We sometimes have to face the fact that some of our most cherished ideas, lifelong characteristics and habits may be what is holding us back from development. It takes much courage to ask for healing even if it means those cherished characteristics may have to go.
I am talking now about such things as dominance and submission and all the activities that go with those, and which are so much a part of the lives of some of us that blog here.
We suffer unhappiness, yet may be unwilling to give up, even do not remotely consider giving up, those very things that may, in ways unbeknown to us consciously, be holding us back from escaping to freedom. The ego is assiduous in working for its survival, and does not want us to dismantle the structure by which it maintains its hold on us. We prefer to live among the familiar features of our personal landscape, and dread to bring into action those techniques which we know will be effective, in case we are led away from familiar shores and into the deep waters of uncertainty, even though deep within us we know that what looks like uncertainty is really the appearance of freedom when viewed from the prison we are presently in. Those familiar features are the bars of our prison and the fountainheads of our tears.
Orchidea sent me this comment as she doesn't have a blogger account:
ReplyDeleteHi Malcolm
I can't post a comment to your blog (I don't have a blogger account), but
felt I must thank you for describing my current situation so eloquently in
your latest entry.
The issues I am contending with/embracing aren't connected (or are at most indirectly connected) with my relationship with M or any part of the bdsm equation, but choosing a new path, releasing oneself from the comfort of self-imprisonment and moving forward are scary at any time and on any level.
I seem to be a fellow traveller and I wish you all the luck and clarity you
need to achieve your aim.
orchidea
orchidea,
ReplyDeleteI read your blog regularly and with great enjoyment. It may have been reading your blog that prompted me to write the latest entry; but I have been thinking along these lines for many years, not daring to express it outwardly.
wendy, you're the second one to write saying this reflects her own situation.
I have been thinking along these lines for years, and recently read one or two blogs which seemed to prompt
expressing these thoughts. My own situation, too. It just kind of popped out from a kind of subconscious internal pressure.
About parenting from how you were raised, I think that is unavoidable much of the time, we cannot work everything out from scratch; but yes, we need to keep a lookout for what our children really need, as distinct from the general run or the traditional ways. I have been a father of young children or teenagers most of my life! It's a long haul.
Malcolm
Intriguing. Like Wendy, I wonder what may have prompted your post!
ReplyDeleteIn general, it seems to me that change is frightening to us. Better to stick to what works, we think--even when it has ceased to work.
Good luck to you--