My Therapeutic Journey
by Barbara Rogers
Author of "Screams from Childhood, http://www.screamsfromchildhood.com

My journey in therapy began, when I was 32 years old—today, I am 55 years old. I entered therapy during a family crisis, which I describe in the scream “don't tell the truth.” During those first 18 months of therapy, I worked with a psychoanalyst, Allen Siegel, who wrote “Heinz Kohut and the Psychology of the Self.” I felt understood and opened up as my feelings came alive, as I describe in “walls” and “if you do something for yourself.”

After my return to Germany, a painful crisis asked me to confront my first marriage and I started to write therapy by myself in a four-step concept. My writing enabled me to get in touch with my needs and gave me the strength to make them come true when I considered them vitally important. My needs took me out of my first marriage and away from my family and Germany.

When I fell passionately in love at 45, my writing could not help me anymore. Overwhelmed by anxiety, unable to sleep, I went back to my first analyst. It helped to be able to talk and be understood. I could sleep again, and fall in love. But he could not help me deal with debilitating fights, or fighting voices, in my mind, and the tension and confrontations inside, all of which paralyzed me. After 2 years, a dream told me that I had to leave him. At first, he suggested counseling for our therapeutic relationship. But my inside said a clear “no” to the voice on the answering machine of the therapist who was supposed to help us.

Allen Siegel was supportive and accepting while I looked for a new therapist, and we continued our sessions until I found two therapists. One was Richard Schwartz, who created the IFS model and has written “Internal Family Systems Therapy”. The other was Gina Demos, a Dance Movement therapist. I chose Dick to help me deal with the fights in my mind, and Gina to develop a relationship with my body and movement. I worked with both of them for 6 years. The work was at times extremely hard, yet amazing and fascinating.

I learned to see those “voices in my head”, or certain beliefs and emotional states that I carried, as parts of me—like inner entities that don’t go away because I don’t like them or because I know that they are not who I truly am. Although I don’t like them, they are still a part of me that is there for a reason, put there by traumatic, painful childhood experiences. Will power did not help to fight strange ideas in my head or bothersome, frightening feelings in my gut.

My so-called internalized mother, for example, continued for years to live within me as her way of thinking or as her beliefs that tortured and intimidated me through agonizing guilt feelings. At the same time, my reactions to her when I was a child still live inside of me too, sadness, anger, protest. Sometimes, when I reacted like that in the presence, it also was not what I really wanted to do or who I longed to be. I learned to check very carefully very intense, overwhelming feelings. Dick Schwartz sees the Self as a conductor of a big orchestra where the changed and liberated parts work together with the conductor, the Self, to “make music”—to live, and also to help those places inside that are still confused and hurting.

I also worked with a massage therapist who did Cranio-Sacral and Somato-Emotional Release massage therapy. This very gentle massage provided me the deepest form of physical and mental relaxation, which was most helpful after difficult therapy sessions. If pain or a memory would come up in a body part or through the body, I could talk about it and cry. Cranio-Sacral Therapy helped my body and mind deal with my work in Internal Family Systems Therapy where the incest finally could surface, and also the horror that my mother tried to kill me as a small child.

I learned to talk to parts and to physical symptoms. The most dramatic memory of that was an evening when I had very passionate sex with my second husband. In this marriage, my body came more and more alive the more I trusted my husband and our relationship. I was about to fall asleep, when a violent headache seized me. Too tired to write, I talked to it and asked it why it was there. The clear and unmistakable answer was that my father had committed incest with me, when I was 16 years old, traveling with him by boat to America. I could not deal with this information and asked it to wait until the next therapy session. I was moved when I read in Dorothy Lewis’ book “Guilty by Reason of Insanity,” how strong headaches are a sign in people with multiple personalities that they are switching into another personality.

The other devastating memory became clear during months of depression, marked by anxiety and sleeplessness—very well know symptoms during all of my life. During a culminating two-week period, I felt I was going crazy. It was my worst time in therapy. As I struggled to survive, the terrified part communicated that my mother had tried to shove something down my throat when I was a very small child, and almost had killed me. I realized that a child could never integrate such a horrendous experience. To figure out my feelings and what had happened was an immense task even for my adult mind that was flooded with the unthinkable terror, confusion, and deadly fear.

From then on I understood deeply why I had felt like paralyzed and absolutely powerless and voiceless with my mother. Every cell of my body remembered her as the greatest danger in my life—of which I had not been aware until I re-experienced this hell. My courage and strength grew after that in ways I had always longed for but that had seemed unattainable. I finally began to write my book and could publish it. A dream of 20 years could be fulfilled.

The impact of these two experiences with both of my parents went beyond that of the other child abuse I had experienced. During a time when my foot was impaired, and I dealt with issues of standing up for myself and standing securely on my own two feet, my foot asked in one therapy session to make the sculpture that is on the cover of my book. It asked me to honor and express my compassion with the small child and the teenager who suffered so unimaginably. They survived these deeply traumatizing encounters with a parent whom they deeply trusted, but their life-energy and spirit was zapped from them. My work in therapy claimed them back: “revisiting the queen mary—at the scene of the crime.”

Today, I see parts a clusters of feelings, thoughts, and/or beliefs, and I know that they may take on those of the abuser or perpetrator. They did not go away when I judged or condemned them if I did not like what they thought or believed. I learned to talk with them, trying to understand them. Then they would tell their stories, why they believed what they believed, why they carried certain feelings and fears. Dick Schwartz puts them into three categories: managers, firefighters, and exiles. In my work, we never “classified” parts. We just listened with compassion to what they needed to share and always, in a moving, beautiful part of my work with him, helped them leave their hell and places of terror and anguish, and change by taking them in a healing light.

By thinking of this light, I could internally recognize the emotional and physical reality of that part. Sometimes I saw the child in chains, or terrified hidden away, or I felt I had iron balls around every cell of my body that stopped my cells from swinging and vibrating freely. I visualized how the light melted the iron balls and my cells became free; how I would take the children that I found, away from my parents and out of their misery. I often accuse the parents and even tell them that they don’t deserve to have this child with them.

I or the light always say encouraging, tender, loving things to the child and change the sad image of the physical or emotional state I am in into an image of freedom and hope. It was and is great fun for me, to change dark, frightening inner scenarios, full of suffering. It is as if I can leave behind a trap, where I had been stuck as a victim, and can move on with newfound knowledge, wisdom, clarity and freedom. I don’t consider this a manipulation of my feelings, or of me. To me, it was a meaningful act of creating love for the child or the body. They had never heard encouraging, tender, loving words, and they had not known love, support, and true hope. It also made my present reality conscious to me because that reality was no longer the nightmare of the child—where my part had been caught.

Yet, in the end, I felt that both therapists were not truly on my side. They never asked me to forgive. They showed compassion for my suffering and fate. They never ‘analyzed’ or judged me. But I left my work with them after feeling deeply betrayed and because of a dream:

I am in my dance therapist’s office. At first in my dream, I am on the floor to show what it was like and felt like to be caught in the dark. I am crawling around on the floor and don’t know a way out. At first, I loose my voice and suddenly I cannot talk anymore; nothing can come out of me anymore. (I have experienced this feeling as if my throat and chest become paralyzed and I cannot talk anymore in several dreams and in real life, too. Especially when I am deeply moved and from deep within me my truth and my feelings arise and grow and need to be expressed.)

The same thing happens at first with my therapist Gina. But in my dream I rise from the floor and begin to speak up—my truth and my feelings—passionately, upright, erect, and self-confident. I am moving in her office in a very alive way and support what I say strongly with my gestures and movements. I tell her that I will end working with both therapists. I tell her that I was caught with them in illusions, in the ideology of giving and giving—but not empowered to think of myself, to truly respect my own true feelings and needs, take them seriously, to follow and to fulfill them. The most moving moment of the dream is when I get up, and walk upright, high, self-confident and passionately through Gina’s office, and talk in the same way.

Both therapists had not truly worked with their own childhoods and I also noticed a spirituality in them that I was not comfortable with and that seemed to cover their unresolved suffering. I think if a therapist represses his/her own childhood abuse and trauma, he or she cannot liberate the client out of the jail of childhood. The therapist remains a prisoner of childhood, and the client, too.

It was as if their fear of true liberation kept also me entangled. As if I did not dare to "come out." My dream showed me that I needed to make a step into life that I obviously was finally ready for but which they were not capable of. It is scary and difficult for me to realize that I have outgrown a relationship, when I truly respect, love, and appreciate the other.

When I ended my work with these two therapists, I had a strong, very painful sense of betrayal. I had hoped that my work would make me ‘self-confident.’ But struggling with too many emotions and parts, I felt held back, financially exploited, and I was exhausted and physically impaired through an ailing foot. This foot became to me like the sensor of how my fight for independence and self-confidence—for walking and standing up for myself, for my goals, my dreams, and my needs—was going.

In my work with my parts, it is amazing and fascinating how they tell me their deeply moving origin— even those that I do not like or that terrify me. Here is the link to a written therapy with my self-hatred, which deeply moved and changed me. What was called multiple personalities, or now is labeled as dissociative identities, is to me just a harsher breaking apart of the mind than how I experienced different states in my mind that I could not integrate.

When I think how peaceful my mind is now, most of the time, and that I can help myself when strong feelings, or even anxiety bother me, I know that I have accomplished what I longed for when I entered therapy. Working with my “parts” gave me the courage to write and publish my book, which I had longed for for 20 years.

There were and are different levels where I wanted and needed to grow. My feelings needed to come alive, I had to understand and learn intellectually about what abuse is and what it does to the child. Then I needed to get in touch with my needs, and then I had to help my “parts”. And maybe there is more to come, I don’t know. With strong feelings, I always check if and/or how they are connected to my childhood. And in the end, my inner dialogue decides if, and how, I act on that feeling, especially in a relationship.

In the beginning of therapy, I wanted to overcome my debilitating anxiety and not depend on drugs anymore. But when I changed and opened towards life, new issues from the past would arise and still do. That I am able to help myself, that I am no longer at the mercy of anxiety, even if it arises, gives me a comforting sense of independence and freedom. And should I need support again, I would look for it.

Therapy gave me the power to break away from my past that no longer can run and rule my life, my feelings and actions. It empowered me to have an understanding, open, caring dialogue with what is going on inside of me, be it with my feelings, my thoughts, my needs, or my body. It allowed me to find and live the values that define me today, and to leave the destructive beliefs of my parents truly behind me. I could build the loving relationships I always longed for, while I learned at the same time to protect my boundaries, nurture my dreams, and become supportive of my needs and well-being.

© Barbara Rogers, May 2005