How do we know what happened?

This is a problem that anyone who has experienced discrimination or bad therapy, faces. We recognise a wrong because we feel the physical version of the Shepherd tone, an endless descending sense of wrongness, and emotional pain. At this point, most of us think we are being too sensitive. And at the same time we think about all the times something similar has happened, and everything negative anyone has ever said about us. Because it must be us. As self defence clicks in, it is tempting to make an official complaint, trusting others to clarify and adjudicate.

So many people, most people, me included ask if what's happening fits a publicly agreed on idea or description of a wrong? And if it doesn't - Ah, how do we know that what is happening is harmful. Self doubt, ignoring pain. We keep on feeling terrible. We hope it will change, stop, get better. We have no idea how this can happen, there is no reason, nor explanation that fits. 

We have noticed a problem and tried to understand it. We have imported some tentative guesses from external sources, and we are trying to write a narrative adding our past experiences.

The problem is the perceived illegitimacy of personal experience. We are in a post-scientific culture. We need measures, we need numbers, we need a theory experts can validate,  Our deviation from standard narratives, our experience of pain is de-legitimised unless the therapist wrote inflammatory emails! 

And we also know that what hurts one person doesn't hurt another, what sustains a Wim Hof practitioner - the shock of the ice cold water - may kill another.

The therapist will be perfect for other clients. 

Yet he almost killed me.

How do we know what happened? 

It starts with an explanation.

Recently I've imported a slightly different concept of 'how the mind works'. As therapists we begin with Carl Rogers. And I think the way his model is presented leads to people believing that how we feel is the 'real' self. In therapy we ask about feelings because of Carl. The model I've shifted towards understands self as a process, self as a shifting interface between pure affect and what we remember, know, think, believe, value, want and dream. A self is a process of integration between neuroception, and other cerebral processes; thinking, reflecting, remembering - to create the integrated  self.

So, how do we know what happened - or rather, why is it so vital and so important to know? 

Because our selves are constructed via affect, via relationships, via experience. The therapist often said that there is no such thing as experience,  nothing 'happens' to us without a self to witness it. I radically disagree, regardless of if we are asleep or awake we are aware of things happening within our environment, Porges term: neuroception - the background, automatic awareness of everything we are physically capable of feeling in response to the external and internal world - neuroception is always on.

Fragmentation of the self occurs when affect overwhelms a person's ability to integrate and make a coherent whole. Loss of others fractures our identity. Greif is the pain we feel! Fragmentation is also panic. Memory flags potential harms and potential good things, we feel this, and sometimes there are words. Often there are words. Sometimes fragments of other memories turn up. Jagged and jarring emotional pain that doesn't make sense  - until it does.

This blog has been the work I have had to do to integrate the mess the therapist made of my healing. Bless him, he had no idea  that I'd linked danger with the verbal process he used (defensive communication) because he couldn't imagine how he could be doing harm. Enmeshed as I was within his abysmal ignorance I was drowning in flashbacks and playback to the point of disintegration.

And disintegration is?

In polyvagal terms, dorsal vagal shut down. 

The body mind connection runs both ways. The reality I was in was the reality I'd been in enough to create trauma after four years of constant threat. And in therapy I descended deeper into the endorphin economy of trauma bonds and hallucination.

But, I'm aware that all I've said has not answered the question - how do we know.

I've said that feelings must be integrated by running through the feelings and memories, the thinking, the reflecting, fitting together, making sense, and knowing what we can do..It can't be done without information, and it should be done in relation with everyone involved who was involved because memory is faulty, and because it was never one person's 'fault' unless someone wanted to do harm?

What harmed me was, is, epistemic injustice. I hope I've made the case now for why it is so important. But, epistemic injustice isn't, and never has been, described by any therapy course or put on a therapist's ethical framework. We have honesty, candour, humility but not epistemic justice.

So, how do I know that I am right to say that I was harmed by therapy? Because the theory I've described makes a coherent sense. I was harmed because pointless flashbacks and another dose of endorphins was just about the last thing I needed. A core message from the therapist in my case, in many cases is, 'I can't cope with you'...