, the family, the “prison”. The blue and the infinite of the sea, the lights, the joy, the different, the new, were like the “kiss of the prince” waking me from that sleep I was sleeping for 22 years. It felt as IF I had found my way out, the door! I then decided I could never go back and moved to Greece.
My 25 years in Greece away from all my past and my new identity as a therapist gave me the opportunity to distance from the pain I was carrying. “For the adult therefore the biological stress regulation depends on a delicate balance between social and relationship security on the one hand and genuine autonomy on the other” (G. Mate. 2019) in my late twenties I was bulimic, I developed anxiety disorder, I was sexually self-catastrophic and in deep states of depression at times and somatically I was diagnosed with multiple ulcers. I managed to distance myself from the initial environment of trauma but my adult life would express through my body all the difficult childhood carried, as if whatever was repressed and contained in one environment would be freed and expressed in different ways in another environment. Gustave Le Bon’s main thesis in La Psychologie des Foules (1895) is that “when man becomes a part of a group he regresses to a primitive mental state”.
Indeed I was re-born and I got to be adopted eventually, by Greece. I even became a “good enough therapist” with lots of clients but I was still a traumatized person, a “wounded healer” with a lot or no memory at all. “Traumatized people simultaneously remember too little and too much” (Van der Kolk, 2014).
According to Winniccott (1958) the “Environmental Mother” describes how the mother’s attitudes toward independent, creative exploration of the world is internalized by the growing child and then projected out on the “surrounding” to be felt as a broadened attitude with which one’s creative efforts in life are met. This process thus becomes the prototype of creative achievement in later life.
I would deny and keep hidden my Romanian identity and speak perfectly Greek so nobody can understand. I was ashamed of my identity. I had the body of a woman now, I would be more and more powerful intellectually and I would know the power of knowledge. I got recognition and as a European I had rights equals with those of Greeks. I bought a house fearing someone might chase me away from a Country that is not mine that I do not belong to. Visiting my parents was a torment, they never accepted my departure to Greece, they got sick, I got sick but nothing stood in my way toward freedom. Returning back to the grey prison (that is the color of the buildings in Romania) was not an option and it was every time a difficult meeting with a past I wanted to leave behind.
The sea is that endless limit to my prison TODAY. Ferenczi develops the view that the whole of life is determined by a tendency to return to the womb, equating the process of birth with the phylogenetic transition of animal life from water to land, and linking coitus to the idea of “thalassal regression”: “the longing for the sea-life from which man emerged to primeval times”.
I do not know if I am a victim of my past or a survivor in my present, I do not know how the political, cultural, religious, social environments of two countries and all the people of my life intertwined and influenced my personality. I know I am both and I know I am all my experiences and relationships until today. I use to think there are two lives one in Romania and one in Greece that I am living during one life time.
My biggest challenge was doing therapy in another language than my maternal one. So another language made it easier for me to think and heal others and stay hidden.
“Re-enactments are frozen in time unchanging, and they are always lonely, humiliating and alienating experiences” Van der Kolk talks also about three kinds of memory – narrative, traumatic (ordinary – social) and complete (with feelings).
Why do I call it violence and not aggression of the inner and outer environments of trauma? Because THIS is the way I perceived it since to me violence is a matter of how aggression is expressed through actions. Do we even inherit aggressive desires and violent behaviors, as a response to prior historic violence and the source of trauma? I think of the aggression as belonging to one and the violence as belonging to many and I see a violent act as an expression of a certain form of aggression. What matters the most I think is how my perception of traumatic events of my life influenced my adult personality, behavior, and relationships. A lot and forever. It seems I perceived as acts of violence my family’s members thoughts of “death” in combination with their violent behaviors among each others in a society tormented by almost 30 years of repression and punitive acts.
Caught in between two worlds – Romania and Greece, two dimensions – past and present, two identities – child and adult, two feelings – entrapment and freedom I feel I can not belong anywhere. I propose that the person who leaves behind is a person who tries to “kill”, the person who stays is the person who manages to contain whatever tried to destroy her. Once one leaves her initial traumatic environment, she will never be able to “fit in” properly in any relationship in any country in any home but one will find a kind of symbolic freedom soothing for the soul.
How did therapy free me from my prison of pain? In my first therapy my analyst said, “your mother had a leash on your neck”. I was mad with her, I was 33 and she still saw the collar of dependency. My second therapy helped me realize the depression and the degrees of dissociation and self-destruction I had. My third therapy teaches me I do not know intimacy and closeness and how afraid I am of relationships. And you might ask “And how come she is a good therapist?” Well, because I know all that because I am curious and able to put pieces together, to organize the chaos, to dare killing but also to love life so much to have survived my difficult childhood and manage to treasure and keep together good and bad in the right balance. “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” (Flannery O’Connor)
Conclusions
As I was remembering and seeing with my mind’s eyes those painful moments of my childhood the pain was again re-entering my body but that helped me realize how familiar it all is. I have been carrying everything within me with a power I never knew I had. According to R. May (1952) power is “to be, to exist, to assert oneself as a living thing”.
I think true healing comes only through death and the only think we can do is simply try to sooth ourselves during our lifetime in various warm and tender new environments. I think that trans-generational transmission of trauma is an unconscious process to re-produce their “unknown history” in the same way children are created. In other words trauma is the children being born. Or the children being born are the carriers of their parents’ unknown and unsolved repetition of trauma, the new environments of old traumas!
Depending on how the children are growing and living their adult lives the shape of the traumatic experience re-produced from generation to generation is changing or not.
Romania is as alive in me as ever and no, Greece did not heal me, Greece gave me time to find the power to see what I am carrying. I know now. The re-location of trauma means distancing from the initial environment one is belonging to in order not to heal it but to re-shape it and re-new it so that different processes might intervene and the transmission of trauma might not affect next generations. Yes, therapy was the key to unlocking my childhood prison cell and freeing my true self, but my true self is so sick and so afraid I will always need new soothing environments to take care of it.
1 Psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) originated the concept in his divine child archetype. New Thought spiritual leader Emmet Fox (1886–1951) called it the “wonder child”.[1] The concept of the inner child was further developed by husband and wife team Vivian and Arthur Janov in primal therapy, expounded in the books The Primal Scream (1970) and The Feeling Child (1973).[2]Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child (1990), John Bradshaw, a U.S. educator, pop psychology and self-help movement leader, used “inner child” to point to unresolved childhood experiences and the lingering dysfunctional effects of childhood dysfunction: the sum of mental-emotional memories stored in the sub-conscious from conception thru pre-puberty.[3]
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Mate, G. (2019) When the body says No. Penguin Random House UK
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I am a licensed psychologist working in my private practice in Athens, Greece. I was born and raised in Romania but moved to Greece in my early 20. I am member of GPA (Greek Psychologists Association), IARPP (International Association for Relational Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy), IPhA (International Psychohistory Association), AGPA(American Group Psychotherapy Association) and ISFN (International Sandor Ferenczi Network). I am among others a co-founder of International Ferenczi Study Groups and an active member of the International Forum on Violence. In Greece I have important collaborations with Private and State Institutions as a Clinical and Forensic Psychologist and I am completely devoted to my profession as a relational psychoanalytic psychotherapist as my path toward personal evolution in life but also as an important and active part of society.