1. Introduction
Where trauma exists, when there are irritations, anxieties, depression, traumas of different sorts besides the symptoms, it is hard to integrate feelings and emotions into consciousness. It is hard to have a conversation without being irritated or controlled or feeling like somebody is triggering you.
Jung, C.G. gave us the theoretical structure of the psyche. Using this concept, including archetypes, complexes, the unconscious, and ego consciousness, a treatment has been developed to work directly with the complexes and the unconscious. The treatment produces rapid changes in subjects undergoing treatment, with measurable positive change in 6 - 12 treatment sessions lasting 90 minutes each.
This paper presents the example of one subject, Grace, who recounts her narrative of her past and her experience with JAMP, as well as the immense relief from symptoms she experienced after six weeks of treatment.
2. JAMP
The great gift that Jung, C.G. gave us is the structure of the psyche. Jung created a map of the psyche and stated that the self is the architect of order in the psyche. Within the psyche, there are archetypes [1] (Jung, 1969). When we say archetypes, we are talking about father, mother, king, magician, lover, warrior; all of these different things are called archetypes and archetypal patterns. The self is the architect, creating structure and order, and then you have the shadow, the ego, the persona, the anima, and the animus. The anima and the animus are what Jung thought about as the archetypal patterns of the feminine and masculine, feminine and masculine in the sense of the kind of the energy that is in the world. As Jung described his psychology, I think of the anima and the animus as compensatory. The psyche is always compensatory. If a person is missing something, something out of the unconscious arises to compensate for it.
When Jung published the concept of archetypes, he talked about the anima and the animus and how they are each an archetype in themselves [1] (Jung, 1969). I do not think that is the case. As we move further into Jungian thinking, we can surmise that Jung had this idea but, another loop needed to be closed; the archetypes of anima and animus are two poles of one archetype. The feminine-masculine aspect of the archetypal pattern is what it means to have a sense of the feminine and the masculine.
Archetypes are patterns. When Jung tried to describe archetypes, the biggest issue was that it was very difficult to describe the archetypal pattern. So how do you describe that? The Mandala is an archetypal pattern. There are different aspects of the pattern and, there are images in the pattern. Those images are inherited. The images are fragments of aspects of how we can operate, move, or exist in the world.
The complex is also an archetype. Jung describes the structure of the complex as a series of associated images and frozen memories of traumatic moments that are buried deep in the unconscious and not readily available for retrieval by the ego [1] (Jung, 1969). In Jungian psychology, the ego is a small reflection of the self. The ego, for Jung, is the center of consciousness. Whatever is in the ego-consciousness is not in the unconscious, and whatever is not in the consciousness is always in the unconscious. With that, complexes arise because of a traumatic experience. For example, if you had a terrible relationship with your father and are scared of your father, and that is trauma in the complex. The complex is traumatized. The trauma within the complex, as it’s an archetype, starts to extract energy. Jung said that the complex has a nuclear core of self-generating and self-perpetuating energy [1] (Jung, 1969).
How do you identify a complex? It is felt. It is felt from your toes, on the tips of your fingers, on your lips; a person is charged up. People call it anxiety, people say “I felt anxious, I felt judged.” What is felt is the complex. The complex is drawing out more and more energy. As the complex draws out more and more energy, it takes away all other functioning areas, and the person does not think about anything else. What is thought about over and over again is “How am I feeling? What is he saying? Why is he saying that?” The complex charges up a person and, the person cannot discharge the energy. The energy just keeps gripping the person, and the person ends up getting more and more upset.
This can go on for a day, it can go on for a week, it can go on for a month. This is called possession by the complex. Complexes are created from trauma. The pattern already exists. The creation of it, the movement to a complex has not been created yet. But the first time your father or your mother yells, and it upsets you, the complex is born. The trauma usually is an explosion of consciousness that is indigestible to the person. What comes into consciousness at a certain point changes everything? Here is the paradox. A person becomes traumatized by the consciousness of the event, but the defense mechanism is splitting the event off from consciousness.
According to Jung, the primary defense mechanism of the psyche is dissociation [2] (Kalsched, 2013). Traumas, or intolerable pain, are dissociated into the complexes. What happens is akin to a small hand grenade going off, and shards of the grenade embed themselves within the complex. The psyche cannot accept the events. As a child, this is a consciousness that I am not able to tolerate. Developmentally, psychologically, the child is not ready for this. The event is traumatizing. Those dissociated aspects of the trauma first work on the level of protecting the individual. The dissociation protects the person from the image, from the feeling state, and from the thinking state. But slowly, this protection turns into imprisonment because it cannot be shaken off. It is always an irritant. If the person hears a scream, they start to sweat. If the person sees somebody raising their hand, their heart rate increases. If the person hears a car noise in the background, that feeling returns, but it does not return as an image. What returns is an emotional pull, a sickness in the pit of the stomach feeling.
Regarding the complex, what do we do with it in psychotherapy? What we do in psychotherapy is try to work through the complex. We try to show the pattern of the complex to the individual. The problem with that is the emotional charge that the complex possesses. By the time we get to the point where we have been working with a traumatized patient on an issue, and they arrive at a moment of realization that might help them move away from the edge, time is up. Therefore, what happens is that the image, the pattern that we were trying to show the patient, collapses and now they feel more traumatized by the feeling of failure.
We are now in the 21st century, yet we are still talking about psychotherapy using concepts from the 19th century. How do we bring psychotherapy into the 21st century? We need to understand that complexes and archetypes do exist. To work with the complexes, a practitioner must respect the complexes and respect the archetypes. Jung says that the complexes and the archetypes are transcendent [1] (Jung, 1969). The complexes are from the beginning of our past and they move through our future. The complexes are transcendent. The complexes are not held by time. We are working with transcendent archetypal images broken off into complexes.
3. How JAMP Works
How does one work with complexes that take all this energy? The idea is to move the energy. In order to work with complexes in a new way, we work toward moving the emotional energy essentially out of its historic, negative impact and transforming it while we are addressing the complex. The energy is moved using bilateral sound and a light ball that goes back and forth.
How JAMP treatment interacts with the brain is similar to what is naturally occurring in a stage of sleep that is called REM which stands for Rapid Eye Movement, As Arden reports, in REM sleep almost all levels of wakeful activation your body goes through when it is awake are present. The energizing neurotransmitters are active and your metabolism goes up during REM. So, during REM, you may dream you are running or swimming and it will feel like it is in waking life [3] (Areden, 2010). Thus, REM is essential in the resetting of our invisible internal clock. The bilateral sound and the light you follow in the JAMP treatment replicate REM sleep. Thus, it helps correct course, reprocesses information that was lost, lessens anxiety and worries. It encourages a state of being more hopeful, a sense of a new day beginning, and helps eliminate the fear associated with trauma. With the JAMP treatment, you are able to process very difficult and complicated negative feelings by similarly resetting your internal clock.
Our autonomic nervous system is made up of two systems: One is the sympathetic nervous system—your fight and flight defense system—and the second is the parasympathetic system—dubbed the relaxation response by Harvard Professor Herbert Benson [4] (Benson, 2010). The parasympathetic system helps slow your breathing rate and your heart rate. When one is in a trance-like state as when one is in the JAMP treatment, one is able to access feeling states that would have caused a great deal of emotional dysregulation and activated the fight or flight response. Because JAMP works with the nervous system in a parasympathetic state, we are able to treat the traumatic memory without activating the sympathetic nervous system.
The emotional energy we talk about moving using JAMP, the energy that is activated by complexes, refers to electrical & chemical signals that carry information within the neurula network that guides all brain activity. That neuronal network guides our feelings, thoughts, decisions and memories. The transfer of communication occurs between neurons at synapses and is mediated by a chemical signal referred to as a neurotransmitter [5] (Kringelbach & Berridge, 2010). The most well-known of those neurotransmitters—Dopamine, norepinephrine and epinephrine—are a group of neurotransmitters called “catecholamines”. They facilitate a wide variety of experiences and our desire to engage in those activities.
Brain structure is formed by the cerebral cortex which is divided into four lobes. There’s the outer layer of the brain which is responsible for all that we associate with being human, like imagination, language, thinking and reasoning. The frontal lobe modulates behaviour, forethought and strategy. The occipital lobe, in the back section of the brain processes visual information. The temporal lobe at the bottom section of the brain processes auditory, feelings, memory and visual item recognition. The middle section of the brain, the parietal lobe, incorporates information from memory and from multiple sensory modalities from within the body. Below the cerebral cortex, at the center of the brain, relates to reward, well-being and emotional processing. The neuroscientific literature indicates that the overlapping between the subcortical and cerebral cortex is where the subjective experiences of pleasure, happiness and general well-being occur. The subcortical structures that are involved in these networks and the processing of feelings, emotions and rewards are as follows the prefrontal cortex regions, orbitofrontal cortex, the medial prefrontal cortex, amygdala, ventral pallidum, nucleus accumbens, ventral tegmental, insula and ventral pallidum [6] (Dolcos, 2018).
Relative to the interaction between negative emotional stimuli and response inhibition, Hartikainen suggests that, “in addition to perceptual level competition for processing resources between emotional stimuli and task-relevant stimuli, there is a competition at higher processing levels including executive control [7] (Pessoa, 2009). High-threat stimuli activate wide cortical and subcortical networks and regions and are thought to consume resources related to attentional and effortful control. An unexpected threat, outside the scope of a current task, calls upon executive functions to minimize it. In addition, inhibitory control functions are needed for inhibiting undue emotional reactions and inappropriate behavioral responses. The inhibitory controls of motor and emotional responses are both thought to engage right-lateralized networks [8] (Banich and Depue, 2015). Competition for the shared inhibitory control resources between response inhibition tasks and threat-related inhibitory processes might be expected. If threat-related processing is prioritized, competition for shared resources could lead to a compromised response inhibition performance. This would be in line with previously discussed interference of other right hemispheric functions, such as attending to the Left Visual Field (LVF) [9] [10] (Hartikainen, 2007, 2010) and global-level visual processing [11] (Hartikainen, 2000), due to threat [12] (Hartikainen, 2021).”
What Hartikainen describes is what occurs because of the presence of trauma that is embedded in the right hemisphere. JAMP resolves this competition by relieving the threat of an “inhibitory process”, i.e., negative, beliefs, thoughts, worries and fears that occur within the right hemisphere due to the existence of traumatic experiences. This state is present due to trauma and cannot disengage when it’s activated, except when using the JAMP treatment. JAMP treatment activates the parasympathetic nervous system. It helps re-align both hemispheres thus synchronization occurs leading one to experience, increased relaxation, increased accessibility to brain activity, increased recall, and increase in positive insight. It also deactivates the emotional portion of the cortex border resulting in increased attentional flexibility, increased fear extinction, reduction in avoidance behavior, increase in intense focus and problem solving, and increased thought and emotional integration.
4. JAMP and Chronic Pain
To date, JAMP treatment has shown amazing relief of chronic pain as well as trauma. Recent studies have shown links between early childhood trauma, such as physical abuse, sexual abuse and psychological abuse and chronic pain. Burke, et al., confirmed this in a study of the relationship between trauma and chronic pain. “They noted there are strong prospective links between early-life trauma (i.e., physical, psychological, and sexual abuse) and the later development of chronic pain. Additionally, they discuss the evidence that later posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) amplifies the predictive enduring and the damaging effects of such abuse.” [13] (Burke, Finn, McGuire, and Roche, 2017)
“The amygdala subregions and their connectivity to various brain areas show it to play an important role in all emotions as well as chronic pain [14] (Diano, 2017).” It has been proposed that the amygdala’s main role involves the evaluation of the behavioral salience and motivational aspects of sensory stimuli that can engage emotional, autonomic, and motor responses via connections to the hypothalamus, thalamus, and cortex [15] (Sander D, 2003). As related to emotion regulation, “the amygdala’s connections allow rapid, automatic regulation of emotional behavior”. [16] (LeDoux, 2010) JAMP treatments lower the intensity of amygdala firing and increase the cognitive processing of the traumatic event.
5. Releasing Energy from Complexes via JAMP
When confronting a traumatic event in any context, therapeutic or otherwise, complexes are triggered. With JAMP complexes are deliberately triggered, but rather than allowing the person to relive their trauma in an effort to desensitize the person to the negative emotional energy, we short-circuit the complex, using affirmations to fill in the gaps created by the reorganization of energy. JAMP’s use of positive affirmations helps in the processing of difficult and traumatic memories with positive affirmations. Thus, the affirmation is processed in relation to the old trauma and becomes embedded in the right hemisphere. For example, the new associated affirmations “I am powerful, I am strong, I am brave, I am not afraid” fill the gaps of feeling helpless that originally occurred during the traumatic event itself. The positive affirmations serve to disarm the defense mechanisms historically employed by the complex. With the defense mechanisms disarmed, the dissociated images start to return. Emotions turn into feelings, feelings turn into thoughts and thoughts turn into symbols. Symbols can be integrated into the psyche.
We are energetic beings and our complexes feed off of our energy. The complex hoards energy, and when it does that, all other systems are offline. We have to move the energy while we are addressing the complex. When we say “complex”, we are talking about the archetypal defense that creates a complex, conflictual pattern that the individual has within them. We move the energy using bilateral sound and a light that goes back and forth. We are reorganizing the energy, and thereby releasing the “shards” of emotional energy from the complex.
The complex is triggered by deliberately activating the conflictual idea. At the point of this activation, we can move the energy. We use positive affirmations to fill in the gaps created by the release of energy from the complex. The positive affirmations disarm the defense mechanisms that the complex uses. When we think about archetypes, we must remember that they are transcendent. They do not respond to us as masters. Rather they are masters unto themselves and have evolved since the beginning of time.
The complex, which Jung referred to as having a nuclear core, is where the energy becomes super charged and thus the emotional roller coaster will not be interrupted. We say things like “I am spinning out of control” or “you are out of control”. What people are referring to is that the “ego” has lost control. The ego is the element of consciousness that organizes us and presents us to the world. People recognize us by our “ego” organization/presentation. A riddled with insecurities, fractured, disrupted ego is seen as indecisive, erratic, easily swayed and indecisive. On the other hand, a commanding ego is precise, decisive, forward progressing and enigmatic. The ego is also a complex and comes from the archetype that Jung calls the Self or “Chief Architect” [1] (Jung, 1969).
In the case of parental complexes, it is archetypal images of the mother and father that represent the great King and the Great Queen. These images are derived not from our personal experience but from the collective unconscious, which is the great ocean that has existed since the beginning of time. We have had billions of mothers and fathers throughout time in many different forms. Individuals do not exist as independent molds that were created. Individuals are the experience of humanity in eternity. In Jungian speak, the self is as old as time. The self is a reflection of the cosmos. Besides what most people recognize as the things a person inherits, the color of their hair and eyes, height, strength, teeth, people also inherit humanity’s images, patterns, and the archetypes that have been passed through since the beginning of time. People have transcendent functions within their psyches that take over like someone started a new program on their computer without touching anything. The dynamics are that these transcendent functions are unleashed and the energetic nuclear core of the complex takes over. It starts to attract all the energies like a magnetic reaction within the individual. After you are released from the complex, it feels like you have just come out of the spin cycle of an incredibly powerful washing machine. You are completely depleted and can’t grasp what has happened to you.
Remember the first law of thermodynamics: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Our energy is finite. The psyche has a grand function with its own distribution and equilibrium, and it distributes its energy into places where it is needed. With this release, the dissociated images start to return. The emotional state, that irritating emotion, turns into a feeling. Now it is a feeling state. Now it can be a thought: to understand why it hurts so much. Now it can be archived in the psyche as a symbol. Jung says that the psyche is “mythopoetic” [17] (Stein, 1998). Our psyche is a creator of the narrative, the first storyteller. That is how the psyche comes out in dreams; it is why we love telling stories. If something happens and there is no explanation psyche will create an explanation. Traumatized psyche creates explanations to fill in the gaps. That does not mean that traumatized psyche integrates it for you; traumatized psyche will simply fill in the gaps. There will always be a problem because despite filling in the gaps, those gaps keep opening up. Emotions turn into feelings, feelings turn into thoughts, and thoughts turn into symbols, then the psyche can say, “Okay, I’ve experienced that, and I can put that away.”
According to Jung, complexes are created by trauma. Before the trauma or the event, the archetypal piece exists as energy represented as an image or symbol. The archetype is the main motivating force of creation but does not carry the same disturbing anxiety-producing qualities of the complex due to its personal nature or what Jung referred to as “a feeling tone complex” [18] (Jung, 1973). The trauma creates an emotionally charged memory image that becomes associated with the archetypal image. These things together freeze into more or less a permanent structure, they are so identified due to humanity’s history with trauma or the event. Thus, a complex becomes enriched and extended by later similar bad experiences and traumas. However, not all traumas are external or are inflicted by abrasive collisions with the environment. Some traumas occur internal to the individual psyche. See Dr. Murray Stein’s book, Jung’s Mapof the Soul.
Jung and Freud were soul hunters. They wanted to capture the soul, to dissect the soul, to understand the soul. They wanted to possess the soul. That is what they started. Whether or not they were aware is something else. A quote from Dr. Stein,“complexes have the ability to rub suddenly, spontaneously into consciousness; to take possession of the ego’s functions”. [17] (Stein, 1998)
Complexes and archetypes, how do we function? In psychotherapy, we try to help people understand their patterns by taking them through their stories and by reflecting them back to them. I am talking about analytical talk therapy. I am not talking about cognitive behavioral therapy, which treats human beings like they are nothing but organic beings without a psyche. Remember, we are not just organic beings, we know that from DNA and science. We are inorganic beings as many as organic ones. The psyche, the self, the complexes and the archetypes are not organic. We have them just the same as they have us. The archetypes are not the problems but the origin of all we are. They inform us, help us, feed us and guide us. A problem becomes a complex because of the trauma. The complex that is erected is a problem because it is a security force, an alarm. Trauma is an invasion of the psyche. Internal security forces are trying to force out the invaders, and the person finds that they have turned against themselves and internal insurgency has evolved. We just don’t know it yet. The speed by which that happens is how you know the trauma has been internalized.
The complexes are part of the inner world, meaning they exist in a separate reality that is connected to us through soma or the body. The complexes absorb energy; they have a nuclear core. They will possess the ego or isolate it when they are activated. Complexes become activated or triggered by anything that the psyche has dissociated that is related to the trauma. Activating events are triggers that are associated with the trauma and then get split off. Usually, triggers are the first things that get split off.
In Jungian Advanced Motor Processing (JAMP), I have developed a method to go into the complex, distribute the energy and then flood the complex with positive self-affirmation to saturate it with healing, and repair the splintered and shattered internalized pieces/images of the Self. The complex still exists as a pattern; it just does not operate with that energy anymore; the nuclear reactor is offline. You can actually reflect on the trauma without being triggered or possessed by the trauma. The example of Grace shows the efficacy and outcomes of JAMP as described by one recipient of the treatment.
6. Case Study: Grace
Grace is a client with whom I employed JAMP. She says, “I was born in 1963 in Oregon. I am the youngest of five children. My parents were descendants of immigrants from Italy, Greece, and Germany, and both of my parents grew up poor. My father’s parents did not have a shared language in which they were both fluent. Both of my mother’s parents did not speak English. My siblings consisted of three sisters and one brother.”
Grace goes through their ages; she was the youngest. “They are 12, 8, 4, and two years older than I am, with my brother being my nearest sibling in age. As my siblings were born, they paired off, with the two older sisters making one team and my next sister and brother making the other team. I was the odd one. Our family moved relatively frequently due to my dad’s work. He was determined not to be poor and worked his way up in a corporation, starting as a low-level office clerk and was a high-level executive when he retired. He amassed a great deal of monetary wealth. By the time I was three years old, our family had lived in four different homes. A period of relative stability followed with us living in one house for six years, then another house in another city for seven years. We relocated again when I was starting my junior year of high school. I was the last child left at home. I did not attend kindergarten but started grade one at the age of 5. I had attended six schools by the time I graduated high school.”
Grace’s case is what we call complex PTSD because trauma has been redefined. There is trauma, complex trauma, PTSD, and Complex PTSD. Complex PTSD has more physical symptoms involved.
“Both of my parents were accustomed to a fairly high level of violence in their homes. As children, my siblings and I fought constantly. Our family was hierarchical, top-down, and I was at the bottom of the heap. I was the youngest and the smallest. At an early age, it became apparent to me that fighting back did not work well. Being so small, I was not usually able to overpower or outrun my siblings; my survival strategy consisted primarily of hiding. If I were in a situation where I was unable to hide, I would cover my eyes and pretend like I was invisible. Apparently, I learned to dissociate at an early age. My parents rarely, that I recall, punished us physically. This was due to one of my aunts threatening my father with death if she heard of him hitting one of his children or his wife after he had delivered a significant beating to my eldest sister when she was less than four years old. Instead, my father practiced emotional and verbal abuse. He was highly skilled. Until well into our adult years, each of us thought we were the only one subjected to his lectures.
Physical abuse was delivered from sibling to sibling, from the eldest down to the youngest. My eldest sister (A) believes being perfect is the main goal in life and strove hard to be the perfect daughter. She doled out punishment on the younger siblings when we were less than perfect. The next sister (M) was, in a way, salvation for the rest of us. She was the wild card. Later diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she was the one who took the pressure off being perfect by being the opposite of perfect. She perfected lying, stealing, substance abuse, and multiple forms of abuse primarily directed at her younger siblings. Whereas A mostly “fought like a girl” by slapping and pulling hair, M utilized these methods as well as scathing verbal and emotional abuse and added hitting and kicking to the repertoire. To be somewhat fair, M was no doubt suffering and received a significant amount of negative attention from our parents. She was kicked out of the house while she was in high school.
The next sister, T, was also physically abusive. She was also cruel, whereas most of the other siblings were simply mean. T had the kind of mind to devise truly cruel methods of psychological torture. T was personally responsible for every major childhood injury I sustained—a broken arm, mangled left foot (still a half size smaller than the right foot), broken nose and concussion, to name the most memorable events. My mother, on the other hand, believed T was the reincarnation of her own mother, whom she idolized. So, T got a free pass for virtually any behavior for which any of the rest of us would have received condemnation and ex-communication. Finally, my brother J was mostly my nemesis and also the closest thing I had to an ally. He was responsible for my having bruises on my biceps my entire childhood until I graduated high school and moved out of the house. I was 16 years old, and for the first time, I did not have bruises covering my upper arms from where he punched me in the arms.”
Can you imagine this child was abused from day 1? This is why we call it complex PTSD. There are physical symptoms as well as psychic disturbances; flashbacks, fear, anxiety, anger and self-hate.
“All of us were either too fat or too skinny. Each of us girls was fat, stupid, and ugly. Adolescence for me was particularly fun. I first began fantasizing about running away from home around the age of 11. Being chronically depressed I never did attempt to run away as I played it out in my head and, having no money, I decided that I would probably get caught, returned to my family, and things would only be worse. By the time I was 15, I had decided suicide was a better option and had devised a means and method to carry out the task at hand.”
Then her parents get her a puppy as a companion for her 16th birthday. This narrative says, “All of my siblings were out of the house, and the dog is the reason I chose not to end my life.” The self always gives a person a reason to go on. There is always something out there that they can hold onto in order to move forward.
“I spent most of my younger adult life trying to fit into my family and failed miserably. I continually returned to the milieu in an attempt to have a corrective experience. My worldview was so skewed by my experience of ‘normal’ that, as an adult, I did not think the continued abuse was unusual. Every time I was around my siblings, the verbal and physical abuse began again, and every visit with the parents was additional emotional and verbal abuse. I was very poor financially throughout my 20s and 30s. At no point did anyone in my family offer assistance. I worked hard, usually at least two jobs, to make ends meet and lived very simply. I was programmed to believe that it was not okay to ask for help. Meanwhile, my parents gave one of my sisters money for a down payment on a house, continually provided my substance-abusing sister with monthly money to support herself, and were otherwise relatively generous with money to my siblings. At one point, I was homeless, sleeping on a couch in a friend’s unfinished basement. Despite working two jobs, it took me three months to save up enough money for the first, last and deposit on an apartment. I’d left my previous dwelling to escape an abusive relationship. My primary lifeline throughout my life was my maternal aunt.”
This aunt is the only person who was ever nice to her.
“This aunt and uncle loved me unconditionally. Unfortunately, I rarely got to see them. Most of the time, we either did not live in the same city, or my mother didn’t want to go and visit them because my father disapproved of them because they were blue-collar. They rarely were invited to visit us because of my father’s disapproval. This aunt and uncle were literally the only people in my life for 37 years who validated my experience and suggested that perhaps the way my family treated me was not right. My aunt passed away when I was 37. At that point, I entered therapy as I was unable to stop crying for months on end. I could not stop weeping.”
Can you imagine? The only character, the only symbol of safety, the only symbol of love, the only symbol to hold on to, dies. Grace cries for months.
“Some of the things that have come up in the course of my life in regards to my family, which I then chose in my relationships, were deceit, deception, betrayal, lack of trust, belittling, undermining, utter lack of caring. These were the things that I generally found in relationships with friends and partners, as this is what was familiar to me. I continued to attempt to re-engage and have a different experience.”
Grace was continually hurt and disappointed when things were the same. She stayed in therapy mostly full-time for more than 15 years.
“I grew, I made changes, and my therapist encouraged me to attend graduate school. I received a master’s degree in psychology. I started my career in my 40s. Previously I had a series of unrewarding jobs. I began to realize that I am really smart, attractive, funny, loyal, reliable, loving; my life changed significantly.”
Fifteen years to get her from point A to point B.
“In 2014, I started a hiatus from my private practice. Two months later, I suffered significant trauma.”
This is why we talk about complex trauma and complex PTSD. This is complex PTSD; this is a series of traumas. It is a sea of traumas. They are all interconnected; it is a giant wave of trauma, a 1000-foot wave. All these family pattern habits of betrayal, deceit, and neglect reappear in a larger-than-life format. It was impossible to ignore them.
“After the traumatic event, I was unable to function for about three months. It was an effort to get out of bed every day, let alone do anything else. Despite seeking help in every avenue imaginable, I was still gutted.”
Because the complex controls the energy, the person is gutted.
“I eventually attended a week-long silent meditation retreat and believed I was better. I was able to function to a degree. However, I was dead inside and felt separate from everyone else in the world. As time went on, rage and anger drove my actions. I began over-functioning. It seemed like negative emotions were the only ones I had, and the depth of my inner numbness made me feel like I wasn’t even having feelings. I didn’t actually care about anything or anyone. I became passive and increasingly resentful.”
What happens with the trauma? The illusion of safety in this reality is shattered.
There is a lot of self-blame and negative self-talk that occurs when a person is triggered. They fault themselves and begin to call themselves negative names. They think about and talk about their value. Remember, the psyche is compensatory.
Four weeks after Grace shared this narrative, she began treatment with Jungian Advanced Motor Processing (JAMP). She now reports that she no longer feels dead inside. She has positive feelings; she does not get triggered. “I can now contemplate the traumatic event of 2014 and allow myself tender feelings.”
I continued working with Grace. We still did JAMP regularly; for different reasons, and it was more integrative. Grace has started to draw images. Grace feels integrated, and she is not as angry. How do I know this? How do I know she is not as angry and she is more integrated? I do not have a transference reaction to her. When I worked with Grace at the beginning, I would have serious counter-transferential reactions to her. I would feel that nobody loves me. It would make me deeply sad, and tears would start running down my face. I started to feel like nobody cared. That is not my emotional state. That is not my feeling state. I have friends, and I have families. I am loved. However, when that feeling state hit and I became so emotional, so angry, I could not put my finger on what was happening. That was a counter-transferential reaction. That was Grace’s emotional state in which she existed.
Whitmont states “Healing integration then is to be seen as that sort of a ‘coming to terms’ with the new by that which on the one side manages to maintain organismic integrity through preserving indispensable, established form element, yet on the other side sacrifices, ‘eliminates’ a part of its individuality in order to allot a sort of ‘living space’ to the ‘intruder.’…The healing sacrifice consists of the surrender, expulsion or dematerialization of an existing sub-system for the sake of creating, preserving ring, recreating or fulfilling the gestalt-entelechy of the whole.”
With JAMP©, Grace does not have to go through 15 more years of therapy. I continued working with Grace for over a year, yet she could have stopped after 12 treatment sessions. Grace continued with JAMP© treatment because she enjoyed the personal exploration. Grace did not continue JAMP© sessions because she needs it. That is the difference. Jungian Advanced Motor Processing provided significant symptom relief within a matter of months.
7. Conclusion
Jungian Advanced Motor Processing (JAMP) transforms because it unwinds and re-circulates energy contained in a complex so that a person no longer fights against themselves. The 19th century and the 20th century are gone. We are in the 21st century, and a new therapy has to emerge. In JAMP, we have a new treatment that will liberate individuals from their complexes and let them live free of fear. The treatment is available online. Right now, our protocols, the treatment itself, the length of the treatment, and the effectiveness of the treatment, produce significantly positive results more quickly than traditional treatment techniques.