Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes 19

I'm thinking again today of the "Self-Hater". Think of him as a noxious, grey-black shadow that rather oozes its darkness while squatting over you on your shoulder. It would be bigger than a raven. Perhaps the same size as an Andean Condor. If you do not know what an Andean Condor is, it is one of the world's largest flying bird, a species of South American vulture with an enormous wingspan. If you don't know what a raven is then don't expect me to explain it to you if you don't know this by now, Gentle Reader. This shadow, the Self-Hater, oozes also a certain mix of odours, all of them bad: primarily there is a vague clinging stench of death and rotting flesh, with something else redolent of petroleum and its various products, with a tincture of vomit, and rather slightly rancid molasses. Blackstrap, I would imagine. This demon, this Black Imp, has been with us and part of us since time immemorial. He might even have been around, piggy-backing on our earliest ancestors as they first emerged out of Africa. Who only knows? But this Self-Hater. How does he manifest and how does he influence, warp and distort our growth and development? Why, in so many ways. All our contemporary obsessions are the fault of the Imp. Be it self-destruction or self-improvement, it all carries his dark, oozing claw-print. We destroy ourselves on drugs, consumerism and porn because of the self-hater, and we whip ourselves into a frenzy of wellness and fitness in the gym and yoga studio and we are all being whipped forward by that same nasty, rasping and clinging voice and diction: "You are not good enough. You are worthless." I don't know how or when this started. Maybe as our earliest ancestors were descending from trees the Imp might have taken control to tell them that they would never survive in the open veldt. They would never stand up straight enough, never walk or run fast enough. They were too weak, not smart enough. They would be at the mercy of predators and would all go down as kibble for fattening of prehistoric lions. Throughout our history, young people have had to go through often painful and humiliating initiations into adulthood. They are not already good enough. They have to earn merit. And in many cases this has been necessary, especially given the capacity for hubris in arrogant young males. We have always been flawed and, worse, we have always known ourselves to be flawed, not in a way to heal ourselves, but to hate, try to cover, make excuses, or relentlessly improve on what cannot really be changed. We carry in our collective unconscious, all of us it seems, a distant memory of a time of innocence, a golden age that was all light, goodness and delight. Then something happened, our mother and father got it wrong, were expelled from the garden, and what succeeding generations of miserables they have spawned! Even as I am writing these blogposts, I on occasion also feel driven and whipped by the Imp, the Self-Hater, that my writing will never be good enough, that I have run out of ideas, that no one is going to ever read this dreck, and in turn I too so easily become the Imp's vector as I nag and hector all of you, Gentle Reader, to somehow improve, educate yourselves, rise to your higher selves, to your best potential. But there is a difference. We can do this without the Imp. We can do this for love and because of love. And we can do this fueled by love for one another, for our Mother Earth, and for ourselves, Gentle Reader. This will take out the spurs and we can move at a gentler place as we grow into the people we were intended to be. But not too slowly, because time with climate change and global warming, is quickly running out. We can ignore the Imp, or maybe we can make him work for us, by motivating us just enough, without enslaving ourselves to his vile, hectoring message of hate.