Last year, I read a book called Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson. (If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it.) She got me thinking about emotional maturity as spectrum, rather than something you either have or you don't. I see emotional maturity more like a muscle, one that you can build or one that can atrophy, depending on how much it is used.
Honestly, I don’t feel this current North American culture offers many structures, skillset- or mindset-developing opportunities to practice and cultivate emotional maturity. In fact, after reading the book, my beloved Austin said he thought emotional immaturity was an epidemic in the US, and quite possibly in many parts of the world. When I read about the experiences and impacts of emotional immaturity, I had to agree with him.
One of the parts of the book that was extra meaningful to me was the idea of ‘healing fantasies’. The idea is that we experience a wounding in childhood through our parents/caregivers and then we create a fantasy about how we can heal this wound. This usually involves a “If only I just [fill in the blank], then I will be healed.” For example, if only I am quiet and self-sufficient, then my dad won’t be so stressed and fight with us. Or, if only I am demanding and loud, then my mom will give me her attention and care about me.
In my case, my healing fantasy for the last few decades was something like, “If only I bring in facilitation tools like appreciative inquiry and comfort-stretch-panic zones, then my parents and I will develop the deep heartfelt bond that I see Maggie has with her mom, or Sky has with his dad.” I was both comparing to others and seeking to use all the tools I have to get the healing I wanted, to receive the kind of relationship I longed for. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work that way.
The healing fantasy is challenging for a few reasons. One, it puts so much pressure on one side of the relationship equation when, clearly, it always takes two to tango. Two, it misses the reality that each person will have whatever emotional capacity they have, based on their own life experiences, and this capacity can only be changed through learning/unlearning efforts by that person. Three, the healing fantasy refuses to acknowledge the reality of past experiences and suggests that, despite that past evidence, there is a perfect point that can be reached with enough effort, where there is no conflict or disruption.
I started thinking about how this idea of ‘healing fantasies’ extends to non-profits, social movements, worker-cooperatives, democratic schools, etc., and many other ‘alternative’ spaces. I, and other folks in these spaces, have often been burned in more mainstream industrial/corporate systems, and so we turn to these places to make everything better and to be good and right. And then they are not, because conflicts are inevitable and conscious containers have not been built, and so we feel burned again. Many times, in seeking this kind of perfection, there is no space for mistakes or grace or learning, much less in working through conflicts constructively. Instead people or organizations are shunned and/or ‘cancelled’, often painfully discarded because they missed the mark on the unnamed, unarticulated healing fantasy (more on that coming in another article).
For me, it has been important to recognize that co-creating healing communities is not about starting or perpetuating healing fantasies. I cannot impose my ideas about what communities will or should look like, much less how they will become what they are. Instead, I and others can offer an invitation, work together to co-create a conscious container (this step often gets skipped), continue to fill and empty that container, and then be present to what is and what wants to emerge over time. I need to know full well that conflicts will be a part of any healing community, and that if we continue to build the muscles of emotional maturity with mindsets, skillsets, and structures, we will be able to address them and grow together.
Maybe that's why a participant once said that Jamming was “Jedi training for our emotions”. For sure, in YES! Jams, we are learning how to be with people and with our own selves as beings with complex emotions. We learn how to make space for them, using our hearts, spirits and bodies as the sources of understanding — rather than just, or primarily, our minds. So many of the elements of emotional maturity that Lindsay is naming in her book — honoring complexity, listening and resonating, being a steady presence, etc. — are what we practice and cultivate in Jams together.
And it's also more than that. Through Jams, and like the Jedi, I have come to understand that there is a force in and through our emotions – which is completely central to our healing. Healing within my self. Healing in my relationships with others – those who share my identities and those who don't. Co-creating systems that support healing. Healing with the Earth. The Force is with us, one way or another, and if we can become conscious of it, we can really channel it towards the healing cycle.(Star Wars fans out there, please forgive me if I am not doing the Force justice here, and feel free to add in the comments. :)
I think about the mindset shifts that are essential here. One is that each of us is a healer in some way, shape or form, and each of us is in need of healing in some way, shape, or form. Healing is not an external thing, but an interdependent reciprocity lived out in human and Earth community. That asks us to develop skills – of listening, of witnessing, of making space, of sharing vulnerably, of mirroring, of slowing down, and so much more that we will continue to explore here. It also invites structural shifts in our systems, organizations, and world, to integrate and make continuous space for practices that invoke, inspire and support us to heal together. Examples of these shifts include inclusive healing circles, four-day work weeks, ready access to the arts, neighborhood potlucks, delinking worth from work, and much more.
Amidst all of this, I am in an active process of unlearning my own healing fantasies, and I have been making some progress. I spent a month in January with my mother in Chicago, as she cared for me during a significant eye surgery. It started out bumpy, as I started to go into my typical habits and stories, and then something shifted, when I received support from a few different circles of Jammers and friends. I realized I could release the fantasy and receive the emotional support I needed from others, while simultaneously receiving gratefully the gifts of medical knowledge and care and stability of food, housing, transport, from my mom. I changed my understanding of the container we were able to build, and it made a world of difference. As a result, I healed a lot internally and externally with my mom and actually feel closer to her than I have in well over a year. I am mindful now to not construct another healing fantasy, and rather just build upon the container we are now co-creating, to see how it can fill us for whatever time we have left together in this life.
Reading this over, I think it can be summed up in a phrase:
Release the fantasy, embrace the Force.
What do you think? I would love to hear your healing fantasies, or anything you want to share, in the comments. Thank you for being with me in this learning journey. More to come next week!
Shilpa dear, this has such huge revelations for me and, I would imagine, many of us. I’ve been wading through my own these past 2 weeks, and for me it has come down to forgiveness of others, and thus forgiveness of myself. Seeing how much of the problem has been acknowledgement of my own envy for…whatever…and in the process recognizing the envy of others for my own whatevers. And they would be right in envying my good luck with this and that, just as it makes real sense that I would envy…dotdotdot…or folks would envy your beauty and brilliance.
Happens all the time. I ask myself, how big can I be and be glad for another’s fortune when I have been hurt or igored in the process?
I guess we all struggle with variations on this theme, so how do we get beyond it? Personally, I have no answers, but I know the dilemma is real and it stinks in all directions. Denying it does not help, but what has helped for me recently, is something like this:
People who are hurting, hurt people. Do I envy a hurting friend? Nope. Do I miss her/him? Yup. So maybe that’s the reality, and I’ve got other things to do right now, so maybe there’s a shelf to put that on for the time being, and focus on stuff that’s a lot more interesting to me in the moment.
Healing fantasies- a very helpful frame!