Often there is a particular core story that has tremendous energy and tenacity, the one around which many people have used to construct their identity. This story as a high-pressure ridge, in a sense that it holds the self-concept together. Although everyone has their own unique version, common core stories include: I am not good enough. I do not deserve to be loved. I am all alone, there is no one there for me. It is not safe for me to be myself. With events like the shooting at the nightclub in Orlando, Florida USA, where 50 were killed and about 50 more injured, and the riot at the State Capitol on 26 June 2016, left 10 people with stab wounds and many others with serious injuries, and the suicide bomb attacks in Istanbul, Turkey at an airport killing 36 and wounding 147 others on 28 June 2016, these are valid concerns. Many people fear feeling emptiness emotionally because they imagine it to be a deficiency or lack of some kind. Children have a biological instinct to attach—they have no choice. Whether their parents or caregivers are loving and caring or distant, insensitive, rejecting, or abusive, children will develop a coping style based on their attempt to get at least some of their requirements met. The discursive mind is afraid of anything that does not fit its accustomed conceptual categories—afraid, in other words, of the unknown in any form—and works quite hard to create a consistent, familiar worldview that it can project onto the unknown. Emptiness, of course, is alien to the mind, and therefore very threatening. In a sense, the entire inner life is a defense against experiencing our inherent emptiness, which is actually our oneness with all of life.   

Some children and infants deal with anxiety either by becoming chronically upset and demanding, while others become more passive and withdrawn. In the avoidant attachment model, the infants look like nothing really bothers them—they do not cry when their primary caregiver goes away and they ignore when that individual comes back. However, this does not mean that they are unaffected. They are dealing, but not feeling. In fact, their chronically increased heart rate shows that they are in a constant state of hyperarousal. Parents with avoidant infants seems to dislike touching their children. They have trouble snuggling and holding them, and they do not use facial expressions and voices to create pleasurable connections with their babies. Conversely, children who are anxiously attached to their parents, these infants constantly draw attention to themselves by crying, yelling, clinging or screaming: They are feeling, but not dealing. They seem to have concluded that unless they make a spectacle, nobody is going to pay attention to them. These infants become enormously upset when they do not know where their parents are and derive little comfort when the caregiver returns. And even though these infants do not seem to enjoy the company from their parents, they stay passively or angrily focused on them, even in situations when other children would rather play. Different styles of attachment work for different children. The child uses the best strategy they can find to elicit help from their caregiver. Some babies are more liked than others, so they may be able to act up and know the parent will still come around and actually punish this parent by being mean, even after being comforted.

Other children know they are not really prize child and perhaps sense their parents’ feelings towards them and so they deal with being left out and take whatever attention they can get. In infants who encounter a consistent pattern of care—even if marked by emotional distance or insensitivity—can adapt to maintain the relationship. This does not mean that there are no problems: Attachment patterns often persist into adulthood. Anxious toddlers tend to grow into anxious adults, while avoidant toddlers are likely to become adults who are out of touch with their own feelings and those of others. In school avoidant children are likely to bully other kids, while the anxious children are often their victims. However, development is not linear, and many life experiences can intervene to change these out comes. Some people may experience this emptiness, this groundlessness, this open, spacious freedom as rather surprising and liberating, rather than constituting a deficiency, this so-called emptiness with a different conceptual filter, is actually wholeness, our fullness, our completeness. It turns out that nothing is missing, left out, or problematic; there is no place to go, nothing to achieve, and no problem to resolve.  In fact, when you realize you get everything you require out of life, one experiences a deep peace and unaccountable joy—as well as, as times by laughter, relief, gratitude, and other similar emotions—and they can be profoundly and lastingly transformative. However, there is another group that is less stably adapted, a group that makes up the bulk of people out in society causing havoc and evil, and no matter what you say to them they just do not seems to understand what they are doing is wrong, until they finally do something so bad that they get a serious punishment. Whereas some children cannot relate to their caregivers because their caregivers are a source of distress or terror. 

When children have horrible caregivers who terrorize them, if then times the child has no one to turn to, and they are faces with an unsolvable dilemma; their caretakers are simultaneously necessary for survival and a source of fear. They can neither approach (the secure and ambivalent strategies), shift their attention (the avoidant strategy), nor flee. If you observe such children in a nursery school or attachment laboratory, you see them look toward their parent when they enter the room and then quickly turn away. Unable to choose between seeking closeness and avoiding the parent, they may rock on their hands and knees, appear to go into a trance, freeze with their arms raised, or get up to greet their parent and then fall to the ground. Not knowing who is safe or whole they belong to; they may be intensely affectionate with strangers or may trust nobody. This is called disorganized attachment. Disorganized attachment is fright without solution. Here are some critical deconstructions one may want to consider when dealing with traumatized children or adults: Is this story, belief, or cognition true? Can you absolutely know that it is true? How do you react when you think that thought [i.e., hold that story or belief]? Who would you be without it? It can be a powerful moment when one stops to ask these questions with an innocent mind, open to the possibility of seeing themselves and their life in an entirely new way.   

Once one deeply quarries some cherished and usually painfully self-defeating story or beliefs, there may be the sudden recognition that it might not be true after all—and, even more revealing, that at some level they always knew it to be untrue! Once you recognize the cognition or story that causes you suffering, you are one step closer to questioning its validity. Remember that answering no to the question “Can you really know that it is true?” does not necessarily mean that you now see it as false, it merely means that you accept that you cannot really know for sure. In this way, living in not-knowing, in a present-centered reality allows you to remain relatively free of preconceptions and expectations. And the various beliefs and stories that comprise the self and World construct system are discovered to have dubious validity at best, the entire structure gradually begins to crumble, revealing huge spaces or gaps—the emptiness we talked about earlier. Eventually the self and World construct system may even fall away entirely, an experience of complete freedom that is the ridge of high pressure collapsing.  It is equally clear how the violation of certain taboo prohibitions becomes a social danger which must be punished or expiated by all the members of society least it harms them all. This danger really exists if we substitute the known impulses for the unconscious desires. It consists in the possibility of imitation, as a result of which society would seem be dissolved. If the others did not punish the violation, they would perforce become aware that they want to imitate the evil doer.