The deepest step you will take in this journey is to come to the knowledge that just living in this world causes what I call an Original Lie to be planted deep inside us and it manipulates our reactions and our behaviour. You can never be free while ever it is in there. To root it out and replace it with true knowledge of who we were always meant to be is Fight The Lie. It is essential to being free.
This morning a friend sent me a life skills teaching on Face book about how saying you are sorry does not help the person you have hurt to heal. I have believed in this for a long time and have written about it in my books. As I thought about it this morning, I heard words about how to explain simply and interestingly how the lie gets into us and how it damages us.
When I worked in a crisis accommodation many years ago, before I retired, when we had a lady in with a lot of anger she could not get rid of, we would send her out to a tree with a noodle from a pool, and tell her to hit the tree trunk as hard as she could until she felt calm. This was a good and harmless way to help her to release anger instead of harming herself. This morning He likened this process to an illustration of the Lie.
Imagine a young child is a tree, a sapling. It needs good conditions to grow into a strong, straight healthy tree. But life does not always give a tree this chance to grow. There are storms that come and they can damage a sapling and even a fully grown tree. These storms can be dysfunction in a family, addictions in parents that affect us, separation and divorce, domestic violence. Storms can take many forms. What were the major storms in your childhood.
Sometimes a tree can be hit by lightning, which can be likened to a major catastrophe like the death of a parent, a severe illness in a child, loss of many kinds that necessitates changes that are hard for a child to cope with. Did you suffer anything like this in your childhood?
Hail is very damaging to a young tree. It can strip leaves and small branches right away. I liken these to the thoughtless words and behaviours of significant others in our lives, even of other children, our peers. Words can be very damaging. They are very important to a child. Then there is the damage I sat under once in a park. It was a huge Camphor Laurel and small branches were dropping all around me everywhere. I could not see or understand what was causing the damage. It was a flock of sulphur crested cockatoos. They were just being destructive for the sake of keeping themselves entertained. I likened this to some adults who say words or damage children by deliberate actions designed to hurt. This was my experience in childhood. Of course they have no knowledge of the damage they are doing to a child. They are just entertaining themselves.
The tree can suffer lack of water which can cause it to not flourish as it should have, and often to die. I liken this to lack of nurture of all kinds to a child; kind words, hugs, praise, encouragement. Also the negative neglect that lack of water can cause; criticism, physical punishment, abuse of all kinds.
I think you will have the picture by now. The sad thing is the trees that do not have ideals conditions to grow in can become stunted, deformed, spindly, weak, damaged. So also becomes the child who does not have ideal conditions to grow in. But as with the tree, a lot of the damage that is done is beyond the protection of the parents. Hail, cockatoos, lightening, strong winds, drought are things that cannot be prevented.
Through this we learn that it does not take specific dysfunction or neglect for a child to come out of childhood damaged. Every child suffers damage of some kind that allows an Original Lie to be planted before they come out of childhood. This means that there can be no condemnation for parents. It is what living in a world where things just go wrong brings about. Even where the parents are abusive or unloving, there is still no condemnation because they themselves have had Lies planted in them when they were children and so damage their children because of the damage that was done to them.
It is not about blame. We are all in this fight together because we all have an Original Lie controlling us to some degree or another. And it all goes back to Adam and Eve. They had their Original Lies planted when they ate from the tree and realised the difference between good and evil and just making decisions that were either right or wrong, and learning from it without condemnation. They had the perfect parent. But the result was that one of their sons was so badly damaged, he killed his brother. Extreme.
The really good thing about the teaching of Fight The Lie is that you do not have to go back into childhood issues to become free. You only have to look at your behaviour and reactions today. It can be a far faster and less painful process than working through childhood issues with a counsellor. It is up to you how hard you work to be free. There are two more things I need to write about before we can begin the actual journey of becoming free. But until then, begin to watch your reactions especially when someone upsets you. Write down exactly what happened and how you felt. Awareness is an essential key.