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Exploring Emotional Maturity Part III with Richard
Kieninger Q: You were talking earlier about the brain
playing all sorts of tricks to deter a person when he is trying to search back
to root out causes of neurosis. Is that a physiological function of the brain
that you are speaking of? RK: Yes, a function of nerve interconnections.
They are real things that can be measured electrically. And as these troublesome
interconnections are formed, they have an emotional component in the memory
record. Q: If a person can trace back to a
conscious retrieval of earlier experiences that were traumatic, I am not
quite clear on what you mean by reliving or expressing those feelings. Let’s say
there was a situation that caused a lot of fear, and let’s say that by some
technique a person could recall that memory vividly. What should they do now
in the present? RK: As I’ve said, live the associated emotion
completely. Experience it in full depth. Most of us blocked the emotion at
the time because we felt that we couldn’t cope with it; probably as a small
child or teenager. It seemed like we would be totally overwhelmed by our
emotions. We can experience them to the fullest without their destroying us.
But without question, strong emotions can be debilitating for a period
of time. Yet we recover completely if they are allowed to play themselves out
completely. It is the discomfort of emotions or their social unacceptableness
which causes us to abort and bury them. Then they cause mischief for a
lifetime. Q: Does finding and reliving an emotion
truly remove the associated armoring? RK: An armoring of a muscle is a stored
feeling (not emotion) waiting to be experienced, and it can be held there for
a lifetime. A discharged resolution of an emotional blockage dissolves the
associated armoring, and it is then simply gone forever. It’s not necessary
to recall the causative events to be effective. Q: Is such reliving of a buried emotion
similar to Primal Scream therapy? RK: Yes, similar to it. Q: I think that from a practical point of
view undergoing scream therapy would be difficult to do in many cases. RK: Well, shut the door. If everyone is aware
that you are trying to improve yourself that way, then your muffled screams
shouldn’t cause any great concern. A lot of people find it satisfying and
healing to spend a lot of money going to a therapist where you are
encouraged to scream and wail your deepest pains and neurotic blocks away. In
Rolfing the therapist wrings out your muscles so you can’t help but scream
and yell. Dr. Ida Rolf discovered that by forcefully (and painfully) gouging
into hardened muscle, the associated emotion is evoked and released, and the
events that caused the armoring often comes to mind as a result. She worked
at the problem from the other direction than where the patient makes a mental
breakthrough first that then releases the feelings. Such therapies seem
weird, but they work, and that’s what counts. All of the things that Freud
got into sounded pretty weird at first, but we now know that he got us
started on the right track. Q: We saw a movie about some therapy by a
Dr. Alexander Lowen where a woman went through these kinds of discharges on
the movie screen, and I know some other people in the audience went through
them sympathetically at the same time. I mean, I found myself crying
involuntarily at a certain point, and I think that it was upsetting to a lot
of people. Some of us may have been turned off by it. I suspect that most
people would have a hard time overcoming our conditioning of having to be
dignified and correct at all times were we to want to undergo therapy for
self-improvement even if it were conducted in private. RK: You see, that has to do with pride or with
losing face. Some people say that screaming out a discharge is unnatural, and
that a person ought to maintain control rather than letting go so as to
behave like he was insane. We don’t like to see people who are out of
control. As a matter of fact, we will flee from it. I remember being on a
streetcar one time when a young man had an epileptic fit to where he was
thrashing about on the floor. It lasted I’d say about a minute, but the reactions
of people were astonishing to me. I kept telling people to let him alone
since he was not in a position where he could hurt himself. Some guy who
weighed about 250 pounds figured to protect everybody else by sitting on the
young man’s chest. He was lucky he could still breathe with 250 pounds on top
of him. Other people just buried their faces in their newspapers or turned
away. I mean, it was happening right there at their feet, yet other people
were looking away very embarrassed for their children. It was just too weird
for some people and they just freaked out over it. Many people decided to get
off at the next corner rather than be in the same streetcar with him. Since
we know that is how people respond to somebody who does something a little
peculiar, we are going to be very careful about exposing ourselves to the
same kind of ridicule or fear that “outlandish” therapy would generate in
other people. That is why I say it may be advantageous to go to a therapist,
where a show of powerful emotions will be accepted. There are group sessions
where there may be fifty people in an auditorium who are screaming at the top
of their lungs. Then obviously that’s really quite acceptable, and you may be
paying two hundred bucks a weekend for that privilege. Otherwise, you can
learn to do the same thing in the privacy of your home. Hopefully, family
members will recognize that you are doing something which is beneficial for
you in the long run. Most people want to better themselves and improve their
capacity for happiness and greater competence. Granted, there are some people
who like to wallow in their neuroses, but a reasonably healthy minded person
will undertake the means to become a good brick, a stronger brick. Q: You keep talking about bricks. What’s
that supposed to mean? RK: That phrase about being a good brick comes
from an ancient story about an Athenian who was being given a tour of Q: If I understood correctly, you said
earlier that it was legitimate for a person to reach out to another for
emotional support. Would something like that be either wise or practical for
a therapeutic setting or would that lessen the effect? RK: There is nothing wrong with that. You
know, women seek such support frequently. That helps contribute to women
living longer than men. It’s not bred into them to be ashamed to reach out to
somebody else for help, to somebody who at the moment seems to be more solid
because they are not going through the same kind of thing or to somebody whom
they respect. Q: Would such support in any way lessen the
experiencing of those repressed emotions? RK: Well, I don’t think that I should put an upper
or lower limit on which kinds of therapies that you might have to go through.
Whatever happens to work for you is what works, and you have to search out
those things. Some people go to four or five different therapists before they
find something that noticeably works for them. What is effective for one
person may not work for the next person. There are about two dozen different
kinds of discharge therapies around. All of them are valid, but each seems to
appeal to different types of personalities and individual lifestyles. If
there is somebody whom you are paying to help you through therapeutic
sessions, then naturally your incentive is stronger to put real effort into
it. That seems to facilitate your determination to go through it and to keep
at it regularly. You have to show up every week because he has you scheduled.
If you don’t show up, you still have to pay. That is an incentive to get
there and do something every week. Q: In reference to my possibly getting into
a deep anger discharge while a counselor is present, I’m wondering if that
might not actually have a detrimental effect on him if I am unloading those
feelings on another person. RK: He doesn’t have to buy into them. He’s
trained to elicit and withstand a client’s extreme emotions at close range.
For any therapist to buy into your problems would be very self-defeating as
far as his personal welfare is concerned, and he won’t succumb. But that’s
not your lookout. Q: If you were able to consciously figure
out why you follow a particular unconscious pattern and realize that it was
bred into you when you were young by a certain fear, would that behavior then
be dissolved merely by the realization? RK: Possibly. Sometimes a behavior pattern
only goes one layer deep, and getting rid of that one layer allows your
conscious modification by simple decision. Negative attitudes which we have
picked up in later childhood are much easier for us to get at. The ones that
stem from very early childhood are very resistant to penetration by our
later, adult understanding because they take so many disguised subconscious
avenues. A lot of blocks can have their origin during adolescence due to
feelings of social inadequacy, embarrassment, or sexual fears. These can
develop into patterns of shyness, avoidance of people and trying situations.
After repetitious failures in the teen years, a person can develop habits and
attitudes the origin of which the victim buries as memories too painful to
dredge up. Resolving the problem may require a person at age thirty to go
through certain adolescent challenges that were not met at thirteen. But
those are not so deeply buried, and are easier to get at. At one time the
adolescent’s situation was too embarrassing or too threatening to his
self-esteem, so frightening he didn’t know how to cope with it. So he blocks
it and buries the events that were so troubling then. Later in life as other
areas of life provide feelings of self-worth and successfulness, there is a
mature platform for exploring and expunging the teenage failures, but it’s
not an easy road. How
marvelous it is when you unblock something. Then you can say, “Hey, I don’t
have to be that way anymore,” or “I don’t have to do that,” or “That was
based on faulty thinking.” Sometimes you realize, “Well that is just so silly
that I can’t believe that somebody told me that was how it was to be, and
here I’ve been trying to live my life according to those images. Those buried
fears from adolescence are much easier to get at. It
is easier to retrieve the series of circumstances that led to faulty
attitudes. They are based on cultural mythology or just plain bad
information. You may have thought you understood something but it turned out
that you got it backwards, and you were trying to live your life that way.
Sometimes teens have minds like blotters—they pick up everything, but they
get it backwards. Q: I know that I have no memory before my
fifth year. Could there be a physiological reason for that? RK: Sure; that’s about the age when the
neurological development of the cortex allows it to begin to dominate one’s
perceptions. Then the small child begins to deal more with intellect than
feelings and intuitions. A heightened awareness of reality dawns. But input
into the “subconscious” has nevertheless been going on since birth; so
people’s attitudes toward a child and the things they say to him or her are
powerful, unconscious self-attitude formers during the first six years of
life. Then all the do’s and don’ts that people tell you are things that you
don’t yet have any critical capacity to judge or evaluate. Implanted
absolutes of what are right and wrong or what are true and false become a
foundation for later conscience. These things seem to be pounded into your
head as being the way the world is, and all of these concepts which are
induced by society via your principal caretakers are then the things that you
as a small child begin to operate on unconsciously. This clearly colors your
dealings with reality. Another problem is that all small children form
erroneous interpretations of what they see and hear, and these
interpretations also become an unconscious part of the child’s view of his
world. Presenting the small child with verbal abstractions, cogent arguments,
and logical reasons is futile because the brain is not yet ready to deal with
that until about the sixth year. Children respond to prospects of pain or
pleasure, and they learn by interacting with physical items. It is built into
all tiny children to interact with the things of the earth in order to best perceive
reality in preparation for dealing with the issues of survival in later life.
They are not concerned with what God is. They can’t picture where heaven is
or what kind of powers God has. They are interested in bugs and birds and
cats and flowers and water. Those are real things that inform them of life.
Only later can children respond meaningfully to theoreticals like law and
theology and moral principles. Q: And when does that begin? RK: Between six and seven. That is when
neurologically the brain enters a new stage of growth and inter-connections
to make the cortex intellectually functioning. The immature cortex is already
involved in learning how to walk and run, and language is also a cortex
function. But so far as the ability to deal with abstract thought is
concerned, that doesn’t occur until age six or seven. That new stage has a
profound effect on all of us because it tends to diminish thereafter all of
the other methods that the little one operated by, which depended on the
mid-brain, the pons, and the medulla. Those now become subordinated to the
cortex. And it happens with dramatic suddenness. Q: That’s just about the time they ship you
off to school. And is that even more trauma? RK: Well, as far as traditional schools are
involved, the deck is stacked against you from that point on. The operative
rules are obedience and discipline. Those seem to be more important than
gaining knowledge. You must be trained to accept the authority of school,
church, government, and the business hierarchy. Q: So that then you have been made
acceptable to and useful to the system? RK: That’s the desired goal, but I doubt that
most of the trainers have ever looked at it that way. Teachers tend to feel they
are providing tools for their student’s success in life and for instilling
good citizenship. They start giving you grades of A’s, D’s, or F’s, as the
case may be, and you wonder, “What’s this all about? What did I do to suffer
this?” Q: Are there any ways that you can help a
young child keep the brain functions of the subcortex more to the fore after
the full cortex clicks in? RK: No, I don’t think so. The brain has it’s
own schedule and way of doing things. You should enlarge the small child’s
awareness of the world and enhance his intelligence by teaching him or her
to read early. The brain develops optimum ability for learning to read before
the age of three years. Every child will have lost between twenty and forty
percent of the ability to read if you don’t start teaching them until age
six. But stay away from the abstracts before age six. Tiny ones can readily
learn to add and subtract—five pennies plus five pennies is ten
pennies—because that is not abstract at all, that is real. They love everything
about nature, but they don’t theorize about why things are that way in
nature. They don’t have to know about DNA, for instance. They want to know
about the way animals behave and how they live. There is a certain charm
about all creatures, and a wonder and a mystery of them all. Butterflies
coming from caterpillars still astounds me! They like hearing about children
in other lands and what they do in other countries. There seems to be a basic
eagerness in children to learn how to deal with Nature and with other human
beings. But as soon as you start getting into metaphysics, or abstract
sciences such as theories of how an atom is put together or how universes are
constructed or how it all began, most of which is probably in error anyway,
then you start filling them with things which no longer relate to their
reality. You may as a parent be eager to indoctrinate and program your child
early in order to assure he will be socially acceptable, but that should be
limited to rules of politeness, which they want to know anyway. However,
expounding the basics of morality is over the tiny child’s head. Morality is
a valuable thing, but, unfortunately, many of its precepts are based on
abstracts, which may or may not be so. A child usually knows how to deal fairly
with another child. Q: I don’t know if I am understanding you.
A lot of parents here talk about Brotherhoods and karma. Are you saying wait
until they’re six to talk about those things? RK: No, they like to understand about karma
because karma is a very satisfying thing as far as they are concerned. It
says, everything is going to come out even, and it appeals to their innate
sense of justice. There is nothing wrong with the simple statement that if
you cause harm to somebody, then harm is going to come back to you at a later
time. If you do something nice for your younger brother or sister, then
something equally nice is going to come back to you later on. That they can
understand If God is like daddy writ large, that is all that they need to
know. And their whole theology need be nothing more than Jesus loves me.
Anything beyond that is too hypothetical, and we ourselves can’t really know
about them as certainties. Bible stories are scary to little ones and can
cause nightmares and deeply buried subconscious aversions to things
religious. The Old Testament deals mostly with horrendous examples of
Jehovah’s wrath, wars, pestilence, inter-family killings, dirty politics,
sexual sins, and dire prophecies. Not that there isn’t enough threats of
hellfire and crucifixions and cruelty in the New Testament. That kind of
stuff is not for little ones. Little
ones thrive on love and attention, and we can give them concrete information
in great quantities because they have an insatiable curiosity and a desire to
know. But, remember, information is not intelligence. It’s only data.
Perception and manipulation of things that are in the environment is real
intelligence. If you are allowed to develop cognitive perception such that
you can see things as they really are, then you can get around the
programming by our society which says don’t ask questions—this is the way it
is. The
latter attitude serves the authorities who are in charge of the world. If
they can make the average Joes feel guilty about themselves by repeatedly
telling them that they are unworthy because they don’t live up to religious
ideals, then poor old Joe will more readily accept full responsibility for
his failures in life. Instead, Joe should ask, “What is society doing to us
that is causing me to be unable to make appropriate responses so that I can
live my life in a happy, productive way?” What the arbiters of society keep
doing is convincing the individual that he is basically faulty and is always
the one at fault when his life doesn’t come out right; whereas, it really is
the other way around. Everybody has it built into them by Nature to make
proper responses to Nature, be able to live in Nature as it is, to prosper
and be happy and fulfill themselves in every way possible. Granted, we also
have to recognize that we have to live together in large mobs, and we have to
set up customs of courtesy and decency in order to facilitate our ability to
live together with a minimum of friction. But society today is struggling
with conventions of guilting and threats of eternal hellfire which have so
much overkill that it has been almost impossible for people to feel good
about themselves and truly human. Today’s society actually induces neurosis
so that people are compliant and self-doubting. That keeps them so
preoccupied with their personal troubles that they don’t have the time or
energy to change the system or even to question it. We
here are trying to get back to what the Lemurian system was. I will grant you
that it takes three to five years just to begin to understand and truly live
the concepts of what the Lemurians had. Our neuroses set up an internal
dialogue that reinforces and constantly supports the philosophy which the
culture induces! We get into a habit of repeatedly telling ourselves the same
things we have been told by those whom we respect. That is the force of
conscience. We end up having a lifelong, constant argument with ourselves as
to what is right and proper. And if people told you as a child that you were
no good, stupid, or would never amount to anything, then you may keep saying
the same thing to yourself out of unconscious habit. You need to stop such
dialogue. First you need to recognize that you are doing it, and then stop
yourself. By replacing negative statements to yourself with positive ones,
you can radically change your self-image and become more connected to the
great human potential you were originally born with. This is more effective
than you might imagine at first encounter with the concept. The subconscious
believes whatever it hears or that you tell it. It cannot make distinctions
between reality and fiction. Moreover, by reprogramming yourself with such
positive affirmations oft-repeated, new levels of self-confidence and
self-acceptance seem to automatically change your external life for the
better. It’s your brain and your life. You can change it however you choose.
You don’t have to let other people’s expectations of you dictate your life.
Dream big dreams and make them come true by self-reprogramming.
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