The Oral Character Style

Adapted from the work of

Characterological Transformation

byStephen M. Johnson

By Michael Mervosh

PSEN Training Program

Issues for the Oral Character

  • The need for nurturance, sustenance and touch.
  • The capacity for appetite, for being fed, and for being able to pursue what will nourish one’s self. (Pursuing it, having it, taking it in.)
  • The external experience of being “The Abandoned Child”.
  • The internal experience of being weak, collapsed, resigned, empty.
  • A feeling of “paradise lost” – symbiosis is begun but never fulfilled; a sense of confident expectation is never adequately established.

Etiology of the Oral Character

  • Not all children who are consciously wanted are adequately cared for.
  • The young one is essentially wanted, and an attachment is initially or weakly formed, but nurturing becomes erratic – producing repetitive emotional abandonment - or the primary attachment figure is literally lost, and never adequately replaced.
  • Environments that had chronic illness, depression, addiction, isolation, or situational traumas.
  • Also brought forth by the vulnerability of a nuclear family in an industrialized and highly mobile culture.
  • Bowlby’s three stages of oral character formation:

-Acute Protest – expresses the pain of loss, hunger, distress, fear, and rage!

-Deep Despair – a perpetual state of mourning and loss

-Adjustment – gives up, detaches, moves to the superficial, and begins to deny the need

  • This results in the acting out of childlike fantasies and wishes for fulfillment in other ways – alcohol, drugs, sex, food, money, etc. – but provides no real adult feeling of satisfaction from these acts!

Dilemma of the Oral Character

  • The oral character is caught between the despair of the unfulfilled emptiness and the fear of exposing it and risk being abandoned again.
  • Breeds painful self-deprivation, as we negate our own needy feelings, and yet still try to get our needs met.
  • Fosters a fundamental attitude of dependency/passivity.

-knows how to wait!

-knows how to long for someone to bring love to him

-knows how to cling!

  • Compensates for this with a dominant caretaking posture.

Energetic defense pattern of the Oral Character

  • Is rooted in the denial of needy and shameful feelings, yearnings, longings, and the need to reach out, go after, pursue, secure, have, take in, receive. Our energy blocks are formed out of this crucible of painful deprivation.
  • The body learns to contract against itself rather than extend itself, compromising and lowering its energy level, and becoming susceptible to depressive moods, muscle weakness, and collapsed states of being.
  • The mind retreats into a wistful, wishful state, which reinforces the attitude of passivity, and reduces the impulse towards pursuits.

Collapsed defense of the Oral Character

  • Affective state – flat, depressed, ‘pining away’

(vs. lonely, despairing, longing)

  • Behavior – withdrawn, self-absorbed, irresponsible, whining, help-rejecting, complaining

(vs. reaching out for help)

  • Mind-Set – helpless and victimized

(vs. motivated to change and act)

Compensated defense of the Oral Character

  • Affective state – conscious – ‘good’, elated

-unconscious – resentful, despairing, fears loss

  • Behavior – caretaking – overly nurturing of others

-takes on more than they can sustain

-makes optimistic to grandiose plans

-charged with ungrounded energy

-poor self care

  • Mind-Set – conscious - optimistic to grandiose - sees self as sweet, kind, giving, good

-unconscious – self deprecating, fearful of own needs

Script decisions of the Oral Character

  • “I don’t need (you)”.
  • “I can do it all by myself”.
  • “I can find myself in giving and loving”.
  • “My need is too great and will overwhelm others”.
  • “If I express my needs, I will be disappointed by the lack of response”.
  • “If I express my needs, I will be abandoned”.

Emotional healing of the Oral Character

  • Must be able to experience and receive NURTURANCE.
  • Must learn to bring the nurturing of others to one’s self directly.
  • Must learn to then nurture one’s own self

Healing the unconscious attitudes and beliefs of the Oral Character

  • Our conscious attitudes and beliefs tend to be the polar opposite of our unconscious attitudes and beliefs.
  • Must see how we have prematurely contracted against our own needs, particularly our infantile ones, and we have compensated by offering others what we never received.
  • Must see how we create our own loneliness and abandonment in relationships!
  • Must see that our demands for unconditional, total acceptance and love are inappropriate for mutual adult functioning and living!
  • Must see that our demands beneath our needs, and the collapse associated with it will inevitably bring on the abandonment we fear!

Fostering the healing tasks of the Oral Character

  • Suggest and prescribe self-care behaviors.
  • Strengthen ability to reach out and ask for help, and explore what one needs in all relevant social relationships.
  • Must learn to stop waiting and longing to be given to.
  • Must learn to assertively solve one’s own problems.
  • Must learn strategies to cope with unrealistic adult demands.
  • Must learn to face one’s own adult aloneness.
  • Fundamentally and gradually increasing a constancy of commitment to work, “give & take” relationships, child-rearing, personal objects.
  • Developing a “STICK-TO-IT-IVENESS”.

Working with sensation and affect in the Oral Character

  • Feeling feet and legs as a solid base.
  • Breathing more deeply into the torso to reduce chronic tension.
  • Developing GROUNDING, STRENGTHENING and RELYING exercises and experiences.
  • Working with bodily resistance at all levels in order to get to the true and real underlying need is crucial to the healing process!
  • Learning to tolerate the strong sense of threat that is evoked by touching upon real needs.
  • Learning to tolerate the feeling of disappointment.
  • Learning to allow the acknowledgement of the deep rage held underneath the chronic resentment and irritation.

The Oral Outcry: “What’s the point?”

  • When any of us come from our true ground, there is a fundamental solidity and strength in that; even when that ground is infantile, rageful, fearful and despairing. There is a certain peace to be had in knowing what we are facing in ourselves.
  • It drops the energy that maintains illusions and childhood fantasies.
  • It drops the energy that suppresses our emotions.
  • It drops the energy that maintains false hopes and ideals.
  • It drops the energy that continues poor self-care behaviors.
  • When we work through disappointments, we can then reach out for what is available under the circumstances, however limiting they may be – and live from one’s own realistic ground, whatever that is.
  • Our existence has been devoted to preventing what has already happened – abandonment. The very maneuvers engaged in to prevent it often recreate it.
  • Must learn to stop abandoning one’s self, denying one’s needs, and the natural reactions to needs that go unmet.
  • We begin to grow up by acknowledging what is infantile in us, and by caring for our own inner abandoned child.
  • We must stop looking for the ‘lost mother’, and become able to receive adult love.
  • This does not constitute a resignation to life; rather, it represents an acceptance of a resolution and a new allegiance with reality; a rapprochement. From this position, one can really live and appreciate and take in life’s tender mercies.

A patient in psychotherapy does not literally return to childhood to unlearn the self-destructive pattern he evolved in growing up, although he might engage in much regressive experimentation in order to undo that negative learning. What is essential is that he be able to relinquish his attachment to his pathway – be able to say to himself, “I have wasted X years in a painful and useless pursuit; this is sad, but I now have an opportunity to try another approach.”

This is hard for people to do. There is a strong temptation to rationalize our wrong turnings as a necessary part of development (“it taught me discipline”), or to deny that we participated fully in them (“that was before I became enlightened”).

Giving up these two evasions always leads to despair, but as Alexander Lowen points out, despair is the only cure for illusion. Without despair we cannot transfer our allegiance to reality – it is a kind of mourning period for our fantasies. Some people do not survive this despair, but no major change within a person can occur without it.

Philip Slater, Earthwalk

Affirmations for the Oral Character

  • I have the right to need.
  • I have the right to reach out and take what I need, while respecting the rights and limits of others.
  • I can be alone.
  • I have the right to mourn the losses I have sustained.
  • I can be strong.
  • I am whole in myself.
  • I have the right to want love.
  • I have the right to love another.

Healing Mantras for the Oral Character

  • I recognize that the love within me is the only true source of love.
  • I nurture myself in order to allow the love within me to grow.
  • I no longer enter relationships to find love, but to express the love I have within me.
  • By experiencing my uncomfortable and inconvenient feelings, I am transforming my life.

The House of Belonging

This is the bright home

In which I live,

This is where

I ask

My friends

To come,

This is where I want

To love all the things

It has taken me so long

To learn to love.

This is the temple

Of my adult aloneness

And I belong

To that aloneness

As I belong to my life.

There is no house

Like the house of belonging.

- David Whyte

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