Spiritual Openings for Children and Teens
by Bruce Bibee

 

…there are spiritual openings sprinkled throughout life. One takes advantage of these openings to the degree that one is developmentally capable.

Developmental psychology maps the stages of progression from infant to elder. Most of us know this as Maslow's needs hierarchy: physical needs assert themselves first (the need for food, water, shelter, security, etc.); emotional needs emerge second; and so on up to "self-actualization," which is the need to manifest one's potential in the real world.

What is not as widely known is that shortly before his death Abraham Maslow became interested in what he called "peak experiences." The study of these type of spiritual moments, done by Maslow, Jung and others, reveals that there are spiritual openings sprinkled throughout life. One takes advantage of these openings to the degree that one is developmentally capable. For example, puberty is a time of spiritual opening:

And when he was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem after the custom of the feast. And when they had fulfilled the days, as they returned, the child Jesus tarried behind in Jerusalem; and Joseph and his mother knew not of it...after three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions...his mother said unto him, "Son, why has thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing." And he said unto them, "How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" (Luke 3:42-49)

Jesus took it upon himself to satisfy this spiritual urge, and he did it in a way that was developmentally understandable. One can only imagine what his parents did to help him incorporate his spirituality with his young age. Whatever it was, he didn't reemerge on the scene for another 20 years or so.

Indigenous communities have a more formal way to address adolescent spiritual opening. These societies believe that an adolescent must be reacquainted to his/her True Self at this time. Failure to do so means that the young man or woman is stuck with only their ego-selves -- half of their identity, half of their potential -- and missing the spiritual half of themselves that their meaning and purpose for being on planet Earth at all.

Another spiritual opening may occur at the end of high school. Here a young person wonders: Who am I? What am I doing here? What am I going to do? The existential questions hit with full force at this time, and our culture has few ways of satisfying the spiritual hunger evident within these young adults.

As the developmental progression continues, there is another psycho-spiritual dilemma about age 25. The young adult, assuming s/he has had some sort of vision quest to define more fully his/her unique reason for being, will return to the original family or tribal system for community validation. The tribe's job is accept and honor the young adult in order for him/her to function with authority within that society.

The next major opening occurs between ages 35-45. Until this age, it seems to be the norm that we identify who we are by what we do (I'm a carpenter, politician, lawyer, plumber, student, teacher, etc.). During what has come to be known as mid-life crisis, identification with one's roles begins to break down. The search for a more complete identity begins. In short, mature spirituality can now start.

There are state-specific spiritual openings as well. What I have noticed as a recovery counselor is that those who were abused as children have access to a spiritual escape hatch as early as 4 years old. These escapees build a "safe place" just beyond the door and retreat to their safe place when they are being assaulted, neglected or abused. It is in this spiritual location that they imprison their inner child -- the archetype that represents their splintered off innocence, playfulness, curiosity, etc. Paradoxically, it is also here that they imprison their spiritual connection to a Higher Power. As a result of all this, they are doomed to worshiping a variety of false gods, including drugs, work, bigotry, relationships, and so on. Given the above, it should be no surprise that the only cure for addictions is a spiritual program of recovery (e.g., Alcoholics Anonymous). Nor should it be much of a reach to define addictions as "spiritual diseases," a disease born of worshiping the false gods, of seeking the Source of joy, meaning and purpose, and our ultimate true identity, in the world of illusion.

We have the beginnings of a viable spiritual community within the framework of the variety of 12-Step programs; we also have the means to bring recovering folks back to a point-of-beginning -- healed ego and conscious connection to their spiritual lives. Now we need to take that one step further: find a way to keep children not only from being injured in the first place, but also develop (or discover) a way to connect the pubescent child with his/her True Self. Mainstream religious ceremonies and organizations are not adequately accomplishing this task.

In the immortal words of Hilary Clinton, it takes a village to raise a child. This lands us back in the need for viable community. Where do we start? How do we encourage individuals to come together and create community? I'm not sure. Perhaps through our common heritage as children of the Earth.

 

Bruce Bibee, MTP, is a counselor in private practice. He is also the owner/instructor of the Kung-Fu San Soo Center.

Teens and Their Challenges
by Bruce Bibee

 

By spending most of August in the woods, my son has completed the second rite of passage.

My 18-year-old son spent most of the month of August in the woods, by himself, in a fairly remote part of the Swanson River lake system. When he graduated from high school in June, he came to me and said, "Now I'm supposed to spend a month in the woods, right?" I had forgotten that many years ago I told him that to leave home he needed to finish school, get a driver's license, and go to the woods for a month to get to know himself. I was surprised he remembered.

When he asked me, "What am I supposed to get out of living alone in the woods?" I told him I hoped he would find two things. "First, I want you to find a way to be your own best friend. Isolation encourages that. Second, I want you to have the experience of being totally free and totally responsible for yourself, which is an experience you have never actually had before. With those two things in the bag, life as an adult will be a lot easier. I do hope that you get more out of this adventure than those two things, but if not, those two will do you well in the future." And off he went.

In this column, as well as in other venues, I have been ranting about the lack of cultural support for the unique needs of teens. Those needs fall into two basic categories: a series of rites of passage, and an apprenticeship program with healthy role models. Teens need these; our culture does not provide these.

Rites of passage are needed twice -- once at puberty and once at the end of the teen years. Apprenticeship begins with the first rite of passage and ends with the second. During the apprenticeship, boys learn from healthy male role models to be men; girls, to be women. When this does occur with our teens, it occurs because knowledgeable parents make it happen. School does not make it happen, churches do not make it happen, hanging out at the mall does not make it happen, nor does plugging into a video game or surfing the Internet.

I have been concerned about this lack of teen support in society since 1988. At that time, a few juvenile probation officers asked me to develop a diversion program for violent teens. These juvenile probation officers told me that there were many diversion programs for non-violent teens, but none for the violent ones. The only option available for violent teens was incarceration. I got to work researching what a viable diversion program would look like and then developed one. I handed it in and it was rejected on the basis that I had included a martial arts component in the program. The thinking was that "you don't teach violence to violent kids." Those who rejected the program obviously did not see the paradox that martial artists learn how to fight so that they do not have to fight.

My interest was captured by the unique needs of teens at that time, and I have continued to research this area and develop programs to address those needs. The current evolution of this is a series of one-day workshops we are offering during the three Anchorage School District in-service days this semester.

By spending most of August in the woods, my son has completed the second rite of passage. He ended his solitary stay with a journal filled with his thoughts and feelings, positive experiences of self-reliance to remember when he meets life's tough times in the future. I think he has a better sense of himself. And my two younger sons now have a tradition to follow, a challenge to prepare for.

Bruce Bibee, MTP, is a counselor in private practice. He is also the owner/instructor of the Kung-Fu San Soo Center.

Surviving and Thriving Life Transitions
by Valerie Taylor

 

The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us. ~ Gloria Steinhem

As a well-known bumper sticker notes, "Life happens." The question is not if but how are you going to deal with life happening? Transitions are those periods when life happens in a major way, when you find yourself in the midst of profound change. They involve a major reshaping of your day-to-day roles, a redefining of your identity and, most likely, a shift in how others perceive you. Whether or not you initiate a major life change (such as getting married or changing careers), there's no escaping them.

But why are these periods so challenging? Two reasons: loss and fear.

Every transition begins with several losses: loss of familiar roles, people, places and your own sense of where you fit in the world. Loss is about feeling powerless; it's about aching for the return of the nonreturnable. As psychologist and author William Bridges notes, it's as though having launched ourselves from the riverbank we look up, midstream, to find we have lost sight of the shore to which we were swimming.

You may feel fearful or dragged down by a constant sense of formless anxiety. Given that your future may represent a string of unknowns, this reaction is normal. Our culture hates not knowing things. In addition, you are traveling in foreign territory. You will be called upon to learn new ways. Learning new skills is scary- but only at first. Then comes the exhilaration of having mastered the challenge. So, hang in there!

Life transitions provide a rich time for inner work. They allow for self-exploration, an opportunity to conquer nameless fears and to make friends with uncertainty. To deny yourself this time is to deny yourself the gifts of the transitional process -- to discover how you truly want to live.

Six things to remember along the journey:

	Say hello to goodbye Every beginning starts with an ending. Letting go of the old is the first step to embracing the new. This means examining how you work with endings. Do you avoid them, prolong them or minimize them? Or have you learned that you can't embrace today while clutching the debris of yesterday?
	If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Whether this major life change is of your choosing or not, it helps to keep at least one thing consistent in your routine - be it your morning ritual of tea, reading the newspaper or a daily workout.
	You don't get to know everything You are likely to spend much time simply not having a clue: accept this! We are raised to fear ambiguity and lack of clarity. But it's okay to be confused and fearful. Just ask yourself what your best guess would be if you did know. Do that. Then you'll know.
	One small step It's natural to feel that your life has deteriorated into a huge unmanageable mess. It hasn't. Identify one small thing you can take control over right now. Then break that down to tiny, concrete baby steps. Write them down and post the note on your refrigerator or share your goals with a friend. Whatever it takes, just make the first move. It's a cinch after that.
	Surround yourself with cheerleaders. Seek out those who have your best interests at heart, those individuals who make you laugh, encourage you and accept you. Don't know those kinds of people? Start with a significant and loving relationship with yourself. You'll be amazed at the people you attract -- it's better than a Dale Carnegie course!
	What do you want, anyway? Take this opportunity to ponder what your ideal life would look like. What hopes and dreams have you left along the wayside? Write about them in a journal or talk about them -- get explicit about the details. After all this effort, why would you shortchange yourself with anything less than a passionate, fulfilled life?

The transitional process ends with a new beginning. You emerge from the fog having a deeper appreciation for your strengths and confident that you have used this experience to your best ability. Applaud yourself for your willingness to keep going, to trust your own wisdom, and to stay true to your values. Enjoy your newly found wisdom, self-knowledge and personal power!

Valerie is a licensed psychotherapist and owner of Transitions Counseling. She is a Certified Interactive Guided ImagerySM Practitioner specializing in successful major life changes, including chronic illness. She can be contacted at 907-249-3290.

Death & Rebirth
by Bruce Bibee

 

This presents the intriguing, and somewhat frightening, conclusion that Western civilization may be operating from a pathological framework…

The most universal symbol for the death/rebirth process is probably the butterfly. As this creature dies to being a caterpillar, it is reborn as a butterfly. Another symbol of this process is the snake, which sheds its skin every year and grows a new one to fit its bigger body. For indigenous people, the cycle of spring-summer-fall-winter was the wheel of life, constantly dying and rebirthing itself. All of these symbols and cycles found their spiritual home in the Great Mother traditions, for the metaphor of birth, menstrual cycles, and the nurturing capacities of women were the natural ways to connect the human experience to Nature.

The Great Mother religions were replaced by the Sky-God traditions beginning in earnest with ancient Greece. At first, the pantheon of gods and goddesses achieved a balance between the Great Mother religions and the emerging Sky-God tradition, which brought to humankind the psychological template for the individuation process through the archetypal journey of the hero. The Great Mother traditions honored and continued to foster embeddedness with nature that disallowed the evolution of the separate ego-self. The Sky-God traditions provided a way for the ego to escape that embeddedness and attain selfhood. The problem, however, is that the evolution of consciousness must follow a "transcend and include" protocol for it to be successful. Humankind needed to find a way to continue to honor the Great Mother, while at the same time push forward into full development of the ego-self. Ancient Greece was able to mostly manage that; later Rome was not. Even later, with the Holy Roman Empire, the Great Mother tradition was suppressed.

At a personal level, this is equivalent to repressing one's own body, one's own human nature. We all start out, as Freud said, as "bodyego." We are embedded with nature, the physical world. Our personal evolution then goes through a series of developmental stages until, by the time we are 12 years old or so, we claim full ego status. Our cognitive abilities, our brains, and our sense of self have reached a mostly adult level. We can reason in the abstract; we can take the role of another; we can form and work with hierarchies, possibilities, and hypotheses. We have a secure sense of our own identities. But this evolutionary scheme cannot happen if we have denied and repressed our bodies. If we have done that, we end up in diagnosable pathologies.

This presents the intriguing, and somewhat frightening, conclusion that Western civilization may be operating from a pathological framework, a framework that has been developing since the Great Mother traditions were suppressed rather than transcended and included. If that is the case, what might those pathologies be?

Developmental psychology tells us that during the early formation of the ego there are three major stages: pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational thinking. Pre-op is roughly equivalent to preschool; con-op to grade school; form-op to the teens years and beyond. If things go wrong in the pre-op stage (where the child moves out of her embeddedness with nature and establishes a mental-ego), the resultant pathologies are in the borderline/narcissistic categories. If things go wrong at the con-op stage, the resultant pathologies are "script" or role pathologies. If things go wrong at the form-op stage, then a host of psychoneuroses can occur. So, if Western society, by suppressing the Great Mother traditions, is still saddled with the pathology that attends to that developmental stage, we ought to have some borderline/narcissistic problems that are engrained in society's gameplan.

The major feature of borderline and narcissism is a weak boundary system. In other words, the distinction between emotional-me and emotional-other is not well defined. It just so happens that this state or condition of weak boundaries is the primary definition of codependency. Researchers that work in the field of recovery claim that up to 85% of the people in Western society do the business of life from a codependent mindset. If that claim is true, then what is the remedy? Codependent recovery is the current remedy, and there are many folks gaining quality recovery in programs such as Alanon, Coda, and the various Adult Children of Dysfunctional Family groups. One can hope that once there are enough recovered codependents in society, critical mass will be achieved and society itself will shift to a more healthy set of contracts among its citizens.

On the other hand, we will still be left with the fact that the Great Mother traditions, which are the societal and probably the spiritual counterpart to an individual's developmental process, must be taken into account. Said differently, Nature must be included-not deified, as the Romantics have done, because that would be regressive. Included means that we find a way, as a society, to honor the Earth and accept that we are all, first and foremost, children of the Earth.

Bruce Bibee, MTP, is a counselor in private practice. He is also the owner/instructor of the Kung-Fu San Soo Center.