Sometimes I look back at my personal past and am amazed that I thought that I did, believed what I believed, and did what I did because I thought that it was the right thing to do.
I can wonder in true alarm, “How could I have believed that!“

How alarming it is to think as one does once one has become “awakened” from the drowsy state of conformity, have some personal views, but all other views were impregnated into my soul; by other people or the system, and my having accepted their views, the system and status quo of the world and things as they currently be I reacted, acted, and lived as this “thinking within the Box” showed I should.

I remember crying a lot when I became a believer in God, because once one realizes that the beliefs of the past were not stable, correct, nor decent, moral or even ethical, it can be a real downer.

I know of people who were in gangs, were violent, drug addicts and so on, which I was none of those things, but what got me was what i believed, how I acted, and how I treated some people. I was not that bad in many ways, but I was so heavily disappointed in myself that it brought me to tears.

The point I want to make here in this article is how I feel now, and 20 years ago, both so completely different and of course if once’s thoughts are different then they are on now a completely different future path than they were on say 10, 20 years ago.

I watched a video of myself about 18 years ago as I was then, and I cried in bitter disappointment.
I felt that I was arrogant, used bad language, was crude to some degree, and that just shamed me so much.
It was not that I am mister do-goody now or anything, I still make mistakes and so on, it was just that my combined character was so disappointing to me now.

I was not back then capable of doing evil, cruelty and so forth, but I was a fallen man, foolish, spoke irrationally, and generally a big disappointment to how I am now.

It took some reading and self discovery over the years, and also more importantly a true discovery of those who influenced me as I grew up and their real affect on my mind, life, soul and how I was molded into being what others wanted me to be rather than who I could have been had they not been in my life.

Self-Discovery should always include a realization, a discovery, of what really happened and why, and then we can come to a fair conclusion that even though we didn’t like who we were, we need to get a grip on who the culprits really were.

I discovered that adults in my life are fast to cast guilt off themselves and point to me and say that i did what I did because it was me, who i am and so on, they claimed that i still had a choice.

But sometimes other people’s touch in our lives has a far deeper, even darker, even abusive, even mentally affecting way on our soul, and then as an adult we are way out of true character.

You see, today I am me, but 18 years ago, I was not me, I was a combination of how I was treated in my life, my experiences and so on.
Those who treated us bad are the first to blame others, they even can be so much in denial they may even believe that they are innocent.
I have met people who have physically, or sexually, or emotionally abused their children, but by gosh they will never admit it. But they are sure to go on long stories about how their children are suffering mental issues, struggle with courage and confidence, are depressed, suffer anxiety and so on and how the parent is so disappointed that the adult-child is suffering and has not got their life in order.

When we have an abuser or toxic parent who is in denial, be weary, because their denial can make us, the victim, feel that we are the guilty one when we are clearly not.

When we are abused, or don’t have a natural upbringing, we have a bruise in our soul, one that won’t go away. It causes all sorts of issue, like when we are triggered to remember it, or when we show irrational fear of what we need not fear, or we are gullible, easily led and so on.
When our Foundation of Life, our personal structure is weak, was weakened, by others, when it is not healed and cured, causes us to struggle as adults.

Well brought up children can deal with life as an adult.

Abused and not well brought up children cannot handle what happens to them as an adult, so they fall to anxiety, depression and so on, and those who caused the bruise refuse to admit or, rather they get into blame-shifting, false accusations, and calling others evil and bad.

I remember an adult who was abusive to me always claiming that other people were bad, or abusive, or are our enemies, yet I knew that these other people were good people. Her toxic way of justifying herself in lies to herself so that she could walk the streets with her head held high was to blame-shift, then she could have her delusions and the younger people trusting her, her own children, while being abused, saw others as abusers and abusive, or bad character, and even our enemies, when our real enemies were in our own home.

I was told back in 2004 that my mistakes of my childhood and teenage years were not my fault, and at the time I was very confused. I note that “I” made the mistakes, so who else could be to blame?

But what I did not realize is that when we are formed wrong, weak, hurt, abused and mentally struggling, what we do is not what we would have done in a different more stable mature, moral and decent home.
So what we did was not our normal-self, it was the troubled-childhood, its inability to cope, and therefore made foolish, unwise, and sometimes self destructive choices.

You see, if one knows better then one will not do stupid things.
Those who don’t know better can be told a rational mature way to live, but they refuse it (because they genuinely cannot comprehend it or the suggestion of change), and that is because their mind was never developed enough to know what is good, bad, right or wrong, moral or immoral, or even what is indecent, so when the immature troubled mind chooses, it choose as if it was still in child-mentality-mode, and makes irrational, foolish, and even self-destructive choices.

Once I realized that who I saw as me when I looked back at my past was not the real me it was easier to accept, see who really was to blame, and to bring myself up again as I should have been brought up and that this would make me confident, courageous, strong willed, capable of all the things I was not capable of years ago.

You are not to blame for those years or the choices that you made.

All the best from
James M Sandbrook.
18th of November, 2021.