To be around a baby which is loved and cared for and whose needs are generally being met is a remarkable experience, as many of you will know: there can be an energy which almost seems other-worldly in such a child. In a way the perfection of human creation is something we see reflected in a baby’s eyes. Why is this? Why should a well-cared for child trail such clouds of glory?

The natural condition of the human animal is to love, to be loved, to connect deeply with others, and in doing so, to find a safe haven for the expression of the most profound aspects of his or her own humanity. This safe haven ought to be the trusted container created by parents in which their children can grow up, knowing they are fully accepted in all of their natural potential and possibility.

But as we all know, life does not offer such an experience to the vast majority of children. Indeed, it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that the one constant of human society has been the extent to which children have been abused or victimised throughout history.

As Alice Miller observed, victimisation of children has never been prohibited – what has been prohibited is the telling of the story of the victimisation of children. We see that clearly in the way so many societies and societal leaders have conspired to hide the widespread experience of child abuse in recent years.

At the root of such issues, the sad truth seems to be that parents often emotionally wound their children in a way which reflects how they themselves were wounded during childhood. As parents are wounded emotionally, physically and spiritually, so they may in turn wound their own children; unless, that is, they are enlightened in some way – or they do the personal “work” necessary to recover their own wholeness and sovereignty. It is such emotional wounding that seems to prevent a child from accessing their Sovereignty and all the potential that it holds.

And even an “adequate” upbringing, where a child is cared for reasonably well, does not generally allow the magnificence of the sovereign energy within them to emerge in its purest form. Alice Miller suggested that around 45% of children get an “adequate” upbringing. But what does adequate mean?

Our society, I would seem, generally doesn’t like to see children shining, a dislike reflected in statements such as “don’t toot your own horn”, “pride goes before a fall”, “don’t get too big for your boots”, “little Miss Know It All”, “nobody likes a show-off”, and a million more spoken and unspoken reflections of how much safer it is for a child to be small in the world than to stand out, to be seen, to be heard, to be head and shoulders above the crowd.

Such pressure to be “small” extends throughout every level in the fabric of our society. Even in what should be our first and safest environment, our own family, there are moments when we are “missed”;  critical moments in which, had we been seen and acknowledged, our self-confidence and sense of self-worth would be reinforced and grow a little stronger each time.

We can be missed simply because our parents are overloaded or too busy. But worse, we may experience negativity, scorn and ridicule from our carers, our siblings, our teachers, our friends, and these energies can cause our natural exuberance, confidence and sense of self-worth to wither, to go into shadow, if not to die.

Even a simple lack of attention, a lack of reflection of our power, a lack of acknowledgement of our growing sense of ability, can be enough to make our desire to stand out and be seen gradually dwindle to nothing.

The thing is, young children have a natural desire to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be recognised. When a young child announces their presence with actions or words which declare “Look at me!” they may be greeted with warmth and delight, or they may be greeted with sarcasm and ridicule – or anything in-between. These are the wounds that impact upon our ability to both find and express our Sovereign energy later in life.

And even if they are greeted with warmth and delight in the family environment, it’s a certainty that some point in their early lives they will receive a very different reaction in school, or amongst their peers.

Such blows to a child’s self-esteem can come in many forms. I’ve come to see, over the years I’ve been working with people’s deep emotional wounds, how exquisitely sensitive we all were as children; and how deep was the pain that we all experienced, and generally hid, in our early years.

The deep pain of our emotional wounding is rarely visible; children are adept at covering it up, a skill which increases as we grow older. But the wounds come, even when children are well cared for.

For example, firstborn children who have the love and attention of their parents generally don’t welcome the arrival of siblings, and are not prepared for the loss of attention that they experience. Unsupported, their pain unseen in the excitement of a new baby brother or sister arriving, and unable to process what they see as the loss of their parents’ love, they may adopt behaviours towards their siblings that seriously impact their brothers’ and sisters’ freedom to express their true selves.

It’s a truism, too, that parents are often more engaged with their first child than subsequent children. In that lies another Sovereign wound.

However, the hits that our self-confidence and sovereign energy can take, whether deliberate or unintentional, don’t only come from the interpersonal dynamics of the family. Recent scandals and revelations about how children have been treated in schools, particularly boarding schools, demonstrate how easily we can turn a blind eye to the oppression of young children, teenagers, and young adults.

In Britain it was legal to physically assault children in British state schools, under the guise of discipline, by hitting them with canes, slippers, sticks or leather belts until 1986. (Private schools took a while longer: until 1998 in England and Wales, 2000 in Scotland and 2003 in Northern Ireland.)

Even our cultural idioms such as “spare the rod and spoil the child” and “children should be seen and not heard”, speak to a level of embodied hatred and abuse of children which seems unimaginable, but which has been a fabric of society in many countries around the world in more or less brutal forms for a very long time.

A child’s ego is a very delicate thing. Children are naturally sensitive, and they not only look for, but must actually receive the acceptance and approval of their parents to ensure their spiritual, emotional and psychic growth. Children blossom in an environment of love and acceptance, encouragement and support, and to the extent that they don’t get these things, the natural expression of their potential is inhibited, and the free-flowing expression of their sovereign energy is blocked.

We can assume that the natural growth of Sovereign energy depends on a child being raised in an environment where they can begin to express qualities such as self-confidence, self-worth, self-love and, perhaps above all, the expectation of being accepted in the world just as they are. And so, perhaps, the dearth (or should that be death?) of sovereign energy in our world becomes easier to understand.

But although the way we treat our children, both individually and collectively, may be partly responsible for the lack of sovereign energy in society, there is much more to the story than that.

Some recurrent themes in the men’s workshops I run sound very much like this:  Why do I feel like a boy? Why do I feel like a teenager? Why do I find it hard to stand up to women? Why do I find it hard to make my mark in the world? Why do I struggle so much? Why can’t I assert myself or set boundaries? Why am I so weak / soft / unboundaried / unmasculine? And so on.

To understand the answers to these questions, we need to look back at what helps a boy step into his masculinity.

In tribal societies, boys spend a lot of time with their fathers and other older men in the village. There is something about simply being in the presence of older men which infuses the boys with a sense of masculinity.

Spending time around their fathers and older men teaches the boys how to be a man in the society they live in. It also teaches them what’s expected of them as adult members of that society. It shows them how to behave, and it shows them how to relate to women and children. In short, what sort of man they become is the result of being around adult men and soaking up societal norms.

There is something about this proximity of adolescent and older man which seems to switch on a kind of developmental process in the boys, aiding their transition into manhood by giving them a day-to-day example of what that means.

In addition, most village-based societies had some kind of initiation rite of passage for the boys. There are various explanations and theories about how rites of passage can help boys transition into manhood, but there are certain things that we can say with certainty.

To start with, a rite of passage marks a transition in a boy’s mind very vividly – it’s deliberately designed to be memorable in some way. This leaves him in no doubt that he is moving from boyhood or adolescence into manhood, and the expectations placed upon him, and the responsibilities that he needs to fulfil, will be different in the future.

There’s also a sense of setting boundaries around the boy’s relationship with the wider world. The nature of a rite of passage, which often contained elements designed to be frightening or intimidating, would show him that the world was bigger than him, and he couldn’t take his arrogant testosterone-fuelled superiority as a licence to exploit the world for his own amusement or benefit.

Indeed, some rites of passage involved a genuine threat of death: a Maori adolescent going out to hunt a lion with nothing but a spear and a cloak would either have been in no doubt about his prowess as a man once he’d achieved that objective that, or he’d be dead.

However, if you look at modern societies in the world today, neither rites of passage nor time with older men features much in many boys’ or teenagers’ lives.

Another poignant example: in the USA, XX percentage of boys don’t see their fathers after the divorce of their parents. The equivalent number n the UK is ZZ.

But even when a family stay together while the children are growing up, fathers can still absent themselves, one way or another. That’s why many men in my workshops tell me that even though their fathers were physically present, somehow they were emotionally absent.

And beyond that startling reality comes the question of whether a man who is trying to be present can actually communicate with his son in a way that the boy needs. This isn’t about being a perfect father; it’s more about being present to the boy’s struggles and being able to relate to him in a way that the boy needs.

And that might not be the same as the way women and girls tend to relate to each other, by talking things through at great length. It might just be a sense of being alongside in support, or being able to offer appropriate boundaries or emotional support when necessary. It might mean being able to contextualise a boy’s experience in a way that makes things comprehensible for him.

Robert Bly suggested that the separation of fathers and sons which has proved so damaging to the development of Sovereign energy in our world began with the industrialisation of society and the resultant physical and emotional separation of fathers and sons.

It’s a plausible idea: that our ancestors’ ancestors were emotionally wounded because of their experience in an industrial society. The suggestion is that their lives were exhausting, that they didn’t have the time or energy when they came home to attend to their children in a good way.

I’ve also heard it suggested that previous generations of fathers and grandfathers were deeply wounded by their war experiences in the first and second world wars, so much so that they closed down emotionally and weren’t able to be present to their family.

It’s certainly a complicated issue but I think there’s one thing that we can agree on: that many older men don’t know how to be present for their children in the way that their children need.

To put it another way, even when the desire to build relationship with children is present, the demands of history, tradition, society and culture may be so great that men aren’t left with the space or time to do it. The demands of our world are such that men can’t any longer fulfil the role of father in a way that would enable their boys to become men with a strong sense of masculinity and self-confidence.

I don’t want to make this sound like I’m blaming fathers. I’m not. We live in a society that is been gifted to us by the time into which we were born. There’s no point demonising aspects of it because they don’t happen to suit some idealistic model of how fathering should take place.

Continued here