Ch 14 - SURVIVAL, ABUSE AND HOPELESSNESS - PART 1, Connections into Infancy

CHAPTER 14
SURVIVAL, ABUSE AND HOPELESSNESS - PART 1
Connections into Infancy

To repeat: The three basic kinds of experiences that overwhelm us are old age, sickness and death. These also involve the issue of survival, or at least the fear that we won't survive. We feel hopeless and helpless when we're up against things that are overpowering; when nothing we can do can change what we see is happening. These involve real physical circumstances such as death and near death experiences, serious illness, imprisonment, long-term isolation and major loss. They all cause us to feel a total lack of power. Sometimes, they threaten our very lives.

A number of overpowering episodes involving survival occur in childhood. As infants and children we're forced to experience circumstances during which we encounter various kinds of rejection, denial, manipulation or control. They may be sudden major traumas, or they may be long-term stressful living situations. These kinds of experiences always cause us to feel helpless and hopeless about certain ways of living. Even in good families, children meet up with difficulties. Everyone has them. And while they're unavoidable they help to create "blocks."

Most of us can remember some of these episodes that happened after about age four and many people can give a summary of what childhood was like. We think we understand what went on for us. But to remove the issues, we have to get to specific episodes. During the processes, some of my clients have found that pertinent episodes from late childhood were still located in their unconscious minds that they'd consciously forgotten years ago.

For example, someone might remember that father was always going away on business, or mother was always yelling, or "They never acknowledged me." Someone else might remember how Mother was always worried, or how she was always overworked, or how Mom and Dad were always fighting. In order to release the effects these circumstances have been having on us, we have to experience-out the specific experiences that made a lasting impact.

In the latter part of childhood and into the teenage years, our episodes usually involve physical struggle, sexual abuse, muggings, and major decisions we made about ourselves and our relationships. Typical decisions are: "I've had it. She's threatened me and tried to push me around too many times. No one's ever going to do that to me again." "They're not my parents anymore," and "I hate him. I'll always hate him."

However, even though some of these episodes can be significant and must be released for the person to feel OK, they are not the formative ones. Those always seem to occur in infancy and the pre-verbal. As I've said in other sections, the later experiences are repeats of what happened earlier. Unless someone is pointing a gun or knife at us, or doing something similar, later experiences are about 'concepts' and not about physical survival. Even when they do involve physical harm, there are similar experiences at ages 0-2 that exist inside us, even if we've never known about them. These must be processed along with those in later times because it is the physically overwhelming experiences that lock-in the blocks. This can be seen by examining these early childhood experiences. It's important to understand how this works.

A good example of a significant infancy experience involves a person saying he or she feels "smothered" by a narcissistic mother who always wants her child to achieve what she wants it to achieve, in the way she wants it to evolve. This word "smothering" is even used by adults to describe how their mother still tries to control them. It will also often describe how Father behaves, too. We normally associate this pattern starting around three years old with Mother manipulating the child into 'good' behavior. This is one part of the pattern and affects a certain level of our development. Clearing it helps.

Investigation can also reveal that an infancy experience involved the child smothering as a frustrated Mother pressed a pillow over its face to shut it up. The Mother may very well have been saying words like, "When are you going to listen to me? Do as I say. I wish you'd shut up. I don't understand what you want." The unspoken words of this normally kind Mother's rage are transmitted into the child through her hands and the closeness of their energy fields. These words might be, "I want to kill this kid if it doesn't shut up," or even, "I can't stand this any more. Shut up or I'll kill you."

So the most physically controlling episode occurred in infancy, and included the frustrating experience of nobody understanding nor acknowledging the communication of either mother and child, the lack of either one getting its needs met, the terror and physical experience of the infant, and the trauma of the decent mother realizing what she'd just done. It will also include what the mother says and thinks as she cools herself down and apologizes to the baby.

This experience will embody a lot of how this person feels in certain situations as an adult. These situations will neither be physically abusive nor terrorizingly traumatic. They will, however, involve a fear of not being acknowledged and not getting one's needs met. Even the physical sensations can occur when the adult thinks about reaching out in the way he or she got hurt early on.

I have found that people usually process out a three year old manipulation experience before the infancy one. But interestingly enough, even the three-year-old experience involves terror and/or physical control. Later, when the infancy, birth or prenatal physical experience is released, people have an easier time of releasing related, psychological episodes that occurred later in their life.

Other experiences of smothering at the hands of a woman will have occurred at or around birth and will be found in the prenatal where there is some kind of physical breathing problem with the fetus and maybe also with Mother at the same time. Mother will also have a flash of worry about her and/or the baby right then. Mother may or may not also be thinking that she feels smothered by her mother or even by her husband.

Another common infancy experience occurs regarding the issue of a father who dies or abandons the family when the child is five or six. While this can be the most emotionally traumatic and pivotal episode in the person's life, another experience in the first couple years of life will also be there. This will usually involve Mother leaving the baby unsatisfied in its crib and include Mother's thoughts of dissatisfaction about Father leaving her. Here, too, the same kind of words and experiences will occur around birth and in the prenatal.

I have found the same pattern in sexual abuse. Although the father is the seducer, manipulator and forcer when the girl is four years or older, another experience, with Mother, occurred for one person before the age of one. This was much more physically traumatic at the time and involved mother unknowingly feeding her child some spoiled food. When the kid spit it out, the Mother tried to seduce it, manipulate it and finally control it into taking more into its mouth. While this didn't work, it did make the mother more frustrated and the child more upset. Stating threats, the mother put the child into the crib and a more violent confrontation occurred. You can see the parallels between what happened here and forced oral copulation at a later age.

Interestingly, this episode was on top of the stack when we asked the person's unconcious mind for the most significant early childhood episode that was influencing her low blood sugar problems. When it was partially cleared, the person found a doctor that eliminated a bacterial infection in her gut that was supposed to have been causing the low blood sugar condition.

This client had already spoken at length about her sexual abuse and even processed out a later significant episode involving Father's seduction using a lollipop. But removing the experience of that lollipop had done nothing for the blood sugar issue even though the woman processed out the episode without any problems. Yet when the infancy episode came out, the amount of trauma that was built into this, hidden, yet overwhelming episode, was so strong that it was the only time this knowledgeable woman got hooked into heavy transference.

This is more evidence that the earlier episodes are more controlling on the organism. When they happened, they affected a greater amount of the individual than those that occurred a few years later.

Infants and Children can also be programmed as they sleep, even if the words are spoken about someone else. I've mentioned this kind of programming in other chapters. The unconscious mind doesn't know who it is; it just records the words. This is what happens for adults when they use cassette tapes for subliminal programming while the sleep of watch TV. What children's minds receive when they're sleeping also programs them, whether it's one adult saying something directly to the child, or two parents making comments about the child in its room, or even when the parents or the neighbors have a violent argument. This will also happen when their TV or radio is played while they sleep.

This kind of programming becomes part of the stack when the words involved connect in with the rest of the person's issues. It will effect them no matter what the words are, but if it's one more episode on top of the others, it will add to the matrix and should be cleared. This is where Netherton's therapy is very different from others. While there are usually underlying foundational traumas also involved, these words help to program the child. So even if Mother never inter-acted with these particular words and violence, if the neighbors did with each other, and the child got it subconsciously, it will be there.

As I mention elsewhere, this same phenomena occurs at deaths, especially on battlefields and in hospitals where people are talking about other individuals who are hopeless and dying. It also occurs from the delivery room staff at birth, with Mother and her friends in the pre-natal, and during any operation when you're under general anesthesia. It's been found that you can't just play any music during an operation; the words and the beat have to be positive and energically healing.

So as I've said, there is a theme running through the episodes of all these time periods. When we start from the present circumstance, we can connect back through each time period to earlier and earlier events. Teenage experiences always have their roots earlier in childhood and the pre-natal, and these have exact parallels in past lives.

In all situations, our awareness, or objective minds, are not doing it. What we observe happening to us in these kinds of situations is the product of an energy pattern that was set up a long time ago. This pattern keeps repeating itself in different, but similar kinds of circumstances. Those we are immediately concerned with as adults do not threaten our very survival, but they are linked to the ones that do through the theme. It is the pattern that must be eliminated, and we use the episodes to do it. As I've said, each episode contains both the trauma and the words that were stated at the time, and these program our future events. By removing the words, as well as the traumas, the plugs are pulled that have been connecting the past to our present and future. The key episodes of past lives are those in which we did not survive. The key episodes in this life are when we did, of course, vive, but in which we were terrorized and felt that we might not.

In adult situations, our problems occur because we're caught up in them. Not only don't we know they aren't 'us.' but their energies and feelings are so strong we find them hard to resist. The pattern uses our current life situation and our own bodies to recreate the characters and scenes in its script. We get so caught up in the interactions that we don't recognize there is an underlying 'power force' making it hard or impossible for us to get out of it.

The strongest force is one of abusive death or near death experiences, where survival was, or seemed, hopeless. The key episodes are those where that threat was performed by another person. In infancy, a child is at the physical mercy of the much larger and more developed adults. When terrorized, it physically contracts and senses only fear and pain.

All the foundational situations that set up our negative patterns involve some sort of forced overwhelm, by another human being. We could say we are victimized. And that's exactly the feeling many people have when they go into therapy. They feel victimized by other people or even by life itself. These experiences stem directly out of infancy, and later childhood, and have exact matching experiences in past lives. When the trauma and words from these experiences are eliminated from the body and aura, most of the pattern is eliminated.

There are other lifetimes that result from conditioned behavior patterns that relate directly to what we recognize, and are working on, in our adult life. It's rare that we get all the way back to the source immediately and cure all our problems in a few sessions. More often, we have to move back through stages of releasing the blocks to our development. So what we process out are not always the ultimate bottom lines, because this is, in a way, not the point. What we do is process out the bottom line for the 'place' we're at in our development (or therapy).

The past lives on the top of the stack are almost always parallels to what we're currently working on in this life. They'll also be parallels to the childhood and pre-natal experiences we've been processing and to the levels of the birth experience we've been able to reach. So in the course of therapy we move from the branches down the trunk of the tree to the roots. One of the jobs of the Netherton therapist is to make sure we keep moving along this path from session to session and not repeat the same kinds of episodes we've just processed. This requires our own deeper introspection about what's been happening in our lives and how we feel.

These lifetimes are 'intermediate' ones between the original foundational episodes and our current situation. But they have significant command statements and often need to be released. They often involve deaths where we were beset by natural or man-made disasters, such as being trapped in an avalanche or being blown up by a bomb. Here, we were killed after confrontations on our issues occurred with other people. Often, we got killed because 'we gave away our power' and took a course of action that got us killed.

Significant aspects at these levels also include hopelessness, and futility in being unable to persuade other people to do what we sense is best. The people we confronted didn't directly kill us, but doing what we gave in to doing got us killed. The pattern is there but it occurred because we gave into it, or were intellectually manipulated into it, not because we were forced into it. We may even have gotten killed by other people. You can see these kinds of experiences have a lot of similarities to what we do as adults in this lifetime.

What's important to recognize is that we get 'attracted' into these lives because the patterned way of behaving is set up by the earlier energies in of the abusive person. These forced us to give in and implanted the words of doing so along with the action. One the forced behavior is set in, it repeats and competes with our better judgment for our course of action. What was said in terms of hopelessness in the avalanche was also said, and forced upon us, in the earlier situations with the controlling abusers.

Since we were terrorized and killed, these 'intermediate' lives can set up phobias and other issues. In fact, the experiences around those deaths are directly related to other blocks we're currently working on. Since we have elements of the problems at each stage of development, one episode will often touch upon a number of issues we're familiar with. As the processes continue, what's left becomes more specific. We are working an interwoven matrix.

The arrangement of the past life patterns in the stack are the same as what chronologically happens in this lifetime. We are first forced into a behavior and the words that keep it perpetuating are said by other people as we are forced into pain, hopelessness, fear and death. Initially we resist, and keep resisting, until we are beaten into submission and killed. In subsequent lives, we give in a little sooner and take the words of hopelessness as our own. This is the pattern of abuse.
In infancy we aren't killed but it gets close, or Mother thinks it got close.

Mother forced us to shut up or do something else she wanted. In these episodes the physical aspects to energy expression are blocked and the words are embedded in the child. From this point on, our patterns have the experience that we are no longer able to stand up for ourselves in those circumstances. And indeed the energies in our bodies are blocked. By the time we reach childhood, we must always give in. Even Mothers' words of hopelessness are thought, and considered our own. As we grow up, we regularly give away our power. The blocks force us to behave in those directions.

Thus old lifetimes exactly parallel the development of what happens in this life.
As women's rights activists and law enforcement officials say, abuse is a control issue And all our patterns stem from these experiences in which we were overwhelmingly controlled by others, against our will. It is a case of victim and victimizer. In past lives the identification is clear; there are some really bad guys.

In this life, it's not how we usually think of it unless you remember having very abusive parents. For most of us, Mom and Dad may have been quite supportive and loving, even if there was a generation gap or there were difficult times. Infancy experiences are rarely recognized, even in Reichian and Bioenergetic therapies. And they are rarely repetitive. But only one is enough to set in the block, and then later experiences add to it. I've found that these kinds of event happen regularly in our society but not in premeditated malicious ways. Overloaded and/or frustrated mothers just 'lose it' and the baby gets hurt. Judging from the fact that there are now TV ads I've seen aimed at young mothers, other people also recognize how prevalent this kind of thing can be.