Insanity, Neglect & The New Age

It’s been awhile since I’ve had a chance to blog. Does anyone out there have a nutball in the family? I mean like an alcoholic, or a narcissist or someone with borderline personality disorder? It’s not very fun dealing with them. Not easy. They have a tendency to absorb all your time and energy by creating drama and making everyone in the family feel bad while turning themselves into a martyr. I’m sure most of you can relate. We all have someone who we have to deal with who fits this general description. I’m pretty sure that part of what fine tunes psychic ability is growing up with a crazy parent. It’s a heightened form of instinct, self-preservation. What will crazy do today? Be nice or kick me out of the house?

Every psychic I’ve ever known came from a seriously messed up family. I suppose being psychic is the consolation prize for dealing with insanity during childhood. Personally I would have prefered a normal family to “the gift.” But then we don’t get to choose sometimes, or perhaps I did choose before I could remember (on the other side).

Which brings me to a few points I’d like to make about how western people have assimilated the notion of Karma and Darma. We seem to have used it as a substitute for the old fashioned “God is punishing me,” or “I must be doing something right,” ideas. It’s become a New Age way of blaming the victim. I’m not sure if anyone saw the Oprah show about the girl who was so neglected that she was still in a diaper and weighed 30 pounds at the age of 6. She couldn’t feed herself, had lice and cockroach bites all over her and slept on a mildewed piece of foam. She couldn’t walk or talk and was still being fed from a bottle. She was cognitively still a baby from the severe neglect. Her name was Danielle and when her mother was asked in an interview about the girl she said, “All I’m guilty of is, is not keeping a clean house.” Then she started crying and said, “I love that baby.” And then when the interviewer asked the woman if she regretted anything (this was after the mother had been informed of the severe retardation she had caused the girl due to her neglect) she answered, “Moving to Florida.” Because Florida authorities were the ones who busted her and took Danielle away from her. This woman went out drinking constantly, left her child in the care of her two mentally retarded brothers and said to authorities, “I’m doing the best that I can.”

I was very disturbed by this story for so many reasons. The little girl was permanently damaged by this neglect. Although she was adopted by some kind people, her life was stolen by her sick mother. Children who suffer neglect feel invisible and those who suffer from any and all abuse feel its their own fault. This is a defense mechanisim. It’s actually easier to (as a child) believe you are the problem than your parent is, because you are completely dependant on them and the only thing you have control over is yourself, therefore if you’re a bad kid then you can change your behavior and magically your sick parent will become kind and loving. Of course this isn’t true but it is the fantasy all abused and neglected children have about their sick parent or sick parents.

Stay with me here I want to tie this mentality to many New Age beliefs. Louis L. Hay wrote a book in the late 1980s that broke down each illness and told you what was emotionally causing it, like you have back troubles, you are feeling unsupported. While I can see the value in how certain types of stress contribute to our physical problems, sometimes its really not our fault and we do not have control no matter how much we wish we did. Sometimes a person gets back trouble because they get hit by a drunk driver, or they fall down the stairs. Or they have a genetic disease. I have trouble with many of the New Age beliefs that don’t allow for chaos and the dark side of human nature. Many New Age beliefs hinge on a love and light philosophy where everything is decided by our souls before we incarnate and there are no victims and all is for the good of our development. Bull shit.

Pure and simple bull shit. There are people who throw monkey wrenches into our plans, there are people who do not live up to their side of a bargain and there are children born to psychopaths who treat them like potted plants and who steal their development and life away. How can this sort of serious abuse and neglect of a child be anything but the fault of the crazy person who could do that to a child and still believe they “love,” them. Why would any soul choose to incarnate into a situation like what Danielle had to suffer and what could she possibly have learned from it? She will spend the rest of her life with the cognitive skills of an 18 month old and when her foster parents die, she’ll end up in an institution. Does anyone deserve that? And if they do then why would Danielle have been rescued and what gives that mother the right to be so cruel?

The tangle of moral questions are too great to be answered with simple New Age platitudes or really any spiritual ideas because these are depraved acts done in the service of the darkest sides of their nature without thought or care of anyone but themselves. These people operate in the darkness of the unconsccious playing out their shadow selves while being completely unaware and unable to experience love or empathy.This mother clearly had some sort of personality disorder. She was completely unable to have empathy for anyone, even her own child.

Which leads to the question of what causes this incredible lack of empathy among people with certain personality disorders? Is it chemical, genetic or enviornmental or do they bring into this life some sort of spiritual lack that makes them incapable of caring for anyone else. These people often have deep feelings for themselves and see themselves as victims with elaborate justifications for their actions. They can turn their own evil deed into the passing stranger’s fault in a split second. They live like Plato’s cave people, in an eternal darkness projecting their emotional troubles onto others without ever seeing themselves or how they are hurting others. They never take responsibility or say they are sorry for anything as they see themselves as godlike, above all others, their emotions being the only ones that count. These are the people that bring chaos to our world, who cause wars, who are destroyers. They balance those among us who go out of our way to help others. They are the entropy to our growth. There must be a purpose for them, but I still haven’t figured out what it is yet.

Many blessing to all you kind and good people,

Denise

The Shadow Self

Many New Age concepts and ideas focus on the love and light side of human nature and neglect dealing with the shadow self. In ancient esoteric tradition the shadow self is as important to master as forging a connection to the higher self is.

By the shadow self, I mean the dark side of ones nature, the place where pain, childhood scars and wounds get hidden. Often it is this part of the self we work very hard to keep in the dark for fear of seeing ourselves as imperfect, wounded or incapable. It is the shadow self that plays the trickster giving us a visceral dislike of someone who reflects this part of us, or seduces us into a relationship that opens up the closet full of familial negative patterns and self-sabotage.

It is not that the shadow self wants to destroy the self, it is the shadow’s job to make us face our deepest pain, fear, sadness, remorse, shame and grief in an effort to heal and move past these events that marred our sacred wholeness. 

We live in a culture that promotes easy answers, quick solutions, magic pills and 7 steps to success. Oprah talks about “light bulb” moments, as if one moment, one concept or one idea can actually change the trajectory of someones entire life. In reality our experience is built in layers brick by brick, no one piece of information will solve everything, no one solution is right for everyone and while there are helpful principles and lessons, there is no Secret behind all of life’s dilemmas and no simple solution to just visualize what you want. Sure all those things are helpful tools that can transform a person’s life, but all the visualization in the world of meeting the perfect mate isn’t going to work if one is an agoraphobic shut in whose only human contact is with a handful of relatives who go grocery shopping for them. Unless that person’s soul mate is their mail carrier visualization isn’t what’s holding the person back from their dream, it’s their fear — their shadow self has overtaken and eclipsed their ability to do anything productive, including leaving the house. 

We all are on different journeys and have different shadow selves to heal, and be tricked by. There are no mistakes in life, just opportunities to learn and grow created by the part of us that needs to be healed. But when we judge ourselves based on these past experiences as failures, or idiots or whatever, we fail to see that what happened was perfect.

As painful as any situation maybe, it is a chance to go deeper, learn, grow and connect. Negative experiences afford us the opportunity to re-evaluate and stop the unconscious script we are playing out by becoming more conscious, so that we can make better decisions in the future and individuate fully without the constraints put on us by our ancestors’ issues (parents, grandparents, etc.)

When evaluating any spiritual system it is always (in my opinion) important that that system has taken into account all sides of the human psyche. Systems focusing so much on being positive without understanding, or reconciling the internal negative conflicts we all have can be very dangerous to our spiritual and emotional well being. These systems are more akin to drug addiction than actual spiritual work, affording people the chance to slip into a world of fantasy and narcissism where the ego is dowsed in positive affirmations without the proper reflection and integration necessary to actualize and manifest a person’s dreams.

This is why ancient mystic traditions were not only secret, but required intense study, dedication and meditation. People were brought through layers and levels of teaching depending on their innate wisdom and ability to grasp lessons on multiple layers. Not true of many of the easy fix New Age medicine shows offering a cure to everything in the form of some numbered panacea. (The 3 steps to ultimate weight loss, the 8 steps to becoming a millionaire, the 9 steps to happiness, etc.)

It’s easy to understand something intellectually, but without understanding the emotional and spiritual elements of a problem, it can’t be solved. For example one can not choose who one falls in love with. Intellectually, a person might know that person A is bad for them but love is a feeling, not an idea and therefore no amount of logic can remove that feeling. Instead that person has to go through all the feelings necessary to get to the place where they can let go, usually after immense grief and intense pain, to the point where those negative feelings eclipse the feeling of love and the person can no longer hold onto the warmth they felt for the other person without causing themselves great distress. Does that make the person stupid? Absolutely not. Yet we judge ourselves and others as if we should somehow be able to spontaneously turn into robots and be able to use logic to solve our emotional issues. 

I suppose my point here is the importance of knowing your shadow, of confronting it, making friends with it and letting it teach you. Otherwise if the shadow is ignored it will eclipse a person’s life and lead to terrible heartache, destruction and pain which hopefully will ultimately lead to understanding. But there is a better way, don’t ignore the darker side of your nature. I’m not saying to indulge it, actually exactly the opposite. I’m saying, know it, listen to it and reflect on it so you don’t feel the irrational urge to act on those feelings. This actually works believe it or not. Awareness is the first step, self-acceptance the next, toward controlling your life rather than being controlled by outside influences (actually more accurately your shadow self which if you’re not fully aware of, will feel out of your control as if stuff is happening to you rather than you are co-creating your life). Not that we always have the choice, the shadow self is a trickster and it tricks everyone at some point or another. But the better a person knows their dark side and allows communication with it, the clearer and the healthier the choices are as well. 

And best of all comes the realization that you are a God/Goddess of your own life. Meaning you are co-creator with the divine, part of the divine and given this tremendous gift of consciousness which you can use to achieve whatever goal you set for yourself as long as you are truthful with the wholeness of who you are.