First Digital Issue 2013

Cover Design: Silke Bunda Watermeier, www.watermeier.net

Translated by Samar Nahas, www.samar.info

Copyright© 2012 Wilfried Nelles

All rights reserved.

Print and photomechanical reprint in any form or partly

only with permission of Innenwelt Verlag GmbH.

www.innenwelt-verlag.de

ISBN 978-3-942502-72-6

WILFRIED NELLES

EMBRACE

YOUR LIFE

ADULTHOOD AND THE TRANSITION

TO PSYCHOLOGICAL MATURITY

Translated by Samar Nahas

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. “I Want to Finally Be an Adult.”

2. Stages of Maturity

In the Womb–Symbiotic (Unconscious) Unified Consciousness

Childhood–Group Consciousness

Adolescence–Ego Consciousness

Adulthood–Consciousness of the Self

3. The Individual vs. Universal (Collective) Consciousness

Traditional Society: Adulthood as Role Play

The “Death of God” and its Consequences

The Role of Science

Adulthood Today

4. So What Can Help?

Why?–On Cause and Effect

“I can’t” and “I don’t”

“How do I get rid of my anger?”–A Case Study

Perspectives

Trauma

Jung’s Neurosis

The Therapeutic Principle and Approach to Psychological Trauma

What can you do for yourself?

Life Heals

5. Embrace Your Life

Seeing Yourself

Constellation Work

The Life Integration Process (LIP)

A Small Exercise

Our Life’s Inner Vision

We Are Not the Children of Our Parents

The Child in the Family

The Adolescent and the Young Person

Touching Your Own Being

Appendix

The Methodological Approach in Constellation Work

Chapter 1

“I WANT TO FINALLY BE AN ADULT.”

The concern of psychology is solely that the individual becomes what he is, regardless of what that may be in any given case.

Wolfgang Giegerich¹

The woman next to me pulled a serious face and her voice sounded determined. It was the voice of someone who had finally made a decision after a long period of contemplation: “I want to finally be an adult.” She was a pretty, medium-sized, slender, blonde woman with big blue eyes, and full sensual lips. Her make-up was discreet and she was always perfectly dressed. Her expression was usually more dreamy than resolute and her engaging smile was an irresistible magnet, drawing you in whenever she looked at you. It wasn’t difficult to imagine her as a child who could easily wrap her fingers around her father, and how difficult it must be for most men to resist pleasing her and fulfilling her wishes.

A woman-child, both attractive and unhappy. She was well aware of her weapons, wearing them like a second skin, and though she used them well (though unconsciously and automatically) she also hated them.

She sensed that even though they gave her the control, using these weapons meant she would always remain the child. She had become fed up of living the life of this woman-child and so began a year earlier to uncover her issues in family constellations and individual one-on-one sessions. All that work gradually culminated in her decision: I’ve had enough; I no longer want to be the cute little girl. I want to finally be an adult!

I spontaneously laughed and shook my head. She looked at me puzzled. What was all that about? Was I not the one constantly talking about how we should leave our childhood behind and finally grow up? Why was I laughing? Something to this effect must have shot through her head, or perhaps she was simply perplexed at my reaction (which somewhat surprised me as well). “You can’t”, I finally said in a more earnest tone, “it’s absolutely impossible!” I looked her straight in the eyes. She returned a quizzical look. If she hadn’t known me so well, she might have walked off.

But she waited for me to offer an explanation. “Imagine a rabbit that comes up to you, looks you in the eyes and says in an earnest voice: I want to be a rabbit!” One of the group participants broke out into a laughing fit. But the woman continued to look at me with puzzled eyes. She still didn’t quite understand what I meant and was now visibly confused, so after a short pause I continued: “You are already an adult. An adult who wants to grow up is no different than a rabbit who wants to be a rabbit.” The other woman was now laughing so hard that she almost fell off her chair, but she was laughing less about the woman next to me and more about herself–she had discovered something about herself in the woman’s question, my answer and her reaction to it. Though my client was clearly quite serious and distressed, I remained earnest and stuck with my “you can’t”. She became even more perplexed. “I understand that, but what am I supposed to do now? I don’t want to be this small kid anymore! How do I get out of it? I’m tired of this!”

“You need to understand that you are already an adult. In the very moment that becomes absolutely clear to you, your childish behavior will come to an end by itself. Wanting to grow up and be an adult can only come from someone who isn’t. As long as you want to become an adult, you remain a child and your situation will never change. You seek something that you think you’re not and endlessly run after it, instead of finally recognizing that it’s what you are and were all along.”

She finally relaxed. Something clicked for her internally and she was now laughing a little, even though she was still unsure of how to move on from here. I also didn’t know, but I knew that now I could work with her because now she was an adult, at least for this moment, whereas previously, despite all her seriousness, she was still a child wanting to grow up.

In practice, the situation is not all that simple of course, and I understood quite well her desire and her despair. For what compels you to want to leave your childhood and your child behavior behind you in the first place is precisely the realization that you, though seemingly an adult, often behave like a child and–especially in important and emotionally charged situations–are unable to act in an adult fashion. You now feel half-enlightened so to speak–you know what you’re doing is wrong but you don’t know quite how to do it right.

In the past, when you were still fairly ignorant, this wasn’t a problem. You were simply unaware that there was something wrong with your behavior, and when problems arose you always blamed others: your parents, your husband, your stressful children, your boss, your colleagues, the state, society and anyone else that you could possibly hold responsible for your happiness and unhappiness. “I can’t help it” or “I can’t” are two of those powerful child statements that can stand in the way of regaining your own life. As long as you use and believe in such statements, you remain deeply anchored in your childhood.

So, in effect, we are grown up and yet not. When a woman or a man falls in love with someone else, his or her partner’s world falls apart. And it’s not only the actual problems that arise or may arise from this situation that scare us. In most cases, it is more the child inside us that feels that it has lost the ground beneath its feet. In most relationships, we also play the role of parents (I am referring to the emotional level of course). Our partners give us (or we anticipate, expect and hope that they give us) what our parents once provided us, namely safety and security. When this is threatened, we feel like children whose place in the family is no longer secure and who fear their parents will abandon them and leave them to stand alone in the world.

And thus we also behave as children: we scream and freak out, we throw things around, we cry and plead, demand and beg, and feel abandoned and lost. Or we withdraw into an inner imaginary world (as children often do when they don’t feel understood by the outside world) and no longer become accessible to anyone. That this behavior makes it difficult for our partners to take us seriously, and perhaps even confirms that this relationship can no longer continue, further exacerbates the situation.

That’s not to say that it’s easier for an emotionally mature person when his or her partner leaves them for someone else. This certainly is a problem because the lives of both partners are intricately intertwined on several levels. They have expectations for the future that suddenly become void, or have grown accustomed to one another and had believed that they could always rely on each other. They may share children or material investments and, though the honeymoon may long be over, they still share a more or less deep emotional bond. When a marriage is seriously threatened or ends, something dies for each partner: namely, the couple. Even in the case of a grave illness or a sudden accident (within the relationship), they may see death on the horizon and are affected by it. Yet, there’s a big difference between dealing with it childishly and dealing with it maturely. The child is essentially helpless, essentially dependent and so essentially a victim, because it does not have the inner or outer resources to take charge of its life. When it realizes that its parents may abandon it, the child naturally feels lost and without ground. The adult, on the other hand–and that is the fundamental difference between the adult and the child (and the teenager)–has the ability to act and can do so self-reliantly, within the framework of the given situation and its possibilities. The one who moans and feels like a helpless victim is in effect trapped inside an inner child consciousness. For an adult, such behavior is inappropriate.

But I’m also not implying that you should grin and bear it like an adult, as if to say: “That sort of thing happens”, “I can handle it”, “I’m not jealous”, or “It doesn’t bother me”. In most cases, this only means that you’re repressing your child feelings or that you’re so separated from them that you’re no longer aware of them. But that way they survive even better. A feeling of pain, disappointment or sorrow will always arise when something like that happens, even for mature grown-ups. And we gain this maturity only when we have faced our child’s sense of helplessness. So when the pain and the entire spectrum of child feelings such as anger, fear, loss, helplessness etc. arise, we should bring them to light, give them space and experience them. When we see and acknowledge them for what they are, only then does the opportunity arise for us to gradually outgrow them. And when the child sees that it has been carrying these feelings for a very long time, in many cases the source and cause of these feelings becomes evident. Then something inside us can gradually begin to heal and what at first seemed like a catastrophe can perhaps transform into a healing process for our inner child, which in the end strengthens our inner sense of stability and independence and so helps us become more mature. And then–when we have truly understood it–we may even feel grateful for what at first seemed to be a catastrophe and a terrible injustice. However, this is not something we can bypass; we need to experience it with all the pain.

But we don’t need to look so far back to see our child patterns in action–the helpless, smothering, screaming or beating mother whenever her child does not behave; adults of 30, 40, 50 or more years of age who become angry at their mother or are sad and desperate every time she interferes with their lives; the husband who doesn’t dare to contradict his wife and allows her to dictate what shirt or pants he wears. There are countless examples of child emotional and behavioral patterns found in adults, some of which are harmless (like the enthusiasm we feel for “our” football team or the short-lived suffering when they lose a game), some are annoying but insignificant, and some are extremely painful or even destructive. Regardless of how grown up we feel and present ourselves in many aspects of our lives, say in our professional or public life in general, our child feelings and behavioral patterns deeply impact our daily lives, especially where emotions come into play. As I mentioned earlier, this is not necessarily always problematic, in fact we would lose a certain richness in life if we completely lost touch with our child-like qualities. An adult life can and should also be light and playful, and as an adult you should be able to “let yourself go”. However, the child patterns that I am talking about here are neither light nor playful. They are literally deeply ingrained within us and make our lives more difficult than easy. When we finally understand what it really means to be an adult, we see that our life becomes far easier than one dominated by infantile feelings and demands.

As disturbing as this childlike inner sense of helplessness can sometimes be, we in fact profit greatly from it, or so it seems. It offers us a wide range of benefits even though, on closer inspection, these mostly turn out to be burdens. It’s important to see and admit these benefits, because the reason we hold on to our infantile behavior is that we don’t want to lose them. The woman who as a child was daddy’s girl, and so (secretly) felt bigger and more important than her mother, would lose her importance and significance when as an adult she is stripped of her star role and thus becomes an ordinary woman. Likewise mummy’s darling. Who would he be if he no longer lived at the center of attention? The helper who sacrifices everything for everyone and then complains how difficult life is for her and how she feels exploited by everyone, or how ungrateful the world is. Who would she be without her burdens? Who would she be if she only takes care of herself rather than take responsibility for everyone else, which of course only seems that way because she in effect can’t carry that responsibility at all?

I’ve already briefly mentioned the biggest benefit: as a child, you are not responsible for anything. You can’t help it when you feel helpless and unable to act when the boss suddenly gets loud, or when you feel like a little boy, feeling guilty and dejected or, depending on your inner child’s nature, you become defiant or flare up in anger whenever your wife morally reprimands you. Obviously if this is a recurring pattern that has perhaps cost you several jobs or career advancement opportunities, or has led to several relationship breakups (a one-time event is rarely enough to recognize that it’s not always merely the other person’s fault), you then begin to question yourself and become annoyed by your own behavior. You may even begin to see that, at that particular moment, your boss was your father or that your wife was your mother and you are subsequently frustrated by the fact that you have once again fallen victim to a situation against which you seem defenseless, much like the child to the father or mother. But even then you feel like a helpless victim. What else can you do? It just overcomes you! I really want to be a real adult but I can’t! And, though this may sound like a cheap excuse, it actually feels that way. And yet it only feels that way–it is not that way. This is important to understand or rather to see. When you see it for what it is, when you face your own childlike behavior, it dissolves. Seeing dissolves it because it reveals it for what it really is, namely an illusion. You see that you really are no longer a child and that your childhood is past and over. But to do that you must first see yourself fully and totally in your childlikeness and learn to accept and live with what you see.

This is not at all as easy as it may seem. There are (at least) two reasons for this: firstly, the act of seeing immediately exposes your own responsibility, thus making you aware of it–you can no longer remain innocent, small and helpless. While you may not be the one to blame for the situation that you’re in, you can however do something about it. You can change your situation. The second reason why this situation is so difficult is that you feel with this child that you once were and who still lives within you. You don’t only feel with this child, you are often fully identified with it–you are that child (at least that’s how it feels). In order to really look at and see this child, you have to step out of this identification, you have to become aware of yourself as an adult and see the child in front of you. And you also have to endure the pain, the helplessness, the confusion, the loss or the sorrow of this child that you once were, to see it without falling back into the identification. For most people this is difficult to do from one day to the next and certainly not without any external help.

The Life Integration Process (LIP), which I will describe at the end of this book, is one such external help. But before I begin describing it, I want to talk more deeply about the subject I outlined here. LIP is only a method used to make a deeper reality more visible. And though I believe it to be a very good method, the same rule applies to it as to all methods: if we do not thoroughly understand the methods and what they bring to light, their effect will quickly become superficial.

Chapter 2

STAGES OF MATURITY

In order to fully understand what it means psychologically to be an adult and how we attain adulthood, it’s helpful to review the differences between child, adolescent and adult consciousness. I would first like to describe and closely examine the most important stages of our lives and the inner and outer life circumstances that apply to each particular stage of development. These life circumstances differ greatly depending on which stage of development we are in. That’s why at each stage of development we have a different sense of life and a different awareness of ourselves, our immediate environment, and the world as a whole. This different consciousness guides us through our respective life situation and helps us act and behave appropriately. I differentiate in total between seven stages of life development, each corresponding to a different consciousness²:

Stages 5-7 are initially not significant for the subject of attaining adulthood as they follow afterwards. Yet they are not entirely unimportant. Much like a child who doesn’t understand childhood because it lives in it, we can only really understand our adulthood once we have mentally and emotionally outgrown it. In this book, however, I will focus on how adult consciousness differs from the earlier stages of consciousness.

In the Womb Symbiotic (Unconscious) Unified Consciousness

Our life begins in a state of unity, or to be more precise, symbiosis with the mother. We are not only bonded to her, we are embedded within her, almost like one of her organs. But only almost–we are not an organ. Despite our bond, we are something unique and alien that grows within her that will inevitably leave her. Up to that point, the mother feeds and nourishes the fetus with everything it needs through her blood stream and her metabolism.

The story of the land of plenty, where the sky is filled with ready-roasted pigeons that effortlessly fly into your mouth, is in reality the story of the womb. We evolve to the extent that the mother’s organism nourishes us, and we starve to the extent that it doesn’t. Everything good that the mother consumes benefits the fetus. And the same applies for everything bad she ingests. The cigarettes the mother smokes, the alcohol and drugs she consumes, the illness she’s afflicted with and the medication that she has to take for it, all these reach the child albeit in a weakened form. Nature’s amniotic fluid and placenta are filters that protect and cushion the child from whatever the mother does or suffers or whatever upsets her body. Nevertheless, the mother’s heavy alcohol consumption, for example, causes serious harm to the child. The same applies to anxiety, stress, the thoughts and feelings the mother has–the child feels them and absorbs them albeit it in a weaker form.

However, this in no way means that the expectant mother should avoid anything that burdens or stresses her so as not to damage the child. Besides being quite impossible to do, it wouldn’t be very good for the child because life is not only made of milk and honey. And we are prepared for it as early as in the womb, and we have to be prepared for it if we want to survive later in life.

But generally if the mother is healthy and relaxed, the child is well because it feels safe; when she’s sick, has an accident, or suffers any physical or emotional stress or injury, the child is also at risk. And if she seriously considers an abortion or even when the attempt is unsuccessful (which apparently happened quite frequently back when abortions were illegal and not performed by specialized doctors–something I’ve occasionally experienced in my work), this leaves a mark on the child. The child’s life hangs on its mother’s, in good times and bad. The fetus can do nothing for its own survival–a decisive element for our consciousness. Everything depends on the mother.