Mental Health Notes

Trump: Our National Traumatic Stress Syndrome - from HuffPo 8/17

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 13:36:00 +0000

Click HERE

The Insanity of Narcissism - from HuffPo

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 13:35:00 +0000

Click HERE

Immanence and Intersubjectivity

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Wed, 23 Dec 2015 10:29:00 +0000

This paper appears in the volume

The Skillful Soul of the Psychotherapist: The Link between Spirituality and Clinical Excellence, Edited by George Stavros and Steven Sandage.

This paper and the others in the volume above were from a conference at the Danielsen Institute at Boston University in 2012. I was responding to a paper by David Wallin, author of Attachment in Psychotherapy.

Spirituality and psychoanalysis were not always, and are still not always, thought of as compatible. But to me, based on what I think of and experience as “spiritual,” they are inseparable. I have been asked to discuss Dr. Wallin’s paper, and I have also been asked to speak of my own spirituality in relation to my work. What I have chosen to focus on first are some of the similarities in our backgrounds, and the common themes that have influenced us both as psychotherapists. One similarity I recognize immediately is that David and I both bring to our work a desire for and a belief in freedom: freedom as a human right, freedom for ourselves as therapists in terms of the creativity we are capable of in our efforts to help - and freedom for our patients, from the tyranny of trauma and the fragmenting dissociation that is the result of trauma. The theme of freedom has run through psychoanalysis from the beginning. For Freud, freedom from misery meant becoming able to experience ordinary human unhappiness (Breuer and Freud). For Ferenczi, freedom meant healing traumatic experience (Dupont). For Erich Fromm, freedom meant finding faith in oneself rather than in false idols (Fromm). Hans Loewald (Loewald) saw freedom as the self-authorization one achieves when the individual recognizes she must cease to be simply the child of her parents, and take on the authority of an adult. In my work and in my reading of David’s work, I see all these kinds of freedoms as an integral part of what the analyst hopes the patient will be able to discover.

In terms of how I might differ in my approach from David’s, that’s a bit harder to get at. As I understand it, the mystical experience David shared with us involved a direct connection to something transcendent, an exquisite, profoundly moving broadening of his perspective accompanied by an immensity of well-being and gratitude. Since then, he has been able to offer something of this broader perspective to his patients in a way that is deeply meaningful and healing.

For me, Spirit is immanent in the human spirit, as it can be experienced in the intersubjective intimacy that we call love – and as it can potentially be known in the therapeutic relationship. So yes, I am using the old transcendence – immanence debate as a means of speaking to what may in fact be some very subtle differences in our perspectives. More on that later. For now, back to the similarities.

Like David, I too was raised in a secular Jewish home, with parents who were politically to the left. Though the religious aspect of being Jewish was never given importance or emphasis in my family, the ethical and moral values of Judaism, conveyed mainly through my parents’ cultural and political leanings, moved and inspired me. A memory of childhood Passover Seders comes to mind. While my dad’s parents were still alive and well enough, we had the traditional Passover dinners with them, and as the story of the Jewish slaves escaping Egyptian oppression is told, my family always sang the Negro spiritual, “Go Down Moses - Let My People Go.” My father would sing it very loudly, and when I was a bit older, I realized that he was trying to sound like Paul Robeson. That spiritual as sung by Robeson was a civil rights anthem in the years of Martin Luther King’s activism. This was the best part of the seder for me – the song that cried out for freedom. Freedom from subjugation is a theme I have been drawn to again and again, in my life and in my work.

David speaks of developing a “masochistic” relationship to suffering, a compulsion to assuage the suffering of others, referencing not only his particular family situation, but a culture-wide PTSD for Jews, “a centuries’ long intergenerational transmission of trauma.” I think this is exactly right. A significant trauma in my family was my mother’s undiagnosed and untreated OCD, which took the form of hoarding. Her problem grew progressively worse as I got older, and was the source of endless rages and tears, if any of us ever tried to throw anything out. As a child, I was deeply identified with her as the victim of my older sister and my father, and I was her staunch ally, her rescuer. Later, I came to a much more conflicted position, as I realized how trapped and destructive my mother had become, and how much my father too had suffered.

But it wasn’t until after both parents had passed away that I understood the intergenerational trauma that haunted us more deeply. I saw a Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof, in 2004. Watching the scene where the Cossacks shoot up Tevye’s village, suddenly, I remembered the story my mother had told long ago: she was 3 years old, and she and her mother had run to a barn in their Ukrainian village. The Cossacks had swept in, looking for Jews, shooting and killing. The cow my grandmother and my mother were hiding behind took the bullet, and my mother and her whole family escaped shortly thereafter. Arriving in New York Harbor on July 4^th, 1918, fireworks were going off as the ship pulled in, and my three year old, terrified mother screamed “The Cossacks, the Cossacks” in Russian. In retrospect, her hoarding in later life became comprehensible, given how much unspoken, unprocessed loss, grief and terror she and all her family members had known and had always sought to forget. Escaping persecution, poverty, and starvation by coming to America was fortunate for many, but at the same time, traumatic.

So very much like David, the masochistic streak I developed early on was linked to Jewish themes of oppression, and to my mother’s depressive suffering and the sense that I should be able to save her.

Transcendence

Now to the spirituality. David describes the numinous, transcendent experience of mindfulness he has had as a profound sense of “impersonal awareness,” a variety of spiritual experience, not unlike one that William James might have described (James) in his classic study of religious experience, that is free of the “dense construct of history, identity, feeling, purpose.” Beyond the capacity for mentalization that David describes as a key to the possibility of finding freedom from the constraints of an internalized past, David recognizes “mindfulness” as a further possibility for freedom – an experience of knowing and being that transcends the personal, that links all being to the pure consciousness that is the ground from which all individual consciousness springs.

David’s experience of mindfulness has led him to a greater awareness and understanding of his involvement in enactments with his patients. He perceives that his Buddhist strand, an awakening to mindfulness, has blended with his Jewish strand, his identification with suffering - in such a way as to help him recognize when he might be overidentified with suffering, too immersed in the patient’s suffering to allow either of them to imagine the possibility of transcendence. As I hear it, David’s mindfulness experience supports his ability to deeply recognize his patients’ suffering, at the same time that it allows him to step back, and give his patients a chance to step back, to recognize something transcendent, something that might help to restore faith in life and evoke compassion for self and others. This awareness David describes seems to have been freeing, emboldening, and imbued with healing compassion. This is what I think psychotherapy can and should do – free, embolden, and ultimately, awaken compassion.

For many who have grown up knowing depressive suffering, an experience of transcendence, or even the idea of it, can be deeply appealing. No surprise then, that by the time I got to High School, Thoreau and Emerson were among my idols, though Walden Pond and Concord seemed a million miles from my Bronx apartment. So I was not entirely unprepared for my first extraordinary spiritual experience, but it certainly came as a surprise. As a struggling actor in New York in my 20s, I struggled a good deal more than I acted. There were some awfully low points: the short version is rejection, poverty, and loneliness. There was one day of despair when I just started walking, out of my tiny apartment and up Riverside Drive, until I found myself at Riverside Church. I was cold and I walked in to sit down. This was one of the few times in my life I had ever been inside a church. Alone in one of NY’s most beautiful landmarks, the autumn sun streaming through the stained glass, a few things were suddenly happening all at once: I felt warm; my tears were falling; and I felt a strong firm hand clasping my right hand, telling me it would be alright. Not a real hand, not audible words – but then again, as real and as audible as could be. When I got up to leave, I was restored, for a while at least. And as I read the New Testament in the days that followed, I knew that The Comforter, spoken of in the Gospel of John, had come to be with me that day. I was amazed and moved, and I was very tempted to consider becoming a Christian. I got as far as reading a bit of Thomas Merton, and listening with rapture to Mahalia Jackson records and the Bach Cantatas. And over the years I have read a great many of the writings of the Christian mystics – but where I ultimately went in terms of religion was not what I would have expected. Here’s what happened.

Not so long after my experience in the church, my luck changed, or so it seemed. I was cast in a show, an exciting workshop with some well-known people involved, where I got to sing and act and dance. It was a show, of all things, about an Indian guru, about his spiritual journey and his teachings, like a Hindu version of the musical Godspell. It was all some crazy cult nonsense, as far as I was concerned, and the show went nowhere, along with my acting career. But a few years later, at the end of another long bout of despair, I learned that the guru we sang and danced about in the show was in residence upstate, at his ashram, and that he was giving spiritual initiation. This was around 1980. I had by then sought help from two analytic therapists, candidates in training, I later understood. I left the one who was almost completely silent; I stayed for a while with the second one, and when I succeeded in getting a romantic relationship off the ground, she declared that therapy was over. So therapy ended, the girl soon broke up with me, I heard that the guru was upstate, and I decided to go.

I spent 13 years in all, calling first this man, and then after he died his female successor, my guru. My initial meditation experiences were literally electrifying, indescribably ecstatic, the most intense love and oneness I have ever known. It was only a few months before I sold my possessions and took off to follow the guru. For many years as a full time worker for the guru, on her world tours and in her ashrams in the U.S. and in India, I meditated and chanted daily, served in many managerial and teaching positions within the organization, travelled the world as a teacher and spokesperson for the guru, and worked my way up, closer and closer to the guru – the person I believed to be God incarnate.

When I left, and fortunately my wife left when I did as well, I was in shock for quite a while, as I came to realize more and more fully how abjectly I had submitted myself to this abusive, corrupt guru. Sadly, if I am really honest with myself, I knew the truth early on, but I didn’t want to know that I knew. There were a great many kinds of dishonest and abusive behaviors practiced by the guru, of which I heard some whispers and saw some hints. But what I did see plainly was the cruelty – for months before I moved out of the ashram, I had been on the receiving end of it from my ex-guru and her appointed surrogates - the scathing public criticism and taunting, the public shaming and humiliation. It was treatment I had witnessed many before me receiving, and I always believed it reflected the guru’s determination to help us along the spiritual path. Eventually, I was able to reflect on my own experience, and I came to realize that there was no genuine purpose to the public humiliation – it was simply an excuse for sadistic cruelty.

When I finally severed my ties with this group, I could feel myself coming out of dissociation, like coming back to life. I had tried so hard to murder my subjectivity and make myself the kind of object the guru would approve of and pay attention to. In this kind of relational system, only the leader is perfect, and no one else is, and to make sure that this is clear, the leader must continually bring followers up, raise their hopes of being favored, and then put them down (see Shaw, 2014). Initially, having experienced an indisputably ecstatic mystical experience connected to my ex-guru, I was at my most vulnerable. But it was a bait and switch. My pre-existing idealism and tendencies toward self-sacrifice, and the unhappiness in my personal life at the time, made me all too susceptible to exploitation. The leader I chose to follow led me to idolatry and masochism, perversions of idealism and self-sacrifice, and the opposite of what I now can thankfully think of as spiritual. This perversion of the experience of surrender into compulsive, masochistic submission, was brilliantly identified by Manny Ghent (1990). Surrender in this sense would mean the opening of oneself to the sublime, spiritually and interpersonally; submission is a closing down, a negation of self.

As powerful and as beautiful as my experience in the church was, and as my experience of spiritual initiation in meditation was, for me, what has been the most meaningful and enduring change and growth I’ve known is the experience of finding, claiming and knowing myself as subject – and working out the difference between feeling like a subject, or feeling like I have to be the right kind of object for someone – a guru, a spouse, a patient, a friend, colleague – in order to feel like I am not alone. Bach (1985, 1994, 2006) has written extensively of this narcissistic problem – he describes the inflated narcissist who is fixed in his own subjectivity, and the deflated narcissist who self-objectifies, and automatically finds himself striving to be a gratifying object for another. The deflated narcissist is also hoping that the approval of others will quell his sense of unworthiness and unlovableness. Confused and unconscious about my own attachment narrative and family history, searching for a way to feel that I had a self I could feel good about, I ended up drastically objectifying myself in the hopes of being certified as good by my ex-guru, in whom I invested all goodness. I have discovered that many others behave similarly, with bosses and colleagues, parents, lovers, siblings. Many who enter psychotherapy know they are depressed, or anxious, but do not know the extent to which they have forsaken their subjectivity, and submitted to objectification as though that would be a way to finally feel good enough.

The many years of self-subjugation I experienced under the influence of an abusive guru have led me to deeply ponder the nature of being an authority figure, a teacher, a therapist. Based on my understanding of the trauma of objectification, I want to construct with each patient a way of being in our process so that neither of us has to feel negated or subjugated as a condition of being in the relationship. In the psychotherapy context, I view the construction of intersubjective relatedness as necessary for therapeutic change and psychological growth. I am referencing Jessica Benjamin’s (1988, 1995, 1998, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2009a) use of the term, in which intersubjectively constructed relationships reflect what she terms the lawfulness of the moral third. Benjamin speaks here of mutual recognition, the effort we make in relating such that we resist the pull toward becoming a dominator or a submitter, the pull toward falling into a mode of relating where one person must be the object of the other. Lawfulness in relating means that each person’s value as a human being is recognized and respected; and that relating as two separate people, mutually recognizing their shared humanity, is what both emanates from and creates the space of the moral third. In this realm, the experience of being two opens to the thirdness of mutuality, because relating has not been forced into collapse, by one negating the other.

In one of Jessica Benjamin’s earliest, seminal writings on the subject of recognition, she offers a list of near synonyms that capture what she means by the term:

“to affirm, validate, acknowledge, know, accept, understand, empathize, take in, tolerate, appreciate, see, identify with, find familiar, . . . love. . . What I call mutual recognition includes a number of experiences commonly described in the research on mother-infant interaction: emotional attunement, mutual influence, affective mutuality, sharing states of mind” (1988, pp.15-16).

Benjamin asks, in her elaboration of concepts drawn in part from Hegel and Winnicott, how do two people “make known their own subjectivity and recognize the other’s?” (1998, p. xii). Bringing the importance of this deceptively simple question into sharper focus, she cites philosopher Richard Bernstein:

“Reciprocity must . . . be preserved as a condition of conceiving the ethical relationship, in which, as Bernstein (1992) says, both self and other ‘stand under the reciprocal obligation to seek to transcend their narcissistic egoism.’ For ‘without a mutual recognition of the Aufgabe [task/obligation] of searching for the commonalities and precise points of difference, without a self-conscious sensitivity of the need always to do justice to the other’s singularity. . . we are in danger of obliterating the radical plurality of the human condition.’ (p. 75).” (Benjamin, 1998, p. 100.)

In this model of mutuality, there is an understanding that both parties are supported and enhanced when they consciously attend to striking a reciprocal balance between giving and taking. But mutuality is not a simple achievement, nor is it easy to sustain without effort. As Benjamin shows, the “shadow” of intersubjective recognition and relating is complementarity: the sadomasochistic, domination-submission dynamic of “doer - done to” (Benjamin, 2004). Relating in this mode, each person fears the loss of superior power, and insists on the supremacy of their own subjectivity. Each becomes locked in to the conviction that they are the victim of the other, each feeling they must negate the other, or be negated. One dominates, the other submits, then the other one dominates, and the other other one submits… ad nauseaum. Giving and taking is now based not on good will and gratitude, but on strategic calculations aimed at maintaining dominance, and at the deepest level, aimed at preventing being destroyed by the other – being the destroyer, not the destroyed. Failure of mutual recognition represents a collapse of intersubjectivity that Benjamin likens to a kind of death.

“Just as Freud posited an inherent conflict in intrapsychic life between eros and death,” Benjamin (1999) wrote,

“so [we can] posit an inherent conflict in intersubjective life between eros and narcissism, recognition and omnipotence. The tension that we ideally imagine between these continually breaks down and has to be accomplished over and over (p. 202)… It is the constantly renewed commitment to restoring … intersubjectivity that allows us to get beyond a struggle of your meaning versus my meaning, to a sense of working together to transcend complementarity in favor of mutual recognition” (p. 208).

Benjamin is careful to highlight here that we cannot perfect an ideally intersubjective position and then live happily ever after in a Utopian relational world. Recognition is a “constantly renewed commitment” we make, working together, creating a dialogue with our others – parents with children, spouses, siblings, colleagues, teachers with students, analysts with patients – that moves us toward mutual liberation from the tendency to seek power and control through negation of the other, out of fear of otherness.

So to bring this around to David’s work: The essential teaching of Buddhism as I understand it is that wisdom and compassion for suffering are inseparable and are the goal of being human. I hear that David’s experience of a transcendent spiritual wisdom has opened up for him ways of being compassionate that had previously been foreclosed. Identifying with and witnessing suffering are crucial ways of being compassionate – but sometimes, compassion will mean helping our patient to recognize a stuckness in his victimization; or perhaps a tendency to negate the alive aspects of himself so as not to lose sight of the parts of himself that have suffered unbearably – as though being alive betrays and abandons the traumatized child in him. Perhaps our compassion can extend to the various parts of this patient – his suffering, of course, but also his aliveness, creativity, resilience, and so on. We are not merely what has happened to us, I hear David saying; trauma can cause our victimization to be dissociated, but conversely it can cause our strong, healthy and vital self-states to be dissociated as well.

For David, the capacity to become the witness of one’s own emotional states links to the sublime experience of transcendence he describes. For me, the way toward spiritual and psychological health need not be based on a connection to something that transcends the mind and the body. When we are relating to the Other – stranger, friend, patient – as a subject in his own right, we are expressing the human spirit immanent within us and all beings. For me, intersubjective relatedness in the analytic dyad is a powerful force, mutative for both analyst and patient. Finding a way out of transferential impasses and reaching intersubjective connectedness is a kind of spiritual quest in psychoanalytic work. Succeeding can produce a profound, revelatory experience for analyst and patient.

An example of this kind of experience took place recently in my work with Elliot. I have seen Elliott for a 3 year period, followed by a one year hiatus, and now resumed for a year so far. Elliott grew up in a wealthy family, with his father almost constantly away on business. His mother was very charismatic and Elliott became what we eventually recognized was a kind of surrogate husband to her – but one that she could powerfully influence and control, unlike her actual husband. Elliot’s father died of brain cancer rather suddenly just after Elliott graduated from college, and not too long after, his mother developed a form of cancer which slowly, over a ten year period, took her life. When I first saw Elliot, his adult life had all but ground to a halt because he had been attending to his mother throughout her illness, as she pursued dozens of quack remedies, healers and other New Age practitioners.

Elliott and I had reached a point in our work where we had a coherent and persuasive narrative of his attachment and developmental experience. But our work was not leading Elliott to the kind of change he wanted. He was stuck in a dead end relationship with a woman he was not happy with; he came late to sessions, changed times often, sometimes forgot. He often began sessions in an annoyed, out-of-it state. It took me a while, but I went ahead one day and confronted him about this behavior.

He was immediately angry, and shouted, “Why don’t you tell me what I’m supposed to do? Why don’t you help me remember where we left off the last time? Why am I spending all this time and money, for what?”

I thought for a moment, and said, “what about my time? The time I spend waiting for you when you’re late; the time I spend rearranging your appointments. The time I’ve put in to help you understand all that’s happened to you? The time I’ve spent caring?”

Of course, I did exactly what critics of the idea of mutual recognition as part of the therapeutic process (Teicholz; Orange, 2008) would point to as a clinical error. I directly asked Elliott to consider me from my point of view, not just his. In retrospect, I understood that speaking to Elliott this way was unique in his developmental experience, where any expression of his anger would be met not with acceptance and a willingness to negotiate relationally, but with complete withdrawal. I hoped that what I said would be experienced by Elliott as my willingness to be real with him, and to stay in relationship without withdrawal.

Elliott was quiet for a short time. He then said, calmly now,

“I’m making you into my father. I’m angry at you for not advising me and teaching me – but he’s the one I’m really angry at, because he never tried, he never tried to connect with me. I got him to drive cross country with me, and he had the radio on constantly. If the station went out of range, and all we heard was static, he’d leave it on and listen to that rather than talk to me.”

Elliott was crying softly, acknowledging the anger and grief he felt about his father more deeply and fully than he ever had before. As we continued to work through Elliott’s pain, and to sort out the enactment we had been in, we continued in a very fresh, new way for both of us. We were connecting, each of us taking the other in more deeply, in a way that was moving and real for us both. No longer the objects of our frustration with each other, we were intersubjectively connected in a way that now allowed Elliott to feel my care and my attention; and for me to feel able to more freely respond to Elliott. Elliott’s new ability to use me led to his becoming more self-reflective, and more connected with himself.

Our experience was not, as I perceived it, one of transcendence as a means of gaining a broader, more nuanced perspective about what was happening for Elliott and for me. Rather, we collided (Bromberg); we hung in there through the mess (Bromberg) of our collapsed intersubjective relatedness. Out of our effort to be real with each other, we found ourselves with each other. I could be an analyst; Elliott could be an analysand; and our work opened up and became alive.

I bring my personal biases and beliefs about spirituality to my work, and David brings his. The inevitable personal biases of the analyst cannot be denied, and in fact can be a source of deep trust between analyst and analysand if openly acknowledged (Orange, 1994). The fruit of David’s transcendent experience is that he has deepened his empathy and compassion, as he has shown us in his work today. The transcendent aspect of consciousness can illuminate a way that we are more than merely our particular selves, our unfree selves. This kind of experience of oneness, of the interconnectedness of all being, can be deeply healing. But for me and others like myself, the transcendent experience ultimately became a way of feeling separate: as I chased after my concept of transcendence, I lost myself. The dark side of “enlightenment” is duality – in which the transcendent is viewed as the only reality, supposedly superior to the mundane, illusory, petty material world. Getting my feet back on the ground for me has meant working from the immanence side of the dialectic. As a psychoanalyst and in my personal life, the experience of intersubjective relatedness - a form of relating that is always seeking freedom from the domination and submission agenda, that allows us to experience ourselves as subjects in our own right, free of objectification, and free of the need to objectify others - has turned out to be my most valuable spiritual experience. When David speaks of the “caregiving/controlling” strategy from which he has worked to free himself, I know just what he means. From that place, the patient subtly becomes our object, the one we need to show us that we have been helpful, so that we ourselves can overcome the feeling of helplessness. Freed of that need to control, David and his patient broke through, from impasse to revelation. David and his patient each became free, more alive, more fully and truly themselves, subject to subject.

What David has helped me think about is how I have reconciled within myself the transcendent, mystical experiences of my 20s and 30s, with the disillusionment of my post-cult life and my subsequent embrace of the healing potential of relational psychoanalysis. My bias is on the side of immanence, a belief that intersubjective relatedness is a nurturing and healing human capacity. But whether through awareness of transcendence, or awareness of immanence, the goal I think is the same: the deep recognition of our common humanity, recognition that lifts the burdens of shame, fear and aloneness that are the universal psychic wounds of the human subject.

A long time ago, I stopped wondering if I believe in God or not. The intimate, subject- to- subject experience, in which the human spirit in each of us can be most fully expressed, is sublime enough for me, for now.

References

Benjamin, J. (1988). The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon.

----- (1995). Like Subjects, Love Objects: Recognition and Sexual Difference. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

------ (1998). Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.

------ (1999). Afterword. In S. Mitchell & L. Aron (Eds.), Relational psychoanalysis(pp. 201-210). Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.

-------- (2004). Beyond doer and done to: An intersubjective view of thirdness. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73, 5–46.

------(2009). A relational psychoanalysis perspective on the necessity of acknowledging failure in order to restore the facilitating and containing features of the intersubjective relationship the shared third). Int J Psychoanal (90)441-450.

----(2009a). Response. Int J Psychoanal(90)457-462.

Breuer, Josef, Freud, Sigmund: Studies on Hysteria. Translated from the German and edited by James Strachey. (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. II.) Hogarth Press, London 1955.

Bromberg, P. (2011). The Shadow of the Tsunami and the Growth of the Relational Mind. New York: Routledge.

Dupont, J., ed. (1995). The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, by Sándor Ferenczi. Edited by Judith Dupont, translated by Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar and Rinehart.

Ghent, E. (1990). “Masochism, Submission, Surrender: Masochism as a Perversion of Surrender.” Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 26:108-136.

James, W. (1902). The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Longmans, Green and Co.

Loewald, H.W. (1979). The Waning of the Oedipus Complex. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 27:751-775.

Orange, D. (1994). “Countertransference, Empathy, and the Hermeneutical Circle.” In The Intersubjective Perspective, Stolorow, Atwood and Brandchaft, Eds. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc., pp. 177-186

--------- (2008). Recognition as: Intersubjective Vulnerability in the Psyc... Int. J. Psychoanal. Self Psychol., 3:178-194.

Shaw, D. (2014). Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation. For The Relational Perspectives Series. New York: Routledge.

Teicholz, J.G. (2000). Chapter 3 The Analyst's Empathy, Subjectivity, and Authenticit... Progress in Self Psychology, 16:33-53.

A New Review

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 22:23:00 +0000

A New Review of "Traumatic Narcissism" by Donna Orange, PhD

Hello again! I don't usually pepper you with these emails this frequently, but I was blown away today when I learned that the new number of the Self Psychology Journal was out, and that it contained a review of my book, "Traumatic Narcissism," written by Donna Orange, a clinician, theorist and writer whom I greatly admire.

Her review is so generous and so kind - read it if you have a few minutes. Click here:
http://www.danielshawlcsw.com/OrangeReview

Thanks for your support!
Warm regards,
Dan Shaw

Traumatic Narcissism on the Road!

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 22:23:00 +0000

Greetings! Since "Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation" was published in the Fall of 2014, over 2,000 copies have been sold - a big number, I'm told, for a book primarily intended for mental health professionals.

It's been especially gratifying to hear from so many readers who are not mental health pros, but who picked up the book because the title sounded like it would help them understand problematic relationships they've been involved in. I've heard from many of these non-professional lay readers, and I am very moved and grateful to know that the book is making a difference not just to therapists, but at a grass roots level as well.

I've received and continue to receive many invitations to speak about the book:

In addition to 3 podcasts, that I've put up on my website (www.danielshawlcsw.com), I've spoken to the following groups:

IN NYC: Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis; Mental Health Training Institute; New York State Society for Clinical Social Work; Women's Mental Health Consortium; National Institute for the Psychotherapies;

Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic group in Tampa, FL

SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse NY

And looking ahead, I'll be speaking at the IARPP conference in Toronto at the end of June 2015

In Santa Fe for the International Cultic Studies Association in the Fall of 2015

And doing several presentations in NYC in the Fall of 2015 and Winter 2016, including a Webinar for members of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

And a workshop in Los Angeles in Winter 2016 at the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis.

I'm in the process of overhauling my website, but you can keep up with upcoming events there, at www.danielshawlcsw.com.

As always, I'm available for presentations and consultations, by phone, in person or by Skype! Email me at danielshawlcsw@gmail.com

And Thank You to all of you who have supported and encouraged me in the writing and promotion of this book - it's truly heartwarming to know that the book is reaching and helping so many people.

Sincerely,
Dan Shaw

Courage

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Sun, 22 Mar 2015 19:39:00 +0000

March 22, 2015

It's deja vu all over again. Supposedly celibate guru is discovered to be sexually abusing dozens of women in his religious community. This time it's a guy I knew for a few years in the 80s when I was a manager in the Siddha Yoga religious community. Once a smart funny guy from Brooklyn, Russel Kruckman stopped doing drugs once he started getting high on Eastern mysticism. He followed Swami Muktananda, my original ex-guru, no slouch in the sexual predator department himself, and became a Swami (monk), Swami Shankarananda. Caught seducing too many women in Muktananda's and later Gurumayi's ashram, he was kicked out. Unfazed, Shankarananda moved to Melbourne and started his own Ashram community, calling it Shiva Yoga. Now about 40 women have come forward alleging charges of rape, and Shankarananda is the subject of a police investigation. In Australia, these guys tend not to get away with this stuff, unlike here.

I bring this to your attention not for the schadenfreude, but because one of the women he abused decided to speak publically about how it all happened. Of course she was immediately vilified by Shankarananda's propaganda machine; but then many of the other women who were abused stepped forward, and the police stepped in to investigate. I thought her public declaration was courageous, and extremely important to help those who do not understand what this kind of narcissism, Shankarananda's, is like, and how traumatizing and abusive it is. Here is her letter:

Dear Shiva Yoga community,

I have felt for a while that I have needed to share a public statement. Not out of hate but concern for everybody involved. I love everybody in the community very much and it was very painful for me to wake up to the reality of what has gone on at Shiva yoga. I was in a denial that allowed me to cope. I knew that if I ever "spoke" of what was happening to me that I would no longer be permitted to be a part of Shiva yoga.

There is no end to my disappointment in Devi Ma who I have loved dearly, as well as Vani, the Swamis and Centre leaders whom remain there. I feel that they are not only ignoring the facts but are also condoning sexual abuse. And all in a community where I was led to believe that love, compassion and truth were the practise and goal. I loved my job/dharma as a swami and it was heartbreaking to stop serving others. But I could not condone the abuse once I continued to hear of others. I know some women may not feel abused. Some believe and feel like it's a sacred act and feel special, others confused and many are completely traumatised by it. I am not to judge on anyone's position only I feel a responsibility to share some of my own experience. I would like to express my apology for not speaking sooner as I may have been able to protect other victims. I feel a great regret over this. I am aware of the backlash and vilifying that has and most likely will occur from me speaking. Some people that have stood up have been attacked. I feel however that there is nothing for me to be afraid of. I speak only from my heart. Every day I worry about my sisters who I love dearly and who still remain there.

When I came to live at the ashram I was never informed of "Tantra" in the way of sex, sexual rituals or anything of the like. Had I known that, there is no way I would have stayed. Not only was I already a victim of rape, but I was just about to go through a second trial at the county courts in Melbourne. I came because my sister and father were trying to help me and I was looking for spiritual guidance. As another woman has said in her testimony, I also do not want to put every distressing detail here. I only wish to clarify some facts to help those who remain confused. As one of Swami Shankarananda's 'victims' I have had to ask myself some difficult questions: Was I coerced? - Yes. Was I manipulated? - Yes. Was I scared? - Yes. Did I ask for the "tantric" relationship to stop? - Yes many times. Was I silenced? - Yes. Did Swamiji ever listen to what I wanted? - No. Did Swamiji care that I had a partner? - No. Did Swamiji ever allow me to speak to anyone when I felt I needed help about it and was having panic attacks? - No. (He told me that wanting to tell the truth was a wrong understanding spiritually and that I had to learn to lie.) Did Swamiji care that I was scared? - No (He got angry at me. Told me I was neurotic, weak, and that I would not attain spiritually speaking.) Did Swamiji give me a choice to stop? - Well when I begged him, he stopped temporarily, but started again quite quickly. He also made sure I felt condemned, guilty, and ostracised by saying things like "you're dead to me", "I don't want to speak to you. There is no love between us anymore." "This (tantric/physical relationship) is all I want from you", and "you should obey the Guru". I trusted Swamiji at the time. I was extremely devoted and continued to ask him why there had to be a physical element to our relationship that I didn't want; wasn't my love enough? Yet he remained relentless, never taking no for an answer. Even then I believed he had my best interests at heart, that it was my fault, my shortcomings and that I just had to "put up" with this difficult situation, and that it was, as he had told me, "my sadhana" (spiritual path). There is no denying that I wanted to be close to him. I was told that my relationship to him was my path to God. I wanted to feel close to God. But I never signed up, or asked him for a "tantric" sexual relationship.

I completely understand the needs of other women who had shared in anonymity, as the unfortunate response from the Ashram is what has kept many silent, unable to heal. To talk has been what has helped me. I hope that anyone else suffering through this abuse is able to seek the help they need. The counselling services such as CASA, Nigels team at Integrative psychology has been a great help to me. Also reading 'sex and the spiritual teacher' helped me understand how and why these things happen. My love goes out to everyone in the Shiva yoga community both men and women, in and out.

Leila McCann, (formerly Swami Priyananda Saraswati)

Only when those who have been abused have the courage to speak out will predators be brought to justice. If you have been abused, are being abused, know of someone being abused - speak out.

Interview by Chris Bandini on New Books in Psychoanalysis

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 14:35:00 +0000

Here's the link! http://newbooksinpsychoanalysis.com/2015/01/28/daniel-shaw-traumatic-narcissism-relational-systems-of-subjugation-routledge-2013/

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 11:46:00 +0000

Upcoming Presentations - 2015

Wednesday, January 14, 2015 1pm-2:30pm

ICP New York Trauma Studies Cooperative

Presentation: The Relational System of the Traumatizing Narcissist

Trauma Studies Cooperative

The Trauma Studies Cooperative meets on alternate Wednesdays at ICP from 1:00-2:30pm. It is a continuation of the original group that began meeting after 9/11 and was the inspiration for the Trauma Studies Center.
The Trauma Studies Cooperative:
- Invites speakers on a variety of topics of interest to those in the trauma field.
- Studies pertinent material and theories as a group
- Provides for community and support for this difficult work
- Offers innovative models of treatment
The Trauma Studies Cooperative is open to all mental health professionals with an interest in understanding or treating trauma. Participation is by request. Regular attendance is encouraged in order to maintain group cohesiveness.
For 2013-2014 the Trauma Studies Cooperative presents the Dissociative Aspects of Trauma
- The first meeting of the year will be September 25, 2013 at ICP.
- This year’s lineup of presenters will focus on the history, theory, causes, manifestations, and treatment of dissociation in its many forms.
- This year’s presenters include Elizabeth Howell, PhD; Margaret Hainer, LCSW; Susan Dowell, LCSW; Rebeca Gonzalez, Psy.D; Lydia Denton, LCSW; and Na’ama Yehuda, MSC, SLP and others TBA.

To join the Trauma Study Cooperative please contact Huong Phan, Trauma Administrator at 212-333-3444 ext.114 or emailtrauma@icpnyc.org.

Saturday, Jan. 24, 2015 10am - 1pm

Traumatic Narcissism and Couples

The Training Institute for Mental Health

Information: 212.627.8181

115 West 27th St.

New York NY 10001

APRIL 9-11, 2015

2015 CAPS International Conference

OMNI INTERLOCKEN RESORT & SPA, DENVER, COLORADO

Wellness, Mindfulness, Prevention & Self-Care

“Surviving Traumatic Narcissism: From Subjugation to Emancipation”

Panel Discussion

Date and time to be announced

Conference Brochure: http://caps.net/images/2015International/capsregistration2015finalweb.pdf

June 11, 2015

SUNY Upstate Medical University and the APsaA Affiliated Study Group in Syracuse.

Grand Rounds and Workshop

Information: Contact Lynn Storman at stormon@mac.com

June 25 - June 28 , 2015

IARPP Conference 2015, Toronto

The Relational Pulse: Controversies, Caricatures and Clinical Wisdom

Paper Presentaion on Traumatic Narcissism, date and time to be announced

Intercontinental Toronto Centre
Toronto, Canada

Information: http://iarpp.net/events-hub-page/upcoming-conference/

New publication

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 15:25:00 +0000

My chapter on "Immanence and Intersubjectivity" is in this newly published book.
The Skillful Soul of the Psychotherapist

http://www.amazon.com/The-Skillful-Soul-Psychotherapist-Spirituality/dp/1442234482

by Dr. Kelly Falanagan

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 12:57:00 +0000

Why I Waited a Month to Write About Robin Williams

Recognizing and Treating Cultic Trauma - Workshop, Nov. 2014, NYC

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 21:04:00 +0000

CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS

Burning Out

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Sat, 30 Aug 2014 21:00:00 +0000

I recently spoke with a man who had received a prestigious promotion not too long ago, who needed help to see that he was pushing himself way too hard. This man, Ben, defines himself as being a leader in a helping profession, even though that is not exactly typical of how this particular kind of work would be described. Making his job about helping others is part of how he pushes himself, which couldn't be more admirable - except there are some pitfalls, and some unconscious motivations for him and for many like him, that it would be good to recognize.

1. Superhero complex. Ben grew up in a family where his father had a rage problem, a rage that sometimes became violent with Ben and his siblings, and with Ben's mother. Ben grew as an adolescent to be a very large, imposing man - and he began to take it on himself to save his mother by getting in between her and his father. He eventually won that battle, but it did not erase the years that he felt small and helpless against his out of control, raging father. Ben's expectation of himself that he be all things to all people, that no amount of work is too much, amounts to a wish to save the world - which is what a small frightened boy might wish in the face of a terrifying father. There are many other scenarios that could lead a child to develop the superhero fantasy, too many to go into here. Ben and those of us like him have to realize that no matter how much we push ourselves, we cannot single handedly "save the world." Ben needs to take the pressure off himself and be realistic about what he can achieve.

2. Self-care is selfish. Because of this credo, Ben doesn't stop to eat meals, he stays at work far longer and later than others, and when he comes home, he's got a wife and 2 kids that he's too exhausted to deal with - and he takes out his frustration on them. Helpers in any profession will burn out if they cannot recognize how important it is to take care of themselves. Having a can do attitude may bring recognition and appreciation, but when it is taken too far, it becomes a kind of martyrdom, a self-sacrifice that is self-defeating. Ben can keep up a good front at the office, but he loses it at home. His work is supposed to support his good, healthy, happy life with his family, not destroy it. Without careful, committed attention to self-care, people burn out.

3. If I make one mistake, nothing else I ever did matters. Ben erases all his accomplishments the minute he discovers any mistake, of any magnitude, that he's made. So he's always pushing himself back to square one. Pride and self-confidence don't accumulate enough to ward off the constant fear of not doing something right. The link to his childhood shows up in this trait - the fantasy that if he does everything right, his father won't be angry and violent. For Ben to feel like a failure because of any mistake, or to fear that he will be perceived as a failure by others, is truly unreal. Rationally he knows this; but the fear is not rational, it's phobic. It's based in personal history that formed early in his development - and this history lives on and gets restimulated when he feels the least bit out of control. Only by properly valuing and holding on to his positive accomplishments can he diminish his fear of error and tolerate his imperfection. To negate all the good because there is any bit of bad is another express route to burn out.

All hard working people who care about what they do are vulnerable to burn out - no matter what the occupation. The three pitfalls above are good to keep in mind - and of course there are plenty more. Some jobs are impossibly demanding, that's true. But often, it's our own impossible demands of ourselves that is the bigger problem.

Upcoming Presentations This Fall

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Mon, 25 Aug 2014 00:23:00 +0000

Dan Shaw will present this fall at several venues on the subject of his book, “Traumatic Narcissisism: Relational Systems of Subjugation.”

On Sunday, October 12th, he will present to the New York State Society of Clinical Social Workers (NYSSCSW) in New York City. This will be a brunch presentation with discussion from the audience. The program begins at 12:30; location in NYC to be announced. Check the Events Calendar at http://www.nysscsw.com/.

On Saturday, November 8th, Shaw will present at theInstitute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (ICP) in New York, along with Shelly Rosen, a director of the Trauma Studies Program at ICP; and speakers who are former cult members. The program will address the issue of traumatic abuse in cults. Shaw will discuss his concept of the relational system of the traumatizing narcissist in the context of cults; and describe post-cult trauma and its treatment. Details of this program are still being finalized. Refer to the ICP website, at http://icpnyc.org/, as more information becomes available.

And on Saturday, Nov. 15th, Shaw will present to theTampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society (TBPS) in Tampa, Florida, from 8:15 am to 4:30 pm. This workshop will review the concepts of traumatic narcissism developed in Shaw’s book, and will include a clinical presentation by a Tampa Bay Society participant, which Shaw will discuss with the participants. Visit http://tbpsychoanalytic.org/ for further details.

Shaw locates the roots of narcissism in relational trauma, and describes the relational dynamics of the traumatizing narcissist. He details the traumatizing narcissist’s need to subjugate his (or her) objects by destabilizing and invalidating the object’s subjectivity. By establishing hegemony for his subjectivity, suppressing his object’s capacity for developing good enough subjectivity, and trapping the object in the sado-masochistic binary, the traumatizing narcissist maintains the narcissistic delusion of omnipotence. Shaw’s work on “traumatic narcissism” has been widely acclaimed by colleagues and lay readers alike.

Teaching Fri. and Sat. on personality disorders at BIPACT

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 11:25:00 +0000

http://us8.campaign-archive2.com/?u=ed7abf3aedd75630340ac1a8c&id=726dea0293&e=4fd3094582

Strength

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Fri, 04 Jul 2014 15:00:00 +0000

A patient I see told me recently about a video talk, by Simon Sinek, which describes "why leaders eat last." It's an excellent talk, you can watch it online. The piece of Sinek's idea that I want to riff on here is about what makes a person strong. It's that strong people care about and seek to promote the well being, the strength and the safety of others.

This point was brought home to me recently by a patient I see who grew up in Vermont, where her father built a successful company. Sarah described how he personally hands each employee their bonus checks each year; how he personally delivers each of them a Thanksgiving turkey; how if he learns that an employee who has become ill can't afford to do some needed repairs on his house, he sends workers over to take care of it.

And then Sarah compares her memories of her dad with her job in New York City, in a giant corporation, where the charismatic, high level boss she works for, whom she has slaved for for almost 3 years, turns on her and throws her under the bus, blaming her to the HR department for an error that wasn't her fault. It is so hard for her to grasp that this boss, a woman she has idealized, looked up to, and given her all for, could have another side to her - a ruthless, selfish side that could so easily betray someone who had been so loyal.

Sarah is very smart, but she is not used to the cutthroat corporate culture of New York City. The boss she thought of as such a strong, powerful woman, spent most of her day on the phone, dealing with her delinquent children, or with her divorce, haggling over expensive purchases, getting massages and visiting the hair salon, disguising her expenditures so she could charge them to the company, and so on. When she did turn her attention to work, it was usually to berate all the hard work being done by her underlings.

It isn't so hard to become enthralled by these personalities - the film The Devil Wears Prada did a good job of depicting that dynamic. These are people, men or women, with intelligence, talent, and charisma. But most importantly, they have an unshakably high opinion of themselves - and whatever lies they have to tell themselves to maintain that hyper self-idealization, they tell them readily.

The rest of us tend to have more realistic views of ourselves. In fact, many people downplay or minimize their strengths. A patient I am getting to know tells me how desperately fragile she is. When I say something about how fragile she feels, she corrects me and says, "I don't FEEL fragile - I AM fragile." And yet, she has survived a terribly traumatic childhood to become a really excellent social worker, beloved by all her terribly troubled clients; a kind and devoted friend to many of those she knows who have become ill or suffered losses; and a loving wife who has managed some very difficult marital problems with real grace.

Another patient is going through a horrendous divorce, with his wife telling vicious lies about him to their children and all his friends, doing everything she can to ruin him in every way. And for a few weeks, he is stunned, shattered, and tearful, telling me how weak he feels. And yet, every move he makes to deal with his situation, every communication with his friends, colleagues and his children, is made with honor, dignity and honesty. And he remains completely present and expert at his extraordinarily difficult work, in spite of losing sleep and feeling too upset most of the time to eat.

Both these people, in my view, are strong people. There are times when they feel overwhelmed, exhausted, frightened, lonely - and weak. Their weaknesses - and we all have weaknesses - exist alongside their strengths. Our strengths are not cancelled out by our weaknesses. We just have to work harder to find our strengths, when our weaknesses are in the foreground.

Real strength is not measured by how much control a person has gained through domination, manipulation, and diminishing of others; or how manically one can deny vulnerability. Real strength is more about the ability to protect and care for those with less power; and to encourage and support others - whether family, children, colleagues or subordinates at work - to grow and develop to the fullness of their potential.

Reviews for "Traumatic Narcissism"

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 13:16:00 +0000

I am proud of and grateful for these wonderful reviews of my book, by some of the most distinguished psychoanalysts in the profession.

"This book belongs on my shelf between Leonard Shengold’s Soul Murder (Shengold, 1989) and Bernard Brandchaft’s pathological accommodation work (Brandchaft, Doctors, & Sorter, 2010). To these irreplaceable resources, Shaw adds not only his extensive studies of the precise mechanisms of soul destruction in cults and cult-like groups (such as allegedly therapeutic cults and the large group awareness trainings—LGATs) , as well as his own description of cult-like families ruled by traumatizing narcissists."
-Donna Orange, International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology

"Readers will be compelled by Daniel Shaw's differentiated and lucid account of relational trauma and non-recognition in the shaping of what has been called narcissism. The book's intelligent and compassionate portrayal of clinical dilemmas involved in working with those who have suffered in abusive subjugating relationships is ideal for students and advanced practitioners. Traumatic Narcissism offers an original and captivating analysis of the relational configurations and painful emotions that lead to and so often prevent emergence from submission. While his thinking is informed by a broad theoretical knowledge, equally impressive is Shaw's exemplary dedication to exploring how we can use our own experience and personal honesty in order to transcend shame and confront the pitfalls of being an analyst while still maintaining our focus on recognizing the patient." - Jessica Benjamin, author of Shadow of the Other

"Daniel Shaw has written a fascinating book that places his personal psychological journey in the well-researched context of his larger compelling theory of traumatic narcissism. Inspired by his own experience in a cult with a guru whom he eventually came to see as a traumatizing narcissist, and enlivened with numerous clinical case examples, this absorbing and far-ranging book traces the history of traumatic narcissism from ancient times to the vagaries of the current political scene." - Sheldon Bach, PhD, Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology, NYU Post Doctorial Program in Psychoanalysis

"This book is a must-read for any of us who have worked with victims of traumatizing narcissists or been their victims ourselves. Whether drawing on his personal experience in the clinic and in cults, or analyzing literary productions and the inner worlds of their creators, Dan Shaw brings vividly to life the relational world of those bent on subjugating others -- and of those who have been subjugated by them. Not since Benjamin’s The Bonds of Love has there been such a powerful analysis of the psychic life of domination and submission, complemented by a moving account of the effect of analytic love. Perhaps only someone like Shaw, who has known firsthand the psychic effects and needs fulfilled by living in a world of traumatizing narcissists, could have provided such a compassionate and helpful guide for clinicians engaged in the painful work of helping those who have been drawn into the traumatizing narcissist’s relational system." - Lynne Layton, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis

"Daniel Shaw has written an astute, dramatic portrayal of the traumatizing narcissist’s subjugation and destruction of another’s subjectivity as it emerges in families, cult-like groups and even in the psychoanalytic profession itself. He boldly offers "analytic love" as the avenue of restoration of subjectivity. Professionals of all levels will be riveted as they expand their understanding of these phenomena." - James L. Fosshage, Ph.D., Clinical Professor of Psychology, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis

"Dan Shaw's fine study of what he calls "traumatic narcissism" explores the toxic forms of self-involvement in areas as diverse as the life of Eugene O'Neill, a number of his patients, and in his own experience with a guru. Shaw is at his best, however, exploring some of the dark corners of the cultic world of psychoanalysis itself. He holds a mirror up to those who claim the authority of self-understanding. Not all reflect well. Wisely, for all the anger and despair in this book, Shaw ends in hope that is cautious but authentic." - Charles B. Strozier, an historian at the City University of New York and a practicing psychoanalyst

Mercy

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Fri, 30 May 2014 18:46:00 +0000

I'm no theologian. I'm a non-sectarian spiritual humanist, on the verge of atheism but not quite there. I carry no card. But my ears pricked up the other day when I heard Brian Lehrer on WNYC interviewing a retired religious, Cardinal Walter Kasper, who has just had his book on "mercy" translated into English. Pope Francis recently said that he deeply admired the book, and it's creating quite a buzz in the religious-lit world. Not having read it yet, I want to talk about mercy anyway. I want to talk about mercy as it pertains to us, religious or not, living in the here and now.

In my psychotherapy practice, one of the things I encounter over and over is a person who has suffered a fair amount, sometimes greatly, who nevertheless seems to be unmerciful about herself (or himself). "Why am I such an idiot," they say, or, "I'm so sick of myself," or "You must get sick of hearing people whine all day."

Actually, most people I speak with are not whining. They are actually suffering. They feel stuck in anxiety and depression; they feel stuck in anger; stuck in relationships that don't feel good and bring too much unhappiness. Some people feel stuck about the past, about mistakes they made, or wounds that were inflicted on them. And as they speak about these things, in a process that is meant to help them sort it out and lift them up, they instead collapse into self-loathing, self-condemnation. They show no mercy on themselves.

I usually ask, "Does that help you get unstuck?" If I'm not waiting for them to answer, I'll add,

"Because it looks to me like your self-condemnation keeps you in a vicious circle. You try to figure out what you need to be able to move forward, so you talk about the problem. And as you talk about it, your self-directed condemnation mounts."

"I'm just an idiot, I'm sick of hearing myself say the same thing over and over."

"So the process of making sense of things, feeling supported to change, to understand, to heal and grow comes to a halt, because it becomes more important to abuse yourself. How did abuse become your preference?" (Not an easy question to answer, but a crucial one. I'll save some possible answers for a future column. What do you think an answer might be?)

Another angle: some people can't stop condemning others, like their spouse, or child, or parent. I've seen many couples where one, husband or wife, is angry about every single thing the partner does and doesn't do. That person, the angry one, doesn't realize that he is filled with anxiety, doesn't know what to do with it, and takes it out as anger on those closest to him. Spouse, kids, etc.

Chances are, he grew up in a home where someone constantly blamed someone else for their anger, their unhappiness. Anger and unhappiness do get triggered by other people, of course. But the anger and the unhappiness is within us. The other person isn't forcing us to be abusively angry. That anger is our own responsibility, and expressing it constructively, in a dialogue that can be reconciling, is an option.

But mercy is not optional. Without mercy, there is only begrudging, resenting, blaming - either the self or the other. What is mercy? It is, to paraphrase the Oxford English Dictionary, compassion and forgiveness shown to someone whom it is within one's power to punish or harm. Begrudging, resenting and blaming says, to the self or to the other, "you are bad, you're no good, you're shameful and unloveable." Mercy says, "I don't want to inflict pain. You're human, I'm human, and you/I deserve compassion and forgiveness simply because we are human."

Yes, there is a time, and a need, for anger to be expressed between intimates. The absence of willingness to fight often signals indifference, even contempt. But if mercy is not also present, there is no moving forward. This is nothing new. As the Old Testament states, "Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other." Psalms, 85:10. To which I say, Amen.

Daniel Shaw LCSW practices psychotherapy in Nyack and in New York City. His book, Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation is published by Routledge. E-mail Dan at danielshawlcsw@gmail.com,or visit www.danielshawlcsw.com

Next public appearance: Thursday, April 24, 2014

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Fri, 07 Mar 2014 14:49:00 +0000

Meet the Author: Daniel Shaw LCSW
Thursday, April 24, 2014, 1-1:50pm
Spring Meeting of Division 39 of the American Psychological Association
Central Park East Room, Sheraton Times Square Hotel
Discussing:
Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation, published by Routledge
by Daniel Shaw, L.C.S.W
For conference information, go to http://www.apadivisions.org/division-39/news-events/events/spring-meeting/index.aspx

Jan. 26 in NYC

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Tue, 24 Dec 2013 14:22:00 +0000

Traumatic Narcissism: Systems of Subjugation

NIPPA Focus Seminar

Daniel Shaw, LCSW

Sunday, January 26, 2014

11:00 am - 1:30 pm

Daniel Shaw presents a way of understanding the traumatic impact of narcissism as it is engendered developmentally, and as it is enacted relationally. Focusing on the dynamics of narcissism in interpersonal relations, Shaw describes the relational system of the 'traumatizing narcissist' as a system of subjugation – the objectification of one person in a relationship as the means of enforcing the dominance of the subjectivity of the other. Bringing together theories of trauma and attachment, intersubjectivity and complementarity, Shaw theorizes traumatic narcissism as an intergenerationally transmitted relational/developmental trauma, illustrating the workings of this relational system in couples, and in some aspects of psychoanalytic training.

Learn more or register online now.

Trauma

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Mon, 09 Dec 2013 23:24:00 +0000

Speaking psychologically, trauma is a word that is often used both too

broadly and too narrowly. From the German, trauma literally means “wound.” Medically, your child’s knee scrape from skateboarding is a trauma. But psychologically, a knee scrape may have nothing to do with trauma. Or it might be profoundly connected to trauma. For example:

Whenever Meg hurt herself as a child, no matter how badly or how bloody, her mother reminded her of what their religion taught: “man is the perfect, spiritual reflection of God. Matter, sin, disease, and death do not exist. You are spirit, blissful, eternal.” For Meg, her mother’s preaching felt emotionally detached, a knee jerk rather than a compassionate response. It left Meg feeling like her pain did not matter to anyone. And Meg grew up driven in two opposing directions. One was to think of herself as invincible and to behave accordingly, like a superhero everyone could always count on. The other was to secretly believe that no matter how much pain she was in, how lonely and in need of someone to depend on, no one would ever care or help. No one’s love - not her husband’s, her therapist’s, her friends’ – was real enough to her to make a difference. Meg’s trauma was cumulative, and had set up a lifelong pattern of ambivalence about dependency in which she repeatedly found herself stuck.

Psychological trauma was first fully recognized in WWI, when it was called shell-shock. Mental health practitioners today understand that trauma can be both discrete - that is, limited to a specific incident that took place in a moment of time, like a bombing, a rape, or a tsunami; but also cumulative, not simply discrete. Cumulative trauma is also called relational trauma, or developmental trauma. The terms describe an ongoing traumatic, or wounding, experience, usually going on during development from infant to young adult. For example, cumulative traumatic situations could include growing up with a depressed, alcoholic, self-centered and neglectful parent; or with a step parent who clearly would prefer not to have you, his step child, in the picture. These are wounding situations for a child to grow up in, and as resilient as kids may be, and as complex as families can be, these situations are likely to have a traumatic impact that gets played out in repetitive problems later in life.

To give another example: Joe and Karen came to see me because Karen was fed up with Joe’s almost constant irritability and his frequent outbursts of stringent, belittling anger. Joe didn’t deny it; it pained him to confront this aspect of himself, and the ways he saw himself harming his marriage, his wife and his children, all of whom he loved. Working individually with Joe, we were able to quickly get past his reluctance to really think about his childhood family situation. We soon got to the traumatic situation he grew up with: his irritable, anxious father, always screaming at his mother about money, screaming at him and his 7 brothers and sisters because nothing was ever good enough. More often than he cared to fully remember, Joe and his siblings were beaten, as was his mother. The beatings went on until Joe was old enough to get between his mother and father and threaten to kill his father if he touched his mother. Dad stopped hitting, but there was never an apology for his abusive behavior.

Joe’s wounds were deep, and it stunned and pained him to realize that as wounded as he was, he was behaving like his father just the same. Joe’s cumulative trauma of being exposed to a father who could not take responsibility for his anger, who insisted that he was only angry because people made him so, had led Joe to be disgusted by his father’s behavior - and yet to repeat his father’s behavior without somehow knowing what he was doing.

Joe was a very intelligent, hard working man. He put his mind to changing and did so, very successfully. But not all cumulative trauma is as clear as Joe’s. The more subtle the traumatization, the harder it can be to understand and recognize its impact. It’s good to remember that we all have wounding – no one escapes some amount of wounding as we become adults. When we notice ourselves stuck in self-defeating, repetitive patterns of behavior in relationships, or in work, it can be tremendously helpful to recognize the underlying cumulative trauma or traumatic situation that might have influenced our character, our defenses, our expectations. Knowledge of our own psychological make-up is power.

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Sat, 09 Nov 2013 12:31:00 +0000

Don't forget - if you've been reading "Traumatic Narcissism," a review on Amazon will be greatly appreciated! Go to the book page on Amazon by clicking HERE.

20% off "Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation" by Daniel Shaw

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Click on the blog heading above to go to the flyer!

Intimacies: A New World of Relational Life: Alan Frank, Patricia T. Clough, Steven Seidman: 9780415626903: Amazon.com: Books

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Fri, 01 Nov 2013 23:48:00 +0000

Intimacies: A New World of Relational Life: Editors: Alan Frank, Patricia T. Clough, Steven Seidman:

See my chapter, "Intimacy and Ambivalence" reprinted below.

Intimacy and Ambivalence

Daniel Shaw, LCSW

Have you ever watched a grown-up play peek-a-boo with an infant? Wanting to be hidden, and wanting to be seen and found starts early for humans. It seems that we have been designed so that intimacy must always include both.

In my psychoanalytic psychotherapy practice in New York City, it has always been the case that almost all the single men and women I see, and almost all the divorced or considering being divorced men and women I see, are struggling with intimacy: loving and being loved. Many people present with depression stemming from painful feelings of loneliness, and with frustration and discouragement about being able to create and sustain an intimate relationship that feels passionate and alive, and at the same time safe and dependable. According to Aron (1991), their analysts have similar struggles:

“I believe that people who are drawn to analysis as a profession have particularly strong conflicts regarding their desire to be known by another, that is, conflicts regarding intimacy… Why else would people choose a profession in which they spend their lives listening and looking into the lives of others while they themselves remain relatively silent and hidden?” (Aron, p. 43)

Aron is referring in particular to the kind of intimacy that can develop in a therapeutic relationship, but many other sub-categories of intimacy can also be described. In this chapter, I will focus on the intimacy associated with romantic love and partnership. What is true for many analysts, that the longing and need for intimacy conflicts with a wish to hide, is true for people in general. Most of us, whether we know it or not, are ambivalent about wanting intimacy. The desire to be hidden, to avoid vulnerability for fear of emotional pain, is often dissociated. Many people who believe that they desire and are seeking a lasting intimate partnership, but who experience repeated disappointment and loneliness, find their plight incomprehensible. In a therapeutic context, it becomes possible to recognize the dissociated desire to be hidden and to avoid vulnerability – at which point, inhibiting fears can be examined, understood and worked through. What I see as the therapeutic task in the area of intimacy is not leading patients to achieving a particular type or degree of intimate relating – but rather, helping patients sort out and understand what their real desires are – and what their fears and underlying beliefs about intimacy really are.

In this chapter I will present clinical vignettes of people I have worked with in psychoanalytic psychotherapy who have struggled with intimacy. But one of my intentions in quoting Aron is to be clear that I do not presume to speak from a privileged position as an expert on intimacy, or as a therapist whose personal intimate relationships are so ideal that I use myself as an example. I am speaking from a relational psychoanalytic perspective, and I am speaking also as a fellow human, who has struggled and struggles still with the intimacy of loving and being loved.

Loneliness

We seek intimacy because the alternative, loneliness, is for most people very hard, if not impossible, to bear. Intimacy-seeking is in our blood and bones - the human infant is biologically designed to grow and develop optimally when intimate nurture is provided. One way we know this is that we can draw a bright line from failure to thrive, to its cause: failure to provide adequate nurture (Spitz, 1964). A thriving baby is one who seeks nurture and receives it. But humans are very adaptive creatures, and in the absence of optimal nurture, and in many cases in the presence of very poor and inadequate nurture, humans can still develop and function, sometimes very highly. Optimal nurture provides pleasurable experiences of shared intimacy between infant and caregiver – the warmly held, lovingly touched baby is learning the rudiments of tender intimacy in all the daily routines of infant care. Such early intimacy experiences influence, to one degree or another, the development of each person’s particular capacities for and means of expression of intimacy, as the person grows throughout the life cycle.

Of course, parents are not always calm, devoted, soothing and comforting when providing nurture. They can be agitated, anxious, depressed, dissociative, and many other unpleasant things. – either predominantly, or intermittently - and still provide what we would call nurture: basic care that keeps the baby well enough to grow up. So what can we say with any certainty about intimacy? Given the huge discrepancies in how humans are nurtured that we can observe, it would seem that any conceptualizing we do about intimacy must take into account the myriad, each different as a snowflake ways that romantic intimacy is actually experienced and expressed. From a liberal perspective, in which heteronormativity is not considered a priori and otherness is not pathologized, it follows that there is no one right way to be intimate. There is no set of 7 Steps to achieve healthy, socially acceptable, approved-by-The-American-Psychological- Association intimacy. We think of intimacy generally as a kind of deep closeness, but what that means to any particular person varies infinitely.

The truth of the matter is, we are all making it up as we go along.

The Universality of Ambivalence About Intimacy

Nevertheless, one thing about intimacy that can be said to be virtually universal is the conflict Aron describes in the passage quoted above, between wanting to be known and wanting to stay hidden. For the many people I have worked with for whom loneliness felt unbearable and intimacy seemed unreachable, this conflict was always dissociated at first - that is, desire and longing for intimacy was felt deeply, but the desire to remain hidden and the fear of being exposed was dissociated, split off from conscious awareness. For someone who has dissociated the side of their conflicted feelings about intimacy that wants to hide, failure to achieve lasting intimacy can seem incomprehensible. Of course, the person who longs for intimacy and is repeatedly disappointed would absolutely deny an unconscious wish to avoid it. But again and again, in my clinical experience with frustrated intimacy seekers, I discover that there is a dissociated part of the psyche which anticipates only failure and disappointment if intimacy is attempted. Without recognizing it, they are repeating earlier, developmentally traumatic experiences of lonely despair. When their behavior is explored more deeply, it turns out that they are consistently making choices that have led to failure in the past, while somehow imagining that those choices will, this time, succeed.

This understanding about dissociated conflict has been developed extensively by Bromberg (1993), who put it this way:

“the individual cannot hold conflicting ways of seeing himself…within a single experiential state long enough to feel the subjective pull of opposing affects and discordant self-perceptions as a valid state of mind that is worth taking as an object of self-reflection. The contents of the mind (affects, wishes, beliefs, and so on) are not readily accessible to the reflective capacity of the observing ego; the individual tends to experience his immediate subjective experience as truth and any response to it that contains the existence of data implying an alternative perspective as disconfirming and thereby unthinkable” (p. 163).

Bromberg’s insight about unconscious conflict stems from his study of trauma and dissociation – in particular, the realization that cumulative, relational trauma leads to dissociative mental organizations (Bromberg, 2011). Relational trauma, also referred to as developmental trauma when specifically describing trauma experienced by developing children due to exposure to problematic aspects of the parents, describes the psychological impact on a person who is or has been in an ongoing relationship with a traumatizing other.

Harold

Harold’s story gives a particularly striking example of someone who suffered significant developmental trauma and whose conflicts around intimacy were dissociated. Harold is a single gay man about 35 years old who had referred himself to a 12-Step group for sex addiction, and then contacted me for psychotherapy. Harold was brought up by his paranoid schizophrenic mother, whose intense rages and violent physical and verbal assaults he experienced almost daily. When he left home as a teenager, he came out, and since then, Harold has experienced a few short-lived romantic relationships. Otherwise, his extensive sexual activity was with anonymous partners, though since beginning his 12-Step work, he had chosen to eliminate all such encounters. At a point in our third year of working together, Harold had yet to enter into an intimate romantic relationship, and he was expressing feelings of intense loneliness. He admitted to feeling “euphoric recall” for his anonymous, nighttime encounters in Central Park, and I asked him what he especially remembered about those times. His answer surprised me. He said “I experienced the most tender intimacy I have ever known with those men. We kissed and held each other so intensely, passionately – it felt so deeply loving.” I think Harold was surprised by his answer too. How incredibly ironic, he thought, that the most intimate experiences of love he has ever known were with strangers in the park at night, hiding in the bushes. The problem for Harold with relying on these experiences as a fulfilling source of intimacy was that the tenderness was just one part of the experience. There was also the desperation, the insatiability, the danger and the degradation. Yet when Harold tried to develop a relationship with a man in a more conventional way, he invariably felt overwhelmed, confused, obsessed – and ultimately, he would give up in despair.

It is hard for Harold to imagine how he can be truly close to someone and also feel safe, both at the same time. His mother’s insane rage and violence toward him was internalized as a sense of himself as bad, unlovable, disgusting. For a short while, at night in the park, he could free himself of pain, he could feel completely desirable, and deeply connected. He could feel safe – because he and his sex partner knew nothing of each other, and never would. They only knew their intense, compelling desires, and the urgency they both felt about those desires being fulfilled.

As was the case with Harold, people who repeatedly struggle with seeking and not finding intimate connection often have a powerful part of themselves, again mostly dissociated, which feels hopelessly convinced of not being good enough. That underlying belief can be expressed variously, as in:

“there are no good [men] [women] out there” – this would be an attempt to project out the bad feeling within;

or, “I must be wrong to think that I’m a good person – I must actually be horrible, unlovable, undesirable” – depressive, self-loathing feelings;

or, “I need to learn to play the game, I just have to learn the rules, I need someone to tell me what the rules are” – expressing a sense of being on the outside and feeling helpless; and so on.

These explanations are experienced as facts – but they are actually feelings, examples of the hopelessness of depressive thinking. But for those people who suffer from a pervasive but dissociated sense of badness about themselves, and dissociated fears of intimacy, no explanation makes sense. Believing that the bottom line is that they are unlovable is at least a way of having some kind of explanation for their pain. It is easy to understand how someone like Harold, who suffered extreme, cruel abuse at the hands of his mother throughout his developmental years, would internalize a sense of badness. It has been literally beaten into him. He makes great efforts to free himself from this sense of badness, but it clings to him in ways that are not always obvious.

All the harder then, for someone who believes that their upbringing was relatively normal, to understand how or why they carry within them some kind of hidden sense of badness, one that does not conform to their more conscious self-image. The sense of badness about the self, which is experienced as shame, is universal to one degree or another. In depressives, it is blatantly obvious; in others, it is less apparent, and not particularly significant, because it plays a relatively insignificant role in the psyche. But for many, the sense of badness (shame, unlovability) is present but heavily defended against – a situation of dissociated conflict which sets up an internal tension. Especially for people who prefer to think of their upbringing as “normal,” recognizing this sense of badness of the self involves recognizing some of the ways their caregivers may have instilled that sense in them. I’ve never actually met anyone whose family was “normal,” unless normal is meant to describe the average expectable neuroticism in families generally. Families are complicated, and even the most loving parents can inadvertently influence their children to carry feelings of guilt and unworthiness. For people in this situation, it may seem safer to go on defending against this feeling of badness than to confront it directly – for one thing, it allows the sense that everything was fine and normal to remain unchallenged. But working to deny an internalized sense of badness almost always signals that bad aspects of the parents and the family as a whole are also being denied. This leads to a very unstable internal situation, sitting atop a foundation of dissociation. Facing the truth, while painful, can lead to an internal shift that opens the way for therapeutic work that can strengthen and stabilize self-esteem.

Harold’s story opens many questions for me about the nature of intimacy. His experiences in the park at night afforded him a kind of intimacy that may have been the most he could tolerate, the most he felt capable of, the most he believed he could get – perhaps all of the above. The intensity of the sexual excitement was amplified by the dangerous and transgressive nature of the encounters. But coming down from these highs, Harold would feel intense shame, helplessly at the mercy of his addiction. The problem for Harold was not that the intimacy he experienced in these encounters was not real. It was intensely, passionately real for him. The problem was that the intimacy was limited, constricted, without the possibility of developing, deepening, and becoming an integral part of his whole life. After many years of thrilling nights in the park, Harold had exhausted his ability to compensate at night for what was missing by day. Harold’s loneliness grew more acutely painful, not less, as he came to rely more and more on the availability of strangers.

Safety

Which feels less safe: loneliness, or intimacy? The answer is, of course, it depends. For the human infant, too much loneliness can actually be fatal. Even a small amount of loneliness can feel unbearable for an infant, something that I probably knew from my own infancy, but had to learn all over again, the hard way, when trying to put my first child to bed or down for a nap. Like many first time parents, we were reluctant to let our baby cry it out when being put down to sleep, so we stayed and stayed and stayed until he fell asleep, hoping he would not not wake up and start screaming the instant we left the room. We learned our lesson three years later with our second child – we let her cry it out for two nights, making brief reassuring visits every 10 or 15 minutes until she was finally able to sleep, and then my daughter never had trouble going right to sleep again. My son is now a teenager, and far from complaining when we aren’t staying with him, he is happy to spend as much time away from our home as he can; and while in our home, he usually prefers to be in his room with the door shut. He has many secrets now, and almost never wants to be touched, let alone cuddle with either my wife or myself. He’s had all the intimacy with his parents he needs for a while, and of course that is as it should be, more or less.

My point is that given the way human development goes, we are generally people for whom too much loneliness is painful, and for whom too much intimacy is often undesirable. We want closeness, and we want distance; we want connectedness, and we want solitude; we want to be taken care of, and we want autonomy. We are a bundle of contradictions when it comes to intimacy. I contend that we attempt to regulate our experience of intimacy based largely on how safe or unsafe we are feeling.

Interpersonal safety has to do with emotional and narcissistic vulnerabilities – how we feel about ourselves. We generally attempt to feel, or hope to or expect, to feel good about ourselves. We bolster ourselves in various ways – accomplishments, possessions, cosmetic enhancement, fashion sense, moral and religious values, community affiliations - these are just a few examples of ways that we elevate and maintain our self-esteem. Good self-esteem – that is, feeling good about oneself - provides a feeling of safety, a sense of security that allows for confident engagement with the social world.

We also defend ourselves in various ways from lowered self-esteem. Defenses against feeling badly about ourselves, against injuries to our narcissism, or self-love, can get very complicated. The counter-dependent defense is a common one. It can be heard in the casual indifference of the lover who says, “You can come over and spend the night if you want,” indicating that she is not the one who needs or wants anything, but she understands that you do. The counter-dependent person arranges for others to do all the desiring in the relationship, while she never seems to need or want anything. This is because the vulnerability involved in intimacy leads us to seek ways of defending, or protecting ourselves from anticipated pain. A counter-dependent stance is one of the ways of defending against vulnerability. For married people, another kind of defense would be having affairs. In a secret affair, a married person can enjoy exciting sexual intimacy that is completely isolated from all the dull, routine aspects of his domestic life, and he can completely avoid the exposure of and the arguments about all his weaknesses, flaws, bad habits and so on – all the minutae that is on display in his marital relationship. The affair is a defense against the bursting of the fantasy bubble that says that intimacy can be easy and uncomplicated, that you are and will always be desirable and potent, and that every fuck can be what novelist Erica Jong (1974) famously called a “zipless fuck” – a kind of hot, earth-shaking sex where there is no mundane tedium about the details of reality, before or after.

How each of us understands what interpersonal safety means to us at any given point of time, how defended or vulnerable we choose to be, will influence the extent to which we are willing or not to be intimate, and will also determine the kind of intimacy we seek. The last posthumously published book by Stephen Mitchell (2003), a seminal thinker in the development of what is now known as relational psychoanalysis, was a deeply thoughtful exploration of intimate romantic relationships. Mitchell noted that loving intimately exposed our vulnerability and dependency, and as such was fraught with emotional danger – the fear of loss, the shame and hurt of rejection. He reasoned that marriage was a way of trying to make love safer, a way of being a winner in the mating game, and not a loser; and a way to insure against loneliness. And then he noted the paradox:

“The great irony inherent in our efforts to make love safer is that those efforts always make it more dangerous. One of the motives for monogamous commitments is always, surely, the effort to make the relationship more secure, a hedge against the vulnerabilities and risks of love. Yet, since respectable monogamous commitment in our times tends to be reciprocal, the selection of only one partner for love dramatically increases one’s dependency upon that partner, making love more dangerous and efforts to guarantee that love even more compelling” (p. )

Mitchell’s point, that depending on one partner is never as safe as we would like to believe, has been demonstrated to me again and again in my work with couples. There is dangerous vulnerability in trusting and depending on one, till-death-do-us-part, intimate other – the more we care, the more devastating unexpected loss or betrayal would be.

The following vignettes describe people I have worked with, disguised for the sake of confidentiality, who longed for intimate partnership, and had experienced profound frustration and disappointment in their search. I offer these vignettes to illustrate some of the different ways people become confused and discouraged when safety needs are in conflict with the need for intimacy.

Laura

I have seen Laura for about four years, from the beginning of her relationship with Jimi. They are still together, but there has almost never been a session where Laura hasn’t talked about her agonizing dread of learning that Jimi is cheating on her. Laura is 45 years old, very intelligent and intense. Her 17 year old son from a previous bad marriage lives with her and Jimi, who often has with him his two young sons from his previous bad marriage (there was one previous to that as well). Laura and I worked hard together to try to understand why she was so anxious, almost constantly preoccupied with the possibility that Jimi could cheat on her. We combed through her childhood history - a cold rejecting mother, and an angry, distant father; we looked at her previous marriage in great detail. We talked about Jimi extensively, and though he had not been honest in his relationships in the past, he was older now, he had suffered a great deal through his second divorce, and what was odd was that the way Laura described him, it didn’t sound to me like Jimi was cheating, or that he wanted to. And, when she was more calm and less agitated, it didn’t sound to Laura like he was cheating either. So why couldn’t Laura stop being suspicious? I observed that she had an extraordinary ability to interpret the motivation of others, and it seemed that she continually assumed that Jimi was motivated by a desire to be with other women. And yet in her heart of hearts, she believed that he was faithful; when she told me what Jimi would say to her, she conveyed an impression of him as deeply committed, very intelligent, perceptive and sensitive. Those qualities stood in contrast to her description of his intermittent selfishness and thoughtlessness; but Laura confirmed my sense that both aspects of his personality were true.

In time, Laura also became more honest with me about the fights she had with Jimi. It became clear that Laura was often intensely provocative and accusatory, and could fly out of control into violent rages that stopped just short of getting phsyical. Eventually, I had to wonder if Laura’s unrelenting suspicions and fears of being betrayed might be less about Jimi, and more about her own dissociated conflicts around intimacy. Laura had grown up with extremely emotionally volatile parents, and though she felt adored by her father, he could be terrifying when he raged, mostly at her mother, but sometimes at her. She learned to be constantly vigilant for the next outburst, the next attack. Laura had also been molested as a child by the husband of her older sister. She did not tell me about this until well into three years of work together. I wondered if Laura was so traumatized while growing up by witnessing the impact of rage, cruelty and betrayal in her adult role models, that she had come to feel that it would be impossible to be loved without being devastatingly hurt. Laura was very insightful in many ways about her vulnerabilities. But it just seemed impossible for Laura to feel safe in an intimate relationship. The very experience of feeling safe elicited feelings of panic: the terror that the safety might suddenly, unexpectedly be lost.

Once her loneliness and longing for intimacy had led her to find Jimi, the underlying conviction that betrayal was inevitable seems to have driven her to behave in undermining ways. She returned repeatedly to her suspicions and accusations, almost as if to convince him to leave her. The Patsy Cline song with the refrain “hurt me now, get it over”[1] has a pithy way, typical of the Country Western song genre, of getting at this kind of self-fulfilling prophesying. I challenged Laura’s certainty that betrayal was going to be coming from outside of her. I asked her to consider the possibility that her anticipation of future traumatization was actually a return of her dissociated memories of traumatizations - traumatizations that had already happened, long ago (Winnicott, 1974). This is the case with post-traumatic stress disorder, which is characterized by flashbacks, seemingly arising for no particular reason, of prior traumas. Also characteristic of this disorder is a constant state of agitated hypervigilance, as though the trauma might reoccur at any minute and could possibly be sidestepped with enough advance anticipation (Herman, 1992).

In her desperation to have a love that could feel safe, Laura was unwittingly generating a continual state of being in danger in her relationship. Her conflict – between a deep longing for intimacy, and an underlying conviction that love and trust must always lead to catastrophic betrayal – was clear. She could even notice that when things were going well between her and Jimi, she would often find a way to start a fight. If Laura truly wished to choose partnership as her primary source of intimacy, she would have to find a way to take the risk of feeling safe and intimate at the same time. How she could construct that experience for herself became the focus of our work.

Raul and Carole

While Laura and Jimi seemed to be unable to resist mutual destructiveness, many couples drift further and further apart by “playing it safe,” avoiding confrontation and conflict. I’ve heard many people say that they just don’t feel attracted to their partner any more. After deeper exploration, it becomes clear that their supposed “indifference” is actually the tip of a colossal iceberg, one made up of deeply suppressed rage, frustration and resentment. Intimacy, it turns out, cannot be sustained if differences, anger and conflicts are persistently avoided. This was brought home to me very dramatically by a couple, Raul and Carole, whom I saw only once.

Raul and Carole’s respective individual therapists both knew me and referred them as a couple to me. I was warned that things were very bad between them; that Raul had decided he was gay, and Carole didn’t believe him. Both still in their 20s, Raul was Cuban-born and an associate in a large New York law firm; Carole had grown up in New York City, in a WASP family that had fallen apart, exposing her to divorce and alcoholism at an early age. After being together four years, and married for two of them, Raul was unable to go on hiding from himself the fact that he was gay, and as much as he loved Carole, he could not go on lying. He was terrified of how his family would react – they were Cuban immigrants whose fervent religious and cultural traditions were extremely antithetical to homosexuality. But most of all he was miserably guilty for hurting Carole. Though he had yet to have a sexual experience with a man, he had no doubt that he was gay, and that his life and Carole’s life would only be further traumatized if he did not face up to it. He wanted Carole to let him go.

Carole had been completely blindsided by Raul, she claimed, and she refused to believe that he was really gay. I found it hard to believe that she had never suspected that Raul might be confused about his sexual orientation; she told me that the sexual passion they shared had removed any uncertainty about that for her. She was enraged, and deeply hurt, but she wanted Raul to either realize he wasn’t gay, or go and have a gay affair, get over it, and come back to her. The thought of losing him was unbearable, and at one point in our session, sensing that she was going to have to give up the fight, she threatened to kill herself. Raul immediately counter-threatened that the moment he heard that she had killed herself, he would kill himself too.

“Alright, now nobody is going to kill themselves, OK?” I shouted over their hysterics. “That’s enough of that nonsense.” They quieted down, somewhat abashed. I continued, somewhat abashed at my outburst myself:

“I am truly sorry. I think what you are going through is tragic. But you each have a chance to come through this – if you can find the courage to end the marriage. Raul, that would mean that you will have to begin life as an out gay man; you only risk hurting yourself and others further by not fully coming to terms with your sexual orientation. You will have to find a way to forgive yourself for hurting Carole. And Carole, you will have to grieve your loss, and eventually be ready to meet another man, and start over. You are both young, and you both have every reason to believe that you can find happiness, but only after you have accepted reality and dealt with it. Which is what you will do, what you must do, because any other alternative is simply ridiculous,” I finished.

The session came to an end. They were my last patients that night, and when I left my office and walked out into the street, there they were, in a tender embrace, a fine light rain falling, holding each other, looking into each other’s eyes with tenderness and deep sorrow.

I heard nothing more of them, until more than a year later when I ran into Carole’s therapist. She told me that Carole and Raul had divorced, amicably; that Carole was happily remarried, and had given birth to a baby boy. Raul had come out, left the law firm and moved to Chicago, where he was pursuing his dream of owning an art gallery and representing new artists. They remained friends, but they were also both focusing on their new relationships, and both were doing well. I was greatly relieved. Raul and Carole had loved each other intimately; but each in their way had chosen safety over reality. For Raul, being heterosexual and married seemed a much safer choice than being who he was, that is, a gay man. Carole imagined that she was safer to ignore any suspicions about Raul’s sexual orientation, and just cling to him as tightly as she could. In the end, their love was best expressed by granting each other the freedom to pursue the enduring romantic intimacy in a partnership that they both wanted – and could not fully realize with each other.

Carole and Raul loved each other very much, it seemed to me, and there was no question that the intimacy between them was intense and real. But their mutual dissociation of Raul’s homosexuality made it impossible for their intimacy to deepen and grow in the context of their marriage.

Lorraine

Lorraine is an example of someone who clung to an unfulfilling, deadened marriage for decades, for the sake of “safety,” unable to mobilize herself in spite of how dangerously destructive the marriage had become. Almost 50, Lorraine and Karl had raised their two boys together, both of whom were doing very well, one in college and the other soon to follow. Lorraine contacted me shortly after Karl announced that he wanted a divorce.

Karl was the man Lorraine fell in love with in college, the first man she had sexual relations with, and a man who never lost his sexual attraction for her, even after the divorce. The problem was that Alan was controlling and demanding, intimidating and belittling. Though Alan was dismissive, belittling and resentful of Lorraine’s career aspirations, she nevertheless went on to become an accomplished author and professor during the years she was married to Alan and raising their two children.

Lorraine grew up in a fairly conservative family, in which her younger and older brothers had been free to join their father in his authoritarian ways, while Lorraine was raised in the old-fashioned way - to be a good assistant homemaker to her mother, and to stand by her man, no matter what. Lorraine’s world turned upside down when not long after the birth of their second child, Lorraine discovered Alan was having an affair – because she discovered she had gotten a sexually transmitted disease from him. Alan confessed, he was contrite, they went to counseling, and eventually Lorraine believed that she had forgiven him. What she only came to realize much later was that from the point of her husband’s affair on, she finally felt she had something she could hold over him. This realization came to Lorraine months after the divorce, but it marked a point for Lorraine where her identification as simply a victim of Alan’s domination became more complex.

Originally living out west, they came east when Alan got a promotion that required him to relocate. Lorraine left her tenured professorship, and the house they had built, to move with her family. It was a huge upheaval, but they managed, the adjustments were made. After two years on the east coast, with their oldest son in college and their younger almost through with High School, Alan made his move, and announced that he wanted a divorce. As devastated as she was, Lorraine was also relieved not to have to go on feeling so unseen by Alan, so careful to try not to anger him, so pressured to submit to him. By the time the divorce was final, almost two years later, she had sold the old house, bought a new one at a good price in an excellent location with a mother-in-law apartment she could rent out, found excellent, helpful contractors for the needed repairs who were willing to work in her price range, had gotten a contract for a second book, had been offered a tenured position at her new job, and was well into some adventurous dating.

Lorraine was someone who tended to forget how capable, strong and intelligent she actually was. Lorraine often missed Alan, often returned in her mind to the possibility that maybe she should have just given in to Alan, maybe it was all her fault. After all, she had been, she realized, passive aggressive in many ways. Maybe her mother was right, she would sometimes think - she should have focused on keeping Alan happy and kept her troubles to herself. She spent months convinced that she couldn’t possibly, at her age, meet anyone who would love her. Her aloneness terrified and paralyzed her. She didn’t want to get out of bed; she dragged herself along, doing what she had to do, but it was all hopeless, all over for her.

In spite of Lorraine’s certainty for some time after the divorce that she would never find someone else, she eventually found Tom, and they began to negotiate the terms of what for both of them was the first important relationship since their respective divorces. Tom was especially appreciative and admiring of Lorraine, which she found deeply gratifying. But as for conflict and disagreement, Lorraine had never in her life managed either satisfactorily. If she wasn’t submitting, either willingly or begrudgingly, clamming up and getting passive aggressive, and/or dissociating to the point of not knowing what she felt, she’d end up feeling out of control and blurting out explosive things she felt horrible for saying. As it turned out, Tom had a stubborn streak, and he sounded, to my ears, rigid and unyielding in many ways. Lorraine was starting to feel déjà vu, the sinking feeling that she was with someone like her ex, to whom she would end up submitting resentfully.

So on several occasions, we play-acted conversations in which she acted the part of Tom, and I played her. She showed me what it was that Tom did or said that made her shut down, we explored why (in short, he could react with disapproval just like her intimidating, judgmental father), and I acted out how I would be if I were Lorraine - or a version of Lorraine that didn’t freeze like a deer in the headlights when she got scared about the possibility of the whole relationship going up in flames.

In time, Lorraine was able to have different kinds of conversations with Tom, even including expressing different forms of anger (irritation, annoyance, resentment, hurt), that began to seem more constructive. Reluctantly, Tom made some changes. But while Tom was more loving in some ways than any man Lorraine had ever been with, she eventually could not ignore the extent to which Tom was still dictating the terms of their relationship, and the extent to which she was going along with him whether she liked it or not. Stubborn, rigid habits of his that she had tried to overlook became more pronounced, and more and more she felt unheard and dismissed by him. She also noticed how she positioned herself to feel that she mattered less than Tom, while another part of her became preoccupied with the things about him that made her feel superior to him. For the first time in her life, she realized how much her family of origin, and her relationship to her ex-husband existed on the binary seesaw (Aron, 2006; Benjamin, 1999) of complementarity, the relational matrix where only two positions are possible – superior, or inferior; up, or down. She realized that from an unconscious conviction of her inferiority and lesser status as a woman, she tried to be what Tom wanted – she tried to be a woman that Tom would want, whether that was actually who she was or not. She noticed at these times that she was far more concerned with what Tom wanted than what she wanted. She saw herself slip into the role of Tom’s object, and lose the sense of herself as subject.

I asked Lorraine if she could become more aware and self-reflective about when and how she was focused on what Tom wanted or on what she wanted. She became a keen observer of her state shifts and the interplay of her different self-orientations – now object, now subject - and struggled to center herself less on Tom’s needs and more on her own thoughts, needs, feelings, wishes. More fully connected to herself, she realized that Tom’s unacknowledged ambivalence about intimacy, and his disavowed need to keep their relationship completely on his terms, was more depriving and required more submission than she could now tolerate at this point in her life, after all she’d been through.

The more Lorraine could allow herself her subjectivity without invalidating herself, the more she was able to bring her feelings out in the open and try to work things out with Tom. At first, this seemed hopeful to Lorraine. Maybe they could be more honest with each other, and negotiate ways of dealing with their conflicts that did not require her submission. But the more connected to herself Lorraine became, the more rigid and shut down Tom became. In the end, she had to ask herself what frightened her so terribly about letting him go? She began to recognize more fully a subjectivity that belonged to her, one that offered freedom that was unattainable as long as she remained subjugated, orientated to herself as the object of others, her subjectivity vacated.

Lorraine tried valiantly, but it became clear that Tom was not willing to be with her if her needs were going to be considered as important as his own. As she described their conversations to me, she certainly sounded like she had been loving, and hopeful that they could resolve their differences. But Tom would have none of it. And so Lorraine was ready to move on. She realized that she had probably stayed with Tom twice as long as she would have, if she had not been so terrified of loneliness. I told her that it seemed like when she was focused on being what Tom would want, she made herself his object. Without being centered in her own subjectivity, being without Tom seemed to mean being unbearably alone, or being “nothing.” Her stronger, more connected sense of herself now as subject seemed to make the prospect of being alone far less terrifying. She even seemed to look forward to having some time to herself, and began to take care of herself and stand up for herself in other areas that she had been neglecting. It no longer seemed safer to Lorraine to submit, to accommodate, to mold herself to what she thought the other would require of her. She had done that throughout her marriage, or tried to, and it hadn’t made her happy, and it hadn’t made her marriage work.

I told Lorraine that I believed that her shift out of the object position to a sense of herself as subject seemed to give her a much better chance of being able to meet someone and build an intimate relationship – because she, the whole Lorraine, would not be afraid to be more fully present.

Conclusion

I have shared these various stories of people I have worked with to illustrate the myriad ways that it is possible to be ambivalent about intimacy. Comedians have long joked about playing hide and go seek when they were a child with their parents, the punch line being that the child hid, and the parent never found. What is true in this old joke is that yes, we want to hide, but we also very much want to be found, we want to be sought. Similarly, we want to be safe, but we want excitement and at least a little danger. Intimacy isn’t easy – not for those who find it readily but are then challenged to sustain it over many years; and not for those who find it exasperatingly impossible to ever get it off the ground.

The point I have wanted to make here is that we humans are naturally ambivalent about intimacy, often in ways that are not conscious. Awareness of this ambivalence, and understanding the sources from which it arises, is an important first step for people who are trying to understand why they feel trapped in repetitive situations, in which their efforts to form a lasting romantic relationship with an intimate other are thwarted. Recognizing the inevitable ambivalence we feel about intimacy is important in sustaining intimacy over time, because we will need to be prepared for the oscillation of closeness and distance that naturally occur in any intimate relationship. We will not be as surprised by ruptures in the relationship, because we will understand that ruptures in intimate relationships are inevitable, and that it is possible to feel lonely with someone you think of as an intimate. People who are good at sustaining long-term intimacy haven’t eliminated fighting, or clung to each other allowing no distance between them. Rather, they are people who have learned how to repair ruptures well; and how to reinitiate closeness when distance has gone on too long.

Recognizing our ambivalence about intimacy is equally important for those whose longings for it go repeatedly unrequited. Such people can use their consciousness of their ambivalence to make choices that differ from those they’ve made previously that have not worked out; they can take risks they might not otherwise take. They can learn to be more present and engaged by centering themselves as subject, rather than throwing themselves away to try to be the right kind of object.

Each of the people I have depicted, Harold, Laura, Raul and Carole, and Lorraine, sought to experience intimacy with a romantic partner. The crisis for each of them that brought them into therapy was that they recognized that the ways they were creating intimacy were not fulfilling. Their intimacy was not growing, and they themselves were not growing. They felt that they were stuck - not growing wiser, happier, more trusting, more free to give and take. They hoped that with an intimate partner they would feel safe, and not lonely. What they came to realize is that they also wanted to feel alive and to feel that they were growing, fulfilling their potentials, moving toward a life that in the end they would feel had been worth living. They, like so many of us, hoped that they could achieve this by securing for themselves an intimate partnership, a home base, from which they could go out to the wider world feeling supported and fulfilled, and to which they could return, to rest, to refuel, to find support and comfort. Each discovered that they had put themselves in positions where those desires could not be realized.

Harold easily found intimacy with strangers, but over time he felt his days were lonely and empty, and that he was not growing. His mother’s hatred had become internalized as self-loathing, and his sexual encounters, which had at first dispelled self-loathing, eventually added to his self-loathing to an unbearable extent.

Laura too had internalized the disapproval and anger of her parents. Her internalized lack of faith in herself took the form of lacking faith in those from whom she sought love. Constantly on the lookout for betrayal, her anxiety and suspicion put Jimi constantly on the defensive, threatening and destabilizing the relationship. Their intimacy could not deepen and grow while they remained in a constant state of upheaval.

Raul thought he could be safe from his shame and fear and the rejection of his family by denying his homosexual desires. Carole thought she could find a safe haven in Raul’s love for her, so she denied all the indications that he might be gay. Their intimacy was real, but it could not support their growth in the context of their marriage.

Lorraine stayed in her unhappy marriage out of fear of the unknown, and was devastated when her husband ended it. Lorraine had been taught that the only way to be safe is to be married. To stay married, you made sure your husband was happy, no matter what you really felt. Divorce gave Lorraine a chance to believe in herself, to free herself from objectification and to understand that intimacy cannot grow between two people when one of them is subjugated.

There are myriad, perfectly valid ways of experiencing intimacy, and the psychoanalyst’s job has nothing to do with determining what particular form of intimacy should be preferred, or which forms are “right” and which are “wrong.” Rather, the analyst’s job, as I see it, is to carefully attend to those repetitive patterns and situations for the patient which have led to frustration, hopelessness, and despair. Many of those I have worked with for whom loneliness felt nearly unbearable were people who had come to know the acute suffering of loneliness throughout a traumatic childhood. For the developing child and adolescent, loneliness becomes traumatic when intimacy is not made safe, or when intimacy is not provided to the point of deprivation.

The potential of psychoanalytic therapy to help those for whom intimacy has become painful is this: by listening carefully, both for what is said, and what is left out of the patient’s narrative, the analyst can eventually help bring into awareness the dissociated conflicts and ambivalence about intimacy that the patient has not recognized. The analyst can help the patient discover and become grounded in her own center of subjectivity, so that the patient may become free of unconscious self-objectification. For this to happen, the analyst too has had to grow, to have become able to understand and negotiate the safety needs of the patient, while at the same time finding ways to keep things opening up and moving forward. This kind of psychological growth - which happens not just for the patient, but for the analyst in each therapeutic relationship - signals that the analytic relationship itself has become safe and intimate at the same time, that healing and greater self-knowledge have resulted. At that point, it has become safe enough to be more fully oneself, which means that it is possible for intimacy - with friends, siblings, parents, children and lovers – to be more fully realized, and more deeply fulfilling.

Reeferences

Aron, L. (1991). The patient’s experience of the analyst’s subjectivity. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1:29-51.

------------ (2006). A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.

Benjamin, J. (1999). Afterword. In S. Mitchell & L. Aron (Eds.), Relational psychoanalysis (pp. 201-210). Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.

Bromberg, P.M. (1993). Shadow and Substance: A Relational Perspective on Clinical Process. Psychoanal. Psychol., 10:147-168.

------------------- (2011). The Shadow of the Tsunami: And the Growth of the Relational Mind. New York: Routledge.

Herman, J. (1992). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books.

Jong, E. (1974). Fear of Flying. New York: Secker and Warburg.

Mitchell, S. (2003). Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance Over Time. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

Spitz, R.A. (1964). The Derailment of Dialogue—Stimulus Overload, Action Cycles, and the completion gradient. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 12:752-775.

Winnicott, D.W. (1974). Fear of Breakdown. Int. R. Psycho-Anal., 1:103-107.

[1] From the song “Leavin’ On Your Mind” by Pierce, Webb and Walker.

Upcoming Conference Presentation

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Fri, 01 Nov 2013 23:00:00 +0000

Traumatic Narcissism: Systems of Subjugation, in NYC at NIP on January 26, 2014.
Click on the link above for details of this presentation. Daniel Shaw will discuss his recently published book, Truamtic Narcissism, exploring the complex and often difficult to recognize dynamics of relationships in which one person is subjugated, and led to self-subjugate, by the other.

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shaw) — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 21:14:00 +0000

Next conference presentation: NYC, Jan. 26, 2014
http://www.nipinst.org/nip/training/events/nippa_focus_seminar_traumatic_narcissism/

Mental Health Notes

Trump: Our National Traumatic Stress Syndrome - from HuffPo 8/17

Click HERE

The Insanity of Narcissism - from HuffPo

Click HERE

Immanence and Intersubjectivity

The Skillful Soul of the Psychotherapist: The Link between Spirituality and Clinical Excellence, Edited by George Stavros and Steven Sandage.

A New Review

Traumatic Narcissism on the Road!

Courage

Interview by Chris Bandini on New Books in Psychoanalysis

Upcoming Presentations - 2015

Wednesday, January 14, 2015 1pm-2:30pm

ICP New York Trauma Studies Cooperative

Trauma Studies Cooperative

To join the Trauma Study Cooperative please contact Huong Phan, Trauma Administrator at 212-333-3444 ext.114 or emailtrauma@icpnyc.org.

Saturday, Jan. 24, 2015 10am - 1pm

Traumatic Narcissism and Couples

The Training Institute for Mental Health

Information: 212.627.8181

115 West 27th St.

New York NY 10001

APRIL 9-11, 2015

2015 CAPS International Conference

OMNI INTERLOCKEN RESORT & SPA, DENVER, COLORADO

Wellness, Mindfulness, Prevention & Self-Care

“Surviving Traumatic Narcissism: From Subjugation to Emancipation”

Panel Discussion

Date and time to be announced

Conference Brochure: http://caps.net/images/2015International/capsregistration2015finalweb.pdf

June 11, 2015

SUNY Upstate Medical University and the APsaA Affiliated Study Group in Syracuse.

Grand Rounds and Workshop

Information: Contact Lynn Storman at stormon@mac.com

The Relational Pulse: Controversies, Caricatures and Clinical Wisdom

Paper Presentaion on Traumatic Narcissism, date and time to be announced

Intercontinental Toronto CentreToronto, Canada

Information: http://iarpp.net/events-hub-page/upcoming-conference/

New publication

by Dr. Kelly Falanagan

Recognizing and Treating Cultic Trauma - Workshop, Nov. 2014, NYC

Burning Out

Upcoming Presentations This Fall

Teaching Fri. and Sat. on personality disorders at BIPACT

Strength

Reviews for "Traumatic Narcissism"

Mercy

Next public appearance: Thursday, April 24, 2014

Jan. 26 in NYC

Trauma

Don't forget - if you've been reading "Traumatic Narcissism," a review on Amazon will be greatly appreciated! Go to the book page on Amazon by clicking HERE.

20% off "Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation" by Daniel Shaw

Intimacies: A New World of Relational Life: Alan Frank, Patricia T. Clough, Steven Seidman: 9780415626903: Amazon.com: Books

Upcoming Conference Presentation

Intercontinental Toronto Centre
Toronto, Canada