Goodbye necessary illusions, hello new realities
The drama of acknowledging one’s early trauma
In a previous article, I addressed a type of grief which tends to accompany the witnessing and experiencing of a ‘psychological death’ of a parental figure. This is where a parent is simultaneously physically present and psychologically absent, usually in the context of mental illness, such that a parent is “there but not there” (Miller, 1996, p.633). This deeply felt sense of internal loss often remains unseen for a considerable amount of time. Being well-hidden, it is therefore disenfranchised. But when the relationship to the parent who is physically present but otherwise absent (i.e., psychologically unavailable) also feels to the offspring as if it is reciprocal when it never really was to begin with, different problems emerge. I argued that this feeling, that the relationship to the parent is reciprocal, was a necessary and well-constructed illusion because the person needed to unconsciously develop this illusion to experience a sense of safety and security. To this phenomena, I added the point that the person experiencing grief over an illusion was not the sole author of this illusion. Various written and unwritten government policies and general community expectations ‘co-author’ or feed into this same illusion making it difficult for individual sufferers to dispel, dismantle or even see the illusion. Prior to any conscious realisation of the illusion and the dismantling of it, individual carriers of this type of illusion do not readily give up. They seem to persevere, holding on to their illusions for dear life well into adulthood, all while society feeds into it by reinforcing such an illusion rather than reflecting back facts. That is, the truth and reality that their emotional needs cannot be met by psychologically absent or unavailable parents. This lack of reflection of the truth often continues unabated until failures (to have their needs met) clearly outweigh any hope for change. Consequently, the process of dissolving this formally necessary illusion and grieving its loss is often delayed, unless sufferers encounter a personal crisis. Often they carry this illusion until well into adulthood and until they’ve achieved a sense of safety affording them a level of internal strength and independence enough to see the truth. Only then are they able to take a step back, change the image of themselves in relation to actions they must take to have their needs met. This may also have something to do with developmental milestones in terms of how the brain grows in synchronicity with fundamental attachment needs. To clarify this process of loss, I referred to this phenomena as grief over an illusion.
It would be perfectly understandable if therapists and others felt perplexed about how grief over an illusion could manifest in daily life or what it might look like without concrete examples. Therefore, in this article, grief over an illusion is described via a case study referred to as “Person X”.
Person X desperate to visit his abusive parents to show off his young children
Now aged in his 40s, Person X has come to understand that he is a survivor of sexual, emotional, material and psychological abuse. He was also able to articulate the psycho-emotional death of his parents. Although it took him some time to reach the subsequent realisation that his parents were psychologically and emotionally unavailable to him, he never really gave up on his wish for him and his current family to remain connected. Meanwhile, his illusion developed a special focus: that his parents would be active grandparents in the lives of his children just like all those other grandparents he witnesses whenever taking his children to play in the park. His wife had different plans. Unaware of his early history of abuse because Person X had kept this secret due mainly to his sense of (irrational) shame, she instinctively felt their toxicity leading her to have no interest in connecting or even visiting them. This frustrated Person X.
Each time Person X saw other grandparents engaging with their grandchildren he felt envious, causing him to break down and cry as he described such heartbreaks during therapy. He would then become increasingly resolute, determined that his children will not miss out. That they too will meet and engage with their grandparents (his parents). That they too will play in the park under the loving gaze of their proud grandparents as do other children. He tried all sorts of ways to (unsuccessfully) convince his wife to support him in bringing their children to visit his parents. His wife refused to buy into his fantasy. She intuitively felt they were abusive people so did not go along with his wish. For this reason, Person X became increasingly angry at his wife. This caused serious marital disharmony. It was the crisis that drove him to seek therapy.
Desperate, Person X resorted to coercive tactics similar to how his brutal father used on him and his siblings whom his father had sexually abused when they were young. After several attempts over many months warning him not to take his children to visit his abusive parents, the therapist was left with no alternative but to inform him that he would need to be reported to child protection services if he ever took any of his young children to visit his highly abusive parents. He became angry at his therapist, threatening to terminate treatment. After three years of intensive 1–1 therapy, his wife accompanying him on a few one off couple work, things began to shift.
One day during a session there was an unanticipated light bulb moment as it dawned on Person X quite abruptly, a realisation that his parents were never really psycho-emotionally available to him. It was a necessary but painful insight. But one that dramatically smashed through his assumptions shattering his illusions. It was sudden, catching him and therapist unaware. Shocked, bent over, there was a lengthy pause broken by heavy out-breaths as he broke, sobbed into his hands for a while before resolutely lifting up his weary head. The colour of his face had changed. In that moment he looked awash with exhaustion. Then with a mesmerised hypnotic-like stare and a voice to match, his tone embodied the equivalent passionate conviction with which he spoke of his earlier desire for his children to connect with his abusive parents. Only this time, he vowed to do the exact opposite declaring “I will never set foot inside their house ever again and neither will any of my kids for as long as I live”.
Discussion:
Reflecting on the above case example, Person X had to believe for the sake of his very survival that everything was O.K., and that his parents were harmless, non-threatening people (John Bowlby, 1988). His illusion co-opted into a false belief system which allowed him to blindly continue on. Until Person X was strong enough mentally to grow and usher in an important insight, and until he felt safe enough emotionally to break down and bravely enter into the necessary grief work, he had to continue living off ‘the smell of an oily illusion’. He had to build this illusion internally within the confines of his imagination since childhood. He needed illusions for that vulnerable time period. It was an important adaptive response which served him well but had now gone past it’s ‘use-by-date’.
Essentially, Person X needed to build a kind of internal capacity and strength before being able to enter the process of realising that his relationship to his parents, and even with some abusive siblings, were in reality highly toxic. In other words, only after he was able to: (1) feel safe enough to view life differently; (2) be strong enough to exercise independence of thought and action; and (3) feel sufficiently supported by appropriate trauma-informed therapeutic interventions was he able to permit himself to detach from toxic attachments (Bloom, 2002). Previously he could only live with what Michael Polanyi (1967) described as ‘tacit knowledge’. Or with what Ronnie Janoff-Bulman outlines in her (1992) book entitled “Shattered Assumptions”, a certain set of taken for granted assumptions peculiar to trauma survivors which Person X had needed to hang on to. This adaptation for earlier survival grew to become maladaptive. The “mirror” (i.e., his core assumptions) he was looking at had changed. In fact, they “shattered”. This was a critical entry point into the rebuilding of a more viable assumptive world. Grief work and trauma recovery were twin tasks awaiting him. He was now emotionally and mentally strong and brave enough to enter this new, critical phase.
Whatever the narrative, grief over an illusion seems to be partially driven by what could be described according to Lévy-Bruhl’s (1857–1939) understanding of a ‘primitive’ form of thinking, i.e., a prelogical phase of knowing, indifferent to contradictions staring him in the face. In other words, in his natural need for personal connection, Person X tolerated the constant abuse and neglect. He normalised it. He could not immediately and logically see reality reflected back because at the time, for the sake of survival he had no other choice. His mind could not afford to address those contradictions that blocked his access to truth. This is partially because the human attachment system gets activated even if the family as an institution cannot and does not reciprocate loving attention to its young members (John Bowlby, 1988).
Ultimately, Person X was able to appreciate the logic that living his life through a rigid self-tailored set of illusions was not only beyond any usefulness for his survival, but also threatened his marriage and the quality of his relationship to his children. But while he was within this pre-logical phase, Person X could not have consciously known the true reason why, outside the initial presentation of “marital problems”, he needed to attend therapy. He believed his wife was solely “the problem”. This logic of forgetting earlier childhood abuse as described by Jennifer Freyd (1996) became unsustainable in the long term as he soon realised his needs were not being met (Misrachi, 2012). But due to dependency needs continuing into adulthood, he could not see facts staring back at him because to face such logic at that point in time threatened to overwhelm him (John Bowlby, 1988). Consequently, he had to both experience the presence of the trauma while simultaneously be in touch with his needs — a recipe for psycho-emotional exhaustion. So he existed in a fog, unable to see reality being mirrored back. Only after receiving adequate trauma-informed professional support, including informal support via his wife, was he able to autonomously begin to see the full reality of his family of origin reflected back. But until then, Person X projected his earlier coping mechanism and poor paternal role-modelling such that he not only normalised but also employed similar coercive behaviours received from his father on to his own wife and children. Challenging as it must have been for his wife and children suffering at the time, it was that very crisis, which fortunately for all concerned, gave him the impetus to attend therapy.
Over time, therapy offered Person X a safe environment with clear ethical boundaries which kept him, his wife and importantly their children, safe. Safety allowed him to dissolve his own self-created albeit necessary illusion to the extent he could no longer ‘unknow’ what he now unambiguously ‘knows’. Previously, for Person X his illusions were observed reality. But to others, they were straightforwardly wrong. Nevertheless, out of necessity for survival, he had to view his illusions through his own one-way biased mirror.
Reflecting back on his journey, Person X articulated why and how he did not wish for any return to his pre-logical phase of knowing. Although he realised his needs were not being met, it was not over yet. His grief contained a potent combination of irrational guilt and shame (twin themes I addressed in Mindcafe Issues 20, 24 and 44). At one point, feeling so disenfranchised, he expressed envy of the victims giving testimonies at The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse stating “I would have preferred it was the church that abused me”. The cascade of losses as a consequence of his traumas triggered for him deep sadness and a profound sense of what Doka (1989) coins disenfranchised grief. It was grief, peppered with (irrational) shame and guilt. And it was grief over more than one illusion as it included the perpetrator (his father), the enabler (his mother), and siblings (who continued believing in similar pre-logical illusions).
This is where appropriately timed grief understanding and trauma informed psycho-education aimed at normalising trauma and grief responses comes in handy. For example, the chronicity of sorrow suffered by Person X is suggestive of what Bruce and Schultz (2001) term “nonfinite loss and grief” in which unanticipated grief might never end. It is equally important to realise that “[a] loss could be appraised as positive — an end to extreme suffering” (Doka & Martin, 2010, p.60). This being particularly true in cases, like Person X, experiencing estrangement (Agllias, 2017). Moreover, Person X had no reason for shame or guilt. Therefore, a clear-cut message to Person X by a trauma-informed clinician would not only be highly relevant but also constitute an ethical obligation to unburden, alleviate suffering. Here is one possible reply:
It’s not your fault. You did nothing wrong. At the time, you were not in any position to see, know or reflect reality. You had to live with and by each of your illusions. That was how your body and mind could keep safe. It is how you managed to survive. This is the way certain traumas operate and the type of grief that can follow once such illusions are ready to shatter. Previously, you simply had no choice. But today you can afford to stand tall, hold up that special mirror, steady it…and confidently say to yourself: now I know the real truth once and for all.
This article was originally published in Mind Cafe, November, 2021, Issue 76.
Selected references:
Agllias, K. (2016). Family Estrangement: A matter of perspective. Routledge.
Bloom, S., L. (2002). Beyond the beveled mirror: Mourning and recovery from childhood maltreatment. In J. Kauffman (Ed.), Loss of the assumptive world. New York: Brunner-Routledge.
Doka, K. J., & Martin, T. L. (2010). Grieving beyond gender: Understanding the ways men and women mourn. New York: Routledge.
Miller, F. E. (1996). Grief therapy for relatives of persons with serious mental illness. Psychiatric Services, 47(6), 633–637.
