(From Handbook For Humans)
Our natural self is spontaneous, loving, creative, open. Just watch an infant, who is still residing in that early natural self—open, affectionate, spontaneous, and so on. We were all completely that way once. What happens to us?
What happens is that inevitably we become wounded by the world in various ways. And the younger we are the more vulnerable we are, so our early family or caretakers tend to wound us the most. Even the most loving childhood will inevitably include some mistakes, some unmet expectations, some accidents and so on. A certain amount of loss and pain seems to be built into the fabric of life. So even the best of childhoods will inadvertently wound us to some extent.
And of course some children are abused in various ways, physically, emotionally or sexually. We can also be wounded, innocently or otherwise, by schools, society, other children, prejudice, religion and many other things. I personally have never met anyone who was not carrying some wounds from childhood. We all seem to have them to some extent.
What happens to us when we’re wounded? Modern psychology describes a process of “schemas,” or competing centers of influence in the brain. L Ron Hubbard talked of “engrams” created by early trauma. Harvey Jackins and others describe a process of “distress,” and I think his view in this area is especially clear. The ideas in this section are partly based on his fine work.
Imagine that an infant and its mother are separated in a crowded shopping mall. And let’s say the mother and child are reunited after a few minutes, so the child’s bad experience is intense but short. What will the infant do?
The child has a natural repair process which will go into effect immediately. It will cry and cry and cry, if the mother lets it. If the mother is attentive and aware but not distressed by the child’s crying, then the child will keep crying until the process is all done. And when it’s done, the child will once again be happy, enthusiastic, affectionate, spontaneous, and so on, just as before.
In other words, the crying is an outer manifestation of an inner repair process. When this process is completed the child is drained of distress, able to normally store information about what happened, and ready to continue its existence in a natural and spontaneous way.
What often happens, though, is that the child’s distress stimulates the caretaker’s own distress patterns—picked up mostly from their own childhoods—and the caretaker cannot stay relaxed while the child cries and its organism repairs itself. Instead the crying alarms, threatens or irritates, and the caretaker or others try to get the child to stop crying.
We’ve all experienced variations of this: “There, there, don’t cry, it’s all right.” Or “Stop your crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.” Or “Look, see the pretty picture.” There’s a thousand variations, but the net result is that the child is not allowed to finish crying, to complete the natural process of internal repair.
Because the child is forced to stop this natural process, the experience gets stored as a wound in the unconscious. It’s uncompleted. The child contracts a little, becomes a little more shut down, a little less spontaneous and alive.
The next time the mother needs to leave the child with someone else, things may become difficult. The emotional recording of the old upset is going to be triggered and the child will cry and be upset again. In psychological terms the child undergoes a spontaneous regression back to the earlier incident, reliving it again—emotionally—through the present incident.
But the story goes further than that. Because the repair process was incomplete, a pattern (also called schema or engram and other names as well) forms in the unconscious mind that seeks to recreate itself. A chain of similar incidents will be scripted or facilitated by the unconscious mind, which seeks to recreate the original incident, duplicate the feelings of that incomplete experience, and complete them this time.
If we look carefully, we’ll see certain patterns recurring again and again in our lives. Usually we think of these things as bad luck, unfortunate circumstances, coincidences, etc. We have a good reason every time we lose a relationship, or every time we arrive late, feel abandoned, or lose our temper, for instance. But the same kind of thing keeps happening.
We start on the road to our freedom when we begin to see that these recurring patterns in our life are, for the most part, self-created. Though ultimately liberating, it’s a difficult notion to face—and I ought to know.
I was somewhere in my mid-twenties when I started to realize that I got angry at people a lot. I always had a good reason, but there was a pattern: I was irritated a lot. Suddenly one day I saw that I was involved in creating the situations that made me angry.
It was quite a big moment in my life. I had a glimpse for the first time that I was not some puppet on a string, helplessly reacting to my past or to events, but rather the creator—or rather, the co-creator—of what was happening to me.
Of course I would have to have this insight again and again, in new situations and at deeper levels over the years. Nevertheless, it was when I first saw that pattern and started to own it that it began to gradually lessen. Though it’s humbling and painful, it’s also great news to begin to observe some life-pattern that we’re involved in creating, because if we’re creating it one way then we can create it some other way.
Sure, others make their contributions to whatever is going on. But, tempting as it is, it doesn’t help us to see where others need to work on themselves. Perhaps they do, but so what? Seeing that isn’t going to help us. What helps us is to see what our contribution is—to work on ourselves.
Whenever we first notice a pattern it’s going to seem very reasonable that we have it. We’re going to feel very, very justified in having it. The reasons for each occurrence will be good. It requires a degree of insight and humility on our part to admit that maybe we’re helping to create these repetitive patterns in our life that seem to be unfortunately happening to us because of circumstances.
I was perhaps 33 when I identified manipulation as an issue in my life. The insight occurred when I happened to spend an afternoon with an unusually flowing person and I suddenly saw the contrast in our behaviors.
It wasn’t an easy insight. It was difficult to confess to myself that I was being rigid, controlling, and manipulative with others. It was a terrible moment to look into myself and see that, but it was also the way out. By seeing and admitting for the first time what I was doing, for the very first time I also began to have some choice about whether I wanted to be that way or not.
By the way, I’ve had to make such confessions to myself many times. The first time we see something is simply the first time; we’ll have to see it again and again. The good news is, once we truly start identifying a pattern in our life, it’s on its way out. It may take years, and many more episodes of insight under varying conditions, but that pattern is on its way to eventually being history.
Seeing into the patterns of anger or manipulation, for instance, didn’t mean that I’d never be angry or controlling again—far from it, as friends could tell you—but rather, that I’d slowly become more conscious about those things and thus gradually lessen them as a factor in my life.
Becoming conscious of various areas of unconsciousness within ourselves is like a purifying flame. In the loving gaze of consciousness, those things that are natural to our being stay with us and are strengthened; those things that are part of our wounds gradually dissipate, or to put it more accurately, they gradually integrate into our consciousness. Then they become simple memories instead of emotionally-charged unconscious directives.
That is why, in any serious work on our relationships, we have to begin with ourselves.
It’s fine to think that other people should change, but that won’t help our growth. We can be very well-intentioned and even skillful with others, yet to the extent that we’re still running old patterns on them, still acting out unconscious childhood wounds upon them, our relationships are going to suffer. And so are we.
With this background, let’s go back to the child now. What other natural healing responses does the child have?
If she’s badly frightened—and someone is there who will be attentive and relaxed and willing to let her go through whatever she needs to—the child will start to spontaneously tremble and scream and perspire from a cold skin. She’ll keep this up for quite a long time, and then, as with the crying, it will be done. Then she’ll resume being happy and affectionate and creative; she’ll have no emotional residue left over from the incident.
If the child is frustrated about something, she will again discharge the distress if allowed to. She’ll do this by making angry noises and sharp physical movements and perspiring from a warm skin. In other words, she’ll throw a “temper tantrum.” If not stopped or frustrated in this discharge, she’ll once again heal herself and resume being happy, relaxed and cooperative.
If a child is ridiculed or embarrassed in some way, he’ll seek out a chance to talk about it if a relaxed and attentive adult is available. If that adult will refrain from giving advice but will merely listen with attention, the child will relate the experience repeatedly.
Finally he’ll start joking and laughing about it. He’ll laugh more and more until the tension of the embarrassment is completely gone. Once again, he’ll be completely healed of that incident.
In all these ways, our body-mind organism knows how to heal itself from traumatic experiences if allowed to do so. But most of the time when we were wounded, we were not allowed to discharge the distress. We were not allowed to shake, tremble, scream, cry, make angry noises, talk without being evaluated or advised, and so on.
Because the wound was incompletely healed, it will be retained in the unconscious, along with the other wounds that were unhealed. These form our present-day patterns as adults, the ways in which we compulsively create and act out our old unconscious scripts from the past.
This hidden-away pain is the unexperienced, uncooked, undigested part of our experience.
How do we heal it now? Basically, by being willing to experience the unexperienced pain that is there.
© 1997 by James Sloman
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