• feel like "something's wrong with me; I'm not good enough; I don't deserve love"
• spin-our-wheels in tug-of-war relationships
• end up stuck, recreating "dead-end" lives
• never have our desires fulfilled
• lack self-esteem and self-respect

        . . . because of "ineffective parenting."

Now, the good news . . .

    After years of research as a behavioral psychologist, Camille A. Smith, Ph.D., D.D., D.M., R.C.H., has discovered how to Take Back Your Power! and complete your "Self" metamorphosis from the womb into adulthood that dysfunctional parenting prevented. Without loving care for our unique intuitive Self, our "curious" Spirit becomes dormant -- generating the above plights, or expires. The medical field has long had a term for infants unable to survive when this vital nurturing is missing: Miasmas -- failure to thrive. ⁽²⁾

   Yet our society continues to ignore that "mere neglect" is harmful, even though the medical profession long ago recognized that a child's Spirit cannot thrive on food alone, but must receive physical affection and acknowledgment of its worth. It's our Spirit that holds the blueprint to our destiny! This vital Life Force within magically shows us our path, by kindling our curious nature to discover our own style and become independent. So we're unable to thrive and live our dreams, until we "re-parent" our inner Self and revive our curious, magical Spirit.

    Our natural "curiosity" is this innate spirit urging us to become self-reliant, motivating us to explore our world and discover how to function on our own. The results of our exploring determine the degree of curiosity, or spirit, we retain. So, if we have too many unpleasant experiences, or receive evidence that we have no power or control over what's happening to us, our spirited Self will gradually be overwhelmed by fear, and we begin the infamous "struggle" to regain balance in our system. ⁽³⁾ When our unique, intuitive Spirit is valued, we have the foundation for self-esteem. Without this regard, we feel unsafe and fear the loss of our parental models' love, which is so overwhelming a child cannot bear it, so we either expire (Miasmas), or adopt a survival belief to bring the situation within our control.

    The universal survival belief is "something's wrong with me," to avoid facing devastation from this loss of our source of love. We then begin a silent, unspoken quest to prove we are "good enough" as we attempt to thrive. But our curious Spirit has been subdued by fear, and will remain so until we go back and develop our lost, spirited Self. We've become the victim of Freud's spiritless "ego" ⁽⁴⁾ (Fear, Chapter 2) that is now in control of our inner magic, and the fear messages given to us as a child by those in power over us, are in control of our life.

    A child is born with a brain like a sponge soaking up its first experiences ⁽⁵⁾ as it encodes its parental models' behavior into a "mirrored survival reflex," that is only meant to last until we develop our own style. What is incredible is that our genetic makeup for survival is designed so we don't have to witness this first behavior over and over in order to imitate it. But, it's the psyche (subconscious) of a child without reasoning developed, who's perceiving these experiences and translating conclusions about them back to us as survival beliefs. Our brain is actually wired by those experiences ⁽⁶⁾ and our life then becomes shaped by fear-based beliefs, because our actions will only be in accord with our beliefs. Fear silently enslaves us to recreate the imaged behavior - our mirrored survival reflexes - until we develop trust in "our" inner voice, our intuitive, spirited Self.

    Unless we've bonded to one role model with effective skills so our innate survival encoding attached to their behavior (or have developed our own style), we'll silently recreate our ineffective parental models' actions, as Erica Jong reveals in her title, "My Mother, My Self." Now, new brain research ⁽⁷⁾ shows, when a threat to our safety, or integrity, is perceived (believed, not whether it's real), an almond-shaped part of our brain, the amygdala, trips the fear message, bypasses the "thinking" brain, and triggers our mirrored survival reflex -- the behavior in our ego.

    When the child's mirrored-reflex is unchanged in an adult, the brain sabotages us with fear if we try a new (unknown) response, using many guises to convince us it might be harmful until we give it up. The ineffective patterns have become our "comfort zone" of behavior, even though the actions are painful and offer no comfort, because fear now blocks the adults ability to reason. So we respond with this mirrored-reflex, our comfort zone, that's controlled by unconscious messages from our care givers, school, society and religion, and they determine our views about life.

  Unbalanced fear causes disharmony in the body's two major systems that are designed to maintain "inner balance." Both systems rely upon "pleasurable" activities to activate their soothing chemical response. But the Puritan belief that "seeking pleasure is sinful" is so strong in our society, it becomes almost impossible to create this balance. Our parasympathetic system restores energy (eating, drinking, sleeping, etc.), and is fully developed at birth. But our sympathetic system expends energy (curiosity, mastery, working, discovery, visualization, etc.), and like our brain, ⁽⁸⁾ it's designed to be developed outside the womb by our natural urges to explore and discover who we are.

    Part Two then teaches us how to "arrive where we began, and to know the place for the first time," (T. S. Eliot) as we transform our "mirrored reflexes." Now, for the first time, there is a complete guide to be placed on every coffee-table with detailed knowledge of how to Take Back Your Power! and create the life of our dreams, our destiny, instead of remaining spinning-our-wheels re-creating the life of our dysfunctional childhood role models.