The Social-Emotional Journey Cards
O
THE JOYFUL INFANT
Now is the time to take a risk, starting at the beginning, and explore. Treat it as an opportunity to seek joy, which is feeling glad to be together in strength, but especially weakness. If you embrace this, your capacity will expand, and you will build strength as joy becomes your normal state. It is the opportunity to delight in a child’s wondrous agency and sovereignty. If we’re uncomfortable embracing the joyful infant, we risk weakened identities, allowing insecurity or fear to dominate relationships without empathy.
I
THE TRUSTING INFANT
Trust the powers around you before the power within you. The trust from loving bonds will allow you to manifest your goals, be effortless in strength, and actualize the desires in your heart. Develop trust using unconditional love, releasing your emotional legacy. Trust in a child’s creativity and will. Without trusting bonds, we may find ourselves in relationships of control, ego, loneliness, and regret.
II
THE RECEIVING INFANT
Open yourself to receive from the mother-heart, given to you, for your needs, without your asking. Receive safety in your dreams, sensitivity, wisdom, and intuition. Take the child into your lap to provide care and protection. Those of us that do not receive, withdraw, disengage, and do not know how to respond.
III
THE ORGANIZING SELF
Begin relationally organizing yourself into a person for integrated harmony between security and significance. Pay attention to how your unique identity is organizing through behavior, which leads to security, and character, which leads to significance. Observe the child the same way. Without a self-organizing identity, we will not develop the abilities to regulate our emotions.
IV
THE RETURN TO JOY
To actualize your promised potential, with passionate power and effortless enthusiasm, learn to return to joy from every unpleasant emotion. The more aggressive your goals are, the more social-emotional resistance you may face. Avoid being controlling, imposing your will, or becoming passive-aggressive. Create a secure and intimate space where the child can draw from your emotional capacity to find joy in difficulties, without enabling or being overprotective. Without the skill of returning to joy, we can get stuck in our emotions, suffer from emotional outbursts, social anxiety, and try to escape instead of achieving.
V
THE FEELING AND THINKING CHILD
Find your focus and where you fit, by appropriately articulating what you feel, what you think, and what you need—in that order. Teach it to the child as a discipline, being stern but always loving. Without this skill, the structures of life will seem unbearable, filled with frustrations, disappointment, and passive aggression.
VI
THE SATISFIED CHILD
To do what you love, learn first what satisfies you in how you relate to the world. You cannot experience healthy relationships without knowing the satisfaction of love. As the satisfied child freely express your emotions and trust your feelings. Help the child explore what satisfies, but also help them evaluate the cause-and-effects—consequences—of their choices, for the satisfied child, is a fortunate child. Struggles with obsessions, addictions, or striving for power, are signs of a dissatisfied and desperate child.
VII
THE PERSISTENT CHILD
Take the road ahead by focusing on the persistence necessary to do hard things. In “voluntary hardship,” you will find the resilience to harness your energy, make progress, and achieve triumph, victory, and success. Encourage the child to see problems as challenges and that the tasks that they do not feel like doing, no matter what size, are always worthy. As you learn persistence with small things, big things will come your way. Without persistence, we get stuck and fail to learn from experience. Nobody will trust or depend on us. And at worst, we take the road of comfort and fantasy.
VIII
THE RESOURCEFULLY TALENTED CHILD
Develop your resources in strength and talents with power. Instead of reliance on controlling the external world, focus on the inner resources that will help you face the challenges ahead. Teach the child to develop their unique talents, and express them in resourceful ways for abundant courage and fortitude. Without strength in our inner resources, we fill our lives with the illusion of being “busy,” when our true abilities await to be unleashed into the world.
IX
THE KNOWING AND KNOWN CHILD
To be embraced by the multitudes, first embrace your solitude. This process starts with knowing yourself and then accepting the responsibility that only you can make yourself known to others. To know yourself is to reflect on your inner vision. To be known in the world requires wisdom. For the child with an introverted heart, this will be easy. For the extraverted child, teach them to examine their unique characteristics and the reasons they draw energy from others. Without this silent reflection, we fail to develop an identity with integrity. We risk constant compromise to external pressures that seek to hijack our sense of self.
X
THE CHILD IN STORY
History is a doorway to the bigger picture of your life. How you fit into that bigger picture determines your understanding and growth. A child without an appreciation of history is a child who will get stuck as an adult without a story. Teach them that their story is unfolding and how it connects to the stories of the world. Stories protect us from the lies of emotional legacies that threaten future generations.
XI
THE RECIPROCAL ADULT
Seek relationships that are mutually satisfying in spirit, soul, and body. Care for others with fairness. But seek harmony by caring for yourself. Seek a generous compromise when needed. Teach youth to partner and participate in community life together. But teach them that true love is always reciprocating. Without it, we become selfish, egotistical, frustrating, and cause them relational dissatisfaction.
XII
THE STABILIZING ADULT
When you are lost, have exhausted all options, and face seemingly insurmountable odds, stabilize yourself first, and turn back to the joy of a child. From there, you will find your path to a new life. Teach your youth stability with optimism and hope. Or risk that, as adults, we will conform under pressure, instead of creating with joy.
XIII
BONDED IN BELONGING
We all seek identity and belonging. But to find belonging, we must find our community. And If you indeed seek real community, your individual identity must die so that you can be reborn into a new collective bond. Yet, just like death, you must grieve the old individualistic life, which makes way for new joy bonds. These joy bonds—your new belonging—will then give you a new sense of identity. It is the paradoxical death and rebirth cycle. Without the solace of grieving however, no matter how painful it may seem, you will revert to an original identity defined by trauma bonds. Trauma bonds lead to isolation, codependency, or excessive entitlement and self-importance.
XIV
THE RESPONSIBLE PROTECTOR
Take responsibility for how your actions affect others and choose to protect others—sometimes from yourself. Childlike creativity and inner beauty need shelter. Become a partner in youthful desires, zeal, and vision. Teach them that their actions have meaning and impact on other people’s stories. Without taking this responsibility to protect, we will seek to control through blame and leave others vulnerable.
XV
THE COMMUNITY CONTRIBUTOR
When it comes to community, the devil is in the details. These are the offenses that seem minor at first, like little paper cuts that eventually fester, leading to confusion and disappointment. A community will decay from the inside out because of materialism, power dynamics, and dishonesty. But you can be part of a collective identity that seeks to right the wrongs and resolve conflict. Provide opportunities for youth to collaborate on meaningful tasks. Or risk becoming self-absorbed and a drain on society.
XVI
THE AUTHENTIC HEART
To be authentic, express your heart and deepen your style. Come down from your perch of security and dive into the depths of your true character. Do not be surprised by a sudden change and a sense of freefall. It is only your true self leaping forward into your new world. Release control, but stay accountable. Accept and affirm the youth. Stop playing the expectations of others, trying to prove that you are worthy. Once you have landed and arrived, you will not need their approval anymore.
XVII
THE SERVING PARENT
Serve and enjoy family. It will inspire you with increased vitality and hope. Although it requires sacrifice, the servant parent draws strength from the community for transformation and regeneration. There is no higher path and life’s work. You will be a light that shines—the north star by which generations can align—so, do not hide it. Without this beacon of service, families become at-risk, are deprived of joy, and struggle with unworthiness.
XVIII
THE SELFLESSLY DEVOTED PARENT
It is time to evolve into devotion—the love that cares for others without expecting to be cared for in return. You no longer need what you received in the past, but are in a phase of emergence with new sensibilities and emotional capacity. Your community will support your devotion. And this may take more transition than you anticipate with the unexpected outcomes. It is a terrible loss of innocence when a child is expected to care for their parents, for it is socially and emotionally impossible. Being “parentified” before adulthood is traumatic and stunts social-emotional development regardless of how many responsibilities they inherit from the selfish parent.
XIX
THE COMMUNAL PARENT
As the African proverb goes, it takes a village to raise a child. Therefore, the communal parent allows spiritual parents and siblings to provide support for success, prosperity, clarity, and contentment. Encourage these extended relationships from your community. Acceptance from the village is like a sun that radiates warmth and vitality. However, there is another African proverb that says if the village does not accept the child, they will burn it down to feel its warmth. This tragedy occurs when parents are overwhelmed without communal support, and children become vulnerable to forces that derail their identities and life goals.
XX
THE JOYFUL GUIDE
The parent is no longer the hero of the story—instead becomes a heroic guide, leading children with joy. This stage of adulthood is preparing you for a whole new and higher order of life. Guide the children and youth through the challenges of their journeys and help them find joy in their strengths and weakness. The community provides encouragement, mentoring, rest, and opportunities to recharge. It becomes a life-giving system that flows from tribe to village, then to parents, and finally as a gift to the children. In a deadly system, one where children play roles to keep the system alive, the result is an emotional legacy of hopeless despair.
XXI
THE SACRIFICIAL ELDER
Your actualization from joyful infant to sacrificial elder—from the finite world to an infinite existence of wonder and fulfillment—is here. Here, you will dance with your community, even in trying times. You will prize each member, cherishing every true self. You will manifest sacrificial influence, offering yourself as the sage, to mature all families. You will give life, especially to the social and emotional orphans. In return, the community will recognize and involve you while creating structures for you to engage and share your wisdom. Together, you will be family to those with no families. Without the sacrificial elder, the community loses meaning and structure, stunting its maturity. Children become at-risk, youth become fragile, and immature unqualified leaders create a systemic crisis on all levels. As poverty, violence, and crime increase, mental health, and sustainability decrease. Only the true sacrificial elder, with the utmost vision, courage, and character, can lead in these times.