WOUNDED STATES OF

CONSCIOUSNESSAbout Hurt Feelings,

Pain, Anger an Unconscious use of Power in Relationships

Bogna Szymkiewicz, Ph.D.

MARTIN BUBER I and THOU

• Persons appear by entering into relationship to other persons.

• Through the Thou a person becomes I.

• All actual life is encounter.

IT REALLY HURTS

The research shows that social rejection hurts: hurt feelings affect exactly the same region of the brain as a physical injury.

Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Science, 302

WHEN FEELINGS GET HURT

• “the perception of relational devaluation – the perception that another individual does not regard his or her relationship with the person to be as important, close or valuable as the person desires” (Leary, M.R., Springer, C., Negel, L. , Ansell, E., Evans, K. (1998) The Causes, Phenomenology, and Consequences of Hurt Feelings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Vol.74, No.5 )

• „the perception that one is being excluded from desired relationships or threatened to be excluded” (MacDonald, G., Shaw S. (2005) Adding Insult to Injury: Social Pain Theory and Response to Social Exclusion. W: K. Williams, J. Forgas, W. von Hippel (Ed.) The Social Outcast: Ostracism, Social Exclusion, Rejection & Bullying. New York: Psychology Press)

• perceived violation of the norms accepted within the relationship (Vangelisti, A. L. (1994) Messages that Hurt. W: W. R. Cupach, B. H. Spitzberg (Ed.) The Dark Side of Interpersonal Communication. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

RELATIONSHIPTwo Different Worlds Meet

GROUPHope for belonging

SHARED REALITY

DREAM OF UNITY AND MARGINALIZATION

This perceived „togetherness” or „shared reality" is based on partial perception: some experiences and ideas are taken to account while the others are disavowed.

In the dream of unity we often marginalize:• Power and rank differences• Minority/majority issues• Our high and low dreams• Secondary dreamfigures

Primary identities and marginalized

experiences

HURTFUL EVENTS

• criticism • betrayal• depreciation• ingratitude • active disassociation• passive

disassociation

 

„Participants’ ratings of how hurt they felt correlated with how rejected (vs. accepted) they felt.”

„They felt most rejected when hurt by romantic or dating partners.”

Leary, M.R., Springer, C., Negel, L. , Ansell, E., Evans, K. (1998) The Causes, Phenomenology, and Consequences of Hurt Feelings.

Hurt destroys perceived shared reality

Wounded state of consciousness gets activated

• A person feels

„crossed out”• The world falls into

pieces• Out of these pieces

separate „particles” are created

• The wall appears between persons

• Wounded state of consciousness is constellated

Dreamfigures take over

ALTERED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Dimensions of ASC(From Amy Mindell, Alternative to Therapy)

Ability

to metacommunicatevs.

identification with one part of the experience

Consensualvs.

non-consensual experiences

Time (duration)

WOUNDED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

FROM INSIDE • Feeling trapped, blocked, isolated• Entanglement, emotional and

cognitive chaos• Pain, helplessness, anger and

frustration mixed together• „Broken record” – repeated thoughts

and feelings• Having no control over one’s

experience

Entanglement Feeling trapped

Drawings representing subjective experience of wounded states

Separation of two sides

We perceive the boundary as solid „when we image its two sides to be separated and unrelated; that is, when we acknowledge the outer difference of two opposites but ignore their inner unity.”

Ken Wilber

Archetypal roles in the field

Western culture teaches us to bring coherence to a wounded state experience by offering the myth of polarization between the victim and the oppressor.

There are also some other archetypal roles that are involved in this basic conflict.

Terrorist

Perpetrator

Victim

Avenger

Savior

The Victim and the Perpetrator

• cannot defend herself• experiences pain, fear,

helplessness• perceives all the power

as coming from outside

•one who has chosen the „dark side of the Force”•a person of authority who subjects others to undue pressures •imposes one point of view without taking to account the others

The Terrorist , the Avenger, the Savior

• perceives herself/himself asa victim; feels forced to takeradical measures• aims at destroying the whole system rather then just the „wrongdoer”

•re-establish justice by punishing the wrongdoer•takes vengeance for himself/herself or on behalf of somebody• his/her action is a re-action to the perceived harm or injustice

• one that saves from danger or destruction• one who brings salvation

Roles are mixed

Victim

Terrorist

AvengerSavior

Oppressor

COMMUNICATION PATTERNS

• Communication between the roles or dreamfigures, rather than between persons

• Dreamfigures looking for/ constellating the complementary role

• No feedback loop or accusing the other side of a wrong feedback

• No interest in the intentions of the other person

• Taking things personally; blaming, accusations; emotional outbursts, „silent treatment”

 

The Observer„Something must be developed

in consciousness that reminds outside the identifications and mechanical actions and experiences of the moment.”Charles Tart

“If you have an overview and realize that there are various states of consciousness, various frames of reference, you can “metacommunicate” about them.” Arnold Mindell

DREAMFIGURES AND THE OBSERVER

• Dreamfigures often perceive their reality as the only reality.

• In wounded states of consciousness, dreamfigures feel that their reality is not seen or/and threaten by the other side.

• They are not interested in the observer position because they are afraid they may become annihilated.

WAYS OUT

In order to heal and transform the wounded states of consciousness we need:

- personal and interpersonal awareness work

- social and political changes- new ways of looking at reality and new

myths that would help us to stay in touch with the basic interconnectedness, the Dreaming, the flow.

APPROACHING WOUNDED STATES OF

CONSCIOUSNESSMetaskills:

• compassion• loving detachment

When working with client’s hurt feelings it is important to remember that he/she may be in a subtly altered states of consciousness: he/she identifies with the part of experience and becomes a dreamfigure – victim, avenger, child etc.

Some ways of working with emotional aspects

of wounded states• Accompanying a person in her world  • Completing emotional state (non-

judgmental attitude; staying temporarily with the person’s inner experience and emotional truth without comparing it with ‘objective’ truth)

• Working in different channels (ex. drawing or dancing out the emotional state)

Working with ‘dreamfigures’

• Helping the dreamfigure to express her story (encouraging a person to speak from the point of view of a child, warrior, avenger etc. until all the emotions are expressed and some resolution is found) 

• Creating a puppet or a mask of a ‘hurt part’, and giving her/him a chance to speak and act (see Amy

Mindell Dreaming Source of Creativity) 

• Facilitating the conflict between a dreamfigure activated by the hurt feelings and a complementary role (a ‘hurting spirit’) through a role-play (discovering the repeated pattern that is acted out in different conflicts with different people)

Rank and power differences

Rank and power differences play an important role in evoking hurt feelings. Unconscious use of power often leads to hurt feelings. Some basic interventions include:

• Pointing out and discussing the areas were the partner has higher rank or more power and discussing client’s emotional reactions to it

• Searching for the clients areas of higher rank and developing conscious ways of using it for the benefit of the whole relationship

Little I on the journey

Little I identifies with different experiences, one after the other; each time having the perception structured by the activated identity.

„Just as the river flows along until it meets an obstacle like a fallen tree, a branch, or a rock, the flow of our perception is blocked at edges.

(…) The more encompassing are our identities, the fewer obstructions to the river of experience.”

Arnold Mindell

BIG U

Big U doesn't identify with any of the experiences but reflect them all like a mirror. It is able to embrace the one who is wounding and the one who is wounded while staying in touch with the basic Unity, the Dreaming, Tao.

INTO THE FLOW