CosmicSandBox’s Weblog

            The adult children of the world are having a temper tantrum! Individuals and nations are blaming and hating each other because they’re not getting their own way.  Centuries of hiding from oursevles has produced this gigantic season of violence and calamity in which we find ourselves. We can’t begin to find a way out of this conundrum until we know the cause. I believe the cause is our hidden shame.

            Although it would take a book to explore this subject, I just want to begin a discussion and hopefully you will resonate with what I think I see happening.

            We are suffering from what some therapists would call “arrested development”; meaning we stopped growing emotionally at a young age, and we see life through the fear-filled eyes of our child, who is still very much alive within us . We don’t realize this child within is directing the show, because we buried him/her when we were little. We were punished, humiliated and shamed. We were told we were bad, ungrateful, selfish little boys and girls. Grownups didn’t like who we were BEING when we were just being ourselves, full of light, joy, vitality and imagination. Being threatened with rejection, we decided we had to be someone else to be loved and cared for.

            With our young, now hurt and shamed little minds we tried to figure out what our parents wanted. A lot of us modeled one or both of our parents’ roles, such as Bully, Victim, Pleaser, Joker, Abuser, Rescuer, etc.  You know the drill. The abused child becomes an abuser. We put our joyful, happy, trusting child self in the basement of our psyche. And there he/she has stayed.

            So here we are now. We’re all grown up little kids with our masks firmly in place playing our chosen roles and trying to find joy and fulfillment in our prefabricated lives. Life works for awhile until something major happens that requires that the real us shows up. When something or someone demands 100% of us be present, our false self can’t make the grade. Our real self is stuffed so far down we don’t even remember he/she is there. So what do we do? We project that fear and hurt from our shamed child outside ourselves onto whomever is involved in the drama. We attack, judge, manipulate, play victim, run and hide, you name it.

            We must acknowledge that the care givers had good intentions. The goal was to teach children how to control their selfish, angry feelings so they could function in our society. But no one seems to know how to do that in a healthy and life affirming way. Most everyone makes the child wrong and bad for having human emotions. They are coming from fear of losing control and they repeat what was done to them as children.

             If we can understand what happens to children when parents/teachers project their hurt and shame onto young minds, we can begin to free ourselves of that shame. The fear of being humiliated is a person’s greatest fear. This is why we are experiencing so much violence on the planet. Billions of us were shamed as children, and we fear being shamed or made wrong and bad again now. This is why we project our buried shame outside ourselves onto scapegoats.  We do this as individuals and as groups and even nations. What our parents did to us is what their parents did to them back for hundreds of years, so this isn’t a beat up the parents time. But we do need to recognize that just because it has been accepted practice to shame children it must stop with us now. We can be free of those toxic tapes running in our minds by being aware that they are there and choose instead to listen to that still small voice inside our heart instead.

           We aren’t the persons we were told we were by our hurt/shamed care givers. What is true is that at our core we are still vibrant, joyous, innocent beings who love and want to be loved.  That never changes one iota no matter how old we may be. The flip side of the story is that we also have a darker shadowy side that does want its own way, and can be selfish and demanding like our three year old child. This is called being human.

           None of us have been trained in accepting our darker side or how to integrate it. Like I said, we have “arrested development” and we just react to situations from our inner three-year old child space. In order to get back in the driver seat of our lives we have to pay attention to our feelings in the moment. 

          When scarey, hurtful, stressful events happen in our lives, pause a moment, and look within to notice how and what we are feeling down deep…in that still, small place where our inner child is hiding. Fear of some sort usually comes up first, i.e. fear of failing, fear of not being good enough, fear of being humiliated. Then instead of running away from that fearful feeling, accept it. If possible go back in your memory to when you were a small child and note when you first felt this same fear. When you get a hold of it, realize that you don’t have to react with that fear in your current situation. You are grown and safe now, not a scared, powerless three year old. We can honor and respect that imaginative, joyful free spirited child within us.

            We could never stand up to our parents as kids and tell them they were wrong about us and to ask them for what we needed.  Now we can do that for ourselves. Our authentic vibrant self is alive and well within us. This isn’t a Polyanna philosophy either.

            We are both light and dark, good and  bad. We don’t really want an all flawless vanilla world. We want the dark chocolate to spice it up and give us contrasts and challenges. These become fertilizer for our new creations. However, if our fears and hurts are denied and  kept hidden they become toxic. That’s when we unconsciously project the negative, destructive behaviors onto others.

            I am encouraged because I see that more and more of us are beginning to awaken to who we are as human beings – the good, the bad and the ugly. We are learning to accept ourselves, forgive ourselves and integrate our weaknesses instead of denying them and stuffing them into our unconscious. If we face our fears with courage, we can live an authentic life in peace and creative compassion. 

           We won’t have to have any more tantrums!