Who Were You Raised to Be?
#2 - Prompts for Journaling, Meditation and Conversation.
Beloveds, I forgot to record yesterday’s post!!!! Sheesh. I have now edited it and the recording is added. Click here and kindly listen, if you did not read it. I hope the audio makes it easier for you.
Our Socialization
As social beings, we are informed by everything around us. Think of the most precious little bitty baby, fresh and newborn. That little baby dies if it is not coddled, fed, cleaned, and nurtured by another human. We need older people as we develop and they help us grow up. As they help the little one integrate and grow into the world at large, they socialize and program the clean slate that is a baby.
The Cycle of Socialization1, today's resource, shows us that everything around us programs us before we are even born. It starts with our parents. We cannot control the family we were born into. We cannot control our race, or our privileges, when we are born. Yet while we are in the womb, our not-in-our-control phenotype begins to shape our life experiences, given the larger society that we will be born into.
No matter what skin tone/color is revealed at a birth, race should never generate shame. Yet, the reality is that this phenotype takes on programming from external forces. Our parents teach us their traditions and beliefs. So do our extended families, teachers, and our larger communities. People whom we love, and trust inform our expectations, norms, values, roles, rules, and models of behaviors. These experiences and people are the source of our dreams, the shapers of our identities.
As we grow up, it continues. Our faith traditions, the songs we listen to, the patterns of thought we develop, our ideologies and patterns, both on a conscious level and an unconscious level, reinforce all our programming. It is like an escalator that is almost impossible to get off. As we keep getting rewarded for doing the "right" thing, our programming deepens. There is a pressure to conform.
If we stay on this cycle of socialization, we will experience dissonance, dehumanization, and the reduction of our own humanity because we are now constrained into a little bitty box and have become an automaton. We lose our zest for life, our spunk, our uniqueness.
The internalization of patterns of power continue to haunt us throughout our lives and if we don't make waves, promote the status quo, and do nothing, we just continue to recreate this for the next generation and the next generation
As this critical point in time, at this moment, we are all called towards a change, through our feelings of dissonance, anger, guilt, collusion, ignorance, frustration, self-hatred, stress, and hopelessness.
Often these socializations are based on fear, scarcity, ignorance, and feed off the fight-or-flight response in our brains. This is about survival. Historically, many choices our ancestors made were prioritized for their own personal survival over the thriving of the whole community. And that sense of what it takes to survive, that contraction, tightness, consternation, it no longer supports us.
Part of the goal of this series is to get you to shed the toxic aspects of our socialization for your own humanity to be revealed. We do that by getting off the escalator and embracing change, educating ourselves, questioning, and reframing many of the things we have been taught.
Today’s invitation is to be aware that you are programmed. I am not saying that you are not you, or that have no sense of who you are, or you have no control. But are you aware of how you were programmed? And, how much of that is really you?
Prompt
With kindness, no blame, no defense, explore your social architecture. Look at the Cycle of Socialization as you think of your early life. Notice where you stumble on a contraction, tightness, consternation, or even an openness, as you go through the circles and arrows.
Who were you raised to be and who raised you? What structures raised you? What shaped you?
Source: Cycle of Socialization developed by Bobbie Harro ©Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, Routledge 2000.