Physical appearance is a great deceiver. Most people look like adults but are not really adults at all. Emotionally, most people are children. The emotions and attitudes that prevail in kindergarten and on the playground continue on into adult life. Within most people is a child who is merely imitating being an adult.
The simple reason why we stay at the emotional level of children is we rarely examine the childhood beliefs that we filter our perceptions of the world through. We most often stay patterned in the beliefs that we laid down as children, repeating the same kinds of feelings as we did when we were little.
Michael Brown explains this process of our child within inside our adult body so eloquently:
"Experientially it is in the first seven years, any and all uncomfortable experience arising from our entry into the conditional world are imprinted into and affect the condition of our emotional body. Our emotional body is therefore where the record of these occurrences is kept."
Children literally soak up the emotional soup around them. I remember an instance many years ago of sitting on the sofa and noticing the synchronicity of my emotionality with my child's. My four year old daughter was in the next room, in our old claw foot tub taking a bath. The house was silent and suddenly I felt a sharp loneliness strike my heart. Just at that moment, my daughter in the next room cried out, "Mommy! My heart feels like it is falling out of my chest with loneliness!"
In my study of family system therapy I have come to understand that whatever our parents and ancestors cannot deal with emotionally falls upon the next generation's shoulders to feel, process and integrate. This is how we evolve as family groups. We are all an integral part of a larger whole of healing. We do not suffer alone. Everyone suffers in some way. We are not crazy. We are sensitive human beings. We are all part of a larger family group evolving and healing.
I have often felt the pain of my mother and father as if it were my own. We can often feel the unhealed traumas, losses and disappointments of the previous generations in our family because we are all joined. So to try to pin our uncomfortable feelings on a specific trauma from childhood, or to always look for some kind of childhood story of abuse, is often much too simplistic. As human beings we suffer on a deep level for all of those who have come before us. We suffer for all those in our family who did not know how to handle their emotional pain.
The Search for Unconditional Love
On a deep level we are angry that we were not unconditionally loved as children, and this anger can saliently block our creativity and our forward creative movement. We can feel frustrated that we regularly compromised our truth and our authenticity. We became inauthentic in childhood to belong, but now it is our task and our purpose as mature adults to find out who we really are.
We move through our creative blocks by loving ourselves unconditionally. We do this by feeling everything deeply. And in that intensely loving fire of attention to all that we have denied inside of ourselves, we come to know ourselves and our purpose profoundly. Loving all that is repressed and rejected in our unconscious mind is evocative of the mother holding her child in the collage at right with such tender awareness. With unwavering attention and determination she vows to never abandon her crying child. We need to treat ourselves in this same reverent way.
It is all to easy when we feel uncomfortable feelings to become the opposite of loving towards ourselves. Usually we put ourselves down and start mentally punishing ourselves for not feeling happy. We wonder what is wrong with us. We tell ourselves that we are no good, or substandard as a human being for feeling the way that we do. We punish our shadow parts that are simply trying to come into the light to be seen and included and learned from.
Perhaps one of the most creative things life accomplishments that we can we can focus on is to learn how to love ourselves unconditionally. To love ourselves means loving what feels hard and painful inside - unconditionally - without thinking or reacting. It does not matter what comes up - we attend to it with tender and exquisite attention. Every feeling holds messages and gifts embedded within it no matter how difficult it feels.
Becoming Strongly Present to Your Emotional Pain
Often inner pain can take over our entire life for a time. It can become so big, we can barely think, function, work, or relate to other people. We think we have to get rid of our pain. But presence to our emotional pain is nothing more than learning to become more largely loving than the pain. Becoming larger and stronger than your pain does not heal your pain - it is still there - but because it is loved and accepted with such inner strength, it integrates into your larger being. This is how we grow up. This is how we mature ourselves into contributing, creative adults.
We do this presence work by touching our inner pain with awareness - tapping it lightly at first - taking breaks when it hurts too unbearably. We then effort to sustain loving attention to our emotional pain for longer periods of time until we learn how to become consistently larger than it. As we grow psychologically stronger, the pain passes through our being at a faster rate and we are no longer mired in emotional difficulty for such long periods of time.
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