John Steinbeck

“There Are Those Who Must Live In Rooms Of Experience That The Rest Of Us Can Never Enter - Perhaps We Should Quit Trying To Intrude Into These Places, And Simply Learn To Guard The Door.”

John Steinbeck

The business of trying to achieve a sense of self/power in one's adult life can (but doesn't have to) become an obsessive/compulsive expression of childhood neediness and unmet needs that stems from deep core belief structures. In the more extreme circumstances, this is expressed as personality disorders that can be coupled with addictions, obsessions and compulsions.

When one reaches out into life for adult relationships, the relationships so formed become a sounding board for buried pain and the repressed core issues. That is when all hell will break loose. So it follows that if one only tries to resolve the relationship problem(s) and the core belief issues are never dealt with ...that is, they remain quietly in the deeper and darker recesses of the mind, they will rise again at another inopportune time to keep the individual from having the very thing they want ... a loving relationship with another human being.

What one has to do is: take hold of what they are doing in the present ... then come to understand that they are being driven by parts of their past ... then come to terms with knowing they can act differently ... and finally, understanding there are deep forces at work here when our basic needs are not being met ... Then Begin The Process Of Meeting Those Needs From The Adult Perspective And Not The Child's.

Note: In negative approaches to finding needs satisfaction, one of the most common indicators is that it is being done at someone else's expense ... “if he would only” or “if she could just” ... someone else is the brunt of my pain ... the reason why I can’t ... the hurt and pain is about transfer and counter transfer.  This one is very important to understand.

If a child can't find the sense of power to identify themselves as an individual, then they will be on a life long journey of attempting to establish that Sense of Self as an adult. One of the inherent problems in this is that it is the child's needs that are in question not the adult ... Hence the Adult Child Syndrome. It can and usually does become a very ugly tread mill to be on.

By understanding the drives for SURVIVAL, POWER, LOVE, BELONGING, FREEDOM, SPIRITUALITY & SPIRITUAL GROWTH and FUN in people, we become more conscious of the need for our world to be a Quality World of our choosing.

Page 72 ... Into the Light

On Having and Finding Respect


Respect


This starts with the individual’s sense of self and that sense of self is a by-product of very early developmental experiences.


Its clearest defining qualities are related to time and how time and interaction with affective adults was spent … with those who reflect how that individual was viewed by them during the child’s first 30 to 60 months of life.


It Is True That:


It is a necessity that we must first have respect for ourselves … it then follows naturally … that we next have to have respect for the rules we chose by … which we agree to … and conduct our living accordingly and build our social order around.


On the other hand if we do not have this sense of respect instilled at a very early age then ... it is with great effort and difficulty that we will move through our lives.


Respect is something that is purely experiential … it can be obtained anytime … but first we must know what it is that we are looking for … and then … where it is we must search to find it. 12 Step programs help enormously here as do other self help programs. The book Iron John asks the question “Where is the Key hidden?”


One of life’s conundrums is that sooner or later we get ourselves involved in attempting to make something happen or a series of things happen … herein lies the problem; a necessary ingredient for those things to happen is we need to respect ourselves to accomplish or complete the tasks we have set out for ourselves to complete … now the complexity sets insomuch that for the most part most of us don’t carry the necessary tools to cause the respect to be there because it is not part of our working tool kit … it somehow got overlooked … thus the task at hand that should not have been all that difficult becomes a very difficult task.


The Basics of the concept is:


• A person cannot respect himself unless he knows the truth of himself.


For most the truth about us is lost back in the early beginnings … at times and places where we simply had to begin to pretend to be someone else just to be able to get along in our families of origin That Hurt(s).


It is also true that our every effort is to maintain the lid on this painful thing so that it does not get out and hurt us again. The problem is that (neurotic) defense strategies themselves become more painful than the pain they were masking but our only defense to pain is to build another neurotic structure … mask … false self … to protect us from our pain of our reality.


Finding our lost self-respect is a prerequisite to healing; something a kin to Peter Pan recovering his lost shadow from Wendy’s drawer. Now we have a place to look … and a direction to go in.

Daily Reflection

Made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God, as I understood Him and sought through prayer and meditation to improve my conscious contact with God, praying only for the knowledge of God's will for me and the power to carry that out.

13 On Appreciating Deeper Processes - Past Made Present

EXPERIENCE has taught us that most of us are secretly reliving things that are no longer present in our lives. We are protecting ourselves from demons that are no longer there.

Psychic shadow boxing - again it appears.

It is true that life is a place filled with the weird, the wonderful, and the colorful, and we do have to consider using caution with some things. But we can do it from an adult perspective and see things as they are, not as they used to be.

The demons were real once; that much is true. It just may not be true now.

Being Open To The Fact That The Past Is Not The Present

Allows Room For The Soul To Come Out Of Hiding And

To Grow And Mature.

45 On Seeing Simple Truths

EXPERIENCE has taught us that there are gifts in life that most of us do not recognize as gifts. Sometimes we may have to stretch it a bit to understand them as gifts.


The gift of fear is the restoration of our capacity for wisdom and freedom.


By embracing our fears we gain the opportunity to notice what is life-destructive and what is life-enhancing. Both avenues of investigation require risk.


Peck says, in The Road Less Traveled,

“When We Extend Ourselves, Our Self Enters New And Unfamiliar Territory . . . The Experience Of Change, Or Unaccustomed Activity, Of Being On Unfamiliar Ground, Of Doing Things Differently Is Frightening . . . Courage Is Not The Absence Of Fear, It Is The Making Of An Action In Spite Of The Fear, The Moving Out Against The Resistance Engendered By Fear Into The Unknown And Into The Future.”

Lessons on Life: Beginning Middle and an End

There was a man who had four sons. He wanted his sons to learn not to judge things too quickly.

So he sent them each on a quest, in turn, to go and look at a pear tree that was a great distance away.

The first son went in the winter, the second in the spring, the third in summer, and the youngest son in the fall.

When they had all gone and come back, he called them together to describe what they had seen.

The first son said that the tree was ugly, bent, and twisted. The second son said, no it was covered with green buds and full of promise. The third son disagreed; he said it was laden with blossoms that smelled so sweet and looked so beautiful, it was the most graceful thing he had ever seen. The last son disagreed with all of them; he said it was ripe and drooping with fruit, full of life and fulfillment.

The man then explained to his sons that they were all right, because they had each seen but only one season in the tree's life. He told them that you cannot judge a tree, or a person, by only one season, and that the essence of who they are and the pleasure, joy, and love that come from that life can only be measured at the end, when all the seasons are up.

If you give up when it's winter, you will miss the promise of your spring, the beauty of your summer, and the fulfillment of your fall.

Author Unknown ...

In the Nature of the Lie --- Adapted from Pamela Meyer, author of Liespotting

Lies are only possible because they are—by necessity—a co operative act1.

Statement of Fact: A lie has no power of its own.

A lie only has power when someone else agrees to believe the lie. So if you have been lied too lately, then in there somewhere you set it up to be lied too. That is sometimes a difficult pill to swallow.

Not all lies are hostile acts ... Don’t I sing well? ... Does this make my butt look too big ??? ... etc ... What would you say? ... Maintaining social niceties are excuses we use to lie. Once agreed to as a social norm then, consciously or unconsciously we are in agreement and we can both agree to pretend. The problem is, now we are both liars ... in a nice, kinda of way.

Two Basic types of lies: Willing participants in the lie: That is, I’ll believe you are who it is that you say and think you are... if you believe I am who it is that I say and think I am. There are several thousand other extrapolations on this theme but this is the basic premise. I’ll look after you ... if... you look after me. Some call this sharing ... some form relationships based on this but essentially, it’s lying, and that’s the truth.

On the other hand there are times when we are unwilling participants. You get to see this particularly in business; Bernie Madoff is one of the better known worst examples. Statistics noted that in the business year 2008/2009 nearly ¾ of a trillion + dollars or nearly 7% of the GNP of the USA was scammed by deceivers like Madoff. Another infamous example is President Bill Clinton and there are literally thousands of examples where these few people get their greed needs met at the cost of the many.

The underlying premise is that the conman is working from a place that was stated very clearly by Henry Overlander, a Brit, who was said to be able to bring down any (if not all) of the world’s banks single handedly. In the one and only interview he ever gave in his life he stated: “I’ve got one rule. Everyone is willing to give you something. They’re ready to give you something for whatever it is they’re hungry for.”

What you are hungry for does not have to be real; it just needs to appear to be real for you and your portion of the deal. The dupe is positioned by the con to give first and then forced to wait for the fantasy return (shortly). If it is too good to be true ... etc. The nature of what we are hungry for is buried deeply in our unmet needs ... and by the time we hit adolescents or early adulthood the need has been masked over by so many false fronts and wishes it is hard to tell what the real need is.

But it is still the deeper needs fulfilment drives that causes “the hungry” Overlander is talking about.

If you don’t want to be deceived then you have to know what you are hungry for ... that much is simple.

Basic Primary Needs are:

1. Food Shelter Clothing,

2. A Sense of Power,

3. A Sense of Fun,

4. A Sense of Belonging ... Love and Acceptance, A

5. Sense of Freedom...

We all have our fantasy wish list ... and the lie is the bridge between the Reality of My Reality (my painful world) and the Fantasy of My Reality (my painless world).

No one wants to be hurt ... But the truth of the matter is life is painful and the lie is a vain attempt to bypass that pain. By accepting that life is painful, by accepting that as a fact, it makes the pain of life a little less difficult to handle and life a little more tolerable.

Statistics say that strangers will lie 3 times in the first 10 minutes of meeting. It is also stated that we are normally lied to 10 to 200 times during the course of a normal day. It seems to be the way of things.

When this information hits us it is hard to imagine that this is really the way of things in the day to day world of our life. Now the truth of the matter is that we lie more to strangers then we do to co workers ... extraverts lie more than introverts ... men lie 8 times more about themselves then they do about other people ... Women lie more to protect other people from the pain of the perceived truth ... if you are in an average marriage then you are going to lie to your spouse one out of every ten interactions ... now if you are unmarried, and that number drops to one in every three interactions ...

Rule one: The truth of the matter is that we are deep ambivalent about the truth and pass it out only as necessary...

Rule two: we are overtly against lying but covertly for it. We are for it in the ways that our society has sanctioned ... sometime the history of the sanctioning drifts far back into antiquity.

Rule Three: we are hard wired to lye ... the larger the neo cortex in the species the bigger and better the liar.

• There is the well-known story of Koko the gorilla who had a baby kitten name ‘All Ball’... Koko was taught to sign and could communicate readily with her keepers ... she once blamed All Ball for tearing a sink off the wall ...

• Babies will fake a cry stop and see if anyone is coming then go right back to crying

• One year olds learn concealment ...

• Two year olds bluff

• Five year olds lie out right ... they manipulate via flattery

• Nine year olds are masters of the cover up

• By the time an average person gets to be college age they will normally lie to their mom one out of every five interactions

• So by the time we enter the work world we enter a world that is full of spam and fake digital friends ... people who would rather lie then tell us the truth if in fact they even know what it is ... it is a world that is full of schemers ... referred to in the literature as the Post Truth Society.

[1] Adapted from Pamela Meyer, author of Liespotting