Freedom, then, over time places power of all sorts in the hands of those who are unwise. Freedom contains, too, though, the power of reform, and this rule obviously is not absolute. It merely describes what I feel is a tendency.
I would stipulate this: no person who is unable to relax fully, to let EVERYTHING go, can be said to be fully psychologically healthy; and I would guess this is most people on the planet, certainly in the supposedly “developed” world; it is likely less true for those who have less to hold on to, although I don’t presume to speak for the poor, who in almost all cases would certainly prefer not to be poor.
Autogenic Therapy rests on this premise. How it works, effectively, is that as the patient learns deep relaxation, more and more unconscious content, held in reservoirs of sorts, comes flowing out.
It has been my own experience that there are qualitative levels, approximately, and that as you process one, you gain access to another. The end will find me capable of letting go of everything that binds me, which is the goal of most spiritual traditions, all of which, in my view, would benefit from incorporating the insights particularly of modern trauma psychology.
Virtually everyone you see on every street is “walking wounded” in some way. Given the chance, they will not be able to fully let go in a deep relaxation session. This is my guess, although of course my opinion may be skewed by me being, I think, a bit more wounded than most.
But I got to thinking. I remember being screened for scoliosis in grade school (I have it). What if we screened kids for trauma? What if, for example, we taught every school kid in America both Progressive Relaxation and Autogenics from grade 4 through 6? Sooner or later, all traumas would likely come out.
Look at our prisons: could you not hang a sign on the neck of virtually everyone there, even those in for drug and alcohol related offenses, and say “untreated trauma victim”?
I suspect you could hang such a sign on every other person, at least, in a typical ghetto.
What a wonderful society we could build, though, if everyone got the help they needed, and which in most cases they didn’t even know they needed. This holds particularly true if as many people suffer from pre-3 trauma as I suspect do. What emotionally immature mother is not capable of scaring the shit out of a rambunctious 2 year old?
Food for thought.
Ponder that last phrase.