There has been movement toward subself-based psychotherapy in the last thirty years in the form of inner child work, voice dialogue therapy, and an array of other psychospiritual approaches. These methods started with a single inner subself and then expanded to include dialogue with many different attributes or feelings, and have grown to include dialogue with any number of transitory emotive states, Jungian-type archetypes, and role-based behaviors. While this way of targeting sub-roles, sub-emotions, or sub-attribute aspects of the overall personality has been a helpful step in the right direction for therapeutic interventions, it is only a partial small step toward the true source of our core emotive congestion.
The limitations of other approaches involve several critical areas of therapeutic context and content, where all still operate within present psychological paradigms that do not understand how deeply mired in primacy of will-as-essence and mind-as-essence thematics they remain; do not see through to the actual architecture of the human emotional body; do not even minimally negotiate with our deep unconscious defenses; define healing far too broadly at the level of simply accessing and expressing deep emotion without knowing what is actually needed to healingly process that emotion; and finally, don’t appreciate how unconsciously pervasive and impedimental a role the strategic selves of both client and therapist play in their dyadic counter-transferential interface and thus how obstructively one’s path through therapy actually proceeds.
This doesn’t mean these approaches are without value or that they don’t help people in some ways, of course. Subself-based modalities at least represent improvement over far less effective traditional talk therapy modes; mental-body based therapies like CET, NLP, and cognitive therapy; more new-age type models like tapping temples and rolling eyes; holding body points to access emotive congestion in body-based interventions; without ever negotiating with the deep defenses; pseudo-spiritual interventions involved in clearing the pain body of ‘negative’ energy; or, most especially, the majority of western-medical-model-based psychiatric ‘therapy’ dominated so much by a pervasive psychotropic drug culture pushed by Big Pharm and the billions of dollars involved globally.
Other subself-based therapies simply go farther than these other approaches before they hit the limit they can heal, due to the fact that the practitioner will not accurately see the deeper emotive backstory of what is actually going on in any phase of a client’s journey. Two therapies may share identical clinical exercises, terminology, or even methods, but have vastly different results because one is working those exercises and methodology within a far deeper paradigm of emotive vision and so bring the heart to a new outcome of reality from there.
In EBE, a subpersona is a personality-wide snapshot taken at a particular flow-moment of our experience, where an outer occurrence triggers an accommodation or a disowning of our inner reality in favor of an outer reality. This disowning of our reality, is thus what we call a fixation, a place where an ego development becomes stuck, in the sense that the healthy disembedment process can’t proceed. This occurs because the painful disowned reality fixates and thus makes it impossible for further disembedment from the object relational ground of identity with caregivers. According to EBE, a subpersona is an actual conscious emotional aspect of consciousness that consciously lives within us, not just a theoretical therapeutic tool or construct to access repressed or unconscious core material.
So when the pain or non-validated experience of not being able to feel caregivers feel what we feel, why we are feeling it, and while we are feeling it, is too much for our fledgling ego to bear, our emotional body contracts in resistance to block out the feeling of pain. It is this resistance that creates an ego-defense ‘wall’ to take the place of a healthy ego boundary that would have formed had we encountered enough emotive porosity in caregivers to ‘land’ in the way described in earlier chapters. Because of this pain, a piece of our emotional reality ‘checks out’ or is disowned.
It is critical to understand that at the level of the fixated egoic state, this disowning process blurs the distinction between the experiencer and their experience. This is because the resistance inherent in the fixation prevents a healthy piece of our fledgling ego from disembedding from the Uroboros. Energetically, resistance-based ego defenses thus keep us embedded or fixated at the level of that painful experience. But emotively, it is this blurring at the level of the resistance-based ego defense that represents what EBE calls a subpersona, where the natural disembedment process is frustrated. A child’s consciousness remains stuck or fixated at a level of being the hurt experience because the having of that experience was so painful. This blurring between having painful experience and being painful experience is the most succinct description of subpersona in EBE. As long as we remain fused to the emoto-energetic painful experience, we won’t have enough non-fused ‘distance’ to have a relationship with it necessary to digest and heal the congestion.
Since this being fused as the painful experience makes us unable to have a context to emotionally digest its emotive-based content, it must be repressed so that life can go on. This is where we begin to utilize our otherwise natural will body- and mental body-based repression mechanisms to deny large segments of our painful emotive reality. But our will and mental bodies’ natural repression mechanisms are a double-edged sword.
In a healthy emoto-energetically plush childhood, will and mental body mechanisms are needed to sift and move into what could be called the para-consciousness the overwhelming amount of sensate data we receive on a daily basis. As such, repression algorithms are a necessary part of our ego development, in that we would be overwhelmed if we didn’t have the capacity to use our will body to utilize the mental body to repressively create compartments to store and sort all of that data.
It is only when this mechanism is used to deny the painful emotional reality created by emotively immature parenting that it becomes problematic. Obviously, the repression of tragically traumatic events in childhood is necessary for us to create enough life stability to ever make it to a therapist’s office, of course. But at that point we must therapeutically counter that natural repression mechanism so emotional wounds may heal. Not understanding the necessity to reverse repression mechanisms for full emotional health to be attained legitimizes leaving unconscious distortions in our ego development in the name of societal functionalism.
As said, it is important to note that what EBE calls a subpersona is not usually created by any single traumatic event. An event that triggers formation of a subpersona is a moment when a long series of collisions between a child’s reality and his parents’ reality ripens to a point of critical mass, and the conflict becomes too severe to emotively digest because parents are unaware or not emoto-energetically present enough to do so.
So subpersonas are formed when there is an interruption of the disembedment process due to being unable to feel caregivers feel what we feel, why we are feeling it, and while we are feeling it. EBE maintains our subpersonas are specifically comprised of five universal situational-based emotively-congested themes that form in early childhood: hurt, anxiety, rage, control, and depression; two themes created in later childhood: Guilt and Innate Despair; two deep existential-based emotively congested themes of the Shame of Insufficiency and Aloneness Anguish; and a three-tiered defense-based complex referred to in EBE as the Sentinel, comprised of Provider, Pretender, and Punisher versions, the main author of the day-to-day expressions of the Strategic Self. The Sentinel complex does not want the other nine emotively-congested situational- and existential-based subpersonas to ever fully feel the depth of their thematic feeling-tones.
Unlike other subpersona models, EBE offers that these twelve represent the actual structural and developmental anatomy or map of what has been called the shadow, how our primary emotional congestions first form, and then in what manner they are stored and expressed over a lifetime.
Along with these shadow-based subpersonas, we all carry a small innate thirteenth natural aspect that retains its emotive suppleness despite childhood wounding, the more emotionally real aspect of being that is supported and deepened by EBE dharma referred to as HOH or Head-of-Household. Because of emotively immature parenting, the HOH is not of sufficient percentage in the being to express the theme of Love which we bring into any incarnative chapter as the root essence of our soul-being at the base of our local personality. Supported and deepened by EBE to become the larger proportion of HOH presence in the being is that which would have been emergent naturally had we had emotively mature parenting, and that which is ‘recovered,’ as it were, in EBE.
All of the interventions in EBE practice are grounded in the framework of this specific emotional body anatomy. Along with the other premises described in this book, it is this linkage to a developmental ground of how psychopathology forms and is stored in all of us that makes EBE so different and so much more clinically effective than other models.
EBE thus provides a ground-context to experience subpersonas as permanent, living emotionally conflicted emotional body engravatures out of which all secondary passing distressed moods and feelings and the behaviors based upon them emanate. Without this developmental matrix, subselves in other models are unavoidably relegated to the level of free-floating passing distressed moods and feelings, which means their clinical interventions and practices will only be focusable at a symptomatic and not causal level of conflict.
As such, other definitions of subselves from other traditions are ‘downstream’ of these twelve themes and are thus reducible to them. For example, a theme of bitterness is most often a downstream manifestation of anxiety and rage; procrastination is most often a combination of anxiety and control; and sadness is most often a version of hurt and depression.
All other subself models in use today lack the link of their subselves to a ground developmental matrix based on a deep misunderstanding of what children actually need to be parented most effectively because none of their therapeutic paradigms are based in emotivity-as-human-essence. As such, they can only deal with diluted versions of these twelve themes, which limits and prevents causal-level healing. By working proactively with these twelve universal themes directly instead of chasing down more downstream versions that secondarily or reactively arise, emotional body healing is far more productive in both the short and long term: working only downstream playouts leaves upstream subpersona sources untouched.
When these upstream congestions are deconstructed, downstream emotional realities and their behavioral expressions change naturally as a consequence of that decongestion. And when EBE says these subpersonas are permanent, it doesn’t mean the emotively-valenced theme such as hurt or anxiety or shame is permanent. It means that there is a permanent soulful aspect of self that is wounded in childhood and from that point on carries the subpersona theme until it’s healed. Once healed, that emotively congested theme changes its emotive valence.
The charts at the end of this chapter illustrate the architecture of both strategic and authentic versions of the emotional body.
Hurt, the first subpersona to form, is created early in infancy as the initial result of the first emoto-energetic collisions between a child’s and its parents’ realities, as the child is unable to feel his parents feel what s/he is feeling, why s/he is feeling it, and while s/he is feeling it. Hurt is an energetic contraction of the heartfield, not unlike how pain in the physical body causes us to recoil from the external source of any pain. But in the emotional body, the recoiling has nowhere to move except farther into itself and away from the dynamical interface with the outer painful reality.
Thus, the Hurt that flows from an emotively-unconnected relatedness ground with caregivers is the true root of psychopathology, wherein our naturally vulnerable and opened-up heartfields collide with the innocently closed-off defense-based strategic emotional bodies of parents. As said, this is the ‘smoking gun’ cause of our psychopathologic emotive landscapes. And as already noted, because the emotional body-based wounded template-experience of childhood is so intrinsic to how we then view and experience human life, we have no other reference reality with which to compare it. There is no way to see something as foreground without a new background reality against which it is made visible.
When Hurt keeps occurring because the child can’t feel the caregivers feel what s/he feels, it cannot be digested emotively and thus reaches a certain critical mass. When this happens, Anxiety is born. Anxiety is simply the fear of future hurt occurring, arising as Hurt happens frequently and deeply enough for the child to anticipate the next occurrence. Anxiety is thus derivative of prior Hurt, an emotionally reactive relationship with the future based on experience of what has happened in the past, as we fear more versions of Hurt against which we learn to become anxiously vigilant. If we were never hurt, we’d never be worried about being hurt in the future.
Large reservoirs of Anxiety within us thus always indicate large reservoirs of unhealed Hurt. This truth is rarely addressed when treating anxiety in these modern pharmacological times, especially when drugs are prescribed reflecting the old paradigm simplistic and erroneous premise that anxiety is caused at the level of brain-chemicals.
The only true way to authentically heal and dissipate anxiety is to process it in EBE dharma at the same time the underlying Hurt that serves as its source is processed in the same way. EBE differentiates Anxiety and fear by identifying Anxiety as our worrisome anticipation of future Hurt, and fear as the secondary relationship we have with our anxiety. Likewise, fear is also infused in all the other congestive emotional themes. This is why fear is not a primary subpersona in EBE, living within us instead as a secondary weave in the fabric of all our congested subpersonal aspects.
Using the metaphor of music to further explain this: Hurt is the music; Anxiety the instrument that expresses the music; and fear is our unsettling reaction to the troublesome music we are hearing.
As Hurt and Anxiety accumulate in the young child with no way to be processed and thus no way to be digested with emotively immature parenting, their combined dynamic reaches a critical mass, usually by age two, and expresses as Rage. Rage is simply the inevitable expression of undigested Hurt and Anxiety, the only means by which the preverbal or neo-verbal developing child can channel the Hurt and Anxiety they feel.
Rage is thus always a derivative emotion, a downstream version of our accumulated Hurt and Anxiety. It is not possible to be angry or rageful about something that in some way has not hurt us or made us anxious. This is true whether or not what hurts is personal, as in rejection and betrayal, or impersonal, as in being enraged by social injustice or political duplicity. In the latter cases, what is hurt is our sense of dignity and empathy for others: we ‘scratch’ the ‘itch’ of Hurt and/or Anxiety by becoming angry.
This simple idea has enormous ramifications for framing adult contexts of Rage. If it were recognized on a universal level that we could not be in the thrall of Rage unless we were deeply Hurt in some way, and we learned to express that Hurt as such, instead of as Rage, not only would behavioral expressions of Rage lessen, a new way of connecting with each other by vulnerably expressing our Hurt instead would give us new ground for negotiating our conflicts.
Despite the pervasiveness of our distorted religious, spiritual, and cultural positions about Rage, this does not mean Rage is negative at all. Rage is simply a shadow-based version of our innate positive qualities of Passion. What is ‘negative’ is what we do with our rage behaviorally. If the feeling of Rage was seen as a reasonable proof we have been Hurt and have been made Anxious, then we could acknowledge and be grateful for the natural feeling of Rage as pointing us to its true source. But instead of expressing the Rage with violent action, the action would be for us to go back inside to find the Hurt and/or Anxiety at Rage’s source, and express that instead.
Imagine scenarios of that dynamic, where Hurt is expressed in adult intimate relationships instead of Rage, and you will be able to imagine entirely different outcomes of conflict and far more vulnerably-valenced interfaces of heart-fields in all manner of interactions of human beings.
So because Rage is almost always viewed as being a negative emotion and thus punished in some form, we learn to repress Rage in most of our personal and societal interactions. This means it is rarely discharged or expressed productively. The world-wide transcultural repression of Rage as a negative emotion is the actual cause of all the violence in the world, as a compensation for repressed rage. When we finally incorporate ways to not see the feeling of Rage as negative and so support its healthy processing as Hurt or Anxiety behaviorally, violence in the world could taper off and end.
In EBE’s developmental picture, then, as Rage begins to emerge, frequently in what we refer to as the ‘terrible twos’ wherein tantrums begin to express, it is seen that the tantrum is simply the child’s only way to express his or her reservoir of accumulated Hurt and Anxiety.
In other words, what is Rage to a parent is not ‘Rage’ at all for children. For children Rage is nothing but passionately expressing deep and undigestible Hurt and Anxiety. If this were recognized, we would have far different interventions for rageful behavior in children and far healthier psychodynamical contexts in family life. Emotionally mature caregivers know this instinctively without having to be taught this.
But in almost all of our families all over the world in all of our history as a species, Rage is punished either benignly or malignantly. Despite being an improvement over past behaviors of physically striking children when they expressed Rage, even the modern forms of ‘time-out’ are non-validative of a child’s inner Hurt and Anxiety as the actual cause of the Rage or tantrum. If a child begins acting out in a rageful manner, a parent with open-hearted caring explores in that moment what it was that has Hurt or made the child anxious so much that they are feeling so rageful. The child could then emotionally digest the actual cause of his pain and accept the limitations put on their acting out patterns.
But since most parents punish children for feeling Rage, this only deepens and extends the non-validation of the underlying Hurt and Anxiety. This then causes more Hurt, more Anxiety, and more Rage. But because of the innate wisdom of children, they begin to learn quickly that it is not acceptable to express what they feel in any of these ways. They learn instead that if they act this way, parents will approve, and if they don’t, they won’t. Control is thus born, the strategic ground in children used to maximize approval and Love from parents and minimize rejection and punishment.
This Control algorithm is the essential dynamic at work in Brando’s quote at the beginning of the book.
Learning to Control what we feel emotionally as the solution to changing the way we act is the ignominious seed for all the later strategically inauthentic versions of selfhood that dominate all of our relationships with self and others in life. The Control-based strategic ground children learn to manifest to maximize approval and Love and minimize rejection and punishment from parents who cannot feel the Hurt and Anxiety in them because of their own heartfield blockages, then translates into strategically ‘acting’ in inauthentic ways to maximize approval and Love and minimizing rejection or punishment with all others in the world.
In this way, Control is the foundational seed for the strategic self, the version of selfhood that then dominates the relationship with reality for virtually all human beings in earth. Strategically repressing what we actually feel by means of our Control mechanism and learning that we get rewarded by parents for acting in certain ways that go against what we really feel, becomes the pivotal form of relating in and to the world in all domains.
This acting a certain way to unconsciously and manipulatively influence the outcome of any interaction with anyone in life in order to maximize approval and Love and minimize rejection or punishment is learned so early and incorporated so deeply in our relationship with ourselves and others it becomes a de facto unconscious motive influencing all of our actions and reactions in life and makes us mistakenly believe it is a theme of our natural human being.
Thus living inauthentically relative to our true emotive reality in order to manipulatively maximize approval and Love and minimize rejection and punishment from others because Life taught us so, in the form of how we experienced parents unable to feel what we were feeling, why we were feeling it and while we were feeling it, is the actual cause of almost all of our suffering and non-manifestation of dreams as individuals and as a species.
This inauthentic motive for almost everything we feel and do in life is almost completely unconscious for us in lieu of not healing our congested emotional bodies. Almost everyone says they are being authentic in any moment. But what we call authentic is actually what EBE sees as the inauthentic strategic self we have constructed without knowing it.
As said throughout this book, the true authentic self is only accessible and expressible by deeply effective emotional body enlightenment effort, something that will never happen while we think we can change by altering our thoughts, behavior, or beliefs, simply accessing repressed emotional reservoirs or becoming clear how those reservoirs create belief systems, by tapping our temples, rolling our eyes, changing the spin of our chakras, learning to transcend the ‘pain body,’ or by attaining what has been mistakenly called enlightenment in eastern traditions.
Virtually all of our spiritual, religious, secular, psychological, or political solutions to our problems as a species are completely blind to this artificial Control-based pathology, iatrogenically injected into us in childhood, the lens through which we view reality that is the base cause for why we remain mired in suffering, conflict, violence, and broken dreams. The truth is that we all do life as inauthentic manipulators who learned to sell out our emotive reality in childhood and as a result also learned how not to trust that Life will impart to us the reality that we are knowable in the form of being felt as who we actually are.
We thus artificially become someone else than who we really are very early in childhood, almost always by the age of seven. Because our emotive-based dependent needs were not naturally provided, we are forced to get those needs met via the Control we strategically employ to try to artificially manufacture positive outcomes in life because positive natural outcomes wherein natural approval and Love could occur did not happen for us.
Love, expressible as an emotive-based set of frequency bandwidths of being, can neither be let in fully or take root fully in an inauthentic version of self, because Love is the most authentic dynamic of Life, of which everything is made. Love can thus only temporarily touch but not take root and grow blossoms of connectedness with ourselves, others, and Divine Being when the version of self that seeks Love in the first place is covered over by an artificial Strategic form of selfhood.
In that way, no manner of any spiritual or religious practice alone will ever impart the true depth, width, and breadth of all the vibratory wavelengths of Love available to the consciousness of human beings. Deeper and truer forms of Love, God, or Reality are only experiencible when we first create an authentic self capable of experiencing them. And since we have never had a way to actually create that depth of authenticity before now, because we have not seen through to the hidden truth that the very one who seeks Love, God, or the truth of Reality has been unconsciously inauthentic, we as a species have much to look forward to in this and future generations in terms of experiencing forms of Love, God, enlightenment, and personal connectedness that we have never tasted before.
So until and unless we learn to heal the artificial strategic self of our being in charge of our lives and all of our societal interactions and efforts, including those who have become enlightened in nondual traditions and feel they are thus beyond such a need, and learn to awaken the sleeping authentic self of our being, no amount of enlightenment, mental body insight, or behavioral intervention personally or globally will ever address the root-cause of our suffering as individuals or as a species. To change the world we must change ourselves first, and EBE teaches that changing oneself first is about learning to heal deeply enough to be reborn as the essentially emotive authentic self we really are.
Control-based strategic selfhood does not cover our authenticity 100%, of course. On average, at this point in our planetary consciousness evolution, most of us carry between twenty and twenty-five percent authentic HOH being intermingled with seventy-five to eighty percent strategic versions of self. Some domains of our lives may possess more, or less, wound-based strategy than others, but the overall average is solid in EBE’s experience.
Another way of driving home how deeply this issue of strategic selfhood is embedded within the human experience is to say that the degree your strategic self is dominating your life is the degree you do not know how deeply your strategic self dominates your life.
The intermingling of strategic and authentic themes in everything we feel, everything we think, and everything we do is so complex no one can become incisively aware of it or process it through to healing without reflection of an Other: EBE is impossible to do alone as any kind of self-help regimen, examples of which are so rife in the human potential field. All self-help guidances available in pop psychology contexts are based in false feel-good goals, attitudinal shifts in will and mental bodies, and mere behavioral change. None of them begin with the paradigmatic premise we are emotional beings before we are willful, mental, or physical beings.
A foundational principle of EBE is that healing change can only occur in the same domain as the wounding occurred. Since all of our wounding occurred in relational space with parents and involved primary emotive dynamisms, healing must also occur in relational space with a facilitator and others in group process that also involves primary emotive dynamisms. Solo effort without that critical and necessary relational space and the associated primary emotive dynamisms at point for suffering and our recovery, will only result is shallow treatment at the level of shallow symptom.
An EBE facilitator must thus possess the most refined kind of ‘eyes’ that can see when, where, and how to disentangle this complexity in order to heal away the strategic themes and thus allow a higher percentage of authentic themes to arise, and can only do so if they themselves have attained some modicum of emotionally mature authentic selfhood in ways our parents did not, so as to actuate real change at the characteriological level. The specifics of this assertion has never been articulated in the over one hundred years of psychological paradigms in our world.
So because Rage is almost universally held as a negative emotion, most cultures and families teach us to employ Control to manage our Rage. Control usually comes in the form of willful, cognitive, spiritual, and behavioral-related overlays to suppress that which we do not have familial or societal permission to express. Control is then the means we use to strategically and reactively sculpt ourselves to get our needs met in life, with the core agenda of maximizing approval and acceptance and minimizing rejection and disapproval. And getting enlightened is one of the most powerful ways to gain respect and approval by others, even though this motive is almost completely unconscious to most enlightened teachers.
As said, parents are not the only authorities guilty of counter-transference fusion-reactions. Ironically, it is the unhealed, invisible, and fear-based subpersonas of Control in spiritual gurus, clergy, psychologists and psychiatrists that ends up prescribing all of the cognitive, behavioral, religious, transcendental, or drug solutions for our suffering.
Because of our innate emotive nature, trying to control our suffering as a downstream effort not based in that emotivity always leads to a solution that involves creation of another version of the very suffering we sought to control in the first place: we simply create new outcome-versions of the very things we resist. This happens because Control is a resistance-based reaction that only creates further versions of the very fear it seeks to control. We can’t clean something soiled with something that is also soiled. Resistance can never lead to wholeness. But if we were given permission to express our Rage productively throughout our childhood development because that Rage was seen by our caregivers as an indicator of our deeper Hurt and Anxiety, we would never have learned to employ Control in the stagnative and destructive manners to which we have been conditioned.
Now armed with a governing dynamic to maximize approval and minimize rejection, a child begins his/her social explorations in early school relational contexts. Since s/he has learned to ‘shrink-to-fit’ their true reality of emotive valence to some degree at home, children will automatically either extend this dynamic into peer relatedness or use compensatory over-expressions of self-authority, as bullies do. As the school experience progresses, collectivistic projections of this maximize approval–minimize rejection dynamic and over-self-authority compensations create the clique, where conformity with whatever the prevailing acceptable attributes of style, looks, or behavior, focused, embodied, and led by the compensating clique leadership, determines a child’s status in the social net.
Tragically, incorporating Control-based energetics of relatedness into a child’s world will itself prevent the actual heart-field connection they crave with others. In other words, even if someone is strongly accepted into a cliquish social group, that inclusion is a reward for the conformity of the shrink-to-fit dynamic, i.e., it is not the true emotively authentic version of the self of the child that is accepted: it is their strategic self that is.
Over time, this relative lack of true heart-connectability in peer relatedness, even when it appears to be successful, makes it appear to the growing emotional body of the child that again, as it was at home, that reality does not serve up heart-field-resonant relatedness with others.
This leads to the emergence of the next developmental subpersona suffering nexus, that of Depression. Depression occurs next in the developmental sequence because a Control-based relationship with life does not allow us to heartfully connect to others, because a controlled strategic version of self interfaces with others. The ensuing feelings of alienation, most of which remain unconscious, create the foundation for Depression. The clinical arisement of depression itself incontrovertibly displays the hidden alienation created by trying to strategically create connection with others.
This is also the reason Depressive themes of hopelessness, helplessness, and suicide are so prevalent in teens. The strategic-based Control subpersona fully blossoms in this phase of peer pressure and conformity, as teens socially and strategically sculpt themselves from the outside-in to gain acceptance from peers for their behavior, attitudes or dress. In that way, Depression emerges when they are unable to get their needs met from the inside-out, because they are surrounded by others who themselves operate out of inauthentic selfhood strategies, including parents and teachers. This can lead to suicidal despair when they blame themselves for this failure, not knowing this failure comes from their innocent, but doomed-to-fail strategies, and the similar strategies of those people all around them.
The child that is not strongly accepted cannot find any place in the social milieu, and the pain is more consciously and outwardly evident. It is this version of teen, underlain by deep feelings of alienation, that shows up as suicide in extreme cases of extra-sensitive teens, and in less extreme cases shows up as either teenagers’ common use of street drugs to medicate it down, and/or risky or acting out behaviors meant to compensate for it. Teens raised in more emotively mature households simply are not drawn to street drugs and risky behaviors: they have learned from the templates of their more emotively mature parents to value themselves too much.
The drug use and acting out behaviors demonstrate the underlying Depression at cause just as much as a suicide does. And in other extreme cases of how deeply the relational alienation of this phase can occur, the news is filled with many examples of mass murders and/or violence as the tragic versions of that acting out.
As another example of when Depression is not covered over by strategic successes, in the news recently as of this writing, an adult man in his twenties who had been missing for some time showed up in a national newspaper in a photo of a homeless man, who was then identified by his family. His mother’s reaction to his being found gave away a compelling reason for his Depressive-laden dynamics at point for his homelessness.
It went something like, ‘My baby is in pain, and I will spend the rest of my life making him well.’
Here is a tragic example of a mother’s counter-transference in relating to her grown son as a baby who needs her to make him well, which would only be the current expression of how she raised him all of his life. That her reaction was viewed as appropriate to a loving mother’s care for her son, instead of how it overtly displayed the toxic dynamics that most likely were at primary cause for why the man ran away in hopelessness in the first place, is yet another tragic indictment of how much in denial we are as a species to the poisonous counter-transferential toxicities of parents in the context of the cult of family values that only looks like clean love to the ignorant in both professional and laic populations.
For others, the Depression theme never accrues to a critical enough mass to become conscious, covered over as it can be by the ‘success’ and reward of acceptance in either scholastic, social, or athletic endeavors. But even when we seem to get our acceptance needs met as teens and then later as adults, the gratification that results from this is a temporary solution that never goes through to the depth of our authentic need.
Strategically-generated success in covering over Depression thus only teaches the child that outer rewards and successes never reach down to heart-deep areas of being, creating the hollow feeling within so many overachievers experience, precisely because their over-achieving is a compensation for an already inadequate core of self-worth. In such cases, we can’t let in the significance of attainments because they can’t ‘land’ in any authentic version of self, because such a version has never been ‘grown’ sufficiently. As such, a drug of compensation only makes us feel better temporarily, and can never nourish us as the food of authentic relatedness does.
This is also why attaining and sustaining Love in our relationships as adults is so problematic: coming from a base of a strategic version of self, we try to ‘capture’ Love, acceptance, and self-worth and hold it, which can never work. The authenticity of real Love lies beyond whatever our strategic grasping hand can reach. Real Love has no moving parts: it moves in us only when we stop consciously reaching for it or unconsciously resisting it.
Virtually all of us are aware of how much we reach or ache for Love. But very, very few ever really experience how much we, in the form of our hidden defenses, unconsciously resist the very Love we seek because to those defenses it was proven to never be available in our childhoods in the form of healthy parental emotive porosity. As such, any near occasion of Love coming at us in later life is resisted so as not to recreate the horrific pain that occurred when we were emotively vulnerable and energetically defenseless as children.
It is this double reality, where our conscious adult selves seek Love that so often never seems to ‘stick:’ this only happens because our unconscious defenses will not allow us to be emotively porous and vulnerable enough to offer Love a real and enduring landing place in us.
In all these ways, EBE maintains that Depression is not caused by any altered serotonin levels in the physical body as held by sophomoric body-based paradigms, and that instead, serotonin levels are only the secondary effect of emotional-based Depression in the emotional body. The current psychotropic drug-based culture that sees the physical body as the source-cause of emotional body distress will soon be seen as a barbaric and harmful prolonger and deepener of our pain.
Those who need relief from Depression need to connect with an emotional growth facilitator, not with a drug dealer with a doctorate innocently or malignantly ignorant of the subtleties of the heart. The pandemic presence of overt or repressed Depression in all of our cultures indicates how hurt, anxious, angry, and controlled we are as world population, and how little experts understand about the basic dynamics of the emotional body.
These five components of the shadow are thus etched reactively into our emotional body by not being able to feel caregivers feel what we felt, why we were feeling it, and while we were feeling it, and without having fusion-reactions to us. With the four more existential-based subpersonas and the three aspects of defense-based structures discussed next, our twelve subpersona aspects of the Shadow are conscious sub-beings within us, alive and desperately waiting for someone to access them and supply them with the medicine of Love and connectedness they’ve always needed.
There are two reasons why EBE’s version of subpersonas become actual conscious entities within us and not created artificially as mere therapeutic constructs. The first is that we are alive and conscious beings at all levels at all moments, imparted by our overarching soul-being.
Whatever we experience in life thus comes alive in us in an intrinsic way as we animate our reactions to life with varying degrees of consciousness. Even the cells in our physical body are ‘aware’ enough of their needs to be able to absorb nutrients, perform their functions, and ‘act out’ as physical body distress and disease when they do not receive their version of healthy care in their physical domain.
Secondly, in the same way brain scientists inform us that we record and store all of our experiences in life to some degree, our emotional body Shadow-aspects store all the context-details of other environmental data we experience while they are forming and coalescing. In other words, as they develop, emotive-based subpersonas incorporate other aspects of the child’s world into them. Thus, a child’s fondness for sweets at one stage of his life and for fruit at another will result in the younger-formed subpersona preferring candy and a later-formed subpersona liking oranges. At all levels, conscious or unconscious, consciousness imparts personality shape.
This incorporation of all the other aspects of a child’s life into the Shadow thus creates a specific character and valence to a subpersona that will be different from another, and imparting to each subpersona a true kind of their own living ‘personality.’
Lastly, our subpersonas can be described as developing in the same way as do pearls. Some kind of irritation in the inner softer tissue of a mollusk, usually a grain of sand, causes the mollusk to secrete a milky substance around the irritation. That secretion hardens and becomes what we call a pearl, the lustrous and beautiful result of a source of ‘pain.’
Just so, when the sand of irritation in the form of not being able to emoto-energetically land in caregivers, we respond by secreting a living substance of defensive-based reactive being around the irritations of that emotively painful reality. As we grow, that living substance of our reactive being then ‘hardens’ into the living, self-aware pearls of subpersonas who carry the specific valence of the six thematic charges at their irritated center, but who also possess the lustrous sheen of all the other life experiences that ‘surround’ or correlate with that specific valence. This imparts a form of subpersonal self-awareness and character with certain likes, dislikes, preferences, and reactions to life different than other subpersonas and often different than the conscious you whom you call you.
This truth that there is more to a living subpersona than just the specific six thematic valences at the core of their essence has deep ramifications for how subpersonas heal, as alluded to earlier. Only when they experience an Other with whom they can have heartfield connect can they digest that which caused them to form in the first place and ‘disembed’ from being the Hurt, Anxiety, Rage, Control, and Depression, and instead are then able to have Hurt, Anxiety, Rage, Control, Depression, and Shame and know themselves as other than just being their original dynamic.
When this kind of meta-space is made available by the presence of an emotively mature authority in the person of the EBE facilitator, over time, usually a period of two to three years, subpersona valencies change respectively into Vulnerability, Trust, Conviction, Management, and Riskability. In this way, the subpersonas remain alive after healing what caused them to arise in the first place. In this transmutation, they integrate naturally back into the emotional body of the newly emerging HOH and seed these new healthy valences as aspects of the person that are then carried out and through to our manifested life and expressions.
As said, there are two other subpersonas that form later in childhood as we move out into the web of social interactions and relatedness with others. Guilt is the basis for how we move and project deeper more existential layers of self-held Insufficiency Shame into our basis of connecting with others. One step more unconscious below Guilt, Innate Despair is the carrying forward of the deeper existentially-held Aloneness Anguish.
Guilt is an emoto-energetic dynamic that serves as the basis for serving the needs of others in caretaking or enabling strategic ways that try to avoid being rejected and support being accepted and loved. Because our emotive-as-essence-based needs and desires could not be served by emotionally immature parenting in infancy, feeling guilty of having our own needs and desires is the inevitable outcome, because our innate experience was that they were not servable or ever met emotively.
Feeling guilt consciously or unconsciously about our own needs and desires thus causes us to over-serve others’ needs and desires as a compensation, leading to caretaking and enabling behaviors toxic for giver and receiver.
Innate Despair is the subpersona that holds a deep helplessness or hopelessness about existence in general. It is the voice of: ‘I find no hope in ever feeling like I will ever know how to do anything right in this world.’ This feeling has a voice that might say: ‘Even if I know what is right for me to be or do, I am unable to actually be or do it.’
Interestingly, Innate Despair is the basis for what has been called teenage angst, its more overt playout dynamic, and is the basis for gender-based inadequacies that become more consciously acted out in teenage years. It thus represents the despair of the newly emergent teenager who must start to face into less child-like ways of relating to others and the world, with the predictable hopeless or helpless feeling that would emerge if they were not properly prepared gender-wise for that stage.
Shame of Insufficiency is the aspect represented by a feeling that the burdens of incarnative life in these realms are too onerous for us to meet with the self-perceived flawed versions of personal self created by never having been met emoto-soulfully by strategic forms of parenting. In that sense, we blame ourselves for the ‘sins’ of the parents, who themselves innocently did not know how deeply they were unable to provide for our emoto-soulful needs because they also never received emoto-soulful nourishment from their parents, necessitating their own strategic-based defenses that disallowed them from serving ours. We thus turn the ‘fault’ back onto ourselves for why we never received emoto-soulful nourishment: somehow it is our fault, that something must be wrong about us for never having received it.
The existentially-held and almost wholly unconscious Shame of Insufficiency is the basis for the Dark Age invention of original sin, a completely disingenuous and wholly erroneous projection of the Shame of Insufficiency, engendered not by some mythical action by some Adam and Eve, but by emotively immature parenting, and then poisonously projected out onto our relationship with Divine Being by Dark religions.
The outrageous teaching of original sin has allowed archaic religions to enslave countless billions over the millennia, the club they hold over people’s heads such that they, and only they, possess the key to solving by teaching people they require the religion and/or its particular prophet or savior for salvation, because they can never save themselves from it.
The tragedy is that what has been called original sin is a complete fabrication, its true basis as Shame of Insufficiency wholly created by emotively immature parenting, and wholly healable by human beings in EBE dharma without needing any one to save us: our own HOH-based self-authority as divine human beings and the commitment to heal, is all that is needed.
Aloneness Anguish is actually the deepest fear at the base of Personhood work, its ‘bottom’ wound, as it were, lying at the deepest layer of the existential domain of consciousness. At the same time it is both the sum and the root of all the other wounded aspects of our Shadow, the root expression of the pain that life in these dense realms has the power to cut off access to all the Spirit-based connections we knew prior to incarnation.
Aloneness Anguish thus represents the feeling that we do not belong here in this earthen realm because there is not enough emoto-soulful food or heart-connect for us to be strong enough to survive or thrive here. Most people who are attracted to EBE and Theohumanity are so because other paradigms they’ve encountered are not complete enough for them. Such people will have a strong version of this aspect because of how different density frequencies are here compared to what they are accustomed to in their home soul domains. The voice of Aloneness Anguish might express as: ‘I am terrified and unable to bear the burden of personal consciousness in what feels like an abyss of eternal solitude.’ EBE is the first dharma of our species that actually allows a proactive conscious seeking of these existentially-held unconscious elements of being and their progressive states of healing.
Developmentally, Aloneness Anguish is induced into being from our own emotivity-as-essence soulful purity as infants colliding and dissonating with the will-, energy-, or mind-first frequencies of our parents strategic versions of selfhood. In the same way as original sin is the mistaken western religious label for the Shame of Insufficiency, Aloneness Anguish serves as the basis for many eastern and hindu-based teachings like Advaita Vedanta, which mistakenly believe that earth-life in itself is somehow intrinsically not resonative with Spirit, and must be renounced in favor of a transcendental solution, never knowing our intrinsic humanity has always been the expression of our innate divinity, and as such, inseparable.
Aloneness Anguish is thus not caused by earthen realms in themselves being inherently too dense or toxic to our soulfulness: it is wholly caused by not having had emotively resompathic ground with caregivers who parented us from their own strategic versions of self and so never were able to feel what we were feeling, why we were feeling it, and while we were feeling it, and never knew they were not doing that.
These last two core subpersonas thus represent the existential-level content of our wounding, wherein life or reality itself is not safe, and from which for most people involve the most painful recovery. They are vibrationally ‘buried,’ as it were, beneath the others and the deep defenses and cannot be freed up for healing until the more downstream situational-based subpersonas are worked through.
As said earlier, Love is the root of our truest being, our 13th aspect expressed through the authentic selfhood of the HOH, covered over by this cascade of wound-based emotive themes. As the root of our being, Love is always an energy of positive pressure; always a power that is struggling to express itself while buried beneath our Hurt, Anxiety, Rage, Control, Depression, Guilt, Innate Despair, Shame of Insufficiency, Aloneness Anguish, and our three-tiered strategic-based Sentinel defenses. Only through subtraction by healing these wound-aspects does real Love arise.
As these are healed, the self-Love of the HOH that comprises the state of emotively mature egoism gradually uncovers and rises organically. Unlike so many other psychotherapeutic and spiritual-based interventions, EBE eschews any proactive cultivation of Love, contentment, happiness, or fulfillment. Such proactive effort will always and everywhere be a strategic-based effort that will absolutely prevent the natural emergence of the natural Love that vibrates as the basic tone of our being. Naturally authentic self-Love will naturally rise as we sequentially heal the congestive themes that lie ‘between’ this aspect of Self and our manifested worlds.
In that way, real Love never needs to be cultivated, and moreover cannot be cultivated other than strategically. Because it is intrinsic to our being, it can only be liberated by healing that which unnaturally keeps its embodiment from arising. This is why any and all effort to create or attain Love, happiness, or serenity in the being will always lead to inauthenticity: real Love is so Real it can only be released, not created or attained.
To finalize the picture of the human emotional body, there are three tiers or levels of defense structure in the form of ‘supra-subpersonas,’ each overseeing the protection or handling of one or more of the eight wounded subpersonas. Together, they actually comprise what EBE calls the strategic self. Separately, EBE refers to them as the three Sentinels, the Provider, the Pretender, and the Punisher.
The Provider aspect of the Sentinel was the last to form and thus first in our line of defense, overseeing and protecting the subpersonas of Hurt, Anxiety, Rage, and Depression, using Control as its front line enforcer. The Pretender aspect arose out of the deeper existential wounding that never allowed our more authentic emoto-soulful nature and being to root and prosper, and arises, as said, as we move out onto social interaction and educational institutions. The Punisher was the first to form in our preverbal phases of development from the self-blame, the inner critic who punishes us with narratives ensuring we remain unworthy, pliant, and self-deprecating as a defense. Together they represent the triad of our strategic selfhood.
The Provider aspect of the Sentinel is the defensed aspect of us that uses secondary and tertiary aspects of our being, will and mind, to literally supply us with what EBE calls meds and dreads, the substances, energies, unwarranted fears, and belief systems that keeps our inauthentic strategic version of being maintained and strong. It does this because we were never provided with the emoto-energetic fuel in childhood we needed to be able to live authentically without disowning our essential emotive nature. The Provider is like a teenager babysitting ‘children’ of Hurt, Anxiety, Rage, and Depression, and using will-based Control as its enforcer.
As a teenager and thus unable to really care for the emotive needs and suffering of the first five subpersonas, the Provider Sentinel is also author of our medication patterns. Since it is not mature enough to provide for its ‘children,’ it needs to numb them down with the ‘candy’ or ‘chocolate’ of our substance- and energetic-based drugs. By keeping the ‘children’ occupied with numbing agents to quell their suffering, it thus bolsters its ability to keep the strategic nature running by providing us with unhealthy outer fuel sources, the medicative objects of our addictions.
The Provider Sentinel literally provides us with whatever level of medicative substance or energy we need to survive and cope with life: food, exercise, religion or spirituality, codependent relationships, alcohol, enlightenment, drugs, sex, money, success, status, etc. Hard drugs like heroin and opium tend to medicate Hurt; tobacco and food-related issues for Anxiety; alcohol most often medicates Rage; excess exercise or self-attainment goals deal with Control; marijuana and drugs of its ilk are commonly used for Depression; and codependence of all kinds is used as an overall med so we never feel too alone with ourselves, which risks emotive disquiet.
Eastern-based meditation can now be added to the list as a deeply toxic and powerful medication to numb down/transcend so-called ‘negative’ emotive states that threaten the ‘wa’ of our lives in the name of spiritual process. All meditative effort must be suspended early in EBE in order to bring the meditator back to earth and to show how deeply meditation is a medication if used prior to becoming more emotively mature.
The Provider thus correlates to what is referred to in some therapeutic circles as the ‘user,’ the part of us who needs to fill in the black hole of specific aspects of our emotional distress with unhealthy relationship to just about anything available in life, good or bad in itself, that will reduce or numb down our fears and allow us to carry on. Only through such demedicative effort will the underlying subpersona dynamic be un-numbed and exposed enough to give it the real emotive food it needs to heal and not the drug used to keep it temporarily sedated. As that gradually occurs, real heartfield-based capacities of expression can emerge.
The Provider also utilizes dread, unwarranted out-of-reality projections of deep apprehension or worry to keep the inner children a victim of the world and from being exposed to emotive danger. It will supply dreads like ‘i will die if i can’t have _ _ _ _ _ _,’ or ‘God will punish me if I _ _ _ _ _ _.’ We become so accustomed to dread dynamics in everyday life, it becomes very easy to lose touch with how unreal or silly such fears actually are and how deeply wells of neurotic dread keep us from creating situations wherein the underlying subpersonal themes would be exposed such that we might become disabled emotively and rendered nonfunctional.
Dread is inextricably tied to victimhood: as such, dread is a downstream medication to cover how we actually were victims in childhood from not having emotively resompathic parenting. Actually abiding with the pain of that essential victimhood can be emotively disabling, so the Provider uses more unreal forms of dread to make us feel like false victims of life so as to prevent us from ever risking that more essential existential-level pain. As the dread/victimhood linkage is healed, and demedication of more substantive toxic medications occur, more of the five subpersonal essential wounding is revealed and thus available to be worked through.
As said, bereft of an authentic emotive-based seat of being because of non-resompathic-based dissonance of our own emotivity-as-essence with the energy-as-essence, will-as-essence, or mind-as-essence frequencies of our parents, we must strategically learn to be a pretend human being by matching parental frequency templates and also becoming energetic, willful, or mentally adept first instead of our natural state of emotion first.
The Pretender covers Guilt and Innate Despair utilizing an array of toxic dynamics of attitudes, behaviors, and energies to create a false self-authority in order to maintain an uneven false stability of being. That false self-authority is held together by what EBE calls Truth-in-Service themes. It will use reasonably accurate observations or truths of life experience in service of resisting access to fully embodying the existential level of pain, such as: ‘No one has ever been able to feel me;’ ‘If I stand to my full height I will be alone forever;’ ‘People won’t go to the depths in themselves necessary to ever be able to know me;’ ‘Life on earth will never support my needs;’ ‘I will never meet a mate,’ ‘I will never let anyone tell me who I am,’ et cetera.
These truths can also be more objectively verifiable, like: ‘Trying to blend the practical and the inspirational in life is too hard;’ ‘The world only rewards passion-work that is a compensation for people’s own lack of self-value;’ ‘Men are emotional cowards who never open up to true vulnerability, and those that appear to do so are not actually opening up, they’re broken little boys looking for mommy to save them;’ ‘Women beg for men to open up authentically, but when they encounter such a man they recoil and run away;’ ‘God never answers my honest, heartfelt, and reasonable prayers to stop the pain, so God must either not exist, or doesn’t care about me,’ etc.
After working through myriad guilt-based forms of false authority in all the domains of one’s life and detoxing from the many Truths-in-Service that keep the Pretender strong in its false self-authority, the Innate Despair-based subpersona emerges and the EBE facilitant learns how to become a surrogate parent to him or her, in effect then disabling the Pretender.
The Punisher Sentinel is the seat of judgment of self and others. It is the Shamer of our internal Shame of Insufficiency subpersona in the self-to-self domain, and criticizer of people in the self-to-other domain. It is often the internalized voice of a critical parent, and its aim is to keep others far enough away from the heart to ensure our self-unworth is never deeply exposed to ourselves or others. By being the voice that supports self-deprecation, it ensures keeping the shaming energy ‘in house,’ as it were, in that from its point-of-view, it is better for an internal part of us to keep us shamed as a defense against the outer world beating us to it.
In this way the degree of our inner self-judgment is the degree we then so easily criticize others: an emotionally healthy person simply does not energize strong dynamics of judgment either of self or of others. In EBE, judgment in this case means withdrawing love from those we judge. If we do not withdraw love from those we judge, that is called discernment. In that sense, discernment represents a key element of real love, that real love felt for another does not stay silent when we experience what seems to be self-stagnative and self-destructive actions in those whom we love.
This is completely different than how emotionally immature persons, afraid of being seen as a judgmental person, will strategically keep such judgments from interactions from others. True emotional maturity only comes when we courageously make a stand for our discerning observations of others without worrying about being rejected for it, while at the same time always looking for how such judgment may be a projection that comes from our own Punisher, so we can finish that phase and move on.
The Punisher is the deepest and most profound representative of our strategic selfhood because it was the first to form in defense of the existential level terrors associated with self-blame for our pain of never having been given a resompathic landing place in parents’ heartfields.
In that way the Punisher guards our deepest emotive repositories of self-inadequacy and existential terror of aloneness. When the Shame of Insufficiency subpersona is exposed from the retraction of both self- and other-based toxic judgmenting, it requires surrogacy of its state by an Other in order to heal. That Other is almost always an EBE faciliator with whom an EBE facilitant shares deep resompathic-based frequencies.
After that surrogacy, the HOH becomes strong enough to address the Aloneness Anguish that is subsequently emergent and work it through to healing. Until that occurs, technically we cannot do noncodependent relationship because we never worked down to the existential bone our terror of aloneness and so need to medicate it with relational forms with Other.
Few people ever address this murky existential realm and healingly come out the other side, due to the dearth of an open-hearted means to access and heal this domain of consciousness. Those who never create sufficient layers of strategic selfhood to keep these existential dynamisms at bay tend to be committed to institutional care that itself re-wounds the being because such intervention so often utilizes drug-based treatment and so rarely involves heart-centered emotively mature clinicians. Ironically, such emotively disabled people actually are more emotively and authentically in conscious touch with what is actually going on in everyone unconsciously.
When the Provider Sentinel heals, it becomes our capacity of finally claiming a more real version of Self. When the Pretender heals, it becomes our Seat of Self-Ownership. And when the Punisher heals, it transmutes into Self-Acceptance, wherein we can utilize meta-based insight, discernment, and perspective in our lives and our relationships without using them to cover over unconscious emotive distress. Guilt heals to Self-care wherein we no longer caretake others from our own lack of knowing how to care for our own needs and desires. Innate Despair becomes a more incisive Self-Authorship; the Shame of Insufficiency becomes realization of our Innate Self-worth; and Aloneness Anguish moves to Self-based Relationalism, wherein an emotively mature seat of individualized being then transacts more noncodependently with others.
Thus, we have this twelve-element chain as the root of psychopathology making up the primary components of the congested landscape of the shadowed version of our emotional body. We finally can then have an energetic and emotionally textured experience of confidence in our gender identity and expression, our innate goodness that brings tears of joy, and the healthy emotively mature fulfillments that occur in relationality when the self-pole in relational space has been healed of its wound-based and unconscious projections and defenses.
Only radically deconstructing the ego and discovering its hidden wounds and bases for all of our intentions and behaviors will yield up that result. Spiritual work alone, east or west, will only lead us to states of spiritual attainment, not states of spiritual maturity, because it never questions why the agent who seeks spiritual work is seeking it in the first place.
None of us are qualified to do any kind of spiritual work in learning about the paradoxical mysteries of life in all of its dimensional complexity within which our human lives uncoil until we prioritize and address the spirituality inherent in ego-based healing work, which is no less spiritual than any other activity aimed at the heavens or Ground of Being.
In that way, in EBE states of authentic emotional maturity represent the emotively healed context of the way we relate to our life, not to any specific content of qualities. Emotive maturity does not exist as ‘I am good because I am . . . . . . . . . . , or possess the qualities of . . . . . . . . . . . .’ It expresses simply as ‘I am good just because I am.’ It has no ‘because’ clause. It just Is, without conditions of perfectionism. Despite the fact that many who do spiritual work only claim they have attained this state, it is only the strategic self who has done so, rendering the attainment a drug to seal out any problematic ego-based vicissitude. The strategic self is only too happy to have God, nonduality, or Universal Love impart this ersatz state of consciousness, because in such a case it never has to deal with the surrender inherent in healing its own unconscious ego-based issues.
The Sentinel complex cannot discern the difference between surrender and submission, and so mightily resists such a vulnerable state because it is not that it doesn’t trust in self or others, it is that it does not trust in Trust itself. Until our strategic selfhood moves through its own agonal deconstructions to be able, often for the first time in life, to trust Trust at the level of human dyadic transaction ground, all spiritual work will do is act as a drug to ensure the being never has to do this and instead can ‘float’ ‘above’ such humanized states and instead ‘dwell’ in ‘higher’ frequencies of the ‘I am,’ Universal Love, or nondual Aspects of Divine Being. This is exactly the governing dynamic of the drug of spiritual attainment at its worst.
In EBE, then, clinically it is not our conscious personality that has emotional congestion: our conscious self only has the symptoms of the congestion possessed by our subpersonas. We can say psychopathology develops in seven stages:
1. In the absence of resompathic relational ground with parents without parental counter-transferential fusion-reactions, Loving affirmation of the child’s inner emotive reality does not occur.
2. Without this affirmation, collisions inevitably occur between a child’s inner reality and the outer reality provided by the parents, thus prohibiting healthy ego boundaries of the child from forming. In their place, resistance-based ego-defense boundaries that try to reduce the pain from those reality collisions, form instead.
3. With these artificial resistance-based ego-defense boundaries, a child is not strong enough to disembed from continuing painful experience of inner/outer reality collisions, so the fledgling ego structure of the child fixates at the level of being the pain. This creates a subpersona still partially embedded as that pain while neurobiology allows the rest of consciousness to move past that point.
4. The resistance-based ego-defense begins to strategically steer our neurobiologically maturing consciousness away from continuing painful experience so as not to trigger felt-reality of the pain, the same experience that created the subpersona in the first place.
5. Because the blocking of feeling the pain also results in the blocking of receiving and experiencing Love in the form of feeling felt, the defensive movement away from the pain also moves the child away from receiving Love. This further starves the suffering parts of the child needing the Love they didn’t receive originally.
6. The adult self, neurobiologically mature but emotionally immature, is thus run by a defense-based strategic version of itself in a vain attempt to both get the unconscious subpersonal emotive needs met and minimize their pain without being strong enough to risk opening to Love. This inevitably leads the Strategic Self to seek medications of both substance and energy to provide the self with false and ineffective forms of Love, security, and control to make up for the lack of real Love and connectedness with life.
7. A strategic addiction-medication system then secondarily conditioned by similar pre-existing themes in the collective culture, thus becomes the outer personality-projection of the inner-ego-defense boundaries, and as such, becomes the crippled substitute for the healthy ego boundary that never formed. This then creates the wounded and medicated downstream adult personality themes and behaviors masquerading as the true self, with all of its neurotic, psychotic, self-destructive, or self-stagnative forms of lifestyle.
In EBE, then, productive emotional body healing is only effective to the degree that we learn to access, dialogue with, and enfold our repressed, subpersona realities in Love-based dyadic relational space without drugs, hypnosis, or attitude adjustments of any kind. This must continue until we establish a Loving relationship to those fixated places within us, a making-up for the Loving relationship with caregivers that was lacking originally. Through that process, we give ourselves what parents did not.
As the subpersonas feel us feel what they are feeling, why they are feeling it, and while they are feeling it in the presence of an Other who offers the dynamical heartfield our parents were not able to provide, we learn to feel ourselves feel ourselves, create an emotion-first algorithm of consciousness, learn to generate self-Love, and give ourselves the incalculably precious gift of a second childhood.
Until and unless long-term Loving relationships are created and sustained with the living subpersonas that carry our real distress and congestion, the subpersonas will never be able to digest their fixation with their specific congestive distress. In this context, all the emotive venting practices found in most therapeutic interventions only temporarily de-gas our energetic pockets of pain that are accessed, but do not access the subpersona-based source of that pain.
This is similar to the way methane is always found overlaying underground oil and is initially de-gassed in drilling. The ‘oil’ in the form of the disowned subpersona remains, creating repetitive distress later. This is why only symptoms dissipate for a time while the source-ground of the symptom remains intact to surface and express later.
In other words, a child’s trauma is never experienced in a vacuum. That small person has an entire array of personal and unique qualities and ways of relating and reacting to life. All these factors and the world-views they represent, are themselves fixated with the benign or malignant trauma. Without including the context of a subpersonal container within which the content of the trauma-conflict is held, that conflict at the source of our outer patterns of behavior will never be healed because the trauma remains emotionally undigested, regardless of other therapeutic approaches.
In this way, virtually all psychotherapy designed in the last one hundred years has targeted the mental and/or feeling-based versions of the trauma or conflict, not the actual subpersona who possesses that trauma and conflict. This is why the deep patterns of wounding and behavior remain despite years of work in psychotherapy: the actual ground or subpersona that carries the trauma-conflict has been ignored.
Another way of saying this is that the source of our situational-based wounding originates in not being felt by caregivers during or after a negative or traumatic experience. If that child could have felt their caregivers feel them at that time of trauma, they would have been able to emotionally digest the trauma. This kind of context within which the content of the trauma is held is needed for emotive digestion and must be provided. We can never re-parent an emotion or set of emotions outside of the context of the subpersona system and arrive at healing.
It is essential to remember that it was the relationship to the painful experience that was lacking, when the overwhelming nature of the conflict caused us to fixate or remain at the level of being the experience rather than the having of the experience. This is why, to fully digest and heal our congestion, we must develop the relationship between the conscious person seeking therapy and his or her subpersonas, and not just access the repressed emotive nexi, as do virtually every other traditional and modern interventions, whether they are based in talk, touch, movement, psychodrama, spiritual, transcendental, or cognitive algorithms.
EBE refers to this as developing a ‘Head-of-Household’ or an adult authentic self, that then creates enough meta-space from the subpersonas to actually have a relationship with them. Only when the HOH has an emotionally digestive relationship with subpersonas can the subpersonas emotionally digest their specific emotive valence. Again, as long as we are embedded as our experience, we cannot have healing interactions with our experience. We must disembed from the experience, in the form of having a relationship with it, before it can be healed.
Only when the newly-emergent HOH of a person creates long-term healing relationship with a subpersona can that subpersona itself then create a healing relationship with the emotively congested charges it carries, and disembed from its fixation. This is the governing dynamic of all EBE work, the fundamental algorithm missing in all of our psychotherapeutic interventions. When the subpersona finally has dynamical space and validation for those emotions from his/her HOH, it gives him/her what the parents could not, the emotive congestion becomes digestible, and healing can occur.
This is why the therapeutic beating of pillows or primal screaming is so limited: the emotive venting is being done by the conscious personality of the client, not the subpersona who has the conflict. It is only when the disembedment process is freed up sufficiently, via the subpersona being able to emotively digest its painful experiences, that healthy ego boundaries can be formed. Anything less than this will simply result in a further masking of the fixation by abating the symptoms that flow through it.
So without authentic subpersonal healing as just described, we cannot ever become emotionally mature. This explains why our life situations and outcomes tend to be unsuccessful and full of disharmony. It is because the un-deconstructed strategic self of the seeker is the one who does all the therapy or spiritual practices that explains why all such effort is so severely limited and could never meet the criteria of healing offered by EBE, even when these attainments seem to be authentic and enduring. All one has done in such a case is muscularize the strategic self, not deconstructed it.
And since almost all forms of psychological therapy or spiritual practices regard our defenses, resistances, or the authors of our addictions as an adversary or the ego that must be defeated or overcome, such can never provide a context for healing or recovery. We must negotiate with and embrace our resistances in Love, not try to rid ourselves of them.
Finally, this idea that we all possess an inner subpersona family directly relates to what is referred to as multiple personality disorder. When abuse occurs in infancy, there is not yet present a fledgling self ‘having’ the experience of being abused, only a ‘pre-self’ being the abuse. This represents existential, and not just situational dynamisms of woundedness. This level of congestion is so severe normal Sentinel-based defenses are unable to deal with it. This allows the otherwise hidden dynamics of the subpersona to break out of defensive control and overtly manifest in the life of the victim as what are clinically observed as multiple personalities in that syndrome.
Multiple personality is real, not an artifact of therapist projections and misinterpretations, as is now commonly held. MPD is subpersonas breaking out overtly into outer life because of the lack of an inner adequate defense system due to the trauma occurring before a solid enough objective self can defend against it. This causes the blackouts inherent in MPD as each subpersona vies for boss of being. In less severe traumatic situations that happen later in age, subpersonas manifest their intentions and actions below the conscious level of the adult, and thus leave the adult version of the adult, the strategic self, in charge of daily functions.
Psychiatry, in its ignorance of the structure and functions of the emotional body, has thus never understood how MPD is simply an exaggeration of how inner subpersona landscapes are configured. Psychiatric wards are full of people suffering from nothing less than a spontaneous breakout of inner-family subpersona emotivity, and are thus misdiagnosed, drugged, and languish needlessly. What psychiatrists do in such cases is ignore the plea of the subpersona, in all its agony, to be felt.
This actually recapitulates the emotive invalidation of childhood, as the person is silenced by medication or institutionalized for expressing their authentic subpersona feelings in ways that do not fit with societal norms, the cause of which is never understood or treated.
In summary, EBE demystifies the unconscious and gives us a working model to explore its terrain in effective, heartfelt, and non-invasive ways. This allows trust to slowly build between facilitant and facilitator so that even the most painful emotional themes can be elucidated and healed. This allows us to slowly but directly get to know our inner world in ways that will change the relationship we have with ourselves forever, so that oneday we can claim what was buried in us all along, the unmanifested but real emotively mature seat of authentic being.