IMAGINE IT’S ELECTION DAY – DO YOU REALLY KNOW THE PERSON YOU’RE VOTING FOR?

30Aug2012 By Judith Barr

Imagine it’s Election Day. You walk into the voting booth.

Who are you going to vote for? Do you know how you came to that decision? Do you really know the person you may help put into office?

You may think you do. But it is highly unlikely!

You may think I mean it’s unlikely because so many candidates hide who they really are. Because so many put on a politically correct – or a supposedly politically correct – mask meant to do just that, hide themselves. Because so many candidates are the furthest thing from transparent. That’s part of why we keep discovering abuses of power by candidate after candidate, government official after government official.

But no, that’s not what I mean. I mean because . . . you may think you know e-x-a-c-t-l-y how you came to your decision, but that is more doubtful than you may imagine.

What if you have not been a particularly introspective person . . . and didn’t think that was necessary in relation to elections? What if you always thought you were introspective, but didn’t realize there is more introspection needed to be a truly good citizen, particularly in relation to elections? What if no matter how introspective you have been, you have so much more to understand about how our own unconscious can motivate us to make a choice – including a voting choice – or interfere with our making a healthy choice – including a voting choice?

Over the course of the coming weeks, I invite you to search within yourself to understand what is influencing your vote . . . beneath your awareness . . . to help you make the wisest, most conscious choice you can on election day.

Let me help you begin. Let’s look at an example of a major unconscious influence on your vote. What if when you were a child your father didn’t take care of your needs, but instead promised he would, and then just took care of his own. What if, without realizing it, you want the next president to take care of your needs – not from the adult place within you, but from the child still alive within you wanting a good daddy.

From a young place, you don’t even realize what you’re doing. You’re not even aware that you are going to vote for the “daddy you hope will take care of your needs.” Well, what if your own childhood pain seduces you into voting for the person who promises to take care of your needs and then breaks his promises and takes care of his own?

Did you ever think of that?

In my work, psychotherapy, this is called transference. It’s when you transfer onto a person, situation, or thing in the current day some person, experience, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, perceptions, senses you had with someone in the past . . . particularly an authority figure. It happens not only in the therapist’s office, but all through our lives, every day, often without our even knowing about it. It happens with spouses, partners, employers, employees, friends, neighbors, professionals we go to like doctors, accountants, lawyers. It even happens with our own children.

What if we elect the next president because most of us are in transference with him? We think we know who we’re voting for on Election Day, but we’re really voting for someone from our past that we have transferred onto our candidate. Or we’re really voting for the corrective or idealized antidote to someone in our past who treated us badly, and we’ve transferred the idealized daddy, for example, onto our candidate.

Without our being aware of what can influence our vote, we may elect someone because of our unconscious wounding. Without the understanding and the introspection to find out . . . instead of being truly responsible citizens, we could end up being automatons thinking we’re voting responsibly but not doing so at all.

And without doing the introspective work, the real soul searching to know what in you is causing you to vote for Joe Smith . . . you can so easily be manipulated to vote for someone you would otherwise, with consciousness, not vote for. So easily, so scarily manipulated. That kind of manipulation is done all the time, and in so many ways: by ads, by sound bites, by lies, by covering up the truth, by attacks, by endless chaos and confusion, by months and months and months of hype around the elections, not just by the candidates but by the media, too.

For example, in connection with the example above, what if you have been manipulated based exactly on your fear that the daddy won’t take care of your needs because your daddy didn’t when you were a child? What if the candidate leads you to believe, even promises you that in effect . . . he will fix things and soon, and he will be a good daddy and this time take care of you. Your pain and fear from childhood – the pain and fear that you may not even be aware of and certainly haven’t worked through – will set you up to be seduced to voting for this candidate.

Yes, I did say seduced.

And if you help elect that person, what will you experience when he doesn’t take care of your needs, but instead takes care of his own and the needs of his cronies? Will you realize that what you are feeling is once again the pain from daddy’s broken promises and your unmet needs? Or will you think it’s just a thing of today? And will you realize that because you weren’t aware of the connections, because you hadn’t worked to heal it, you co-created this repeat experience that doesn’t just affect you, but affects our whole country, even the whole world? Will you be able to take responsibility for not having been a fully responsible voter? A completely responsible citizen?

Or will you pooh-pooh it all, brush it all aside, dismiss it all . . . and just be angry at the new president’s broken promises. Or the government? Or politics?

We all have a part – a deeper part than we know, a deeper part than many of us are willing to know – in our political system, our government, our country, our world. We all have a part – more unconscious than we know – in how things are created and co-created in our world. We will all have a part – beyond what we’ve been taught – in what’s happening over the next two plus months of the campaign and in the election itself.

Will you take this in and become more responsible in finding what part you are now playing, what part you would play if you stay unaware, and what part you could play if you really explore your consciousness? On Election Day, will you truly be a responsible citizen? Or will your actions as a citizen have been manipulated by others and driven by your unresolved transference . . . not by the adult you, but rather by the child you once were long ago still alive within you, showing you she or he needs the help to heal?

If We Believe Anything We’ve Tried So Far Is Going to End The Violence . . .

01Aug2012 By Judith Barr

Beneath The Violence in Aurora, Colorado…

21Jul2012 By Judith Barr

The tragedy yesterday in Aurora, Colorado, is heartbreaking. The cauldron of feelings it must have stirred in people in the theater, those left in grief, and those watching and hearing about it . . . also heartbreaking. But the cauldron of feelings in the ones who commit the acts of violence and destruction are also necessary to consider. We need to let those feelings break our hearts, too.

How many times are we going to have violent, destructive attacks – in our country and our world – and not look for the deepest root? How many times are we going to just look at why the shooter did what he did? How many times are we only going to look at computer games, television shows, movies – or other superficial things – as possible causes? How many times are we going to call them “bad” and that’s it? How many times are we going to split hairs about who is mentally ill and who is just looking for revenge? Revenge is a sign of something unhealed.

Any person (male or female) who commits an act of violence and destruction is deeply wounded and needs help. No one is born destructive. Nobody is born violent. Not even Hitler. We are born and wounded by our families, communities, society. And we all need to look at this, to understand this.

Any person who commits an act of violence and destruction is deeply wounded and needs help. He needs help with feelings he has never had the help to build the capacity to feel and know what to do with. And how is he going to get that help in a family where the parents don’t have that capacity – were never helped, themselves, to be able to feel and use their feelings well. And how is he going to get that help in a society that doesn’t have that capacity to feel and use feelings well. A society in fact, that is complicit in numbing feelings, burying feelings, moving away from feelings any way possible. A society, for example, that supports taking medication to stop the emotional pain, instead of working to find the root of the pain and heal it. A society that allows its insurance companies to limit the kinds of therapy and the number of sessions for someone to do their healing. Limits that are bizarre in terms of any real healing being done. And therapies that can only possibly, perhaps, help the symptoms temporarily – like bandaids – never truly resolve the wound and its inner and outer consequences.

How is he going to get that help in a society that calls certain people ‘mentally ill,’ and refuses to look at the wounding in us all and in our society?

If we want this violence to stop, we’re going to need to find a way to look at our own wounding – individual and societal – build our capacity to feel our feelings healthily and tell which feelings we need to safely explore for healing and which feelings we need to act on safely, and do the deep inner work to heal our wounds that caused us suffering, continue to cause us suffering, and will continue to cause us unnecessary suffering until we heal them.

NOTE: If you have read this and think I’m making excuses for those who are violent and destructive, or not holding them accountable, you have completely misunderstood or distorted the purpose and meaning of my words. I hope you will read it again and open your mind and your heart, so that you can see and feel my efforts to help us go beneath the surface to the levels from which we can truly help ourselves heal this kind of destructiveness in our world.

WHITNEY, TELL THEM WHAT BOBBI KRISTINA IS REALLY SUFFERING FROM

19Feb2012 By Judith Barr

Too many media people have reported that Whitney Houston’s daughter, Bobby Kristina, is suffering from anxiety and stress. This is such a tragic sign of our cultural emotional ignorance. And such a dreadful way to feed that lack of emotional awareness. Such an unfortunate way, perhaps without even realizing it, to prevent the development of emotional maturity in our world.

Emotional maturity is not about diminishing and discounting our feelings. Rather it’s about recognizing them, feeling them, and giving them the importance they have in our beings, in our lives, and in the life of our world. Emotional growth is not about rising above our feelings. Rather it’s about building the capacity to feel and express our feelings safely – safely for us and safely for those around us. It’s about growing the awareness of which feelings are here-and-now feelings and which are feelings from long, long ago . . . so we can discern which ones need to be simply felt and perhaps acted on in the here and now, and which ones need to be felt and expressed purposefully, consciously, and safely solely for the purpose of healing. Emotional maturity is about feeling so safe with our own feelings and our safe, healthy expression of our feelings . . . that we don’t have to defend against them, demean them, be contemptuous of them anymore.

Emotional wisdom is about being able to grieve . . . whatever loss you have experienced. It’s about being able to feel and express safely all the feelings that are contained within the cauldron of grief. It’s about being able to feel the grief in the current day, and tell when there’s also grief coming up from previous times, both recent and long, long ago.

Whitney, don’t let them tell Bobbi Kristina that she’s just feeling anxiety and stress. Let’s make sure your precious daughter knows she is grieving. Let’s make sure she has the help to grieve fully and deeply. Let’s help her know that along with her grief from your death, she will likely also be feeling grief from earlier in her life – like when you and her father divorced, among other times.

Whitney, let’s give our whole hearts to helping Bobbi Kristina and the rest of the world grow their capacity to grieve deeply, fully, and safely . . . in order to grow from and through the grief, instead of getting stuck in it and acting out on themselves, others, and our precious earth. Let’s help utilize your tragic, sudden, premature death, Whitney, for healing our distorted relationships with grief and many other feelings.

WHITNEY HOUSTON – AN UNEXPECTED LEGACY

19Feb2012 By Judith Barr

In his eulogy for Whitney Houston, Kevin Costner acknowledged the questions Whitney carried in her heart … Am I good enough? Am I pretty enough? Will they like me? He went on to say that it was the burden that made her great and the part that caused her to stumble in the end.

I listened to Kevin speaking lovingly and respectfully about Whitney and I wept. Oh Whitney! You stumbled from not knowing if you were good enough? I could have helped you with that. As a psychotherapist, I work with people all the time who suffer from the same thing. It didn’t have to bring you down.

To begin with, it’s so sad you felt that way. And it’s so sad you had so many resources with which to get help and never found someone to help you with your own painful questions. It’s so very sad. And it is so sad that so many people feel that way.

So I say to you, Whitney, to your daughter, Bobbi Kristina, and to millions all over our world . . . if you are suffering from questions like these about whether or not you are good enough, it is possible to heal this suffering to the root.

As we can see from your struggles, Whitney, it’s important that people know of this possibility. Too many in our world don’t know. Too often in our world the help advocated and given only offers bandaids and techniques through which to manage the pain, manage the questions, manage the aching, broken relationship with self. The bandaids and quick fixes delude people into imagining they’re healing, while actually it keeps them stuck, haunted by the inner world of ‘not good enough,’ that’s been pushed further into the ground and not at all resolved. But you can find people – psychotherapists – who truly know how to help you utilize those agonizing questions, experiences, decisions, and feelings as a passageway through to real healing.

There is hope. Imagine what it would be like to heal your experience of not being good enough. Imagine what it would be like for you. And imagine what it would be like communally, as each person who doesn’t feel like she/he is good enough heals individually and, as a result, has a healing impact on our world.

Imagine, Whitney, if that healing becomes part of your legacy!