I accept everything I experienced or did not experience with my parents as part of who I am, exactly as it was for me at the time and without wishing for anything different.
This sentence is only possible and meaningful now that I have realised that my birth was successful, that my childhood is long gone and that my youth is also over. At the same time, this phrase makes it possible for me to become aware of this at all. Like all sentences connected with the truth of the present moment, it creates its own reality.

Images
There is an interesting phenomenon in remembering past life stages in relation to one’s parents: children of the same parents have different images of the same situations they experienced together. When two or three siblings meet, there is not one father and one mother in the room, but two or three. These three sets of parents have nothing to do with each other. Each child has a different image of his or her parents and therefore experiences them differently from his or her siblings. How does this happen? We constantly associate concrete experiences with our parents with our ideals of ‘mother’ and ‘father’ (see [intlink id=’5291′ type=’post’]Part II[/intlink]). We are to a large extent the embodiment of the connection between our experience of our parents and our ideal of parents.

A child’s concrete experience of their parents is largely determined by their place in the sibling hierarchy and the role they play in the family. Our parents live on in our physical appearance as well as in the way we feel and think. More precisely, our emotional landscape is our inner image of our parents, for our emotions were created in relation to them. They live on in our rational view of the world. Our thinking began when we began to noticeably differ from what our mother and father saw in us, when we began to doubt, to say no and to develop our own self as a new ideal in contrast to them. For many years of our youth, this thinking forms a kind of negative image of what we experienced as children in our place in the sibling hierarchy with our parents. Sometimes this continues to this day.

For me, this means that ‘parents’ exist only as an inner image and therefore as a concept. This image has only a casual connection with the real people who conceived us, who lived with us, who may now be old, far away or even dead. Parents’ as inner images are the sum of all our experiences with them, measured against the ideal of all-encompassing care in the womb. The credits for our image of our parents go to: the physical sensations of the embryo, the feelings of the child and the thoughts of the young person. Each stage of life has contributed to this within the horizon of its typical form of dependent love and thus within the horizon of its consciousness. I would argue that our image of our parents, our image of ourselves and our image of the world are virtually indistinguishable.

We cannot see the real people behind the image of our parents as long as we maintain the ideal of them, both in the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’. Nor can we see ourselves, because the ideal of our parents is always linked to an ideal self. Nor can we see the world, at least not as it is, because our ideal of the world is naturally formed on the basis of our ideal of our parents. One cannot exist without the other. All these ideals say the same thing: ‘The way things are is not good. Not your parents, not you, not the world. Things should be different.

It’s not personal…
There is something else: the vast majority of our image of our parents does not describe anything personal, even though we have formed it from completely subjective experiences. The image of ‘parents’ is essentially made up of collective attributions. The material that fills the structure of these collective attributions comes from subjective personal experience. However, we share the structure itself with all Western Europeans, North Americans and other members of open societies. Static societies have a structurally different image of parents, and indigenous peoples have yet another.

But one thing seems to be the same all over the world: A child never has a choice about how to behave towards its parents and itself. But they unconsciously believe that they do.

This allows it to banish its actual powerlessness, to strive for the stabilisation of its environment (e.g. its parents) out of dependent love, and thus to grow up more securely. This dynamic gives rise to their magical view of the world. This means that our image of our parents is determined by magical childhood assumptions until the end of puberty. For indigenous societies, which are completely immersed in nature, this applies without restriction throughout the human lifespan. It also applies to closed, static societies, albeit in a weakened form and with the beginning of crisis-ridden transitions towards the dissolution of the magical worldview, for example in the form of a kind of enlightenment, i.e. with the establishment of critical thinking as the main reference point for the respective reality of life. In an age when enlightenment has run out of steam, we have no choice but to recognise the magical, and therefore unreal, in our childhood and adolescent desires.

Unlike children, adults always have a choice in how they behave towards their parents, themselves and the world. Yet they unconsciously believe that they do not.
I call this belief a neurosis. Neurosis’ is the advanced version of the magical world view of childhood. It is created by the means of youth. Childhood itself does not know neurosis. Childhood knows only precise and inevitable acts of adaptation. Even if these seem to be neurotic symptoms from the outside, such as fear of school, bed-wetting, lack of concentration, violent outbursts, somatisation with the help of illness, etc., they are not neuroses. Children do not yet have neuroses.

For children, their symptoms are necessary adaptations to their real life, which actually depends on their parents. Symptoms in children and adolescents are expressions of dependent love. They are always appropriate, and from the child’s or adolescent’s point of view there is no alternative. Working therapeutically exclusively with children or adolescents therefore often exacerbates their distress. It seems more promising to me to acknowledge their efforts to adapt and to focus on the people to whom their symptoms are related: their parents or their family. Children and adolescents find relief when the adults in their lives begin to look at themselves….

not even neurosis.
To create neurosis, you need a tool powerful enough to separate you from your current reality. That tool is thought. Neurosis uses thinking as a means of protecting the dependent child. Neurosis understands everything. It may sound strange in our scientific age, but with the help of understanding and the desire to understand, neurosis builds the most durable bulwark imaginable against the currently relevant facts of life. Understanding as such is the life insurance of neurosis. In this sense, almost all physically adult people are neurotic, i.e. blind to certain parts of their reality (myself included, of course).

Almost all adolescents have to invest a lot of energy in creating their neuroses so that they can continue to hold up their ideal of their parents, their ideal of themselves and their ideal of the world against the concrete reality of their lives. In this way they protect their inner child, which they subjectively experience as threatened, and build an autonomous ego over it. The autonomous ego is therefore, of course, almost indistinguishable from the phenomenon of ‘neurosis’. I think it is important to note that ‘neurosis’ is not actually a disease. Neurosis is an inevitable developmental task. Without ‘neurosis’ we would not be able to separate from our family of origin. Without it, it is almost impossible to say goodbye to childhood, and thus to our parents, and to really let go. Without it, it seems almost impossible to realise that we are ‘outside’ and really ‘here’. In my view, neurosis serves to complete the external birth process by making the internal birth of an adult inevitable.

The ‘neurosis’ of the adult is driven by the survival impulses of the previous stage of life, i.e. the dependent love of the child, and is created in the previous stage of life, i.e. in the thinking of youth. I have nothing against thinking in the sense of retrospective reflection, for example in the form of reflection. This can be wonderfully productive if you let it happen. But I am showing that thinking in the sense of ‘I meet the reality of my life with my thoughts, i.e. with my rational models, concepts and ideals’ is very likely to become a workshop for ‘neurosis’. Thinking in the face of what is actually immediately present has a tendency to deceive: it allows me to experience only unconscious concepts and ideals instead of my immediately present reality of life. It separates me from the present. That is why thinking is the favourite hiding place of all problems.

Much of what we experienced as children with our parents causes us no difficulty in our adult relationship with them: food, affection, attention, protection, simply everything that allowed us to grow physically in the first place. The fact is, as children we had a place to survive. That is the most important thing. Without that place, there would be no one here to read this and come to terms with their childhood. Adults who are struggling with their childhood often don’t realise it. I was like that. When people tried to make me realise that I had survived and therefore had enough and, above all, had received the right things from my parents, I began to protest: Yes, but what I lacked was what tormented me…

The safe distance of time and the echoes of the past.
Today I see that the way a child feels about his place in childhood is quite different from the fact that he has survived that place. The subjective experience of the child at that time has its own validity.

This means that a child is never wrong about what they feel or how they experience their situation. They may find their existence temporarily or permanently insecure, stressful, annoying, restrictive, threatening, hurtful, tormenting or even paralysing. There is nothing to judge. Nothing can be changed retrospectively, made more beautiful, healed or whatever. Childhood was what it was. Full stop.

What’s more, a child is its feelings, it is its experience. He has no distance from his perceptions. Distance from one’s own experiences only begins to be established in the run-up to puberty. So both are true: what you received was nourishing and secure enough because you are still here. And what you experienced as threatening and frightening, you experienced exactly as you did, and so it was just as real and threatening and frightening to you as a child.
Now, as an adult, when I begin to really accept everything I experienced with my parents as a child, just as it was subjectively for me at the time, without wishing for anything else, I inevitably come into contact with the powerlessness I felt as a child. It can overwhelm me. As a child I could neither do anything about it nor really want anything else. As a child, I was willing to do anything and let anything happen to me that I thought was necessary to continue to belong to the people I thought were my parents. Nothing could extinguish my unconscious love for them, because my survival depended on this love; in this love my survival instinct found the form appropriate to a child. More precisely: I was that love, I was its expression and fulfilment.

In summary, from the perspective of their children, parents are always both the source of nourishment and security and the source of powerlessness and pain. This mixture is inevitable and not personal. It comes from the actual dependence of the child and the forms of dependent love that arise from it. This means, for example, that there are many adults living today who do not feel sufficiently loved in their childhood memories. The child within them who did not feel sufficiently loved at that time was right. There are no adults living today who were not sufficiently loved as children. They would inevitably have died as children.

What I find wrong with my childhood today, or what I suffer from today in relation to my childhood, is nothing but an echo. There are many years between then and now. They are my safety margin. Only with this safety margin, only from today’s perspective, can I leave everything as it was and allow it to belong to me exactly as it is. The childish desire to return home returns.

You can read what happens next in the fourth part.