TRANSCRIPT
Why is it so scary to grow? I think if it weren’t so scary to grow, we would all just grow so easily. We would become the people who we were really meant to be in the world. We would connect more with our true selves and express that all the time. And that’s what growth is: going toward that connection with our inner true self.
But why don’t we do it? To me, it is because it’s so scary. And what is really scary about it? When I stop and think about why it has been so scary for me to grow, and really growing emotionally, it’s breaking from my parents. It’s breaking not just from their fears, but the fears that they instilled in me. Basically, I see the family system as kind of a cult, and that’s including really good families too, not just the really screwed up families.
And because of that, they don’t want people breaking out of their way of doing things, their way of thinking, their way of behaving in the world, their way of interacting, and also thinking beyond their limits. Now, I know many parents who say, “I want my children to go beyond me. I want my children to do better things than I have done in the world.” And actually, my own parents said that. But I think the caveat that most people don’t add, most parents don’t add, is they really don’t want their children to be more emotionally mature than they are.
And so basically, if you’re going to grow, you’re going to leave behind your past. You’re going to leave behind your parents, your family, the cult from which you came. You may have to leave behind your culture, or a lot of it. And I think this is all an internal process too. The terror isn’t just terror that they’re going to reject me and they’re not going to like me. The terror is within, mostly because when we’re children, we internalize our parents. We take them inside of us, and they become a part of us. They actually help us develop our personality, for good and for bad.
And so we have to break with sides of ourselves. We enter a land that we don’t know. We go into places that are very unusual. And if we’re going to really do it well, we’re going to be all alone. And so the deepest fear that I’ve seen in myself and others is the fear of the child within us being abandoned. So it’s childhood abandonment that comes up with growth.
And growth is also facing our limitations, facing our traumas, grieving them. It means bringing up a lot of feelings that are very, very old, that haven’t been accessed in a long, long time. And they’re not easy feelings. If they were easy feelings, they wouldn’t be blocked off with trauma. We would actually naturally grow without even thinking about it. But to really start to face those traumas is a terrifying prospect because the whole nature of trauma is that it’s terrifying, and it’s deep within us, and it’s buried, and it’s the unspeakable.
So when we really start to grow, when we really face these demons, we start speaking the unspeakable. We start having a relationship with our self that says, “This relationship with me is actually more important than my relationship with all the people who were once so important to me.” And that is entering a whole new terrain where the rules are different, and our internal selves define these rules. And it’s simply not easy.
I also think another thing that makes growing so scary and so difficult is that on a really deep level, not a lot of people are doing it. That has been my experience going all over the world, meeting people, having my website for more than 10 years. Yes, there are people out there, but they still are rare. And I think this is part of the problem. Humanity has not yet reached a critical mass, not even close to it, so that most of the people who are doing really deep inner work to really grow in significant ways are doing it almost entirely alone.
And it’s very scary to do something this profound alone. It’s a lot easier with allies. So I think if the world changed, I think if there were a lot more people who were a lot more visible about really doing massive growth and really getting in touch with who they really were at a deep level, it would be a lot easier, and it would be a lot less scary because there would be a new group to hold us. Right now, since we’re doing it alone, we have to face this abyss of horror all by ourselves.