Chapter 16: Tranced

 

The chief cause of human error

is to be found in prejudices

picked up in childhood.

~ Rene Descartes

So why is all this stuff about inner Kids and adult children important?

Because it’s essential to understanding ourselves as adults.

It reminds us of where we came from, and what happened to us there:

~ that we started out helpless, totally dependent on the big people around us.

~ that we had no choice but to adapt to those big people.

~ that this adaptation occurred not just on the surface of our personality, but seeped down to the very core of us.

~ that, like a lie you tell so often you come to believe it’s true, this adaptation came to feel not like something we did but something we are.

~ that as a result it left us confused at the deepest level – confused about who we really are and how to be in the world.

Psychiatrist R.D. Laing describes all this as an intergenerational hypnotic process. He writes,

In the family situation…the hypnotists (the parents) are already hypnotized (by their parents) and are carrying out their instructions, by bringing their children up to bring their children up… in such a way, which includes not realizing that one is carrying out instructions: since one instruction is not to think that one is thus instructed.

Got that?

We are hypnotized to ignore the fact that we are hypnotized.

I’m reminded of the old saying about computers: garbage in, garbage out. Misprogram a computer and it will produce only bad data.

The same happens with children.

Hypnotize a child into accepting beliefs and rules that may serve the family but which ignore the child’s feelings and needs, and you produce emotional garbage – anxiety, depression, addictions, dysfunctional relationships, and, eventually, struggles with their own parenting.

These, by the way, are the five most common problems people bring to therapy.

I’ve never met anyone, in or out of therapy, who hasn’t suffered from at least one of them.

They all flow from being tranced into functioning like kids trapped in adult bodies, and from having inner Kids they don’t know how to listen to or care for.

Adult health and happiness depend on escaping the trance.

You simply cannot be an emotionally strong and healthy adult so long as you’re carrying around a hypnotized Kid inside.

Or as Carl Jung famously put it, “Whatever we don’t own, owns us.”