Psychologist Erik Erikson is best known for his theory on psychosocial development, which outlines the various stages of development and highlights their key characteristics and associated conflicts. However, another area that Erikson extensively researched was early childhood trauma and its effects on healthy psychological development.
Early childhood trauma refers to any adverse event or experience that a child experiences before the age of six. This can include various forms of abuse, neglect, loss of a loved one, violence and other experiences that can negatively impact a child’s healthy psychological development. Erikson was keen to address the effects of such trauma on child development, noting how they can affect an individual’s psychological makeup well into adulthood.
One of the key areas of early childhood development that Erikson focused on was the development of trust versus mistrust. According to Erikson, children pass through this stage within the first 18 months of their life, and its central conflict is between trust and mistrust. In this stage, children require consistent care and affection from their primary caregivers to develop a sense of trust in the world around them. Parents and caretakers play a crucial role in shaping the child’s perception of the world through their daily interactions and responses to the child’s needs. If these needs are not met due to early childhood trauma, mistrust may develop, leading to further psychological problems later on in life.
Erikson also emphasized the importance of a child’s autonomy during the second stage of psychosocial development, which occurs between the ages of two to three years. This stage is marked by toddlers’ assertion of their autonomy as they seek to assert control over their immediate environment. Children who experience early childhood trauma may find it challenging to develop a sense of self-trust and autonomy, leading to lower self-esteem, anxiety and feelings of inadequacy that can be long-lasting.
Early childhood trauma can also have profound effects on a child’s social and emotional development, affecting their ability to form secure relationships and attach healthily to others. Erikson posited that children pass through the stage of intimacy versus isolation during young adulthood, where they seek to develop genuine connectedness with others. However, individuals who lack a sense of trust and self-autonomy may find it difficult to establish such connections, leading to social isolation and feelings of disconnect.
Erikson was also concerned about the effects of early childhood trauma on academic achievement, given its critical role in shaping later-life outcomes. He argued that children exposed to traumatic experiences may develop cognitive and behavioural difficulties that can hinder their academic progress. Such difficulties can have long-lasting effects on their future career prospects, social mobility and overall well-being.
One of the most severe consequences of early childhood trauma is the risk of developing mental health issues such as anxiety or depression. This is because such experiences can leave a lasting impression on a child’s psyche, leading to unresolved emotional conflicts and feelings of vulnerability. The effects of childhood trauma can manifest in adulthood, leading to the development of low self-esteem, trust issues, difficulty forming relationships, and a host of other psychological difficulties.
Erikson was keen to emphasise the role of caregivers and parents in providing support and guidance to children exposed to early childhood trauma. Through supportive care, counseling and therapy, individuals can better work through such traumas and minimise their impact on their psychological development.
In conclusion, Erikson extensively researched the effects of early childhood trauma on healthy psychological development, noting how it can negatively impact a child’s perception of the world and their place in it. From issues of trust versus mistrust, autonomy, academic achievement, and social-emotional development, early childhood experiences profoundly shape later life outcomes.
Caregivers and parents play a crucial role in providing support and guidance to children experiencing traumatic events, which can minimise the impact of such events on their psychological well-being. Erikson’s work reminds us of the importance of a supportive and nurturing environment for children to develop healthy psychological development and highlights the long-lasting consequences of early childhood trauma.
This article is about how to engage pain appearing at a physical or emotional level. Fortunately, the process is much the same. I will maintain a focus on the inside view of pain, and what we can do about it. I would ask that the reader at least temporarily suspend their beliefs and views about anything theoretical regarding what pain is or where it comes from. It can be easy to rationalise or intellectualise our suffering, and in so doing, we can miss the opportunity to simply meet it on its own terms.
I have had a lot of experience with pain, mostly the emotional variety. I have never broken bones, but I have been through overwhelming grief and trauma. I have found this to be one of the most oppressive forms of pain. Since physical pain can often have a sense of being implacable once we see it is not moving anywhere, we can come to accept it to a certain degree.
Mental or emotional pain is different in that it can be very difficult to accept. We often feel very strongly that it simply shouldn’t be there, or that if we could only just think the right thought or occupy the right philosophical perspective then it could be cast out like a phantom, banished with a perfectly recited magic spell.
I have found that this kind of ongoing vacillation in non-physical suffering is precisely what keeps me tethered to it. It is not only the view that perhaps it should not be happening, that things ought to have developed differently in my life, but also the desperate hope that there may be some kind of salvation by way of a previously unconsidered solution.
We do everything we can think of to try to manage or subdue mental and emotional pain. One person’s meditation practice may be used in the same way that another person uses alcohol. In this case, are the means of escape necessarily better or worse, from an inner perspective? In frustration, we beg to be relieved or numbed in any way possible. I have watched myself go through these cycles of torment many thousands of times, frequently tempting me to at least consider taking the most extreme of measures.
However, I continue to have faith in the value – not of pain, not even of endurance or stoicism – but of our innate capacity to simply wakefully meet what is actually here. I don’t just mean here with me, but also the ‘here’ which you are assigned to experience indefinitely. I would contend that nothing is as important as where you are, here and now. This moment offers every tool for meeting that which it contains. Allow me to unpack this a little further.
We have a bevy of helpful perspectives, and many of them may be quite true, such as ‘pain is temporary’, or ‘we are more than just this form or our experiences’. Relatively true though these things may be, we must examine what the immediate value of such a position is relative to our immediate experience of pain.
Are we employing our confidence in the truth these things point to in order to make what appears here and now seem more bearable, for hopes of a brighter future?
As a seasoned sufferer, I have discovered that the most meaningful invitation in all of this is the invitation to simply stop and stand back. This includes weighing up whether you are a victim, whether there is justice in your suffering, and whether anything will ever get better or worse. I would like people to really take a look for themselves at how all of the psychological methods we have at our disposal for negotiating with this pain are actually ingeniously devised to draw our attention away from experiencing what is present to us emotionally here and now.
This can be a sobering discovery. I have watched myself and others suffer for a very long time, with an intensely keen interest in how and why we experience such pain. I had not learned a single thing of value until I stopped running from this pain it and met it where it sat within me, on its own terms. Easier said than done, to be sure, but here is what I have learned about the process this far.
Every instance of pain has an inside and an outside, and at least a potential narrative attached to it. If it doesn’t have one, the mind is extremely quick in manufacturing one. So, we have a story attached, often an angry story, or maybe a melancholic ‘woe is me’ tale. I don’t want to talk about whether the story is true, but what I do want to address is the simple fact that the application of the story is significant. This application is dysfunctional whether the story being told has a basis in fact or not – it is false in its foundational assumption.
The effect of this is to upgrade pain to what we call suffering. This is sustained pain in its unexamined and therefore potentiated form. The story allows it to breath like a fire, drawing in more oxygen making itself larger and more powerful.
All life must involve some degree of pain, but we have a massive influence over the degree to which pain becomes suffering. If you allow the pain to filter through your mind, it seems as if your entire field, your ‘am-ness’, your Self, is flooded with pain. Everything in the value of being in this moment is then hidden from view, occluded like a total lunar eclipse.
So, you do not allow it to filter through the mind. Instead, you occupy the witness state.
The story isn’t always easy to drop. What I would recommend you focus upon, again, based on my own experience, is not trying to drop the story. This effort can result in very little headway, and tends to also accompany frustration and self-punitive thoughts. Rather, direct your effort of attention to understanding the story.
By understanding, I also mean seeing through the story. To understand it means to step back and see where your pain fits in. Illusion is always transparent from some angle; it is usually just a case of rotating the object of our attention enough to get a clear view of its insubstantial nature. Why is this human pain there, what are the conditions of it? Do other people also have it? For what reasons? What was misunderstood?
So, I put it that it is critical to understand, not to renounce or revoke. You will not progress by renouncing or avoiding your feelings, no matter how upset you are, and no matter how justified or unjustified you think those feelings are. We are so used to meeting things we don’t want in the world with push-back – what happens inside us has a totally different dynamic that you will begin to see after a while if you spend enough time in there. Resistance will trap you, but acceptance and understanding will free you.
I will give an example of how a story can be sustained by ignorance and then challenged through inquiry. Remember that this story, being a narrative as accompanying the pain, while not necessarily causing the entirety of the pain, is what nonetheless promotes and sustains it, thereby elevating the pain to the status of suffering.
Here is an important inquiry rule which i have found indispensable. If there is suffering within you, then there is always something false that has been invested with your belief. In my thousands of hours of self-inquiry, this rule has proven true. I invite you to test this for yourself. The discovery, if you happen upon it, will possibly spark an inner revolution, but this cannot have value as a second-hand insight, you really need to see it for yourself in order for it to yield any effect. This gives you an important method for distinguishing pain from suffering and truth from falsehood.
I will provide some examples.
Say you value a relationship, and that relationship ends for whatever reason. There will in most instances be some form of pain, to a greater or lesser degree. Suffering may take root in a pronounced way when stories about this break-up begin to play in repeat. Common examples of the kinds of thoughts you may find yourself investing and believing in: I was not good enough to love. I was not worthy. No one will ever love me. I am a failure. I am not worthy of love from anyone else. I am ugly.
These can go on as far as the imagination will allow.
This tendency to problematise our pain must be present very early on. I remember being a child and doing this myself from as soon as I was capable of thought. I remember having arguments with my parents and wanting the pain to escalate into bittersweet suffering. Although it was completely uncalled for and totally unnecessary, I would take simple situations of not being permitted to do something, and then berating my mother with accusations such as “You wish you had an abortion”, “You wish you never had me”, and “You wish you gave me away for adoption”.
It is relatively easy to see as an adult how immature and baseless these reactive forms of lashing out are. It is a far more demanding task to see how the very same energies behind those immature reactions have insinuated themselves into our long-term thoughts and behaviours. The same energy feeds various manifestations of spite, resentment and acts of microaggression. In my adult life, I found that same energy translated into throttling my emotional availability to people based on whether I was in a good mood, or whether they were acceptable to me based on their looks, their behaviour, attitude towards me or what they could do for me. This is no way to live.
I didn’t know it at the time of childhood, because it was shrouded in darkness, but what I was really doing in this exercise was worshipping pain in order to allow it to become suffering, like someone thirsty for destruction throwing petrol onto a fire. It was of course completely unnecessary, because if I had known the fundamentals of experiencing human energy, I could have simply dealt with the pain of having my wants and desires thwarted without complicating the process and creating further turmoil for my family.
Where it becomes suffering, at least psychologically, I have discovered that it always relates to what is illusory, that which is false. What is false can always be subjected to the scrutiny of self-inquiry. In my childhood, I didn’t need to go to war with my ignorance and my false belief. If anything, I needed to see through the falsity of my claims, to make the falsehood transparent before my psyche. That would have resulted in understanding, and therefore relief of suffering.
I had no discipline at this stage of life, of course, but even so, occasionally there would be merciful spontaneous insights that resulted in the occasional relief of suffering. The availability of the promise of wisdom was never far away, even when all seemed encompassed in a pall of darkness.
These lessons of childhood are repeated for us in many similar ways in our adult lives with all of our relationships. I expected to grow into an adult one day and magically become a functional human being, but this isn’t how it works, as anyone with an interior life will have discovered for themselves. It usually takes a will, directed attention and a desire to understand our encounters that leads to wisdom.
It is possible to face the same situations over and over and react in precisely the same dysfunctional way indefinitely. This would lead to misery, because the failure to embrace understanding and wisdom is therefore, by the same movement, the welcoming of illusion and falsehood and therefore suffering.
As a child, in my situation, ideally, I could have applied a simple measure of self-inquiry in the following manner: why is it so important that I always get what I think I want? Does that rest on some universal truth, or is it something about my mind that is making demands of the world? Who else should be in pain because I do not get what I want? These are always relevant questions.
If we look again at the situation in which a person may have experienced grief from a relationship break up, the very same sobering questions can lead to understanding, even if it is only seeing how were stuck in the same patterns that repeat over and over. Remember, it is always falsehood that leads us to believe anything that causes us undue psychological torment. You will see this is if you look close enough. Bringing the power of this inquiry to bear is then like a healing balm to our pain.
For example, instead of berating myself for how dysfunctional or ugly or unworthy I am that may have led me to being abandoned by a partner, I could ask the following questions honestly of myself: under what conditions would I leave a partner? Does that mean that this other person is never capable of change? Does it mean that just because I have my own reasons for leaving them that they are inherently unlovable, unworthy, or permanently incapable of change? What is the part of me that needs to be loved or approved of by another in order to feel loved and worthy? If I really messed things up and I am indeed personally responsible, is there any universal law that forbids me from not only learning from my mistakes, but forgiving myself for the pain I caused myself and others? Was my love for that person the one thing that gave them value, or is there something else of value in them? So what about me?
There are many other forms of inquiry possible, but these are simply a few that strike at the heart of how and why suffering may be experienced, and introducing a sense of calm, honest objectivity to what can very often be emotionally reactive, volatile and subjective. This is impossible without your will. As we know, you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink. The wisest teachers in all of history can do nothing for a person who does not have the will to look for themselves.
When you are experiencing pain, as we all do, it is important to remember that we do not need to banish the pain. We do not need to get rid of our feelings, however painful they happen to be in the moment. What does benefit us is the wisdom inquiry brings. The expectation that our spiritual practice will banish our pain I have found to not be a reasonable or mature expectation. Oddly enough, we don’t even need to arrive at answers most of the time. Often simply asking the pertinent questions can be enough to bring a sober sense of wakefulness to a pattern of reactivity or entrenched self-involvement.
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, an astonishing and surreal collection of weird fiction stories.
Everything ever written about the project of self-examination and awakening has at least two potentialities – it could aid in your progression, or it could prove to be obstructive. The inherent problem which anyone who talks or writes about self inquiry faces is that there is a crucial danger of all of this being interpreted as mere talk. In the process of awakening, which is really simply a direct experiential meeting of ourselves, no adding of concepts is required, nor is any kind of conceptual understanding or analysis.
The primary problem I find is that people become so intrigued with the potential suggested by mystical experience that they skip the only important part and wind up erecting a teetering mental tower of beliefs, concepts and assumptions, all resting on a foundation which is itself conceptual, and therefore not grounded in direct experience.
This is the primary danger of the project of self-discovery. If you trip at the very first hurdle, you might delay your awakening for decades, or even indefinitely. The mystics of every tradition have advised us unanimously not to take any assumption for granted in self-discovery, to turn within and find out for ourselves. You may observe that this is the opposite of philosophy or theology, in which a vast body of concepts is accrued and then some degree of rationalistic intellectual commitment is apportioned accordingly.
This is not the case at all with turning inward. In any other endeavor, it is always the last steps that are considered to have the highest importance, whether it is earning a military rank, a degree, a belt in martial arts, or a professorship. In self-discovery, in the meeting of our true self, the first step is always of the highest importance. The authenticity of the drive to self-knowledge is at the beginning, or it is nowhere. We do not accrue it after years of gaining conceptual understanding, nor through years of sitting in meditation, for that matter. This is because awakened nature has absolutely no dependence upon the conceptual.
The fact is, you could have studied anything and if you had not met your true nature from the beginning in total innocence and curiosity, then your understanding will be totally impoverished. This is what is meant by building a house upon a shifting foundation.
None of this other stuff, including everything we talk about to do with the various nuances of self inquiry, ego and spiritual sounding concepts, is finally necessary. In fact, I would go so far as to say that no spiritual concept, however sophisticated or meaningful, is ultimately more important than your actual awakening. There isn’t a universal checklist of things for you to believe or ways to behave after you wake up – it doesn’t work like that. It is certainly true that there are trends, but there is no prescription for what you waking up to yourself should look like. You start fresh every day, or you are really not starting at all – you are simply back in the temporally dominated realm of the egoic mind.
Meeting who we truly are is utterly simple.
The problem is that often once we are implored to turn within, we flex and twist in meditation as if we are in a gym trying to develop muscle for the ultimate test of strength. This isn’t what is being asked of us. We have what we are looking for, because it is unconditionally with us all right from the very beginning of our journey. It is consciousness here and now, the thing we always mistook as being so commonplace and ordinary.
What people don’t typically see is how that ordinariness is actually woven into the other aspect, which is the totally miraculous infinite. Since we could first comprehend language, we were all effectively brainwashed into thinking that this innate experience should be met with anything other than gratitude and astonishment.
All that is ever being asked of you in this mystical venture of turning within is that you stop your trying to get somewhere else, right where you are in this moment, and put down your baggage long enough to see what is really here. Your baggage is your beliefs, assumptions, expectations. Put it all aside for long enough to get a glimpse of that which was always already here and see that it is an immediately available miracle, a flower eternally blooming, an endless act of divine creation.
You only need to see the beginning of the experience once. You will give up every concept for it if you knew what it was, because you would immediately see concepts as chaff before a great fire of being which, at your core, you are. Then, once you have tasted directly from the well of your own soul, see what ventures and beliefs you are drawn to and go about your own way. But I cannot overstate the value of a true meeting with your soul. The fruit of this meeting is not a strengthening of belief, but Gnosis.
I would like to conclude this by saying that if you have not had this meeting, I would encourage you to prioritise it to the point of putting aside everything else practically possible. The alternative is to have a house built upon sand. No matter how elaborate and beautiful the house, it has no lasting basis – it is temporary. When the bedrock is discovered, anything built upon is merely a ‘nice to have’. The bedrock is discovered to be primary and indispensable. That rock is Being – but this is too easy to talk about merely conceptually.
See that which cannot be unseen, discover that which was always there beneath your each and every belief, idea, and concept, with every step and every breath. People are looking everywhere for how they are going to end up, but only because they have a poverty of experience when it comes to understanding where they begin.
Reality is not a belief, it is an experience. Because it is misunderstood as the former, religions and philosophies find disagreement and discord. Precisely because it is the latter, mystics of all traditions find no disagreement. You can believe in infinite variations of what is false conceptually, but you can only ever meet one Reality. So the invitation, as ever, is to turn within. Not for becoming better or more advanced, but to Know once and for all where you begin and end.
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
When Posie Parker tried to speak at Albert Park on Saturday, and was attacked and silenced by a frenzied mob of far-left extremists, a dark and cold wave washed through the nation. Many Kiwis, lost in the blissful ignorance for which our country is reknown, had little idea of how precarious our rights to free speech had become. On Saturday it was driven home to us by a multitude of shrieking, hissing lunatics.
The anti-Parker protesters had been emboldened by a number of wins for the authoritarian side in recent years.
One of the first was shutting down VJM Publishing’s ability to sell ‘It’s Okay To Be White’ t-shirts on TradeMe. This was a double win for the globalist authoritarians, because not only did they silence someone who was satirising them, but they also established that they could silence their enemies at will by telling lies (there is nothing “white supremacist” about saying that it’s okay to be white).
Another big win was silencing Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern when they attempted to speak in Auckland in 2018. Molyneux and Southern had some redpills to share about the nature of mass immigration from certain cultures, so the globalists whipped up a crazed mob in order to stoke fears of violence, when they then used as an excuse to shut down the Canadians.
The authoritarians struck again when VJM Publishing’s best-selling book, Clown World Chronicles, was banned from TradeMe on false grounds. It seems that you can be an admitted far-leftist and former terrorist fundraiser, and still TradeMe will delist a book on your word.
These examples set the precedent: the far left decides if you get to have free speech or not.
Emboldened by these victories against free speech, the far left expected that they could shut down Posie Parker in Auckland. And they were correct. On Saturday a mob – incited to hysteria by a week of mainstream media scaremongering – attacked the rotunda on which Parker was to speak, and drove her away under Police escort.
It’s now apparent, if not publicly spoken, that your rights to free speech only exist if you have political power.
Such events underline the genius of Brian Tamaki. He never gets silenced, because he effectively travels in a gang, and this gang provides security for his talks. His entourage consists of dozens of high muscle mass males, most of who also have a past history of violence. They surround him like beta chimpanzees surround their tribal chief. Anyone mocking him for the crudeness of his approach is a fool; he gets to speak where few others do.
New Zealand is now much like an Anglo Somalia where only warlords have any true freedom of speech, and that only on account of their command of a capacity for extreme violence. Thus, anyone expecting to use their supposed right to free speech in the future best start lifting weights, training in martial arts and making friends with violent people.
The contrasting examples of Parker and Tamaki prove that anyone who wants the right to speak freely in New Zealand needs their own gang to protect them. So if there’s anyone out there who dreams of providing a genuine alternative to the political Establishment: don’t start with a manifesto or a million-dollar donation. Start by assembling a fighting community of high muscle mass men who are willing and capable of following orders.
If a fighting community of honourable and loyal men sounds like something out of the 1920s, that’s because it is.
In the same way that German Communists in the 1920s were inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the German Revolution of 1918-19, the far-left extremists of 2023 have been emboldened by the victories of recent years. Just like in Russia, ultimate victory for the far left means physically destroying the people they hate.
Antifa terrorists have been known to stalk freethinkers and attack them with hammers and metal bars, as they did on six separate occasions in Hungary last month. This is the sort of thing that any free-thinking person (right-wing or otherwise) now needs to deal with.
If you want to exercise your free speech in New Zealand today, you need to get fit and strong. Lift weights. Get used to receiving blows to the head. Study the basics of all the major martial arts. Find like-minded men and create bonds of solidarity with them through ritual and spending quality time with each other. When you have a group, learn some basic drills.
Today’s Albert Park protests taught us that anyone who wants to prevent New Zealand from sliding into tyranny needs to study the Laws of Iron.
