Intimacy is the primary ingredient for connection.
But what is intimacy?
Intimacy is to bring yourself, who you are,
to the center of the relationship
and for the other person to do the same.
It is to see into someone, to feel into someone
to listen into somebody, to fully understand them.
To be intimate, you have to commit
to be an expert on someone.
Now, it's tempting to think that
it's possible to live your life without intimacy.
But it isn't.
The Most Dangerous Parallel Reality
Without intimacy in childhood,
we don't actually develop a sense of who we are.
We come to know ourselves as children through reflection.
What that means is
the reactions we are getting from other people
or even them mirroring the way we feel "Oh, you feel sad right now."
Let's meet the reality that you're in right now.
That lets us know who we are.
So obviously, if there is an absence of that
we don't develop a sense of self.
If it's particularly bad mirroring that we get,
we develop a negative sense of self.
But here's the thing that is so dangerous about that.
We start to perceive ourselves existing in a parallel reality.
When what we don't get is intimacy.
So you can understand this.
Let's imagine that when you're a child, you feel angry or you feel sad
or you feel afraid and your perception of the situation is that you got hurt.
That's your reality. It's a perceptual reality.
Now, if the people in your environment won't acknowledge that reality,
so you're afraid and they won't even acknowledge that you're afraid.
maybe they bypass it completely
and say: "Heeeey, what do you want in your pancakes?!"
There is such a discrepancy between where they are and their reality
and where you are and your reality
that you start to believe that two different realities exist.
Now, this is happening in a very somatic level,
it's happening at the deepest foundation of our being
it is not something that's happening rationally.
So we just start to develop this concept that
we are so deeply alone that it doesn't really matter
who it is that we are in our environment with.
Now, let's pretend that you haven't had a horrific childhood
where when you didn't get any validation, weren't acknowledged
and grew up in a different parallel perceptual reality from your parents.
The majority of people on the planet learn about these parallel perceptual
realities when they go through extreme grief.
Let's say that there is a death of a loved one.
What you'll notice when something like that happens
for you is that time stops.
It's like the impact happens and at that moment life can no longer be the same.
You can't feel good, no matter how much you try
you're missing this person
in every moment
the things that held joy for you, don't hold joy for you any more.
And meanwhile, in the rest of the world people are moving on with their lives.
You feel like life has ended, and they come over
and say: "Heey! Let's go get a drink. Come on!"
You start to feel this vast difference between
your own perceptual reality and theirs.
And this is for most of us, this is our first experience
with the parallel perceptual reality.
And it is torment.
I will never forget a time, when I was at a public park,
it was a few years ago
and there was a park bench,
and sitting on that park bench was a girl, a teenager,
she had her arms completely cut up, I mean, bandaged,
and she was crying.
And what I watched completely blew my mind.
I watched joggers go past her, friends talking go past her.
Not one person noticed.
It was as if this person might as well have been a ghost.
She was existing in a parallel reality of her own
which was completely not shared by anyone who was around her.
It was at that moment that I thought to myself:
"If people can be in different perceptual reality
and not even notice something like this"
"the rest of us, who aren't so demonstrative
with our state, have no hope at all"
To explain this concept further,
there is no perceptual parallel reality
that is set up in quite as extreme a way as it's set up by abuse.
Let me explain.
Let's take a classic situation of incest,
and let's pretend that it's daddy or an uncle,
in this type of a situation
you basically have to create a split reality eventually
Why?
Because what this perpetrator will do is that they'll rape you
and then, an hour later, the next day
they ask you: "What kind of mayonnaise do you want in your sandwich?"
You're having to go to Thanksgiving dinner with this person
and act as if nothing has happened.
And pretty soon what start to happen is that reality
which is day-to-day life, you know, the Thanksgiving dinner, going to school
it actually starts to feel fake.
The reality that you are in where you're being abused
feels much more real to you.
It's actually activating more of your nervous system
that is dedicated to fight-or-flight.
So basically, you start to get sucked into this parallel perceptual reality
where you're actually living a double life.
So that when you are at Thanksgiving dinner
you can't actually be at Thanksgiving dinner.
It feels false, it feels fake
it is a parallel perceptual reality.
In one reality, your reality is torture, pain and danger
and dad's the enemy.
In the other, life is mundane, you go to school
you have Thanksgiving dinner and dad is dad.
When you're at Thanksgiving dinner, or when you're at school
or when you're doing these mundane things in this other parallel reality
you feel like you're just a thing in other people's world.
It starts to feel like there's a pain of glass.
And you can see out, but no one can see in.
This is the real kind of parallel reality that we need to be concerned with
in our lives here on Earth.
This is the kind of parallel reality that makes it so people perceive themselves
to be so alone and no hope that they commit suicide.
The foundation of parallel perceptual realities
is emotional invalidation.
Now, I cannot stress enough how important emotions are
not just for our own lives but in our relationships.
I can't stress how important it is to respond
to emotions appropriately.
For this reason, I am begging you to watch the video
that I created that is titled: "The Emotional Wake Up Call"
The reason why it's so important to watch this
is because this dynamic that creates parallel perceptual realities
can happen in all kinds of homes even loving ones.
the ones that are not overly abusive.
So I want you to think about these parallel perceptual realities
as existing in a kind
of sliding scale.
So let's say that you grew up in a good home
but just doesn't understand how to deal with emotions.
You're going to develop a parallel perceptual reality
but it's... you know... a mild one.
It's still causing you pain but it's you know...
not super super super intolerable.
All the way to the other side you have the people who commit suicide.
They're living in such an incredibly painful parallel perceptual reality
that there is no way in their reality that anybody will be able to join them.
And all of us fall somewhere on the scale.
Until we learn how to address people
so that they don't create a parallel perceptual reality.
To understand how emotional invalidation creates parallel reality
we have to go back to the beginning.
I want you to imagine a little girl who's unhappy.
She's in pain because her family had to move to a different town.
She has no friends here. She's lonely.
She's afraid of the harshness of the new place.
She misses so many things about the old place.
If she looks unhappy or acts unhappy, if her parents can't create intimacy
they will respond in one of two ways:
they will disapprove of her emotions,
or they will dismiss or ignore her emotions.
The parent who disapproves of the child's emotions
is critical of their children's display of negative emotion.
and reprimand or punish for this expression.
The parent who dismisses or ignores the child's emotion
disregards them as important, ignores the child's emotions
or even worse, trivialises their child's emotions.
They may even interact with this child as if she's fine.
This creates a parallel reality between the parents and the child.
The child is now in a reality that hurts
in her reality, tragedy and loss has occurred.
In her reality, her parents are not even there
even if they're in the room physically.
in the parents' reality on the other hand
they are meeting the child's need and everything is good.
The move is great because it provided new opportunities
for better things.
Because they can't actually see their daughter or feel her
or understand her,
they can't actually make any changes that would improve the way she feels.
This little girl is isolated completely in her own parallel perceptual reality
and her parents don't even notice.
As life goes on, society may begin to mirror this split reality.
She will perceive herself to be in one parallel reality
when everyone else is in another.
The torture of not only being in pain but being in pain alone
or worse watching people who are together and happy
is so painful that she might develop addictions.
She will do anything to escape that pain
and to be honest, the pain of the condition
is worse than any drug or addiction she could ever choose.
But, because she's unconscious that she's experiencing
a different perceptual reality she just feels the torment
and has no clue how to resolve it.
She has no clue how to resolve it because resolving it would entail
breaking down the separation between these parallel perceptual realities.
She feels powerless to do that because she was powerless to do that
with her parents.
In that powerlessness, her option is
to either escape from the pain through addiction
or commit suicide
We are at risk of developing a parallel perceptual reality in any time
that we don't have intimacy
Anytime someone doesn't see us, hear us, feel us,
or try to understand us
so as to join into one reality.
Let's go one step further.
Mental illness is in fact primarily caused by these
perceptual realities.
If you break down each one of the mental illnesses that we have diagnosed today
at the heart of them is a parallel perceptual reality.
I'll give you some examples.
So a schizophrenic, for example,
a paranoid or a schizophrenic.
Let's just pretend that this person actually feels
like they're living a perceptual reality that people are following them.
That's their reality.
Now, everyone else is acting like it's completely normal.
How would you feel today if army men broke into your house
and they were literally raiding the house
out to get you and everyone else was going:
"What? I don't see anything."
It's one of the most gaslighting experiences
and what we do as a huge mistake in a mental field.
is that we try to convince them that their reality
doesn't exist.
Instead of trying to join them and interact in some way
with what their actual reality is
so that we can break down this veil
between our reality and their reality.
We have not managed to integrate people who are mentally ill
because the rest of us judge their reality as false and invalid.
If we judge them this way we can never join them
wherever they are so as to make any improvement.
We can't find a way to integrate their reality with our own
Instead, we're just doing the same thing that parents do
when they ignore, dismiss and disapprove of their child's emotions.
Someone suffering from PTSD
is also living in a parallel perceptual reality
So let's say that fireworks are going off
in this person's parallel perceptual reality
lets say they are a returned vet from war,
they are getting fired on. This is war.
in our perceptual reality it's just fireworks
whats the big deal?
that's a different parallel perceptual reality.
someone suffering from depression is in a parallel perceptual reality
of hopelessness where life is pointless
someone who has panic attacks is in a different perceptual reality
one of imminent doom
and they're out looking at everyone else that in the moment that
that they're having a panic attack,
they're acting like everything is normal and fine.
ok so im gonna explain gaslighting for a minute
because when we are in two perceptual realities it's a gaslighting experience
to gaslight somebody is to make them believe
that their reality doesn't exist
so, what you see you don't see, what you hear you don't hear
your truth cant possibly be your truth.
now, this can get really scary
because its a classical symptom that happens in dysfunctional homes.
so lets say that you've got Dad
Dad's drunk off his ass.
he comes home, he falls down on the floor and passes out clean.
what the mother in this scenario
let's pretend that she's a codependent
what she's going to say is: " you know what kids,
he's just tired from work"
so that's gaslighting, because in that moment the kids are going
"what? I don't get this he came in dead drunk and passed out
and you're telling me that what I see I didn't see,
what I feel I don't feel, and what I'm hearing I'm not hearing
my reality isn't true
the reality is Dad is just tired from work.
now, when we have a parallel perceptual reality with somebody
we are setting up this kind of gaslighting experience
for each other.
which is why it's so important to find a way to merge our realities
so we can basically find a place to meet in the middle
so, we're not isolated in our own realities.
the real hell on earth is not suffering
the real hell on earth is suffering alone.
when we are living in a parallel perceptual reality
this ultimately is where it leads us.
we are suffering in our own reality and alone
we can't actually handle that.
nor should we.
nor should we put up with it in our species
so what we have to understand here
is that we all benefit by getting rid of
these parallel perceptual realities.
Tearing down the veil between them. really being intimate with each other.
it doesn't just create torture for the people
who are stuck in these parallel perceptual realities
it causes torture for all of us
because eventually when we are on the other side of a person
who is in a parallel perceptual reality of pain,
is that we lose them too.
I'm gonna just give it to you strait.
when you take a snap shot of human suffering
hell on earth, right?
suffering alone is the number one hell that you can experience.
when we watch these images on our news channels
of people who are suffering in earthquakes
people who are going through famine or disease,
people who are starving to death even, in Africa,
I'm gonna have to break it to you,
that is not the deepest form of human suffering.
in fact, it doesn't even come close.
for one primary reason
because everybody is in the same perceptual reality suffering together.
the people who are suffering the most
are the ones who are suffering in their own perceptual reality, alone.
It is a tragedy when people say, “I never saw it coming”
when someone commits suicide.
because the reality we have to face is
' And that is why it happened.'
because we don't have the level of intimacy
in order to even know where this person actually is.
if you did know, believe me there is plenty of warning.
I'm gonna be honest with you, when people come to me
and they tell me " I never saw it coming."
when someone commits suicide.
my first response mentally
is " then that's exactly why it happened.
another thing we have to understand is that it is ignorant and incredibly cruel
when we say in a derogatory way,
“misery likes company”.
We've got to literally cut this out of our vocabulary.
would you like to know why?
Because unhappiness, misery actually needs company.
that's what it needs.
it doesn't need somebody in a different parallel perceptual reality jumping in
and saying: " look at all the good in life." No!
what suffering really needs is for somebody to join it.
and from that space
where somebody is willing to actually join it
there will be an improvement
in that vibration.
just by virtue of the fact
that we are bringing the light of consciousness to that space.
Connection is what people need in order to feel good
and to feel like their life is worth living in.
all too often, people who are in pleasure
cannot accommodate the reality of someone who is feeling pain.
this is the real reason actually why any AA program
or any support group works for anyone
it's because it is the only time
that you actually perceive somebody joining your perceptual reality
It's the opposite of alone.
Now, obviously I've told you that alone
that feeling of isolation is what causes addictions.
So of course AA is working.
it is in the developing of genuine connection
that we can tear down the separation between these realities
so they can merge.
one reality must begin to account for the other and vice versa.
denial is like the veil that serves as a divider between two realities.
it is within our capacity to accommodate polarities.
that our consciousness will find true progression.
pain must accommodate the reality of pleasure
and pleasure must accommodate the reality of pain.
to understand this concept fully
I want you to watch my video titled
"And Consciousness ( The Modern Day Replacement for The Middle Way)"
there is no possibility for two people to stay close
and to stay connected when they are living in two different
parallel perceptual realities
and it is intimacy
and our bravery to join people wherever they are,
that is going to bridge the gap between these two realities.
that make us so utterly alone.
Have a good week.
Subtitles by: Tanya Duarte www.tanyaduarte.com