On Setbacks
My translation of the statement; to supply me with prestige, security, and the like… into the trauma-informed language of the 21st century would draw attention to every child’s needs for ample acknowledgement, attention, affection, and an ongoing felt sense of safety. For those of us who came up short in any of these areas, our Inner Child may, even decades later, continue to attempt to draw our attention to the necessity of healing the woundedness, the childhood trauma. Until these cries for help are heeded and acted upon, we will remain in bondage to impulsive, somatically driven reactions, the coping patterns of the helpless child. This is a form of mental gridlock.
Parents
My paternal grandfather died long before I was born, when my father was a boy of 14. The fact that my dad died when I was a boy of 16 would appear to be the flip side of that coin of synchronicity. He was in his 52nd year and struck me, then, as being a very old man. The luxury of the blessing of enjoying an adult-to-adult relationship with both my daughter and son is something I consciously cherish. Again, through stories and hearsay, I conclude that my paternal grandfather was not emotionally available to his eleven children, of which my father was the second youngest…
Awe
Because many of us rarely experience awe or do so only sporadically, we remain unaware of its beneficial effects on our state of heart and mind. When most of us have the experience of feeling down, for example, we usually look for distraction through busyness or light relief through comedy or entertainment. These are not only less effective than awe; they may, in fact, be counterproductive in that our stress levels are ultimately increased by the end of the day. Cultivating awe, on the other hand, can still the mind and trigger a great mental shift, propelling our neural activity beyond what had become its predictable comfort zone…
Summer Solstice
We arrived on the first day of the retreat in awe of the wild, beautiful natural surroundings of Ballycroy, Co. Mayo in the stunning, pristine, natural landscape of the Erris Blanket Bog. Here in the wild West of Ireland, it would be no surprise to encounter selkies at dusk where the sand dunes meet the ocean on the further shore of the estuary, the confluence of the two black-brown rivers as they dissolve into the broad, salty ocean. This encounter with the “wildness without” is conducive to our opening up to the “wildness within”, a wildness that often gets buried beneath layers of societal expectations, childhood coping strategies, urban living, busy schedules, family obligations, and the superficialities of life in our driven consumer society…
Indivisible Reality
When we say a person has her feet on the ground, we mean rooted in reality, perception unclouded by denial, delusion, illusion, grandiosity, or anxiety, all states that skew our sense of reality. If we can’t even recognise where we are, we will have enormous difficulty in getting where we want to go. It’s a bit like asking Google Maps to take me to “Cologne Cathedral” and when the prompt comes to submit my current location, I enter “unknown”. Even Artificial Intelligence algorithms are going to have great difficulty in providing accurate directions under such circumstances…
Source
When we operate in hyper-rational mode, those with whom we interact tend to become intimidated, especially if the are less analytically inclined. We appear to them as emotionally cold, even harsh. In doing so, we proliferate a pattern we experienced as children, whereby our feelings and perceptions are discounted and belittled. The tragedy in adult life is that we are now doing this to ourselves, in our own inner dialogue, as well as to others. In the work of our circles, we men begin to transcend this old, ingrained pattern, get in touch with our feelings and – further underneath – our intuition…
Vulnerability
It was all those jagged edges that bewildered and overwhelmed me, that had me on the run almost from the time that I had learned to walk. Now I can see that these were the product of the unexpressed grief, the denial, and the crazy making which characterized the family in which I grew up. There was no one there to hold me with my jagged edges, so I simply covered them over in the hope of avoiding further mutilation. When we hide things from others for long enough, they become hidden from us too. Yet beneath the armour, the wounds continue to ache. And then they begin to fester. Only when the pain becomes intolerable do we cry out for hope.
Dealing With Fear
I have had countless discussions with others in recovery or on the threshold of such an approach. The hallmark question that has emerged from these interactions is: “How safe did you feel while growing up? To my genuine surprise, an overwhelming majority of people answered that they often didn’t feel safe, and then went on to describe aspects of a nebulous state of distress which comprised one or more of the following: danger, risk, peril, threat, hazard, jeopardy, trouble, distress, chaos, unpredictability, instability, vulnerability, violability, etc….
Encouragement
In the Positive Intelligence (PQ) Mental Fitness modality, we postulate that the fear-driven Saboteurs (Judge, Controller, Pleaser, Hyper-Vigilant, etc.) reside in the left hemisphere, and that the love-propelled Sage Powers (Compassion, Exploration, Navigation, etc.) are located in the right hemisphere. A neural shift is required if we are to move from Saboteur to Sage. This shift is enabled by the Mind Command muscle, which is activated and strengthened by daily on-going short bursts of somatic and imaginative exercises, many no longer than two minutes each. These so-called “PQ Reps” represent a circuit-breaker of our incessant thinking. Called “Stinking Thinking” in some quarters, this habit keeps us either in the past or the future, or alternating continuously between the two…
Panic!
How many of us have done this in our own lives? We get hurt, betrayed, lied to, or abandoned, and instead of healing, we obsess on the apparent cause of our suffering. We replay conversations. We wait for apologies that may never come. We try to explain ourselves to people who have already shown us they could never truly listen. We pour our energy into understanding the one who hurt us (so we can better manipulate their thoughts, feelings, and actions) instead of caring for the part of us that has been wounded. The truth is simple, even if uncomfortable: Some people bite because they are in the grip of their fear-driven Saboteurs. Systems driven by fear wound because that’s how they are designed…
