At an emotional level, we are still children. We cannot forget that the child’s worst fear is abandonment.

At an emotional level, we are still children.  We cannot forget that the child’s worst fear is abandonment.  Since the child is totally dependent on its caregivers for its survival, abandonment equals death.  This keeps us, the norm, skittish about leaving the alleged safety of the family.  We sense that self-investigation would pry them out of the group’s conformity, away from parental approval and into exile, into worlds unknown, a wilderness.  This we equate with death.  Therefore, we refuse to look within and avoid the perceptional shift inherent in self-investigation—at the cost of losing our connection with the self.  The sad irony is that the traumatised family and their compromised parents have long ago abandoned us.  Thus, by remaining in the family we are already in exile, cut off from our true selves and cut off from what would truly sustain us—an honest inner life.