I’d like to continue reflecting on the significance of Jesus’s words here:

“Because you had been so well trained to behave well – frequent punishment and shaming for misbehaving, infrequent rewards for exceptionally good behavior – you do tend to put on a mask or a front of good behavior that is culturally and socially acceptable. Beneath that mask you may fume, rage, or sink into depression.” (1)

His statement is an apt description of what I’ve called in another place “intergenerational transfer” of behavior patterns.

I applied his insight when I felt shame recently. I’d made a mistake and it caused minor hurt and pain on another’s part.

My response was to feel shame and I had to go very deep to “source” (or get to the bottom of) what was happening.

And what I saw was a childhood upbringing in which the making of a mistake was considered shameful.

I’ve said elsewhere that my upbringing at least on my Dad’s side had a lot in common with dog training. “Atta boy, Stevie. Good show” was the form of compliment shouted from the stands at a Little League baseball game. That was the same language we used with our dog.

When I made a mistake, I was a bad boy and told that I oughtta be ashamed of myself.

In its very simplest form, this is how the intergenerational transfer of behavior patterns takes place. It is in a sense training the child, rather than teaching.

Now, without needing any intervention from my parent, I feel shame when I make a mistake.

The really interesting thing is that, as I observe myself in response to my mistake and what follows, if I didn’t know how to work with these feelings, I’d be completely taken over by the mistake/shame pattern.

It wouldn’t even be a behavior pattern; it would be me.

And when it becomes “me” rather than the behavior I do, then I act out the part and speak the lines proper to a shameful person, a stigmatized person.

This is when I start to project my feelings of shame outward if I’m going to do that.

We assimilate a shameful identity, a stigmatizing of the individual, a tight garment of shame that becomes invisible to us as a pattern.

That shame-based identity then results in the breakdown of many of our relationships. We feel less than. We’re insecure. We feel needy. We vamp another’s energy. And it all falls apart.

No one of a couple who behaves this way loves, not transformatively. Or perhaps one loves and the other doesn’t and the one who does runs out of steam. Or the one who doesn’t runs when the loving stops.

Our patterns (or at least mine) are invisible to us. They’re now an identity.

We pass trauma such as physical, emotional or sexual abuse down through the generations. And our unlucky partner becomes the traumatizer as soon as the pattern is triggered.

It takes so much awareness to separate or distinguish ourselves from our tightly-assimilated and integenerationally-transferred patterns.

And even when we achieve a degree of distance from them, the necessity of managing the pain we feel if and when they still go off remains.

None of this is a feature of the life we’re headed for. So we only have a short time left in which these features of Third-/Fourth-Dimensional life will confront us.

But we also have only a short-time left in this rich learning environment here on 3/4D Earth. How much more we can learn about ourselves and human processes here than we can learn, or learn very easily, on the higher planes.

It’s said that we can learn more in a single lifetime of 60-80 years here than we can in 1,000 years on the astral planes. (3)

So this is the last chance we have to cram in every bit of learning in the rich Third-Dimensional human experiment before school is declared permanently over and we graduate.

Footnotes

(1) “Jesus: The Purpose of your Lives is to Uncover or Rediscover your Own Creative Abilities,” channelled by John Smallman, April 21, 2015 at https://johnsmallman2.wordpress.com/

(2) “Jeshua via Pamela Kribbe: The Third Way,” Jan. 26, 2014, c2012, at http://goldenageofgaia.com/2014/01/26/jeshua-the-third-way/.

(3) “It would take a thousand years out of the body to do what you could do in one short sixty or eighty-year life period on the earth plane. So many will choose to incarnate to speed it up, but it is more difficult because you don’t have the awareness you have when you are on the other side.” (Unnamed spirit teacher through Betty Bethards, medium, There is No Death. Novato, CA: Inner Light Foundation, 1976; c1975, 9.)