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Early
Childhood:
At the
very earliest time in our lives, we experienced a range of
physical and emotional situations. These experiences could
have been positive and life enhancing, extremely abusive and
destructive, or anything in between.
Abuse
comes in many forms: Physical, sexual, emotional, spiritual,
and possibly the worst; abuse of the sense of wonder of the
miracle of life.
Abuse
includes physical, sexual, emotional and "spiritual,
not being "delighted-in", lack of real attention,
barrenness of environment, neglect, or abandonment.
"Feeling-Images":
Because
our earliest emotional experiences happen before we have any
kind of rational awareness of the world, we create, totally
unconsciously, preverbal"feeling-images" of the
world and our place in it.
These
feeling-images have no logic or rationality to them, but are
what the world is to us at that time. These images are created
very quickly, very early on.
An example:
The feeling-image might be - "The world is a black hole
with huge teeth and I am totally alone and dare not move".
If the
life experiences that created these images continue, they
reinforce and fix-in the feeling-imagery.
This creates
a "Love equals...(good feelings/bad feelings/pain/whatever)…"
imprint on our experience of life and survival mechanism.
Beliefs:
Belief
structures (ideas of how the life and the world are) begin
to build in the psyche.
These
try to make "sense" of the feeling-images, and to
bury them deep, because the feeling-images are usually too
painful to leave exposed.
We take
on ideas and beliefs from the people and world around us,
from which to build our reality-maps of ourselves and life.
Unconsciously, our every action is intended to make people
treat us in ways that confirm the beliefs we are holding.
Examples
of these might be:"If I am alone I will die!" "I
will only be safe if I build a wall of people around me, to
keep out the deep sense of isolation and loneliness I feel".
"I must also do whatever it takes to keep people around
me, no matter what it costs me physically and emotionally".
Unfortunately,
what also happens is that we create alongside those beliefs,
other ones that say such things as "I don't deserve to
be loved by the people around me so they will leave me."
(If they
don't leave, they make them leave, because they are very insecure
at a deeper level with having people around them - it's not
what they are used to".)
This all
leads us to create outcomes in our life that confirm our deepest
feelings and beliefs.
Our
Survival Mechanism:
This is
the part of our being that nature has set up to look after
us.
With complete
and tireless diligence it follows the survival instructions
we gave it, unknowingly, from our early feeling-imagery and
imprinting, long ago.
If we
are running on automatic, it doesn't matter how old we are,
or how "successful" we seem to be, this is the place
from where we create the content and experience of our lives.
Behaviours:
We act
in the particular ways that bring about our survival outcomes
- promiscuous sexual behaviour for example, to make people
"want to be with me so I won't be alone", but at
the same time, we choose people who continue to abandon us.
Etc. Etc.
We have
entirely forgotten - we never knew - that we set this
up to happen the way it does, when we were very young, so
we blame those around us for what happens to us.
All of
this confirms and reinforces what we believe about the world
and ourselves, in a self-reinforcing loop.
There
is hope!
The solution
is to gain conscious understanding of these underlying dynamics
and to bring our deep unconscious "source code"
into consciousness, so that we can begin to choose the nature,
content and experience of our lives, consciously.
In doing
this, it can be very useful to engage in whatever professional
psychotherapy works with these deepest feeling-images.
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