This morning, awakening from a night on the town, I stepped back from a cycle I now see in myself. What I realized is that if you terrorize a child ONCE in a beating it does not have the emotional maturity to understand, that child will internalize that beating and make it a part of a recurring cycle. It will cycle between the bad and the good. It will “beat itself up” both in obvious ways like excessive self criticism, and relationships that are in part masochistic and unfulfilling, but also in more subtle ways through lowered expectations from life globally, generally.
You can’t live in that place where you were crushed forever, so you leave it, and have moments of relative happiness, but since the original pain was unexpected, and you don’t know on an unconscious level what to expect from the future, you feel a sense of acute anxiety if the next beating is too far in the future, so you bring it on yourself. You self sabotage, you learn to live in feelings of lowered excitement, you compromise.
And in my own life, I now see for the first time, I have cycled between the beatings and the emotionally dominant atmosphere, which was low level anxiety and emotional detachment. If you compare to the beating, it is relatively more pleasant, so you feel you like you doing yourself a favor in leaving that place. You can create, through cycles like this, the feeling that your life, on balance, is in balance, that you are doing well, everything is fine, it’s all good, just a few bad moments here and there. But you can be miserable because NOWHERE in the cycle is there AUTHENTIC happiness, love, joy, creative engagement. You don’t have that reference point, so you don’t know you are lacking it.
And I want to be clear that this has been the norm for human history for almost all people. Almost everyone who has ever lived has fallen far short of their potential. What is unique about this time is we can shout this truth from the mountaintop without being crucified.
The purposes of life are to learn to love and be loved, and to pursue goals, purposive work. Our goals are to learn to connect with others, and to connect with creation in a teleological way. Life has these purposes, but they are sundry and appropriately pursued by all in their own unique and thus beautiful way. It is the seeking and the finding that makes us unique.
I look around me, and I am not unique in the nature of my emotional scars. On the contrary: people whose parents genuinely nurtured them to love and be successful are few and far between. The only thing unique about my past is the extent to which I have engaged with it, found my centers of distress, and walked into them and asked for an explanation, and listened long enough to get it.
I have reached some truly deep places. This realization is filling me, somatically, with anxiety, but it is the feeling of a poison I long ago learned to accept and ignore slowly leaving my body; a cancer being denuded of nutrition. The fangs of the snake are being removed. There will be few, if any, more injections, and I will walk down the road lighter.
I am feeling peace, and wish you the same, friend.