Emotional Survival: Childhood Pain Relived in the Drama of Adult Life

By Rosa Cukier

The relational and emotional needs of babies and small children, when not systematically met, will generate feelings of low self-esteem, shame and humiliation. These feelings will remain at the core of the personality, covered up in various forms, ranging from a hurt child living inside an adult's body or a 'false self' of an apparently successful and narcissistic adult, or even like the complex borderline disorder in case of which the individual pushes away the people they need most. This book presents powerful techniques that can be applied in an intense therapeutic relationship, which help bring into the light this 'ghost-child' and enable reparatory work of the childhood wounds. It is a must-read for all therapists, teachers and relatives of adults and adolescents who struggle with childhood issues of abandonment, abuse and violence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257168293

Book preview

Emotional Survival

Childhood Pain Relived

in the Drama of Adult Life

Rosa Cukier

Copyright © 2007 Rosa Cukier ISBN 978-1-43570-645-3

eISBN: 978-1-25716-8-293

All rights reserved by the author. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

To Sonia Marmelsztejn, my cousin and friend, whom I closely studied with and discussed the material which I write about. She also helped me to cry and deal with the pain of mourning for my brother. Our Tuesdays together were really worth it!

To my husband, Nelson, and my children, Karina, Vivian, and Renato, who always support me in my urgent need to study, learn, write, and teach about mental disease.

To Raquel Cukier, my mother-in-law and a great friend, and to all the women in my life who were behind the scenes — maids, cooks, housekeepers — who helped me in my household life so that I could study and write.

Thank you, friends and great auxiliary egos of my life!

To Zé, my brother, for everything that he involuntarily taught me through his immense personal suffering.

Preface

One time many years ago a middle-aged client was in front of me sobbing and talking about her low self-esteem. She was telling me that when she was very little, her mother had inadvertently and casually told her that she had found her in a garbage can.

In the presence of such despair, my desire was to shake her with tenderness, as paradoxical as it may seem, and tell her: My God, it was just a joke! So much useless suffering, so many years for a stupid thing like that!

Because of such repeated depositions, I ended up agreeing with Zerca Moreno, from whom I heard approximately the following definition when she visited us for the first time in São Paulo in 1978: Psychotherapy is the act of taking care of the injured child that each one of us carries around inside of ourselves.

Therefore, when I read right in the first pages of Rosa Cukier's beautiful book almost the same words, I only rediscovered one more of the ideas and feelings we have in common and which bring us together. This, along with the same passion for psychodrama, enthusiasm for healthy and profitable theoretic discussion, and the comprehension that in dealing with psychodrama nothing is experienced outside of one's life. And it is exactly because of this that the tragic destiny of Rosa's brother, which she refers to as an example early in the introduction, leads me to say with shared emotion and brotherhood that something similar happened to me, which puts us directly in the ‘survivor’ category.

Also, like her, I cannot understand the psychotherapist's role unless it is to serve human suffering in its entire range and abundance. Theorizing about a subject is, or should be, to construct a competent base, supplying the right instrument to combat so much suffering, and should never be the result of vanity or a foolish discussion of empty scholarship as a scarcely disguised end in itself.

I understand Rosa's book in this way, a solid supply of means anchored in a deep sharing of her vast experience. It does not deny us generous flashes of the psychodramatic scenes in which she performs as director, substantiating the theoretical thought that she develops.

For this reason, Rosa Cukier has the daring and courage to venture into thorny subjects normally avoided by us psychodramatists, such as child abuse, narcissism, borderline clients, dissociation, and professional abuse. These are difficult themes, easily capable of revealing our frailties and insufficiencies, and leaving us immobilized and impotent in front of those who demand help determined by a clear, close, and coherent professional performance.

Displayed throughout the book are themes of equal relevance; such as the child within the adult, sticks for punishment, submission, sexual manipulations of which the child is the target, and including his physical and emotional needs.

The way the author deals with these questions shows both the positive and negative aspects, going from the conceptual in specialized literature up to psychodramatic understanding and management, with a great number of examples.

At another time, the process of reconstructing selfesteem is brought to our attention through the defining and re-dimensioning of the parent/child relationship form.

The treatment given to the subject of narcissism is offered to us by way of the sensitive use of imagination in which Narcissus himself appears and is comparably treated by Moreno and Bustos. This shows a difference in approach between one of the contemporary psychodramatic methods face to face with one of the original classical psychodramatic methods. At this point, the concepts of the complementary role, identity matrix, and interrelational and intrapsychic movements become interlinked in the vacuum of our theoretic doubts, comprising a new and particular way by the author of the interpretation of the phenomenon.

I completely agree with Rosa Cukier when she affirms that the ‘regressive’ psychodrama (quotation marks are the author’s) is not psychoanalytical, as it is frequently labeled. This controversy might possibly come from the repetition of psychoanalytical terms improperly applied to psychodrama, without the superposing of meanings.

One of the most pertinent criticisms of these questions was formulated approximately twenty years ago. Wilson Castello de Almeida proposed at that time the substitution of the term ‘regressive’ scene for ‘reliving’ scene, defining in a more widespread way the fusion of action, emotion, and insight which happens in the psychodramatic scenario.

Equally, ‘nuclear scene’ ends up giving the impression that in the psychodramatic scene, in reliving situations, only the scene that originated the transference is reproduced. In truth, the scene's faithfulness to scenery and characters is less important than the way of relating between them and clearing up the hidden plot to which the conflict is subordinate. The ‘exact’ time and locus, impossible to be guaranteed by memory, are not as relevant to the conflict's design as the re-edition (reliving) of the emotions and feelings involved in it.

For this reason, and knowing this, the author makes us a gift of an interesting technical guideline for the director's role in these dramatizations. It is the first clear systematization (at least to my knowledge) of the complex articulation of operations with which the psychodramatist comes across in the rescuing of the wounded child, finally taken care of inside the adult.

What else can be said about this very useful book which will not give away the ‘end of the film’ to the reader?

That the wonderful partnership between Rosa Cukier and Sonia Marmelsztejn, in the chapter that deals with the difficult topic of the borderline, teaches us from the characterization to the psychodynamic of these high-risk clients, in front of whom we so many times immobilize ourselves?

That the study of dissociation encompassing its pathological levels and post-traumatic stress clears up unknown aspects of child abuse?

And what can be said about professional abuse, dealt with in the last chapter, in which Moreno dilutes the therapist’s power with the introduction of the auxiliary ego and sharing?

And about Rosa, above all, the resonance. She has a competency full of emotion that is expected from an author and a therapist. She also has an abundant and consequential use of language that at no time runs away from suffering’s urgent call.

Sergio Perazzo,M.D.

Preface to the first English Edition

I am very glad to finally be self-publishing this book in English. I have tried for many years to be recognized and published by well-known publishers in the USA and the UK. However, no publishers seem interested in my books. Some of them were kind enough to answer my questions saying that psychodrama doesn’t have a big enough reading market for an author who is unknown in English-speaking countries.

Well, Dr. Adam Blatner introduced me to Lulu.com, a self-publishing site on the Internet, and through Angel Editing, this allowed me to bring out all of my three books. I have to give special Brazilian thanks and hugs to my dear friend Adam, and dear Mark, the kindest Internet editor that I could ever dream of having in my life. Thank you.

I also have to add a note about the bibliographic references: I tried to find the names of the books in English, as well the editors. However, I couldn’t get the place of origin of some editors, and also I couldn’t research the books in English to find the right page numbers that I mentioned in the Portuguese version. Sorry English-speaking folks, it is not easy to publish a book outside your native language.

Finally, I have to tell you that this book was first published in 1998, and is currently in its fourth edition in Brazil. It was my second book, and I received a very good response from the public, and especially from psychotherapists, students and psychodramatists. I have been receiving feedback from all over Brazil for the last ten years, showing me that child abuse and its consequences are far-reaching issues that should be discussed without rest for all of humanity.

My two other books are already available in English on Amazon and several other outlets; and I am very much looking forward to seeing the response to my work from the English-speaking community.

 Thank you,

     Rosa Cukier

Foreword

I have had this book inside of me for a long time. And today, for no reason, it decided to come out. I am a fortyfour-year-old woman, happily married for twenty-three years and mother of three very dear children. Professionally, I have been a psychologist since 1974 and have taken courses and specialized training in psychoanalysis, psychodrama and Eriksonian psychotherapy, along with several workshops in body therapies, gestalt therapy, family therapies, etc.

Out of my forty-four years of life, I have already dedicated twenty-seven to the most widely varied psychotherapeutic forms, from psychoanalysis to psychodrama. I have had six different therapists. I could tell you that all these therapists and their therapies were necessary only because, having chosen to be a psychologist, I was compelled to be treated as part of my own program or even that I wanted to learn from practice. But this is not the truth, at least in my experience.

The truth is that the decision to be a psychologist was the most intelligent way I had of asking for help when I was seventeen. I had an extremely troubled childhood in a family where dedicated but immature parents fought all the time. My only brother, much beloved and older than me, survived at the cost of very serious emotional defenses which culminated in his suicide in 1992.

In truth, dear readers, all of my years in therapies and different courses were, at first, a desperate search to help my sick brother (in the beginning, he was seriously depressed). After, I tried to make myself happier, less lonely, and self-sufficient (I was always a very good student with very few friends).

In the last ten years, I have actually felt that life has become less of a burden, and I dare say I have been happy. The help of some of my therapists, above all Dr. Dalmiro Bustos, was, and still is, invaluable for me.

My brother, however, did not have the same luck. He, and I only know this now, had serious personality problems. He was one of those clients who went to countless therapists, staying for two or three months with each one at most and swearing that he was already better or that the therapist was no good. Actually, Zé (as everybody fondly called him) defeated, one by one, all the therapists, doctors, friends, family, and rabbis who tried to help him. And he apparently never managed to get better.

Some scholars of human behavior say that, deep down; people like my brother are not really looking for help. What they are looking for is to prove a kind of basic hypothesis about life. In short, it is something like this: nobody is good enough to help me; my disease and I are stronger than everybody!

I do not believe this now; at another time, I did. I know that my brother truly wanted to be helped. Deep down, he wanted to be happy, to