HOW THE TRANCE DEVELOPS PART 1

In these postings, I have attempted to provide information that will help you create a more wonderful life. In addition to absorbing information from me, it is my hope that you will make important discoveries for yourself about your own life and your own personal keys to a life full of more Love, Joy, Enthusiasm, Satisfaction and Success.

As you read these words, keep this important thought in mind. A major key to this whole process is a willingness to take action. Without that vital step, these words will remain only a potential difference in your life. It will be like trying to start a fire with paper, wood and matches, but without ever striking the match. Sitting in a perfectly tuned car with a full tank of gas will not get you anywhere until you take the action of turning the ignition key. Similarly, when you mix action together with the information you find here, you will discover or rediscover a power within you that will enable you to successfully meet every challenge.

Each of these postings can be read individually and will provide you with useful information. However many of them are related to each other, and all together, they generally fit together. Some will be understood better, and be more helpful to you if you read them in order. Therefore, before reading this post, I recommend that you first read THE TRANCE.

AS WE LOOK AT HOW THE TRANCE DEVELOPS

As we look at how the trance develops, we will see how we create limitations for ourselves. We support self-sabotaging behaviors with our depression affirmations. As part of our understanding of how this all works, we will examine social emotional development early childhood through adulthood. There is convincing evidence that most of ideas about ourselves; whether or not people like us, how we compare to other people, how successful we expect to be, what types of relationships we will have, are all decided and accepted during normal childhood development by age 5 and probably even younger.

HOW DID I BECOME THE WAY I AM?

To understand our own lives, I think is valuable to spend some time asking “How did I become the way I am?” Not for the purpose of wallowing in it and certainly not simply to look back at all of the painful things we may have experienced so we can label ourselves and feel stuck forever. The reason for looking back is to find clues that reveal the underlying beliefs and premises under which I run my life. In other words, “How did I get to be this way?” If there are circumstances in my life that I want to improve, or change all together, I need to know these things. As Earnest Holmes wrote, “We do not say peace when there is no peace, but rather we try to discover what is wrong and why we do not have peace.” The clues we find will also lead us to ideas on how to change our situation.


It makes sense to me, based on my education, my personal life experiences, and more than twenty five years of helping people lead more satisfying lives, that how we act is based on our beliefs about life, ourselves, and other people. We believe a certain idea is true, and then we act in a way that makes the most sense to us based on our beliefs about “what’s going on.” Our beliefs can be conscious but more often they are unexamined, unconscious assumptions.

Therefore, when I observe someone acting in a way that concerns me, I believe a good way to make sense out of someone’s behavior is to ask this question: “What would someone have to believe about themselves, other people, and life in general so that it would make sense to behave in this particular way in this particular situation?” Also, what type of life experiences might someone have so that developing those beliefs would make sense? This could be called “the Colombo approach” after the famous detective character played by Peter Falk.
After we can understand the underlying beliefs that drive our behaviors, we can generate the desired change in behavior by evaluating and changing our underlying constellation of beliefs.

WHERE DID THESE BELIEFS COME FROM?

To answer these questions, I think it is valuable to ask two more questions:

1. “Why am I the way I am?”

and perhaps more importantly,

2. “How can I change?”

As we seek to answer these questions, we discover that a great deal of our personality and basic outlook on life is formed by the time we are 5 or 6 years old. In fact, if you observe children as they grow, it seems that much of our basic personality is evident by the time we are 4. We are quite naturally influenced and programmed by the combination of other people’s ideas of how we should be, as shown by their words and behaviors towards us, and how we interpret and react to those words and behaviors. At that early age, we haven’t been on this planet very long, and we have only our very limited perspective to make all of these important decisions about life.

IF I REALLY MADE THESE DECISIONS WHY DON’T REMEMBER DOING THAT?

When I first suggest to people that they made so many important decisions so young, often I hear, “I’m not sure I believe that. I don’t remember doing that.”
If you are having a hard time accepting this, let me ask if you remember learning to stand up and walk? How well do you remember learning to talk? In my case, it seems to me that I have always understood English, and I can’t remember a time I didn’t know how to walk. And I bet the same is true for you.

LIVING IN THE LAND OF THE GIANTS

Let’s examine this further. When we are little, we live in the land of the giants. To get a sense of this, imagine how it would be today if you were surrounded by people who were 10-12 feet tall and weighed 1,000 pounds. You would pay close attention to everything these giants did. That’s how it was for you as a small child.

When you first tried to stand up, the ‘giants’ got very excited. Their big giant heads got big giant smiles. They made encouraging sounds and gestures. Then you fell down. You were probably shocked and cried for a moment. Then you probably got back up and tried again. As it took approximately one to two years for you to achieve moderate skill as a toddler, you may have fallen five to ten times per day. Each fall was accompanied by drama involving the ‘giant’s’ reaction to your falling. Over those one to two years, you experienced perhaps 1,725 – 3,450 falls (365 days x 5 falls = 1,725; 365 days x 10 falls = 3,450). Each event surrounded by drama.

Yet, most of us admit we have no clear memory about any of this. Similarly, there were thousands of separate events surrounded by excitement involving the ‘giants’ during the period you learned how to talk.

In addition, you had not yet learned the habit of calling yourself negative names (loser, stupid, etc.) whenever you could not master getting what you wanted after only one or two unsuccessful attempts before giving up. At that time in your life, you persisted as long as it took for you to achieve your goal. It is obvious to me that we come into this life ‘hardwired’ to learn and succeed.

Later, as we become more socialized, we learn to associate emotional risk with our attempts to learn new skills, and we often give up and abandon our goals when we don’t succeed quickly. You see, after a while, we begin to define ourselves as ‘this type of person’ or ‘that type of person’ and we forget these were just arbitrary decisions we made before we understood much about life.

When you think about this, isn’t it plausible that there were a lot of decisions we made that we don’t remember, about who we are and what life is all about?

OUR FIRST TEACHERS

Initially, the first people who influenced us were our caregivers. Those were probably our parents, grandparents, older siblings, or for some, institutional workers or foster parents. Soon afterwards, there was the influence of whatever little peer group we were exposed to. Then there was the influence of television, stories that were read to us, movies and other cultural influences, plus our personal interpretation of all these. I’m not saying that our personalities are cast in cement, only that most of it is in place by these early years, and then the rest develops up through our adolescence.

Most people don’t easily become consciously aware of this, so we think, “We are just this way.” How many times have you heard someone say, “That’s just the way I am” as if it just magically happened all at once one day? Without an acknowledgement of how our personalities and beliefs developed in our early years, we can become stuck with whatever ideas about life we had at that age. In a very real sense, then, a small child may be running your life.

ALL THOSE SEPARATE HOMES

I was struck by this idea in a dramatic way one day when I was flying into Los Angeles International Airport. If you have ever flown over Los Angeles, you know how immense it looks. The houses, streets and freeways cover an enormous area. The houses seem to go on and on as you descend for a landing. It is quite a sight.

On this particular day when I was flying home from a vacation in Mexico with my wife, I looked down and was struck by the realization that under the roofs and inside the four walls of what looked liked millions of individual homes something important was going on. Wherever there were small children, whatever was going on inside that house, was, for them, the whole universe.

If you were raised in a family that resembled families like those on old television shows like “Leave it to Beaver”, “The Brady Bunch”, or “The Bill Cosby Show”, you had some pleasant, successful role models. For example, on those shows, if the child did something the parents didn’t like, Dad or Mom would take them into the family library and have a nice little talk. Mom or Dad would usually have a story about their own childhood that made a nice moral point. The kid would learn their lesson and everyone was happy. Those TV moms always had plenty of time to keep a sparkling home (sometimes with the help of a live-n maid/cook/substitute parent) shop with their friends, do charity work, serve freshly baked cookies to their kids and their friends, while dispensing wisdom. The dads had great jobs which evidently paid them well and they didn’t seem to have to work much. A child growing up in this house will absorb much different ideas about how life works than one who grows up in a home with alcohol fueled violence or poverty induced chaos.

As I look back on my own life, I don’t remember my father acting like those TV dads. Although he did take interest in us, and played sports with us, he was more likely to yell when he was angry rather than tell me a story with a convenient message to help me find my moral compass. I don’t remember my mother being like those TV moms. My mother had a lifelong eating disorder and always had a job outside the home. She suffered a herniated disk in a car accident and spent many years under the influence of prescription diet pills and pain medications. In our house, things sometimes became loud. Unlike our television counterparts, our problems were not limited to who misplaced somebody’s favorite sweater.

Both of my parents were raised by families with histories of untreated alcoholism. My mother’s childhood was filled with episodes of chaos, embarrassments, and some violence. My father learned to not value himself. Although they both made efforts not to recreate their parents’ lives, and both resisted their tendencies towards alcohol abuse while us kids were growing up, their ideas about relationships and life reflected the impressions they had about life based on their childhoods. The episodes of violence were infrequent, but my parents had constant arguments consisting of high volume yelling at each other and mutual shaming and blaming.

In my work as a family therapist, I have learned my experiences were not unusual. We are fortunate enough to be living in an era where some of the socially acceptable “masks” we were taught to wear have been coming off. More and more, we are agreeing to admit that MANY OF US GREW UP IN HOMES that resembled “Roseanne” more than the “Huxtables” or the “Waltons.”

This is not an exercise in blaming our parents or anyone else. What if you had caring, loving parents? I believe I did. Most parents don’t set out to deliberately hurt their children. Many parents were just inadequately rained for the job at hand. Even if your parents were very good, there may still have been problems created by your misinterpretations of events due to your lack of knowledge and experience. After all, at two years old, you haven’t had a lot of exposure to the world.

In the next posting, HOW THE TRANCE DEVELOPS PART 2, we will take a look at how families are a system, and that like other organizations, families require members to fulfill various roles in order to continue functioning. We will talk about some of the typical roles that develop in families and how they fit in with the family trance.

Please send me your comments and suggestions for future topics by clicking on the comments section at the end of each posting. Also keep checking back to see how I have responded to your suggestion or question in future postings.