Pathwork Lecture #099: Falsified Impressions of Parents: Cause and Cure

An Unofficial Summary of Pathwork Lecture #099:  Falsified Impressions of Parents:  Cause and Cure

For a deeper, more rewarding experience of these teachings, consult the Lecture itself, available free of charge at: http://www.pathwork.org/lectures/P099.PDF

Our lives are empty without the capacity to love.  The capacity to love is not the same as a craving to receive love.  The more fearful, self-involved and dependent we are, the less able we are to let love flow through us, and the more meaningless our lives feel to us.  Freeing the capacity to love requires us to resolve our psychological problems.

As children, we focus only on a few aspects of our parents’ or caregivers’ personalities, remaining completely unaware of the remainder.  This simplified image of these people, which exists even if we know better intellectually, colors our experience of life and restricts the channel which permits to love and experience others in a real way.  It is certain that there is a connection between the most problematic area of our lives and an image we have of a parent or other significant person from our early childhood.

The remedy for the negative effects of this situation is to BECOME AWARE of how we really feel about our family members, and then to CONSIDER whether these feelings might not be related to fragmentary images of such persons.  We would do well to ASK whether we see our parents as complex, vulnerable human beings, capable of having contradictory aspects, or as one-dimensional, artificial and invulnerable robotic beings.    Having an unrealistic image of our parents, whether it is positive or negative, binds us to certain problems in our lives, and limits our power and our capacity to love, until we manage to correct the false perception.  Thus, it will serve us to CONSIDER who our parents really are, with detachment and objectivity, making an effort to see all of their facets — their childhood experiences, hurts, fears, frustrations and so on.

Giving up a glorified image of a parent may be difficult, especially when this parent was the only person we could depend upon in childhood for acceptance and love.  Giving up a hated image can also be difficult, as where accepting the humanity of that parent is felt as a justification of the harm which he or she inflicted.  Our resistance to seeing the truth about our parents is partly about losing the security we thought we had gained by creating a simple, static view of them.  It will serve us to ASK in meditation and prayer to see the truth about our parents.

We need to see the truth about ourselves in order to see the truth in others, but seeing the truth in others also helps us to see the truth about ourselves.

Even where there are practical obstacles to gaining information about our parents, as where they are deceased, there is a way.  For instance, it may by contacting someone else who knew them.  It may even be by nothing more than the sincere prayer to know, which will be answered in some way, as by a shift in perspective which makes one able to understand remembered events in a new and more informative light.

The first step is to DETERMINE whether we want to know the truth.  If we have resistance, simply ACKNOWLEDGING it and keeping the issue in consciousness will cause the resistance to fade organically over time.  If we hear ourselves saying, “I can’t find out,” it is important to ASK whether that really means, “I don’t want to find out.”

Questions & Answers:

Understanding why our parents may have been cruel brings us to an understanding that it was their problem — that they were doing the best they could at the time — and consequently we stop taking their behavior on as being about us.  This enables us to establish constructive patterns which will reinforce our feeling of self-worth.  Whether or not we believe this, or can see how gaining knowledge about our parents would be helpful, it will serve us to PRAY to see the truth in this respect.

The real meaning of the Fourth Commandment is not that we should compulsively superimpose false positive feelings for our parents over our true feelings, which is unhealthy, but that we should see them as they truly are, thereby respecting their humanity.

Spiritually, one person who gains inner truth has a greater influence on the entire cosmic development than millions who do not.

After an image has been dissolved without its root cause being found, the false need for protection may persist, contributing to the creation of a new image.

In the words of the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven,” Earth refers to the outward material manifestations of our lives and Heaven refers to the inner psychological and spiritual levels.  Doing God’s will requires not only right actions, but an inner intention.

A balance of healthy activity and healthy passivity brings us into harmony with the state of being, which means heaven.

Masochism results from finding pleasure only in the pain of rejection, and giving up on ever finding anything better.  Many other aspects may be relevant to any individual person, and may require exploration, but this core is always present.

Where there is resistance coupled with an unwillingness to look at it, this is where we must focus attention in order to open the love channel within us and lead a meaningful life.

Rejection of pleasure may have its root in rejection of the self.

Sadism and masochism are the same current, directed outwardly in one case and inwardly in the other.  Ultimately they are the same, because we hurt ourselves when we hurt others, and if we hurt ourselves, we must eventually hurt someone else.

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