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Today’s post is another chapter from my book Liberation from the Lie. If you have been following these posts, you will already know that the key to understanding our search for purpose, meaning, and even awakening, is fueled by an underlying belief in our own inadequacy. In this chapter we discover the roots of that belief in a primal trauma that I have called the Wound. The Wound develops very early in life and is, over time, covered over by what is called the Fear-Selves. If we are ever to find our Authentic Self, that energy that is always there even underlying the Wound, we need to see these processes first hand in our own immediate life. That is the primary purpose of this book. See if what is described in this chapter is not true for your own experience and knowledge.

Beyond living and dreaming
Is what matters most
Coming awake.”
~ Antonio Machado

Are we born fundamentally perfect, or are we born wild and imperfect, requiring the graces of civilization to become good, productive human beings?
One advocate of the theory of primal inadequacy is Aristotle. In his treatise Politics, the Greek philosopher argues that we are born as savages. People without laws and permanent settlement need to be subjugated and ruled over, he claims; they are like children who are not habituated to civilized society. Our goodness, if it is to manifest in our lives, is solely a consequence of our exposure to the fruits of moral and ethical culture. We are, in other words, born insufficient. Most of us have accepted this belief without exploring our own childhoods, our relations with our children, or our view of humanity.
If we believe that all children are savages, then their transformation into civilized, moral beings should simply be a matter of teaching them the ways of civilization. Do our observations of everyday life and our knowledge of history support this statement?
When the “civilized” nation of Spain landed on an unknown island in the eastern Caribbean in 1492, Columbus noted the remarkable grace, positive spirit, and extraordinary kindness of the “savages” he encountered. He also noted that they would make excellent slaves.
When the Pilgrims were starving during their first, long New England fall and winter, not only did the “savage” Wampanoag Indians feed the “civilized” European newcomers, but they taught them how to plant and grow maize and beans, enabling them to survive future winters. When the “civilized” Portuguese first entered sub-Saharan Africa and encountered the “savages” who lived there, it took them less than 10 years to organize the first slave trade by paying off tribal leaders.
Earlier we examined the lives of hunter-gatherer children. Contemporary anthropologists consistently describe their placid but alert natures, their deep connections to their communities and the natural world, the absence of sibling rivalry and temper tantrums, and their easy smiles. These children possessed a sense of stability and balance that has attracted note from observers from the 17th century to the present.
When Europeans first landed in North America and Africa, they were greeted with kindness, curiosity, and care. They responded with ruthless violence, including genocidal massacres, cultural intolerance, and total subjugation of the native peoples who had lived on those lands for countless generations. Invariably, they used religion and God to justify their murderous intents and actions.
Who, exactly, is the savage?
Certainly these painful interactions occurred between two very different peoples. The Native Americans and Africans were relatively content. The Europeans, in dramatic contrast, were not. Their discontent was rooted in their sense of inadequacy, a quality the natives did not share. The Europeans sought to fill their empty feelings of “lack” with power and possessions. But their insufficiency was a bottomless abyss. It could never be filled. And the very actions through which they sought to fill the void inadvertently sustained its gaping emptiness. This is why the Europeans related via force, while the natives related through curiosity and care. The Europeans were already wounded by their culture. They were a restless people, always on the lookout to augment their riches and control. Their response to the gentle, satisfied souls they encountered in their explorations was to kill or enslave them. The taste of power created a rapaciousness for more power and possessions, a quality of imperial civilization from the dawn of history to the present.
Invalidation is born of a significant imbalance in power, and the consequence of that imbalance is violence. Secure people are not motivated to apply force against others as a way of expressing their inadequacy. The European settlers’ attitude and actions toward indigenous populations were paralleled in the relationships between parents and children in their “civilized” society. When adults see their children as “savages,” they project their own experience of self-contempt onto their children. In this way, the wound of invalidation is passed down through the generations.
Aristotle correctly points out that children act in a way that could be described as “deficient.” But he fails to understand the source of the deficiency. The “savage” children he observed had already experienced their infantile trauma, their emotional separation from their mothers, and pressures to change; thus they were already insecure in their standing with their parents and had begun to exhibit behaviors to compensate for their internal feelings of low self-worth. These characteristics are part of the price of civilization.
Because this phenomenon is both unintended and little understood, it is not surprising that we have adopted a belief system that seeks to explain what we think we are observing. By accepting the belief that children are savages, we justify the role of civilization to transform their “savageness” into more manageable personality traits. We do this through coercion, hard and soft. We remake people into the images projected onto them by civilization.
The collapse of our original sense of self occurs at a time before communication can occur between child and parent; the original person is already covered over by the Fear-Self before the child is able to protest. Children develop a sense of their inadequacy well before they can ever express their dissatisfaction in words. The child’s “savage” behavior is simply his expression of his despair. Some children will really persist in their “savagery,” acting out with “unacceptable” behaviors. But even the most docile child will express her anger and frustration in some form. The family uses the power of repression to control this anger and frustration, just as the larger society later uses its authority to manage her as an adult.
It’s time that we moved on to a more loving and accurate understanding of who our children are and who we are in relation to them. Children are not savages. They are human beings who already have been cut off from their Life Force. A child’s anger and frustration come from the struggle to learn new abilities in order to establish an identity designed to mollify the emotional pain she has experienced.
Keep in mind that not all children display in this way. Resiliency varies greatly from child to child, as does the fear of expressing one’s true feelings to parents who might be perceived as threatening or whose connection to the child is so tenuous that he fears loss of love if he is honest. Most of us become experts in the fine art of repression early in life. The problem of repression becomes much more serious when we begin to regard it as normal and rational—which is, of course, what most of us do.
Savagery, therefore, is in the eye of the beholder. The term “savage” is useful mainly to those who would like to manage another person or group through the use of the pejorative.
The next two posts will focus on the actual phenomenon of invalidation. Through these posts will you be empowered to see, precisely, how you yourself have been invalidate and in that seeing there is a powerful glimpse toward your own liberation.

Tags: invalidation, wound, Child-raising

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We need to understand that existential fear, the underlying unease that underlies so much of our personal experience, is not integral to the human condition. When we delve into the heart of this unease, this low-level free-floating fear, we discover the great sea of lack that undergirds all of our self-disappointment, as well as our seeking. This lack condition is a recent development in the human story.

Anthropologists have not observed this same lack phenomenon in pre-agricultural societies. So in this post we will return, again, to this world with the purpose of locating the very core root of fear itself. Perhaps if we can trace the origins of lack back to their beginning, then maybe we can better understand its manifestation in our life.

As I did in yesterday’s post, I will be using passages from my book Liberation from the Lie. This is, exactly, what makes this book unique among all books about the troubled self. Liberation does not rely on conjecture, but on the observations of many. Test what is written here with your own intelligence. Ask yourself, is this true? - is this true in my own direct experience unfettered by belief or second-hand knowledge. Evaluate what is said in this blog and ask yourself, repeatedly, is this true?

Child-Rearing and the Origins of Invalidation
While the hunter-gatherers lived in a world fully connected with nature and other members of their families and tribes, we live in a world of profound disconnection, set apart from both nature and the other people in our communities. While hunter-gatherers were an integral part of their environment, we are like visitors in a hostile land. Somehow we have migrated from a place of apparent peril where people felt safe and secure to a place of apparent security where we feel unsafe and insecure. How, then, can we account for the paradigm shift that has occurred in the modern era?
An explanation can begin by examining the differences in central beliefs regarding children and the role of parents. Hunter-gatherers regarded new human life as perfect in and of itself. Each child was seen as a unique being intended to follow his own, distinct journey through life. On the other hand, modern civilization sees children as flawed even at birth, requiring constant discipline and education in order to become fully functioning adults. In hunter-gatherer societies, children remain physically connected to an older person, most of the time their mothers, throughout most of their first three or four years. In today’s homes, most children are physically separated from their mothers from the very day of birth. Their life of partial isolation begins on day one.
The separation and endless correction that a child undergoes in modern times results in invalidation—the negation of ourselves as we are.
Our sense of self is most vulnerable when we are very young, well before we can understand words or express ourselves. Thus is the origin of what I call the Wound, our conviction that we are innately inadequate, insufficient, and worthless. This angst is the very signature of modern life. It is the source of our disconnected selves, those parts of us that struggle for completion and wholeness only to find persistent frustration.
The hunter-gatherer did not carry the burden of invalidation. He knew he was “as he is supposed to be” prior to any action or doing. He was not expected to prove anything; he didn’t have to justify his right to be just as he was.
Child-rearing philosophies tend to develop in order to reproduce a particular personality type that will be functional for adult life in the society at hand. Consider these differences between the way children were raised by hunter-gathers and how they are raised now:

• Hunter-gatherer children were raised without overt discipline; we “civilize” our children through punishment and other consequences levied when “rules” are broken;
• Hunter-gatherers perceived children as a creation of the same nurturing universe that supported and took care of the tribe; we see children as “little savages” who need to be domesticated;
• Hunter-gatherer children remained physically close to their mothers for up to four years, constantly held and carried; modern children are separated from their mothers at least for periods of time each day from birth onward;
• Hunter-gather mothers breastfed for three to four years; we usually wean within a year;
• Hunter-gatherer children slept with their parents for up to five years; most modern children sleep in a separate bed, if not a separate room, from their parents from the day they arrive;
• Hunter-gatherer children possessed the same power as anyone else; modern children are told in no uncertain terms that they are powerless and are often punished if they try to exert power;
• Hunter-gather children were raised in groups or clans, with many adults taking responsibility for parenting duties; modern children are usually raised by their biological parents alone, or with the help of a very few trusted relatives or hired caretakers.

The differences are many, but the most profound is this: Hunter-gatherer children were loved and respected just as they were. Modern children must earn the love and respect of their elders, on their elders’ terms. This is the origin of the fundamental invalidation that nearly all of us experience in our very first months of our lives. We are left alone at times; we are constantly corrected. We get the message that we are deficient burdens. Expressions of parental love are undermined by angry words, harsh expressions, indifference, distance, and punishment
Let me elaborate on some of the differences outlined above. While a personality is shaped by genetics, upbringing, and socialization, one of the most potent ingredients in that mix is one’s earliest relationship with his or her mother. For the hunter-gather, that relationship was extremely close, both physically and emotionally. Among the !Kung (and many other non-Bantu tribes of southern Africa), Australian Aborigine groups, the Berbers of the Middle East, and most Native American tribes of the Plains and Plateau region, children were virtually attached to their mothers for most of their first 18 months. When not in the arms or on the back of her mother, a young children was passed on to other people in the community who held her for extended periods. This provided contact and bonding with a much more diverse array of adults than would be found in an American household today. In the parlance of the well-known African adage, it takes a village to raise a child.
We, on the other hand, typically place children into their own rooms early in life, where they experience isolation and terror from being alone; often in the dark. This occurs at a time when a baby is utterly vulnerable and powerless to affect her fate. She screams in protest, but parents close their hearts to these cries in order to allow the child to habituate herself to pain and fear. Over time, as the child begins to cooperate, she is praised and rewarded for her compliance. This early trauma is relatively new to our species; the children of hunter-gatherers were touched, held, and comforted almost continuously for the first few years of their lives.
Consider another difference. While the hunter-gatherers considered each child to be unique, to be loved and respected for the individuality of his talents, life path, and story as it unfolded, modern parents seek to produce children who become “special” by dint of their accomplishments. But when some in a group are considered special, others, of course, will NOT be special. Indeed, the special ones continually run the risk of losing their special status. Children soon absorb this lesson and sever themselves from their innate, unique identities; instead, molded by external rewards and punishments, they strive to achieve the standards of “specialness” defined by their parents and society. In this competition for attention and esteem, children disown their inherent power of self and bow to the authority of those who can confer on them the coveted “gold star.” We innocently participate in our own powerlessness making.
The extreme pressure modern children feel to compete for accolades—indeed, for love itself—adds additional trauma to that already inflicted by separation and isolation. The Wound, source of our persistent sense of inadequacy and incompleteness, is deepened. And the resulting anxiety, turbulence, conflict, and unhappiness on an individual level is mirrored by our culture at large.
Tomorrow we will take a look at the final chapter in this series and examine the contemporary world and how it nurtures and sustains the Wound.

Tags: Child-raising, Fear