Imagine a cute, joyful, and happy puppy with an enormous cuddle factor. Now, this puppy lives in a family where there is a lot of unrest and stress. There is no room for gentleness and love. When the puppy jumps around happily after being alone for a long time, he is ignored. When he’s drinking or eating, his tail gets stepped on. When he is peacefully sleeping, he’s not noticed and gets trampled. What the puppy needs is love, warmth, and boundaries so it can feel safe. But the family is under enormous pressure, and no one has time or attention for him.
After a year, not much remains of the puppy’s joy and happiness. When the puppy sees people, he hides in a corner or urinates out of fear, and when he feels truly cornered, he bares his teeth and growls out of fear. Until the day a gentle neighbor boy, with the best intentions, tries to pet the puppy, but the dog is startled because he doesn’t know this, and out of fear and shock, he bites the boy. Would punishing the dog help in this situation? Would it prevent this from happening again?
Old wounds, fear, and suppressed pain get lodged in the brain and body—or rather, the nervous system—both in animals and humans. You can see this as bruises and wounds that are sensitive; it’s stagnant energy that hasn’t yet found a way to release. It hasn’t been regulated or transformed yet. Until then, it turns inward or outward, manifesting as fear, freezing, or aggression (eventually leading to depression and various emotional, psychological, or physical complaints).
These are survival mechanisms, comparable to reflexes. These reflexes are not consciously chosen but are symptoms of underlying pain, fear, anger, and/or suppression. These emotional reactions are driven by the brainstem, the primitive or reptilian brain, which exists solely for survival. It doesn’t know logic or reasoning. The neocortex is responsible for higher functions, but it is entirely shut off in such moments. The greater the wound or complex, the stronger the reflex will be. These reflexes can be so powerful that they take over the animal or person entirely. We may then be “out of our mind” for a moment.
These reflexes and emotional reactions serve as protectors of the old pain and lose their function only once the underlying pain is healed. Until that time, emotional reactions will dominate. Unresolved traumas can be passed down through up to five generations, both individually and collectively. In that sense, you could say we are born with a backpack, carrying the unhealed pain of our ancestors.
Would punishing damaged and fearful people or dogs help? Would it prevent old fears from being triggered again in the future?
Yet this is how we often deal with the human race.
The “old Soulles Yang thinking,” on which our current systems are still based—fueled by a great deal of unconsciousness, hardness, and lack of insight—leads us to believe that a punishment must be handed out. If something has been done to us, the “offender” must pay for it. We live with the idea that the soul will then find peace. But is it truly the soul that finds peace, or is it the wounded mind— the ego? The ego thinks in terms of revenge, as if this could undo what has been done.
But is there any real gain in revenge? Or is it only the ego that grows from this? The bigger the ego, the more we are distanced from our true Self. (From a Jungian perspective, the opposite is true.)
When you explore systemic work/family constellations, you’ll see that we are all subject to energetic dynamics and tendencies, and that we are not as guilty as our thoughts would have us believe.
Vulnerability, acceptance, and forgiveness are much more powerful and will lead to a sense of liberation. Revenge feels powerful to the ego, but energetically speaking, it only creates more karma and turmoil in the nervous system. Often, we are so unconsciously identified with our thoughts that we don’t even realize this. Acceptance of the situation feels like a loss to the ego because it goes against ego-driven thinking. But this is where peace lies. Without forgiveness and acceptance, we cannot free ourselves from the situation and pain; similar circumstances will keep repeating themselves because these are energetic laws that work like magnets.
Does punishing damaged animals or people really make sense if there is no healing involved? Old, unresolved pain distorts reality, as you can see with the dog who bites the gentle neighbor boy. It pulls the experience out of context.
When the nervous system can return to homeostasis, the self-healing capacity can do its work, healing on every level: emotional, mental, and physical. But for this, a sense of safety is needed, which goes far beyond mentally thinking or knowing you are safe. Somatic exercises work directly on the nervous system. Our autonomic nervous system listens to the language of feeling rather than words. The body—or rather, the nervous system—scans the environment without us being aware of it. This is called neuroception. This is how we sense tension and the atmosphere.
Punishing damaged people and animals is as effective as replacing a car’s engine when the issue lies in the electronics, or vice versa. In fact, it often deepens the wound. Perhaps this is why prisons are referred to as breeding grounds for “criminals,” and why the recidivism rate is so high for people with a criminal past. Perhaps we are creating repeat offenders this way. In the past, I worked with forensic patients; they are not “bad” people, but rather damaged individuals.
The power does not lie in pointing out guilt or defending innocence; this is a huge energy drain. Forgiving yourself and others brings power, liberation, peace, and healing. For the ego, this can be a monumental task. The ego will always make us believe that the solution and the blame lie outside of ourselves.
When we can recognize that we or someone else is falling into a reactive pattern, we no longer take the situation so personally and can forgive more easily, or at least have more understanding for it. It is crucial to set boundaries, of course; letting others walk all over you is not the goal.
It helps to remember that every situation or story has at least three sides: yours, the other person’s, and the truth. This helps you distance yourself from identification and the pull of conviction—or possibly misperception—and keeps you from falling into reactive patterns.
A good exercise: when you feel the urge to go on the defensive, seek revenge, or assign blame, try doing nothing at all. Sit with it. Try to locate the feeling in your body and focus your attention there. You may feel like bouncing in your chair or boiling inside because there’s a lot of unrest beneath it. This feeling will change; keep following it with your attention. This way, you can move through different emotional layers and eventually reach the core, where peace resides. The goal is to feel what you feel. And yes, the ego loses, but you win!
Understanding and forgiveness—for ourselves and others—are essential in these times. Herein lies our freedom.
Book recommendations: The Power of Vulnerability by Brené Brown, Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg, The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer
For more inspiration and book recommendations, visit www.jelion.nl/inspiration