Connecting with Anger
There’s not a Worker in this world who will do this work of healing and not grapple with their anger. And while there is such a thing as healthy and justified anger, like when we viscerally react to someone’s cruel or careless ways, or when we feel a deep conviction there’s a wrong that we have some control and authority to make right, that type of anger has a whole different mojo from old anger.
Old anger is a cover for buried hurts the Worker doesn’t want to feel. While they may be cut off from many of their more nuanced feelings, it’s entirely likely the new Worker is in touch with their anger. They activate their life force by lashing out at an unfair world that feels out of control. This anger is not the same as a deep inner No to life, but we will never get to that No if we don’t address the surface anger that is acting as a smokescreen for painful feelings.
If we are going to help our Worker, we will need to be able to not only tolerate their anger, but invite it to come forward. We do this by creating a safe container with the Worker so they can feel and vent their anger, under which is an even deeper rage at living on this harsh dualistic plane. Until and unless the Worker breaks through into all this messiness, they will remain stuck behind the mask of their ineffective defenses.
In the early decades of doing Core Energetics work, large full-body movement was used to loosen up the body’s tight energetic holdings. This was done in conjunction with powerful verbal expressions that could unmoor the deep physical attachments of painful feelings. Today, many of the very same Helpers who came up working that way, now do the work in a more subtle fashion.
Instead of standing in the middle of the room and beating a pillow with a tennis racquet by swinging it straight down from overhead, now people are often capable of accessing feelings of anger just as readily by twisting a towel. Perhaps its because they’ve already done work in other ways—opening up the body through yoga or tai chi—or maybe its because collectively we’ve matured in this area. The Guide says over and over that we have no idea how much we are helping all of humankind with the individual healing work we do, and this is likely part of the positive effect of many decades of people doing deep inner work.
This isn’t to say there isn’t a perfectly appropriate time for doing the transformative work as taught through approaches like Core Energetics. But in a healing session, there may be less gross-motor-movement ways to accomplish the same thing. These may also be safer to direct the Worker in, since large movements are more prone to causing physical harm due to accidents.
So when the Worker is sharing their story with us, and we notice they are feeling angry as they speak, we can offer them a towel to twist in their hands while they continue to talk. At the same time, we want to encourage them to stay grounded and connected with their body. It may be helpful for them to stand and stamp their feet. We can also encourage the Worker to make sounds—especially guttural, growly sounds—and to open up their jaw where anger and tension often get congested.
Speaking of which, it can be really hard to access deep-seated anger without swearing. It just is. Swear words gives us an inner traction that has the grit needed to really connect with hate and anger. Directing the Worker to yell “I hate” is good, but screaming “I fucking hate you” is often, for this work, far better. As the Helper, even if swearing is not a regular thing for us, consider feeding phrases to the Worker that include the curses necessary to get all the way to the bottom of the well of pain.
We can invite them to aim their anger directly at us, pouring their hate through the portals of their eyes and directly into ours. Whenever doing this type of physical embodiment of feelings, it’s usually best for the Worker to keep their eyes open, directed at the floor if necessary. This keeps them in the room and in their body, and prevents them from losing a sense of their surroundings and potentially getting disoriented and hurting themselves.
As Helpers, we may find ourselves doing these same movements with the Worker, such as stamping our feet or growling. This offers both a demonstration of what to do and eases the shame of feeling these intense feelings in front of someone else. Shame is related to how we think others perceive us, and as the Worker exposes more and more of their vulnerability with the Helper, the shame will lift off. But we may need to help them over this hurdle. Working in groups is also tremendously effective in dissolving shame (read more in Working with Groups) and opens doors for other anger-releasing exercises, such as having two people push against each other by pushing each other’s hands.
Clearly, as Helpers, we need to have explored this type of Core Energetics exercise ourselves before we venture into guiding our Workers in this way. And always keep in mind that we have to invite the Worker into these deeper waters slowly, actively attending to maintaining a sacred container as well as a safe environment for doing this work.
Transforming the Inner No
The yes-current is the part of the Worker connected to supreme intelligence and the creative forces of the universe. It strives toward union and wholeness, longing to live in harmony and to be fulfilled. It accepts and embraces life, and is loving and in truth. Where the Worker has a yes-current, they will always have a yes-current. And sometimes it can be really helpful to remind them that this part of them exists, especially when it is being overrun by their no-current.
The no-current works in the opposite way. It is ignorant and blind, lacking in awareness and fearful of the truth. This distorted aspect of the Worker is what we are most concerned with. It’s the opposite of love and sends the Worker down dead-end streets filled with discord and isolation. The no-current sets up its own little house of mirrors that keeps directing the Worker down more blind alleys that lead to more error and half-truths. It puts the emphasis on the wrong things, so that even if correct, the answers won’t lead the way out of the no-current. Hence, the Worker needs our help.
What the Worker needs most is to realize that they have such a life-defeating, destructive attitude. There is actually nothing negative about discovering one’s No, and it’s important for the Worker to stop ignoring this aspect of themselves. They must come to understand why their hidden concepts are untruthful, so they can then set about replacing them with truthful ones. If they don’t see the destructive nature of their own Lower Self, they will have no motivation to change it.
What doesn’t work is for the Worker to have a vague idea about these concepts. That won’t cut it in terms of surfacing and transforming their deeply imprinted no-current. They need to discover specifically how they are saying No to whatever it is they desire and don’t have. After such a discovery is made, the Worker will never be the same. They will be able to see that it’s true after all—they are not some persecuted victim in an unfair world. This isn’t a chaotic place where the law of the jungle prevails. Such awareness will also go a long way in unraveling any notions about a punishing deity in the sky who rewards and withholds in whatever unsatisfying way the Worker’s parents did.
When the Worker finds their no-current—the way they are saying No to the very thing they most desire—they will suddenly see the truth of the divine order of things. They may lose this thread and need to find it over and over again, but their grasp will forever be extended just a bit.
This work must be done through the painstaking work of taking small, slow steps, of looking at every subtle, elusive emotional reaction. Once the Worker begins to observe the most mundane and seemingly insignificant details of their life, they will start to see their No in action. Once they see that it exists, the next area to explore is why. What is the misconception that it is based on? How it being used to keep them safe?
Once the Worker cracks open this Pandora’s Box, their self-responsibility for their life’s events will turn defeatism into genuine hope. They will ever so barely start to shift toward a positive attitude towards life; they will be able to envision the possibility of changing.
All this is going to kick up some serious dust for the Worker. Their no-current will drop into high gear in its attempt to thwart further discovery and change. They will quite possibly develop a strong negative attitude toward the Guide and these teachings—possibly even to us, their Helper. This resistance corresponds to a No toward life in general, even while there may be a pseudo-yes-current frantically clamoring for help.
This is a battle that the Worker must go through. It’s a crucial point of transition and their memory of prior success will evaporate. The way forward involves prayer, meditation and the willingness to note what goes on in their emotions throughout their day, which the Guide calls the Daily Review. The Worker needs to ask for help, dig for clarity, and pray to see the truth about the matter.
It is this opening to truth that will bring the Worker into alignment with their yes-current. To get there, the work must involve a two-part process. First, the Worker must come to realize the truth, including the reality that as long as they are not living in harmony, they are not in truth. Second, they must pray for the strength and stamina to change. The Worker must, at a certain point, apply their healthy will to give up their Lower Self habits and make new choices in the details of their daily living.
The Worker must make an effort to align with their Higher Self and God’s will, until eventually this will be what emanates through them. As Helpers, we carry the wisdom in these teachings and we offer help to guide them on their spiritual journey. But in the end, it is the Worker who must courageously work to transform their no-current into a solid Yes toward life.
Working with Sexuality
Humans are sexual beings, so at some point, we can expect to work with the sexual aspect of our Worker’s life. But it may take some time for the Worker to be comfortable in talking with us about problems they face regarding their sexuality. As their Helper, we hold their sexuality as being an integral, sacred part the Worker’s make-up, and as with any other Higher Self quality, it can become distorted by the Lower Self.
Self-responsibility is one of the primary qualities that this particular line of spiritual teachings calls us to. And it is not uncommon for a lack of self-responsibility to show up in our Worker’s sexual lives. Both sides of the Lower Self—the Little-L child aspects and the Big-L cruel parts—have a strong tendency to avoid taking responsibility. The child aspects say “I can’t” and the more intentionally cruel aspects say “I won’t.”
While we, as Helpers, are not in the business of policing our Worker’s activities or offering advice about their behavior, we may want to encourage them to stop acting out potentially unsafe sexual behavior. Then the underlying motives can be explored more deeply in session.
One of the most effective ways to do this is by exploring the content of the Worker’s sexual fantasies. This isn’t just for the purpose of addressing sex-related issues, but rather it is one of the most effective ways to understand pervasive distortions that show up throughout the Worker’s life. There is nothing sordid or voyeuristic in such explorations. On the contrary, as a Helper, you will discover that the exquisitely delicate holding and the necessary vulnerability of such work feels highly sacred.
The Worker must have developed a deep sense of trust in you as their Helper in order for them to reveal these most intimate aspects of themselves. Of course, no one should explore working this way with their Workers until they themselves have explored their own psyche through the doorway of their own sexual fantasies.
The correlation between sexual fantasies and our life issues is this. When babies are born, they take in everything through their physical being. Touch is paramount for infants because the emotional and mental tracks, if you will, have not yet been laid down; these will develop as the baby matures. So everything that happens to us as human beings gets recorded in our physical track, and that’s the same track in which the current of sexuality flows.
Now we need to weave in the Guide’s teachings about negative pleasure. This is a vitally important aspect of the work, and something we need to attune our radar to as Helpers, always listening to understand how the Worker gets their life force activated. A helpful phrase to hold in our awareness during a session is “where’s the juice?” Where do we see the charge getting activated—through some painful or unpleasant experience—that literally lights up the Worker, typically with feelings like anger, frustration or resentment.
The Guide teaches us that human beings are wired to experience our life force through the experience of pleasure. We can’t live without our life force, ergo we can’t live without pleasure. But if what we experience as children is “unpleasure”—and this is the grand set-up for all of us, given that parents are selected explicitly for the purpose of bringing our painful distortions to the surface so we can heal them—then we will attach our experience of pleasure to something unpleasant. Now we need to experience that unpleasant thing to activate our life force. It’s a compulsion—we can’t live without it.
So back to that physical track that’s been laid down in the Worker’s being. In it lies every experience they have had since birth; it has captured everything that has happened to them since they were born. It also holds the twisted wiring of this negative pleasure principle, meaning that to activate the sexual experience of orgasm, the Worker must re-experience the negative thing that now gives them pleasure.
We can invite the Worker to step into their fantasy and share it with us as if they are part of a dream, speaking in first person in present tense: “…and then I do this, and now this is happening.” By walking through the fantasy, the Worker will come directly into contact with the most exciting aspect of the fantasy—which is the also the part that holds the distortion of their life force. There is always pain locked into this highly charged condition that the Worker can drop into and let go of.
The fear on the part of the Worker is that without their fantasy, they will never be able to fully experience this highly pleasurable aspect of their life force. So they don’t want to give this up. What they don’t realize is that it could be possible for them to have this pleasurable experience without the attending negative spin that must now be associated with it for it to be activated.
For the sake of illustration, let’s say a Worker has a sexual fantasy that involves being urinated upon. There are feelings of being degraded that could be explored, but what is really powerfully exciting to the Worker is when the urination stops—that’s what pushes the Worker over the edge to orgasm. In fact, in his childhood, his mother was often critical of him, which felt humiliating and caused him to painfully cut off the flow of his own creativity. This cutting off of the flow is now the unpleasant experience that the Worker is wired to enjoy. He currently struggles in life to complete any creative project he starts—he routinely cuts them off at some point, and then perpetually feels the guilt of this washing over him. Although he rationalizes his behavior with excuses, he really doesn’t understand why he doesn’t finish what he starts.
To avoid the sexual aspect of a Worker’s life, then, is to avoid something vitally important about who they are. As we hold the Worker in their wholeness, they will slowly reveal their splintered shards to us for healing. Our welcoming of their divinity and our objective stance that all distortions are nothing but God’s light shrouded in darkness, can be the soothing balm needed to make healing possible.
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