The Parental Disapproval Syndrome

If you are A Course in Miracles student, you know that being a parent is one big set-up. Babies aren’t innocent–they have chosen the ego as their teacher and so their experience will proceed accordingly. In other words, they have to be dissatisfied with their parents. Children have to feel victimized, no matter how idyllic their childhood may have been–and most are not so lucky. Here in the dream, the parent-child dynamic is perfect proof that life is unfair. The article below is a classic written by Leonard Orr and Sondra Ray, and gives some useful explanation of what the parental disapproval syndrome produces in the world.

The Parental Disapproval Syndrome
by Leonard Orr and Sondra Ray (Rebirthing in the New Age p. 59)

The Parental Disapproval Syndrome is another major cause of fear and negative programming. The syndrome develops as a result of your parents’ experiencing disapproval from their parents and their resentment of that disapproval. But they were not able to get even verbally or physically, so their true feelings were suppressed. They didn’t receive enough love and affection and found their parents difficult to please. So they spent the rest of their lives trying to get even with their parents or trying to please them to win their love. They constantly had to perform and conform according to their parents’ instructions in a futile attempt to win their love. This is later transferred to employers, authority figures, and “society.” They found little satisfaction until they had children (you). Then they had a captive child who was defenseless against parental hostilities and often coerced into giving them affection when the parents desire it.

To sum it up, parents take out their hostility toward their parents on their children (you). The spirit of the child is broken. Then you, as a child, have to suppress your true feelings until you have children and you take out your anger on yours—it goes on from generation to generation.

The fact is, you were a divine being when you came out of the womb.* Your parents began to disapprove of you and you resented it. But you couldn’t resist them or get even because you didn’t have a big enough vocabulary or a big enough body. The only way you could get even was to do what they disapproved of, which caused more disapproval. So you kept the disapproval syndrome going until you decided you could not win. Eventually you gave up and surrendered your loyalty to your divine nature and decided to follow instructions. So you followed instructions for the rest of your life. And when you got old enough to move out of the house, your parents (after they had invalidated your creativity, initiative, and natural wisdom) kicked you out and said, “Now is the time to succeed.” Then you went out and looked for somebody to give you instructions. That is the reason most people find employers and why people find mates. Hopefully, when you get married you will finally have found somebody who knows how to give you instructions, somebody who will solve all your problems, make all your decisions and plan your life for you. And, they don’t do it! Your mate doesn’t do it because he or she is expecting the same of you.

Behind that desire to have you plan their life for them, mates will express their hostility toward you. “Falling in love” is the hope that you have finally found a parental substitute. If you suppress your hostility successfully enough, then you will have a successful relationship. If you suppress your hostilities long enough in the relationship, then the relationship may last long enough to end in marriage. If you continue to suppress your hostility long enough, then your marriage might last long enough to have children. Guess what happens then? You get even with the bastards. You get even with your parents by taking it out on your kids. (It is obvious that people inhejit at least a portion of the subconscious minds of their parents as well as their bodies. In fact, financial and marital relationships usually follow the parents’ behavior so exactly that it almost seems mechanical.) The ultimate knowledge is self-knowledge and the ultimate freedom is internal freedom.

There are several vehicles by which the parental disapproval syndrome is transmitted. Three of the most popular are bedtime, mealtime and toilet training. You came out of the womb with “divine” energy and you probably didn’t need to sleep a whole lot. But your parents taught you that you do need to sleep a whole lot. Sleep is related to the birth trauma and to being in the womb. When you came out of the womb and all hell broke loose, you learned that the world outside the womb was a hostile place. You have gone through the rest of your life protecting yourself from a hostile world during your waking hours. After running around all day protecting yourself, you experience enough tension so that you get tired and you want to go to bed—you have reached the point of not being able to cope, which develops as an addiction. You want some rest from the world, so you go back into the womb/bedroom. You turn off the lights to make it dark, as it was in the womb. You crawl under the covers, which simulate the pressure of the walls of the womb and raise your body temperature. Then you go into a state of preverbal-like consciousness called sleep. So by going to bed you have recreated the womb experience. If you stay in bed long enough, your bed becomes a hostile place. It is hostile because your parents disapprove of your staying in bed too long, and they will come after you with sticks.

There is a lot of unpleasantness connected with bed; it is no wonder that some people have difficulty having fun in bed. It can be an unpleasant place, just as the bedroom is uncomfortable because children also get punished by being sent to their rooms. They go there and feel unloved. So it turns out later that those people can screw on Main Street and get off on sex in the back of the car, but in bed, no way! There is just too much tension and too much going on in the bedroom. It is better to make love on the dining room table, if the dining room table is a pleasant place. However, for most people, the dining room table was where they got all the bad news. Your parents criticized you for playing with your food and not cleaning your plate. Eating can make you nervous forever after.

Mealtime is the time when most kids get the bad news. That’s when you learn if you don’t clean up your plate you are not loved. So whenever people feel anxiety they go “clean up” a plate.

Then there is toilet training. Now if you had unpleasant toilet training and you go to the bathroom five or six times a day (and you “plug into” those unpleasant emotions every time you go to the bathroom), then it is no wonder you have difficulty ever being happy and experiencing bliss. Problems of constipation, diarrhea, etc., are probably all ultimately connected to your toilet training. I had one client whose mother was so obsessed with toilet training that he developed an anal fixation, became homosexual and could only get off sexually with anal intercourse. He took enemas constantly.

Being aware of parental disapproval is very valuable, because when you are disapproving you are just “running out” your parent, or replaying your parents’ tape. The idea is to express your hostility toward your parents and get it out. This will ultimately enable you to love them more. Otherwise, when your parents die, you experience failure. You never “got even” and now you are never going to get their love either. You feel disappointment for having suppressed your true nature and for not having gained their approval.

*From an ACIM perspective, babies are just as “guilty” of believing in a separate ego self as adults.

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Thank you Leonard Orr and Sondra Ray for your many insights into healing.

Pleasure and Pain are One and the Same

The article below, “Pleasure and Pain are One and the Same,” offers clarification on a subject many ACIM students find difficult to understand.  Thank you, Helgi, for such a clear explanation–very in keeping with A Course in Miracles.

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In the world of form there is pleasure and there is pain. Everything in the world is subject to polarities, and so we could say that all things already contain their opposite; you cannot have good without bad, and every high has a corresponding low. In the very nature of gaining something lies the possibility of losing it, and we know this intuitively. And so if we look closer, we see that pleasure and pain are really one and the same: they are the two polarities of suffering.

The great misunderstanding

And how can pleasure be suffering, you ask? We may think that pleasure is an aspect of joy and peace, and this is certainly what our culture wants us to believe, but trying to derive pleasure from the world of form, and thus looking for peace and joy outside yourself, will always lead to suffering. And another aspect of the misunderstanding is that, counter to what we might assume from surface appearances, externally derived pleasure is really no closer to joy than pain. We associate the two because they often go together on the surface, but pleasure does not in any way contribute to the sense of joy, no more than pain does. And in fact, pain can bring us closer to joy than pleasure because it prompts us to break free from the polarity, whereas pleasure seduces us further and further into the illusion.

There is a verse in the Bhagavad Gita that addresses this:

“Pleasures from external objects
are wombs of suffering, Arjuna.
They have their beginnings and their ends;
no wise man seeks joy among them.”

The reason that pleasures from external objects are wombs of suffering, as Krishna is saying, is because we mistake externally derived pleasure for peace and joy. The suffering lies in the belief that you need to gain something, that you need to add something to yourself to be complete. This belief is included in the illusion that joy can be derived from the world of form, because what you are really seeking in all of this is yourself, and a sense of being at home, of having arrived. And this misunderstanding, that your identity and the sense of home is somewhere out there in the world of form, is actually the essence of suffering and the core of all human misery.

The truth is that the joy you are seeking is already whole, and already within you. It is God, the one, yourself, peace, joy, truth, love — whatever you want to call it, it is already complete and cannot possibly be added to in any way by something in the world of form. It cannot be outside of you because it is the essence of who you are. And the illusion that you need to acquire it from somewhere in the world of form is the suffering that then manifests as the polarity of pleasure and pain.

Renunciation is not required

However, and as if I haven’t complicated it enough already, pleasure and pain only turn into suffering when you are seeking yourself in them. Which is why it is not necessary at all to renounce all sensory pleasures in order to become free from suffering. Some people do this, and in some cases it works, but abstaining completely from worldly pleasures is certainly no requirement.

It is possible to enjoy worldly pleasures without suffering when you recognize that any sense of joy you may experience in conjunction with it arises from within and is in no way derived from out there. And when you realize this, you will feel that pleasure and pain don’t carry much weight with you anymore. You will begin to experience both with the same sense of detachment, and then it really doesn’t matter that much which end of the polarity you are faced with. Pleasure will most likely still be your preference of the two, but it is relatively unimportant none the less.

You are then free to enjoy the things of this world, without demanding that anything should give you joy or make you happy. And in fact when you don’t have the expectation that things should give you joy, you can engage with the world in a much lighter and more playful way than before, in a way that is free of tension and stress.

Freedom from pleasure

Our conditioning has a momentum, as I’m sure you must be very aware of, and the pull of form is strong. When things are going well and the world seems promising, it is very easy to fall back into the illusion that there is lasting fulfillment to be found in form. And as long as you believe, even just a little bit, that something out there can give you what you think you need, you will continue to seek for pleasure in the world of form, and continue to bounce between the two polarities of suffering, pleasure and pain.

The way to become free of this illusion is simply to see it for what it is, and to realize that pleasure is not really what you want. This realization can be reached in a number of ways, and one of the more direct ones is to directly question the values that we have been conditioned to project onto the things of this world; seeing one thing as desirable and another as undesirable. In relative terms this will of course be the case, but in the conditioning these are absolute judgments implying that joy is to be found in some things and suffering in others.

Here are a couple more verses from the Gita that talk about this:

“They do not rejoice in good fortune;
they do not lament at bad fortune;
lucid, with minds unshaken,
they remain within what is real.”

“The mature man, fulfilled in wisdom,
resolute, looks with equal
detachment at a lump of dirt,
a rock, or a piece of pure gold.”

Questioning the assumption that the high is good and the low is bad leads one to see that there is nothing to be gained by good fortune, and nothing to be lost in bad fortune. Having realized this, you become like the men of wisdom that Krishna talks about and simply “remain within what is real.” And what is real is beyond good and bad, beyond high and low.

Looking “with equal detachment at a lump of dirt, a rock, or a piece of pure gold,” is the result of this realization, and can also be a pointer to it. You can practice this, as an experiment or a meditation, and question the differences in value that you project onto the world as the thoughts arise. This will expose the mechanics of the conditioning, and the illusion will start to slowly unravel. We could say that it is a practice of withdrawing projected value from the world of form — not in a negative way, but in a way that values all things equally and fully. There will still be relative preferences, but what the practice does is make way for an intuitive seeing of how all things are inherently neither good nor bad. As Shakespeare wrote, “for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

When you see beyond the conditioned polarity of good and bad, pleasure and pain, you find what you were looking for all along, what was always there, what always is and always has been; a sense of peace and joy that is not of this world, and of which form derived pleasure is merely a pale reflection.

This article is reprinted from http://everydaywonderland.com.   It seems to have been written by Helgi … thank you, Helgi!