What a great year of learning, again.
Lessons seemed to continually line up to serve to me… more of me; more freedom, more letting go, surrendering and allowing, more ways to be expressive, a deeper understanding, followed by affirmations of what doing the opposite would look like.
I think I thought, that when I said I was going forth with love, peace and joy, like magic, that was what would follow. Wrong.
Instead I was served up all of my relationships were no love, peace or joy existed, and asked to redo myself there.
I was given opportunity after opportunity, sometimes many at a time, all clamoring for my attention…insatiable energies of need and control, that had kept me from peace or feelings of love or experiencing joy.
What I believe lots of folks believe, is that they stay in the same place, but instead of feeling anxious, controlled, resentful, rage, anger, tight restraint…they will just work harder to feel different.
To stay with same relationships, BUT feel differently about them.
Feel more loving…will bring up love. And to become peaceful where rebellious feelings explode…to dial down or to a different frequency.
That isn't what real love, peace and joy is.
That is denying what is there and forcing feelings. Which is to have false feelings of love, peace and joy.
Many believe you can simply just 'think' differently about an individual etc and like magic, feelings will change. That your feelings are the problem within the relationship…not that the relationship itself is where the troubles lie.
Seeing life differently is where the key lies.
I am reading, "The Body Never Lies" by Alice Miller. This is one of the first authors who addresses the child, instead of the parent…she sees abuse from the child's perspective and how the body feels and then how the child is made to 'feel different' in order to honor and love thy parents.
She writes, "The parenting approach know as "Poisonous Pedogogy" breeds overly well adjusted individuals who can only trust the mask they have been Forced to wear because as children they lived in constant fear of punishment. "I am bringing you up in the way that is best for you" is the supreme principle behind this approach. "If I beat you or use words to torment and humiliate you, it is for all for your own good."
"In this famous novel Fateless, the Hungarian writer and Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz describes his arrival at the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was fifteen years old at the time, and he tells us in great detail how he attempted to interpet the many grotesque and appalling things he encountered on his arrival there as something positive and favorable for him. Otherwise he would not have survived his own mortal fear."
"Probably every child who has suffered abuse must assume an attitude like this in order to survive. These children reinterpret their perceptions in a desperate attempt to see as good and beneficial things that outside observers would immediately classify as crimes. Children have no choice. They must repress their true feelings if they have no "helping witness" to turn to and are helplessly exposed to their persecutors. Later as adults lucky enough to encounter "enlightened witnesses," they do have a choice. Then they can admit the truth, their truth; they can stop pitying and "understanding" their persecutors, stop trying to feel their unsustainable, disassociated emotions, and roundly denounce the things that have been done to them. This step bring immense relief for the body. It no longer has to forcibly remind the adult self of the tragic history it went through as a child. Once the adult self has decided to find out the whole truth about itself, the body feels understood, respected, and protected."
"I call the violent kind of "upbringing" abuse, not only because children are thus refused the right to dignity and respect as human beings but also because such an approach to parenting establishes a kind of totalitarian regime in which it is impossible for children to perceive the humilations, indignities, and disrespect they have been subjected to, let alone defend themselves against them. These patterns of childhood will inevitably then be adopted by their victims and used on their partners and their own children, at work, in politics, wherever fear and anxiety of the profoundly insecure child can be fended off with the aid of external power. It is in this way that dictators are born; these are people with a deep-seated contempt for everyone else, people who were never respected as children and thus do their utmost to earn that respect at a later stage with the assistance of the gigantic power apparatus they have built around them."
"The sphere of politics is an excellent example of the way in which the hunger for power and recognition is never stilled. It is insatiable, it can never be entirely satisfied. The more power these people have, the more they are spurred on to actions of compulsory repetition, restore the initial feelings of impotence they were trying to escape; Hitler is his bunker, Stalin in his paranoid fears, Mao in the final rejection by his people, Napoleon in exile, Milosevic in prison, Saddam Hussein in his mortifying fall from power. What impelled these men to abuse the power they had achieved to such a pitch that it ultimately plunged them into impotence and powerlessness? I believe it was their bodies. Their bodies sustained the knowledge of the impotence they felt in childhood; they stored such knowledge in their cells, and they set out to force their "owners" to face up to that knowledge. But the reality of their childhood instilled such fear in the hearts of these dictators that they preferred to wipe out whole peoples, to exterminate millions of human beings, rather than confront the truth – their truth." Alice Miller
I am reading this book for the second time, and it once again has a much broader meaning to me, than the first time around. I am now able to see more potently the actual ways a child has to disregard its own body in order to survive, to look for 'positive' so not to drown in its own mortal fears…and how quickly an outsider can spot the crimes, while those within are unable to see.
I have experienced the view of being an outsider and the quick slamming of the door behind me as I stood on the sidewalk, for the 'family unit' couldn't withstand the truth…mine and theirs.
Their impotency against truth is what causes such insane behavior. Their lack of self power and worth has them snubbing outside…like that is where their truth lives…within us.
You can berate me and kick me out of your life, but your truth, just as in the Dictators of the past did…but you are kicking us so as to NOT feel and own your own truth.
I know that I have been kicked aside. And it has nothing to do with me, but it has much more to do with the individual's fear of their own truths. By keeping me out of their worlds, they like the 15 year old Hungarian Boy, keep their concentration camp a place of positive living…of love, peace and joy.
I am so grateful that I was able to have the courage to see my own truth…
What I didn't know, is that the most violent among us are those who are in mortal fear of seeing their childhoods in Reality's Light.
That their violent behavior is to keep themselves from feeling the truth about their parents.
So, as you go forth on this New Year's day, be careful what you seek for your self in 2012.
If you seek, like I did, a life filled with love, peace and joy; you will first have to find all the places you have it wrong. It has been 7 years of learning what isn't…in order for me to then set forth again.
My wish for you is your own wish for your self.
I M Perfect lady 