And I became the Humpty Dumpty man
(Continued from Part 1.)
Another was that my Dad, colorfully, used to call me a “lazy, no-good, good-for nothing.”
The flip side was that I became the world’s most prolific producer, a workaholic, a person for whom his output defined who he was (as you can see by the library attached to this site and this site is just one of a few).
Steve, when are you going to stop?
So our core issues are a negative attribution made of us by ourselves or others which we compensate for by developing qualities that are usually the opposite or the flip side of the negative attribution.
Both the negative attribution and the positive flip side shape our characters. Now we need to let go of the negative attribution, which we’ve internalized. But we don’t need to let go of the paramit or virtue that we’ve developed.
In fact the value of having chosen before life to place ourselves in a situation where this negative attribution would occur is that we wrote into the script the circumstances that would motivate us to develop this paramit or virtue and to put it into practice.
So now to the last core issue I saw in this chaotic “null zone.” I sum it up as “Don’t mess with me.”
I was the youngest of the family and got kicked around a lot. I was a bright young student with an October birthday so I was usually the youngest in my grade … and got kicked around a lot.
My Dad made me a target, he told me in later life, because I looked like my Mom and so I became the stand-in for her. Sort of like kicking the dog. Or he might take something from her, but not from me.
Any way you look at it, I agreed to subject myself to a fair amount of violence.
At the same time my Mom also sustained a fair amount of violence and I promised to help her one day.
So this desire to protect myself, and what later became expanded to “women” rather than just my Mom (who by that time had taken leave of the planet) became mish-moshed together, which is one reason why I have difficulty sourcing it.
When I try to let go of the anger that arises in me, I come up against the fact that my being the policeman of the world shows up like a sacred vow I made to my Mother at age … whatever. 7, 8, 9, 10. Every time I feel the need to let go of my anger and vigilance, I see its existence as part of a sacred promise made to my Mother.
Last point: Certain circumstances can complicate the processing of a core issue. In my case I was dissociated from age 7 to 42 because my Dad shouted at me from such close range that I shattered as a personality early in life. I became the Humpty Dumpty man.
There were two “me’s” who didn’t know each other existed. They met when I was 42 because a friend said that I had the profile of an abused child.
The two me’s raced to the foreground at the same time to say “yes” and metaphorically looked at each other and said “Who are you?”
I erupted in a volcano of anger at that moment, probably anger I had stored up for thirty-some years. It took years to complete the process of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.
The upshot was that there was no one person “here” who would take responsibility for me and my core issues. Moreover there was not a stable personality base, no one strong enough to take the reins and see to what I needed to do. I lacked confidence as a result, direction, motivation, etc.
But there again, the flip side was that I attended one growth course or workshop after another and learned the skills of the growth movement. The writing I do today derives from all I learned there.
The angry edge I had lies below so much that is “everyday” for me. I was talking to my bank manager yesterday and heard it at a very deep level. And I believe he recognized it too and shied away from me.
It colors so much about me. And it has long, long ago outlived whatever usefulness and survival value it may have had.
So I plan to do a kind of sacred ritual and ask my mother formally to release me from my vow to continue protecting her and hope that removes the lynchpin that keeps me being policeman to the world.
I don’t feel totally complete and won’t until I source the residual anger I feel that still colors my self-presentation. But I do feel years younger from having sourced the other core issues.