Making Friends With the Child You Were

Back when Jimmy Carter was President, I did volunteer work in the jails. I had hoped to be assigned one person in the GED program that I could tutor once a week. I wanted to see if there were some way I could then help that person arrive at more effective ways of making his life decisions when he was returned to society. My theory being that once someone is listened to, they can use that experience to learn to listen to what they are telling themselves and that much of the confusion in the world comes from people not listening to their own problems. What happened at the jail instead my working with the same person week after week was that when I showed up for my volunteer slot, I was assigned whichever inmate was the most frustrated…the most likely to blow his stack.

Sometimes when I worked with someone I could feel him unwind and relax. Sometimes it didn’t work as well. (Never was that what I wanted to do. But, when you volunteer at jails, you don’t get a lot of choices.)

Bill and I came home from somewhere out of the area and he read in the paper that Ruth Carter Stapleton was giving a workshop in San Jose. He thought I should go to it. He always thinks I should go do something political and worthwhile. (Of course you understand going to worthwhile political things “isn’t the sort of thing he does well.” So it falls my lot to be the family representative in that arena even though I believe it to be of more interest to him than to me. Somehow, he never quite believes I brought the right information home to him.) I read the blurb…it was a healing seminar. From what I read I thought it would be about ways to talk with people that would defuse potentially dangerous situations. So I thought, that might help me understand the jail dynamics. Might improve my odds of being helpful.

I forgot that the woman was a faith healer. Either that, or I didn’t know it. I must have known. She was a preacher. But, I believed the seminar would be about communication.

When I got down to the civic auditorium I was in for what I took to be a disappointment. The plan wasn’t to teach us have healing conversations with other people. The plan was to have a healing conversation with the people who paid to come to the seminar. Did I need healing? I thought not.

She talked about the fact that her work was based on her religious experience, but could be translated to your own version of the religious, whatever that might be. Her work was also based on the work of Michael Wright, a psychologist. Her premise was that a great deal of our pain comes from our misinterpretation of life. Michael Wright’s premise is that most of the problems in life come from operating with faulty information. We don’t know enough about the situation and have filled in non-helpful data, or we have been given some information that is inaccurate for whatever reason. He believes in re-storying your life.

I may have been aware of Michael Wright’s work at that time. I may not have been. At any rate I found no reason to object to the notion of re-storying, although I can’t say that I had practiced it, at that time.

She went on to say that the divine plan is for people to be well and happy. But things happen, and people, run afoul and life gets icky. The most common times for people to find themselves operating without proper information fall into five categories. These glitches serve to trip them up for the rest of their lives. I will see if I can remember them.

1. Birth-a child comes into a world that is not ready to offer them a secure place. For instance the parents can’t afford them either emotionally or financially or both. Such a person is likely to go around saying, "I wish I had never been born."

2. Some traumatic experience occurs when they are very young and people are so caught up in their own melodrama that no one bothers to tell the kid what is going on. Such a person is likely to blame themselves for the trauma that occurred to others.

3. When a person first experiences sexual interest. Such a person is likely to be operating under faulty information and either do things that believe to be evil, or not do things because they believe them to be evil…but they would sure like to do them.

4. When a person becomes a part of a second family. No one every understands the dynamics of the in laws because so many things are done so differently in even the most similar of families.

5. That may have been her whole pack of cards. I would add several others, myself. Like moving to a different part of the country or the world. Somewhere where things are done differently. Moving from one tax bracket to another which is another place things are not done according to the way you thought they were. Divorce and Death have to come in there somewhere.

According to Ruth Carter Stapleton, the cure for problems resulting from the amassing of misinformation at those crucial points was a series that always followed one general pattern.

You will get the idea of how that worked if I list out the way she dealt with the problems that unwanted children face.

First she, Ruth Carter Stapleton, told about people who had had a problem like that. Someone who had been most suicidal all her life because her parents had been so unready to have her when she was born. Things like that. Then she went into a guided meditation in which she had the entire audience visualize their being born. And there in the birth room was Jesus Christ, or the individual’s personal equivalent…waiting along with the parents to welcome you into the world. S/He would hug the new you and tell you how happy S/he was that you were there and how much S/he loved your being there. Then if the parents were not so happy. S/He would sit them down and say, “Look, I know you are having a hard time. What with the bills and all. What with the lost job. What with the fact that you have both been disowned. But, is this the kid’s fault? You have the chance to give this child the love you failed to get in you life. S/He would then embrace the parents, who would understand (this being your vision) and then S/he would hand the kid to the parents who would accept the kid in love this time.

After the meditation was over, Ruth Carter Stapleton invited anyone who wanted to to come forward and share their experience with her. A whole stream of people went up to receive her solace and her appreciation for their coming up to share their experience with the others.

I, of course, rolled my eyes skyward. Having been raised in a Baptist Church, I have come to be skeptical of Revival addicts. There are people, I thought who really get into the showboat activities.

I thought about slipping out and going home, but missed the opportunity.

The next exercise was about things that happen to children. She had a grim set of stories about grim things that happen to children and how their lives improved when they allowed their divine overseer to explain it all in a better light. You were then supposed to envision the front door of your house when you were little. Four perhaps.

I had done some work with remembering when I was little because when I was in Antioch the first time the guy who taught social psychology believed in childhood amnesia. He thought you couldn’t remember anything that happened before you were four. I didn’t believe him, so I devised a set of rules that I felt would separate what I had heard from what I remembered for my own experience. Visual was the requirement. Could I remember what it looked like?

So when Ruth Carter Stapleton when into her guided meditation I didn’t look for the front door of the house where I lived when I was four. Instead a very familiar picture came into my mind—not one from my psychology experiment phase—one that lurked in the fringes of my mind. It was a big gray window looming in front of a child that I could only see in silhouette form. But, when I went there in the Carter-Stapleton Seminar, I realized that this child was me when I was a little girl. I had never realized that was what that picture was. But that day in the civic auditorium I knew who it was. Me seeing me from the upper right hand corner of a small dark room. Me looking out the window…and I knew what I was watching. This was when my brother was so badly burned. I was watching my mother smother out the flames that had engulfed Jack’s pants with a wet sheet.

About that time Ruth Carter Stapleton must have gone into her bringing God into the scene, because I heard this giant IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT in my head. And tears were streaming down my cheeks. (I must have forgotten one part of the exercise. I guess when she did the guided meditations, she must have had everyone holding hands with the people on either side of them. Because I remember I was holding hands with these strangers.) When she invited people to come up and tell the group about how that went, I chose not to.

I had never thought it was my fault, even though it was kind of a family story that had I not fell into the fish pond, and had my mother not been busy changing me out of my wet overalls on that cold November day, Jack might never have been burned, I never once believed that Jack’s burning was my fault. It took me some years and the writing of a book of poetry on the meaning of living in the shadow of someone else’s pain to understand why did it felt so wonderful when God said, "It’s not your fault."

I do not remember the exercises that went with the problems one might have had as a result of victimesque envision at any of the sundry points of vulnerability. I expect that they were along the same lines. I do remember that she was very specific that there was no point in telling the in-laws that had treated you so badly when you first came into the family that you forgive them. That not only was that counter productive but also there is the fact that you haven’t forgiven them if you have to make the point of telling them that you have forgiven them. All you will be doing is attacking them and bringing the old hurts back into focus.

There was homework that I don’t believe I have ever done. But it sounds good. You were supposed to a little meditation every morning, bring out that little kid and tell it you loved it, etc. I expect I am too intimidated by that little kid. She is skeptical of the sincerity of my interest in her. Who knows? One day, I may drag her out and talk to her yet.

Since nothing works for everyone, and some things work sometimes and not others, I am going to give you an alternate, although similar writing exercise, that you can use interchangeably with the Carter-Stapleton Exercise.

Now we come to Emerson’s first law of journal writing: Never force the issue. Write only what comes to mind. Do not go fishing deliberately to try to force some understanding on yourself. If what comes to mind feels truly unpleasant…there may be too much fear of pain collected there for it to be wise to force the issue. It often makes sense to simply promise to come back and visit the pain site with it is accessible with less pain. No point in pulling scabs away from wounds that are still in the process of healing. Sometimes the sunlight of recognition of the pain will be enough to make it safe to go into that area at some later date.

If the kid doesn’t want to come out and play. You might be able to sneak into your mind using another trick.