The Secret to Successful Child Training: Walking in YOUR Shadow

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But somewhere early on our way, we eat one of the wonderful fruits of the tree of knowledge, things separate into good and evil, and we begin the shadow-making process; we divide our lives. Abraham Lincoln once remarked that he didn't like a man's face. When his companion criticized him, saying "he can't help his face," Lincoln answered calmly that "after a certain age, every man is responsible for his face. Psychologist Wilhelm Reich's clinical studies confirmed Lincoln's astute observation.

Reich found that our bodies are literal mirrors of our souls. Our muscles set in patterns which are indicative of the choices, good or bad, we have made in our lives. We develop body armor to protect us from life. We become rigid and unyielding. In order to make changes in life, we have to break down that rigidity and become flexible once more. The person we are is the product of many choices which we have made along the course of our life.

We each begin with a unique set of possibilities determined by our inborn abilities and our outer circumstances. These provide the material with which we can paint the portrait of our life. However, it's the choices we make in life which actually paint the picture. Over the course of our lives, each of us has taken paths that others haven't taken. We have each accepted certain ways of doing things because they fit us, and denied other ways because they just were not us. Over time, those paths, those choices, have made us the person we are, and that person is less and less likely to change.

When we are confronted by a new challenge, we are prone to fall back on solutions which have been hard-won in past struggles. However, inevitably life presents us with problems which can't be solved with old answers. These are the problems that demand a change in our life. We know it, but resist knowing it. We force an old solution onto a current problem, pretending that, while it might not fit perfectly, it's close enough.

Of course it doesn't really. We're just applying the ostrich principle of sticking our heads in the sand, hoping the problem will go away. If, through fear or rigidity, we continue this behavior long enough, we begin to cause ourselves real suffering. It seems too much to expect that we have to change still one time more; after all, haven't we changed so many times before?

We feel unfairly treated by life. However, as Robert Green Ingalls said: If we choose security over change, we have to suffer the consequences. As Gail Sheehy summarizes succinctly: If we don't grow, we are not really living. Growth demands a temporary surrender of security. We can learn how to recognize our own rigidity and how to correct it. It takes honesty and courage, but the rewards are immense. First, the suffering stops.

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This is the surest sign that we have chosen the right path again: More importantly, new possibilities open up everywhere in our life. Where everything seemed sterile and barren, and there seemed no possible answers, now everything seems possible. The possibilities may be scary, because each offers a path that we have never taken before, but it's a good kind of fear, like the fear that a fine pianist experiences before a concert.

Hello Darkness My Old Friend. There is nothing so frightening as facing the darkness within, our inner shadow. We will do almost anything to avoid having to look into the dark places of our soul. And rightly so, the darkness contains much that we mere humans can't face. There is evil, of course, we're all too familiar with that, but there is also much more that is neither good nor bad, but merely beyond our human capacity to comprehend.

Wonder and beauty and all our future possibilities also lie hidden in the darkness, and far too often in our shortsightedness, we confuse them with evil. There is no change that doesn't begin in the darkness of the human soul. We first have to discover an entrance into the darkness, then we have to light a tiny candle in the dark, so that we can search for our future self, and finally we have to join with it. And that takes resourcefulness, and patience, and most of all courage.

The necessity for the confrontation with the shadow has been known by all cultures in all times, and recorded in their myths and legends. I'm fond of a modern fictional version by science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin. In A Wizard of Earthsea , she tells the story of a world where magic still rules and wizards go through years of training at an academy, much as doctors or lawyers might today. One young wizard-in-training, Ged, already realizes that he has powerful magical abilities, which he is chafing-at-the-bit to use. Challenged by an another student to demonstrate that power, he determines to raise a spirit from the dead, the spirit of a very great lady who died over a thousand years before.

Ged's power is great enough that he succeeds at his task, but in the process a shadowy creature also emerges, a creature of darkness and evil, a creature with no name. Ged has no idea what it is, though something about it is vaguely familiar. The shadow nearly kills him before Ged is saved by the Archmage Nemmerle, the head of the academy and its greatest wizard. But though he forces the shadow to flee, even Nemmerle cannot return the darkness to its home. The effort is so great that Nemmerle dies afterwards. Though Ged has survived, his face is deeply scarred, and the shadow is loose in the world, looking for an opportunity to finish what it started with Ged.

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There is seemingly no way to conquer the shadow because no one knows what it really is, and what its true name might be. For a long time, Ged wishes for death, sure that he has forfeited his future for the sake of a moment's prideful indulgence. Slowly he resumes his training as a wizard, since there is little else available for him. At least, as long as he remains at the academy, he is protected from the evil he has loosed in the world. Eventually though, he completes his training and goes out into the world, constantly on guard since he never knows when he might once again be attacked. Ged accepts a position as wizard for a small fishing village which has the rare bad luck to be threatened by nearby dragons.

While he remains there largely as security against dragons, he also performs the many small chores that a wizard can do for such a community. Though respected by the villagers, he remains a lonely, isolated figure. Somehow he does become friendly with one of the villagers, but even that causes him further grief when his friend's small boy becomes desperately ill.

While trying to cure him, Ged realizes that the boy is already dying. In desperation, he sends his spirit forth after the spirit of the boy, into the dark place that lies between the living and the dead. And there he once more encounters the shadowy creature of darkness. Somehow Ged manages to fight it off and return to the human world, where he again lies as if dead for days.

The boy is dead, Ged has once more nearly died, and his fear of the shadow is now almost crippling. When he recovers, he realizes he is a danger to the villagers as long as he remains with them.

Yet he cannot leave without abandoning them to the threat of the dragons. So he determines that he must face the dragons.

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If he survives, which he doubts, he will then leave. At least, if he dies it won't be due to the shadow. Ged goes to the island where the dragons live. Attacked, he slays five small dragons, if such a concept as small can be applied to dragons. Then he comes to face the great dragon who is mother of all the dragons on the island.

Dragons are wise, but think and speak in ways that are strange to humans, so Ged has to learn to read the meaning that lies beneath her outer words. She thinks Ged has come to steal her treasure, but Ged insists that he only wants safety for the villagers. The dragon reveals that she knows of the shadow who pursues Ged, and perhaps can give him its true name.

This disturbs him, as it didn't seem possible that the shadow could have a name. When Ged resists even that temptation, the dragon decides she is tired of negotiating and will simply kill Ged. But Ged has been smart enough during their discussion to deduce the dragon's name. With that name and his wizardry, he has power over the dragon.

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The dragon is forced to agree that none of the dragons will ever harm the villagers again. Ged can now leave the villagers in safety, and proceed on his lonely way. He has further adventures, each of which increases his powers. Each adventure also brings a further encounter with the shadow, which increases his fear.

Eventually there comes a time when he realizes that he can no longer remain the hunted, but must become the hunter. Restorative practices and approaches provide a concrete means to address colonial history, while recognizing the complexity of intergenerational trauma and working toward the mutual understanding and respect that truth and reconciliation requires. He has worked in program development, community-based research and Aboriginal child welfare.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Is there intergenerational transmission of trauma? American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 78 3 , Trangenerational trauma and child sexual abuse: Reconceptualizing cases involving young survivors of CSA. Journal of Mental Health Counseling, 31 1 , The Canadian government and the residential school system, — University of Manitoba Press.

Social work in Canada: An introduction 2nd ed. Aboriginal Children in Care Working Group. Aboriginal children in care: Council of the Federation Secretariat. Canadian Policy Research Network. Aboriginal homelessness in Canada: Canadian Homelessness Research Network Press. Residential school nutrition experiments explained to Kenora survivors: Historian Ian Mosby shares evidence First Nations children being intentionally malnourished.

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Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Summary report is only one step in reconciliation. Aboriginal children and child welfare policies. Law Now Magazine, 38 6. In Greg Madison Ed. Emerging practice in focusing-oriented psychotherapy: Innovative theory and applications. Stolen from our embrace: The abduction of First Nations children and the restoration of Aboriginal communities. Restorative Aboriginal child welfare in diverse urban spaces.

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