I finished Annie G. Roger's Book, "The Unsayable" and I found it had tons of information packed into it in a wildly compact messy way...not unlike how abuse feels in the body. How she is trying to show clearly that which isn't clear.
It is very complex and hidden...how it begins, how it is disguised and how it repeats and appears behind the facade of illusion we create.
I believe we, as humans, would like to put abuse into a tiny package and keep it separated and isolated; so it not drip into our own lives. We would like to see it as only the issue of the perperator...that evil exists out there, and not see the strains within our own lives. To see that our lives are weaved by those who came before us...all their unresolved issues, become our DNA.
What I learned most from this book, is that way abuse flows from generation to generation. How it appears and how it is overlooked, due to the blindness of what abuse is or how to read the language of the unsayable. And even more importantly, how we continue to look outward and blame others for our own language...and how we don't pay attention to the signals and signs of our unconsciousness...screaming to gain our attention.
I do know that it takes great courage to go inward. Especially where abuse is. You have to see where it came and how it grew you.
I find her work remarkable in its accuracy and how it seems to settle her clients when they are being seen in their true natures. Even as Annie helps to show them their unsayable language it makes sense.
Highly remarkable, and not an easy read. But, then so are we who have been abused.
Annie's closing remarks.
"I've written this book with the hope of making some concepts clear to any reader, but especially to people who have clinical practices and those who come to us to trust us with their suffering. And, in the end, there are at least three things to glean from this book."
The first of these is that in America we've watered down and neutralized Freud's concept of the unconscious to such a degree that we no longer know how to listen as he listened. What's taken its place is a practice that in fact closes down the unconscious and its great gifts to us. We diagnose, medicate, remove symptoms, change cognitions, change behavior, and understand relationships, and yet we ignore the unconscious—its otherness—because we're frightened of it and have no access to it in the way we practice. I hope my efforts here awaken an interest in Freud, the original, daring Freud, and his idea of the unconscious.
The second idea is close to the first: The unconscious insists, repeats, and practically breaks down the door, to be heard. The only way to hear it, to invite it into the room, is to stop imposing something over it—mostly in the form of your own ideas—and instead listen for the unsayable, which is everywhere, in speech, in enactments, in dreams, and in the body. And the third idea is the simplest and requires the most courage: to befriend your own unconscious—its signifiers, symptoms, and quirky logic—or it will play havoc in the work you do with patients, no matter your intentions, no matter your degrees and qualifications." Annie
While she is writing this for her fellow therapists, I would like to encourage others who have been abused to read this. It will make you feel normal in how you came to be, having lived unseen. And how it was impossible for you to speak, when there was no one there capable to hear.
She clearly shows how untreated incidents of abuse manifest in our lives. How the trauma doesn't go away, it is in plain view for all to read and hear...if they are willing.
What she clearly shows as well as the deafness of the parents, how they too are contributing factors in our having to make a second hidden language...which appears not so hidden, if you care to know.
