The Separation verses Unity Trilogy, Part 2

Part 1 of this exploration studied the ‘big picture’ aspect of the need to both separate and seek unity.  Now we are entering the realm that is closer to home. As we learn, moment by moment who we are, separating ourselves off from the provided support mechanism that taught us the basics, we now have a new set of challenges to incorporate into our growth. We must allow the scaffolding of family to fall away, allowing us to prove to ourselves, and others, that we can stand on our own feet. Nothing is an instant process. We build on our experience’s moment by moment, with the theory and a modicum of experience, assisted hopefully by an adequate safety net. No matter how efficient our upbringing was, we must now put it into action to test its validity for us as well as to learn the finer points of adult life. If we don’t spread our wings, learning trust in ourselves, we will feel like children, relying on others for the rest of our lives, resenting every minute of it.

The process of individuation requires us to recognize the boundaries that keep our selfhood intact, whilst respecting that space for others. For most of our childhood we have been shown when we have stepped on others territory but not been taught how to recognizes when we are approaching their boundaries. Defining our space from theirs is difficult but using the appropriate tools we can become more skilled at it.  There is a reason for this lack in our education.

Practically, if our goal is financial, it is useful to have a family unit, run by one head of the house, moving in sync with the needs of the economy. As a result, after much destruction, patriarchy has replaced equality as nuclear families have replaced tribes. While this has worked for monetary profit, it has led to a condition called codependency. This is an inappropriate adult dependency on other adults to meet their needs as if they were a helpless child. By culturally encouraging the extension of the family, without the ability to differentiate ourselves first, it has left us ill equipped to explore our personal creativity before breeding. We then find ourselves in what is known as the ‘adult child syndrome’. Essentially, immature people attempting to teach their offspring the skills of life they don’t themselves have. Again, often creating resentment at the place they find themselves, based on choices with cultural bias, rather than personally felt ones.

Codependence has been encouraged as the cultural way we should be, but it has wrought a huge psychological damage to us as people. Our fear and anger stems so much from the expectations that we should never have to grow up and provide for ourselves. Fears that we cannot do it. Anger that we must, leading to the ongoing desire to have others parent us. Around and around we go, fear leading to choices that anger us leading us to be fearful all over again.

Meanwhile our family members encourage this, holding us close for fear that we can’t find our own way, and that they, too, can’t live without us. Our culture has encouraged them to feel that it’s their life duty, rather than a phase that was needed but must now disintegrate to allow functionality of both. Parents have become codependent on having people to look after, rather than finding their own path after parenthood. But this is by design also. It has been deemed important to have defined roles within this system, not for the health and wellbeing of the people in it, but to feed the system itself. Having a stable workforce that moves together wherever it is needed is designed to keep people tied it. If we had people deciding that they wanted to do something else other than their prescribed role would be disruptive…but also extremely creative.  In fact, this is exactly what has started to happen as women no longer want to stay at home, taking on the grandchildren for working parents, with men no longer wanting to stay in a controlled marriage for the duration of their lives. It is creating changes within societal rules that are forcing change in the system, whether the system likes it or not. Nature always moves us towards health, if we listen to our deep feelings.

This is first step to breaking this cycle: by to learning the skills that will allow us to know what our own needs are first, developing techniques that help us meet them for ourselves. We are needs-based beings, as are all that inhabit this planet. If we are unable to identify those needs, we are unable to meet them appropriately. The part of us that knows what they are is the body itself, not the mind that has been enculturalised. The body uses the feelings and senses to send that information to the brain, to set the process of fulfillment into motion. But we need to listen to them. Our instincts knowing where we begin, and others end. Not knowing this results in meeting what other people might think we need rather than what is real for us. Our needs are ours alone, peculiar to where and who we are, at any given time. This is ‘knowing ourselves’. To do that we must know who we are not.

Some have questioned me about this, feeling that I am suggesting selfishness as a way of being. Nothing could be further from the truth. What I am advocating is ‘self-nurturing’: the need to take care of ourselves first so that, if necessary, we will have the health and energy to be able to help others when required. Because taking ‘caring of ourselves’ is the first principle of survival. It’s not an either/or. Killing ourselves to help other is a zero-sum game. It is not only the body that dies in the process of codependent thinking. Eventually the soul loses hope of us ever fulfilling its creative role in life and gives up. This is called ‘soul death’.

Nature is our biggest teacher. It constitutes all the laws upon which life hangs. What is true for plants, birds, insects and other animals, is also true for us. Without the balance these laws bring, we will not be long for this planet. Without the same cultural conditions, designed to create us into money making entities, other animal species have little trouble defining when it is time to go their own way from the nest or den. This is because their father has already departed to follow his next path, and Mum, once her offspring can stand on their own feet, also leave to begin the breeding cycle all over again.  

Here is the testing time again. Is the newly independent young animal capable of meeting it’s needs. Can it become a viable part of its species? Or will it wither and die? This seems harsh to us, but it is the way all nature works to keep itself in balance. Those of you that are gardeners will have weeded out seedlings because they cannot flourish, allowing the stronger to continue. Nature does the same. Whether we survive and thrive as humans depends, like our animal cousins, on whether we can grasp the survival tools we were are offered, continuing to be guided by those tools or not? We will never know unless we step out, beginning somewhere.

In earlier eras, teenagers, having learned the skills of life, were sent out into the forest to survive with little more than their hands and knife. After a time, and if they made it, they were welcomed back into the village as full adults, who could take up their essential role within the group. Drinking a yard of beer at your 18^th birthday does not constitute adulthood, or an ability to survive. Rather, it shows a self-destructiveness, than an understanding of healthy needs.

It's time to grow up, and take on the mantle of adulthood, no matter how old we are, as an individual and a species. If we don’t effectively make the separation that it offers us, the next stage of the journey will be fraught with problems. This next stage is the unity that comes with relationships and sexuality. Because, for it to be effective, we must take the opportunity to find out how to combine separation with unity; partnering someone without the expectations that codependency has made mandatory. Allowing them to meet their own needs, as you meet yours, without insecurity. It is the act of a secure adult, confident in their own ability to survive alone, but able to be connected to another for their mutual benefit.

The final stage of this exploration into separation and unity will come next month, when we investigate what a healthy relationship between equal adults might look like and could really offer all of us, and the humans that are to come.

The upcoming book “The Enculturalised Mind” goes deeply into this subject and its implications. Watch this space.