So I’ve been introduced to a type of therapy I haven’t heard of before – The Spectrum of Creation. I haven’t been able to find much about it on the web but I went for an initial session with a therapist and found it fascinating as well as troubling.
The basics are this. Your emotional troubles manifest themselves in the physical. That’s not a complete revelation in itself. John Cleese in Surviving the Family realizes that his multiple physical illnesses at one point in his life were caused by his depression. When he sought help for his depression his physical ailments subsided.
The Spectrum of Creation idea goes one step further. It argues that each ailment belongs to a specific emotional problem. That ache in your shoulder is because of stresses due to a relationship issue with your mother. That eczema on your knee is down to problems you are having at work.
As such if you focus on your shoulder ache or your itchy knee they will reveal the issues to you even if you were not consciously aware of them before.
Focusing comes with the help of a therapist who touches you in various (non private!) places and then suggests what the issue is. They believe they can sense both the physical ailment and its cause.
What would make this interesting is that I don’t suffer any physical ailments and I very rarely get ill.
In my first session the therapist started by saying, “Imaging a light shining through a hole in the top of your head, how far does it reach?”
I imagined and replied, “All the way through”.
“No” said the therapist. “It stops at about the level of your eyes. Imagine that light shining on that point and tell me what you see.”
This didn’t get very far because I saw the physical. A goo that is our brain,
Now I’m going to sound a bit cynical from here on in but read it in the knowledge that I am going to go back for more. I might be critical but that doesn’t mean this method doesn’t work, I’m not sure yet.
So the therapist then pokes and pushes me in various places and settles on my right hand shoulder. After a while he asks why I feel I’m responsible for so much in my wife’s business. That was odd because I don’t. I help out where I’m useful but I don’t feel I carry a weight in this way, she is a very capable woman and her enterprise is successful in multiple ways, none of which I count as my successes.
We moved on. A little more poking and prodding and he settled on an area just above my stomach. Here is asked me why I was stressing about what happened when I was 21 years old, especially regarding my relationship with my mother.
21 was probably one of the best years I ever had. I was on top of the world, had achieved some extraordinary academic success and believed anything was possible. I have a very distant relationship with my parents and in that year there was nothing different about it, positive of negative, closer or farther.
In both the above cases the therapist was relaxed and just said, “There is definitely something there but you are just not conscious of it yet”.
After a couple more attempts he asked me about my memories as a four year old. I actually don’t remember much from that year except nursery school which my memories tell me was excellent fun!
I suspect I don’t remember much because my home life lacked emotion as well as any particular activities (say holidays or trips) that would have burned a memory in.
The therapist was very enthusiastic about this and asked me to imagine myself of today standing with my four year old self and seeing how he reacted. If my nursery school memories were anything to go by I would have said he was a fidgety kid who just wanted to get on and do stuff, explore stuff, try stuff out.
The therapist suggested I try and show my four year old self love and attention … nothing much happened. I explained that I wouldn’t expect much to happen with any child.
A four year old is not going to change their emotional stance the instant they are shown love and attention unless they are desperately craving it. In the latter case this would usually be because they had had love and attention and it had been taken away.
But four a child who never had would be hesitant. Waiting to see if this is a passing moment or a lasting situation before letting down their emotional guard. Or perhaps hesitant because they do not recognize this behaviour from an adult so do not know how they are supposed to react.
Time would be needed. The therapist seemed to act as if this was a sort of breakthrough but I just saw it as the rational (but theoretical) observations of looking at a four year old that came from a household where emotions were not really on display.
His suggestion, before the next time we meet, is that I should regularly take some time out to close my eyes and spend time with my four year old self. Do activities perhaps but all the time show love and attention and see what happens.
I’ve done this daily for a week not and all I get are multiple theoretical outcomes. If you change a point in history, you change the persons path in life. If I had been more emotionally sensitive early on in life I may have made different friends, studied differently, etc. Or perhaps not. Perhaps I would be in the position I am today but more self aware.
The point is theses are all hypothetical constructs of the mind and many can be affected by your experiences with others. Quick story:
For example a few years back I visited an old university friend who I had not seen in nearly a decade. During that time she had married a man who already had a son who was about 12 years old when I met him.
I was only there for two days but on the second evening he threw his arms around me, hugged me intensely and said, “I’m going to really miss you”. I hadn’t been aware of any particular emotional bonding – we hadn’t even spent that much time together – but some of the things I said or did must have had some profound effect on his emotions. Something he was desperate to let out but couldn’t and now his way to do it was slipping away.
In one of my hypothetical outcomes I could be, subconsciously, projecting that experience onto my four year old self as one possible reaction to receiving love and attention.
Now here I enter the twilight zone of myself. Am I being purposefully obstructive because I’m not convinced with this therapy? From a helicopter view it seems to be a bit of hit and miss. Randomly chose different parts of the body, different years from your life and relationships with others and finally you will hit a nerve.
If that is the system there is absolutely nothing wrong with it in my books as it could work. A friend of mine who saw it in action during a group session remembers the therapist asking one person about issues when he was sixteen.
The group member unloaded stresses and negative emotions from that year like a flood gate collapsing. She was impressed that the therapist had hit so accurately but I’m as cynical as they come.
- How many other guesses revealed nothing but were conveniently forgotten by the emotional force of the final revelation?
- 16 is the kind of age when most people have emotional issues, many of which are bottled up for life under the label “embarrassing adolescent” so it would be a ‘good guess’ for a therapist.
- The group member was obviously there because he was mentally ready to let something out. Perhaps what he talked about happened when he was 18 but really he just needed an excuse, a setting and a final push to get this historical stress off his chest.
None of that really matters in the end if that group member goes away feeling better and feeling they are a little further along their route to self awareness. Even better if others feel more confident as well to the point where they also ‘make the therapy work’ in order to unload their issues.
But to me it becomes a mental block because I am looking at the technique, not the result.
I also hold a fierce awareness around ‘the power of suggestion’, perhaps to the point where it holds me back. I remember several times during my Psycho-dynamic therapy the therapist would suggest some emotions to me. “When that happened perhaps as well as frustration you felt sadness”.
I would think about it but the answer always came back, “Perhaps, but now that you have mentioned it I’m not sure I did or if I am inserting things into my memory because you have suggested them.”
The power of suggestion is always strong in these situations. The patient wants to be helped but sometimes to the point that they make things up to please the therapist. They become worried the therapist will give up and abandon them so they start feeling that they need to keep the therapist happy.
It doesn’t even have to be that strong a motivation. There is a study around somewhere involving they way police carry out interviews of witnesses and suspects. In the interviews the police were asked to insert a false point into the testimony of a witness or suspect.
They might, for example, say “Perhaps you had trouble seeing because the sun was in your eyes”. Some witnesses agreed this might have been the issue even though in that particular scenario it could be proved that the sun was behind them.
In other interviews a police officer would add an additional object like a tree into the story and soon enough the witness would be talking about the tree like it had been there all along.
The power of the suggestion had overridden the real memory.
For a successful self awareness trip I’m very defensive that my memories remain intact – to the point that I may actually block my progress for a while.
I am also aware, or suspect I am aware, that there is a sense of pride floating around somewhere. A pride that will be dented if someone else can progress me on the road to self awareness where I could not.
For some reason I don’t feel that defense when listening to someone in audio or reading a book, only when they are physically present. Something I will need to explore and actively work on.
So I’ll be going back for another session and to talk over these concerns with the therapist.
Right now I’m not convinced that this type of therapy is real – that the itchy knee is due to a specific memory or stress – but this does not stop me respecting the technique as a ‘gateway’ for some to their self awareness.
In my imagination though I can see the therapist saying, one day, to someone who has explored and progressed, “By the way, that whole thing about a specific physical ailment belonging to a specific stress, that was all nonsense. It was the gateway to take you from the mental state you were then to the mental state you are now”.
Other therapies admit as much. De Mello explains things in a similar way. I haven’t got the actual quote but it goes something like: I had to explain it in a way that you could understand then, now that you have progressed mentally you are ready to understand it in the real way.
Science admits to. Much of what is taught in Physics up to the age of 16 then needs to be thrown out when moving on to advanced physics. The rules taught are to help take the evolving mind forward and make it ready to comprehend real physics.
I’ll carry on spending time with my four year old self until the next session and see where it goes. Who knows, there may be a surprise revelation ….