Listened to a powerful interview with Gabor Mate yesterday who theorizes that childhood trauma creates addiction.
I’m just getting into his work as I come to understand the correlation between trauma, addiction, powerlessness and the journey to empowerment that each of us are uniquely walking now. Our inner parent-child dynamic is also a huge factor!
It’s a journey I’ve been on for several years while writing a book about the Hero’s Journey but as Matt Kahn shares in Everything Is Here To Help You “even though patterns may repeat throughout out lives, we are always experiencing them from a more expanded level of consciousness than we had in the past.”
Addiction is one of those topics that reveal themselves repeatedly so that we can distance ourselves from it with a new level of awareness each time we take a break or decide to change our relationship with the object of our attention.
In a traumatized culture like ours, where we are on the leading edge of a new form of humanity that is being designed by the heart-breaking-open experiences our traumas lead us into, we are given a chance to see our own lives and the world through a new lens with every change we make, and through the lens of new teachers who enter our lives at the perfect time to gift us a lesson that we can use to understand ourselves and how we choose to show up in the world from a higher level.
Gabor Mate just crossed my path and in an interview on YouTube (check out DR GABOR MATÉ – CHILDHOOD TRAUMA CREATES ADDICTION – Part 1/2 | London Real) offered an insightful message I feel you would benefit from hearing:
The power of the parent comes from the desire of the child to belong to you. When the child is driven to belong to their peer group because we’ve taken them out of the natural context… we lose the authority and so we become authoritarian and the more authoritarian we become the more pressure we put on them and the more resistant they become… when all they’re doing is acting out their attachment dynamics.
So if we want to discipline kids we have to make them our disciples and a disciple is not someone who is afraid of us. They are someone who loves us and we want to follow and belong to… so discipline is the very opposite of punishment (shared around the 26minute mark of this interview)
This parenting insight contains a deeper message about authentic leadership as embodied by the best of us – not from the perspective that some of us are better than others but that each of us contain best, worst and everything in between parts.
We must also realize that our inner realms are ruled by a parent-child dynamic that we have developed within ourselves and must resolve through a disciplined approach to creating the life of our dreams. Our dreams being the daydream that we fixate on during our waking hours and give Time, Energy, Effort, Attention and Money (T.E.E.A.M.) toward bringing to life.
These energetic resources are our T.E.E.A.M. players and their power-plays will be far different depending on whether we have the child or parent archetype of our inner realm at the helm of our inner kingdom.
We get to choose in any given moment so the question becomes how can we best support our inner child in feeling safe enough to follow the lead of the parental team within?
Comment below a method you use to lead your T.E.E.A.M. away from addiction, regardless of what it may be to, and please share this message with someone you feel would resonate with its message. It’s time to take our power back, one choice at a time.
Much love,
Laura JeH – Namaste
PS. While I don’t have children of my own, my nephew (the baby in the image) is as close as I’m ready to get to parenting while I tend to my inner parent-child relationship and help others with theirs. He’s pretty spectacular nonetheless, if I don’t say so myself <3
