How to Be Free, Joe Blow [reading tree .txt] 📗

etc. As we learn to walk and talk our ways of communicating, as well as the things we want to communicate about, increase.

The only problem is that we soon learn that not everyone wants to communicate openly and spontaneously with us. Maybe other children do, and our parents when they have the time to relax and play with us, but much of the time we find that adults are not really with us. They don’t listen, or if they do they don’t respond in ways which make sense to us. The feeling for us is like that of a child who enters a playground but finds that most of the other children don’t want to play with him.

One of the most important things to understand about the mind of a child is that children always think it is their fault. This makes sense. If you come into a world, of course you are going to assume that those who already live there know what’s what. To say, “I’m sane and they are all crazy!”, would seem pretty desperate. How were we to know that that was the case? And this is why so many traumas happen in childhood which can warp us for life. “It must be my fault my parents got divorced,” we tell ourselves, or, “I must be to blame for Uncle Pete going to jail, because it was my genitals he was caught playing with.” If all we were dealing with was the thing itself, the effects of most misfortunes and abuses would pass away much more quickly. What causes the really deep scars is self-blame and the ego insecurity and thus obsession with self-justification and questions of self-worth that it engenders. This is what is meant by “the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons”. Sin is just a judgemental religious word for neurosis - for the self-obsession of the insecure ego.

Of course, if our parents were able to explain to us that they were fucked-up and insecure, and that it was nobody’s fault, least of all ours, things would have been much easier for us. If we had parents who were blind or deaf or physically crippled, we wouldn’t have felt bad about the fact that we could see or hear or run. It is not a case of our needs not being met. We didn’t need our open and spontaneous communication to be responded to in kind. We were resilient beings who could be happy with however the world worked. The only problem was the conclusion that something was wrong with us.

This feeling that something was wrong with us meant that more and more of our thinking was taken up by attempts to find a way to prove it wrong. Our ego became insecure. This is the time in our development when we would start to “act naughty”. The more we doubt our own worth the more we feel compelled towards acts of defiance. We project our insecurities onto the outside world and then fight against them in that arena. Later in life we may try to prove our worth by scrawling graffiti on a public building, fighting in a war or climbing Mount Everest, but when we are still in diapers we have to be satisfied with stealing candy bars in the supermarket or pulling the cat’s tail. It was at this stage that we became angry. Anger is the emotion with which the insecure ego tries to defend itself when challenged.

This is when our parents had to start teaching us right from wrong. They gave us the blue print for our conscience. At first we might try to obey the rules our parents set in order to avoid punishment, but eventually they would become incorporated into our thinking about our own self-worth. We would feel any failure to live up to these standards was evidence of our worthlessness. We learned to feel guilty.

Two factors in our upbringing contributed to how neurotic, i.e. armoured, we ended up. First was how positive our early interactions with others were, that is how little sense of blame we took onto ourselves to make us feel insecure. And the other was how restrictive the value system was which formed our conscience. (Although this normally happens in childhood, some of us adopt an ideology or religion later in life, thus changing the nature of our conscience.) If our experiences are bad, leaving us angry and insecure, but our conscience is not too restrictive, we needn’t repress those feelings entirely. We might go out to heavy metal rock concerts, take drugs and fuck around, and thus not entirely loose access to our capacity for love, but, if we were born into a fundamentalist religious society, for instance, we would have to repress our rebellious expressions within a very restrictive form of social discipline (not to mention that the strict moral code would be a constant source of criticism to our insecure ego, thus increasing its anger), so we would end up very alienated indeed from our capacity for unconditional love. We could still feel love within the security of our own kind, but that is all.

My Own Journey

Sometimes we have a somewhat faulty concept of the nature of childhood innocence. We may think that the innocent child has an angelic nature. This is not true.

At the age of ten I asked my mother if we could go to a Grand Prix because I hoped to have the opportunity of witnessing a racing car driver die in a car crash.

This isn’t the sort of thing most of us associate with the healthy child, but at that time I was psychologically healthy. 

I was motivated by curiosity. I felt no hostility towards race car drivers. But I knew that they sometimes died painful deaths in car crashes on the speedway and I was curious to see what someone dying in that way would look like.

As I’ve said elsewhere, our original nature when we are born is one of unconditional love, i.e. we are open to the world and non-judgemental of what we find there. However we have no morality. A moral system is something we learn from adults. And we have no compassion. Since compassion is nothing more than projected self-pity, we do not develop the ability to feel compassion until we become a neurotic adult.

As a child I was emotionally strong, resilient and not easily hurt. I was often bullied, but I don’t think I blamed the bullies for being bullies any more than I would blame a bee for stinging me. I was non-judgementally accepting of others.

One day in primary school, when I must have been about 6 or 7, one of the bullies got me in the toilets, told me to lay down on the floor, pulled down my pants and stuck wet wads of toilet paper up my arse. He told me that, if I didn’t come back and let him do it again the next day I would die. Since I hadn’t found the experience particularly pleasant, I decided not to come to him the next day. “If I die, I die,” I told myself.

This was a temporarily uncomfortable and scary experience, much like a trip to the doctor to have an inoculation, but, in itself, it was of little significance to me.

Now if the same thing had happened to me when I was a neurotic teenager, full of self-doubt because of all of the aggressive feelings I’d been repressing and desperately uncomfortable about my own body because of the extreme form of sexual repression I’d been practicing since shortly after the onset of puberty, the experience might have been an almost rape-like ordeal. I was much more fragile emotionally in adolescence and adulthood than I had ever been in childhood.

I think that what makes childhood a vulnerable time and a time when the seeds of adult neurosis are sown is that it is the time when we are learning the lessons we will try to apply as an adult. We are building a conceptual framework about ourselves and the world. If we learn a lesson which is unhelpful it can warp our adult life up until the point at which we may unlearn it and thus free ourselves from our neurosis.

I think the lesson I learned which made life painful for me as an adult was to turn inwards. I always held onto the concept of accepting others unconditionally, and I wanted to understand them, but I think it must have been made clear to me early on that simply asking a bully why he is a bully was not going to work. I’m not sure if I ever tried it. I think not.

But if there was conflict in the world and I wanted to understand it, I think I must have decided to keep my head down, keep my thoughts to myself and take a passive approach to that conflict outwardly. If I hadn’t been bullied I might not have taken this approach. The bullying itself didn’t inflict all that much pain, but the lesson I learned from it led to me adopting a strategy which would almost kill me. (Perhaps if an adult had been able to perceive what I was doing to myself and give me guidance about it this wouldn’t have happened. But when I’ve sought help for my problems throughout my life I’ve found that those who’ve tried to help me have their own problems and are often pretty clueless. Those who helped me the most were those like my mother and my psychiatrist who provided me with space and acceptance in which I could help to formulate my own self-understanding.)

The big problem with the introverted approach to life is that one tends not to allow oneself an outward expression for frustration, in the form of competitive activities or angry outbursts or whatever. If we bottle up our feelings of frustration then we are liable to take them out on ourselves. In my case, toward the latter part of my teens I became severely depressed and developed an obsession that I might gouge my own eyes out.

This can’t be explained simply by the inward directing of anger. I think another factor was sexual repression. Soon after puberty I became mysteriously ashamed about masturbation. This had nothing to do with anything any adult had said to me as my parents had a laid back, healthy attitude about such things. But I went for several months without masturbating during which I felt a heavy cloud of condemnation hanging over my head. Later, during my twenties, the comfort and sense  of connection to my repressed healthy self which I got from masturbating to pictures of naked women, was one of the few things to make my life bearable. But, at the same time, I felt this erotic element as something powerfully anarchic which could shake up my repressed state in ways which were very anxiety-provoking.

I think the third, and perhaps biggest factor, in my neurosis was the fact that I held on so tightly to the concept of unconditional love. The problem with it is that, the only way to keep this non-judgemental attitude alive in the absence of the resilient, flexible, amoral and non-compassionate innocent state is to, emotionally, take within oneself all of the conflict one sees in the world. If one can take sides one can get some emotional catharsis out of conflicts, but if one identifies with both sides tremendous internal stress is liable to occur. And, in a neurotic state we feel compassion, thus we feel a lot of pain about the state of the world.

While I was non-judgemental that doesn’t mean I wasn’t critical of others. I was always critical