Everyone has experienced violation.

In the first seven years of your life, your cerebral cortex was not developed enough for you to develop critical thinking. You merely absorbed everything around you and accepted it as true.

What that means is that you were subject to your parents' intrusive thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and energetic states, imbedded both in their way of communicating, their body language, and their energy, and those of the other people around you (siblings, teachers, extended family), nonstop, for AT LEAST the first seven years of your life.

I call this a necessary violation, because the core functionality of this biological wiring is to keep you safe (even if it happened to be terribly dysfunctional in your case).

Rebellion is an essential stage of growth into adulthood for this reason.

A fundamental piece of rebellion is to help a growing young adult learn discernment and to think for themselves at a time when they are much more capable of protecting themselves and suffering the consequences of their own self-driven action than they were as a toddler.

In most indigenous tribes, this phase of growth involves some form of initiation.

In the Western World, particularly in the more privileged areas of the Western World (where not coincidentally, much of the global power is held and much of the destruction of the planet is being caused), it mostly just involves sneaking out and teepeeing someone's house or experimenting with alcohol, drugs, and sex. Most of which comes with limited, if any, consequence.

And those violating emotions, beliefs, and thoughts continue running, unquestioned.

What that means is that we, in effect, NORMALIZE the experience of this once-but-no-longer necessary violation, and if it continues unchecked, we then play it out in a multitude of ways.

✅ By outsourcing our power to our bosses in careers that do not fulfill us and then feeling victimized by our jobs.

✅ By outsourcing our power to our partners and then being resentful about how they show up.

✅ By outsourcing our power to society and cultural expectations of how we should show up and then feeling cornered into living life in a way that has us feel trapped.

✅ By outsourcing our power through reactive behavior, implying that other people have power over us and them being themselves is in violation to our...everything.

✅ By unconsciously inviting actual violating experiences (this is charged, and as a person who has done extensive healing around multiple forms of violation, both energetic, emotional, and physical, I am well within my right to talk about what I know works in terms of recovering from these experiences, so please reign in your impulse of implying that I'm bullying or victim blaming or otherwise being exclusive in making this statement - I'm not)

Consider the you of right now. What if someone came into your house in the middle of the night and forced you to do something you didn't consciously give consent to.

Would you feel violated?

Probably.

Would you fight back or try to escape?

Maybe.

Would you call the cops?

I hope so.

This is the part where I tell you that any unresolved negative belief systems and unhealed wounds planted into your mind and body before the age of seven ARE DOING EXACTLY THE SAME THING TO YOU ALL THE TIME WITHOUT YOU EVEN REALIZING IT. They are disguised as your unquestioned assumptions. And they are ruling your life.

In fact, according to Carl Jung, it's precisely during the dream cycle that these belief systems do their deepest work to find expression in your conscious life, which is why he was such a big fan of dream interpretation, symbology and archetypes.

If you are experiencing a reality that feels violating to you, it's time to look inward and ask yourself how you're creating that.

AND IT'S TIME TO CALL THE COPS ON YOUR SELF-VIOLATION.

If we don't call the cops on this nature of covert violation, we inadvertently repeat that violation over and over again well into adulthood by refusing to investigate the unquestioned thoughts, beliefs, and feelings that aren't necessarily ours but govern all of our actions and, MOST IMPORTANTLY, our intentions.

To heal as an adult — to learn to think, believe, and feel for yourself — is an act of rebellion. It's a veritable initiation in a world that is doing everything it can to keep you wounded and broken and in a constant cycle of self-violation.

Because when you violate you, so will others. And when you violate you, 👏You👏Also👏Violate👏Others👏AND👏The👏Planet👏 (an extension of you) either directly or indirectly. In order for us to stop the overt violation, we have to first tackle the covert violation.

NB: The real-time response to a person who feels violated is NOT to ask them how they created the experience. Triage, compassion, acknowledgment, calming the nervous system, etc are all necessary. But much in the same vein that we take a Westernized medicinal approach of killing off symptoms rather than looking at the root cause of the dis-ease, my suggestion is we start getting preventative in our default mindset, before we create a society that is entirely only reactive to the symptoms.