PLEASE SEE WORKSHOPS AND COURSES ON OFFER FROM THE CENTRE TO SEE WHAT ELSE IS AVAILABLE

PLEASE SEE CENTRE'S CALENDER ON FUTURE EVENTS

To phone and make an appointment click here. To email for an appointment click here.

CHILD'S POSITION IN THE FAMILY - In this part we discuss the position (eldest, middle, youngest, only child) in the family and the normal psychological impact that would have on the child. In my experience the position in the family has a profound impact. Read here to find out more. When this is compounded with sexual abuse it is normally enhanced.

CHILD SEXUAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT - In this part we discuss the developments of each age of the child, both physiologically and well a spiritually. Please note that these are general stages and may not be totally accurate in every child's case.

Life cycles and Human Rhythms
Each of us are subject to these cycles. They are an integral part of our development and have a profound psychological impact on us. As you read through the cycles you will see the impact that it has on your life. Depending on what happened to you during that cycle so the impact will be more pronounced. This impact will be felt in the later cycles as indicated. The seven year periods or phases form the basic rhythms of human life. A significant biological change also occurs in the course of each approximate seven year period.
In addition every seven years, leads to the “birth” of new elements in the unfolding individuality. Each seven year phase gradually develops into the next.

In every phase the body, soul, and sprit interweave within one dominant theme. In each rhythmic phase, elements of past phases reappear together with a new aspect. Working with the cycles and understanding them is very helpful in ones personal development and will contribute immensely to contributing to the unravelling of ones own problems.

Each seven year phase marks a new birth. The first – physical birth- is the most obvious; the child emerges from the womb leaving behind the spiritual world where it existed as an independent entity. The following births take place in the soul and spirit when something new is born that was not there before. This is not expressed physically but in attitudes, feelings, and capacity’s which arise in the individuals

Birth to seven years (The first cycle):-
This is the birth of the physical body brought into manifestation. From the earliest days, children are like one great sense organ, taking in sense impressions of all kinds from the outside world. They turn these sense impressions into their own activities, through imitation.  By imitating those around them, children learn to stand upright and walk. They learn to understand and speak their “mother tongue”. These impressions influence the physical body; if they are quite and soft, the child can breathe more rhythmically and relax; but when children’s immature nervous systems try to process startling noises, flickering lights and quick visual impressions, it becomes too much for them. They can become exhausted, tense, and afraid. The environment has a direct impact on the child in its growing up first cycle.  This environment will have a direct impact on the child’s psyche, and this impact will reflect itself in the later years.

Around the third year children experience their own being and start referring themselves as “I”. Self awareness now awakens in a rudimentary way and memory begins to develop. Although children of this age have moments of consciousness, they are in general rather “asleep”. External sensory impressions experienced inwardly and lay the basis for conscious ideas to be formed later. At this stage, children enter into the world mainly through their will and movements. They are always doing something. Through this process, the child starts to learn about their environment as well as this starts to form the basis on which relationships work. Such movement forms the inner formation for what they will “feel” in the next stage. Spiritual forces are at work shaping the organs, building the body and completing the physical body.  The culmination of this activity is expressed in the falling out of the milk teeth. At this time new creative powers are released within the body for the next phase.

In this stage the subconscious mind has already started to function very well. This phase is mostly influenced about how the child feels about life in general all around them. When major negative things happen in this cycle, it will have a profound psychological impact in later cycles, particularly how they feel about life.

Seven – fourteen years (The second cycle):-
The physical body continuers to develop, with adult teeth starting to come through. Consciousness – from a state of sleep to a dream like condition. Inner soul life now starts to intensify. In the earlier period, creative formative powers were shaping the physical body, but now these become available to the soul as powers of the imagination and thought, as image forming activity. Children’s thinking at this age is influenced by strong feelings and personal experiences and expressed through the imagination.

It is also in this period that the child starts to explore the greater world around itself. This is typically the stage where the children start to discover other children in the world. In their quest to learn more about the world around us as well as other families of origin, the child often wants to leave home for short periods to go and explore other children’s homes, always wanting to come home to see that everything is safe. This is often the time when sleep over’s occur and the child often just wants to do that  so that they can start to see how other people start to live and compare that to home. This is the curiosity side starting to develop. This is also the time when the child starts to discover the world around them and how big it is as well as its wonders. At school the child is generally taught about the world and how it operates. It is a period of great discovery of a world external to ourselves which was prevalent in the first cycle.

In the 9th year change starts to come about for the child. Children often feel a greater separation from their parents at this time and from everything around them which has previously been imbued with magic and wholeness. Now they begin to experience the world more objectively, and the glow of the early childhood is gradually replaced by common everyday events. Ordinariness begins to delve the child’s inner joy and spontaneity. Should any traumatic event occur such as sexual abuse, the child is thrown into early adulthood where they are now supposed to accept adult behaviour even though they are not prepared for it. This accentuates the separation from the parents and inevitably impacts on their ability to trust in life. This deeply impacts the child’s psyche.

Around the twelfth year children’s thinking capacity develop from picture thinking to cause and affect thinking. This is the beginning stages of conceptual thinking. They are now able to understand how and why things happen. Their strong physical resemblance to their parents may start to wane as their individuality becomes more pronounced. The physical body begins to experience heaviness and gravity, a sense of being pulled down to earth. In every day speak we term this that they become more grounded. In boys the larynx elongates causing the boy’s voice to deepen, his sexual organs mature. And he becomes able to reproduce his own kind. The girl’s body in turn becomes rounder and softer, and though hormonal changes and menstruation prepares itself for reproduction. The changes at puberty echo changes such as the loss if teeth which occurred at the end of the first seven year cycle. The forces released in puberty are now available for the next phase.

Fourteen – twenty one years (The third cycle):-
The physical body goes through great hormonal change as the adult physical body takes shape. Feeling life becomes chaotic. Expressing its self in powerful highs and lows accompanied with erratic swings. It is also round about the physical age fourteen that the soul starts to stir the child, for the child to start to develop a sense of their own individuality. The soul prompts the child to start asserting itself in a way to support the growing of independence so that the “I” of the child can fully enter at age twenty one.

This period is often viewed as the generation gap between the parents and the child.

The creative powers which worked on the physical body from birth to seven, and on the soul from seven to fourteen, are now working on the thinking and feeling. The transformation of outer experiences into inward experience leads from images to ideas. In the newness of this budding capacity the spotlight of the young person’s thinking directs it’s being around them; at first they become critical of everything, questioning and perhaps rejecting aspects of the world that disappoint them. The child starts to experiment with their own feeling world and learn about it. Negative events here such as sexual abuse are carried deep in the psyche as well.

It is also during this period that the child will look at the same sex parent to see how it is that they should conduct their relationships when they are much older and what their role should be when they are in a similar situation. This period of observation and acceptance of how we should conduct ourselves is mostly unconscious. The child gains its sense of self from the opposite sex parent ie. daughter from Dad and son from Mother. Depending on how the interaction occurs it will have a direct impact on the sense of who they are as a man or woman in society and will directly impact on the quality of the relationship and kind of relationship that they finally settle in.

Adolescences struggle to use their thinking as a way of controlling their feelings and their power/will impulses. Thinking gradually becomes more inward, no longer needing to be stimulated by strong soul experiences. It becomes conceptual and abstract. Their glimpse of the “higher” self around the seventeenth year gives the adolescences a sense that there is purpose and meaning in life, as well as disappointment. They begin to accept the contradictions of life and, with this spontaneous idealism of youth, put their energies for a better world. During the period fourteen to twenty one, the young person’s character is forming. Individuation now starts to coming into play in preparation of the “I” becoming fully incarnated round about the age twenty one.

Twenty one – twenty eight years (The fourth cycle):-
The human being now begins to feel a new identity awakening as the “I’ incarnates itself more fully. This period is marked as a strong activity of the emotional life, impulsive feelings, excitement, sensuality, social ability and adventure. Throughout this period our “I” tries to take control of the impulses and emotions in order to stabilize them. This is the time we try to prepare ourselves for a career and to gather experience in the worldly realm. Our creative abilities are now for the first time at the disposal of our “I”. Somehow there is almost nothing we can’t attain. Memory reaches its peak. We begin to evaluate what is being learned as our “I” permeates itself within all of our experiences.

The “I” also now starts to direct our affairs on the journey of maturation. During this phase we are given many opportunities to resolve hurts and feelings, disappointments, etc that arose during the cycle fourteen to twenty one. This is our area of primary focus to try and resolve, the previous two cycles are secondary but still very important.

Twenty eight – thirty five years (The fifth cycle):-
The “I” begins to enter still deeper into our soul life, penetrating our thinking and feeling worlds. We experience life through our thinking, and through awakening of the realities of life. We feel the need to organize our lives. During the maturation process in this cycle we start to regard life more objectively than before. At the age of thirty three many woman start review their lives and start looking at it with some more critical “eye”.
It often happens at this stage for a woman where they say to themselves that there must be more; life should be richer and deeper and have more meaning. Woman often look at their relationships with these deep inner stirrings and start to demand more.  Many relationships are at risk during this period. Men tend to rely objectively on their thinking and try to override their feeling world.

We tend during this period to start to judge everything around us, we should be careful because there is a tendency to become critical, cold and self righteous. This tends to lead to dissatisfaction in many areas of our lives, but also to a sense that our thinking can solve all of our problems whilst ignoring our feeling world.  During this period we are also given the opportunity to address personal issues, hurts, rejections, emotional pain that arose during the period seven to fourteen.

Thirty five– forty two years (The seventh cycle):-
During this period consciousness generally becomes the main theme. This can be a time of strength and ambition, but also of emptiness and loneliness. What we used to take in through our senses doesn’t fully satisfy us anymore. The body no longer fully excites us in the same way as used to in the cycles four and five. 
We start to view life’s demands in a different way, having lost the continual stimulus of the “I” during the cycles three, four and five. Life can take on a more routine quality, and yet we experience more and more problems. We are often given the opportunity to resolve issues that arose in our life in the first cycle.

Much of what used to bring contentment no longer serves us. We become critical of the causes, philosophies, or religion which might have been previously rather important.  What we achieve in life completely depends on what we ourselves make of our capacities and how we work together with and integrate our “I” from the age of approximately thirty years old.

Forty two – forty nine years (The eight cycles):-
This period often viewed as the midlife crisis. The midlife crisis may, have even started to arise in the second half of the previous cycle.  The period after the midlife crisis is generally marked by a strong period of productivity, innovation, and imagination.  New strengths seem to appear which manifest themselves into new opportunities for us. It often happens that careers are redesigned or even changed completely. 

We come into touch with what we really do, with what we really want to do in life. We can develop patience and warmth; we may make new friendships, and feel a complete new confidence in life. The chaos the previous cycles slowly starts to clear and order begins to reign in our personal life. We start to regain different forms of balance within our life. The temptation during this phase is power and it takes great strength to resist it and exercise our higher nature instead. Much depends on our maturation development from the previous cycles.
From this cycle onwards our health is often severely impacted in that where we have ignored the many opportunities that were sent our way during the previous cycles to heal our issues. We often generate major dis-eases that exactly reflect our erroneous thinking and feeling of the previous cycles. (please see the nature of illness on www.iempowerself.com website for further information.

Where sexual abuse has happened in the early cycles in women for illustration purposes, it often reflects itself as problems with the sexual organs and may result in cancer of one or more sexual organs, hysterectomy etc.

Forty nine – fifty six years (The ninth cycle):-
During this cycle we are much more flexible and we use a lot more humour to face the problems of life. We have to make adjustments to life, but there can be a new vitality to do so if we have successfully worked on ourselves as highlighted in the previous three cycles. There is much remembering of the past as we struggle to gain perspective and to translate our experiences into wisdom and likes. 

As we utilize the wisdom and light brought about by our correct utilization of our experiences this often results in the taking up of new possibilities, new direction, or even yet again a change of career.  But what is done, is done with greater equanimity. Should we have not worked on ourselves to resolve many of the emotional and perceptual issues that arose from the previous cycles; we are often subjected to the influence of the major diseases. The diseases are natures and the soul’s way of prodding us into the maturation process.

Fifty six – sixty three years (The tenth cycle):-
We may now experience yet another burst of energy, or even inspiration. Should we have matured enough during the previous cycles we find that many earlier conflicts are resolved, and we are now no longer interested in power or material success. Now we can enjoy the respect and confidence we have gained from life. We are now living from within, out of the richness of the depth of experience and emotional maturity.
If often happens that life somehow simplified itself. We develop enthusiasm through our efforts. We work through our thoughts and emotions more carefully, we ponder, we consider, we develop our wisdom. We have now reached the stage that we realize that we need to go inward for our insight rather than go outward for stimulation. This brings about a new sense of our inner strength which is now activated, new life forces are generated. New possibilities of devotion and companionship often present them self.

Sixty three years and onwards (The eleventh cycle):-
From the age sixty three onwards we reap the benefits of the working on ourselves from the previous cycles especially the last three. The process of development which began at the age thirty five continues and matures within us.