Enactment - a shadowy something in your psyche
Sometimes, things feel a little weird.
I aspire to an exemplary level of conscious, present living. It is my intention to enter each moment of my life eyes wide open, clear, clean and available to the newness arising with each breath. This is basic tuned in living. And of course, complete fantasy.
Most of us, in reality, tend to stumble through life from one crisis to the next, with a scrappy bundle of unprocessed trauma, painful memory, and vague but largely irrational fears about the future. This is completely normal and don’t let the wellness industry deprive you of your scrapbook of chaos - it is from here that we create, apart from anything else. However, there is one particular avoidable form of difficulty that I want to address today. There is a thing that can strike at our behaviour, our feeling state, our wellbeing, our dreams and our security. But it is a thing which is not really ours and which we may well be able to step away from completely. I am speaking here of enactment.
Like a puppet
Enactment. An insidious, involuntary mode of being wherein we become like puppets on strings to a preset drama. This could be our own drama from out past. It could be that we have been cast in a role in someone else’s psychodrama. But what it is not is a clear, fresh, clean eyes open approach to each arising moment. No. It is a way of being that has an element of compulsion. It is usually unpleasant.
From the unconscious
Enactments come from a psychological place that we don’t have access to. They are enactments because there is something which wants to be known, but we are unaware of it. The only way for it to be present is for it to be enacted. This unconscious aspect to enactment is particularly uncanny, but provides the clue to how we can manage the situation.
The skill of the therapist
When you are snared in to the enactment of someone else, it is because that person’s psyche needs - for some reason - to enact a particular scenario. They need to set up a certain dynamic in their life. You become a pawn in the game which is established. You might act in a way deeply uncharacteristic of your usual way of being - it is mesmerising. This is how contemporary psychoanalysis works, how relational integrative psychotherapy also works. The therapist allows themselves to be ‘used’ in this way and lets themselves become acutely and exquisitely aware of their state of being when with the client. The therapist notices what happens and especially notices what is new in their own psyche. It might be new physical sensations, novel images, or uncharacteristic behaviours. When aware of them, the therapist assesses what is hers, what is alien, what is mysterious, and finds ways to draw attention to what they have begun to perceive, hopefully helping the client to draw more of this previously unknown material in to their own awareness. It is delicate work, and needs care, precision, courage, patience, skill and high levels of ethically drenched integrity to practice well (this is why your therapist has had so many years of training and therapy herself, to offer you this space).
(Isn’t this just projective identification?)
For the therapists reading this, you can think as enactment as a close cousin of projective identification, but with added…..actment. It is slightly more extraverted as processes go (and there is a very interesting piece of writing by Robin Brown in which he argues that enactment is a form of extraverted active imagination, but that might be for another day. Sorry that piece is behind a paywall but the abstract is visible - tell me if you are interested and I will write about it).
How do I know my experiences are ‘someone else’s stuff’? Sounds like a recipe for lack of responsibility to me…
This is the key. I think that it feels different when we are in an enactment, from when we are just being our usual not-yet-perfect selves. For example, what if you are late for your friend, but you are a person who is never late? You might be enacting something in his psyche that says ‘no-one ever attends to me properly’. Or how about you can’t get a certain email out of your head that you have to respond to, and yet logically you know that it is not urgent, at all. Maybe here you are enacting something which is going on for the person who sent you the mail. How do you know that you are not just bringing your stuff to the situation, but have been co-opted by the other? Because it feels different. It feels uncanny, creepy, or somehow alien and wrong. What is called for is quiet reflection and self examination, but you will notice that you feel - just slightly off. That is the clue.
My contention is that the more we can be alert to where we are being used in a form of psychological ventriloquism by another person’s psyche, the more we can unravel the situation and step out of the role if we so chose. It is not always easy to get out of these kinds of unconscious tangles (one of those laser-beam security systems in heist movies springs to mind as an analogy for the delicacy of getting out of the snares), but it is possible, and it will leave us happier, cleaner, and clearer.
If you are a therapist, you might chose to stay there and surrender to the dynamic to see what can be learned - I suggest a trip to supervision for some serious unravelling and thinking and support. Enactments can be very painful for us, and also for our clients. It is a complicated path.
Of course, maybe you are just living your clean, clear life, with your psyche open, present, and uninvaded by the dark hidden material of others. Good for you. For the rest of us, take heart that some of your tangles might not be of your own making.