Drinking The Elixir, Imbibing The Poison!

Herewith the disclaimer of the writer, proceed with caution.

Devoid of any professional instruction, without the benefit of any benevolent mentoring, I have the temerity, the daring, to share my untutored observations on the nature of the human animal I have experienced during my passage through our life together.

We are issued through the cave of life into this world armed with the potentialities authored in the DNA we inherit from the partners who gave us life. Then there is the period during which we learn to care for ourselves among strangers we come to know. It seems to me that the persons we become are the product of the interplay between the potentialities we inherit and our early life experiences in the crucible of our upbringing. There can be no doubt that the final result can be affected by the events encountered during our further experiences. I believe that the mold is most profoundly shaped during our early life times when our fate is most firmly in the hands of those during the times when we are the most vulnerable. There, I believe, it will most likely be determined whether we are to grow up to be psychopaths or generous human beings sensitive to the needs of others beyond ourselves, or something in between.

So often, it seems to me, that we see, in the character of our parents, the tendencies that play themselves out in our own characters as their offspring. Like it or not, we, as parents, play an unwitting role in this transformation. And, I believe, one of the important elements in this interplay, is whether we have the good fortune to experience, at some time in our formative years, a state of unconditonal love from another person. Fortunately, for most of us, that can come naturally from our mothers. That is the all-healing elixir that I believe, can color our lives. If we are very lucky, we may find that again in our further experiences. Failing that, all bets may be off in developing into that fully rounded personality we all have the potential to forge.

Human capacities vary. So often we see the failures, and the positives of the parents, witting or unwitting, repeated in the children. In the interaction between one’s parents, how they, treat, or mistreat, each other, is, so often cast a shadow dictating how offspring, as parents, treat their own children. And the children cannot remain unaffected by what they see and what they feel during the experience.

We can rise above early negative experiences, but so often, also seen, behaviors are repeated by the children in their own personal life experiences. Without even realizing it, they have imbibed some poison from their early experiences. Whether they are conscious of it or not, or in spite of that, they have been damaged. Some is reflected early in childhood behaviors. It can take courage, and self –awareness, to come to terms with it, and accept responsibility. But that is unlikely, given the nature of the beast. We inherit the blindnesses along with the poison.

We have seen the Mandela’s and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s rising above the potential hatreds likely to be aroused by their experiences of adversity, charting a path of reconciliation in the face of unremitting hatred. Something in their early upbringing gave them the strength to return generosity for hate. We have seen the emergence of a Hitler who built on his adversity to gather the like-minded damaged ones, succeeding in sponsoring genocide and death for over eighty million other humans. Where did this arise if not from what they found in their early childhood experiences, and spreading the poison through their educational systems.

Experiences in America today are giving evidence of the widespread nature of these ills in our society. The disaffected in our midst did not get that way by accident. The particular has its parallel in the general. All is not well in the nature of the family experience that so many of us take for granted because we have benefited from drinking of the elixir when so many have imbibed the poison of their early life experiences. There is an epidemic of a different kind bestirring the body politic.

Some of the logic of inception and progression has been sloppily handled here, but I believe the thesis holds.

Why do we do these things to ourselves? Because we are not always fully competent in the management of our affairs. We are never fully aware of how we have unconsciously been groomed ourselves, by the behaviors around us, particularly from those of our parents. Having a partner who cannot help but act out his/her failings in a continuous pattern of aggression, for a particularly damaging example, against others in his/her lives. This cannot fail to strongly impact the children as well as the primary victim.

Children may absorb this as an acceptable behavior, or develop an aversion. One way or another, these things are stored away. Sometimes they may show themselves in problematic behavior by the child. Regardless, there is a legacy for the child. Of course, the mechanisms can be occurring to reinforce behaviors on the positive side. But, it is the negative that we worry about.

There you have it without the benefit of bibliography and biographical citations to uphold the argumentation. Why all this? I grapple with this in assessing my own criminalities and the likely fates awaiting my near and dear. How are things at your house?