The Ideal Family
Wounding Families
The Child's First Loves -- Mother and Father
The Confused Gay
Marriage with Children--the Opiate of the Masses
We Marry our Parents
The Ruse of Romantic Love
When the Honeymoon is Over
Marred Life
We Have a Baby
We Destroy our Children as They Carry our Baggage
Gay and Married with Children
The Parental Ideal
The ideal family
Ideally the family fosters the child’s unique personality, and aligns him with his or her true self. This prepares the child to go into the world with an identity consonant with his nature and gifts. True to himself, the child, now adult can lead a purposeful, constructive life expressive of his talents. A well-parented child will not exploit the earth’s resources or other people to compensate for the despair churning within him for his interior is consonant. This child now adult will honor life in all its forms, and contribute to life evolving into consciousness. He is a building block of an enlightened future.
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Wounding families
Unfortunately, when wounded people form families and become parents, the family becomes not a building block for its members, but a cell block – a prison. Children are condemned for at least 18 years to submit to its tyranny – the unresolved needs, expectations, and projections of unenlightened parents. Children may become so habituated to this family’s system of distortion, with a denied unconscious reality festering below the surface, that life outside its walls seems threatening, unreal, and impossible. Besides, within the mix of these distortions is what the child has come to equate with love. These parents are not all bad, and at times are quite supportive. These highly complex dynamics are too much for a child to sort out.
As a young adult, any attempt a son or daughter makes to escape this cult of family and to individuate is squashed by internal censors or external threats. The risks of freedom, the demands of personal responsibility, and the agony of self-reflection never occur to these “inmates” of the family as a real or rewarding possibility. It is easier to submit to a tyranny that is familiar, than escape and risk the most feared punishment for the child – parental abandonment and social exile.
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The child’s first loves – mother and father
The child’s first loves are mother and father. The child has a profound connection to these primary caregivers for they are his first deep connection to life – his guides into existence and reality. In fact, parents are God to the child. The quality, limits, and perversity of the love of these primary, god-like figures dominates the emotional tone of the child’s adult “love” attachments.
Whatever consistent nurture we received from our parents, we carry forward into adulthood. Whatever damage we endured, we carry forward as well. And until this damage is grieved and love is freed of the bonds of the past, we will always “marry our parents“.
To the extent that parents love directly from their sacred selves, and not through the murky lens of unresolved traumas from their own past, the child feels secure and indeed is. They can witness the child’s unique identity, including the child’s unique gender, and when gay, his or her homosexual capacity, with unconditional love. These parents have no hidden agenda for the child to fulfill. The child is taught to maneuver into the world with confidence because behind him are his enlightened supporters, mother and father. However, healthy parents are extremely rare.
If parents have not resolved their childhood conflicts, sadly the norm, these parents “love” with conditions and expectations. The child exists to love the parents and must meet the parents’ unmet needs from the past if “nurture” is to continue. The parent/child relationship is reversed -- needy parents make inappropriate emotional demands on the child. The child is orphaned emotionally for there are no enlightened caregivers to guide him into the riches of his identity – and for gays, into the value of his or her homosexuality. The child is wounded, and enters adulthood compromised.
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All chidlren are born rare, true and beautiful.
However some children, because of their variant orientation or their spirited, independent nature -- their originality -- stand out and are considered suspect by the norm's demand for conformity. These children face a confusing situation when confronted with the limits of their compromised and conventional parents. Who is true -- me and my different nature or them, my god-like parents. This is a conundrum for a child.
Certainly, the gay child needs to be seen and valued for his or her homosexuality or this child will enter life uncertain of his or her right to exist. If not endorsed by parents, the gay child will wonder why he wasn’t loved fully. The child asks, Is it because I am different – because I’m not like the others? In truth, it has nothing to do with the child’s orientation, but all to do with the limits of his first loves, his parents. These parents fail to love their heterosexual children fully as well. But the gay child does feel a particular shunning from conventional parents in a homophobic world.
It takes courage and fortitude for the gay adult to weed out this conundrum – intellectually the adult gay knows he wasn’t fully accepted because of his parents’ and society’s limits and not because of him. But from the child’s perspective, it is hard to surmise that god-like parents could possibly be wrong in their assessment of him -- and that their love was withheld for a good reason. The child’s answer is to blame himself – not his caregivers. The child thinks I am bad, defective, and unworthy – how could my parents, who wield such power and have such stature in my life, be wrong? The seeds of self-doubt and homophobia are planted early and deep and by the family.
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Marriage with children – the opiate of the masses
The easiest and most socially acceptable way to avoid self-knowing and the anguish that goes with enlightenment is to marry and have children. It isn’t religion that is the opiate of the masses, of even drugs or alcohol, as prevalent and numbing as they may be. The most common drug the masses turn to in order to alleviate the anxiety of introspection is marriage with children. And if marriage isn’t possible, then people have children anyway out of wedlock. This is all a vain attempt to obliterate our traumatic past -- as we decimate the child before us. We hope to love our children better than we were loved and some progress is made. But without a resolved unconscious, its roiling repressed matter will have its say.
As good as any a drug, addiction, or dissociative religion, having children is sure way to avoid our interior life and its hardships as we project unwanted material onto our offspring.
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We marry our parents
Until our traumas from childhood are resolved, we will “marry” our parents through surrogates.
As long as the damning voices of mother and father, leftover from childhood, remain unconscious, they will secretly dominate our psyches as ruling introjected voices. And the emotional limits of our parents will be our template for love in our adult lives. We will seek out partners who replicate in exact emotional detail what is most troubling in our parents. This is a blind attempt to resolve with our partner what wounded us so deeply in childhood.
We will try to get the love, nurture, and care from other adults that we so desperately needed from our parents as children. We will misuse “love”, romance, and marriage to heal our childhood wounds. We will also pick partners who replicate the abandonment, violence, and abuse we endured in childhood in an attempt to conquer the pain endured without confronting the authors of this primary affront – so often our parents.
Looking to other adults to resolve our child’s despair through “love” or violence is an exercise in futility. Our wounded child can only be healed by us, not through unconscious relationship with others. Only by going within, holding our child in our own care, and establishing a relationship with ourselves, will we heal our inner child. It is our adult responsibility to soothe this neglected little one with our love and understand and calm his need for violence and revenge.
We will date, obsess over, fight with, marry and divorce our parents until we resolve the conflicts that originated in childhood under their care. Our lovers will always replicate the wounds perpetrated by our first loves, mother and father, until we deal with these betrayals directly, bringing our painful childhood reality to consciousness and grieving it within the sanctity our own psyche. Until we become our own authority, an individuated adult, our parents are the template of love to come.
Two halves do not make a whole in relationships. Healthy couples do not seek meaning for empty lives by living vicariously through another. They do not seek salvation through their partner’s strengths, nor find opportunities for revenge through their partner’s weaknesses. Nor do they attempt to resolve their wounds by projecting them onto the other for “healing”.
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The ruse of romantic love
Romantic love is a ruse seldom appraised for its true meaning. This seeming adult activity is actually the work of immaturity, the yearnings of a wounded child who is seeking a parent – not a partner. Acting through an adult form, we fall under the spell of romance and find the perfect “parent”, not partner, to take care of our wounded child within us. Or we project our wounded child onto the other, hoping to heal our wounds in him, while we ignore the aching child crying for our attention within us. Either way, we use romantic love to avoid our adult responsibility of healing and parenting our own wounded inner child.
Romance leading to marriage is intoxicating for it is the blissful illusion that our child has found the perfect parent at last. Fuelled by sexual desire and the glow of romantic fantasy of rescue, we call it love. But it is not love but delusion. Romance does not affirm life, but is actually a cult of death. In romance, our wounded child within, who legitimately needs our witness, remains untended, starving for affection, recognition, and care. What will heal our inner child is grieving our wretched past -- not candle-lit dinners with kisses – or sex, degenerating into perversion and conflict.
Even when romance is mutual and both partners buy the illusion of childhood bliss regained, reality hits eventually. We realize that this romantic idol is not the parent we need, nor will healing the other make up for what was missing in our past. Our suffering is real, but our disappointing new lover is not to blame. It is our lonely child, hurt long ago and who remains untended, who is the source of our agony.
To stay in romance’s twilight, we must refuse at all costs to face the bleak reality of the broken, desperate child within us who remains un-parented. If empty feelings and conflict creep into our fantasy relationship, we may decide to break up and divorce with blame and tears only to try again with someone new. But our attempts are futile. Another lover will not redeem our childhood. No one but us can rescue the child who was not seen as a treasure, but as an embarrassment, a nuisance, a disappointment. Only we can rescue ourselves with our own love.
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When the honeymoon ends and romance wanes, reality hits us like a cold shower. If we refuse to face the traumatic source of our pain that this most recent loss replicates, our unfulfilled needs from childhood, we seek the fault in our partner or blame some unnamed defect in ourselves that picks the “wrong” one. We may even blame cruel fate. No matter who we blame, the perfect lover we hoped would love us unconditionally into an enchanted wonderland and redeemed childhood is a disappointment. The one we thought had come at last to rescue us from our locked tower of distress, from the depression and despair of the abandoned and isolated child who we deny, does not save us. In fact, our flawed partner turned out to be a lost child, too, who we label unavailable for whatever reasons we can conjure up. He or she was the “wrong” one.
Blame, bickering and disappointment erupt. There may be infidelity, emotional or sexual to justify breaking up. There are recriminations on both sides, sighting endless examples of how we have been betrayed. All these examples are symptomatic of a deeper and more profound betrayal of long ago – but these betrayers, our parents, we will never name.
Remaining unconscious, we will always protect mother and father, and blame their surrogates instead. We will hold accountable the ones we date and marry, the un-evolved partners we choose unconsciously to match the limits of our parents and our own denial. Sadly, our partners suffer from the same emotional malady that we do, unresolved yet denied traumas from childhood, and blame us in return.
So, we dump this “prince/princess charming” turned “frog” for another, recreating another round of paradise in dissociated bliss until once again, reality hits – this is not the “perfect parent” to save us. We may realize no one will be the “magic one” we seek, and we’re not getting any younger. We assess our situation as time, reality, and the biological clock closes in on us. Maybe it’s time to settle down … or just settle.
With the illusory “romance phase” ending, we face the sinking feeling that one more romance won’t work. We realize that no one out there will do any better than the one we’ve got and are used to. We could get honest with this reality and begin a long and painful healing process, but we have another card to play, another approach to our despair -- marriage.
We unconsciously realize that a depressed marriage with our known and compromised partner is better than the uncertainty of what is probably not out there anyway – a “perfect partner”. We hope and pray that a formal, socially supported relationship, a marriage with vows before God and family will solve what ails us. It will certainly please mother and father, and maybe we’ll get their unconditional love at last.
We settle into resignation and feign excitement as we marry. And there is lots of enthusiasm within the family. We receive lavish gifts, a public ceremony in which we star, and support that our aching child always yearned for but never received. Maybe this will work -- this marriage of lost souls.
We must never admit the emotional gamble we’re taking, as we decide to “take the plunge” and marry. We hope that conforming to the rules of the family and society and its religions will make up for the failed illusions of romance. We hope that the ache that still smolders within us as a vague uneasiness will go away once we say “I do”. We equate our jitters to the major commitment and life change we’re making. We hope that this socially sanctioned bond with public vows will do the trick and quiet our nerves at last. We secretly pray that “wedded bliss” will magically solve our uneasiness. We hope this wedding that causes such anxiety in our stomachs, yet garners such approval, even tears of joy in our parents, will be the answer that will save us at last.
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Married life
For a while, the marriage works. We adjust to the demands of living with our spouse and we play house. We receive oceans of approval from our family, friends, and the norm. We also receive material gifts from toasters to tax breaks just because we are married. We move into our first home. There’s much to do – and meals to prepare, even a steady sex life filled with fantasy that keeps our minds occupied.
But one day, if we’re at all in touch with our souls, an empty feeling creeps in that we can’t deny. The marriage isn’t “doing it” – it’s starting to get stale. After a certain amount of time, we realize that marriage with our spouse is not the antidote for the despair that we refuse to name – childhood anguish.
Where to turn – a divorce, another partner, an affair? But there’s great social, religious, and family pressure to stay married. Every relationship needs “adjustments” and compromise. “Relationships take work”, as the adage goes. Denial takes more work.
There seems to be no escape. We remember our single days and the loneliness we felt and the desperation that began to color our dating. We realize we must endure and stay married. A repeat of single-life and dating is untenable. Introspection that entails individual loneliness, and the pain of healing, not to mention the social opprobrium reserved for those who individuate are too painful to face. We compromise to assure our good standing in the family and among the norm. We adjust to the sad reality that the promise of marriage and its prospects of rescue have faded into the mists or unreality. What to do?
We are caught with no where to turn. The marriage is empty -- yet we have been compromised for so long that telling the truth is alien. We could go to therapy, but instinctively we realize that it might begin to unravel a house of cards we have carefully built, and lived in satisfactorily if awkwardly since our earliest moments. Where to turn? We look at other married couples and gather there is a way to return “excitement” to a troubled marriage. We decide to have a child.
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We have a baby
Once we sense that our marriage isn’t really “working” (i.e. resolving the pain buried in our unconscious), we need another drug -- and a stiffer dosage. When romance with our spouses is a sad disappointment and our “savior lover” spouse fails us (a needy child himself), we need to find a new drug to fuel our fantasies of rescue, and bolster our denial of unspoken inner dismay. We seek a new way to distract, deny, and project our buried feelings. We grab at the next socially rewarded way to avoid the arduous work of self-knowing – we have children.
With a child, the couple has a new object to project unconscious hopes of rescue and denied rage. Parents use the child as an emotional outlet – to carry the brunt of their pent up anger and self-hatred, and also fulfill unrealized dreams and capacities. This misuse of the child by parents is totally socially acceptable and unquestioned. There’s certainly no law against such punishing abuse because it’s the norm. Every one does it. With blatant and potent projection going on, the couple can avoid feeling and healing the real source of uneasiness in their lives – their own unresolved childhood dilemma.
It’s heartbreaking and maddening to see that people need a license to drive a car, but to engage in the most profound and complex act of all, having and raising a child, no license or thought is required. If you can have sex, you can have a baby … or as many babies as you please, despite the emotional inadequacy of parents to meet the actual needs of the child and not inflict harm. Any one can have a baby – no questions asked. This is a cultural crime against the child. A child has no rights within the family or in society nor the ability to retort. Unfortunately, the ravaged and denied child will have a voice later in life and exact revenge in assorted ways.
The honest way to solve the turmoil within this married couple would be to separate, to stand alone and apart in order to nurture the child within each spouse individually. But this would require not only dissolution of the marriage, but a major break from the family system and its approval and rewards. Deep reflection and healing requires solitude and a nurtured relationship with one’s own self. But this path is too strenuous for most. Instead of healing our inner child, we have a baby and start a new dysfunctional generation. Our chance to become a universal person fades, as we join the tribe more completely.
At this “good news”, the family gives a nod of approval and breathes a sigh of relief. Once a couple has children, they will never tell the truth about the family crimes – but instead replicate this abuse themselves. Soon these new parents will be complicit with the family’s transgressions, committing themselves what was done to them. Unfortunately, we will always replicate in some form what was done to us on our own children until we heal. Once parents inflict the crimes done to them on their own children, they will find it very difficult to blame their parents for the very crimes they’re now guilty of perpetrating on this new generation.
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We destroy our children as they carry our baggage
When it becomes clear that marriage will not bring us peace, we must find a new way to unload our emotional baggage. We turn to the most easily misused and most socially acceptable way to avoid feeling the pain of our childhood -- we have children of our own.
Where spouses could fight back, our children can’t. Their innocence and complete dependency on us make them much easier victims than our adult partners. We can easily project our hopes for rescue and our denied rage onto our kids. Entitled parents assume that children belong to them to use for their own purposes – and society never blinks an eye when a father or mother spanks or inflicts any other expressions of rage or demands any form of “love” from a child. It is the parents’ right to use the child as they see fit.
Our children carry the burdens we shirk. We act out our denied rage at our parents on these innocent beings. When they have demands of their own, we are irritated. They live under our care, and at our mercy, just as we lived under the tyranny of our own all-powerful parents. Now the tables are turned – it’s time for payback. Our anger finally has a safe outlet – and mother and father who deserve our wrath remain idealized.
Unconsciously we hope and pray that this new life will fill our emptiness, resolve the ache we sense just below the surface, but vehemently deny, and fill our lives with meaning that eludes our every turn. We hope this child will save the child within that was desecrated long ago.
With our parents’ approval and pressure, we have children and begin to commit the crimes that were committed against us. Once we as parents fail our child, we collude with the crimes of our ancestors and perpetuated on our child what was done to us. Now to indict our parents, we now must indict ourselves. It is too painful for most to admit that we have inflicted the crimes done to us in some variation on our own children. We vowed to do better and in some ways have, yet if we’re honest, we see how we have failed. Tragically, we have created another abused generation who -- unless they break the cycle and most don’t -- will abuse others including their children.
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Gay & married with children
Gays deserve the same civil rights that other citizens enjoy, including the right to marry and raise children. However, as these rights become established, gays must become conscious of their motives for marriage and child rearing. Straight people ought to do the same soul searching, but seldom do, since marriage with children is an unquestioned entitlement for heterosexual couples.
Most couples, gay or straight, fail to do the preparatory soul searching necessary to be a true parent. Having children goes beyond a civil right -- and needs to be addressed as a profound responsibility from a psychologically and spiritually. Are my childhood traumas resolved? Thius is the only true criteria for having a child. Anything less than this rigorous investigation indicts the parent as an abuser.
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The Parental Ideal
Anyone who has healed his or her own childhood trauma would be an ideal parent. Anyone who has parented himself into his own care will not look to the child for rescue or as an outlet for repressed rage. Healed of the past, a parent will not seek the love and nurture he missed in his own childhood from this new life in his care. Healed of the past, a parent is capable of consistent love, witness, and reassurance to meet the needs of the child who is first encountering the uncertainties of life outside the womb.
Even a pregnant woman must be enlightened. An anxious mother inflicts her emotional turmoil on the fetus and maternal abuse has begun. And an absent or neglectful father adds to mother’s stress, which is then translated to the unborn child as well.
We must parent consciously. Our own history must be understood and integrated, or we will be tempted to avenge our past on our children. Sadly, most straight people, including single mothers, have children with a casual air of cultural entitlement and family encouragement, giving little thought to unconscious motives, or what is truly needed to parent successfully, not to mention casual parenting’s great potential to inflict harm. Rarely do parents inspect the painful neglect they suffered at the hands of their own parents, but instead transfer this unresolved pain onto the next generation.
Gays having children, a right they deserve, must be wary of the great temptation to avoid the difficult work of healing their childhood tragedy before they simply transfer these wounds onto the next generation. Rather than feel the pain of ancestral abuse, more often than not, parents, gay or straight, simply pass it on to their children.
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