Winter 2004

Article

The Violence is Within

By Scott Baum, PhD, CBT

Editor’s note:
For the purposes of this newsletter, this article has been edited.
A full text of this article as well as other articles are available from the author. Scott can be reached at 212.665.3908 or email Docsbpsych@aol.com.

Violence is within us. It is part of our dialogue with ourselves and our communication with others. It can pervade and even fill the communal space we share, and it can take root in the soul and fester.

This is about my understanding of the forces that lead people to be violent with each other and how we as therapists perceive those forces in our clients and carry what we learn as professionals out into the world. It is not my intention to focus on the violence of the streets or the gulag, but the violence that strikes closer to home; the damage done by a parent to child, teacher to student, leader to follower, therapist to client. The kind of violence that is present when dependents are exploited for the gratification and enrichment of one in authority. This kind of violence diminishes a person, making her or him feel devalued and ultimately annihilated, psychically and spiritually.

I have been affected by such violence, much of it lost to memory but still a potent force. My own experiences have made me aware that violence exists behind the doors of even the best and quietest of homes and most reputable of organizations. Even ones composed of therapists. Many of my conclusions have been drawn from my own experience-my own family background, my discoveries about how I’ve been both the object and perpetrator of violence and how I had to listen to those treated violently for years before I understood its effects. I was one of the many for whom violence was always present, embodied and enacted, sometimes consciously, more often automatically, unthinkingly.

Psychotherapists see the devastating effects of violence all the time, the damage chronic violence does to the mind and spirit, as well as the body. And we see its legacy, witnessing time and again how people consumed by violence done to them feel impelled to repeat the cycle of destruction. As therapists, we are charged with finding the root causes of this violence. It falls to us to talk openly and honestly about how we, as therapists, relate to violence both in the clinical setting and the world. Understanding how violence develops and is expressed is one place to start. Seeing how it is denied and covered over by perpetrator and victim alike is another. Ways of confronting and addressing the violence as it manifests itself in clinical work is a third.

However, in some ways the most important discussion we can have is about what we as therapists and people learn about ourselves; the violence within and among us and what we do about it…

For many years I expressed myself in ways colored by my own experiences with violence. I adopted a tone of self-righteous, strident outrage that demanded of others immediate comprehension, total deference and ultimate agreement. I protested violence violently. That protest is now more grounded, the terror of having experienced the violence I did is somewhat tempered. Let me tell something of what I have learned and how I learned it.

I am a bioenergetic therapist. In my personal therapy, bioenergetic work, a view stressing the unity of psychic and somatic processes, has been extremely valuable. It has allowed me to touch and amplify a flow of experience which was nearly dead. Bodywork gave me a path of experience to follow, a way to rage and grieve over and over, a way to gag and throw up the toxins I had ingested. It offered me a way to slowly and painfully dissolve the cocoon in which I lived my life.

This would have mattered little without the help of a therapist devoted to the primacy of felt experience. That was not the case in my family, despite appearances to the contrary. There, the devotion was to image, and to loyalty and surrender to that image. My therapist’s absolute and abiding belief in the validity and meaningfulness of my experience provided the support I needed to begin, along with the efforts of those who have cared enough, and dared to fight with me-especially my wife-to soften the bark of my defensiveness and face the brokenness of my body and the awesome negativity embedded in my psyche. I was able to see the negativity as a reaction to the people most significant in my life and the culture in which they lived.

As with so many of my clients, my value and identity had been betrayed by my parents. I spent my early childhood alternately contracting in terror from my mother and enveloping myself in my father, first to assure my survival and later for more complex reasons including meeting his needs. This subsuming of myself left me almost insensible, unable to connect sensation, feeling, and thought. Eventually I came to live with my father as my only parent, solidifying this habitual position. I loved my father and was terrified of losing him. My inability to refer to my own experience for information about reality, coupled with my father’s need to be revered as an all-good authority, rendered me incapable of challenging him or his primacy in my life…

Frequently these days I find myself negotiating the extremely delicate and difficult task of assisting a client in recognizing the way she or he has had to give themselves over to another and thereby give up themselves. Almost always the surrender is to a family authority. Recognizing that that has happened, and how it happened, is a slow and demanding process. The knots which bind dependent and authority are complex and extremely tight. It is my job to support and validate that part of the person that holds the key to becoming more real and self-possessed; but it is also my job to empathize with and support the part of the person that can’t imagine life without the other to whom she or he is bound. Separation and individuation is experienced as an unendurable loss, and may well result in abandonment. So much of the dependent’s basic sense of reality and meaning are intertwined with that authority (or authorities), that contempt and dismissal from the parental figure can annihilate the client’s sense of self or leave her or him feeling evil or horrifyingly guilty…

More and more I see that the negativity in myself was in my parents, introjected by me into my personality. It remained unintegrated and unavailable to consciousness as I struggled to contain and manage my terror, developing a false self modeled on my father. It has been hard to face this negativity, both their, and my, hatred, contempt, dismissiveness and sadism, but I have faced it, little by little over the years, despite denial and defensiveness. I know how difficult it is to acknowledge the truth of these negative forces in oneself. I have learned to recognize the subtle ways in which these profoundly negative feelings are expressed and how prevalent and quiet abusive behavior is in our world. I know firsthand how difficult it is to awaken from the trance that anesthetizes the victim to her or his pain and suffering, and even more difficult to separate oneself enough psychically from the abusive authority to see, feel, and speak out against the mistreatment.

The forces effecting the bond between parent and child or authority and dependent are very powerful, embodying the basic elements of physical and psychic survival. Abusive treatment results in the inhibition of the ability to fight back appropriately. Destructive authorities often demand reassurance that they are beloved, and that they are seen as doing that which is best for those in their charge. Children bonded to parents in a crucible of intense love, hate and fear find it extremely hard to effect a separation between themselves and those parents. Effecting such a separation is not only a process of finding and developing the ways in which one is different from another, it is also a process of separating oneself on a cellular level from someone by whom one has been possessed, someone whose view of oneself has become completely, or nearly, one’s own…

Psychotherapy, when it facilitates self-differentiation and the development of increasingly refined empathy, can foster the development of a moral sensibility and center. It is a discipline and practice which works for the development of the ability to choose and be accountable for one’s own response to oneself and others. It puts each of us firmly at the center of our actions, while acknowledging the multiplicity of forces and influences, known and unknown, which determine these actions. From that position we are required to be accountable for our behavior and, if we are to avoid the mistakes of previous authorities, we must be receptive to and accepting of our interdependence-as hard as that is to do. If the resolution of conflict, and the ultimate response to wounding, is to identify with the authority or authorities which perpetrated the injury, it is hard to see how anything will change much for the better.

When authorities perpetrate the kind of violence I have experienced directly and described here, they put submission and loyalty ahead of integrity and autonomy. They act on the presumption that a different set of standards should apply to them, that presumed superiority as a clinician or a person entitles one to privilege at the expense of others and immunity from the constraints which govern us all equally. Even if one’s skills or accomplishments were of superior quality, these constraints do not diminish; perhaps they even increase. An authority who feeds on the needs of the dependent while denying her or his interdependence with those in their care, dismisses them and nullifies their worth.

Can our professional organizations be exemplars and models of authority relationships? Can we embody what we learn from our clinical work and refuse to tolerate the abuses of power which are so damaging and often so subtle? My experience tells me that this is very hard to do. It requires seeing and knowing that the forces that promote the violence are present in our institutions and in ourselves. It also means being vulnerable to and dependent on the perceptions and awareness of others to find the truth of the effects of our behavior. Once we are able to do this, perhaps we will be more effective therapists, rooting out the hidden pieces of violence, raising our own and our clients’ consciousness and taking what we learn our into the world.

Only then will we begin to stop the violence.

Scott Baum is a clinical psychologist and Bioenergetic therapist living with his family and working in New York City.

Scott will be speaking at the upcoming Southern California Bioenergetic Conference in Lake Arrowhead, California, February 18-21, 2005. For information about the conference, email cldcrsng@aol.com or call 909-798-7711 Ext. 7#

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