Most of us have been affected emotionally over the past several months from the political ideologies that want to take their countries backwards to an imagined time when everything was so great and glorious. We who work in this field of helping people move forward in our lives just kind of shake our heads and say, WHAT!!!!!!!! That is because the people we work with on a daily basis have such a difficult time getting detached from the past that was such a nightmare for them. For most people that past wasn’t really that fantastic. The illusion that the past was greater than it was arises from the practice of burying past nightmares, the forgetting of the negative by blowing up what was perceived as positive.

The problem with buried nightmares and falsely imagined glorious pasts is that they tend to make us fearful and then protective from outside forces. Instead of engaging fully in the world, we make practices in ourselves that lock us away. We all have it. We all do it. In the larger outer political world we see it being played out by politicos who have unresolved childhood family issues. Literally they are trying to protect themselves from the family that they grew up in, and so are we.

The nightmares show up in the dream world as well as the outer world, but if you are good at burying negative memories, which highly traumatized people are, then you might not remember any of your dreams. It is a protective mechanism that tries to keep us safe. It is a tariff that the ego mind uses so that we can forget what happened. Furthermore it makes an illusion of what the positive was like, and how much more evolved the past generation was, that the current generation has it so easy and expects everything to come easily.

The fact of the matter is that most households were authoritarian nightmares. Most families lacked true intimacy and closeness. We have just allowed some of our leaders, who have had the same nightmares, to think that they are going to protect us from the next boogie man. Is is NOT going to happen because it is a failed strategy. What it will do, like what is happened in Vietnam and now in other wars that go on endlessly, is to keep the collective world in a long nightmare, until we learn what we are supposed to learn, which was the same thing that we were supposed to learn in our families, closeness and cooperation.

If you have had an inkling of intimacy growing up, then the transformation process to the new world of working together cooperatively is going to be a much easier process for you, but no one has it that easy. This is all new stuff. We are collectively going to a new world, and it takes a lot of inner work. Throwing people out of the house is very temporary. The nightmare inside of being abused or neglected does not go away from protective measures. It goes away with a lot of inner work, daily over a long, long period of time.

The first thing we all need is a safe haven to process. Most of us have grown up in cultures where the primary value expounded was to be absolutely tough and stoic under all kinds of duress, what you would expect as a soldier. “Soldier on.” Toughness. Showing any kind of vulnerability was a bully’s paradise. Instead of processing the trauma or pain, we buried it like a soldier in battle who has just lost his closest friend in a fire fight. When I graduated from high school, I went to military academy thinking that what I need was more toughness. I even decided that I wasn’t going to quit because it was too tough. It took me 3 years to realize that what I was really searching for was close relationships, which I ended up making a lot of there. But the journey from being protective to open and honest with yourself about what you really need is not a short road. It is a long, long road and requires a big investment. When we have a safe haven, safe people to process with, then we can move forward into new areas, and for most people that will be about spiritual intimacy.

A safe haven is usually a small group or partner or professional where you can begin to feel like it is OK to feel like you can share the darkness inside without feeling any kind of judgement coming from the group. In that kind of environment you can let go of the false bravado and fear and then gradually move your life forward. If you start getting the relationship right, everything else tends to fall into place. Start small and find safe group. Don’t choose people who tell you what to do. Choose people who listen and support you, and gentle help guide you to your path.