Everything Changes; everything returns.

There is one image which is never long out of the news media in the last twenty years. It is almost interchangeable from Bosnia to Libya to Afghanistan to Gazza. It is the image of young men with guns and armoured cars or battered cars; posing, shooting in the air, shooting at buildings, waiting to shoot or to be shot at. There is much heroism or recklessness or craziness or desperation and many touching scenes of intense emotion and also atrocities. After a while the big baddie in power like Gaddafi is kicked out and another or others replace him. A new era is proclaimed. We are all invited to cheer and be thankful. 


In the Middle East, much of the conflict is between men who were circumcised at birth (Jews) and the men who were circumcised  between the ages of three and eight (Arabs). Such genital mutilation causes massive trauma and the conflict is between those where the trauma can only exist as a body memory; very deeply repressed and those who may have it as a conscious traumatic memory. It is the earliest linking of sex and violence and as the body is mapped on to the penis, damages the point corresponding to the heart centre. Of course the conflict is also fed historically by earlier traumas; the echoes of the Holocaust and the memories of displacement and poverty. Only clearing the trauma will make a lasting major difference.


There seems to be an unquestioned belief that what replaces the old is much better than before. But the same character structures are prevalent. They even came to power in a similar way. A character structure is the result of the natural life force in a person meeting an environment which doesn't respond lovingly and supportively. Natural impulses are suppressed and energies distorted. Traumatised rulers are replaced by more traumatised people with the same levels of consciousness. What is needed is therapy on a national scale; this to some degree happened in South Africa where the end of apartheid didn't result in mass bloodshed and revenge partly because of efforts of organisations like the Justice and Truth Commission.  What is also needed worldwide is a culture of acceptance of life energy and its embodiment in passion, sexuality, emotion and aliveness.

Replaying

Alice Miller died a couple of weeks ago in her 80's. As a psychoanalyst and then as a writer she is best known for her fierce championing of the rights of children and her brilliant books. In her book entitled Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, she looks at the childhood of Hitler, Stalin, and other tyrants and finds there the roots of their later tyranny. To a large extent, the oppression we receive in childhood, is first repressed as a memory and acted out in adult life in the personal and in the social and political realms. Today the actions of Israel in intercepting the convoy for Gaza are in the headlines. All these actions and the decisions around them and all of Israel's policies towards Gaza are done by the children and grandchildren of the Holocaust. It is no wonder, from the perspective of Alice Miller and her lifelong work; that they created in Gaza a giant concentration camp. What we cannot heal; we enact. It is the tragedy of human history. I often feel that the work we do in individual healing is so small compared to the collective trauma, however healing creates a different resonance in the field. I hope the ripples can spread.