ARAS (Age Regressed Altered States)

One may be triggered into acting or reacting to current upsets or traumas in a manner that may seem at odds with one’s chronological age. If one has unintegrated traumatic materials or memories from an earlier period of one’s life, one may flash back to an earlier time in one’s existence emotionally. One’s suppressed and internalized rage, for example, may surface in a situation that might, to the contemporary eye, seem inappropriate – though triggers in the present may re-awaken old traumas that have been unexpressed or unexplored. If one has been unable to express the fear, shame, or sense of helplessness at the time these errant emotions were originally felt, they may resurface, having been triggered by current events. An age regressed altered state (ARAS) occurs when emotions carrying the weight of an earlier age are triggered into awareness in the present, with attendant behavioral anomalies. (See also Tart, 1988).

All individuals are at least occasionally drawn back into these states, sometimes more forcefully than others, depending on the depth and breadth of previously unintegrated materials held by the individual, in storage. These traumatic memories carry a powerful psychic charge, and one’s body may be awaiting an opportunity to express and release them. These are state-dependent memories and are stored with linkages to the original traumatic circumstances and triggers. The homeostatic process (Cannon, 1932) is at work, seeking to balance any untoward experience, and make more relatively free the workings of the individual’s energies, previously bound. If one has suppressed some aspect of one’s emotional processing because of the presence of a fearful or shame-inducing object (e.g., an angry father by whom one is fearful of being beaten who smells of tobacco smoke and alcohol), then it is possible that any future encounter that stimulates fear may be triggered by any of the elements that made up the original encounter – tobacco smoke, the smell of alcohol, an angry man, one’s sense of needing to submit to an angry man, etc.). In that experience, it is actually an emotionally charged analog child state that manifests in that moment, directly related to the age-regressed child analog that originally experienced the trauma.

Case Example

Bill is a seemingly average forty-year old businessman who is invited to a cocktail party with his peers at his boss’s house. He is anxious to make a good impression, and has perhaps spent some time rehearsing his social graces, tuning up his conversation for the evening (the latest statistics to impress his superiors, sports’ scores perhaps). But because he is anxious, he has one too many cocktails, exceeding what he really knows is his limit. A co-worker makes what Bill would normally have considered an innocuous remark; but on this occasion, fueled by too much alcohol, Bill suddenly decides that the comment was aimed at him. He is particularly reminded of his older brother who had always verbally demeaned him in a similar manner; and backed it up with threats and occasional demonstrations of physical violence. Bill was always humiliated and generally took the beatings without fighting back because he was too afraid of his brother.

Bill might ordinarily have ignored the remark, at least to maintain his façade, but tonight he reacts in a way that is totally at odds with his usual persona. The alcohol has triggered a long-suppressed sense of emotional deficiency in him. Suddenly he feels immensely ashamed, as if her were 5 years old again – and reacts as if he were. Though his colleagues judge him to be acting “inappropriately,” even in a manner not befitting his position – one that a psychologically astute witness might call regressed. With his brain disinhibited by alcohol, he is vulnerable to the otherwise inaccessible contents of his long-suppressed memories and emotions. He raises his voice in a harsh and challenging fashion, and challenges his co-worker to a fistfight. He is filled with images of his repeated humiliations and has decided that he will no longer put up with his brother’s intrusions; that he is old enough and big enough to finally take care of the situation. The initial images that filled his mind may have long passed by now, leaving only the bitter residue of their memory. They may have been gone even before he can take back his shamed and angry words; perhaps even before he is forcibly removed from the room in full view of his boss’s disapproving glare.

Reflection

A disinterested observer might have commented that Bill was “acting like he was 5 years old.” In some sense this was partly true. The ARAS triggered in him gave rise to memories that were previously frozen in time (age 5) and freshly awakened in the present moment. Bill did not act upon the rage he froze and stored, as he was legitimately fearful for his life at that time. Now all of the stored energy has been awakened and mobilized. The original emotions, plus those that are associated with other similar incidents throughout the course of his life that have been unexpressed, all rush to the forefront of his disinhibited consciousness. (The feeling of possession that many addicts, and victims of violence express, may be related to such a process being acted out by the perpetrator.) This may be related to Seligman’s (1975) notion of “learned helplessness,” if it has been repeated frequently enough.

It is the freeing of these orphaned states, with their intense affective charge, that may ultimately need to be revealed to the self in order to free oneself of the webs of shame and entanglement that are so often wrapped in parental (and by extension, societal) mandates and proscriptions. Establishing an “aware ego” (Stone & Stone, 1989) is related to what I am calling an Inner Adult (IA) – a stable, radiant inner center of consciousness wherein the errant energies may be retrieved, grieved, and integrated into the larger personality of the individual. I will discuss this in further depth in the section on healing.

Within the context of the encounter, one may actually feel some sense of temporal dislocation, as if one were both the age-regressed child and the contemporary adult. One may have the opportunity to heal an old, unintegrated rift if one is able to own the dissociated materials as one’s own. Conversely, it is possible that one may be re-traumatized by the experience; may feel re-ashamed by the needs and feelings that surface; may re-suppress the materials rather than working through, or processing, them. In this latter case, the energy and materials are very likely to be re-interred only to resurface at a future time, as the correspondence between the energy and the materials remains unresolved.

This may be the basis of compulsive activities, performed as a kind of magic warding to keep away unwanted or fearful materials from a more conscious awareness (Levenkron, 1991). This also holds the original dysregulated affect in stasis, awaiting integration. In this view, one might see an addictive process as a series of repetitive compulsive behaviors whose purpose is self-soothing (albeit in an aberrant manner) that simultaneously obviates the individual’s personal power which is held encapsulated or encysted in time awaiting healing and integration. It is the analog child that has been triggered in the ARAS, and seeks the healing and soothing that child wanted and needed at the time of the original trauma.