Taking In
BFNow Self-Study Module 3 - Exploration 2
[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.
I’d like to start today by acknowledging that delving into your defense patterns can be emotionally challenging at times. It’s OK to have this work stir you up somewhat. Remember, you have tools to keep it all in context.
Remember that you wouldn’t be where you are today if you didn’t have some strength and resilience to offset whatever challenges you may feel.
Remember, from beginning and end of Module 1, the Inner Smile and the self-compassion of the Mirror exploration. From Module 2, remember that even though the language here may seem categorical, in real life it’s all on sliders – a matter of degree.
Remember you can use the neurological reset (nose wiggling) and the chest-glow breathing anytime to help move you back toward your Optimal Zone.
Also, let me reiterate that 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 Experiential
As best as you can, get a general feel for this character style and how it may be present in your life.
By the way, in case you are wondering, I feel I have at least some degree of each of these Character Styles among my sub-personalities.
The ultimate goal of this lesson is to support you in feeling confidently nourished from a variety of sources, including those within yourself. Our pathway to that goal involves
getting an overview of the Taking In developmental task and the defensive patterns that emerge when that task gets distorted or blocked
getting a start on healing any underlying wounds.
We will build on this material for the rest of this module and in Modules 4 and 5.
Taking In
Timeframe
6 months to 2.5 years
Developmental Task
Initially, to take in and assimilate physical nourishment and love (archetypally through nursing) and then, based on that experience, open to life energy nourishment from the Earth and the Universe. Requires caregivers who can reliably provide both nourishment and love.
When it’s completed well, the child learns the rhythm of asking, receiving, holding and digesting in a way that feels both satisfying and secure, and starts to learn how to access universal life energy. Life continues to feel safe and worth living. But if the task gets blocked or distorted, the child fixates on feelings of needs that must be met by another, and the inner weaning and diversifying remains weak.
Adverse Circumstances and Initial Triggers
As very young children, we are completely dependent on our caregivers for nourishment. Even if the child gets enough to survive, if the response is slow or erratic, the child will spend long stretches of time with a gnawing hunger they can’t directly address. Children are also dependent on their caregivers for love, especially comforting and connection. If this is provided inconsistently, the child will learn an emotional kind of hunger.
It’s close to impossible to go through childhood without at least some of this experience.
Such parental behavior can be chronic or it can be occasional, such as when an otherwise attentive parent gets overwhelmed or exhausted. 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 triggers in strong terms but even milder forms can have an effect, especially if the child is sensitive to begin with.
Defensive Patterns
Because of the dependency on the caregiver, the one thing the child can do is to work harder to get the caregiver’s attention – through various forms of pleading and demanding. In an attempt to block the discomfort in the body, the child tends to clamp down on its internal energy and direct its attention outward to the other. This interferes with the body’s ability to mobilize its own resources and connect with a more universal life force. This creates a reinforcing cycle that builds the habit of shifting attention away from oneself and one’s internal resources towards a dependence on others and external resources.
I’ll call this a Pulling defense pattern. It is a very common pattern, present to some degree in most people.
This also has a compensated form in which the focus remains external but now with a need to care-take (give to rather than get from) others.
Indicators
How can you tell if one of your sub-personalities has a Pulling defense pattern? Here are some clues. They don’t all need to match or be as stark as I’m describing them.
In a Pulling sub-personality:
you are likely to feel you don’t have enough, feel helpless, fearful of being alone, lacking in self-confidence, insecure, fearful of being abandoned
under stress you are likely to eat, get depressed, turn to others, give in to others, feel you are a victim
you are likely to believe: I’m not enough; Love will solve everything, if only I could find love; I’ll never get what I need; There’s not enough to go around; If I ask, it’s not love; If I don’t ask I won’t get it; It’s too hard; I can’t
you struggle to hold on, your inner critic shames you and you create what sense of safety you can by connecting with others
in the compensated form, you deny you have any needs and focus only on the needs of others, creating dependencies that guarantee you won’t be abandoned
you view relationships as much more important than ideas, rules, power or achievement
you do things to get attention
you talk more and longer than your listeners appreciate
you feel you never have enough time
Positive Aspects
Not all is grim. The defensive pattern itself requires or encourages certain skills and abilities (“workaround behaviors”) and these can continue to make a positive contribution even after healing the original wounds.
By attuning so closely to others, Pulling types become masters at sensing the needs and feelings of others. Once healed of their own wounds, they can show great love, compassion, nurturance and generosity. They can be open-hearted, accepting, trusting, innocent and forgiving. Think of the archetypal Good Mother or a kindly male saint. Kessler identifies Marilyn Monroe and Oprah Winfrey as examples of the Pulling character style.
Gender Considerations
This pattern shows up in both genders, but society expects and even encourages it in women and shames it in men, at least in public. Men, however, will often have Pulling sub-personalities that come to the fore in the privacy of their relationships with partners. Indeed, we have lots of romantic imagery built on a kind of mutual Pulling co-dependence. Once the wounds are healed, this can be a quite beautiful relationship dynamic.
Energy Flow
People in the Pulling pattern tend to draw their energy from others and haven’t developed the capacity to draw energy from their food, from the Earth or from the Universe. This tends to keep their life energy weak and their orientation needy.
The classic Pulling body type tends toward low metabolism, a soft rather than muscular shape, slumped shoulders and pleading eyes. Think puppy-like.
When the Pulling pattern isn’t predominant but just in a particular sub-personality, the body won’t be the Pulling type, but the sense of softness, low energy and pleading eyes may well show when the Pulling sub-personality is active.
Alternate Names
The classic name for this character style is Oral. Kessler calls it Merging and Johnson calls it the Abandoned Child.
Relationship to Attachment and Pursuit/Withdrawal
While the correspondence is not exact, the Pulling character style connects best to the anxious-resistant (also know as ambivalent) attachment style. Here is what we have so far:
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 to withdraw. A sub-personality with a Pulling character style would tend toward pursuit when stressed. Here is what we have so far:
Healing Strategies
As with all of the defense patterns, the key 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.
With the Pulling pattern, the goal is to retain and undistort your capacity for connection while releasing the neediness and desperation that drive you to see the other as primarily a means for meeting your needs.
Just as with a Chinese Finger Puzzle, you often need to move in the opposite direction from your habitual impulse.
Here are some examples for the Pulling pattern:
Practice the Chest Glow breathing exercise I shared over the weekend. Experience that glow as an energy from an inexhaustible well that you can draw on whenever you choose. Do the breathing exercise enough different times so that you get the felt experience that it is always there to nourish you. Let this be an example of your ability to draw on your own resources in addition to drawing on others. (This exercise was an important turning point in my relationship with the Pulling style.)
Enjoy an esthetic pleasure, like a sunset, that could be, but doesn’t need to be, shared with others. Appreciate your own capacity for enjoyment.
Take steady small steps from “I can’t” to “I can” in any area of your life, especially in self-care. Go for the easy and appealing steps first.
Food is a big issue for the Pulling pattern. We’ll turn to it next module as part of System Mapping.
Experiential
I’m going to recommend two parts to today’s experiential, similar to the previous exploration. If anything in this experiential triggers you or feels overwhelming, just stop and get support from people you know.
The first part is about awareness. Starting now and throughout your day, tune into whether you have any sub-personalities with a Pulling 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 Pulling pattern sub-personalities. If you don’t feel you have one, 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 Taking In 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 while they moves forward
• asking the younger sub-personality what they need 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 an appreciation of the abundance of life
• building skills and having corrective experiences that bring them comfortably and pleasurably into their own capacity for nourishment and non-dependent connection.For now, just spend some time, in the spirit of the Inner Smile, connecting with the abandoned child at the core of your Pulling style sub-personality. Let it know, as you would with any child, that you are there for them. Listen to what they have to tell you. For now, just be with them.
You can take this further if you have the inspiration for what to do – 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 at least 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.]