When I was in the second grade, my family moved from a small town to a larger city . Of course, this meant leaving familiar surroundings and embracing a new home, school and friends which, for a 7 year old was a lot of change. The ‘new’ school was ‘new’ only to me. Its dingy gray exterior and boxy construction presented an aged, uninviting vision that left an unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach and did nothing to generate enthusiasm or inspiration.  I arrived my first day at the new edifice of learning after a long walk of 2 miles to get there and immediately felt unhappy, vulnerable and alone. Soon after this new twist in my life against which I railed, I began to create fantasies of the heroes from my favorite TV show, Whirlybirds, landing in the schoolyard with their Bell 47 helicopter to rescue me. I envisioned the surprise and envy on the faces of my fellow ‘inmates’ as I was swooped up to freedom by my rescuers and whisked away to a place where everything I could ever want was available at my mere asking for it. I felt with delicious joy the feeling of being so special as to be chosen by them to be taken into their care and custody. Every time I ran that movie in my imagination, secure, happy, at peace feelings flooded my otherwise tortured and powerless existence. Truth is, as I, the 7 yr old, discovered – nobody  was coming to save me and all the magical thinking in the world would not shift my sense of insecurity or change my circumstances. Whirlybirds’ pilots were actors and there was no chance in hell that my fairy tale would ever materialize – but it never stopped me from day-dreaming about the possibility.

Like my 7 yr old imaginings, it occurred to me that, as individuals in today’s troubled America, we are looking to someone else to satisfy our needs and longings and save us from our untenable life situations. We seem to be incapable of seeing life as within our power to do something about.  Instead, we unconsciously give away our power to others and expect them to provide the external life circumstances that create a sense of safety and well-being for us.  Case in point – the proclamations of portions of the populace that we didn’t get the change we were looking for. A mere 18 months into this current presidency there is an outcry from the disenfranchised  to change yet again, the flavor of the Washington DC government. It seems as if our collective ‘wanting, wishing or fear-driven child’ personae has been ignited and the satisfaction and successes must be both immediate, complete and individually recognizable….NOW!   The external source of this indulgence is partially manipulated from those out of power. More importantly, the inner cause, as we know from Voice Dialogue,  comes from the voice of our repressed child parts.  The imperative for a more balanced existence invites us to wise up to this aspect of us, and quiet the mechanism that operates in opposition to our ability to accept personal responsibility for our emotional, mental and physical well-being.  but, how can this be done when the pervasive sentiment teaches us to be afraid and to feel vulnerable?

First discover the cause – How did we get here? It’s an inside job!!!!

Our view of the world is formed from the inside out not the other way around.  From our early years of life when uncomfortable or abusive things happened to us such as starting kindergarten or Sunday school, watching Mom and Dad argue, experiencing illness or other tragic events in our families, struggling to garner love in a dysfunctional home environment,  we made crazy meaning of what was happening to us so we could feel safe and assure our survival. At that tender age, we had few sophisticated tools to use and it often came down to the silencing  our intuitive emotional reactions  in order to stay safe and feel loved. Doing the bidding of the adults in our life no matter how much it went against what our authenticity wanted to do seemed the only pathway to security. Sadly,  those suppressive behaviors  became our conditioned response to acceptable actions – a belief that we carry unconsciously into our adulthood.

As adults, when we operate from those emotional 7 yr old selves – wishing for rescue, silenced in our authentic desires – we tend to develop parent-child relationships with our spouses, friends, bosses and government that  divest us of the responsibility to make conscious choices and decisions for our life circumstances. Instead, we play the blame game – it is someone else’s fault and they need to fix what they did to us. Think about today’s political atmosphere – frightened, people find their power in anger and blame.  It is as if the expectation is that the Fairy Godmother must scatter fairy dust over the country and make everything all better! and return things as they were.  Of course, the head Godmother lives at the White House – we elected him to take care of us exactly as we want!…we get our old jobs back, get our homes back so we can continue to live as we have…

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