The first thing to recognize about the Child ego state is that, no matter how real the feelings seem now, they all come from the past. Regardless of how present the fear or how strong the neediness seems to feel, everything from the past is merely a memory. The Adult knows that the present is the present, an always-evolving new set of unpredictable possibilities to create with. The Adult realizes that we have no power at all to change even the tiniest thing from the past.
Prove for yourself right now that you have no power to change the past. Do this experiment: Make it so that you did not just read this sentence. Can you do that? No. Why not? Because reading the sentence occurred in the past. Even though you read the sentence only a few seconds ago, you cannot alter the fact that it already happened. We have no power in the past. The only place we have the power to do anything is now.
Power is in the present. How much time and energy have you spent trying to make things different in your past? Trying to re-have a conversation in a better way? Wishing that you had made a different decision? Trying to find a solution to a problem that you had a long time ago? It is silly, actually, that we try to change the past. But we do. And what we get for our efforts is ordinary human relationship.
When we were children our parents were busy. Toward us, perhaps, they were being authoritarian, being anti-authoritarian, or trying out some other parenting fad. The results were that some of our childhood needs were not met. We sometimes can feel the void left from these unmet needs in our day-to-day life. We experience an aching space in our soul, deep, wide and unfulfilled. This aching emptiness comes from the Child ego state. We look to our partner to fill this void. But it is not his or her job. No amount of chocolate-chocolate-chip ice cream can fill that void either. We seek for approval and acceptance, recognition and rewards, successes and glamorous attention to fill the hole, and none suffices. The emptiness remains.
Well, there is some bad news and some good news about this aching emptiness. The bad news is this: Your childhood needs will never be fulfilled. Your parents and teachers and brothers and sisters are never going to come to you and hug you and say, “You did a great job. We love you totally.” It is never going to happen. That is the bad news.
Here is the good news about the aching emptiness: Your childhood needs will never be fulfilled. You can finally stop waiting around with false expectations and faint hopes for something from the past to change. You can stop waiting around and get on about living your Adult life. You can grow up! This is great news!
Relocate to the Adult Ego State
The Adult recognizes that you cannot change what happened to you. It happened exactly how it happened. It happened in the past so you cannot change what happened. But you can change your relationship to what happened. You can change the story that you subscribe to about what happened. You can change your subscription. That old story about the thing that happened to you is a stake in the ground that keeps you from flying. You can cut the rope. You can stop giving the old story your energy and let it be what it is: a memory. Then, you can get on with your life and put your energy into creating what really matters to you now.
Anchoring yourself into the short now-moment of the Adult ego state creates a star-tlingly clear perspective. All of a sudden a lot of extraneous psycho-emotional baggage from the Child ego state drifts effortlessly away from you. It is possible to graciously let this baggage go. All of those memories and conclusions are only one of your possible identities: your child identity. When you affirm that you are no longer a child, you let your child identity go back to where it belongs – in the past – and you step into your Adult identity. Sentimental nostalgia only interferes with the enjoyable lightness of being that characterizes the Adult state. There is a difference between reflecting on memories from time to time, and indulging in memories to try to relive them.
MAP OF ADULT EGO STATE
EXTRAORDINARY HUMAN COMMUNICATIONS
COME FROM STAYING IN THE ADULT EGO STATE AND NOT GETTING HOOKED, EVEN IF IT IS NOT FAIR
Memories are memories. You can experience memories in the present, but what happened in your memories is in the past. Whatever happened then, good or bad, cannot happen now. Only what is happening now can happen now, and we can only change what is happening now now. The Adult ego state includes only now.
Adults source responsibility; children do not. The free natural Child has a great time, but that great time is an illusion because the responsible Adult is the one who must clean up the mess.
The concept of “reclaiming the free natural Child ego” state has been frequently misunderstood. The concept has been somehow distorted to imply that the only real freedom of expression and joy in life comes through the free natural Child ego state. To finally experience freedom and fun, some people have desperately tried to drag that little guy or girl out of being abandoned in the basement of memory and then to place them into the driver’s seat of their lives so they can go play with the other “kids” and eat ice cream. The embarrassing aspect of this distortion is that your life as an Adult is an Adult life, not a child’s life. The Child neither knows how nor wants to take responsibility for your Adult life. Shirking responsibility and trying to live wisely and fully through the Child ego state is a choice that can be costly in terms of life decisions. Really, what Man wants to have sex with a little girl? What Woman is attracted and turned on when in bed with a little boy? Don’t let years go by while you try to figure this out. Grow up now!
Childhood is the “bad old days” where we are born as functional victims and have no capacity to take responsibility. Authentic freedom, joy and high level fun happen through the free and natural Adult ego state. It is the Adult who can engage the world at the level of creative responsibility. The Adult starts “impossible” projects – and then completes them. The Adult builds cities, reinvents governments, changes company policy, creates organizational gameworlds, explores the fringe delicacies of intimacy, originates new languages, expands ways to express inner commitments, conquers fears, authenticates visions, transforms itself, launches new products, sources religions, creates and destroys universes before breakfast, and cleans up the mess! This is the Adult ego state.
To recap: In the Parent ego state you are at the effect of other people’s voices so you do not get to be you. If you are mouthing words and feelings of someone else, you do not have your own power and intelligence. In the Child ego state you are hooked into the past, so you do not get to be in the present. If you are entangled with trying to change things that cannot be changed, you do not have your own power in the present. The place where you have your own power and intelligence in the present is the Adult ego state. So the Adult ego state is important. It is a key element in creating extraordinary human relationship.
How do you know that you are in the Adult ego state? Here is a big clue: In the Adult ego state there are no words. Reality is wordless. Words come from stories or interpretations that our Box makes up about what is happening. Stories occur in time. The present moment is only now. Now has no time. If the present moment has no time and stories occur in time, then the present moment can have no stories. If you are involved in stories, voices in your head, or words from the past, it indicates that you are not in the present moment and therefore not in the Adult ego state.
Another important clarification is that the Adult ego state is the gateway to the deep Masculine and deep Feminine Archetypal structures that are hardwired into your body and waiting for you to turn them on. You cannot get to the Archetypal Masculine or Archetypal Feminine except through the Adult ego state. This will be investigated later, but it is helpful to start thinking about it now. Additional indicators for determining if you are in the Adult ego state include:
• Adult ego state respects people for creating the exact problems they need for taking themselves through their next step in evolution.
• Adult ego state lets other people have their own problems and takes responsibility for self-generated problems.
• Adult ego state keeps its center, is not hooked, stays present, makes contact, pays attention, holds space, and listens or speaks responsibly and with genius.
These conditions create extraordinary human relationship. The rest of the chapter unfolds these ideas. A short sample communication between Adult ego state and other ego states follows.
Parent addressing Adult: “Well, I don’t like this. Too many freedoms for the children these days, don’t you think? And your Johnny certainly is going to pay for his little attitude problem when it comes time for him to get a job! Everybody knows what happens around your dining table at night!”
Adult responding to Parent: “You don’t like this.”
Child addressing Adult: “I don’t know how to do this. It is all so confusing. What should I do next? Is this right? Why can’t they make things simpler? This is impossible for me. I am too tired. It’s too hard for me. I can’t do it.”
Adult responding to Child: “You don’t know how to do this.”
Adult addressing and responding to Adult: “Hello.”
Further explanations of Adult communication are given in a later section.
SECTION 6-C
Extraordinary Human Love
Our body, mind, heart and soul are designed to live in and be fed by extraordinary human love. But how do we get there from our familiar rounds in ordinary human love?
Ordinary human love originates in the irresponsible perspective of wanting to be loved. We focus on consuming love. We go around in love-scarcity, looking for someone to love us. We live in the childhood longing to have our unmet childhood needs finally fulfilled. When someone appears to be fulfilling our needs, and we say to them “I love you,” what we actually mean is, “I need you to keep fulfilling my needs. I want to own you. I have to have you. I want to possess you and control you so that you keep taking care of me.” We conclude that if someone is fulfilling our needs then they apparently love us and we apparently love them.
The ordinary definition of love, meaning “an exchange of need-fulfillment,” gets shaky when we start asking what is meant by the term “need.” Specifically, which aspect of our psychology, emotionality, personality, or habitual thinking patterns is speaking for us in the moment that we claim to have a need? What is really a need? Is it something that feels normal to us, like “I need you to put salt in the potatoes”? Is it something to make us comfortable, like “I need you to drive faster”? Is it a physical “need,” like “I need to pee”? Or is it more of a preference, like “I need a hug”? Is it fulfilling an expectation? Agreeing with an opinion? Reacting from old fears? Love entangled with needs gets very messy.
Extraordinary human love is a different agreement with life than maneuvering to have other people take care of us and fulfill our needs. In extraordinary human relationship we are responsible Adults who take care of getting our own needs met.
Ordinary human love is like a paint-bythe-numbers kit that we got from our parents for a birthday gift. Extraordinary human love is a blank canvas with an easel, professional quality brushes, and a full set of colors that we have bought for ourselves. The empty canvas is a true laboratory for experimenting with extraordinary human love.
Ordinary human love depends on the evidence of love (“He says ‘I love you’ to me every night before he goes to sleep”), or the experience of love (“I feel overwhelming joy every time I see her”). Ordinary human love is conditional. In comparison, extraordinary human love has no conditions. Instead, extraordinary human love is the condition.
In extraordinary human love a person may have neither the evidence for love nor the experience of being loved, and yet still be in love. An Adult man or woman takes responsibility for realizing that love does not come from somebody else. Love comes from you.
MAP OF THREE KINDS OF LOVE
1. Ordinary Human Love, self referenced, neurotic, “I need you” love, dependent on certain expected circumstances and experiences.
2. Extraordinary Human Love, respectful, playful, adult, responsible, alive in the present, independent of circumstances because you create new love happening in each moment.
3.
Extraordinary human love is like this: You experience love when you love. You no longer wait around for love to happen. You walk around in a self-caused field of love. There is no lack of love because no matter where you go love happens. Love is not scarce, something you look for or try to find. Love is abundantly there because you are there. Love is the playing field that you create and sustain for your relationships to unfold into. The whole twenty-four hours are about making love because you are a love maker. With your partner, your colleagues, your children or your friends you have love for no reason, love without cause. Your relationships happen not so you might find love; they happen because you are already in the space of love, and you are the “space holder” for this love happening. Love is not an ideal or a fantasy. Love is the way. “I love you” is a declaration. Love exists because you say it exists.
In extraordinary human relationship if you are not happy it is not the other person’s fault. If you are not happy it is because you have not taken care of yourself to be happy. Taking care of yourself to be happy is Adult responsibility. In extraordinary human relationship your own happiness is a gift that you make and bring to your partner to share with them.
SECTION 6-D
The Soft Skills of Extraordinary Human Relationship
We might have assumed that since we are human beings we already know about love and relationship. But think about sex. Did you already know about sex when you began your first sexual encounters? If so, it was sex in its most rudimentary form. The same is true of love and relationship. There are so many levels to discover and explore. Gaining skills in love and relationship is a different procedure from gaining skills in mathematics or sewing. There is a considerable difference between learning “soft skills” and learning “hard skills.”
“Hard skills” are skills that produce an immediately visible result. If someone teaches you how to fry a sunny-side-up egg, it is easy to confirm that you have acquired the skill. The same is true of mowing the grass, paying the bills, ironing shirts, setting the table, cleaning the toilet, and so on. The results of learning a hard skill are visible, well defined, directly obvious, and usually involve a human being manipulating inanimate objects.
“Soft skills,” in contrast, usually involve interactions with other human beings. Suddenly the equation takes on a very wiggly character. Human beings are not inanimate objects. They have a will of their own; suffer from short attention spans; are prone to reacting irrationally with strong emotions; and possess agendas not always obvious even to themselves. In short, soft skills are complex! Hard skills are simple in comparison.
Learning a hard skill is usually a matter of figuring out how things work and then doing it that way. Not so with soft skills. Acquiring a new soft skill means modifying your already existing habitual behavior. Even if your present behavior is to go numb, avoid contact, avert the eyes, stay silent, or do nothing, it is still a behavior. Doing something different from that requires behavior change. Behavior does not often change by simply figuring it out. How often have you figured out that a certain behavior produced unwanted results and yet you still continued with the same behavior? Behavior change requires constant, careful self-observation and continued involvement with other people who are willing and able to give you feedback, coaching, encouragement and attention. Even with abundant support the results are not guaranteed.
The sobering news is that the difference between ordinary human relationship and extraordinary human relationship has almost nothing to do with your ability to deal with inanimate objects, and everything to do with your ability to navigate interactions between subtle and fickle human beings. You will need to learn new soft skills.
Soft Skills Cannot Be Taught
The actions that shift you fro
m ordinary human relationship into extraordinary human relationship are soft skills. Acquiring new soft skills requires a more complex holistic learning than hard skills. Learning soft skills is not restricted to the intellect or physical body. Soft skills are learned in all four bodies, including the heart and the energetic body. Four-body learning encompasses a much broader range of experiences than we might be accustomed to experiencing during our usual intellectual or physical learning.
As shown in the Map of Learning Soft Skills (see page 122), the development of soft skill competence comes as a result of engaging four subtle but powerful learning forces. Engaging these learning forces is volitional. In other words, we have the power to choose whether or not we will engage these learning forces. Our present set of soft skills are so deeply ingrained in our behavior that we stay in Unconscious Incompetence, where almost nothing changes until such time as we start making conscious efforts. But, making conscious efforts rubs against our ordinary nature – gaining consciousness and making efforts can both feel highly uncomfortable.
For example, the first step in learning soft skills is moving from our original “ignorance is bliss” condition in Unconscious Incompetence (quadrant 1 in the map) to Conscious Incompetence (quadrant 2). This shift is like being awakened from a fabulous dream with a bucket of cold water, and then seeing that while we were sleeping our house burned down.
The cold water in the process of learning soft skills comes in the form of feedback, either verbal feedback from somebody we are forced to respect or someone who cares enough about us to speak in the face of our obstinacy, or physical feedback like how much money is in our account, the level of our blood cholesterol, or our car’s tire rolling ahead of us on the highway. The world is generous with its feedback. Subtle and obvious signs are constantly mirroring back to us the consequences of what we are creating. But, until the cold water wakes us up, we are fast asleep and not able to consciously perceive the feedback.
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 19
