Advice on Parenting From a Childless Sorcerer

If a parent comforts a child from a place of excess personal involvement ~ feels pity, anxiety, and such, because his or her own wounds are being stirred up ~ then this increases the enmeshment. Although the child is ostensibly being "comforted," what's really happening is that their own patterns are being confirmed and consolidated by the parents' patterns. When a child falls over, it looks to the parent for a cue as to how to react; when the parent shows fear and concern, the child then begins to cry. The parent has taken the child's feelings seriously, so now the child knows it is supposed to do the same (or that s/he can get away with it!).

Enmeshment, all down the line.

The alternative (stand back for the wisdom of a guy who never had a kid advising fathers!) is to hold a neutral, impersonal space for the child, one that is constant. This way, the child knows that, when it really needs protecting or soothing, the parent is there. The rest of the time, it is on its own. The space is always available to the child, but because there is no enmeshment, there's no pull for the child to go into the space simply for comfort, only for real nurture and support when needed.

That "pull" is the result of the parent wanting the child to need him or her, in order to feel especially loved themselves.

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What it comes down to is that, as long as we raise our kids from a personal space, no matter how functioning and "happy" they may turn out, they are still going to be living from a place of personal sovereignty, hence, in a way of being that's untrue based on the way of being taught them by their parents. So they are basically in Hell.

Perhaps this is why sorcerers don't generally have kids. They know they'd be raising livestock, food for entities. Knowing that, but not having the ability to change it, could make for an insufferable tension.

As for the kids-in-bed thing, it's not true that children naturally grow out of wanting that sort of proximity and comfort from the parents. Again, this would depend on whether the parent is enmeshing, using the child for its own comfort. A close relative allowed her daughter to sleep in her bed until she was 12 (for all I know she still does), largely because the child was so insistent. She was unable to sleep alone and her mother didn't have the necessary ruthlessness, or neutrality, to be detached about her child suffering. De-enmeshment is always painful for both parties.

Clearly, a case can always be made for both sides of the argument, or any argument. Too much love and not enough discipline spoils the child; the reverse, and the child grows up damaged in other ways. No parent could ever get the balance right through conscious will alone; the only way is not to be personally involved with one's children. I would guess that even sorcerers find that nigh-impossible.

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Spelled out very simply: when a child doesn't receive enough of a clean, loving physical connection to its mother, it is imprinted with that lack and seeks it elsewhere, into adulthood and sometimes unto death. This wound is further compounded if, during later infancy (from about 2), when the child begins to individuate and wants to bond with the father, the father is also lacking, absent, or physically distant or disconnected. Then the child grows up with a double wound that comes down to a sort of emotional hunger for touch, for "validation" (for an infant, physical touch can be necessary not just to well-being but to survival).

As adults, we are unlikely to find ways of bonding with men to meet this hunger (though lots of guys get into sports and join the army just to rough-house with guys); so then almost 100% of that emotionally-patterned neediness is going to be directed toward women. What guys consider horniness is usually nothing of the kind, because their physiological responses are hooked into those emotional/psychological patterns, and when they think they are looking to get laid, they are really looking for mommy's (or even daddy's!) love and attention.

If a child was really cut off from the father, and maybe overly smothered by the mother (as well as sometimes neglected by her ~ which was my case), they often wind up homosexual, or, as in my case, rather waif-like, ephemeral, romantic types with low libidos. (My Wife might disagree on the last point!)

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