Are you really born yet, as a real human being, or do you just exist as a mirror image of the expectations of your surroundings?

Introduction. (skip if you want)

In 2009, I was to give a lecture on the publication of a psychological book about relationships in a well-known publishing house in Oslo (Aschehoug publishing house). The book was about the development of the self and self-awareness, and how we are shaped by our relationships and how we in turn influence them.

As I was writing the lecture, I came across how very few of us who truly live an independent and self-differentiated life. A life where we make our choices with a full awareness of what we are doing. A type of independently chosen life, in which we also admit our dependence on others, our parents, the family, the clan, the society around us and the global environment with the air that we breathe.

To my surprise and despairI found, – when I thought about everything I had been working on for the past twenty-five years,-there were few people outside of my patients and some friends, who were actually born yet! Yes, they had come out of the womb, the umbilical cord had been cut, and they had become so-called adults. But was this all?

It should be mentioned that I grew up in a multicultural quite affluent environment, with Americans, Britons, Catholics, Jews and, I believe, an Afro-American moderate Muslim, who worked for NATO. After an economic collapse due to a bankruptcy rider who inflicted great losses on our family’s business, we moved to a somewhat more affordable place in town.

Here our closest family neighbors were Jews. It should be said that my initials are JEW, so I was well received despite my Christian background. Actually religion played little role here, friendship trumped all this. But at least I learned that in Jewish tradition, a human being dies twice. The first time when the heart stops, and the second time when no one is talking about you or remembering your name. What about births then? How many births do we have, I asked myself later.

Each one of us has three possible births.

1. Our Physical Birth:

• Our first birth is when we finally after approx. 9 months comes out of the mother’s womb and the umbilical cord is cut. Then we are physically separated from our mother’s body, but not at all psychologically or psycho-physical. At this stage of our llives we need a lot of closeness, care and skin contact to survive. It’s not enough to be fed.

2. Our Psychological Birth:

• Our second birth comes gradually, after many months and years of interaction with our parents, where we discover differences and similarities, and perceives our psychic existence as different from mother, father, siblings and the others “out there”. The day we look into the mirror, point at our reflected image there and say, “I”,- we are born psychologically. But this our psychological identity is strongly linked to the reflections of others opinion of us. That is the mirror who others want to see us through, by their definitions and expectations. Although we break with this mirror image in our youth, or meet the expectations, – self-perception and self-esteem are still closely tied to the mirror image. In a way, we will live up to what we believe and want others to recognize us for. We can in a way choose, but without the necessary self-awareness.

3. The Existential Birth of Man:

• Our third birth, on the other hand, does not occur until we have understood what push and pulls, what leading threads, what pain, and indeed what history our parents, our family and our relatives on both sides carry with them, and which in turn also has shaped us. We have come to a point in life where we acknowledge our positive and good sides aswell as our mistakes and wrong doings. We have discovered both our strengths and our limitations. And no matter how much we would have changed our negative sides earlier, we must understand and accept them before changing.
• At his point in development history, we have simply understood why our life has become the way it has! This we have done to a point where we not only continue to choose this or that, the one thing or the other. We have come to a point and a crossroads where we can consciously choose what we choose, because we know our background and our history.
• This is nothing less than an existential crucial moment: An existential BIG BANG, I would call it!

• With this knowledge, awareness and will, we can choose us out of a family tradition, or choose to continue most of it, because we believe it to be the right thing. Are there a family trauma we have discovered, we can try to repair the devastating effect of it, and by that avoid passing it on subconsciously to our children. If not we could risk doing, without knowing it, what Alice Miller’s family did to their son, Martin Miller.(http://www.selvuniverset. com/2020/01/29/a-parents-gravest-betrayal-and-deceit/)
• We can also choose to change ourselves, not necessarily because others want it from us. But because we ourselves want it in the depths of our self-knowledge.

Conclusion and new Year’s wish for us:

Unfortunately, most of us are only born twice. We lack the courage or opportunity to undergo the last “cognitive pregnancy”. In that sense, we are like mass produced blueprints, that have never really taken responsibility for realizing our originality.

Let’s hope some of us manage to make that leap in 2020.