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We have seen that psychic tensions lead to body (neurophysiological and muscular) tensions which seek release through body motion and interaction with `others'. Interaction can be of the inner, with a recorded other (the so called `inner object'), or of the outer, with a physical other (a support for the `object').
The freeing of the checked cycles is the main motivation of our life. Of small unit cycles (reactions, emotions, sentiments) or of greater more global cycles (developing through stages, learning, maturing, self-actualizing). It is hindered by strong fears registered early in our lives, and a number of means of avoidance of this freeing equally got early in our lives: repression, suppression, seeking the opposite, devitalisation, desensitization, escaping in the imaginary world of thoughts and fantasies, etc. Our life is in fact at the meeting point of the avoidance necessity schemes and the release necessity schemes.
The avoidance schemes bring unawareness.
Avoidance schemes put our point of functioning way off the inner recorded events. They thus lower the tensions necessary to keep the event in check. When the (inner) events are particularly `dangerous', we tend to function such as to never come close to them. We thus live as if they have never existed. Here unawareness means distance.
However, the necessity of release makes these events somehow active and they show in our lives in two ways: first by the care we take to avoid situations of release, second by subliminal tentatives of release such as dreams, disowned (unrecognized) words, disowned actions, and scenery buildup.
Even actualized inner events, therefore recognized, may be disowned by the use of the `false labeling method', i.e. sticking on the act a meaning which is at variance with its real signification.
Sample: Rejecting an infant may be deemed "good education" not to acknowledge the reality of the permanent damage it does to the child.
The release schemes bring awareness.
At the time of release, especially during the plateau and relaxing phase, an intense work of making sense of what has been lived takes place: the event, when released, is accompanied by a knowledge of its age (date), a knowledge of its context and others present, and an awareness of what was the case then. This knowledge is usally of the body, not of words; words (thoughts) or images may come in a second step, but are usually a more recent construction.
Release schemes are always operative.
This means that vitality activates the inner stalled events whatever we do to avoid their emergence. They thus organise the world around us, the context, to create the situation where the seeked release will come to happen. This is the main if not the only motive of our lives.
The building up of this context first acts on the more proximates, the family (children, consort, close relatives), the work place, the leasure activities; second: it tends to collectivate using the family, relatives and colleagues to organize and act for its goal of release, building up if necessary a clan ideology (the label for justifying the acts); third: if the release is thus not obtained or not sufficient, it seeks to percolate into the society in the way of a global ideology masking its real purpose which is the individual necessary release of certain patterns. It is this process of organisation of the (social) environment and its contamination with `false labels' which authorises the release of archaic recorded patterns in a collective way, the `banalisation' of which prevents owning the event (responsibility).
Therefore, our motivations in life separate in two levels 1-our conscious projects which tend to procure what we want (archaic), justified by our mental constructions; 2-the inner unaware seek for release of all checked archaic events which generally organize the world for their purpose under a false pretence.
The necessity of this false justification of the seek for release comes from many sides:
In the occidental society, there is a general disapproval of the release of archaic patterns, if not a total refusal and associated punishments. We have no institutionalised cathartic ritual except war.
Thus we are kept from early childhood in a Bateson's double bind: the necessity of release of events that our parents and the society have imprinted in us, and the forbid of such release by the same parents and society; and we are prevented to make meaning of what pushes inside of us.
Therapy rely therefore on the creation of an environment where release and catharsis is possible, without judgment, and without harm done to self or to others, and the possibility to make meaning of what happens in a second step. The depth the therapy can reach depends only of the means given to the person to retrieve, relive and release its archaic history. This possibility is transferentially given by the depth the therapist has himself reached. [see > theory of the therapist]
The methods used have to be adequated to the possibility of reliving the archaic history: mainly the womb and perinatal period, the feeding and carrying period and the separation period. But they will be efficient and safe only if the therapist has himself relived and liberated all this period, if not, it will block again the release of any event and/or information.
The contained archaic events show in our lives in several ways: the inner activity of these events seeking an emergence produces side effects or ripples even if they do not proceed and their cycles remain stuck. The containment itself of the event or its avoidance uses a great deal of energy and/or construction which is evident, but is usually unfelt through insensitivity, habituation or banalisation. In the order of the amount of energy release obtainable, the side effects of a contained archaic event may be:
The usefulness of the release schemes reside in its ability to make the cycle progress further than its initial stagnation point. Very generally, this is obtained only when the body charge is sufficient, the cycle proceeds to its former stage, then overrids it if there is enough safety, and displays in a cathartic motion a heretofore unknown part of the event, bringing in its wake reality, significance, and an amount of relief of the bound suffering.
Without this re-living the event the suffering remains bound by the (unconscious) necessity of blocking the emergence of the event; the first part of the event recurs up to its stagnation point, we live the same scene again (repetition compulsion). The analysis of the ripples produced by the inner event, dreams, fantasies, or situation, however precise the guesswork be, is not going to reveal the hidden actuality, is not likely to go beyond the stagnation point, and does not produce release and substantial relief. Therefore, the person is left with the only possibility of re-enacting its archaic scene in real life, which is far more dangerous, thus very unlikely, and of dubious outcome. It is also likely to block further progress since precisely the wish for a therapeutic frame is to avoid this dangerous repetition in outer life.
As cycles dissolve into the emergence of other stuck cycles, the unrolling of cycles one after the other progressively digs further into the depths of the unconscious, that is, of the past. Going into the originary world cannot be done by words work only. Verbal work, with respect to the originary, can not be better than guesswork (inference), and can not bring release, therefore progress. In the originary realm, all is body, sensations, feelings, impulse, instinct and reaction, although there is a sense of knowing (what is the case) which cannot be put into words, even when reliving the event, at least before a sufficient distance with the event can be had. Originary events are very strong, and severe. They can be approached, accepted, relived, disengaged, the pain they carry relieved, and the significance they carry come to full awareness and actuality only in certain precise conditions which are the subject of this work.
The actuality of the originary register can be discovered only by reliving the events. This is also true of traumatic events, if any, of later life.
When in a favorable bath of regression, the cycles (events) unroll in a definite manner, one after the other, respecting the possible `branchings' (redirections) of the emotional chains, the tiers and the organisation of the recorded events, and the congruence of emotional patterns.
Although there may be several paths leading to uncovering the archaic actuality and especially the few root events of the originary register, a therapeutic path behaves as if there was one leading thread through the maze of autoprotections, defenses, provocations, and motivations, guiding very precisely and surely to the focal point of the person's history which is the deepest event to be discovered and uprooted before a possible general release of the overal tension can happen.
During regressive work, re-living the archaic events, unrolling the emotional cycles, re-enacting originary reactions, discovering the past actuality, naming the significant events, all these therapeutic events, even necessary, tend to disperse the psyche.
This effect is multifold:
Therefore, progress may come only if some integration work proceeds at the same time release work takes place. To our knowledge, integration can be helped by these means:
Each time we live an emotional release, during the integration of the new discovery, a process we may call concatenation takes place: it is the complete rebuilding of our aware history with the new links and the new meanings it brings. This process is in itself an integrative process.
It cannot be helped, but it can be respected and not hindered nor prevented.
After the root events of our life have been uncovered, worked through, released, and the anxiety and pain they carry sufficiently relieved, and after we have integrated all that unbelievable early life and made it our own, we slowly come together and begin to feel more whole, experience easier energy flow and vitality, something pushes in us at all times, and life begin to appear simpler and more straightforward. That part of the integration process may need not only therapy in the ordinary sense, but some very special relationships. Structural therapy is designed to provide such a setting, but it may also take one into foreign situations if this setting is not at hand.
There are two known settings where ultimate integration can happen.
One is the sexual bath: during the long process of therapy, the couple adventure is somehow used as a 'developer'; confrontation with the other one replays the archaic history from symbiosis to individuationm (in the Mahlerian sense) and it can be put to profit to expell the emotional turmoil of childhood and get awareness of one's early history. After this process has more or less dissolved, sexuality can turn to seeking the complement of the self, which is one necessary challenge for the attainment of self-completedness, or individuationj (in the Jungian sense).
The other is the spiritual bath: much in the same way, after the egotic features (which are also the archaic) have given way, meeting with the mystery of life can happen; not the mystery of one's origins and how one's life is guided by the archaic which is the purpose of therapy, but the greater mystery of how life comes into our cells, and how our lives and deaths are guided by greater-than-us laws. Meeting regularly this mystery, the other world, or the beyond, according to various namings, through mediums or initiates slowly brings an inner agreement which ultimately reflects in an agreement and reverence with the world as it is.
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