Julie Motz

[emotionologist]

Who Colonizes?

Julie Ann Motz

2 min read

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Just now

To a certain extent this is an expansion of the last story I posted. Since then I've had a chance to look at the whole phenomenon of colonization and to ask in much broader terms, who colonizes?

If we take the example of the British empire we know that those from the ruling class and the upper middle class who went abroad to the Americas, to Asia, to Africa and to the South Pacific were the disenfranchised younger sons. But more generally across all nations and all classes of society those who chose to leave the homeland were those who were not comfortable there or couldn't make it there. In a sense those who were cast out. The most extreme examples of this were the convict settlers of Australia and New Zealand.

While social and economic rejection hurt profoundly the most profound hurt is parental rejection. People who feel deeply loved within their families usually find ways to make life work where they are. Or if they do leave out of a sense of adventure or economic necessity they don't have the impulse to exploit.

If we want to consider colonization and exploitation cultural values of certain kinds of societies it is interesting to note that colonization began to be most strongly condemned after World War II, and that this condemnation has increased with time as more women have work, have greater access to birth control and have fewer unwanted children.

[emotionologist]

The Great Unwanted

I have been trying to understand the deeper meaning of the Israeli Palestinian conflict and I have decided it is about dramatizing the plight of unwanted children for all of us. For centuries the Jews were the great unwanted children of the world, which is why having a place to call home was so important to them. But of course they had to do it in a way that would create another group of unwanted's, the Palestinians, because they never resolved the true pain of their situation.

Donald Trump's great appeal was to all the people in the country who felt unwanted and who were, like himself unwanted children. He declared that in his America they would not be the unwanted ones. But again because their own trauma of not being wanted by their parents was never resolved they had to lose their unwanted status by making others the unwanted — in this case Muslims and Latin American immigrants.

And so it will go on and on until parents only have children they can truly love and support at a time when they can truly love and support them and when anyone who has the misfortune not to be so loved deals with the pain of it and the rage of it and the fear of it and the terrible need it creates and doesn't force this on to others

[emotionologist]

Let’s Work Out In The Emotional Gym

If you’re on Clubhouse join my club, Emotional Gym, and come to our next meeting - tomorrow, July 6th at 7 pm Pacific Time. We’ll be exploring anger and desire.

[emotionologist]

The Mother (And Father) Of All Conspiracy Theories

Parents are the original conspirers. They withhold information from their children, often outright lie to them and manipulate them for their own comfort while claiming to do things for “the child’s own good.” (See Alice Miller’s wonderful book, For Your Own Good for a chapter and verse account of this.) Mommy and Daddy teach that they are safe but people outside the family can be dangerous. Since it’s too threatening to step outside the family myth, see parents clearly and confront them many people walk around with the sense that powers they cannot know and cannot see are somehow controlling things. Conspiracy theories offer a convenient place to put these anxieties.

[emotionologist]

Cancel Culture

The people who came up with the term, “cancel culture” and who are the most afraid and angry about it are people whose mothers wanted to cancel them in the womb - i.e., abort them. These mothers no doubt tried to accomplish this with some chemical that failed and never told anyone about it. So their progeny grew up with a non-specific sense that someone was desperate to get rid of them, which is why this is such a primal issue for them. Once more we have to look for the personal behind the political if we really want to understand what’s going on.

[emotionologist]

TRUMP AND THE ARC OF SELF-DESTRUCTION

As the brilliant Swiss psychiatrist, Alice Miller, observed, people who seek the power to dominate others in order to hide from themselves and the world their abuse and humiliation as children inevitably feel compelled to bring themselves back to that humiliated, defeated state. (Think of Hitler in his bunker and Saddam Hussein in his foxhole.) So Trump had to keep pushing things to the point of utterly disgracing and discrediting himself in the most public way possible. The tragedy is that so many people were viciously hurt in the process. We can be grateful, though, that he crashed before he could accelerate the destruction of the environment beyond all repair and bring Mother Earth down along with him.

[emotionologist]

Violence, Like Charity, Begins At Home

Who are the people who stormed our capitol yesterday? What is their pain and how was this violence intended to address it? They are children in adult bodies who were treated violently by their parents. Often the violence was inflicted on them as babies and often in secret. Just as often they were beaten and/or raped when older and told that they deserved this, were to blame, needed to be punished. Their nervous system protected them in their families by quelling any rebellion, any confrontation of the family story that they had “loving” parents, often any memory of what had happened.

Now along comes Big Brother Trump, urging them to rebel and promising to lead them against that classic parental authority figure - The Government. With no access to their rage at their actual parents they follow, desperately needing to release their roiling anger somewhere, against someone or something powerful and apparently uncaring and invulnerable.

So by all means lets defund the police and put money into prenatal and neonatal care, support for new parents and classes to enable them to face their own childhood suffering and not pass it along.

[emotionologist]

The Meaning Of Communion

Catholic communion is not about connection with God, it’s about connection with Mommy - or rather Mommy as God. It goes back to being inside her womb when she is out entire universe and her body and her blood are what feed us and sustain us. The ritual is appealing because so many mothers, both historically and now, have children they really didn’t want and from whom they feel disconnected during pregnancy. The idea that although your original “higher power” - i.e., Mommy - rejected you, there is someone now revealed as even more powerful who wants to “save” you, wants you to live, will give you HIS body and HIS blood freely and lovingly is tremendously appealing and relieving.

[emotionologist]

Why We Are Besieged - The Price Of Denial

For most of my life I could not let myself  know that my parents and older brother wanted me dead - that they tried to kill me (multiple abortion attempts), brought me to the edge of death (smothering, strangling and drowning that stopped just short) and put me in the hands of others  who cared little for my life or well-being ( a cult in which children were raped, tortured and murdered). This denial on my part put me in the path of other murderous people and in life-threatening situations in which I often felt paralyzed and unable to leave.

Now we have a president who wants to kill - literally or figuratively - anyone who is in his way or not existing exclusively for his benefit and millions have felt helpless - too paralyzed to act in any effective way  - against him. We are also in a pandemic caused by a virus that first seduces a cell by appearing to offer it something beneficial and then exploits and destroys it. And although we may finally have vaccines to protect us for months we have also felt helpless in its wake.

Denial not only leads to dementia and Alzheimer's as we age - it scales up to national political and health disasters. I wish there were a magic bullet for waking ourselves up to the early dangers inside the family that we, individually and collectively, recreate outside it. For now all I have discovered is using present personal suffering as a window on past traumas and the body as the vehicle for traveling back to awaken and heal.

[emotionologist]

“Nothing Human Is Alien To Me”

When I think of the rapes and the beatings, the strangulations and suffocations I endured from my mother, my father and my brother (all of them respected academics) nothing that Trump and his supporters do or hope to do feels alien to me. From one perspective it is the perfect expression of all the violence, hatred and destruction hidden in American families.

[emotionologist]

Relating To Black Lives Matter

All unwanted children know what it’s like to have the people who run things, the people who are in control of your life, want you dead. They know how it feels to be blamed for things they haven’t done, held responsible for situations they didn’t create and punished arbitrarily for nothing at all. They may not expect to be discounted, hated, rejected or exploited just because of the color of their skin but they live with the terror that this will happen to them just because they exist.

I believe it is gangs of these unwanted children who are the die-hard racists.  Led by our enraged Fetus-In-Chief, instead of focusing their anger on the mothers who longed to abort them, they “solve” the problem of feeling unwanted by putting that label on others. So it has to be immigrants and people of color who are the unwanted ones, the ones in the way, the ones causing all distress and difficulty.

As an unwanted abortion survivor myself I know how tempting this can be. In my own case I chose intellectual snobbery over racism - so much more acceptable in the academic liberal atmosphere in which I grew up. I saved my contempt and dismissal for those who hadn’t gone to the right schools, read the right books and didn’t love the right artists and composers. It took me decades of life experience and  personal work to grow beyond this.

So how do we make people feel wanted enough, loved enough, included enough not to turn on others and push them out of the tent? I think we are each responsible for examining our own hostility and rejecting impulses and searching our history for the roots of fear and pain that engender them. A matter for constant vigilance. If what someone is doing or saying to us or about us is not directly life-threatening our anger is always historic.

Looking to the long term, how do we support women in having children only when they can afford them, both financially and emotionally?  And where this fails, how can we support under-resourced mothers so they can truly love their children in spite of their own deprivation? Let’s keep asking and moving towards the answers.

[emotionologist]

Take Back America

I was listening to a former Democratic voter from the Rust Belt who ended up voting for Trump. What he said was that he had been merely curious before he went to a Trump rally but once there he felt he belonged to something. Hearing this I realized that one things the Dems aren’t giving people is that sense of belonging, of being part of a family or on a team. I’m not sure how they can create this but it seems essential to victory. The desire just to get rid of someone can be a powerful glue but I think something stronger is needed. My friend Shelley Hogden has come up with a slogan we can start with. How about, “Take Back America?”

[emotionologist]

YOUR MONEY AND YOUR LIFE

YOUR MONEY AND YOUR LIFE A Four-Week Online Course Starting Saturday, August 22nd (F. Scott Fitzgerald - “The very rich are different from you and me.” Ernest Hemmingway - “Yes, they have a lot more money.”) How important is money in your life? Do you feel you have to choose between doing what you love and making enough money to support yourself? Do you have trouble charging what you know you’re worth?

For some people making money is a complete mystery. They can’t figure out how to become financially successful, stable or secure. Others know exactly what they need to do to grow their business, to get a promotion or to create a reliable income stream - but, just as mysteriously, can’t bring themselves to do it. There are people with lots of money who feel embarrassed by their wealth and others who are always afraid that their money is what people secretly find most attractive about them.

There are couples who fight constantly about money because the real causes of distress between them are too scary or painful to approach. There are parents who use money to control their children and adult children who are afraid to tell the truth to their parents for fear of losing an inheritance. There are people who stay in all kinds of uncomfortable and unhealthy relationships, both business and personal, because they believe they “can’t afford” to leave.

Through lecture, discussion and interactive exercises with Julie Motz (the woman who brought energy healing into Dr. Oz’s operating room)  you’ll look at what money means to you. You’ll examine the attitudes of your parents and your grandparents about wealth and feel into the emotional web you have woven around money in your life. You’ll discover the barriers to having all the money you want and the stumbling blocks to being content with what you have. And you’ll learn how to grow beyond them.

All sessions will be recorded and anyone taking the course is eligible for a one-hour private healing session at a reduced rate of $100. WHEN: Saturdays, 12 noon - 1:30 pm, Pacific Time (3 - 2:30 pm Eastern) August 22 - September 19 (Skipping Labor Day weekend) WHERE:  Zoom online COST: $160 For more information and to register email [email protected], call 415 256-2528 or text 415 342-1833 To read more about the work of Julie Motz go to juliemotz.com and fourenergies.com

[emotionologist]

“To our bodies turn we then...”

The rejection of the body that is part of certain religious and spiritual traditions and new age cults is rooted in the desire to be free of the non-nurturing body of a rejecting, reluctant mother. The baby is desperate to get out of the under-nourishing and often toxic womb, beyond the resistant vagina that isn’t opening easily and lovingly to welcome and support birth. It is not our body we want to transcend and leave behind but hers in order to find and be our true selves.

[emotionologist]

Follow The Money

Instead of bailing out corporations how about spending trillions of government dollars on hiring teachers and reducing class size so children can go back to school safely.

[emotionologist]

Making Sure Black Lives Truly Matter

African-Americans, Latinex people and Native Americans routinely under self-report on the U.S. census, meaning their communities get less congressional representation and fewer tax dollars than they deserve. I don’t know anyone in the Black Lives Matter movement but I would like to ask those of you who do to contact them and urge them to start an educational campaign among those populations to change this. It is at least as important as voter registration.

[emotionologist]

A Crisis Wasted

My friend Terra pointed out last night how completely ass-backwards our approach to Covid 19 and our understanding of its meaning is. I was so struck by her argument that I wanted to put it out in some forum besides her living room. So here it is.

Since the defining factor of how well we as individuals do facing the virus is our health in general and the health of our immune system in particular why is there not a huge push on the part of the government for people to take actions to improve these? We’re never going to be able to keep out all viral invaders so the only long-term solution is a population that eats well (organic, largely plant-based,), doesn’t smoke, heals rather than medicates, doesn’t consume coffee or alcohol and reduces stress by working at jobs they love and living with people they love. Where are the tv and social media ads urging us towards these goals? And where are the educational opportunities to make enjoyable, productive work available to all?

It may be time to see Covid 19 not as as threat but as a warning of how low our standards of health have been and how miserably unhealthy we collectively are. It is health and not healthcare that is broken.