These children are not your children
They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself
You can strive to be like them
But you cannot make them just like you ...
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
We cannot solve life's problems except by solving them.
M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled
Facing things as they are is the essence of growing up; owning and using new capacities within ourselves; recognising and responding to new features of the world around us; coping realistically with the gains and losses to our well-being that these changes bring.
Or at least that's the idea. For many people, however, the phrase and the associated idea of 'growing up' carry such a mass of pain and anger that they will already have turned off from reading these words, and are responding by reflex. 'Why don't you grow up?' 'Stop being such a baby!' 'When I grow up I can do what I like, I'll understand everything and have power at last.' 'I don't ever want to grow up and be like them.'
Growing up is a process, not a state; we never reach a point of 'grownupness', certainly not on our eighteenth birthday. Neither is being physiologically adult a measure of how much growing up we have managed to do. As children we are fed a lot of images of grownupness that may seem both enticing - power, freedom, status, knowledge - and discouraging - conservatism, rigidity, responsibility, worldweariness. These are images and not reality, but of course they impose a certain reality on most of us. The process of growing up becomes one of growing into a set of shared beliefs and attitudes, many of which in our society are crippling.
Even in the healthiest environment there are always losses alongside the gains in skill and enjoyment which growing up brings. Apart from anything else there is the simple loss of familiarity, which we tend to equate with security. However limiting and impoverished a particular situation may be, we are at least surviving it, and it's often tempting to choose the frying pan rather than the fire, a known and survivable limitation rather than an unknown mixture of promise and threat.
So it's a genuine question: do we want to grow up? Physically, we may have little choice - the first great example is the foetus who simply grows too big for the womb to hold it, and our growth process continues with the same irresistibility (though some people do seem to keep a 'childlike', underdeveloped physique which corresponds to an emotional unwillingness to grow up). As far as feeling and behaviour go, however, we can choose at any point to stop, not to pass through the next gateway in our developmental process. Although we apparently continue with life, our being has said 'No' on a deep level: inwardly we are committed to preserving the attitudes and values of the past.
In childhood, this refusal is clearly not literal. We can't, for example, go on breastfeeding for our whole life. But we can go on manifesting the attitudes which are appropriate to the breastfeeding or bottlefeeding period and which, if maintained, become negative and unhelpful. Genuine dependence becomes a clinging, weedy behaviour; we act as if the world owes us a living.
This is quite different from the way in which one stage can and should act as a foundation for the next To continue the breastfeeding example, we should be able to build on the secure feeling that we can be fed by the universe, while breastfeeding itself builds on the deep security of the previous experience of being continuously nurtured through the umbilical cord. We move from continuous, effortless feeding into a situation of dependence on a reliable source of nourishment, where we become more and more capable of actively asking for it Thus by stages we move gradually into the adult situation of having to create our own nourishment. If all goes well there is a safe and gradual progression, even if there are some difficult moments, like weaning, or adolescence.
Growing up isn't just about childhood. True, it is most obvious and intense early in life, but the opportunities to grow continue throughout our existence. Physically, our body goes on changing and developing both emotionally and mentally. We face new situations which challenge us to respond in new ways, to reconsider ourselves and reintegrate our values. How we cope with these opportunities depends a great deal on what has happened in our childhood, because by the time we are physical adults most of us have made some basic decisions not to go on changing. At one or more of the crucial developmental thresholds, we have rejected the new in favour of the old; not through wilfulness or inadequacy, but because our world did not give us the necessary support in a deeply scary and demanding situation.
As we have already suggested, these 'decisions not to change' are what creates armouring. Once made, such choices are not easy to unmake, especially since we are normally unaware of having made them. They are frozen into the basic pattern of our bodymind; secretly, tenaciously, they warp our responses to every new situation, enforcing a particular style of limitation of our bodily and emotional mobility.
We may be unable to raise our arms easily over our head, for example - unable to ask for help. Or we may be unable to push our jaw forward - and to defy authority; unable to balance on one leg - and to feel securely grounded in the world.
There are limitless examples, but as we shall see they tend to be organised within each person into a few basic patterns, a few main styles of defending against the world and our own impulses, each relating to a major threshold of development over which we stumbled in childhood. We use 'character' as the name for these patterns - for the inflexible, protective structures built into our ways of being in the world; the armoured bodymind which people often falsely identify with the real self.
The irony is that many of the attitudes which physical adults hold up to the young as examples of 'grownupness' are in fact pieces of character armouring. The caution, the conventionality, the exaggerated politeness and deep habitual patterns which are supposed to indicate 'maturity' are really more like the first stages of death. Young people who instinctively recognise this shrink In horror from the cold rigidity of adults, retreating into destructive nihilism - 'I'm never going to grow up'.
Armouring forms different patterns in each person; each of us favours some styles of expression and of holding more than others. In a very real and remarkable way our armouring presents a fossilised history of its own development: old feelings that have turned to stone, layer upon frozen layer, like the rings of some prehistoric tree. It is possible systematically to bring these fossil feelings back to life, liberating the energy that is trapped in holding them down - trapped in the past.
It's a great help in this task of creative archaeology to realise that character, though differently constructed for each person, falls into patterns. We can look at a particular way of relating to the world, of holding tension in the body, and connect it with other similar patterns, and so approach the individual with some sense of what feelings are being frozen and why, some idea of which era of childhood the process relates to. Of course, we can never deny that person's uniqueness, the very uniqueness we are trying to help them liberate, but the armour, as distinct from the human being within it, will almost always fit into one of relatively few patterns.
There are many different ways In which theorists can and do classify character for purposes of recognition - and no way to say that one is 'right' and another 'wrong'. It's like sorting buttons: we can put all the red ones together, or all the ones with four holes, or all the wooden ones - it depends entirely on what we are aiming to do with the buttons. We can, however, point out the different values which different modes of character analysis hold up as 'normal' and 'healthy'. What do they think human beings are 'really' like?
Some approaches to grouping character are attempting to say something about the origin and function of the attitudes involved: what they protect against, for example, and why. We feel that these approaches are powerful and potentially useful, for they have direct implications about how character can be melted and loosened. But at the same time they are dangerous, because if we go off at the wrong angle we are likely to miss the real person completely, and because they create the possibility of manipulating individual personality into what we regard as 'good for them'. Our own work with character starts from the belief and experience that human beings are originally and fundamentally loving; that our primal impulses are for contact and creativity; and that character armour represents our response to the frustration of these original impulses. So rather than trying to 'turn people into' healthy and loving beings, we are trying to help them melt the layers which obscure their original healthy and loving nature.
Of course, it's a rare individual whose character consists of one pure type, who reacts all the time to every situation along the same groove. Generally, each character can be seen as a complex interweaving of strands, often with many layers of defences lying 'on top of' each other, so that as one dissolves the next comes into view.
These layers represent phases of historical development in each person, ways of reacting which get frozen into us in a sequence of attitudes. Thus, in a crude example, there might be a layer of frozen fear which the person protects with violent anger, and then covers this up with a sneering politeness, which she tries to control with a stance of sweet reason - and so on.
Reich saw each of us as consisting of three major layers which show up in our character attitudes and in our musculature. He referred to these as Core, Middle Layer, and Surface. The Core is our 'original mind' as Buddhists sometimes call it our innate, organic capacity for love and creative work. For an infant growing up in our society, her attempts to express her core nature, to move this loving and enthusiastic energy outwards, are often met with systematic coldness and repression. Love, by its nature, turns to anger when frustrated, the organism's way of focusing energy on blasting through whatever obstructs its satisfaction.
But if this anger is itself suppressed, we end up with a superficial layer of socialised 'niceness' covering up all sorts of hateful and vicious feelings, created out of anger which cannot discharge itself, stewing and stagnating under the Surface. It is this Middle Layer which many people take to be their 'real innermost self' - a terrifying idea, which naturally enough makes them feel they must stay concealed at all costs!
A dim awareness of the
Middle Layer, without any direct sense of the Core, is
what stops a lot of people from working at their own
growth. 'If I let go of my control I might attack people
with an axe, or have sex in the middle of the road', is a
common attitude. The core may be seen as if it was
outside ourselves rather than inside, so that goodness is
in other people, or in Heaven. Will I like what
I find? Will other people like it? Am I normal?
These are the fears that police our separation from our
own core nature.
Character defends against outside threats ('they won't
like it'); but equally, or even more importantly, it
defends against inside feelings which seem too dangerous
to express or even to acknowledge ('I won't like it').
Hate and violence, though, are only a distorted version
of love and pleasure. Once we contact our original
nature, with its primary feelings of wholesomeness, we,
can find the courage to release what Reich called
'secondary emotions' without feeling overwhelmed by them.
Of course, to contact the Core we need to explore some of
the Middle Layer which is in the way, so it is a delicate
process of opening up as much as we dare, and seeing that
we gain a tremendous amount from doing so. At the same
time our Core offers a natural self-regulation of how
much we open up at any given moment. Once again, our
feelings are not the problem, but our feelings about
our feelings most certainly are.
This is particularly true when the feeling is of guilt,
manifesting itself in a belief that our defensive
character structure is 'our fault'. But we are not to
blame for our decisions to 'never grow up'; and nor,
really, is anyone else. Everybody at all times does their
best; all energy starts out from the clear core and
struggles to reach expression. If we have decided to say
'no' to some of life's demands, it was always the result
of an accurate judgement that we couldn't handle them - at
that time.
However, circumstances have changed. As adults our
potential powers and capacities have greatly increased,
and it would probably make sense to revise some of those
past decisions. One thing this means is becoming conscious
of them - re-owning the frozen history of our character
armour.
So what stopped us growing up?
No single incident will bind us into a straitjacket of
character armouring. Often a single incident becomes the
focus, and this may emerge in the course of therapy,
sometimes with stunning force. But that memory usually
stands as a symbol for the whole context in
which we grew up - or rather, failed to do so. We recall
one occasion on which our anger, say, was swallowed back
through fear of adult power. But if it only happened once
we could easily cope with it - it's the constant
repetition of swallowed anger which creates the adult
character unable not only to express anger but even
consciously to feel it.
As we have said, the whole purpose of armouring is to
remove conflict from consciousness. We could see this as
a sort of learning, not very different in
principle from the way we learn to walk or to talk, so
that the actual mechanics of the operation become
automatic and unconscious: we 'just do it'. In the case
of armouring, though, it's the tensing of the muscles to prevent
action (including breathing) which becomes automatic,
coupled with the equivalent mental 'act' of blanking out
thoughts and feelings.
Tension in a particular muscle system will tend to
produce more tension as the muscles shorten to
fit in with how they are being used. A wider range of
muscles thus becomes affected, so that eventually the
movement we are inhibiting tends to become physically
impossible, a defensive habit imprinted on the body, just
as it becomes mentally 'impossible' to feel and express
the repressed emotions. Changes take place in the sheaths
of connective tissue that surround our muscles. What
started off as doing - tensing muscles as a
deliberate act - has become a state of being:
'that's just the way I am'.
We are going to show how these character patterns - 'just
the ways we are' - emerge out of specific stages of
development that we all go through, and which in turn
correspond to specific areas and organs of the body.
These patterns, found in particular segments or our
armour, first formed during the phase of childhood when
our energy was focused in that area of the body, a result
of the work of growing up that was going on there. The
body armour is a map of character - but an archaeological
map.
In the womb, the embryo grows from the head down. This is
the direction of the energy stream around which we
develop. After birth, the process is repeated on another
level in our formative interactions with the world. The
energy of our need, our interest, our desire, streams
through one body system after another, tracing in the
first few years of life a path down the body from head to
pelvis. This is partly a metaphor, but to a remarkable
extent - as we shall see - it is a simple statement of
fact.
Clearly there are many
'stages of growth' - as many as we choose to name - but
our system of character analysis focuses on some main
stages relating to those parts of the body where we
'exchange energy' with the universe: places where we take
things in and give things out - and which are, therefore,
sites of pleasure and frustration, satisfaction and loss.
These parts surround what we call the 'heartlands' of the
body: our torso and belly, the inner areas of which, the
great involuntary muscles of the heart, the diaphragm and
the intestines, we can identify on a bodily level with
the Core. The word 'core' in fact comes from the Latin
for 'heart' and there is a very special relationship
between the heart segment and our primary feelings of
love, contact and creativity.
Thus the places where character is defined are the places
where energy moves between the heartlands of our body and
the outside world: eyes, mouth, chest, anus and genitals
are the main systems involved, with other areas like
legs, throat and back taking their cue from the sorts of
charge, blocking and investment that happen at the two
ends of the organism, head and tail. Armouring elsewhere
will give a particular 'flavour' to the character, but it
is what happens in the head and tail that defines the
essential character attitude.
Since we all go through much the same biological process
of growing up, we have all experienced the essential
attitude towards the world that goes along with each
character type. These attitudes are all part of a healthy
life function; we all need an energetic connection with
seeing and thinking, with feeding and speaking, with
self-regulation, assertion and love.
What keeps us stuck in negative versions of
these attitudes is when some of our growth energy is
still trapped back in that phase of our development,
never having satisfactorily resolved the issues that
arose there. At each stage we need help, validation and
support from the world. Without these, a certain part of
us never makes it through to the next stage: like Peter
Pan, we just can't face growing up.
That part of us will then tend to identify every new
situation which comes along as being nothing but a new
version of that same issue from the past. So, to use the
same example as earlier, someone who hasn't properly
dealt with the experience of being weaned will see every
new person in their life as a potential provider or
witholder of nourishment - 'Are you my Mummy?' is the
unconscious question. Every crisis of life will then be
understood as being basically a threat to nourishment,
whatever the actual issues may be. The process of
creative learning, whereby we use the past to draw
lessons for the future, has here gone out of control. In
a sense no future exists, only action replays of the
past. We will return to some of these issues in Chapter
10.
The same sorts of pattern correspond to each phase of
development over the first few years of life, up to the
point at which our basic character is pretty well formed.
To each bodily function of exchange with the world there
corresponds a basic need, which must be
satisfied before the bodymind can fully move on. Insofar
as that need is denied or left unsatisfied, a part of our
life force is 'left behind' in the form of muscular
armour and character structure, and future issues will be
comprehended largely in terms of that unmet need. For the
eyes it is the sense of existence and reality; for the
mouth, feeding and support; for the chest, validation;
for the anus, grounding and self-management; and for the
genitals, assertiveness, love and surrender.
The great majority of us have to some basic extent made
it through to the end of the process, the beginning of
independent life, with the ability to be open, accept
reality, and have genital sexual relationships, Bruised
and battered, tattered and tom, we've made it; but not
completely. We've left a considerable part of our
potential power and pleasure back in those growth stages,
locked up in the armouring that forms around our
frustrations.
We can only fully let go to reality and pleasure, it
seems, when we replay and release this old history,
re-own our existence, nourishment, self-regulation,
validation, assertiveness and love. What we then achieve
is the wholeness of our bodymind from top to
toes, able to focus and express itself through each and
every organ, able to carry on with the open-ended process
of growing.
We can achieve a relationship of wholeness with our
entire developmental process. There is a perfectly
healthy 'regression' that goes on all the time: every
night we return to a womb-like state to sleep and dream,
and at different moments in our daily life we are using
the attitudes and feelings appropriate to every phase of
life. Even a six-month old baby can at times be seen
regressing to earlier phases for reassurance and comfort.
And there is also a process of what we might call
'progression' along our lifeline - the times when we feel
old as the hills, or when a child suddenly shows
unexpectedly adult attitudes. This is all a natural part
of being alive. The important thing is to have the
capacity for free movement, rather than being compelled
to enter or stay in a particular state.
It is our character structure which can make some forms
of 'release therapy' very disappointing after a while.
It's a tremendous relief to cry, to rage, to scream and
to shake, especially if we have spent years being unable
to do so. But eventually it is brought home to us that
there has been only a limited change in our ways of
living our life; that we still have most of the problems
we came with, and we don't seem to have that
much less need to discharge emotion.
Our character is like a sponge which soaks up and holds
on to certain kinds of feeling, It's comparatively easy -
and very important - to learn how to let those feelings
go - like squeezing out the sponge. In itself, however,
this won't alter the structure of the sponge: it
will soak up the same feelings again at the first
opportunity. Working to change the character itself is a
much harder and more subtle task. In the following
chapters we shall show how we go about it.
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