Where do we get stuck?

Back when I worked for Solvay, we had recently bought a plant near New Orleans when hurricane Katrina hit. There was some flooding at the plant, but in the end, not much serious damage. And all of the people working there were safe.

Two years later, I was having lunch with someone from that plant when the topic of Katrina came up. I asked her if the people working there still talked about it. Every single day, she said.

They had gone through a trauma and were now, years later, still stuck in the aftermath. They were caught in an old groove that was gouged deep into their psyches, and they couldn’t move on.

Getting stuck in childhood

There are some common periods in life where we tend to get stuck. Take the process of growing up, for instance. From infanthood through adolescence, we go through many developmental stages. And depending on what difficulties show up when, our development gets stuck, right there.

In other words, something traumatic happens to us that wounds us—maybe physically, but more often psychologically—and the pain, chaos and confusion this creates is hard for us to take. In fact, often, we believe we can’t take it, especially if the trauma goes on and on.

To protect ourselves from feeling this pain, we freeze it. We block it. We do what we can to run away from it, either literally or figuratively. What we don’t realize, as children, is that this just kicks the can down the road. The effects of the trauma don’t go away when we bury them. Rather, they become lodged in our psyche and later are the inner obstacles that cause similar painful feelings to arise.

Later, then, when life feels difficult and hard to take, what’s happening is that this buried, unfelt pain is still in there, trying to surface. Now, as adults, we need to face it, feel it and transform it, or we’ll stay stuck spinning in unhappy life experiences.

Surfacing our hidden obstacles

The many developmental stages of childhood create, collectively, the first stage of life we all must go through. In this stage, we are nurtured and sustained. At least we are supposed to be nurtured and sustained. Trouble is, we are all raised by people who themselves may not have been fully or wonderfully well-cared for.

Since we can’t give what we don’t have, parents end up wounding their children, even when they have the very best intentions of doing better. But hold on, because the story about how we become so wounded in childhood—and therefore stuck in childhood hurts later on—goes back a long, long ways.

This lifetime, as they say, is not our first rodeo. At this point in history, most of us have been here many times before. By here, we mean living a human existence and doing our best to get through it.

Until now, just doing our best was enough. Not any more.

We are now ready to understand more about what’s really going on here. Because collectively, we’re all growing up. It’s time for more powerful teachings, more powerful medicine. It’s time we see through the illusion.

Here is the hard truth: We are born to these people because they are the perfect choice for bringing our already festering buried wounds to the surface. Because by now, we’ve been burying difficult feelings for eons.

But by realizing this, and consciously working to bring them to the surface, we can transform ourselves and our life experiences immeasurably.

Growing into self-responsibility

The second developmental stage we all must go through involves becoming self-nurturing and self-sustaining. We must learn to step away from our parents and stand on our own two feet.

 “For each of us, as we mature, our first major growth phase comes when we give up dependency and move into self-responsibility. When we do this, we become independent, accountable and able to stand up for ourselves. Of course we don’t do this all at once, in one giant leap. No, we’re typically ambivalent about taking this step, with part of us raring to go and part of us dragging our feet.”

–Living Light, Chapter 18: The movement toward giving: The three stages of development

 

Indeed, part of us is itching for freedom. But the kind of freedom we want comes with something that may be difficult to swallow: self-responsibility. On top of that, we fear and resist this change, because we confuse being independent with being abandoned and not loved.

What can make matters worse is having parents who don’t want to cut us loose. We resent them for hanging on with an unspoken attitude that says, in short, “I depend on your dependence on me.”

Actually, such an inner tug-of-war happens during every developmental phase. And if we don’t sort it out and clear up these inner blocks, we’ll become—you guessed it—more stuck.

“We can gauge our progress by checking out how well we have assumed responsibility for our lives. Financially, have we become productive and self-sustaining, gladly providing for ourselves? Emotionally, do we still blame some authority figure for our problems and any unhappiness?”

–Living Light, Chapter 18: The movement toward giving: The three stages of development

 

We’re stuck with an ego

When we become adults, we have the chance to face into ourselves and resolve our wounds from childhood. For by now, we have developed an ego. And the job of the ego is to attend to the details of living. Further, as young adults, our ego can now start paying attention to our conflicts in life.

For these outer conflicts always point to conflicts within. They are an out-picturing of what’s really going on inside us. This means that if we ignore our conflicts, they won’t go away. Why? Because all our conflicts in life are an effect, not a cause.

The causes of our conflicts live in all the stuck places now hidden in our psyche. And they are just waiting to be brought to the surface and healed.

The ego is both separate and limited, but it is the part of our psyche we have direct access to. Meaning, the ego can choose to do either “this” or “that” in any given situation. So it’s the part of us—the only part—that can direct this show about maturing. To do so, it needs to start paying attention to what’s going on, both within us and outside of us.

What happens, all too often, is that the ego wants to avoid what we feel is unpleasant. Better yet, it wants to find a shortcut to happiness. But life doesn’t work that way. So another place we get stuck is in habitual distractions and addictions.

Once we land there, we can spin in those circles for a very long time.

Sorting out misunderstandings

The path of self-discovery has to go through the difficult terrain of our psyche. And this is not easy. We must not only release the old pent-up pain that is now stuck in us, we must find the wrong conclusions about life that are pinning our stuckness into place. These are the roots of our immaturity, and they cause us to revert to childish behavior.

Next, we’ll need to find a deeper, even darker place in ourselves that’s really and truly stuck. In this part of ourselves, we actually like being stuck. We want to stay stuck in separation and justify our sad lot in life.

Until we get to know this negative part of ourselves—especially when on the surface, we desperately want to be otherwise—we will keep looking “out there” for someone to blame for our sorry state. Blame, then, goes hand and hand with immaturity, and indicates we’re not yet willing to move into self-responsibility.

When we feel like we are a victim—of life, of bad parents, or of just plain old bad luck—we are stuck in a misunderstanding about how life on this planet actually works.

Waking up

The last development stage that humanity travels through involves giving nurturing and sustenance. When we become ready to move into this stage, our deepest inner self—which is also our highest self—will nudge us forward. “Wake up,” it says. “It’s time to try a new way of being in the world.”

If we flow with this movement, we will move forward in harmony with life. But if we get stuck here, stubbornly digging in our heels, we will find ourselves once again swirling in conflict and chaos. But remember, if we delve into any conflict, we will always find some kind of misunderstanding.

In this situation, the mistaken belief is that leaving the comfort of our self-assertive state—the one where we focus on being self-reliant—we will be going backwards. Our fear is that by opening up and giving, we will be forced to go back into that dependent state. But that’s not what’s actually happening in this third state of development.

“In the third stage, we are opening up—with trust—to a way of being that includes self-responsibility, self-dependency and self-assertion, plus something more. Nothing valid is taken away, but rather something new must be added.”

–Living Light, Chapter 18: The movement toward giving: The three stages of development

Taking on more

Many people are now ready to move from being self-nurturing to nurturing others. We can see how this shows up in our readiness to be a good parent, or at least a good-enough one. Some of us are far enough along on our spiritual journey that we are ready to take on more. We are ready for a more global task.

“For us, our freedom from selfishness will manifest in creating new models for world government and new methods for handling society. For collectively, we are spiritually ready to develop new ways for all people to share spiritual as well as material riches.”

–Living Light, Chapter 18: The movement toward giving: The three stages of development

What happens when we are ready to grow up and no longer depend on someone else, but we resist this movement? Life becomes more and more difficult. Often sickness comes about. The same thing happens when we are ready to move from the second stage, the stage of self-responsibility, to the third stage, the stage of finding new ways for societies to get along.

When we resist this forward movement, our attitudes turn into ugly distortions and what we create will be nothing short of absurd.

The measuring stick changes

It’s challenging to realize that the people in any given society are not at the same stage of development. Some people are ready to move from the first stage to the second. Others are ripe for moving into the third stage.

We each must do whatever developmental work is right for us, without skipping steps. But whichever stage we’re in, if we resist the forward movement, we’re going to get stuck.

Consider, also, that we all roll up into a group of people who are at a certain level of development. And what’s right for any given group at any given time will become obsolete—even destructive—at a later point in time.

Because as societies develop, the pendulum keeps swinging from focusing on the individuals to focusing on the group. The state emerging now is about working together as groups. This means our focus needs to shift from the individual to the whole.

“Our awareness then must shift to include a larger scheme. If we resist this movement, believing our lives only belong to us, we forget that what we are receiving is for sharing. Instead, we consider everything that exists around us to be a tool for serving ourselves.”

–Living Light, Chapter 18: The movement toward giving: The three stages of development

We must come to realize that giving out, during this third stage, is a way to enrich ourselves that is even better than what we experienced during the second stage. But instead, we fear that our giving will make us poor.

Friends, this fear is an illusion. And the only way to get through this fear—to not get stuck in it and let it hold us back from our true destiny—is to die into it. Then we will discover that this death is also an illusion. In fact, it is a doorway that leads to personal enrichment.

“The more fully we develop ourselves as individuals, the better will be our integration into the greater group. So we need to avoid looking at our development in terms of either/or—it’s me or them. Living well in a group in no way contradicts living well on one’s own. Being a strong individual allows us to love our neighbor.”

–Gems, Chapter 3: How consciousness evolves between individuals and groups

Becoming more whole

As we move through these stages of development, we will have many chances to face into opposites and find the wholeness that resolves all conflicts. For example, as we move into the third stage, we will learn to reconcile the apparent opposites of individuals versus groups, and of nurturing ourselves versus being of service to others.

This is the way forward that will lead us to resolving the seemingly opposite political systems of socialism versus capitalism. We must figure out how to bring together fully functioning people in a group that functions well together.

This doesn’t mean our efforts don’t matter and that everyone is now at the same level. People who work harder and better are not on the same level as those who have resisted life and are now stuck in some way. Yet here we are, all together, going through this transition that wants to bring us to a more fruitful and harmonious way of living.

This isn’t a new idea that’s now being sprung on us. This is the how the course of human development is meant to unfold.

Yes, moving into self-responsibility is a huge step. Everyone must learn to meet their fear of pain, find their hidden misunderstandings, and stop rationalizing, avoiding and running away. No doubt, seeing how we are responsible for our personal struggles is humbling.

But it’s also freeing. For it means there is a way out of difficult times. Just as there is a way forward that heals our fractured communities.

We’re meant to take a big step forward together. And while this time of transition is not easy, it hurts far more if we try to keep a foot stuck in the past.

–Jill Loree