A place filled with arguments, and violence, or a place full of material wealth but with busy parents who’s schedules are too full to actually spend time as a family. A place of poverty, but part of a community. And we all grow up. In a place with a loving and caring mother, or in a lonely home. Rianne writes about unity and connectedness.

Shaping us

The place and home where we were born and grew up, shape us. As children we look at our parents and do things the way they would. We can also pick up their patterns and reactions, that are actually related to their fears and pain, and their strategies for not having to feel that fear and pain. Unconsciously, we copy these patterns.

Patterns of condemnation, patterns of violence, patterns of depression, patterns of isolation, or being secluded

As I wrote before, I was depressed for years when I was younger. But it wasn’t really something new, because my father had also been depressed before, and his mother and her father as well. I had a desire for death that all of us were familiar with. A strategy for not having to carry the pain in this life any longer.

I think depression is the most dampening of all emotions. To store everything in a pot, that will eventually start boiling over. The pressure on this pot is the depression. It becomes clear when we look at the actual word; de-press. It contains the word press (referring to that aforementioned ‘pressure’). To me, depression was the unbearable burden of not being able to express my feelings. And furthermore, of not being able to express my ideas. I didn’t feel like I had the head space to do this anyway. I was in fact, suppressing my entire being, the actual essence of me.

These patterns of suppressing my emotions wasn’t something new that I came up with

I learned it from my parents. And in turn, they learned it from theirs. My metaphoric ‘pot’ boiled over, after years of sadness, pain, loneliness, and feeling broken. Everything came pouring out. I started my journey of healing, broke the silence and opened myself up. I shined a light on my dark sides, and on the strategies I had picked up, and came to the conclusion I wanted to break those patterns, that I didn’t want this for myself.

We are all born into a broken world. A world in which our parents know about pain and damage in life, and in which they develop patterns to deal with it. (In my experience this isn’t about being right or wrong, but about daring to see the truth, to decide whether you want to carry on living like this).

The documentary ‘in utero’, with Dr. Gabor Maté, shows us how we observe and store patterns from the very beginning of our existence. And how we may have learned to make ourselves invisible, to not be a burden, to be quiet, to protect ourselves.

It may seem like a gloomy way of looking at things, that we arrive in this traumatised society as a helpless, tiny, human being. In which nature is traumatised, and the society is traumatising. In which schools and healthcare systems contribute to this traumatisation.

But I would like to take you back to our real essence

In the past, people used to say: the soul is pure, it’s our innocence, our untouched, and our light. It’s the love, the unity, and connectedness in everything. “I am a part of this earth. I can’t live without the trees, because without them there would be no oxygen.” I would not exist without my parents, and without food; fruit and vegetables from this earth, I wouldn’t exist. The fact that trees are being cut down, and whole forests are being sacrificed for money, is only possible if there’s fragmentation.

A belief in being separated. Because if we were to truly integrate and acknowledge that we need the forest to survive, that we and the forest are a part of life, it wouldn’t be possible for us to cause so much damage to our planet.

It wouldn’t be realistic to think that I would be able to exist all on my own. To believe that I am cut off from this all-encompassing connectedness is in my experience a strategy to not having to feel the pain of this collective trauma.

By living, or calling myself cut-off from everyone else, I can distance myself from your war, your exploitation, and your rape. By doing this I won’t have to feel the pain of the damage to nature, damage to animals, and the sorrows of other people. The ‘I’ becomes an isolated ‘individual’ who thinks it would be possible to live without this all-encompassing connectedness with animals, plants, and people.

Unity and connectedness

Concerning unity, there is actually a chain of all events, a system of interdependency. We could see the individual as an expression of the collective and vice versa. In the place where a person wants to look at their brokenness from their wholeness, a cycle is broken It makes me think about the chaos theory. This theory is also known as the butterfly effect, as meteorologist Edward Lorenz described it. It assumes that a wing beat of a butterfly in Australia can cause a tornado in Kansas, or a monsoon in Indonesia.

One deed can make a world of difference, one moment can fill a life with love and light. Together as humanity we can be carriers of emotions, from love, unity, and connectedness. With the courage to face our cruelty, our pains, our isolation. Unity: It’s as if all of mankind is just one body. The people within psychiatry are like a black eye that is constantly stared at, but because of which you secretly hope that someone asks you how you are, and what happened to you.

Soldiers anywhere in the world, are like your chopped off toe, that needs to be stitched , connected, and learn how to be part of the body again, the unity. The orphan and the widow are like a pain in your belly, that longs for good nutrition and the warmth of a hot water bottle. Remember the unity of everything and the love in everything, because she is the mother of existence, and then we can see, and carry the trauma.

Translation by SGM Taplin