I was dreaming last night that I, as a perhaps 10 year old child, and my father, had been living some time in an abandoned but monumental building filled with monsters. A sort of survival scenario, which has been the fare of many movies.
My father was benign, and on my side, which differed markedly from the reality. And as a child I was not innocent. I had resolve and resourcefulness, and no little bit of cunning.
The air was filled with danger, but also a long standing capacity for survival.
As I would interpret this, I am slowly integrating more resources for dealing with my trauma. The constant sense of danger is still there, but I am slowly coming to terms with it.
And the point I would make in this regards, is that our “Inner Child”, which we tend to assume is innocent, helpless, and just needs love and support, is perhaps better imaged in a more complex way. We all need love, and we all needed love growing up, but even children by the time they are past the age of five or so have developed coping strategies.
If you were born into fire, you have some resistance to it. It does not do much good to mourn what didn’t happen, and does much good to emphasize the fact that you survived, somehow, emotionally, and to build on what worked, if it was not grossly dysfunctional.
And at the root of this is, as I just argued in another post, is the capacity for the fight, for standing your ground and giving at least as good as you get.
Fierceness can be a virtue, and it is my perception that our current cultural obsession with niceness weakens that, and that that weakness, in turn, breeds more trauma–you are more or less giving up without a fight, which means internalizing more shame–which in turn breeds more unconscious violence which, when it is rationalized, as it usually is, makes the world darker and worse.
This is how you get “nice” people who feel little on a daily basis but rage and anger and if we are honest, hatred. It is in large measure externalized self loathing, which is to say shame. The target does not matter much, and obviously many power hungry psychopaths are only too happy to provide targets that are politically useful to themselves and their ambitions.