… I will find someone who will take me under their wing and take care of me forever. I won’t have to make decisions myself. I will let them assign tasks and activities to me, and I will swear total loyalty and fulfilment of those activities.
I won’t communicate what it is that I really want.
Because I don’t believe that I can get it. Because I have made the experience in my childhood that I am not getting it. The love, the attention, the care which I needed and didn’t get.
This happens in relationships, but also at work. I will do what you want me to do, and you will give me money. I won’t tell you what it is that I really want to do, and I will accept the tasks given to me.
Wanting care is not the problem. The problem begins when I silently promise compliance in exchange for care, while hiding what I actually want.
But then I won’t fulfil what I promised. In a relationship or at work. I will unconsciously sabotage it. Because truly I don’t want to do it anyway. It’s a fake bargain based on a fake promise and on unspoken needs which will never get fulfilled.
Confusion: the strategy of staying harmless
I will hide what I am really doing. I will get confused about what I really want and don’t want, and I confuse you too, so you don’t understand what is happening or how to move forward.
My own wishes won’t disappear because I haven’t communicated them. I have agreed to something that I don’t really want to do. Confusion keeps me from having to state that clearly.
This confusion makes me harmless. There is no clarity and no decision and no action and no anger and no boundaries. This is a childhood strategy of being harmless through confusion and through confusing others.
We live in this soup of unclarity, where the only way for this arrangement to survive is for that unclarity to exist. Then we can be nice, and people can love us and pat us on our heads, and we have someone to take care of us.
I am the perfect weapon of human destruction. I am the little child that doesn’t want to grow up.
How come?
From that inner child perspective, I have oh so many reasons for not wanting to grow up. Because, for example, you know, I couldn’t even be a child during my own childhood.
Compassion and the adult position
There is so much harshness in this realisation and also inside of me, and a sarcasm that parts of me find very entertaining. I am pondering whether I can also find compassion for myself, for how lost I have become in this experience, and for the huge pool of pain and sadness which I still carry, even physically, and which I still need to process.
There is such a subtle line between actually feeling that pain and being hooked by it as a justification for how I act.
We do so much work with inner children. We acknowledge them, we give them attention. But I am now noticing there is a shadow child. That part which wants to be taken care of and just can’t get enough. Which takes over everything, trying to receive what it didn’t get. It kidnaps our relationships and our creative power.
Unrecognised, hurt inner children can dominate and take over whole rooms of people. The child occupies the driving seat while the adult position remains unoccupied.
The adult position is the one from which I acknowledge what I want, communicate it, and act towards it. From which I consciously create the reality I want and take responsibility for my participation in it, including the consequences of my actions.
How can I occupy that position and still feel compassion for the child? How can I acknowledge what I didn’t receive and process those emotions without letting them justify whatever I do?
What am I surrendering?
The same construction enters spirituality and my relationship with God. I am looking for someone who will finally take care of me. If I surrender enough, I won’t have to decide for myself anymore.
Spirituality becomes hijacked by it. God becomes the ultimate parent who can fulfil my wishes on the promise of devotion and oneness. I can stay protected, keep being a child, and avoid the responsibility of being part of this web of life.
Is this another level of delegation of my own power?
What is the difference between this and devotion and surrendering? What do I surrender, and what do I still take responsibility for?
To stand naked before God, without hiding what I am or what I want, asks something of me. It dawns on me how much it means to take responsibility for what I am and be there in full devotion.
What becomes possible when we take responsibility
As I stop asking only who will take care of me, I begin to notice what already sustains me—and what my receiving asks of me.
Taking responsibility means coming out of the fog of confusion, so that we can actually look at the whole chain of events in which we participate.
There is a difference between a prayer before you eat your food and the realisation that an animal had to die for you to eat this piece of salmon.
A tree had to use love to grow the fig that you now let drop on your tongue.
We are doing something upside down when we pray before our food and try to tune into a frequency of gratitude without really looking at what has made this possible.
When we are really there, it dawns on us what needed to happen. We can see the chain of events, what has been given to us, and the responsibility that comes with receiving it. We can see the depth and the consequences of what we participate in.
This means no longer closing our eyes so that we don’t have to feel what we don’t want to feel. Our own pain is still there, but it no longer keeps us from seeing beyond it.
Gratitude is then a consequence of what we have allowed ourselves to encounter. We are overwhelmed by it. It overflows our being.
The collective sleep
Collectively, we are sleeping. We don’t want to really see and don’t want to take responsibility, and we enter this collective soup of fog and confusion about what we are actually doing.
I feel this is a collective childhood structure, a European illness. We want to be taken care of without seeing what sustains us and what it costs. We do what is assigned to us and leave the decisions to someone else. We remain in this soup of unclarity where we can keep feeling harmless and nice.
The people in the driving seats have their own inner children, hungry for what they never received. They become hijacked by them, but now they have the power to act that out over whole nations.
We have people who want someone to take care of them, and people in the driving seats who themselves still want to receive what they never got.
The earth gets ruined in that. Whole nations get driven into havoc while we remain in this collective sleep and don’t want to see what we are doing.
Where in my life am I still hoping that someone will take care of me, and what am I not saying, not seeing, or not taking responsibility for so that this can continue?
This cannot remain a question I keep asking without changing how I live. While I wait for someone else to take responsibility, my choices—and my silences—are already shaping my relationships and the world around me. The consequences do not wait until I feel ready.
I begin now: saying what I want before I promise anything. Letting someone be disappointed. Asking for care without making them responsible for my life.
Where are you waiting for someone else to make a decision that is yours to make?