has to happen outside the womb. Consequently the human baby, when it first emerges, is in need of total care and education from day one: how to eat, how to walk, how to hold and manipulate objects, how to communicate, all the basic functions of a person. These skills need to be taught to the new child by parents and carers, and the most common and seemingly efficient way we’ve found to teach our children is to give them loads of gushing approval and love when they ‘get it right’ or obey us, and when they don’t, give them less, or none. Children’s main source of safety and survival is the love from their parents and carers, so the discomfort or even trauma for that source of nourishment to be turned on and off is very impactful. Each of us, when we were being brought up and ‘taught how to be a person’ had the experience of this on/off approval and love. When we give something great but then withhold it, and then give something great but then withhold it, what that creates in the human is an addiction. We have all been unwittingly turned into little approval addicts throughout our childhoods, with a deeply ingrained fear of criticism or failure because we equate that with ‘less love’ or even ‘rejection’.
This value system is backed up all the way through school, too. If you’re first in the class, or win the race, you get endless love and praise and validation, and if you’re bottom of the class or last in the race you’re less appreciated and even, in some cases, shamed. Most kids get the message that to ‘do it right’ and be ‘good and appropriate’ is essential if you are to be loved and welcomed and not rejected or emotionally exiled. The addiction to being high up the league table of approval is so compelling that even though brothers and sisters love each other, are each other’s main playmate, the moment that one of them does something against the rules, the other sibling will likely run straight to Mummy and Daddy to report the transgression, all for the prize of being higher in the approval rating.
We are so addicted to approval that we even needed to invent Facebook. ‘Ahhh, I got seventeen likes under my Rumi quote.’ Yum yum yum.
The real problems begin when we don’t just get approval withheld, but we get some unexpected, angry negative feedback from our parents and carers. ‘Stop that! That’s disgusting!’ Pow! It hits us in the chest. I remember as a kid once being whacked with a venomously delivered ‘When are you going to grow up?!’, which I felt physically hit me in the body, knocking the emotional wind out of me. We have no idea as children that this adult is just tired or having a bad day, or simply doesn’t realise they are being an arsehole. We’re too young to have the maturity to screen out their violence and know ‘it is their stuff, don’t take it on’. We believe it really is our fault they have reacted that way. It is so, so painful that, whatever we were doing when they scolded us, we make a personal note never to be seen doing that again. The possible withdrawal of their love and approval is so frightening and the feeling of the adult’s anger is so impactful that we make a little edit in ourselves, hoping never to experience that rejection again. And this goes on and on throughout childhood.
‘How could you?’ <snip>
‘Good girls don’t do that!’ <suppress>
‘Bad boy!’ <edit>
Day after day, year after year as we’re growing up <snip> <suppress> <edit> <snip> <suppress> <edit> and the violent editing continues with our peers in school, too.
‘Oh, you’re so uncool!’
<Oh, am I? OK, never wear bright colours ever again . . . never dance in public again . . .>
Through this ongoing process of editing out the parts of ourselves that get mirrored to us as ‘unwelcome’ or ‘bad’ and only allowing to be seen the parts of us that get love and approval, we arrive as adults presenting a much diminished ‘brochure’ of ourselves, the shop window of our good bits – an ‘appropriate’, risk-free version.
Debbie Ford says in The Dark Side of the Light Chasers that when we are born we are each a castle with a thousand rooms and each of the rooms has a gift for us. We are completely open, we are curious, adventurous and limitless. Our imaginations and our creativity know no bounds. But as soon as we come into the world our parents tell us, ‘Darling, we don’t use these rooms over here so much’, and so those rooms immediately start getting boarded up. And then throughout our childhoods people walk through our castle and tell us which rooms they like better than others, and more and more rooms fall into disuse, until we arrive as adults believing we are a two-bedroom flat that ‘needs some work’.
The big problem is that no Masterpiece ever came out of that place. No touching expressions of art or intimacy were ever born from the sanitised, appropriate versions of ourselves. Whoever heard anyone say ‘Have you met Brian? Oh, he’s just so . . . appropriate! He turns me on!’
The artists and people who touch us deeply are the ones who are not so scared and limited to only express their appropriate qualities. The ones we are moved by are the ones who are brave or eccentric enough to go to the edges of what’s normal and safe. We are turned on by those characters, we even deify them as if they are special, as if they are stars. We want to feel those edgier, juicier parts of ourselves but we want to experience them in a safe, controlled way, so the artists and rebels provide that for us. We don’t want to experience hanging off a cliff by one arm, sobbing in anguish, but we do like having a vicarious experience of Brad Pitt doing it up on the big screen while we all sit in safe dark rows. There we can cry along safely, or feel terror, or immense, boundless love – all because the artists are willing to really go there. This is why we worship the actors and musicians who deliver these experiences and pay them such incredible amounts of money.
This is the predicament of being human. We want to feel intensity. We want to feel our edges. But only safely within each of our comfort zones. Our problem here is that all our treasure and inspiration is not found in the safe areas furthest inland from our edges. The treasure of our lives, the illuminating and fulfilling experiences, are all discovered by snorkelling around the coastline of the edited version of ourselves, not staying away from them. That doesn’t mean we have to trample our boundaries and rush straight out into the deep water proclaiming ‘Here are my nipples!’, but neither will we ever be available to bring in a Masterpiece of feeling, of intimacy, or creation, by staying as far away from those edges as we can day after day.
BURIED TREASURE
It is not only the ‘darker’ sides of our nature that we bury and suppress. We imagine that the shadow sides of our nature are the darker qualities like greed and neediness, or our deviant sexual appetites, but if we grew up in a house where something as innocent as our natural flamboyance wasn’t supported, then our entertainer nature might very well have been buried in the shadows, too. Most of us were cautioned to quieten down if we were getting excited with everyone’s attention, often shamed or muted with irritation by the adults. Well, it doesn’t take more than a couple of ‘stop showing off in front of your friends’ blows to crush that confident entertainer mojo and flavour future flamboyant impulses with some shame or worry about our natural urge to move the crowd.
In another home it might be quietness or shyness that’s not acceptable. ‘Stand up straight!’ ‘Speak up for everyone to hear!’ ‘Don’t be a shrinking violet!’ And whoever lives in that house is likely to grow up with shame or worry around being too shy.
It is wonderful and often heart-breaking to see some of the attendees of my Transforming Shadows workshops allowing themselves to play with their more ‘forbidden’ qualities in the safe container of the group. Suddenly a previously meek woman cries with hilarity and relief as she struts around the place being totally bitchy to everyone and those she encounters absolutely love her in it, or a once spiritually, politically correct Buddhist monk gets into people’s faces, vocalising extreme judgements about them and letting his unenlightened voices
