When The Ones We Love-Hurt Us

Cycles...The world is full of cycles.

If when you were three years old, you interpreted your relationship with your mother or father as one in which you found yourself "feeling" unseen, chances are that feeling stayed with you. And as you grew, if that "hunch" or "feeling" was not diminished, chances are you found your brain seeking situations outside of you to validate that "hunch" or "feeling". Maybe it was the way mommy looked at your baby brother, and didn't look at you. Maybe it was when daddy took your older sister to the dentist and left you behind at home. Maybe it was the time you fell off your bike and no one noticed.

Cycles...If your mind got stuck on a painful thought, it is highly likely that inside of you you recycled that thought over and over.

As you ran through the cycles in your mind, emotions were being stirred up. These emotions then aligned themselves with the thoughts you were feeling.

Thoughts always couple emotions...

The problem is we don't always see things clearly when things are actually happening in real time.

Perception is crucial.

Let's say you were left to stay home one afternoon when your father took your sister to the dentist...At the time, you may have interpreted this act as one that was being done against you. In your mind, because of your interpretation of the situation, you then attached a negative emotion to it.

But was it valid?

What if your sister and father were going out to pick out a birthday gift for you? What if your sister was having trouble at school and the situation was serious? What if your father was picking out a new baseball glove for you? Would this change your perception? And wouldn't it have changed your emotional attachment to it?

The ego tends to make all that is, about itself. This is debilitating to us as individuals, to us as families and to us as a society as a whole.

But when we are small, and we are just learning about our world and our place in it, it is impossible to separate ourselves from the grips of our ego.

Our best shot would have been found in having been born to parents without ego's; parents who had done their spiritual work, and who understood that it is possible to be in the world and not of the world. Mothers whose interests were not found in punishing her hard working husband for working late, or in fathers who appreciated how hard his wife worked. Parents who understood that love was ego-less...That love was about lifting their partners up, and not tearing them down.

But the truth is our parents were flawed, wounded, and found themselves thinking they were in love, when in fact they were "in-control" mode. Many of our fathers married our mothers, because they wanted mothers themselves, and many of our mothers married our fathers because they wanted father.

Whatever it was that our parents didn't get in childhood, our parents married one another, hoping they could control whatever that "emotional fix" was out of the other.

Whether it was validation, appreciation, visibility or worthiness, most of our parents married from places of wounded-ness rather than from wholeness..

And so the cycle continues..

Until one day, one special day, our minds awake, find a blog like this one, or a book, or a person, who in some way helps reveal the cycle to us..

And when that day arrives, our new life begins.