January 11, 2004

Why am I the way I am? – A three part series

Part 1 – How Emotional Wounding Happens

OK, this is not a “happy” topic to begin a new year; however, it is one which is applicable to anyone old enough to read this newsletter. The end of a year is often a time of reflection about peace and humanity although probably not enough thought or action is devoted to either. I think that the more we dwell on peace and humanity the better off we are individually and as a species, and most of us (including me) probably don’t spend enough time and effort doing so. Why?

As I usually do as of late I speak for myself, and if what I write generalizes to you or someone you know, then may you discern something of value from it; otherwise, I honor you for your enlightenment. Why don’t I practice peace and humanity more than I do? It is because I am emotionally wounded, and my wounds block me from being more present to peace and humanity. How did I get wounded in the first place?

It occurred a long time ago in terms of this life’s tenure; in fact, it began when I was a young child. Something happened that caused me to conclude that the love I received from others was conditional. It had to be earned; I could not depend on receiving love as a matter of the due course of life. I learned that I did not “deserve” love until certain conditions were met. Older, significant people in my life, consciously or unconsciously, used two methods either individually or together, to “structure” the conditions, the fulfillment of which, were necessary for me to be “awarded” love.

The first (because it was used before I had the ability to understand language) was physical. Physical “conditioning” (no, not exercise) is easy to use on a small child for he is weak and essentially helpless. If I didn’t do what was required of me, I was spanked, restrained, slapped, isolated, and otherwise shown that to receive “love” I needed to adapt whatever behavior was required of me.

I do not intend to portray the people in my life at that time as cruel or abusive. They were not. Probably in most respects I was not physically conditioned more than was typical growing up in the USA at the time that I did. I was probably very much loved by my parents as well.

The second method was verbal conditioning. Once I began to verbalize and understand speech, verbal conditioning was easier and less strenuous. Now, when I did not do what was expected of me, I was yelled at, berated, degraded, shamed, and generally made to feel unworthy until I adapted whatever behavior was required of me. Once again, I do not think the treatment I received was atypical or excessive for the times.

Often, both methods were employed simultaneously to doubly reinforce the desirability of certain behaviors. This may sound a little too clinical, but the language makes it easier to understand how emotional wounding occurs from the subtle to the absurd. The clinical nature of conditional love is rooted in a body of knowledge called learning theory. Learning theory is a set of “rules” that predict how we learn. Those doing the “teaching” do not have to know learning theory in order to use it; the theory was derived from observation so it is descriptive in nature, not instructive. Here are two basic principles of learning theory that are relevant to emotional wounding (which I will get back to shortly):

1. The primary “unit” of learning theory is the stimulus-response reflex (also called a “conditioned response” – hmm?). Here is how it works. You are an adult and I am a child. I enjoy making an odd slurping noise. You find my slurping irritating so you tell me to quit, but I don’t and continue to slurp because I like it – it is fun. There is no stimulus-response reflex – yet. You tell me to quit a few more times, but I don’t. Your irritation grows and finally you tell me that I sound like an idiot and that I am stupid. Now you may have my attention – I don’t want to be thought of as an idiot (whatever that may be – I am not sure, but it couldn’t be good from your tone of voice) yet, slurping is sure fun; OK, I will chance being thought of as an idiot and make one more slurp.

Out of a cloudless sky comes a thunderbolt in the form of the palm of your hand, and I get slapped up the side of my head. It hurts. Now a response has occurred that gets my attention. My slurp (stimulus) elicited a slap (response). If the response was powerful enough (pain in this case), the reflex is established. If the response was not powerful enough but painful, a few more occurrences (“trials,” social scientists call them), and the response is eventually established. Here is the key: to set up the reflex, the response must be more powerful than the benefit of the stimulus. Slurping is now not worth the pain of a slap plus being judged as an idiot. Slurping stops and “love” results albeit very conditionally. Conditional love is better than no love at all especially if it means that I will not be hurt, physically and/or emotionally.

The only problem is that I didn’t understand why slurping brings pain; it just does. Congratulations, I just experienced an emotional wound. It may not seem like a big deal, but let’s look at the principle of generalization.

2. I did not simply learn that slurping brings pain. I “generalized” that not adapting to demands made by someone bigger and stronger than me will result in a loss of acceptance and/or the experience of pain.

The small “slurping” wound now becomes gaping and can stay unhealed for the rest of my life. Although the conditioning was a combination of physical and verbal, the wound itself was emotional and became submerged in my psyche, out of sight, and after a while, not even conscious to me. The resulting stimulus-response reflex is alive and well but below the threshold of realization. The reflex has taken over. I do not even have to think about it. The reflex is automatic. I have not learned to be a “good” boy; I have learned to not be a “bad” boy; there is huge difference. Think about it.

Thanks for sticking with me through this weighty topic. It is not important to remember the detail. What is important to me is that emotional wounding happens to everyone no matter how loving and benevolent were our parents and significant others in our lives. Some of us are more deeply wounded than others, but we are all wounded, and we carry these wounds through childhood and adolescence into adulthood.

The wounds form the basis for judgment, ego, fear, and all of the heavy emotions that we experience. Much of my waking time was spent using strategies and tactics that I learned in order to earn love as a result of emotional wounding.

Lest you are somewhat put off with the word “love” as applied to people with whom you are not close such as managers, co-workers, and casual friends, simply substitute “acceptance” for love.

Acceptance is really the same thing. As I grew older, these strategies and tactics became more sophisticated and complex, yet way in the background, out of sight, is the kid who slurped. My strategies and tactics help me to stay “safe” from being rejected and thus unloved or unaccepted. Make no mistake in thinking that emotional wounding does not occur and that it is not the greatest block to spiritual evolution and living life harmoniously, for it truly is.

Another view of emotional wounding is described in Chapter 8 – Primal Abandonment in my book A Tao Of God. The chapter is included at this end of this Modest Proposal should you wish another description.

It was important for me to understand how my wounds were created (the stimulus-response reflex and generalization) so that I could eventually learn to heal them – and that is the subject of next month’s Modest Proposal: Part 2 – How to Heal Emotional Wounds. My proposal to you is this: think about how you were emotionally wounded and how those wounds, healed or not, affect your life today. Why are you the way you are?

May you discern with compassion…

Ron McCray

source site: click here

posted with author's permission

A Modest Proposal

Uncommon thinking about common experiences
inspired by a quote attributed to Albert Einstein:
“Today’s problems cannot be solved at the same
level of thinking that created them.”

February 11, 2004

Why am I the way I am? – A three part series

Part 2 – How to Heal Emotional Wounds

Emotional healing is undoubtedly one of the most difficult undertakings in life. It is the gateway to evolving a life that is harmonious and fulfilling. It is the antidote to fear. With such a wonderful payoff, why did I wait so long to start it, and why do so many people never start at all?

In Part 1 of this series, How Emotional Wounding Happens, I used conventional learning theory to describe how emotional wounding takes place. In short, stimulus response reflexes, or conditioned responses, were created as I attempted to learn how to earn love in the face of discovering that I would not always be treated lovingly.

Love of self, God, and the Universe is the most important need of humanity, exceeding by far the physical and material desires which we find ourselves chasing. The importance of the reflexes or responses born of not being loved is that every one of us has them in the form of emotional wounds. They are an inevitable consequence of being born and maturing into the times that humanity has experienced for millions of years. This is what I have discovered, and it is what I believe with every cell of my being.

I did not begin to heal my emotional wounds until after I was fifty. First, I did not know that I was emotionally wounded, and after I discovered that I was, I did not know HOW to heal. It took me several years to learn how.

Second, even after I learned a process for healing, the prospect of having to use the process to heal was not inviting. It required revisiting and reliving events in my life that I did not wish to re-experience. Third, it was, and continues to be, difficult to determine what I need to heal – to remember those events that actually led to the reflexes and responses so that I could release the cause of the wounds and heal them.

Wounding happens. Why then do the wounds simply not heal as a matter of time as do wounds to my physical body? If you have had a wound that got infected, even a small scratch, you know that it will not heal until it is treated.

Another example is a scab that gets “picked” until it comes off to reveal the raw flesh underneath. I realize that these are not pleasant images, and neither are emotional wounds. It is just that emotional wounds are not visible. I only know the consequences of them remaining unhealed, the “symptoms” of the wounds, such as anger, fear, hate, depression, sadness, unhappiness, dissatisfaction, helplessness – the list is quite long.

As I am fond of saying, emotional healing is simple; it just isn’t easy for most folks including me. An emotional wound stays raw and unhealed until I choose to undertake the healing process. There are many such processes; I do not know the “best” one, and in fact, am not sure there is a best one for different processes appeal to different people. I describe one in my book, A Tao Of God. One chapter summarizes the process, and it appears at the end of this commentary. So if you are interested, take a look, but before you do, I would like to talk about the principles involved in healing emotional wounds.

“Healing,” in my experience, is a word that is too broadly applied. The context in which I use healing is relieving symptoms. Healing may also cure an emotional wound, and it may not, for curing is the elimination of the causes of symptoms, not just their relief. For example, if I have a headache (symptom), and I take an analgesic, then the headache’s pain will be masked. That is healing, and the pain may become evident again, or the causes for the headache may be eliminated by my body, and I am cured.

If the pain returns, then I should try to determine the cause of the pain so that I may cure it. It may be that the prescription for my glasses is no longer correct, and I need new glasses to eliminate the strain on my eyes that is causing headaches. That would most definitely be a cure. Treating the symptoms alone may result in temporary healing while masking a serious cause. I once had an acute tooth pain, and my dentist told me to take several aspirin daily until it went away. I did as he suggested and ended up with a duodenal ulcer from taking too many aspirin.

So when I reference “healing,” I am really referring to treating symptoms so that the deeper work of curing can be done. Just like in the Emergency Room of a hospital, the symptoms of trauma are treated first, and then the underlying causes are addressed once the patient is “stable.” Emotional healing can relieve my emotional pain so that I can begin the work of curing my emotional wound. Part 3 of this series deals with scars left by emotional healing that enable me to eventually affect a cure. Let’s take a look at the basic principals of emotional healing.

1. Locate the wound.
2. Clean the wound.
3. Apply a bandage and allow it to heal over to form a scar.

Sounds like treating a physical wound, doesn’t it? Well, the principles are the same. I believe that any process for healing an emotional wound follows these three steps in one fashion or another.

How do I identify that I have a wound? If I am open and aware, it is easy to simply identify my greatest judgments of myself and others for they are all rooted in emotional wounds. Scratch a judgment, find an emotional wound. I describe the judgment, for example, “people do not listen to what I say.” I know this is a judgment because I have heavy emotions around it: I may feel angry at the “non-listeners,” I may think I have nothing of merit to say, I may feel ignored and shut out, or I may think the “non-listeners” are too stupid to understand me. There are lots of choices.

Locating the wound is about understanding how the wound originated. The absolute best way is to be able to remember the precise origin of the wound. How old was I? Where was I? Who else was there? What happened to initiate a conditioned reflex designed to protect me and/or to earn me love? Not everyone can initially remember this time, the “primal abandonment” – the moment when we learn that love must be earned which created the potential that we may not be able to earn it. This is the origin of fear: when I realized that I may not be loved.

Even if someone cannot remember the moment of primal abandonment, if he goes back in his memory to the earliest recollection of experiencing the judgment, that is a great start. Healing that moment may clear the way to remember further back, closer to the primal abandonment events.

The crucial thing is to start, where I start is secondary. This is locating the wound. For example, let’s take a “stimulus-response reflex” (see part 1 of this series) that resulted in an emotional wound. It manifests as my reluctance to speak my truth or perhaps to not speak at all.

I have something to say but the fear of not being accepted/loved because of speaking up keeps me mute or relegates me to agreeing with what others say even though I do not concur. When I trace this reflex back to its origin, I find that my parents practiced the principle of “children should be seen, not heard,” and punished me whenever I did speak up. It did not take long for the reflex “to not speak up” to become one of my emotional wounds that still exists as an adult.

Cleaning the wound is next. When I clean a physical wound, I remove any dirt or foreign material that is in the wound and apply an antiseptic to kill harmful bacteria. When I clean an emotional wound, I must remove the effects of the event that created the wound. How does this work? The debris in an emotional wound is the emotion that I experienced when I got wounded. The emotion could be frustration, shock, anger, disappointment, shame – there are many, and they all have their basis in fear.

To remove these emotions, I must return in my mind to the moment when the wound was created. I must relive the emotion, not just remember it – I must relive it. This time I vent the emotion as I fully experienced it. When I was young, I could not vent the emotion unless I was willing to receive more emotional and possibly physical pain. “Big boys don’t cry. Don’t be a sissy, or I will really give you something to cry about!” Now I cry (even though I am a big boy), I yell, I scream – maybe I punch a pillow or hit my fists against something soft like a bed – I release the energy of the emotion.

Releasing or venting an emotion is a very personal thing, but released it must be for healing to take place. The energies from the initial wounding and all of the subsequent reinforcements of it are retained in my emotional body. It is not enough to “understand” what happened; it must be “felt” as well, and then I can release those feelings. How you do so is how you do so. The point is that you must release the emotions, not simply intellectualize the memory. “Oh yes, I remember when my mother spanked me for breaking a dish – ho hum,” does not contribute to healing.

When I treated my physical wound, I applied an antiseptic after removing the debris. I also apply an antiseptic to my emotional wounds. It is called love and light. Releasing the emotion left a void that I fill with love and light. I simply ask light to flow into the place where my emotion kept the wound from healing for so long – in my case for decades. I apply love to the event that created the wound in the form of forgiveness for what happened and acceptance that what did happen was an important opportunity for me to learn how necessary love is to living a harmonious and fulfilled life.

Now for the bandage – when I finish treating my physical wound, I apply a bandage that keeps the wound safe from contamination and further damage.

My emotional wound needs protection while it heals as well. The bandage that I place on my emotional wound is compassion for me and whoever was involved in creating the wound.

Compassion is simply the recognition that what happened was a necessary part of the human experience, and when I was wounded, the wounding was NOT because of me, but was about whoever wounded me. The person who wounded me was in the midst of his or her own lessons, and I got caught in the crossfire between them and what they were confronting. It is often difficult to accept that, but when I really thought about it, I could see and understand the clarity in what actually happened.

The tape that holds the bandage on is the last step. It is honoring and thanking the person who initiated the wound. That may seem difficult to do; however, remember that the person was doing the best he or she could at the time, and after all, healing this wound strengthened me, for now I am immune to this old “stimulus-response reflex.”

This is one way to heal emotional wounds. It is as basic as I can make it. I think that, one way or the other, all wounds that are healed mirror what is described above. I respect that some of you may not find this description applicable. If you are discerning from your heart, then I honor whatever works for you. The important thing is as long as the method or process works for you, then it is valid. My modest proposal to you is to heal that which you have not. I will benefit, you will benefit, and humanity will benefit. Remember the words of Friedrich Nietzsche,

“That which does not destroy us can only make us stronger.”

Next month, this series concludes with Part 3 - Curing the Scars of Emotional Wounds.

May you discern with compassion…

Ron McCray

source site: click here

Why am I the way I am? – A three part series

Part 3 – Curing the scars of emotional wounds

Although I heal emotional wounds (part 2 of this series), why do I continue to react to the stimulus-response reflexes or triggers that were created by the wounds? Even after successfully healing, I still get triggered by situations that are related to the healed wound.

Doesn’t seem fair, does it? Here I went and did all of this work to heal, and yet, I feel as if I didn’t really heal. This happens a lot for many people, not just me. So many folks assume that the healing process (whatever it was) did not “take,” so they repeat the process (or a different one) again and again but with the same recurrences of unharmonious emotions, angst, and fear. What’s up?

The reason that the healing appears to not have worked is rooted in another aspect of learning theory. It is also a phenomenon that a lot of healing processes do not take into account thus it seems that the process did not work when it really did. When I figured this out, I knew that my healing was successful, AND that there was another step that was needed beyond healing the wound. I call it “curing.”

In part 2 (How to Heal Emotional Wounds), I compared the emotional healing process to the physical healing process associated with an injury resulting in a physical wound. Now, please consider that when a physical wound heals, it often leaves a scar. Sometimes the scar fades over time but sometimes the scar is there for life unless it is removed. Healed emotional wounds have scars as well. That is where learning theory comes back into the picture.

I think that one of the best ways of understanding who we are as humans is to use the concept that we have four “bodies:” physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. When a wound is created in the spiritual body via any one (or combination) of the other three bodies, a corresponding trigger is created in the mental body (mind or ego). In a successful healing process, the spiritual body is repaired, yet the trigger still exists in the mental body (and possibly the physical body as well). There is a scar remaining in the spiritual body that when touched, triggers a stimulus-response reflex in my mental body, and I “feel” like the wound was never healed.

When I was child I was often emotionally wounded by being criticized, so I developed a stimulus-response reflex to criticism by becoming defensive when criticized. I healed this wound some time ago; however, I found myself still becoming defensive when criticized. Had I not healed? I guess not. So I repeated the healing process except that when I relived the events that caused the wound in the first place, there was nothing there. I had released the emotions with love, accepted what happened as a way station along my path, forgiven the people involved, and was grateful for the experience. In short, I took all of the “right” actions, yet why was I defensive when criticized?

The criticism trigger in my mental body was alive and well. I finally learned that healing at the spiritual level does not result in the elimination of the reflex! The two, although related, are not connected. The reflex will blindly continue to be triggered when the appropriate stimulus occurs – in my case becoming defensive (response) when criticized (stimulus). Wow – this was quite a revelation.

This phenomenon was first recognized was in the early 20th century when Russian scientist and Nobel laureate Ivan Pavlov experimented with feeding dogs accompanied by a ringing bell. The dogs developed a stimulus-response reflex of salivating when they heard the dinner bell. Pavlov then rang the bell without feeding the dogs, and they salivated anyway.

One would think that they would soon stop salivating when no free lunch appeared, but Pavlov discovered that long after he stopped providing chow when the bell rang, the dogs continued to salivate when the bell rang. OK, you might say that humans are not dogs and that we have free will and choice. Yes, we do, BUT free will and choice operate at the conscious, mental level; the stimulus-response reflexes operate at the unconscious, mental level, so in that regard we are in the same pot or feeding bowl as Pavlov’s famous dogs.

I thought this all seemed a bit unfair when I understood that the “scars” of healed emotional wounds were still triggering the old feelings that I had prior to healing. What had I gained by doing the healing work? It seemed futile… What I accomplished through the healing process was the removal of the cause of my defensiveness when criticized.

Now, I had the basis for eventually rescripting the reflex. It would take work, and it was not only possible but very rewarding in its accomplishment. What I needed to do to “cure” the scar was to work at the mental level where the reflex was alive and well. My spiritual body was OK; it was my pesky mental body that still needed work.

How do I cure the scar so that the reflex disappears? I “LAF” at it!

LAF is an acronym for “Love, Accept, Forgive.” Before expanding LAF, there is a habit that I had to learn to make LAFing possible. It is simply having the awareness that the stimulus-response reflex was triggered. It may sound simple but doing so can be a bit more challenging than it might seem. If I do not develop the awareness that an old button was pushed, then I will be enveloped in the old emotions triggered by being criticized or whatever. I will not have the presence of mind to use LAF or any other technique to dampen the reflex.

Awareness is enabled by vigilance. To be vigilant I do whatever is required. I was told to make “vigilance” a kind of mantra, to repeat it over and over every day until my mind does indeed become vigilant. Another common technique is to post the word “vigilance” on a mirror that I look at everyday; still another is to use the word as part of a computer password. If I expose the word to myself in enough different ways, then I will become vigilant. Once I am vigilant to the possibility that old reflexes will be present, then when one does pop up, I can invoke awareness and start LAFing.

Love is a matter of being non-judgmental about myself for having gotten triggered – love is about realizing that I am healed of the wound. Acceptance is simply allowing that the event and the trigger constitute something that simply happened and has no “meaning” – acceptance is letting go of the triggering event. Forgiveness is the recognition that I have not been wronged by whoever pulled my trigger or pressed my button – forgiveness is not placing blame on anyone.

LAF covers all of the bases: me through love, the triggering event through acceptance, and the person pulling the trigger through forgiveness. It takes many repetitions of LAF to cure the scar. As in most worthwhile endeavors in life, persistence is the key. Remember vigilance enables awareness, and awareness sets up LAF. It is that simple, albeit not necessarily easy.

My modest proposal to you is: start LAFing or some other practice more to your liking that will cure the scars left by healing emotional wounds.

This concludes the series on “Why Am I the Way That I Am?” I learned a lot in writing these three articles, and I thank you for being a subscriber to Modest Proposals. If you wish to read the first two articles, they can be found in the Modest Proposals archives; look under the listings for the year 2004.

Ron McCray

source site: click here

posted with the permission of the author