Growing up I wondered if everyone has a constant musical backbeat playing in their heads like I do, a DJ who never takes a day off, always keeping me company. I rather enjoy the accompaniment, and rarely have a complaint about the choice of songs. Interestingly, the sense of hearing is one of the earliest developing sensory brain areas, preceded only by the sense of touch. And we now know that the unborn are soothed even in utero, parents should be starting the lullabies and gentle melodies early. My memory of Harry Belafonte crooning Day-o, the Banana Boat Song and Burl Ives’ Waltzing Mathilde go back as far as age two. I am not aware of what came before that!
Since I have been working with neglect trauma where there is no known narrative, clients have no story to verbally tell, and I must stay keenly attuned to whatever might be going on inside of me, as it might be some sort of nonverbal communication from them, through the “field.” Perhaps this kind of communication sounds a little “woo woo” or magical, but the psychoanalysts wrote about it decades ago, with the psychobabble designation of “projective identification” (eg Melanie Klein’s 1946 paper “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27:99–110 – I am certainly not suggesting you read it!). I am not sure what the neuroscience is of these communications, but they do resemble the wordless discourse between infant and caregiver, before they share a verbal language. Although my early classical clinical training was not always resonant with my own developing thinking, it was like practicing scales and classics on the piano as scaffolding before I got to play the music I liked.
Projective identification is powerful stuff. It is non-verbal experience in the therapist’s own body, emotions, sensations, images, spontaneous memory of one’s own or of something the client might have told me previously, and yes, for me songs. In retrospect I am grateful for having had to wade through those mind-numbing texts, because the processes are so relevant to neglect-informed work. Of course, this all requires the therapist to be vigilant, ever on the watch to sort out what is mine and what is not. A central missing experience of survivors of childhood neglect, is “simply,” and accurately: being and feeling heard, let alone remembered. Recently, out of seemingly nowhere, I found myself repeatedly visited by an old favorite song that I had not heard or even thought of, in years. It did not seem to come from a client…
Tempest
I have always loved Latin music, especially starting in my 20’s when Latin America was an important part of my world, Latin music was what I listened to most, and it was the burgeoning time of what was then called the “New Latin American Song” movement: music that was very political and included folkloric instruments and influences. I loved it. Especially I loved Puerto Rican and Cuban music, and I still have groaning shelves of battered vinyl that I have no phonograph to play but will never throw away. The song that was recently inhabited my internal air space was an old Puerto Rican song called Temporal, which means tempestuous storm. I could hear it clearly in my head, but I could not even remember correctly who the musician was. Thanks to the wonders of modern search engines, I was able to find it, after repeatedly looking under the wrong musician’s name. I had no idea why it was lodged, on repeat, in my mind. And this started before the recent catastrophic “Melissa” battered Jamaica, another Caribbean island struck.
I found a video of the song and watched it. Perchance the video I found on YouTube included a little re-enactment which I also curiously watched. The rhythmic bouncy accompaniment begins, as the narrator walks along knowing a big storm is coming. He arrives at a gathering where a group of women, perhaps some sort of a party, dressed in matching traditional costume, are happily dancing. He proceeds to describe all the predictable disastrous impacts of a big storm: homes blown apart, lost crops…tragedy. The refrain repeats “todo es ansiedad…” All is anxiety. “Que sera de Puerto Rico?” What becomes of Puerto Rico when the big tempest arrives? Yet, all the while the people continue dancing. Their facial expressions may change and change again. The words describe battening down, trying to secure the buildings, people huddling together, holding on to each other (also enacted) as the lively music continues. The people keep dancing. Finally, the wind and rain begin. The dancers cover their heads and begin to scatter, some holding onto each other. Yet the music continues sounding bouncy and joyful, ultimately fading out. I watched it again and again, trying to understand it. What was it trying to tell me that was relevant to my own process? What was my inner DJ trying to get me to understand?
Powerlessness
Yesterday I heard on the news of the day, the unsurprising but nonetheless jarring and terrifying “executive order du jour.” It seems to be a daily contest here in the US, what outrage can shock even more than the last. We must carefully regulate our news consumption here, so not to be paralyzed by it. At least I do. This time, although not yet a “done deal” the order proposed that the US courts would only recognize two “legitimate” and therefore legally recognized genders: male and female. US passports would only be issued stating the bearer’s gender “assigned at birth,” essentially boiling down to a travel ban for the non-binary of this country. I thought of the trans and non-binary friends and acquaintances that I have met in Oxford over my last three years of going there. Would those from the US simply disappear from the conference? Let alone all the other non-binary individuals that I don’t know…Already a population poorly understood and underserved by our field, they would be even more invisible, less heard and understood and learned about and from?
I, a lifelong sex positive, inquisitive and fairly well-educated citizen of San Francisco, USA, still have a ton to learn. I felt my stomach and then my whole body seize up with a familiar feeling of enraged powerlessness. The age-old infantile cry of “It’s not fair!!” This time, it was neither infantile nor even injustice against me personally. But the feeling is primordial in this old body. I remembered it since time began. And it revisits all too often these days, hearing the absurdities, the daily injustices coming down from “up high.” Like the child of neglect, the ignored, uncared for and unprotected are most at risk for subsequent trauma and abuse. Many of our clients who come in presenting incident and shock trauma, have a base layer of early neglect that left them more vulnerable to attack. And the neglect brain, prone to the freeze response, collapses into powerlessness.
It is a familiar refrain of the child of neglect, including our adult clients, to lament “I don’t know what to do! What do I do? There is nothing I can do!” I have learned over the years that in therapy these clients are not in fact asking for our suggestions, even though we may think we have some very good ones. What they are really pleading for is understanding of the despair, of having nowhere to turn and no one to ask. I also know that these rulings require more than a collapsed freeze response. But my insides were still frozen in outrage.
Hope
A little while later, I heard a report of US NBA hero Magic Johnson partnering with a major health organization to promote mental health (CBS News.) Although I truly have no interest at all in professional sports, I have an inexplicable fascination with professional athletes. I remembered Magic Johnson’s winning smile, which I had never taken notice of before his appearance on the cover of Life Magazine, with the “shocking” headline that he had tested positive for HIV. It was November of 1991, almost 34 years ago to the day. The AIDS scourge was in full “bloom,” referred to as the “gay cancer.” Of course, Magic was immediately assumed to be gay, although he wasn’t/isn’t. But that did not work in his favor either. Nor did the sensational allegations of his supernumerary sexual exploits. As I listened to the story today, Magic seemed to be smiling again.
My mind wandered back in time; I remembered the AIDS epidemic here in San Francisco in the 1980’s. Initially I only knew of one friend I had lost, my childhood best friend Donny, who had later “grown up” to become an internationally acclaimed fashion model. Donny died at age 24. I had felt the same enraged helplessness. However, after gathering myself up from the freeze, I scrambled until I found what I could “do.” First, I found a local therapist AIDS project, where we provided free therapy to people with AIDS. I was not so good at that, loss being the core of neglect trauma, I was not a good candidate for working with a person I would likely lose soon, as in those days, AIDS was a virtual death sentence.
Ultimately, I found the California AIDS Ride, which later became AIDS Life Cycle. It was a 545-mile (877 KM) fundraising bicycle trek from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Like a traveling party, pedaling down the coast together, 3,000 of us eating, camping, sweating together for seven days. We were like the Puerto Rican dancers, who, not ignoring the impending storm, kept the beat. It reminded me of the 1975 song by Holly Near, where she referenced the murder of New Song Movement icon Victor Jara, by the military junta in Chile in 1973. First, they cut off his fingers, so he could not continue playing his guitar, but Victor continued to sing while they “shot his body down…” As protest singer Holly Near sang it, “You can kill a man, but not a song, when it’s sung the whole world round…” (It could Have Been Me, 1975 Anthology What Now People? Volume 1).
The Ride became an annual fixture of our lives for ten years, taking up months of weekends consumed with training. A straight, monogamous, married couple, my husband and I felt a vital connection and sense of belonging to this diverse and motely traveling community. We raised about $16 million dollars a year and funded much of the city’s AIDS research and services. We can proudly say that AIDS is pretty much history here in this town with the Ride being an important part of that victory. Sadly, in many parts of the world it is not over.
So, what is the message of song mysteriously playing and replaying? The dancers who keep dancing as the storm nears? Maybe that we must band together and keep dancing and keep pedaling, keep singing? And not collapse in cringing outrage and let the storm sweep us away. That is easy to say as I sit here in my cozy San Francisco home with power and internet and food, not a war torn, or storm ravaged battle zone. I certainly do not mean to minimize or over-simplify the complexities we all face. Nor am I willing to sit by idle and let my trans and non-binary friends be banished form a larger world cast back into the darkness and nothingness of lonely neglect. Perhaps the dancers are harbingers of hope. Perhaps that is what I can hope to be…
