EXPANDING CONCEPTS
"And what I will one day know, not knowing, I already knew." Milton H. Erickson
THE PSYCHISM
THE CONSCIOUS – What I know I know.
THE UNCONSCIOUS – I know and I don't know that I know. Everything is contained in the unconscious. He is the great ocean that contains the primitive as raw material.
THE IMAGINARY – It means mental representation (conscious or not) of an object or the mental reproduction of a sensation in absence. It is his characteristic to reduce the other to himself, the different into identical, the strange into similar. The imaginary always in this sense feeds on synonyms, analogies, isomorphisms. Everything that is similar and familiar, we think is good or normal, even if it is violence, abuse, pedophilia or any other negative pattern. The way in which these unconscious experiences are fixed is called imprinting.
IMPRINTING – Imprinting is a term proposed by Konrad Lorenz to explain the indelible mark imposed by the first experiences of the newborn animal (as it happens with the baby bird that, after emerging from the egg, follows the first living being that passes through it, like if it was your mother). Cultural imprinting marks humans from birth, first with the seal of family culture, then school culture, then continues in university or professional life. Imprinting is an invisible repeating pattern, passed from parent to child and transferred to successive generations. Example: family myth.
REPETITION – The unconscious has a mind that always chooses what is comfortable, known, easy and without responsibility – he makes a copy. The person creates a mental model for a certain thing and even when he no longer needs it, he continues to repeat the behavior, because of the mental model that has not been reversed.
MENTAL MODEL – It is a mechanism of thought through which a human being tries to explain how his world works. It is the way a person acquires a language and from there will perceive and think about the world. The mental model starts from language, as language and perception are formed, the mental model is formed.
GENEALOGICAL PROGRAM – A computer program is a set of instructions encoded in such a way, to obtain a certain result in the machine that makes it work. Program means written in advance and indicates the intentions for which it is intended to be acted upon.
Sometimes, as in the case of the parental project, our ancestors act within a genealogical program through a name or family beliefs. Such a program is created spontaneously, after one or more traumas and certain descendants are chosen to cure them. In most cases, repair attempts remain unconscious, fail and consolidate through a repetition of the problem in several generations.
CLOSED MENTAL MODEL – The person lives on the principle of determinism or linear causality. Default Gabriela – I was born like this, I grew up like this…
COMPLEMENTARY MENTAL MODEL – Principle of plasticity, zigzag, complementary, reversible. The therapist's role is to help the person "flex" their mental model, which has been hardened by trauma. But to tamper with a person's mental model one must have permission to do so.
PERMISSION – It is a rule of the mental model. Only someone with authority equivalent to that established in the initial organization of this template can grant this permission.
COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS – Carl Gustav Jung – In the elaboration of his theory on the functioning of the psyche, he postulated the existence of a collective unconscious beyond the individual. According to this conception, the history of our family is also registered in the human psyche, the feelings that our precursors experienced, as well as the traumas and sufferings, as the physical characteristics inherited from our ancestors are registered in the body. This family memory is part of what Jung called the collective unconscious.
FAMILY UNCONSCIOUS – The family unconscious speaks through the person. In individual therapy, the search for therapy is personal and not personal. It is the entire family system that seeks therapy through this person. The client has his personal pattern of functioning and also the family/systemic pattern of functioning.
FAMILY UNCONSCIOUSNESS AND THE PHYSICAL BODY – The client's body is also a tool for locating issues. It contains information stored and passed on through family genes. We have billions of cells and thus billions of information stored in us, from our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and being accessible within us. The physical and psychological structures contain the history of that species, which can become more rigid through trauma. Good experiences are also stored, but what stays are the traumas.
TRAUMA – Unlike animals that enter a state of trauma less, we, as so-called rational animals, enter a state of trauma more easily, because we are able to dissociate emotion from thought. On a physical level, the adrenaline released gives an enormous fight or flight impulse. In general, the animals engage in physical activity and the adrenaline and released hormones are used up and there is then no information left in the body to remember the event. But when human beings experience an unpleasant event, in addition to the options of fighting or fleeing, they have the option of freezing in the rational freezer. The adrenaline comes, you are ready to act and then comes the rational freezer, dissociating emotion from thought. On the physical level, this chemical information is stored in the body, in the cells, in the muscles, in the structure like trauma and making it more rigid. So the emotional flow is being less accessible and can be transmitted unconsciously from generation to generation. It could be dozens of generations. When the client arrives at the office, pay attention to how he behaves, what his symptoms are.
THE SYMPTOM TELLS A STORY
"What is silent in the first generation, the second generation carries in the body."
Françoise Dolto
When a client comes to our office with a symptom, as psychotherapists we must ask: – who else in this system has or has had this symptom? Father, mother, uncles, grandparents, great grandparents? It doesn't have a feeling, an emotion that hasn't been experienced countless times in that system.
Reporting a clinical case
Male patient, about 30 years old, married, referred by the psychiatrist, with insistent thoughts that he was going to strangle his six-month-old daughter. To preserve the patient's identity, names have been changed.
The patient reported that one day when he returned from work, playing with his daughter in bed, he went out to get a towel and his wife scolded him for leaving the child alone. He quickly returned to the bedroom and when he got close to the girl's bed, he had for the first time the thought that he was going to strangle her.
In one session, when he started to draw his genosociogram, he had a lot of difficulty confirming the number of siblings he had. He initially stated that his mother had not had miscarriages and that no sibling had died. But as there was an age difference between him and his brothers, up and down chronologically, I insisted on the possibility of stillbirths. He then reported: they say that above me there was a baby who was born and died a few days later, but I don't know how or when.
At the end of the elaboration of his genosociogram, as he sat down he said: – ah! there was Maria Alice who was younger than me and died with a few months. I asked him if he knew how, he replied with difficulty, that they said that her parents, once drunk, slept on her, suffocating her. At this moment he becomes emotional, as if a light has been turned on inside his soul. He completes the story: but my parents fought a lot… So, after a while in silence, I asked him what he imagined had actually happened. He shook his head in the negative and said he didn't know. In view of what he had narrated, I asked if there was a possibility that they had been drunk and had strangled the baby during a fight. He says yes, because he had already seen his father almost strangle his mother.
So far, everything has been hypotheses. But soon after, I realized that your daughter had the middle name of her dead little sister. – Alice. I asked if he named his daughter after this dead sister. He said no, because he didn't even remember that he had this sister.
This part of a genosociogram session leads us to understand that:
- the individual as the essence of the family system has access to information on family events and traumas;
- it has the reality of now and a reality that comes from elsewhere: the past;
- we know that negative information being stored gives resonance in the body or in situations in the person's life;
- it could also just be something that the person saw and didn't experience, that he only watched (mirror neurons) and couldn't elaborate.
MIRROR NEURON – It is a neuron that fires both when an animal performs a certain act, and when another animal observes (usually of the same species) doing the same act. In this way, the neuron imitates the behavior of another animal as if it were performing that action itself. These neurons have already been directly observed in primates, and it is believed that they also exist in humans and some birds.
PSYCHOGENEALOGY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY – When the client comes with any question, with any symptom, he brings us a lot of familiar information. We must explore together with him how we can complete this picture. Some of the information we still don't have. We can explore through resources such as: the genosociogram, social atom, photographic genogram, metaphorical genogram, phenomenological family sculpture, family constellation and other works.
As therapists, we don't need to give anything back to the client, because it's not possible to give back what already belongs to him. But we must help you say yes to your reality. Jacqueline Cassia de Oliveira |
Parts of texts from the didactic material Systemic Psychogenealogy - The family romance told by the genogram - Pages 12 to 15 Systemic Interaction Editions - Brazil
