Author Topic: Reichian Growth Work by Nick Totton  (Read 1064 times)

truthaboutpois

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Re: Reichian Growth Work by Nick Totton
« Reply #15 on: April 15, 2015, 07:38:07 am »
undamental stance of 'I won't' - eat, cry, ask, speak, get angry - give myself away as needyand yearning.Alongside oral blocks we often notice an
irritability
that is both emotional and physical - apeculiar hot prickliness to the skin, and a general difficulty in becoming comfortable. It is asif the person's teeth are being set on edge, and teething can be a very serious factor indeveloping an oral position. Suppressed anger commonly comes out in 'biting', 'sharp-tongued' speech. There is a big overlap between weaning, teething, standing and learning totalk, often with a lot of tension around trying to ask for or demand the feeding we need, tryingto articulate the unfairness we are experiencing.The child may grow up to be a smooth, glib talker, with many rationalisations for theirdependence on others - a 'sponger' or a con artist. Or - and sometimes at the same time - shemay be caught in a trap, since expressing the rage she feels just makes adults withdraw evenmore, so that she feels forced to 'bite it back', 'swallow it down'. Stammering is one possibleresult of this contradiction - 'I can't (mustn't) say what I want to say' - so is tight-lippedsilence. The discomfort already referred to may mean 'It isn't
right
!'You may have already noticed how people often react against their real character so as toconceal it; what we can call a 'flip' into a polar opposite position. With the oral position, thereis often a tendency to become a 'compulsive carer', someone who looks after everyone in sight- whether they like it or not. We can recognise this attitude by the absence of openheartedlove. People in this position are often the social workers and official carers from whomeveryone runs a mile! What such people need to recognise is that in caring for others they aresecretly acting out what they want for themselves, yet their caring is undermined by theconcealed aggression and resentment of the oral position.Oral blocking, as we have said, makes it difficult to feel fundamentally secure in the world.While the boundary character often feels unreal, in danger of annihilation, the oral character ishere and real, but often terribly lonely, empty and cold. 'Empty' is the key word: an inner gulf,an absence of energy for self-starting or carrying through projects. No petrol in the tank; nomilk in the tummy! Most of us have at least occasional experiences of this state.An oral block will interfere with creative enjoyment of activities like eating, drinking, talking,kissing, singing. We will either dislike them, or compulsively over-indulge them - always thetwo fundamental tactics for dealing with any kind of stuckness. The yearning oral charactercan try to fill herself up with almost anything - food, drink, TV, music, drugs, sex, ideas, orlooking after other people!When oral energy is freed, it expresses itself creatively in an
appetite for life
, a capacity forgusto and enjoyment including, but not restricted to, the sorts of oral activities describedabove. Often there is a genuine eloquence, which can serve other functions than wheedling. Inparticular there is a genuine concern with
 justice
, that no one be left out or rejected, and a truecapacity to nurture others, based on a sense of security in yourself.
 Exercise 16
 To experience your oral position, work with person B standing on a chair, and person Areaching up to them with their arms and their whole body - again, tending towards tiptoe. Breathe fairly deeply, one breath at a time, with pauses at the end of the inhale and theexhale. Person A says things like 'Please', 'Play with me', 'Feed me', while person B
 
53
experiments with 'No', 'Not now', 'Leave me alone'. After a while stop, make contact, and reverse roles.
 
Control Position
 Heart segment block: issues of
validation
 A good experience of the oral position means that we have felt enough support from thosecaring for us to move forward into a more independent role in the world. Small children wantto start playing 'away from' their parent - but still in visual range, with the sense of being seenand validated: 'Did you see me on the swings, dad?' Support is still crucial, but less
direct
thanin the oral stage: the child is being held, not by the arms of the carer, but by their attention andtheir acknowledgement of the child's experience.Through the kinds of experiences we - hopefully - have at this stage, we are learning about'other minds': learning that other people exist, that they have roughly the same kinds of experiences we do, and that we can project ourselves imaginatively into their experience asthey can into ours. Through play - especially play in which we are held in the parent's gaze,and play in which we ourselves 'control' and 'manipulate' the parent ('Now you be the baby,and you're sad because the mummy's not there, and then I'm the mummy and I come back...') -we develop a sense of 'mental space', of an inner world, and that other people also have innerworlds. Through adults' support of our play and fantasy, we learn to engage with aninterpersonal reality.What can go wrong at this point is that, instead of our experience being supported, it can be
denied
. The important adults don't join in with us, don't let us be at the centre of a playfulinterpersonal space. This may be simply because they are themselves tired, drained andemotionally preoccupied. Or they may have a compulsion to dominate, 'You will do what Isay and like it'. Or often they are caught up in a mistaken kind of caring, which is deeplyundermining of our reality: 'You don't really mean that, dear'; 'Of course you're not sad,nothing to be upset about'; 'There's mummy's brave boy'... All these sorts of interactionsmasquerade as contact, but are actually profoundly out of contact with the child's trueexperience.These reactions to our need for supported play hurt our heart. It becomes bruised, frozen,withered, numbed. On another level, it also damages our cognitive development, and preventsus, perhaps permanently, from learning about the existence of other selves - from learning toempathise. Ultimately, we may give up on any expectation that contact with other people willbe
 possible
, that anyone will see and hear and touch our reality. Yet we still have needs, of course; how are we to get them met?Really only two techniques lie open to someone whose heart and mind have been blocked inthis way. We can seek to
dominate
other people, by physical force or by force of will; or wecan seek to seduce and
manipulate
them. (These options each relate to another later characterposition, as we will see.) Underlying either strategy is a fundamental lack of belief that otherpeople are
real
, that they have feelings and needs, experience pain and pleasure. It is as if wehave been stranded on a planet of androids, and have to learn the codes by which they can becontrolled and made to serve us. This is the aspect of the control position which has led sometherapists to label it 'psychopathic': if other people are androids, we can feel free to cheatthem, hurt them, even kill them.