Five Steps to Freedom

Balboa Press

Contents

Introduction............................................................................xiThe Right Approach to Healing...........................................................xiiiCHAPTER 1 Step 1. ACCEPTANCE...........................................................1CHAPTER 2 AWAKENING YOUR POTENTIAL FOR HEALING AND POSITIVE CHANGE.....................41CHAPTER 3 Step 2. PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY..............................................57CHAPTER 4 Step 3. LET GO &TUNE IN......................................................100CHAPTER 5 Step 4. LIVING IN THE NOW....................................................140CHAPTER 6 Step 5. LIVE THE PROCESS AS AWAY OF LIFE.....................................168Appendix One............................................................................171Appendix Two............................................................................175About the Author........................................................................179

Chapter One

WHERE OUR CONFUSION BEGINS

The opposite of self-acceptance is negative self-judgment or self-rejection. This form of self-judgment, more than anything else, blocks us in our efforts to work through and overcome emotional problems.

In my personal and professional experience, all destructive judgement stems from one fundamental belief, or rather misbelief, that becomes imbedded in our minds from an early age. This misbelief is:

I am unworthy because I am human.

By the term "human", I mean not perfect. For children in particular, the standard of perfect behaviour is measured by others such as parents, teachers, older siblings, social pressure from peers or the media, or any other form of perceived authority. Furthermore, there are invariably many different versions of what this perfect standard is, depending on who is giving out the discipline, or the pressure to conform. This standard can even change from moment to moment with one individual disciplinarian, depending on his or her changing moods. When we were children, we were often unable to live up to these standards. Sometimes this was because we weren't given the appropriate training and mentoring, and sometimes it was because we simply lacked ability in that area. Sometimes the standards set for us were actually impossible to comply with.

We are very vulnerable when we are children. We are dependent on our adult carers for our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. In relation to our mental and emotional wellbeing, as children, we depend on our carers for our sense of identity and worthiness. It is essential for our successful development into adulthood that we feel we belong and that we are loved unconditionally. When we don't receive this vital love and attention, we are liable to be adversely affected in a very deep way.

During our childhood, when we failed to live up to the standards set for us by our carers, some of us suffered abuse, ridicule, and rejection. We were deemed unworthy of love. As a result, we frequently felt sad, afraid, ashamed, abandoned, angry, and so on.

Often the problem is a lack of active mentoring by our carers. They were often pre-occupied and/or absent and not in tune with our essential needs. We felt unworthy of love in this situation as well—not important to our carers. Feelings of loss, abandonment, and loneliness would be particularly strong as a result of this.

Another problem many of us faced in childhood was too much involvement from our carers. As children, we need room to be ourselves—to develop our own unique identities according to our own special potential. When our carers are overbearing and inappropriately controlling, we end up feeling inadequate, incapable and helpless. We tend to remain dependent on others, overly compliant to the demands of others, and unaware of what is uniquely and essentially important for our own needs. Our creativity and self-confidence becomes stifled. Our sense of what love is becomes highly distorted. There is always an underlying dread that we will be deemed unworthy of love and even abandoned if we dare to think and act for ourselves.

Another situation we can encounter as children is a home environment that is chaotic and even dangerous. We may not have known what to expect from one moment to the next. A sense of all-pervading fear and anxiety known as random conditioning is often the result. One minute we may be stroked and the next we may be beaten, without knowing why. At other times, we may be inappropriately left alone to fend for ourselves for extended periods of time. With this sort of unpredictability, our primal defences have to be on all the time. We need love like everyone else, but we become afraid of it as well. Love, in this situation, becomes a confusing nightmare.

As children, due to our vulnerable, undeveloped minds and resultant deep dependency, we end up taking such negative experiences very personally. Without even realising it, we conclude that we must be fundamentally wrong in some way to be treated in such a manner. In many ways we conclude that we don't deserve love. We take on the beliefs of our main carers, not knowing anything else. As children, we are on a rapid learning and developmental path, but we can't yet discern the quality of what we are learning. We are just unconsciously soaking it all up. This is the root of childhood conditioning, positive and negative. This deep misbelief that we are unworthy simply because we are human becomes embedded into our minds.

Love is repeatedly withdrawn from us when we are children, often simply for being childish. As children, we are placed in an impossible dilemma. Being children means that we have little capacity to control our instinctual cravings and emotions. We simply can't help ourselves. We are doomed to fail when we are expected to be "good little adults" by well-meaning but confused carers, or carers who are plainly abusive.

When we take this misbelief into adulthood, no matter how we try to hide this deep confusion from the world around us, it nevertheless pervades and distorts every area of our lives. This condemnation, this withdrawal of love, I believe, is the main root of all continuing rejection of ourselves and others.

As children, we may have also had a character that was sensitive or difficult to manage, in many different ways, which can compound the situation. In other words, children often display strong personality traits and emotional dispositions seemingly from birth. We are not necessarily a blank slate before we start. Nevertheless, the weight of responsibility is on parents and other significant carers to equip themselves with the skills for the task of parenthood. It is the parents' challenge to constructively work with their child's negative traits to help the child reduce them or even overcome them. It is also an opportunity for the parents to help the child reach his or her highest potential. Children are children. They cannot be expected to successfully parent themselves.

As powerless, vulnerable children, we are so dependent on our carers that we are compelled to try to conform to their confusion no matter how impossible this may be to achieve. In the face of this dilemma, we feel so...