Sometimes you’re born into a family you don’t share a connection with, this going deeper than simply you as a child liking your parents more or less, or having disagreements with them: you don’t relate to your family on a fundamental level. Being raised in these circumstances can result in various emotional states for the adult, which can become challenging and difficult to understand – or even realize they exist.
In this text we’ll be discussing this matter at length, addressing what not sharing a connection means, some of the behavioral patterns that can appear in an adult, and ways to understand, cope, and, hopefully, heal.
Imagine that at a young age – say, 4 or 5 years old – suddenly, without warning or preparation, you’re taken from your family and “dropped” onto an entirely new one. Just like that. You’re introduced to a brand new household with a father, a mother, maybe a grandmother, maybe one or two siblings – none of whom you’ve ever met before. You also don’t get to say goodbye to your original family. From one moment to th next, you simply don’t see or speak with them ever again. Next, let us take it one step further and say, like in a Twilight Zone episode, you’re gaslit in your new environment: the new individuals are relating with you as if they were always your natural, legitimate family, with zero mention of your previous life or how you feel. And when you complain or try to explain the situation, all you get is blank stares and little response. In short, there’s a sudden and instant replacement of an earlier scenario with a new one, and only you have any knowledge of it. But, in the new setting, you’re nevertheless expected to engage with and reciprocate those around you, as if literally nothing had happened.
In this hypothetical (and admittedly disconcerting) scenario, the child would likely go through extreme confusion, and equally extreme suffering. But if no further changes were to happen, over time they would eventually, probably, give up their questioning and adapt, essentially being forced to succumb to the pressure of being gaslit and invalidated, and submit. Becuase if nothing else were to take place, there would be no real alternatives to the child. A child is still entirely dependent on (the now new) adults, so if there’s a total absence of acknowledgment of what they went through and felt, there’s little other choice for the child other than to adjust. So eventually, in this hypothetical scenario, there’s an acceptance of the new individuals, not out of relief or closure, but out of necessity and survival. It’s not that the suffering itself has stopped; only that a heightened state of distress is not sustainable. Thus, out of necessity, the child accepts: these people are now “family”.
But the child, even if they do surrender and submit, is going to feel you don’t belong regardless. Their acceptance hasn’t changed the fact the child has to relate to strangers as if they’re family. The child may even succumb to the gaslighting, to the extent they become convinced that was their family all along. They could adopt that belief to avoid suffering more. But even then, if they do, on the layer of feeling, if you will, they’ll still miss the original home even if only subconsciously. Even if they dissociate what they think and act from what they really feel, the new environment won’t register as the original. No matter how the child tries to cope, no matter what they think, what they do, or what they accept as true and real.
This example, created to convey an idea for this explanation, illustrates how it feels to grow up in a family with whom you don’t, and can’t, relate, in a spiritual sense. You feel it in your skin, not with your mind.
The closest real-life comparison I could think of is perhaps when you’re born into a gender or body that doesn’t match with what you identify inside. No matter what you think of it, or how you try to cope, there’s an inescapable feeling just beneath the surface telling you something is off.
Absence of Spiritual Connection
What does it mean to not share a spiritual connection with someone? To illustrate this I’ll be practical and offer another brief example/exercise. Imagine you don’t know the person in question, and you meet them on the street as a stranger. Let’s say you were walking past each other, and you exchange a few words for whatever reason. In this exercise, bar any matters of necessity or obligation, you ask yourself the following: would you want, feel compelled, to spend any further time with the person? It’s a yes or no question. If the answer is that you wouldn’t want or feel any particular appeal to meet them again, and therefore each would go their separate ways, in all likelihood this means the two of you don’t share a spiritual connection.
When performing this type of exercise, you’re tapping into the spiritual connectivity between human beings that exists above the mental, emotional, and physical layers of reality. The spiritual is somewhat independent of the other layers of reality, yet it still dictates what’s fundamentally true and meaningful, and what isn’t, regarding what happens in it. And this spiritual layer determines, for instance, the nature of how you relate to someone on a fundamental level. Not sharing a spiritual connection with someone is (at its core) a completely neutral characteristic. It doesn’t necessarily imply you like or dislike a person or hold a grudge towards them – although these things can develop at some point. Rather, it essentially means you would have no particular affinity with them (on that spiritual layer). And in turn, in completely neutral and detached real-life circumstances, that is to say, without any obligation of any kind, you wouldn’t feel any particular appeal to approach and engage with the person. In other words, you don’t feel any particular bond with them on a spiritual level.
And that is perfectly fine! Beyond the essential tenets of compassion, empathy, and connection with the rest of humanity, you don’t have to create a deep and meaningful bond with everyone in existence. You don’t like everyone the same, and you don’t have to. You’re entitled to your preferences and affinities. And this truth is valid on a spiritual level, in a spiritual sense. Assessing who you are, purely on that spiritual layer, there are several souls with whom you have a special type of connection, affinity, and bond, whom you’ll probably call and relate to as ‘family’ – while with others, well, you don’t. A spiritual connection is like a pipe between two faucets (hear me out): it’s something mutual and reciprocal. If the pipe exists on one end, it also exists for the other. There’s no such thing as one side having a connection, and the other not. True spiritual connections are always mutual, reciprocal, and unconditional. Under circumstances that would reflect the spiritual bonds between individuals in a “pure” manner, you likely wouldn’t try to establish any particularly deep relationships with others outside of those you share bonds with. Again, not because you dislike them, but simply because you don’t feel the appeal to do so, and wouldn’t have to.
But in the human experience are you not free to create and enjoy relationships with others? Yes you are. One of the points of the Earth experience is allowing you to explore connections and feelings you can have with others in the physical world, with the spiritual layer being a little less present, a little less obvious. But freedom to explore relationships doesn’t mean all relationships are healthy or desirable for you. Freedom doesn’t imply the absence of consequences. And some relationships are going to be “bad for you” – yet you can still choose them, and reap the consequences of that choice. And what happens is that throughout our experience on Earth – including past lives, which typically you’ll have hundreds if not more – for various reasons we can make choices that lead to situations where the bonds we create in the human experience don’t necessarily reflect the nature of the bonds on the spiritual level.
It comes down to the challenging nature of the physical realm. For a myriad of reasons, at some point or another, we can cave into fear, excitement, or necessity, or otherwise fall prey to the various pressures and demands of life. This can lead us to choose or accept being connected with those we wouldn’t otherwise, often individuals with whom we don’t share a spiritual connection. The underlying nature of any such situation is always of disconnection and separation, because that’s the underlying spiritual truth to them. And due to this nature, these are going to be stories and contexts that are prone/ripe to experiencing forms of disharmony, lack of communication, breach of trust, or even neglect, abandonment, suffering, and so on. In these contexts, we’re bound to step on each others’ toes and create suffering for each other, which sometimes lead to unresolved trauma and pain shared with those involved, with these bonds of trauma transversing multiple lifetimes – which we call “karmic”, as in, unresolved issues from the past. This is how we develop charged and/or negative emotions towards certain individuals with whom we didn’t originally share a spiritual connection.
And this is why we sometimes end up creating and sharing relationships with individuals in the current lifetime in those circumstances. For example, when you feel a great charge and intense emotions towards someone, this can be mistaken for love, but in reality being the intensity of a karmic bond being remembered. Now, this type of bond can, and frequently will, apply between parents and children. Meaning, the child is born into a family with whom bonds of karma are shared. So your parents can be spiritual beings with whom you shared past-life experiences, thus making them past-life acquaintances of yours; yet, neither the fact they’re your parents, nor sharing past lives with you, will necessarily imply you share a spiritual connection with them.
As a rule of thumb, the problem in a situation of lack of spiritual connection isn’t whether that connection should be “created”. A spiritual connection can neither be created nor destroyed, because the truth of the spiritual layer is immutable, relative to, and ultimately unaffected by, anything that happens in the physical reality. Meaning, you can’t create a spiritual connection with someone if that connection isn’t there to begin with. In the physical world, you can explore your connections with other selves, and you’ll be discovering things that feel and appear new to you – but you can’t create spiritual connections when they aren’t there. If you try to force it, you’ll be working under false premises: you’re pretending something’s there when it isn’t. And certainly, you’re free to try. In the human reality, you’re free including to pretend whatever you want to pretend; but you still can’t create a spiritual connection that’s not there to begin with.
The true issue of such a situation is the set of factors binding individuals together in the first place. What got them there in the past, what patterns exist that might be maintaining it in the present, and how to proceed going forward in the future. In a scenario of complete absence of karma, the two individuals simply wouldn’t be in each other’s vicinity to any sustained extent. In other words, in a situation without karma you would never gravitate towards the person and having them in your vicinity, and vice-versa. Therefore, the core challenge of this situation is never to “create” a connection, it is instead to heal whatever keeps the individuals unnaturally connected. The spiritual challenges in this situation will always trace back to this innermost point.
Subject Matters Covered + Notes
When anywhere in this text you read the words “absence of connection” when applied to parents and children, again this doesn’t refer to individuals merely liking or disliking each other. It doesn’t have to be about certain people in the family being good or bad, one person not getting along with another, or whether the parents made this or that mistake raising the child – even though these considerations can be present of course. But this refers to a fundamental absence of bond between parents and children, spiritual in nature and as described above, that can exist deep beneath the surface that is comprised of the matters that are more visible. From the point of view of the child, what you’re looking for is a subtle but pervasive feeling you don’t relate to your parents, irrespectively of the dynamics you have or had with them. The child will probably feel, on some level, in some way, that they aren’t supposed to be a part of the family, and/or that they shouldn’t have to care about anything about the context they’re in and the people they’re with – yet they’ll have to. Although granted, any situations of imbalance within the family environment, between parents and children, certainly can and will carry more weight if the aforementioned disconnection is also present.
With this being said, matters of spiritual connectivity and its nature, metaphysics in general, as well as human relationships of course, can be intensely complex, with each person’s situation being completely unique and with its own intricacies. The discussions here presented therefore are necessarily an abstraction. Situations may not all be covered exhaustively (even if this material is written with an in-depth approach) and some portions can even be seen as oversimplified. In addition, please keep in mind the following notes before proceeding.
Note #1: regarding the term “spiritual”
If you have some form of association from past lives and past experiences with someone in the current moment, it wouldn’t be incorrect to use the word “spiritual” to describe them. Still, the connection in the molds of what’s described above is a connection from the heart. The heart as in, not the tightness from the gut when meeting with someone, or the exuberant emotion for reaching a goal; but rather the heart center, the heart chakra, the middle of the chest (physically), and your kernel of deepest truth (spiritually): the source of what’s of innermost importance to you.
In this text, you’ll often see “spiritual connection” and “heart-to-heart connection” used interchangeably. That’s because a genuine spiritual connection is always coming from, and felt at, the heart. And the absence of such connection implies great difficulty, or rather virtual impossibility, in achieving a heartfelt connection with another in the material realm, even if you willingly try. Even if you share past-life experiences with another, that doesn’t necessarily mean you share a heart-to-heart connection with them, and the words “spiritual connection” refers only to the latter. The heart is the most profound source of truth within the human being – a fundamental tenet of many religions and bodies of esoteric knowledge – as the heart is tightly related to the spiritual connections we’re discussing.
Note #2: regarding spiritual connections
It is possible to share a spiritual connection with someone, with one of the sides being able to realize it but not the other, due to their own circumstances and/or the spiritual development/readiness. In which case you do share a spiritual bond on some higher level, yet one of you will have their heart closed to that bond, unable to reciprocate it. In other words, the “pipe” exists but the other side isn’t in a place where they can open the faucet on their end. The spiritual challenge of this situation could be slightly different, namely the side that can realize the connection having to hold patience and compassion for the other’s lack of readiness; but still hold similarities, namely with one side feeling rejected or not reciprocated by the other. To avoid overcomplicating an explanation that’s already covering a complex matter, I’ll ask you to consider such cases as being the same “bag” of what’s addressed in this text, which essentially is about lack of spiritual connection. That being said, bear in mind the main focus of this text remains being the “complete” absence of spiritual connection between individuals, and especially when present in the relationships between parents and children. This is the main exploration we are carrying out.
Note #3: regarding emotional imbalance
All of the emotional/psychological dynamics that will be discussed here can develop in the human experience between parents and children, even if this spiritual element doesn’t apply. This text will be covering emotional hurt that is related to disrespect, disregard, neglect, breach of trust, and rejection, among others, and those can exist even within shared spiritual connections. So let me be clear: emotional imbalance is not exclusive to the absence of spiritual connection; it can manifest in spiritual backgrounds of varying natures. Likewise, an absence of spiritual connection doesn’t necessarily equate to relationship “disaster”. Parents with their heads in the right place can still manage to raise their child in a responsible manner, seeking to uphold their best interests and respecting their integrity whether there’s a spiritual connection or not. In other words, there doesn’t need to be a spiritual connection to respect another human being. At most, this parent could, on occasion, reflect on how they feel differently – or perhaps more indifferently – about their child, or one child more than the others; but without this necessarily equating to a degraded relationship and parenting.
Human parents are just that: human. In fact, they can only ever be human. For a little while, they are caring for another human being who’s entirely dependent on them, a role of inherent responsibility and consequence. In the process of carrying out that role, parents will sometimes be wise, and sometimes they won’t be. They can have burdens and traumas which they can inadvertently pass on to their children, and in the long run, these may result in some of the emotional patterns here discussed in the adult. In this regard, and if you were so inclined, the materials of this work could be regarded as a study of several emotional mechanisms and patterns parents can use to engage with their children, and the corresponding, possible emotional artifacts that develop in adulthood as a result, independently of a spiritual connection being shared or not.
You may go through the text and conclude “I relate to many of these points a little, but I don’t necessarily relate with the disconnection premise”. And that is possible, and fine. My understanding is that as part of the process of healing wounds across human consciousness, the metaphysical energy of the ones who’ve been coming to Earth at this time is slowly and steadily allowing for an effect of contrast, for the purposes of that healing those wounds. Among others, this contrast leads to emotional dynamics within families, that in the past may have been regarded as “the default” i.e. normal, expected, so-commonplace-they’re-unseen, can more and more be increasingly recognized as inappropriate (when that’s the case), a matter this text is focused on. But it may be that the energy of those who are more recently incarnated can on some level reflect and feel many of the characteristics discussed here, in a general and overarching manner, without necessarily having gone through extreme ordeals or critical events.
That being said, this text does primarily aim at covering some of the “worst-case scenarios”, and respective variations, when the absence of spiritual connection is present between parents and children. And particularly when such absence is conjugated with the parents engaging with children in an emotionally unhealthy manner.
Note #4: regarding my perspective
I have no medical qualifications of any kind; my perspective approaching this work is that of a spiritual provider only. If you are a qualified medical professional in the field of mental health, or otherwise if you have any meaningful amount of study and experience related to that field, you could find the various analysis in this work, in terms of human emotions and behavior, superficial if not rudimentary. This is okay in my mind, as long as the observations that are made hold up. My main priority is to establish the impact of the lack of spiritual connection on the human psyche and interpersonal dynamics, namely as the child grows up and how it translates to adult behavior. From that point, any further observations made by a more qualified and informed mind, namely in fields related to mental health and human development, would be beneficial and welcome.
Note #5: regarding the approach taken in this text
In spirituality you’ll often hear “there are no victims”. This means all participants in situations of shared karma will bear an individual burden that is equivalent to each of the other participants’ burdens, which also applies to any karma between parents and children. Spiritually, whenever assessing a situation from the outside, “siding” with one participant more than the others can be a biased approach, potentially reinforcing perspectives of separation rather than helping dissolve them. That being said, you may find this text may at times adopt the child’s perspective more than that of the parents. If and when you feel this, you’ll largely be accurate: it is an approach I am willing to take. The child is typically the part of the equation coming onto the Earth plane bearing newer energy, yet can also be the one left the most impaired and isolated. This text aims at offering validation and guidance for those who might have had neither from the start, and couldn’t understand what happened to them. Despite this, if you are a parent and you’re reading these words, please know there’s legitimacy to your side of the story, and you are equally worthy of understanding, compassion, and support.
Evidently and as stated, this text can’t cover all variations of interpersonal dynamics, spiritual backgrounds, or karmic attributes. For every element here addressed, there will be parents who are very responsible and reasonable, and children who are just wonderfully empowered. But there are situations where neither is true; and in those circumstances, the child later adult can end up in a position of such frailty they essentially “need all the help they can get”. This work is primarily aimed at those cases.
The Spiritual Hostage
When a child is born into a family and there is a lack of spiritual connectivity with their parents, there’s likely going to be various spiritual factors involved in the background, namely involving shared past lives, and karma, that in some way will relate, and give rise, to the situation. Another way to put this: the circumstances that are “visible” in this lifetime are a continuation of factors in the background, unseen, from the past. But the child isn’t misguided in feeling unrelated to their family: again, just because you share past lives with someone doesn’t mean you’re connected with them from the heart. What it might mean is that you share a string of past experiences with these individuals, where those involved (you anr them) made or had to make concessions away from each one’s inner truth. Those choices were made for the sake of survival, protection, or practicality, but were dissociated, disconnected, from what the person felt was right. This is a normal occurrence throughout the 3D of Earth, still, when you make a choice not in alignment with your heart, you may intrinsically be creating situations of disconnection and separation – relative to the truth of the spiritual layer – regardless of the choice’s practical value or what’s believed to be correct. In short, the lifetime taking place now is a continuation of energies and momentum of disconnection that stem from the past.
Having a spiritual disconnection with your family registers with feeling like a hostage: you’re not really meant to be there, yet you have to. The word “hostage” doesn’t mean that a boogeyman, or those who are your family, have somehow trapped you against your will, for reasons that are spiritually unrelated to you. It just means your individual karmic attributes led you to a situation that for all effects and purposes registers as disconnected and limiting, in the molds addressed here. Your mileage may vary depending on how much you can feel the situation as a child. Still, you’ll probably be perpetually in a defensive, standoff-ish stance, a little like “biding your time”, as if unconsciously waiting for the moment when the situation comes to an end or someone comes to save you – as you’d instinctively expect in any hostage situation. Except in a real-life hostage situation, things can be limited in time and achieve closure; there’s a beginning and an ending. But in this case, the end never comes. It can’t, because the individuals in question are your biological family; a context from which normally there’s no “exit”.
Hope is a fulcrum of being human, and of the human experience. When you have hope, you can go through anything. If you know that at the end of 100 days of a next to impossible situation you will be rescued, and all will be completely well afterwards, you’ll have the energy to endure anything that happens to you during those 100 days, since you’re setting your sights on the closure that comes in the future. Your heart is full of Light, you hold on to that Light, which helps you push through whatever happens to you in the meantime. But if no one is coming, if nothing ever changes, or if there is no end in sight i.e. if you have no hope, then every minute of a challenge is going to be soul rending. This experience is one of absence of hope for the child, because there is no visible exit or solution to the situation. The absence of hope is a critical aspect to the context as it heightens the sensation of hopelessness, and helps solidify any situations of suffering happening in it, which may lead to lingering trauma in the future. Other aspects of the environment may add and compound with this fundamental absence of hope, such as the willingness of the parents to adjust or correct their ways, or validate what the child feels, for example.
In the relationship with their parents, the child will always have to them a subtle movement of “pulling away” whenever in their presence. Even if this movement is unspoken, enacted subconsciously, instinctively. Again, it’s a natural reaction: a response to being held in a situation where you feel uncomfortable, with no end in sight. The child can’t connect from the heart with the parent or parents. The “pipe” isn’t there. So the child won’t be receptive to receiving and exchanging energy with them. They don’t want proximity or comfort; in fact emotionally they might not want much of anything at all. The child will essentially recoil if and when any of those things are offered. You’ll feel uncomfortable with and recoiling from your parent’s approaches, proximity, interactions, as well as any of their expectations and demands. Yet, since you’re a child growing up, you still need your parents! No child can or is supposed to be able to fend for themselves in the world, functionally and emotionally, without any support or nurturing. And the child is in fact, expecting that support and nurturing, simply because they need those things to grow and thrive – yet they’re missing them. The child will find it very difficult to extract these energies from those who are, in essence and spiritually, strangers.
So the child goes through an experience that’s exceptionally disparate and disconcerting: they won’t be able to reach or be reached by their family even if either side tries it; yet, at the same time, they’ll still deeply crave attention and affection; critically, they’ll crave the parents’ attention, the parents’ affection, at the same time they can only recoil from them. The child will crave the energy from the parents because, despite being felt as strangers, they’re nonetheless their family, the only family they have, the ones who share biological and proximity ties with them. Children are naturally and emotionally geared towards establishing very close bonds with their parents.
A child is unlikely to make sense of any of the experience. How can they feel so unloved yet recoil at any attention they’re offered? It is their problem or the parents’? This would be disconcerting even for an adult, let alone for a child who’s simply going through such things with little chance of making sense of them or even having them validated. In any case, they’ll experience the inability to be nurtured and protected; their own inability to be emotionally available; and maybe their parents’ apparent unwillingness to connect with them from the heart. The child can develop the feeling of being emotionally unsupported, unworthy, or rejected, without this being the whole picture of what’s really taking place.
At some point in their maturation, children and teens eventually go through a period where they’ll start pulling apart from their parents. Suddenly they won’t want to be hugged or kissed in public, they don’t want to be driven to school, and they’ll be very protective and secretive of their space, interests, and beliefs. But this on its own doesn’t imply an underlying lack of spiritual connection, or of love: it’s the natural process of the child developing into an adult, wanting a sense of identity, seeking to be proud of themselves, and trying to create an independent presence in the world. Still, if anything, this naturally occurring process – the child developing a sense of identity and independence – can and will be made all the more intense and challenging if a lack of connection from the heart is present at the same time. You want to pull apart from your parents because you want more space, you want to be your adult self – but deep inside you already desperately wanted to pull away in the first place, for a very long time. There’s a part that’s about natural rebelliousness and individuality, but another part of deep rejection and distress. The two aspects combine into one, possibly compounding with each other.
The primary issue with the situation of spiritual disconnection between parents and children is, first, the general lack of awareness of its existence in the first place; secondly, and derived from the first, the absence of any viable ways to address it. You can’t go to a therapist or social worker and say “I don’t belong to my family!”. How do you prove it? How would you go about stating and justifying your case? A mismatched spiritual family is not something regular human consciousness contemplates; society barely acknowledges the spiritual layer of reality. And so there’s literally no solution to address this situation as conceived by the human reality, in current human systems and cultures. At most, later down the line, you can choose the family and connections to build anew, as you go forward. You can create an adult life that’s relatively independent of your biological family, enough for you to feel you no longer need to give them satisfactions or comply with their customs and regulations. And in some cases the aspects of abuse and neglect are so evident that the child may legally be taken away from the parent or parents who are enacting or enabling them. But otherwise, it’s very difficult to legitimately state the claim you don’t belong to your family, and hope to have some form of resolution and closure to this matter, simply based in feelings.
And yet, this situation is going to be at the core of many situations of estranged families, rejected parents, and other types of rifts, disagreements, and general uneasiness, within family relationships. There certainly will be some problem or another more on the surface, big or small; but on a deeper level the family is coming apart “at the seams”, those seams being the lack of fundamental connection. A lack that was always present, and at some point starts being rejected by one of the sides, or both, without the reality of the situation being entirely understood.
Possibility of Imbalance in Parental Dynamics
While we’re approaching this exposition mostly from the point of view of the child, it’s important to bring up that within the family unit the lack of connection is going to be reciprocal. The existence of the “pipe” is mutual – and so is its absence.
The parents themselves are going to be operating from that same lack of connection towards the child, with their behavior and responses influenced by it. They’re also going to feel the child isn’t quite emotionally responsive to them. “Children aren’t stupid” as is often said, and I’ll argue that neither are the parents: a parent knows how their own child feels about them. In short, it’s not just the child dealing with an apparent lack of love/connection; the parents, one or both, are going to be dealing with it on their end as well, each in their own ways, with the reactions on both sides possibly having compounding effects.
When the child recoils from their approach, the parents may rationalize, thinking it’s a phase, or maybe they’ll wonder if the child has some form of emotional or behavioral deficit. But even as they do, on an emotional level they can still interpret the child’s response to them as a rejection. When that’s the case, if emotionally they’re processing taking the experience personally, parents can and will respond in whichever ways they know how to handle rejection and attachment, namely by utilizing any coping mechanisms they’ve acquired in their personal lives, both healthy and unhealthy, when dealing with the child. The child, in turn, will be faced with the impossibility of receiving love from the parents, and in conjunction with any of said mechanisms of control, they can register all of this also as rejection, as well as criticism, judgment, and so on. The child is likely to interpret these things as if there’s something wrong with them – as children normally do – yet still can’t avoid pulling away as their parents engage them. Note this means an adult can be tempted here to utilize their “adult” coping mechanisms dealing with their own children. This may interrupt, delay, or shortcut some of the latter’s natural stages of emotional growth, as they’re engaged with adult-level mechanisms of defense and control before they’re ready to process them.
On some level, everyone in the family unit will be facing an experience of lack of love, in other words, of rejection. Some family environments can be stable and emotionally balanced enough for this to be mitigated somewhat, but in others the impact will be stronger. The truth is that there’s hardly a more difficult context to experience lack of love than as a child with your own parents, or as a parent with your own child, either way within the context of your biological family. This context can create a difficult cocktail in which any possible dynamics resulting from lack of love, lack of support, emotional abandonment, etc., that can come into play, will.
A lack of heart-to-heart connection in the family setting is a fertile environment for the flaring up of any existing toxic behaviors, namely from the parents, both between themselves and towards the child. In these circumstances, the relationship between the couple can often be a spiritual continuation of past disconnection. For example, the parents may have already had a toxic, unhealthy relationship; they may have been brought together through choices not made from the heart; they may even have had the child when spiritually they weren’t ready, or meant to. And when the child is born, the experience of disconnection they exacerbate may flare up any emotional coping mechanisms in the parents even more.
Clingy parents may react to the child’s rejection by hanging on to them more tightly. Some people are needy and don’t want, and never learned how, to deal with rejection. Some will therefore discharge their attachment and coping mechanisms onto their relationship with their children. Clingy parents may take advantage of the proximity and vulnerability of their own children to covertly perpetuate toxic behaviors and foster co-dependency. In this situation, the mother who yearns for the infant stage of motherhood, that is to say, caring for the infant when he’s entirely dependant on her, might be compelled to delay or sabotage the child’s natural development progress, in order to keep them dependent and under their control. Further, suppose one parent is needy and behaves in this manner, but the other isn’t and doesn’t. This stance adopted by one of the parents may cleave a division between the couple and hurt their shared trust, as one of the sides is foregoing committing to create a solid and united front to raise the child, and choosing to stay closer to the child instead – and possibly taking advantage of this closeness and dependency as a form of leverage in future disputes with the partner.
A more austere parent will instead respond to being rejected by being even more cold, harsh, and severe. Austere, harsh individuals who believe the only way to progress in life is through hardship and struggle, are invariably extremely frail and helpless inside. Such a parent will feel weighed down by having to deal with someone with whom they can’t connect and might reject them. So when raising the child, they may double down on their harsh views. They’ll want the child to grow up, mature, and become independent, so as not to feel like a burden to them. To do that, this parent may press with their principles of learning from hardship, coldly presenting challenges to the child well before they’re ready to handle them. If the child is also involved in a co-dependency with the other parent as mentioned above, this parent might criticize and guilt-trip the child for accepting being co-dependent, which will scar the child with a stigma of shame.
A standoffish parent may engage in an avoidant if not even isolationist behavior. They may do so not just towards the child but also with their partner, if they’ve already in the relationship not with their heart. The daily presence and proximity of another whom the self doesn’t love is always uncomfortable, worse when it’s someone you’ve married, worse still with someone you’re biologically connected to. This parent may persistently go to great lengths to withhold validation from the child, to not be supportive, to never meet halfway, and not take their side. They’ll be unwilling to come close, come clean, validate, be forthcoming with their patience, or have a meeting of hearts, with the child. The child may be pushed constantly to “not be a burden”, implying they’re one to the parent, especially if this parent is also of the austere type. This parent can also lead the child to feel, explicitly or implied, they are to blame for the couple’s disagreements if not their separation if it occurs. This parent may be all too willing to withdraw long-term support (emotional, financial, tutoring and guidance, and so on) with the pretext of the child becoming independent; this may be the parent who’s in a hurry for the child to grow so they can leave the house.
One thing is the principle of raising a responsible, emotionally healthy, independent adult, which may need tough love sometimes. In that sense, parents can still consider “showing the door” to their grownup child if that’s what they feel would serve everyone’s best interests; if that’s what best serves the child’s life growth, and respects everyone’s space. In other words, that’s not to say parents are supposed to carry around their children while feeling that’s inappropriate. That being said, a distant or austere parent who doesn’t share a bond of love with the child will want them to leave their vicinity as quickly as possible. Notice the difference: the former is difficult but could be a necessary and appropriate approach, whereas the latter is a form of rejection. A parent who is adamant about expelling their child from the house when they turn 18, will more often than not fall into the latter category. They may use the need for the child to grow, or any other pretext, to camouflage their own sense of rejection, their discomfort around their presence, and maybe the possible disharmony and rifts the child’s presence is exacerbating between the couple. Now picture something or someone you love and is dear to you (even if, for example, a pet), then consider the thought of sending them away and not having them around you. While admittedly a necessary circumstance sometimes, it’s not something you ever consider lightly – when you love that is.
Emotional Patterns in Adulthood
“Default” Negative Self-Perception
This pattern is very simple and easy to explain: you’re used to feeling bad by default. Inherently, intrinsically. On one hand, this is about yourself and your self-worth, but it is also true in a more general sense: you’re in a state where the normal of your emotions are them being negative. Not all “bad feelings” in life come from spiritual disconnection, but this is a circumstance where a negative emotional outlook can become ingrained and pervasive, if it’s the only thing the child knew as they grew up.
If you at least share a connection from the heart with one of your parents, you may live through suffering or discomfort that are more or less associated with the other parent, but you may still get a reference of love from one of them. However, if you can connect with neither, all you’re going to know is the discomfort of being around them both; the discomfort of how you feel about them; and the discomfort of how they feel towards yourself. All your existence you were surrounded at all times by people who don’t know you, and can’t see who you really are. And you’re immersed in a perpetual lack of love, a sense of coldness, and a vague pain, from being in a situation you spiritually want to leave, and in which you can’t exchange love with those around you – and without any other reference otherwise. Even if the family on paper does everything “right” to raise you, the underlying absence of connection can become second nature, it can become your default. It’s something you’re inside of and trapped in, perhaps without even realizing it.
For every person, there’s a line between a) what’s inflicted upon you by external sources, and b) what you assume to be yours, inside you, that belongs to you or is your responsibility. This line can be crossed if you spend long enough in an environment where unpleasant elements abound. At which point will you start seeing something that is external as yours instead? For the child this line is starts already crossed to begin with: children naturally tend to assume things as their own, and as their fault, especially bad events and negative emotions. They’ll assume things are of them, about them, because of them. This is because the perception of the child is immediate, without filters. The advent of self-analysis, questioning what you’re feeling, and where things might come from, only comes much later in life – but by that time it might already be late. The child’s biology will have adjusted to living under these barren emotions permanently, having adapted to them throughout the most malleable stages of human development: the child’s early years, beginning at birth. The brain and metabolism’s ability to use and produce the “feel good” chemicals of the body – dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins, and so on – might be impacted, as the body adjusted to the emotions it had to live with and cope on an everyday basis.
Therefore, the adult will feel poorly all the time, regardless of what they objectively think about themselves, or what they manage to accomplish. On one hand, being immersed in a constant negative emotional state, even if “bad”, can make it difficult to realize it, let alone acknowledge it’s even an issue and take steps to address it. On the other, you can foster an instinctive assumption of having problems with your feelings, reactions, or otherwise how you function. This perception may have been worsened by any blaming, gaslighting, or guilt-tripping, the child was subjected to by their parents. Leading the adult to a having perception of themselves as flawed that accompanies them into adulthood.
Unfortunately, part of the perception of having something wrong about them is going to be true, to an extent: in the sense the adult’s biological “wiring” may have become affected, preventing or making it difficult for them to sustain a positive or even neutral/relaxed outlook in life, even if they actively want to.
Impostor Syndrome with Feelings
Human beings tend to regard what and how they feel as a crucial factor guiding their lives. Certainly you can be the person questioning the relevance of feeling, heart, or emotion, as opposed to rationality, logic, and necessity. But when push comes to shove, you’re acting and choosing according to what you feel at all times. If you feel good, you want to make the most of it, and you may fear losing what’s creating or allowing that feeling. When you feel bad, you wonder what’s wrong, you try to change things, or you seek something to bring back the sense of “good”. And that’s it. Human beings are simple animals; and how you feel is for you a fundamental baseline you rely on to guide you in the world.
But not here.
From a young age, you’ve grown to some extent feeling towards your parents something that’s not love. You might feel an absence of emotion, a lack of connection or empathy, or otherwise a lack of some description. The child might very well be aware and conceptualize, for example, “I don’t like my parents”. But even if they’re aware of it, this is an awfully destructive feeling for a child to have! For one, the child depends on the love from the parents to grow healthily, so this love not being there is on its own is something that at some point of their growth may cause them to start questioning themselves, doubting themselves, whether they feel or function properly or not, and so on. But in addition, the child may be unable to discuss this openly. How often did you a child felt comfortable enough with your parents to openly share your feelings?
In these circumstances, it’s easy for the child to develop an impostor syndrome about how they feel. The child is going to be forced to hide and stuff their feelings in, when these feelings are disconcerting and distressful. An emotion that can become predominant is guilt: you’re supposed to love your parents and feel close and comfortable around them, yet you don’t. There can be a great deal of shame, or a sense of inadequacy, about not feeling what you should towards your own family. Contemporary human values, and perhaps parents who are dealing with their rejection, promote you’re supposed to love your parents, they’re the only parents you have, and your family is meant to be treasured. A belief that is for the most part valid, but only when you share a connection from the heart with another. But if you’re not feeling that love, if you’re not truly able to reciprocate it (in your heart) the love you’re offered, you’ll feel you’re flawed. A sense of falsehood that is intensified due to not being able to be open about it.
An important part here is that the child might additionally be guilt-tripped by the parent in question, or by both. This can come from the parents’ own difficulties in dealing with rejection, as discussed previously. This aspect can create the patterns now discussed when otherwise they wouldn’t exist or be prevalent. In all fairness, no one accepts rejection well; the point here is that some parents may utilize emotional tactics with the child in dealing with said rejection, as stated, making an already difficult or at least uncomfortable situation worse. Maybe the parents will criticize the child for “not feeling” towards them, not being emotionally available to them, or not being more willing to engage. They may explicitly criticize the nature of their feelings and reactions, labeling them as flawed. Maybe there’s a parent that demands the child for satisfaction, amends, and compensation, based on how they feel or don’t feel. Yet the child can’t reciprocate no matter the reasoning; so this can only result in having them be pushed onto inner states of distress. Even in a context with spiritual connection actually present, an emotionally needy approach that is enacting demands based on the expectations from one individual to another can and will limit if not completely shut down the space for natural feelings and love to be felt. Let alone when it happens without the aforementioned connection being present.
Around your family nowhere is safe. Every time you’re engaged by your parents, every time they approach with their expectations, to share love, or to re-establish a connection that feels lacking or nonexistent, you feel you’re not able to reciprocate, yet you can’t act accordingly. At which point you’re left with one of two choices. You can either pull apart and distance yourself to avoid the discomfort, but inadvertently running the risk of signaling a more explicit form of rejection, further revealing the absence of connection. Thus counterintuitive it can be construed as a more confrontational approach, despite the motion being of pulling away. Alternatively, you can start playing a make-believe game, where you pretend you reciprocate the love or connection your parents are demanding, to avoid being confronted. Either one is a bad choice: you’re either making the disconnection explicit and confrontational, or exacerbating your own sense of dishonesty. Either way you’re left with no choice where you can simply be yourself and true to your feelings, possibly assuming these are incorrect or at least uncomfortable.
The result is the adult ending up extremely uncomfortable and wary whenever approached emotionally by others. Even if they want nothing more than love, as they are starved of it. The awkwardness and suffocation in their upbringing can now permeate their adult relationships – even when these are true of heart. Even if there’s a valid, spiritual heart-to-heart connection in a relationship the adult is participating in. They won’t trust what they feel, nor feel they can be open and forthcoming with their feelings; so they’ll be permanently walking on eggshells around others, hoping “their true feelings” won’t be discovered. Remember things affect you the deepest when you’re growing up. And how your biology, namely your brain and metabolism, might not be functioning in an optimal state by this point. Growing up you lived with a strong sensation of falsehood in the relationship with your parents, not understanding why you didn’t like them, and not being able to reciprocate the attention and expectations as you were expected to, while being trapped in that situation. Therefore, by the same token you can be stuck in a negative emotional state as an adult, you can also end up bringing the suffocation and sense of falsehood of your childhood to your current relationship settings.
Another possible effect is a perennial urge to abort and disconnect from new relationships, even as they form. When present, this replicates the despair of the child who only wanted to cut loose from the parental setting but couldn’t. This may be active at all times, or sparked by an event or trauma. If active, when emotionally involved with someone you enter a panic that “they will blow your cover” i.e. they’ll discover you don’t love them. So you react by awakening the sense of un-love and rejection you felt towards your parents, and then wanting to escape that discomfort. Yet, as you do succeed at disengaging (adult relationships aren’t blood ones, therefore individuals normally are free to leave) you’re left the situation of panic, but once the relief wears off you may realize you were operating from a state of panic and you had a reaction that was out of proportion, but you didn’t really want to leave. This can lead to cyclical patterns where you systematically break away from, and then return to, the person offering you a connection; and/or where you’re always reacting with an excess of harshness and hostility to break away. But then inevitably you regret it, feel guilty, and try to make amends. This is a pattern you can end up repeating to exhaustion, for as long as the other person tolerates you doing so.
Do note that neither wanting to escape from, nor wanting to return to, a given relationship are by themselves a sign of the person sharing a spiritual connection with you. You can experience this sense of panic next to a person you otherwise have a heart connection with, and you can desire to return to and re-establishing a relationship with someone you don’t. This pattern merely represents how the inner child is just too emotionally scarred by the context it lived with the parents, that the adult doesn’t feel emotionally free, and is unable to sustain the necessary emotional and mental states that would them to carefully and objectively find your way in close proximity with another.
WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME is not something no child should ever hear from a parent. For the parent who does this: who are you to demand love from a child? Why would you place the burden of your feelings on your child? What reason does a parent have to use their child as an instrument to deal with their rejection? A child must be left completely free from any emotional expectations of the parents, under any circumstance, without exception. Doing otherwise severely risks hampering their emotional development.
Stigma of Invisibility/Invalidation
A child in these circumstances is not just going to be surrounded by those who spiritually can’t see who they really are, but they’ll also have no meaningful way for these issues to be expressed, let alone validated. How do you go about telling your parent or parents “you have no connection with them”? And what could it be done, even if such a thing was acknowledged? The answer is, very little.
Let’s say, for a moment, a child is somewhat aware of a lack of connection with the parents, and expresses themselves in that regard. At best, emotionally balanced parents who are told anything along these lines by their child (and assuming they’d receive it meaningfully, rather than dismissing it as a whim or rambling) would probably try to remain neutral, and avoid expressing anything strongly in the now moment. Then they would possibly retreat and regroup, waiting for the best time to reflect and try to understand the situation, and how to proceed about it, on their own and not in front of the child. So their response, if any, would likely be carefully measured, articulated, and consistent among them, thus unlikely to cause a stir. But that’s a best-case scenario, as this may not be what happens. If a child at any point is vocal about anything along these lines, some parents will either dismiss them entirely, or take it personally and thus get defensive or confrontational. An emotional parent will negate what the child feels, sometimes to the point of stating those feelings are not legitimate. The child will learn quite quickly that there’s little that can be done, and nowhere to turn, assuming they are cognizant of this situation to any extent.
In practice, for the child going through this, there’s little hope for what’s happening within. The only possible outlet will come only much later, if the child, now adult, decides to seek help, guidance, therapy, etc. Until then, you’re left with yet another stigma: that your suffering is invisible, unrecognizable, and won’t be met with validation. You learn to assume there’s no point in expressing what you feel outward, first and foremost there’s no hope someone could possibly understand what you’re saying and where you’re coming from. You learn to stuff things in, and cope yourself, because you perceive others would otherwise only judge and attack your feelings, the basic foundations of how human beings govern themselves. You’ll often learn that there’s no point in complaining, in expressing how you feel, as not only there won’t be measures taken to accommodate you, but you may even be judged for it. You don’t get to feel the way you feel. This is essentially a stigma of invalidation: you and what you feel don’t matter.
Things aren’t going to fix themselves just because they’re not validated – obviously. Further, human beings can’t really function properly that way: by how they feel being deemed irrelevant. In other words, learning to stuff your feelings inside is hardly ever a balanced approach, in any situation; neither is coming to perceive that what you feel is either irrelevant or inappropriate. Your feelings matter; in a way, as stated before, you are what you feel. This is a fundamental truth about how human beings function. Yet, when you’re too long in a place where your feelings are wrong and create a stir – namely when you grow in that place – you’ll soon understand that in practice your feelings being irrelevant means you are irrelevant. The child is deprived of their existence being validated, and now they’re only worth something to the extent they’re validated by others, they meet their standards and expectations, and they are and behave how others expect them to. Or they’re worth nothing at all otherwise. Therefore, apart from playing with the permanent negative outlook of self-value previously addressed, this is a brand of invalidation that can quickly turn into a necessity to please others.
Revulsion Towards Physical and/or Specific Details
The environment where the child grows up isn’t the one where they, subconsciously, want to be. Further, most experiences demanding anything from the self within that environment further add to the sensation of discomfort. On an emotional and spiritual level, the child is processing the experience as being in a hostage situation that they can’t get out of.
When we’re forced into something we don’t like or don’t want to, one of the possible responses from the human being can be aversion. That aversion can be more about contrast than rejection per se. When you physically push against a brick wall, you might feel like “the wall is pushing back”; a sense of aversion to a place/setting can primarily be a reflection of being forced to be trapped in that setting; if that wasn’t the case the aversion might not have existed. If the child were to cross paths with the same adults in the street but with them being literal strangers (the analogy at the beginning), they would probably feel indifferent to them, and not much else. Meaning, the child might not necessarily hold rejection towards the individuals if they weren’t bound to each other. But because the child is trapped with them, that sensation of discomfort, as well as any other displeasure in that setting, can create that aversion.
Yet, the child’s mind may not make sense of that sensation. It may not even be able to process it at all, particularly when the child is at a very early stage of growth – yet the child is still a hostage spiritually. So instead, the child can develop forms of distaste and rejection, if not revulsion, targetting specific moments, events, or focusing on very particular details, that happen to be associated with the setting and the people in it – like a ‘proxy’, if you will. For instance, if the child had a door in their room when growing up, and this door had a yellow knob, and in this room they consistently experienced sadness, feeling lost, invisible, neglected or invalidated, and so on, the adult may later develop a strong emotion against all yellow knobs they see. The yellow knob stood out as a specific detail in that setting, and the association became engraved as synonym with the trauma. Another example: if the child’s parents had freckles, they may develop an aversion to freckles, or any other physical characteristic of the parents, even if a very minor one. The focus of the reaction will apply to both the others but also to the self; when it’s something related to the physical body it can give rise to body image issues, body dysmorphia, and so on. This can impact all things related to body image, as well as how others are perceived, valued, and engaged.
Aversion and revulsion can form because the child wasn’t able to process the rejection of their environment in a different way. The child’s mind didn’t realize nor comprehend the aversion it felt towards the parents, and/or the situation they were in – but it was still felt regardless. What the child’s mind did, was what it already is meant to do at its early stages of development: be very sensorial, pick up on details, absorb the world around them, and experience everything very vividly. So the child was picking up on all of the various things of their environment, something their mind was designed to do, but doing so in a situation of spiritual and emotional discomfort, distress, and rejection. The sensorial aspects of the self registered the negative feelings and blended them with the details it was picking up in the setting. The mind wasn’t ready to make sense of those feelings, but what it could do was pick up on details such as the parents’ freckles, for example. And so it associated the freckles with the rejection of the parents, or with the other sources of distress. So now freckles are a synonym of the original suffering.
As an adult, the old programming of the mind can, and will, still tell you “stay away, this is bad, you’re going back to your childhood” when they see freckles in another – even though the freckles themselves had nothing to do with it. In addition, this element may further add to the impostor syndrome patterns discussed previously, as the adult tries to form new relationships. I like the person, but I feel repulse about [detail], therefore I must not like the person, therefore I’m being false with my feelings.
Becoming One with Coping Mechanisms
In a context where the child shares no spiritual connection with the parents, they are born and raised outside of, and receive no, Love, spiritually speaking. Please mind we are referring to an aspect that can be subtle and is bound to the interpretation of love bound to this explanation. In a balanced family environment upheld by emotionally responsible parents, forms of caring and compassion and the bond between parents and child can still exist. But not so much the intrinsic sense of comfort as well as the spontaneous outpouring from the heart that is present and natural with a spiritual connection, as this connection cannot be pretended into existence. From the point of view of the child, this absence of spiritual love will still be registered even if subtle; and, as we’ve often mentioned, it can and will be emphasized and worsened by any difficult experiences lived in the setting.
From the start, the child becomes used to, is programmed to some extent into the habituation of, not being worthy of love. This happens because they are operating in perpetuity under complete absence of love, thus the assumption of that lack of love becomes the norm. By the time they reach adulthood, their baseline “truth” is that they just don’t have the personal value that could match the worth and “love-wordiness” they’d otherwise want to have, and wish to be perceived by others. But it is a sense of worth and love they are still starved of and still lack and crave. And they will therefore seek, often going to great lengths to do so. This craving for love, deep down and spiritually speaking, is the adult knowing they are in desperate need of healing and love, and in that sense they’re going to try to “self-medicate”, so to speak. It’s just that human awareness is biased towards perceiving love as an external resource, that is to say, as something others have in their power to give. Which in many ways is not an erroneous interpretation, given how the experience of love on the physical world is carried out by exchanging it with others, as are, or can be, some of the experiences that are going to be required for healing and validation to occur. In other words, you need others to heal. Therefore, love is something that is bound to be felt and interpreted as something for you to “go out and get”.
The adult will likely be invested in employing all of their energy and resources to try to get that worth, on some occasions from things and experiences, but also and namely when engaging with others. But from their states of lack and imbalance, they’re unlikely to aim for those things without being influenced by the perspectives of the original emotional space. In their awareness, they are likely to mix their natural spiritual and emotional needs with the references of love and worth they had, still coming from the setting of lack of connection. They’re trying to compensate for said lack of love, and coming from an unconscious attempt to try to fix themselves, yet they’re still conceptualizing what love and worth mean from the references they did have – because that’s the only references of nurturing and attention they did have. And in the process of doing so, they are likely to make use of control or coping mechanisms in order to get what they want and/or deal with rejection, possibly the same or equivalent mechanisms that were acquired from their parents. They’ll seek artificial forms of love, possibly replicating the same lack of connection they knew from their parents, which can and will further exacerbate those same forms of control.
To the extent the parental context may not have been the most healthy, the mechanisms that develop from those references can have toxic and ego-based elements to them. When taken to a sufficient extent, they can be exclusively ego-driven (even as they ultimately correspond to the spiritual desire to heal). The ego is mostly false in a spiritual sense, meaning it operates through premises that are untrue, yet can still be very powerful in a material world that may not validate spiritual truth. Employing ego-based patterns to obtain worth from others, when the self is operating from an extreme lack of said worth inside, can lead to mindset values that are narcissistic in nature. The self becomes heavily engrossed and invested not necessarily in sharing love with others but in using them to fulfill the void within, the original lack, from a mindset that’s largely defined by the past and its lack of connection, yet is so intense and focused that can heavily influence most if not all priorities in life. But if the ego is false, it can’t lead the self to the connection that was missing and is still craved; thus the adult can become embroiled in self-perpetuating patterns where hugely-important objectives are pursued relentlessly, but that never provide any meaningful answer.
In seeking what’s perceived as love and validation, romantic and sexual endeavors are one arena where you’re likely to conceive and pursue that love. You’ll aspire to get from romantic partners the very basic sense of approval, personal demand, and validation of existence, that were absent when growing up. But as there are still patterns of choices being made without following the heart – and these are likely – you’re trying to create connections with others where these don’t necessarily exist, for the sake of receiving that basic level of approval from another. It may be a replica of the same type of behavioral decision-making that led the parents to create their relationship. A self-fulfilling prophecy may be created: you enter a relationship highly focused in ‘obtaining’ the person’s validation (through their love, pleasure and arousal, consent, voluntary choice to be with you, etc. i.e. their love) only to then realize, after you get what you want and you “come to your senses”, you don’t really love them. The child was sensitive to the lack of spiritual connection, and can still identify it as an adult in their own connections with others. So spiritually and emotionally you start regretting being with them. And at this moment many of the sensations that were experienced as a child will be re-lived. You may start to feel less about them, that you don’t love them. You may start awakening the various parts that create revulsion in you. You can re-experience the absence of heart connection, the impostor syndrome, the sense of emotional suffocation, as well as the perception you’re flawed in what you feel, and in your discernment i.e. you want, like, and choose, etc.
In this specific case, as you’re questioning what is wrong with you and/or your choices, you’d be more or less “right” in the assessment the situation is out of balance. By your life experience, you’re now acutely aware, more than ever, if and when a heart-to-heart is present between two individuals – and you feel it when it isn’t. So if once more in a relationship without that connection, you can start exhibiting reactions that reflect the absence of that connection, with the new person.
Coping Mechanisms – Additional Remarks
In trying to dilute persistent feelings of inadequacy, unworthiness, shame, guilt, or failure, the adult may find a momentary fix or escape to those sensations, which can otherwise create a constant effect of pressure, in certain chemical substances. Remember the metabolism of the body might be impaired and geared towards making negative emotions persistent, hence why such substances may create an effect that opposes those emotions. When tried, these can be felt as diluting the negative emotion that’s otherwise persistent, providing momentary relief or liberation from it. The thing to keep in mind is that, for the sake of that momentary relief, sustained, ad-hoc use of chemical substances without discernment or in an unsupported manner may degrade the body even further, depending on how far this is taken. In addition, it may create further emotional instability by leading to behaviors of addiction, which will bring about more shame, guilt, and perception of frailty and lack of willpower, as opposed to less of these things (i.e. the reverse effect of what’s ultimately intended). However, if anything can be taken from this, is that an apparent effect chemical substances might have on the emotional imbalance, might suggest that a discerning use of medication could wield beneficial results as part of a therapeutic process led by certified professionals.
To compensate for a general lack of intensity of emotion or ability to feel, or to distract from a generally negative emotional state – which, again, may be supported on a biological level – the adult may adopt behavior meant to create strong emotions or a “rush”, such as engaging in high-risk or self-harm behaviors. At the same time, consciously or unconsciously, this could also in part be an unconscious attempt to evoke a strong reaction in others: to make up for the lack of willingness to approach, validate, support, etc. by the family during childhood. Others might tap into this and say “well, the person is just seeking attention”; and in reality this can be true: deep down the person is seeking the healing and validation they might not even know they need and are deprived of. The original family, however, may be tempted to interpret these as purely selfish and attention-seeking, which may lead them to be even more prone to withholding attention, potentially giving rise to yet another cyclical pattern.
There may be a lot of anger accumulated over time from the child’s own sense of powerlessness, first and foremost, due to their inability to leave the context of their childhood. No human being will ever cope well with their Free Will not being relevant, one of the primary sensations of being in a hostage situation. But this can be further compounded by the attitudes of the parents towards the child: the clingy parent will try to guilt-trip the child’s feelings into submission; the austere parent will coerce, force, and seek to control the child according to what they think is correct, leaving them with little space to choose. These are oppressive if not abusive situations the child is never able to retaliate against, and they will cause a continuous accumulation of frustration within. Later in life, this frustration may translate into the adult exhibiting bursts of anger if not violence in adulthood. Further, the traumatized self can take any sense of agency it has acquired as an adult, and may try to use it to accrue more personal power or defend themselves against what they perceive as aggression, suffocation, or disrespect, from others.
Outbursts can assume different types and shapes. Even if the person may maintain red lines it won’t cross, there’s the potential for some loss of control whenever the frustration pours forward, triggered uncontrollably as certain buttons are pushed. The anger that’s inside and then jumps outward represents the scale of the violence the child was subjected to throughout the entirety of their childhood and formative years, which likely never saw any validation of any kind. Still, needless to say, the trauma that isn’t healed and is directed toward others can and will undermine and dismantle the self’s attempts in garnering connection with others. Further notes about this point are up ahead.
If you’re reading these words and you’re the one going through these, or you’re witnessing these bouts of anger in another, regardless of the approach you take there’s something to be aware of: what you (or the person) went through was nothing short of continuous, endless violence. From top to bottom, from beginning to end, and all the way around. There could have been physical violence and abuse, but even if not, there was certainly a vast sea of emotional and mental violence, and definitely spiritual violence as well. And the more spiritually sensitive you or the other person were, the more you would have been impacted by it as a child. Here a first step will be to acknowledge, you are not well. You’re not supposed to be, considering what you’ve been through.
Stigma of Breached Personal Boundaries, Aversion to Enmeshment, Hypervigilance of Personal Space and Energy (1/2)
One of the potential traumas for the adult who lived through this situation during their childhood, can be acute sensitivity to the perception of having their boundaries disrespected. This is phrased as “perception” because it’s possible to be reacting both to valid and genuine disrespect of boundaries, but also to situations that would otherwise be normal/healthy, yet are felt as disrespectful due to the person’s trauma. Still, if this element is present, the origin of the trauma isn’t fictitious.
Let us consider for a moment the scenario where no significant unhealthy emotional dynamics took place between parents and child. Let’s say both parents had a healthy psyche and did not engage in any stratagems to control or condition the child. Even if this is the case, what you need to observe that the child’s boundaries were already trespassed to begin with. The definition of personal boundaries is that you determine and uphold who and what enters, and is welcomed, in your space. And in this situation, the child has their space occupied and perused by individuals who they’d rather choose not to engage with, but who have the unspoken and indefinite permission to do so regardless (because they are the child’s family). Therefore, the child’s personal space is already “occupied”.
Now, it could be argued whether a child has personal boundaries to begin with. Children, after all, are utterly dependent on their parents, without anything in the way of the means to acknowledge, let alone deliberate, over their own boundaries. For you to consider someone’s personal space, you need to see someone as a person, and children aren’t always regarded as such. But I will strongly dispute the notion children don’t have personal space – it’s not true at all. All human beings, of any age, not only have their own personal space and energy, but they will feel and react to the energies of whoever and whatever comes into their proximity. What happens is that an infant “starts out” utterly depending on their parents, and therefore have to exist in very close proximity to them. The child will only gradually develop their independent sense of identity as they grow up, and with the development of their identity comes the gradual realization of their own space. And in the process of doing so, the maintenance of their space slowly shifts away from the parents onto them, sometimes with them having to somewhat claim that sovereignty. This is why at a certain age children and teenagers start to suddenly try to detach from their parents: they feel the need to claim their own space and the determination over its boundaries. This is healthy, it’s how it’s meant to be. If your child is emotionally balanced, this is what they will naturally do.
So it’s not that children don’t have personal space; rather, it’s more that they gradually develop the realization of it and take over the sovereignty over it, as they grow and mature. But that space was already there. Therefore, a child in the spiritual circumstances this work is addressing can and will feel their personal space trespassed in perpetuity, by default – even if they haven’t reached an age where they can make sense of it. Even if they haven’t realized the existence of their space, because the natural timing for that to happen hasn’t arrived.
This alone, the fact you’re subject to discomfort before you’re able to ever realize and claim your power over it, could cause heightened sensitivity towards one’s boundaries as an adult. Cumulatively or alternatively, if nothing else, the continued and duty-bound presence around someone you don’t have a spiritual connection with will over time create a low-level discomfort that is felt by and amongst family members, namely between parents and children, which the child will them absorb growing up, and will tend to carry over to their relationships with others, and with themselves as well. Discomfort will be present in the equation, in some way. It can something that’s triggered by a specific event, or that is felt generally, as a reaction to the presence of others, either way leaving you prone to react cautiously or even defensively in every interaction. You can feel your mental focus and thought process is being easily interrupted by others; when there would already be a natural contrast between an introverted adult and others who are extroverted, that contrast is undoubtedly going to be exacerbated here. When coming unto adulthood, or maybe later down the line, as the person makes ground in becoming more independent and able to rule over their own boundaries, there’s going to be an added feeling of liberation from it because there’s an empowerment and acknowledgment of their own Free Will that was absent when growing up. This relative absence of Free Will can be seen as part of growing up and being a child but was made relevant due to the emotional and spiritual circumstances.
So this element in principle would tend to happen even in the circumstance of the parents being emotionally balanced, freely allowing the natural development of the child. But this doesn’t always happen. We’re covering the topic of family environments where unloving choices outside the heart are bound to be made, possibly in an endemic manner. This is an environment where by definition the child already feels emotional and spiritually EXPOSED and vulnerable; thus, any further toxic and imbalanced behavior enacted by the parents will only worsen that feeling of vulnerability.
On Earth, rather than primarily focusing on the spiritual responsibility of bringing a new sovereign being onto the world, children are often an investment of the parents; children are often an investment the parents made. This can be expressed overtly or merely implied, but it is always visible by observing the emotional expectations of the parents. Some parents want to achieve work and career fulfillment through their children, either trying to have the career they couldn’t or achieving a continuation of their career. Some parents want to experience social fulfillment in the eyes of others through their children and/or how they turn out as adults – the child growing up may feel like a trophy on display, and adulthood metrics of success are not the person’s own but what the parents regard as successful. Some parents are invested in having their children carry their name, their family’s reputation, or maybe take over a business or care for real estate and investments that have been in the family for a long time. Some parents want their children to carry on with their family tragic stories, the drama, disputes, and emotional baggage. They may go to great lengths to indoctrinate and instruct their offspring on who to hate, how to judge, where goes each elder’s will, and which sides are there in feuds – and if the child shows themselves reluctant, they’ll be seen as either immature or ungrateful (the parent is going to feel alone and unsupported in the struggle they’ve been holding on to). Some parents will expect their children to have more children of their own, to experience being grandparents and to continue expanding the family. Some parents had children because they wanted a network of support in their old age; they were fearful of loneliness and lack of companionship and their children are expected to provide them with these. Some parents were so afraid of being abandoned that they had children to bring to the world someone with whom they share an unbreakable bond, or to receive the love they feel they don’t deserve or can’t have from partners or family.
The parents’ investment in their children is emotional, and always from the ego. The ego believes it wants something – depending on one’s beliefs, culture, etc. – in order to survive, be successful, and be happy, in life. Given A) children begin by being and are seen as an extension of the parents, and B) human life and health are finite, one of the ways the ego finds to cope with the limited time it has to achieve its objectives, is to pursue them through their children. On the 3D of Earth, the investment of parents on children is a way the ego has to cope with surviving in a hostile world and cope, or avoid coping, with the self’s finality. In essence, the parents, or rather their ego, want and expect their children to be a continuation of them. This creates an energy of enmeshment, where the emotional worlds of parents and children are indistinguishable, without contemplating the acknowledgment or maintenance of the children’s boundaries, and consequently, their healthy development.
One thing is for parents to use their discernment when trying to reasonably and adequately raise their children. Parents have to guide and deliberate over their children by necessity, but ideally, this necessity is altruistic rather than self-serving: it’s meant to serve the children’s own greatest good. But the parents’ ego creates a set of emotionally charged expectations placed on their children, and these become like implicit forms of control that overrule their Free Will, beyond what that necessity would otherwise dictate. These expectations from the parents are psychological and emotional, and may or may not coincide with what’s otherwise in the best interests of the child’s growth – often it won’t be, of course. The parents can’t serve two masters. So in a setting that’s already uncomfortable for the child to be in, where they would already feel exposed, they must also contend with the added demands to belong, to be involved, to believe in the same things, and to participate, as they are invited to become emotionally entangled in their parents’ (toxic) stories.
One way the child may react to this, is by recoiling. The child becomes withdrawn, unwilling to engage, acting distant or aloof. They’ll close themselves off in their room, seek private time for their own mental space or just be away from others. They’ll arrive late to meetings, be slow to meet requests, show disinterest or distaste, and not really be open to participating in common activities. The child will be trying to get away from the emotional demands, without really understanding how or why, but feeling so nonetheless. For the child or teen, it’s more than simply wanting an identity: the parents’ expectations are not their problem, they’re unhealthy and a burden, yet they will still be expected, and pressured, to care. The truth is, the child would be very likely to react normally and openly if their family behaved in a balanced manner, without exerting these invisible, emotional burdens of their ego on the child. But in a family where this does happen, the child feels emotionally suffocated and will seek to avoid it.
The problem? The parents who are invested in their children will likely react poorly to seeing their investment trying to pull away. To see their investment showing disinterest, detaching from their intentions, and seeking space to be and choose something else (or simply seeking space, oxygen, room to breathe, from them). Again, if the parents were emotionally balanced, the child would largely feel they could be who they are and want to be; essentially they’d be free to be and choose. But when the ego of the parents is involved, and when that ego sees its plans placed in check, its first reaction is to oppose. To fight back, to reclaim power, and do whatever it takes to reclaim control.
Some parents can respond to the withdrawal of the child/young adult with a more austere, harsh approach, by denying the child the space they’re trying to claim. This is where the parent tries to monitor the internet, emails, or text messages, very closely. It’s when they try to set tighter rules and schedules, or otherwise attempt to police the child’s behavior. This may be accompanied a loud, more intense response that is escalating, rising in tone the more the child seeks to recoil and defend themselves. This is where parents deny closed doors and removes the lock of the child’s room, arguing they “don’t need their space” – when in fact children do need their space. Paint this as a picture on a frame and it’s clear where the imbalance is coming from. In their mind, the parents are probably attempting to do the right thing, they are trying to maintain the family’s tightness and unity. But the emotional aspects of their response will betray if and when they’re not necessarily parenting with the child’s best interests in mind, but instead attempting to retake control. Everyone has the right to their space, but here space is denied for the sake of control.
Here’s another illustrative example. You are a zookeeper or a helper in an animal shelter. Among the animals you care for, a specific one is traumatized, recoiling, hiding in a corner, while the rest behave normally. You love what you do and care deeply about these animals, so you’re invested in reaching out to that specific animal, it breaks your heart. You want to do everything you can, perhaps offering a degree of healing and rehabilitation. But what would you do to approach this one animal? If you go in with all guns blazing, carrying a loud and “pushy” energy, you’ll risk worsening the animal’s already profound trauma. your sensitivity will tell you this. The correct response will be to instead adopt a cautious, carefully measured approach, one that may have to be tailored to suit the animal’s needs and avoid triggering what they’re sensitive about. And even this cautious approach doesn’t guarantee healing will occur – yet it’s the only approach you can take. The last thing you want is to risk inflicting more harm on the traumatized individual’s energy, at least not any more than what you have to in order to get to them.
When you’re in the presence of recoiling behavior that may be suggestive of debilitating trauma or at least hypersensitivity, the correct response is almost never an assertive approach. Rather, it is one of caution, compassion, mindfulness, and patience. It may be perseverant and even assertive, but it can never be emotional or aggressive. In this situation, a parent’s loud and emotional approach that is designed to re-establish dominance will largely be inappropriate if not destructive, contributing only to exacerbate the problem.
Stigma of Breached Personal Boundaries, Aversion to Enmeshment, Hypervigilance of Personal Space and Energy (2/2)
An alternative of how a child can react to this emotional pressure and enmeshment is the reverse: by adhering very closely to them.
It’s the child adopting the beliefs the parents had, as well as their input and opinions, even if toxic or hostile to them. If for example, the parents (or one of them) are frequently critical and judgmental towards the child, that criticism can be felt like a form of attention and caring, or a semblance of guidance and order, within a setting where otherwise none are felt. Which, coming down to it, could be considered a Stockholm-Syndrome-like effect: meaning, the child living within a barren or hostile environment closely adopts what most resembles love, support, and guidance, in that environment, even if it comes from a party who’s abusive. In this environment, the child feels unaccepted, disapproved, and inadequate – fundamentally due to the spiritual connection with the parents, but it can be interpreted as discomfort that comes from them, a lack of approval from them towards the child. So the child may be tempted to seek as much approval as it can, especially from the parents who demand submission or dictate what the rules should be. As a result of this seeking of approval that is fueled by lack of love, there’s little leeway for the child’s personal sense of identity to form properly. Parents may actively seek to impose their beliefs and ways of thinking over their children from a young age, with the practical effect of formatting, if not brainwashing, the child’s psyche towards how they think.
Either way, what can be taken here is that this process is violent. On one hand, you have a child who’s not only immersed in an emotionally suffocating environment with no hope for escape and likely no validation, but they’re also likely subjected to control and defensive mechanisms enacted by their parents merely for their attempts to cope or defend themselves from it (essentially a form of assault/abuse). On the other, you have a child who allowed and absorbed those same types of mechanisms in their psyche, mostly imbalanced and toxic for the reasons stated above, letting them “in” within their minds and adopting them as their own. In both cases there was a level of pervasive, can-happen-at-any-time violence the child was permanetenly subjected to, within a setting they already felt exposed and uncomfortable. Violence is registered as happening within their personal space, enacted by those who had tacit and legitimate access to it i.e. who they were supposed to trust. The toxicity inflicted upon the child was the original invasion, which in turn was preceded by the presence of individuals in the child’s space with whom no spiritual connection was shared.
Hence, the adult can be very touchy, very sensitive, to the presence of others and to interactions with them. Minor comments, small remarks, words in passing, if remotely construable as criticism or manipulation, will trigger the deeply ingrained emotional responses programmed ad infinitum throughout childhood, explosively reminding the self of the turmoil they were subjected to and couldn’t choose away from. The adult, without having developed a proper emotional distancing that would allow them to objectively distance themselves from what others may think – in other words, with a mindset of enmeshment – can be susceptible even to the mere knowledge of the opinions and biases of others near them, with a tendency to take all of those too seriously. This response will be stronger the closer the person becomes emotionally involved with the adult, for example with a relationship with them.
As stated before, the input that triggers the emotional response may or may not carry the imbalance the self feels in them (toxicity, manipulation, coercion, criticism, etc.). On one hand, the adult is now hyper-sensitive to ALL imbalance, able to “smell it from a mile away”. This is valid and legitimate. It doesn’t help the majority of regular human-to-human interaction, particularly without a certain level of spiritual/emotional self-reflective awareness, emotional patterns can roam unacknowledged and be pervasive among individuals. But the emotional proximity to others prevents the self from reacting objectively and in a detached manner to their presence. On the other hand, the hyper-sensitivity to imbalance comes with trauma and may therefore induce interpretation error: seeing threats when they don’t exist, or blowing them out of proportion. The child/adult will either hurt constantly and silently in the presence of peers so as to maintain any form of social life, but coming at the cost of significant suppression of their own feelings; or, alternatively, any sense of normalcy and spontaneity in said social life becomes difficult to sustain, as the adult tries to process these impulses more openly. But even minor details can trigger deeply ingrained emotional responses resulting in abrupt flight-or-fight behavior, where everyone is or can be a threat to the well-being of the self. As a child the self had their personal space perpetually breached and violated without validation, and they’re now coping with the aftermath.
In their attempts to deal with the constant or repetitive distress that inevitably comes from engaging others, the adult will likely become hyper-protective of their personal space. In particular, when building and maintaining relationships as an adult including of the romantic kind, an intense sensation of emotional suffocation can appear. As well as the experience of one’s personal space being constantly disrespected, and/or one’s mental focus being interrupted by the other, for example. In other words, the other person’s mere presence can and will persistently trigger the emotional buttons inherited from the emotional space shared with the parents, bringing back the old sense of pressure, suffocation, disrespect, abuse, and/or invalidation. In a relationship this can lead the adult to become over-focused in establishing rigid rules and boundaries that the other person shouldn’t cross, as they attempt to avoid their suffering or attain a sense of emotional relief, while coping with a perception the other person either purposefully or unwillingly can’t help but step on their boundaries.
While there’s undoubtedly room in a relationship for learning how to define one’s boundaries and mutual respect for those boundaries, there’s a point when excessive rules can sap the naturality and spontaneity between two people who are meant to be comfortable and at ease around each other. Past this point, this matter becomes more about realizing you’re fighting your own inner “state of enmeshment”, as well as the lingering trauma and anger of the child whose boundaries and energy were successively violated.
The trauma was others having free access to your energy. In this context, you were incessantly criticized or manipulated, whether as a reaction against withdrawing, or as a correction against deviation from the parents’ perspectives. In your childhood you couldn’t do anything right. Even if you managed to emulate your parents’ beliefs and perspectives completely to appease and placate them, this could bring some peace, yet a new mistake was always around the corner for you to be making, as soon as your guards were down and you relaxed a little. Combine this with never having learned a healthy level of interpersonal space, instead acquiring only references of emotional enmeshment and attachment from the parents, and/or an adherence to their perspectives that foregoes the learning of self-determination, and you’ll have an adult who’s very vulnerable to what anyone else thinks and to any form of criticism. They can’t detach from what others think or say, feeling everything intensely and personally, in what amounts to an inner state of constant enmeshment, if you will. Then it becomes a self-fulfilling dynamic: others say something that touches your buttons, you feel your boundaries trespassed against your will, and since you don’t really know any other way to cope, you’ll want to leave the situation, or fight back to defend yourself. Otherwise, you resort to suffering in silence.
When parents hold ego-based expectations over their children to exert control over them, they are trespassing.
When visiting your friend’s house, no matter how calm and at ease you are, you’ll always have to respect the house owner’s energy. You have to keep your ego in the pocket, hold yourself accountable, and mind at all times what you could do that would disrespect the space’s owners. It’s really not that difficult, rather it’s normal human behavior: keeping yourself in check for the sake of the continuation of the friendship. As long as you value the other person enough to want to maintain your relationship with them, you take care not to disrespect them. That’s it. You then return to your own home and you don’t have to sustain that effort anymore; it was something that was bound to that situation. Now, if your friend came to your home and tried to override your choices and tell you what you think and what to do, even just by a small amount, perhaps you’d say to them something like “hey, you’re out of bounds”. What bounds? Of your space, your energy, your sovereignty. Of them displaying an attitude discordant with caring for the continuation of your friendship. They would be out of bounds because they weren’t paying due respect for the other’s energy and space as they stand within them. When you’re in another’s energy, if you care about them, what you want takes a back seat relative to what the person’s best interests, priorities, and considerations, determine for the situation. This is especially true if you happen to be an authority, if you are in a position of power, relative to the other person, such as the specific case of parents to their children.
Parents, for a little while, by necessity, have to somewhat occupy, “take over”, their children’s energy, in order to raise, educate, and care for them as they grow. But they still have to respect the child’s own energy – that’s part of the unwritten responsibility that comes with authority and with that role. Parents don’t cease to have to respect the connection because they’re in charge – they need to precisely because they are. Parents don’t get to do “anything they want” just because they hold arbitration over their children. Parents are not entitled to hold personal emotional agendas in raising their children, other than doing what they think serves their child’s best interests. They can’t “overstay their welcome”, if you will, no matter the justification. Any justification provided in this regard will always be ego-based, put forth to justify and cover personal interests, held in what should be a primarily selfless purpose.
When a parent holds emotional expectations that lead them to try and exert control over their child, when they allow their personal agenda to dictate what they do because they can, it’s not merely disrespectful, it is a form of abuse. And that is the abuse that takes place in this situation, creating a trauma the person as an adult will feel towards their own boundaries. As a child, they had felt disregarded, unvalued, unloved, because the parents didn’t bother to hold the due, unspoken respect their connection warranted. The absence of such consideration registered, felt as, a form of lack of love.
Fear of Abandonment
Here we start delving a little more into the spiritual roots of the situation. This child will always have a fear of abandonment that runs deep and virtually impossible to bypass, but the circumstances create this fear as it is also a factor that originated them in the first place. Although any events of abandonment that are experienced through the course of life will undoubtedly help awaken and/or “give body” to this fear.
But let’s take it from the start. You’ll find both child and adult are going to hold a deeply rooted fear of abandonment, which to others may largely go unnoticed as it’s sitting quietly in the background most of the time. The potential for the fear is always hanging subtly in the air, it is awakened at certain junctions or specific events, and then it’s cumulatively reinforced by any further experiences of abandonment or rejection. It can even manifest/trigger as early as from the shock of the incarnation into the circumstances surrounding the self. The moment when the fear first manifests may be engraved in the child’s memory even if they’re otherwise very young.
This fear, to an extent, was already present spiritually before the incarnation, representing a foundational element for it. This is why it will run deep and be present all around. The child came to Earth to heal, and some of the things being healed are spiritual core wounds related to this main fear. All spiritual fears will trace back to separation, abandonment, and oblivion – the original separation of the Soul. We’ve stated the child is already born isolated from love, and here, by the same token, we’ll also say the child is already born abandoned. In other words, they’re born into a setting of spiritual disconnection and absence of love, out of and carrying an element an equivalent separation within that they’ve brought to heal. And as we also stated, this lifetime can be a more visible manifestation of previously existing patterns and momentum of isolation/insulation from love, which led to the molds for the lifetime, its circumstances, challenges, and lessons. So they can be faced and healed.
We’ve discussed the absence of a bond of spiritual connectivity between parents and children. “Spiritual” means an element that goes beyond the human identities of the participants in the now moment: it already was before this specific lifetime. What is spiritual is real and valid regardless of if and when it is realized by the conscious mind, including if it creates feelings and sensations well before the mind can process them. Consider the child being born completely surrounded by this absence of connection and love, and possibly without ever acquiring any other reference to the contrary: this lack of love is all they will be in the foreseeable future, likely with broad lifelong ramifications extending over time.
So the child already feels abandoned from the get-go. From the spiritual impression of having been dumped on Earth isolated from love. From any event that reminds their spiritual memories of being rejected. If nothing else, from the process of incarnating pressing on a core emotion they brought with them to heal. Imagine forcibly spending your entire lifetime abducted from those who care about you, and around whom you feel comfortable; you would feel a deep void, as you’re forced into deprivation of genuine caring, having only the memories of your loved ones in your heart. Except in this case the child has no recollection of anything other than the absence of love. It’s the only thing they’ll know.
This fear of abandonment plays with every other potential for patterns discussed so far. It associates and can play with a default negative self-perspective, and it can become an underlying factor driving the person to tolerate and even perpetuate the enmeshment with or subjugation to parents, and later others, when present. Children already start life naturally suggestible; a part of human life is about the child being a blank canvas, absorbing everything around them throughout childhood. But in addition, this child also holds within a fear that can lead them to take in toxic influences if the alternative is to be rejected (or they’re threatened with rejection). Not to mention a child is entirely dependent, so usually leaving your parents isn’t a realistic proposition. Being emotionally entangled with others, toxic as it can be, in a setting without love can register to the child as the lesser of two evils, compared to being abandoned. There’s a spiritual basis for this. For the human being’s awareness, and to a large extent to all spiritual entities in existence, receiving negative energy can be preferable to not receiving any energy at all – a fundamental tenet upon which many dysfunctional patterns in the human reality are based. The plant that receives little sun and water grows weak and crooked, but if it doesn’t receive anything it doesn’t grow at all.
This gives a weapon to parents who are willing to wield it.
Being deprived of love and fearing rejection makes the child compliant, prone to exchanging sovereignty for toxic comfort and facilitation, unwilling to fight back against control and manipulation, or vulnerable to control by someone who wields rejection, literal or emotional, as a threat. So the child can easily become co-dependent if that serves another’s purpose. They may find it challenging to create and develop their own identity as they’re discouraged from doing so. And they may be gaslit into accepting external perspectives, beliefs, and judgment, to appease and seek acceptance. All of this also plays into the sensitivity towards barriers being breached.
The adult may at some point find a degree of liberation from their family, yet at the same time, it can also be challenging to completely release bonds of enmeshment, making it difficult to release the past (also see Stockholm Boomerang). In relationships, you’ll perpetually assume your worth to be zero, and you know it’s only a matter of time until someone you’re in a relationship with “realizes your true worth” and leaves you, materializing the abandonment. If someone loves you, surely they’re either wrong and/or they’ve fallen for and bought into the strategies you use for control but without revealing your true self, in what amounts to narcissistic-like patterns; either way, others can’t like you. Relaxation, acceptance, peace, all of these are a no-go. Others not loving you is a given, a default truth, or so you believe, so you’re always coping with a future of abandonment, real or otherwise.
Oppressive Emotional Space
Due to a combination of enmeshment, hypersensitivity to others, and fear of abandonment, the adult is prone to inadvertently develop an emotionally taxing, tense, if not an oppressive, emotional environment for others, namely in relationships. You’re hypersensitive to others, loved or not, but especially those with whom you’re in an emotional connection and both parties have stakes in it (as opposed to something more casual/transient). When in a relationship, especially of the romantic kind, they’ll feel as if their boundaries are continually trespassed, but they may also exert emotional pressure and engage in mechanisms of control themselves, towards the other person.
They can do so, for example, to eliminate perceived disrespect (in their eyes defending themselves), or to root out discord (to avoid abandonment, but possibly recreating enmeshment). The adult may display an extremely low tolerance to dissonance from the other person; anything and everything that can be interpreted as disagreement, disharmony, deception, betrayal, or even relatively innocuous differences in opinions, priorities, and sensitivities, can be seen as extremely uncomfortable, unsettling, challenging, or hurtful, if not even a constant threat. As a result, a propensity to try to “snuff out” the source of this suffering, that is to say the other person, may develop. This does have the effect of reducing their emotional space and Free Will, ironically recreating the kind of tense and oppressive environment the self might have been raised in.
Dissonance can be construed as a threat due to a confluence of previously addressed factors. The habituation to enmeshment, for one, can create the perception that the absence of it – i.e. the other person having emotional space to think, room to breathe, freedom to make mistakes, etc. – is a form of emotional distance, therefore a sign the other person might no longer wish to be there (fear of abandonment). Much like the parents could have done to the child, the adult doesn’t want any emotional separation (including to a healthy degree) for fear this might equate to the other inevitably abandoning them. This element can be exacerbated if the parents separated or divorced due to any disharmony, disagreements, dishonesty, or other form of dissonance between them, which will be likely due to the nature of the setting here addressed. For children, a breakup or divorce of the parents can be extremely dissonant and challenging already; for a child who’s sensitive to abandonment/rejection/separation as a theme, this will ring all the more true.
A part of this can be equated to a form of emotional Stockholm Syndrome: the child learned to equate enmeshment with the love they could get (no matter how toxic and dysfunctional it was) so it seeks and tries to maintain it, purely for safety. Emotionally, the absence of enmeshment represents falling once more into the unseen, big black void: the inner state of total and complete lack of love the self carries and fears at all times. And that cannot be: compared to that void, enmeshment is preferable. However, this does lead the adult to perpetuate the same pressure they were subjected to during their childhood, and recreate the same patterns that in theory they’re trying to avoid, even if a genuine heart-to-heart connection is present in the current relationship.
An emotional space that would allow the other an objective perspective can flare up the fear they’ll “discover” the “true” negative worth of the self (fear the other will “discover the truth” about me, thus fear of abandonment). Or worse, uncover the inner impostor syndrome in feelings, that is to say, the fear they’ll “discover I don’t feel as much as I should” – ironically, these are feared because it would lead to the dissolution of the relationship (fear of abandonment). Also ironically, the self fails to hold an objective, detached perspective of themselves, through which they wouldn’t see their worth in such a poor light. Again, the real issue is never the other person’s perspective and how they value you, but your own self-perspective of yourself and emotional entanglements.
A mindset of enmeshment, of emotional entanglement, can interpret disagreement, dissonance, and difference, in additional and compounding ways. The adult can feel a difference in opinion as a threat to their boundaries, because they’ll feel their rules, perspectives, and choices can and will be disregarded by the other due to their differences in opinion and priorities (in other words, the belief the other may disregard the self). They may fear losing their sense of identity and any personal achievements, growth, and sovereignty they’ve attained, threatened by the presence of this difference (fear of being in a setting that engulfs and suppresses their essence). They may fear any slight difference in perspective in/of/by the other person may in reality be veiled disapproval, or eventually grow and lead to it over time (criticism that creates suffering). This can generate the propensity to argue and bicker with the other, correcting them constantly, or react with hostility towards even small spoken details (fear of invalidation, criticism, and de-valuation). This is fueled by an already imbalanced, sensitive emotional field, and will be exacerbated in particular when there was an austere, judgmental, or otherwise emotionally oppressive parent, exerting the same type of force on the child. Constant bickering or a condescending attitude may seem innocuous or even appealing at first glance, but over time they do very much become low intensity chronic warfare, a bit of a buzzword today, but precisely true. Chronic bickering/correcting is a form of violence that will only demean and cancel the other person, again achieving the opposite effect of what is intended.
When a couple wants a child, they will accommodate for them. A side note: parents didn’t always choose to have children when they do. Children can be born by accident, or otherwise in an unplanned manner. That on its own doesn’t imply one spiritual intention or another: it is possible for the spiritual selves to desire the experience, and made it happen unexpectedly; but it’s also possible they aren’t spiritually ready to have the child, but the human selves opened that possibility, one way or another. In any case, parents who have opened their hearts and minds to the child, will welcome them, and prepare for their arrival. They’ll be willing parents. They’ll make adjustments, adapt and adjust their lives as needed, on their own accord. They’ll open up the space in their lives, minds, and hearts, for the child. But parents who on a spiritual level did not desire the child (even if their ego did) and who don’t share a spiritual connection to them, won’t accommodate. Parents in these circumstances are likely unwilling to open up the space, in their hearts and lives, to the child. They can’t, because they don’t have a spiritual connection with them that would enable them to do so – even if on paper they’re doing “everything right”. They won’t have the underlying spontaneous willingness, even if they want to, even if they try, even if they do their best. And here, chances are the child will feel their caretakers are unwilling make room for their presence and existence. Further, even if neither parent ever directs an ounce of criticism or emotional control towards the child, they’re spiritually unable to feel proud of their son or daughter – the kind of pride that gets you a twinkle in your eye. The child must to operate always from a sensation, explicit or subtle, that they are inadequate to some extent. And all of this is only going to be worsened, and further intensified, by any patterns of control the parents may engage the child with – the situation is ripe for it to take place.
This is why it is important to make decisions in life that are concomitant with your spiritual essence, or trying to. As otherwise you risk choosing yourself into situations where you don’t and can’t find inner meaning and purpose.
As an adult, the self may repeat this pattern with others: they’re unwilling to accommodate another, even if loved. There might be a level of anger or sorrow here (see Anger and Aggressiveness, below). Others didn’t accommodate me, so why should I accommodate you?I was ruthlessly criticized for X, so why should I tolerate your X now? It’s a form of “it happened to me, so it should happen to you too”, a reaction of anger that perpetuates, rather than healing, trauma patterns. The adult will be even more susceptible to being “bothered” by another’s presence, unwilling to open up the space in their hearts and minds for the other. They’re going to deny them emotional and mental freedom and room to breathe. Again, possibly, inadvertently and unconsciously, replicating the same experiences of the emotional space lived during childhood. This will be especially prevalent if the parents promoted enmeshment; if they were highly critical and judgmental; if there was emotional blackmail and gaslighting; if there was emotional co-dependency; if the parents’ beliefs were absorbed without the proper development of emotional sovereignty of the self; or otherwise if they didn’t freely allow space for the child to BE. The adult tightly controls the space around them, to defend against control and oppression, and to avoid their buttons being constantly triggered. But it is an energy of control nonetheless.
Anger and Aggressiveness
The adult is coming from a place where they assume that others won’t validate them by default. How intense and prevalent depends on the depth of the childhood experience. Further, the perception of the adult, as with other aspects we’ve been listing, can either fruit of a biased interpretation of a non-existent problem or a reality they’ll keep attracting to themselves, where they continue surrounded by those who can’t seem to see them. Either way, you may see this can be seen as a continuation of the stigma of invisibility (see Stigma of Invisibility/Invalidation) that was carried onto adulthood.
“Not validating” means others are unwilling to meet you halfway, accommodate your needs, priorities, and general way of being; or acknowledge their own shortcomings when dealing with you. Or at least they don’t appreciate or consider you to consider doing so. Still feeling isolated while always under emotional duress, the person remains forced to either fend for themselves or stuff everything in, enduring in silence. But there comes the point where this will come boiling over. This can be particularly true in close relationships, where the energies of personal spaces rub off against each other, and emotional buttons are pushed more frequently. In these circumstances, being constantly triggered may create explosive reactions that can’t be kept quiet. Especially if the person crossed a threshold in life where they got fed up with keeping things inside and are more actively trying to uphold their standards, and seeking not to suffer, and end the pain, one way or another. When the person crosses this threshold, they can be less willing to continue just stuffing things inside, but they can become more prone to vent outward, because the trauma hasn’t ended. And in close relationships, it becomes natural for this to be directed towards the ones you perceive to be disrespecting or invalidating you, be it the actual parents (who will more closely be related to the original trauma), or any other relationships that are built later down the track.
For the purposes of discerning someone’s spiritual role towards the adult in this regard, they can only ever be one of two cases, but not both at the same time. This may appear to be a simplistic proposition about a complex subject matter, but it’s still one that’s valid and where all boils down to at the end of the day.
The other person either doesn’t share a connection with the adult, or is unable to understand or cope, both leading to the same practical effect. This likely means this person can only ever push on the emotional buttons, without really helping healing them (other than serving the karmic purpose of button-pushing). This person cannot spiritually help, and may even be an actual “real” threat, i.e. someone who’s repeating the same karmic patterns of old. Alternatively, the person does share a spiritual connection, and through that connection they can see who the adult is. They can validate them, or bear the potential to learn to do so over time as healing occurs. Any invalidation, behavior creating anger, or trespasses on boundaries and energy that this person makes, will be an opportunity for mutual improvement and/or not a real threat at all (in karmic terms) – the other person’s behavior perceived as an offense only due to constant emotional charge. Either way, the former is a person/situation/partner that is mirroring the original trauma; in contrast, the latter can be, and likely is, a spiritually appropriate opportunity to process and heal wounds.
Still, outbursts of anger are bound to happen either way. What’s coming out is the fury for not having been respected or received acknowledgment by the ones raising the child. So in the present moment, in every trigger, the adult is assuming the other person will never change, that is to say, the threat is static, permanent, indefinite. A replica of the indefinite, pervasive, and permanent nature of what was endured, further enhanced if those in question never acknowledged and owned their role in the story.
Human beings aren’t flawless, and aren’t designed to be. Everyone incarnating will have issues to work on or at least imperfections to iron out. Everyone has things on their plate. Everyone is fighting a hard battle, as they say. Therefore, it is unrealistic to hold any expectations that a human must be perfect in everything they do – much less so about the person who has the responsibility and is under the pressure of parenthood. All of this to say parents will always do things, big or small, once or all the time, the child later adult will end up feeling sensitive about. That’s fine. It happens. What an emotionally responsible person can do, however, whenever they recognize they’ve engaged in behavior with another that may have caused more harm than good, and it’s behavior the person may not have gotten over, is, first, to realize it. It is to recognize the role they had in the situation, even if on their own, within only. And then, to come clean about it. You can’t change past mistakes, but you can choose to own up to them. You can choose to apologize. That choice is powerful and, on its own, can be enough (if heartfelt).
Apologizing doesn’t mean selling yourself short or giving up the authority you have. Further, depending on tone and intention, utilizing the words “sorry” or “apology” may not equate to a valid apology. Apologizing means willingly owning up to your role in a situation or pattern you were a part of. In the process, you’re “repenting”, that is to say, you’re lowering your arms and dropping your guard, and with them, any struggle or control you might still hold on to. And you’re saying, “look, this is what I did, I recognize it, I validate you, and I regret doing it”. It’s letting the ball drop to the floor without trying to catch it. That’s what an apology is. Apologizing means willingly acknowledging that some things weren’t right, even if you don’t know how you would treat them differently. When you make mistakes, even if you don’t have all the answers, the least you can ever do is own up to them. Granted, some people aren’t necessarily ready to receive an apology without wanting to take advantage of it and further propagate the imbalance; but at least you’ve come to a point where you’ve dropped past dynamics within you. And some people will in fact need to hear you did so; those could really use hearing that apology.
If your parents participated, willingly or inadvertently, in patterns such as those that are described here, and at some point later down the track they willingly validated you; if they did so not just in passing, only admitting things when forced or because that’s what you want to hear, but they truly came clean; that was truly a remarkable gift from them to you. Because by owning up to their role, they’ll spiritually remove the emotional accountability the child took upon their shoulders from what happened, which today might still be part of your burden. Even if they haven’t fundamentally “changed” in their ways, at least they’ve come to a place of appreciating you, at least enough to validate what you went through. Apologizing in the adult stage is offering the inner child the adjustment and validation they might not have been spontaneously granted when growing up. And this is a key aspect of this type of trauma: one of its hallmarks was being a silent and unacknowledged suffering. And a true apology finally gives a voice to that suffering. This is why acknowledgment and validation are so essential in healing: you’re allowed to achieve closure, or at least do so to some extent. All closure is healing; thus, validation is healing.
However, if you fit these circumstances to any capacity, but you’re unfortunate enough your parents never arrived at this stage and to the point of coming clean to you, then your contact with them will always retain the same tonality. Coming close to their energy will feel the same; the emotions around them will be the same; and they’ll always perpetually represent and have the practical effect of draining your energy, for the same causes, in the same circumstances, even if decades have passed. Even if you’re 60 and they’re 90. Why? Because they’re in the same place spiritually and emotionally. No matter how much clock time passed, it’s as if spiritual time stood still. And your parents will always have the same connection with you. In the meantime much-stored anger will remain simmering beneath the surface, creating outbursts over time, possibly damaging everything and everyone around them, like they themselves are within. This comes from never having been worthy of the parents’ validation – and possibly still being subject to their influence even as an adult. The offense is due to never having received an “I’m sorry”. This is going to be the case that will be far more difficult for the adult to manage in these circumstances. Because they’re going to be forced to achieve their closure on their own, by their own means, just as they were all along emotionally, from a state of emotional imbalance if not damage.
Parents aren’t always willing to apologize to their children, because they’ll feel doing so can undermine their authority, and children can already be a handful. And indeed, as any figure of authority will tell you, a misplaced apologetic tone may undermine your role, parents included. As an authority, you always have to maintain a balance between your responsibility and a willingness to be honest and compromise, lest you run the risk of losing your handle on the situation. However, there’s a difference between maintaining that balance, and a complete unwillingness to concede and own up to one’s choices. Particularly if this means the person remains invested in perpetuating imbalanced behavior.
Parents refusing to acknowledge and apologize while insisting on the same behavior, particularly if as an adult you remain co-dependent or in a position of frailty towards them, plays with the absence of hope as mentioned in The Spiritual Hostage. By not apologizing, what they’re essentially telling you (either by words or by their actions) is that there’s no hope for change. Things will always remain the same, at least insofar as the connection with them goes, retaining any harmful impact the connection with them transmits. By refusing to surrender, they deny you hope, and they’re still telling you that what you feel doesn’t matter, or that you don’t get to feel how you feel. These parents may vocalize an apology that is in fact a veiled denial, for example saying something like “I’m sorry but we did the best we could”, “I’m sorry you were very difficult“, or equivalent. The sequence I’m sorry but almost always means the person isn’t, in fact, sorry at all. Here they’re still deflecting blame or placing it on you – only perhaps creating more anger, maybe leading you to be blamed further.
The result is that, in the present moment, the adult can face any dissonance, any discrepancy, any disagreement from another, even slight differences in perspective, let alone actual arguments and tussles, as if they’re STATIC – stuck in time and in a loop. Because they’re operating without hope.
The adult will always assume (emotionally) that the other person does not understand and is not sympathetic towards them and that they’ll never be willing to change their positions. This makes any point of hurt, challenge, or pain immutable and insurmountable, a stone wall that burns to the touch and will last forever. Which can easily lead to reactions that create a volatile, unstable, and even hostile environment, where the partner will never feel safe to offer their opinion and be themselves – the opposite of the safe environment the adult would otherwise wish, as well as a replica of the hostilities endured throughout childhood. Further, this will be made *far* worse if the partner is unwilling to repent, that is to say, to honestly drop their guards and come clean about feelings and mistakes they might have made or understood as such. Here it’s not just about an immutable challenge, it’s also the other person’s invalidation replicating the parents’ unwillingness to at least say sorry. This is the single most critical point for lashing out.
From a trauma without hope, you see things that arrive at you in extremes, as if stuck in time and immutable. Deep down, this is a reaction from both child and adult to the lack of connection – what they (really) want is connecting from the heart to the other person – but that reaction that ended up directed at the perception of invalidation. Note that it is still possible for you to be right in your assessments despite the trauma within: you aren’t necessarily wrong in detecting potentials for adjustment and growth. It’s just that you’re bearing unhealed trauma that can exponentiate your reactions and possibly your interpretations. An emotionally healthy person in these situations would detect an element of discomfort for them, but they’d try to assess how to go about sharing and handling them calmly, over time. But with a sufficient level of trauma that was kept silenced, when that trauma comes out it’s only possible to react sharply, sometimes with hostility, given the assumption no other input will be well received or acknowledged. It doesn’t help that a chronic confrontational reaction can make the other person instead recoil and become less willing to meet with the heart. They’re being forced to adopt a defensive posture to protect themselves from hostility. Being attacked hurts and makes it challenging to keep an open heart, ironically instigating the pattern itself.
Learning is difficult! Spiritual and emotional lessons take time to be understood and lead to personal progress. Sometimes growth takes ages and lifetimes to achieve. But in this situation, the other person may be forced to become stuck in a defensive position, not able to meet halfway, or begin to improve. The hostility can also erode and jeopardize the other person’s goodwill and willingness to change. So by this you aren’t just denying space for the other person to be themselves, you’re also denying them the space and time to adjust to whatever you happen to be uncomfortable with. In fact they may even start adopting their own coping mechanisms, such as exerting control not to be controlled, or become distanced and standoffish, at which point they’ll seemingly be justifying the reactions of hostility. Finally, these dynamics create the risk of eventual irrevocable dissolution of the relationship, deep down what’s feared above all else. Note how all of it is part of the same dynamics; all are effects that both will be familiar to you and you’d want to avoid.
The child develops feeling isolated, sometimes amongst patterns of co-dependency and guilt, together with a baseline fear of abandonment sitting underneath it all. In these circumstances, the child can become co-dependent on parents actively exerting control over them. By the time they reach their teens or adulthood, the person will feel weak, emancipated, and submissive, with critically low self-esteem and confidence. Their personal power not only didn’t develop, but its development might also have been neglected, if not purposefully undermined.
Without the power to liberate themselves from constant abuse, the child is going to feel helpless and underpowered, i.e. without the strength to protect themselves or achieve liberation. They didn’t have that strength to begin with, because they weren’t supposed to. No child is supposed to achieve emancipation at five years old, nor are they meant to have to “fight off” their parents. And yet, controlling parents may bring an imbalance that perpetuates the child’s states of dependency. The child’s natural progress of emotional development that would empower them thus can be compromised. And the child grows without acquiring the necessary tools, sovereignty, and backbone, that are often necessary to embark on the process to release themselves from abuse – thus propagating their perception of their own weakness.
As an adult, the person’s inner state will make them already have a lot on their hands, due to the existence of any and all the patterns already addressed previously; the adult has their work cut out for them. This will further undermine the buildup of the necessary efforts and motivation to attempt to break through dependency. Cyclical, self-feeding cycles will develop: you’re weak and submissive; you’re sapped of the willpower to protect your space; therefore you’re still letting those who abuse you “in”; then you feel even weaker and more powerless, and so on. Co-dependency patterns – emotional, material, and/or psychological – may not develop and stay in childhood, but continue and become hardened and persistent throughout adult life. Now you are an adult, but still dependent on your parents, a very devaluating emotion that perpetuates any feelings of weakness, failure, etc.
It can already be challenging to claw back from the holes you find yourself in and develop and grow emotionally, for any person, under normal circumstances and without any further considerations. But it will be that much harder if the game is rigged against you. That is to say, when you’re seeking empowerment from an emotionally emaciated state and an ingrained absence of agency, and possibly against the resistance and/or influence of a surrounding environment designed to prevent you from doing precisely that. The material and emotional elements of life – how you feel about something, your personal power and confidence, and the money you have in the bank – are very practical; they all determine what path your life is actually taking. And a lack with any of these can and will keep you tied up to an abusive environment, not just figuratively (within) but possibly also literally, with you depending on those invested in perpetuating abuse. Such lack itself might, in fact, be designed as part of the original setting, meant to continue to deprive you of your agency and keep you under control.
Throughout adulthood, this is a pattern that can create a “Stocholm Boomerang” effect, sometimes repeatedly. Play of words aside, this is something that can be extremely difficult and soul-wrenching to go through.
Let us state you reach a particular stage of development where you become aware of the bonds of co-dependency, and you naturally wish to leave them. So at some point, you feel stronger and more able; you feel empowered and with some independence under your belt. You want to get free, and you manage to gather the strength to try – which on its own might have already been a massive undertaking given your circumstances. It might have taken you years just to get to that point. But you, the hostage, gathered the courage to pull yourself out of what and who binds you. And so you break free: you finally speak your unfiltered truth (with feels liberating after stuffing everything in); you send some people their merry way, perhaps using some colorful words of choice; and you leave them behind. And then, that’s it: you’re finally free.
But while you may achieve relative success at doing so, and even as it feels quite liberating, you might still be in an emotional state of great frailty. Even if it was a monumental achievement, it didn’t necessarily mean you were entirely ready to do it.
Everyone goes through periods of vulnerability and difficult choices in life – and your emotions are a giant field of vulnerability already. This means that, eventually, later down the track, at some point, you will fall into a particularly vulnerable state. A low point. This won’t be a single low moment to which you are a stranger to; but the inevitable culmination of the tilted vector your inner state describes over time, leading you inexorably down the same old black hole. The experience of the world can be that of a harsh place that won’t care or wait for your feelings, much less for a trauma that’s both extensive and invisible.
At this point, you’ll need help.
Everyone needs help, at some point. But you might be extremely reluctant to ask help from anyone, out of the fear of exposing how weak and corrupted you feel to the outside world, out of shame. Possibly also to avoid spreading “the rot” i.e. to involve additional people in the world of destruction and toxicity you came from. You are trying to leave it behind, not involve others in it. Receiving help, for human 3D awareness, can already have a connotation of shame; the feeling of inability and failure (rather than natural and commonplace misfortune that can happen to anyone) that leads you to a place where you depend on charity from others. It happens that here, you already carry that stigma inside. Help is something you’ll always equate with being weak and powerless, a feeling closely related to depending on those who abused or keep abusing you. What’s more, and ironically, you might not be needing help from a place of convenience and propagating dependency, but rather after having realized the toxicity you were in, and actively committing to breaking through it. In other words, at this point, you might need help because you have no other choice.
Further, in all likelihood there won’t be anyone else outside of the immediate family circle who is open and willing to help at all. Even if you ask for assistance outside of this setting, others you will unlikely relate to the problem or grasp its extension, no matter how well-meaning they are. You can ask for help once, but you risk letting others into what’s not a one-time situation but rather ongoing frailty and dependency. It will probably be far too much to ask out of anyone. The only ones able and willing to lend this level of help will be the ones who participated in its creation in the first place: the ones of the abusive environment and who may still be interested in the co-dependency being perpetuated. And so, with no other alternative, you’re forced to come back to the hostage environment, and all that entails.
You’re asking for help, so you’re toning down your agency. Once more you’re submissive, pretending things are fine and swell. You already have to moderate yourself, and play nice, even as you approach the setting. Possibly after having vented your liberation triumphantly to those same people.
It goes beyond humiliation. Life has proven you wrong and them right, as you come back with the tail between the legs. At the end of the day you’re all bark and no bite; when push comes to shove, what you say and how you feel continue not to matter. You’re the one who’s crazy, imbalanced, unreliable, and volatile. The problem is with you. And every time it happens, you’re stacking layers of emancipation and weakness, your personal power becoming more and more degraded, and with it your sense of worth. In these circumstances, you’re not reliving the past just in your heart and mind; you’ll be going back to it in very literal ways, which essentially amounts to a living nightmare you can’t wake up from. How would you not stack shame, guilt, and impostor syndrome emotions within? And how would you not keep down layers of anger and resentment that sometimes come forth explosively?
What is happening here, is that a part of you consciously realized the toxicity of the setting you’re in, and therefore you bear the very natural reaction of wanting to expel these things from your reality immediately; yet you may still not be spiritually/emotionally ready yet to and detach from it forever, without having to go back. The fields might still have so many mined that it’s impossible to plant and farm in them. That is to say, your spiritual stage might not yet allow you to depart the context of imbalance completely. This largely depends on the trauma and the karmic attributes shared with those involved that still linger, factors that will keep you gravitating towards each other. Healing has a timing of its own; the puzzle pieces are not yet all in place.
Others
While growing up, the child likely won’t feel supported unconditionally. They can feel this to an extent given the absence of spiritual connection, but a responsible approach from the parents may mitigate it. However, parents may instead make a conditional application, if not weaponization, of their support towards the child (closely related to Stockholm Boomerang above). They may withhold/deny support, utilize it as emotional leverage to exert control and foster co-dependency, or otherwise not be forthcoming with it. In which case the child will feel that the support they’re surrounded by is ‘tainted’. It is a “wrong” support, something that exposes to criticism, that is given as a favor therefore that they’re not deserving of it, it registers as a burden, to name a few examples. In other words, they’ll feel the support they receive from their parents is conditional.
This will make the child feel fundamentally unsupported even in the presence of support on paper. The love that is conditional isn’t true love; much the same way, the support that is conditional registers as unsafe, false, weakening, corrupting. One side effect of this, compounded by the overall sense of isolation and absence of spiritual connectivity, is that the child learns they’re terribly alone in the world, thus ultimately forced to fend off for themselves (and likely without the empowerment to do so). Any challenging events or situations that happen during this time and create negative impact can easily originate long-lasting trauma. This is because they’re happening while the child spiritually feels alone and helpless, meaning they’ll believe or feel there’s not going to be any viable (unconditional, safe) help if the same event ever happens again.
The child who’s gone through some portion and variation of what’s described here, can grow as an adult mired by a convoluted emotional, with plenty of sensitivity and intricacies. They may be stock full of what we call “karmic buttons”: when a situation in the present resonates with trauma of the past creating a disproportionate reaction – especially if the trauma remains unacknowledged or misunderstood. Much like the minefield is a field of mines, their entire emotional functioning feels like a trauma field: a state of trauma that is continuous instead of discrete, not limited to a specific moment or situation. It’s not a trauma about one thing or another; it’s not “this” or “that” sensitivity. Rather, it’s a whole emotional functioning that is traumatized, portions of which not entirely understood or even acknowledged, and filled with scars (when healed) and softs spots (when not).
Further, many situations will spark outward reactions that may be intense, sometimes aggressive, towards those seen as stepping on the buttons (as seen in Anger and Aggressiveness). The trauma can become so pervasive and ingrained, that it impacts the mind and brain as if “burning” in place the biases and their responses, to the extent they’re acted upon automatically and repetitively. The comparison I want to make here, is with the person who received literal brainwashing and is now responding to cues whenever they hear them, likely without realizing it. Yet, with a cool head, the adult may still be able (on occasion, to the extent they can) to recognize their reaction was disproportionate, and maybe that what caused it wasn’t there in the first place. This can and will create a complex of lack of clarity: you never really know what’s right and wrong in an absolute sense, since what you’re reacting to may or may not be there. Additionally, on top of the suffering and trauma carried within, the adult can further develop a stigma of “always doing something wrong”, particularly when engaging with others, out of the impulsive, misguided reactions they may not be able to control.
The patterns above, emotionally speaking, will be a replica of several aspects lived during childhood, core to those being the child’s difficulty in ascertaining what’s right and wrong about them, namely regarding how they felt towards their families. These may have been worsened if they were immersed in patterns of control and manipulation (where applicable), as in practice they were being asked to dissociate the truth of what they felt (emotional and spiritual) from the programming received with the mind (heard, believed), possibly even having their feelings invalidated or de-legitimized. Any and all patterns of harshness, criticism/judgment, disapproval, and rejection the child endured from the parents will contribute to this. As the adult, in those moments that are more impulsive/reactive, you may be recognizing the disproportionate nature of the emotional reaction and the possible bias in perception that gives rise to it – that was there just a moment ago: both signal the trauma is there and is asking to be healed. What is being fundamentally replicated is why the child fundamentally could not understand why the self didn’t feel supported, embraced, accepted, loved, etc.
Lastly, it should be no surprise that the adult may find, or discover at some point, that they’re much more comfortable when they’re alone, by themselves. To avoid the intrinsic discomfort and pressure of being around others; to avoid criticism; to avoid the preoccupation with the risk of being controlled and manipulated; to prevent repetitive patterns of anger and aggression and the turmoil and guilt that come after; or because it’s simply easier to be in one’s own mind and focus, without having to consider any external stimuli. They might occupy themselves with work, spend a lot of time busy with activities, or simply stay alone at home all the time. This is because, quite simply, it is uncomfortable almost to the point of being unbearable, the sensation of being exposed all the time, let alone when karmic buttons are triggered creating direct suffering, which can happen at any point without warning.
Do note that the peacefulness and quietness of solitude can be a valid and important discovery in any spiritual path. Here, it just so happens this same discovery will coincide with an inner context of emotional hypersensitivity. Also, mind, preferring to be alone doesn’t mean the adult has ceased to seek love or interaction: they’ll still crave everything that was always lacking just the same, i.e. love, belonging, acceptance, tranquility, and peacefulness, with others. It’s just that the sheer pressure of being perpetually immersed in distress that flares upon proximity may surpass any hypothetical gain that hasn’t manifested itself – but may also impede seeking and finding it. Further, just because the person is alone doesn’t mean the feeling of pressure is relieved in its entirety; you’ll still feel the effects and sensations of the traumatic energy endured as a child, in whichever shape they assume, even when entirely alone – a sign the trauma still lingers inside.
At no point will you read in this text solitude is anything other than beneficial and spiritual. Nor will it be suggested you “should get out”, or do anything you don’t want to. The only true risk of withdrawing is doing so out of trauma when you wouldn’t otherwise, and to the extent you cease to seek the healing and connection you need and are looking for.
A Life of Challenge
As you might imagine, the confluence of some of the patterns here addressed can lead to an adult life experience that’s challenging in many ways, the extension of this proportional to how pervasive and disruptive those patterns were. And in this impact there’s likely a significant extent of mental and biological programming that took place throughout childhood, which can become ingrained and very complicated to deal with alter in the adult life. For the sake of the explanation, I’ll ask you again to think of actual brainwashing, and how the human brain can be affected and distorted by programming that is inflicted externally. Imagine the level of violence and intrusion it must take for a person’s mind to become altered, and how upsetting it may be for someone else to witness changes in that person’s behavior as a result. I’m using this analogy knowingly and purposefully because I consider this to be a valid equivalent to the depth of emotional and spiritual violence and damage the person can endure – and now has to hide.
I am using the word “violence” because what was endured is nothing short of violence. Both child and adult become used to hiding everything, if nothing else because there are very few outlets in the human reality ready to acknowledge and match how their inner state feels like. This observation can apply to mental health in general, and is certainly true here. The adult will find both regular human awareness, as well as human systems of support, are hardly ready to provide support that matches the scale of the trauma within, perhaps with the hypothetical exception of institutional internment, something that carries a huge stigma of its own. The person is habituated by omission to not having their inner world validated, let alone having their needs met.
The aspect of default invalidation is a special kind of violence of its own. A good analogy for this situation would be if a hostile party came into your country and left its land territory in their entirety laden with land mines, superimposed, in multiple layers throughout the soil. Now it’s impossible to walk, travel, build, plow the fields, or do anything else at all, without severe life-threatening danger – an analogy with how your inner world feels, where everywhere is a mine ready to be stepped on and explode. At most, someone who comes along catches a glimpse of the trauma, and they might ask, oh you have a mine in your field? You have to take care of it! Have you healed yet? When you can barely move around, which is to say, you’re lucky if you can still function as a regular human being. Invalidation is a norm.
Depending on how pervasive and extensive these patterns can be, they may be involved in what the mental health medicine will diagnose as mental imbalance and disorders. In particular, I’ve come to establish a parallel with the patterns above and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), given it shares some of the attributes described above, such as fear of abandonment, outbursts of anger, identification with coping mechanisms, or hypervigilance relative to personal boundaries, to name a few. I’ll state I’m not a certified medical professional, so this assessment comes only from what I know about BPD strictly from a layman’s perspective, while establishing parallels with my spiritual work. Further, even as a practitioner/reader I cannot establish a 1-on-1 association between the circumstance of spiritual disconnection and BPD, as I have insufficient data to make that association. It goes without saying human beings are infinitely complex and I consider each person to be their own unique case. Even medically diagnosed imbalances aren’t neatly divisible in watertight drawers, rather they encompass some degree of variation, with sets of core attributes that have to “check” more than others. With that being said, some commonalities certainly lead me to point out a level of correlation between the two, hence my observation in this regard.
Even if the emotional impact doesn’t match a classification of mental imbalance, or an equivalent degree of severity, it can still result in various comparatively milder ways, and create distress and challenge just the same. It can for example make introvert/extrovert dynamics more difficult, where the introverted (not a “problem”, a characteristic and advantage in many aspects) faces the challenge of learning to validate themselves and navigate the world, while protecting their energy from external forces. The situation of estranged families is another circumstance where this may apply, something that was stated before. Children (as in adults towards their parents) may see themselves with the options of either A) staying in alignment with their parents and their emotional/psychological expectations, or B) be true to themselves – but not both at the same time. Thus finding themselves forced to leave connections if they ever want to achieve the latter. On the other hand, parents can feel misunderstood and helpless and find a portion of their life expectations completely disrupted. They may often be at a loss on how to cope with a difficult child, what to do to “fix” them, or wonder where they failed and went wrong. Still, the willingness of the parents to self-analyze is a positive sign nonetheless. Because, as we’ve seen, parents often can not do so, instead only ever be able to allocate blame externally, thus never able to cease controlling and relinquish toxic patterns. In which case they can only ever be part of the problem rather than of the solution.
Either way, you’ve embarked on a lifelong transformative experience. It will be a process of healing that is likely to be enduring, taking place in every moment and most areas of life. If you have the perspective of finding a definite solution, you’ll quickly find there isn’t one. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and recuperating can be even more difficult than destroying. There isn’t going to be one answer you get to that solves it all; there isn’t going to be a pill you take and the trauma is washed away. Even if and when you choose to partake in more “active” measures for your healing – meeting a therapist, for example – the healing process isn’t going to stop as you walk out of the therapist’s office. Much like the trauma is continuous rather than discrete in nature, so too will life experience as a whole be a continuous process of healing, at every corner something flying at you and hitting where it hurts.
Will you get better? I don’t know. Is there hope? Yes.
There is hope for as long as you can acknowledge the situation in yourself. Even if you don’t understand it entirely; even if you can’t make all the connections; even if you don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong; even if you can’t control certain programmed and/or reactive impulses as they happen. There’s hope, as long as you can read words such as these and relate. And most importantly, there’s hope for as long as you hold the intention of healing, of getting better.
Healing
What does healing mean, and what will it take?
First of all, healing is what you’re already doing by existing. Merely facing issues direct experience in the physical world is a form of healing under a spiritual interpretation. Life challenges are not random; if you or anyone you know lived through a story in the molds of what has been described here, it most certainly means they wanted to come into the incarnation to heal parts within them that are associated with these experiences, namely those creating or involved in the experience of spiritual disconnection. So healing can simply equate to life taking you through certain paths and experiences, to make this happen. Of course, “healing” can also represent any approach you take in a more proactive and direct sense to take yourself from an inner state of imbalance and lack of love, to one with less of those things.
Healing of any kind, particularly complex emotional and spiritual patterns, can be multi-layered and cyclical, taking place as superimposed, repeating stages. Life may lead you through different processes of varying types, some actively chosen and others seemingly sent “at” you at different times. It’s difficult to use watertight definitions to classify what paths life may take; still, generally speaking, there are several stages the adult can go through, and various dynamics to each of those stages. There are no guarantees someone will go through theyr healing process and come out “the other end” claiming complete success. And yet, life will certainly and inevitably take you on a healing path, given we’re here on Earth for little other purpose, whether you achieve it in this life or the next.
In a first stage, perhaps as you’re just about to enter adulthood, perhaps when you emancipate, or maybe a little later down the line, you’re passively embracing the environment of the trauma without questioning it, be it externally or internally. You may be very submissive, or developed a rebellious streak instead. And you may even live far and away from the original childhood context. But, either way, you’re feeling poorly overall. You still carry the original emotional space inside, but you haven’t necessarily turned inward to realize “something’s not right”. You’re reacting and coping, you’re doing your best, but still going through the motions. To get beyond this stage, it might take a few problematic moments, or life can just wear and drag you down over time, slowly suffocating and oppressing you, leaving you with nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. Either way, at some point something has to give. And you finally reach the conclusion you aren’t okay.
There’s something different that comes with this realization. Before you were only keeping things inside, but now you’ve collected yourself enough to self-analyze, and be able to decide differently. There’s a light in the room that is lit, even if it’s subdued and faded at the start. From this realization, you may start making specific changes targeted at your own wellness. You may want to go on a trip, change jobs, or move things around in your life, or in your house for example. You want to improve things. You’re deciding to take more care of yourself actively, and you’ll want to live life more fully, more according to what you want. Spirituality may also start to arrive in your life at this stage. And you may also be looking for tools to help you understand what you went through, and hopefully what will heal it. Regardless of the steps you take, the realization itself, your acknowledgment of the situation, signals an intention that starts off the more “active” stages of healing. You’re no longer going through the motions; you’re now claiming more control over your existence.
Yet, this doesn’t mean the healing is done.
From here, the process may go a little slower or a little faster, a little bit more smoothly or a little more bumpy. At this point, you’re as if coming out of a type of “hibernation”, slowly opening your eyes and making sense of what’s around you, figuratively and emotionally.
You may be educating yourself about what others went through you did also; you may be going to therapy or otherwise finding small islands of safe spaces to be in, and share. You may even absorb new spiritual and esoteric information. Again, this stage may occur at different moments and in varying contexts. Emotionally, you’ll be going over your past, coming to terms with what you lived that might not have been normal, and might have even been toxic. And you’re finding a little bit more peace, acceptance, and relief within, attempting to bring these values and emotions into your current reality. You’re taking away the blindfolds slowly, and time is needed for you to adjust to the (metaphysical) Light that has just started to come in, and that’s being shedded around you.
Still, this also doesn’t mean the healing has been achieved. This is a stage where a little more of yourself, spiritually speaking, is coming down onto life with you. As was your choice and prerogative in the realization and decisions above. But, there will be a point where what was stored inside will need to come out. In a way, this may have already been happening inadvertently, through explosive reactions. But even if so, you can consider those as part of this aspect.
There’s going to have to be some form of purging of the emotions that were left within, due to all that was endured, yet remained more or less invalidated. The emotional works by processing feeling, and feeling that has been kept inside means it hasn’t been processed. So it will need to be so. The steps above haven’t completed the healing yet; there’s still much that needs to get out. You’ll probably notice that despite the levels of relative peace and newfound Light you may discover in the stages above, you’re still heavily broken inside, with a lot of soft buttons that hurt to the touch and can’t be pressed. These signal emotional processing still needs to occur. And how will it occur? Here, you vent.
Healing can be a broadly encompassing concept; under a spiritual meaning, healing can mean and/or involve being placed in contact with what is hurting. Venting is primarily taken place by external situations coming to press on the buttons so the respective emotions can come to the fore. For this phase, you can expect certain contexts that will give you plenty of the stimulus of precisely what you most fear. To get those nice little emotions flowing out. And you can expect your reactions to be a little intense, to say the least. Others may react with surprise and astonishment to what’s happening with you, yet only because they’re unlikely to understand where it’s coming from. For these purposes, creative/expressive action may also be used as a form of venting and processing. The painter will paint, the writer will write, and the musician will sing about what they’re going through. Anything that helps put forth, process, and validate, what you are going through, can help.
Venting notwithstanding, for as long as you’re vulnerable to hurtful, sensitive spots being pressed, you’ll be reliving the past successively, on a daily basis – if not falling into it in a more literal sense (as discussed in Stockholm Boomerang). The sour spots are an open wound that still hurts, a wound that controls you and keeps you stuck in the past, figuratively and maybe literally.
In a spiritual sense, the process of venting at this stage is meant to extract the venom – that is to say, the charge, the edge, the sense of abuse, the vitriol, what zings – out of the emotional/spiritual wounds, so they may start to heal and develop scar tissue, so to speak. A scar may never leave your skin. You may always carry on living with the knowledge of what you went through, aware when certain situations remind you of your past. But there comes the point when the pain no longer controls you, and you’re no longer “forced” to react to it. And that’s where healing is ultimately meant to take you: when your past no longer is a burden.
Some healing processes can end up with you becoming completely neutral and unresponsive to the original type of situation that created the original trauma. As you witness a situation, you barely register this was the type of thing that once upon a time made life difficult for you. But it is now truly in the past: you haven’t reacted to it. “Full” healing is when you’re unresponsive to something that was once traumatic. This is where you notice healing was achieved.
Tools
Apart from the aspect of life on its own being a continuous transformative process, at any point along the journey, you may want or need concrete measures to help it along. To shorten the “lifespan” of the trauma and programmed attributes and their impact.
The extent you need help, or help could be beneficial for you, largely depends on the severity of your situation and the point in life you’re at. Worthy of note is that specific behavioral patterns can reach a point where they won’t improve unless you do something to address them. Healing tools and helpers should encompass not only the spiritual but the emotional/mental and physical as well. What follows isn’t an exhaustive list; my intention is to showcase some of the resources available, from a laymen’s perspective of someone who primarily focuses on the spiritual dimension of challenges. Ultimately, one way or the other, you’re the one who’s responsible for your own healing. The mindset here should be “you do what you need to do”. If something helps, then “go for it”.
Apart from the spiritual aspect, there are stages where you might need more conventional therapy methods, depending on where you are emotionally at the time. You’re encouraged to explore therapy and counseling solutions if you think these would be of help, whether or not they involve a spiritual component more explicitly. If you think your mental health situation fits X, you can seek a specialist in X. A specialized therapist can help identify points of trauma, and may conduct therapy to help minimize it, reprogram ingrained associations supporting it, as well as teach healthy coping techniques. A therapist can and should also be a safe space to share and process what you went through, with support and without judgment. In that regard it’s important to find someone with whom you can fundamentally connect. A certified therapist may also direct or suggest medication or other treatments to help tackle some of the physical components of the patterns, such as handling panic, anxiety, and mood stabilization. Various alternatives for reducing distress and anxiety exist, such as CBD oils. Magnetic stimulation techniques may be able to physically help with anxiety, depression, and impulse control – please consult with your therapist when exploring this matter. In general, you’re encouraged to inform and educate yourself, namely about your specific situation and medical condition when applicable, and what possibilities are at your disposal to address it. Here it is highly advisable to bypass any preconceptions and stigma surrounding mental health. You have what you have; the most important thing is to proceed to the part where you cope and handle it in healthy ways.
Modalities of spiritual healing and/or practice can and will be paramount. Spirituality can help bring you balance, be in the now moment, and lend you the tools you need to stand in your sovereignty. When exploring spiritual venues, regardless of their nature and your approach, you want to be focusing in particular on bringing healing to the inner child. It was the child who endured something they couldn’t understand, cope with, defend themselves from, or get out of, and thus they were left traumatized. Essentially, what you’re doing as an adult is going back to your inner child and bringing them the comfort, relief, and validation they’re still missing, something a spiritual approach, in general, can be adept at achieving. In general, the act of expanding your awareness through your own personal work will help make sense of what the child went through, helping you see and make sense of what wasn’t seen before, thus bringing you validation and understanding. Reading and healing past lives will also be helpful because most of the patterns experienced today, namely in dynamics with parents and partners, will stem from previous behaviors and events carrying over from previous lives. Therefore, the healing of those can greatly mitigate the strength and pulling power of dynamics taking place today. It is important to note there comes the point when digging into the past may start getting you diminishing results. This is because past that point it may become more important to bring focus to your current life and present moment. And this is where focusing on your inner child, and providing yourself with validation, come in.
Validation (and its absence) are an absolutely crucial topic. A large extent of what caused the trauma to build up in the first place was not having it validated by others. This is why you’re encouraged to educate yourself about what you went through and how you feel, and share your experiences if and where you feel a safe space to do so. The simple act of speaking about what goes inside, in the context of therapy or otherwise, can and will be helpful. As can be simply recognizing and validating your own experience, which can be achieved even just by reading information online and relating to it, such as with this text. Giving yourself validation is paramount to bring a degree of relief, and begin disassembling what was kept stored within. Further, spending plenty of time and attention on yourself, and engaging in whatever you deem as self-care and self-nurturing, will always and generally be a sound principle, as it’s going to provide you with emotional validation.
Finally, equally as important as the above, is for you not to panic and be patient. It’s almost inevitable to desire immediate and instant relief out of states of intense distress endured for a long time and with no end in sight, and possibly with forms of distress consistently created in others. Even so, remember the paths that created the trauma were very long and very arduous, and so can be their healing. You shouldn’t expect decisive results out of one or two “big” measures (even though these may occur); likewise, don’t expect any given solution to “hit” all the problems, to incorporate all of the answers at once. Even the aspect of spiritual enlightenment isn’t something you “do” or “get” in a specific moment, rather it arrives in spurts and with a timing of its own, and largely as a byproduct of your sustained intentions and efforts poured into yourself.
What you’re primarily aiming for is a trend of improvement: describing a movement that over time generally heads towards a place that’s better than one you were before. What matters is that each of the steps you take may add one more piece of the puzzle, acting as another small step to get you further ahead. be patient but persistent. If something doesn’t help, or someone doesn’t click with you, depending on where/how you are, you may not be able to afford to lean back and say “I tried once and it didn’t work”; you try something new then. Likewise, if you keep assessing your progress in a minutious manner, you may not see results or even think you’re getting worse. Waiting for major breakthroughs will feel similar to staring at the clock waiting for time to pass. What’s important is that you can acknowledge progress when you look back in the long run; even if it’s gradual, slow progress, with many ups and downs along the way. Like enlightenment, healing has its own timing: it happens when it happens, it takes as long as it takes.
Battlefield Relationship
Relationships are going to be prime ground in adulthood for healing to take place. This can apply to any type of relationship, namely friendships, social, professional, etc. But it is the romantic and intimate arena that may assume a unique role in this regard, whenever applicable. Romantic experiences are not “necessary” for healing, strictly speaking. In other words, this isn’t intended as a justification for you to “run after” a relationship. But, if and when relationships do manifest, they may reveal themselves to be crucial for your path and your healing. Romantic relationships can be a realm where a significant portion of healing occurs, if nothing else because it’s in close, sustained interaction with a partner where your emotions will be at their most vulnerable and sensitive. Thus it’s where it will be most likely for those behaviors and patterns, designed to either defend yourself or seek the energy, love, and attention you deep down still lack, to come to the surface.
I won’t mince words here, depending on the extent of the trauma, romantic relationships can be dramatic and devastating. My choice of words for the title means to both lighten something that can often be quite dramatic, while pinpointing how dramatic it may become. A relationship can become a veritable battlefield where the adult’s trauma causes them to engage with their partner with intensity, if not hostility, taking the other person’s love and patience to their breaking points. The adult is operating in a mindset of perpetual tension and distress, and they can fling their energy at the partner systemically and automatically, in a manner that may escape their control. This can be exceptionally painful and difficult to endure for the other person. The possibility of the relationship dissolving is always on the table, out of their exhaustion if nothing else. When happening, this will lead to the fulfillment of the prophecy of abandonment.
That being said, no matter how challenging relationships can be, not all all of them need to be a neverending march toward inevitable disaster. The traumatized adult might fear abandonment and relive their trauma, but that doesn’t mean the existence of said trauma is “meant” to manifest (metaphysically speaking).
As a general guideline, relationships and partners will be loosely divided into two main groups: part of the problem, or part of the solution. The former will be a continuation of the original environment of trauma, whereas the latter will be an opportunity to heal it. But either case will still be a part of the adult’s spiritual process; life is not random but instead, it continually offers you experiences according to the tenets dictated by your life lessons and spiritual challenges. Do keep in mind situations in life aren’t as linear as an explanation in an article online; what follows is purely a general guideline meant to improve your understanding of what types of dynamics you may find yourself in, to best discern how to address them. At the same time, remember it may not be in your power (it usually won’t) to change or affect the nature of the connection someone has with you. If they can only cause more harm than good, chances are this can’t be helped – this can also be true from the partner’s perspective.
Any partner can and will push on your karmic buttons. They can still barge in your space; they can remind you of wounds of old; they can still press on things you find displeasing and unpleasant. However, if from a calm and clear mind you truly want to be with them; if they are fundamentally worth your respect and your commitment; then the challenges you’re facing with them (spiritually, metaphysically) likely aren’t going to be just about your boundaries or your suffering, but fundamentally involve deeper and more sustained forms of spiritual and emotional healing. In other words, it’s essentially a “good” or at least a benevolent experience, not meant to gratuitously inflict more of the same harm and separation that caused the trauma, but rather bringing forth those situations so as to heal them. In this relationship, what might be hurting and binding you, in reality might be there to induce the transformation it takes to heal you over time. The hallmark of this relationship is that, when you look back and assess the experience, much like with the principle for your own healing, you see steady and lasting improvement, that matches the direction of where you spiritually want to go.
In this relationship, the person is necessarily participating with you in the work needed for your healing. For these purposes, it greatly helps you’re in tune with your partner; that they’re at least somewhat understanding and compassionate towards your plight; and with some degree of frequency, you’re able to “snap out” of your own programming and connect with them from the heart. To validate your connection, come clean about mistakes made, assess where the relationship stands, and discern what specific steps should be taken next, if any. The communication channel must always be open, transparent, and honest, no matter what happens. In addition, you must always remember all things you see, hear, and feel, are ultimately not about the other person but a reflection of yourself. There might be bumps in the road in a wild ride in this relationship, but your resolve, honesty, and commitment to healing, are the key aspects that may make it or break it. They’re going to be an indicator signaling to the other person whether you’re serious about your own healing, and you’re serious towards them. This is what will inform the other person’s commitment, letting them know whether there’s hope, or there isn’t.
On the other hand, if the partner is fundamentally unable to understand and/or empathize with your situation, this could mean they fall in the alternative category. This partner may be difficult to reach and communicate with, which means you’re again forced to stuff things inside. They may not be recognizant of their own issues and struggles, which means they can and will resort to their mechanisms of control and defense, and not be able to go beyond them. And this partner may have been chosen through coping and control mechanisms to begin with, which means this may be a relationship created with a person who lacks spiritual connection with you. A partner in these circumstances may not be part of a scenario of healing, but instead, be a direct continuation of the same traumas and disconnection. Thus, they won’t be a bumpy road headed in the right direction, but an old road leading towards where you don’t want to be. While situations in life and human beings may not be black and white, a spiritual connection still can’t be created out of thin air, no matter how much you try to do so. Thus the fundamental nature of the association with this person, in all likelihood, will never change.
Likewise, the same type of principle also applies if you’re in a relationship with someone holding these traumas and facing the prospect of dealing with them. It is always within your choice’s reach whether and how much you choose to endure and take in your plate. But to make such a choice, at the core of your consideration should be whether the person is recognizant of, and owning up to, their own struggle, in practical terms. If they are, there is hope. If they aren’t, then there is only one way the relationship can go.
Spiritual Trial for the Spiritually Attuned
We covered emotional patterns that develop and are exacerbated by a lack of spiritual connection between parents and children. As the name states, it is a lack of connection that is spiritual in nature. Thus, you necessarily have to feel it on a spiritual level, with “your” spiritual. This means that, even as a child, you needed to have brought with you into this lifetime a level of spiritual advancement and sensitivity even to allow you to feel this lack in the first place.
It is a trope that those who are more spiritually developed are often born and brought up in dysfunctional, toxic families. This certainly can be a valid assertion for the topics we’ve addressed. Here, the child may even have certain types of metaphysical gifts: they’ll be empaths, intuitives, mediums, psychics, channels, healers, or leaders/teachers; yet these aren’t explored and remain untapped due to the chaotic and dissonant nature of their upbringing, or they receive criticism if they do manifest. Still, within the scope of this explanation, the importance of what kind of spiritual affinities the child brought exactly, if any, is relative. The point that matters the most is that the child necessarily, with 100% certainty, came with a level of spiritual sensitivity that allowed them to feel the absence of connection with the adults, intensifying all of the experience. They’ve brought a degree of Light that would uncover that lack of connection, pushing it front and center, regardless of how and if that Light might manifest. The child (usually) isn’t going to say “mommy, I feel a lot of Light”. Light just is. Light illuminates and makes clear. And you feel what the Light shows and exposes in your skin, perhaps even before your mind can realize it, let alone make sense of it. This type of feeling happens with every child who experiences being a spiritual hostage in their own family.
The child’s spiritual sensitivity is, in nature, a blessing. It’s just that it’s also somewhat of a curse in this case because it makes the trauma possible. That sensitivity was the element intensifying all of the disrespect, invalidation, abandonment, judgment, control, and/or abuse. The Light’s contrast possibly exacerbated these things, making their toxicity much more evident, intense, and violent. This same spiritual acuity is also why the person can hold the disconcerting perception as an adult they’re both right and wrong: they hold a level of intuition and sensitivity that lets them intuitively see how things are, and feel the truth of situations; yet their trauma/imbalance (based on the same acuity) can also skewer their perceptions and exaggerate their reactions, at the same time. This fundamental intuitive insight also makes invalidation worse to bear: what’s evident to you may not even be seen by others; a sensation that on its own can already be disconcerting and infuriating, creating anger. Originally this child would have already been wise “beyond their ears”, as they often say, and for that readong they would have been prone to react poorly even to be treated like a child! Let alone being disrespected, controlled, neglected, or abused.
Why is the child born in these circumstances? Because in this lifetime, they brought their truth within and are meant to embrace it. With the Light of that truth they’re meant to purge and heal misplaced choices, absence of connection, and the choices and behaviors that keep those things in place, and their Light hidden. They’re meant to heal these things in themselves, while also bringing a degree of Light to their own families, and by extension, to planet Earth at large. And if the child has any kind of spiritual gift, then they’re likely meant to embrace it as well. Undoubtedly the child is going to share karmic chords with their parents: stories control, neglect, abuse, abuse of trust, abandonment, and any other forms of separation that may apply, would have been shared as mutually inflicted experiences in past lives between the one who’s the child and those who are the parents, these patterns replicated in this lifetime within the family setting. And the child will be at a point in their spiritual journey where they’re ready and willing to discard those coats of behaviors and beliefs, which belittle, create separation, and enact forms of control, for others and for themselves, accumulated throughout their experience on Earth. This lifetime is one of shedding those beliefs, and the experience of lack of connection and of truth they create.
The child is meant to interrupt family lineages of abuse, toxicity, and the continuation of creation of relationships that have lack of connection. They’re also meant to use, accept, and learn about any gifts they may have. Educating oneself isn’t just about coping with difficulty, it’s also about getting to a point where one can realize and later utilize any gifts and affinities they might have. The child may ultimately even use their gifts and personal experience to heal and teach others.
What Happens With My Family?
In general, I’m reluctant to use a conciliatory tone when describing the spiritual end game for those involved, namely between child and parents. Why? Because that’s not the fundamental purpose of this type of situation. We could always pretend it is! We could pretend the happy ending is a family-friendly get-together where everyone is seen partying and singing kumbaya together, forever after. But that may not be what healing will look like for your situation. And you know what? That’s still spiritually appropriate. What point is there in trying to paint a picture that ultimately doesn’t serve all of the parties involved? The purpose of true healing, like true love, like true support, is unconditional: it takes you where it takes you.
You’re going to be bound to your family by karmic chords, for a time. It warrants no contemplation which part is yours to bear and which is theirs; the only thing that matters, the only one, is that these chords are being dissolved on your end through the healing induced by your life story, and your spiritual work in handling it. That’s the only thing you’re tasked with focusing on; that’s your burden to bear. And that’s enough already.
For as long as you’re karmically bound to the individuals of your family, you’ll have to deal and cope. You’re going to experience distress and suffering in their proximity, if not at their hands. You may continue to gravitate around and towards them, sometimes repeatedly. And they may still significantly affect you and hold power over you, one way or another, even if you don’t want to. But at some point, through the course of your healing, it is inevitable that these connections gradually, eventually, become de-charged, de-escalated, defused, and grow to become more neutral.
In a state of healing – that is to say, any state that is in equilibrium/alignment with the Light and therefore reflecting It – when there’s no spiritual connection between two individuals, there simply isn’t going to be an association between them. The two won’t gravitate toward each other. So as you heal and approach the Light – your Light – through your spiritual work, your practical reality will always tend to start to shift and adjust to accommodate and reflect that Light. If not right away, if not quickly, if not obviously, then eventually. At some point. But progress is inexorable.
Each case is its own case. As you’re embarking on your healing process, your spiritual entourage, the ones who continually supported you throughout your journey and this lifetime, and who carefully crafted this life story with you, will know what to do. They’ll know what will best fit your spiritual intentions and greatest purpose. Still, in general, and regardless of format, the result of any process of healing is a state of healing. And in such a state the same individuals might still be there, the same relationships might still exist on paper; but they’ll lose their power over you. The connections will lose their emotional charge, their relevance, and the capacity to influence you and how you feel against your choice. In other words, the tone of the relationships will become neutral, by fading in importance. And you become free from them.
Over time, as you clear the karmic chords with those with whom they are shared, you’ll understand that any guilt and sense of obligation towards them are karmic. In other words, they are false. As with any karmic belief, they are held under false premises, as opposed to corresponding to legitimacy/truth. And with your process of healing, you’ll eventually learn, and behave accordingly, that you’re not responsible for your family’s happiness. You’ll learn that dealing with their own rejection, their expectations being frustrated, and their view of the world not being validated, is their sole responsibility. Not yours.
One of the things you’re doing as you heal, is detaching from a misplaced sense of responsibility towards those entities, souls, and individuals you’re involved with. You’re spiritually detaching from old bonds of enmeshment, karma, and mutual dependency. And when there isn’t a spiritual connection underneath, then spiritually you’re saying goodbye.
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