Connected again (2)
Resolving the consequences of sexual boundary violation: it can be done
This article was posted in the Trade journal for contextual counseling, volume 27, number 1, March 2022.
Because it is an extensive article, we offer it here in 3 parts.
It is advisable to read it in the order in which it was written, i.e.
- Part 1 (click here)
- Part 2 (here you are now)
- Part 3 (click here)
Those who have been abused get over- and insensitized
The most painful thing to discover in oneself are the habitual coping mechanisms. Indeed, various psychological mechanisms ensure that those who have been abused do not "go free.
Sometimes people who have been abused see boundary crossing when it is not there and get upset that others do not notice the injustice.
At other times, it happens before their eyes and they cannot recognize the signs themselves.
Sometimes they are hypersensitive, sometimes insensitive - both of which are survival impulses. Hypersensitivity comes from fear that it would happen again. Insensitivity numbs the pain and confusion.
Insensitivity has a dual origin.
On the one hand, the abuse is more like a movie that happens outside the person than something experienced in person. If the person stays in the environment where the sexual boundary violation happens, then insensitivity is the only way to survive.
There is no choice: it is "don't feel" or "die of pain. The subconscious security system then disables feeling.
On the other hand, this non-feeling is the result of being energetically benumbed by the "perpetrator. This leads to a subconsciously driven "identification with the perpetrators.
Indeed, during the most painful moments, the person's fleeing psyche may look from the eyes of the 'perpetrator' (dissociation and identification). It is an automatic impulse, an ultimate attempt at control, where the 'perpetrator's' actions are experienced rather than the pain and physical boundary violation.
Affiliation with the "perpetrator" is the coping mechanism that afterwards blinds one to one's own transgressive behavior: insensitivity.
Both defense mechanisms, oversensitivity and insensitivity, cause the person to get a grip on the stress signals at the time.
Sometimes this means seeing danger when it is not there. Other times it means repeating the dissociation that occurred during the sexual boundary crossing.
Dissociation thus means that "victims" can afterwards be "catapulted back out of their bodies" and become spectators of what is happening. It also causes people to automatically "refuse to take into account the rights of others precisely because the others have also failed to take into account their rights and needs" (Ducommun-Nagy, From invisible to liberating loyalty, 2008).
According to Ducommun-Nagy, such insensitivity occurs from situations in which something is done to us. Because during the dissociation the pain cannot be felt, they do not experience it while they themselves wrong others afterwards.
Nagy has named this phenomenon as destructive right: from perceived injustice are entitled to deal destructively with others (Boszormeny-Nagy & Krasner, Between giving and taking: about contextual therapy, 1994).
"I noticed the other day that as soon as I finish something, I get up and leave without saying goodbye. My attention is then on the next thing I'm going to do.
For the other person, it gives the impression that I am 'letting him or her down' and just moving on. This is really repetitive behavior from identification with 'the perpetrator'. After all, after a rape, I was left behind and let myself fall to the ground, totally exhausted, while 'the perpetrator' left and engaged in other things.
Fortunately, I received feedback on my behavior and was able to adjust it. I now stay in touch when I want to focus on the next thing."
Not feeling what we do is actually always a signal that part of a trauma has not been processed. Unprocessed trauma sets the whole mill in motion "from generation to generation. Those who are triggered almost automatically execute the given script.
Thus, sexual boundary crossing is often a family pattern that is blindly transmitted from one generation to the next. It is subconsciously driven and is part of the broader family and by extension the entire society.
I think that we, in 2022, are the first generation who can stop and solve this subconsciously controlled behavior. During Pathway Breaking you can reprogram yourself and the family patterns. But before I go into this recovery process, I want to say a few words about forgiveness, about what happens in our brain when we lose control, and about recognition and correction.
Those who abuse yearn for forgiveness, liberation or absolution
"When one of 'the perpetrators' after some pressure from me accepted what had happened, his first reaction was 'Forgive me, please?" and because of the urgency in his voice and eyes I immediately said "I forgive you.
It was a little too quick, but nevertheless one of the most liberating sentences I have ever spoken.
He cried, "She forgives me! He had wanted to shout it from the rooftops. I could see the burden sliding off his shoulders".
The "perpetrator" is not the only one who yearns for forgiveness.
To achieve peace, N. also had to forgive himself.
Not that she had been guilty during the sexual boundary crossing, but because she recognized that she had failed to protect herself. She had failed in her deepest mission as a human being to "preserve her integrity.
And however irrational, it was necessary to forgive herself that she had not been able to safeguard herself. She needed to forgive herself that she had gotten into this situation, that she had not been able to prevent it. Even though she could not have done this as a small child and was absolutely not guilty of it.
I suspect that Nagy's whole wrestling with the concept of forgiveness, which he takes a slightly different approach and calls "exoneration," has to do with needing forgiveness without being guilty. Exoneration means "exclusion of liability.
N. forgives, she gives "the offender" back his integrity, even though he has lost it. She also forgives herself, and in doing so she restores herself. She no longer blames this "perpetrator. She realizes that this perpetrator cannot bear the responsibility for his actions, it is too much for him, it weighs him down, he is weighed down.
N. does want recognition of what happened and for the suffering she is bearing, but she no longer wants it to weigh down, not for her and not for the "perpetrator. This is a step toward finding peace, the goal she had set for herself. To accomplish this, she must turn off the alarms in her brain, alarms that go off as soon as she is triggered by something that evokes the sexual boundary violation.
Loss of control
The worst thing that can happen to us as human beings is loss of control (see the webinar 'Right to Life! Clean up the consequences of sexual transgression'). Being abused is total loss of control.
To realize what loss of control triggers, we first explain how our brain works normally and the effect it has on our memories.
Under ordinary circumstances, when our brain is working normally, all the sensory signals we experience (what we see, hear, feel, taste and smell) are clustered and stored as a memory (Riemslagh, Constructive Counseling? Destructive justice in professional Conversation, 2012).
During loss of control, the normal cooperation between the conscious and the subconscious fails, preventing sensory signals from clustering and memories from forming. This creates a blackout, where the sensory signals attach to our fear centers (amygdalae) in the center of our limbic system.
So of the worst moment of what we experience, during loss of control, no memories exist.
The sensory signals (seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling) do not cluster. They do become attached to the amygdalae that cause us to move to safety in the face of similar impulses.
The amygdalae are constantly scanning our environment. They are focused on preventing this loss of control in the future. As soon as they notice at least three similar sensory signals, the whole body goes into alarm: acute stress. The message is: get yourself to safety, this is life-threatening for you! Fight, flee or stiffen (freeze)!
Specifically, we have not created a memory of the most painful moments in our lives. We have, however, made sure that we are alarmed at the same sensory cues.
If our fear center detects the same signals, we go into acute stress. This immediately triggers a fight, flight or stiffen reflex. A voice, a gesture, a smell can trigger these defense reactions instantaneously.
If our brain - and therefore our body - goes into this acute stress, we perceive the outside world as hostile. We have to defend ourselves; we are in danger.
"I went into acute anxiety at the sight of wounds: I fainted immediately. The other day something painfully unexpected happened, and then I also fainted. I asked the doctor what happens physically then, because I do want to know.
'You're doing a vagal reflex,' the doctor says. My body cannot sustain itself in such a moment, freezes and stiffens. By fainting, I do not have to experience the painful unexpected event: I am not there.
As a child and adolescent, I often fainted. It feels like disappearing because it hurts too much. Then when I recover, I feel so dazed, as if something happened without my knowledge."
Trying to prevent the loss of control
In order to avoid losing control, a psychological mechanism is active that seeks the stress itself. We "seek repetition" in an attempt to now maintain control ourselves. It is a subconscious dynamic that prompts us to challenge the danger.
In her book "How Often Must You Fall?", Tuckerman (co-founder of the Spandau Girls' Home and editor of Tigermädchen) how a young woman who was previously raped finds herself in dangerous circumstances again. She is so afraid of it that she provokes it herself (self-fulfilling prophecy). It is as if she still wants to prove that she does live in a safe, respectful world.
"One of the men who raped me as a child said 'You asked for it yourself,' and at first that made me incredibly angry. Then I understood how it worked psychologically.
After the first rapes, I subconsciously tried to both protect myself and control the situation".
Trauma seems less threatening when we have some control over it ourselves. Writing this down is controversial because it blurs the strict boundary between perpetrator and victim.
Those who want to insist on a clear delineation between perpetrator and victim, however, forget the interaction aspect. We are always subconsciously interacting. That does not alter the fact that the one who crosses the boundary does bear full responsibility for it.
Indeed, he/she should have used his/her whole consciousness at the last minute, when the subconscious impulse to abuse occurred, to stop this destructive impulse. This is what Darcia Narvaez calls "the free will-not": that is, the space our consciousness ("free will") has to interrupt and stop destructive behavior (Narvaez, Triune Ethics: The Neurobiological Roots of Our Multiple Moralities, 2008).
"I know I need to pay attention. I consciously try to adjust my attunement to what is appropriate clothing or how I behave toward men, for example. Sometimes I also ask people around me what they think is appropriate.
After all, I know that since I was raped, there's a real chance that I'm creating new situations with them where I'm unsafe."
This is a tricky topic that also comes up at some point in therapy after sexually transgressive behavior. This requires deep respect for everyone's responsibility, and it is different with children than with adults. Children can never be held responsible for the transgressive behavior of adults.
Relationally-ethically, the most-powerful is always responsible to go out to a "no" from the least-powerful (Rober, The Client's "No": The Challenge of Creating Dialogical Space for Both Partners in Marital Therapy, in Liégeois, Burggraeve, Riemslagh, Corveleyn, "After You!" Dialogical Ethics and the Pastoral Councelling Process, (2013), 67-86.)
The most-powerful is the adult in relation to the child, the husband in relation to the wife, the manager in relation to the subordinate,... The ethical quality of the relationship depends on the extent to which the most-powerful asks the least-powerful if they feel safe and want what is happening and then says "feel free to say 'no'" after that.
It goes without saying that sexual boundary crossing always involves some form of overwhelm in which this relational-ethical rule is flouted. The coercion that accompanies these sexual acts is precisely what characterizes sexually transgressive behavior.
Read more in part 3 (click here)
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