Justine Wilson's Blog

If we have an incomplete (and by implication, negative) experience of ourselves as children, we live the rest of our lives trying to rectify that.  This deeply unconscious process is most apparent in our ‘partner’ relationship, because it is in romance that we strive to re-create the closeness and intensity of our first great love affair – the parental bond.  In our increasingly fragmented, depersonalised and alienating contemporary western society, we have taken to extremes the “significant other” role, and then played it out in the isolation and concentration of our primary relationships and the nuclear family.

Within the adult LOVE connection – as mythologised over the past few hundred years – we have been exhorted to seek that elusive experience of UNCONDITIONAL LOVE, which can only truly occur between parent and child, as anyone with children will attest.  Absolute love is what IDEAL child/parent relationships are doing.  A blessed person who has been loved absolutely in childhood will go on gently, undramatically, comfortably (and usually permanently) to generate a MATURE LOVE for another adult based on respect and tolerance.  They will pour out unconditional love onto their offspring because their offspring are what the adult connection is devoted to.  In a proper, natural society, children count more than the lover relationship per se – because offspring are LIFE, are the future of the species.

The only real chance you had to feel loved absolutely was when you were a child.  If that was not your experience, then tragically you have missed out forever.  If you explore the pain of this loss, and you work towards healing it, then your relationship with your children will be so clean that you will receive that type of love again, because that’s how young children instinctively love, until society (and screwed parents) start in on them…But you will NEVER consistently receive that type of love from your lover.

Two adults themselves as separate beings, like overlapping circles, neither alienated nor enmeshed, precious in their childhoods, and so are no longer driven to find someone to whom they can entrust themselves absolutely.  The desperate drive to totally entrust to another once past childhood is can be called co-dependence and is dysfunctional.

Self-raised adults have relationships based on interdependence.  All primates are group dwellers and interdependent.  The tribe is the ultimate expression of interdependence.  Modern society is the ultimate expression of something trying fruitlessly to act like it is not interdependent.  And for generations, this alienating society has produced hungry, pained children on the inside who look like grown-ups on the outside spending their lives lurching from one co-dependent relationship to another.  The lover and love relationship have become the false source of belated safety and absolute care that should have been felt during those years you knew your life literally depended on getting it.

In a society that has increasingly abandoned its responsibility to the young and the vulnerable (the honouring of which used to bring the greatest emotional rewards), a curious compensatory, distracting focus has developed.  It is almost although, after generations of impoverished parental love, the unconscious mind of society has desperately turned to another possibility, another source through which to seek for that ultimate love experience.  We have been encouraged to believe at a cultural level that LOVE and the Lover are there to complete us, to guarantee us security, to bring us happiness – all unnecessary requirements of living in a tribal community totally committed to its children and the life force embodied within them.  However, as negative and destructive as our present situation sounds, Nature makes no mistakes and tolerates no waste.  The stress and perturbation of Alienation vs Enmeshment seems to be the catalyst for the emergence of complete, consciously integrated beings, and thereby is probably, in the great scheme of things, a required evolutionary shift.  If you have reached the point where you are driven to resolve your internal dilemma, then you are evolving.