‘I accept myself as my parents’ child, just as I am now, without wanting to be any different.”

The fourth and final part of this series is about the way I react to myself or treat myself on a daily basis. In doing so, I encounter recurring patterns. By this I mean all the preconceptions, emotional reactions, thought processes and courses of action with which I involuntarily respond to certain situations, ideas or memories. They often do not fit the actual situation at all, but they seem to happen almost automatically. First of all, I am not writing here about how to get rid of your ‘patterns’. That’s not possible. And that’s not what this is about. ‘Letting go’ and ‘getting rid of’ are based on the illusion that you can effectively work on yourself. For adults, however, the time for ‘working on yourself’ is over, both in your personal life and in therapy and counselling. If you work on yourself, you work against yourself. This is about letting yourself be, including your ‘patterns’.

The first patterns begin to take shape in the womb. In childhood and adolescence, new ones are added as needed. None of them are avoidable. I developed or adopted them while I was dependent on my family, my primary group. If I hadn’t been able to develop or adopt one of my patterns in exactly the same way, I would have been dead long ago. ‘Patterns’ are there for survival; they are always survival patterns; there are no others. So let’s look at situations in which they made immediate sense, at their “place in life.’
‘Patterns” arise in the confrontation with the life “with” which I was born, with the lives of the people and places “at” which I was born (James Hillman), such as my parents. In the course of time, in the womb, childhood and youth, dependent love forms a network of thousands of survival strategies and patterns with which I identify myself: my ego. As long as I am unaware of the life-saving work of dependent love within me, my ego is in charge. As long as I am unaware of the life-saving work of dependent love within me, my ego is in charge.
I consider everything that dependent love makes me do, feel and think to be my essence, my ‘I’.

The ‘ego’ is not interested in fulfilment, happiness or growth. The ‘ego’ wants to survive, nothing else. The ‘ego’ only knows dependence on its environment (embryonic period and childhood) or the struggle against this dependence (adolescence). Surprisingly, the ego does not perceive when this dependence ends, for example when one has grown up in physical terms. The ego cannot cope with freedom; it experiences true freedom as a threat. The ego also does not know that its own physical, emotional and rational patterns are an achievement, an achievement of survival. The ego confuses (identifies) itself with them. The ego deludes me into thinking that this is who I am. It does not realise that I have already outlived the life of ‘the people and places where I was born’. The ego is a trick, an ingenious survival trick of dependent love. It has only one small peculiarity: in order to function as a watertight spiritual bodyguard, the ego must continuously trick itself by pretending that the threats of the past are still there.

The precise opposite of this seems to me to be my ‘self,’ the life ‘with which I was born’ (Hillman). The ‘self’ is not interested in survival. It always feels secure. It is pure existence, simply my life. The ‘self’ already exists when I am conceived; it is the life ‘with which I am born.’ The ‘self’ means nothing more than ‘I am.’ It does not perceive dependencies or threats. It wants to fulfil itself, nothing else. Wherever this is restricted, constrained or hindered, sadness arises. My self is growth and open devotion, nothing else. It is ‘self-love’ or spiritual love (Wilfried Nelles). Self-love does not feel personal, it is simply an open space.

There is something else: ‘Self’ is always present. ‘Self’ is now. ‘Self’ has no past and no future; it has and needs only the present moment. The present moment knows no time; it has nothing to do with time. The present moment is simply life, nothing else (Osho). Jesus called this ‘eternal life.’ ‘Ego,’ on the other hand, has no present. Its job is rather to protect me from the present. The ego does not know present life; it only knows time, on the one hand as the past and on the other as the future in projection of the past. For the ego, time either passes too quickly, too slowly or not at all. The ego does not perceive the present moment. Its task as a bodyguard is to prevent me from coming into contact with the present moment, which it (unconsciously) perceives as threatening.

‘I accept myself as my parents’ child, as I am now, without wanting to be different.”

When I encounter myself today, when I feel and see myself and experience myself as “Thomas,” I encounter a lively resonance between the two: between ego and self, between the need to survive and the naturalness of existence, between narrowness and expansiveness, between tension and relaxation. I am a vibration, an alternation of rest and action, of going and staying, of stagnation and growth, of departure and security, like every living being. Beautiful, isn’t it? Well, essentially, that is what I am as a child of my mother and father.

These two people made themselves available as parents to conceive and raise the man Thomas is today, without knowing what they were getting themselves into. In the same way, they made themselves available to other people, my siblings. They also became inevitable subjects of dependent love on my part, just as I became on theirs and, of course, on the part of my parents’ dependent love. I find all of this when I encounter myself. It can make you feel dizzy. Where should I look?

My impression is that it doesn’t matter so much where I look, but rather from where I look. It’s about the inner place of my experience, connected with age and all the memories, abilities, active patterns, etc. that go with it. It’s about the consciousness from which I experience myself. If I experience ‘myself’ from now, from the immediate present, everything is fine. Then there is nothing about me and my life to complain about or gloss over, to claim, to ignore, to improve or to praise to the skies. Then I am simply there, casual and self-evident. Then I feel, so to speak, in all my cells that I cannot be anyone else, because there is no other Thomas. That I don’t have to be anyone else, because otherwise the real Thomas would have disappeared. That I am, so to speak, inevitable, both for myself and for those around me. Then there may sometimes be pain or discomfort, but no lasting suffering.

Experiencing the present moment, from the here and now, has two immediate effects: First, I allow myself to be. I am at peace with myself, without doing anything for or against it. I no longer take myself personally, for example, I accept my nose as it is, without finding it particularly beautiful or particularly ugly. It needs to be nothing more than my nose. I allow my patterns to be as I recognise them from my history with my parents (and siblings). This also includes what is emerging from me right now. Without finding anything special in it, neither contempt nor pity, nor enthusiasm or adoration. Pain, fear, anger and sadness seem like an echo – most of the feelings we experience on a daily basis are nothing more than echoes from the past. The present, or rather the experience of the present, needs and generates above all something like cheerful compassion. With oneself and, as a result, with one’s surroundings. Then self-love becomes tangible; it is active anyway, whether you notice it or not. Many people seek it under the heading of ‘serenity’ or ‘inner peace’. You cannot ‘seek and find’ it. It is enough to realise that it is there anyway, and always has been – in the present moment.

Secondly, I let myself be in the sense of ‘let it be’. I stop working on myself. There is nothing to improve, I am, so to speak, incorrigible. By this I do not mean resignation or childish or adolescent defiance: ‘I am the way I am, and if you don’t like me, you can go to hell.’ This defiance was necessary and good in order to banish feelings of powerlessness at the time. But I am no longer powerless. ‘I let myself be’ means that I release myself from all optimisation and therapy programmes, be they diets, good intentions, educational partnerships, life plans or other forms of torment. Anything that prevents me from being myself will sooner or later become torment. It repeats and re-enacts the old pains and pleasures of dependent love from the time before I was born, from childhood or youth. ‘I let myself be’ therefore means that I no longer have to survive by conforming or protesting against this conformity. I live from within myself. More precisely, I surrender myself to what wants to live from within me. I don’t know in advance what that is. It can be quite surprising, but at the same time it is always alive and inevitable. And it is as beyond my control as other facts of nature, such as an earthquake or a sunrise. When I experience myself from the present, from now, I find no problem in my being.

However, as soon as I experience ‘myself as a fact of nature’ internally from a place other than the present, it becomes threatening. Often even subjectively life-threatening. I don’t need much for this, just an internal or external situation that feels like a threat from the past, a so-called trigger. There are countless triggers, and the best self-service shop for them is our close relationships, such as partnerships, children or even our own parents. Let’s take a closer look. We will proceed in order, starting with a place of inner experience that is naturally closest to us: youth.
From the perspective of youth, ‘myself as a fact of nature’ does not exist. In the inner experience of young people, there is no contact with their actual present, only with their past, which is long gone. When I experience myself from the perspective of the young Thomas, I exist primarily as an angry, sad entity, suffering from myself and my own imperfections, burdened with a self-imposed task of development and self-realisation. I basically exist only as a concept, as an ideal. ‘This is how I want to be, but unfortunately I find myself like this – there must be something I can do about it!’

With oneself as a developmental task, as a life project and a means of self-realisation, one can keep oneself very busy for many decades. You work on yourself, you definitely get better. You develop skills you didn’t have before. You feed your neurosis by fighting it over and over again, by trying to overcome the patterns in which it manifests itself. You identify your inner demons, chase them away, put them to sleep or kill them. ‘One ring to find them, one ring to drive them into darkness and bind them forever…’ (J.R. Tolkien). The human longing for perfection finds its contemporary – and always latently fascist – expression in the ideal of the flawless self. Unconsciously, dependent childlike love is negated or perverted.

Here we see the ego’s struggle for an autonomous self. This struggle produces its own symptoms and effortlessly manages to incorporate them into its ‘good fight of faith’ in the ideal self. This struggle is futile; it is basically the inner drive of every neurosis, but it must prevent this insight by any means necessary. He experiences himself as a struggle for survival, as a large-scale and as total as possible protective action for the inner child he experiences as wounded and powerless. There are no prisoners. The effect is always the same: fatigue. Nothing else. The struggle for illusions leads to futility and exhaustion, and other struggles may not even exist.

A place somewhat further back in time, from which one can experience one’s present existence, is the place of childhood. When the man/woman of today finds himself/herself in a situation that was threatening to the boy/girl of that time as the child of his/her parents, when I encounter a ‘trigger’, then outwardly adult people suddenly try to save themselves with the means of that time. Their ‘patterns’ become active. In my case, the little Thomas from 50 years ago takes control. The adult Thomas of today now has two options: either he disappears into the panicked little boy and acts out the rescue patterns he learned back then. He loses the present and ends up in his childhood past, as if in an endless loop. He does all this to avoid the pain of the past, to avoid feeling it.

The other option: he reflects on himself and remains in touch with himself and his current present. He simply perceives what is happening without following the childish urge to save himself. This is often very painful; the inner child cries out. But this pain is an echo, an echo from the past. It does not return once it has been truly felt and seen from a distance. Then the adult experiences the child within, and the child within experiences the adult. This may be the first adult who wants nothing more from the child. They simply look at it. They perceive it, allow it to be and agree with it without following it. Once again: without following it or wanting to do anything else for it. For the inner child, this is often a blessing that has been longed for decades: to be seen, appreciated and recognised, at last. This is when the child from back then begins to feel safe with the adult of today. It ends its struggle for survival and relaxes. The adult of today can remain in the present, putting the trigger back on the shelf. The childish pattern from back then was not necessary this time, it happened all by itself, without any work on oneself.

The trickiest and most difficult to notice inner place from which one can experience one’s existence is the unborn human being, i.e. the time from conception to the end of birth. The unborn child in us experiences everything ‘outside’ as immediately life-threatening, because it lives completely inside the mother. Sometimes people are unable to truly realise that their own birth took place and ended well, for example if the birth was not without danger or if someone was very afraid during it. They then remain with their body memory in their mother’s womb. It may also be that they already had to make great efforts to adapt in order to be able to mature to the point of birth. Every time their body memory is reminded of the time in the womb and their birth in their present life, the unborn child or the child who is in the process of being born takes control and reacts in the way that made sense and saved their life at the time. This child can also relax, for example when it is seen and acknowledged in a constellation or in a life integration process.

My conclusion
I cannot turn off any of the patterns that saved my life back then and may be preventing me from living today, because they are all connected to my dependent love from back then. But I can see them from today’s perspective, acknowledge them, feel the echo of the past, acknowledge their achievement and then let them be. With my three sentences on ‘taking and leaving the parents’ in connection with constellation work, I describe the effect of these inner processes. I will summarise them briefly at the end of the series on parents.

‘I accept myself as the child of these people, just as I am now, without wanting to be different.’ I no longer take myself personally, but without distancing myself from myself. At this moment, the inner birth begins, the coming into oneself, self-love or spiritual love.

‘I allow everything I experienced with them to belong to me, exactly as it was for me at the time and without wishing for anything else.’ I also no longer take my childhood as something personal in the sense of something my parents did or did not do to me.

‘I leave my mother and father as they are, without demanding anything else from them as parents.’ I stop taking my parents personally for who they are. That means I no longer take life itself personally. I simply live it as it comes to me, whether from within myself or from outside. I let myself live from the ‘I am’ without knowing where it will lead. It could hardly be more exciting. Someone recently asked me how I was doing. ‘A little older, a little rounder, a little happier,’ was my answer.

So much for this little series about our parents from the perspective of constellation work. Thank you very much for reading.