Do you want to engage in more respectful, productive and sustained relationships with other activists in the Denver-Boulder metro area?
Do you want to feel more empowered to speak your truth while establishing healthy boundaries with other activists?
As activists, we are not necessarily aware to what extent the dysfunctional aspects in our culture (one-up and one-down dynamics, patriarchy, reactive defense mechanisms) affect our work by generating division and frustration. Improving our communication and relational skills can help us be more effective in exchanging ideas and seeking unity of action, while preserving our identity and autonomy as individuals or groups. It would benefit us all and the work we do to foster a community that honors and welcomes each person, even when we disagree about approaches for raising an issue and demanding change.
Progressive local activists want their voices heard in the streets of Denver during the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in August, and beyond. Whether we are progressive democrats, pacifists, feminists, anarchists or socialists, political, social, environmental, cultural or media activists, or a combination of the above, we all have a common interest in improving the way we relate to each other. Building a new democracy from the bottom up requires it!
The Relational Workshop for Activists will be held on Saturday July 12th, 2008, from 9:30 am to 4 pm, at the Mercury Café (22nd and California Streets) . This event will be facilitated by professional relational therapists and local activists that have been working together for almost a year to foster successful progressive change in our communities. Please write us at relationalactivism@gmail.com to reserve your place (the workshop will be limited to 30 participants). The event is FREE. Donations will be accepted.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
The Struggle: An Introduction to Relational Activism
As activists we talk about the struggle against the status quo, a status quo that does not align with our values or our vision for the world. The struggle is the struggle for a world of peace and justice for all.
But what about the struggle among us? That struggle infuses the work we do, our meetings, our events, our words, and our very choices. And we don’t speak of it, don’t address it, we might even try struggling to align our community with our values and our vision of the world. Why? Perhaps we are so permeated by the culture that even in our struggle against the status quo we also embody it. We want a different world, but we don’t necessarily know how to do it. We envision another world, but we have all been educated by the same system. Many of us do not come equipped with an alternate set of skills for real community building and transformation—the crucial missing piece in our unity and effectiveness.
For example:
Have you ever felt like you were at a meeting where the ideas were dominated by one or two people?
Have you ever felt overworked in your volunteer (or paid) activism until you finally had to stop?
Have you ever felt as though the work you are doing went unappreciated?
Have you ever felt like the work you were doing was the grunt work, and the “glamorous” work was given to others?
Have you felt uncomfortable with the tactics of other activists but didn’t have a means to effectively express it?
Have you found yourself expressing your dislikes of people or ideas to everyone but those people?
Have you found yourself in meetings that consistently started late or ran over with no consideration for your time?
Have you found yourself in meetings where you didn’t feel comfortable sharing your ideas for fear of ridicule, etc.?
Have you found yourself in meetings where criticism (of one another, not the outside systems) reigned?
Have you known (or been yourself) a new, enthusiastic activist who went to a few events/meetings and then disappeared?
Have you known (or been yourself) a new, enthusiastic activist who felt obligated to take on more work than you could do?
Do you find that you don’t support the events of activists you don’t personally like?
Do you find a lack of elders in the movement? A lack of youth? Do you wonder why?
Do you know (or are you yourself) a person who criticizes the work of other activists behind their backs?
Do you feel better than other activists? Do you feel worse than other activists?
Case Studies
Joe goes to his first anti-war rally. He is surrounded by people like himself for the first time. He puts his name on an email list and he is invited to a meeting. He is very excited and he has all sorts of ideas, ideas that he has been thinking about for years. He arrives eager and enthusiastic. At the meeting, there are three people doing most of the talking. When he finally gets up the courage to share one of his ideas, someone immediately dismisses it as cliché. He doesn’t return to the meetings, nor does he go to any other events.
Lisa has been working at an organization for a long time, doing the behind-the-scenes work. But whenever there is an event, a rally, or something, she feels excluded, her concerns and opinions unimportant or “not radical” enough. She eventually quits from burnout.
Marie works 60 hours a week or more trying to run an organization. Her health is suffering. Her family is suffering. None of the members of the organization notice, and she feels ostracized when she finally quits.
Bob has spent a lot of time and energy working with an organization. It means a lot to him, and he has helped organize lots of events. At some of these events, people have come with more aggressive tactics that he thinks will alienate potential allies. He doesn’t know how to address the differences between them in a way that would support everyone, so he concedes, feeling like his organization was taken away.
Jane is the kind of activist you love—always able and willing to do all sorts of work. She likes to come to a meeting and get things done, as her time is already overextended. She gets frustrated when people want to talk theory, politics, grandiose scenarios. After faithfully attending many meetings where she felt nothing got done except a lot of talk, she stops coming to meetings and does things solo.
Chris has been an organizer for a long time. He has organized dozens of events and rallies, and he wants people to take a more strategic stance, do something that will have more then a theatrical effect. He wants to talk about long-term strategies and tactics. He is always voted down by people who want to have another rally. He feels this is ineffective, and he eventually stops coming to meetings and rallies.
Laura considers herself a radical activist. She likes to stir things up, not play nice. When she goes to a rally she wants to burn flags, shock people. She feels that the situations require more aggressive methods. She feels silenced at rallies when she tries to express her anger, and she feels betrayed by those in the movement.
Kevin doesn’t like the way his organization is going. He decides to leave and start his own organization. Half of the organization follows, and a split splinters the community. Now they are working against one another rather then with one another.
Relational Activism
All of the above examples are not unusual, but all of them were opportunities for growth and community that were completely missed. Each of these situations required a new kind of communication, and a commitment to being relational and supporting community. We are all a part of a movement working for change, but within the movement we are individuals struggling with our own wounds, our own biases, our own issues. Groups are struggling. The movement is struggling. Ultimately we all want the same thing: a world of peace and justice for all people. So, how are we going to get it?
We don’t claim to have all the answers. In fact, in our group, we all have different answers (and our own other activities). But what brought us together as a group was to begin asking the same questions. How activists with very different backgrounds, ideas and comfort levels can work together more efficiently, preventing conflict or immediately addressing it? How can we better focus on our common grounds and goals rather than emphasizing our differences, and yet speak out our truth? We think that building a truly democratic movement, bottom-up, a movement that promotes participation and demands accountability, requires us to learn to relate to others as "same as", or in other words, as emotionally grown-ups.
And here is where Relational Activism comes in. Understanding the dysfunctional aspects of relationships in our culture inherited from thousands of years of patriarchy and other forms of domination (one-up and one-down dynamics, reactive defense mechanisms), and overcoming them by educating ourselves using communication tools (such as expanding our ability to listen and establishing healthy boundaries with ourselves and others), are unavoidable. Other possible definitions for describing this work are "Conscious Activism" or "Mindful Activism" or even "Sustained Activism." And it requires some basic principles.
Relational Principles
1. Full-respect living: the commitment to respect both yourself and others at all times. One may need to be assertive; one may need to “rock the boat”, but none of the ways we do these sinks below the standard of respectful treatment. There is no excuse for abuse – either dishing it out or putting up with it. This is the framework for living a non-violent life.
2. Cultivating compassion: the commitment to, whenever possible, move into compassionate understanding of my own and others’ pain and imperfections.
3. Committing to growth: the commitment to consciously move myself and my relationships in the group through ongoing cycles of Harmony, Disharmony and Repair.
Activist Community
If we see ourselves as part of an activist community—and even the movement as a larger community of people struggling for the same ideals, and possibly the broader population also as part of our community—it is helpful, then, to take a look at the stages of community. Notice the similarity with the stages of Harmony, Disharmony and Repair:
Pseudo Community—this is when everything seems great, when there are no issues, when people find it easy to get along with one another.
Conflict—This is when issues come to the surface. Tensions rise, either overtly or covertly. Factions can form. Things are said, usually not to the right people. One-up dynamics begin to happen. At this stage the community has two choices—split, or transform.
Real Community—in order to reach this stage from the conflict stage the community must consciously decide to transform, to learn to grown together, to address grievances with the purpose of mutual healing and mutual growth. This requires a conscious choice, a paradigm shift. Doing nothing or playing nice does not initiate transformation; neither does accusations or holding grudges. At this point we are asked to grow up, to become more adult in our relationships. To become relational. Relational activists. If that happens, the false community becomes a real community.
Why do this work?
There are many reasons for doing this work. For one, doing this inner work, this community work will make the individual, the community, and ultimately the large community we call the movement more effective. That alone is a good enough reason. But as long as hierarchy, one-upping, and top-down authority are not addressed within our own circles, our view of what is possible is limited. But we can take the brave steps of healing ourselves and our movement, creating a new kind of solidarity based on a radically new set of values. And not just values we give lip-service to, but values we attempt to practice.
Secondly, this vision of a world of peace and justice does not end with us. This is a long-term vision, a lasting vision that will be carried on by our children and their children. It is crucial that we end the cycles of inner-community conflict for the sake of our children. What is not addressed by the parent will be passed to the children. We owe it to our children to not pass the dysfunction. Freeing our children from these burdens will give them more space to carry out their own struggle for a better world.
But what about the struggle among us? That struggle infuses the work we do, our meetings, our events, our words, and our very choices. And we don’t speak of it, don’t address it, we might even try struggling to align our community with our values and our vision of the world. Why? Perhaps we are so permeated by the culture that even in our struggle against the status quo we also embody it. We want a different world, but we don’t necessarily know how to do it. We envision another world, but we have all been educated by the same system. Many of us do not come equipped with an alternate set of skills for real community building and transformation—the crucial missing piece in our unity and effectiveness.
For example:
Have you ever felt like you were at a meeting where the ideas were dominated by one or two people?
Have you ever felt overworked in your volunteer (or paid) activism until you finally had to stop?
Have you ever felt as though the work you are doing went unappreciated?
Have you ever felt like the work you were doing was the grunt work, and the “glamorous” work was given to others?
Have you felt uncomfortable with the tactics of other activists but didn’t have a means to effectively express it?
Have you found yourself expressing your dislikes of people or ideas to everyone but those people?
Have you found yourself in meetings that consistently started late or ran over with no consideration for your time?
Have you found yourself in meetings where you didn’t feel comfortable sharing your ideas for fear of ridicule, etc.?
Have you found yourself in meetings where criticism (of one another, not the outside systems) reigned?
Have you known (or been yourself) a new, enthusiastic activist who went to a few events/meetings and then disappeared?
Have you known (or been yourself) a new, enthusiastic activist who felt obligated to take on more work than you could do?
Do you find that you don’t support the events of activists you don’t personally like?
Do you find a lack of elders in the movement? A lack of youth? Do you wonder why?
Do you know (or are you yourself) a person who criticizes the work of other activists behind their backs?
Do you feel better than other activists? Do you feel worse than other activists?
Case Studies
Joe goes to his first anti-war rally. He is surrounded by people like himself for the first time. He puts his name on an email list and he is invited to a meeting. He is very excited and he has all sorts of ideas, ideas that he has been thinking about for years. He arrives eager and enthusiastic. At the meeting, there are three people doing most of the talking. When he finally gets up the courage to share one of his ideas, someone immediately dismisses it as cliché. He doesn’t return to the meetings, nor does he go to any other events.
Lisa has been working at an organization for a long time, doing the behind-the-scenes work. But whenever there is an event, a rally, or something, she feels excluded, her concerns and opinions unimportant or “not radical” enough. She eventually quits from burnout.
Marie works 60 hours a week or more trying to run an organization. Her health is suffering. Her family is suffering. None of the members of the organization notice, and she feels ostracized when she finally quits.
Bob has spent a lot of time and energy working with an organization. It means a lot to him, and he has helped organize lots of events. At some of these events, people have come with more aggressive tactics that he thinks will alienate potential allies. He doesn’t know how to address the differences between them in a way that would support everyone, so he concedes, feeling like his organization was taken away.
Jane is the kind of activist you love—always able and willing to do all sorts of work. She likes to come to a meeting and get things done, as her time is already overextended. She gets frustrated when people want to talk theory, politics, grandiose scenarios. After faithfully attending many meetings where she felt nothing got done except a lot of talk, she stops coming to meetings and does things solo.
Chris has been an organizer for a long time. He has organized dozens of events and rallies, and he wants people to take a more strategic stance, do something that will have more then a theatrical effect. He wants to talk about long-term strategies and tactics. He is always voted down by people who want to have another rally. He feels this is ineffective, and he eventually stops coming to meetings and rallies.
Laura considers herself a radical activist. She likes to stir things up, not play nice. When she goes to a rally she wants to burn flags, shock people. She feels that the situations require more aggressive methods. She feels silenced at rallies when she tries to express her anger, and she feels betrayed by those in the movement.
Kevin doesn’t like the way his organization is going. He decides to leave and start his own organization. Half of the organization follows, and a split splinters the community. Now they are working against one another rather then with one another.
Relational Activism
All of the above examples are not unusual, but all of them were opportunities for growth and community that were completely missed. Each of these situations required a new kind of communication, and a commitment to being relational and supporting community. We are all a part of a movement working for change, but within the movement we are individuals struggling with our own wounds, our own biases, our own issues. Groups are struggling. The movement is struggling. Ultimately we all want the same thing: a world of peace and justice for all people. So, how are we going to get it?
We don’t claim to have all the answers. In fact, in our group, we all have different answers (and our own other activities). But what brought us together as a group was to begin asking the same questions. How activists with very different backgrounds, ideas and comfort levels can work together more efficiently, preventing conflict or immediately addressing it? How can we better focus on our common grounds and goals rather than emphasizing our differences, and yet speak out our truth? We think that building a truly democratic movement, bottom-up, a movement that promotes participation and demands accountability, requires us to learn to relate to others as "same as", or in other words, as emotionally grown-ups.
And here is where Relational Activism comes in. Understanding the dysfunctional aspects of relationships in our culture inherited from thousands of years of patriarchy and other forms of domination (one-up and one-down dynamics, reactive defense mechanisms), and overcoming them by educating ourselves using communication tools (such as expanding our ability to listen and establishing healthy boundaries with ourselves and others), are unavoidable. Other possible definitions for describing this work are "Conscious Activism" or "Mindful Activism" or even "Sustained Activism." And it requires some basic principles.
Relational Principles
1. Full-respect living: the commitment to respect both yourself and others at all times. One may need to be assertive; one may need to “rock the boat”, but none of the ways we do these sinks below the standard of respectful treatment. There is no excuse for abuse – either dishing it out or putting up with it. This is the framework for living a non-violent life.
2. Cultivating compassion: the commitment to, whenever possible, move into compassionate understanding of my own and others’ pain and imperfections.
3. Committing to growth: the commitment to consciously move myself and my relationships in the group through ongoing cycles of Harmony, Disharmony and Repair.
Activist Community
If we see ourselves as part of an activist community—and even the movement as a larger community of people struggling for the same ideals, and possibly the broader population also as part of our community—it is helpful, then, to take a look at the stages of community. Notice the similarity with the stages of Harmony, Disharmony and Repair:
Pseudo Community—this is when everything seems great, when there are no issues, when people find it easy to get along with one another.
Conflict—This is when issues come to the surface. Tensions rise, either overtly or covertly. Factions can form. Things are said, usually not to the right people. One-up dynamics begin to happen. At this stage the community has two choices—split, or transform.
Real Community—in order to reach this stage from the conflict stage the community must consciously decide to transform, to learn to grown together, to address grievances with the purpose of mutual healing and mutual growth. This requires a conscious choice, a paradigm shift. Doing nothing or playing nice does not initiate transformation; neither does accusations or holding grudges. At this point we are asked to grow up, to become more adult in our relationships. To become relational. Relational activists. If that happens, the false community becomes a real community.
Why do this work?
There are many reasons for doing this work. For one, doing this inner work, this community work will make the individual, the community, and ultimately the large community we call the movement more effective. That alone is a good enough reason. But as long as hierarchy, one-upping, and top-down authority are not addressed within our own circles, our view of what is possible is limited. But we can take the brave steps of healing ourselves and our movement, creating a new kind of solidarity based on a radically new set of values. And not just values we give lip-service to, but values we attempt to practice.
Secondly, this vision of a world of peace and justice does not end with us. This is a long-term vision, a lasting vision that will be carried on by our children and their children. It is crucial that we end the cycles of inner-community conflict for the sake of our children. What is not addressed by the parent will be passed to the children. We owe it to our children to not pass the dysfunction. Freeing our children from these burdens will give them more space to carry out their own struggle for a better world.
What is Relational Activism? by John Mariner
Mahatma Gandhi was never satisfied with the English rendition of his work as “nonviolence” or “passive resistance”. He thought this term was too passive a description of what he was about. “Truth force” or perhaps “soul force”, came closer for him.
Gandhi said that truth and love were two sides of the same coin. It is here that we come to a definition of relational activism: The coming together of truth and love in our relations that undergirds and empowers our activism to be a powerful force for growth and change.
So what does this mean, this cross-hair of truth and love? This Relational Activism? First of all, about truth. We are not talking about absolute truth here, or imposing my truth on you. It means telling “my truth” as best as I can and owning it as mine. It means speaking my truth about the reality I live in with the openness to always seeing a deeper truth than what I presently see.
Secondly, what does “love” mean in this context? For one thing, it means always striving to be relational with everyone and everything. It means the dissolution of false boundaries or walls. It means moving out of one-up and one-down—I’m better, you’re worse- or I’m worse and you’re better dynamics. It means the dissolution of false hierarchies and the recognition of real community, a recognition and appreciation for each person’s strengths or gifts and contributions to the community.
Significantly, it means seeing truth and love together as related aspects of the same force within us and without us. This is important because truth without love can be like a hammer and move swiftly to grandiosity – I have the Truth and you don’t and therefore I am inherently superior to you. Love without truth becomes mushy, can blur essential boundaries and level everything in an indistinguishable soup that is no longer really loving. It is this cross-hair of truth and love that is the essence of Relational Activism as it is directed at the injustices of this world. Truth and love harnesses the power of love.
So what does this mean, practically, creatively living in the world? Relational Activism begins with ourselves. It means we work to stay in Same As and have healthy boundaries with ourselves.
Gandhi said that truth and love were two sides of the same coin. It is here that we come to a definition of relational activism: The coming together of truth and love in our relations that undergirds and empowers our activism to be a powerful force for growth and change.
So what does this mean, this cross-hair of truth and love? This Relational Activism? First of all, about truth. We are not talking about absolute truth here, or imposing my truth on you. It means telling “my truth” as best as I can and owning it as mine. It means speaking my truth about the reality I live in with the openness to always seeing a deeper truth than what I presently see.
Secondly, what does “love” mean in this context? For one thing, it means always striving to be relational with everyone and everything. It means the dissolution of false boundaries or walls. It means moving out of one-up and one-down—I’m better, you’re worse- or I’m worse and you’re better dynamics. It means the dissolution of false hierarchies and the recognition of real community, a recognition and appreciation for each person’s strengths or gifts and contributions to the community.
Significantly, it means seeing truth and love together as related aspects of the same force within us and without us. This is important because truth without love can be like a hammer and move swiftly to grandiosity – I have the Truth and you don’t and therefore I am inherently superior to you. Love without truth becomes mushy, can blur essential boundaries and level everything in an indistinguishable soup that is no longer really loving. It is this cross-hair of truth and love that is the essence of Relational Activism as it is directed at the injustices of this world. Truth and love harnesses the power of love.
So what does this mean, practically, creatively living in the world? Relational Activism begins with ourselves. It means we work to stay in Same As and have healthy boundaries with ourselves.
Oh, Grow up!! by Mary Simon
Have you ever been told this – or had the urge to say it to someone else? It turns out there may be a very valid reason for this common complaint!!! Most of us are not entirely grown-up in at least some aspects of our functioning. In fact, most of our “problems in daily living”, as well as more serious dysfunctions, can be understood in the context of not being fully “grown-up” emotionally.
In this article, I will help you understand the parts of each of us that are not fully grown-up and that get in the way of our living happy lives and having healthy relationships. I will also describe for you what “grown-up” or Adult functioning looks like. Later articles will describe more in detail how to move from the less mature patterns we all have into more Adult functioning.
What we’re going to talk about first is a way of understanding several different levels of processing and responding. Each of these levels of processing and responding becomes possible at different stages of our life. We will look at four stages of this development. We call them the ego states of Natural Child, Wounded Child, Adapted Child and Functional Adult.
Neurobiologists tell us that these ego states are actually “engrained neural networks”. They find that “neurons that fire together, wire together”. That means that whole sets of perceptions, physiological reactions, emotions, beliefs and behaviors that have occurred together either repeatedly or under very traumatic conditions can get “wired together”. So, when something in our current life triggers one of these neurons to fire, the whole network tends to kick in. It’s like someone turns on an “automatic pilot”.
The problem is that many of these networks developed when we were very young and so move us into thoughts, feelings and behaviors that are typical of a much younger stage in our life. They were “age-appropriate” then and helped us to protect ourselves and survive when we had few options and very little power. Most of our problems in our current lives occur when we move into these neural patterns and do the “same old, same old”! The issue is not that we are bad or stupid but that we are thinking, feeling and acting “young”.
Some of these patterns are so engrained and commonly activated that others often think of as our personality – Joe, Susan, etc. We may also identify with these patterns as “who I am.” It’s important to be aware of these patterns, to understand what triggers them and to evaluate how they work - or don’t work - for ourselves and for our relationships. Then we can begin to make conscious choices about the ways we process and respond to our environment. Doing this work enables you to live happily within yourself and to build healthy relationships with others.
To keep it simple, we’ll look at just four different ego states – each of which is most likely made up of a number of different, but inter-related neural networks. To help you understand the concepts, I will include a picture with each of the descriptions.
How we come into life as infants is what we call our Natural Child – a bundle of needs and feelings, potential abilities and ways of responding. We are valuable and precious, open and ready to connect. We are also totally vulnerable and spontaneous, “in the moment” without the ability to reflect. This Natural Child part of us persists through life. It is the source of our energy, our unique abilities and contributions to the world. It is, however, always vulnerable and needs nurturing and protection in order to be free to be his/her best self. Invariably in the process of growing up in this imperfect world, our needs don’t always get met, painful things happen AND, because we are so vulnerable, this is painful to us. So this Natural Child ends up feeling wounded in certain ways.
The most painful part of this wounding for a young child is caused by the only mode of processing experience that is available to the young mind. Since very young children experience themselves as “the center of the Universe”, they subconsciously believe that everything that happens is “because of something about me.” So, when our needs are not met or we are treated badly, we develop a belief about ourselves, e.g. I am not lovable, I am not good enough, I don’t deserve …, I don’t matter. These negative beliefs about oneself are essentially what we mean by childhood “wounds”. Consciously or unconsciously, we carry them with us unless or until we are able to change and/or “heal” them.
Along about the time we are 3-5 y.o., instead of being pretty much the “center of the Universe”, we begin to live as social beings. We become aware that there are other real people in the world and that we want and need to figure out how to live with them. Our Child, now somewhat wounded, develops a Social aspect. At this point it seems we also become aware of what’s not working for us in relating to these others. It’s as if we say to ourselves, “Wait a minute! I’m getting hurt here. I’m not getting what I need. What can I do to protect myself and get more of what I need?” So we begin to develop ways of adapting to our social environment. We call this part of ourselves the Adapted Child.
The patterns we develop will be influenced by our own natural inclinations and abilities as well as by what works in the particular family in which we find ourselves. This part of us does whatever works for us to protect our vulnerable part from being hurt and to get as much as possible of what we need and want from the people around us. Because this part of us is concerned with how to survive – both physically and psychologically – it uses a great deal of our available energy. I guess you could say it is a very powerfully engrained neural network. I like to say it’s our default “auto-pilot”.
This pattern of adaptation is what’s often called our “personality”. We tend to believe “this is who I am” when it’s most often more a result of the ways I constricted and distorted my “real self” in the effort to survive and get along in the social environments in which I grew up.
I know that I learned to adapt by trying to be very good, work hard and do things “perfectly.” I over-developed my “doing” part and, in some ways this has served me very well. However, I often ended up over-working, being “super-responsible” and feeling resentful. AND I constricted my warm, loving, connecting parts and lost the ability to play and have fun. It’s taken a lot of consciousness to bring these parts into balance. And I can still slip back into the old “auto-pilot” under stress. I’d like to ask you to take a minute to think about what worked for you when you were growing up. How did you get approval and try to protect yourself?
Because it’s a 5 y.o.’s version of what an adult would look like, this Adapted Child ego state often looks grown-up but it’s rigid and compulsive and has just a few options for ways to behave. Sad to say, most people operate much of the time, emotionally, from this 5 y.o. self. While our 5 y.o. may use a lot of adult information to justify and defend our behavior, it’s not really adult.
In an ideal world, we would all have had grown-ups around us who were able to provide us the nurturing and protection we needed and model how to take better care of ourselves as we grew older. Unfortunately, as I said earlier, most supposed adults operate from a 5-10 y.o. Adapted Child ego state much of the time. So that’s the best picture most of us got of how to be a Adult. So, for us as a culture, this is a “New Frontier” for Adult development.
Therefore, most of us are faced with the task of developing a strong Functional Adult state that can more effective and kinder job of nurturing and protecting our vulnerable Child than our 5 y.o. can.
You might be asking, “So what is that, what does an Adult ego state look/feel like?”
An overall concept that is central to being Adult is that of RESPECT. In an Adult state, I am respectful of my own and others’ intrinsic value, of each person’s right to personal safe space, and of each of our needs, thoughts, feelings and perception of “reality”. Any time I am not speaking and acting respectfully towards myself and others, I am not coming from Adult.
In addition, when I am not being respectful, I am most certainly not being loving! As Pia Melody likes to say, “Respect is the MINIMUM of love.” How contradictory it is that we so often are least likely to be respectful towards those that we say we love!
So the goal in Growing Yourself Up is to learn ways to move out of reactive (Wounded or Adapted Child) behaviors that are disrespectful of yourself and/or others so that you can develop truly loving relationships with yourself and others. This allows the Natural Child the energy to heal (change those negative self-beliefs) and grow, create and play. It also allows the Adapted (Social) Child to stop trying to do the grown-up job of taking care of the young Child and instead to use its energy to learn to “play well with others”.
In this article, I will help you understand the parts of each of us that are not fully grown-up and that get in the way of our living happy lives and having healthy relationships. I will also describe for you what “grown-up” or Adult functioning looks like. Later articles will describe more in detail how to move from the less mature patterns we all have into more Adult functioning.
What we’re going to talk about first is a way of understanding several different levels of processing and responding. Each of these levels of processing and responding becomes possible at different stages of our life. We will look at four stages of this development. We call them the ego states of Natural Child, Wounded Child, Adapted Child and Functional Adult.
Neurobiologists tell us that these ego states are actually “engrained neural networks”. They find that “neurons that fire together, wire together”. That means that whole sets of perceptions, physiological reactions, emotions, beliefs and behaviors that have occurred together either repeatedly or under very traumatic conditions can get “wired together”. So, when something in our current life triggers one of these neurons to fire, the whole network tends to kick in. It’s like someone turns on an “automatic pilot”.
The problem is that many of these networks developed when we were very young and so move us into thoughts, feelings and behaviors that are typical of a much younger stage in our life. They were “age-appropriate” then and helped us to protect ourselves and survive when we had few options and very little power. Most of our problems in our current lives occur when we move into these neural patterns and do the “same old, same old”! The issue is not that we are bad or stupid but that we are thinking, feeling and acting “young”.
Some of these patterns are so engrained and commonly activated that others often think of as our personality – Joe, Susan, etc. We may also identify with these patterns as “who I am.” It’s important to be aware of these patterns, to understand what triggers them and to evaluate how they work - or don’t work - for ourselves and for our relationships. Then we can begin to make conscious choices about the ways we process and respond to our environment. Doing this work enables you to live happily within yourself and to build healthy relationships with others.
To keep it simple, we’ll look at just four different ego states – each of which is most likely made up of a number of different, but inter-related neural networks. To help you understand the concepts, I will include a picture with each of the descriptions.
How we come into life as infants is what we call our Natural Child – a bundle of needs and feelings, potential abilities and ways of responding. We are valuable and precious, open and ready to connect. We are also totally vulnerable and spontaneous, “in the moment” without the ability to reflect. This Natural Child part of us persists through life. It is the source of our energy, our unique abilities and contributions to the world. It is, however, always vulnerable and needs nurturing and protection in order to be free to be his/her best self. Invariably in the process of growing up in this imperfect world, our needs don’t always get met, painful things happen AND, because we are so vulnerable, this is painful to us. So this Natural Child ends up feeling wounded in certain ways.
The most painful part of this wounding for a young child is caused by the only mode of processing experience that is available to the young mind. Since very young children experience themselves as “the center of the Universe”, they subconsciously believe that everything that happens is “because of something about me.” So, when our needs are not met or we are treated badly, we develop a belief about ourselves, e.g. I am not lovable, I am not good enough, I don’t deserve …, I don’t matter. These negative beliefs about oneself are essentially what we mean by childhood “wounds”. Consciously or unconsciously, we carry them with us unless or until we are able to change and/or “heal” them.
Along about the time we are 3-5 y.o., instead of being pretty much the “center of the Universe”, we begin to live as social beings. We become aware that there are other real people in the world and that we want and need to figure out how to live with them. Our Child, now somewhat wounded, develops a Social aspect. At this point it seems we also become aware of what’s not working for us in relating to these others. It’s as if we say to ourselves, “Wait a minute! I’m getting hurt here. I’m not getting what I need. What can I do to protect myself and get more of what I need?” So we begin to develop ways of adapting to our social environment. We call this part of ourselves the Adapted Child.
The patterns we develop will be influenced by our own natural inclinations and abilities as well as by what works in the particular family in which we find ourselves. This part of us does whatever works for us to protect our vulnerable part from being hurt and to get as much as possible of what we need and want from the people around us. Because this part of us is concerned with how to survive – both physically and psychologically – it uses a great deal of our available energy. I guess you could say it is a very powerfully engrained neural network. I like to say it’s our default “auto-pilot”.
This pattern of adaptation is what’s often called our “personality”. We tend to believe “this is who I am” when it’s most often more a result of the ways I constricted and distorted my “real self” in the effort to survive and get along in the social environments in which I grew up.
I know that I learned to adapt by trying to be very good, work hard and do things “perfectly.” I over-developed my “doing” part and, in some ways this has served me very well. However, I often ended up over-working, being “super-responsible” and feeling resentful. AND I constricted my warm, loving, connecting parts and lost the ability to play and have fun. It’s taken a lot of consciousness to bring these parts into balance. And I can still slip back into the old “auto-pilot” under stress. I’d like to ask you to take a minute to think about what worked for you when you were growing up. How did you get approval and try to protect yourself?
Because it’s a 5 y.o.’s version of what an adult would look like, this Adapted Child ego state often looks grown-up but it’s rigid and compulsive and has just a few options for ways to behave. Sad to say, most people operate much of the time, emotionally, from this 5 y.o. self. While our 5 y.o. may use a lot of adult information to justify and defend our behavior, it’s not really adult.
In an ideal world, we would all have had grown-ups around us who were able to provide us the nurturing and protection we needed and model how to take better care of ourselves as we grew older. Unfortunately, as I said earlier, most supposed adults operate from a 5-10 y.o. Adapted Child ego state much of the time. So that’s the best picture most of us got of how to be a Adult. So, for us as a culture, this is a “New Frontier” for Adult development.
Therefore, most of us are faced with the task of developing a strong Functional Adult state that can more effective and kinder job of nurturing and protecting our vulnerable Child than our 5 y.o. can.
You might be asking, “So what is that, what does an Adult ego state look/feel like?”
An overall concept that is central to being Adult is that of RESPECT. In an Adult state, I am respectful of my own and others’ intrinsic value, of each person’s right to personal safe space, and of each of our needs, thoughts, feelings and perception of “reality”. Any time I am not speaking and acting respectfully towards myself and others, I am not coming from Adult.
In addition, when I am not being respectful, I am most certainly not being loving! As Pia Melody likes to say, “Respect is the MINIMUM of love.” How contradictory it is that we so often are least likely to be respectful towards those that we say we love!
So the goal in Growing Yourself Up is to learn ways to move out of reactive (Wounded or Adapted Child) behaviors that are disrespectful of yourself and/or others so that you can develop truly loving relationships with yourself and others. This allows the Natural Child the energy to heal (change those negative self-beliefs) and grow, create and play. It also allows the Adapted (Social) Child to stop trying to do the grown-up job of taking care of the young Child and instead to use its energy to learn to “play well with others”.
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