We are all born with an innate capacity to fulfil our potential, the fact that so few of us get the merest whiff of what our potential is let alone achieve it is a completely avoidable tragedy. The main obstacle to our discovering and attaining our potential is our upbringing, the particular parents and circumstances we are born into and the ways in which we internalise these factors. As adults we each possess the capacity, however deeply buried, to heal and resolve these internal obstacles, discover our potential and fulfil it.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Sunday, December 20, 2009
On 'pruning' friends
What happens when you realise that you’ve grown and or want to grow in a direction your friends cannot support? Or worse still in a direction that they actively object to, one which threatens their psychological 'safety'? How can you even consider such a thing without seeming impossibly arrogant? I’ve had friends who I’ve enjoyed taking drugs with but when I’ve stopped enjoying it and needed to stop was it possible to maintain a friendship with those people, people with whom I’d lived and enjoyed so many adventures had years of friendship with? The honest answer is no, not really. As any addict will tell you, if you sit in a barbershop long enough you’ll get a haircut -whether that's what you went in there for or not; that's what you’ll come out with. What about more subtle ways of growing- what about becoming more real- being more in tune with your true self, becoming less of a people pleaser, no longer being content to smooth things over and ignore the pain caused by the fault lines? The thing about that stuff is that you either get it or you don't and if one part of a friendship starts to see those fault lines, to spot their own half of a codependent relationship when the other doesn’t or can't the friendship can’t last or at least can't be very deep. In the end you can try to surgically remove it as cleanly as possible or you can have an almighty storm which rips the old branch off but it has to go. I read somewhere recently that obstetricians are realising that if you let a woman tear naturally during childbirth it actually heals faster and better than an episiotomy, and when you think about a tear versus a cut it makes sense. Maybe the same is true of friendships or relationships where one party is growing in a different direction or is growing whilst the other party is stuck, even if the stuckness is temporary (and I've certainly had prolonged periods of stuckness in my life!) Either way whether you need to cut or tear the end of a friendship hurts. Facing the ways in which you’ve compromised yourself in order to maintain an unhealthy relationship is painful though ultimately essential if you’re to keep growing and in the end whats the point of living if not to grow!
Friday, November 6, 2009
Monday, November 2, 2009
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:
Friday, August 28, 2009
What is comfort and what's so wrong with it?
A few months ago I decided to start telling friends more about what I think about the world. Even though a part of me is frightened of losing friends and alienating people as as result, in my heart of hearts I know that for me to keep growing I have to get more real, get more fully aligned with my true self and actually live, instead of pretending to live!
Its a tough mission but I wonder what the point is otherwise?
The date of the book group meeting arrived and I decided that my book group friends, (who are all trained therapists!) would make a good and thoughtful place to start. I began that evening, before the others joined us the following day, by talking about comfort with my host and her husband. To my surprise they weren't immediately dismissive and got the point of what I was saying (though I'm sure they felt as though I was going a bit far!) they were kind and respectful and listened till late at night. They asked pertinent questions that helped me clarify my ideas as did the rest of the group the next day. Apart from sharing my ideas with my closest friends, people who already know and have discovered this stuff for themselves I realised that I hadn't shared much with the other people in my life and I knew that as I do want to communicate this stuff and of course fear was at the bottom of this avoidance, as ever!
Thinking about the search for comfort as a major organising principle upon which so much of human activity is based seems strange at first. After all, we all want to be comfortable, what's so awful about that? Its easy to see though, how our drive to attain comfort, at least at the superficial level, is a negative propellant by thinking of it as being on a continuum....
People use a variety of means to manage their feelings of discomfort, distress, upset and emotional pain. Ever used heroin to numb the terror and pain of being physically and sexually abused by your family throughout your childhood? Hmm, probably not eh? Had a glass of wine or a beer to conquer your nerves at a party? Seem a bit more familiar? Its basically the same thing. In all the significant ways our culture (in other words the families we grew up in) encourages us to manage distress by avoiding it and we have been endlessly creative in developing innumerable ways to do just that. Don't drink,smoke or do drugs? Ever do a bit too much of something? Running, watching telly, shopping, eating, working? Ever wondered why or what you were avoiding by doing those things to excess? In a way its not the thing itself that's the problem its why we are doing it, what our unconscious motivations are and what the implications of these reasons are for ourselves, children, the planet might be if we were able to stop! More on this later...As an aside here; whether people use socially acceptable means to dissociate or not is not the problem, the 'war on drugs' is futile not just because of the hypocrisy involved but because it doesn't so much as touch on the reasons people actually use drugs. This is what I mean when I say the compulsive, ceaseless drive to attain comfort is a negative but exceedingly powerful force in the world, however, resistance is not futile!
In the example I gave above, at one end of the spectrum is somebody regarded as a social outcast, someone who is, temporarily at least, unable to function in 'normal' (!) society. At the other end we see many average, high functioning, high achieving persons. Despite the differences they were basically motivated by the same thing- the flight from discomfort, pain, agony. How much of human activity is just that? When I stop to really consider this question my mind frankly boggles! The drive to acquire more property and possessions, more worldly goods to demonstrate your success- a home, a spouse, even children; all of these are ways in which we declare to the world that we are 'doing well' that we are successful ‘adults’. To a crack addict, 'doing well' is not running out of drugs, not getting sick, not getting caught by the police and successfully numbing all traces of the terrifying traumas within. To someone who is a high flying,’succesful’ professional, the same things apply; unless their work, or health or possessions (including that wine collection!) with which they comfort and numb themselves from their traumatic histories are threatened or taken away they feel fine- not that different from the junkie at all.
We have constructed a culture which is all about not feeling, we are all, as I said in my first post... brought up not to feel- to seek comfort at the merest hint of feelings breaking through our defences. Often people come to therapy because they no longer feel comfortable, or they're in a crisis that, in some way, has brought them in touch with their inner pain. Often this is due to a loss of something that was preventing them from feeling pain and in its absence their pain wells up, overflows and threatens their equilibrium- their ability to feel comfortable. Many people decide to stop using drugs or alcohol, enter recovery and realise they had reasons for wanting to numb out for all that time or they have a child who develops a mental health problem or they discover infidelity in their partner or they lose their job or get cancer or they meet any other major life challenge and the painful truth starts leaking out. And it hurts, I've been there and it really does hurt! Most people want help simply to stop the pain, make it go away so they can continue as normal. Such a goal might be addressed by a short course of CBT available through the UK government's new Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies' programme!
Some of us realise that simply stopping the pain won't bring about profound change and what we need is profound change- a radical rethink of who we are and what made us this way. In exploring that we unearth a journey that takes us deep within ourselves and our histories, it has miles of grief and inevitably demands having to explore pitch dark, scary alleys. At times the journey toward our truth, the truth of who we are and what we have experienced; to discover what lies beneath all our defences is so isolating that we'll need to stop and grieve that too. This journey to regain a full, heart, soul and mind connection with ourselves, the connection we're all conceived, if not born with, is ultimately the only way we can enable ourselves to live and feel as spontaneously as we are capable of. In fact to survive and evolve as a species this is exactly what we need to do! If we gave up comfort seeking and avoiding the truth that the casues of our pain hold for us, both about what has been done to us and what we have done to others, we would be fully aligned with our true selves and free.
Its a tough mission but I wonder what the point is otherwise?
The date of the book group meeting arrived and I decided that my book group friends, (who are all trained therapists!) would make a good and thoughtful place to start. I began that evening, before the others joined us the following day, by talking about comfort with my host and her husband. To my surprise they weren't immediately dismissive and got the point of what I was saying (though I'm sure they felt as though I was going a bit far!) they were kind and respectful and listened till late at night. They asked pertinent questions that helped me clarify my ideas as did the rest of the group the next day. Apart from sharing my ideas with my closest friends, people who already know and have discovered this stuff for themselves I realised that I hadn't shared much with the other people in my life and I knew that as I do want to communicate this stuff and of course fear was at the bottom of this avoidance, as ever!
Thinking about the search for comfort as a major organising principle upon which so much of human activity is based seems strange at first. After all, we all want to be comfortable, what's so awful about that? Its easy to see though, how our drive to attain comfort, at least at the superficial level, is a negative propellant by thinking of it as being on a continuum....
People use a variety of means to manage their feelings of discomfort, distress, upset and emotional pain. Ever used heroin to numb the terror and pain of being physically and sexually abused by your family throughout your childhood? Hmm, probably not eh? Had a glass of wine or a beer to conquer your nerves at a party? Seem a bit more familiar? Its basically the same thing. In all the significant ways our culture (in other words the families we grew up in) encourages us to manage distress by avoiding it and we have been endlessly creative in developing innumerable ways to do just that. Don't drink,smoke or do drugs? Ever do a bit too much of something? Running, watching telly, shopping, eating, working? Ever wondered why or what you were avoiding by doing those things to excess? In a way its not the thing itself that's the problem its why we are doing it, what our unconscious motivations are and what the implications of these reasons are for ourselves, children, the planet might be if we were able to stop! More on this later...As an aside here; whether people use socially acceptable means to dissociate or not is not the problem, the 'war on drugs' is futile not just because of the hypocrisy involved but because it doesn't so much as touch on the reasons people actually use drugs. This is what I mean when I say the compulsive, ceaseless drive to attain comfort is a negative but exceedingly powerful force in the world, however, resistance is not futile!
In the example I gave above, at one end of the spectrum is somebody regarded as a social outcast, someone who is, temporarily at least, unable to function in 'normal' (!) society. At the other end we see many average, high functioning, high achieving persons. Despite the differences they were basically motivated by the same thing- the flight from discomfort, pain, agony. How much of human activity is just that? When I stop to really consider this question my mind frankly boggles! The drive to acquire more property and possessions, more worldly goods to demonstrate your success- a home, a spouse, even children; all of these are ways in which we declare to the world that we are 'doing well' that we are successful ‘adults’. To a crack addict, 'doing well' is not running out of drugs, not getting sick, not getting caught by the police and successfully numbing all traces of the terrifying traumas within. To someone who is a high flying,’succesful’ professional, the same things apply; unless their work, or health or possessions (including that wine collection!) with which they comfort and numb themselves from their traumatic histories are threatened or taken away they feel fine- not that different from the junkie at all.
We have constructed a culture which is all about not feeling, we are all, as I said in my first post... brought up not to feel- to seek comfort at the merest hint of feelings breaking through our defences. Often people come to therapy because they no longer feel comfortable, or they're in a crisis that, in some way, has brought them in touch with their inner pain. Often this is due to a loss of something that was preventing them from feeling pain and in its absence their pain wells up, overflows and threatens their equilibrium- their ability to feel comfortable. Many people decide to stop using drugs or alcohol, enter recovery and realise they had reasons for wanting to numb out for all that time or they have a child who develops a mental health problem or they discover infidelity in their partner or they lose their job or get cancer or they meet any other major life challenge and the painful truth starts leaking out. And it hurts, I've been there and it really does hurt! Most people want help simply to stop the pain, make it go away so they can continue as normal. Such a goal might be addressed by a short course of CBT available through the UK government's new Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies' programme!
Some of us realise that simply stopping the pain won't bring about profound change and what we need is profound change- a radical rethink of who we are and what made us this way. In exploring that we unearth a journey that takes us deep within ourselves and our histories, it has miles of grief and inevitably demands having to explore pitch dark, scary alleys. At times the journey toward our truth, the truth of who we are and what we have experienced; to discover what lies beneath all our defences is so isolating that we'll need to stop and grieve that too. This journey to regain a full, heart, soul and mind connection with ourselves, the connection we're all conceived, if not born with, is ultimately the only way we can enable ourselves to live and feel as spontaneously as we are capable of. In fact to survive and evolve as a species this is exactly what we need to do! If we gave up comfort seeking and avoiding the truth that the casues of our pain hold for us, both about what has been done to us and what we have done to others, we would be fully aligned with our true selves and free.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Your Sacred Self
"As we search deeper, under our traumas, we also encounter our sacred self. We see how our traumatic history has entombed our magnificence. With this awareness, now unlocked from the unconscious, we begin the process of our enlightenment"
From Your Sacred Self, (www.yoursacredself.com) my dear friend's website.
I love this quote! Learning to see how our traumatic histories have entombed our magnificence is a wonderful,poetic, rallying slogan! Its also a life mission for me and all of us who want to become fully aligned with our greatest humanity and its a beautiful line of poetry too!
From Your Sacred Self, (www.yoursacredself.com) my dear friend's website.
I love this quote! Learning to see how our traumatic histories have entombed our magnificence is a wonderful,poetic, rallying slogan! Its also a life mission for me and all of us who want to become fully aligned with our greatest humanity and its a beautiful line of poetry too!
Sunday, August 16, 2009
So whats to be done....
My friend's feedback on my last post got me thinking! She felt the anger coming through in what I'd written and I agree with her, I am angry! If you're not angry about the ways in which children are abused, whether overtly OR far more insidiously and subtly I can only ask you why not!? If you're not angry about the implications for our future and the future of the environment of all this abuse why not?! What she also did was inspire me to post about what we can do to arrest this apparently downward spiral, so huge thanks to her and hence the title of this post.
Healing our own pain and trauma is the way out of the loop of self, other and environmental destruction, of course ALL our destructiveness has its roots in our ability to not feel, to dissociate. As a species we are endlessly creative in developing dissociative aids, from drugs and alcohol to television; from shopping to..... well, you name it we can use it to avoid our emotions! Even essential or positive things like food, exercise, work or helping others can all be used to avoid, deny or numb our feelings and I've tried them all! (Well maybe not exercise YET). The only way to change our globally destructive trends is for individuals to stop dissociating and start healing the pain that their dissociation is helping them to avoid! How to go about this work? More on this later but in the meantime take a look at:
www.iraresoul.com
Thanks for reading!
Healing our own pain and trauma is the way out of the loop of self, other and environmental destruction, of course ALL our destructiveness has its roots in our ability to not feel, to dissociate. As a species we are endlessly creative in developing dissociative aids, from drugs and alcohol to television; from shopping to..... well, you name it we can use it to avoid our emotions! Even essential or positive things like food, exercise, work or helping others can all be used to avoid, deny or numb our feelings and I've tried them all! (Well maybe not exercise YET). The only way to change our globally destructive trends is for individuals to stop dissociating and start healing the pain that their dissociation is helping them to avoid! How to go about this work? More on this later but in the meantime take a look at:
www.iraresoul.com
Thanks for reading!
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