By Robert Burney: Author of Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls; Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in The Light; and Romantic Relationships: The Greatest Arena for Spiritual & Emotional Growth

CODEPENDENCE – THE WALKING WOUNDED

As human beings, we do not know how to Love our self in healthy ways because our parents did not know how to Love themselves.  We were raised in shame-based societies that taught us that there is something wrong with being human.  

The messages we got often included that there is something wrong with: making mistakes; not being perfect; being sexual; being emotional; being too fat or too thin or too tall or too short or too; and so on.  As children we were taught to determine our worth in comparison with others.  If we were smarter than, prettier than, got better grades than, were faster than, etc – then we were validated and got the message that we had worth. This is what Robert Burney describes as Codependence – a dysfunctional relationship with self.

In a codependent society everyone has to have someone to look down on in order to feel good about themselves.  And, conversely, there is always someone we can compare ourselves to that can cause us to not to feel good enough. 

THE NEED FOR HEALING

We are set up to be emotionally dysfunctional by our role models, both parental and societal.  We are taught to repress and distort our own emotional process.  We are trained to be emotionally dishonest when we are children.

This emotional repression and dishonesty causes society to be emotionally dysfunctional.  Additionally, urban based civilization has completely disregarded natural laws and natural cycles such as the human developmental process.  There is no integration into modern culture of the natural human developmental process.

As an example of this, consider how most so called primitive or aboriginal societies react to the onset of puberty.  When a girl starts menstruating, ceremonies are held to celebrate her womanhood – to honour her coming into her power, to honour her miraculous gift of being able to conceive.  Boys go through training and initiation rites to help them make the transition from boyhood to manhood.  Look at what we have in modern society: junior high  or secondary school – a bunch of scared, insecure kids who torture each other out of their confusion and fear, and join gangs to try to find an identity.

This lack of integration of the natural human growth process causes trauma.  At each stage of the developmental process we were traumatized because of the emotionally repressive, spiritually hostile environment into which we were born.  We went into the next stage of our development incomplete and then were retraumatized, were wounded again.

For all of the so-called progress of our modern societies, there is still so much that we could learn from most indigenous cultures in terms of respect for individual rights and dignity in some kind of balance with the good of the whole.  (I am speaking here of tribal indigenous societies – not urbanized ones.)  Nowhere is this more evident in terms of our relationship to our children and nature.

Modern civilizations are no more than a generation or two removed from the belief that children were property.  Some societies actually still lag behind in this respect. This, of course, goes hand in hand with the belief that women were/are property.  The idea that children have rights, individuality, and dignity is relatively new in modern society.  The predominant and underlying belief, as it has been manifested in the treatment of children, has been that children are extensions of, and tools to be used by, their parents.

A very telling insight into the basic beliefs underlying Western attitudes towards children is shared by inner child pioneer Alice Miller in her book The Drama of The Gifted Child.  She shares how the 19th Century German Philosophers who laid the groundwork for modern psychology, emphasized the importance of stamping out a child’s “exuberance.”  In other words, a child’s spirit must be crushed in order to control them. 

Children are to be seen and not heard.  Spare the rod and spoil the child.

It is only in very recent history, that our society has even recognized child abuse as a crime instead of an inherent right of the parent.  The concept of healthy parenting as a skill to be learned is very new in society.

Any society that does not respect and honour individual human dignity, is going to be a society that does not meet the essential needs of its members.  Patriarchal societies, that demean and degrade women and children, are dysfunctional in their essence.

We form our core relationship with our self and with life – and of course with other people – in early childhood in reaction to the messages we get from the way we are treated and the role modelling of the other people in our lives.  In modern society, we then have no training or initiation ceremonies, no culturally approved grieving process, to help us let go of the old programming and learn a different relationship with our self and life.  So, we build upon the foundation laid in early childhood.

As adults, we react to the programming of our childhood. To contend that our childhood emotional wounds have not affected our adult lives is absurd.  To think that our early programming has not influenced the way we have lived is to be in denial to an extreme.

Because societies standards for what constitutes success are dysfunctional, many people can be pointed out who “have risen above” their past to be a success.  It is those people, who are supposedly successful, that are running the world.  How good a job do you think they are doing?

We make choices in reaction to our childhood wounds and programming’

It is our world leaders and us the people who elect and support them, reacting out of the fear and insecurity of our inner children, and the dysfunctional belief systems underlying civilization, who bring about war and poverty, billionaires and homelessness, environmental degradation and climate change.

HEALING

In order to live in a peaceful world, a society based upon respect, dignity and Love, we need to heal our relationships with ourselves enough to learn to Love and respect our self. We cannot Love our neighbour as our self, as long as we are judging and comparing our self to them in order to feel good about our self.  

We cannot have a society that meets the essential emotional and spiritual needs of its members as long as we are reacting to life in alignment with rules of interaction that we learned in junior high or secondary school.

We are all connected – not separate.  We all have worth and deserve to be treated with dignity and respect – instead of earning societies version of worth by stepping on and over our fellow humans, to say nothing of destroying the planet we depend on for life.

It is through healing our inner child wounds that we can learn to respect and Love our self so that we can know how to treat others with respect and Love.  It is through healing our inner children that we can save our planet and evolve into a society that meets the essential needs of its members.

Inner child healing is not some fad or pop psychology.  Inner child healing is the only way to empower ourselves to stop living life in reaction to the past.  We have been ignoring history and repeating it for centuries.  If we are going to have a chance to reverse the self destructive patterns of human kind, it is going to come from individuals healing themselves.  By healing our inner child wounds, we can change the world.