In the second stage where parts of us lose the contest with ourselves and the fellowships we evolve into real suffering.

In the second stage where parts of us lose the contest with ourselves and the fellowships we evolve into real suffering. This is a stage of depression, failure, misery, and inertia. Here we wallow in seemingly purposeless pain. The silver lining around our cloud of parental idealisation has been stripped away, but the cloud remains intact. We still wish to be rescued by our parents and their replicated stand-ins, but we lack the requisite pain tolerance to be able to acknowledge the impossibility of this. Here we live in tortured ambivalence, and we spend out hours and days trying to get others to love us in the way our parents never could. Part of us wishes to devolve back into the seeming pleasure of grandiosity, but the healthier part recalls how cruelly that route already failed us.

Those parts of us with the capacity to face our terrors enter into grieving. This is the stage of purposeful struggling. Here we unearth the truth of our past, which allows the eruption of the stinking cesspool of our buried traumas. Here we witness the problems lurking behind idealisation of the parents and we work to disassemble their ancestral lies. Our honest confidence leads us into the face of the hurricane, because our child within and its allies tell us that blue skies lie on the other side. Here we are humble, here we confront the truth of the worst of our parents, either in interaction with them or through whatever means will best help us integrate the truth, and through this our journey rages forward.


With each demon we conquer we take a further step into recovery. This is the stage of emotional integration, psychic balance, and inner peace. Here lie the deepest goals of our child within. All want to know truth, and the enlightened person achieves it – in all parts of himself that arrive in the final stage. Here we grow able to distinguish light from shadow and water from mirage. Here we nurture the evolution of our primitive sides instead of expressing them destructively. Here we devote the best of ourselves to healing. Here we no longer traumatise others in the very patterns in which we were traumatised, but instead replicate the best of ourselves – and generate beauty in the world around us. Here, having healed our wounds, we share freely of our gifts, because now our gifts are at last accessible.

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