Clarity of Innocence

Neither anger, nor conflict happen, until requests for obedience enter the picture.

People don’t fight with each other over possessions. That’s not who people are. People are cooperative and loving until they are hurt so bad, they change.

The fighting only starts after hurt is introduced. With enough hurt, people can get defiant, and even dangerous.

Life is designed to fight for survival. The power comes from inside.

In the midst of this life or death struggle, requests for obedience cause hurt.

That’s life-threatening hurt.

To be obedient it is necessary for any life to defeat it’s own driving force.

The fire has to come from within.

What if that’s not allowed?

That’s a terrible load of hurt and pain to live with, and most of us do exactly that.

All life, including our own, starts out self-powered.

All the other lives get to stay that way.

But children don’t!

Other life never needs to question who they are. Being self-powered, feelings, needs, and wishes are always fully connected. They don’t need secrets, they live out loud. They don’t need philosophy, or psychiatrists. Every cell in their body’s remains in perfect harmony with who they are. They always know exactly how they feel, moment to moment, and they revel in it.

If only we could have done that too! It we could have, we wouldn’t be angry. We wouldn’t have doubts. We would have no need for secrets. We would still be living out loud.

The difference is full connection.

All life starts out fully connected. This is health.

In the natural world, ongoing hurt doesn’t happen. There is life and death, and the food chain, but chronic anxiety doesn’t normally exist.

In mankind’s world, there is hurt. It shouldn’t be there. We create it by mistake.

Enough hurt happens, to change each person.

That’s what happened to us. That’s how we changed.

Everything that we are is driving us to survive through our own efforts. Nature set it up that way.

How can we be obedient? We can’t. No life can, and still remain healthy.

Moment by moment we become forced to ignore our entire existence, and behave to someone else’s standards. That sets up life or death hurt!

All the rest of the story is the details.

People have the ability to disconnect from their own feelings!

In the world of people, and perhaps other life, with enough hurt, it is possible to disconnect from our feelings. That eases the hurt. The stress is still there, within us, but we can’t feel it as much.

Most, if not all of us, have been in enough hurt to make it necessary to disconnect from our feelings, in various degrees!

What problems do you suppose might develop from disconnecting like that?

Let’s look at the situation. We felt more hurt than we could live with. We removed ourselves, somewhat, from those painful feelings. Hurt still exists in our bodies from both the past, and ongoing life. Being partially disconnected, we don’t feel it as much, but it’s still there.

What side effects would you expect to see from that situation?

These huge amounts of hurt cause stress. We get rebellion, anger, feelings of complete hopelessness, hate, and worse of all, a complete collapse of our self esteem. Our sense of importance is destroyed. Most of us will spend the rest of our lives trying to prop that back up.

Clearly, this is unhealthy. Feelings are going to be compromised in some way. There is going to be body tension. There is going to be confusion regarding our place in life, because disconnection happened inside us. When our internal connection is compromised, our external ones are going to change along with it.

This is the condition of most of us right now. It’s not any one person’s fault. It’s been a gradual slide of our entire population. Anger is only one of the consequences.

That’s why we all have issues. We aren’t supposed to.

It happens through all of us not having a clear picture of the needs of infants and children.

Where then, have we fallen short on satisfying the needs of our young?

Life comes from within. That’s what life is. Nature set it all up. Each new life gets to be unique, and is gifted with the drive and energy to survive for a lifetime. That comes from being alive, and it comes from inside each life.

The fire comes from inside.

For a healthy life, the fire always has to come from inside!

What happens if we deny that, and insist that the life be obedient?

Do you see the problem? We have a driving force, unique to that individual, absolutely demanding survival coming from within, with instinctive skills, needs, and it’s own special path of development. That’s true of all life, including children. That inner instinctive force will power that life for it’s entire existence, and never mellow out.

How can that life manage to become obedient?

It can’t! It can only hurt, and try to find a way to ease that pain.

To be obedient, we must accept some damage.

That is why it is imperative we allow our young to exist and survive through their own efforts and drive. Failure to allow that has destroyed love and community across the planet.

Changing this alone, repairs so much of what is wrong with the world, it’s difficult to establish if there would be any problems left at all, once we fix that one.

WHO ARE WE NOW?

Our lives have changed from inner driven, to other driven. That has taken humans into so much conflict, we might not survive.

Each of us has disconnected, in various degrees to manage the hurt that results.

We do the best we can, but we all have issues.

Chronic anger is one of those issues. Confusion about who we are, what we want, and what we really need, follow along with the disconnection.

We can manage the anger, but unless we can reconnect, we are basically just shuffling things around.

Reconnected we feel whole again. We become stronger, and healthier. Self doubt goes away. In this condition we cannot be obedient, but with luck, we no longer have to.

We once again become the one and only life form, that we can ever be.

Fortunately, that’s also the finest person we can ever be.

It doesn’t take much insight to see that the most disconnected people are the ones causing all the trouble.

WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT THIS?

What do we do in therapy?

We talk things out. We try to get things out in the open. We reveal our secrets. We feel better with each step.

What happens within ourselves as we do that?

We are reconnecting!

We are dissipating the hurts that are still within us.

Why is it hard? All we doing is telling the truth. Why isn’t that easy?

Way back, we surrendered and gave up our inner drive. It was telling us one thing, but others were basically forcing us to do a different thing.

We were trusting, and we accepted that our inner drive was wrong.

We became ashamed of our instinctual needs. To reveal them now, still fills us with shame.

That’s why therapy and recovery is hard. Feelings are nature’s best present. They are the imagination, and the magic. They are beyond special to us. Interfering with them in any way is life threatening.

It’s just as traumatic to fix feelings, as it was to lose them!

Revealing our basic wishes now, also fills us with fear. Way back when we surrendered our real identity, we did not give up voluntarily. We fought to exhaustion. It was fear and exhaustion that eventually caused us to give up.

Revealing our real selves causes us fear. That’s because the fear is still there, from long ago.

Facing, and expressing our fear and shame allows us to reconnect. We were never allowed to express any of this, way back when we were little.

Being connected, a lot of things change. Probably the biggest is we can feel our own needs. Our strongest need outside of survival, is to feel loved. Feeling that, how do you suppose we behave?

That’s right. We assume the responsibility of taking great care with other people. We now have an inboard guide continually updating us on how to treat others, so that they love us.

Behaving this way, it’s not long before we do become loved. Connected with our feelings, we find ourselves beginning to love as well. We thought we knew how before, but being fully connected, and feeling it right to our toes, love is a lot different.

Disconnected, we had no way to create an environment that would allow us to feel good by satisfying our own needs. We didn’t even know what they were. Now we do. Now we can feel our needs. We feel good because our stress is gone, and again because we feel loved.

This blog is clarity-of-innocence.com There are numerous posts, all exploring these issues.

Thank you for allowing me to be part of your day.

Norm Cormier.