Meeting The Pain of Destructive Patterns

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, my dearest friends. God bless each one of you. Blessed is this lecture.

Most of my friends who work on this path approach a certain area of their soul problems where they encounter pain. To help you to understand the meaning of this pain I should like to give you an overall view of the process of dissolving it and of resolving your inner problems and conflicts as well. Some of what I say is in repetition of the long, drawn-out work that we have done together in these years, but I shall attempt to give you a comprehensive view of the entire process. Such understanding will help you toward the further resolution of your conflicts, and it will enable you to cope with the afflicted area of your psyche.

First, let us briefly recapitulate. To begin with, the child suffers from a certain imperfection in the ability of the parents to render love and affection. It also suffers from not being fully accepted in its own individuality. By this I mean the common practice of treating the child as a child, rather than as a particular individual. You suffer from this, although you may never be aware of it in these terms, or in these exact thoughts. This may leave as much of a scar as do the lack of love and the lack of attention. It causes just as much frustration as does the lack of love, or just as much frustration as does cruelty.

The general climate in which you grow up affects you like a constant minor shock that often leaves more of a mark than one traumatic, shocking experience. That is why the latter is often easier to cure than the former. The constant climate of the non-acceptance of your individuality, the lack of love, and the lack understanding cause what is called a neurosis. You accept this climate as a matter of course. In other words, you take it for granted. You believe that it has to be so. Nevertheless, you suffer from it. The combination of suffering it and of believing it to be an unalterable fact conditions you to develop your destructive defenses.

The original pain for the frustration which the child could not deal with is repressed. Although it is put out of your awareness, it continues to smolder in your unconscious mind. It is then that the destructive images and the defense mechanisms begin to form. In the past we have gone into these various defense mechanisms rather extensively. The images that you create are defense mechanisms. Through their wrong conclusions you seek a way of fighting against the unwelcome influences that have created the original pain. The pseudo solutions are a way of battling the world, of battling the pain, of battling all that you wish to avoid.

When the pseudo solution is a withdrawal from feeling, from loving, and from living, then it is a defense against being hurt. Only after considerable insight into yourself will you see what an unrealistic, shortsighted remedy this is. Then you will want to change and you would rather welcome the pain than the self-alienation of either feeling nothing or of feeling very little. Continuing the work and courageously going through the temporary periods of discouragement and resistance, you will come to the point when this hard shell breaks down and therefore you are no longer dead inside. But the first reaction will not be pleasant. It cannot be. At first all your repressed negative emotions and all your repressed pain will come into your awareness. Then it will seem to you that your withdrawal was right. Only after plowing ahead will you have the reward of good, constructive feelings. We shall talk in greater detail about this a little later.

If your pseudo solution is submissiveness, weakness, helplessness, and dependency as a means of having someone care for you -- not necessarily materially but emotionally -- then that is equally shortsighted and unsatisfactory as a solution. The constant dependency on others diminishes your already existing lack of belief in yourself. As the withdrawal solution makes you dead in feeling and robs you of the meaningfulness of life, so does the submissive solution rob you of independence and of strength, and it creates no less isolation than your withdrawal, although it does so through a different inner road. Originally, you wished to avoid the pain by providing yourself with a strong person to take care of you. In reality you inflict more pain upon yourself because you can never find such a person. That person must be yourself.

By making yourself deliberately weak, you exert the strongest tyranny over others. There is no stronger tyranny than that which a weak person exerts over a stronger person, or upon his entire environment. It is as though that person were constantly saying: "I am weak. Therefore, you have to help me. I am helpless. Therefore, you are responsible for me. The mistakes I commit do not count because I do not know any better. I cannot help it. You must constantly indulge me and allow me to get away with everything. I cannot be expected to take full responsibility for my actions, or for the lack of them, for my thoughts, or for the lack of them, for my feelings, or for the lack of them. I may fail because I am weak. You are strong, therefore you must understand everything." The self-indulgent, lazy self-pity of the weak exerts stringent demands on their fellow creatures. This becomes evident if the unspoken expectancy and the meaning of emotional reactions are investigated and then interpreted into a concise thought.

It is fallacious to think that the weak person is harmless and therefore that he hurts others less than the outrightly domineering and aggressive person. All pseudo solutions bring untold pain both to the self and to others. By withdrawing, you reject others and you withold from them the love that you want to give to them and that they want to receive from you. By submitting, you do not love, but you merely expect to be loved. You do not see that others, too, have their own vulnerabilities, their own weaknesses, and their own needs. You reject all of that part of their human nature and thus you hurt them. By the aggressive solution, you push people away and you openly hurt them with your false superiority. In all these instances, you hurt others, and thus you inflict further hurt upon yourself. The hurt that you inflict cannot help but bring you consequences. Thus, the pseudo solutions -- which were intended to eliminate the original pain -- only bring you more pain.

All the pseudo solutions are incorporated into your idealized self-image. Since the nature of the idealized self-image is self-aggrandizement, then it separates you from others. Since its nature is separateness, then it isolates you and it makes you lonely. Since its nature is falsity and pretense, then it alienates you from yourself, from life, and from others. All of that is bound to bring you pain, hurt, frustration, and unfulfillment. You chose a way out of the pain of your frustration. But this way has proven not only inadequate, it actually brings you much more of that which you wished to avoid. However, to clearly recognize this fact and to put the links together requires the active work of sincere self-search.

The perfectionism that is deeply ingrained both in you and in your idealized self-image makes it impossible for you to accept yourself, to accept others, and to accept life in its reality. As a result, you are incapable of coping with it, and therefore of eventually resolving both your own problems and the problems of others. Your perfectionism causes you to forego the experience of living in the true sense.

Most of you have dealt with all these levels and aspects of yourself. You have come across many recognitions and many insights that deal with your wrong conclusions, with your misconceptions, with your images, and with your pseudo solutions. You are, at least to some extent, aware of the particular nature of your idealized self-image. You have some inkling as to the way in which you are self-alienated and perfectionistic. You have therefore realized the extent of the damage that you have inflicted both upon yourself and upon others, and you have seen how unsatisfactory these pseudo defenses and these protections are. Not all of you may be fully aware of all these factors, but most of you are sufficiently aware of them to be inwardly ready to give them up. Some of you have actually reached the threshold that opens the way into a new inner life of being emotionally willing to let go of all the defenses. Others, too, will soon approach this phase, provided they continue in their work with an inner willingness. The exercise of constantly observing your unrealistic and immature emotions and reactions weakens their impact, and therefore begins an automatic process of dissolving them. When a certain amount of dissolution has taken place, then the psyche is ready to cross the threshold. But the act of crossing it is a painful one in the beginning.

When crossing this important threshold, then you might expect that the new constructive patterns can immediately replace the old destructive ones. Such an expectation is unrealistic, and therefore not according to truth. Constructive patterns cannot have a solid foundation before you experience and go through the original pain and frustration, and all of that which you once ran away from. That which you turned away from has to be faced, it has to be felt, it has to be experienced, it has to be understood, it has to be coped with, it has to be come to terms with, and finally it has to be assimilated before that in you which is unhealthy and unrealistic is dissolved, that in you which is immature is matured, and the healthy forces that had been repressed are brought into their proper channels so as to work constructively for you. The longer you delay this painful process, the more difficult it is bound to be when you are finally ready to pass from childhood into adulthood. Even if you die in this life as a child, then at one period or another of your spiritual development this threshold has to be crossed. When you overcome your resistance to this process, then you will find that the pain is a healthy growing pain and that the light is in sight. The strength, the self-reliance, and the capacity to live fully -- with all of your constructive patterns beginning to work -- is ample compensation for all the years of destructive and unproductive living, as well as for the pain of crossing the threshold into emotional adulthood.

Can you imagine being spared experiencing the pain against which you instituted the destructive patterns? You used them to run away from something that occurred in your life, whether actual or imaginary makes little difference. It is the wishful thinking process of running away and looking away from something that either is or that was -- thereby not facing and not coping with your reality -- that caused your soul's sickness. Therefore, this is the area that has to be tackled now. This is why those of you who have made your first tentative steps over the threshold -- and there may be occasional relapses, for no inner process ever develops in one smooth action -- are puzzled by the acute pain that you experience now. Often you do not understand why this is so. You may have some vague idea and some partial answers, but this lecture will help you to derive a more profound understanding of the reason.

Intellectually you all know that this path is not a fairy tale, in which you find your deviations and your misconceptions and then nothing but bliss follows. In the last analysis it is true that being freed of your shackles of error and deviation is bound to bring you happiness. But until you reach that stage many areas of your soul have to be experienced before your psyche is truly equipped to make the best of life. Even after the acute pain has been properly dealt with, and therefore is no longer present, the unrealistic -- although often unconscious -- expectation often exists that now life will always grant you what you wish. No, my friends. However, the truth is much better. In reality you will learn to cope with the mishaps and the difficulties, rather than becoming broken by them. You will no longer fortify your destructive defenses. This, in turn, will equip you with the tools you need in order to make the best out of each opportunity and to derive the maximum benefit and the greatest happiness out of every experience of life.

This can never be accomplished with your destructive defense mechanisms and with your various images still intact. Let me repeat what I have often said. First the outer negative events will continue to come your way as a result of your past ingrained patterns, but now you will encounter them in a different way. As you learn to do so, you will become aware of many opportunities for happiness that you had ignored in the past. In this way you will begin to change the patterns, until gradually -- perhaps in the process of several incarnations -- the unhappy outer events cease more and more. But when you find yourself at the beginning of this stage, then do not expect immediate fulfillment and happiness in every respect. In other words, do not expect that it comes from the outside without you creating it yourself by learning to experience in a productive way. First you need to see your possibilities, your opportunities, and your independent ability to choose, instead of being utterly helpless and waiting for fate to bring you happiness.

By now you must understand how, in many respects, you yourself have caused your own unhappiness through your destructive and unrealistic evasions and defenses. You will now realize, with a new sense of strength, that you can bring about your own fulfillment and happiness. This cannot be done by intellectual understanding. It is an inner process that grows organically. As now you understand that no unkind fate or cruel God has either punished you or neglected you, so will you know and deeply understand that it is you who can now create all the fulfillment that your soul craves for -- with a craving that you were not even conscious of when you first began this path.

This consciousness may emerge only after a fuller understanding of all your pseudo-solutions and of all your misconceptions, whose depth will make you aware of your needs. The primary result of this path is the understanding of your own causes and effects, and an experience of the sense of strength, of independence, of self-reliance, and of justice that this understanding gives to an individual. How much time it takes to reach the first tentative beginnings of this new strength, and later to increase it, depends on your own efforts, on your own inner will, on your own willingness to overcome the ever present resistance, which wears off only after you gain sufficient recognition of its devious ways.

When you come across this pain, is it really merely the pain that you once experienced as a child? In other words, is it really the frustration that the child suffered from the parents and nothing more? No, this is not entirely correct. It is true that this original pain and frustration has afflicted the resiliency of your psyche, and thus has made you incapable of dealing properly with it. It caused you to turn away from it and to look for unsatisfactory solutions. But the pain that you experience now is much more the pain of your present unfulfillment -- one that is caused by your unproductive patterns. Consciously you cannot distinguish this. You may not even be aware of the original childhood pain. It may take time and self-observation to distinquish the pain at all. After you do so, then you will see that the more acute pain is your despair with yourself and with life now, not in the past. The past is important only because it caused you to institute the unproductive ways that are responsible for your present pain.

If you do not shy away from the pain but go through it -- becoming aware of its significance -- then you will realize that it is your present unfulfilled needs that cause your pain. Your frustration is with your inability to bring about fulfillment now, at this time. In other words, you cannot see what you can do about it. You feel caught in your own trap, not seeing how to get out of it, thus being dependent on outer intervention over which you have no control. Only after courageously becoming aware of all these impressions and of all these reactions will you gradually see a way out. Thereby you will decrease your helplessness. As a result, you will increase both your independent strength and your resourcefulness.

In a previous lecture we discussed the human needs. Before you uncover your various protective layers, you cannot be fully aware of your real needs. You may know some of your unreal, superimposed needs, but only after a fuller understanding of yourself do you gradually become aware of the basic, naked needs that you have held in check. When you experience the pain -- before passing through the threshold into emotional maturity and productive patterns -- then you have the possibility, if you so choose, to become precisely aware of these needs. This is inevitable if you wish to come out of your present state of unproductive living.

As you go through the process of becoming aware of your needs and of the frustration of their unfulfillment, you will find first the stringent need to be loved, just as the child needs to receive love and affection. However, it cannot be said that the need to be loved is childish and immature. It is so only when the adult person has locked his soul and has refused to grow in his own capacity to give love, so that the need to receive remains isolated and covered. Through your destructive patterns, you pushed your painful need to receive love into the unconscious. Due to this unawareness and to your defense mechanisms, your ability to give could never grow within your psyche.

However, during all the work that you have done, not only have you become aware of much that was hidden away, but you have also begun to dissolve certain destructive levels. This has inadvertently caused your ability to give love to surface, even though you may not yet be fully aware of it. As you encounter the pain, you actually experience the tremendous pressure of your needs. On the one hand, you face your need to receive, which remains ungratified as long as your destructive patterns prevail. It requires some time to gain the necessary strength and the necessary resourcefulness to bring about the fulfillment of this need to receive. On the other hand, the need to give cannot find an outlet until this stage is reached. Thus a double frustration is caused -- and this generates tremendous pressure. It is this pressure that is so painful. It seems to tear you apart.

But do not believe that this pressure, this entire frustration, did not exist before you became aware of it. It did exist, but it created other outlets, perhaps in physical sickness or in other symptoms. As you become aware of the central core, then the pressure and the pain may feel more acute. But such must be the healing process. Thus you draw your awareness to the central cause, where the problem really lies. In other words, you focus your attention upon the root. You shift your emphasis from evasion to reality. This real pain has to be experienced in all its shades and in all its varieties. You have to become aware that your needs are exactly both to give AND to receive. You need first to observe and then to feel the frustration of not finding an outlet: the accumulated pressure, the momentary feeling of helplessness about finding relief, the temptation to evade yet again. As you battle through this phase -- and you therefore grow stronger -- then you will no longer run away from yourself and from the apparent risk of living. Opportunities will come your way. But now you will first see them and then you will make use of them. They will teach you to further your growth and your strength, until your needs can at first find partial fulfillment and then, little by little, increase this fulfillment as you grow and as you change your patterns.

You must understand that at this period you find yourself in an interim stage. You have become aware of your need to receive, which is in itself healthy. But this need has become exaggeratedly strong, and therefore immature, because of your repression of it and of the consequent frustration of the healthy fulfillment of receiving. If you do not receive enough, then your demand grows out of proportion, especially when you are unconscious of this stringent demand.

Due to your progress and to the growth that has taken place within you, your mature need to give has also grown. You could not find an outlet for this because the destructive patterns were still in effect -- perhaps only partly so, or perhaps in a modified form. You may even have begun attempts to compromise between the old undesirable way and the new desired way. However, do not forget that effective results can come only when the new patterns have become an integral part of you, and therefore are an almost automatic reaction in you. Your old patterns have been in existence for years, for decades, and often even longer -- going through several lifetimes in which you have battled with the same problems and have always shied away from facing them, from facing yourself, and from facing life as it is. Now -- as you learn to do so and have begun to change inwardly -- outer change does not come at once. In this period, the pressure inside has become most stringent. However, if you realize all this and if you have the courage to go through it, then you are bound to come out a stronger and happier person, one who is better equipped to live, in the true sense of the word. Beware of turning back into evasion all over again. Do not believe that this temporary period -- in which you encounter all the accumulated inner pressure, with all the accompanying helplessness, inadequacy, and confusion -- is the final result. It is merely the tunnel through which you must pass, my friends.

After you do so, then your sense of strength, your adequacy, and your resourcefulness will grow steadily -- with occasional relapses, of course. But if you make each relapse serve as a further stepping stone, as a further lesson, then the new patterns will eventually establish themselves in your inner being and they will make you see all the possibilities that you have overlooked for so long. Then you will have the courage to take advantage of these possibilities, instead of rejecting them in fear. Only in this way will the fulfillment come.

It is so important for you to first understand this and then to deeply absorb it, my friends. If you do, then it must help you.

Is all that clear? Are there any questions regarding this subject?

QUESTION: When I go through certain phases of various fears, is that connected with the subject you discussed here?

ANSWER: Yes, it is indeed. Fears are often a subterfuge to hide from the basic core of pain. They come into existence as a result of your evasion. In this work you have noticed that after certain progress the fears begin to vanish, and then you become aware of your pain. The fear is an inadvertent result of the evasion -- that was not chosen deliberately, of course. But all evasions must have more unpleasant results than the original core. Unpleasant as the original pain may be, once one accepts its truth, then it is much better, much easier, much more honest, and much more healthy to live with than the result of any evasion -- be it fear or anything else. Since fear vanishes only after it is faced, met, and come to terms with, then pain, which is the underlying core of it, has to be dealt with similarly.

However, it is not only the pain of your unfulfillment that you cringe away from. You also do not want to take upon yourself mature self-responsibility. This may not apply to your outer material life, but it may affect the emotional plane. If you do not wish to love, if you live in the constant fear of being hurt -- in other words, if you are defended -- if you do not wish to take the risk of living upon yourself, then it means that you wish to remain the child who waits helplessly for life to fulfill his needs without the necessity of self-involvement. The price that you pay for such evasion is very high. Many of you do not yet realize how high that price is. This running away from self-responsibility, from the apparent risk of living, and from the apparent risk of feeling is caused by an original sense of inadequacy. But running away only increases that sense of inadequacy. Only as you change this pattern will you find your sense of adequacy, and therefore your self-confidence. There is a psychic law that says: Running away from the original pain of an unfulfillment increases the unfulfillment, and therefore the pain. It operates here, too.

QUESTION: In the process of my work, of late I occasionally feel the need to give love, and not only to receive. But this feeling goes away again. How can I learn to always feel the need to give?

ANSWER: My dear friend, it would be misleading to say that you learn it. This is something that you cannot learn by a voluntary act. If you should attempt it, then it amounts to a manipulation of your feelings, and this would be dishonest. If it is real, then it happens naturally and by itself. This will come more often -- and it will last longer and it will become stronger -- but only if you do not try to force it directly. The best way to get to this point of growth, of maturity, and of productive living is by observing your emotions. Note how they are still geared to the one-sided, childish desire to merely receive. The more you observe yourself objectively, the more you will find the underlying causes for such an imbalance, and the more you will speed up the process of your growth that will finally enable you not only to experience the need to give love as much as the need to receive love, but eventually also to find the necessary outlet.

I must repeat that inner growth cannot happen suddenly. First, you have a glimpse, a momentary experience of a new way of feeling. Then it goes away again. If at such a time you are not discouraged -- and therefore you do not give in to the feeling that it is of no use because you have apparently relapsed into the old way -- but you persevere instead, then the periods of healthy, good feelings will come more often and will last longer. Each relapse seems to lead you to the same old tunnel, but it does not. It is a new one. If you pass through it, then the momentary glimpse of strength, of love, and of light will come again, until it finally becomes a part of you.

QUESTION: I have discovered in my work that mixed in with healthy and productive pleasure there is also destructive or self-destructive pleasure. The latter can't always be recognized as such and is difficult to get rid of. There seems to be in me a confusion between the pleasure principle and rejection, as well as between happiness and selfishness. What can you suggest?

ANSWER: Apart from the question of masochism, about which I have spoken considerably in the past, I have this to say: Here the either/or attitude of the child in you prevails. The child in you feels that if you are in pursuit of pleasure, then you are not in reality. For reality means rejection and unpleasure. Therefore you escape from it and you build up your pleasure in your fantasy. Then this seems to confirm the contention -- the image -- that reality and pleasure are incompatible. To a lesser degree this can be found in every human being, but to a greater extent it is found in emotional illness and in mental illness. If this misconception did not exist to begin with -- in other words, if one knew that reality is not only feeling rejected but also being in pleasure -- then one would not need to seek pleasure only in unreality. This is the confusion. By the same token, the confusion between happiness and selfishness is also based on the principle of either/or. The child in you feels that if you are happy, then you must be selfish, while all unselfishness automatically goes against your interest and your gratification. This is not so in reality. Only the inner process of growth through which you are going will give you the inner understanding and the conviction that happiness and unselfishness are not incompatible.

QUESTION: You discussed in the last lecture that the effect of one person being in truth about himself is of greater cosmic importance than we can possibly realize. Can you explain this?

ANSWER: If you think for a moment of the effect of the negative, distorted soul parts of a human being in the sense I discussed in this lecture, then you will understand the opposite. Any pseudo solution is bound to reject another human being. When you submit, then you do not experience the truth of the other person's humanity, of his needs, of his problems, and of his insecurity. In your demand to possess a strong and ever loving protector you must be disappointed, perhaps unconsciously so, and in your disappointment you become hostile -- perhaps also unconsciously.

When you are aggressively arrogant, when you deny your need to find love, when you deny your need to find affection, and when you deny your need to find communication, then you reject the other person outright. In your withdrawal, you never give warmth and you never fulfill the other person's needs. When you are self-alienated and perfectionistic, then you cannot help hurting others. When the pretense of your idealized self is at work, then you do not let another person come near you out of your unconscious fear of facing exposure. Therefore, you are bound to reject him or her over and over again, perhaps without ever realizing that you are doing so. All this rejection, all this isolation, and all this pain that you inadvertently inflict onto others is bound to strengthen their own destructive defense mechanisms, just as their destructive defenses fortify your own. This will persist, unless you are on a path such as this and you begin to see the process for what it is.

Now reverse the process. Imagine the effect that it must have on your surroundings when you are no longer defensive, when you are no longer fearful, when you are no longer withdrawn, when you are no longer falsely superior. For then you open both to life and to the heart of another person. The courage to live and the courage to love enable you to help others to weaken their own defenses and their own destructive patterns, even if they are not yet developed enough to choose such a path of self-finding. Therefore, everyone whom you come into contact with is affected. And this effect extends over all those with whom they come into contact. It draws rings upon rings of effect that interact. If you think about it in these terms, then you are bound to visualize the truth.

My dearest friends, be blessed, each one of you. May these words be a further key and a help for your continued growth and for your liberation. May they help you to become yourself. In other words, to be in full possession of the individual you are, with all the resources, with all the strength, with all the ingenuity, with all the creativity, and with all the love force that are inherent in you -- and that are waiting to be allowed to function freely. Be in peace, be in God.

March 16, 1962