Many people suffer from the past of what their parents did to them, the negative events of their childhood etc. The purpose of this article is to present the reason why it is hard to release the past and end the perpetual limitations and suffering.
The concept of forgiveness rarely works, as I have discussed in another article The Truth About Forgiveness, How To Really Forgive Permanently
The first step is to see where the problem really lies. The pain is always related to the thought that these things happened to ME! Because of this view, we cannot let go of the past and these memories trigger painful feelings.
I have found that the problem is not really related to the events we attribute it to, but rather it is the need of recognition.
Everyone needs to be recognised, to be acknowledged. This is common to all humans of any age starting from the ‘terrible two’s’. This need brings with it the perception that you are the centre of the universe and all things you are involved in somehow have a special reason to happen just for you.
You may believe that your parents treated you the way they did because of what you did, or your parents divorced because of you, or the meteor fell to earth and crushed your new car all because God hates you and He has very good aim.
The problem of course, and why we cannot let go of these painful feelings, is that it is not really about you, it really has nothing to do with you personally. With the ego centred view, we look in the wrong place for the problem and thus keep missing the target of healing.
When we stop thinking that we are the centre of the universe and realise that nothing that happened to us actually has anything at all to do with us personally, we can be free.
This is relinquishing the ego. We must see the world for what it is, a series of random events that each person or thing is responding to, and these reactions will effect anything in the near vicinity.
A tree will fall in a strong wind. The tree did not decide to fall on your car. The tree was responding to the strong wind which blew it down, and it just happened that your car was parked beside the tree on the downwind side. The tree was blown over in that direction and your car was parked in the spot that the tree fell when it responded to the wind. It had nothing to do with you or your car.
Likewise, a child goes through tremendous emotional distortions due to the actions of their parents who are just responding to the demands and trials of life that adults face. All people, especially parents, sometimes snap or do things out of the stress, which then effects the children since they happen to be in the same house and family.
People respond to current situations due to the events of their past. The past events continue to effect people through their whole life because they feel the events were meant for them, directed at them. If we see the events that touched us as random in this way, we no longer have the ego centred view. Rather, with this objective view, the event loses all long term emotional impact.
Do you recall every event in your past that you know had nothing to do with you? How many events have you gone through, for example bad weather on your holiday, that you do not have a long term emotional inhibition or bitterness about? That was a terrible event, but you do not hang on to it like you do for things your parents did.
The difference is that you do not feel the bad weather was specifically created and intended to attack you personally, but you do feel that about your parents actions.
When you will give enough thought and acceptance to the reality that your parents were just responding to the events in their life, and most importantly that you are really totally irrelevant to those events or their actions, then your pain will end.
You must release the need to feel important, the centre of the universe and cause of all actions and events, which is ridiculous if you consider the events in your life right now and how they make you act and treat other people.
The key is to accept that you simply are not all that important. This is the work of mastering your ego, and in a word, humility.
Life is just a chain of events. You behave the way you do in your relationships, work, emotional inhibitions, emotional outbursts, reactions and fears due to the events that happened to you as a child. Some of these events were the actions of your parents who were reacting to the events in their life. They reacted as they did due to the events in their parents life that moulded them, and this goes back generations.
The chain of emotional suffering must be broken, and it is your personal responsibility to break that chain for yourself and your children and people you interact with.
Nothing in this world that happens has anything to do with you. You personally are not even a speck of dust in the universe.
The more you build up the concept of individual personal importance, which is exactly what the new age movement and society in general is working towards, the more important you try to feel which means the stronger you build up the lower ego. The stronger that ego becomes, the more you feel that the negative events in your life were all meant to hurt you. The more you feel that, the harder it becomes to release the pains that you endure today which are based in the past.
If you want to become emotionally free, then come to the objective reality which is that you are simply not that important and that things happen which have nothing to do with you. When you see life this way, you can have compassion for everyone, even those who do bad things, or at least almost everyone because there are always exceptions to every concept.
However, as long as someone has not committed such evil acts, and you consider the events in their life, and you accept the difficulties of being human in this world and how hard it is for anyone other than Superman to just let it all blow by, all the pains you endured, the beatings and abuse, turn into events that inspire love and compassion in your heart rather than resentment and all sorts of pain.
Join the discussion
But what of the effects of the Law of Attraction? Isn’t our emotional programming/personalities/character a product of our parents actions and our survival responces toward these feelings and actions? I cannot see my parents actions which formed my life’s unconscious programming as a random act as a tree blown over in the wind due to due to the effects of their intent on the Law of Attraction. The key for me to unlock my own prison of self importance into the freedom of humility is to constantly employ vigilance and methods of neutralizing the survival self centered programming created by me through emotional reaction to my parent’s “training” . Perhaps someday someone will divise a way to re install a new operating system, but until then I will continue to use anti virus tools to keep cleaning my corrupted operating system. Thank you, David.
The law of attraction is not relevant in this case. I am presenting an alteration of your perception. Currently many people perceive that things have happened to them, but in fact, they just happened. This difference is very important.
The idea that everything in your life happened because you attracted it is simply preposterous because it implies you are the one and only being of significance on the entire planet. If you think about it objectively, the concept that you attracted certain people into your life to do certain things to you totally negates their free will.
You think you made them come to you, but what if they did not want to come to you? This false view of the concept of law of attraction builds up a tremendous ego because it implies you are more powerful than everyone or everything that came into your life.
There is no spiritual growth or essence when the ego is so large it thinks that it made everything happen and the whole world conforms to your thoughts.
You say; “…cannot see my parents actions … as a random act as a tree blown over…” In fact they are just as random, as are your day to day acts. When you are angry and yell at someone, or simply are grumpy to the server in a store for example, wasn’t it a random act to them?
You are responding with a mood that was created by an event totally unknown to the person you just treated impolitely. For them, your actions are a random act caused by some other event in your life, not theirs. How they respond determines the rest of their day, or life.
Again you mention the law of attraction, and again, you are implying that your parents are so powerful that they made the whole universe conform to their will even though all the people in their life have their own will which would pull them in a different direction.
The big flaw in your point is the concept of magnetism in which the stronger magnet draws the weaker one to it.
When you think that you have brought everything into your life because of your thoughts, you are saying that your magnet is stronger than everyone else’s. Where is the humility in that? You are not alone in this case, as you know, so many other people are as well.
If you want to neutralise your programming, then simply accept you are not that important that you caused anything to happen. Just take a look at the night sky and think again about how significant you really are, or if that does not work, consider this number: 1 in 7,000,000,000.
How significant are you if Seven Billion other people are also making everything and everyone in their life act according to their desires. Who is left to have free will? I hope this puts the whole concept into perspective.
This article is the new operating system you ask for, the problem is that the virus came later from following concepts which are building the ego rather than helping to tame it.
With love and a hope you can attain the emotional freedom that some of us have.
great article! How do we realise this emotional authenticity?
That is what all the articles are about. The solution to any problem is always found in the problem itself, in this case the answer is in the question.
To correct such a large part of our life it takes a long time and lots of effort. There is no simple answer, and to hope or expect or even imagine that there could be a simple answer to such a profound problem shows that the expectations are unreasonable. And this is the problem.
And so, to answer your question; There are hundreds of articles on this site that I have offered freely, there are several books on my books page for only a few dollars, there are courses I give.
I have been devoted to working on myself for decades, and if I could give a solution in one brief email or lesson to comprise what took decades for me to learn, then I am far too much of a fool for anyone to pay attention to 🙂
Time, patience, perseverance and devotion to making yourself a better person, that is the answer.