This is a continuation
of my previous entry on the history of military occupation in Israel.
During the time we’ve
been on pilgrimage in Israel, we’ve learned a lot about its ancient and recent
history. As part of this, I’ve reflected
on my many Jewish friends and colleagues, whom I’ve known and loved over the
years. I’ve also read up on the history
of the 1967 and 1973 wars here.
And I’ve been mindful
of the many parallels between the history of Israel and that of the United
States and the British Empire, their relationship to native/indigenous peoples,
and my part in that as someone who lives within the privilege of a majority
culture. For example, I’m aware of the claim (made in 2008 by the SNP) that in
East Glasgow, not far from my office, the average life expectancy for men is
lower than it is in Gaza (Channel 4 News, 2008).
What I’m left with
about all this is a sense of mutual tragedy and sadness. My understanding of the psychological basis
for this tragedy has several other sources:
• My work as a psychotherapist for many people with trauma histories,
especially over the past 30 years of my practice as an EFT therapist;
• My work with people with social anxiety over the past 8 years;
• The study that my PhD student Robin Hinson and I did in the 1990’s on
working with prejudice, which we carried using an experimental one-session EFT
protocol for working with “difficult people”;
• Charles Eisenstein’s analysis of the ultimately self-defeating nature
of what he calls the agenda of control in Ascent
of Humanity (2007); and
• Psychotherapist Al Pesso’s analysis of the roots of terrorism in
childhood exposure to narratives of injustice and cultural trauma (which I talked
with him about last year in Berlin) (Pesso has developed a form of Empty
Chair/Self-Soothing Work for addressing this.)
All of these have
given me an acute sense that in some way the Tragedy of Israel and Palestine is
something shared and deeply intertwined.
Here is what is
emerging for me: The peoples of Israel and Palestine are locked together in a
deep, shared history of mutual trauma and injustice, leaving them feeling
broken, violated, distrustful, afraid and angry. Over
millennia, each has suffered repeatedly at the other’s hands; and these events
have been lovingly preserved and rehearsed from generation unto generation,
without understanding or forgiveness.
For example, in the
case of Israel, there is very much a sense of national trauma going back for
thousands of years, but reawakened in the 20th century, first by the
Holocaust and then strongly reinforced by the 1967 and 1973 wars. Human beings are powerfully evolved to learn
rapidly and often rigidly from situations in which their very existence is
threatened. One-trial learning is
generally sufficient in this case to lead us to put strong protective measures
in place so that such threats will “never again” happen. In the case of Israel, such learning has
happened repeatedly in living memory.
These traumatic events
and the associated vulnerability have resulted in victims becoming
perpetrators, over and over again (as I noted in my previous entry), thus
creating a cycle of abuse, which I am hypothesising may have led to a deep
sense of emotional and spiritual impurity, whose source is a vague sense of
guilt that has been pushed out of awareness.
Instead, eternal
vigilance and readiness to take offense have been the rule. Each feels threatened at an existential level
by the other, and seeks to both make themselves safe and to claim and control
what they feel is theirs. The more they
seek to do this, the more they threaten the Other, causing them to become more
vigilant and to try to gain more control over the Other. It is this constant guarding and seeking
control that is the heart of the problem, because it continually makes the
problem worse by threatening the Other.
In Emotion-Focused
Therapy, with both individual and couples, such negative cycles between
partners or between parts of the self are common and feel wholly intractable to
those involved (and often to the therapist).
However, according to EFT “the only way out is through”:
• First, we offer a situation in which all parts of the self (or both
members of the couple) feel deeply and credibly understood and validated.
• Second, this enables the person or persons to slow down and become
more deeply aware of their core painful, stuck emotions. In this case, we have among other emotions,
lingering anger at old injuries and fear of the Other as dangerous. These emotions have to be understood and accepted,
but by itself this is not enough to change anything.
• Third, with seemingly intractable problems, it appears to be important
to spend time developing an appreciation for the cost that maintaining a stand
based on these emotions has had for the person. (I thank Laco Timulak for
making this point explicit.)
• Fourth, for emotional transformation to take place, there must be
another step, to identify alternative, more adaptive emotions. In this case, these include: curiosity about
the Other and what they may have to offer; sadness at disconnection and
separation; realistic fear at the long term consequences of one’s own
intransigence; genuine empathy and compassion for the Other’s suffering; and
perhaps even appropriate, motivating guilt for the role that one has played in
the bringing about or allowing the Other’s suffering.
• Fifth, by creating an atmosphere of mutual openness, this emotional
transformation makes it possible to begin a process of negotiation and
resolution.
I’m not saying that
such a process is easy; it isn’t. But I’m
not sure that I see any alternative other than despair and giving in to a
continuing cycle of traumatising interactions, which only perpetuate and deepen
the problem.
 |
| Wall Art, Wall of Separation, Bethlehem |
References
Channel 4 News. (2008). FactCheck: Glasgow worse than Gaza? Retrieved 21 May 2015, from: http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/society/health/factcheck+glasgow+worse+than+gaza/2320267.html
Eisenstein, C. (2007). The
Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self. Berkeley, California: North
Atlantic Books.
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