| that the way we have grown to see the world is the only way to see it, the right way to see it, and we seldom suspect the conditioned nature of our perception. |
| Even in the most privileged of childhoods, life may be experienced as traumatic. We were connected to the heartbeat of the cosmos in our mother's womb. Suddenly we were thrust violently into the world to begin an exile and a search to recover the lost connectedness. Even religion (from Latin religio, ''bond between man and the gods,'' or religare, "to bind back") may be seen as a projection of the search for lost connections onto the cosmos itself. For many, given the impact of poverty, hunger, abuses of various kinds, the initial experience of the world is devastating to their sense of self. As children they encapsulate affective, cognitive and sentient capacities to defend themselves against further hurt. They become the sociopaths and character disorders who fill our prisons and haunt our streets. |
| Sadly, for those thus devastated, the potential for growth and change is dismal; opening themselves to the world of pain, which growth requires, is too frightening. Most of us survive as merely neurotic, that is, split between the intrinsic nature of the child and the world to which we were socialized. We may even conclude that the unexamined adult personality is an assemblage of attitudes, behaviors and psychic reflexes occasioned by the traumata of childhood, whose primary purpose is the management of the level of distress experienced by the organic memory of childhood we carry within. This organic memory we may call the inner child, and our various neuroses represent strategies evolved unconsciously to defend that child. (The word "neurosis" is used here not in the clinical sense but rather as a generic term for the split between our nature and our acculturation.) |
| The nature of childhood wounding may be broadly generalized into two basic categories: 1) the experience of neglect or abandonment, and 2) the experience of being overwhelmed by life. |
| What we may call the provisional personality is a series of strategies, chosen by the fragile child to manage existential angst. Those behaviors and attitudes are typically assembled before age five and are elaborated in an astonishing range of strategic variations with a common motiveself-protection. |
| While external forces such as war, poverty or personal handicap play a large role in the child's preception of self and world, the primary influence on our lives derives from the character of the parent-child relationship. Anthropologists have described the cognitive processes of so-called primitive |
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