TRANSCRIPT
Little babies have perfect spirits. They know truth; they inherently understand it, and they love it. But their parents hold some degree of denial, and that causes conflict with the child because the child desperately wants to be real and needs to be real. The horrible rub is that his parents desperately need him to be just like they are. For a little child, this is torture because it goes totally against what all his instincts are telling him to do, which is to be 100% real and honest, 100% connected with his spirit.
So right away, he comes into conflict with his parents and their needs, their unresolved emotional needs, their need to lie. The result of this is that every child that comes into the world has to go through this transitional conflict of giving up parts of himself in order to fit into his family system, in order to fit into the world and the needs of his parents. This is traumatizing for a child and traumatizing in 100% of the meaning of the word trauma. It’s emotionally overwhelming; it’s totally intense. It’s full of horror and misery and terrible, terrible pain.
I often am very alone in expressing this idea that little kids go through emotional trauma just by fitting into the denial of their family system. Because this traumatizing process is so incredibly common that it’s the norm, it’s ubiquitous. Everybody goes through it, so that in our society, that’s not even considered a problem. Or another way to say it: the pink elephant in the living room is that all little kids are going through emotional trauma in their families, but it’s so common that nobody wants to say it.
What it means is, first, that people shouldn’t be having children until they’ve totally worked out their inner issues, until they’ve totally worked out their denial, so they’re not forcing the child to squeeze into their little box of denial. The second thing that it means is that parents themselves have to look at what happened to them. They have to look at their own history and see that what they are doing to their children and have done to their children is exactly what was done to them. That means that they have to look at their own history of trauma, and they have to get in touch with their own internal pain that’s been split off for decades.
They have to look at the horrible things that their parents did to them, and this entails breaking their idealization of their parents to whatever degree they idealized their parents. This entails looking at their childhood and really seeing the denial that was everywhere in their family. It also entails looking at themselves as adolescents and as adults and seeing how much denial they were and are still in. And to be blunt, who wants to do that?
Well, if someone has a desperation to get real, in a desperation to be their true self and totally connect with who they really are, then they do want to do that. But if part of them wants to live for comfort, if part of them wants to live an easier emotional life, if part of them wants to just feel good and happy most of the time, if part of them wants to be loved by the norm, beloved by their parents, beloved by conventional friends, beloved by their conventional spouses and partners, then they don’t want to look at it.
And here’s a fascinating point: the process of a child being traumatized, emotionally traumatized, being forced into denial, being forced to go through horrible painful experiences, is exactly what an adult needs to go through in order to work at his traumas, just in the other direction. So being traumatized is like swallowing poison. It burns your mouth, it burns your throat, and it burns your stomach. But if you can learn how to take that poison and put it into some split-off part of yourself, it doesn’t hurt anymore.
Now, the process of emotional healing and of bringing those traumas up, of looking at your denial and of resolving it, of figuring out how to work it out and becoming an honest person, that’s the exact opposite process. That’s taking the poison out of the split-off comfortable parts of yourself, bringing it right back into your gut and vomiting it up. It’s terribly painful; it’s exactly the same pain that the child went through once upon a time.
So the intensity with which people resist looking at their traumas and resist healing them goes to show exactly how painful the traumatizing process was in the first place. Extreme examples qualify here perfectly: alcoholics. Why are they in denial? Because it’s terribly painful not to be in denial. Now, the pain that an alcoholic has to go through to really understand why he became an alcoholic and why he has stayed an alcoholic for so many years, that pain tells exactly the horror he went through once upon a time because it’s the exact same pain. It’s the unresolved pain of childhood trauma.
Now, that’s an extreme example, but for all of us, that’s true. Breaking our denial is terribly painful. And how much easier to just say, “I’m not in denial, I don’t have any problems.” Lots and lots and lots of people say that. Normally, in day-to-day life, we don’t address child abuse; we don’t address painful life experiences of childhood. How many biographies skip right over people’s entire childhood? Or if they talk about their childhood, they just paint it in the idyllic and rosy terms about how wonderful the childhood was. Maybe spend five or ten pages on the idyllic nature of childhood and then move right into adulthood as if childhood never even happened.
Well, that’s how most people live their conscious lives. They really don’t have any connection with their deep and painful childhood experiences, and as a result of that, they really don’t know themselves at all.