Noble minds emulative of perfection may be allowed a little generous envy. Imagine being young and not having a source of safety, making your way into the World unprotected and unseen. Persecution and discouragement depress ingenuous minds, and blunt the edge of lively imaginations. Keep in mind that people universally feel ashamed about traumas they have experienced. However, great works are performed, not by strength, but perseverance. How do you take a trauma history? How many would trust a complete stranger with such delicate information about their personal life? Who do you rely on in your daily life? When you are sick, who does the shopping or takes you to the doctor? Who do you talk to when you get upset? In other words, who provides you with emotional and practical support? Some people give surprising answers: nobody. Yet, I never give up on things that I choose to do. Perseverance is the surest road to success.  

Some people do not have the option to run away or escape; they have no one to turn to and no place to hide. Yet, they somehow manage their terror and despair. They go to school or work the next day and pretend everything is fine. Felicitate thyself then upon thy defects; which are evidently thy principal perfections; and which occasion thee a distinction which otherwise thou wouldst never have. When youth feel pervasively angry or guilty or are chronically frightened about being abandoned, they have come by such feelings honestly; that is because of experience. When, for instance, youth and seniors fear abandonment, it is not in counterreaction to their intrinsic homicidal urges; rather, it is more likely because they have been abandoned physically or psychologically, or have been repeatedly threatened with abandonment. When youth are pervasively filled with rage, it is due to rejection or harsh treatment. When youth experience intense inner conflict regarding their angry feelings, this is likely because expressing them may be forbidden or even dangerous.   

When youth must disown powerful experiences they have had, this creates serious problems, including chronic distrust of other people, inhibition of curiosity, distrust of their own senses, and the tendency to find everything unreal. However, the difference between a common man and a poet is, that one has been deluded, and cured of his delusion, and the other continues deluded all his days. Sweet pliability of man’s spirit, that can at once surrender itself to illusions, which cheat expectations and sorrow of their weary moments! After three years of therapy approximately two-thirds of patients show markedly improvement. The patients who remained self-destructive had told us that they did not remember feeling safe with anybody as a child; they had reported being abandoned, shuttled from place to place, and generally left to their own devices. If you carry a memory of having felt safe with somebody long ago, the traces of that earlier affection can be reactivated in attuned relationships when you are an adult, whether these occur in daily life or in good therapy. 

However, if you lack a deep memory of feeling loved and safe, the receptors in the brain that respond to human kindness may simply fail to develop. If that is the case, how can people learn to calm themselves down and feel grounded in their bodies? The use of inquiry to deconstruct the apparent, constructed self can have a powerful therapeutic effect. By turning the light of awareness back on the experiencer itself, such inquiry has the potential to awake people to a deeper level of identity where antiquated beliefs, stores, and patterns of conditioning no longer exert the same control. Once you recognize and directly experience the deeper silence, spaciousness, and peace beyond the mind’s chatter, it becomes increasingly difficult to be seduced by the same beliefs and stories again. Many people in our acutely self-conscious, self-help culture have compounded their problems by overly analyzing and interpreting their feelings, impulses, and motivations. In the process, they have just added psychological material to the complex stories and identities they have constructed about themselves.   

Most forms of conventional psychotherapy leave this fundamental construct unchallenged and instead work within it to solve problems, change habits, and reveal deeper meanings for the fictitious me. By encouraging direct experience of feelings and sensations unmitigated by the mind while inquiring into the beliefs and stores that cause suffering, people must deconstruct the self and World construct system entirely. So forget what others say about you and make an attempt to understand and orient yourself by embodying your most basic values and sense of who you are. They way in which you find validation is to learn to deal with your core struggles and overcome them. Rather than struggling within a dream to solve problems that the dream presents, it is far easier and more effective to wake up from the dream and recognize that the problems were imaginary. All of our experience is an expression of this nature that accepts all forms of its expression, no matter how pleasurable or painful. This awareness is unconditional love as it equally accepts the most sublime ecstasy and one of the most painful of all human experience, trauma. It is only in this embrace of the manifest by the unmanifest (what you wish to become true) that true transformation or healing takes place.