Capacity of the Awakened Child: Dual Awareness

When we develop normally (with a “good enough” childhood environment), ego states are coconscious and relatively integrated in their functioning. Forgash & Copeley

When, thus, warmly invited into the garden, born into Beauty, the child learns to Play. And eventually Loving-playfulness becomes a secure felt-sense in her physical being. In this energy, she can learn in her own unique way how to be with herself, sensually taking in the inner textures, and shades and colors, to be with the unpleasant bumps and aches, the internal distress, and joys. Freedom and challenge.

The Awakened Child can move in and out of diverse energies of Pain, Self-deception, or the Abnormal without losing her way. To describe this connected fluidity, therapists sometimes speak of dual awareness. It’s the ability to perceive two or more realities at the same time.

It’s knowing:

1. What is happening in the moment.

2. While being aware of other energies that are running underneath or in the background without getting lost in them.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Processing (EMDR) and other similar therapies rely on dual awareness. To “reprocess” memories you will need to stay in the moment, aware of your surroundings and what is occurring, while also allowing yourself to move back to the traumatic moment. You won’t benefit from being trapped in the past, and becoming retraumatized, nor make progress if the past is walled off and remains dissociated.

Co-consciousness is a similar concept to dual awareness. You may have heard this term from discussions of traumatic experiences or in the diagnosis of DID. It is often understood as a capacity of a psyche in which multiple aspects of consciousness operate simultaneously and potentially in harmony. It describes a more integrated unified experience, with ego states “relatively integrated in their functioning.” Such awareness allows for contact with potentially many inner states, with coexisting personalities in us.

The Awakened Child as I depict her here is open and aware of what is occurring and can move seamlessly between internal energy forms. I am going to call this, simply, dual awareness, but I do mean that she can acknowledge different internal parts and has the potential to find a balance, a sense of integration, wholeness, a growing Inspired core. The Truth she knows is that she is an interconnected part of everything, and something extraordinary. Such Truth requires connection with our bodies and gut feelings. And it is not a passive process. What is “real” arises in our active efforts to seek and to explore fearlessly, and to experience the full range of our suffering and joy. This is not passive. It takes active curiosity and energy to dig inwardly, beneath the appearance and beyond our roles and rules. Many children naturally do this, given the opportunity.

To summarize the Awakened Child, she lives in the state of Mindfulness, animated by the Loving-Playfulness energy. When we access her spirit, we gain:

• Some comfort acknowledging what is occurring at deep levels, allowing us to honor who we are beneath the roles we will assume.

• Acceptance that we have paradoxes and polarities and that is interesting, something to be curious about.

• Intuitive understanding that what we seek most of us is found in states of Love and Play.

• Awareness of what we want most of all (peace, connection, spontaneity, and creativity).

I imagine the Child entering a school assembly rather than a sophisticated performance though she can show anywhere of course if the adult persona will allow her to. She would be at home in a cafeteria or a gymnasium watching players costumed with papier-mâché, acrylic paint, and construction paper pieces on an improvised stage. There are suggestions of exotic characters but with some familiar eyes of classmates peeking out. It is an event met with wild curiosity, giggling and the exhilaration of pretend and the novel, the unexpected. Such places are distinct from a bored “mature” theatre with its cultured critics. Instead, the audience is wide-eyed, watchful, always curious, filled with the freedom of a long-awaited recess, the magic of talking scenery and weird animals and monsters both terrifying and silly. I imagine there are some characters who have been given many lines, but there is likely little narrative throughline to the Child, regardless of what the teachers or the parents might want to see performed. It’s not the Pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth’s Rock or any predictable and dubious plot, not a holiday enactment, not a recital exactly, not a contest. For the Child, protagonists and antagonist are all part of the game, feeding the imaginal Heart. She takes it all in.

But we lose this ability to be there and there and there if we let the Abnormal, Pain and Self-deception neuro-gravitational energies shape us. There is danger we will lose the ability to see the hilarious and the unique moments, hear the still quiet Inspired voice. Those psychic Titans will perform a type of soul-murder as they solidify and wall off some innocent aspects of our natural contraries, freezing us in our development, reprimanding us if we are frolicsome and lively and vulnerable, replacing joy with seriousness and turning Love into a desperation to be loved or a fantasy of perfect love.

Dual Awareness Supports Healing

If someone you loved desperately died or abruptly left you, you will of course feel intense grief; and, yet, with dual awareness you may find that you’re able to better cope despite the loss, at least over time.

As a personal example, when my sister died way too young, though I was deep in mourning, I found it possible to focus on tasks at hand adequately, most of the time, though understandably with some increased exhaustion, as my psyche tried to manage two tasks, one an emotional task of surrendering to the loss, the other a more cognitive of managing life.

On a break at work, I would allow or even invite sorrow to the surface. Though I did not want to be overwhelmed, at times I did become lost in grief. But, with practice, I got better at moving in and out of distress. Peter Levin calls this “pendulating.”

            Dual Awareness creates a necessary condition for pendulating. With such dual awareness we can make a deliberate limbic practice of inviting and allowing the Pain to move forward without being so bewildered and then encouraging it to move into the background where we can be a witness to it. Titrating in and out. How long before any of us are able to fully put away an emotional injury? To be brutally honest, it could happen quickly, or it could take years, or never fully. Part of being a Child is surrendering to timetables.

Without These Capacities

When we’re have not done sufficient work to deal with our emotional injuries, have not taken the time we need, then we can find ourselves drowning in the misery. Or we expend a lot of psychic energy to avoid, repress, lock Pain outside the house like an abandoned dog, and so exhaust ourselves; meanwhile, our left-brained Abnormal, like a delusional cheerleader or obnoxious uncle may want to convince us that we’re doing well. We are over it and are now focused on what needs to be done. However, when we close the blinds and dull our hearts in denial, parts of us continue to howl and scratch relentlessly at the door or they escape despite the fences, running wild, astray, sometimes very far astray.