by Halko Weiss
From the systemic perspective—a perspective that views the person as a living organic system—beliefs can be understood as a system’s organizing structure. Systems develop from simpler to more complex forms, and each developmental progression always integrates the previous one (Wilber, 1995). (This process of development is described in terms of schemas above.) A system also acts and organizes itself as a whole based upon communication between its parts (Bateson, 1979; Maturana & Varela, 1992; and, well summarized in reference to psychotherapy, in Johanson, 2008). As such, beliefs are comparable to the concept of internal models of reality (Holland, 1995; Waldrop, 1992). Successful interactions with the environment depend on the fact that the organizing structure and internal communications remain fluid, developing and accommodating themselves in response to changes in the environment (Bateson, 1979).
Currently a great number of efforts are underway in the service of integrating psychotherapeutic insights. Struggles between theoretical orientations have thankfully begun to wane. Instead, increasing efforts are being made to create a common language that examines common factors. Efforts along these lines have been particularly prevalent in neuroscience and psychotherapy research in relation to the origins of beliefs, how they develop, and how change in belief takes place. This research has resulted in further validation of the importance of the role of core beliefs and, with this, has corroborated one of the central concepts of the Hakomi method.
CHAPTER 8
Hakomi Character Theory
Jon Eisman
AS ALREADY DESCRIBED, Hakomi focuses on the way somatic, emotional, and cognitive experiences form from deeply held beliefs, which in turn generate habituated behavior and perceptual patterns. These behaviors and perceptions may then be processed utilizing mindfulness and the careful study of present experience to uncover the underlying formative “core material” (Kurtz, 1990a, p. 115). These operational precepts of the body—mindfulness, present experience, and neurologically held belief patterns—form the cornerstones of the Hakomi method.
While each Hakomi session seeks to embrace and reveal the individual nuances of these belief systems, it is also true that there are great similarities and consistencies among clients’ experiential patterns. Because of this, Hakomi employs a variety of psychostructural maps to frame, articulate, and facilitate the terrain across which clients travel. Central among these maps is character theory.
Hakomi’s original character map is an evolution of the theories of Wilhelm Reich (1949), Alexander Lowen (1958, 1975), David Shapiro (1965), and John Pierrakos (1990). Character in general seeks to describe the learning tasks of child development; the internal and external factors that contribute to that process; the successes, omissions, and wounding that occur during that learning; and the various, specific, strategic adaptations that people create to compensate for the gaps and impediments they encounter in their search to become integrated and fully resourced.
Since this learning takes place in relationship to others, character at its root is a description of relational processes. As Frank Lake describes it, “The various reaction patterns of personality are shown to represent reactions of loss, or the threat of loss, of various aspects of the normal dynamic cycle of loving dependent relationships in infancy” (1966, p. xvii). Character, however, also articulates the internal personal frameworks (habitual perceptual, experiential, and behavioral patterns) that develop as a result of these relational experiences: thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, somatic responses and defenses, emotions, moods, and so forth. Vygotsky generalizes by stating, “Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological)” (1978, p. 57). This applies, of course, to both healthy learning and adaptive, characterological fixation.
An element of character theory that distinguishes it from numerous other personality maps is its focus on somatic processes (Kurtz & Prestera, 1976)—the ways in which the physical body both holds and expresses the psychological identity. Reich (1949) referred to this somatic component as “armoring,” the total chronic bodily tension of the person that protects him from others and his own suppressed impulses. “The character of the individual as it is manifested in his typical pattern of behavior,” wrote Lowen, “is also portrayed on the somatic level by the form and movement of the body. . . . The body expression is the somatic view of the typical emotional expression, which is seen on the psychic level as ‘character’ ” (1975, p. 115).
The theories named above from which Hakomi derives its character model were all authoritarian and classically medical in their orientation. That is, they viewed strategic adaptations to developmental wounding (in Hakomi called “character strategies”) as signs of pathology—as unhealthy, neurotic disorders that required the diagnosis and intervention of an authoritative healer to remedy (Dychtwald, 1987). Hakomi takes a gentler and more systemic view. We see character not as a pathological digression, but as a creative attempt to assert one’s organicity—to find personal empowerment in an untenable situation. Thus, character is not a measure of what’s wrong with a person. For the Hakomi practitioner, character theory allows us to identify and attend to the habitual, neural-based, conditioned perceptions, responses, and personas that arose in the child’s developmental experience, which ultimately overshadowed the hypothetically free-functioning development of the client. We are not looking to “type” our clients, but to recognize universal categories of wounding and strategy, and to use this recognition as a vehicle for mindfully exploring the specifics of a particular person’s inner organization.
Neurologically, experiences happen because a specific collection of brain cells (neurons) fires together, activating thoughts, emotions, bodily events, and so on. When they fire, a link develops among them, creating a network. Even after the firing ceases, this link, like a kind of channel dug between the cells, remains. The more this network is activated, the stronger the link becomes. In this way, neural patterns are “use dependent.” Use a pattern a lot, and the tendency for that pattern to fire again becomes more entrenched. Disuse leads to such links fading away (Perry, Pollard, Blakeley, Baker, & Vigilante, 1996).
Furthermore, the more ingrained a pattern becomes, the less it takes to activate that pattern. This is called sensitization. “Once sensitized, the same neural activation can be elicited by decreasingly intense external stimuli. . . . The result is that full-blown response patterns . . . can be elicited by apparently minor stressors” (Perry et al., 1996, p. 275).
In this way, habits are created. As children, we learn how and what to feel in specific situations, how to respond, which aspects of our humanness to embody, how to perceive events, and so on. As experiences repeat themselves (our parents being calm and available or not, our bellies being full or empty, feeling safe and welcome or threatened and anxious), our neural patterns become habituated. As adults, characterological responses arise in us when some present event activates the old, habituated neural pattern. Thus, character is the practical description of the neural patterns we form in response to what we have learned about living. It reflects the way we manage our experience.
A general neurobiological sequence can be outlined for the development of character:
1. The child is well regulated or not. Strong, affirmative, limbic resonance and secure attachment allow the child to thrive (Ainsworth et al., 1978; Bowlby, 1973). Harsh resonance and poor attachment, on the other hand, not only instill limiting, social neural patterns, but also cause the child to operate from a threatened, survival mode, activating the more reptilian survival defenses of flight, fight, and freeze (Karen, 1998; Lewis et al., 2000). The first levels of character formation, then, are marked by the reversion of the child’s psyche from the emotional stability of strong limbic resonance to the more reptilian world of life and death.
2. In any case, limbic feeling states arise in response to developmental su
ccess or stress. Emotions arise, and somatic responses erupt.
3. Repetition of the success or stress creates neural patterns that form around these limbic feeling states. That is, an emotional framework, for better or worse, starts to wire in, along with somatic patterns of armoring, expression, and containment.
4. These habituated somatic, emotional, and energetic patterns synergize to create a neural network: a complex aggregate of interactive experiences.
5. This network stimulates the neocortex to provide a rational context for these experiences. Cognitive beliefs, perceptions, and behaviors are generated, which then become part of the network.
6. This entire collective network constitutes a character pattern.
7. Attractors—“ingrained prototypical neural links . . . that influence perception according to past experience . . . and lead us, at times, to see what we expect to see, rather than what is actually present” (Morgan, 2004b, p. 55)—evoke character responses when a life situation triggers some element of the pattern. That is, a single new element of experience (a look, a word, a gesture, and so on) that has a related reference in an existing neural network may activate the entire character pattern, even though the new experience is not actually challenging the person’s sense of safety or integrity.
8. As a pattern gets stronger, it takes less and less to trigger it (the sensitization process cited above).
9. We can develop numerous such networks, and therefore have different characterological responses to varying life situations, depending on which neural networks are activated.
When we observe characterological behavior, then, we are seeing the expression of deeply wired, neural patterns in the person’s brain and body, which typically misinterpret present experience. Some are lodged originally in the reptilian brain, generating primarily survival- and attachment-related experiences (though as the child develops, more sophisticated experiential content will arise); others are primarily limbic or cortical, manifesting as emotions, attitudes, beliefs, thought patterns, introjected voices, posture, and so on (Eisman, 2005). Overall, however, there is an integration of characterological patterns throughout all levels of the bodymind (Johanson, 2011c; Siegel, 2009).
The Character Map
Hakomi identifies eight basic character patterns, representing the perception of basic developmental learning tasks. Below are brief overviews of these eight basic patterns, presented in chronological (developmental) order. Since everyone goes through all of these stages, and there is almost always some interruption in the learning of the developmental tasks, we generally form a constellation of character patterns. Some people seem to dwell more consistently in one or another, whereas others are more fluid, with various character postures arising in response to different situations, and sometimes more than one pattern within the person arising in the same situation.
Being and Belonging: The Sensitive/Withdrawn Pattern
The sensitive/withdrawn pattern is marked by the person’s withdrawal from embracing full human experience. Typically developing from prebirth to about six months, the child, in a global state of consciousness and not yet able to discriminate himself well from the world around him, experiences whatever happens outside as an internal event. Such experiences form the framework for the child’s sense of identity. If the events are harsh in nature, the child develops a primarily kinesthetic and limbic sense of being harshness personified. (Positive experiences, of course, would engender positive identifications.)
Attachment and issues of affect regulation are central here. Since the child requires dyadic affect regulation to survive (Schore, 1994), any limitation or interruption to this feeling of a safe container leads the child to revert to reptilian survival mode: fight, flee, or freeze. In this mode, ordinary painful experiences become perceived as life threatening, and the child’s defenses are constructed around these survival responses. In Lowen’s theory of basic conflicts, the child chooses “existence” over organically satisfying “need.”
We, therefore, see the sensitive/withdrawn pattern as exhibiting reptilian defense mechanisms: withdrawal from experience; dissociation; later refuge in fantasy or cognition (flight); chronic hyperarousal, tension, anxiety, and underlying rage (fight); and frozen core tension, armoring, terror, and robotic behavior (freeze).
Since, at this time, the child is coming to terms with being alive, feeling welcome in the world, and experiencing the range of events allowed by having a complicated set of sense organs, the interruption of these learning tasks causes the child to fear existing, to feel unwelcome and invaded by experience, rather than supported by it. The fact of being becomes painful, and the world appears to be a relentlessly harsh place.
Physically helpless, and with an as-yet undeveloped rational and verbal function, the infant’s only real defense is to withdraw from experience, and—as he gets older—to live either in a fantasy world of the imagination in which he has control over the creation of experience, or an analytical world of machines and precision in which feelings and needs either don’t exist or are mere data entries. In either case, there is retreat, and others are kept out. In short, the strategy is to withdraw from both external and internal actual experience, and to substitute a self-generated facsimile of human experience—acting as if one is human, but without actually knowing and feeling what humanness is like.
On the positive side, this embodiment of fantasy and analysis, coupled with the freedom from following the usual social norms, often allows people engaged in this pattern to be particularly creative artists and thinkers. While the internal world is often quite sensitive and painful, the artistry expressed may be quite brilliant. A good example is the painter Vincent van Gogh. As a refuge from the harshness of this world, the person may also pursue deep spiritual experience. The underlying innocence of the aspiring self often leads people in this pattern to be exquisitely honest and to expect the same from others.
Getting Support: The Dependent/Endearing Pattern
From about six months to a year and a half, the child views the world as the source of his or her unending and essential needs. The child is functionally helpless, and needs and expects sustenance to come from the outside. The provision of such nurturing is expected by the child, and, in fact, the child is wired hormonally and neurologically to engage with a nurturing other while being sustained and regulated (Schore, 1994).
Against this very real backdrop, the child needs to learn that he will be sustained here, and that such sustenance can and will come from others. If successful, he will learn about the continuity of life and the abundance that allows it. If interrupted, the child is taught instead about the possibility of not continuing, about collapse and despair. Instead of abundance, the child will internalize a sense of emptiness, neediness, and abandonment.
It is important to note that such a sense of abandonment may have various origins. The adults responsible for nurturing the child may be ignorant, absent, ill, or stressed. They may be following some theoretical idea of how children should be managed. There may be economic or social factors, like poverty or war. The child’s metabolism may be weak or inefficient, resulting in nutritional deprivation.
In any case, the strategy that develops is the continued and undiscriminating pursuit of getting needed support, even though it is continually frustrated. If he is to stay alive and keep from being abandoned, the child must somehow endear himself to others. He must appear helpless and needy, and arouse in the other the motivation to provide.
The dependent/endearing child seeks attention and the demonstration of caring. Of course, locked into a sense of emptiness, the child becomes unable to take in offered support, and the efforts of the provider are wasted. He ends up feeling still unsupported; the impulse to give up and collapse arises again, and the strategy is triggered once more. Just as the sensitive/withdrawn person fails to see the potential for pleasure in experience, the dependent/endearing person fails to accept nourishment. He is, as Kurtz has said, “starving at a banquet
.”
Adults experience this pattern as an ongoing sense of deprivation and dependency. There is a feeling of being drained, inadequate, or somehow lacking in the right stuff: others have more than they, they just can’t seem to get ahead, and life feels unfair. They feel great rage, which they must try to hide in the service of seeming endearing. In terms of basic conflicts, they have chosen to forgo independence until they can secure their unmet needs.
On the positive side, people in this frame may be nonthreatening, affectionate, considerate, and endearing to others, with a strong sense of devotion to group and family. They are typically easy to talk to, and often have a warm, cuddly sweetness to them.
Independence: The Self-Reliant Pattern
From approximately one or one and a half years to about two or two and a half years, children slowly become more independent. They progress from rolling over to sitting up, to crawling, toddling, and now walking. They start to speak, naming their experiences and expressing their needs more precisely. They are delighted to be more self-sufficient, yet they still require constant outside support. At this point children need to learn that they can integrate their physical needs and desires with their newly developing skills, all the while still being sustained by outside support. Along with experiencing “I will be helped,” they need to master a sense of “I can do it!”