Self - Encounters & the Intention Method: The Practice of IoPT

Von Franz Ruppert, Ute Boldt und Susanne Bhangu

This book explains in detail Identity Oriented Psychotrauma Theory (IoPT) and the method of therapy that goes along with it (The Intention Method). Illustrated through numerous examples, the book shows the amazing abilities our human psyche has to resonate with the psyche of others and how we can help bring unconscious processes to light. This is an extremely effective therapeutic process for genuine change.

• Sprache: Deutsch
• Herausgeber: Eigenverlag
• Erscheinungsdatum: 25. März 2023
• ISBN: 9783982211572

Franz Ruppert

Prof. Dr. Franz Ruppert ist 1957 in Bayern geboren, er lebt in München und ist seit 1992 Professor für Psychologie. Er hat ein eigenes Institut für Fort- und Weiterbildung und eine Praxis für Psychotherapie. In 30 Jahren beruflicher Tätigkeit konnte er die Identitätsorientierte Psychotraumatherapie (IoPT) schrittweise entwickeln. Dieses hocheffektive Therapieverfahren wurde bislang bereits in 10 Büchern dargestellt. Diese sind in 13 verschiedene Sprachen übersetzt. Herr Ruppert ist international tätig und einer der bekanntesten und führenden Traumatherapeuten weltweit.

Buchvorschau

1. The Development of IoPT

Family Constellations - a chance encounter?

It all began for me back in June 1994, at a workshop given by Bert Hellinger at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. This was the first time I had been picked to act as a representative in a Family Constellation. The moment I was chosen, I got this incredible sensation that I had a big hole in my stomach. As the person whose Constellation it was then went on to explain, they wanted me to represent a Jewish relative who had been shot during the Holocaust.

The second role I got called upon to represent during that workshop was that of someone’s son. During the representation I got this sense of being really big and feeling vastly superior to my parents. In many ways I could relate to in terms of how I was with my own parents and as part of my own story, but I was still very struck by how quickly the experience took me over and the speed at which these feelings all came up in me.

The experiences that I had during that workshop were completely revelatory to me, and if I hadn’t had them I probably wouldn’t have carried on doing Family Constellations over the next few years. Nor would I have spent the next thirty years going on to develop Identity-oriented Psychotrauma Theory (IoPT) and the Intention Method.

Was it just a coincidence that in an auditorium of over 200 participants, I got chosen as a representative on each of the two days? Was it just chance that one of my wife’s friends had only told me a day or so before that this workshop was even taking place, because she happened to be part of the team that was helping organise it? Was it purely coincidental that I had just seen Hellinger’s book ‘The Orders of Love’ on another friend’s kitchen table and he’d spoken to me about what a furore Family Constellations were causing in Germany at that time? And was it just chance that in this very book there were case studies about ‘adoption’, the very topic that I was currently discussing in a series of lectures at my university?

I never was then, and still am not now, what you could describe as a ‘spiritual’ person. I am very sceptical when it comes to anything bordering on the esoteric. If something is inherently illogical or contradictory then you’re never going to convince me otherwise. I need explanations to be rationally comprehensible and I reject arbitrary assumptions. Therefore, I am also very cautious when it comes to speculating or conjecturing how or why something is the way it appears. I prefer to wait until the actual explanation of a phenomenon gradually reveals itself to our human consciousness, in accordance with those wonderful lines of Rainer Maria Rilke:

ON PATIENCE

‘You have to give things their own,

quiet undisturbed development.

This comes from deep inside,

It cannot be pushed,

It cannot be accelerated,

Everything must take its gestation - and

Only then can it give birth…

Things must ripen like the tree,

Who does not force his sap

But stands confidently in the storms of spring,

Unafraid

That beyond it, summer

May not come. But it does come!

But it only comes to those who are patient,

Who stand there as if eternity

Lay before them,

So unconcerned, silent and vast…

You have to be patient

With all that is unresolved in your heart

And to try to love the questions themselves

Like locked rooms and like books that are written

For now in the most foreign of tongues.

The point is to live everything.

If you live the questions now

Perhaps then, someday far in the future,

You will gradually,

Without even noticing it,

Live your way into the answer

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 -1926)¹

The word ‘coincidence’ comes from the latin roots cum/com meaning ‘with’ or ‘together’ and incidere meaning ‘to fall upon.’ So it literally means ‘to fall upon together’. It’s what falls in your path - however that may come about. And then you have a choice. Do you pick up what has fallen infront of you or do you pass on by, pretending not to see, which means you will never get to appreciate it? Despite the criticism I may have for them today, I am still very grateful that Family Constellations fell across my path back in 1994.

Constellations and Self-Encounters

I went on to work intensively with Family Constellations for the next five years, and it is because of that, that I call the work that I do now ‘Self-Encounters’ rather than ‘Constellations’ (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: The differences between ‘Self-Encounters’ and ‘Classical Family Constellations’.

In Family or Systemic Constellations there is the idea that a person’s suffering is likely to have come about because of one of the following core reasons:

■ Because the family system, or organisation concerned, is no longer aligned along the ‘Orders of Love’.

■ Because, for example, we don’t properly appreciate our parents or we are not sufficiently grateful to them for their ‘gift of life’.

■ Because someone who should be part of the system is not properly acknowledged - this may be a former partner of one of our parents, a child who has been kept secret, a family member who has been excluded etc.

■ Because the rule that those who were born earlier should have priority over those who were born later is not being properly observed (for example in the order of siblings or in the hierarchy of a company).

In Family Constellations, therefore, the focus is on searching for who or what has fallen ‘out of order’, and this may be to do with one of our ‘ancestors’ from many generations back. This has led to ‘dis-order’ in the system, and this has to be corrected. According to ‘Family Constellations’, this can be done by appreciating each and every member of the system. Above all, we must forgive our own parents for the harm that they have done us (this may even include sexual abuse). We must reconcile with them - generally this takes place through a symbolic gesture of subordination. Only in this way can we get to take our rightful place in the system. Once this is done, we can be loved and recognised by others. If our system, from which we come or which we have created for ourselves, is in order, then we are also in order and our suffering will disappear.

DO I REALLY HAVE TO BE GRATEFUL FOR MY LIFE?

A man came to one of my workshops with the Intention ‘I am permitted to live’. During his Self-Encounter, it became clear that he thought he had to be grateful to his traumatised mother for ‘the gift of life’ that she had given him, despite the fact that his mother had mercilessly bullied him within an inch of his life. This is an extreme victim attitude. During the process of the Self-Encounter, it became clear that his mother didn’t have the slightest interest in him. And, of course, this is one of the worst possible things for a child - they do not want to imagine that such a thing is even possible. It is too threatening and painful for them. The only way the young child’s psyche can cope with this is to split. The survival part of the child can then continue to idealise the mother and resolutely hold on to the illusion that one day she will love him too.

Each person can only free themselves from their own trauma

If we properly understand human development we can see that the source of our life is within us. Yes, the egg comes from our mother and the sperm from our father and these fuse together, but it is our will to live that initiates that spark of life. We ourselves are the source of our own lives and are also responsible for how our lives develop. But our mother and father, and our relationship with them, provide the framework for this, and the favourableness or otherwise of those conditions, will have a direct effect on our development.

IoPT states that there can be interpersonal bonding and attachment systems that are in themselves traumatising. Primarily, we see this when traumatised mothers and fathers in turn go on to traumatise their own children and abuse them to satisfy their trauma survival strategies. Therefore, the way out of the problems that result from this is not to attempt to repair these kind of bonding systems, but to detach ourselves from these traumatising relationships, to detach ourselves from the entire traumatising systems, and, in this way, allow ourselves to grow up internally and become, not only psychologically, but in a very real practical sense, autonomous.

Any attempt to try to heal these kind of traumatised systems will prove impossible. And to think we can save others from being traumatised by these systems is in itself a trauma survival strategy. Because only each individual traumatised person can resolve their own trauma and liberate themselves from their own internal splits. No child can save their mother, father, brother or sister from their trauma. And similarly, parents cannot heal their children, even when they themselves have already severely traumatised them. But Family Constellations do not properly acknowledge this and so allow for a principle that is well-known in psychotraumatology, that of identification with the aggressor and the attitude of protecting the parent/perpetrator. There is no attempt made to resolve emotional conflicts by feeling the emotions, instead this is bypassed and resolution is attempted on a spiritual or intellectual/rational level.

What is possible in terms of IoPT however is that if a mother or father is prepared to face their own trauma and integrate those experiences into themselves in a deep and real way, a great burden is then lifted off of their children. Their children no longer have to be available to the parents as a ‘survival aid’. Relieved of this burden, their children can then finally devote themselves to looking at their own inner conflicts. Their focus can then be wholly concentrated on their own biography and what traumatising situations they themselves have experienced during their own life.

Because our whole biography is taken into account when it comes to this work, any problems cannot be quickly ‘fixed’ by one-off ‘Constellations’ that supposedly bring the external system back into order. What he have to work through is an in-depth exploration of our own inner system and that takes great courage and patience. I talk of this inner system in terms of our own psyche and inner world - and this is where we have to bring the trauma feelings to light that have often been repressed, split off and packed away from a very early age in our development.

I want to keep the many differences between IoPT and Family Constellations clear, and so I differentiate on a linguistic level as well as a methodological one. In this way, I speak in IoPT of ‘people going into resonance’ rather than referring to them as ‘representatives’ and I term the processes themselves ‘Self-Encounters’ and not ‘Constellations’.

Self-Encounters are a methodology that allows the rational, intellectual leftside of our brain, with all its focus on analysis and problem-solving, to take a back seat and allows more room for the right-side of our brain and indeed our entire body, with all its immediate responses, perceptions, experiences and feelings. This means that Self-Encounters can bring the psychological processes, that are going on inside us unconsciously, to light. The whole of our body is involved in this process of change and healing. And because of this, good therapeutic results can be achieved relatively quickly, which can’t be reached by methods that rely purely on the verbal.

The Central Themes of IoPT

IoPT is a theory of psychology that I have been developing since 2000, and have written about in eleven books so far, which have been translated into many different languages.²² There are also a number of excellent books written by Vivian Broughton which do a wonderful job of summarising, describing and expanding on IoPT thinking and theory (Broughton 2013, 2014, 2021). IoPT focuses its attention on:

■ The human psyche.

■ How the psyche develops, right from the very beginning of a person’s life, in other words from the moment of fusion between the egg and the sperm.

■ The possible causes and ways that a human psyche can be traumatised: usually rejection, violence and lack of love, with the awareness that this can happen prenatally, during the birth process and in those first few years afterwards before our conscious memory develops.

■ Identity and the Trauma of Identity.

■ Interpersonal attachment and bonding relationships, especially the mother-child bond.

■ Traumas in the mother-child relationship: I call this the Trauma of Love.

■ Death and the Trauma of Loss, the trauma of the loss of the bonds of love.

■ The development of human sexuality and the different forms of sexual trauma.

■ How identity disorders and traumatisation effect us on a physical bodily level.

■ The victim-perpetrator dynamic and the fact that perpetrators traumatise themselves through their own actions.

■ The impact on society because of how massively traumatised members of that society are, and how this leads to widespread perpetrator-victim dynamics and a complete lack of compassion in the economic and political sphere and ultimately results in war.

The Human Psyche

At its core, IoPT is concerned with the human psyche. What it is and how it develops from the beginning of a person’s life all the way through to their death.

I think of the psyche as the ability of a living organism to take in information that is relevant to it, to process it in a way that is in accordance with its needs, and to store that information. In conjunction with this, the psyche also governs the release of information into its external world, that is relevant to its coexistence with the world around it. I therefore assume that other living organisms such as plants and animals also have a psyche that is appropriate to them. Looked at in more detail, our ‘psychic abilities’ - I mean this in the literal sense as in referring to the abilities of the psyche - consist of:

■ The various forms of perception (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling)

■ Different feelings (fear, anger, love, joy, shame, disgust, pride)

■ An infinite number of ideas

■ Billions of thoughts

■ Memories stored in various forms in different parts of the human organism

■ Multiple ways of expressing oneself linguistically (mimicry, gestural, verbal)

■ A highly complex ability to control how the body moves from general movement to fine motor skills…

■ And the ability for self-reflections and to make one’s own life decisions.

This ‘information processing’ has two main purposes: the self-preservation of the individual living organism concerned and its contribution to the continued reproduction of the species. The psyche helps the individual to fulfil its inherent needs for fresh air, water and food, for movement, interpersonal relationships and sexual desire. It helps the person care for their own offspring in an appropriate and creative way in accordance with the situation and conditions they are in and in a way that is age-appropriate to the child.

EVERY CELL HAS A PSYCHE

In any living organism, the smallest unit is the cell. And every cell has the ability to absorb information from its environment, to process that data and to transmit information back to the outside. Each cell can also be said to be self-reflective in that it process information about itself, for example about its own current state or condition (Lipton 2006). Nerve cells are only special cells in that they are faster in their highly complex network of information processing, but all cells do this on some level. When these cells are packed together they form parts of an organ and then together those parts form a whole organ, like, for example, the brain, with its various parts, hemispheres and sub-brains.

And this is happening throughout the body. There is a constant stream of information being received by our sexual organs, our intestines and our heart. This information is then passed on from there, and transmitted both inside and outside the body. We therefore not only have a head brain, but also a sex brain, a gut brain and a heart brain. People who think of themselves as ‘cerebral’ or ‘brainy’ are using very little of the full potential that their psyche as a whole offers them.

When a new human being comes into existence, when the maternal egg and the paternal sperm cell unite, the psyche of a new human being is also born in that moment. It can experience life and store those experiences right from the very beginning (Alberti 2012; Chamberlain 2013). We should therefore not draw the erroneous conclusion that cognitive psychological processes are only possible through nerve processes in the brain.

EARLY TRAUMA

As soon as any living being begins to develop, the psychological functions become highly active because they are needed for self-preservation. For this reason, a person can still feel a fear of death even though it may have been from an experience very early on when their life was under threat. For example, the uterus may have been highly resistant to implantation and the newly formed child had to work with all its might to nestle its way into the uterine wall. For the child concerned, that first contact with their mother then had to become a fight to the death. They had to fight for their life or die. I saw this situation for real in a woman’s Self-Encounter that I was accompanying. At the end she said, Slowly, the more I shiver the calmer I get, because in reality I am actually soft and loving.

It is also a matter of life and death when someone who is still in the womb is on the receiving end of an abortion attempt. The child has to try to make themselves invisible, essentially hiding somewhere in the womb. Fear and panic permeate the child’s entire body. He or she has to split off this experience and then, if they survive, this split-off fear of death is taken with them into the rest of their life.

There are similar lifelong consequences when a child, whilst still in the womb, witnesses the death of their twin. This is then their first trauma of loss because an unborn child instinctively loves their twin sibling and wants to keep them alive (Bourquin and Cortes 2020).

There are many ways a child’s life can be threatened during the pregnancy, for example if the mother eats something toxic or if she smokes. The birth process too can be a life-threatening experience, especially when it comes to medical interventions such as caesarean deliveries, ventouse (suction-cup) extraction, pulling the child out with forceps or inducing the labour in the first place, all these can traumatise the child - as well as the mother - at this very early stage in their life. In extreme cases, the mother may die during, or shortly after, the birthing process and this obviously represents a massive early trauma of loss for the child and will have far-reaching consequences such as lifelong latent depression, a profound mistrust in partnership relationships, diffuse feelings of guilt and even chronic suicidal tendencies.

When we are a baby or a young child, we are especially vulnerable to trauma. Being born prematurely is a traumatisation (Specht 2014). Adoption is massively traumatising (Krüger 2014). Being farmed out into external care by relatives (Stoffers 2014) or nursery staff (Freund 2014) is also traumatising.

These are all facts but they are not recognised by society and are not properly acknowledged as traumas. Mainstream science and medicine has so far steadfastly refused to look at all the traumatisation that it systematically causes in the pre-, peri- and postnatal spheres (Assel 2016). In many therapies, however, these early traumas show themselves to be key to helping a person improve their physical and psychological health and their relationships. But if society at large continues to ignore their importance, is it any wonder that so many people are suffering from something whose causes they do not or cannot understand and that no one from the medical, psychotherapeutic or social-work system can properly explain to them?

Our unconscious early life experiences govern our lives in such a far-reaching way. It is heartbreaking that we have to give up contact with ourselves so very early on and then spend the rest of our lives on a futile quest to find ourselves again. Not only that, but there is also the wealth of problems these traumas go on to cause us in our future relationships and interactions, and the knock on effect that this has on society in general and our whole political system and climate.

It is also worth remembering that we experience these early traumas before we have a language for them. We feel the threats, but they remain unnameable.

BUDDHA AND HIS EARLY TRAUMA

It looks like this was also the case for a certain prince called Siddhartha who was born over 2600 years ago in what is now Nepal. He came from a wealthy family. On the outside it seemed he wanted for nothing, and yet he gave up all his wealth and his family life and set out on a solitary quest for the truth of human suffering. From his teachings came the philosophy of Buddhism (Khyentse 2007). It seems to me that Siddhartha searched high and low, in every nook and cranny that his mind could reach, but he could not see into the darkness of his own biography where the source of his suffering lay hidden: his mother had died shortly after his birth and he was raised by his father’s sister.

According to my experience in working with people whose mother died in childbirth, this is like a nuclear apocalypse for a child - it is a massive trauma of loss. The child not only desperately misses his or her own mother but there are also immense feelings of guilt: ‘It’s my fault that my mother died’. All this happens on a psychological level in a completely pre-conscious and unconscious way, and so is cut off from our conscious awareness, which only gradually develops in most people from their second to third year of life.

Perhaps this early loss of the primary mother bond is also the reason why Siddhartha recommended to completely detach oneself from all bonds or ‘attachments’, because then we can appear to no longer have any needs that may prove to be painful when they go unmet. In terms of IoPT, however, this is a trauma-survival strategy and it can never resolve the split in our own psyche.

The spiritual path as preached by the Buddha and others often involves the idea of detaching ourselves from our body, seeing ourselves as separate from it. The more extreme the spirituality the closer we think we are to pure consciousness. But this too can be seen as just a trauma-survival strategy in order not to have feel the distress we felt as a child and the unbearable pain of losing our mother. Because of the fears we have - the very real and justified fear of death, the pain and the enormous rage and disappointment we feel in relation to our own mother - we can then take refuge in the ideas of connecting to something ‘higher’ or ‘greater’ than us, connecting to ‘nature’, to the ‘cosmos’ and the ‘world whole’ but in doing so we just lose ourselves further and further. In contrast, IoPT focuses on a embodied and emotionled solution to traumatic conflicts instead of a spiritual and cognitive one.

MATERIALISTIC SOLUTION

In my view, the second dead end that we can take in trying to solve our emotional problems is based on the idea that we can eliminate them by putting ourselves into an ‘altered state’ by consuming drugs, medicines, medicinal plants or by fasting. Eating sugar, drinking coffee, smoking tobacco are the most widespread habits to get us out of a state of discomfort and back into a ‘better place’, but any alleviation of our pain is purely temporary.

Society’s answer to an individual’s emotional distress is, in most instances, for a doctor to prescribe the afflicted person psychiatric drugs. The effect of these psychotropic drugs can be roughly thought off as tampering with essential hormones or neurotransmitters so as to put the brain and the entire organism into an altered state - a dissociation from reality. Any emotional conflict that in reality still exists and remains unresolved is pushed to the side and the person concerned finds himself in an illusory state of apparent inner harmony.

But these kind of states only last for a short