Act-Outs Are a Funny Thing

 For years I was drawn to crime stories in the newspapers.  Ordinarily, we would not consider  that an act-out but it was, as so many small little act-outs are.  Understanding the act-out helps me comprehend the more egregious act-outs.  Those that are damaging to others.

 For each act-out there is  almost always a feeling behind it; and the more compulsive and obsessive the act the stronger the feeling and usually the earlier it is in life. That is one way we know where the “push” comes from and on what level of brain activity it lies.  So in rage we pretty much know it is brainstem, first-line.  This is also true of other feelings or sensations driven by the first line:  terror, not fear; fury, not annoyance; suicidal hopelessness, not passivity.

 Mind you, I never knew I was acting out or even what an act-out was.  But when I got to the feeling under it, I finally knew.  And what was it?  I was looking for justice. I wanted the guilty party to be found, judged and convicted.  I clearly was acting out my feelings at home.  I was told to do things that made no sense, punished for acts over which I had no control.  Made to feel guilty for the least transgression.  I was continuously afraid of making a mistake.  I was looking for redemption.  It is also why I had a Primal over that lion I wrote about who was raised by a kind lady who came back to see him after five years; he hugged and kissed her.  I waited years for someone to say they loved me.  That all was forgiven and that I was not such a bad person, after all.  And in many of my Primals I cried, “Say I’m good.  Please!”  For those parents who were unloved and never were approved of, they are looking for the same thing.  Before they can say someone else is good they need to hear it for themselves.  It never happens.

 Many act-outs are in the sexual realm; and that same feeling I had can be transported into sex.  Wanting to get even; looking for justice.  So a person wants to dominate and command her sex partner; reliving exactly what happened to her.  That reliving is an attempt at resolution.  It is also a way of “getting even.”

 One woman needed to be spanked again and again in sex.  What was behind it?  Her father pulled down her panties to spank her. That bare-skin contact was what she desperately needed, and she got it with punishment.  She became obsessed with spanking and needed more and more of it in order to orgasm. Imagine! Instead of pleasure leading to climax, it became pain.    Look deep into the act-out and we find pain.

 What we see is how all relevant feelings congeal into a focused act that symbolizes those feelings in the same behavior.  If I punish someone over and over again they will certainly look for justice.  It is not only act-outs that are involved but act-ins also.  So those same feelings can produce a migraine or high blood pressure.  Once they surpass the limit of repression to hold down the feeling there are act-outs or act-ins.  That depends on many things;  a vulnerability of certain weak organs…..tendency to allergies, for example.
 Or a prenatal history that forced act-ins.  A highly blocked fetus who is parasympathetically dominant.  His modus operandi is to be repressive not expressive.  I wrote a book on this called, The Imprint.  It is complicated and needs to be read more deeply.  It is in the way the imprint is laid down.  Maybe later I will expand on it.

 But imprints dog nearly all of us.  They force acts that are completely unconscious and therefore cause all kinds of misery in the world.  So if you cannot feel wrong then you will be a master of figuring out how others are to blame.  Until you feel, feeling wrong is devastating for a young child because it means he is not loved.  He has to shuck that “wrong” immediately and make you wrong.  There is no relief from his abuse except for him to feel wrong in context.  Always in context for that and that alone is resolving.