One of the hardest things to see clearly is the the conditioning we received growing up. Our parents imprinted us with themselves. It doesn’t make them bad. It doesn’t make them wrong. They’re human beings who had children they loved, and they brought everything they were into raising those children: their fears, attachments, hopes, beliefs, insecurities, ways of seeing the world, their own childhood conditioning, all of it. That’s how it works. We come into the world completely open, and the first reality we know is theirs. We don’t have any perspective on it because there is nothing to compare it to. If a parent is particularly fearful, anxious or paranoid, that fear becomes part of the atmosphere of childhood. You breathe it in. You learn what is dangerous according to them, what you should worry about, what might happen, what other people might be doing, what you’re responsible for, what will happen if you disappoint somebody. Eventually you don’t experience it as their fear anymore. It feels like reality.
This is where the path gets very real. At some point you have to begin separating what is actually true from what you were conditioned to experience as true. You have to believe in your own intelligence. You have to recognize the strength of the conditioning that has been laid into you and begin looking at it without blaming the people who gave it to you. They were conditioned too. Their parents had a line on them, and their parents had a line on them. Humans keep handing these things down because most people don’t know they’re doing it. Spiritual practice gives you the possibility of finally doing something about it.
When Their Fear Still Feels Like Your Reality
You can be an adult, living independently, building a career, making your own decisions and doing extremely well, and one frightened phone call from a parent can suddenly make you feel eight years old. It is extraordinary how quickly it happens. The external circumstances may have changed completely, but the internal circuitry is still sitting there. You know this person. You know their moods. You know what happens when they get frightened. You know how far their imagination can run. Before anything has even happened, your body is preparing for it. Then you begin making decisions around their possible reaction rather than around the actual circumstances of your own life.
That was what interested me in this conversation with a student. She was at a significant crossroads. She had just landed a powerful new job, double the salary, a real step forward in her life, and almost simultaneously an old family pattern came roaring back. There was a family event she had already agreed to attend, genuine love and attachment to the people involved, and a parent who had become deeply worried about her. None of those things were imaginary. The question was what happened inside the student when they all came together. She could feel herself beginning to organize her decisions around somebody else’s fear. She had done this before. She knew what it cost her. And here it was again, at almost exactly the moment when life was asking her to stand on her own two feet in a whole new way.
That is the part worth paying attention to. Life does this. A pattern comes back, sometimes in a slightly different costume, and we have another opportunity to see it. We can rationalize why this time is different, and sometimes it really is different. But sometimes we have simply found a new explanation for doing the same old thing. That’s why you have to be willing to look at your own life. Where have I seen this before? What did I do? What happened to my energy? What did I learn? You don’t need to make yourself wrong for any of it. Your own life is showing you the pattern.
The Fear That Was Put Into Us
Some childhoods contain an enormous amount of fear. If a parent was chronically anxious, suspicious or frightened, the child doesn’t have the ability to stand outside that and say, My mother is experiencing fear and interpreting the world through it. A child simply lives inside the world the parent presents. If the parent sees danger everywhere, the child learns danger. If the parent catastrophizes, the child learns that catastrophe may be around the corner. If love becomes entangled with worry, obligation or the need to reassure the parent, the child can grow up feeling responsible for making other people feel safe.
Then you become an adult and wonder why it is so difficult to simply say, This is what I’m doing. This is what works for me. There may be tremendous fear underneath such a simple statement. You may know intellectually that you’re free to make your own decision, but your nervous system remembers an entirely different reality. It remembers that somebody might become upset. Something might explode. Somebody might withdraw, panic, accuse, pressure or become overwhelmed. So you anticipate the reaction and start accommodating it before it even occurs.
Seeing that clearly is enormously important, but seeing it is only the beginning. Eventually you have to get over it. I mean that very specifically. You have to go beyond the reality you were molded into. Otherwise you can spend the rest of your life explaining your conditioning beautifully while continuing to live inside it. Understanding why you have fear is useful. Becoming free of the fear is the point.
Love Does Not Require You to Become a Child Again
This becomes particularly confusing because you really do love these people. You may love your parents tremendously. You may adore your siblings. You may genuinely want to show up for your family. There can be grief, memorials, holidays, important occasions and people you haven’t seen in a long time. So this isn’t some simplistic exercise in separating yourself from your family. Attachment and love are mixed together, and part of growing up spiritually is learning the difference.
You can love somebody without being on their timetable. You can love them and postpone a visit. You can love them and go. You can love them and leave earlier than they want you to. You can call, FaceTime, visit next month, spend Christmas together, or find another way. None of those decisions by themselves tell you whether you are free. The question is: What is making the decision? Are you going because it feels true to you, or because you are afraid of what will happen if you don’t? Are you staying because that is genuinely right, or because you’re avoiding something you need to face? Those can look exactly the same from the outside. Inside, they are completely different experiences.
This is why nobody else can finally tell you what to do. A teacher can put possibilities on the table. I can say, Look at this. Have you considered that? This looks very familiar. What happened last time? I can offer a perspective that is outside the fear because when you are deeply caught in somebody else’s reality, sometimes you need to hear what the situation sounds like from outside of it. But then you have to ignore me and go inside yourself. The purpose of a teacher’s perspective is not to replace your knowing. It is to help you get clear enough to find it.
Get Back to Reality
When fear is running, reality can become surprisingly difficult to locate. Somebody else is worried about you. They have interpretations of your life. They may be imagining all kinds of things. Because you love them and because their fear has had a great deal of power in your life, you start entering the imagined world with them. You begin making choices inside their interpretation instead of standing in the facts of your own life.
When this happens, it’s on you to get back to reality. What is actually happening? In this case, the student had just been hired for a demanding new job. She was doing well. She was stronger than she had been a year earlier. She was more confident, more present, more independent and increasingly capable of directing her own life. Those were facts. A parent’s fears about what might be happening were also real as fears, but that did not make the content of the fears reality. That distinction is huge.
You can have compassion for somebody’s fear without adopting their conclusions. In fact, you may be able to meet them much more lovingly once you stop being afraid of their fear. If you approach a frightened person already frightened of what they might say, you have entered their state before the conversation has even begun. If you can ground yourself first, feel your own life, remember what you know and walk into the conversation without needing to defend yourself, then something completely different becomes possible. You aren’t there to overpower them. You’re simply no longer giving their fear the authority to define you.
Your Ego Strategies Are Part of the Path
These patterns are not interruptions to the spiritual path. They are the path. The funny ego strategies we live inside are pathways to enlightenment because they show us exactly where we are not free. If the same pattern keeps appearing around family, relationships, work, authority or obligation, that is incredibly useful information. Something in there has a hold on you. Go look at it.
Look with curiosity rather than self-condemnation. Why does this person’s disappointment have so much power over me? Why do I immediately feel responsible? Why does somebody else’s fear make me doubt what I know? Why do I give away my energy precisely when my life is expanding? Those are rich questions. If you actually enter them, you can understand something about yourself that makes you freer, stronger, more open and more insightful.
Sometimes life even seems to give us a do-over. You find yourself in circumstances eerily similar to something that happened a year ago, except now you are different. You have another year of practice. You have been through things. You have watched yourself fall apart and put yourself back together. You have learned how your energy works. You have discovered that you can say no, that you can stand up for yourself, that you can recover, that you can trust what you see. So perhaps the question isn’t whether the situation will repeat itself. The situation can repeat. You don’t have to. Life is giving you another chance.
Don’t Make Decisions From Fear
This is really the heart of it. Go or don’t go. Have the conversation or wait. Visit your parents or stay home. There is no universal spiritual answer. But don’t make the decision from fear. Find the strength you have developed and make it from there.
If fear comes up, sit with it. Don’t let it keep baking inside you until it becomes an enormous barrier between you and life. Feel the fear directly. Feel what it does in your body. Watch the thoughts it generates with curiosity. See the old conditioning that comes rushing forward. You don’t have to argue with any of it. You also don’t have to obey it. Stay present with life. Keep returning to what is actually here.
There is something profound that happens when you finally realize that your parents’ reality does not have to be yours. You can see how you were molded without spending your life blaming the molders. You can recognize that they loved you and still acknowledge the fear they passed on. You can see where their consciousness became woven into yours, and slowly begin pulling the threads apart. What is theirs? What is mine? What is old? What is actually true now?
Eventually even those questions become less important because you begin to know yourself directly. You trust your intelligence. You trust your experience. You can listen to somebody else without being overtaken by them. Your parents can worry and you can love them. They can misunderstand you and you can remain yourself. You can hear their reality without climbing back inside it.
That is growing up in the deepest sense. And that is the path: seeing the conditioning for what it is, facing the fear it created, and then getting over it.