Returning to the Secret Garden of Lost Selves

I was in a spiritual support group today where the topic was Step Five of the Twelve Steps:

We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs (the nature and symptoms of our emotional illness).

This step is the continuation of Step Four:

We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

The Fourth Step is a spiritual inventory of
1. What we perceive others did to us that was “harmful” to us because they separated themselves from us – some form of abandonment or abuse.
2. Our lasting resentments and anger as reactions to each memory of each separating event or series of events.
3. Our fears that the harm activated and intensified.
4. Our harmful behaviors and actions – our behavioral symptoms – caused by our perception of being “harmed” – separated from others.

This spiritual inventory lists and identifies the symptoms of our human illness.

My experience is that we have experienced “harms” -- separations of abandonment and sometimes abuse – as emotional traumas of varied intensity. When these harms or traumas occurred, our brains responded instinctively to protect us, and our wounded selves were separated – placed in protective custody -- to an unconscious place inside of our brains. These parts were -- and are -- lost selves -- sacrificed and put away from our current self in order to protect them and to protect our current self.


These lost selves are lonely, sad, scared, and angry – lost and disconnected from conscious intimate Presence. When we feel angry, scared, sad, or lonely, we are experiencing a brief, yet frequently powerful contact with one or more of our lost selves. They are the so called “committee in our head” – the voices that we hear in brains -- talking, shouting, crying, pleading for attention, and relief to be restored to the “sanity” of being consciously a part of who we are.

The Fourth Step is an organized way of beginning to identify and re-experience these lost selves by remembering the harm that caused them, by listing the angers and fears that the lost selves are experiencing, and by observing patterns of separation – abandonment and abuse – that our lost selves exhibit as symptoms of their woundedness.

As I listened in the meeting, I experienced my lost selves as being imprisoned in a Secret Garden. The door is hidden by painful growths and debris of past separations. The walls are solid, hardened thoughts mortared tall and strong by obsessive thinking – the protective place of the lost and mostly forgotten selves.

I have experienced the Fourth Step as a starting place in the process of reconnecting with and regaining my lost selves. In Step Four we begin to identify and consciously experience their painful presence again.

In Step Five, we reach out to our God through the flesh and blood of another human being, and together we move away the debris that blocks the door to the Secret Garden, willingly swing the door open, and together, the three of us step inside. With our list of lost selves, we begin to seek those we have identified, and when we find them, we bring them out and allow them to be restored to our Self.

Otherwise, we would be doomed to live the rest of lives without the presence of these parts of our selves – doomed to live the incredible loneliness, pain, and desperation of all our selves being separated and abandoned from each other.

Without improving conscious contact we relive the traumas of the past -- over and over -- without the possibility of “parole”. We must take our God’s hand and return to our Secret Garden of lost selves. We can’t do it alone. And we don’t have to try.
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A person in the meeting shared about having just gotten a dog. The dog had been used for breeding for six years, and had been kept in a 2 by 4 foot space, had been “debarked” (rendered unable to bark), and had a serial number permanently etched in its ear. I experienced how my lost selves have been imprisoned in a small space, silenced from communicating and being part of my Self, and reduced to a label without a name and without an accepted or recognized personal identity.

The dog seems to be coming back slowly because she is increasingly wagging her tail, and moving happily around – but she is still guarded and easily frightened. The higher presence of her new owners is giving her a chance to come home to love, safety and presence.

We can come home, too. It starts with having an intimate relationship with our God, and can result in our lost selves beginning to ”wag their tails” with the excitement and joy of coming back home -- experiencing being loved, cared about, and safe – empowered to be and to become who we really are.

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Photography/graphics by W. Wass