Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 27-71
 2012 Heart-Centered Therapies Association
A Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes
Seeking a Bodyguard
David Hartman and Diane Zimberoff*
Abstract: Unbearable trauma causes fragmentation of the child’s structure of
the self, her wholeness. And this fragmentation occurs on the level of
personality (behavioral changes, or shadows in Jungian terms) and on the
level of physiology (nervous system changes, or shock in our terms).
We want to distinguish between traumatic dissociation and the “soulloss” of traumatic shock. A helpful aid to understanding that difference is an
analogy of dissociation as slipping away from the triggering experience into
dream sleep. It is creating a distraction to get caught up in, an escape that
allows another, dreamlike, experience to replace the threatening one: “I have
abandoned you.” This requires defenses of the ego, such as rationalization,
denial, sublimation, or suppression.
In contrast, shock would be analogous to slipping into dreamless sleep,
recognizing that there is no escape, nowhere to go to escape. It is thus not
escape into an alternate reality but rather into the annihilative nonbeing of the
withdrawal of one’s soul, temporary oblivion: “I have abandoned myself.”
This is a second-line of defense, when the ego-defenses have been penetrated
resulting in unacceptable levels of anxiety. This level of wounding requires
primitive archetypal defenses of the self, such as splitting, trance-states,
switching among multiple centers of identity, or psychic numbing.
And fortunately, when the ego falls into the abyss opened by unbearable
trauma, it falls into something already there to catch it – the archetypal world
functions to defend the traumatized psyche against further trauma.
“The regressing libido immerses itself in the unconscious,
thereby provoking infantile reactions, affects, opinions and
attitudes from the personal sphere, but at the same time
activating collective images (archetypes) which have a
compensatory and curative meaning such as has always
pertained to the myth.”1
“In moments of great need when the psychic system proves to be
incapable of an adequate response, or when these specific
[psychic] organs have been violently destroyed, then the
primordial psychic powers are aroused and it will be these forces
that will seek to overcome the disruption.”2
_____________________________
* 3716 – 274th Ave SE Issaquah, WA 98029 800-326-4418
27
428
Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
We begin with an epic tale of the very human experience of
abandoning part of oneself in order to save the whole of oneself,
and the journey back to reconciliation. The story captures the
terrible choices a child is forced to make in the face of abuse,
neglect, or other intolerable traumas. We call it “Running Away
to the Circus.” Just as the human being comes apart at death,
with the body dying and decaying while the breath of life
persists, we suggest that a person comes apart in a similar way at
other crucial junctures of life, such as moments of excruciating
shame, intolerable betrayal, or insurmountable trauma. To be
sure, this coming apart occurs as well in moments of ecstatic
spiritual experience and delirious orgasmic transcendence. There
is a vital difference, however, between these two routes through
which coming apart takes place. The former is filled with dread,
despair, and terror; what comes apart under these traumatic
circumstances tends to stay apart because the precipitating threat
continues to menace the individual with further harm. The latter
is filled with buoyancy, trust, and passion; a soothing and
graceful transition usually exists back to wholeness from the
coming apart. Of course, sometimes an individual may
experience the spiritual coming apart as disorienting or even
traumatic, leading to a “dark night of the soul.” Nevertheless this
individual’s essence, or soul, has not been stolen or murdered but
rather allowed to loosen the tether that binds it to the person’s
ego.
The traumatized child, coming apart in this way, faces the
same dilemma as shipwreck survivors in an overcrowded
lifeboat: they must sacrifice some aspects of the self in order to
preserve others. The more overwhelming the assault, the more
intolerable the wounding, the more essential and closer to the
core is that aspect that must be sacrificed. The coming apart
process is clinically called dissociation. Dissociation “seems to
be a hard-wired capacity in the human psyche, like the circuit
breaker installed in the electrical panel of a house. If too much
current (trauma) comes in, the circuit breaker trips and no more
experience is registered. The painful experience continues, but it
is not happening to ‘me’.”3
Deeper levels of dissociation in an individual come to be
built into the structure of the personality, and are clinically called
splitting. The psychic energies cast off through dissociation and
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard
29
splitting, the sacrificed aspects of self, do not simply disappear
into thin air, but rather continue in split off form as a primitively
organized alternative self. What we are proposing here is a
profound level of splitting in that what is split is neither
consciousness nor ego nor self, but rather one’s essential
spiritual identity, what we are calling one’s soul. It is sent into
hiding from itself, run away to the circus of imagination to find
protection.
Yet, the psychic energy displaced takes on a life of its own.
The personhood who sits staring out the window, or becomes
entranced counting flowers on the wallpaper next to the bed,
during a girl’s sexual abuse is a person. She exists apart from the
girl identified with the body that has been violated. That
fragment of a human being, isolated from others and frozen in
time (i.e., arrested development), carries some of the essence,
some of the soul, of the being she separated from. Davies and
Frawley state emphatically: “We view dissociation . . . as a
process which preserves and protects, in split off form, the entire
internal object world of the abused child”4; and “We stress that
this child is a fully developed, dissociated, rather primitively
organized alternative self. We speak, in this regard, concretely,
not metaphorically.”5
The self defends against threat and intrusion first by banding
together with supportive others. When such others are not
available, the self defends by withdrawing from others,
developing the capacity to be alone without fear, without feeling
unprotected and empty. After all, “trauma is an attachment
disorder – it’s about a rupture in a life-sustaining early
relationship.”6 As a last resort in facing intrusive threat, when
one’s own resources are inadequate to protect and defend, the
self withdraws finally from its own essence (soul). First
collaboration with others, then abandonment of others, and
finally abandonment of self.
This same progression applies to the internal defense system
within the child. Any early traumatic event causes some degree
of shock reaction in the child, i.e., disbelief, inhibition,
dissociating from emotions, locking up the unexpressed catharsis
in “body armor”, and re-directing libidinal life force energy from
“passion for life” to “resistance to life”. The child’s essence
experiences shame, requiring a split of identity into “me - the
430
Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
good one” and “the other - the one carrying what is intolerable”.
The split causes more shame, because the “me” is no longer
whole. Defense begins with an attempt by the ego to create a
specialist within to do whatever needs to be done for protection:
a shadow part. The shadow is an aspect of the ego. But when that
is insufficient, the ego recognizes its own limitation and goes
outside the system to find a more powerful collaborator: a
complex is developed. The complex is a collaboration between
the ego and an “other”.
Shadow. When the trauma is painful but tolerable, the
“other” that is created by the split remains closely connected to
the original “me”, i.e., the child’s ego, although put out of sight,
in the shadows. This shadow is an identity of convenience,
functioning in alliance with the ego to pursue their mutual goal
of insuring safety and satisfying needs. The shadow uses means
that the ego would not, either because it is deemed to be bad
(“I’m not the kind of person that would do that”), or else beyond
the capability of the ego (“I’m not the kind of person that could
do that”). In either case, the ego’s plea is, “Oh, I couldn’t do
that.” Whether it is manipulation, seduction, being devious or
defiant, the shadow says, “Oh, but I can.” The child introjects
the traumatizer’s powerful qualities. That is, the tactics used by
this shadow are determined by those of the source of the trauma,
either mimicking them, standing in defiance of them, or
attempting to mollify them. If the source of trauma is a raging
father, the child may develop a shadow that rages, or one that
stands in judgment of rage, or a shadow that fearfully tries to
anticipate the father’s needs and meet them before rage can
erupt. The shadow’s identity is formed by aligning with
introjects from caregivers.
Complex. When the original traumatic event is so intrusive
and devastating that the ego experiences it as overwhelming, the
threat is greater, and the shock response must create a more
divisive split. The “other” that is created cannot stay connected
with the child’s essence, serving as an ally like the shadow did. It
must retreat deeper within, just as the shock has been driven to a
deeper layer of embededness. This personality fragment is forced
to align itself with something or someone “bigger than life” to
attempt to create safety and meet basic needs. It “runs away to
the circus” and aligns with one or more of the archetypal
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard
31
characters to be found there. The aspect of this child that is thus
created, called a complex, has a core of his essence, but a much
more forceful identity borrowed from circus characters who live
in the great collective unconscious. The shock state associated
with this complex is much more autonomous from the ego than
any shadow, and so when it appears it explodes into activation,
suddenly, unexpectedly, forcefully. It “possesses” the individual
and compels the ego to comply. The ego abdicates immediately
because the arrangement, which is intended to insure safety and
survival, has been in place for “as long as I can remember.” The
complex’s identity is formed by aligning with energies from the
deep unconscious.
Running away to the circus
When the stress and trauma becomes overwhelming and
intolerable, children run away from home. They have to stay
home, too, because they are dependent on the adult caregivers.
So the child creates a split, allowing part of her to run away and
part to stay home. The part of her that has run away also needs a
“big person” to take care of her, so that she runs away to the
circus and aligns with one or more of the characters there. The
characters at the circus are bigger than life, and carry the intrigue
that has captivated humanity since the beginning of imagination.
And they are eager to be “adopted” by a child because then they
too can split, allowing part of it to “run away from the circus”
and go home with the child. In this way, the archetypal energy
descends from the Great Collective into a personal life story.
The child has a working relationship with a circus character,
but the circus character is more powerful than the child, and has
a life of its own. The more overwhelmed the child is, the more
overpowering is the circus character. In clinical terms, the splitoff child part has identified with an archetype (circus character)
to find solace, protection, or to avoid loneliness. The split-off
child part in alliance with an archetype forms a complex (Jung’s
terminology). This is accomplished through dissociative
splitting, the mechanism whereby groups of ideas, fantasies and
emotions operate unconsciously and independently of the
conscious mind. Jung called these clusters sub-personalities or
complexes. Jolande Jacobi suggests that the content of the
complex may be derived both from the personal unconscious,
432
Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
which is formed from internalization of personal experience
(introjections), and also from the collective unconscious, which
produces archetypal imagery entirely independently of personal
experience.7 The introjected personal experience with
relationships in the world (e.g., with parents) is superimposed
onto a primordial archetypal image from the collective
unconscious (e.g., the All-nurturing Perfect Mother, or the Evil
Witch/Mother). The core of the resulting complex is archetypal
and therefore more powerful than the child’s personal
contribution which is more superficial. A useful analogy for the
construction of a complex is a child uncovering an ancient
primal image in the form of a statue, elemental and mythical, and
then spray-painting graffiti all over it: “My mother is the Allnurturing Perfect Mother”, or “My mother is the Evil
Witch/Mother.”
And the more deeply split the child, i.e., the more embedded
is the shock state, the more autonomous is the complex from the
conscious mind. Addiction is an example of how the autonomous
complex can take control so that we cannot say no to it. It seems
to come out of nowhere and can quite literally take over. Indeed,
the victim of psychological trauma continually finds himself or herself in life
situations where he or she is retraumatized. As much as he or she wants to
change, as hard as he or she tries to improve life or relationships, something
more powerful than the ego continually undermines progress and destroys
hope. It is as though the persecutory inner world somehow finds its outer
mirror in repeated self-defeating ‘re-enactments’ – almost as if the individual
were possessed by some diabolical power or pursued by a malignant fate.8
Ultimately healing depends on separating out one’s essence
from the introjects (qualities and beliefs from parents, priests,
teachers, abusers) that he took on and eventually identified with
as himself. In the same way he needs to separate his essence (the
child parts, all of them) from the archetypes he collaborated with
and eventually identified with.
Just as we need to return to the scene of the traumas where
we took on the introjects, so too do we need to return to the
circus to find those characters we identified with and to finally
sever the original bargain. But the circus that was so easy to find
when we were children, full of wonder, awe and imagination,
may not be so easy to find as an adult. And so we use ritual
ceremonies, symbols, fairy tales, dreams, intimacy with another
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard
33
human being, what Jung called the transcendent function, to
trace our steps back to that Great Collective.
The circus characters that the child formed alliance with
provide a semblance of what the child needs: perhaps a sense of
protection to allay existential fear, or nurturance to soothe
feeling abandoned, or proactivity to calm helplessness. They
provide a container for otherwise unendurable experience; they
become an “inner caretaker” in the words of Donald Kalsched.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s recognize these new archetypal
caregivers as bodyguards. The role of a bodyguard is, of course,
to take over in threatening or dangerous situations, to make the
split-second calculation of what action to take, and to implement
that action immediately. The abused or neglected child’s survival
instinct dictated that she contract with her new bodyguard to do
exactly that. She deferred to her bodyguard to decide when
danger threatened and to take control. That pattern, based on
perceived life-or-death consequences, became deeply embedded
in her unconscious psyche. The bodyguard was allowed to
operate without supervision, limitation, or reflection. And the
part of the girl’s personality that would otherwise have
performed those tasks was dismissed and relegated to exist in
some alternate, non-real place and time. When the bodyguard is
pushing you out of harm’s way, you no longer experience an
internal locus of control. In fact, control is external, and is not
really experienced at all because the experience has become an
object rather than the subject. This serves the purpose of survival
for a small child suffering sexual abuse. However, that same
pattern decades later is no longer healthy when the bodyguard
perceives intimacy in relationship as threatening, takes over and
pushes you out of the situation when you desperately want
intimacy with your loving and safe husband. Yet, the experience
of control for this forty-year-old feels just as external as it did at
age six.
Let’s look more closely now at these archetypal bodyguards
that children find and align with. Following is a partial list of
archetypal bodyguards within the circus metaphor to help make
the defensive dissociative process more concrete.

Clowns are very powerful. Some clowns use gallows humor
to keep everyone laughing to distract them from noticing the
434




Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
clown’s deep pain of loneliness or despair. Other clowns are
sad and dejected, or downtrodden and bullied, or sneaky and
mischievous. But in each case the clowning is sleight-ofhand distraction to cover up fear of intimacy that feels too
vulnerable to risk without the buffer of clowning around.
The Tightrope Walker keeps everyone looking up (away
from what is really going on down below), fearing disaster,
but bringing relief when he makes it. He has learned to
“walk a tightrope” between disasters on either side, and his
movement is tensely constricted. He feels right at home in
situations and relationships that demand concentration to
navigate, and that allow no variance from the “straight and
narrow.” The balance is precarious, and even the slightest tilt
one way or the other would be disastrous. The balancing
wires are almost invisible, so everyone believes the fantasy
that he is dancing through his death-defying feat.
The Fat Woman eats and eats and eats more, using all that
fat to protect her from the emptiness within, or from
unwanted advances from men. She has found a perverse
form of control in her life, a way to deny control to those in
her life who try to tell her what to do with her body. Perhaps
her mother wants her to be thin and delicate as a ballet
dancer, or perhaps her father wants her to be tantalizing and
sexy. She is creating a diversion from the truth in the form of
a buffer, a shock absorber.
The Roustabouts are unsavory characters who do the grunt
work. They are the only truly essential ones in the fantasy
because they hold it all together. They build the fantasy day
in and day out, providing the structure for the illusion. They
are hard workers, but only until payday, in other words until
they get their short-term desires met. Then it may be time to
go out and “celebrate”. They can’t understand why anyone
feels betrayed when they do, because that was the only
motivation for doing the hard work in the first place. The
irony is that everyone needs to depend on them for the
existence of the structure, and yet they are truly
undependable.
The Barkers reach out and “put out the call” with a hearty
“Step right up!” They call the passersby to come and “play
the game.” They make false promises, feed the fantasies and
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard



35
hopes of family members. They are generally manipulative
and not to be trusted. They know how to “tell sweet little
lies”; they are the players who only love you when they’re
playing. People often buy what the Barker is selling, only to
leave the encounter disappointed, if not distraught. He
knows that it is the sizzle that sells, and not having much
steak to offer may not pose an insurmountable obstacle to
getting what he wants. Once you buy the ticket, he has
turned his attention to the next opportunity.
The Tattooed Man is covered in designs, which are
distractions from seeing what is underneath; tattoos make
him appear to not be naked. The tattoos are intricate designs,
sometimes beautiful or sometimes scary, but always
captivating. The tattoos are not really part of this man,
although they seem to be. The tattoos are an elaborate
superficial disguise that say, “Go ahead and get lost in the
anecdotes and minutia of what I present to you; you’ll never
know the real me because I’m hiding behind a maze of
mirrors.” Of course, the man decorates himself with tattoos
to attract others, and yet at the same time to deflect their
attention.
The Ringmaster is in control of everything: all three rings at
once. She is a master of multi-tasking, and appears to be able
to manage the chaos all around her with ease. She feels most
at home with high drama, dazzling spectacle, and a dizzying
array of activities. She has learned to manage everyone in
her life by selectively calling attention to one or two at a
time. She shines a spotlight on the loudest noise, the flashiest
act, or the most demanding character. And then she redirects
the spotlight to the next drama. In this way, she can be the
center of attention without actually revealing anything about
herself.
The Muscle Man can guarantee safety because nobody
messes with him. He is proud of his power, and
demonstrates it at every opportunity. In fact, he can tend to
belittle others or bully them because it is a way to show off.
He spends an inordinate amount of time training and
developing his power as well as trying to impress others with
it. He always feels like he is competing with others, and
wants to be “one up” on everyone, belying an
436




Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
unacknowledged insecurity deep underneath the macho
facade.
Animals can offer useful resources to a child in need of a
bodyguard. Some animals are cuddly and disarming, some
are ferocious and dangerous.
The Escape Artist can always find a way out of every
predicament, and flees every entanglement before you know
it. He always seems to feel like he is trapped, and therefore
that he needs to extricate himself. Relationships become
threatening or suffocating when the other person wants true
intimacy, and so it’s time to leave. He doesn’t want to stay
too long in any one place or job, because the longer he stays
the more tied down he feels. He is at his best when the
challenge is great, so he seeks out people who demand more
of him than he is willing to give. That way he gets to do
what he enjoys the most, and what he is the best at:
abandoning others. Of course, he is running away from ever
being in the position of being abandoned by someone else.
The Daredevil loves being shot out of a canon because it
requires one to be fearless, seeking attention and thrills
through danger. Live dangerously, seek the thrill of narrow
escapes, and feel alive by cheating death. Sometimes one can
achieve this by getting involved in a sinister or creepy
subculture. The more spine-chilling the feats of daring, the
more recognition he claims. And underneath the bravado, he
has a numbing disregard for his own essential value or
worth.
The Lion Tamer’s job is to try to domesticate the wild ones,
even at great personal risk. This can be a legitimate strategy
for dealing with abusive caregivers: do whatever it takes to
calm them when they begin getting agitated, anticipate their
needs and provide them before the demands become abusive,
or perhaps crack the whip and try to overpower the wild one.
The methods vary, but the Lion Tamer is always vigilantly
aware of her lion’s mood, hunger level, and readiness for
violence. Taming the lion is a great challenge, and is never
completely accomplished but rather must be re-established in
every encounter. And, of course, any self-respecting Lion
Tamer will show off her prowess by placing her head in the
lion’s mouth; she knows that her success and reputation
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard





37
depend on demonstrating just how dangerous is the wild one
she is taming. So she has a perverse vested interest in
keeping her lion wild.
The Business Manager is busy in his separate office,
counting the money but disconnected from the goings-on all
around him. His only connection with the others in the circus
family is to pay them off. He has a vital role, but manages to
accomplish it while remaining detached. The office is an
effective place to hide from involvement with others, and to
receive social rewards for doing so. He can hold himself to
be superior to the Ringmaster, above the high drama and
dazzling spectacle, while capable of just as much
multitasking.
The Jugglers are able to amaze everyone by keeping multiple
balls in the air, or plates spinning, attending to each one only
enough to avoid it crashing to the ground. She challenges
herself right to the limit of what anyone thinks is possible to
balance, and as soon as she masters that challenge she adds
another ball or another plate. More is always better. It
requires focused attention, keeping her conscious awareness
narrowed down to the immediate task at hand. And there is
always another task just at the point of crashing, demanding
to be attended to. It is never-ending, and soon becomes
exhausting.
The Contortionist is able to tie herself in knots. She can
make herself small enough to fit into a tiny space. She is
double-jointed, and will bend over backwards to
accommodate someone else’s requests or demands. In fact,
she bends in ways that most people won’t or can’t. Her
strength is the agility to compromise like a chameleon.
The Sword Swallower willingly takes into himself what is
obviously self-injurious. He knows that he can withstand the
assault as long as he stifles any natural reflex or reaction,
disconnecting from his body in order to use it for
performance.
The Trapeze Artist thrives on the thrill of freefall between
letting go of one stable and secure home base and attaching
to the next. She relies on her excellent sense of timing to
avoid the disgrace and danger of falling. And she must rely
also on her fellow Trapeze Artists to catch her when the time
438

Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
comes, and to hang on tight. When she becomes truly
accomplished at this feat, she may be tempted to perform
without a net in order to add more suspense. She can often
be found flying high above the mundane details of most
people’s ordinary life, dazzling others with her extraordinary
adventures. For this reason, she is actually quite dependent
on those others to catch her when she falters.
The Magician is a master of sleight-of-hand. He is able to
mystify others with his razzle-dazzle, diverting attention
from his trickery that creates the illusions. He alludes to
connection with higher forces and access to supernatural
gifts, but in fact employs cheap gimmicks and tawdry tricks.
The Magician can sometimes fall into the trap of believing
his own publicity, forgetting that he is merely mortal and
entirely fallible.
Establishing a relationship with one of these bodyguards
requires the child to split into parts. One part is the
child/archetype alliance (the bodyguard, or the complex in
Jungian terms), and another part is the remaining essential child
herself (the ego). And these parts alternate in controlling the
child’s internal experience and external behavior; the bodyguard
takes over when threat is perceived, at other times the ego is
allowed to dominate. These parts are quite separate. If they
weren’t, the split would not serve the purpose of defending the
child (ego) from intolerable trauma. However, since the parts
share the same physical body, they must each have access to the
body’s brain and nervous system in different ways. It is similar
to an automobile that allows multiple settings for the driver to
select: a woman establishes settings for seat position and steering
wheel tilt for when she is driving the car, and her husband has a
different preset available at the push of a button when he drives.
We will see that the child’s parts exhibit just such distinct
characteristics from each other emotionally, somatically, and
even in access to memory.
In response to trauma, children “both know and don’t know
about their experience, in the same moment, and without
conscious conflict or anxiety.”9 How does this paradoxical state
of affairs develop? In Deikman’s10 words, “The central problem
of understanding states of consciousness is understanding who or
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard
39
what experiences the state. Our theories evolve with the center
missing; namely, the ‘I’ of consciousness, the Witnesser.”
Something vital is missing, and yet the individual is capable of
continuing to function in its absence. What is missing? We
utilize the conceptualization of structural dissociation to answer
that basic question.
Benyakar et al. conceptualize the initial stage of a traumatic
event as one in which “a structure enters a forced open state. An
open state is a temporary, partial, and usually self-regulated
semi-permeability or full abolition of the boundaries, for a brief
amount of time.”11 The forced opening of boundaries is
terrifying and results in a structural collapse of the self, for two
reasons. One, it is terrifying to the child to realize that the rules
thought to define the self and reality are no longer operational,
that I am not who I thought I was and you are not who I thought
you were. Wholeness, the secure sense of identity and continuity,
is threatened by trauma. Two, the structure of the self collapses
because of the merging with something beyond the self. The
abuse or negligent absence of the caregiver(s) who intrusively
force the opening of the child’s boundaries inject their own
beliefs, fears, rage, grief, shame, and body experience into
merger with the defenseless child’s psyche. And the child then
proactively seeks out another non-self presence to neutralize the
unwelcome introjects from the abuser: a bodyguard from the
circus. This merger causes further fragmentation of the child’s
structure of the self, her wholeness. And the fragmentation
occurs on the level of personality (behavioral changes, or
shadows in Jungian terms) and on the level of physiology
(nervous system changes, or shock in our terms).
Once the archetypal self-defenses have been mobilized, the unmediated,
unintegrated system ossifies into a closed, rigid paradigm that is shut off from
human influence. The system resists being educated—a stance that leads to
tragedy. Because the system is stuck at the original trauma, it doesn’t take
account of the fact that as the child grows, other defenses become available.
Instead, the innocent, creative, relational essence of the child is eternally
locked away in a prison for safe-keeping. The energy that should be
propelling the child to grow into who he or she really is, is diverted into the
process of survival, and living with a “survival self” at your core is like living
in a prison. Paradoxically, in the name of survival, the archetypal self-care
system says “NO!” to life.12
440
Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
Another way to conceptualize this process is offered by
Sandor Ferenczi.13 He suggests that when a young child is
traumatized, the child splits into three parts: the fragile conscious
ego and two internal personifications. One part is a suffering,
brutally destroyed child-part, associated with the body, regressed
back to the place of innocence prior to the traumatic experience.
This part is really the essence of the child – the creative,
relational, authentic, innocent spark of life that is at the very core
which must go into hiding, deep in the unconscious. And the
other part is a progressed precociously mature part, growing up
too fast, that knows everything but feels nothing. The progressed
part then caretakes and defends the regressed part, but also
persecutes it due to an identification with the aggressor, labeling
it as bad, shameful, unloveable, stupid, or dirty. This progressed/
bodyguard part then is both protector and persecutor. All the
while, the trauma-weakened ego, having lost its sense of selfidentified wholeness, identifies with whichever part is most
demanding in a given moment. The child ego now gains power
through manipulation in the name of innocence and
victimization, or through tyrannical rage. The psyche comes to
live a caged existence under the dominance of the extraordinarily
powerful archetypal protector/ persecutor figure who offers this
pact with the Devil:
“You can go on living, but you owe the baby – the true self – your life’s
potentials, to me. I will hold your innocence for you, but the price you pay is
that your true potential will be anaesthetized, frozen, suspended in a kind of
permanent trance.”14
This provides an eerily detailed description of the psychic
state embedded in the nervous system that we call shock. And
the shock state applies whether it takes the form of sympathetic
activation in one moment or parasympathetic activation in
another. He also explains the contagious nature of shock
interpersonally in this way: “In an earlier time, these early
trauma patients would have been described as ‘haunted’ by
ghosts or ‘possessed’ by daimonic spirits, and so our work with
them exposes us to auto-hypnotic states which tend to be
contagious.”15
This split represents a resource that lies beyond the ego, in a
unifying ground in the child’s psyche/ universe. “For Ferenczi,
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard
41
when the ego fell through the basic fault opened by trauma, it
fell into something already there to catch it—the primordial
psyche in the absence of a personal one. When outer mediation
broke down, inner, daimonic mediation took over, for better or
for worse. In this way Ferenczi adds something important to
Jung – an understanding of how the archetypal world functions
to defend the traumatized psyche against further trauma.”16
The word daimonic in the original Greek meant some
division in consciousness through which ‘divine’ activity could
be glimpsed – either for good or for evil. Possession by the
daimon could be the experience of being ‘seized with rage’ but it
could also be the experience of being struck down by the god of
Love. For example, Plato in the Symposium described Eros as a
mighty daimon or spirit, halfway between God and man,
explaining that the divine world will not mingle directly with the
human and that it is only through the mediation of the spirit
world that man can have intercourse with the gods. So daimons
are intermediate beings,
the envoys and interpreters that ply between heaven and earth, flying upward
with our worship and our prayers, and descending with the heavenly answers
and commandments, and since they are between the two estates they weld
both sides together and merge them into one great whole. They form the
medium of the prophetic arts, of the priestly rites of sacrifice, initiation, and
incantation, of divination and of sorcery.17
So, through the earthquake fault of early trauma, an alternative world of
daimonic inner ‘Beings’ comes into view – an encapsulated world in which
‘pre-personal’ and ‘transpersonal’ elements are intermingled and in which
inner objects take on an ‘uncanny’ quality. Daimonic objects are not simply
internalized outer objects but are archaic and typical (archetypal)
personifications – unconscious phantasies having to do with the most basic
libidinal and aggressive affects in the human personality. Melanie Klein
believed that such primitive unconscious phantasies are present from birth and
help to organize the infant’s experience. They come from what some have
called the ‘mythopoetic’, the ‘archetypal’ or the ‘psychoid’ level of the
unconscious and they are experienced by the ego as extraordinary, mysterious,
awesome, dreadful, or numinous.18
Kalsched elaborates on Forenczi’s conceptualization,
describing what he calls ‘the self-care system’ or ‘trauma
complex’.
Together, the "mythologized" images of the "progressed vs. regressed"
parts of the self make up what I call the psyche's archetypal self-care system.
The "system" is archetypal because it is both archaic and typical of the
442
Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
psyche's self-preservative operations, and because it is developmentally earlier
and more primitive than normal ego-defenses. Because these defenses seem to
be "coordinated" by a deeper center in the personality than the ego, they have
been referred to as "defenses of the Self (Stein, 1967)."19
“Never again,” says our tyrannical caretaker, “will the traumatized
personal spirit of this child suffer this badly! Never again will it be this
helpless in the face of cruel reality.... before this happens I will disperse it into
fragments [dissociation], or encapsulate it and soothe it with fantasy [schizoid
withdrawal], or numb it with intoxicating substances [addiction], or persecute
it to keep it from hoping for life in this world [depression].... In this way I will
preserve what is left of this prematurely amputated childhood -- of an
innocence that has suffered too much too soon!"
Despite
the
otherwise
well-intentioned
nature
of
our
Protector/Persecutor, there is a tragedy lurking in these archetypal defenses.20
The dual roles of protector and persecutor develop over time.
This defense (forming an alliance with an archetype) can be very
effective at surviving the ongoing trauma, because the person is
now accompanied by a powerful companion (whom the person
identifies to be them, that is ‘me’, although a part of me that I
don’t quite control). It could be a muscle man, a fat lady, or a
mild-mannered milquetoast, but whatever form it takes is
intended to provide a protective bodyguard for the traumatized
and overwhelmed person to hide behind. Creating this
bodyguard comes at a steep price, however; the person must turn
over to the bodyguard, the complex, the moment-to-moment
decision-making about when and how to protect him/her. So the
complex might perceive an imminent threat, whether there is
actually one or not, and throw himself in front of the one he is
sworn to protect, suddenly, without warning or explanation or
even rational purpose. That happens when one begins to
experience loneliness and his protector ushers him into the
kitchen to eat three pieces of cake; or when one experiences that
his boss is angry at him and the protector forces him into the
nearest hiding place; or when one experiences one’s spouse
getting cozy with someone considered to be a rival and the
protector explodes in a jealous rage.
The result is a split in the individual; the bodyguard develops
into a powerful neurotic pathology in the form of addictions,
thought disorders, anxieties, depression, and other selfsabotaging behaviors which we call shadows.
These shadow behaviors are the psychological component of
the protection, i.e., the adaptation to perceived threat. And shock
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard
43
is the physiological component, the same dissociative and
defensive pattern embedded in the autonomic nervous system.
The bodyguard (who shares the body’s real estate with the
conscious ego-self) has conscripted the body to its service and
manages to step into control, to take the steering wheel away
from the conscious ego-self, through control of the nervous
system. The over-eater literally “finds herself eating desserts”
despite the conscious ego-self’s best intentions not to. The
bodyguard has taken control of the part of her that carries the
willpower and ability to make healthy choices by putting it to
sleep (parasympathetic shock) or by distracting it with busyness
(sympathetic shock), all in the misguided attempt to protect her.
Structural dissociation
To clarify the nuances of fragmentation, we will identify
some of the known neurological consequences of early child
abuse. “The integrative failure that is characteristic of
traumatized individuals may also relate to structural brain
changes, notably in the hippocampus.”21 The hippocampus is a
brain structure instrumental in the synthesis of experiences,
providing a conscious structure, context and a time stamp to the
experience in the process of memory encoding, storage and
retrieval. Smaller hippocampal volumes are reported in female
adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse.22 That damage
consists of a loss of neurons and synapses (a loss of up to18%),
and results in corruption of thought process and learning,
particularly deficits of encoding short-term into long-term
memory.23
The traumatic experiences, etched in procedural memory but
not converted into long-term memory, interfere with current
working memory. Past threats are perceived to be present threats,
suggested by intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, and hypervigilance.
Not only does PTSD obscure the ability to distinguish between
past and present, but the “repertoire of survival skills remains
confined to those skills that were acquired up to the time of the
trauma, and they lack the resilience to learn new strategies.”24
An aspect of this individual is frozen in the past, or perhaps more
accurately that frozen dissociated part of the person is carried
like deadweight in the ever-present – a “primitively organized
alternative self”.25
444
Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
Fortunately, however, the hippocampus is the only known
region of the human brain which can replicate new neurons.
Treatment of PTSD and resolution of early childhood trauma can
reverse the damage to the hippocampus, and there is evidence
that the hippocampal volume actually increases along with a
decrease of PTSD symptoms and significant improvements in
verbal declarative memory.26 The current authors have
previously addressed specific treatment indications for Complex
PTSD and hippocampal damage.27
The dissociation so prevalent in traumatized children results
in more than one part (sub-personalities) each with its own
unique configuration of neural circuitry. These autonomous parts
of the individual share one brain, one heart, and one nervous
system, of course. Yet they each have separate identifiable
patterns of reaction in the heart and brain. Before looking at the
evidence for these statements, we examine one theoretical model
of dissociation that will help increase our understanding.
Many traumatized individuals alternate between reexperiencing their trauma and being detached from, or even
relatively unaware of the trauma and its effects. Each of these
alternative ways of being can better be conceptualized as a
cluster of mental/emotional states, proposed as a Theory of
Structural Dissociation by Nijenhuis and associates.28 Severe
threat may provoke a structural dissociation of the pretraumatized personality,29 creating a split between the defensive
system on one hand (re-experiencing trauma), and the systems
that involve managing daily life and survival of the species on
the other hand (detachment from trauma). The traumatized
individual, then, develops an “emotional” part of the personality
(EP) and an “apparently normal” part of the personality (ANP)
that engages in matters of daily life (and that has failed to
integrate the traumatic experience).30 The current authors
recognize these parts as identical with the parts Kalsched and
Ferenczi label the regressed and progressed parts.
These dissociative parts of the individual’s personality each
have a different sense of self, and respond to trauma memories
differently.31 This dissociation compromises the development of
a coherent sense of personal existence in a framework of the
past, the present, and the future. The emotional personality
carries memories somatically, and often pre-verbally, and
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard
45
experiences the memories of traumas as personal to the
emotional personality. The emotional personality presents with
the identity of a child, the arrested development inner child stuck
in time at the point of the original traumatizing event(s). The
traumatized individual’s apparently normal personality does not
experience memories of traumas as personal, or may have no
access to them at all.32 The apparently normal personality,
dissociated from her body and her emotions, presents as, for
example, the precocious caregiver, willing to tolerate ageinappropriate responsibilities. She is condemned to live life “on
the surface of consciousness”.33
In other words, when the emotional personality is activated,
the individual tends to lose access to a range of memories that
are readily available for the apparently normal personality, and
vice versa. The lost memories typically involve episodic
memories, i.e., personified memories of personal experiences.34
The emotional personality cannot function in the world like the
apparently normal personality, because its brain does not have
access to the memories necessary to function in that way, and is
burdened with trauma memories that the apparently normal
personality is not. We now turn to the known physiological
differences between these sub-personalities, and in particular
those of the nervous system.
One research project35 found large differences in regional
neural activity for these dissociative sub-personalities of
traumatized individuals when they listened to trauma memory
scripts. The apparently normal personalities, who did not regard
the recounted memories as personal, had more activity in parietal
and occipital regions which are related to lack of sense of self.
The emotional personalities displayed decreases of heart rate
variability, and increases of heart rate frequency, systolic blood
pressure, and diastolic blood pressure. Studies link reduced heart
rate variability with various outcomes indicative of emotional
dysregulation, such as anxiety, depression, and rigid attentional
processing of threat.36 Increased heart rate and blood pressure, of
course, are symptomatic of stress. Both dissociative parts of the
personality responded differently to recounted traumatic
memories, but did not have differential physiological responses
to neutral (non-traumatic) memories. “ . . . [E]motional
personalities have strong emotional responses to traumatizing
446
Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
events that escape inhibition by prefrontal regions, whereas
apparently normal personalities inhibit emotional reactions,
while being depersonalized and not well in contact with bodily
feelings.”37
Translated into our terminology of the shock response, the
apparently normal personality (progressed part) utilizes
dissociation from somatic and emotional response as a defense.
This part of the personality, protected by the alliance with its
archetypal bodyguard, manages to avoid stressful feelings and
thoughts that lead to anxiety or depression. The somatic defense
is embedded in the autonomic nervous system as either
sympathetic or parasympathetic shock. The emotional
personality (regressed part) also utilizes dissociation as a defense
but, without the aid of the bodyguard/complex, is not nearly as
good at it. The emotional personality has the memories, has the
physiological stress responses, and is the more vulnerable. The
apparently normal personality has amnesia, has dissociation from
the body, and is the more superficial “false self”.
The sympathetic response (fight/flight) is most easily
understood as an upsurge – those feelings which are experienced
as coming up – anger, fear, excitement, desire, hatred – and
which if expressed involve movement out, or towards, or in the
case of fear, away from, an object. Conversely the
parasympathetic action (freeze) is a concomitant of coming
down – disappointment, grief, shame, guilt, despair; and
contentment, peacefulness, satisfaction - feelings which involve
a decrease in tension, withdrawal of energy inward and tend
more towards introspection. Laughter and tears are both usually
a sign of parasympathetic activity.38 Porges’ work documents
how the body, through the vagal nerve system, determines
whether parasympathetic activation triggers disappointment and
shame on the one hand, or contentment on the other.39 It is here
that one sees clearly the somatic distinction between the
apparently normal personality and the emotional personality.
Note that the eliciting of positive or negative emotion
through the vagal activation of the parasympathetic system is
physiologically observable in the heart rate variability measure
to be discussed later in this article. Whether the archetypal
complex manifests as protector or as persecutor in a given
momentary experience is related to, perhaps determined by,
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard
47
which of the two vagal nerve pathways is engaged to transport
parasympathetic activation from the heart to the brain.
These archaic behavioral reactions are often denied or
thwarted or undischarged in a traumatized individual, and they
become split off from the whole self and become trapped in the
body. That is where we find them, and incidentally, how we heal
them. After all, the child tried fight or flight and it didn’t work
(the abuse got worse), so he had to stop responding with that
behavior. But his body’s nervous system didn’t stop reacting
with sympathetic or parasympathetic activation. So he had to
find a way to override the body’s natural response to stress, to
tolerate the growing accumulation of undischarged energy. The
mind dissociates from paying attention to what is intolerable; the
body dissociates as well, through compensating activation,
which we call shock. This is the central distinction between
trauma and complex trauma, between PTSD and complex PTSD.
If a person’s emotional personality tends toward
hyperarousal (fight/flight) response that is not effectively
discharged, his/her apparently normal personality will tend to
utilize parasympathetic dissociation as a defensive effort to
achieve a semblance of homeostasis in the body: “spacing out”;
being a “couch potato” vacantly watching television; eating or
drinking in excess; chronic exhaustion. If a person’s emotional
personality tends toward hyporarousal (freeze) response that is
not effectively discharged, his/her apparently normal personality
will tend to utilize sympathetic dissociation to achieve a
semblance of homeostasis: mindless busyness; incessant talking;
chasing endless lists of “must do’s”; constant attentiveness to
others’ needs. The trauma victim lives in a state of involuntary
and disruptive autonomic instability and cycling.40 Incidentally,
the area of the body that is not feeling can be equally as
important an indicator of stored trauma as body parts that do
feel.
The child first exiles from conscious awareness of affect
(numbing), then from knowledge (amnesia), and then from
foundational beliefs. Freyd (1994) provides a vivid analogy of
the dissociative process, and how one might resort to numbing,
and further to amnesia. Consider an individual who breaks a leg
on a skiing accident while traveling with a companion.
Experiencing tremendous pain, she will not want to move at all,
448
Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
and certainly not stand up and walk. Instead she will wait while
her companion goes to get a rescue team. On the other hand, if
she has a similar accident while traveling alone, she will block
perception of the leg pain and get up and hobble to get the help
she needs. While the woman in both cases wants to avoid feeling
pain, only in the second case does she block the experience of
pain. Applying this to traumatic child abuse, numbing becomes
functional when there is no help readily available, i.e., when the
primary caregiver upon whom the child is dependent is the
source of the abuse. Thus betrayed, the child must rely on herself
to survive, using dissociation and memory repression to ignore
the pain of hobbling on her psychically broken leg.
The more advanced defense, blocking information about the
abuse, i.e., amnesia, is more likely to occur with these
circumstances:41 “alternative realities available (abuse in middle
of night and ‘normal’ family interactions in day, allowing for a
small set of consistent constructions of reality); isolation during
abuse (lack of social validation for the experience, allowing for
cognitively consistent internal denial); young age at onset of
abuse (reality defined by adults, lack of integrative functions,
plasticity of nervous system); alternative reality-defining
statements by caregivers (‘this didn’t happen’); and/or the
absence of any socially shared explicit discussion of the abusive
events, causing a failure of information entry into the child’s
explicit autobiographical memory.”42
With persistent incidents of trauma, or more flagrant
betrayal, next to be exiled is the child’s internal working model,
or world view (foundational beliefs). The phenomenon of
“isolated subjectivity”43 helps to explain this defense that
approximates splitting. Subjective experience consists primarily
of affect, knowledge, and belief; exiling or isolating elements of
these three components establishes the condition of isolated
subjectivity. Chefetz44 explains:
How does isolated subjectivity make itself felt in a person? It would
make sense to think that in the child’s capacity to respond to either the
frightened or frightening parent, “on the fly,” there is a whole different way of
being Ms. Hollander when she is with her father than when she is with her
mother—a different subjective “set” would be present. To go further and even
more to the point, there is a whole different way of being Ms. Hollander when
she is with her father engaged in sexual play than when she is with him at the
breakfast table. The shift in subjectivity required is much more glaring in the
latter example, especially if the sexual play needs to be hidden from mother, is
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard
49
not acknowledged by father, and has not really been felt to have happened by
daughter.
Having multiple subjective “sets” is something we all experience, but in
isolated subjectivity, the extent of the isolation leads to that set being
experienced as “Not-me.”
In order for such a child to survive psychically, she must
attend to the needs of each of these isolated subjectivities. The
“Not-me”, a primitively organized alternative self, experiences
things that I could not, endures assaults that my psyche could
not, and must find a source of strength that I am not. And so the
“Not-me” goes in search of help, to find solace, protection, or to
avoid loneliness. Split off and isolated, she wanders through the
realm of a child’s imagination, looking for protection,
companionship, and nurturing. What resource will she find in the
great Land of Imagination? Perhaps one of the circus archetypes,
or a fictional character like Nancy Drew, a historical figure like
Joan of Arc, or an imaginary friend in the guise of her favorite
doll. A part of her personality has now loaned its psychic energy
to this other, who takes up residence in the same body but who
has uniquely different emotional and somatic settings, and who
is experienced as “Not-me.”
So, the traumatized child first exiles from conscious
awareness of feelings and emotion (numbing), and then from
knowledge and memory (amnesia), and next to be exiled is the
child’s world view (fundamental beliefs). These maneuvers
require disconnection of aspects of the child’s ego, i.e., memory,
affect, self-image. This disconnection splits off part of the
child’s identity, the part that is unacceptable to her conscious
self-image, and sends it “into internal exile.”45 But more invasive
abuse with even deeper levels of betrayal requires a more drastic
defense, and that is to split off part of one’s essence, one’s soul.
Forced to go beyond reevaluating beliefs and feelings about
the self in relation to the world, beyond the approximated
splitting already discussed, how deeply within does the
necessary renunciation go? “The psyche’s normal reaction to a
traumatic experience is to withdraw from the scene of injury. If
withdrawal is not possible, then a part of the self must be
withdrawn, and for this to happen the otherwise integrated ego
must split into fragments and dissociate. . . . a violent affair –
apparently an active attack by one part of the psyche on other
parts.”46 Kalsched47 refers to this fragmentation at the soul level
450
Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
as archetypal defense. This is the use of ‘dissociative’ defenses;
for example, splitting, trance-states, switching among multiple
centers of identity, or psychic numbing. The child has been
forced to make a terrible choice: sacrifice a vital part of herself
in order to salvage the remainder. It is the choice presented to the
young hiker whose arm became lodged under immoveable
boulders. Alone, he could either severe his own arm, freeing his
body to escape certain death, or succumb to that death.
“Whenever chronic brutalization and betrayal have been part of
an individual’s early life, ‘psychic dismemberment’ becomes an
acceptable option.”48
Through cataloguing these progressive stages of inner exile,
we have been distinguishing between traumatic dissociation and
the “soul-loss” of traumatic shock. A helpful aid to
understanding that difference is an analogy of dissociation as
slipping away from the triggering experience into dream sleep. It
is creating a distraction to get caught up in, an escape that allows
another, dreamlike, experience to replace the threatening one: “I
have abandoned you.” The withdrawal from traumatic reality is
into the self or an alternate reality of the self’s own making,
utilizing defenses of the ego such as rationalization, denial,
sublimation, or suppression.
In contrast, shock would be analogous to slipping into
dreamless sleep, recognizing that there is no escape, nowhere to
go to escape. It is thus not escape into an alternate reality but
rather into the annihilative nonbeing of the withdrawal of one’s
soul, i.e., temporary oblivion: “I have abandoned myself.” That
is, of course, a last resort, the only way possible to preserve the
sanctity of the innocent remainder of the whole self, the core of
the individual’s “imperishable personal spirit”49. “When other
defenses fail, archetypal defenses will go to any length to protect
the Self – even to the point of killing the host personality in
which this personal spirit is housed (suicide).”50 That ultimate
sacrifice may be literal suicide, or it may be temporary oblivion
in many forms that leave the conscious ego shattered, fragile,
and defeated, and the physical body damaged, diseased, and
crippled.
Research51 documents clearly that this distinction is
observable as two distinct sets of PTSD symptoms. Individuals
with Type I stressor trauma (trauma) exhibit exaggerated
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard
51
reactivity (such as startle reflex) when confronted with stressors,
while individuals with Type II stressor trauma (shock) exhibit
suppressed or diminished reactivity. For example, rape survivors
classified as highly dissociated exhibit suppression of autonomic
physiological response. Medina et al. suggest that an individual
who experienced exposure to trauma over an extended period of
time, as opposed to a discrete event, is likely to develop the Type
II symptoms. “Perhaps Type II stressors, which are chronic and
perceived to be inescapable, more frequently elicit coping
responses of dissociation, and thus PTSD arising from Type II
stressors is more likely to be related to suppression of
physiological reactivity.”52
It has become clear to most clinicians as well as most
researchers in recent years that there are degrees of wounding in
traumatization, some being more pervasive and complicated than
others. Distinguishing between Type I and Type II dissociative
responses is one attempt to do so. Another is the distinction
between trauma and complex trauma, or PTSD and Complex
PTSD (CPTSD). Complex trauma refers to trauma that occurs
repeatedly and cumulatively, usually over a period of time and
within specific intimate relationships which violate the human
bond and sever the vital human connection.53 The victim of
complex traumatization, generally acknowledged to be any form
of domestic violence or attachment trauma, is entrapped and
conditioned by the perpetrator whom the victim relies on for
safety and protection. Small children enact the violence
surrounding them in their repetitive fantasy and play.
Adolescents and young adults reenact the insidious violence
from their histories as well, not symbolically but in actuality,
“because they were unable to think about the events and process
them, they simply repeated them, often with the hope of
mastery.”54 This attempt at mastery was initially referred to by
Ferenczi as identification with the aggressor.55
Clinicians were discovering that these complex conditions were extremely
difficult to treat and varied according to the age and stage at which the trauma
occurred, the relationship to the perpetrator of the trauma, the complexity of
the trauma itself and the victim’s role and role grooming (if any), the duration
and objective seriousness of the trauma, and the support received at the time,
at the point of disclosure and discovery, and later.56
452
Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
A great deal of research has been done to clarify the causes
of these differences in level of wounding. For incest and
childhood sexual abuse, Somer and Szwarcberg57 summarize
what the level of traumatization and the ensuing psychological
damage have been attributed to: early onset of the abuse58, its
duration59 60, the age difference between victim and abuser61, the
number of perpetrators62, the intrusive level of the abuse63, and
the number of different types of abuse64 65 66.
Jung drew a distinction between two levels of trauma and
two corresponding levels of complex, i.e., a distinction between
‘loss of soul’ complexes on the one hand and ‘possession by a
spirit’ complexes on the other. On the first level of less severe
disturbance, dissociation is systematic. That is, a coherent ego
remains, and the functional unity of the complex – its ‘gluing
together’ of all elements of experience (sensation, feeling, idea,
memory images, etc.) – is not disturbed. Jung compared these
complexes and their effects to what primitive peoples experience
in ‘loss of soul’.67
However, in the more severe trauma response characteristic
of dissociative disorder, Jung thought that dissociation is
unsystematic, i.e., that there is destruction of the architecture of
the complex itself.68 Jung said, “So far as I can judge [these more
severe forms of the complex] occur … when something so
devastating happens to the individual that his whole previous
attitude to life breaks down.”69 Such persons, said Jung,
experience themselves as in some sense possessed by a spirit or
demon, or perhaps by legions of spirits or demons. The
protective bodyguard has now assumed control and, in the
interest of protecting the weakened and frightened ego, has taken
“possession” of the personality and the body.
Wounding at this deepest level “threatens the total
annihilation of the human personality, the destruction of the
personal spirit. This must be avoided at all costs and so, because
such trauma often occurs in early infancy before a coherent ego
(and its defenses) is formed, a second line of defenses comes into
play to prevent the ‘unthinkable’ from being experienced. . . . In
psychoanalytic language, they are variously known as the
‘primitive’ or ‘dissociative’ defenses; for example, splitting,
projective identification, idealization or diabolization, trance-
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard
53
states, switching among multiple centers of identity,
depersonalization, psychic numbing, etc.”70
These primitive or archaic defenses against trauma “are
personified as archetypal daimonic images.”71 “These ‘daimonic’
Beings provide a container for the trauma victim’s annihilation
anxiety and in this way serve as archetypal defences of the
personal spirit.”72
The archetypal defense against fragmentation at the soul
level requires not only a deeper split within the personality, but
also requires resorting to a more powerful resource, one that is
less personal and more collective. Calling on grandma or a
trusted neighbor is not sufficient to deal with the power being
wielded by the abuser at this level. The abuser appears to the
child to be the most powerful person anywhere, certainly more
powerful than grandma or the neighbor, or mommy or the police.
Now the child needs the “big guns”: Nancy Drew, Joan of Arc,
or the Contortionist. If I have to annihilate and abandon some
part of myself, at least the replacement better be bigger and more
powerful than the abuser.
Figure 1 summarizes the inner architecture we have been
exploring. It is based on the work of Ferenczi (1933), Kalsched
(1996, 2003), and Nijenhuis, Van der Hart, & Steele (2004). The
figure is a modified version of a graphical representation titled
“Self-care system and its daimonic objects” in Kalsched, 2003,
p. 153.
454
Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
Figure 1
It is important to recognize that the bodyguard is just doing
its job, what it was selected for so long ago and trained to do:
protect us. It is not malevolent, bad, or mean-spirited, any more
than the ocean is when it rises up in a tsunami. It is just doing
instinctually what comes naturally. We showed great courage
and wisdom as children in going out to seek and find a powerful
ally to help us deal with the trauma. Surely now as adults we can
find the courage and wisdom to confront those same powerful
forces (bodyguards) to renegotiate the arrangement.
The way to retrain or recondition the bodyguard is to retake
control of the body’s nervous system. When the bodyguard
(shadow or complex) cannot usurp the body through sleep or
distractions, the conscious ego-mind is returned to its rightful
place at the steering wheel, and then can choose to say to the
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard
55
bodyguard, “Thank you for trying to help me, but right now
there is no threat. So take a break. I’ll take it from here. And that
means I won’t eat cake right now; I’m going to deal with my
loneliness in a different way. Maybe I’ll call a friend.”
Three layers of healing
We recognize three layers of healing: ego (personal),
existential (social/ cultural) and transpersonal (archetypal). The
same applies to stages of ego development and spiritual growth.
The ego level is organized around the self-image of ‘I’ as
separate and unique from all that is ‘not I’ – the physical
dimension of being with nature and the social dimension of
being with others. Here psychotherapy is focused on “What I am
not, what you are.” In other words, the client discovers long-held
erroneous beliefs about herself (such as “I am shameful” or “I
am bad” or “I deserve everything bad that happens to me”) and
discards them, declaring her innocence. At the same time, she
must attribute responsibility or guilt onto the perpetrators of
neglect or abuse in childhood. The individual here is myopically
limited to black-or-white thinking – “you and I are nothing
alike.” Work at the ego level builds boundaries, integrates
polarizations, replaces nonfunctional concepts of self and others,
and modifies character structure for more fulfillment. “Once
individuals have developed a more cohesive egoic identity, they
can embark on a process that takes them further on the journey
of self-discovery, that of unfolding their existential self, or their
true inner individuality.”73
The existential level is organized around the ‘I’ living the
“human condition,” that is, life on earth itself and the social,
cultural and spiritual ramifications of it – the personal dimension
of being with oneself. Here psychotherapy is focused on “What
you are not, what I am.” In other words, the client explores a
deeper layer of unconscious experience including his own
culpability, his secondary gains for maintaining a dysfunctional
status quo, and his shadow side. At the same time, he begins to
have compassion for those who victimized him, recognizing that
they are not the entirely bad people he railed against in the first
layer of healing work. One is beginning to see many more gray
areas – “you and I are not so different.” People’s existential
issues are related to their mortality and impermanence, their
456
Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
experience of freedom of choice (or lack of it), their sense of
worthiness, and their sense of separation/ connection with others.
Work at this level is to loosen the rigidity of the self-image, to
expand the relationship to the sacred, and to integrate the
profound influences of prenatal and perinatal experiences and
one’s relationship with death.
The transpersonal level is organized around the parts
experienced as ‘not I,’ including rejected and repressed parts,
introjected and attached energies, and the unrealized potentials –
the spiritual dimension of being with meaning. Here
psychotherapy is focused on “What ‘I’ am when I witness myself
in the same way as I witness the world.” One is opening to the
subtleties of paradox, to the reality of the invisible, to the
possibilities of peaceful coexistence through embracing the
tension of opposites. The work at this level includes identifying
and healing repressed shadow parts and unconscious anima/
animus constellations through re-collecting one’s projections,
identifying and reclaiming the transcendent parts hitherto beyond
reach (such as archetypal, karmic/ past life, preconception), and
establishing collaborative relationships with archetypes from the
collective unconscious (such as spirit guides, angels, gods and
demons).
The present authors have formulated a more complete
discussion of this three-layer schema.74 Clearly, people do not
work on these layers strictly sequentially, so that for someone
who is primarily at the Biographical/ ego layer there may be
occasional forays into both of the others, and someone who has
progressed to working primarily at the Archetypal/ transpersonal
layer it may be useful to occasionally address the other two.
Figure 2 summarizes this distinction graphically.
Archetypal/ transpersonal
Intersubjective/ existential
Biographical/ ego
Archetypal/ transpersonal
Intersubjective/ existential
Biographical/ ego
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard
57
Archetypal/ transpersonal
Intersubjective/ existential
Biographical/ ego
Figure 2
Notice the shifting emphasis in the progression through these
layers of the perspective of the subject, the one experiencing
being ‘I’, from a separate and unique ‘I’ (what I am not) to an ‘I’
connected to the human condition (what I am) to an ‘I’ that
incorporates both without being limited by either (what I really
am). Clarifying who I am involves discovering early
introjections and dis-identifying with them, discovering all the
many projections and re-collecting them, and discovering the
other psychical subjects who populate the unconscious and
forming alliances with them. One may discover shame or fear or
rage or grief that were early introjects from a shame-filled,
fearful, raging, or broken-hearted parent; indeed, “I am not that.”
Continuing to a deeper layer, an individual will find that she
does, indeed, belong; that she is, in fact, smart and capable and
worthy. She has seen these qualities in others and felt jealous
that they had what she did not, but now she is ready to claim
them for herself; indeed, “I am that.” Yet she also has seen
pettiness, jealousy, and lack of integrity in others and felt relief
that she wasn’t like that; now she is ready to re-collect those
projections and claim those qualities for herself as well; indeed,
“I am that, too.” And continuing to a still deeper layer, one finds
that the reclaimed shadows have turned out to be guides of
introduction and initiation to relationship with the archetypes
that inhabit the unconscious.
Navigating clinically between personal and archetypal layers
Therapeutic facilitation requires us to navigate between these
layers of wounding and their respective sources of resourcing.
First, the therapist working with deeply wounded individuals
with early trauma must understand and prepare for the client’s
resistance to treatment. The therapy relationship may actually be
reminiscent of the original abusive betrayal, because the
therapist is asking the individual to undo and relinquish the
458
Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
survival defenses that have made life possible up until entering
therapy.75 We are encouraging the client to remember, indeed to
re-experience, the unbearable trauma that she has been trying all
her life not to be aware of. The part of the client’s personality
that is resistant is the most powerful part, the bodyguard hired so
long ago. The wise therapist welcomes the challenge from the
inner authority, although of course it may well be disconcerting
and feel like an obstacle. The appearance of resistance provides
the clearest map of the inner landscape, on both the personal
layer (ego and shadows) and the archetypal layer (complexes).
Working with adults to heal early trauma calls on therapist
and client alike to navigate the borderland, a concept developed
by Jerome Bernstein.76 The Borderland is that space in the mind
where the rational, the ‘transrational’, and nature meet and are
integrated. The borderland personality is one who may have
experienced the same trauma and anxiety as the borderline
personality but does not split as a result of his/her transrational
experience(s), or who has healed the split that occurred. The
borderland personality is able to tolerate ambiguity, is at home
with the natural world and the archetypal realm, and has
expanded her identity beyond the ego and personality.
At some point during almost any session, even one focused
on the transpersonal layer, it usually becomes clear that residual
emotional content from the past is “bleeding through” into the
current work in the form of projections. For example, the client
may be dialoguing with a symbolic image or dream figure, or be
expressing the perspective of that figure in role-reversal, and
experience abreactive emotion (fear, hate, jealousy, grief, etc.). It
is often very helpful to age regress the client at this point for
further clarification on the source of that reaction. You can do
the age regression either from the ego state of the client or of the
archetypal figure, whichever the client is in when the need for
regression surfaces. That is because regression from either one
will go back to the source trauma, and therefore the source of the
shock state.
In this modality of work, just as in therapy that is dominantly
personal, we continue to elicit, illuminate, titrate, and heal the
client’s shock. Whenever as facilitators we encounter shock
states, we must be prepared to intervene in the pattern. That
means, for example, interrupting a client whose abreactive
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard
59
expression of emotion is actually sympathetic shock (someone
yelling, hitting down, and expressing anger, yet that is not
actually dissipating or releasing the festering residue carried
from the past into the present). It also means interrupting a client
who has lost any ability to feel or express emotion, which is
actually parasympathetic shock. In both cases we interrupt the
shock pattern and introduce resources. The resource begins with
an internal experience that can be identified and expanded. For
sympathetic shock, the “time out” or “cool down” provided by a
few quieting breaths, a sip of cool water, or ice on the neck or
forehead, allows the client to access an inner calm, titrating the
shock. For parasympathetic shock, the inner resource is an
awareness of an activation or energy somewhere in the body that
by focusing on it can be expanded into the remainder of the
body, titrating the shock.
A significant difference between working with shock on the
personal and the archetypal layers is the nature of the resources
that we utilize. In both cases the resource is external to the client.
In work that is predominantly personal, we bring in a healthy
nurturing adult (e.g., a grandmother, teacher, or parent from the
client’s childhood; or perhaps the client’s own adult ego state).
The age-regressed child ego state needs to have the corrective
experience of safety and nurturing provided by an appropriate
caregiver. In work that is predominantly archetypal, we bring in
a powerful symbolic resource instead: it may be a figure or
image from the dream, a Tarot card, or from an active
imagination. Utilizing archetypal resources for a client working
at the personal level is to collaborate in spiritual bypass,
suppressing emotional distress rather than healing it. On the
other hand, utilizing personal resources for a client working at
the archetypal level is to collaborate in psychological bypass,
reinforcing old patterns of self-limitation rather than moving
beyond them.
The presence of shock indicates the existence of a complex.
The more deeply embedded the shock state, the more
autonomous is the complex. It is helpful to regress back to the
source trauma to discover and differentiate the two aspects of
any complex: (1) the original essential part of the client’s child
that split (ran away to the circus), and (2) the archetypal energy
(the bodyguard circus character) that he became identified with.
460
Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
The first is the core of the complex; the second provides the
“bigger than life” quality to it. When we facilitate healing a
complex, we are liberating the split-off essence to return and
flourish, and we are also liberating the archetypal energy to
return to its imaginal realm. Each one is freed from its bondage
to the “unholy bargain” made so many years earlier. The
Perfectly Nurturing Mother archetype or the Trapeze Artist
archetype is now liberated from the contamination of personal
projection, and is available once again as a powerful resource.
Ultimately, corrective experiences need to address all layers.
For example, the client needs to experience liberation from a
suffocating birth canal and a transcendent pathway opening up to
grand new horizons. The client needs to reclaim and nurture her
own traumatized six-year-old and recognize kinship with the
“I’m in control here” Drill Sergeant archetype that stepped into
her life at six. Thus, we contribute to healing in the personal
unconscious and in the collective unconscious.
The way to retrain or recondition the bodyguard archetypal
complex is to retake control of the body’s nervous system from
the sympathetic dissociation or parasympathetic dissociation
installed and enforced by the apparently normal personality. And
that process begins with allowing the emotional personality
(child ego state) to express itself without the inhibition that has
been imposed on it over a lifetime through nervous system
dissociation, i.e., shock.
Heart rate variability for assessing and treating shock
The research on differences of physiological reactions
between dissociated parts of the personality lead us to an
exciting potential intervention. The emotional personalities are
subject to emotional dysregulation, such as anxiety, depression,
rigid attentional processing of threat, and stress. The apparently
normal personalities are lacking depth of feeling or passion, and
thus as a “false self”, lack a clear sense of authentic self.
That coherent sense of self seems to depend on an
individual’s identity with and intimate linkage with her body.
“Difficulties with embodiment following trauma seem to disrupt
the development of cohesive identity and body integrity
(Armsworth, 1992) and the management of ego states.”77
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard
61
Brown78 emphasizes “embodied soul,” and Winnicott79
emphasizes embodiment, or “indwelling,” as a core constituent
of cohesive selfhood. In his view, infants only become integrated
and personalized, or “called into existence,” as they come to
experience linkages between self and body and body functions.
That indwelling provides a limiting membrane between “what is
me versus what is not me,” a psychic structure providing
containment. Stolorow and Atwood80 emphasize that the failure
to achieve indwelling results in extreme states of disconnection
of mind and body, leaving individuals vulnerable to states of
depersonalization, mind-body disintegration or disidentification
with the body. Healing such a deep wounding requires “soul
retrieval” efforts to re-inhabit and reclaim the body.
Since emotions are reflected in the heart rhythm pattern,
heart rate variability provides a therapist and client a window
into the client’s emotional state, especially the coherence of the
sympathetic/ parasympathetic systems. The new field of
neurocardiology has discovered that the heart communicates
directly with the amygdala and is involved in creating emotional
experience. Learning to better regulate the autonomic nervous
system is empowering for clients.
The heart is constantly responding to “orders” sent by the
brain in the form of neural signals. Yet the heart actually sends
far more signals to the brain than the brain sends to the heart.
Moreover, these heart signals have a significant effect on brain
function – influencing emotional processing as well as higher
cognitive faculties such as attention, perception, memory, and
problem-solving. In other words, not only does the heart respond
to the brain, but the brain continuously responds to the heart.
There is substantial evidence that the heart plays a unique
role in synchronizing the activity in multiple systems of the
body, and thus in orchestrating the flow of information
throughout the psychophysiological network. The heart is in
continuous connection with the brain and other bodily organs
and systems through multiple pathways: neurologically (through
the transmission of neural impulses), biochemically (through
hormones and neurotransmitters), biophysically (through
pressure and sound waves), and energetically (through
electromagnetic field interactions).81
462
Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
Sustained positive emotions such as appreciation, care,
compassion, and love generate a smooth pattern in the heart’s
rhythms. This reflects increased order in higher-level control
systems in the brain, and increased synchronization between the
two branches of the autonomic nervous system. By contrast,
research has shown that negative emotions such as frustration,
anger, anxiety, and worry lead to heart rhythm patterns that
appear incoherent—highly variable and erratic. Overall, this
means that there is less synchronization in the reciprocal action
of the parasympathetic and sympathetic branches of the
autonomic nervous system.82
Research has demonstrated that different patterns of heart
rhythm (which accompany different emotional states) have
distinct effects on cognitive and emotional function. During
stress and negative emotions, when the heart rhythm pattern is
erratic and disordered, the corresponding pattern of neural
signals traveling from the heart to the brain inhibits higher
cognitive functions. This limits our ability to think clearly,
remember, learn, reason, and make effective decisions.
In contrast, the more ordered and stable pattern of the heart’s
input to the brain during positive emotional states has the
opposite effect—it facilitates cognitive function and reinforces
positive feelings, emotional stability and perceptual clarity. This
means that learning to generate increased heart rhythm
coherence by sustaining positive emotions not only benefits the
entire body, but also profoundly affects how we perceive, think,
feel, and perform.83
Heart rate variability is considered a measure of
neurocardiac function that reflects heart–brain interactions and
the dynamics of the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches
of the autonomic nervous system. There are six general
categories, or modes, of psychophysiological function that can
be detected by measuring heart rate variability:
1. Mental Focus (associated with impassive emotions
experienced while attention is directed to performing
familiar, cognitively engaging tasks or actions). This
state is primarily one of mental attention to the task at
hand and, as such, is characterized by little or no
emotional arousal, either of a positive or negative nature,
and low motor activity.
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard
63
2. Psychophysiological Incoherence (associated with
negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, etc.), generally
typified by an erratic and disordered heart rhythm
pattern and intense activation of the sympathetic nervous
system.
3. Relaxation (associated with calm emotions experienced
while resting from the effort and stress of everyday life),
characterized by a virtually steady heart rate. There is
shift to increased parasympathetic activity (the
relaxation response) and lower overall heart rate
variability. This same rhythm is also seen during periods
of restful sleep. Many relaxation techniques are
essentially dissociation techniques, whereas the
psychological states associated with coherence are
directly related to activated positive emotions.
4. Psychophysiological Coherence (associated with
positive emotions such as appreciation, care, compassion, etc.), signaled by a highly ordered, smooth heart
rhythm pattern and typically with increased
parasympathetic activity.
The remaining two modes occur under extraordinary or
unusual circumstances. They are physiologically and
experientially distinct—physiologically, they are both associated
with very low heart rate variability; experientially, they are at
opposite ends of the spectrum, with one mode being associated
with an uncommon sense of inner peace and the other mode
associated with extreme negative emotions such as fury and rage.
The two hyper-states:
5. Emotional Quiescence (The subjective experience of this
mode is a state in which the intrusion of mental and
emotional “chatter” is reduced to a point of internal
quietness, to be replaced by a profound feeling of peace
and serenity and a deep sense of being centered in the
heart.) First-person descriptions include a heightened
awareness of the movement of energy both within one’s
body and between oneself and other people; the feeling
of being “totally alive” and “fully present” in the
moment; the experience of an all-embracing,
nonjudgmental love (in the largest sense); and a sense of
increased connectedness with one’s higher self or spirit,
464
Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
and with “the whole.” This hyper-state involves a
transcendent state in which the individual’s emotional
experience involves the feeling of spiritual connectedness to something larger and more enduring beyond
himself. Typically this state is associated with selfless
actions and is also generative of bodily renewal.
6. Extreme Negative Emotion (violent, uncontrollable fury
and rage, or overwhelming fear and anxiety). Extreme
anger or rage is subjectively experienced as an intense,
highly focused state that is usually directed outward.
Individuals describe their subjective experience of this
state as one that is highly energized and seething with
negative emotion, with a feeling of increased physical
power and a corresponding reduction in sensitivity to
physical pain. In this mode the HRV becomes very low
due to excessive sympathetic outflow to the heart, which
both drives the heart rate up to very high rates and inhibits parasympathetic outflow to the heart. This hyperstate tends to be an all-consuming state of selfabsorption and self-focus. This state is usually associated
with highly destructive behavior—either directed at the
self and/or projected out onto others—and has
detrimental, even devastating, consequences. Negative
hyper-states lead to a depletion of the body’s energy and
resources which, in the long term, results in the
degeneration of bodily function.
Notice that the two states associated with anger and anxiety
exhibit very different physiological signs. Incoherence is
generally typified by an erratic and disordered heart rhythm
pattern, while the more extreme version of the same emotional
content, extreme negative emotion, exhibits very low heart rate
variability, a well-ordered heart rhythm pattern, which is usually
associated with the positive emotions. The latter reflects the
inhibited affect of the apparently normal personality in the grip
of parasympathetic dissociation shock, while the former reflects
the volatility and emotionality of the emotional personality,
which if it is in shock is probably sympathetic dissociation
shock.
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard
65
Notice as well that the two states associated with positive
emotions, i.e., relaxation and psychophysiological coherence,
while both shift to increased parasympathetic activity and lower
overall heart rate variability, have a significant difference. The
former is essentially a dissociated state (parasympathetic
dissociation), while the latter is an actively engaged state (not
dissociated or in shock at all).
Again we want to understand what determines whether one
enters
dissociated
relaxation
or
non-dissociated
psychophysiological coherence; whether a person experiences
emotional incoherence or the controlled rage of extreme negative
emotion; in Jungian terms, whether the archetypal complex
manifests as protector or as persecutor in a given momentary
experience. The answer is related to, perhaps determined by,
which of the two vagal nerve pathways is engaged to transport
parasympathetic activation from the heart to the brain.
According to the Polyvagal Theory proposed by Stephen
Porges84, two branches of the vagus nerve serve different
adaptive behavioral strategies. The dorsal vagal complex is a
slow responding nerve that supports immobilization in response
to threat (e.g., the freezing response, or death-feigning) –
parasympathetic dissociation shock. On the other hand, the
ventral vagal complex is a fast-acting nerve that functions as an
active brake, or counterbalance, on the fight/ flight sympathetic
system. It can rapidly mobilize or calm an individual via its fastacting inhibitory influence on the activity of the heart without
mobilizing the slower-acting sympathetic nervous system. This
branch of the vagus nerve is suggested to be involved in the
modulation of respiratory-related heart rate variability.85
The way to retrain or recondition the bodyguard archetypal
complex into letting go of its persecutor aspect and master its
protector aspect is to retake control of the body’s nervous system
from the sympathetic dissociation or parasympathetic
dissociation installed and enforced by the apparently normal
personality. And that process begins with remembering and reempowering the exiled parts to return to us, embodied and free
of physiological shock. This requires allowing the emotional
personality (child ego state) to express itself without the
inhibition that has been imposed on it over a lifetime through
nervous system dissociation, i.e., shock. Then we are open to the
Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
466
magical, mystical influence of what Jung called the transcendent
function, a deeply embedded drive toward wholeness.
It is my experience that the divine often comes to us through the broken
places, through those split-off and shameful places that are almost always
traumatic. When the exiled parts of us are re-membered, and re-collected, and
we can welcome them into our lives, there is profound healing. When the
banished parts of us return and we can hold them with compassion, a sense of
the divine often enters our lives as a sense of wholeness.86
References
Appelfeld, A. (1994). Beyond Despair. New York: Fromm International.
Appelhans, B. M., & Luecken, L. J. (Sep 2006). Heart Rate Variability as an index of
regulated emotional responding. Review of General Psychology, 10(3), 229-240.
Armsworth, M. W. (1992). Role of body and physical self in development of cohesive
sense of identity and body integrity. Paper presented as part of a workshop entitled,
Advanced Issues in Treating Incest, L. McCann, Chair, at the Eighth Annual
Meeting of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, Los Angeles,
California.
Benyakar, M., Kutz, I., Dasberg, H., & Stern, M. J. (1989). The collapse of a structure: A
structural approach to trauma. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 2(4), 431-449.
Bernstein, Jerome S. (2005). Living in the Borderland: The Evolution of Consciousness
and the Challenge of Healing Trauma. London & New York: Routledge.
Bragin, M. (2005). To play, learn, and think: Understanding and mitigating the effects of
exposure to violent events on the cognitive capacity of children and adolescents.
Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, 4(3), 296-309.
Bremner, J. D., Randall, P., Vermetten, E., Staib, L., Bronen, R. A., Mazure, C., Capelli,
S., McCarthy, G., Innis, R. B., & Charney, D. S. (1997). Magnetic resonance
imaging-based measurement of hippocampal volume in posttraumatic stress
disorder related to childhood physical and sexual abuse--a preliminary report.
Biological Psychiatry, 41(1), 23-32.
Briere, J. N., & Runtz, M. (1989). The trauma symptom checklist (TSC-33): Early data
on a new scale. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 4, 151-163.
Brown, M. (1990). The Healing Touch. Life Rhythm Press.
Carroll, R. (2001). The autonomic nervous system: Barometer of emotional intensity and
internal conflict. A lecture given for Confer, 27th March, 2001. Available online at
http://www.thinkbody.co.uk/papers/autonomic-nervous-system.htm.
Chefetz, R. A. (2003). Healing haunted hearts – toward a model for integrating
subjectivity: Commentary on papers by Philip Bromberg and Gerald Stechler.
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 13(5), 727-742.
Chefetz, R. A. (Fall 2004). The paradox of “Detachment Disorders”: Binding-disruptions
of dissociative process. Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes, 67(3),
246-255.
Courtois, C. A. (2004). Complex trauma, complex reactions: Assessment and treatment.
Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 41(4), 412-425.
Davies, J. M., & Frawley, M. G. (1992). Dissociative processes and transference/
countertransference paradigms in the psychoanalytically oriented treatment of adult
survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2, 5-36.
Deikman, A. (1977). The missing centre. In N. E. Zinberg (Ed.), Alternate States of
Consciousness, 230-241. New York: The Free Press.
Dupont, J. (1988). (Ed.) The Clinical Diary of Sandor Ferenczi. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Ehling, T., Nijenhuis, E. R. S., & Krikke, A. (2003). Volume of discrete brain structures
in florid and recovered DID, DDNOS, and healthy controls. Proceedings of the 20th
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard
67
International Fall Conference of the International Society for the Study of
Dissociation. Chicago, IL, November 2-4.
Elliot, D. M., & Briere, J. (1992). Sexual abuse trauma among professional women:
Validating the Trauma Symptom Checklist-40 (TSC-40). Child Abuse and Neglect,
16, 391-398.
Elliot, D. M., & Edwards, K. J. (Aug 1991). Individuals raised by alcoholic versus
mentally ill parents: A comparison study. Paper presented at the annual meeting of
the American Psychological Association, San Francisco.
Ferenczi, S. (1933). Confusion of tongues between adults and the child. In M. Balint
(Ed.), Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psychoanalysis, 156.
UK: Brunner/Mazel, 1980.
Finkelhor, D. (1987). The sexual abuse of children: Current research reviewed.
Psychiatric Annals, 17, 233-237.
Finkelhor, D., Hotaling, G., Lewis, I. A., & Smith, C. (1989). Sexual abuse and its
relationship to later sexual satisfaction, marital status, religion, and attitudes.
Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 4, 279-299.
Freyd, J. J. (1994). Betrayal trauma: Traumatic amnesia as an adaptive response to
childhood abuse. Ethics & Behavior, 4(4), 307-329.
Gilman, S. G. (2011). A Therapist’s Guide Using HeartMath® Tools with Clients with
Post-Traumatic Stress, Addictions, Chronic Pain, Grief and Loss. Boulder Creek,
CA: Institute of HeartMath.
Hartman, D., & Zimberoff, D. (2003). The existential approach in Heart-Centered
therapies. Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 6(1), 3-46.
Hartman, D., & Zimberoff, D. (2006). Healing the body-mind in Heart-Centered
therapies. Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 9(2), 75-137.
Henschel, D., Briere, J., Magallanes, M., & Smiljanich, K. (Apr 1990). Sexual abuse
related attributions: Probing the role of “traumalogenic factors.” Paper presented
at the annual meeting of the Western Psychological Association, Los Angeles.
Herman, J. L., & Schatzow, E. (1987). Recovery and verification of memories of
childhood sexual trauma. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 4, 1-14.
Jacobi, J. (1959). Complex/Archetype/Symbol in the Psychology of C. G. Jung. New
York: Bollingen Series/Pantheon Books.
Jung, C. G. (1912/1956). ‘Symbols of transformation’. The Collected Works Volume 5
(Bollingen Series XX). Trans. R.F.C. Hull; Eds. H. Read, M. Fordham, & G. Adler.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. (1960). The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease. The Collected Works Volume
3 (Bollingen Series XX). Trans. R.F.C. Hull; Eds. H. Read, M. Fordham, & G.
Adler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. (1960/1969). The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. The Collected
Works Volume 8 (Bollingen Series XX). Trans. R.F.C. Hull; Eds. H. Read, M.
Fordham, & G. Adler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kalsched, D. (1996). The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal
Spirit. London: Routledge.
Kalsched, D. (1999). Response to ‘The multiple self: Working with dissociation and
trauma’. Journal of Analytic Psychology, 44, 465-474.
Kalsched, D. (2003a). Daimonic elements in early trauma. Journal of Analytic
Psychology, 48, 145-169.
Kalsched, D. (2003b). Trauma and daimonic reality in Ferenczi’s later work. Journal of
Analytic Psychology, 48, 479-489.
McCraty, R., Atkinson, M., Tomasino, D., & Bradley, R. T. (2006). The Coherent Heart:
Heart–Brain Interactions, Psychophysiological Coherence, and the Emergence of
System-Wide Order. Boulder Creek, CA: Institute of HeartMath.
Medina, A. M., Mejia, V. Y., Schell, A. M., Dawson, M. E., & Margolin, G. (2001).
Startle reactivity and PTSD symptoms in a community sample of women.
Psychiatry Research, 101, 157-169.
468
Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
Metzner, R. (1985). On getting to know one’s inner enemy: Transformational
perspectives on the conflict of good and evil. ReVISION, 8(1), 41-51.
Myers, C. S. (1940). Shell Shock in France 1914-1918. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Nelson, K. (1993). The psychological and social origins of autobiographical memory.
Psychological Science, 4, 7-14.
Nijenhuis, E. R. S., Quak, J., Reinders, S., Korf, J., Vos, H., & Marinkelle, A. B. (1999).
Identity dependent processing of traumatic memories in dissociative identity
disorder: Converging regional blood flow, physiological and psychological
evidence. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on
Traumatic Stress: Psychotraumatology, Clinical Practice, and Human Rights.
Istanbul, Turkey.
Nijenhuis, E. R. S., van der Hart, O., & Steele, K. (2004). Trauma-related structural
dissociation of the personality. Trauma Information Pages website, January 2004.
Web URL: http://www.trauma-pages.com/nijenhuis-2004.htm .
Peters, S. D. (1988). Child sexual abuse and later psychological problems. In G. E. Wyatt
& G. E. Powell (Eds.), Lasting Effects of Child Sexual Abuse, 108-118. Newbury
Park, CA: Sage Publications.
Plato (1961). The Collected Dialogues of Plato. (Eds.) E. Hamilton & H. Cairns.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series LXXI.
Porges, S. W. (2003). The Polyvagal Theory: Phylogenetic contributions to social
behavior. Physiology & Behavior, 79, 503-513.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of
Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation. New York: W. W.
Norton & Co.
Reinders, A. A. T. S., Nijenhuis, E. R. S., Paans, A. M. J., Korf, J., Willemsen, A. T. M.,
& Den Boer, J. A. (2003). One brain, two selves. NeuroImage, 20, 2119-2125.
Scaer, R. C. (2005). The Trauma Spectrum: Hidden Wounds and Human Resiliency. New
York: W. W. Norton.
Schwartz, H. L. (2000). Dialogues with Forgotten Voices: Relational Perspectives on
Child Abuse Trauma and Treatment of Dissociative Disorders. New York: Basic
Books.
Sieff, D. (2008). Unlocking the secrets of the wounded psyche: Interview with Donald
Kalsched. Psychological Perspectives, 51, 190-207.
Somer, E., & Szwarcberg, S. (July 2001). Variables in delayed disclosure of childhood
sexual abuse. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 73(3), 332-341.
Squire, L. R. (1992). Memory and the hippocampus: A synthesis from findings with rats,
monkeys, and humans. Psychological Review, 99(2), 195-231.
Stein, L. (1967). Introducing Not-Self. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 12(2), 97-113.
Stolorow, R. D., & Atwood, G. E. (1992). Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective
Foundations of Psychological Life. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Tiller, W. A., McCraty, R., & Atkinson, M. (1996). Cardiac coherence: A new,
noninvasive measure of autonomic nervous system order. Alternative Therapies in
Health and Medicine, 2(1), 52-65.
Van der Hart, O. (2000). Psychic Trauma: The Disintegrating Effects of Overwhelming
Experience on Mind and Body. Melbourne: University of Melbourne.
Van der Hart, O., & Nijenhuis, E. R. S. (2001). Loss and recovery of different memory
types in generalized dissociative amnesia. Australian and New Zealand Journal of
Psychiatry, 35(5), 589-600.
Van der Hart, O., & Op den Velde, W. (1995). Posttraumatische stoornisssen
[Posttraumatic disorders]. In O. Van der Hart (Ed.), Trauma, Dissociatie en
Hypnose [Trauma, Dissociation and Hypnosis], 103-145. Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger.
Winnicott, D. W. (1945). Primitive emotional development. International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 26, 137-143.
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard
69
Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The theory of the parent-infant relationship. In The
Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 37-55. New York:
International Universities Press.
Wittine, B. (1993). Assumptions of transpersonal psychotherapy. In R. Walsh & F.
Vaughan, (Eds.), Paths Beyond Ego: The Transpersonal Vision, 165-171. New
York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam.
Zivney, O. A., Nash, M. R., & Hulsey, T. L. (1988). Sexual abuse in early versus late
childhood: Differing patterns of pathology as revealed on the Rorschach.
Psychotherapy, 25, 99-106.
70
Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 1
Endnotes
1
Jung 1912/1956, para. 655
Ferenczi in Dupont, 1988, p. 13
Sieff, 2008, pp. 192-193
4
Davies & Frawley, 1992, p. 8
5
Davies & Frawley, 1992, p. 16
6
Kalsched, 2003a, p. 149
7
Jacobi, 1959, p. 25
8
Kalsched, 1996, p. 5
9
Chefetz, 2004, p. 246
10
Deikman, 1977, p. 230, italics added
11
Benyakar, et al., 1989, p. 441
12
Sieff, 2008, p. 196
13
Ferenczi, 1933
14
Kalsched, 2003a, p. 156
15
Kalsched, 2003a, p. 157
16
Kalsched, 2003b, p. 485
17
Plato, 1961, p. 555
18
Kalsched, 2003a, p. 150
19
Kalsched, 1996, p. 4 [also, the quote references Stein, 1967]
20
Kalsched, 1996, p. 5
21
Nijenhuis, et al., 2004
22
Bremner, et al., 1997
23
Squire, 1992
24
Scaer, 2005, p. 67
25
Davies & Frawley, 1992, p. 16
26
Ehling, et al., 2003; Vermetten, et al., 2003
27
Hartman & Zimberoff, 2006, pp. 117-127
28
Nijenhuis, et al., 2004
29
Van der Hart, 2000
30
Myers, 1940
31
Nijenhuis, et al., 1999; Reinders, et al., 2003
32
Van der Hart & Op den Velde, 1995
33
Appelfeld, 1994, p. 18
34
Van der Hart & Nijenhuis, 2001
35
Nijenhuis, et al., 1999
36
Appelhans & Luecken, 2006
37
Nijenhuis, et al., 2004
38
Carroll, 2001
39
Porges, 2003
40
Scaer, 2005, p. 195, emphasis added
41
Freyd, 1994, p. 322
42
Nelson, 1993
43
Chefetz, 2003
44
Chefetz, 2004, p. 251
45
Metzner, 1985, p. 44
46
Kalsched, 1996, pp. 12-13, emphasis added
47
Kalsched, 1996
48
Schwartz, 2000, p. 420
49
Kalsched, 2003a
50
Kalsched, 1996
51
Medina, et al., 2001
52
Medina, et al., 2001, p. 166
53
Courtois, 2004
2
3
Hartman & Zimberoff: Trauma-Weakened Ego Goes Seeking a Bodyguard 71
54
Bragin, 2005, p. 300
Ferenczi, 1933
Courtois, 2004, p. 413
57
Somer & Szwarcberg, 2001, p. 335
58
Zivney, et al., 1988
59
Elliot & Briere, 1992
60
Herman & Schatzow, 1987
61
Finkelhor, 1987
62
Peters, 1988
63
Finkelhor, et al., 1989
64
Briere & Runtz, 1989
65
Henschel, et al., 1990
66
Elliot & Edwards, 1991
67
Jung 1960/1969, paras. 587–91
68
Jung 1960, para. 559
69
Jung, 1960/1969, para. 594
70
Kalsched, 1996
71
Kalsched, 1996
72
Kalsched, 2003a, p. 148
73
Wittine, 1993, p.167
74
Hartman & Zimberoff, 2003
75
Kalsched, 1999
76
Bernstein, 2005
77
Attias & Goodwin, 1999, p. 139
78
Brown, 1990
79
Winnicott, 1945, 1965
80
Stolorow & Atwood, 1992
81
McCraty, et al., 2006
82
Tiller, et al., 1996
83
Gilman, 2011
84
Porges, 2011
85
Porges, 2007
86
Sieff, 2008, p. 200
55
56