Dead Set on Living

by Chris Grosso

  JP suggested we make space for pain and make space for emotions. That space is one of the “greatest gifts a parent can give a child. If the child is angry, that’s some heavy stuff they are processing, and it’s a great gift when the child is given space. ‘It’s okay that you’re angry, let it out.’ Or, ‘It’s okay that you’re sad. You don’t need to convince me why you’re sad or have a valid or logical reason as to why you have this emotion. You’re simply allowed to have the emotion and let me make space for you. I’ll be here with you so it can be safe for you. It will feel safe for you to feel this unsafe feeling.’ That support is so important to give a child.”

  The other way JP suggested we could transform wounding in a way that would be beneficial to a child is for parents to work on their own emotional wellness. As is often said, “The greatest burden that a child must bear is the unlived life of a parent.”

  “I believe that our emotional DNA, our emotional residues are passed on to our children. They are way more brilliant than we can comprehend. They are incredibly intuitive. If we have heavy emotional energy blockages in our systems, even if we’re numb to them and we don’t know they’re there, children feel them. They absolutely feel them, and they’ll want to bring balance to not only you but the overall dynamic of the family. Whatever you ride around with constipated in your emotional energy system, if you don’t take care of you, your child will try and compensate for you. And aside from that, just being a burden, as Carl Jung points out, it will ultimately leave the child with another wound that says, ‘I’m not enough. No matter how much I become the good little boy or girl, or no matter how much I overachieve, or no matter how much I am defiant, or no matter how much I try to do what seems like needs to be done to compensate for this heavy, subtle energy Mom or Dad is carrying, I’m not enough to do it.’ There’s a great wound of shame, of ‘I’m not enough’ that comes when a child naturally unconsciously tries to carry the burden of the unlived life of the parent.”

  “I’m not enough” is something I could relate to, as it’s a belief I’ve carried for the better part of my life. I know it’s played a role in many, if not all, of the relapses I’ve experienced throughout the years. And even after all the time I’ve spent working with the various mind, body, and spirit practices I use, it still rears its ugly head from time to time. Fortunately, I’ve gotten better at smiling at those thoughts when they arise rather than buying into them and believing them as gospel, as I would have done in the past.

  As JP points out, when parents work on their own emotional health and allow their passions and dreams to flourish, it will impact their children and allow them to live out their own dreams, not their parents’ expectations. “It’s said so often, but honestly I don’t think it’s said enough, because I know I haven’t learned the lesson, I still need to hear it probably ten thousand more times: We need to fill our own cup up before we can help fill other cups.” That’s true of all relationships but especially the parent-child relationship.

  This is so incredibly important. I know it’s part of what happened during my last relapse. I was feeling spread so thin in all areas of my life. Much of the stress was a result of my cup being virtually empty, yet I kept trying to fill up others whenever and wherever I could. That’s how I’ve always been. Finding balance is one of the most difficult things to manage in life, especially when you’re in a line of work where you’re trying to help others.

  Assuming we make it through childhood, I was curious what impact JP thought the wounded inner child had on our lives as adults. He answered with one word: “significant.” And then elaborated, saying, “Childhood is called the ‘formative’ years for a damn good reason. We are being formed during those years. We may be coherent in our formation or we’re twisted and scarred by wounds to our psyche. Either way, it’s formation. When we drop a pebble in a still lake, the ripples keep going long and far past the time the pebble hit the water, but that pebble, the shape and speed of its impact, that’s the formative experience that creates ripples.” He had another great analogy: “If we’re aiming to live a good life, just as if we’re aiming to get to the moon, when we launch our rocket, if our aim is even half a degree off, we’ll miss the mark unless we compensate. Otherwise we’ll miss the moon and end up lost in outer space. As adults, when we realize we’re living in a way that’s significantly incongruent with what our heart wants, this is often because we’re still on a trajectory that was misdirected by the wounds of our formative years. It’s like when we’re physically wounded.”

  JP didn’t leave us drifting in space with bleeding wounds. He had some concrete ideas for reclaiming our inner child and healing those wounds. “It’s a journey with a lot of layers, but essentially we need to find the buried feelings, connect with them, make space for them, and feel them. Then we can allow memories to come into our conscious experience to help reshape our wounded or malformation. Look at what happened, both the good and the bad, through the eyes of our inner child—not our adult mind. We’re just going to over-rationalize things if we look at them only through our adult eyes. We can ask ourselves, ‘Okay, Dad left when I was seven years old. What did that mean?’ Our adult eyes will typically see the situation and report something like, ‘Well, I understand my parents’ marriage just didn’t work out. It’s good, because it might have just been worse if they had stayed together.’ There’s no heart in that, no emotion in that. We serve ourselves better when we ask, ‘What was this like for my seven-year-old self?’ For me, when my parents separated, from the perspective of my seven-year-old inner child, my world shattered. That’s a little bit hard to process. It’s not that my parents divorced—that’s the literal explanation that my adult mind can accept. But from my inner child perspective, my world shattered. Your inner child needs to have a voice, and it won’t have a voice until there are ears there to hear it. That’s one of the reasons why we need to go back and revisit our childhood experiences, to listen and hear. For me, honoring the inner child’s perspective, not trying to change it, not trying to talk the inner child into optimistically putting a positive spin on things—all this helps that inner child move out of being stuck and live more fully.

  “Acceptance of what is, or acceptance of what was, for the inner child through the feelings and perceptions is important. Inner children are funny. They’re just like adults. Their perceptions are completely delusional, but these perceptions are their own and need to be honored. Our job when we’re looking at our childhood experiences isn’t to shame our inner child and say, ‘Oh, that’s not how it was.’ Screw that. If that’s how my inner child saw it, then that’s the perception that the inner child reacted to, which is what created the pain, so that perception needs to be honored. It needs to be voiced before it can possibly be moved beyond.”

  I loved the permission and acceptance aspect of what JP had to say. Just allow this to be there. Honor it for what it is. What about people who are completely cut off from their childhood self? Perhaps they’ve suppressed it to the point where it’s completely in their unconscious. They’ve dissociated from it. I think this can often lead to suppressing feelings and returning to self-harming behaviors like numbing ourselves with drugs and alcohol because there’s an underlying discomfort in our mental and emotional (and sometimes even physical) lives that we can’t quite place our fingers on—hence its unconscious nature. Is there something proactive we can do to get back in touch with our repressed childhood self aside from therapy, which isn’t always an accessible or a realistic option?

  JP’s suggestion was so pure and brilliant: play! “Just find a way to play. Not compete. Not compare yourself. Not seek approval. Not avoid disapproval. Those are all words that don’t mean playfulness. I’m talking about finding a way to truly play. I won’t accept the limited beliefs of people who say ‘I’m not playful’ or ‘I don’t have time to play.’ Playfulness doesn’t take linear time—it’s a state of mind. A lot of us need an activity to facilitate that, whether it’s getting together
with friends or going hiking or painting. Finding and making space for playfulness—whether it’s through a deliberate activity or a state of mind—are so important. It soothes the inner child. Taking a direct approach, saying, ‘Dear inner child, tell me about your pain!’ doesn’t always work. Your inner child might need to be soothed a bit with playfulness to create a safe space to express the other aspects of childhood that are seemingly more threatening than playfulness.”

  I’d never associated playfulness and threat, but JP made a great point. “Playfulness is another term for releasing control. If you’re in control, you’re not being playful, and how many of us have been shamed or threatened for losing control? Say we knocked over a lamp when we were a child because we were careless, so when we’re punished for that, our perception probably writes the script that says, ‘Yeah, it’s not good to be playful. Playfulness equals getting yelled at. Getting yelled at equals feeling ashamed. Feeling ashamed equals feeling unworthy. Feeling unworthy makes it feel like we don’t belong in the family, and that can be inherently scary as hell.’ ”

  As JP talked about this, he helped me realize I had an association between playfulness and using, as it was a way to experience being out of control. As sick as I would get and as much as I hated being caught in addiction, there was also a part of me that was attracted to chaos and getting as close to the edge as humanly possible without quite falling off. It’s fucked-up, but then again, there’s not much about addiction that isn’t.

  Another way to get in touch with residual childhood wounds is to work with our bodily sensations in the present moment. “Our sensations are the corridors, or they lead down the corridors to sensations that are much deeper. As in the martial arts—you’re not going to be a black belt without becoming a white belt first. When it comes to knowing your child self, the white belt is getting in touch with simple body sensations. Learning to feel feelings. Tingling in the arm. Tightness in the chest. Lightness in the chest. Heaviness. Some might say, ‘That’s stupid. That’s easy,’ but we have to lift lighter weights to have the strength to lift heavier weights. Making the effort is where the therapy is. The effort creates connection. Accuracy does not necessarily create connection.”

  This made sense to me within the context of the relapses I’d suffered. It made me want to look at the larger picture. Why did JP think relapses happened? Why do we return to self-defeating behaviors we know from experience will harm us, especially once we’ve had some time in recovery or on the spiritual path?

  First JP acknowledged the physical and chemical aspects of many addictions, and then he took it further. “Beyond any kind of chemical component, one of the reasons we all return to addictive substances or behaviors or patterns is because a part of us fears the unknown and becomes desperate to return to the familiar, even if the familiar is discomfort. The dominant comfort of the discomfort of the familiar—the dominant familiarity—has very little to do with the habit that we’re dealing with and more to do with how we react to ourselves about the habit. In other words, if you fall off the wagon and the next day your inner critical voice may be red hot—you’re kicking your own ass—I would say that critical voice is the familiarity that we’re craving. It’s very uncomfortable, but the discomfort of it is comfortable because it’s familiar.”

  Again, this was something I could relate to in regard to addiction—the comfort in the discomfort because it was familiar. Change can be fucking terrifying. I have watched the television show Intervention, in which a camera crew follows around someone struggling with a kind of addiction (drugs, alcohol, binge/purge eating, hoarding, and so on). Toward the end of each episode, they stage an intervention, in which family and friends come together to speak about the way in which the individual’s addiction has affected their lives. Then the addicted person is given the opportunity to go to a detox or rehab facility free of charge, and almost every time, you can see the internal battle going on—it’s written so clearly on the person’s face. In most cases, people agree to go to treatment, and in that moment, you can see a visible shift in their facial demeanor. They made it through the dialogue and the thoughts about why they shouldn’t or couldn’t go, and said yes. In that moment of agreeing to treatment, whether they’re conscious of it or not, they’ve experienced some semblance of hope and peace. Sure, many of them are terrified, but I have to say from my own personal experience that they are also excited by the prospect of freedom from a life like that. Unfortunately, many people leave treatment early and relapse, or complete the treatment and still relapse. Most of the people on Intervention and in real life who struggle with addiction and engage in some type of treatment program experience how change is exactly what they needed and what freedom from the hell of addiction tastes like.

  “Part of our psyche speaks in the critical voice, and another part of our psyche receives it. The receiver is the familiarity with which we become self-identified. Who are we as we’re being belittled and criticized by this voice? Typically, our answer to ‘Who am I?’ when we’re doing this is ‘I’m someone insignificant; I’m someone who basically feels worthless.’ We can look at that and say, ‘Wow! I was starting to go further into the unknowns, the mystery of my life, which is synonymous with stepping deeper toward my great gifts in life, which is our true source of significance.’ Like Nelson Mandela said, ‘I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. . . . The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.’2 We’re far more afraid of our power than our weakness.”

  PRACTICE

  Reshaping Our Wounds

  When I was in Mexico teaching with JP a couple of years ago, he shared a practice that I found immensely beneficial. It was a way to move stuck energy and allowed me to get back in touch with little Chris and explore some of the hurt I was holding. It was a cathartic experience and a practice I’ve worked with many times since.

  It’s another journaling practice, but a little bit more structured this time. The idea is to get your inner child to put the words on paper. Our adult hand may be writing, but the information is coming from our child mind.

  • Start with a memory.

  • Then write a challenging memory, maybe a painful one. You might say, “I can’t access my childhood memories. I’m so disconnected from that pain.” But I know you can. What’s a little thing you can access? Start there. Even if it was that you were picked last for the dodgeball game. Well, that’s not a huge trauma, but it was a challenge, and if it’s the most challenging memory that comes up, then great. It gives you traction.

  • Then ask your child self how that felt. Write down your response.

  • Now ask yourself what it meant to you. Feel free to approach this from a child’s perspective, not an adult’s. I’m right-handed, so sometimes I do this with my left hand to return to the sensation of a child’s uncertainty when holding a pencil and forming words.

  • Now read what you wrote aloud and appreciate the release you’ve given your inner child, the freedom to voice its suffering. As you say the words, think of it as a ritual for moving stuck energy and emotions. It’s a way of putting the emotional energy into words and then back into energy rather than letting it stay stuck in our energy system, in our psyche.

  12

  A TINY BIT MORE

  CONVERSATION WITH MONA HAYDAR

  I was introduced to Mona Haydar and her work by my dear friend Mirabai Starr. Mona is a poet, an activist, a practitioner of permaculture, a meditator, and a tireless God enthusiast who leads a life of sacred activism. Mona and her husband, Sebastian, set up a table in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a sign that read TALK TO A MUSLIM. They gave out free coffee and donuts to encourage questions and open dialogue. This garnered the attention of NPR, Al Jazeera, and other media outlets. I sought to explore Mona’s thoughts about relapse and forgiveness, especially within the context of the teachings of Islam, but first I wanted to know a little bit more about her.

  What was her chil
dhood like, and what was her relationship to spirituality? It turns out that, like me, Mona was a bit of a wild child. “I spent almost all my time outside. I feel like most of my childhood was spent in an apple tree in my parents’ backyard. That was my introduction to the essence of the creator—I found God in nature. I connect the deepest even now to the sense that there’s something greater than myself. Nothing else in my life has brought me such solace or contentment as that sense of depth and interconnectedness and stillness.”

  After nature, Mona discovered poetry. She wrote her first poem in kindergarten: I am dude. I am mood. I am Mona. “It just kind of took off from there, and I’ve been writing ever since. It’s one of the ways I connect to God and spirit, and one of the ways I ground myself. I can get lost in the world of form and in the world of busyness, and the God of busyness and the God of business, too. Writing helps bring me back into my spirit, myself, and my heart-centeredness.

  “Along with nature and writing and reading to others, a huge part of my spirituality is giving thanks for those things, living in gratitude for those things, because they are what helped me to get connected.” Mona knows about connection—she grew up with seven siblings. “I was number seven of eight, so ours was this huge Syrian family, but because they were mostly older, I felt like I had to grow up a little faster, like I was playing catch-up. Perhaps I was a little more serious as a kid than my friends were because I was interested in what my siblings were doing when they were in university talking about lofty ideas. Because I grew up fast, I now hunger for fun and for that childlike playfulness, so I seek it out in my life.”