It’s pleasant outside. If you go to the park, you’re going to see a lot of moms proudly walking their baby in his pushchair. If you look at the baby, let’s say it’s a baby boy, he is literally scanning his mother’s body language, with a particular emphasis on the face. In the first months of life, the baby instinctively understands that there is a source of safety, comfort and pleasure that looks, smells, feels and sounds a certain way. The baby has no idea that that’s his mother or father. He only experiences his parents as the source of food and physical comfort. The baby quickly learns the things that bring this source into being responsive to its needs. The most common way a baby makes this happen is through crying. The crying is his language, his only method of communicating its needs. Now there are mothers who seem to instinctively know what the baby needs: food, change of diapers, less clothes, more clothes, etc. – that’s the ideal situation. But think if the mother is enmeshed in her own drama. Let’s say she has financial concerns, her relationship with the father is troubled somehow, she is too busy, engaged in addictions or with other kids, etc. In these circumstances, and there’s many of them in today’s world, the mother lacks the attunement to the child’s communication, or quite frankly the interest and the skills to engage with the child. She responds mechanically to the signals of distress: she wants to feed the child when in fact he’s cold, she changes the diapers when in fact the child is exhausted and needs to be held… on and on she keeps on offering to that child, unsatisfying responses which only feed the disconnect and only can produce survival.
Now you have to remember that the child does not have the intellectual abilities to make any sense of what is going on. He is just living in the present moment. Moment by moment by moment by moment, his source of nourishment provides him with only crumbles of relating and poor exchange. That is this child’s only experience. At this point in his life, the child mostly has one capacity: to adapt to outer circumstances. In other words, what becomes the norm, what his life is, is a chain of “not enough” and/or “not appropriate”. Through adaptation, the child starts to mould into a surviving mode, instead of thriving mode. He quickly learns that: okay, this is all I can expect from life and this is what I have to do to get it.
So what does this second part consists of? How does the child “decide” what he needs to do to get even those crumbles? Well, he will do that through imitation of his environment. There’s an arsenal of behaviours that he gets to watch and witness every single day. He will test anger, avoidance, shutting off, lack of interest, impatience, all those “goodies”.
Fast forward 20-30-40 years, and we have an individual who has their arsenal of mimicked behaviours that they never even stopped to question or look into, and the life experience that only allows them to feel safe within emotional disconnect and avoidance. Nice! That is the core. That is the base-line of most humans at this point in our civilization. First the child, then the adult, will simply not have in its bag, any type of understanding or skills regarding meaningful, nourishing, life-giving emotional connections, even though they THINK they do!!
The only way people experience anything remotely similar to an emotional connection is through sexual interactions. There’s a certain hormonal cocktail that is present in a sexual interaction, which feels exactly like a true emotional connection. Except that, a sexual connection does not have the sustainability an emotional connection has. It’s a bit like the difference between fast food and organic plant-based food. Both satiate you, but only one of them is nourishing long term. As with food, after a while of just popping fast food into you, something is going to begin to feel off, bloated, unsatisfying and meaningless. What happens in our world, for the most part, is that we jump into these phantasy relationships where we don’t even take the time to know the other person, to even give ourselves the chance of deciding if they have any ability to sustain our life force, taking a momentary satisfaction as the epitome of “meaningful chemistry”, “soul-mating”, “twin flaming” and other such illusory concepts as a basis of our relating, where, after 2 weeks of hot, instinct-driven “relating” we already talk or even make plans about marrying the person, build a life together having kids, etc… Doesn’t that sound a bit like Disneyland?
What actually happens, is the simple continuation of a path where we are losing ourselves in emotional anonymity and disconnect, in order to keep having our quick fix. We will use sex as a substitute for reassurance to manage the attachment distress created by the fact that we, at one point, can no longer deny that this relationship is unhealthy and spiralling downward into more and more dysfunction. To follow up on the earlier idea about the fast food, it’s a bit like waking up after 6 months of ingesting that, and realizing that you’re 20 kilos overweight, that you feel totally exhausted and you hate your life… oh and maybe… start blaming all that on your newly descended-off-the-pedestal partner 😉
So what’s to be done? You need to arrive at a point where you decide for yourself that you want this to change. There needs to be a moment where you simply look with clarity and authenticity at your reality and have the guts to say: this does not work! Fast food does not work. That needs to become both a mental clarity, but also, most importantly, a manifested thing in your life – simply put, you need to stop going to the fast food. FOR REAL! Now! You need to start investing in some type of engaging with natural, nourishing patterns of relating which, quite frankly, you’ve got no idea what they are, how to recognize them and/or implement them. It does feel like going to an organic market for the first time in your life. And if you’ve ever had a period in your life where you’ve been on fast food for a while, and then you make yourself a bowl of fresh, nourishing raw salad… gosh, that will taste yucky to you!!! You simply do not associate the salad taste with something that feels yummy. In the same way, true emotional connection, in the beginning, will feel off, unpleasant, even torturing. It is going to feel like you are giving up a huge chunk of yourself, with very little immediate results. And you did have a lifetime of searching for immediate satisfaction. That’s all you had with mommy, remember? You did not have a continuous, kind, loving, nourishing infusion of care and empowering relating. You had on and off crumbs that barely kept you from starving…
When this decision comes in a meaningful way, it has the power to sustain itself into a different type of existence. An existence where you build yourself into a healthy individual, through reinforcing openness, vulnerability, care, compassion, active listening, mirroring, attunement and self L.O.V.E.

To be continued…

 

 

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