Our emotionally painful experiences are unique to each person. This pool of pain contains the hurt we have accumulated over the years, whether minor or major. Each person reacts to the intensity of the events differently.
Even if you had perfect parents, painful experience happen; you or a loved one becomes ill; a teacher at school yells at you; you are left alone while your parents work; your pet is accidentally killed; your beloved grandparents die; you see major tragedies regularly on the television news. Life is difficult.
When we experience pain and we are unable to release and deal with our feelings appropriately, a portion of whom we were created to be is transformed into a deeply hurting child.
Each time our Original Child (who we were born) experiences pain and we are unable to release and deal with our resulting feelings appropriately, a portion of who we were created to be is transformed into a deeply hurting child (the Sobbing Child). Imagine a potato peeler in one hand and an orange in the other; with the peeler, you could slice away a sliver of the peeling. However, with a paring knife you could cut off a slightly larger piece, including some pulp. With a butcher knife, you could sever a huge chunk of the orange. With a machete, you could chop the fruit in half. Your Original Child, which contains your soul, becomes fragmented in the same way. Sometimes the split is just a sliver; other times, it is a larger chunk. When this splitting occurs, it creates your Sobbing Child. Eventually, you are left with only a small fragment of your initial creation, your Original Child, who is now completely covered by our shredded, bleeding, Sobbing Child.
When this type of psychic rendering transpires, our innate psychological shock mechanism, the Controlling Child, is triggered also, and this child will do whatever is necessary to protect us from pain. As the emotional shock activator, this defense mechanism unconsciously represses and buries the majority of our emotions and is some cases a portion, or all, of our memories connected with an especially painful experience. Our Controlling Child admonished, “Don’t feel. Don’t remember. To feel hurts.”
But is our Controlling Child only a denier of feelings and a defender against pain? Or does that defender also become a captor of joy?
Unfortunately, we are unable to repress feelings selectively. How nice it would be to bury only fear, hurt, sadness, anger, loneliness, helplessness, shame, and so on in a box and close the lid, never having to face them again. When we bury our feelings of fear, hurt, and loneliness, we also greatly damage our ability to feel love, joy, and peace. As a result, our Original Child is also buried, becoming obscured by our Sobbing Child. Our Controlling Child then takes charge and becomes the stringent, sometimes tyrannical, regulator of feelings of any kind – positive or painful.
