dictators themselves, hostile in their reaction to the world, and perhaps
even violent.
As mentioned earlier, there is of course always the possibility that a
child who was totally overpowered by its parents’ rage ends up with such
a low sense of worth that, years later, this parent recreates in its own
children shades of its abusive, raging parents. Feeling too insecure to
claim respect, such a parent then allows its children to become
narcissistic, which leads to the parent being overpowered by its own
offspring.HOW CAN YOU INTEGRATE YOUR PAIN?
Children quite naturally feel all their emotions without blocking them.
They spontaneously surrender to pure feeling, then release the emotion as
it passes. In this way, their emotions ebb and flow in a wavelike fashion.
We adults are often afraid to surrender to our emotions. We find it
difficult to tolerate feelings such as rejection, fear, anxiety, ambivalence,
doubt, and sadness. So we run from our feelings either by burying them
through avoidance, resisting them, or displacing them onto people and
situations outside ourselves through emotional reactivity. Many of us
resort to intellectualizing, plastic surgery, fatter bank accounts, or larger
social networks as a way of avoiding having to feel. Or we deflect our
pain by blaming, being resentful, and expressing anger toward the person
we believe caused us pain.
A conscious person is able not just to tolerate their emotions, but to
embrace them—and I do mean all of their emotions. When we don’t
know how to honor our own feelings, we don’t honor our children’s