The Child: A Victim of Domestication
Young children believe everything they are told. Because judges are the directors of domestication, children are told some pretty mean things — which you now know are all lies. Children agree to believe lies. They have no choice. If a child is told she is ugly, clumsy, or stupid, she will believe it is the truth. If she is called selfish, that lie is added to the light stored in her channels of perception, and can forever distort how she perceives herself.
Sometimes a judge can be so angry, he thinks you should suffer or die. An inwardly violent judge is often the result of an especially dangerous, neglected, or abusive childhood. If you are hearing that judge in your mind, you are encouraged to work personally with a therapist or Toltec master who can guide you to the truth.
When a child resists these lies, and tries to stand up against the judges, she learns that she has no power. Grownups are bigger, talk louder, and have countless methods of punishment, especially for children who talk back to their parents. This experience of being powerless becomes the theme of childhood, and carries right into adult life. When the inner judge takes over from the outer judges, the hurt feelings continue unabated.
The Victim Dream
The parents' job is to repress a child's reality and enforce theirs. It is simply the necessary truth of domestication, not right or wrong. It just is. When the parents impose their reality, a child cannot express his emotions and truth to get his needs met. The child truly does become a victim of the outside world, without power or control over what happens to him. This happens whether the parents' methods of domestication are gentle or abusive. The message the child learns is the same — only the degree of wounding is different.
The mantra in the victim dream becomes “I am powerless to get my emotional and physical needs met my way. It is not fair, and there is nothing I can do about it.” Children learn to be vigilant about the needs and moods of others, and to manipulate adults to meet the children's own needs for attention and safety. They learn to disregard and judge their own needs, and sacrifice them in order to be accepted by the judges around them.
It is unfortunate that when a child leaves home, no one invites him to leave all those agreements, beliefs, and the wounding they cause behind, and go into the world in love with themselves and with life. The dream of helplessness lives on.
The Dream Is Alive
The Toltecs know that dreams are alive and that they reproduce themselves. If you dream yourself as a victim, you will send signals into your world that reproduce and create the world you are dreaming. When a New York City mugger was asked how he chooses his targets, he said, “They already look scared.” His victims already perceived the world as dangerous and themselves as powerless — and muggers of all kinds recognize that energy.
This is a good example of “believing is seeing,” which you read about in Chapter 5. It is as though you are projecting your individual little virtual reality of life onto a big screen, and everyone around you can see and respond to it. How they respond depends on how they are dreaming. Not everyone becomes a mugger just because someone else appears to be vulnerable. Dreams mate and reproduce with their kind!
The Victim Child Lives in the Adult
What is learned in childhood generally becomes the adult dream of reality. Remember how the stored light distorts the incoming reality? Well, this is one of the big examples of that distortion. When a child is raised feeling powerless, that lie lives in her channels of perception, and creates a virtual reality of a world in which she has no power. She will continue to repress her feelings and truth, because she has learned “it doesn't do any good to express them anyway.”
Many people live in this victim dream, usually without being aware of it. They blame their hurt and misfortunes on other people, events, and even life itself. The victim dream can make people angry, suspicious, and resentful. It causes people to take things personally that are not personal. It makes them afraid to take risks or fail, because the judge is there, waiting to make them wrong.
What does it mean to say the victim child is a living dream?
Everyone has many different personalities buried in their minds, each with different needs and desires. These personalities are distinct and seem to come alive depending on outside situations. They do not have separate bodies, of course, so they are called living dreams in the mind.
It is the inner victim who believes the judge, and knows she is a failure at being who she should be. The living dream of a victim child knows she must hide her imperfections — which her inner judge can see so clearly — from the judges of the outer world. She wears masks and adopts roles to hide the truth of who she is (more on masks in Chapters 7 and 8). The frightened inner victim child uses most of the adult's personal power keeping up the illusion that she is better and more worthy of love than she believes herself to be.
