Where the Answers Lie, or Its Not Your fault.

When I was a newbie therapist in the 80’s the zeitgeist was all about personal responsibility. The New Age had just discovered that we create our own reality with books like You’ll See it When You Believe It and others. The understanding, rightly so, was that our choices create what occurs in our lives. But alongside that, a great many people started to get into a semi-blame scenario. If you had a cold, for instance, people would say things like “What did you do that brought that on?”. The assumption was that you chose to get the cold. Well, in a way you did put yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time and came in contact with a virus, but the implication was that it was your fault.

In psycho-therapeutic work there was also a flavour during that time, looking for what you had done that was wrong, or didn’t work, that created the difficulties that you were facing. Much of the thoughts at the time came from a behaviouralist philosophy, based on shifting the bits around on the surface of our lives, to make them more functional within the system. Couples counseling would look at what we said to each other, and how we acted, with the purpose of choosing differently to bring about a solution to the difficulties we were having in our interactions. These would work for a few weeks until we slid back into our habitual ways, when the previous structure returned.

Even in the psychosynthesis practice that I was beginning, I also saw the solutions, in part, about bringing awareness to what we were doing and why we were doing it, as a starting point. It’s what has to occur initially, but it can’t rest there. As years went by, I started to see patterns of behaviour occurring across the board with my clients. Many, if not most, came because of dysfunction in their current, or previous relationships, and we were able to track that back to the perceived relationships modeled by parents.

Of course, more and more, I saw early childhood trauma presenting as a result of unskilled parenting, leading to even worse outcomes of incest, rape, and violence, often accompanied by alcohol. It often turned out that one or more parents had been effected by war damaged parents, fathers, returning from wars with untreated PTSD. Using alcohol and violence was a coping mechanisms in its absence. I  witnessed people from diverse cultures presenting with similar issues to each other, depending on where they came from: with indigenous or ethnic backgrounds. There were indigenous people suffering  the effects of colonialism, experienced by themselves and their families. European people inevitably had stories to tell about bombings, hiding in shelters with air raids going off continually in their childhood, or their parent’s experiences of a war torn community.

It occur to me that if relationship structures were healthier, with children supported in their childhoods in a more functional way, I would be out of business. Willingly so. It took only a short step from there to the realisation that all these issues; relationships, childcare, alcohol, and violence stemmed from a common course. It was not the inability of any set of individuals. but the overall dysfunction of the societies we live in. Stemming from cultures that dictated the parameters of what those relational interactions were allowed to look like, whether those structures worked for the individual. we were all dysfunctional. But it was deeper and wider than that. It was the economic white culture of materialism enforced trade dictating who we were and what we did, starting so far back in time that it was impossible to pinpoint when a family issue began from just a few surface sessions.

I began working with ancestral lines. Sometimes the beginning of a behaviour was several generations back from my client, far too buried for them to easily access, or even know about consciously. As we explored the family structure in Family of Origin work, the pattern emerging could easily be seen, weaving its way down the generations to the unconscious behaviour implicit in my client’s woes. What this did was create relief for them. They realized that they, personally, were not a broken vessel, but the product of a broken system. That’s all of us. None of us have escaped the vagaries of the system that has trundled on for millennia.

Over the decades of my work, I have seen the damaging patterns increase as each generation becomes victim to more and more pressure that this economic pseudo-culture creates for us. It forces us into behaviour that is designed to make us rely increasingly on money for happiness, and healing. This, at the expense of healthy interactions with each other in an aware and caring way, validating our existence with love, from the cradle to the grave. Whats more, the space at our soul level aches. We yearn for something to ameliorate that pain. The substances that we are then encouraged to take, and the work we are encouraged to participate in, numbs but does not heal the hurt. We each have a unique spirit that yearns to express itself. Each piece is one small, but vital part of the bigger picture.

What can we do? Sometimes I ultimately just don’t know. In those moments I feel despair, like many of you. As a society, there needs a massive paradigm shift, bringing us out of the nightmare of this virtual reality, into the nature-based sanity, where we started as a species. But we can’t go back. We never can. We must find a new way forward.  The old adage, Physician Heal Thyself comes to mind as I continue on my own process, weeding out the trauma left in me, and finding ways to heal. Then I pass what I have learned on to you, when you are willing to receive it. And ultimately that’s all any of us can do; deal with our own stuff to create healing inside, so that we can know ourselves. From there we can effectively interact with others, and Life itself, in a healthier way. This work will go on. But the work of changing the Big Picture? This is something that occupies me more and more as things deteriorate on the planet, and in our Societies.

Over the weeks I was working with my fb site, I had the opportunity to read Fritjof Capra’s work on Living Systems Theory, where he outlined that Life, by virtue of what it does, as well as how it operates, has four defining features. It is self-organising, creative, regenerative, and intelligently cognitive. This science-based definition hit me like a ton of bricks. I realised that all that was going on in the world’s weather patterns was Life reorganizing the world, in order to restore stability to the chaos, we, with our tunnel vision, have created.

When talking about this with my partner, a plant person, she made the analogy that, in an old-growth forest, there comes a time when the large giant trees have to fall. They have been gradually undermined by all kinds of natural phenomena, not through greed or viciousness, but simply through the act of living. The same is true on a personal level. Our time to fall over always comes. And so too does the life of all systems. They reach a time when their size is unwieldy no longer able to maintain the constant act of growing bigger. But each component of the forest plays its part. The termite nibbles away at the roots, the mistletoe sucks the branches, each according to its needs, giving back what it can. Gravity keeps pulling at us all, and one day we fall down, termites, people, trees, and economic systems. Nothing to be afraid of, as Life will take care of it all in the end. However, like the termite, we all have our part to play, some in the breaking down, others in the rebuilding.

We don’t have to hold the system up, nor bring it down single-handedly. It will be a natural group effort. What we must do however is continue to seek within ourselves for who we really are, sorting it out from who the system told us we had to be. Then we can see the attributes that we, as an individual, have to offer the Whole, and how we can best use them to assist Life in its ongoing process.