Most of us live in a state of utter resistance without realising. Someone who used to be addicted to alcohol lives the rest of their life in resistance to it. They'll count the hours, days, weeks, months, and even years to find a strange pride in the struggle. Their identity is still that of an alcoholic, enhanced with the torment of having to resist their dysfunctional selves. It is not the object of fascination, nor the emotional release it provides that is the source of the addiction, but the unwillingness to depart from the past identity that is attached to it. Remove the alcohol, the damage, the addiction-and-recovery story and the past self that identifies with the grief and pain of it all also disappears, doesn't it? Beneath this desperate attempt to cease self-deprecating behaviour, lies a starved and tormented past identity who is allowed to exist only in some distant, pseudo-abstract thoughtform, but one that is disallowed to express itself in any present form. One can only imagine how disempowering this state must be for the soul. How painful it must be for the bearer, and how difficult to share and communicate on a word-to-word basis for someone not well-versed in the vernacular arts. At the root of all self-destructive behaviour is a hurt and grieving inner child, a deep and wounding melancholy. What makes this tricky is that it is often attached to the psycho-emotional matrix or the database of memories that reference the exact moment where the wounding of the inner child occurred, so the mind does not want to just let these memories fully pass - and for good reason. There is always a chance of retrieval, liberation, healing. And this trail of tears is put into place by the psyche as a band-aid solution, a sort of temporary defence and self-recovery mechanism for future pondering and eventual rediscovery once the mind has strengthened itself enough to be able to handle exploring the damage without fragmenting itself again. When we're working with the inner child, we're touching parts of the human mind and soul that sit closest to their godly forms, and our inability as a society to both identify and prioritise the healing of these traumas has us living in a perpetual state of self-induced suffering and harm. We are becoming a degenerate species that is slowly and methodically playing out the quiet murder of its inner-most pains in the external realm, as some twisted, ritualized form of resistance and self-denial, instead of embracing and healing these wounds internally and within one another. ![[IMG_3418.jpeg]]