On Child Abuse: From Darkness To Light

On Child Abuse: From Darkness To Light
As a society the majority of our fellow members of mankind live in darkness. By darkness I mean unconscious. That level of our being which from moment to moment is outside of our conscious awareness. Unconscious meaning, the years of imprints, experiences, and generational stories, which from a core level, direct our behavior in most waking moments. As long as we live in darkness there will be child abuse. Our society as a whole is marred with traumatic experiences from slavery, to the Great Depression, throughout Civil Rights, Wars, and so forth. Thus, violence and fear live within our very cells. Pulsating, communicating, and waiting until our stress escalates to the point beyond clear and coherent thinking.

Child abuse does not just occur with the poor, nor is it exclusive to the wealthy. Child abuse supersedes all socioeconomic levels and classes, it  penetrates into communities, churches, and bureaucracy. Darkness prevails. It is simple, easy, relatively painless, and requires only that we move around within it, not questioning. As long as there is darkness there will be child abuse. Until we seek light we will not be free of child abuse. The only way to alleviate darkness is through the permission of light. Light is consciousness. To live a life of light we must seek a deeper understanding of ourselves, our history, and the current state of affairs. We must walk mindfully into each day recognizing the imprints of violence and fear from our past and challenge it at every turn so that we will not perpetuate the cycle. We must seek understanding of others, but only after we have sought it for ourselves. Until you can see something within yourself it is impossible to see it within others. At any given moment we must understand that someone is doing the best they can whether it is right or wrong, beautiful or tragic, it is a reflection of their own unconscious and the making of such has taken years and generations.

By seeking to understand then we can see, relate, listen, and comprehend the pain that might be directing another’s behaviors. This requires a surpassing of judgment based on our own beliefs and values. This is yet another challenge to living in light. Non-judgment. Jesus said “Judge ye not, lest ye be judged.” Suspending judgment is not easy. If we can suspend judgment and truly meet another where they are then we can formulate the actions to help them alleviate their own darkness, thus bringing light, thus reducing the possibility for child abuse.

We must fanatically seek education. If what we have is not working it only makes sense that we must evaluate, revise, revolutionize, and advance towards a new knowledge which in and of itself brings light. Seeking education is a painful and challenging journey. To question the generations, perhaps not in every matter, but in the matters of our hearts and minds is difficult. For not only is the seeking and attainment of education pertinent, the challenge only intensifies with each step afterwards. For once you have attained a deeper understanding, a dynamic new education, and a bright enlightening, then you must face the masses. The masses can be harsh, violent, unrelenting, and dogmatic in their dark beliefs. To this point understanding and education are not enough. Not even close. Stephen Covey says, “To know and not to do is to not know.” True knowing brings about action. Action without understanding only leads us back to darkness. Next time you hear another, or even yourself make the common statement, “I know,” question whether or not you really do know. For if you know you will naturally do differently.

Therefore, understanding and education must lead us to action. Not necessarily action that will be accepted or approved, both of which you should not expect, but action that will bring you into light. A light of love over fear. The path of light is fraught with hardship, for love is not easy. Loving ourselves, truly, and others is not easy. Love is not easy. Within love there is hope, faith, trust, perseverance, commitment, and the list goes on and on. These actions are not easy. Fear and darkness are easy.

Let us question our understanding, our education, and our actions. Do they continue to be burdened by darkness, or are they steadfastly moving towards light. Do we as a society truly have the courage to prevent child abuse? The quintessential question becomes do we have the courage to end our own violence, fear, and darkness? When we can answer that question with a resounding and honest yes, then we are truly ready for a Love Revolution. Then we will begin preventing and ending child abuse.

Always Choose Love.

B.

Have you read Bryan Post’s FREE e-Book How to End Lying Now: Why Kids Lie and What You Can Do to Stop It?

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• www.postinstitute.com – A Radical New Understanding of Difficult Children resource site. Lots of free stuff and training materials.
• www.reactiveattachmentdisorderparenting.com – The Parenting Course for parents & professionals with RAD kids and many other challenging behaviors and diagnoses.
• www.oxytocincentral.com – Resource site for the latest info and research on Oxytocin, the hormone responsible for attachment and bonding.
• www.postinnercircle.com – Where Desperate Parents Come for Solutions and Support. You Are Not Alone. If there were a way to personally interact with Bryan Post on a regular basis, would you be interested? If there were a community of other parents and professionals who wanted peace and harmony in their families as much as you, and you could learn from them, would you be interested in joining them?

“Bryan, I want to be one of the parents you talk about…”

A story from the Great Behavior Breakdown by B. Bryan Post. Read more about the specific ways you can reduce challenging behaviors like this at http://www.postinstitute.com/store/books.html.

In the middle of one of Bryan Post’s lectures, a woman stood up and said, “Bryan, I want to be one of the parents you talk about.” Everyone in the room laughed, including Bryan, and he said, “I want you to be one of the parents I talk about.” This was a grandmother raising her granddaughter. She said, “I’m going to try this stuff, and I’ll let you know how it worked.” Months later, she showed up at another lecture and said, “I’ve got something to tell you. The day after your lecture, I picked my granddaughter up from school. It was always a bad day be-cause she never wanted to leave. She always gave me defiance and back talk. But this day, I walked in and was going to be calm. I got there early and was breathing, and I said, ‘Honey, it’s time to go.’ And she started in with the same dynamics as usual, so I said, ‘Grandma feels scared right now.’ My granddaughter stopped, looked at me, and said, ‘Grandma, what are you afraid of? Are you scared someone is going to hurt me? Are you scared someone is going to hurt you?’ I said, ‘No, honey. I’m scared because every day is like this, and the evening is like this. And we’re not having a very good relationship.’” Her granddaugh-ter looked at her and said, “Grandma, everything’s going to be okay.” And they walked out of that school hand in hand. “That was the best day we have ever had,” she told Bryan. All of this happened as a result of: Reflect, Relate, and Regulate.

None of this is easy to do and sometimes you have to stop yourself and ask the question, “Is what I’ve been doing working?” Most of the time the answer is no, so you’ve got to change your parenting paradigm.

Choose love…

On Love

We at the POST Institute (http://postinstitute.com) decided to spend time examining the very fleeting experience of Love. Why do I say fleeting? Truth is love is not that common. To really know love, experience it, share it, sit quietly within it, is something that I believe eludes most of us most of the time. We are familiar with the all too common “I love you” and the quick “love you too” response that is more of a knee jerk reaction than a truly heartfelt expression of what the words really mean. Truth be told, we all strive for it, hope to raise our children in it, and would like to be seen as very loving. In fact, in the day to day we probably even believe that for the most part we are loving. But let’s take a closer look shall we?

I believe that in order to truly understand something, we can best grasp it by understanding more fully its opposite. I was twenty-seven years old before I first realized that I was fearful. Not fearful on a moment to moment basis, but fearful in a way that it was a controlling factor throughout my life. Within a flash I looked back on my earliest experiences, the anxiety, the shyness, the vigilance, all rooted in fear. I have started this year off with a resolution of getting fit. The other day, as I was exercising, a flash of stress trigger entered my body. At first I could not place the source of my stress and anxiety. When I sat with it for a moment I realized the history of the stress trigger was in my fear of failure. You see, I played college football for a couple of years until I finally came to the realization that my dream of becoming a professional football player was more to get me to college than it was to become a reality. My first college football exercise was to run a mile in under twelve minutes. I was young, strong and in shape. Not really a big deal until I started running. I became filled with anxiety. I couldn’t catch my breath, my heart was beating fast, soon I started to fear that I wouldn’t make it and would have to run extra during the rest of the season. After a few laps I noticed that several teammates had finished and being a freshman, I wasn’t particularly worried about anyone watching me, so somewhere in the mix of things I feigned completion and stopped alongside the rest of the guys. I never finished my mile; my fear got the best of me.

Such experiences were a significant part of my athletic life throughout school. Though I was by most accounts a dominate athlete, occasionally my fear would takeover and I would be almost helpless. I didn’t realize this until years later while in therapy. Though the therapist was not particularly impressive she did point out to me that I seemed to have a tremendous amount of fear. It did not become fully conscious until another year or so passed and a client asked me what I was afraid of and I was about to reply, “I’m not afraid of anything,” when suddenly it hit me like a lightening bolt, “I was afraid of everything and had been so for much of my life.” After sharing with my client the light bulb she had just turned on for me, I began another round of therapy to examine deeper the fear that I had been carrying throughout my life.

Now you might ask, “Well Bryan if you are writing on love why exactly are you going into this diatribe on fear?” The point is that if you don’t know what you are afraid of, you will never become conscious of whether the space you are standing in is one of love or one of fear. It is imperative and much easier to be honest with our fear, more so than our love, because our fear is much more pervasive in our lives. Now if you find yourself taking offense to that last statement, ask yourself why? Why is it that we become immediately defensive with things we do not like, rather than just opening and accepting? It’s because of fear. We are always fearful of encountering new things. It’s actually a scientific finding that when we encounter new things we perceive them as threatening and fearful until we deem them otherwise. If we were holding a space of love we wouldn’t judge, wouldn’t become so reactive, and defensive. We might laugh in our observance of the statement, find it amusing and then move on to the rest of life. But, we don’t. Just like our children’s behaviors. We are so fearful of our children doing wrong, we seldom see the right. It is much easier to see fearful behaviors or actions because our brains are always looking for a threat, as opposed to seeing attempts to survive, or to do better, or perhaps to just do as we’ve been conditioned. (Take a moment to read that last sentence again. I think there is something significant there, which probably deserves another blog at some point.)

Love is simple. There have been songs, poems, books, and monuments built to honor it. However, love requires none of these things. Because it just is. My most sincere suggestion regarding love is that you look closer at the roots of your fear. If you can find it, connect to it, understand it, and don’t judge it, but seek to really see it and how it plays out in your day to day experiences, you will then find the space of love. Remember love and fear cannot co-exist. Where one is the other is not. Your ability to see your fear makes it possible to then put it aside and return to love.

B.

On Healing

I recall as a teen being injured during basketball practice, actually knocked unconscious, and lying in bed when my mother got home from work. When she asked me what had happened I explained the best I could through my tears. My mom listened, turned my light off and then walked back out. Honestly I can’t recall if I was that injured or not, but when that happened it injured me worse. I moaned and cried out loud, begged and pleaded to go to the doctor, finally out of frustration she relented. I left the hospital in a neck brace and on crutches. I had sprained my neck, had a concussion, and torn ligaments in my knee.

Trauma is defined as any stressful event which is prolonged, overwhelming, or unpredictable. That means any stressful event, and stress can occur in more situations than we can possibly imagine. From pre-birth trauma to medical trauma, adoption, automobile accidents, witnessing a crime or murder, living in a stressful environment and everything else before, in between, and beyond, trauma can rear its very silent yet devastating impact.

In his seminal text, Affect Dysregulation and the Repair of the Self, author Allan Schore cites the findings of a meta-analysis of societal trauma: 50% of men in our society have experienced severe trauma and 60% of women. If you consider trauma as occurring on a spectrum of mild, moderate, severe, then essentially every member of our society has experienced some degree of trauma at some point during their lifetime. It is also important in understanding that when traumatic events continue on unexpressed, unprocessed, and misunderstood, it has the potential to impact the person for the rest of their lives.

There are so many levels from which we are impacted by trauma. Yet, it is in our immediate past and present day experiences that we most often look at trauma. I am convinced that this is merely the tip of the iceberg especially when it comes to parents and children who have been impacted by traumatic experiences. First of all, most parents are unaware, in denial, and flat out resistant to considering the impact of highly stressful past events on their current life circumstances. We tend to want to take a very puritanical approach to our pain, thus not surprisingly this carries over to our child-rearing.

Did my mother approach me this way because she was uncaring? Absolutely not, my mother is one of the most caring people that I know. However, when it comes to us and our family it is very easy to rely on past imprinting of just “tough it out”. As much as the trauma we may have directly experienced in our past or present is the impact of the generational trauma that has impacted all most all of us. I always encourage the parents and therapists that come to my camps to think not current generation pain, but go back a generation, two generations and see what you find. In the 1960’s the pioneering psychologist Bowen coined the term “generational transmission of stress” implying that stress and trauma are actually transmitted from one generation to the next. Forty years later science has confirmed this beyond a shadow of a doubt.
A passionate and concerned mother asked me the other day, “How long will it take for our family to find peace in our home. For our children to be more normal and just have the day to day challenges of normal children?” She didn’t like my answer, “Find peace now, today. This is when you will find peace. Not in the next moment or year, but today. Accept that your children are who they are and love them as they are, this will bring peace. If you are waiting for some magical moment when peace and normalcy will arrive, or come knocking at your door, then you have an expectation for the way things should be as opposed to an acceptance of the way things are. The problem with this line of thinking is that when peace and normalcy finally arrive, because we are too busy waiting for what we expect to show up, we don’t welcome what does. When this happens then peace and normalcy leaves our home as unwelcomed guest because we were too busy waiting for what we thought was going to show up.”

Healing is a process. It is a journey through repairing damage that has been done long ago. When a child has been mistreated, abused, deprived, or neglected during their most critical brain stages, then their brain has been shaped differently. In many ways he becomes a stranger in a strange world of expectations and demands, like a foreigner speaking a foreign language when everyone else speaks in the native tongue.

Additionally, what of the imprints we carry from a generational perspective? To have been witness to an adult treating a child in a manner of abuse, neglect, or maltreatment, is a reflection of how that adult was inevitably treated at some point in their own life. Not only is the child therefore victim to the adult, but also to the generations of mistreatment, abuse, deprivation, and neglect that came many generations before. Healing is therefore not merely about bringing one child or family into a sense of peace and normalcy, it is about changing the very fabric and imprinting of life. It is about what will be passed down through the DNA to the next generation of children. Healing trauma is a very big deal.

Let us not forget that life and love in and of themselves have the potential to heal. How many of us who have come from traumatic environments, circumstances, and relationships have been able to rebound and move forward? Maybe not finding perfect peace and harmony, who ever truly does, but able to experience the joys and wonders of the world, along with the sadness and grief that it offers, without ending up in jail, broken down, and alone. Many more have attained this than not. And what of the ones who have not? My personal belief is that as long as there is breath there is hope and everyone has a purpose and the value of that purpose cannot always be determined as it relates to the fabric of our lives.

Choose Love,
B.

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