Family Baggage...Unpacked

Wow! It's been a busy month and a half!! I've been offering a series of 7 Childhood Treasures workshops in St. Louis...and my family convened for a big celebration of Mom's 90th birthday.

Have you ever noticed that, when you're with your birth family, the adult costumes everyone walks around in most of the time seem to shift their seams and zippers in revealing ways? But it's not body parts that emerge; rather, it's our former child selves. The sibling alliances and rivalries, the pecking

orders, the secrets we keep.... All these immodest private parts begin to poke through openings we thought were sealed. Your past is no longer contained inside the carefully sewn exterior self you tend and mend, day by day, in the adult world in which you now move.

Yes, there's nothing like a family gathering to suddenly make you realize three things:

1. Your baggage is gaping wide open, with its tumbled contents on display.
2. Most of those contents have, in fact, already been pulled out and draped all over your frame by well-meaning family members who are more comfortable with this familiar version of you.
3. All that costuming conceals not one of the vulnerabilities you most want to hide.

Sigh. Ain't that just the pits?

After the overview/orientation session I offered on the Treasures, I've begun other sessions with a short recap and a "quiz" -- a sort of "quick and dirty," non-scientific assessment of the status of the Treasures in our lives. Is it turns out, spending a few days with Mom, siblings, and some extended family yields a pretty accurate assessment, too.

Life would be so much easier if these boomerangs back to a younger self happened only at family gatherings. Alas, this is not so. The child selves we have been can be invoked by others who seem like our parents or siblings, in other settings than the hearth of home. What do you do when you suddenly find there's a tantruming two-year-old in charge of your life's transactions with work colleagues, with neighbors, with friends out for dinner...? Or when the  insecure 12-year-old tweener of your youth picks of the reins of your day and giddyups you into a gaffe or out of the room altogether?

Well, first there is the question of whether you even recognize that you've ceded control to a youngster who hasn't a clue how to operate in the adult world. Maybe you think someone else, or everyone else, is the problem and you're just fine. The capacity to self-diagnos regression to a younger self -- especially, right in the moment it's occurring -- requires nurture over time and, in my experience, some loved ones who are willing to gently kick your butt now and then.

If you're lucky, the clues are clear:  you stick out your tongue in lieu of a response, or find yourself in tears over a minor taunt, or find yourself taunting someone -- acting-out some decades-old melodrama or farce. Before you learn to see even these clear signs, maybe your first realization will be the jolt of seeing your middle-aged reflection in a window, wearing the expression of a truculent four-year-old. Suddenly, you wake up from your dream of the past and realize, "I'm in my 40s (or whatever) and I just answered 'Make me!' to my brother when he told me to grab the other end of the table he wanted to move. What the...?"

Well, here's how these occurrences break down in the framework of the 7 Childhood Treasures:

• sticking out your tongue = need for work mining the Treasure of Negotiation
• in tears over a taunt = need for Independence
• taunting someone = probable need for Trust and/or Negotiation
• "Make me" = need for Independence and Negotiation

Maybe you're more sophisticated in your choice of costume finery than most of us, and you simply

spend your family gatherings silently judging everyone else. Poor souls. Look at them acting-out their childhood wounds with each other. They're not smart, or saved, or sober, or sophisticated, or secure, or fill-in-the-blank, like me.... Yeah, well...six of one and half-dozen of the other, as my mom says. Superior judgment is nothing more than a need for brighter Trust, Independence, and Faith. Get out your pick-axes; we're going mining for Treasures!

And that's the good news message of the 7 Childhood Treasures:  it's never too late! It's never too late to reclaim the treasure chest of these assets for relationships and life, in general. The ability to Trust; Independence of self that doesn't sacrifice connection with others; the power of Faith; and the capacities for Negotiation, Vision, Compromise, and Acceptance:  they are all your birthright!! If your parents and teachers and the other adults who influenced your first seven years did not know how to help you mine and polish the raw ores of these fabulous gems for life, then you be the parent now, and re-parent your first seven years of social and emotional development. You be the teacher, you be the helpful adult who cares and knows what to do. You can start at any age, opening up the seams and veins, pulling out the lode of raw materials that still lie within you, just waiting for the right tools in the right hands, to become faceted and be polished to a shining luster.

Truly, life does not require regular drama and melodrama. We need not live in fear of others' emotional reactions to our thoughts, feelings and needs. Continuous anxiety, anger, or frustration is not the daily norm that the Divine has in mind for us. A life of pressure-cooker, no-choice, daily grind is nowhere near the highest and best manifestation of the Love at the center of this universe.

There is another way to live, if not free of life's ups and downs, then at least free of the need to react from the heart, mind, or gut of an infant, toddler, or young child. There is a path to equilibrium, balance, and peace in relationships; a path to the ability to speak truthfully, from love and compassion, to each other; a path to mutual accountability and respect. The path is known, as are the tools we need to navigate it successfully. The sparkling jewels of our wholeness are here already,  waiting for us. We have only to do the work.

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The final workshops in the current 7 Childhood Treasures series are Saturdays, April 9th and 23rd, from 1 to 5 PM at the Center for Spiritual Living-St. Louis. Each session stands on its own; anyone may attend. $35 each, plus optional additional love offering, if you choose to affirm that the work has a higher value for you. 100% of love offerings benefit CSL-StL.