Essay, first published in ‘Trauma and Encounter’, Yearbook of the DGfS, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017. –
Part 2 –

Trauma and Illusion
This brings me to the second keyword of my investigation: illusion. First of all, trauma symptoms are by no means illusory in the sense of being imaginary. They can make life hell for people and those around them. At the same time, however, trauma symptoms are evidence of a fundamental illusion. This is why they push so hard to finally give way to reality. How can this be? To understand this, let us examine the phenomenon of ‘illusion’ for a moment.
Illusion allows me to preoccupy myself with something that has nothing to do with my actual present. When I don’t like the reality of the moment, I let my mind wander, for example on a crowded bus, in a boring lecture or at a boring job. My real presence might be that I am sitting there. My illusory presence takes me to a beautiful beach, to my warm bed or to a loved one. Illusion means that I create inner images and focus on them without realising it. You can help a little with this, for example with television, the internet or drugs. Most of the time just thinking is enough. People move in illusions, indeed they live in them, projecting them onto themselves, onto others and onto the world, again without being aware of this process.
There is no illusion without images, i.e. without internal representations of sensory impressions, bodily sensations, emotions or thoughts: our psyche is constantly imagining, i.e. constantly producing illusions. That is what it is for. Its images are in turn connected to what we think, how we feel and what our body senses.
The difference between illusion and reality is like the difference between an event and the trauma that follows. In reality, the event ends immediately when it is over. It simply becomes the past. It disappears from immediate perception, forever. However, the inner image of the event, created by the bodily perceptions, feelings and thoughts associated with it, does not disappear. The more energy an event had for us subjectively, the more overwhelming it was for us, the more lasting it is.
The mystic Meister Eckhart is often quoted as saying: ‘When the soul wants to experience something, it throws a picture in front of itself and then marches into the picture. This accurately describes the creation of our trauma symptoms. In relation to trauma, this phrase would mean When the soul wants to heal, it projects an image of the threat and then marches into the image.
Here we can see that trauma is basically a single illusion. It is the illusion that the destructive threat still exists. The fact that the danger is over, that I have survived and am now safe, has no reality for the trauma. On the contrary, from the perspective of the trauma, it seems like an absurd, illusory and, above all, life-threatening assertion. The basic illusion of ‘trauma’ in turn generates a number of typical, sometimes contradictory illusions:
– the illusion that one is still powerless and therefore an incapacitated victim and therefore not responsible for oneself, – the illusion that one must continue to fight for one’s survival, that one must not relax and therefore owes something to life, – the illusion that one can forget or control the trauma by functioning as well as possible, i.e. by gaining as much control over one’s life as possible.The illusion that it is therefore better, in the sense of safer, not to feel the pain, or even safer not to feel anything at all, because one might as well think, – The illusion that the trauma is something without which life must inevitably fail without comprehensive processing and treatment.
All these subsequent illusions can be aptly summarised by the term neurosis, as reintroduced by Wolfgang Giegerich (2013). Neurosis in this sense is an inner landscape of images that one unconsciously trusts more than the present reality. When one identifies with these inner images, one reacts only to them and not to what is.
The cost is always the same: limited vitality. In my view, therefore, meaningful trauma therapy aims to achieve the greatest possible gain in reality for the body, emotions and thinking, for both client and therapist. The reality to be gained is: I am no longer threatened. A few things are necessary to achieve this:
1. Experiencing one’s own ability to act in the sense of: I determine my distance from events at any given moment. The wonderful possibility of regulating distance, which is already inherent in the constellation method, is very helpful here when used appropriately. Also helpful in regulating distance are opportunities for creative expression of anything related to the overwhelming event of the past: dance, painting and music, even repeated storytelling in front of witnesses who are open to it.
2. Support that maintains physical and emotional contact with the present moment, bearing witness to it and encouraging it in the sense of I am safe now. Only in stable contact with the relatively safe present can the echo of the threat from the past be perceived as something that happened then and is over now. In stable contact with one’s own body, which is not threatened at the moment, a situation that may resemble the one from the past can appear and be felt without immediately acting as a trigger to plunge us back into the experience of the threat from the past and thus re-traumatise us. If this contact becomes unstable, the support person must react immediately, for example by increasing the distance (physical distance, titration, slowing down, blocking out details, etc.), by physical intervention or by interrupting the work.
3. Concrete and elementary help for everyday life in the sense of What do I do when …? In order to feel empowered, it is important for people to establish a more stable contact with their actual present at their own pace. This applies, for example, to their awareness of their body and its limits, their emotional range, the reduction of their sensitivity to triggers, etc.
4. An eye for resources and skills in the sense of The trauma has everything it needs to transform itself. Resources that have been used and developed by the trauma itself can now, as it relaxes, become increasingly available. These include talents, physical characteristics, inner vocation, the inner logic of one’s professional biography and much more.

In addition, we can prepare ourselves for some of the things the trauma will try to do when we encounter it in the constellation:
1. At the heart of trauma is frozen survival energy. It has no half-life until it is truly seen. It still contains the fundamentally lethal aggression which, because of the overwhelming sense of helplessness at the time, could not be released in fight or flight but collapsed inwards. Fight and flight contain the same energy, but with different orientations: in fight, the impulse is directed towards the threat; in flight, it is directed away from it. In collapse, the impulse of survival energy is directed inwards.
2. The ‘frozen’ aggression seeks release. The violence of its impulse still suppresses feelings in the present as effectively as it suppressed feelings of the devastating experience at the time of freezing. Today it finds its outlet in whoever happens to be around. This is why people who accompany traumatised people often feel a murderous rage. It reminds me of the ghost in various fairy tales who first wants to kill his liberator. This anger is important; it is a signpost to a person’s vitality.
3. Trauma has a tendency to perpetuate itself because it wants to ensure our survival. To do this, it uses the possibility of retraumatisation mentioned above. Retraumatisation is an activity of the trauma itself. It creates a vicious circle, a vicious circle of illusions from which it cannot escape by itself. The form of the vicious cycle, i.e. the symptomatic pattern of a trauma, depends on the level of consciousness at which the life-threatening event was experienced (Nelles, 2010), i.e. the level of consciousness that creates and maintains the trauma. The time in a person’s life plays a role, but it is not the only factor.
4. A trauma seeks resonance with similar vicious circles, i.e. with people who have survived similar or mirrored inner landscapes. This resonance of traumas forms our essential relationships, including of course the working relationship between client and constellator. It ensures that you always get clients who suit you and challenge you at the same time. As a constellation facilitator I need to be aware of when my own traumas are coming up. My guides are the so-called ‘resistances’, both in myself and in my clients. They prevent us from confusing the past with the present.
Constellation work can help to break the vicious circle of trauma when one is open to its symptoms, looks at the survival mechanisms stored in them from a safe distance in time from the event, and acknowledges the resources and abilities that have emerged in the process. This expands the contact with one’s own aliveness by following what the soul seems to want: to contain everything and leave it as it was. For me, contact with one’s own vitality is the central focus of constellations. This brings the phenomenon of spirituality into focus. Spirituality, in the broadest sense of the word, arises when one meets one’s own vitality. This is the subject of the third and last part.
Read more: Go to the third part here …
References can be found at the end of the third part.