Good vs Whole, and also Trust

Trust is a big deal in unschooling, homeschooling, and intentional family living.

In fact, trusting ourselves and our children is the central goal of deschooling.

Many people on the mainstream paths of compulsory school and labor-for-wages, and also families newly off those paths, simply can not understand how homeschoolers can trust themselves to educate their children at least as well as the so-called experts in schools, and they definitely do not understand how we radical unschoolers can trust our children to educate themselves by choice or how we can trust ourselves to facilitate our children's chosen education.

This is because they are living on autopilot- allowing their decisions and beliefs to be dictated by the overarching beliefs of society, which at this point are totally mass-manufactured to keep us in line building other peoples' empires and not even naturally occurring beliefs. For more on our mass-manufactured mass-media transmitted cultural beliefs, check out my post: Unsubscribing from (Hijacked) Consensus Reality.

Here is how I learned to trust both myself and my children.

This is how I teach my children to trust themselves, as well as others I mentor. It's called Shadow Work.

Good people versus Whole people.

For many generations now, since at least the monotheistic Christian expansion / invasion / colonization, our culture has been utterly fixated on morality and goodness. As we have grown from western to WEIRD (western educated industrialized rich democratic), so has the focus on goodness increased. 

What do you associate with the moral pronouncement "good?"

What does it mean to be a good person? A good spouse/partner? A good parent? Coparent? Child? Teacher? Student? What does it mean to be a "good" anyone?

Everyone's definitions are a little different, with some based on religion, politics, or ethics; and we all strive to be whatever we believe a good person is. 

The only problem with that is that we. Are. OBSESSED.

Society has brainwashed us all into believing some basic human needs and desires are inherently morally WRONG. Monotheistic religions that espouse beliefs of one right way and all others are wrong started it, and here in the US we have roots in a particularly strict sect called Puritanism- they were obsessed with purity and productivity, and our culture still shames many of our basic human drives. Our society wants no part of our inherent human desires for sex, money, attention, or power, to name a few. (Except of course as bribes for us to further their own schemes to gather those same things for themselves or selling us solutions to our own "badness" for their own benefit, not really to help us be better..... but that is a whole other part of the story.)

We believe many of these moral pronouncements, and buy into the shame, and try so hard to be (or at least appear) "good," that we leave no room in our hearts for those pieces of us that society deplores and "bad" that we end up shaming, denying, repressing, and hating those perfectly natural parts of ourselves. Even in the privacy of our own thoughts.

We do this to be accepted- by our parents, by our friends, by our society- because acceptance in groups is truly hardwired into our minds as safety and security, because for millennia unacceptance = exile = death, only through acceptance could we survive.

What happens to these desires? 

When we shame, deny, repress, or hate any integral part of our authentic truth, those desires come out sideways. Any true desire we have tends to find fulfillment, and if we do not admit to it at all we cannot have a healthy outlet for expressing that desire.

Wanting to feel powerful can come out as always having to have the last word in disagreements, even when you know you're wrong. Wanting sex can come out as all sort of addictions. Wanting to have money can come out as spending all your time and energy at a lucrative job you hate and never spending a dime on fun instead of building a thriving family business that fulfills everyone involved. Wanting to feel safe can come out as staying in abusive relationships. Wanting attention can come out as licentious promiscuity, when in reality you might just need some quality time with a good friend.

Desires we banish and shame end up controlling our behaviors without our consent, or even our conscious knowledge. We get trapped in repeating cycles, confused as to how or why we keep ending up in these situations, because we refuse to see our true motivations.

If we cannot see the foundations of our behaviors, we cannot choose to change them- we literally cannot control ourselves.

It's truly no wonder we do not trust ourselves, or even believe we are capable of being trustworthy. We do not know ourselves, much less understand ourselves. How could we ever extend trust to someone else?

How do we take back control of our lives from these desires that we have buried in our unconscious minds?

We must make ourselves whole by becoming aware of those deep motivations, maybe even learning why we buried them, and see them for what they are. We must notice our patterns, and dive deep into questioning them until we find the seed that sparks the behaviors we wish to change, so we can consciously fulfill the desire in a healthier way.

We make the unconscious conscious, learn the true motivational desire behind the behavior, and accept it as part of us so we can at least try to approve of the means we unknowingly used to try to fulfill the desire, and then we can knowingly choose a more aligned way to fulfill it.

That is how we heal ourselves, by becoming comfortable with the entirety of our wholeness without shame heaped upon us making our desires come out sideways. Only then are we able to consciously choose how, or even whether, to fulfill our desires. This is how we learn to trust.

So I ask you: is our goal to be / appear "good" and therefore controlled by what society approves of, or is our goal to be whole and live with intention based in authenticity?

Is our goal to raise "good" kids that appear to fit the expectations of a long dead Puritan society and are invisibly controlled by the desires that society forced them to bury? Or is our goal to raise whole people who can know their truth without shame and behave accordingly?

The choice is yours.

For the record, I choose whole. My kids and our entire family appear exceedingly messy, AND we are excruciatingly thoughtful. We are entirely unafraid to grapple with complex ideas or speak our truths or ask deep questions, because we do not believe that any true desire is inherently bad, only perhaps expressed in an unacceptable way. We form our own opinions, beliefs, and values based on the knowledge we have at the time- including knowledge of ourselves and our deep motivations, and we are unafraid to be open to new ideas or change our opinions, beliefs, and values when new information comes our way.

We are shameless, and because of that, we are not emotionally unbalanced time bombs of repressed desire bursting out in unintended ways. We do not hide ourselves from ourselves. We can trust ourselves, because we choose to know and understand ourselves deeply, and can therefore consciously choose whether and how to fulfill our desires. That means we are able to extend trust to each other, because we know we are all doing our best with the knowledge we have about ourselves and each other.. 

To be fair, we also choose to move through life believing that most people are doing their best with what they have. Questing deeply to find the seeds of our motivations to understand ourselves is just another layer of that. 

If you need help with your shadow (which is what psychology calls this mess of repressed desires we carry), especially as it relates to intentional family living, consensual education / unschooling / homeschooling, or respectful / gentle parenting, I would love to chat.

And if you want a guided head start in your deschooling and shadow work, I have a course coming up that you might enjoy.