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CHAPTER ELEVEN
Whenever
anyone Rebirths, thoughts about several specific topics typically come
up into consciousness. Some
of these are about material scarcity, some about sex and love, some
about dying, and some about the Parental Disapproval Syndrome.
These topics are also the focus for the main seminars held during
Rebirth workshops. Negatives
about each of these topics must be let go in order for the Rebirthee's
Thought to create a good life. Since
we all have had parents and most of us are or will be parents, the
Parental Disapproval Syndrome (PDS) is probably the topic that comes up
most often during Rebirths. It
seems central to our thoughts about money and work, as well as sex and
loving relationships. So
healing our PDS and preventing it in our children is of primary
importance. Resting on the negatives derived from the birth itself are the negatives that form what Leonard Orr has called the Parental Disapproval Syndrome. These are whatever we dislike about our parents, about how they treated us, about their attitudes toward us, about how they treated each other, and about their attitudes towards such things as work, money, and time, and sex, love and God. The
grievances you continue to hold against your parents, connected with how
they dealt with your oral, anal, and phallic psychosexual development,
altogether creates the Parental Disapproval Syndrome. Most
conscious PDS revolves around how our parents disciplined us, that is,
how they got us to do what they wanted us to do or kept us from doing
what they didn't want us to do. But
unconscious PDS about our birth needs healing too. When
people ask me what's the value of having children, I usually reply,
"Experiencing your own PDS in the course of raising your children is the
second great reason for being a parent-experiencing unconditional love
is the first." The
only opportunity we ever have to experience unconditional love is in the
parent-child relationship during the earliest months of post-natal life. Every
other love relationship in our life is conditional: "I'll love you if
you do what I want." But
the tie that earliest bonding consists of has no if's in it.
The mother "loves" her infant-usually the instant she first holds
it. AI
love you and I'll do everything I can to make you happy."
The
only time a person has the opportunity to experience unconditional love,
so far as I can tell, is during that time right after a baby's birth
when the parents do everything to try to make the baby happy, to satisfy
him, to meet his needs. They
do not only love him when he's quiet, they do not only love him when his
diaper is dry and clean, they love him, anyhow, anyway.
And, as a result of loving him, they comfort him when he's
unhappy, they clean him up when he has messed his diapers, they play
with him, and they rejoice in every single burgeoning sign that this
infant is becoming aware of them and of the world around them. Such
unconditional love usually becomes highly conditional once the baby
starts getting into things, once the baby can talk and claim attention,
once the baby can protest with words and even with aggressive movement.
Then the parents go back into a more "normal" stance with their
child. They love him, but
they won't tolerate his behavior any more.
They now start expecting him to behave "properly." But,
as the parent goes through that transition, he runs into elements of his
own PDS case. For example,
he remembers how much he hated his mother for nagging him to say Hello
when he came into the room. And
so maybe he doesn't make that requirement of his child, because he doesn't
want the child to hate him, and to have such memories of having learned
manners under duress and through compulsion instead of through some
loving identification with others.
Or maybe, although he insists that his child says Hello, he is
reminded of his mother nagging him to become a polite, social person,
and he resents his child for "causing" him to behave like his mother. Whatever
he does, he reveals his PDS. Once
unconditional love leaves, the parents feel their old feelings about
their parents and act out their old programs related to their Parental
Disapproval Syndrome. They
no longer are willing to "do anything" to make their baby happy.
Now they expect the baby to do what they want, to behave
in a certain way. When he
doesn't, neither is satisfied. In
turn, the baby feels bad about not pleasing them, and, eventually,
disapproves of his parents for not loving him the way they used to.
As he withdraws his loving approval of them, he establishes his
lasting grievances, his PDS. Witnessing
where there are highly-charged negatives and struggles between you and
your children gives you an on-the-spot opportunity to discover and
ultimately heal your PDS case, as well as to prevent it in your
children. As
parents, we all make "mistakes" that our children resent, but mutual
forgiveness is lots easier when we start off "right" by being there for
our children at their first moments of post-natal life.
So, if you're a woman still in the position of creating a family,
be sure to exercise your right to choose to deliver via natural
childbirth. Don't deprive
yourself of the triumph of feeling your body doing what it was designed
for or cheat yourself of the great joy of greeting your emerging baby in
full consciousness. Whatever
you may have heard from exaggerating alarmists, the pain and effort aren't
more than you can bear, and the prize is an immense sense of high
self-esteem. In
addition to ensuring that the birth itself is healthy, you can prevent
your child from having a heavy PDS case by following certain simple
guidelines. (My views on
this today are essentially the same as they were years ago when I wrote Natural
Child Rearing, a book later re-issued as The Intelligent Parent's
Guide to Raising Children. Your
library should have a copy you can consult for specific information
about how to handle particular topics.)
The
First Guiding Rule for child rearing is: Let
your child be the one who decides what he needs and when about things
concerning his body's private needs and satisfactions, such as sleep,
eating, bowel movements, and body exploration. But
you are the one who must decide and teach about social conventions and
family routines like table manners, going to bed, and washing regularly;
and you must handle the matters which have to do with his safety or with
the legitimate comfort and safety of, first, those who live with him,
then, later on, playmates, teachers, and family friends.
My attitudes undoubtedly rest on my own birth: my mother's belief
was that I could get born on my own, without anesthetics or surgical
procedures, and I labored for three days to do exactly that.
So I grew up with that idea of self-determination.
But I have never regretted being able to take care of myself, and
my aim in parenting, in partnering, and in psychologizing has always
been to promote independence. I
think it's better than dependence and I hope you do too.
Have
faith in the ability of your child to lead the way for you so that you
will satisfy his private
needs easily and completely. You
can-you have the capacity to satisfy his real needs.
When you do this consistently, you will be making it easy for him
to learn and follow the social rules he needs to follow in order to take
his place in grown-up life later on. The
Second Guiding Rule is: Never
use physical punishment. It
only hurts-it doesn't teach your child how to behave properly.
Whatever you do to relieve your anger at your child, make sure
you keep your hands to yourself. Don't
hurt! A
child stops hearing the noise the instant his parents stops yelling,
whereas if he were hit, his pain lasts-usually longer than his parent's
anger. Since pain disrupts
clear thinking, it isn't a wise way to teach.
Calm exposition and clear explanation are more likely to teach
reasonable behavior to our children than painful intimidation.
I know my children disliked my yelling and probably feared I
might freak out and hurt them. But
at least they have to give me credit for never punishing them physically
in cold calculation. I'm sorry I wasn't more what they thought they wanted a
mother to be, and I hope they're better at parenting than I wasCthat
will show they've forgiven me for everything I used to do that they didn't
like. Your
child will do what he can as soon as he's ready.
There's no point in disapproving of him for not being ready yet. Just wait and set a good example. Until
he's able to do something, help him out by doing it.
So, for example, bathe him until he can run the bathwater safely
and can soap and use the washcloth.
After that, let him take baths by himself.
Your responsibility stops with reminding him to do what you know
he can do. As
for the essentials of manners, teach by example and then, later, by
directions. Always ask
please. Always thank your child for everything you'd thank a friend
for. Greet hello and bid
goodbye when you come and go from the house.
Be sure to tell him you're sorry when you upset him and say
excuse me when appropriate. Once
he's old enough to talk, he's old enough to use these six magic phrases
(Please, Thank you, Hello, Goodbye, Excuse me, and I'm sorry)
consistently-remind him when he doesn't. Check
what you do with your children against your own complaints about your
parents. The lists of
affirmations in Appendices N, O, and P can be used to remind you about
what you're happy they did and you copied, as well as actions you've
avoided because you used to have grievances toward your parents about
similar behavior. Including
mine, so many good books exist on child rearing that there's no point in
trying to review them here. Go
to your library and read a few, then follow their suggestions as best
you can. Just be sure to avoid all books that recommend punishment or
that seek to perpetuate child-rearing techniques that you know wouldn't
work if you applied them to your interactions with friends. For example, you don't remind your friends to go to the
toilet before you leave the house-don't do that with your child.
Similarly, you don't insist your friends eat everything you serve
them-don't do that with your child either. Rebirth
yourself whenever you find you're into some unresolved struggle with
your child. Some old
negative is present, creating the situation you're finding
uncomfortable. Try to let
go that negative before doing anything about the situation you're
objecting to-you'll probably find that it has altered as soon as you've
let the old negative go. Rebirthing
your child is one of the nicest things you can do-it brings the two of
you back to the unconditional love you felt at the beginning of your
parent-child relationship. So
learn to Rebirth your children by attending a Rebirth workshop.
Then Rebirth your infant by holding him in your arms or next to
you while you carry out the connected breathing.
Infants usually Rebirth to the point of a breath release in five
to ten minutes. (For an
explanation of the term, >breath release,' read Chapter 16.) Rebirthing
your older child is just like Rebirthing anyone else you've Rebirthed at
workshops. If your child
wants to, let him Rebirth you, first, so your negatives are reduced
before you Rebirth him. Remember
to encourage him to use affirmations to help him handle problems with
friends or school. They'll
help him bring up the negatives he's holding on to that are creating the
problem. For example, if he's having trouble with algebra, have him see what comes up when he
plays with the affirmations:
I total enjoy algebra.
It's easy for me to understand algebra.
I like being the kind of person who handles algebra successfully. Ultimately,
your child reflects you, so the best way to prevent his developing a
heavy PDS case is for you to let go yours.
Use the lists of affirmations contained in Appendices N, O, and P
to help yourself let go your old PDS numbers. Remember,
if you still have a grievance against your parents, first work at
forgiveness affirmations. Such
affirmations imply that they were wrong, but at least forgiveness is a
higher spiritual relationship to them than blame. Next,
develop an attitude of gratitude towards them for whatever they did that
you used to blame them for-at least they showed you what not to do and
what you don't want to be like. Eventually,
you can honestly be thankful to them for teaching you so much, and you
can be proud of yourself for being a good parent.
Once your behavior with your child springs from your positive
attitudes and beliefs, only, instead of from your efforts to "get
back"
at your parents for what they did to you, you can be confident your
child is being raised in love and forgiveness and is not developing a
heavy PDS case.
My child and I love each other completely. Rebirthing's
dealing with PDS comprise what I regard as its most outstanding unique
contribution to psychology. Many
spiritual and psychological techniques have used breathing techniques,
so the breath is not unique to Rebirthing. And
certainly all psychologies that rest on the idea of psychogenesis agree
that birth has something to do with later personality problems and
development, so the focus on birth is not unique to Rebirthing. But
the concept of the Parental Disapproval Syndrome (PDS) and the way that
Leonard interprets the relationship between parents and child is
unique to Rebirthing, and in my professional opinion, is his most
creative, innovative, radical, and brilliant thought. The
crucial difference between Leonard's PDS and Freud's ideas about the
schizophrenogenic or neurotogenic parent is that Leonard sees the
child's disapproval of the parents as central to the child's
neurosis, whereas Freud regarded the neurosis as an automatic
consequence of the parents' failure to satisfy the child's different
needs as he passes through the several psycho-sexual stages of
personality development. Putting
it simply, Freud and all other psychogenic psychologists have
essentially been saying that if parents do not satisfy a child's
biological needs appropriately at the time that these are the central
processes in the child's personality development, then the child will
forever after suffer from some distortions of the ego mechanisms that
develop at each of these psycho-sexual stages.
The parent who does not take care of the child's autistic,
oral-dependent, oral-assertive, anal-aggressive, anal-conservative, and
phallic needs will inevitably produce a neurotic child.
(By neurotic, I mean to include all variations of
psychopathology; whether the child later becomes psychotic or neurotic
or psychopathic is not my concern at this point.)
He will be disturbed because his parents didn't give him what he
needed when he needed it in order to develop healthfully. Within
the Freudian psychodynamic framework, the best that can happen for a
person as he proceeds through therapy is that he can reconcile himself
to these injuries, these damages to his ego.
He may go so far as to see some virtue in the damage that has
been done to him. He may
even be able consciously to cultivate particular behavior that might
otherwise have grown automatically as a consequence of healthy
development of ego mechanisms at each stage. For
example, I recall one patient who had started conventional therapy
feeling extremely bitter toward his parents because they had frightened
him so about sex that he remained a virgin until he was in his late 20s.
It didn't help him much to realize that being a virgin through
all those years had at least preserved him from such possible and
probable problems as making a bad marriage at an earlier age,
contracting venereal diseases, having to deal with getting someone
pregnant with a child and not wanting to marry her, etc., etc.
He tried to make the best of a bad bargain, but he still felt
ripped off by his parents. And he still had an unsuccessful love life. But
within the framework of Leonard Orr's philosophy, much better things can
eventuate. As soon as that
patient forgave his parents for frightening him about sex with their
ignorant beliefs, his own sexuality blossomed and he proceeded to have a
successful loving relationship. Rather
than seeing the relationship between the parent and the child as one of
the parent doing something to the child without the consent of the
child, something that damaged the child, Rebirthing sees that what truly
makes the difference is the child's refusal to continue to love and
trust the parent who didn't give him what he needed at the time that he
needed it. Through
the Rebirthing breath and the use of specific affirmations, once the
child gives up his grievance towards his parents, he once more can come
back into a loving relationship with them, and his neurosis, his damaged
behavior, can be changed consciously without a great deal of effort on
his part. So,
although the best a person can do in Freudian
psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy is to reconcile himself to
what has happened to him and to make the best of what he did get from
his parents, with Rebirthing, the person can, by letting go his old
grievances toward his parents, actually come back into a conscious
healthy relationship with himself as well as with them. In
Appendix N I have made a list of forgiveness affirmations to let go the
grievances connected with the most common complaints that I've heard in
the past 50 years from patients and that I, myself, have made about how
my parents treated me. It's
a pretty complete list. Probably
everyone reading this list will find that most of these complaints are
ones he, himself, has made over and over.
I have prefaced the list with the comment AI forgive my parents
completely for:" and then the list proceeds.
Just getting into forgiveness, even forgiveness that is merely
voiced, without any sincere intention on the part of the person uttering
the words, makes an immediate difference.
I have found the change in mood and attitude following pure
lip-recital of a forgiveness affirmation to be far more positive and
immediate than the consequences of the analysis interminable of parents'
faults and how they have damaged the person.
And I have found forgiveness affirmations far more therapeutic
than getting lost in the emotions of that time when the person believes
he was damaged. So,
if you're having any problems with your parents (or children), I suggest
you look down through that list, and also make up your own.
Write down a list of everything that you've ever complained about
about your parents. Write
at the top of your list the heading, AI forgive my parents completely
for:" Then just say that,
everyday, going down your list. It
won't hurt you, and it does change your mind. Moving
from thinking that something has happened to me without my consent,
which has harmed me and which I can't overcome-the position which
traditional psychotherapy places the individual in-to the position of
forgiving my parents and experiencing whatever relief and benefits
forgiveness produces is a significant progression. However,
Rebirthing can even go one step further than that.
It can enable you not only to forgive your parents, but actually
to be grateful to them for having done whatever they did. For
every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
That's one of Newton's Laws of Motion.
It has truth and validity when it comes to psychological behavior
as well. Whatever it is
that they did to you (if for a moment we're going to pretend that they
actually did anything to you without your consent), however bad it might
have seemed, had to have produced some equal and opposite positive
reaction in you. Perhaps
that reaction has not been realized until now.
Perhaps the most that it did was make you vow to yourself that
you wouldn't be "bad" the way your parents were.
Whatever. The point
is that when you start to forgive them, you also find yourself realizing
your feelings of gratitude to them for whatever it was that they did. All
of that is unique to Rebirthing. I
know that, of course, within certain religious frameworks, people are
told to be loving and forgiving and are encouraged never to condemn or
judge or criticize. But
generally speaking, the whole attitude of forgiveness has been relegated
to spiritual and religious approaches to life, and has not played a very
large part, if at all, in the approach of any major psychotherapy. So,
by making forgiveness a conscious act and placing the burden of
forgiveness on the person with the grievance, Rebirthing has essentially
turned upside down traditional psychotherapeutic views of the
parent/child relationship. To
stress it again, let me point out that Rebirthing is saying it isn't
what happens to the child that matters, it is that the child still holds
a grievance about that old stuff as a later adult, and, as a
consequence, has cut himself off from the loving relationship with his
parents that was his at the beginning of his life before he started
holding such grievances. After
using forgiveness affirmations, the next thing to do is to make up a
one-to-one positive that changes each one of your grievances into the
basis for the statement AI am grateful to my parents for...." In
Appendix O, I have listed most of the matters you can be grateful to
your parents for. You can
add more. Making
up a list of affirmations which involve the concept of gratitude toward
parents for what they did to us is an important step in healing our
grievances and letting them go completely. Whenever
I make this suggestion at a workshop, I'm reminded of one of the people
attending one of my workshops in England.
His father had thrown him out of the house at the age of
thirteen, once the father had determined that the boy was homosexually
inclined. The boy suffered greatly, but eventually left his native
country, arrived in the UK, and prospered.
When I told him he would prosper even more if he forgave his
father, initially he only joked about it, saying, AI am totally grateful
to my father for giving me an early opportunity to experience complete
independence." But
after the attitude of forgiveness grew and the attitude of gratitude
grew, he suddenly did, indeed, realize he no longer felt any grievance
toward his father, and that everything that had happened had been what
he would have wished. That man, twenty years afterward, was able to regard being
thrown out of his home at the age of 13 as a beneficial event in his
life. Had he stayed with
his father, had he been a "good boy," he would have married someone his
father would have picked out for him, and lived a life of duplicity and
secret shame in that small town, in a country that today, even, is still
regarded as the most backward of the Western European countries.
So, he certainly was better off for having been thrown out. Beyond
the effect that our parents had on us and our attitudes towards them, of
course, how our parents treated us has an effect upon how we ourselves
behave as parents. In many
cases, our parents were the perfect bad example.
I well remember one workshop I did where every single person in
the room except me had had an alcoholic parent or a drug addict as a
parent, and where, by the end of the weekend, each one of the people
attending the workshop fully recognized that because their parents had
been such perfect bad examples, they themselves, each of them, had
practiced the self-discipline necessary to avoid being drug and alcohol
users. Another
example is the many people who've had brutal, physically punitive
parents, who resolved never to strike their children, and who, as
a result, were better parents than their own parents had been.
They might not have learned such an important lesson if they
themselves had not been mistreated as children. So,
another step in recovering from the effects of whatever it was that your
parents did to you is to look at yourself as a grown-up, especially as a
parent, and see how you are proud of yourself. Write
down everything that you did and still do with your children as a
consequence of your reactions to the treatment you received from your
parents. Then head your
list with the phrase, AI am proud of myself as a parent for helping my
children grow healthfully by..." See
Appendix O for a list of behavior most good parents can be proud of-add
yours as well. By
putting the shoe on the other foot, Rebirthing has enabled the people
using Rebirthing and affirmations to get out from under the burden of
having been "permanently damaged" by ways their parents treated them at
a time when presumably they couldn't do anything about it.
Especially in connection with PDS, Rebirthing has given people
back their power to heal themselves.
It also has given them the basis for considering how they,
themselves, probably constructed the events that they used to hold
grievances over, so that they could benefit in ways they now can
delineate to themselves. As
a Rebirth training leader, my experiences with organizers and with
people attending the workshops have often reflected our combined or
respective PDS numbers. Some
of them have been extremely striking.
For example, one of the ways in which I was most totally hurt by
either of my parents was by my father's death when I was just 10 years
old. The loss alone was a
significant one, of course, and any child has a right to be unhappy over
the loss of a parent. In
addition to that, my mother's reaction to my father's death was a very
severe depression. In some
sense, I felt as if at that point I had lost both parents.
Although she continued to function and was a very lively and
happy woman from time to time, my own feeling was that I was never, nor
were my sisters ever, of importance enough to make her really happy with
life once my father had died. Her
grieving over that, her mourning for him, persisted until she died,
many, many, many years later. So
did mine. In analyzing the
reason for my almost lifelong daily mourning for my father, I can see
that it was due in part to the loss, plus the changes in my mother's
behavior, and also to a generalized kind of guilt that any child feels
when something goes wrong-"If I'd done everything I was supposed to do
exactly the way I should have done it, then my father wouldn't have
died." It
may even have been due to some philosophical belief that so long as I
remembered my father and grieved for him and mourned for him and ached
for him, he was in some sense still alive. That's
a heady combination with a lot of reasons to keep a kid crying
practically every day for years over the death of her father.
In any case, I started mourning when I was ten and a half years
old, when my father died, and that feeling of grief for him and loss
still remained with me approximately fifty years later, until Babaji's
death. Even
that prolonged grieving for my father had beneficial aspects, however. One
day, I found myself leading a workshop in the West of England that was
attended by a man who said he was most unhappy over the death of both of
his parents in an automobile accident.
For two days, I listened to him mourn them and watched him cry,
and then thought to ask how recently they had died.
It was the year that he had left home to go to college.
Suddenly it dawned on me that the accident had occurred more than
twenty years earlier, since he was certainly a man well into his
forties!
I asked him, "Is it so? Is
it true that you're still crying about the death of your parents, a
death that occurred over twenty-two years ago?" And
he said, "Yes, that's true." Suddenly
I found myself laughing ,
almost uncontrollably, as I thought of how foolish that man was (and how
equally foolish I had been). As
I continued to laugh, he stopped his crying, stood up and walked across
the room to stand over me, not menacingly, but nevertheless that was our
position vis à vis each other, and he said, "Madam, do you laugh at me
in my grief?! Are you
mocking me?" My
reply was, "Yes, of course. It's
silly. You know it." Everyone
in the workshop was silent for a few minutes, and then the tension
disappeared as he smiled and agreed it was time he "got off it." I
asked him to work on the affirmation, AI forgive my parents for leaving
me so suddenly." Then
I asked him to go a step further and say, AI am grateful to my parents
for staying alive and being my parents until I was old enough to take
care of myself." Then
I asked him to work with the affirmation, AI forgive myself for having
blamed myself for my parents' death.
I forgive my parents for having left me.
I forgive all of us, knowing that none of us wanted to hurt each
other." By
that time, his grief was fairly well healed.
The root to healing a PDS case goes through being willing to
forgive them, then forgiving them, seeing the benefits and being
grateful for them, and then finally acknowledging how you are the better
for whatever it was that happened. Several
times during workshops I've had extreme difficulty convincing people
attending the workshop that it was vital and necessary for them to
forgive their parents for the harms they had been previously blaming
them for. The
most prolonged such a struggle took place during the next-to-last day of
a workshop I led in Wales with the people who later formed the musical
group Prana. My
position was that we weren't anyone of us going to go to sleep until
everyone in the room truthfully could say that they were willing to
forgive their parents for all of the harm they'd previously been blaming
them for. They didn't need
to have forgiven completely, but they needed to be willing to.
Everyone
went along with the program except one fellow.
We spent from midnight until four in the morning, trying to get
him to, as I put it, "let his mother off the hook." Each
time he started even to think of forgiving his folks, he instead came up
with some more grievances, other things they'd done to hurt him, other
things he still hadn't forgiven them for. It was a great relief for everyone in the group when this one
holdout finally was willing to say, AI am now willing to forgive my
parents for all of the things I used to blame them for." Another
man, I well remember, this time in South Africa, kept yelling, "I'd
sooner die than forgive my father.
He was a bastard. He
was a sonofabitch. He had
no right to treat me the way he did.
I'll always hate him. I'd
sooner die than say I forgive him." And
all I could say in reply was, "If you don't, you will.
You'll just die." It
took almost three hours before that man was willing to take the first
step and say, AI am willing to forgive my father for everything I ever
used to blame him for." The
PDS discussion is always a big time at my trainings and workshops. And it always plays a big part in the relationship between me
and the members of a workshop I'm leading.
Usually the relationship is between me, the "mother," and them,
the "children." The presence of my friend, Louis, at a workshop is always a further catalyst for a large number of PDS cases on the part of the people attending the workshops. Often, what they bring out in reaction to Louis and me also reveals some aspect of my underlying belief with regard to Louis as well. So, everyone's PDS is operating. A
very clear example of that was an episode at a Dutch training held at an
oceanside resort, where, within the space of one hour, two different
people attending the workshop came up to see me in my room during our
after-lunch break. The
first came up to tell me that I had no right to treat Louis the way I
treated him, that I ordered him around and bossed him just the same as
her mother had bossed her father, and she had always hated her mother
for that. That gave us a
great opportunity to get into getting her to forgive her mother for
being bossy and to forgive herself for being bossy as well. It
also gave me the opportunity to let go whatever guilt I might have been
feeling about telling Louis what to do.
Our relationship has often taken on the I'm-the-mama-telling-the-son-what-to-do role.
And I always resent having to be the authority over him, telling
him what to do when he knows perfectly well what he ought to be doing,
and he's quite capable of taking care of his own responsibilities.
My resentment is apparently what brought that girl up to my hotel
room. Right
after she left, another girl came up to my room to tell me that she
thought I deserved better, and I asked her what did she mean and she
said, "Oh, you are so loving and so good and so kind, and it's terrible
the way that Louis treats you. He
just takes advantage of you, and I don't think he cares for you at all,
and that's just how my father was with my mother.
He made her go to work, and he sat around drinking and he had
other women and I have always hated him for that, and I hate my mother
for not getting rid of him, and I just wanted you to know I'm so sorry
for you."
Well, that was her PDS number, but it also reflected how I felt
too, from time to time. For
example, I relatively often find myself thinking that Louis should make
more money so that he always has money of his own to spend on things and
I don't have to keep track of what I'm loaning him and make sure he pays
me back. But when I think
about that, I have to ask myself, what would he need to do in order to
make more money? And the
answers to that question are fairly obvious.
He would have to work more steadily and he'd have to charge more
for his services. He'd have
to become "important." As I
think about all that, I realize that's not what I really want.
I want him to be able to go on a trip with me when such an
opportunity comes up. I don't want him to be so tied down to his work that he
can't leave.
And I also don't want him charging so much for his services that
he practically can't afford to take time off because it will cost him
too much. Even more, I don't want to play handmaiden to the King, so
I'm really happy he's not
"important." So,
every time I feel sorry for myself because of my relationship with
Louis, my more rational mind comes up with sensible objections, and I
find myself changing my mind. Hopefully,
sooner or later, my negatives will be all gone and the relationship will
change. All
of those thoughts ran through my mind as these two different people at
the Dutch training came up with their objections to my relationship with
Louis. And those objections, of course, quite obviously, were pure
projections of their own Oedipal relations with their parents.
"Why
didn't Daddy get rid of Mommy and just take me, and we could have been
so happy together?" "Why
didn't Mommy get rid of Daddy and just be with me, and she and I could
have been so happy together?" A
perhaps more striking example of how PDS rears its ugly head happened
once when Louis and I needed to find a place to stay at in London.
We had arrived there one night in the midst of an immense snow
storm to learn that the furnace at the place where we were originally
supposed to stay had broken down and the place was at below freezing
temperature. So the people who were supposed to put us up made
arrangements for the two of us to go over to the house of one of the
fellows there in London who knew us very well and always had enjoyed us. The
year before he had fallen in love with an American strip-tease dancer
who had come to one of the workshops that I did in England which he also
attended. He had been a
brilliant student at the University, he spoke many languages, he was
involved with mathematics and computer work, he was strong and healthy,
but, although he was quite attractive physically, he had been so
studious as a young man that he had never really dated much and hadn't
had much in the way of sexual experience.
Falling in love with this girl was a great adventure for him.
He was happy as could be! She
was beautiful and intelligent and exciting, she was different, she was
emotional; with her, he could feel and do things that he'd never even
dreamt of doing previously, so he was very happy.
And he was getting laid regularly.
I was happy for him, too. But
one day he asked me what I thought about his getting married to her.
Just
about anyone, of course, knows better than to say anything negative
about the loved one of another person who's asking you for advice.
The only wise thing to say is, AI
know you will make the best choice, I know you know what you're
doing, and please, don't even ask me to offer an opinion, because only
you can offer a valid opinion." But
I was stupid. And so I
said, "Well, I don't think that's a very smart idea." "Why
not?" "Well, she's hardly the kind of girl that you would ordinarily take home to meet your parents, isn't that true?" By
that, I meant that what I knew about his parents was that they were
upper middle class, intellectualized Jewish people, traditional and
conservative. By contrast,
his lady-love was a "wild" American strip-teaser, Protestant, divorced,
and, furthermore, was in England because she'd tried to kill her former
husband by running over him in her car, not once, but twice!
I didn't think it would thrill his parents to meet her.
And I certainly didn't think that they would be very pleased if
he told them that he wanted to marry her.
So, honor-bound, as I usually feel I am, to answer truthfully
when he asked me why not, I detailed those differences.
And his manner towards me cooled immediately and drastically.
However, we left UK and I forgot about the entire incident. Then,
lo and behold, several weeks later there we were taking a cab in the
middle of the night through the blizzard to his really nice home.
When I asked him how she was, I learned that they had broken up. I
was afraid that he blamed me for their breaking up, that, because I had
said something negative about her, those thoughts created her leaving
him. But we really didn't
have much chance to talk about it because we all wanted to get some
sleep. He
put Louis and me in his bedroom, insisting on giving us his bed, while
he went upstairs to the guest room.
Because we had just arrived back in England, we were on a
different time sense. So
Louis and I didn't fall asleep immediately, but, instead, stayed awake
talking in bed. All
of a sudden, at about 5:00 A.M., approximately an hour or so after we'd
gone to bed, our host pounded on the door and said we had to leave, that
he hadn't been able to get any sleep at all because all he could think
of was the two of us making love downstairs, and he just couldn't put up
with it! I
asked him please to re-consider. I
said we had not been making love and I was sorry our talking had
bothered him. I asked him
please to forgive us for bothering him.
But he was having none of it; he wanted us to leave immediately.
So there we were, for the second time in less than half a dozen
hours, getting on the phone to try to locate a place to stay.
Fortunately, Rhagava welcomed us and even drove through the snow
to pick us up.
I feel sorry that I was never able to resolve the issue with our
friend who threw us out of his house.
I think he was projecting a PDS number, probably some anger over
the fact that his parents kept their sex life secret from him, whereas
his recent sex life hadn't been. He never again came to any of my workshops or parties or
anything I was present at, in all the many times I returned to England
in the years since then. And
he didn't reply to two notes I sent or to several messages.
I think what happened was that he simply moved his PDS off of his
parents and put it on me, making it my fault that he wasn't able to
marry the woman he'd wanted. And
I must have been projecting some resentment of my children for something
similar, maybe for their fairly constant objecting to my playing the
piano or singing or dancing. Well,
if he or his friends recognize him from reading this, I do want him to
know that I wish we could be friends once more.
I hope by now some of all this old stuff is long since a dead
issue for us both. I
know how to lie, of course, but I'm not always very good at hiding my
reactions to other people. So
my honesty about a lot of things has certainly gotten me in trouble
throughout my life. I don't
want to make this seem like a virtue because it isn't always a virtue.
Lots of times, it's just that I've been too dumb to have been
able to dissemble or put on a different face fast enough so that the
people I'm dealing with don't catch on to my real feelings.
That form of social lying is not something I'm good at-it's not
something I want to be doing very much either. It
certainly brought up intense PDS when Rebirthers in U.K. and Europe used
to ask me about what I had heard about Sondra, Phil, Leonard, or the
other "Certs." Many
times, stories that I've told in answer to such questions have resulted
in the people listening becoming enraged at me! When
such stories have involved sexual escapades, I've always thought they
were cute, and I've always told them as funny stories.
Generally speaking, I don't hold anybody at fault for making love
with anybody, or for feeling sexual desire and acting on it.
It's not something I have any kind of prudery about.
Sexual behavior has always been something for me to wonder at and
joke around about. I don't
talk about these matters to be passing on such gossip, to be vicious and
to malign their character, because I don't think it has a damn thing to
do with character at all. So I'm not putting anyone down when I say something like, "Can you believe it. So-and-so slept with this many women in one week while he was leading a workshop!" I'm
really saying, "Can you believe it?
So-and-so slept with so-and-so many women in the course of a week
while he was doing a workshop. Isn't
that amazing!" But
I well remember one night when, in answer to questioning, I was talking
about the sexual escapades of one of the reasonably well-known
Rebirthers. One of the people sitting at the table eating supper with me
became so angry that she actually stood on the table to walk past the
man whose chair was blocking her movement away from the table out into
the general aisle of the restaurant!
As she jumped down on the floor, she said, AI hate you!
I'll never talk with you again!" She
was furious at me, apparently because I had tarnished the image of
someone she had been holding up as an ideal.
I imagine that, at least in the scheme of her PDS number, an
ideal Daddy doesn't have sex with people other than the ideal Mommy, his
wife. PDS
is revealed in non-sex-related matters, too, especially in connection
with money. I have found my
PDS definitely aroused by my involvement with Rebirthing. For
example, very shortly after I first became involved with Rebirthing,
Leonard asked me to arrange a meeting of Rebirthers and to ask the
"most important" Rebirthers in Los Angeles to comprise a panel, talking to the
audience about their views on specific aspects of Rebirthing.
He told me that each of the participants would share equally in
the overall profits of the meeting. Well,
I called the busiest, best-known Rebirthers here in the city and arrived
at a great panel of speakers. Each
of them was told that he or she would receive an equal proportion of the
evening's profits.
I proceeded to send several hundred invitations and to engage a
large hall that cost a few hundred dollars.
Everything was all set for the big event to take place on
Saturday evening, the night after Leonard gave a talk here in Los
Angeles. At that Friday
night meeting, much to my surprise, he announced that he was more than
willing to meet with anybody and everybody the following morning at the
venue I had arranged for the following evening.
He said that all were welcome to come to talk with him about any
aspect of Rebirthing, and no charge would be made! Well,
of course, as soon as they learned that they could come Saturday morning
for free, a lot of people came up to me to tell me that they no longer
intended to come in the evening and pay $5 for the privilege. More
than a hundred people showed up Saturday morning for the freebie.
Most of them didn't come back that evening. So, when Saturday evening came to be, the audience was about
a hundred fewer than I had expected and we took in at least $500 less. In
any case, the evening meeting was a lot of fun, people were excited,
they were well-dressed, they enjoyed seeing each other, and the panel
was stellar. Everyone gave a very fine presentation. It was a great opportunity for the audience to see various
approaches, just in personality and behavior, on the part of these
Rebirthers who were talking to them about what Rebirthing is all about. When
the evening finally was over, Leonard came to me to say that he wanted
to give everyone on the panel their share of the money.
Because our audience had been so drastically reduced by his offer
of the free meeting that morning, once costs were deducted, there was
only $50 to distribute between the six people on the panel!
Not a hell of a lot for their efforts for the evening.
When they seemed upset, he pointed out that they had had an
opportunity to come to the evening free, and so that repaid them in part
for their appearance. Anyhow,
he split the money up between them.
But he forgot to give me any!
It had all been a great learning experience, but I hadn't even
made $5! I found myself
trying hard not to feel injured. It
was as if Leonard, by being so good and generous to other people, had
forgotten about me. In
an instant, I realized that that had been true of my father, too, and I
must always have been resenting that.
At my father's death, he left nothing of his considerable estate
to me or my sisters. Instead,
he had left it all for my mother, who, because of her ignorance about
money matters and her innocent trust in one of my cousins, ended up
turning over control of my father's factory and all of our material
substance to that cousin. Essentially
we became paupers, for he gave my mother only $50 a week for only a few
years. If, instead, my
father had remembered us in his will and had put part of the estate in
trust for us girls, at least there would have been some money later on
for us to go to college on, without having to work our ways through. As
I thought that thought, in the few minutes or seconds following my
telling Leonard that there wasn't anything left for me, I realized,
well, I might as well let that go, and made a quick affirmation, AI
forgive my father for not leaving me anything in his will." In
that instant, Leonard handed me $50 which someone in the audience had
just given to him as an extra tip or gratuity for the evening.
So I ended up making some money after all out of organizing that
entire workshop. And I also
had the opportunity to let go another one of the negatives that I still
was holding against my father. Operating
on the philosophy that as soon as I let go old negatives, my reality
changes automatically, it has been interesting for me to observe the
changes that have occurred, for example, in the course of my many
interactions with Leonard about money.
I think our changing money-related dealings reflect a progressive
change in the negative charge on my grievances toward my parents with
regard to money. I
was especially pleased when I found myself finally taking responsibility
for paying close attention to the words used in money arrangements when
I organized for Leonard. I'm
not intimating that I needed to be more careful of Leonard than of
others or that he was out to take advantage.
Rather, I learned mainly with him simply because most of the
organizing that I did for other Rebirthers was for Leonard.
(I have organized for a few other Rebirthers in my role as the
representative of what was called Rebirth America.
That was an organization Leonard conceived of and got going about
1980 or so. His aim was to have at least two Rebirthers in each state of
the union organizing a week long workshop in that state at least once a
month, and to have a team of Rebirth trainers who would move from state
to state doing a workshop every single week.
I was the Rebirth America organizer for Southern California. And so, in that guise, I did organize for many other
Rebirthers. But
predominantly, my organizing efforts were as an organizer for Leonard
Orr.) And each one of those
experiences has taught me something about money and taught me something
about my relationship to my father with regard to money.
So
I was especially delighted the last time I organized a workshop group
for Leonard-not a One Year Seminar group, but a workshop-that I did
pay careful attention to the wording that Leonard used when he had me
sign up to be the organizer for him on a new effort of his.
He wanted to do what he called an intensive workshop, with no
more than twelve people attending.
He sent me a detailed two-page contract that stated that as
organizer, I was to receive 10 percent of all monies collected and to
attend the workshop free, and each one of the people attending the
workshop was to pay $300 in advance.
He would confirm the date once I sent him $3,000. So
I got ten other people to agree that they wanted to attend, and I
collected their $300, each, and sent the $3,000 to Leonard.
Then I got his firm confirmation of the date, and everything was
all set to go. The
night before the workshop was to start, I received a phone call from a
man in Hawaii who wanted to attend, so there were now eleven people
besides me who were attending. I
assumed the $300 that the last man paid me was, essentially, 10 percent
of the money collected and was pretty close to the amount which I was to
receive. Everything
was just as Leonard had said he wanted it to be:
There were only 12 people in the workshop, everyone but me paid,
and I had received my 10 percent. On
Thursday of the week-long workshop, the day that Leonard left (although
the workshop continued the next night as well) he asked, "OK, well, did
so-and-so, the fellow from Hawaii, did he pay?
Where is his money? You
didn't send that to me." I
replied, "It said in the contract you sent me that organizers go free,
and that they get 10 percent of what was collected, so I took his $300.
It was my 10 percent of the money collected." Leonard
looked at me and looked at me. While
he was looking at me, I searched my soul.
Nowhere inside of me could I find any negative whatsoever!
I certainly didn't feel any guilt, and I didn't feel that I had
done anything wrong by pocketing the last fee paid.
It all seemed to me as cut-and-dried as Leonard's contract.
That's what Leonard had said.
That's what I had done. Everything
was exactly as it should be. So
I just continued to smile back at Leonard.
At some point, he dropped his gaze and said, AI guess you're
right. That's what I agreed to," and walked away. I
think that was the first time I realized that I must have actually let
go two big money grievances, one, the grievance toward my father for not
leaving any portion of his estate to me or my sisters, and the even
greater grievance toward my cousin and his father, my uncle, for taking
the factory and, in a sense, robbing a widow and her children. As
I concentrated on forgiving my cousin Arthur for everything that he did,
I found it possible finally to ask him, on my next visit to see him,
more than forty years after the fact, why he did it.
I learned that, from his point of view, he never robbed my mother
of anything. Instead, he
believed he took over and saved a factory which would otherwise have
become defunct instantly without my father there to run it.
My cousin explained he had paid my mother for the factory
at the rate of $50 a week for as many years as it took to pay off my
father's contribution to the initial capitalization of that factory,
several years before his death. Of
course, Arthur got a thriving company for the small amount of money my
father had put in at the factory's start up.
But, from Arthur's point of view, he didn't rob or cheat anybody.
He paid my mother what my dad had originally paid for the same
thing. He paid her back. Maybe
it was all just a total misunderstanding and a misfortune.
Something my father could have planned for better?
I don't know. It doesn't matter any longer.
I know that I forgave my cousin, and went back into being very
close to him, especially in the years before he died.
And I know that I certainly forgave my father. I also know that it no longer happens that men who ought to
be protecting me and taking care of me, instead, cheat me and take from
me, at least not to the extreme extent that used to happen previously.
That PDS number of mine has been let go of.
At least in part.
I'm still not being supported by the "man in my life."
He's not financially responsible for me.
But that's OK. Maybe
the only way I could ever have had the feeling of independence and
self-determination that I do have is to have been the primary one who
has supported me through all my years, as has been true.
I look at other women who've accomplished more than I have, and I
think, sometimes, with a certain modicum of dismay that I might well
have been able to accomplish more if I had had more financial support
and hadn't had to spend so much of my time doing things like painting
the walls and repairing the electrical appliances and doing other things
to save money because I didn't have the money to spend on getting
professionals to do it. Maybe
if I'd been married to a man who supported me, things would have been
different. But then I would
never have been able to say, along with Frank Sinatra, AI did it my way." Quite
obviously, the way each of us relates to all authority in our life is
reflective of how we still relate to our parents.
To the extent that we still disapprove of a parent for doing
thus-and-so, we're likely to create a boss who does the same. Sometimes
the PDS case comes through not from parents but from older sibs. For example, I know that my pre-Rebirth reactions to my older
sister were instrumental in creating for me a series of lady bosses who
treated me essentially exactly the same way my older sister had treated
me when I was a little girl. She
bossed me around, teased me, confused me, hurt me, and put me down. Letting go my grievances toward her, forgiving her, resulted
in my finally getting benevolent Department Chairs my last few years of
teaching. So,
when you're looking at the lists of affirmations on PDS, remember to
include older sibs as well. It's
not all just parents. We
create our bosses out of our disapproval of all the people who once were
authorities over us, including older sibs and other relatives, As
you're thinking over the specific grievances that you have about your
parents, your sibs, and other relatives, remember that a lot of the
interactions sprung from what could be called, in the words of my good
friend, Barbara Bellows-TerraNova, "a confused make-wrong situation that
separates the mother and the child."
The example that Barbara brought to my mind was the example of
toilet-training, where the parent enforces toilet-training before the
child grows old enough to develop the sphincter control and the large
muscle control that enables him to sit on a toilet and strain to
defecate and urinate to will. That
parent has created a negative. So
has the parent who makes the child take laxatives or who gives the child
enemas or who uses suppositories with the child.
They're all saying to the child in all of these ways, "You
can't
be trusted to do what you're supposed to do, without my direction." This
whole issue of trust versus control is a central issue in parenting, and
so it is central to our grievances regarding our parents.
Did they believe that you could be trusted?
Did they act on that? If
they did, then they nursed or fed you when you signaled that you were
hungry, and they didn't make you eat when the clock said it was time to
eat or prevent you from eating when the clock said it wasn't yet time to
eat. Also, they
didn't make you eat anything you didn't want to. (I think it's wise to
ask a child to take one bite of everything, and maybe, as he gets older,
to ask him to take three bites of everything, so that he develops more
catholic tastes and stops being afraid of anything that looks or smells
different from whatever he has known in the past, but that's another
issue.) If
parents trust their child, then when the child is cranky and unhappy,
rather than saying, "Oh, he's trying to control me, I'll show him,
I'll
just make him cry himself to sleep," such parents, instead, say,
"Oh, he
needs to be comforted. I
don't know what it is that's wrong, but at least I can hold him and rock
him and talk with him and soothe him." Parents
must trust their child instead of seeking only to control him and train
him. They must understand
that as he grows and develops, he will develop and grow the capacities
that are needed in order to end up being an independent person who can
take care of himself. He
doesn't need to be pushed or required to do these things when he's
small. Parents just need to
wait until the child has shown that he truly has developed the capacity
to handle some particular activity on his own, and at that point, he
only needs to be given the go-ahead and the wherewithal. The
distinction between trust and need to control shows up in almost every
interaction between the child and his parents.
A trusting parent knows when the child pulls on his shirt as the
parent is trying to pull it over his head, that that child is showing he's beginning to get the idea of how to handle his clothing.
Trusting parents encourage him, they don't instruct or criticize
or prohibit him from trying to do whatever he can.
When he's very tiny, they simply proceed to wash and dress him,
explaining what they're doing, and allowing him to "help."
A less trusting parent who's more interested in controlling her
child might regard his clumsy efforts to wash and dress himself not as
helping, but as interfering. A
trusting Momma doesn't say, "Oh, you're putting that on backwards," or
"Don't try to put your hand through the neck hole, that won't work."
She doesn't ridicule the child, she doesn't instruct him. Trust
and the issue of control play a major role in how the child develops the
capacity to take care of himself. When
he wants to sit up, he shows that by moving his head and his neck and
shoulders forward. He doesn't
need to be sat up or pulled up by his parents.
He'll develop the capacity to sit when he's ready to.
Somewhere between three months and nine months, he's going to sit
independently, because that's something that human beings do.
Sitting, like grasping and walking and talking, isn't something
people need to be taught to do.
These human behaviors are something we do without instruction,
simply because of the way the our bodies are structured and
"hard-wired." We
humans all grab and grasp. Gradually
that is refined to the point where, instead of making a fist and holding
something in our fist, we pronate our thumb and forefinger and rest the
weight of whatever we're holding on the middle finger.
We become deft and adroit. The
pronated grasp we use holding a pencil to write is a human capacity. We are the only creature that can pronate the thumb and
forefinger. Just
so, sitting is human, and standing on two feet is human.
A few other animals do stand on two feet and walk, but only for
very short periods of time. For
example, bears can be trained to do it, but they lumber around.
They're not at all skillful or well-balanced, and they need
frequent pauses in the walking stunt to get back down on all fours and
relax their back muscles and spine.
So do the few primates that actually run on their hind legs for
perhaps fifty to one hundred feet, from time to time.
Baboons and chimpanzees have been photographed running across
meadows as they leave the protection of the tree cover on one side of
the meadow to go across. But
their customary method of getting around is not walking-it's climbing or
jumping with all four limbs. We
don't need to make our children walk or show them how to walk.
We simply need to encourage them and congratulate them when they
do it. Walking is something
human beings do by their very nature. So
is talking. We know how
to speak. Even children of
deaf parents who do not communicate with speech are heard to babble and
coo, developing the human capacity of speech.
What you say, how do you word the meaning of the idea that
you're trying to get across, is something we learn.
We learn languages. But
we don't learn to speak. The
same with toileting. There
are only a very few tribes of people throughout the entirety of the
history of the world who have not toileted in a particular spot, in a
particular way. Those few
tribes are nomads. The
group that comes to my mind are the Masai, who live and travel with
their cattle. The cattle
are, of course, defecating and urinating at will.
And I guess, if you're running barefoot through a lot of cow
turds, you might as well defecate right along with them, rather than try
to set aside some part of the territory for toileting, especially since
they're constantly on the move. So these human capacities are all ones that develop. Parents who trust the fact that their baby is a human being know that the child will gradually grow and develop human capacities to handle more and more of the tasks that are involved in taking care of himself. As he learns how to grab and to hold, for example, he can hold a sponge or a washcloth and can make a gradually increasingly skillful effort |