Chapter 1
Introduction
We see only what we know. We ask only the questions we know we are allowed to ask. I don't read books in a linear way myself: I skim them, go back, skip around. I rarely read more than a few pages at a time. Let me call this handbook a book. It may not be large enough to deserve the name, but it's easier for me that way.
This book is neither scientific nor clinical. I don't want to refer to research or well-known writers in this field. I wanted to describe the experience I have gained: how I currently understand the structure of personality, and what it means to be human. So what is this book about, and what goal do I set for it?
This book has many elements that influence one another and form a whole. Each element works in its own way.
My path is long. At different stages, people appeared who taught me something. It is the same with books. It is not necessarily about the whole story, but about the element that catches your attention. I hope that wherever you open this book, something will inspire you. I would like that inspiration to help you ask yourself questions.
Understanding is merely putting a label on an experience, and that does not mean the words I write will mean the same to you as they do to me. Probably not entirely, and that's fine. I am not writing this book so that you will understand my words exactly as I do. I am writing it so that, alongside these words, you will find your own experience, even if it is different from mine.
Leaves and Stems
Imagine an old stem running through the centuries like the spine of a family. At its top grow leaves, one generation after another, each different, each shaped by how much light it received and how much shadow it had to endure. Our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents grew up in just such shadow, in times when wars, the partitions of Poland and poverty took away their chance to develop at the pace at which they could have developed, had the world allowed it. It was a long time of shadow, in which the stem did not grow upward as fast as it wanted to, but fought for survival, clenching itself and protecting what it had.
A leaf that grows in shadow learns to live modestly. It does not spread wide, because there is no point: it will not reach the light anyway. It curls up, adapts, and takes in less than it could under other conditions. And that is all right, because its task is not to blossom fully. Its task is to keep the stem alive, so that the stem can grow a little higher, toward a light the leaf itself will never see.
Generations pass. The stem, patiently, centimeter by centimeter, finally reaches a place where the sun's rays fall wider and stronger, without obstruction. And then a leaf is born that is unlike all the previous ones. A leaf that, to its own initial surprise, can unfold more widely. It can look for light not because it has to survive, but because for the first time in the history of this family, this lineage, it is possible.
The problem is that leaves that lived in shadow do not know they could want something different. They only know that they live so that the stem may grow. There is no rebellion in them, only patient, silent sacrifice. This Leaf began to identify with the Stem. Its purpose is for the Stem to grow. It stops remembering that it is a Leaf, because its reason for existing is for the Stem to grow. A Leaf living in shadow will not understand that it could look for light, because in its world there is no such possibility. It is not its fault. It is simply the limit of what it was given.
We have a certain destiny and certain possibilities that this destiny opens for us. But there are also situations that can stop this destiny forever: illness, tragedy, a burden that one person cannot carry within a single lifetime. When this happens, the energy that was meant to flow through us does not disappear. It passes to the stem, and from there to the next leaf. A family is one living structure, in which sometimes one link takes on more shadow so that the next one can bear more light.
You may ask how I know this. I don't. Am I convinced that it is so? With my whole self. In this book I have described a few exercises that led me to a place of understanding: understanding of my present situation and compassion for my previous generations. They led me to discover pains that accompanied me for most of my life, pains that were, to a large extent, unconscious. I was used to feeling that way. Pain became a constant sensation, part of the experience of being human. Because of childhood trauma, I had pain stored in tense muscles. I didn't know I was tense. That was how I had been for as long as I could remember. I had to start by feeling myself, in order to understand step by step how the dynamics in my family, from generation to generation, created the construction of personality that I received.
