All children are empathic. And all children must abandon empathy because of the pretense of their parents and care-givers.
Of course, some people are empaths… and they must learn suppression, avoidance, going unconscious for long periods of times if they want to remain sane.
Let me explain.
I grew up with two Holocaust survivor parents. They met in one of those camps where the Nazis collected the Jews before they transported them to a concentration camp.
Later my father impregnated my mother… and shortly after the boy was born, they got married.
My father was insensitive, and my mother didn’t love him. Then she got pregnant with me, and she put all her dislike of my father onto me.
According to some psychologists, I suffered from double bind: i.e. my mother’s feelings and behavior told two different stories. Impossible to reconcile, I went to the suppression route.
But when you suppress one feeling, you also suppress all feelings, so I suppressed all feelings: hunger, needing to pee, tiredness, sleepiness, nausea… everything, together with the hate, the anguish, the depression my mother felt.
But: if you are an empath, you can’t suppress another’s feelings, only your own. Bummer… result: even stronger suppression.
Until today my legs know I need to go to the bathroom, or that I am hungry, way before my conscious mind knows. I find myself in the bathroom, or eating… and then say: Oh, yeah, I am hungry.
It took me to awakening and practicing my Observer even when I sleep, to stop peeing in my sleep.
And this is what this article is about: bedwetting children: what it means about you.
Psychologists are guessing machines. They have no instruments that tell them the contents of feelings and thoughts. And people, for the most part, mislabel their feelings, or don’t hear their thoughts.
The other day I was doing an exercise I was preparing for the upcoming level 5 of the Brilliance at Will. I had some strong feeling in the present towards a person (doesn’t matter who) and I needed to look for what it was. I could not tell. So I had to muscletest it… It was anger, if you are wondering. It was the same anger I had to suppress about my mother not caring about me, not taking care of me.
So, when you ask a psychologist why a child is wetting his bed, the psychologist will probably say: bad dreams, too deep sleep, or Post Traumatic Stress (mostly from physical or sexual abuse too hard to deal with emotionally)… but my hunch is that it’s all because of suppression. Suppression is the issue.
Whether you suppress feelings because they are double bind, you suppress feelings because your little body can’t deal with them, or you suppress feelings because you want to show a happy face, it is immaterial.
You will pee in the bed before your bladder explodes…
Many couples don’t divorce because they want to provide a two-parent home to their children.
But empathic children have to grow up in the sewer of your emotions… and they will suffer from the effects till they die or get over them through some kind of therapy or therapeutic program… like my programs.
The way to deal with suppression is slowly, starting with the innocent memories, innocent feelings, slowly unravel the story of what happened, gently setting things right.
Until I could come to terms with the fact that my mother didn’t love me not because of anything about me, but because of transference, I was still going to suppress my grief and my anger about it.
What people do, what people feel has, for the most part, nothing to do with you… but people get stuck at a young age, the age where the child feels that they are the center of the action, and everything is about them, because of them.
Growing up the child so they can just be, but not the center, not the cause, is the primary job of a coach. Not easy but worth it.
And revealing to the child that in fact adults are two-faced lying cheating people, when they are, destroys some illusions, but allows the child to look at their parents as humans instead of confusing gods.
Wow, this really speaks to me. “Identifying different speaking” . I can see that I don’t distinguish the language.. I want this to be a part of my growth “Identifying different types of speaking”. I need to learn to distinguish between me speaking in to life or death. I remember on one of the coaching calls you said of “I AM” as a permanent identity as I am sad, I am mad, I am stupid…. Instead of saying what we feel in the moment…
This one thing makes me sad that our children have to grow up in our emotional sewer. I can see that the damage to children is done before they even learn to walk… we teach them to live in our size box. I am still hoping that I can create enough change in me and my life that it would reflect in to my children’s life so they can be happy and expanding human beings. That would be impossible without your coaching.
One more thing: being sad about it is a cop-out. Feeling sadness is OK, being sad isn’t. Because you now turned your power to act and be over to a reaction, a judgment, (it’s sad!) and you are right and everyone else is wrong.
Be mindful my love, you are creating and re-creating self-righteous indignation, superiority and victimhood at the same time.
Your most important job will be, in the near future, identifying the different types of speakings by what they create: Life or Death. Light or Darkness. Human Being or sniveling victim.
actually bringing your son to the coaching call was brilliant: I could address the core issue with him. And then you need to learn to make room for what you don’t like, like your husband’s idea of parenting, and your son will be well.
Yes. and your life is especially a good illustration to that
“children have to grow up in the sewer of your emotions” – I’ve never heard it said that way – that describes it perfectly