Contextual Matters
Several years ago, I was sent the above image from a colleague who thought it was of an orphaned child in Iraq. The photo was so painful for me personally that I filed it in my ‘Photos for Future Notes’ folder and tried to forget it. I don’t seem capable of ‘forgetting’ suffering children however so have been carrying this image somewhere in my heart for several years now.
Today, after trying to help an adult friend who has been in severe abandonment terror for over a week anticipating a catastrophic outcome, I decided to try and write about it.
Abandonment fear/terror occurs when we believe, sense, or know we are in danger, and there is no avenue for help or escape. Our bodies are wired to either run, fight, or freeze. The freeze response is a phylogenetically older system thought to have survival advantages in that some animals lose interest in prey that appears to be dead [looking]. But it is also associated with a painless death because the body is in a shutdown state (see Levine, 1997, 2010; Schore, 1994).
Children who must stay with their parents for protection and care have even fewer choices. They can’t really run away from their parents. They can get angry, scream, and tantrum, but if they are afraid of their parent(s), this behavior is quite risky. Children often only have the freeze or shut-down response available to them. When this occurs often in a young developing child, the outcome can be the disorganization of the limbic system with no, or at best, weak prefrontal connections depending on the child’s developmental age. In this scenario, dissociation is the primary defense. With good-enough parenting, the cortical connections to the medial prefrontal cortex occur naturally as the child develops. As it turns out, the medial prefrontal cortex “is the only part of the cerebral cortex that apparently can modify the response of the limbic or emotional brain—particularly the amygdala, which is responsible for intense survival emotions” (Levine, 2010, p. 323).
Children who have experienced unstable attachment relationships and/or have had ongoing chaos in their early childhood can develop abandonment anxiety to almost any sudden change they can't control. When a child with this kind of developmental history grows into adulthood, these early trauma wounds can often be triggered, plunging them into profound limbic terror. The feelings of terror can further lead to panic because the person doesn't understand what is happening to them. This is what happened to my friend. Although this abandonment terror and chaos circuit is now well understood, to the person in it, it feels like being surrounded by a pack of hungry wolves with no escape and no help in sight.
However...
After researching the above picture, I learned that it was taken by Bahareh Bisheh from Iran who entitled the photo: “I have a Mother.” Bisheh writes, “This little girl is my cousin and she actually fell asleep on the asphalt just outside my house. She must have played for some time and just [layed down] to rest and fell asleep. [I] used a chair to stand on in order to take this shot. There is no orphanage involved and no tragic story behind this. I took this opportunity to be creative.”
Now this makes a difference!
…and reminds me of when Dan Siegel used a video at the UCLA Attachment Conference showing people walking down a path to the beach with happy music playing in the background, but then showed it again using shark music. One’s mood changes instantly!
So context matters, and it matters a lot. In fact, analyst Louis Sander (2002, 2008) spoke of the relational background that develops through infant/parent lived experience. That is, a context develops for how it all works in this environment, and this is implicit. The problem (and beauty when we can learn from it) with this is that we can project our own implicit lived experience onto others, like I/we did with the above drawing.
Unless we can take a pause to at least ask ourselves, "Is this really true," we are unconsciously interacting with our own projections, believing they represent reality. Well, they might be true on some personal lived-experience level, but they may have nothing to do with the reality of others.
Think about this: if we resonate to a picture or artform (like I did to the above picture) or even a person and automatically create a story, we need to reflect on it deeply (and do a bit of research), as it is sure to be important for our own healing.
We, and all of our Children need this.
But P.S., did the child draw the outline of the mother? The photographer? How did that mother outline get there? And if the child drew it, she chose to 'rest' in her mother's heart.
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