Heal Yourself, Heal the Children - green spirit

Heal Yourself,
Heal the Children

Most of us are broken and/or out of balance in some way – physically, emotionally, spiritually. And the world mirrors this: it, too, is out of balance. Ask yourself: Is your own personal world in balance? Healing ourselves will help to heal the planet. As without, so within.

Don´t carry on the legacy of disrespect and mental, physical, emotional or even sexual abuse of children. In nature, animals that are unfit for parenting normally have no offspring. Their bad parenting habits are not perpetuated. There are therefore hardly any unfit parents in nature. Sadly, we cannot say the same of us humans.

In human civilization

extreme cruelty can be sanctioned by culture, for example genital mutilation of babies and children in Africa and the Mediterranean, burning people alive in former Europe (inquisition and witch hunt) or former India (widows), crippling the feet of people for reasons of beauty (former China) and so on. 
Unfit parents can inflict many hurtful parenting habits on their children without killing them. See for example the Thank you letter to JK Rowling by B., published in The Guardian on April 17th:
» www.theguardian.com

The author describes grandparents who blame their daughter's fatal multiple sclerosis on her surviving eight-year old son, the “monster who had destroyed his own mother”. He describes how he had to fight depression for most of his life and how the books of Harry Potter helped him survive.

Over generations

bad parenting skills can accumulate to toxic levels within families. Past and present wars, famines and other hardships, low self-esteem and ethics based on violence, control and power struggles further distort the souls of children. Although many still prefer not to look into their dark places, hardly anyone is without them. If you don’t look at them and change yourself, history will repeat itself.

How do you start off on a path of self-reflection?
First get an overview on therapy forms and their underlying conception of the human being. There are hundreds of different therapy schools, for example psychoanalysis (the therapist is a doctor), behavioural therapy (the therapist is a coach), systemic therapy (the therapist "pokes" the system), conversational therapy (the therapist is another human being/companion), Gestalt therapy (the therapist is another human being/companion with a certain tool box), psychodrama therapy (the therapist helps to enact critical biographical scenes to resolve them), neuro-linguistic programming (the therapist manipulates with a time-proven tool set), Rolfing (the therapist offers a very specific kind of massage) and many others. In Germany Eva Jeaggi's gives a comprehensive overview on the different concepts with her book "Zu Heilen die zerstossnen Herzen" (1995, Rowolt Verlag).