ESSAYS ON SELF-THERAPY AND HEALING FROM UNRESOLVED CHILDHOOD TRAUMA
Self-Therapy: Eleven Ways to Be Your Own Therapist
The Value of Dream Analysis
Self-Therapy Without Dreamwork Is Folly
The Twelve Steps of AA: A Translation into Reality
A Three-Part Assessment of the Work of Elnora Van Winkle
SHORT ESSAYS ON SELF-THERAPY
Does Growth Have to Be Painful?
Grieving the Ultimate Loss: Your Imperfect Parents
Passion: The Fuel for the Journey
The Risks of Emotional Healing
Most Meditation Teaches Mice to Be Happy with Their Lot
Confronting Parents: Value and Risk
Fear: A Byproduct of Moving Forward
The Power of Honesty
Self-Doubt: Your Parents Still Live in Your Head
Alcoholics Anonymous: Its Value and Danger
Eighteen Ways to Speed Up the Path to Enlightenment
Does Growth Have to Be Painful?
Yes. Pain is a byproduct of the growth process. Emotional growth stretches the limits of the personality, and this is unpleasant. At some level personalities want to remain static and fixed, and become rigid as such, even for the most growth-oriented people. Even children. If children were not compelled to grow, motivated deeply and intensely from within – by their inner spirits, their life forces, their passion – they wouldn’t be able to put up with the pain of growth. Growing is not fun. Its consequences may feel wonderful over the long haul, but its process is awkward, uncomfortable, and anxiety-producing.
Growth is humbling. Growth requires vulnerability. Crayfish are a wonderful metaphor here: to grow they must shed their protective exoskeleton, because with their tough skin intact their soft underbody cannot expand. So periodically throughout their lives they shed their skin, expose their softness to the world, and grow radically. But this is also their time of highest risk, as their claws are now soft and useless and their backs pierceable. The same fish and frogs they spend their lives eating can suddenly turn around and eat them back. Thus, during this time they must protect themselves. Generally they crawl under a rock and hide, doing their growth in a private, safe space, not unlike a therapist’s office, a confidential journal, or a sanctuary for prayer.
People who cannot handle the pain and vulnerability of growth are consigned to stay stuck in life. They must keep their true selves buried from the world’s eye and from their own. They cannot face their full range of feelings because this is too dangerous. These feeling tell the truth. They must instead act out their inner truth – their buried pain and rage – in disguised form, through addictions and self-destructive behaviors and inappropriate relationships (most notably with their own children), and even physical illness. The body tells the truth when the conscious psyche cannot.
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Grieving the Ultimate Loss: Your Imperfect Parents
Grieving is an intrinsic part of the healing process. Grieving is long, painful, and confusing, but richly rewarding. Life is not complete unless all traumas are unearthed, grieved, and thus resolved. Those who fail to complete this process live forever in a limbo of partial misery, stuck unconsciously in the past and unable to escape.
Everybody suffers loss, right from the beginning. The primary loss is the fact that no parent, at least no parent who is not fully enlightened, is perfect. Everyone deserves perfect parents, but no one gets them – not unless their parents have healed all the traumas from their own childhood. This is the basic radical unfairness of life, and just because it’s all but universal doesn’t make it okay.
Every child needs to be loved in gigantic quantities and with unbelievable quality. If people could feel and know just how much children actually needed in order to attain enlightenment – which is every child’s capacity, and every child’s unconscious goal – they wouldn’t be so quick to have them. This is why more enlightened people have fewer children, if any at all.
Some argue that all you need to do well in life is to have had a “good-enough mother.” This is false. It is a lie that allows subtle neglect and abuse to slip under the radar of societally acceptable, and alienates people from their natural desire to grieve.
Most believe that a healthy life feels no pain. This is why the majority are insane. Avoiding all pain is not healthy. Grieving is horribly painful, and totally necessary. Grieving is beautiful.
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Passion: The Fuel For the Journey
Passion drives us to grow, to learn about ourselves, to be different from the expected, to face the painful consequences of our struggle and to persevere. Passion comes from deep within us. Passion pre-dates our traumas and our consciousness, our decorum and our identities. Passion tears through denial and disrespects lies. Passion is the spark of our souls, and the root of our enlightenment.
Passion is the raw force of life, and it threatens still-traumatized parents – the norm – who are by nature spiritually dead or dying. Out of fear of being awakened such parents unconsciously traumatize the child in order to mute his honesty. They humiliate him to force him to lock his truth in back alleys of the psyche, and they numb his memory with ice to keep him from remembering.
Passion reminds them of what they have buried, what they have sacrificed, and what they cannot bear to remember. They want to forget their own childhood truths, the pains and humiliations they suffered at the hands of their own parents, whom they would prefer to idealize. They want to forget who they might have otherwise become had they spiritually lived. And if their child manifests this it will force them to remember.
But the passionate do not forget. They remember. They keep alive their connections with their true selves, and they remember what lies buried within all of us. They are the well-diggers into the deep soil, and they have an uncanny ability to know where the pooled water hides. And the more they drink, the stronger they become. Water melts the façade, and the façade is death.
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The Risks of Emotional Healing
The emotional healing process, if it goes well, risks much. At basic it risks is a person’s false self, which is all most people have. It’s how they’ve been defining themselves for their entire conscious lives – ever since they created it to fit into their childhood families. Healing attempts to help a person rid himself of this false self and to help him manifest his true self that lies underneath, dormant or partially dormant for years.
If this process succeeds, the consequences will be great, and often seemingly negative. Becoming honest is a betrayal of all false relationships – be they with friends, parents, partners, family members, colleagues, or with society as a whole. It throws old dynamics into turmoil, which can be especially painful if there is much interdependency – and history.
And then there are risks that are entirely internal. Before healing many people live in such denial of their true feelings that they don’t even feel pain. They live in a numb bubble, which, although deadly, often feels pleasant. Opening up ancient wounds forces the eruption of buried feelings, which tend to be ugly, stinking, painful, and pressured. This is a great shock to a system which has long become accustomed to feeling little or nothing – just as eating healthy food can initially feel sickening and even deadly for a junk food addict or a starving person. Few enjoy the grieving process, few enjoy crying, few enjoy the prolonged miseries and anxieties and radical self-doubts and sleepless nights and even physical illnesses associated with deep emotional growth, but such is change. It has its costs, but for the few willing and able to undertake its true journey, the benefits, in the long-run, are wonderful.
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Most Meditation Teaches Mice to Be Happy with Their Lot
Most meditation teaches unhappy mice how to be happy mice. It does not challenge them to truly face the depths of their deepest pain, much less rebel against the forces that caused it. Most meditation asks that you become numb within, find an inner placidity, accept all, let go, dissociate into as much walled-off bliss as possible – and don’t question it. In an odd way this is not at all unlike what parents teach children – to accept parental limitations, to accept a certain degree of neglect, and to bury unhappiness and especially rage at them.
It is hard to live with inner discomfort. No one enjoys feeling uncomfortable within, but no one who is truly growing can live without a significant amount of discomfort. It takes painful stretching to grow beyond the borders of mousehood and manifest something greater. It takes years, and few are able to tolerate this degree of frustration.
So for those who wish to avoid rather than grow, dissociative meditation offers lovely assistance – and it really does work. It can help you bury your painful feelings, bury your self-truth, bury your self-knowledge, and disappear into a very warm and fuzzy nothingness. There’s a good reason they say “ignorance is bliss.” The road to truth is anything but.
But poor them. After all, what do mice contribute to this planet?
(If you want to read critiques on this meditation essay that I saved from the site's now-defunct bulletin board, try these: Meditation Essay Critique 1 and Meditation Essay Critique 2.)
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Confronting Parents: Its Value and Risk
Confronting one’s parents with the truth has both advantage and disadvantage. Its two main advantages are: 1) that it allows you, the now-grown child, to finally see just how strong you really are and just what you’ve been hiding beneath your surface for so long, and 2) that it allows you to finally put your childhood history in the clear backdrop of reality and see where your parents stand: that the unhealed sides of them, which are usually a significant portion of their personalities, are selfish and not primarily out for your welfare, and never were. The disadvantage of confronting your parents is that their unhealed sides will reject you.
One could argue that confronting parents could cause them to take a closer look at themselves - and begin to grow. This is highly unlikely. Every parent I have ever seen has too much pain and denial to protect to be honest. Anyone who confronts them in hopes of being rescued and loved by them is deluded – and yet we are all deluded to some degree until we become fully enlightened, that is, until we fully resolve the traumas of our childhood. Confronted parents will almost certainly not come to the rescue. If this were in the realm of possibility they wouldn’t have had you in the first place and would instead have healed themselves. On the contrary, they had you to rescue them.
Being rejected by parents is dangerous if you are still unconsciously getting your love needs met from them. Most people do this their whole lives, and often long after their parents have died. Parental idealization is a drug, and a highly addictive one. If you confront them, be prepared to go cold turkey, because they are heartless pushers. They are out for profit first. They were psychically taking from you before you were even born.
But there is relief in being rejected by the family. Now the truth is finally out: you are out of the system. Your soul always was out anyway, and now the rest of your psyche can join it. Now you can integrate. The value in integration, if you can stand the tortured hell, is that you can now grow much more freely. You don’t have to capitulate your actions to their limiting perspectives and pressures, and you can see truth that much more clearly.
This is a necessity for traveling the path toward enlightenment.
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Fear: A Byproduct of Moving Forward
Moving forward is terrifying, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not moving forward. To move forward is to heal. To heal is to become more independent. And to become more independent is to leave one’s parents, and the worst of their patterns, behind. This feels like being an abandoned child. And there is no greater terror than feeling like a helpless, powerless, vulnerable infant at the mercy of the world.
Most people spend their lives carefully planning and maneuvering ways to avoid feeling abandoned. They block their healing process at every turn in the road. They disappear into addictions, relationships, parenthood, and other soul-numbing paths of a thousand varieties. They build false selves to fool themselves into thinking they are happy and comfortable, but they never realize that the beams propping up their façades are rotten with the misery of unresolved traumas. Thus they succumb to their terrors, but they cannot outrun them.
Life beckons us to heal. Life beckons us to grow. Life beckons us to become honest and speak the truth. Life beckons us to face our fears, and not blot them out. Life beckons us to open up our most deeply ugly sides and air them in the cool winds.
If we do not, we will face worse consequences. We will grow old and shriveled before our time. Our eyes will read deadness, our souls depression. We will lose our purpose, and only remember how to drive our cars in reverse – if at all.
But if we honor our soul’s deepest process, we will grow supple. We will grow confident. We will grow humble. We will grow forceful. We will grow healthy. And we will grow nurturing, because we will tap into the source of the deep mother within us all.
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The Power of Honesty
Honesty is the channel of truth between the soul and mind. Those who nurture it are imbued with enormous power: the power to see, the power to know, the power to differentiate, the power to reflect, the power to choose, the power to speak the truth, and ultimately the power to grow.
Most people are dishonest in an attempt to eschew their power. They live as victims, strapped into the childhood ruts their parents lovingly beat them into. They lie not only to their closest intimates but to themselves. Their inner truth is dangerous because it connects with all their years of buried pain and rage and sadness and hurt. If it were to explode it would crush their fragile external lives – and force them to realize just how unloved they are by themselves and their present intimates and how unloved they were in their childhoods by those entrusted to guide their existences.
But at the same time this explosion would free their real purpose for being. Suddenly their lives would find hope – and a path toward peace. This peace might kill them, as it has killed some, but at least they would die knowing for once who they really were.
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Self-Doubt: Your Parents Still Live in Your Head
Self-doubt is part of the healing process. As you progressively break from your family on the quest to become a true individual, a part of yourself remains a clone of the family in attitude and behavior. This part does not want to change. It views the world through the sick family perspective and hates that the deepest part of you desires to free your spirit and stand on your own. The weak attacks the strong, and you feel this attack as self-doubt.
Self-doubt is painful and unpleasant, but valuable. It is the ever present reminder that the civil war within really is happening, and that this is no imaginary internal conflict. Self-doubt points out exactly who are the opposing armies and defines the relative strength and tactics of each. Self-doubt is the conscious expression of the battle between the true self and the false parent that you have internalized, and if you lack clarity about your parents’ deepest motives you need look no further than the cruelty in your own self-doubt. Your parents implanted this self-doubt in you long ago with full intention, however unconscious, of blocking you from progressing on the very journey you are undertaking today. Your parents of today may smile and deny it all, but your self-doubt speaks louder.
As you grow stronger your self-doubt will weaken. But this is not always obvious, because as you grow stronger you will become more conscious of your self-doubt and will hear it more clearly. Whereas in the past you heard your self-doubt unconsciously to the degree that you may have hardly even noticed it and simply followed its orders, now at times it can torture you with its poisoned arrows and roadside bombs. In the past it didn’t consciously trouble you much because you weren’t doing battle with it. You were simply trying to fit in and win impossible love just like you struggled to do as a child. Now you are stronger and realize that if you continue to heed its call it will kill you. So you fight. It is the only way out.
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Alcoholics Anonymous: Its Value and Danger
Alcoholics Anonymous has helped millions to stop drinking, which is a vital step for everyone on the spiritual path, but its inherent limits as a program prevent its members from becoming fully enlightened. AA allows alcoholics a fellowship of peers, but it philosophy denies the full truth – and thus cannot provide fully enlightened guidance. As such, if its members go too far in expressing their true selves, they will not be loved by the group.
AA has a cult mentality. Just like the child in the family, the AA member experiences massive social pressure to conform and to buy the denial of AA. If he speaks against the family at the core level – be it the family of origin or AA – he is suspect, and if he rejects the family outright he is criminal. He is expected to stay a child forever, and thus never leave AA, never call it on its lies, never betray its sick social order and conventions.
AA falsely believes that alcoholism is a disease, not a symptom. This may be comforting for some, but it is not true. Alcoholism is not the disease: the unenlightened family is the disease. Alcoholics were not born so: they were created. They drink themselves into oblivion not because of bad genetics but because of the traumas resulting from childhood abuse, neglect, and rejection. No one raised in a truly loving home – whatever his chromosomes – could become an alcoholic. No one who had full connection with his true self – a fully non-traumatized person – would ever even want to experience even the mildest of dissociative pleasures of drinking alcohol at all.
By denying this reality AA protects the abusive parents, many of whom are its members. But more so it protects alcoholics themselves from feeling their deeper pain, because anyone who learns the full truth of his parents’ cruelties is in for a horribly painful ride. Denying this horrible truth may prevent some from relapsing, but it will prevent everyone from becoming fully enlightened.
Avoiding the deepest levels of pain is part of the AA mentality. They replace the depression of the alcoholic with the grandiosity and dissociation of so-called recovery. This is a spiritual step backwards (See The Four Stages on the Path to Enlightenment). AA believes that full spirituality is attainable by simply admitting the damage you’ve done to others and making amends. This is untrue. Admitting your past wrongs does lessen the cycle of guilt and shame, but does not resolve your own traumas – the damage done to you by your parents. Traumas must be addressed and fully grieved and mourned for deeper healing to take place.
Any program, AA or otherwise, that thinks you can heal without fully exhuming, grieving, and ultimately healing your traumas is siding with your abusive parents and perpetuating the addictive cycle of self-delusion.
(For more, view my critique on AA's twelve steps.)
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Eighteen Ways To Speed Up The Path To Enlightenment
People argue that conscious celibacy in the service of the path toward enlightenment would lead our species to extinction, but in their denial they completely miss the point – and get it backwards. It is our unconsciousness which is leading us to extinction, and as the coming decades pass this will become only more obvious.
The way things are heading with our species on our planet, it is becoming increasingly irresponsible for people to have children. Hopefully this will not be so in the future, but it is the truth is now. Some are waking up to this reality and are consciously changing their ways. Some are being woken up to this reality and are being forced to change their ways. And the rest are going through their lives blissfully asleep – and will soon be rudely awakened to this reality.
There is no need to become depressed and bury one’s head in the sand. There are things the individual can do. The basic way is to become personally enlightened. Once that is accomplished everything else falls naturally into line.
Here is a short list of ways to speed up your path to enlightenment:
1) Stop using drugs.
2) Stop drinking alcohol.
3) Stop smoking cigarettes.
4) Stop having sex.
5) Do not masturbate.
6) Discontinue other addictive behaviors.
7) Eat a healthy, reasonable diet.
8) Take a reasonable amount of exercise.
9) Set aside time for a good night’s sleep each night.
10) Do not reproduce.
11) Be single.
12) Study your personal history.
13) Keep a journal in which you honestly express yourself.
14) Write down your dreams at night and study them – and analyze them – carefully in the morning.
15) Study your motives.
16) Simplify your life to the extreme.
17) Take distance from your family of origin.
18) Take distance from people who do not follow the things on this list
If you can follow this list, chances are it will add a great degree of stress to your life – perhaps too much to handle at any given time – but it will certainly provoke some degree of healing reaction.
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