I am unquestionably a scrooge about pretty much all holidays. Most of them are riddled with nightmarish childhood memories, partly because many of the Jewish holidays had traditional foods and food rituals, and often involved a lot of eating, which was of course my nemesis. And later because as a young adult and then a therapist, I was painfully reminded with each returning holiday season, whatever it was, mine or other cultures and traditions, of the expectations and seeming pressure to have happy harmonious family relationships and shared celebrations. The Norman Rockwell image, for any culture. And in this melting pot country, it seemed and seems there is always yet another feast day rolling around. Admittedly, Passover, although it was no exception in terms of dread and distaste, had one unquestionable redeeming aspect. The Passover seder, the ritual dinner/service prescribes four glasses of wine. Traditionally it was Manischewitz “concord grape” as I recall, and sweet like syrup. And even though it was supposed to be a “thimble-full” for kids, I did end up not quite under the table, and I did love that part. Since I stopped drinking in 1983, there has been no remaining selling point (although everyone loves my macaroons, a traditional Passover treat). And I do like the holiday’s symbolic meanings: spring, renewal, and freedom. There are many other ways however, I would now prefer to celebrate them. Like the Boston Trauma Conference, which became if not exactly a holiday, an annually recurring event and milestone to look forward to and anticipate. This year it comes right after Passover ends. Yay! And Lechaim!
Fields
This year marks the 35th year of the annual International Boston Trauma Conference. I am proud to say, I have been to most of them. It has been for me a beacon of direction, lighting the way for my trauma education and the next steps in my thinking, theory, practice, and certainly in my own development and healing. So many of my most cherished mentors and teachers, most of whom of course I never knew personally, I was first introduced or exposed to in these rooms. And ideas that might have been unfathomable, like EMDR, more elaborated somatic approaches, neurofeedback and then psychedelics were presented with enough seriousness, evidence basis and science, as to become part of many of our daily vernacular, vocabulary and lives. I am so grateful. I am so thrilled and excited that this year, like an eager descendant, I will get to be on the roster.
I am not sure if I first made my acquaintance with the work of Peter Levine, in Boston. I would not be surprised, but I admit I can’t remember. In any case, with great admiration, I have followed him for many years. Although I am not certified in his Somatic Experiencing, having pursued certification in cousin-methodology Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, I have taken many trainings with Peter over the years and decades.
One of my greatest and most dramatic life-changing therapy experiences was a “one session wonder” I had with Peter in California’s Esalen Institute at a workshop he and Bessel gave together in 2000. I always say, “If you want to work with the best therapists in the world, volunteer to be a ‘demo client’ which is exactly what I did that January day in the early Millennium. In front of a group of about 40 people, Peter in some 40 minutes worked his magic on my brain. I had not been able to focus my lifelong bookworm mind, and read a page, let alone a book in about 5 years, blankly reading and re-reading the same meaningless sentence over and over again. I was in grief about my lost world and respite. After that one session, I went home and read Allan Schore from cover to cover and have not stopped reading since. (If you have ever read Schore’s brilliant work, you will know that it is anything but light reading!). I have no idea what Peter did, although I do have the VHS recording of the session, but from there he found his place on my eternal short list of great heroes. And admittedly I have always said, with great respect for his many students and trained SE therapists, that Peter’s work cannot be taught. It is simply him. Thanks, Peter!
As I prepared my talk about Neglect Informed Psychotherapy, one of the concepts I included is the complex and, to me, fascinating projective identification, which is important to understand in working with the developmental trauma of neglect. As I am sure I have mentioned, my original psychotherapy training, as well as my long personal therapy, were an updated and evolving psychodynamic. Projective Identification is a mysterious interaction that I learned of from there. Essentially, what it means is a child (or therapy client) in effect “puts” a feeling or experience that they have no words for or even no memory of “inside of the other” mother, therapist, or even intimate partners. The story, desperate to be known and told, inaccessible to the experiences, is given to the other to be “interpreted, translated, felt, comprehended and articulated.” With many a child of trauma and/or neglect, who may flounder largely without a coherent or known autobiographical narrative, it is a highly adaptive and often enlightening default. And when successfully navigated can be exquisitely productive and even connecting, valuable, and challenging. As therapists, we must be scrupulously aware of our own story and our reactivities, so we can discern between our own and the other’s feelings. So many of us trauma and neglect-informed therapists have our own histories, and so we must be all the more committed to doing our own work, so we can be the effective and helpful “mother bird”.
As I was preparing my talk, and attempting to explain projective identification, I provided the story of a client who was struggling without words in one of our sessions. Spontaneously, in my own mind’s eye, I had a pop-up visual flash memory, unbidden, of an early memory of my own, waking up alone in the pitch dark, cold, terrified, in pain untethered, lost. It was so vivid, that I wondered if it was some sort of “transmission”, or communication from the client’s unconscious to mine; a projective identification from this client’s wordless story. I asked him, “What do you know about what was going on in your mother’s life when you were an infant? What might you have heard from older siblings or relatives, that would shed light on your early experience?” Sure enough, the infant image took us to some important details about his mother’s depression during his infancy, her family’s poverty and the discord in her troubled marriage with this client’s dad. Careful and not leading curiosity took us to a wealth of context for unremembered neglect, which seemed to lead us fairly quickly to more actual memory than he had had before. Listening and attending to communication through the “field” is an invaluable skill for the neglect-informed psychotherapist.
As I reviewed this section of my talk, I was gripped by a blast of worry. I already feel like something of an impostor to be speaking at the Boston Trauma Conference. Was this anecdote, this idea too “woo woo?” for Boston? Would it make me sound like an old hippie from Berkeley, California? I hesitated. I tabled the question for the moment…
Geniuses
Warning, the following, Spoiler Alert!
As a devoted follower of Peter Levine and a great fan of memoirs and autobiography, it was with great enthusiasm that I learned, now almost a year ago, that Peter Levine had written a memoir! Of course, I pre-ordered it in a hot minute as I’m wont to do, and about a week or so ago, it came! I am delighted. When I say “Spoiler Alert!” I mean, I am sharing with you a brief section, but I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing! Peter is a self-described introvert and extremely private person, so I have never heard him talk much about himself, certainly not about his own significant trauma story. I won’t spoil too much, only this one snippet that helped me settle down about expounding on energy fields at the Boston conference.
Peter is a serious scientist and scholar, in addition to all of his other geniuses. I knew that he had earned his doctorate in medical and biological physics at the University of California at Berkeley, and even worked a stint for NASA (the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration), so certainly no academic “slouch” or “woo woo” type, Berkeley or not. So I was fascinated to read this anecdote about him.
While a student in Berkeley, he had a favorite restaurant, Beggar’s Banquet, in town, that he frequented on a regular basis. A self-proclaimed and bookish loner, he generally went by himself, well… not entirely. Peter had an imaginary friend who kept him company, that friend was an apparition of the famed genius Albert Einstein. Peter had gotten to know the waitress there, and a regular fan of their homemade soups routinely ordered a second bowl for his “friend.” Although the waitress offered to keep the second bowl warm for him until he finished the first, Peter would decline the offer, and enjoy his conversations with Einstein. They made perfect sense to him.
No one really knew about these outings, until one day on a visit with his parents in New York, Peter chose to tell them about his regular and recurring apparition and time with Einstein. His mother was completely unsurprised and without missing a beat, said “Peter, I know why this happened to you…” She proceeded to tell him a story she had never told him before.
When eight months pregnant with Peter she and Peter’s father were on a picnic and an idyllic afternoon canoeing jaunt when they were overtaken by storm winds and their capsized vessel pitched them into sea. Struggling to find their way to safety a small sailboat appeared, in it an old man and a young girl rescued them, pulling them to shore. Once all were stable on terra firma, the two introduced themselves. As it happened, they were, you guessed it – Albert Einstein and his stepdaughter! It made perfect sense to her that all these years later, Einstein would be visiting Peter, the young college student, through the field. As I read, I felt as if Peter was coming to me through the field and telling me, “It is OK to talk about projective identification and communications through the field, in Boston.” Generations of geniuses have been communicating in these ways, why not us?
Oddly, I had another one of those flash memories from when I first moved to Berkeley in 1976. There was a local dairy in town called Berkeley Farms whose redundant catch phrase was “Farms. In Berkeley?” Followed by a refrain of loudly lowing cows: “Moooooooo.” I found myself thinking “Fields in Boston?” Well, why not?! Hope to see you there!
Today’s song: