When we join the ten stages study course we often come to the realisation that different fragments of ourselves have lived at different stages in our past recovery efforts.

When we join the ten stages study course we often come to the realisation that different fragments of ourselves have lived at different stages in our past recovery efforts. Some segments can be amazingly healed and insightful, while others can remain buried and out of touch. Our different fragments traverse the various stages of our recovery at their own speeds, seemingly independently – but ultimately connected to the core of our recovery by a thread of childhood truth.

The first stage on the stages’s healing journey is our contest stage. This is the stage of argument, attempted acceptance, and dissociated unhappiness, and seeking approval by parents, partners and friends of our crazy making behaviour. The parts of us that we feel are winning our contest stage stop our journey to recovery before it has even begun escaping into the grandiosity of spirituality, various religions and new personal romantic adventures. Here we deny our deepest traumas so intensely that we fool even ourselves into believing they never happened – and that we are already recovered. We attend groups that further traumatise us by our recollections and the recollections of others. It is for this reason that our dissociations/escapism within the groups mimics our recovery. Here we still idealise our parents, which allows us full unconscious liberty to replicate the worst of our past in our present. Here we do not look beneath our surface, but join with dissociated others in their recollections of dysfunction. We remain happily still distant from the misery lurking in our recovery seeking constantly changing new solutions that dont work and joining with inappropriate others to compare our stories.

Yet where parts of us lose the stage contest we move into the second stage: suffering. This is the stage of depression, failure, misery, and inertia. Here we wallow in seemingly purposeless pain. The silver lining around our cloud of parental idealisation has been stripped away, but the cloud remains intact. We still wish to be rescued by our parents and their replicated stand-ins, but we lack the requisite pain tolerance to be able to acknowledge the impossibility of this. Here we live in tortured ambivalence/recovery, and we spend out hours and days trying to get others to love us in the way our parents never could. Part of us wishes to devolve back into the seeming pleasure of grandiosity, but the healthier part recalls how cruelly that route already failed us.

Those parts of us with the capacity to face our terrors enter the third stage: grieving. This is the stage of purposeful struggling. Here we unearth the truth of our past, which allows the eruption of the puss filled boil of our buried traumas. Here we witness the horror lurking behind idealisation of the parents and we work to disassemble their lies. Our honest confidence leads us into the face of the hurricane, because our child within and its allies the students in the stages tell us that blue skies lie on the other side. Here we are humble, here we confront the truth of the worst of our parents, using whatever means will best help us integrate our truth, and through this our journey rages forward.

With each problem we conquer we take a further step into the fourth stage: enlightenment. This is the stage of emotional integration, balance, and inner peace. Here lie the deepest goals of recovery. All want to know truth, and the recovered person achieves it – in all parts of ourself that arrive in the final stage. Here we grow able to distinguish light from shadow and water from mirage. Here we nurture our recovery of our primitive sides instead of expressing them self-destructively. Here we devote the best of ourselves to healing. Here we no longer traumatise others in the very patterns in which we were traumatised, but instead replicate the best of ourselves through contact with our child within – and generate beauty in the world around us. Here, having healed our wounds, we share freely of our gifts, because now our gifts are accessible to us and others.

At The Stages we have a different philosophy for our life. We come to focus on the child within as a living entity.That why we call it the CHILD WITHIN not inner child which is a parental false selfs method of acknowledgement. We, so-called adults are not truly adults at all, and we have to examine this fact we have become a weird self constructed mess. We all get older. Anyone, with a little luck, can do that. But, speaking from a recovery viewpoint, this is not adulthood. True adulthood hinges on acknowledging, accepting, and taking responsibility for loving and re-focusing on our own child within us. For most of us, this never happens because we have long forgotten the language of our childhood. Instead, our child within has been denied, neglected, disparaged, abandoned or rejected. We are told by society to "grow up," putting childish things aside. To become adults, we've been taught that our child within represents our child-like capacity for innocence, wonder, awe, joy, sensitivity and playfulness and this message must be stifled, quarantined or even killed. Our child within is angry, very very angry, Pissed off, vengefilled and often hurt, wounded cowering in the shadows locked in a basement. Our child within comprises and potentiates these qualities.

We, our child within holds our accumulated childhood hurts, traumas, fears and angers. WE the "Grown-ups" are convinced we have successfully outgrown, jettisoned, and left this child within--and its emotional trauma--long behind. But this is far from our truth as we begin to find out as we work on The Ten Stages and start to uncover our real truths in our recovery. Do not expect your child within to be thankful that you have unlocked its prison after a lifetime of ignorance and abuse. Its like a mistreated dog it bites and it bites hard. That is why we have a studied course, not a self help group of dissociated children we are not a feel good society.We have to deal with the reality of long term personal abuse, yes we have learned the language of an abusive parental society that rules by its jails and institutions of dysfunction and at the stages we must replace that language of mis-information and abuse to be able to finally enter into a discourse with the child within and re-connect with our freed personality.

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