This is a phrase you used before - does it imply that some people don't return?
David
It might just be for me David... ?
...being sensitive and quite clever, but dyslexic and bullied by my siblings, but rather powerful, and considering the conditions under which I was brought up, today I've been told I probably would have been put into care by the local authority for neglect by my parents.
I had to look after myself, as both of them were 'dangerous'... one was simply incapable, and the other absent... I was certainly a serious little soul, very bright, frustrated by my dyslexia, and too powerful for my own good... but that's how I had learned to survive. In later life those coping skills were no longer appropriate, and the personal development I went through over 7 years in the end was mainly about rejoining the group, and learning to understand how beautiful it was to let somebody take care me... the very thing I had learned 'not' to do, because of my 'relatively' dangerous and neglectful parents, and the need to keep myself safe from them behaviour.
Soooo... with all that said, you might see that my STE at 11-12, looks like an 'attractive' experience towards rejoining the group, and perhaps that I needed a message that I could be less careful about the world (comparatively), and that the group loved me, and would care for me if I returned, and let them.
The power of the experience would come from the need to integrate something so basic into my 'core', something that I had blocked for so long, so that releasing it finally was tectonic in scale!
I have always felt that those who have these experiences due to physical circumstances... are reconciling the groups average pattern... with their own pattern... and the bigger the distance between the patterns... The bigger the rationalising experience is which explains them.
Nancy had a frightening experience that pushed her to assert herself in life, just the kick she needed considering her life upto that point.
Eben as an adoptee, was rejected twice by his natural parents, and was suffering deeply because of it... Learning that he was really loved was just the experience he needed.
But in my view, to explain these experiences, there is obviously some profound process going on (right here, right now) that we don't understand, and are completely misguided about.
Have I healed something... in myself, and within my family... I'd like to think so.... at least I believe so.