Miracles
Interview
One
of a series of interviews with the leading healers of our time
Healing
the Inner Child
Paul Ferrini talks
with Charles Whitfield about his ground-breaking work on the Adult Child
Recovery Process
Charles Whitfield is the author of the best selling books Healing the Child Within, Co-Dependence:
Healing the Human Condition, Boundaries
and Relationships, and others.
Whitfield’s description of the Three Stages in the Recovery Process is highly
relevant for those of us who seek deep healing of childhood trauma and chronic
feelings of separation from others. Without understanding and healing our
childhood wounds, our spirituality is not grounded in the emotional realities
of life.
Inner child injuries have been happening to
most men and women since the beginning of recorded time. Yet it seems now that
there is a global awakening in which we are becoming conscious of our deep
unconscious wounds and coming forward to talk about them and heal them.
PART ONE
PAUL: Tell us just a little bit
about your religious upbringing…were you brought up into a traditional
religious family?
CHARLES: It was a semi-traditional
Protestant family. My mother dropped out of the Catholic church when she was a
teenager. My father was agnostic and almost never went to church. But my mother
took my brother, my sister, and myself around to various churches. We started
out Episcopal and then we moved and started going to a
PAUL: Did you grow up without a
father?
CHARLES: No, but my father was gone a
lot. And he wasn’t very present when he was there.
PAUL: How did your religious
attitudes change as you grew up?
CHARLES: In high school I went to a
private boarding school and we were forced to go to the religious service of
our choice. There was nothing like Unity or A Course in Miracles then, so I
just attended regular Protestant services – Methodist, Presbyterian, and so
forth. But then in college I became agnostic and then finally an atheist. I
studied the works of Ayn Rand and other militant atheists and would really
argue with believers.
Then, in my early
30’s, I started to meditate. That’s been one of the greatest things that’s
happened on my spiritual path. Because it opened me up to a lot of things,
including the whole idea of Christ Consciousness.
P: Was there a particular kind of
meditation you did?
C: Well, I learned TM at the
beginning – in 1973 – but now I don’t need to use a mantra. I just go into
meditation.
P: What spiritual
books were you reading then?
C: Well, I read people
like Ram Dass, and The Urantia Book,
and others. Eventually, I found A Course
in Miracles.
P: Tell us what your
initial experience was with the Course.
C: In 1978, I got a
copy of A Course in Miracles, and I read the first nine workbook lessons in one
day. Of course it tells you to do it one day at a time. But in my haste to get
it quickly, I didn’t follow the instructions. And then put it down for a few
weeks. A couple of weeks later picked up the Teacher’s Manual and I read about
three pages and got really bummed out.
P: What did you have a hard time
with?
C: It was the whole idea of the
ego’s world being an illusion. So I put the Course down and didn’t come back to
it for close to a year. Then I started going through it more methodically. I read a few pages in the text every few days and I skipped around in
the workbook. And of course I read the Teacher’s Manual. But for me the turning
point was when I got A Course in
Miracles on tape, read by Kellie Love. Then I could listen
to it in my car as I drove along. I have probably listened to the Course
on tape five times.
P: I guess the course
must have provided somewhat a contrast to the religious teaching you grew up
with?
C: Yes, it made much more sense to
me than hellfire and damnation Even as a kid, the idea of being a sinner must
have be repulsive to me, although I was numb to the guilt and shame I felt. In
fact, I was numb to most things, because I’d grown up in this dysfunctional
family, where I was not allowed to be me. I had to put on this mask, this false
self. So I couldn’t identify shame guilt or fear, although I was feeling them
all the time.
P: What were some of
the ways your false self manifested?
C: Well, I was the
combination of the scapegoat and delinquent, as described by Virginia Satir,
Sharon Wegsheider, and Claudia Black. At times I was the family hero, but most
of the time I was the lost child, because I would retreat off away from the
family and build model airplanes and things like that. Doing these kind of
things helped me to survive.
P: You describe your
father as being distant and not involved. What was your mother like?
C: My mother was much
more involved. She is the one who kept us relatively sane. If it weren’t for
her, I think we would have had a difficult life.
P: In looking back on your
childhood what have you learned?
C: I was then acting a lot from my
unconscious. What I’ve come to understand about my own life is that the false
self can’t know God. As a child I could not know God because I wasn’t my real
self.
P: I know what you mean when you
say that you could not know God as a child. I grew up with a dominant mother
and an absent father and like my father I went into a withdrawal and stayed
there for the first twenty-three years of my life. It wasn’t until I could see
a little bit of light within the darkness of my own mind that I was able to
say, “You’re okay the way you are. You don’t have to be the way somebody else
wants you to be, or the way you think you’re supposed to be.” And that’s when I started
to feel God’s love.
I think that it’s
interesting that as students of A Course
in Miracles, we have both found that inner child work is very important. If
we don’t do our inner child work, I think it’s likely that we’ll stay in our
heads with the Course.
C: Well, to me, the child within
is such a great teaching aid or metaphor, because it helps us to understand
what the true self is. It’s been called the real self by Karen Horney and the
existential self by others. The Course calls it right mind. On the other hand, the false self is
ego. It is who we pretend to be.
Lazaris has
divided ego into positive ego and negative ego, and that makes it easier to
understand. The negative ego is the one the Course is talking about. The Course, however, does not talk much about
positive ego. The positive ego is the benign, reflexive, sorting and screening
process that assists us with all of our incoming data.
Anyway, what’s so
neat about the child within metaphor is that it gives us a much easier handle
on what the object-relations people and self psychologists have been talking
about for the last forty or fifty years. It is our true self, our true
identity.
P: When you use term “false self,”
isn’t that the part of us that feels separate from each other and cut off from
God? When we were kids, we reached out for love and acceptance and didn’t find
it. So we learned to defend ourselves against rejection. We learned to withdraw or to be aggressive to
get our needs met. That’s the ego or false self. Right?
C: Well, that’s one
possible interpretation of how ego was made. Another one is Lazeris’ metaphor
of the postman. He says the ego is like the postal delivery man or woman who
brings our mail. Of course, our mail is an analogy for the data or stuff that
comes in and out of our life every day. But because we find a lot of that stuff
painful, we decided to let the postman, or the ego, handle our mail. Now the
ego doesn’t know how to handle everything that comes in, but it has a bit of
grandiosity wired into it. So it accepts the job even though it is incompetent
to do it.
P: It seems to me that the
important thing there is that we created the postman. The postman, or the ego,
is a creation of our fear. The Course tells us clearly that there is only love
and fear. It tells us that what is not love -- or fear – is a call for love. So
even fear is a derivative of love, albeit in a distorted way. So it is my fear
of not receiving love which drives me to create structures that I believe that
will insure that I get my needs met. Obviously, my very attempt to control
places me beyond loves’ reach. This is the vicious cycle of the ego. We are
just a bunch of hurt kids looking for love in the wrong way, are we not?
C: Yes, ”looking for love in all
the wrong places,” often ending up with addictions, attachments, compulsions
and other disorders.
But in addition to
the fear, we have to deal with what the Course calls guilt, but is really
shame. The word shame suggests that at the core of my being I am bad, defective,
inadequate. Shame, in the way we understand it in psychology today, especially
in the adult child recovery movement, is differentiated from guilt. Guilt is
also a painful feeling, but one that is related to my behavior, rather than to
my very being. Perhaps I’m guilty because I’ve done something I’m not supposed
to. Well, I can repair guilt by apologizing, making amends, or asking for
forgiveness. Shame, on the other hand, is not so easily repaired. It is set up
differently. When the Course talks
about guilt, I think it’s talking about one part guilt, nine parts shame.
And to me, the two
major feelings talked about in the Course are fear and shame, and they are
intertwined closely. I see that in the people that I assist during their adult
child recovery work. They have a lot of fear that the mental health
establishment disguises with the word “anxiety.” And they also have a lot of
grieving to do. Grief is also disguised by many therapists, who often call it
“depression.” Giving these basic human
feelings clinical names takes the healing process out of the person’s hands. It
tends to disempower people.
The only effective
cure for fear, shame and grief is the adult child healing process.
Unfortunately the modern treatment for these problems is drugs. Drugs are a
shortcut, a bypass of the real issues, which must be faced sooner or later. Of
course, drugs aren’t the only form of bypass. A Course in Miracles can be used as a bypass.
P: Absolutely.
C: People can move right pass what
I call Stage Two, which is the adult child or trauma-effects healing, up into Stage Three, or
focus on spirituality. And that’s reassuring and feels good for a time, but
eventually that pain of the unhealed child comes back.
P: You have to go back into your
life and see where the false self was created, which was usually early on, and
deal with the fear, the shame, or whatever painful feelings are present.
C: And link that pain to a
particular event or combination of events from the past, and consciously grieve
it. If I just feel the pain, that’s not going to do it. If I just grieve, I
won’t consciously complete the healing work. I’m like a sculptor who is
chipping away at a large block of marble with a chisel and a hammer. That is
what adult child recovery work is. At the heart of that marble is a work of art,
but the process of discovering it is a gradual one. There’s a great deal of
accumulated baggage, attachment to our false self, that we have to chip away to
get to our real self.
P: Do you feel that
children are at some level or in some way responsible for the abuse they
experience?
C: How can a one-week-old child
that is neglected or beaten be responsible? How can a two or three-year-old who
is sexually abused be responsible for that abuse?
P: Then you don’t believe we come
into this life carrying guilt with us? You don’t believe on some unconscious
level we create these experiences to wake up?
C: No. I do not
believe we come in with all of that baggage. I believe we come in as a spark of
love, as part of God. And I believe the pain of this world becomes overwhelming
to us. And so we develop our false self to cope with it.
What other choices
does a child have? There aren’t many people modeling love, or protecting the
children from the pain. The child chooses the ego to run it’s life out of
duress.
Now, on another
level, as part of the Divine Mystery, we may choose to work through certain
experiences. But most of us don’t know the answer to this part of the Mystery
right now.
P: It really becomes a
control issue, does it not? If I come into this life and Daddy and Mommy take
care of all my needs, and I feel that the universe supports me, then I don’t
need to take control to try to protect myself. I find out that Mommy and Daddy
would sometimes prefer to meet their own needs instead of helping me meet mine,
if I gradually discover that the universe is not a friendly place, then what do
I do? I look for the postman I guess?
The more fear I
have the more I try to carve out a little place I can be safe. That starts very
early in my childhood. And, as I grow to be an adult, I just accumulate more
and more of those tendencies to hold on and to control. Eventually I think that
the ego is who I am.
But, my ego, my
artificial construct of who I am, can’t stay together. It does not successfully
protect me from pain. In fact, it actually cuts me off from that love that is
available to me.
It’s only a matter
of time before the ego’s defenses begin to fall apart. Yes, Humpty Dumpty is
going to fall off the wall. And when it all does fall – whether or not I become
an alcoholic or a workaholic or a sexaholic or whatever – then I must look at
what I’ve become. Then I must look at the false self, not to put the pieces back
together again, but to sweep them up and throw them out, expressing my rage
and grief as I do. I’ve got to go through the raw emotion. I’ve got to go
through all of the feelings I did not allow myself to feel before because it
wasn’t safe.
That’s what
Twelve Step and Recovery programs do. They provide a safe place for people to
face all these emotions that have been locked in so long. They offer a place
where people can look at the shame without feeling isolated or outcast. They
offer a healing community.
C: You’re right. So we adult kids
are taking responsibility for our healing and our lives. And so we just do
what we can do, and what we cannot do. We turn it over to God, or the Holy Spirit.
That way we don’t get stuck in the ego’s world of needing to be in control.
P: You mentioned three stages of
recovery, one of which was the adult child work. Can you tell us about the
three stages as you see them?
C: In my book Co-Dependence: Healing the Human Condition, I differentiate three
stages of recovery. But there is Stage
Zero before recovery
starts. Stage Zero can include the experience of having any disorder or disease
that’s physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual.
P: So it might include
alcoholism, or workaholism, or cancer, or attempted suicide, or having a heart
attack or losing your job or breaking up an important relationship?
C: Yes, it can be anything that
shows that something is out of control in our lives. The important thing about
Stage Zero is that the person is not in recovery yet. They haven’t yet begun
the healing process.
Stage One then includes a full recovery program for whatever specific Stage Zero
disorder the person has. So if a person is an alcoholic or drug addict, the
full recovery program would include not using alcohol or drugs, one day at a
time, and changing from within over time. If the person has heart disease, it
would involve eating a low fat diet, and getting appropriate exercise, etc.
Every Stage Zero disorder has it’s own appropriate Stage One Recovery Program.
Then, once a person gets into a stable recovery program, which may take about six months to three years, he or she can start to heal the woundedness that underlies the Stage Zero disorder. But if the person doesn’t do the Stage Two Recovery work, it’s likely that the Stage Zero disorder will relapse.
Stage Two is the
adult child work. It’s healing the child within; it’s co-dependence recovery. I
think it was what Freud and his colleagues probably originally intended
psychoanalysis to be. Unfortunately, psychoanalysis was limited, and in it’s
own way partially abusive, at least until people like Jung and Ferenzci got
involved in it.
P: How long does Stage Two Healing
work generally take?
C: A full recovery program for
adult child wounding takes about three to five years, or longer. It’s also
pretty hard work.
P: And it’s not individual work.
C: It’s more appropriately done in
group therapy. Self-help groups are
helpful, but can’t get quite as deep as therapy groups. Individual therapy can
also help.
P: Tell us about Stage Three.
C: In Stage Three, we move into spirituality. We develop a connection with the God of
our understanding. You see, having completed Stage Two recovery, we are
beginning to realize our true identity. We are starting to be able to experience
God’s love for us in an authentic way.
P: One of the things
that seems important in Stage Two and Three is the increased sense of
connection we have with our brothers and sisters. A Course in Miracles tells us
that when we’re healed, we’re not healed alone. And that is clearly true in
many Twelve Step and Recovery programs. Clearly, the therapy group is an important
healing component in Stage Two. It helps us realize that we are not alone in
our pain. And we learn to support each other in a way that is new to us. It
offers us a needed introduction to the Holy Relationship.
C: Right. To me, we heal in three
relationships. We heal by ourselves alone, with safe others, and if we choose,
with the God of our understanding. Now ultimately, in Stage Three, we awaken to
the fact that these are the same. But early on, we don’t know that. So it can
be useful to go off alone. Some of our healing work can be done in a solitary
fashion through prayer, meditation, and journal writing. That’s what Jesus did.
He didn’t drag the apostles along when he went out onto the desert.
Just having a good
cry by ourselves can be so helpful. But then we need to get with safe others,
share our stories and name our truth. There’s something important about
accurately naming the truth of our experience and having it validated by
others.
Invalidation is
unsafe, it’s toxic, and that’s what some people in the anti-recovery movement
backlash are attempting to do. They’re trying to invalidate us as a movement.
Some of our family members even say to us: “that didn’t really happen, ”or“ you
can’t really be feeling that way.” That’s invalidation of our experience. And
nobody has the right to do that.
Being validated by
others is an essential part of the healing process. That’s what Jesus was
teaching, and what Christ Consciousness is continuing to teach us today. To me
the idea of “acceptance “ is intricately connected to the concept of
“forgiveness.
P: That’s true for me, too. Do you
think forgiving your abuser is essential to the recovery process?
C: No. Forgiveness is not a
requirement for healing. Susan Forward has written probably the most clear
description of this idea in her book, Toxic
Parents. After reading her book, I realized something I had felt before but
was unable to articulate. When you say forgiveness is not necessary, you give
them the choice to forgive. When you say that forgiveness is necessary, you do
not honor that person’s right to choose forgiveness.
P: Well, the very idea that
forgiveness is mandatory is not a forgiving idea.
C: Right. The other point, at least in my opinion, is that forgiveness does not mean letting the abuser off the hook. It means letting go of my attachments to the pain of the wounding I received in the past.
P: Letting go of that attachment
is no small matter, particularly when you say that forgiveness is not necessary
for the healing process to be complete. What is to stop people from wallowing
in the pain, telling the same war stories, blaming others and not taking responsibility
for holding onto their grievances?
C: Well, that’s the dilemma we face. I’ve
got to let go of my grievances, and other unfinished business. But I can’t let
go of them until I have fully experienced them. I need to “get down on the
floor and wrestle” with them. Before I can let go of fear or anger or shame or
my attachment to my pain, I have to know exactly what it is that I’m letting
go of. That’s the work of Stage Two Recovery.
P: Well, that suggests to me that
having wrestled with all this pain in Stage Two, we can continue to work on our
forgiveness issues in Stage Three. But I also understand that we can’t forgive
until we’re ready.
C: That’s my sense.
P: And we go through whatever process we
have to go through to get ready. And that includes honoring who we are, giving
ourselves permission to do whatever we need to do, on our own emotional
timetable.
C: Yes, and it’s helpful to look at forgiveness as a process of letting go. Because ultimately we have to let go and let God. As we surrender our need to control, we enter into a process of co-creation with God. That’s the wok of Stage Three. And when I can involve God in my healing process, I am more likely to be successful.
--end of part one--
To read part 2 of the interview, click here.