Today I answered a coaching question on my Discord, Billy’s Temple. It was about a person’s parents enforcing such a strict guideline on who gets to be their friend or not from an early age, they developed a global filter for people in general and now can’t turn that filter off.
In this day and age there is a lot of discourse on generational trauma and being a cycle breaker. While I am all for that, since my entire life revolves around breaking my own karma, if we fall into the trap of “everything my parents did is something that needs to not continue” ironically that’s what starts perpetuating the exact same cycle.
We think the pattern that we see is the one thing we need to break. We vilify the pattern and try and cut it unconditionally. What we don’t see is that the pattern originally emerged from the exact same scenario: extreme suppression.
Taking a very simplified hypothetical example, suppose person X has a father who drinks excessively. The family dynamic is completely dysfunctional and X carries on a deep trauma stemming from the father’s alcohol abuse. Now when X has a child, who we’ll name Y, we often times see two scenarios happen.
One, X is likely to be EXTRA strict about alcohol to Y since alcohol is a trigger for X. X becomes an extreme straight edge kind of a person and constantly talks badly about Y’s grandfather and criticizes every media portrayal of drinking. This starts warping the mind of Y around alcohol.
Two, X goes through life with Y and all but all of a sudden some overwhelming life event happens. X is not equipped well enough on the inner resources to tackle this overwhelming situation, and in the attempt to self-medicate it reaches for the most accessible form of relief, something that the psyche learned as a relief: alcohol. In this way X becomes a replica of their father and it warps the mind of Y around alcohol.
In both cases, the outcome is same: it is the sensitivity and attachment over alcohol that actually plagues the mind. We cannot be so quick to dismiss and go off on an extreme opposite direction of our pain because we will miss out on what MOTIVATED the painful pattern in the first place. Even if we break the pattern, one thing remains the same: our life still is defined by the pattern.
The topic of the day was about parents controlling children’s friendships. What needs to be understood in context is, why this control was necessary from the parents’ perspective. Parents have this strong need to control the social environment of their children presumably because of the benefits of a good social network and the downsides of a bad social network.
The justification for filtering through friends is, your good friends will be good influences to you and in the future they will become a great asset to have when they're doctors and lawyers. Your bad friends will be bad influences to you and they'll make you smoke, drink, party, waste your life away and become a lowlife.
Our parents’ generation was defined by rapid progress and building after the perils of a global war. In these times of turbulence the gap between the haves and the have-nots were tangibly big AND it was determined just by a few good or bad choices in life. In this context, who we had in our network mattered a lot. I mean, isn’t European history literally defined by marriages and network?
While this line of thinking is valid in a certain context, the reason why it’s a problem for us is that it is still a condition on happiness. Any time we put conditions on happiness, we have to suffer as a result. This isn't just a social network thing, this is a general truth of life.
To the parents' generation, a life fucked up once is a life permanently fucked up. A life that's anything less than perfect, it's automatically a failure. The most important thing here is, COULD you recover from a poor decision? Yes. Could you go to prison once and still have a great life? Yes. Could you go bankrupt once and still be financially successful? Yes.
In reality, poor decisions give you the realest lessons in life because you get to learn by experience. Going to prison can be a way to reform oneself depending on how they take the incarceration experience. Going bankrupt will give you financial lessons that no amount of words could teach you.
From these experiences you can take your life to great places that other people can't because they haven't had your experience. But... to the extreme perspective, none of these matter because they all belong in one large trash can called "failure".
The definition for good is so narrow, it's like a moving goalpost where the goalpost is the size of a needle head. Even if your life is going good, it's always one mistake away from failure. This kind of perspective is what is bringing suffering, instead of the social network.
This kind of perspective can be applied on how you spend your time. How you spend your money. How you develop your career. How you marry. How you eat. How you take care of your body. It keeps you on the edge and never lets you relax, because the moment you relax — you can fuck up in an instant and all of your life will go down the drain.
The truth of the matter is, there are so many ways to be happy and you only need one of them. And the really nice thing is, the only one is sort of a freebie as it’s given to you by default: it is life. As long as you are alive, you can be happy.
The reason why I repeat this statement so much is, it’s okay for you to not fully buy in and commit to this today. But I never know when you might go from “oh yeah sure bro” to “what if that’s true? If that’s true, how come my life isn’t reflective of that truth?”. Once you start genuinely questioning the nature of truth and happiness, I have so many things I want to talk to you about.
We can all believe in conditions for happiness with our abundant free will. The conditions will inevitably have the consequence of suffering. But even when our life is initially starting from a point of a certain indoctrination to a condition, we have the power to liberate ourselves from that condition.
Someone who is trying to quit smoking counts the days since they last smoked. Someone who has never smoked doesn’t count the days at all.