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Imagining A Changed World….

A Changed World….

Just thinking about changing the world is a stimulating exercise. One of my favourite daily activities is imagining what the world would be like if there was no such thing as child abuse. When I talk about child abuse I'm not just meaning the things that western cultures regard as being abuse which are at the very extreme of cruelty to children. I'm talking about all actions which parents inflict on children which are in any way about meeting the parent's psychological or emotional needs rather than the child's and that includes having children in the first place! Much of this abuse goes completely unnoticed in western societies where it is usually regarded as normal or for the good of the child (see Alice Miller's 'For Your Own Good' for an exploration of this idea.)

If I imagine a world where this doesn't happen, where all parents were fully meeting all children's needs that would automatically get rid of:

WAR

VIOLENCE

CRIMINAL BEHAVIOURS

ECOLOGICAL DISASTER

EXPLOITATION (ALL TYPES)

MENTAL ILLNESS

MANY PHYSICAL ILLNESSES

But what might such a world actually be like? What would your life be like if it hadn't been touched by war, however indirectly? Most of us have a relative of ancestor who was affected by war after all- whether as a soldier, a refugee, or as civilians. In this sense everyone has been hurt physically or emotionally by war. What about imagining your own life untouched by any violence? Imagine nobody had ever hit you and you'd never hit anyone as a child or an adult? What about never witnessing a fight or reading about violence in the news or seeing it on TV or in the movies? Likewise Crime. Ever had anything stolen, been burgled or mugged or pick pocketed? Ever been affected by this happening to anyone else? Now imagine a world where that stuff didn't happen to anyone ever! Who isn't worried about what we're doing to the planet but imagine living within our means as a species and not feeling desperately deprived as a result..... What about living in a world where the strong never exploited the weak, where the very idea was unimaginable? Imagine nobody being depressed or lonely or anxious or psychotic and where physical illness was rare….

If we lived in a world where child abuse didn't exist this would be our norm.

At this point I have to silence my inner critical parents who say that such a world is impossible because human beings are inherently lazy and selfish and greedy and even evil or violent! I just don't believe that human beings are inherently any of those things. When I look at a newborn baby I cannot see 'evil' or greed or rage or manipulative sadistic cruelty (though that's not to say that babies cannot be traumatised in utero). All such feelings and behaviours are responses to our earliest relational interactions or lack of them. All the scourges of human life listed above are simply the ways in which the abuse we endure as children manifests in the world.

For more on these ideas check out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2yUMkJKWWA