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'Unfinished business'

By: Dr Charles Bentley

It's a fact that unconsciously chosen attitudes and resistant behaviour patterns from our early life experiences eventually become habituated - part of our adult personality. This means we're in a double bind. We can't satisfy our basic needs, because we're no longer aware that we have them! In an ideal childhood, the unique and growing individual is allowed to express its needs in a variety of forms of nourishment. But the reality of existence is not ideal. Unfortunately, much of our Western culture, and especially in its expression within its constituent family units, has not adapted itself to the necessity of stating clearly and directly, and then accepting, the basic nature of these needs.

This is how the 'curse on the family house' manages to perpetuate itself through the generations. The cycle of repression, by its very nature, is never discussed because it never surfaces to consciousness. The on-going fear of admitting the authenticity of the true nature of each succeeding generation results in a continuing reliance on neurotic patterns of denial. The "unhealthy" or neurotic experiencing cycle is essentially a psychic rubbish processor—accumulating and recycling unfinished business from the past. Although, as infants, we come into the world blessed with an innate, intuitive and absolute awareness, this becomes obscured by a fog of unease, initiated by the hidden neurotic elements in the learning process of our childhood. We are taught to meet the world conditionally, but by its very nature the conditioning process is never spelt out.

You can't disperse fog by punching it. Similarly, you can't get rid of this all-pervading mood of yearning that most people experience throughout their adulthood, by logical analysis or by purely cognitive means. In the unitive approach, the question 'Why?' is never asked. To quote Zorba the Greek - "If I could give my problem a name, I could conquer it." But the fear of authentic personal awareness can only be perpetuated through the generations by a denial that such a state even exists. And that which does not exist can not, of course, ever be named. But the transcendent, joyful and unconditionally aware mood of the new-born infant is never completely extinguished. It reveals itself, even in adult life, through some chink or crevice of consciousness, as an intuitive yearning for a rebirth of personal authenticity.

The aim of my unitive coaching approach is to facilitate this creative sea-change - to burst the bubble of the obscuring denial and thereby disperse the fog that has prevented true perception. People can learn to become aware, just as they have learned to become unaware.

[Article Source: http://www.positivearticles.com]

How unresolved issues from the past distort our perception of the here-and-now.

Charles Bentley PhD Charles Bentley Associates http://www.lifecoachuk.com

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