Why do we have chronic issues we can’t escape from, and why do our parents, instead of helping us with their experiences, knowledge, and wisdom, often can’t, don’t want to, or don’t know how to help us?
Their unconscious competence developed in different times and under different circumstances. The speed of change has accelerated due to technological advancement and the decreasing cost of energy. Long ago, our natural capacity for holistic progress, due to slow natural evolution, lost the race with the ever-faster development of the environment and relationships. Their experiences are based on past events and knowledge from the 1980s, 70s, 60s, or even further back. These experiences in modern times become obsolete or an unnecessary burden that strains relationships between grandparents, parents, and children or grandchildren.
Our parents and grandparents had to primarily focus on raising material maturity and increasing the efficiency of material security, which, due to scarcity, WWII, and expanding opportunities from technological progress, is logical and expected. It is also logical and expected that alongside the rise in material maturity, they could not simultaneously raise emotional maturity. Especially since technological development, being devoid of emotions in its very nature, did not require the simultaneous development of emotional maturity—in fact, quite the opposite.
The more we understand this, the more we can observe when and how these processes from the past influence us, and how we, through our awareness and reduced sensory-motor amnesia, perceive our parents’ influence distortedly and illusorily. Learning through the online program for resolving the relationship with parents and the sensations brought forth by AEQ exercises during the program enable a shift in understanding the mutual influence between an adult child and their parent. This allows us to define, limit, and change their influence on us and our relationships with partners and children, and to influence our parents to notice the difference and change their behavior, developing a new perspective on the world, themselves, and us. In this way, parents can make life easier for their child or at least reduce their negative impact.
In practice, however, it turns out that the negative influence of parents on their adult children is often a consequence of an inappropriate relationship between the parents. Due to the poor quality of their partnership, they are never able to truly end the parental relationship with their adult child. That adult child, who should be old enough to be independent, should end the childhood parental relationship and establish, build, and develop a partnership with another adult child. That partnership should evolve into a quality relationship so that together they can form a new parental relationship with their own children. This, however, especially in cases of emotional incest, does not happen.
A high-quality mutual partnership enables the upbringing and development of a child into a responsible and independent adult. This adult then establishes their own high-quality partnership and, subsequently, parental relationship, thus allowing the human species to continue in a healthy way, with each generation being slightly better—learning from the past without excessive resistance or hatred toward ancestors, and proudly standing on the shoulders of their parents. In this way, a human pyramid is built, rising with each generation.
Suppressed and sensory-motor-amnesia-distorted hatred toward ancestors—who kept us in powerlessness due to their lack of emotional maturity and disconnection from their own and their child’s body—is usually redirected unconsciously toward our successors, continuing the tradition. This makes the loss of respect from youth toward elders, the rise of violence of children against parents, and the increase in anxiety, tranquilizers, addictions, and developmental issues more understandable.
The Impact of the Past on Our Relationships Today
In practice, especially during AEQ exercise sessions with program participants, I observe how important the relationship with the ground, legs, and feet is. We perform exercises so that participants feel how they can lean on a particular part of the body, how they can push off the ground, and how they can reach forward with another part—i.e., higher into the future. We often see that one side of the body can do this more easily, while on the other side it’s significantly harder. When they practice for half an hour, becoming calmer and—due to proper guidance—more attuned to their relationship with the ground, they notice that the ground truly carries the strong meaning of the past from which they come.
Most people, especially those with chronic problems, have difficulty with the past they come from. It’s important to understand what soil we originate from, what our surname means, what our ancestors were like—were they good or bad, honest or dishonest, truth-loving or deceitful. It’s equally important to understand whether our ancestors knew how to function in partnerships where the woman had the female role and the man the male role. Or whether, as was often the case due to circumstances like war, accidents, alcoholism, addictions, infidelity, etc., many women had to take on the male role because they couldn’t trust men, their maturity, or their use of aggressive emotions. Thus, women had to push men aside and take on both roles.
Aleš Ernst, author of the AEQ Relationships Method.
