Embodiment
BFNow Self-Study Module 3 - Exploration 1
[This is part of BFNow Self-Study Module 3: Child Development and Adult Character. For more about the overall Self-Study program, please look at About BFNow Self-Study and BFNow Self-Study Orientation.]
If you haven’t done so already, let me encourage you to pause, relax and release, perhaps with a big stretch or three deep breaths.
Today we start exploring the Character Styles approach to mapping the child development layer of the territory of adult character.
If you have not yet read the Child Development and Adult Character – Module 3 Overview, please do so now before going further. What’s here will make more sense and you will get more out of it if you do.
The ultimate goal of this exploration is to support you in feeling more deeply comfortable and safe in your body. Our pathway to that goal involves
getting an overview of the Embodiment developmental task and the defensive patterns that emerge when that task gets distorted or blocked
getting a start on healing any underlying wounds.
The approach we will take looks at the defensive patterns associated with your sub-personalities, so they show up sometime but not always. I encourage you to keep seeing yourself as a complex territory, not a simple object. These defense patterns and character styles don’t define who you are as a totality. Rather, they can help you to better understand aspects of yourself.
Today’s focus is personal, yet as you come to understand yourself better you are laying the groundwork for a more compassionate understanding of others.
As you do this, it is not necessary to delve into or remember any of the details of your own childhood. All that matters is what’s active for you now. It’s also not necessary to have an intellectual understanding of all of the details in these emails. There is a lot here, as a resource for the future and for those who want that level of depth.
I recommend that you prioritize the following sections:
Indicators
Positive Aspects
Healing Strategies
and, of course, the Experientials
As best as you can, get a general feel for this character style and how it may be present in your life.
We will build on this material for the rest of this module and in Modules 4 and 5.
This module’s experientials are in a standard format to emphasize a common framework for all the different Character Styles – and especially for what you need to do for healing.
Let’s get into it.
Embodiment
Timeframe
In utero to about 6 months after birth
Developmental Task
Integrate consciousness and a sense of self into the physical body. Requires a sense of safety and welcome.
When it’s completed well, consciousness and the body are a mutually supportive whole – strengthening both. Life feels safe and worth living. But if the task gets blocked or distorted, the consciousness never fully arrives.
Adverse Circumstances and Initial Triggers
The infant’s primary sources for feeling safe and welcome are his/her parents. If either parent, and especially the primary caregiver, is cold, abusive, erratic, distant, fearful and/or anxious, the child’s sensitive nervous system will be overwhelmed in a way in which the infant is not equipped to cope. Think of the Still Face Experiment.
Such parental behavior can be chronic or it can be occasional, such as when an otherwise attentive parent gets overwhelmed or exhausted. The parent may react to the child in an unwelcoming way for various reasons, including personal issues, illness, an unwanted pregnancy or because the child didn’t meet the parent’s expectations. The child’s nervous system can also be shocked by, among other things, fighting and violence in the home or external circumstances such as natural disasters and war.
If the child’s nervous system is regularly overwhelmed during this developmental phase, the consciousness will have a hard time fully integrating into the body. If it happens only occasionally, the seed may be planted for a sub-personality that carries this trauma even if it doesn’t affect most of the territory of the child’s personality. I’ve described the initial triggers in strong terms but even milder forms of unwelcome can have an effect, especially if the child is sensitive to begin with. Think of these descriptions on sliders rather than being hard categories.
Defensive Patterns
Because the distress is coming through the body while the consciousness is working to coalesce and attach to the body, it disrupts the process in a painful and fragmenting way. In response, the consciousness retreats, leaving the body to escape the distress – helpful in the short term but the opposite of what it needs to do to accomplish embodiment. With each new shock and retreat, the pattern is reinforced and the consciousness never fully embodies.
Following Kessler, I’ll call this a Leaving defense pattern.
Indicators
How can you tell if one of your sub-personalities reacts to stress and overwhelm by using a Leaving defense pattern? Here are some clues. In a Leaving sub-personality:
you are likely to feel unsafe, fearful of life, not seen, invisible, left out, not belonging
under stress you are likely to get spaced out, dissociate, want to flee, intellectualize, depersonalize
you are likely to believe: Life is dangerous; I don’t belong here; I want to go home; I am my mind; I have no right to exist; I don’t matter; No one cares.
you struggle to hold it all together, your inner critic engages in self-hatred and you create what sense of safety you can by minimizing your contact with other people or challenging situations
you prefer fantasy and an inner life to engagement with the world around you
you have trouble relating to linear time and prefer a sense of timelessness
Positive Aspects
Not all is grim. The defensive pattern itself requires or encourages certain skills and abilities and these can continue to make a positive contribution even after healing the original wounds. These are what I call workaround behaviors.
By not connecting fully with the body, Leaving types retain a stronger connection to other planes of consciousness (however you want to think of that). This sub-personality will tend, when not under stress, to be especially creative, playful, sensitive and able to tune into unseen levels of consciousness. Kessler identifies Einstein, Tesla, Picasso, Mozart and Robin Williams as examples of the Leaving character style.
Energy Flow
Each of the defensive patterns we will be exploring tends to affect the flow of life energy in the person in characteristic ways. In adults who carry the Leaving pattern strongly, their energy tends to be mainly in the head or, under stress, out of the body entirely.
If they carried this pattern strongly throughout their childhood, it may have affected how their bodies developed.
When I first encountered the idea that these defense patterns might correlate with body type, I was pretty skeptical. I’ll certainly understand if you are too. Yet I’ve come to appreciate that, while the correlation is far from perfect (things like metabolism and heredity are also important), there does appear to be a connection to body type built on the impact these defense patterns have on the nervous system and muscles, especially in the body-forming years of childhood. What follows here and in the rest of this module’s explorations are the patterns observed by many generations of therapists who have worked with the Character Styles approach.
The classic Leaving body type reflects the lack of life energy and is slight, extremities may be weak and motion tends to lack grace. When the Leaving pattern isn’t predominant but just in a particular sub-personality, the body won’t be the Leaving type, but awkward coordination may well show when the Leaving sub-personality is active. I know when I feel “trapped in a hostile environment” and just want to be out of there, my physical grace and coordination declines.
Alternate Names
The classic name for this character style is Schizoid. Johnson calls it the Hated Child.
Relationship to Attachment and Pursuit/Withdrawal
While the correspondence is not exact, the Leaving character style connects best to the disorganized/disoriented attachment style.
In couples, or in any close ongoing dyad, the two partners will often develop a pattern where, under stress, one tends to pursue while the other tends withdraw. A sub-personality with a Leaving character style would tend toward withdrawal when stressed.
Healing Strategies
The key to healing the Leaving defensive pattern, as with all of the defense patterns, is to build up corrective experiences that give you the skills you missed in childhood and allow you to replace the beliefs that now hold the pattern in place.
I’m going to use the Chinese Finger Puzzle as an icon for healing the defense patterns since so often real healing requires you to move in the opposite direction from your habitual impulse.
With the Leaving pattern, the goal is to retain and undistort your capacity for creativity and intuition while releasing the fear and alienation that keep you from fully incarnating. This needs to be done carefully and gradually because of the Leaving pattern’s hypersensitivity.
Here are some examples of healing strategies for the Leaving pattern:
Do something that helps you sense your body in a way that feels safe and gentle to you. It can be as simple as being aware of the sensations in your body while you are resting or perhaps a foot massage or other forms of gentle touch
Do something gently kinesthetic – walking and tai chi are great options. Make it a habit so that you and your body get practice cooperating.
Begin to notice when your immediate situation is safe and supportive. Notice times when, in spite of fears, you have the resilience to bounce back. Yes, the world has dangers but they are not the whole story. Gradually reinforce a more balanced big picture that acknowledges your own resilience and all the ways that life supports you. Gradually expand the areas of your life where you feel “safe enough” to really show up.
The key is to do these things gradually but persistently over time. You are changing habits and communicating with your subconscious. A good conceptual understanding can support these changes but it isn’t sufficient by itself.
Experiential
I’m going to recommend two parts to today’s experiential (a pattern we’ll continue for the rest of the module). If anything in this experiential triggers you or feels overwhelming, just stop and get support from those you know.
The first part is about awareness. Starting now and throughout your day, tune into whether you have any sub-personalities with a Leaving character style. Make notes in your journal about what you find. While it may be easier to see some of these character styles in other people, best to understand them in yourself first. Make a rough estimate of the proportion of time you spend in this character style (as a first step toward a pie chart at the end of the module). You can, and likely will, adjust this estimate as the module goes on.
The second part is about healing. In the evening, get into your Optimal Zone adult sub-personality (a few deep breaths can help) and from there connect to one of your Leaving style sub-personalities. If you don’t feel you have one (which is entirely possible), still read over the rest of this experiential and imagine, briefly, how you might do it if you did have one. Take some first steps toward developing a partnership in which the Optimal Zone adult can help the younger sub-personality complete the original Embodiment developmental task. This help, over time, will likely involve:
• reassuring the younger sub-personality that they are no longer alone; you are here now keeping them safe
• asking the younger sub-personality what he/she needs and listening empathetically
• validating that they did the best they could with the resources and skills available at the time
• helping the younger sub-personality shift beliefs toward a positive connection with life
• building skills and having corrective experiences that bring them comfortably and pleasurably into the body and the present time.For now, just spend some time, in the spirit of the Inner Smile, connecting with the frightened infant at the core of your Leaving style sub-personality. Let it know, as you would with an infant, that you are there to keep them safe. Listen to what they have to tell you. For now, just be with them.
You can take this further if you have the inspiration to do so – or you can just let this experiential be a seed well-planted for future healing. If you want to really go into this, I recommend getting either Schuitemaker’s or Kessler’s book as a guide.
Thanks,
Robert
[Link back to the Module 3: Child Development and Adult Character Overview page.]
PS - Chest Glow Exercise
The following exercise was quite important for me personally when I first started working with the Character Styles.
Phase 1
Breathe in comfortably through your nose
Imagine/sense a warm glow building up in the center of your chest
Breathe out slowly through your mouth
Imagine the glow spreading in all directions out from your chest, filling your body and the space immediately around your body
Do this for as many breaths as feels useful. It can be anywhere from a cycle of three breaths to as long as you like.
Phase 2
As before, breathe in through your nose and imagine a warm glow building in your chest
This time, as you breathe out slowly through your mouth, use your imagination to direct the glow to any place in that calls to you, perhaps a place that called your attention in the first part
Again, do this for as many breaths as feels useful. It can be anywhere from a cycle of three breaths to as long as you like.
BTW, breathing in through your nose is a great simple way to increase Nitric Oxide which is important for many aspects of health. For normal breathing, I’d stick with breathing out through the nose as well but I find that for these exercises, I get a better effect when I breathe out through my mouth. Test it and see what works for you.
In any case be sure to breathe out more slowly than you breathe in. That’s one of the keys to calming the nervous system.