Hakomi Mindfulness-Centered Somatic Psychotherapy

by Halko Weiss

  The parents may be neglectful, too busy to help, or may expect the child to fend for herself. Thus, the child learns, “Others will not help. I have to do it myself. If it’s going to get done, I’ll have to do it.” Finally, if she can successfully attend to her own needs, she develops the belief, “I can handle it myself.”

  Because this child is able, she responds to her sense of abandonment and dependency not by becoming endearing, but by becoming self-reliant. Lowen (1975) referred to this character pattern as “compensated oral.” The strategy is to rise to the challenge of independence in order to avoid collapse through the failure of others to provide support.

  The person with this pattern will see everything as a challenge to her ability to handle situations, and will then mobilize to handle it. All of this is done both because there is no other apparent choice, and also, at a deeper level, to avoid the disappointment of not having been helped. Because others will not be helpful and life is about dealing with challenges and stresses, as opposed to relaxed relating, the person with the self-reliant strategy has little dependence or use for others. Sometimes people with this disposition will put out a lot in service of others. On the one hand, they are modeling for others what they want for themselves, but on the other, they are not able to receive mutual help when offered. They will tend to operate parallel to the participation of others. When something needs to be done, they will jump in to take care of the situation without even considering others’ offers of help. As a result, they might live with an underlying resentment that they do more than their share.

  Self-reliance is very prevalent in our culture, and, in fact, is often held as a virtue. While having the ability to be self-reliant is, of course, a valuable skill, the automatic interpretations that others are irrelevant and that situations are challenges to one’s ability to survive are quite limiting.

  Such self-reliance leads to great resiliency, and often a large measure of competency, especially around material concerns. Organized around survival, people in this pattern are indeed skilled at getting by and getting things done. They can be quite decisive, and are usually very dependable in accomplishing a variety of tasks.

  Interdependence and Intimacy: Tough/Generous and Charming/Seductive Patterns

  As the child continues to learn, hopefully, that he will be helped with his needs, he is gaining a greater and greater sense of individual accomplishment. Less and less dependent on others for mastery of the physical world, the child begins to feel independent, a necessary step in becoming a wholly individuated being.

  At the same time, the child now begins to see himself in the context of the world. The surrounding environment is no longer just a source of mechanical need satisfaction. The world and people become a source of human, relational interest. The child, in short, moves from a self-centered search for needs and pleasure to an engagement with others that includes the desire for mutual satisfaction. The child needs to learn about interdependence, and desires equally independence and intimacy.

  A conflict between independence and intimacy arises when the child’s search for or expression of his own wish or needs in relationship is met with manipulation, ridicule, teasing, criticism, bargaining, disinterest, dismissal, or other such limitations on the free acceptance of his will in the service of the other person’s will. The problem is relational, and the issue is not “I can” or “I can’t,” but “I will” and “Will you also?”

  If the child is not met with respect for his will, but instead encounters opposition or ridicule for the benefit of the other, his sense of mutuality will be violated. The child, typically, feels deeply offended, minimized, or even crushed and betrayed. These feelings may lead to further criticism or humiliation by others. The primitive camaraderie of parallel independence becomes a competitive struggle for dominance, with the child having to adopt the position of either supporting his own will at the expense of the others, or surrendering his own sense of individuality at the expense of himself. Everything in his world becomes colored by the issue of power.

  He will then adopt a dual strategy of hiding his own vulnerability and neediness (for these are what evoked the offending response in the other) while seeking to dominate others, both to minimize their threat by not giving them leverage and to assert his own power. Adopting this strategy will see to it that the person appears carefree, competent, authoritative, and generous, with a bit of danger about him that will keep people respectful, but distant enough so that they will not try to be intimate and thereby a potential threat. Of course, this charade of invulnerability must also apply to the person himself, so that he often does not feel the need to act on his own needs, and can actually be less sensitive to pain than the average person. This can serve as a point of pride.

  Out of touch with his own sensitivity and cut off from intimacy, the tough/generous strategy keeps the person in a world of competitive, illusory power and security, without the hope for true intimacy and with only indirect opportunities for nourishment. Those embodying this strategy might attempt to curry favor and care from a position of power such as buying things for another, protecting, or helping them out somehow.

  In a similar way, if the child is not so much ridiculed, minimized, or constrained in her attempts at independence as coerced, manipulated, or taken advantage of, then she may learn not so much to dominate but to evade. Here the issue is not about being confronted or crushed, but about being manipulated or tricked. The other is seen not as an opponent in a win-or-lose battle for autonomy, but rather as an inconvenient obstacle on the path of self-satisfaction. Because the other was supposed to be helpful but is now in the way, the child feels more betrayed than offended. Rather than rising above to invulnerability and competing with the other for supremacy, the child may learn to charm and countermanipulate the situation or the other in order to get her own way.

  The selfish but charming lover or the solicitous con man are both stereotypes of this strategy. The strategy creates an apparent, but false, intimacy while underneath using this illusory closeness to achieve a much more self-centered goal. The person gets the indirect benefits of the pretend relationship, but not the depth of direct, vulnerable intimacy.

  Resources and strengths of people with these patterns include the ability to recognize and exploit opportunities, and the ability to disregard their own needs and feelings for the sake of others or for the cause they have committed to or are leading. The impulse to dominate provides a foundation to initiate, command, and lead with a decisiveness that often does not seek or need the input of others. It can help these people be successful in acting, since they are not hampered by stage fright or afraid of making a fool of themselves like others might be. In relationships, people with these patterns are often, quite successfully, the caretaker, protector, or benefactor. They can sustain relationships where they enlist an attitude of “it’s us against the world,” again a power theme. Their resistance to being controlled or manipulated can lead them to operate outside the rules, and they can be creative outlaws, rebels, and innovators, originating their own vision or path, and often inspiring and leading others. These gifts can also be employed in matching wits with offenders as officers of the law.

  Freedom: The Burdened/Enduring Pattern

  Assuming the child has attained a sense of independence, she next needs to learn about the application of her independence in a relational world. She must learn the balance between freedom and responsibility, between autonomy and consequence.

  We can make a distinction between independence and freedom in this way: independence is the sense of being functionally separate, whole unto oneself, whereas freedom is the ability to be that separate self within the context of other independent selves. Though the child learns about independence in the context of others, and is impacted by their response to her efforts, the learning task of independence itself is not about the relationship. It is about one’s own ability and self-image. It only becomes about relationship if it is interrupted. We might say th
at during the development of independence, the child needs the support of others but has no wish yet to be influenced by their parallel needs.

  During the next learning stage, the pursuit of freedom, the child is trying to strike a balance between his own needs and wishes, and the needs and wishes of others. For the child in the independence/interdependence phase above, such a project is an aberration of his natural timing; through collapse, self-reliance, invulnerability, or manipulation, such a child is forced to include the needs of others before he is ready to, and so must come to view the needs of others as antagonistic, threatening, or inconvenient.

  The freedom-learning child, however, willingly seeks such engagement, especially if secure in his own sense of independence. Mutuality is a state whose time has come, and the child, moving from a sense of “I” to the beginnings of “we,” hopes to master it.

  At first, the child explores freedom by asserting it as absolute, testing how much autonomy is truly acceptable in the relational context. This is when children learn the word “No” and use it as a mantra: “Do you want a bath?” “NO!” “Do you want a spanking?” “NO!” “Are you my little boy?” “NO!” If they are opposed in their freedom—say, forbidden to explore that mysterious cabinet below the sink—they may be insistent, even rude, in their responses. If unable to prevail, they may express their rage in a temper tantrum.

  Over time, the child is trying to learn what the actual rules and boundaries are, where the compromise is between self-indulgence and pleasing those around them. It is important to emphasize that both of these concerns—the assertion of personal will and the generation of pleasure in significant others—are simultaneously at the forefront of the child’s interest. He wants both to happen and is trying to learn how to accomplish this juggling act. Children want to learn both freedom and responsibility—freedom for themselves, responsibility to the needs of others.

  If during this stage the child is forced to choose between these two concerns, he may tumble into an impossible double bind. If, for example, the child is constantly told that his drum banging gives Mommy a headache, the child must either sacrifice Mommy’s well-being to support his own musical explorations, or he must deny his own impulse to play the drum in order to protect Mommy. It is a lose-lose situation, in which he must surrender either his own freedom or Mommy’s pleasure. Either way, he fails at accomplishing the dual task of freedom and accommodating the other. He can hurt himself or he can hurt the one he loves. He is stuck. There is no good choice, and the child becomes burdened by the weight of this impasse.

  Outwardly, the child solves what Lowen calls the conflict between freedom and closeness by voting for the closeness he craves at the expense of the freedom to be himself, a terribly painful bargain of resigning to the tyranny of feeling loved or accepted conditionally. Especially if the child’s expression, individuality, or negativity have been severely dealt with and disallowed, the child learns that such organic expression will surely lead to being cut off from the desired closeness, which is likewise intolerable. Depending on how volatile or close to the surface the never-ending bind is, the person might demonstrate more or less passive-aggressive behavior, and more or less judgment toward others who display the freedom to not toe the line.

  To resolve the continuing inward bind, the child develops a strategy that attempts to include all needs, though, of course, he cannot truly succeed. On the surface, the child will accede to the other’s need, for he feels blamed and guilty that his own need hurts the other and does not want to damage the precious bond of intimacy. He represses his impulse to freely express and indulge himself (in our example, no more drumming). At the same time, the impulse is an authentic part of who he is, so it leaks out in the safe but private form of internal grumbling and tension against the contraction. Since he is violating his natural impulse to be expressive, his love for the other becomes tinged with underlying resentment. In addition to the intimacy, he also feels shame at violating himself, as well as a bittersweet superiority toward the other (based on his choice to take care of her at his expense, which she did not do for him). All of these emotions together—the love, the intimacy, the guilt, the resentment, and the superiority—form a very tense and compact little world that the child must manage and endure.

  To relieve the pressure, the child will see to it that, while not in any way directly confronting the other on the bind she has put him in, he will nevertheless get back at her by somehow undermining her needs. He may lose a shoe just as she’s hurrying to leave the house for an appointment. He may bump into her special vase while innocently playing. He may poke her in the eye while reaching to hug her. Again, none of this would be consciously planned—the child might feel quite surprised and innocent doing these things. But, underneath, there is a kind of smirking glee at having found some situational power by sabotaging the one who burdened him with such an impossible bind.

  A low-grade depression is always near because of the deep unmet need to have someone take delight in him as he is. The depression can evaporate quickly when someone does express interest and invites him to join in. However, hopes of unconditional friendship or contact are inevitably dashed as the child projects not only onto the primary caretaker but onto every significant person he meets that the other is simply the latest in a long line of people who only accept him if he accommodates to their needs and wants, as opposed to his own. If there is a choice of what movie to see, he knows ahead of time that he will go to the one the other wants, or end up going to his own first choice alone.

  Because of this lose-lose bind, the person with this strategy becomes uncomfortable with choosing. Since his perception is that any choice will lead to pain, either for himself or another about whom he cares, he will steer as far from decisions as he can. Knowing that there’s a tiger behind either door, the person with the burdened/enduring disposition prefers to delay and defer. He ends up having serious difficulty actually knowing what his choice would be, since so much energy has been spent wondering what choice the other wants. “How do I like my eggs?”

  This strategy, while not as well regarded in our culture today as it was in the 1950s, nevertheless includes a great percentage of our population. Caught between decency and impulse, duty and resentment, civilization and anarchy, most of us in one way or another sacrifice our true autonomy in service to getting along, pleasing the boss or our families, making the payments, loyally showing up for work, being good citizens.

  To be sure, much of this is noble and productive—remember, supporting the relational context is a highly desired goal for this person—and loyalty, concern, endurance, and a sense of justice are strengths of this pattern. A person organized this way is often able to remain patient, stable, and unmoved in difficult conditions. She may find satisfaction being able to continue with unpleasant tasks that others can’t stay with. Caring and devoted, people in this pattern seek to enjoy family and friends as deeply as possible.

  Acceptance and Equality: The Industrious/Overfocused and Expressive/Clinging Patterns

  By the time the child is about five or six years old, he has hopefully accomplished a sense of safety and sustenance in the world, and an independent and autonomous self, which can both recognize personal boundaries and interact easily with others. The creation of a self as a distinct entity should have taken place, but another step remains: for the self to take its place in the community as a contributing member. If the self were a car, we might say that it has been fully assembled and is now ready to learn how to travel on the highway of life with other cars.

  At this time, the child’s focus, while still firmly embedded in the dynamics of the family, expands to include an eager awareness of the world at large. The child’s sense of self not only is now influenced by what goes on at home, but in a deliberate way, seeks also to learn directly from experience in the community.

  The goal of this phase of development is to end up feeling like an equal member of society (both the one at home and the global one)
, with equal rights, recognition of one’s presence, and acknowledgment of one’s own accomplishments. The child needs to know she has arrived, is included, that she is somehow complete enough to take her place among the community’s membership, and to contribute.

  This sense of recognition can be interrupted in various ways: one or more parents or significant outside others may compete with the child and overwhelm her abilities; a parent might be withdrawn, demanding, or critical; because of their own need to appear successful, the parents may pressure the child to overachieve; the parents may have unfair standards or expectations; or circumstances may require the child to take an adult role in the family. In any case, the child’s innate sense of worthiness for being a valued part of things gets ignored, and the child must strive to attain the recognition and inclusion she needs.

  As a strategic response, then, the child adopts a policy of industrious, highly focused behavior and constant self-critical assessments that drive her to endeavor even harder— because of a nagging belief that she is not yet quite good enough to be fully included. If she gets an A at school, she’ll dwell on how she could have gotten an A-plus. If she scores two goals in soccer, she will go home wondering about the third that didn’t happen, or how she let her opponent score two goals. These children live in a world of achievements that are never quite good enough, measuring their worth not by who they are (as they had naturally wished) but by what they do or, more accurately, what they didn’t do yet, and whether those efforts will be acknowledged.

  Such constant effort requires them to focus on tasks rather than pleasure or feelings, and generates an overall tension of readiness and mobilization. When this strategy is evoked, the person experiences herself as being always at the starting blocks, waiting for the gun to go off, to try, one more time, to win the race and gain the acclaim that should have been hers in the first place, just because she exists.