About: Where emotional reactions come from

One of the first distinctions we need to make is between being childlike and being childish. Being childlike is beautiful. No adult can be truly joyful and creative unless we preserve and nurture our ability to be childlike.

It includes the capacity to feel excitement about new things, to be adventurous, and to question and learn about new things.

To be childish, on the other hand, is to be immature. It is the inability to accept frustration or to take discipline. It is the false notion that if we do not get what we want immediately, we will perish or never be happy again.

The grand setup

Where does immaturity come from? It originates from the fact that every child wants to receive exclusive love, without limits. This is understandable but unrealistic.

Further, every child wants to have their own way. This is equally unworkable. Plus, we all have parents who have their own immaturity.

So in every child’s life, there will be pain and frustration.

What’s more, we live on a dualistic plane filled with life-or-death thinking. And all children are caught in duality. The child, then, equates pain with death. To avoid death, the child acts to stop this pain.

The most effective way to do this is through control of the breath. Children literally freeze their feelings by stopping the flow of the life force—called chi, ki or prana in other languages—through stopping the breath.

This explains why, as adults, when we feel painful feelings arise, we will often feel find ourselves holding our breath. There may also be a lump in our throat from reengaging those constricting muscles.

These are habitual way we cut off the experience of pain, frustration, sadness, disappointment—whatever uncomfortable feelings we don’t want to feel. When we do this, we are investing our life force in cutting off our own life force.

As a child, when this cutting off happened, our life force became frozen and stuck. Movement was stopped in its tracks. And it will remain so until we do this work of “re-membering” these frozen or split off aspects.

Our task now is to allow them to become re-enlivened and reunited with the whole of our being.

This means that we must now experience the pain we could not tolerate when we were children. For it is a spiritual law that life cannot be cheated.

In the end, we can’t avoid feeling anything that is in us.

What can change

It is important to understand that before we were born, while we were still in the Spirit World, we made a choice regarding what we wanted to heal in this lifetime. In order for any of us to see our work, or task, it is necessary then that it manifest in this lifetime.

So the perfect conditions have been chosen—including parents, siblings and environment—for our unique “soul dent” to come to the surface. Otherwise, we might keep ignoring it forever.

When we were children, we had no adult ego available inside us to make choices about how to handle life situations. There were no higher-level-reasoning faculties to make sense of things.

As adults, this has changed.

Our ego now has an important role to play. It opens the gateway to our Higher Self. This makes greater resources available for supporting us in feeling and releasing these wounds and imprinting the truth.

The Gateway Prayer

Through the gateway of feeling your weakness lies your strength;
Through the gateway of feeling your pain lies your pleasure and joy;
Through the gateway of feeling your fear lies your security and safety;
Through the gateway of feeling your loneliness lies your capacity to have fulfillment, love and companionship;
Through the gateway of feeling your hate lies your capacity to love;
Through the gateway of feeling your hopelessness lies true and justified hope;
Through the gateway of accepting the lacks of your childhood lies your fulfillment now.

– Pathwork Lecture #190

Waking up from a trance

If these painful experiences hadn’t happened—but they did—and if we hadn’t innocently stopped the flow of feelings so as not to feel them—but we did—we would not have these immature places in us—but we do.

These are the places that get activated when something happens in life that triggers an emotional reaction in us.

In that moment, our unconscious inner child feels threatened by something that has a similar look-and-feel to a childhood experience. This split-off aspect of child consciousness is now facing what it believes to be a life-or-death situation. And this feels traumatic.

As soon as this happens, we are effectively in a trance. Whatever or whoever is in front of us is now obscured by the situation or person—most often a parent—from our childhood.

We may experience confusion, disassociation from our body, regression in how old we feel, and tunnel vision. We are not in our adult reasoning brain.

We also do not realize that we now have the resources of our own adult ego available to us. It is the healthy, conscious adult ego that can make new choices. This includes opening to the Higher Self and asking for help.

Our adult ego needs to wake up.

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Learn more in After the Ego: Insights from the Pathwork^® Guide on how to wake up.

Teasing apart our past

We can think of this inner child as the “Little-L Lower Self.” Because although it is part of what keeps us in separation, there is an “I can’t” quality to it.

This part feels helpless to make another choice.

From this place, we defend ourselves believing we need to protect ourselves from death. We are essentially saying, “I can’t feel this, or I’ll die.”

When we have an emotional reaction, we slip into a trance. When this happens, we need to learn to pause, breathe, and find the part of ourselves that believes it is still in a life-or-death battle.

We need to see that “that was then and this is now,” teasing apart the reality of the current situation from the way it overlays something from an earlier time. It will feel like two slides have come together, one on top of the other, with the two images feeling so similar it will be hard to slide them apart.

Imperfect parents

It may seem that the child’s main problem is the desire for perfect love. But in truth, even if the child had received perfect love, this would not have resolved the child’s problems. Because they are due to pre-existing beliefs from previous lives.

Further, although the child would have been satisfied with mature love—love that is imperfect and takes the risk of being hurt—the capacity to give mature love is rare. Even if one parent gives it, the other probably doesn’t.

Instead of mature love, the child received distorted love, which children can feel. This creates resentment, which leads to rebellion. The three types of distorted love from parents are:

1. Parent overindulges or overcompensates as apology for not loving maturely.
2. Parent won’t punish or exert healthy authority.
3. Parent is too severe or strict, bullying the child.

Unlike eternal values, which are about love, truth, wisdom and courage, temporary values are dictated by the needs of a society. Over the centuries, then, the values of a society can shift.

In the past, children were often treated with restriction and severity. Parents’ pent-up hostility was acted out this way. Today, the pendulum has swung to the other side. The overarching value now is permissiveness, indulgence and lack of discipline.

The underlying hostility is still felt though.

It is not uncommon for such pendulum swings to occur as part of spiritual development. This is how we find the more truthful middle way. But if one extreme is wrong, its opposite will be just as in error.

If the parents overindulge to atone for their irritation or impatience in parenting, they create guilt and confusion for themselves. Later the child will seek to duplicate the pleasure of the overindulgence.

But since other people don’t carry this guilt, they don’t respond with pampering. The person ends up feeling hurt by this.

Here, the underlying desire to recreate pleasurable childhood experiences is a sign of greed and a lack of self-responsibility. It reveals a hidden desire to remain a child. And this creates shame for an adult, due to unconscious anger and frustration.

The truth about parenting is that we need to follow our inner guidance if we hope to follow eternal values. Sometimes leniency is OK and sometimes punishment is called for. There are no rules.

Receiving any kind of distorted love instead of real affection makes the child feel guilty and uncomfortable, which the child pushes into the unconscious. As adults then, we may love our parents, but we still have this unconscious resentment.

This is what prevents forgiveness and letting go.

In truth, our parents weren’t perfect. But they don’t need to be rejected now because of this.

Exposing the illusion

If all this remains in the unconscious, we will try to fix this as an adult. We do this by unconsciously recreating the childhood hurt, hoping that this time it will be different.

This time, we think, we will win—we will get the mature love we now demand. Unfortunately, this is not feasible.

The result is that we will choose a love partner who has the aspects of the parent who fell short, as well as the one who came closer to meeting our needs. We will then blindly try to force them to give us mature love.

But love can’t come that way.

As an adult, only by giving up our childish demand will we be able to give mature love. That’s what opens the door to creating a mature, loving relationship with our partner.

These vicious circles we create are entirely destructive. After all, it is an illusion we were ever defeated. Therefore, it is an illusion we can now win.

It is also an illusion that lack of love was the tragedy we unconsciously believed it to be. The real tragedy is this re-creation and our attempt to master it.

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Learn more in The Pull: Relationships and their spiritual significance.

The way out

To dissolve this conflict, we must find the link between our unfulfilled childhood longings and our present problems.

First, we must find the aspects of our current relationships that are like the parent we resent or despise—the one for whom we had little or no love. Then we must re-experience the longing and hurt of the crying inner child.

Realize that we may have been both happy and unhappy as a child. Know that the pain hurts more when we push it out of sight. Think of this as turning the child’s pain into a healthy growing pain.

We may have to work to find and feel this pain. Here are the steps to take:

1. Take a current problem.
2. Strip out rationalizations that “it’s them.”
3. Find the next layer of emotion: anger, resentment, anxiety, frustration.
4. Feel the hurt of not being loved, which is underneath—it is the same hurt as the childhood pain.

Doing this will release our parents, and we will start to seek love by giving it rather than by expecting it. Notice too how we may have completely given up on receiving love, which is a wrong extreme.

In truth, we attract people to us with a similar immaturity or capacity to love as our parents. Then we unconsciously provoke a reaction in them that is similar.

As we mature, we may bring out more maturity in the other.

We must learn to balance emotional maturity—the capacity and willingness to love—with intellectual maturity. This can then be used to re-educate child consciousness. We need to develop both.

As we re-educate the inner child, it may be helpful to impress the point that this pain we faced as children was not really going to kill us. Our defenses did not save us.

Such notions can further terrorize this inner child who believes it was in mortal danger from painful feelings. This doesn’t deny the reality that children sometimes die.

“The most frequent way of attempting to remedy the situation is in your choice of love partners. Unconsciously you will know how to choose in the partner aspects of the parent who has particularly fallen short in affection and love that is real and genuine. But you also seek in your partner aspects of the other parent who has come closer to meeting your demands.

Important as it is to find both parents represented in your partners, it is even more important and more difficult to find those aspects which represent the parent who has particularly disappointed and hurt you, the one more resented or despised and for whom you had little or no love.

So you seek the parents again—in a subtle way that is not always easy to detect—in your marital partners, in your friendships, or in other human relationships.

In your subconscious, the following reactions take place:  since the child in you cannot let go of the past, cannot come to terms with it, cannot forgive, cannot understand and accept, this very child in you always creates similar conditions, trying to win out in the end in order to finally master the situation instead of succumbing to it.

Losing out means being crushed—this must be avoided at all costs. The costs are high indeed, for the entire strategy is unfeasible. What the child in you sets out to accomplish cannot ever come to realization…

You have no idea how preoccupied your subconscious is with the process of reenacting the play, so to speak, only hoping that “this time it will be different.” And it never is! As time goes on, each disappointment weighs heavier and your soul becomes more and more discouraged.”

– Pathwork Lecture #73

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Learn more in Bones, Chapter 8: How and why we recreate childhood hurts.

The return to wholeness

We have a clue we are in child consciousness, or an emotional reaction, when we hear ourselves using the words “always” and “never.” As in, “such-and-such always happens to me,” or “I never get so-and-so.”

Then the adult ego can connect with the Higher Self and ask the question, “What is the truth of this matter?” Just asking this question brings in a more mature perspective. The answers will open the door to re-educating this young aspect.

We do this work to integrate all the inner child aspects that have split off at each wounding. It can be helpful to sit in meditation and sense their presence. Notice their number as well as how far away some of them have gone.

It requires patience and the creation of a new safe container for them to be willing to trust this adult ego and return for healing. As such, this work of healing is a soul retrieval that reunites and integrates the shattered soul.

Some people’s memories from childhood have sunken so far out of their awareness they can no longer connect with them. The Guide tells us we need not worry about this. Because everything we need to know is playing out right now, today, in our daily lives.

This is a result of the magnetic pull of these unhealed places inside us. They draw life experiences to us that will allow us to see what is really going on inside.

We can’t heal what we can’t see, and we came here to heal.

What heals our soul dent is the divine love that fills the space where the wound was, once it has been felt and released. We must actively pray for this healing and then become receptive to receiving divine energy.

“When we have no territory to defend, God rushes in to where God always was. This is a paradox we understand only as we embrace life fully.”

– The Instruction Manual for Receiving God, by Jason Shulman

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