Justine Wilson's Blog

Our outer world – our apparently REAL reality – is actually an illusion, a representation of the reality, the belief systems, of those who live in the inner world.  Change the inner world, and the outer world changes simultaneously.  Change your values and your paradigms shift.  We DO create our lives.  You GET what you BELIEVE, but very few of us know what we really believe inside.  So we struggle to change the unwelcome aspects of our lives by grappling like madmen with the illusory outer world – tilting at windmills and doing the same thing over and over, only louder, longer and harder.  Fortunately, the psyche is very patient and benign.  It repeats and represents our negative belief systems as often as we need until we start to recognise a pattern, an indicator of the inner true reality, which reflects profoundly and unerringly our childhood experiences.

The most obvious place the inner world bubbles to the surface is our endless mind babble, especially in our internal criticisms of ourselves.  Also in our negative comments about others.  The ancient wisdom holds: we criticise something in another that we are unhappy with but unable to look at in ourselves.  The unexamined pain and frustration residing in our inner worlds is also revealed in our complaints about society – the “ain’t it awful….” And “THEY should ….” Negativisms that punctuate the conversation of the internally powerless.  The more integrated and self-knowing a person is, the less likely they are to be drawn mindlessly into any of these displaced releases of discomfort.  They recognise ANY movement away from the contentment and peace to be a tug from the inner world, an intention to bring to the surface something negative, a no-longer tolerable discrepancy, an ‘other-imposed’ belief which is ready to be understood and resolved.

Enlightened beings are generally pleasant and serene because they run all their “stuff” in their meditations.  Struggling-to-be-enlightened beings are learning to run their stuff in therapeautic situations and/or (hopefully) to deal with it themselves as they become increasingly skilled in their ability to interpret their own inner worlds.  The concomitant high level of self-responsibility brings with it a sad dilemma.  Communication patterns change considerably, and the type of people one can freely talk to becomes more limited.  Most dysfunctional families run intimacy patterns tht veer wildly between isolation and intense, dramatic interaction.  A lot of pent-up frustration is vented by laying blame, either overtly by aggressing, or covertly by withdrawing.

If a struggling-to-be responsible person declines to either engage in laying blame or to be the dumping ground for someone else’s displaced anger, the intimacy will become based on self-examination and self-revelation.  However, people with a lifetime’s training in displaced anger who are not yet able to look at the source of their pain find this level of communication sometimes too challenging.  This struggling-to-be responsible person can often feel very lonely.

The journey to internal empowerment, growth and health requires that as regularly and as thoroughly as possible the signals from the inner world be heeded and dealt with effectively.  The real world is the screen for our internal world movie.  ANYTHING that disturbs us is the outer manifestation of an inner distortion discharging itself.  There are NO accidents or coincidences.  Everything is information.  We are our own metaphor.  If the inner world is heavily charged with distress and it is not being attended to in the out world (denial), then one day the volcano will blow its top.

To add to the challenge, we are a society whose functioning is BASED ON denial.  Your courageous efforts to deal with reality – to look honestly as what WAS And What IS – will be met with disapproval.  “Let the past be the past” etc ….  This is the same hostility and threat that impacted on you when, as a small child naturally bent on comprehending your extraordinary new world, you struggled with the confusion of seeing incongruence and hypocrisy in the very people who are meant to validate and authenticate your experience.  Coercing you into a conspiracy of silence, denying underlying tensions that obviously pervated, acting out sham relationships – all these behaviours are terrifying and bewildering to a young child.  The child’s instincts are so finely honed, and the psyche truth of what is really going on.  If that truth is then distorted or denied, or the glaring discrepancy rationalised away by a significant caretaker, the child begins to go mad.  His or her internal truth has been invalidated.  Since the totally dependant child needs to believe that the caretaker knows better and more, the child is torn by the agony of abandoning an internal truth system that FEELS absolutely right, and taking on an external belief system that FEELS – and smells – absolutely rotten.

Invariably, the child is finally forced to accept the caretaker’s twisted denial-based reality.  The reward is minor: approval (or at least less harassment) from the caretaker.  The cost is ultimately horrific: despair, depression, rage, shame, paranoia (if you can’t trust “yourself”, how can you trust anyone else?).  The more the caretaker’s reality feels distressing to be in, the great will be the underlying psychological struggle to find out what your own reality really is – TO KNOW WHO YOU WERE BEFORE YOU WERE OBLIGED TO BECOME SOMETHING THAT SUITED THEM.  This is a courageous struggle indeed.  Because if you do go back and find your own truth, back to before the lies, manipulation and distortion started, back to that stage where you know your own feelings, you know where you begin and end, you know what you want, what you feel, you know YOURSELF – then you will be faced with the horrendous realisation of how much of your unique, precious life their conspiracies took away from you. Your denial of your true self, your tolerating of gross discrepancies between your inner knowing and your outer living, will have wreaked a sad and sometimes terrible toll on your life.

But the reward for this endeavour will be worth any pain suffered.  You’ll know who you really are, and you’ll like YOU – unshakably, absolutely, unconditionally.  Who you really are lives in the inner world of the unconscious, in the psyche.

The psyche cannot use language, only metaphor.  Hence the potency of dreams.  However, as a person “awakens”, looks inwards, and by self-examination becomes increasingly intimate with the mystical language of the inner world, three things happen:

1.  They become very skilled in translating themselves and so feel much less at the effect of their emotional states;

2.  The channels of communication become much more direct and there is an increasing congruence between the person’s inner and outer worlds.  They start to become more of WHO they are, and this invariably leads to a great leap in their personal power.

3.  The lessons are taught at vastly refined levels.  The person no longer feels the victim of gross and costly chaos in the outer world.  The demands for learning and change may be great indeed, but they are presented almost symbolically and can increasingly be dealt with privately.  These people develop a lightness and facility with daily life – a detachment from the bog of the outer world that most of the population squelch around in.  That bulk of the population doesn’t like these types of people.

The purpose for journeying into the world of the psyche is indeed to find the real YOU.  The real you is not some enchanting little essential self glowing with light who you will adore at first sight, no matter how much some New Age philosophers would like to believe so.  Certainly, there are many lovable aspects to your personality, but they are distorting experiences.  It’s analogous to your memories.  The happy times don’t need healing or attention.   They are there to be savoured at will, not burned on your mind endlessly tormenting you.

Unfortunately, one of the indicators that an adult has suffered a dysfunctional upbringing is that they DON’T HAVE MANY MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD – GOOD OR BAD.  When you go into the psyche to find who you were, you are seeking the parts you don’t know much about.  These will be like abandoned street kids: ashamed, angry, crushed, terrorised, despairing, heart-broken.  As you moved around your inner world and encounter these enduring proofs of early pain and negativism, you will initially be caught off guard and caught up in the emotions of these waifs.

The intention of therapy and personal development is to make you more able to move amongst their extraordinary domain with some insight and sense of competence, of being increasingly able to have effect on your emotional distress.  It’s the same as adopting a badly abused child.  For a substantial time you would expect the waif to exhibit all their outrage, and you would be patient with them.  You will learn to bring to yourself this same patience, compassion, steadfastness – the mark of a mature adult.  You were raised by grown-ups, not adults.  Children who just got bigger.  Have you ever felt that even though a child, you actually understood more of what was going on than any of the grown-ups?  Have you ever longed for an adult in your life?  Someone wiser, older, trustworthy, caring?  Do your parents fill this need for you?  Have you ever felt like a sham?

No matter how many spouses or mortgages you have, that you’re secretly just a scared kid pretending to be a grown-up?  How would you know how to become an adult?  Who would you model?

Remember that your inner world controls your life.  The blueprint of your life was essentially laid down in the years 0-7.  What happens after that, good or bad, is usually a repeat.  If you learned how to be consistently secure and happy, then you’ll do a lot of that.  If you experienced the emotional vampirism, coldness, physical emotional or sexual abuse, psychological manipulation, emotional withdrawal, tactile deprivation, humiliation or objectification, then YOU WILL DO THAT OVER AND OVER.  If, at the time of your torment, you were threatened never to reveal it or never to seek help, then the sense of powerlessness and hopelessness will be too unbearable and your memory might start to fade out the especially tortuous times.  Appalling memories can disappear and sometimes never return.  Additionally, the fear of resurrecting any of that information can be so great as to even impede your healing process because the original threat of punishment “if you tell” still holds too much effect.

Other forms of avoiding what you are both desperate and terrified to find is to get intellectual about the process.  People can go on for years (even in therapy) talking about their concerns and analysing them, but never going back and actually FEELING and RE-EXPERIENCING them as they occurred.  Making astute, rational observations of the dynamics in your family changes very little.  Feeling them hurt all over again once you’ve given in to the helplessness and the terror can quantum leap your life forward.  (This should be done initially only under qualified supportive attention).  GUILT is also common “I must be over-exaggerating/making it up….” and SHAME … “This is my frail old grey-haired father I’m maligning…”  and MINIMALISING …  “But every kid I knew got hit regularly. Physical punishment was normal”.  No, not normal, common.  One in three women has been sexually assaulted in one form or another, including incest.  That makes it common, but NEVER NORMAL.  Any more than cruelty to small, vulnerable children is normal.  If you were treated cruelly, then I regret to inform you that your parents were sadistic and cowardly at the very least.  Surely, they may have histories and stories and circumstances of their own, but in the end, they were grown-ups – persistently and repeatedly hurting small children.

To be continued ….. How to access your inner world