Facing American Country-Based Injuries: Part 2

Hi Everyone,

I’ve been back in the USA now for several months after nearly a year outside the country. Considering my country-based injuries were some of the biggest issues in love highlighted to me by Jesus and Mary when I was in Australia, I was curious to see how I’d feel coming back.

In the last blog that I wrote on the topic of country-based injuries in Americans (and to some extent also those who live in other rich countries), I shared some feedback and truth from Jesus about these injuries within myself and others in America, and some of my own reflections from that. You can view this post by clicking here if you haven’t seen it.

As a disclaimer, today’s post contains my recent thoughts and reflections on the topic, which I haven’t had the chance to discuss with Jesus and Mary, so they are only my opinions and I can’t say I’m totally accurate about them, or that J&M or God would agree that I am assessing things correctly.

 

Things I Noticed

The first thing I noticed upon being back after a year was, as Jesus has discussed before, the insane amount of choice available here. Even just landing in the Los Angeles airport from Brisbane, the airport snack shops indicated I was indeed back in America.

When I went on my first grocery run, just to a standard store chain store, there was no mistaking I was back. On this first shop in an American store in a year, I walked past an aisle and was struck by the sight of the the tortilla stock. Multiple brands with many different sizes and flavors overflowed the end cap display, and then spilled deep into the aisle as well. I stopped and tried to count the different individual tortilla options–the various flavors and brands. After passing about 25, I stopped. I mean I know Americans love Mexican food, but over 25 kinds of tortillas? The options and variety in terms of shopping–in person and online–for literally anything is truly unlike anywhere else. Prior in my life, that amount of options never would have caused me to even blink, and like most Americans, I’d been irked if my particular favorite was out of stock.

I was reminded of how easy everything is here. Every errand I had to run, every bank-related task, every dealing with any government body, everything single thing I needed to do to get back up and running after a year–it was all easy. Service in all industries is so emphasized in America, and everything is so cheap! As a person with a lot of demand for things to be free and cheap, I noticed how low pricing is on everything, even compared to the UK or Australia, where I had been for the last year.

It’s weird, when you start being aware of addictions that you previously didn’t realize you had. As I settled back into life in America, I could feel myself sinking back into the enjoyment of all the demands being met again. I internally rolled my eyes at myself as I discovered that yes, I do indeed have feelings that the way things are in America is how things should be. I bought my cheap gas for my car and and then went and picked out of those 25+ tortilla options and literally thought to myself, America is badass.

There have been many times I have now caught myself in my entitlement that I should get things, when I want, because I want, fast, cheap, and with little consideration for ethics and morals in any part of those choices. I can feel the demand in me that the USA government should do something about everything, and blaming them for anything going wrong or that is unloving about the country–because of course nothing wrong with this country or how it operates is in any way my personal fault…

I am finding so many examples of our entitlement as a country that I feel like at some point I might try to focus in on particular examples of what I’ve noticed in myself and others. But in this blog, I wanted to focus on a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, which is DENIAL, and how codependent addictions between people support that denial.

 

Denial & Facade

Another thing that struck me upon being back is how happy everyone seems. I know the emotional climate and overall mood can vary widely depending on where you are in the USA, but in Salt Lake City, Utah, where I live–and I imagine in many places throughout the country–people just overall appear pretty “happy”. Enthusiastic, optimistic, energetic, friendly.

I found myself thinking about what Jesus said to me about Americans having a facade of niceness that can cover many dark and evil emotions, including superiority, and how contrasted that truth is from the generally jubilant and contented mood I was observing. It is a pointed example of how well-developed our individual facades, as well as collective facades as Americans, can be, and what a shocking difference that can be to the truth of our emotions and our intentions. I thought, If we as Americans are violating God’s Laws in massive ways, and degrading our condition with our sins all the time, and hurting so many people in the world, what it is that is making us appear happy? Because clearly we are not living according to Divine Truth and Love.

I then remembered an FAQ clip from the DT FAQ channel that I’ll link at the end of the post that explains some principles that I was thinking of when reflecting on this. In this clip they share that if we are “happy” without being truly on the Divine Love Path, it is only because we are getting addictions met. And so, I feel like this disparity between the truths I received from Jesus about the real emotions of most Americans with the appearance of general contentedness, is because us Americans are getting our addictions met so epically, and so therefore we appear, and even believe within ourselves, to be happy. Additionally, we agree with each others’ facades about being nice people, and that makes us feel pretty good, too.

When I was in Australia and receiving personal feedback about my own country-based injuries and how I act them out, after I while I started wondering: Why, if these issues are so severe and so unloving, as well as being present in almost all Americans, hadn’t they really flagged up for me personally before? In other words, how had I never clocked them? There are indeed plenty of other Americans who would rightly call me entitled (I’ve since discovered that I may be even more entitled than many other Americans are), but how had no one ever sat me down and said, “Yo Courtney, these things you do are really, really off.” Why hadn’t the confrontation like that ever happened with anyone in America before?

Why, among my day to day interactions and friends and family, we don’t ever pull each other up on the entitlement? Why had nobody flagged it to me before, and I also hadn’t noticed it in others? Or if we do notice it in ourselves or others, we don’t seem to care that much?

I also wondered, if almost all Americans are demanding, entitled and selfish, why don’t we get pissed off at each other all the time? How is it that we are able to generally go about our lives without huge amounts of hostility towards each other? Well, first off, I know it’s not true we don’t have hostility towards each other, because of course we have a great deal of issues within the country from Americans towards other Americans. But what I mean is, with that level of demand and selfishness, why aren’t we in fights with our family and friends constantly over the issues of love? And as a country, why aren’t we in an outright civil war; a full country-based meltdown? And why can we maintain this somewhat law-abiding society, as well as still mostly believe America is king?

These ponderings made me think about the issues of codependent relationships between people. To share what I mean by that, I’d share an example from my relationship with Perry. For me personally, it’s helping to think of how things can play out between two people, and then see how that also can play out in a whole nation.

 

Example of Codependently Supporting Denial & Facade

In my relationship with Perry, the emotional injuries I am most concerned about are not the ones we have that are different and in conflict with each other, but rather, the ones that we agree on. In areas where our injuries or demands are different, where we do not agree on that demand or about that false belief, we will inevitably clash. This clashing will highlight that one or both of us is out of harmony with God’s Truth and Love on the matter. The conflict will happen quickly for things we don’t share injuries about, and that conflict will expose that there is an issue. This will then mean it will be hard to keep going down that track without realizing something needs to be looked at.

On the other hand, Perry and I have many emotional injuries that are the same as each other, and interestingly, many of them are the same emotional injuries I’m talking about in terms of country-based injuries. Perry and I are both demanding, entitled, selfish and self-focused. These, or any injuries that we both agree on, in my opinion, are far more dangerous. When we agree, we can easily support each other in entitled and selfish choices, never disagreeing with each other, and even not believing we are being entitled or selfish at all. We can reassure ourselves and each other that there is no problem in that area.

I once asked Jesus and Mary why it would be, that Perry and may often seem to get along with each other, if we are both demanding and selfish people, and Jesus and Mary explained to me that instead of projecting our demands at each other (which would eventually create conflict and pain), we may externalize our demands outside the relationship onto other people, and onto systems. In this way, our individual demands are being fulfilled, but maybe not by the other, because they don’t need to be. We are getting them from somewhere else. We can then exist in a space where don’t exhaust each other, and things may appear peaceful and harmonious in the relationship.

It’s like, if I have a demand at the world to get a popsicle every day, and Perry won’t give one to me but I am easily able to find someone else in the world to give me one every day, I have no need to necessarily get angry at Perry for not giving me one, even though I do have the demand for it from someone–anyone. And if Perry also feels he should get a popsicle every day too, and also finds random people to get it from and thinks that’s totally reasonable, we’re going to end up being demanding popsicle fiends who take from everyone else, but don’t fight with each other.

We can then easily live in the delusion that everything is alright and that we are very reasonable and kind people, which is exactly the facade Perry and I have both had.

I have learned that a lot of the time, I tolerate and put up with issues in others because I also want them to put up with that exact same thing in me. It is a barter: you overlook my shit, and I’ll overlook yours.

I also realized in this process that the same thing happened within my family in my childhood. My parents also had the country-based injuries, some of which I outlined in a bit more detail in my previous post. In my childhood, I can see that we were constantly reinforcing within the family that our family, and our country, is awesome, meanwhile there was no consideration about others in the world. In the few experiments I’ve done with bringing up these topics with my family and some friends, I have often discovered immediate resistance and anger that is exactly like the kind I have had myself in receiving feedback about country-based demands: “Who, me? I’m not like that! No way. You’ve got me all wrong. I’m not that bad.”

Sometimes I think of the danger of those agreement injuries in Perry and I, and metaphorically, it feels to me like walking down a road, hand in hand, patting ourselves and each other on the backs, saying, “Aren’t you lovely! Aren’t I great person! Aren’t we nice people!” Meanwhile we are being completely oblivious to the damage we are creating as we bulldoze the world with our entitlement, and end up at our destination only to realize this path we’ve been walking all along has been straight into the hells. But we’ve been too busy getting and eating our popsicles and congratulating ourselves and each other on how nice and awesome we are, that we never looked up from our own navel-gazing long enough to even realize the degradation that was happening.

 

America Collectively

What I shared about Perry and I is also what I feel is at play within America as a collective. We think everything is good, meanwhile we are degrading ourselves collectively into the hells while reassuring ourselves and each other that we are not that bad. We want to believe our own facade, we want to believe each other’s facades, we want to believe the collective American facade.

We can appear to have a somewhat functional and happy society, because it is not other Americans who are suffering from our demands, it is the rest of the world that we are taking from. We are externalizing our demands and entitlement outside the country onto other countries. This then allows us to collectively have a facade that we are nice, and a false sense at times that we are happy. We also then don’t turn on each other within America as readily as we probably would if the rest of the world weren’t being forced by us to continue to give us everything we want.

There are ways I know that I don’t even want to be aware of what I do in my country-based injuries, so this blog is not to suggest that I am out of denial myself. I also cannot yet share about sincerely desiring to change this, or how you actually change it, as I am not at that stage yet either. However, I feel like I’m in a bit less denial about it than I was a year ago, and definitely less than I was when I was growing up in my family. So I thought the topic of denial, and how we as Americans within our families, marriages and with our friends and the collective, can easily support one another in that denial and facade, is an interesting thing to reflect on.

My current experiment is just to challenge myself to be more honest about the ways I am still in denial and facade about these emotions and motivations in myself, my family and in the USA. And, the truth about how much I want the addictions more than love, and where my desires are truly oriented towards. I am a person who loves to try to skip ahead to emotions farther down the line, usually while still being in facade, rather than continue to deconstruct the denial and facade layer. And so I hope that this focus will begin to start moving things in terms of the country-based injuries.

I’ll keep sharing periodically on these experiments, and for any other Americans I’d love to hear what you are going through or looking at in the same areas for yourselves.

 

Resources

In the last blog post I linked several DT videos where Jesus and Mary have talked about American country-based injuries, but I want to link some other videos that I was watching while thinking about these topics and that I really like.

By the way, if any of you are watching DT vids and find material embedded in longer videos that talks specifically about American or “first-world” country injuries, I would love to know about them so I can watch myself and post them in this series–you can email me on the contact page on this site with those if you’d like.

“Why do we feel happy on the ‘Natural Love’ path & sad when following ‘The Way’?” This video was one that I was thinking of regarding why Americans can seem happy and enthusiastic if we are actually sinning so much and not honoring God’s Laws, Love or Truth.

Divine Truth videos about denial

Divine Truth videos about facade

Also, I found a book called The Entitlement Cure by Dr. John Townsend, and both Perry and I are finding it really helpful–I recommend it.

Love,

Courtney

 

photo credits: Matt Howard, Luke Stackpoole, freestocks.org, img.ly, Nick Dunlap